Chapter 30
“I have something better than Earth,” said Jack, and reached into his chest like a man reaches into a cupboard, his arm sinking through flesh and bone to vanish into the very substance of his self.
When he pulled it out again, he was holding a bird in his hand.
Not a jackdaw or a crow, either of which might have been expected, but a black-and-white bird whose feathers gleamed oddly blue in the light.
It cocked its head, looking around itself with bright, keen eyes.
“I stole this from my mother’s cages before we fled her kingdom,” he said.
“She’s never been a part of anyone before, but she would be glad to have a flock.
She told me so, while she slept in the aviary of my heart.
If Zib hasn’t traveled too far down the graveyard path by now, we might be able to call her back. ”
“Just get her back,” commanded Avery.
Fern hooted in distress, still prisoned in the cage where the Page of Frozen Waters had sealed her. The King of Cups moved toward her, reaching for the bars with his newly youthened hands. Fern shied away, hooting again, even as Jack bent toward Zib, the bird still firmly in his hand.
“Getting her back won’t free her, you know,” he said, with one last glance at Avery.
“She’s a burning girl now, and she’ll be a Magpie if this works, and either way, she’ll be a creature of the Up-and-Under always and ever more.
When you go home from here, you’ll go on alone, and all of this will be a strange story you’ll tell to your children someday, in the far-off country where you have them for your own. ”
“No,” protested Avery. “I can’t go back without her. I can’t—she lives on my street! If I go back without her, they’ll know something bad happened!”
“Were you friends, then, before the wall?” asked Jack, as he leaned closer still to Zib’s unmoving shape, as he slipped the bird in his hand into her breast, letting it roost and settle there. “Did you play in the fields together, build snowmen, while away your hours?”
“We met at the wall,” said Avery dully.
“Then the Up-and-Under brought you together, because it needed one of you to learn a lesson, and one of you to be a lesson. It seems the roles are set.” Jack stepped back, away from Zib, straightening as he went.
“I would have done it the other way around, if anyone had asked me. Let her carry the truth of what we are and what we serve back to your America. Let you walk the graveyard path and stay forever down among the dead and the drowned.”
Zib took a great, shuddering breath and rolled onto her side, hacking and coughing like her lungs were preparing to burst. Avery cried out, a low, wordless sound, and moved to steady her.
She turned her face away from him, and when this tilted her eyes toward Soleil, she screwed them shut, denying the sight of any of them.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. No, no, no.” And between each word she spat out either a cinder or a feather, a burning thing or a tiny slice of sky.
“Drowning is hard,” said Niamh, walking over and reaching down to guide her off the ground. “Drowning without water is harder.”
Zib let herself be lifted. “No,” she said again.
“You made the choice, Hepzibah. You could have chosen to let the light in the tower blow out in exchange for your own candled heart, but you chose the Queen. You chose the regent who will see us all protected over the one who would see us washed away.”
The remade King of Cups looked briefly ashamed at that, and said nothing, only produced a key from inside his shirt and bent over the lock of Fern’s cage.
“Choices have consequences, and they can’t always be taken back.”
“I didn’t know,” said Zib.
“But you did. Even if not all of you knew, part of you did, because part of you told the rest of you what to do. You listened when it spoke. You chose, Zib, and now you get to see what happens next.”
“What do you…”
“Look for the path. It’s waiting for you.”
Zib frowned at Niamh, then turned around, squinting at the grass around them. The door to Fern’s cage was swinging open, and the great blue owl was stepping out, shaking the fear from her feathers like dust, or ashes.
And Zib saw the path.
If the improbable road was a rainbow ribbon, this was its dark twin, a twining twist of black-and-gray iridescence stretched across the landscape.
Upon seeing it, she could think of nothing she wanted more in all the world than to walk it, to see where it would take her if she followed to its dim and distant end.
She took a step forward, and then another, and then another after that, and the others watched her go, Jack moving to hold Avery back so he couldn’t grab her arm, couldn’t stop her.
The graveyard path beckoned, and Zib, finally able to see it for what it was, to understand its sweet allure, went willingly.
It gleamed in the fading sunlight, and she stepped up onto it, onto the dark beauty of the road that called the dead, and she faded from the view of the living, disappearing into the space where only the dead can go.
Niamh, who was still a drowned girl, even if the graveyard path was no longer open for her, watched in silence, and if some of the moisture running down her ever-damp cheeks was from tears and not the memory of the sunken city where her heart belonged, who would ever know? Who would ever tell.
Zib walked away, into darkness.…
—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker