Along the Saltwise Sea

by A. Deborah Baker

  Not that he had made the choice in the first place, and not that Zib understood what it was to put value on the shine of a pair of shoes. He held the thought without anger, even though he had been angry with her when the bargain was first made; she had, after all, given away something that was his, and not hers to bargain with. But she hadn’t done it out of malice. She had been trying to preserve them both from the Bumble Bear, who had become a monster when the Queen of Swords had need of one, and had never remembered how to be anything else.

  Avery didn’t realize it, not as such, but he was becoming a more flexible person, one tiny bend at a time. And if some of those bends felt like breaking, well, any willow-whip could have told him something about what it was to yield.

  The cave, which had been dim in the beginning, was growing steadily lighter as their group walked, going from pearl-tinted twilight to something much closer to the rosy light of dawn, as if somewhere in the distance, the sun was giving sincere thought to the act of rising. They walked on, and dawn broke into sunrise, buttery light suddenly filling the air, illuminating every dancing mote of dust, which rose up with their footsteps, chalk and sand and the crushed shells of long-dead marine creatures learning, however briefly, how to fly under their own precious power.

  Zib laughed, and sped up, arrowing her footsteps toward a wide archway cut out of the cave wall. The others followed her, the Crow Girl bursting once more into birds in her hurry to see what was on the other side, until they all emerged into the bright, warm light of a seaside morning. They were standing on a beach that glittered like the sugar on a Christmas cookie, all pristine white and stretching out to the horizon both to the left and to the right, but yielding straight ahead to the lapping waves of an endless indigo sea. The water looked warm and gentle, and when it struck the sand it seemed to whisper, Yes, children, good, children, yes, good children to come into me, come swim, come swim, come swim with the sirens and the sea fairies and all the good things that water can coddle and claim. Come, children, come.

  “Do you hear that?” asked Avery, suddenly nervous as he inched closer to Zib. She might be loud and wild and unaware of the importance of well-shined shoes, but she was from the same ordinary town as he was, and she knew that the ocean wasn’t supposed to talk. Not so clearly, anyway, and not with such a bright and blazing need as this one.

  “It wants us to go swimming,” she said, voice dreamy. Then she shook her head and shot him a quick, alarmed look. “How does it want anything? It’s the ocean. Oceans aren’t supposed to want things.”

  “This is the Saltwise Sea,” said Niamh. “This is where the King of Coins and the King of Cups collide. It’s the truest border between their two domains.”

  “How does that make it so the water can talk?” asked Avery. “Water isn’t supposed to talk.”

  “The King of Cups has the Page of Frozen Waters now, but he used to have the Lady of Salt and Sorrow,” said Niamh. “She’s the patron of my city. Everyone there loves her so, and she loves us, even if she can’t pull herself out of the sea to talk to us any longer. We all know the Page is responsible for her losing her crown and her own good skin, but we can’t prove it, because we can’t find her bones.”

  “Has anyone told the King?” asked Zib.

  The Crow Girl swirled back into being in front of them, pulling birds back into her body until she was only one thing, instead of many. “He doesn’t care,” she said, and there was more mourning in her voice than there usually was. “He has the Page, and she doesn’t question what he wants or tell him not to do the terrible things he thinks will be pleasant. Maybe they are pleasant, for him. I don’t know. I’m just a Crow Girl, I don’t even have a name, and names change everything.”

  “The King of Cups is not your friend,” said Niamh. “The King of Coins might be, because he believes everyone should be free to make up their own minds, even if that sometimes means they make up their minds to stand against him, and the Queen of Wands will be, if we can find where she’s been taken and bring her back to the people who love her, but the King of Cups is not your friend. You have to remember that, if we’re going to walk along the seaside.”

  “Do we have to?” asked Avery.

  “Do you see anyplace else for us to go?”

  “We could climb the cliff,” said Avery, and gestured to the high rock wall behind them. The group turned and silently regarded it.

