Over the Woodward Wall

by A. Deborah Baker

  Sure enough for what? Zib thought, and hit the ground with what felt like force enough to break every bone in her body. Her eyes, which she had not been aware of closing, snapped open.

  She was in a cage.

  The bars were black iron, rimed with ice and studded with decorative swirls that were probably lovely to the people outside the cage, but created a field of spikes and sharp edges for the person inside the cage. Zib scrambled to her feet, looking wildly around. The cage was on a stretch of wide, flat, frozen ground. Nearby, there was a throne. On the throne sat the King of Cups, and around him …

  She froze for a moment, trying to make sense of what she saw. Her eyes, adjusting to the scene, began to find the tiny differences in the three girls who sat arrayed around him, like faithful hounds surrounding their master. All of them were lithe and pale and dressed in gowns of black feathers, with more black feathers in their hair. If one had eyes that were a trifle larger than the other two, and one had a chin that was a trifle sharper, and one looked as if she might, upon standing, be a trifle taller, it didn’t make much difference, for they were crow girls all, like copies of her Crow Girl, who was—she hoped, she wished, she prayed—still with Avery, and safe from the hand of this grasping king.

  The Page of Frozen Waters popped up in front of her like a Jack from his box, a smile on her face and a needle in one hand. There was a black feather in her other hand, held tightly between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Give me your arm,” she said.

  Zib, who was more sensible than Avery gave her credit for being, shrank back against the bars. “No.”

  “Give me your arm, or I will take it, and little as you think you’ll like what’s coming, you’ll like that even less.”

  Reluctantly, Zib extended her arm, until the Page could lean into the cage, just enough to prick her with the needle. It was very sharp. A bead of blood welled immediately to the surface of the skin, and the Page wiped it away with the black feather, leaving no visible wound at all.

  “There,” she said, sounding quite satisfied. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it? Everything is easier when you cooperate.” Then she was gone, bounding away to whatever odd errands occupied a girl like her, in a place like this.

  Zib huddled against the bars and shivered. It felt like things were shifting beneath her skin, like pieces of her that were meant to be perfectly still were finding the power to move around. She thought of the Crow Girl bursting into birds. She thought of her blood on the black feather, and she blinked back hot tears, and she wondered whether it would hurt when she came apart, when she stopped being one and started being many.

  The King of Cups closed his eyes. Ice settled over him like a shroud. Zib held her breath, counting the seconds until she was sure he was asleep. Then she pulled the slingshot from her pocket, and one of the acorns she had been carrying for all this time, and pulled back the strap, taking careful aim at the crow girl with the sharpest chin. She had been told, more than once, that a chin that was too sharp was a thing boys would find unattractive when she got older, and she had seen nothing to indicate that she had been lied to. It stood to reason, then, that the King of Cups might find the sharpest chin the least attractive, and might spend the smallest amount of his attention on that particular crow girl.

  Girls who are ignored can learn to be impossible, can learn to listen, and look, and learn more than they were ever meant to know. If she was going to find an ally here, she would find it in the crow girl with the least to lose.

  She released the strap of her slingshot, and the acorn flew straight and true, hitting the crow girl in the shoulder, where there were no feathers to muffle the impact. The crow girl flinched but didn’t make a sound, simply turned to regard Zib with curious avian eyes, the feathers in her hair standing very slightly on end. Zib made a come-closer gesture, beckoning her. The crow girl cocked her head to the side, considering. Then she looked to the King of Cups, as if measuring the depth of his slumber. Finally, she rose, and padded toward the cage where Zib was waiting.

  Her feet were bare, her toes like talons. All their feet were bare, and unlike Zib, they didn’t seem to feel the cold.

  “Hello,” she said, once she was close enough. Her voice was low, but she made no effort to whisper. “Are you going to join our flock? There were four of us once before, until the first one left. It would be nice to be four again. Four is a good number. Can’t have a boy without four. But you’re not a boy, are you? You move like a girl to me.”

  “Don’t you mean I look like a girl?” asked Zib, curiosity briefly winning over panic.

  “No. Why would I mean that? That’s silly. No one looks like a girl, or a boy, or an elm tree, or anything else. Someone either is or isn’t a thing, and the world can put as many layers on top of the thing as it likes; won’t change what’s underneath.” The crow girl shrugged. “People say I look like a girl, but that won’t ever make me one.”

  Zib blinked. “You’re not? But I thought—”

  “Oh, I’m a crow girl, but I’m not a girl girl.” The crow girl’s smile was swift, there and gone in an instant. “I’m a murder. The skin’s only for the outside people. The real me is all feathers and thorns, and not a girl at all. Are you going to be a part of our flock?”

  “I don’t want to be,” whispered Zib.

  “Oh,” said the crow girl, face falling. “That doesn’t mean you won’t be.”

  “Please.” Zib grabbed the bars of the cage, ignoring the way they bit into her palms. “Can you let me out of here? Is there a key you can bring me?”

  “There’s no key,” said the crow girl. “The door opens when the Page wants it to open, and it closes when the Page wants it to close. It’s like us, you see. It belongs to her. The King makes everything possible, and most of the time all he wants is for us to sit at his feet and smile and tell him how very clever he is, but the Page holds our jesses, and we don’t fly without her permission. There’s no key that can be stolen, no lock that can be picked. You’ll be where you’ll be until she says otherwise. But it’s all right! It’s all right. Once your heart shatters, you won’t even feel the cold.”

  Zib wasn’t sure what a heart was for, exactly: knew that grownups put a great deal of weight on whether or not she was listening to her heart over her head, knew that they were quite fond of telling her not to give it carelessly away. Even so, she couldn’t imagine a heart was meant to shatter, or that it was an event which should be treated quite so lightly.

  “Why will my heart shatter?” asked Zib.

  “So that you can be a murder,” said the crow girl, matter-of-factly. “I have so many hearts now, or I did, before the King of Cups decided that I didn’t need them anymore. He must have been right, because I fly so much better now, and everything is fine, and I never feel the cold, not even as much as I did before he split me open and took away what wasn’t wanted.”

  Zib swallowed. “I don’t think I want that,” she said. “Please, isn’t there anything you can do to help me? I like being a girl. I like having only one heart, that hasn’t been shattered or stolen. I want to stay the way I am, and not change into something else.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the crow girl.

  “Please.”

  The crow girl stood in silent thought for a long moment before turning and walking away, past the throne where the King of Cups slept and the other members of the flock sat silent attendance, until she was almost out of view. Then she knelt, picking something up from the frozen ground, and walked back.

  It was a feather. A long red feather, banded with darker streaks, like a strip of paint peeled from the side of a barn. Zib recognized it at once, and when the crow girl slid it between the bars of the cage, she snatched it greedily, bringing it to her nose and breathing deeply in. It smelled, ever so faintly, of the great owl who had carried her here, who had tried to protect her, who had failed and fled.

  “Oak,” she breathed.

  “Owls are good,” said the crow gir
l. “Owls remember things. Crow girls don’t. We’re a poem in the process of being unwritten, a thought about to be unformed. We forget because remembering is bad for us. If you can hold on to the feather, maybe you can remember. Maybe what’s bad for us can be good for you, since you’d rather be a girl than a murder.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Zib. She reached up and pulled one lock of hair free from the mass, separating it with quick, clever fingers before winding it around the shaft of the feather. When she let go, the feather hung so it almost brushed her cheek, held securely in place by her plaiting.

  “It’s all I can do,” said the crow girl. Then she smiled. “You’ll be happier when you’re one of us. The King of Cups will make all manner of promises, because that’s what he does, and then he’ll break them all, because that’s also what he does: a king may be a liar and not suffer for it one bit. But he’ll tell you you’ll be happier, and he’ll mean it, because a shattered heart can never be broken, and a murder who looks like a girl who has no heart to break is the happiest thing in the world. You’ll see. I promise, given time, you’ll see.”

