ONEREMINDERS AND DEFINITIONS
We have left the territory of once upon a time at this point. Once upon a time is for the beginning of stories, and we are now well and truly mired in the sticky, unpredictable middle. There is a commonality to beginnings. We meet people; we learn their names and the sketches of their stories; we see the situation beginning to unfold in front of them; we either decide we’re interested enough to follow them over the woodward wall or down the road of glistening nacre, like the trail of some fairy-kissed snail slithering through a world of impossible things, or we turn back and let them be. Not every story is for every person, you see, and if a tale baits its hook and dangles it in front of us and we feel no temptation to bite, there is no shame in walking away. There are many fish in the sea. There are many hooks as well.
If you are still here with me now, then when the scrimshaw hook etched with the names “Avery” and “Zib” was dangled in front of you, you were happy to slide it between your lips and into the space between your cheek and your teeth. You bit down, and have since been pulled out of the shallows and safe harbor of once upon a time, and now swim the choppy seas of the middle of the story with the rest of us. I am not sorry. I am glad, in fact, that you are here, for stories cannot be nothing but beginnings: they must have a vast and terrible middle to get them from hook to home. Thank you for allowing me to catch you. We have so far left to go.
But as the beginning is some distance behind us now, it seems proper for me to remind you, at least a little, of where we are going and how we have reached this point. I promise I will not take long, as the story itself is on the other side of this digression, and we would all prefer to get there quickly.
So: once, long enough ago that your parents were not there, but recently enough that the world had things like schools and indoor plumbing and telephones, there were two children living on the same street, by the names of Avery Alexander Grey and Hepzibah Laurel Jones. Avery’s parents were disgusted by the idea of nicknames, and only ever called him “Avery,” as if he had yet to earn the rest of the name for his own use. Hepzibah’s parents, on the other hand, thought a name was like a shirt or a sweater, and needed to be bigger than the child, so they could grow into it as they figured out the person they were going to be. And so they called their daughter “Zib” to the point where some people thought that was her own and only given name, and she never once minded the truncation.
Avery and Zib were not friends when they shared that street, that town, that world; they were close together according to the map, but very far apart according to the world, which sometimes bears no resemblance to lines on paper. They lived separate if parallel lives, and could have happily gone on that way until they left the shallows of their childhood and bit down on the bitter hook of adulthood, which would pull them into a much deeper sea.
It was perhaps coincidence and perhaps contrivance and most likely some alchemy made by combining the two that a water main burst one morning as both of them readied themselves for school, and they found their morning walk directed down a new and unfamiliar path. And as they walked, they each found themselves confronted with a new and unfamiliar person: the other. They might each have dismissed the strange child—for they were deeply strange to one another’s eyes, Avery with his perfectly shined shoes, Zib with her mended skirt and wild, uncombed hair—and gone out without remembering them at all, had the sidewalk not come to an end at a wall that should not have been there, and on the wall’s other side, a forest that should not have been there either.
What they found on the other side of the wall is the territory of “once,” and we have already been there, have explored and understood that landscape, made it our own to the best of our abilities. We are welcome to revisit it whenever the need strikes, but we have no need to make such a visit now. So we will only wave to those distant and dwindled versions of the people we know, people who have never met a girl who is also a murder of crows, or a bear who is also a hive of bees, or a road with opinions about its own destination. How strange they seem to us now, how very queer! We have moved so far beyond them that they might as well be strangers, for all that we were with them at the start. We must continue on.
After “once” comes “upon,” and the children found themselves uneasy companions in a strange new world, walking a rainbow road that bent and twisted at its own whim, charting its own course across the map. At one end, the Impossible City, where all good things were locked behind gleaming mother-of-pearl walls, where a way home might be found by eager children who were willing to work for what they wanted. At the other end, somewhere in the vast unknown, the Queen of Wands, ruler of this patchwork land, without whom no journey could ever be completed. And in the middle, the Saltwise Sea, domain of pirates and princesses, sailors and serpents, where even the waves have opinions about the way things are going to go.
The beginning was simpler, of that there could be no question. But the children had entered the middle, and so they had to navigate that sea, until they found themselves turning back toward the shore, following the improbable road wherever it wished to go.
From “upon” we find our way to “a,” which is the shortest and simplest of the words we have to travel through. It is a letter, without which many words fall into nonsensical disrepair. It is an article, recontextualizing everything after. A city is different from the city is different from any city. The Impossible City is the only exemplar of its kind, and as such receives the vaunted “the,” rather than the generous “a.” To say something happened “once upon time” is to say nothing at all or, if we are being very generous, that something happened at all times, but only once. Once, a babe was born wrapped in a name that never fit quite right, like a cloak of feathers sized to someone else. And once, that babe’s heart was broken so completely the shards could never be put back together.
Once, that babe became a girl, not yet quite a woman, but sliding down that seemingly inevitable road, like a balloon on a string being pulled from one end of her own lifetime to the next. Once, the woman that girl was becoming revolted, and cried, from the secret eggshell palace of her very self, “No. I will not become what you would make of me; I am already a heartless thing because of what has been done without my consent, I will not be a person you define by the character of the heart I do not have.” Once, that girl walked the impossible road on her own, and had her own adventures, as so many children had done before her and still more would do after her. Once, her adulthood caught up to her, and she had no choice but to sit and be still and quiet, to be biddable as the people who controlled such things asked for her to be.
Once, she rose from her place, threw aside her burdens, and went to a woman who called herself a queen for no reason other than that the winds—one of the four pillars that held their world up to the sky—loved her better than they loved anyone else. Once, the woman knelt before the queen, shed her raiment and her rationality, and asked to be made something that would have no need for weeping.
Once, the Queen of Swords ripped out the woman’s burning ember of a heart, held it in her hand, and crumpled it to ashes for the winds to scatter to the four corners of the world, to earth and sea and flaming field, and remade that babe in the image of a murder, black-winged and heartless and free as any sky. Once, the woman was no more, had no name, but was a Crow Girl, monstrous and perfect and wild, and once, all these things were true, and once, they were better left forgotten.
So you see, the events we follow here and now, on the long and rainbowed ribbon of the improbable road, depend upon the “a” even more than they depend upon “once.” They are not singular events in their shape, but only in their order, which assembles here for the first time in history. Our Avery, our Zib, their cool and clever companions, they are a first, and they follow the improbable road as have so many before them, seeking answers more than they seek adventure, but finding adventure all the same.
When first they found the improbable road, it reached across fields and farmlands, extending from and to a great city, and these were normal things for a road to do, not so improbable at all. But as they continued on, the road found new places to root itself, and they found themselves walking on beaches, through briars, and on the surface of the ocean itself.
As we leave the concluded certainty of “upon” for the fresh new surprises of “a,” we step back into the purview of time itself, which has been happening all through this sweet digression, this brief attempt to delay the inevitable arrival of the future. Time will always catch up with you, in the end. There are some who would call it a fifth element, a side effect of aether, as smoke is a side effect of flame. Without time, everything would happen at once, and be finished so quickly that there would be no chance for storytelling, or for children, or for improbable roads to exist at all. Time is the most essential of the elements of this tale.
And so, with time once more firmly in our pocket, we join our brave companions walking on the water, the improbable road wrapping itself around waves like a vine around a tree, as firm and stable beneath the feet of the four children as any solid ground. The road held them up, safe from the depths, time flowed around them, and the children walked on.
Copyright © 2022 by Seanan McGuire
