Over the Woodward Wall Page 8

  Still clutching her sock, she turned until she thought she was facing the right direction, and began to walk.

  It is one thing to walk through an unfamiliar orchard, in an unfamiliar country, when there is a road to walk upon. A road—even an improbable road—is a safe, secure thing, saying “someone wanted to go from here to there, and so they made a way to do it comfortably.” It skirts the worst of the brambles and briars, the stickiest of swamps and the deepest of lakes. It protects, simply by existing. It is another thing altogether to walk through that same unfamiliar orchard, in that same unfamiliar country, when there is no road at all.

  Zib walked as quickly as she dared, tripping over hidden tree roots and stepping on fallen bits of berry bush. The stones that had seemed to roll out of her way before were rolling into her way now, making every step hurt, until it felt like the soles of her feet were black with bruises. She kept walking, clutching her single sock like it was some kind of a security blanket.

  When she came to the edge of the orchard, she stumbled, barely catching herself. In front of her was not the improbable road, not the open fields of berry bushes, but what looked like a part of the Tangle, only coaxed, somehow, into a glorious ballroom crafted entirely from thorny briars. The high, vaulted ceiling was open enough to let the light shine in, passing through leaves in varying shades of green and purple, until it created the illusion of stained glass. Zib knew, without even looking, that the orchard was no longer behind her: there was only the briar, going on forever.

  At the center of the room of briars was a throne made of loops and tangles. On the throne was a woman, dressed in a gown of flower petals and mist, with a crown of silver filigree atop her head. Her skin was pale and almost gray, like the clouds that danced on the western wind, and her hair was long and white and free of snarls.

  She was impossibly beautiful. She looked like sunshine on a Saturday, like chocolate cake and afternoons with no homework. She had a smile like a mother’s praise, all sugar and softness, and Zib stared at her, wanting nothing more than to throw herself into those welcoming, unfamiliar arms.

  As Zib’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw the shape of a sword embroidered on the front of the woman’s gown. As if that were the key, more swords appeared, hidden in the filigree of the woman’s crown, woven into the briars of her throne, created by the shadows on the mossy ground. But of course she was the Queen of Swords. Who else could she have been, to be so beautiful, to be so perfectly here?

  If you trust her, you’ll never get home, whispered a voice in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded so much like the Crow Girl that Zib nearly looked over her shoulder to see if she’d been followed. That was silly. The Crow Girl was with Avery, looking for a lock to fit their skeleton key. Avery couldn’t be left alone. He was delicate.

  Zib had never been allowed to be delicate. From the day she was born, she had been told to be tough, to be bold, to pick herself up and dust herself off and keep running. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, to be allowed to fall down and stay fallen.

  “Hello, little girl,” said the incredible woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Zib,” said Zib.

  “They call me the Queen of Swords. This is my protectorate, and I would very much like to be your friend, if you would be willing to have me.” She leaned forward on her throne, smile growing wider. “We could do such wonderful things together.”

  Queens are cruel monsters. They eat and eat and are never full, and they leave lesser beasts in their wake, thought Zib. Still, she stepped forward, lured by the Queen’s smile, so sweet, and her hands, so soft, and the idea that it would be nice to be delicate, for a change. It would be nice to be cherished, and protected, and safe.

  Thorn briars, even enchanted thorn briars—perhaps especially enchanted thorn briars, which must on some level resent the fact that someone is telling them what to do; briars are meant to be wild, fey things, growing as wild and wide as they desire, driven by nothing but their own fickle whims—must, on occasion, drop pieces of themselves. This is how they spread, and how they cleanse themselves of debris, that they may not collapse under the weight of their own dead branches, their own unnecessary leaves. Zib took another step toward the Queen. Her bare foot, shorn of shoe and sock, clad only in dirt, which concealed but did not protect, came down squarely on a fallen bit of briar, the thorns biting deep enough to draw blood.