  The crow girl turned and walked back to the throne, settling into position alongside the rest of her flock. Zib fingered the acorns in her pocket and thought about trying again. It didn’t seem like the best idea. If one crow girl couldn’t help her, neither could the next, and she only had so many acorns; when they were gone, they were gone. What they could do against a king, she didn’t know.

  Settling to the floor of the cage, she pressed her back as close to the bars as she could, and closed her eyes. She felt small, and cold, and afraid. If she slept for a time, maybe those things would be better. Or maybe she would have a dream that would tell her what to do, and when she woke, she would find her freedom like an apple, ready to be plucked.

  Instead, when she opened her eyes, it was because she itched all over, as if she had rolled in a field of stinging nettles. She scratched at her arm, carefully at first, then with more and more vigor, trying to chase the itching away. It didn’t work. The itching got worse, and worse, until she thought she might scratch her own skin off, trying to have done with it.

  Her fingers found a tuft of what felt like stiffened, mud-matted hair at the bend of her elbow. She grabbed it and ripped it free, and the itching stopped, as suddenly as the air escaping from a popped soap bubble. She started to throw the offending bit of hair aside and froze, staring at it, unable to breathe.

  It was a feather. A small black feather, like the kind of feather she might have expected to find on a baby crow, not yet long enough or stiff enough for flight, but more than long enough, more than stiff enough, to have no business at all growing out of her body. She looked at her arm. A small bead of blood stood up where the feather had been, bright red against her skin.

  Silently, Zib began to cry.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been crying when the Page of Frozen Waters reappeared, popping up beside the cage with a bright smile on her face. “Hello again, new girl. How do you like your feathers? They don’t fit so well beneath the skin, do they?”

  “I hate you,” said Zib, voice gone dull. “You are a terrible person.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not the one in the cage.” The Page twinkled at her, as bright and cold and deadly as a star. “I’m not the one who’ll be dressed in feathers and forgotten. You should be nicer to me while you have the choice. You won’t, soon, and I’ll remember what you said while you still thought you could be free.”

  Zib got up onto her knees, clutching the bars to bring herself as close as possible to the Page as she glared. “You are bad,” she said. “You are rotten and twisted and awful inside, and you can dress me in feathers and make me a murder, but I know something you don’t know.”

  The Page lost her smile, expression turning wary. “What’s that?”

  “The ground beneath your feet doesn’t glitter,” said Zib. “The improbable road has never chosen you, not even once, because if it had, you wouldn’t be here; you’d be off on an adventure, not sitting by a man who lets you hurt people and doesn’t tell you that it’s wrong. You’d go to the Impossible City. You haven’t because you can’t. I could, if you opened this cage, and you can never take that away from me. I’ll always be the girl who could do what you couldn’t.”

  The Page of Frozen Waters hissed fury and reached into the air like she was reaching into a pocket, pulling out a trident that looked like it was made of nothing but ice. She pointed it at Zib. “I don’t want your stupid city, and I don’t want your useless road, and you’re going to be mine to command, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  The owl feather in Zib’s hair twisted, like it was trying to cup her hair; she heard voices, soft and distant but crystal clear, and she smiled.

  “Oh,” she said. “I think that’s where you’re wrong.”

  TWELVE

  THE TRUTH ABOUT OWLS

  “… and that’s when you came,” said Zib matter-of-factly. “You showed up just in time.”

  Zib stopped speaking. Avery stared at her for a moment, eyes wide and round and horrified, before he threw himself at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and pulling her as close as he could, holding her as tightly as a strand of ivy holds a tree.

