The first thing was to find the improbable road, which was at once easier and harder than it sounded. Most roads, being stationary, well-behaved things, are simply impossible to find in a place where they do not customarily go. The road that leads from the woods to Grandmother’s house, for instance, cannot be found in a city or town, or on a seashore, or spanning a mountain. It begins in one place, always, and ends in another place, always. Had that been the road they were seeking, they would certainly never have been able to find it, and would have spent the rest of their days walking confused circles in a place that could never help them to fulfill their quests.
There are, however, other roads, moving roads, roads made of cause and concept rather than cobblestone and convenience. The improbable road knew its travelers, and wanted, in its slow, architectural way, to help them.
One by one, the children set their bare feet on the grassy ground. Avery slipped his hand into Zib’s, not flinching from the berry stains on her fingers, while Niamh walked a little bit apart, her feet leaving puddles behind her as she walked. The Crow Girl circled them all, walking great loops around them, so that they were always in her line of sight. She kept one eye on the sky, and no one asked her why. None of them wanted to know.
If this were a story about an ordinary sort of place, crisscrossed with ordinary sorts of road, we could follow them forever, three children and a gangling teenage girl walking under a sapphire sky, heading for the horizon. But this is not that kind of story. Zib glanced down, and saw a glimmer between her toes, like fireflies caught under the grass. She gasped. Avery looked down and did the same.
“The improbable road!” Zib said.
“Keep walking,” urged the Crow Girl. “It’s figuring out where we were!”
They kept walking, and the grass grew thinner under their feet, the glitter of the improbable road showing through more and more clearly, until the grass was gone and they were walking on glittering stones, walking toward the top of a gentle rise, its slopes peppered with brightly colored flowers. The Crow Girl stopped her circling and fell back to walk by Avery’s side, so that they formed a line: first Niamh, then Zib, then Avery, and finally the Crow Girl, all of them walking in easy harmony.
They crested the rise, and there, before them, was the Impossible City.
The first impossibility was this: it was impossible that they had not been able to see it from a distance, for it was made of towers and spires and twisting, delicate peaks, all of them straining toward the sky like they thought to pierce the sun, to harness the moon. Clouds skittered among their peaks, tangling on balconies and obscuring windows.
The second impossibility was this: it was impossible for a city of such vast size and complexity to exist without changing the land around it, yet the Impossible City—surrounded by a wall of glittering, glistening stone, like a loop of the improbable road had somehow been coaxed into standing on its side—rose whole and shining out of field and farmland. There were no scattered settlements, no clear-cut forests, no quarries. It could have been conjured out of the earth already constructed, complete and unchangeable, pristine and perfect.
Avery and Zib stood hand-in-hand, looking at the great towers of the Impossible City, their mouths hanging open and their eyes filled with wonders. The buildings here weren’t like any other buildings they had ever seen. They moved, changing shape and form and function according to the needs of the people who walked on their high terraces, moving between the buildings like dreams. Stairways formed and came apart; bridges danced themselves into existence and back out of it again.
Beside them, Niamh sighed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.
“I lived here once,” said Niamh. “I never will again.”
“Why not?”
“Because drowned girls are very possible, and the Impossible City only welcomes impossible things. Girls like me happen too often to ever make it our home.” Niamh shook her head. “It is a fine and lovely and glorious place to live. It is kinder than it needs to be, and cruel enough to be real. But it isn’t mine anymore, and it won’t be tomorrow, or the day after that.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Zib stubbornly. “If it’s not your home, it won’t be our home, either. You can come back over the wall with us. We have a guest room, and my mother won’t care if you get the sheets all wet. You can stand in her garden and water it without doing anything, and she’ll call you her favorite and bake you all the cookies you want.”
Avery, whose mother would have minded a perpetually damp houseguest, said, “We’re not going there anyway, not now. The improbable road will have to take us somewhere else. No one goes home if we don’t find the Queen of Wands.”
“I haven’t got a home to go to,” said the Crow Girl. “I gave it away, wherever it was, when I gave my name to the King of Cups. I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was beautiful, and I loved it very much, and I had to leave.”
“Why?” asked Zib.
“I don’t remember that, either.” The corner of the Crow Girl’s mouth quirked upward. “Awful, isn’t it? I must have been very frightened, to give so many things away without getting anything but feathers in return. I like my feathers well enough. I might have liked a feather bed even more, once upon a time that I’ve forgotten.”
“It’s better to forget a home than to lose it,” said Niamh.
The Crow Girl looked at her. “Is it?” she asked.
Niamh didn’t have an answer.
The sky was finally growing darker, the sun dipping low on the distant line of the horizon. Avery dropped Zib’s hand in order to shade his eyes, looking around.
“If we can’t go to the city, we need to find a place to spend the night,” he said. “We’ll start looking for the Queen of Wands in the morning.”
Zib nodded. “Where will we go?”
“Anywhere you want. Adventures follow the people who are having them.”
“Will you stay with me?”
Avery reached for Zib’s hand again. She let him take it, and they tangled their fingers together like the roots of a tree, so tight that they might never come apart.
“Always,” he said.
They turned away from the great, glittering jewel of the Impossible City, Niamh and the Crow Girl by their sides. They started to walk.
The improbable road was there to meet them.