  Zib screamed.

  There is nothing quite like the earnest, full-throated scream of a child in pain, but to dismiss Zib’s scream as something so ordinary is to do it, and Zib, a great disservice. For since she was an infant, she had possessed a scream that could shake windows and wake sleeping strangers, that seemed to reach past the normal sounds and frequencies of agony and grab hold of something deeper, darker, and far more primal.

  She screamed and the Queen of Swords shied away, her delicate composure broken by her confusion. “What is that noise?” she demanded. “Stop it at once! I command you!”

  Pain had broken the Queen’s thrall quite completely, and Zib did not obey. She dropped to one knee and clutched at her wounded foot instead, trying to extract the betraying briar from her flesh. The thorns were wicked. They snatched and tore at her skin as she pulled them, until she screamed again, this time less in pain and more in agonized frustration.

  The Queen of Swords halfway rose from her throne, no longer smiling, no longer quite so perfect, for no one seems quite perfect when they are in a temper. “You must stop, or you won’t be welcome here any longer!” she cried. “I’ll refuse to keep you! I’ll banish you from my lands!”

  This was a baffling enough series of statements that Zib stopped screaming and simply blinked at the Queen of Swords. Even her hair seemed to echo the question in her eyes, curling around her face in a vast cloud of confusion. Finally, she asked, “Is that meant to be a threat?”

  “Yes! All the best things are here! This is the protectorate of winds and transformation, of spades and changes! My gales are the best gales, my storms the best storms, and you’ll have none of them, none, if you can’t stop making that horrific noise!”

  Zib stood, slowly. “I’m looking for a lock to fit a skeleton key. I’m walking the improbable road to the Impossible City with my friends, and we want to be gone. Tell me how to find the lock and how to get back on the road, and I’ll leave, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  The Queen of Swords scowled at her. She was still beautiful. It is a myth that goodness is always lovely and wickedness is always dreadful to behold; the people who say such things have reason for their claims and would rather those reasons not be overly explored. But she was far less compelling without a sweet smile curving her lips and a delicate angle canting her chin. A hurricane can be beautiful. That doesn’t mean it would be a good idea to go dancing with one simply because it asked you.

  Zib smiled, sweet as sugar candy, and opened her mouth, and screamed again.

  The Queen of Swords clapped her hands over her ears. “Enough, enough!” she cried. “Stop that noise and you can have your lock, and take it with you out of my protectorate as fast as feet can carry you! I need beasts and better, not filthy, screaming children!”

  Avery would have been hurt by her words. Avery didn’t think of himself as “filthy,” would have been shocked and horrified to realize that the label was closer to true than not. He was not a child built for mud puddles and brambles, and there was nothing wrong with that, for every child is built differently, and meant for different things. For example, to Zib, the word “filthy” was a simple statement of fact, neither cruel nor a reason to be ashamed.

  “I took a bath just yesterday,” she said brightly, and held out her hands.

  The Queen of Swords, nose wrinkled in disgust, reached into the shimmering folds of her gown and pulled out a padlock carved from a single solid piece of stone. Zib pulled the bit of bramble from her foot and walked closer. The Queen’s lip curled, but she placed the lock in Zib’s han
ds.

  It was heavy, and cold, and exactly what they needed. Zib closed her eyes.

  “It’s improbable that I found the Queen of Swords by accident,” she said, even though it was nothing of the sort, for the Queen had surely been seeking them since their arrival. “It’s improbable that she had the lock we needed, and it’s improbable that me screaming would be enough to get it.”

  She cracked an eye open. There, glimmering dimly through the muddy ground, was a brick, and where there was one brick, there was another, until she could see the improbable road stretching out before her like a promise of something better yet to come.

  Opening both eyes, Zib turned and curtseyed to the Queen of Swords. Yes, the woman might be wicked, and yes, Zib had been well warned that Queens were fabulous monsters, but that was no cause to be rude.