  It was high and sheer, which are excellent qualities in a wall, if not so much in a path. Zib, who was the best climber among them, looked unsure.

  “I could probably find a way up, if I had to,” she said. “But it would be real easy to fall. And this sand is soft, but if you fell from far enough up, it would still be hard enough to break bones. I don’t think we should climb up here. We can find another place, maybe, where the cliffs are shorter, or where they’ve broken on their own and made a path for us to follow. That would be better.”

  Avery, who had never known Zib to be anything other than pointlessly brave, gave her a betrayed look. She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is a very good adventure, but it’s really happening. This isn’t a story or a dream. We can get hurt here. If you fell off that cliff, you’d be well and truly hurt. All the way down to the bottom of you. None of us can put you back together, and I’m not ready to lose you.”

  Avery frowned but, never having had someone who would worry about losing him before, apart from his parents, couldn’t argue with her. Instead, he shook his head, and said, “I think we should stay out of the water. I don’t think we want to meet this Lady, not when she doesn’t have a body anymore.”

  “She didn’t give it up willingly,” said Niamh. “I’d be safe, because something that’s been drowned is hard to take apart, but she could have you out of your body like a hermit crab out of its shell if she wanted to, and we’d never be able to put you back in again.”

  Avery looked at her and shuddered, because he could see from the set of her chin and the seriousness in her eyes that she meant exactly what she was saying. He didn’t want to be a hermit crab, in its shell or out of it. He wanted to be Avery, exactly Avery, whatever that meant.

  “So we stay out of the water,” said Zib. “We haven’t lost each other, but we have lost the improbable road. Does it reach all the way to the seashore?”

  The Crow Girl nodded with such enthusiasm that for a moment, it looked like she was going to nod her head clean off her shoulders. Which might have been possible, since her body was made entirely of individual birds, but would have been upsetting if it had happened. “The improbable road runs everywhere through the Up-and-Under,” she said. “It can find you no matter where you are, if it wants to, and if you’re doing things improbably enough.”

  Zib was starting to have serious concerns about how many of the things in the Up-and-Under seemed to be awake and aware and able to make their own decisions. She pushed them aside and spun in a circle, holding one arm stiffly out from her body. When she came to a stop, she was pointing to the east, down the beach. “We go this way,” she said, as if spinning like a top were the absolutely most reasonable way of choosing a direction.

  The others nodded, and as a group, the four of them moved down the beach, caught between the cliffside and the sea. Zib and Avery walked side by side, their hands occasionally brushing against each other, as if they had magnets in their palms that wanted only to be together but couldn’t quite bridge the gap between them. Niamh cast longing glances at the water as they walked, but kept her distance from it, recognizing the wisdom of leaving the Lady to rest. The Crow Girl trotted alongside the rest, remaining on two legs, looking utterly content.

  They didn’t know how long they walked, for there was no real means of measuring time along the seaside; the tides shifted, but as none of them knew how to chart them, it made little difference, and the sun hung on the other side of the cliffs, out of sight and hence unhelpful. They walked long enough that their legs began to burn with the ef
fort of walking on sand, and their throats grew dry, forgetting the taste of well water.

  When the first flickers of green appeared ahead of them, they could all be forgiven for thinking they were seeing a mirage, something that wasn’t really there and didn’t deserve their attention. But as they continued to walk, the green grew clearer, and more difficult to deny. Zib grabbed Avery’s hand, squeezing firmly.

  “Do you see…?” she asked, in a hushed tone.

  “I do,” he said.

  They walked faster, striding across the beach until the sand under their feet changed into hard-packed earth, and they were stepping onto a little swath of ordinary soil, decorated with weeds and brambles and a small cluster of deeply welcome bonberry bushes, their bright pink fruit an almost irresistible enticement. There was a cottage near-buried amidst the green, with thick stone walls and one open, inviting window.

  Avery approached the cottage cautiously, scarcely aware that he had lost Zib, who was filling her hands and mouth and stomach with small pink bonberries. “Hello?” he called, leaning up onto his toes to peer through the window. Inside the cottage was simple and clean, with a large bed that was a thousand times more inviting than the window had been. The pillows were crisp and plump and seemed to want nothing more than a boy to rest his head on them. “Is anyone home?”

  There was dust on the table. He could see it from outside. Whoever lived here was either a terrible housekeeper, or hadn’t been home in quite some time. Carefully, he moved toward the cottage door. It had no knob, only a simple handle, which moved easily when he pushed it down. The door swung open. The air inside the cabin was sweet and dry.

  Convinced that he was going to be caught at any moment, Avery stepped inside.

  The first thing to catch his eye was the pump on the wall, which hadn’t been visible when peering through the window. Avery moved toward it, and gave it an experimental shake. Water poured out into the basin, too quick for him to catch. Before he pumped again, he grabbed a cup from the counter and placed it under the spout. This time, the water went into the waiting vessel, and he laughed as he raised it to his lips.

  It was even sweeter than the water from the well.

  Behind him, the others were creeping into the cabin. Zib made a sound of wordless delight, followed by a thumping sound, as if someone had dropped a sack of potatoes on the floor. By the time Avery turned around, she was facedown on the bed, arms and legs sprawled out like a starfish. The Crow Girl was standing nearby, studying the contents of a low bookshelf with avian fixation, while Niamh stood by the door.

  “You can rest,” she said. “I don’t need to sleep the same way you do. I don’t get tired the way a breathing person does. So you can rest, if that’s what you need.”

  Avery nodded slowly, finishing the water and setting the empty cup down on the edge of the basin. “You won’t go looking for the improbable road without us?” he asked.

  “No. I know you need to find the Queen of Wands if you want to go home, and I’m not going to run off and risk losing you.”

  “All right,” said Avery. His legs felt very heavy as he walked across the room to Zib. Anyone who has ever gone on a long hike can tell you, truly, that they’ve never been so tired as when they were almost to the ending. His body knew that the ending was in sight, and was ready to stop moving. “Zib. Hey, Zib. Hey, move over, just a little, will you?”

  Zib would not. She remained exactly as she was, face buried in the mattress, limbs akimbo. He leaned closer. It sounded as if she had started snoring faintly, already asleep.

  Well. If she wanted to sleep so as to take up as much of the bed as physically possible, that was her problem, not his. Avery leaned over and grabbed her left arm, carefully moving it toward her body. She was asleep enough that when he let go, it stayed where he had placed it. That was encouraging. He repeated the process with her left leg, opening a slice of the mattress for his own use. Finally, he crawled into the bed next to her.

  One good thing about not having shoes anymore: he didn’t need to worry about taking his shoes off before he got in bed. Avery stretched his hands up over his head and his toes down toward the opposite wall, yawning a yawn so big that it cracked his jaw. Then he closed his eyes, rolling over so that his nose was buried in the rumpled curls of Zib’s hair, and let sleep carry him off and away.

  FOUR

  POETRY AND PIRATES

  Many things in the Up-and-Under were different from the things Avery and Zib had known in the ordinary town where they were born. It would be a lie to claim otherwise, and it is the job of a narrator to tell as few lies as possible, since the people who listen to us will always assume that we have been telling the truth. It is a mean trick for someone whose job it is to honestly account an adventure such as this one to exhibit an unnecessary disregard for the truth when there is no way to verify what’s being said. So I am breaking the veil of the anonymous for a moment to address you, the reader, directly, and make this promise to you:

  No matter how strange or improbable the things Avery, Zib, and their friends encounter on their journey through the Up-and-Under, I am telling you the truth as it was seen on those hazy, not-so-long-gone days. There may sometimes be other layers to the truth, things concealed beneath the superficial surface, but I will not say a thing was so if it was not, nor will I tell you a thing was not so when it was. You can trust me on this journey, even as Avery and Zib could trust the improbable road.

