Over the Woodward Wall Page 3

  “It’s a start,” said Meadowsweet. She turned to Zib. “A slingshot—that’s the human weapon that throws things away from itself, very fast, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a toy, not a weapon,” said Zib. “But yes.”

  “I suppose whether it’s a toy or a weapon depends on whether you’re aiming it or having it aimed at you,” said Meadowsweet. “Take a rock, and put it in your slingshot, and throw the rock as far as the slingshot will let you. Once you’ve done that, go looking for it. Three rocks should see you to the end of the forest. Maybe five. Definitely not four. Four is an even number, and those never get you anywhere.”

  “Will you come with us?” asked Avery. Meadowsweet was an owl, which was strange, but she was also an adult. Things always went more smoothly when there was an adult around.

  To his surprise, the owl laughed. “Me, go with you? You’re human children, and clearly on a quest for something, even if it’s only the wall you say you’ve misplaced. I value my wings too much to accompany human children on a quest. Only head for the edge of the forest, and you’ll find something there to help you.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Zib.

  “Things have a way of going the way they’re meant to go. You should start walking. The wolves will be here soon.” Meadowsweet took off in a flurry of wings, vanishing back into the high branches, and for all that she was impossibly blue, no matter how much Zib and Avery squinted, they couldn’t see her.

  “Now what do we do?” asked Avery.

  Zib slid her hands into two of the pockets hidden in her skirt, coming up with a slingshot and a polished stone the size of a conker. She pulled the strap on her slingshot back, slid the stone into the cup at the center of the strap, and let go, sending the stone sailing straight and true through the trees.

  “We go that way,” she said, and started walking.

  Avery stayed where he was, staring after her. Zib kept going for a few more feet before pausing and looking back.

  “Well?” she asked. “Are you coming?”

  Avery scrambled to catch up with her, and the two children walked into the trees, not quite together but not quite alone, following the trail of the slingshot stone.

  THREE

  THE IMPROBABLE ROAD

  Meadowsweet’s directions had not been very precise, not when compared to a lifetime of hearing things like “turn left on Main” or “three doors down, you can’t miss it.” Following a small stone through a tangled forest was difficult, and strange, and sometimes unpredictable. The slingshot was strong enough to throw the stones quite far, and Zib’s aim was good, but she wasn’t aiming at anything, only trying to send the stones away from the two of them with all the force she could. Finding the stones after they landed was hard.

  But after they found the first one, the trees got a little less foreboding. After they found the second one, the shadows got a little shallower, like the sun had remembered it had a job to do. And when Zib reached under a fern the color of strawberry taffy to retrieve the third stone, she heard Avery gasp.

  “I can see a road!” he shouted.

  She looked up to see him running through the trees, stumbling over roots and slapping branches aside in his haste to get out of the forest. Fear washed through her, sharp and biting. He was going to leave her behind. He was going to leave her all alone in this unfamiliar place, and she was going to be eaten by wolves. She didn’t know him very well—didn’t really know him at all, except that his cuffs were too tight and he didn’t like adventures—but she didn’t like the idea of being all alone. No, she didn’t like that one bit.

  “Wait for me!” She shoved slingshot and stone both into the pocket of her skirt and took off after him.

  The edge of a forest is something entirely different from the heart of a forest, which only makes sense, really: an edge is a beginning, or an ending, and not a comfortable middle. Perhaps that was why Avery froze as soon as he was out of the shadow of the trees, shaking slightly, like an arrow on the verge of being released from a bow. Zib stopped next to him, raking twigs out of the wild tangle of her hair, and followed his gaze. She blinked, slowly.

  There was a road. There was nothing else it could have been: she knew no other name for a ribbon of brick winding its way through a valley, surrounded by grassy, flower-covered hills, bridging narrow streams. But where most of the bricks she had seen were red, or gray, or a dull, disappointing brown, this road gleamed with iridescent rainbows, like every brick had been coated in a thin layer of mother-of-pearl. It was beautiful. It looked fragile, and impractical, and—

  “Impossible,” said Avery, and his voice was brown-brick dull. It was the voice of a boy on the very verge of giving up. “This can’t be happening. It can’t be real. I’m asleep, I have to be.” He turned to Zib, suddenly frantic as he grabbed at her hands. “Slap me. I need you to slap me as hard as you can, so I’ll wake up.”

  “What happens to me if you wake up?” demanded Zib, and took a big step back, away from his snatching fingers. “I don’t think I’m dreaming. But if you’re dreaming, and you wake up, do I pop like a soap bubble? I don’t want to pop. I’m finally having an adventure.”

  “This isn’t an adventure!” shouted Avery.

  A new voice rang out. “Ah, but are you sure that you’re the one who gets to decide that?”

  The two children turned, Zib moving a little closer to Avery.

  At first, it seemed they were alone on the shallow, grassy hill that descended from forest to road. The trees were there, and whatever lived among the trees—Meadowsweet, certainly, and wolves, perhaps, and all manner of other things—but trees weren’t good company, and the things that lived in them weren’t showing themselves.

  There was a boulder off to one side, large and rough and glittering in the sun, veined in pink and black and creamy white, like a scoop of harlequin ice cream. It shivered, which was not a thing boulders were much known to do. It shuddered, which was also not a thing boulders were much known to do. Finally, it unfolded itself, like a piece of paper being smoothed out on a table to show the hidden picture inside, and became a man.

  He was not a very tall man, being scarcely taller than Avery himself, and he was not a very fat man, as Zib could easily have linked a single arm around his waist, but he was a very handsome man, with sculpted features under a fringe of black-pink-white hair, and a smart suit that seemed to have been tailored from the stone that comprised his body. He looked at the children with interest.

  “You’re not from around here, and if you’re not from around here, you must have come from somewhere else, and if you’ve come from somewhere else, you’re almost certainly having an adventure,” said the man. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that, if you didn’t want an adventure, but sometimes adventures happen whether or not they’re requested. They’re like Tuesday afternoons, or headaches, or birthdays. They do as they like.”

  “You were a boulder,” accused Zib. “Boulders can’t talk.”

  “This can’t be happening, boulders can’t talk—tell me, does anything happen where you come from?” The man looked at them with unalloyed concern. “It sounds very dull.”

  “Who are you?” asked Avery.

  “My name is Quartz,” said the man. “As to who I am, that is an existential question. ‘Existential’ means ‘pertaining to existence,’ which I suppose means that asking for a cookie is existential, which means it’s a word with no useful applications, and you should forget you know it.”

  “We know the word ‘existential,’” said Avery. “We’re not babies.”

  “Ah, but here, at least, you are babes in the woods, or babes out of the woods, as it happens, and you don’t think boulders can talk and you don’t think adventures can do as they like, and I think that means you need a guide.” Quartz removed his hat and bowed, deeply. “At your service, for as long as the improbable road will keep us together.”

  “The what?” asked Zib.

  “The improbable road.
I don’t mean to insult you, but do you know what ‘improbable’ means?”

  “Unlikely,” said Avery.

  “Is it unlikely that you know, or does the word mean ‘unlikely’? As it happens, both are true, so we’ll carry merrily on, or we could be here playing dictionary all night, and that doesn’t get us anywhere. Literally. We won’t move.” Quartz replaced his hat atop his head before indicating the road with a sweep of one hand. “Bricks made from sunlight on sand and moonlight on mist and starlight on water? Improbable! A single road that runs the length of an entire kingdom? Improbable! A city of untold marvels and incredible wonders waiting at its end? Improbable! So this, then, must be the improbable road, and if you walk it long enough, all your questions will be answered, for what could be more improbable than a happy ending? Of course, for you to make it without a guide would be…” He paused portentously.

  Zib, feeling quite sure of herself, chirped, “Improbable!”

  “Oh, no, child, no,” said Quartz. “For you to make it without a guide would be impossible, which is something entirely different, and far less pleasant.”

  “There’s a city?” asked Avery. “Can we go there?” Cities meant adults, and policemen, and other people who could make things start making sense again.

  “If you want to get anything done, you’ll have to go there,” said Quartz. “The Impossible City is where things finish.”

  “You mean where things begin,” said Avery.

  “If I’d meant that, I would have said that,” said Quartz. “What is a conversation like where you come from, if no one ever says the things they mean to be saying? You’ve already begun, unless a beginning is something different when you’re at home: see, you’re standing here, talking with me, outside the Forest of Borders, and the only way to enter the forest is to cross a border. The improbable road is right there waiting for you, ready to sweep you away to the next stage of the adventure you don’t want to have. No, the beginning is well behind us now. It’s the ending you need to move toward.”

  “What do we have to do?” asked Zib, who was getting the distinct feeling that if she allowed Avery to make the decisions, they would be standing there until well after the sun went down, assuming such silly things as “sunsets” existed in a world of talking owls and helpful boulders.

  “You have to walk the length of the improbable road, all the way to the Impossible City, where—if you’ve been clever, and you’ve been cunning, and most of all, if you’ve been correct—the Queen of Wands will see that you’ve earned an ending, and send you back to wherever you’ve come from, or wherever you want to be, which isn’t necessarily, or even often, the same thing.”

  “The Queen of what?” asked Zib.

  “The Queen of Wands. She’s the best and brightest of the four rulers of the Up-and-Under. She burns so bright, it’s like sitting in the presence of a star.” Quartz smiled, a dreamy look in his eyes. “I should be in the service of the King of Coins, what with him being in charge of the earth and all the things that grow there, but I’ve always been more inclined to glitter when I can, not sit about being stolid and dependable. It’s the Queen of Wands for me. She’s in the Impossible City right now. She has been for years upon years upon years, and she’ll help you if you get there.”

  “Wait,” said Avery. “We don’t have a Queen. We certainly don’t have four of them.”

  “We don’t have four queens either,” said Quartz. “We have two, one you’d like to meet and one you wouldn’t, and two kings, who keep to themselves, except when they don’t, and who needn’t be involved with this at all. The Queen of Wands will help you, you’ll see. She’s the best of them.”

  Zib, who was not always as quick as Avery to realize when something was wrong, frowned. “What’s the Up-and-Under?” she asked.

  “This is!” Quartz spread his arms, indicating the forest, the hills, the winding, iridescent road. “All of this is the Up-and-Under, and a great deal more than this. It exists even when people aren’t looking, which you must agree is a desirable quality in a world, and so there are oceans and mountains and bakeries where the bread is very good and bakeries where the bread is very bad and cheesemakers and cats and everything. Oh! But you must come from another kind of kingdom, if you don’t know these things.”

  “We don’t come from a kingdom at all,” said Avery. “We come from a country called the United States of America. We stopped having kings and queens years and years ago. We have a President instead, and he does what’s right for the country, not what’s right for the crown.”

  “What happens if your Resident decides that what’s right for the country isn’t what everyone else thinks is right?” asked Quartz, with the sort of polite puzzlement that adults always seemed to bring to games of make-believe.

  Avery rankled. “We have elections, and we elect someone else to be President.” He tried to make the “P” as loud as possible, so that the crystal man would hear it.

  “What a funny way of doing things,” said Quartz. “Here, if one of the kings or queens gets too big for their britches, we just march on the Impossible City with pitchforks and spears and very large spiders, and we boot out whomever’s in ascension and replace them with someone who will do a better job.”

  “That sounds like an election,” said Zib dubiously.

  “Oh, no, it isn’t elective at all. When someone with a very large spider asks you to move along, you move.”

  Zib glanced anxiously at the forest’s edge. All this talk of very large spiders had her worried that some of them might show up to ask for a place in the story. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, exactly. Being afraid of spiders was a silly, squeamish thing, and she hated being silly, and she hated being squeamish. She simply thought that spiders were best when viewed from a distance. The greater the distance, the better.

  “Is the Queen of Wands really waiting for us?” she asked.

  “She is, she is, and she’s a very busy woman; you had best get moving, if you want to catch her before she gets tired of waiting and decides to do something else.” Quartz gestured toward the shining road. “Your ending lies ahead.”

  Avery looked at Zib. Zib looked at Avery. Avery looked at the sky, which was wide and blue and somehow subtly wrong, like the shapes of the clouds weren’t what they ought to be, like the birds that soared on distant winds would, if they came closer, be revealed as dragons, or winged horses, or winged people. Zib looked at the forest, which was welcoming and foreboding at the same time, filled with ferns that were the wrong colors and trees that had the wrong leaves. Both of them looked at the road.

  “We just … walk?” asked Avery. “That’s all?”

  “You walk improbably,” said Quartz. “And here is where I give you a word of caution, although I’m sure you don’t need it, clever children that you are. You began this story together, whether you intended to or not. You’ll end it the same way, or you won’t end it at all.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Zib.

  “It means we both go home or neither of us does,” said Avery.

  Quartz tapped the side of his nose with one striated finger. “Clever boy, yes, indeed! All or nothing, that’s the way in the Impossible City. All or nothing.”

  Avery and Zib exchanged another look.

  They wouldn’t be able to explain why later, if anyone asked them at all, but they started walking at the same time, and when they reached the road, they kept on walking, with Quartz walking alongside them, still disconcertingly made of crystal.

  They had been walking for some time—long enough for Zib to have climbed and fallen out of three different trees growing alongside the road—when Quartz waved them to a halt. The crystal man’s formerly jocular face was set into a scowl.

  “What,” he asked, “do you think you’re doing?”

  “We’re walking to the Impossible City so the Queen of Wands will give us an ending and send us home,” said Avery, and frowned, because that sentence should have made no sense at all.
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br />   “No, you’re not,” said Quartz. “To get to the Impossible City, you need to walk the improbable road.”

  “But we are!” protested Zib.

  “You’re not,” said Quartz. “Everything you’ve done has been completely plain and probable. If you want to walk the improbable road, you need to find it.”

  Avery and Zib exchanged a look. This was going to be more difficult than they had expected.

  “How can you be improbable on purpose?” asked Avery.

  “I don’t know,” said Quartz.

  Zib frowned. Zib sat down in the middle of the road and began picking at her hair, dislodging leaves and twigs and a small, startled lizard that had been there since she’d fallen out of the first tree.

  “Get up,” said Avery. “We have to keep walking.”

  “No,” said Zib. “I don’t think we do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Zib got back to her feet. “I think it’s probable that if you follow a road, you’ll wind up going where the road goes. So that means that if you don’t follow the road, it’s improbable that you’ll wind up going where the road goes. So that means that if we want to follow the improbable road, we can’t follow it at all. Come on, Avery!”

  She grabbed the boy’s hand and broke into a run, dragging him off the road and into the meadow on the other side. A wall of thorns burst from the ground behind them, cutting them off from Quartz and from the road.

  Quartz smiled.

  “Well,” he said. “That took them long enough.” Whistling, he began strolling onward, toward the distant, unseen spires of the Impossible City.

  FOUR

  THE CROW GIRL

  Avery was not very fond of running. They did running three times a week at school, and he was always one of the very slowest, circling the track behind the rest of his class, lungs burning and legs aching and shoes pinching his feet. All those things happened now, as he ran with Zib. His breath whistled in his throat, which seemed to have gotten somehow smaller, forgetting what it was supposed to do. His legs were too long and too short at the same time, and his shoes hurt his feet, making him utterly aware of every single toe.