  “Thank you for the lock,” she said. “I’ll find my friends and we’ll go, quick as anything. You won’t have to worry about us anymore.” Then she turned and walked quickly away, her wounded foot leaving smears of blood on the glittering bricks as she went. The Queen watched her with resentment and respect, for it had been a long time since she’d been denied something she truly wanted to have—but that, it should be said, is another story.

  Zib clutched the lock to her chest as she walked, moving faster and faster through the shadows beneath the brambles, until finally she was running, running as fast as she could, leaves and tangled branches flashing all around her. She was still running when the brambles came to an abrupt end, and she found herself racing down the stretch of the improbable road that ran between the berry bushes, where they had first arrived. She knew that if she looked back, she would see the Tangle, and so she didn’t bother looking.

  An adult might have bitten and worried at the question of how the land had twisted itself beneath her feet, chewing at the contradictions like a dog chews at a flea. Zib was still a child, and she accepted the change with simple gratitude. If anything, this way of doing things simply made more sense than going the long way every time you needed to get somewhere. Why, if the roads could bend to suit every person’s needs, there wouldn’t be any reason not to spend every weekend with her grandparents by the sea, and wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing?

  So Zib ran, and ran, as a white owl circled approvingly overhead, as the Queen of Swords sat and brooded in her bower of briars, until two figures appeared on the road ahead of her. She found the strength to run even faster then, and raced along the road with the lock clasped tight, stopping when she reached them.

  The Crow Girl blinked, once. Avery, on the other hand, looked bewildered—and alarmed. Unlike Zib, he did not like it when things he thought to be rules were broken.

  “How are you here? You should be somewhere else,” he said.

  “The road moved,” she said. “I have the lock.”

  “Let me see,” said the Crow Girl. Zib solemnly surrendered her prize. The Crow Girl turned it over and over, studying it thoughtfully, before she broke into the biggest, brightest smile either of them had seen from her. “It’s a skeleton lock, all right! We can go right to the protectorate of the Queen of Wands and not have to meet the King of Cups at all. Where did you find it?”

  “The Queen of Swords gave it to me if I would promise to stop screaming and leave as quickly as possible,” said Zib.

  Avery stared. The Crow Girl beamed.

  “Clever, clever, and no mistake of that! Come, come, come.” She started walking toward the nearest tree, lock in hand. “We have to hang it high if it’s to work, but not so high the key can’t reach. Challenge, not impossibility, you see?”

  “No,” said Avery. Then: “I thought we were supposed to be afraid of the Queen of Swords.”

  “She was very beautiful, and very frightening,” said Zib. “I don’t think I liked her.” But she had almost gone to her all the same, hadn’t she? Another few steps and Zib’s part in the story would have ended. This would have become Avery’s story, and Avery’s alone, the brave little boy who climbed over a wall and found a friend and lost the friend and learned important life lessons before returning home sadder, wiser, and better prepared to become an adult, with adult thoughts and adult concerns. It was an unsettling thought. Even more unsettling was that the shape of it felt true and right and dangerously close, like so many stories had been told that way that this story wanted to be rid of her, to narrow itself to one child, one destination, one destiny.

  It wasn’t right or fair, that stories should play favorites like that. Zib decided, then and there, that she would see this one all the way to the end: she wouldn’t be shaken off. No matter what, she wouldn’t let go of what was hers.

  The Crow Girl ignored them both as she reached up and hung the lock on a high branch, not so high as to be outside her reach, but very nearly. Then she stepped back, cocking her head this way and that before she reached up and adjusted the angle of the lock, ever so slightly, tilting it toward the brambles.

  “There,” she said. “All we have to do now is open it.”

  The tree shivered. The tree shook. The tree stretched upward, until the lock was well above any of their heads, placed impossibly high.

  Avery gaped at it. “Trees aren’t supposed to move,” he said. “Now no one can reach the lock.”