  “Never do that again,” he commanded. “Never, ever do that again.” Her skin was smooth under his hands, with no hint of quill or feather, but he knew he would see her bursting into birds in his nightmares for the rest of his life. He could be old, older than his parents, older than the trees, and still he’d see her coming apart, dissolving and flying away.

  The Crow Girl was less dramatic, although no less concerned. “Let me see your arm,” she commanded.

  Silently, Zib obliged. The Crow Girl gripped her wrist, fingers surprisingly gentle despite their claw-like nails, and turned Zib’s arm gingerly over as she studied the place where the feather had sprouted. Finally, she exhaled.

  “They’re going back to bone,” she said. “All children have feathers on their bones, waiting for the chance to sprout and fly away. Sometimes the trick is in keeping them there.”

  “Children don’t have feathers,” said Avery, letting go of Zib so he could frown at the Crow Girl. “I would know.”

  “Maybe they don’t where you come from, but here, in the Up-and-Under, they do, and you’re here now, so what’s true for one is true for all.” The Crow Girl glanced at the ground. “The road’s not here. We should find it and be on our way.”

  “Can we find Niamh, too?” asked Zib. “She shouldn’t be alone.”

  “We can watch for her,” said the Crow Girl. “Now come, come, come. We’re still in his protectorate, and even if he let us go, he forgets things sometimes. He could forget forgiving us, and then we’d have to do this all again. But no one else forgets. That’s the trouble with having a memory of ice. It melts, and you get the good again for the very first time, while the people all around you sharpen their swords against the bad.”

  “Swords…” said Avery. He glanced at the blade in Zib’s hand, her fingers curled possessively around the hilt. “You should keep the sword. I don’t think it was ever really meant for me. I don’t want to fight people.”

  “I don’t want to fight people either,” said Zib, making no move to offer the sword back to him. “That doesn’t mean I won’t, if they make me. I’ll keep you safe.”

  Avery smiled. “I know you will,” he said.

  The ground beneath their feet began to glitter, as if a fountain of fireflies had opened somewhere beneath the icy stone. Zib gasped in delight.

  “The improbable road!” she said. “It’s found us!”

  “It always does,” said the Crow Girl smugly. “Come. Come. We have a long way left to go.”

  She began to walk, and the children followed her. Avery reached out, almost timidly, and slid the fingers of his free hand into Zib’s. She glanced at him and smiled, sidelong and shy, and everything was going to be all right. They had survived th
e court of the King of Cups; the feathers under Zib’s skin were gone. Niamh would find them, rising out of the river alongside the road like a fountain, and they would reach the Impossible City, and they would go home.

  Home. It was a shining star of an idea, impossible and infinitely appealing. It was a dream that had no ending and no beginning, only a complex, clean middle. Nothing would have changed. Oh, his parents might be angry at him for missing a day of school, but his mother would cover his face in kisses, and his father would clap a hand on his shoulder, welcoming him back to a world where children didn’t have feathers wrapped around their bones, where fruit always tasted the same way, and where girls never burst into crows.

  Girls. He looked at Zib. She was smiling as she walked, the sword in her hand looking like it had always belonged there, like she had been somehow incomplete before she held a weapon against the world. She was scrawny and scruffy and her hair was somehow more tangled than it had been before, standing up and out from her head like a thorn briar, equally full of secrets. She was not the kind of child his parents had always encouraged him to play with, the kind who would grow up to be serious and quiet and just like him. She was loud, and wild, and his mother would frown at the state of her hands, and his father would frown at the state of her clothes, and it would be so much easier to believe this journey hadn’t changed him if he was only willing to leave her behind.

  He wasn’t willing to leave her behind.

  The realization blossomed like a flower in his chest, and he tightened his hand on hers, until his grip was hard enough that she glanced at him again, questioning and confused. The Crow Girl walked in front of them, blissfully oblivious.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Zib.

  Avery hesitated before blurting, “I don’t understand why there are so many owls. I’ve never seen this many owls in my whole life, and now they’re everywhere. Why are there so many owls?”