Chapter 13
The improbable road reached the base of the mountain and began to snake gently upward, following the curves and dips of a natural pathway worn into the stone.
The group continued to walk along it, allowing the road to lure them up and away from the ground.
They had gone perhaps twenty feet up the side of the mountain when Soleil made a small sound of discontent.
Jack turned to look at her. “What is it?” he asked.
Wordlessly, she pointed to the ground beneath their feet. Jack looked down.
The path they walked along was glittering black stone. The improbable road, fickle as ever, was gone, and they walked now without its iridescent guide to see that they reached the right destination.
Unlike Soleil, who remembered so little of the world that she might as well have been a stranger like Avery or Zib, or Niamh, who came from a place so deeply drowned that she had never had purposeful need of the improbable road, Jack had been raised to respect and revere the road, which was the only true connection between the Kingdoms that could be accessed by those too common to carry a crown.
The Kings and Queens could go where they liked, as could their Pages and consorts; the Great Owls were all but a law unto themselves.
For everyone else, there was the road and only the road, and all else might as well have been stories and lies.
To see the road desert them now sent a shiver of cold slithering down his spine to wrap around his stomach, tight and constrictive as a hungry serpent.
Jack swallowed and kept walking. Zib was not yet heavy in his arms, and the Palace of the Queen of Wands was as yet up ahead, still unseen.
If the road had left them, either it disagreed with their destination, or it felt that they no longer needed its guidance.
Jack had no way of knowing one thing from the other, and so he continued onward, trusting the road not to have left them walking into danger.
The improbable road had no true loyalties save to the Impossible City, which was its source and destination.
They sought a place to care for Zib, yes, but they also sought the missing Queen of Wands at the request of the Great Owls themselves, and a way to access the Impossible City.
Without the Queen, the City would fall to war, and the road would suffer as much as anyone else. He had to trust the road.
They all did.
—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker