Everything was still. Everything was cold, and possible, and finished. Yes. There was a finality to the scene, as if the world had grown weary of two children on an unintentional adventure and simply declared their journeys to be over and finished, and not of any importance to anyone else in the world. Their parents would weep and wonder. Their classmates would stare at empty chairs and make up stories about what had happened to them, where they could possibly have gone. The police would search, and find nothing, for there would be nothing to find.
Too many adventures end with this sort of finality, which is terrible and true and all too probable. But Avery and Zib had been following the improbable road, had stepped upon it the instant they stepped away from the comforting fiction of a straight line and glittering bricks winding through the landscape. So it was that they had barely vanished beneath the surface of the mud when an entire murder of crows swooped down from the cliffside above them, landing on the bank and falling into the shape of a girl.
Crows do not, as a rule, become little girls casually, and perhaps that was why this girl, who was midway between Avery and Zib in size, was still so clearly a crow. She had simply found a means of being a little girl at the same time. She wore a short dress of black feathers, glossy and sleek and growing out of her skin, so that removing them would have meant plucking her bloody. Her nose was sharper than a nose should have been, but her eyes were sharper still, so that it seemed she could see everything, no matter how well concealed, and have an opinion about it. Her lips were thin and her toes were long, gripping the ground like a crow’s talons grip a scarecrow’s shoulder.
“Hello?” she said, to the pool of striped mud. “Are you mud-breathers? Are you breathing the mud right now?”
The mud did not respond.
“I don’t think you are, no, no, I don’t think you are, you looked like human children, lots of things can look like human children, but only the gnomes can look like human children and breathe mud, and you didn’t look like gnomes. Gnomes would have been laughing more. Happy things, gnomes are, when they get to ride a mudslide someplace new. I don’t think you can breathe down there.”
The mud did not respond.
The girl who was a crow who was a girl frowned with her thin lips, leaning forward until the tip of her nose almost touched the surface of the mud. “Are you drowning? Don’t say anything if you’re drowning, and I’ll know that means ‘yes.’” She paused, a quizzical look flashing across her face. “But you probably don’t want to be drowning, do you? You didn’t look like you wanted to be drowning when you fell. Do you want to be saved? I want to save you, but if I do, you’ll have to face the consequences, and maybe you don’t want that.”
The mud did not respond.
The crow girl straightened up, so that she was standing as straight as she could. Her arms drew up against her sides as she did, folding naturally into the shape of wings, for all that they didn’t have any feathers on them, for all that she still had fingers, and hands, and other things an ordinary crow wouldn’t have at all.
“I think I should save you,” she said. “If you’re angry, remember, you’re the ones who didn’t tell me not to, and if you don’t like the consequences, well, they’re probably better than being lost at the bottom of a mudslide, belly full of silt and lungs full of sorrow. Probably, probably, probably.”
She bobbed her head, once, twice, three times, and then she dove into the pool of mud, vanishing quite completely. There was a long moment of silence before a bubble broke the surface, popping with a wet splattering sound, sending mud flying in all directions. The silence returned.
Then, with a gasp and a groan and a yell of triumph, the crow girl’s head broke the surface. She had one arm wrapped around Avery, and one arm wrapped around Zib, and both of them started coughing and spitting out mud as soon as they were in the open air.
“Hold on, hold on,” chattered the crow girl. “We’re closer to there than we are to anywhere else, but you have to hold on.”
Inch by inch, she pulled them to the shore. She flung Avery onto the bank first. He rolled away from the pool, coughing up more mud, so that it ran down his chin in cascades of pink and blue and purple. His shirt, which had been so white and so pristine and so perfect, was covered in swirls of color, so that he looked like he was wearing the results of a half-finished taffy pull. He lay there, limp and dripping, and watched with dull eyes as the crow girl maneuvered Zib to the pool’s edge.
Zib’s hair, that remarkable, untamable mass of curls and frizzes, was plastered down by the mud, forming a hard shell, like a helmet, like a jawbreaker. She barely looked like Zib without it to stand sentry for the rest of her. It was strange, strange, strange to look at her and not see her hair first. Avery closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at strange things anymore. He wanted to look at simple, ordinary things, things he already knew how to understand.
“This won’t do,” chided a new voice. “No, this won’t do at all. Stay here, all right? Stay here, and I’ll make it better.”
There was a wet splatting sound, like a bag of laundry being thrown onto concrete. It was followed by the sound of wings, so many wings, uncountable wings clawing at the sky.
“Avery?”
The voice was Zib’s, but it was barely a whisper. It was so close. Avery reached out, eyes still closed, and stopped when he felt his fingertips brush something solid.
“Avery, I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too,” he whispered, and somehow, that made it better. If they were both scared together, maybe things weren’t so scary after all. Fear was a large and terrible monster, but fear could be conquered if enough people stood up against it.
They lay there in silence. For how long, neither of them could say, but they felt the mud hardening all over their bodies, until they couldn’t have moved if they had wanted to. That should have been worrisome: Avery didn’t like being dirty, and Zib didn’t like being still, and here they were being both dirty and still, and they had no way to stop it. But they were so tired, and the sun was so warm, and maybe it was better to wait for the stranger who had rescued them to come back. Maybe it was safer.
The sound of wings drifted over them, distant at first, but growing louder and louder, until it felt like they were at the center of a thunderstorm made entirely of birds. Then, without warning, water came pouring from the sky above them, soaking them both to the skin in an instant. Zib sat up with a gasp, shaking water out of her hair, which immediately stood at attention, like she had turned into a lightning rod under her sphere of mud and silence. Avery sat up more slowly, and watched in awe as the unwanted colors bled out of his shirt and ran down to the muddy ground, which was quickly washing clear, revealing itself as a great stone symbol.
It was made of brick, red brick and black brick and those strange glittering bricks that had comprised the road that wasn’t the improbable road, not really. Avery squinted at it, trying to understand. It was a sword, he thought, a sword with vast black wings fanning out from where the hilt should have been, and looking at it made him feel cold in a way he couldn’t understand, because the rain was warm, and he was free, and he shouldn’t have been cold.
Zib, meanwhile, sprang to her feet and gaped up at the sky, where crows—so many crows, a flock of crows, a murder of crows—circled around a dwindling, captive cloud. It was bruise-dark with rain, and lightning rippled across its surface as the crows darted in, nimbly avoiding the sparks of light and power, pecking its surface to send more water cascading down until the last of the mud was gone and the last of the cloud burst with a soft, sad popping sound.