  It was not long after Avery followed Zib into slumber that the Crow Girl burst into birds once more, flying out the window and finding roosts for herself in the briars and branches of the garden. She filled her many bellies with bonberries, until her beaks and talons dripped with pink juice. And then she closed her many eyes and slept, although it cannot be said whether she dreamt, for the dreams of birds are strange, tangled things, not recognizable as the dreams of children. The Crow Girl was, in that moment, still very close to being lost forever, for all that she was no longer in the cold hands of the King of Cups.

  Inside the cottage, Niamh sat in a chair with a clear view of the door, being a silent, steady presence as the others slept. She would rest in her own way when the need came upon her, but the need was not upon her yet, and so she watched with open eyes, waiting to see whether the cottage’s owner would appear and object to their uninvited guests.

  The sun sank below the long edge of the sea, having put in an appearance over the high wall of the cliffs, and was gone. Darkness followed, first painting the horizon in pinks and oranges, then tucking all the colors away under a veil of indigo-black night. Stars glittered in the high, clear air, and it was good that Avery was asleep, for not a one of them would have been familiar to him, a stargazing boy who enjoyed evenings in the backyard with his book of constellations and his wide-eyed hunger for the universe. Their strangeness would have been yet another offense heaped on his narrow young shoulders, and he was near enough to the breaking point that he needed no more weight.

  Zib wouldn’t have noticed the strangeness of the stars, but she would have known something was wrong when she saw the moons, both of them too small and too dark to be the moon she knew, and most of all, each one cleaving close to the other, twins dancing through the darkened sky, and not a Man in the Moon standing elegant and alone. They would discover the sky soon enough, and inevitably; while there are many oddities that can be concealed from the eyes of curious children, an entire sky is not among them. But for the moment, they slept peacefully, too exhausted even to dream.

  And Niamh waited.

  The fog rolled in just before dawn, thick and white and heavy as a cotton blanket. It rolled across the garden, chilling the crows that roosted there, until each of them puffed out their feathers, one after the other, becoming black berries with the beaks of birds. The fog rolled on, coming through the open cottage window and filling the room with swirling, skirling whiteness. Niamh relaxed in her chair, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. They had fogs like this in the city she had c
ome from, the city she had lost when the ice closed above it and trapped her alone in the vast dry world. Drowned girls didn’t fare well in the endless dry, and she sometimes felt like she might crumble into dust and blow away in the next inquisitive wind.

  But this fog—ah! This fog came with a feeling of infinite coolness—not damp, exactly, but not dry either. It wrapped around her, soothing away the aches and pains she had almost grown insensitive to, they had been there for so long. Niamh sighed, content.

  Niamh had not considered how much human children liked to be warm and dry, or that Avery and Zib, although fully clothed, had fallen asleep atop the blankets and not moved all through the night, guzzling sleep like it was water and they had been lost in the desert for too long to remember moderation. Zib sat up in the bed, scrubbing at her face with one hand, eyes still scrunched shut.

  “Is it morning?” she asked. If she had been older, Niamh would have thought she sounded drunk, like she’d toppled into bed after one too many cups of wine. Because she was still a child, she sounded more like she’d run face first into a wall and had yet to recover from the impact.

  “No,” said Niamh. “No, it’s not morning. Go back to sleep.”

  Zib yawned, mouth opening so wide that her jaw cracked, finishing the figure Avery had begun when he yawned on his way into bed. She rubbed at her gummy eyes with the heels of her hands, and finally forced her eyelids open, squinting into the foggy white around her. She blinked, once, twice, a third time, and finally, in a voice that dripped with the early threads of panic, asked, “Niamh? Why is everything white?”

  “The fog has rolled off the sea,” said Niamh. “It’s perfectly normal.”