“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.
“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.”