  “I can!” Zib snatched the skeleton key from his hand before he could protest. She ran for the tree, flinging herself into its lowest branches like she trusted them, implicitly, to catch her—and they did, they did, they cradled her close, holding her like she was the most precious thing in this or any other world. Her bare feet found easy purchase on the bark, and her hands traded the key between them, now here, now there, as she grabbed and pulled and climbed higher and higher and higher still, until she was on the branch where the lock hung, silent and closed, until she was inching toward it with the key still in her grasp.

  She reached down and slid the key easily into place. Avery held his breath. She turned the key in the lock, and there was a sharp clicking sound, and the hasp fell open, and the lock fell away from the tree, tumbling into the hole that had opened where the ground should have been.

  “Here we go!” shouted the Crow Girl. She grabbed hold of Avery, having long since figured out that some things were easier for him, and better, if he had help, and dove into the hole, carrying him with her. He screamed, once, as they plummeted down into the misty depths, and then they were gone.

  “Whee!” shouted Zib, and swung herself away from the branch, dangling for a moment before she let go and fell after them.

  The hole closed once she was through it. Overhead, the white owl watched, and whatever he thought, he did not say.

  EIGHT

  IN THE HOLE

  They fell quickly through what felt like a layer of mist or fog, something cool and clammy that chilled the skin and saturated the clothing, leaving all of them damp and somewhat bedraggled. Avery screamed. Zib shrieked, which is not the same thing at all. The Crow Girl laughed and laughed, a sound that was suspiciously like the cawing of a flock of birds, and kept hold of Avery, who might well have found his way to a bad end if permitted to fall without someone holding on to him.

  They were in a tunnel, that much was plain, for their fall brought them periodically into contact with one wall or another, bouncing back and forth like balls in a machine. Finally, their backs settled into a groove that seemed to have been carved for that very purpose, for it was smooth and polished, like a playground slide made of ice or chilled granite. Zib’s hair grabbed at the stone, in its usual, uncivilized manner, until several strands were pulled out and left behind, and the rest of her hair retreated to the safer tangles near her head. Avery howled, slapping the Crow Girl several times in his panic, so that she lost her grip on him and fell away. Almost immediately, Zib’s hand found his in the darkness, and they held each other tightly, not letting go.

  Down and down and down they fell, until the air thickened into fog around them once more and their fall became a plummet, the slid
e vanishing from beneath their bodies, replaced by nothing but empty air. The Crow Girl gasped and burst into birds. Zib’s shrieks of delight became a howl of fear. Avery screamed harder.

  Two children struck the surface of the freezing water, hard enough to force their bodies some distance below the surface, into the depths. The crows circled above it, cawing panic, even as the fog began to clear, revealing the snowcapped peaks of jagged mountains that jutted from the earth like the claws of some forgotten beast.

  A girl stood on the shore, looking at the water with solemn eyes. The crows landed all around her, cawing frantically.

  “Well, yes, I can,” said the girl. “But if I do, it will certainly attract attention, and I’ll need you to go and see what comes on the mountain roads. Can you do that?”

  The crows cawed assent and rose into the air, dispersing in all directions, until it was as if they had never been there at all. The girl watched them go for a moment. Then she walked into the water, never flinching at the chill. She did not swim; the water offered no resistance. She simply strolled, like the improbable road was somehow rising up to meet her.

  Avery and Zib, having crashed together and grabbed hold as they fell, were still holding tight to one another’s hands. This made it difficult for them to swim, and both of them knew, without being able to say anything about it, that they would have been better off letting go. It is difficult to swim when suddenly dropped from a great height into a dark, icy lake. The shock alone is more than the body wants to bear. It is even more difficult to do so when holding on to someone else’s hand, however beloved they may be. Avery and Zib had not yet found their way to loving one another, but they had more than found their way to the fear of being in this strange new world alone, and so they held on and tried to swim at the same time, deep and drowning and afraid.