Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Fiction; Adult; retellings; Science Fiction Fantasy; Adult Fiction; Witches; Magic; Fairy Tales; Classics
Description: When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil? Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then t
Publisher: HarperCollins
Rights: All rights reserved

The Wicked Years Complete Collection

Gregory Maguire

Contents

Wicked

Dedication

Epigraphs

Prologue: On the Yellow Brick Road

I Munchkinlanders

The Root of Evil

The Clock of the Time Dragon

The Birth of a Witch

Maladies and Remedies

The Quadling Glassblower

Geographies of the Seen and the Unseen

Child’s Play

Darkness Abroad

II Gillikin

Galinda

Boq

The Charmed Circle

III City of Emeralds

IV In the Vinkus

The Voyage Out

The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko

Uprisings

V The Murder and Its Afterlife

Map of the Land of Oz

Reader’s Group Guide

E-Book Extras

Acknowledgments

Praise for

Credits

Son of a Witch

Dedication

Epigraph

Epigraph

Map

Under the Jackal Moon

The House of Saint Glinda

Abroad

Southstairs

The Service

The Emperor Apostle

One Plus One Equals Both

The Conference of the Birds

Kumbricia’s Cradle

Dragonfings

Siege

The Eye of the Witch

Raising Voices

No Place Like It

Acknowledgments

A Lion Among Men

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Significant Families of Oz

A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz

Deposition of an Oracle

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

The Nursery in the Forest

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

No Good Old Days to Speak Of

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

A Coward for His Country

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

A Question of Influence

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Past Approaches

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Acknowledgments

Credits

Out of Oz

Dedication

Epigraph

The Wicked Years: A Note to Readers

Charting the Wicked Years Chronologically

Maps: The City of Shiz, Gillikin; The Emerald City

Significant Families of Oz

A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz

Prologue: Out of Oz

I. To Call Winter upon Water

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

II. The Patchwork Conscience of Oz

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

III. The Chancel of the Ladyfish

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

IV. The Judgment of Dorothy

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

V. At St. Prowd’s

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

VI. God’s Great-Niece

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

VII. To Call the Lost Forward

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

VIII. Somewhere

1

2

3

Acknowledgments

Coda

Credits

Tell Your Friends

About the Author

Other Books by Gregory Maguire

Copyright

About the Publisher

WICKED

The Life and Times of
the Wicked Witch of the West

A NOVEL

GREGORY MAGUIRE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOUGLAS SMITH

Dedication

This book is for Betty Levin and for all those who
taught me to love and fear goodness.

Epigraph

‘Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A SYSTEM OF MAGICK

In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

—LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI, WAR AND PEACE

“Well,” said the Head, “I will give you my answer. You have no right to expect me to send you back to Kansas unless you do something for me in return. In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets. If you wish me to use my magic power to send you home again you must do something for me first. Help me and I will help you.” “What must I do?” asked the girl. “Kill the wicked Witch of the West,” answered Oz.

—L. FRANK BAUM, THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

Contents

Dedication

Epigraphs

Prologue: On the Yellow Brick Road

I Munchkinlanders

The Root of Evil

The Clock of the Time Dragon

The Birth of a Witch

Maladies and Remedies

The Quadling Glassblower

Geographies of the Seen and the Unseen

Child’s Play

Darkness Abroad

II Gillikin

Galinda

Boq

The Charmed Circle

III City of Emeralds

IV In the Vinkus

The Voyage Out

The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko

Uprisings

V The Murder and Its Afterlife

Map of the Land of Oz

Reader’s Group Guide

E-Book Extras

Acknowledgments

Praise for

Credits

Prologue

On the Yellow Brick Road

A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air. White and purple summer thunderheads mounded around her. Below, the Yellow Brick Road looped back on itself, like a relaxed noose. Though winter storms and the crowbars of agitators had torn up the road, still it led, relentlessly, to the Emerald City. The Witch could see the companions trudging along, maneuvering around the buckled sections, skirting trenches, skipping when the way was clear. They seemed oblivious of their fate. But it was not up to the Witch to enlighten them.

She used the broom as a sort of balustrade, stepping down from the sky like one of her flying monkeys. She finished up on the topmost bough of a black willow tree. Beneath, hidden by the fronds, her prey had paused to take their rest. The Witch tucked her broom under her arm. Crablike and quiet, she scuttled down a little at a time, until she was a mere twenty feet above them. Wind moved the dangling tendrils of the tree. The Witch stared and listened.

There were four of them. She could see a huge Cat of some sort—a Lion, was it?—and a shiny woodman. The Tin Woodman was picking nits out of the Lion’s mane, and the Lion was muttering and squirming from the aggravation. An animated Scarecrow lolled nearby, blowing dandelion heads into the wind. The girl was out of sight behind shifting curtains of the willow.

“Of course, to hear them tell it, it is the surviving sister who is the crazy one,” said the Lion. “What a Witch. Psychologically warped; possessed by demons. Insane. Not a pretty picture.”

“She was castrated at birth,” replied the Tin Woodman calmly. “She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.”

“Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look,” said the Lion.

“I’m only repeating what folks say,” said the Tin Woodman.

“Everyone is entitled to an opinion,” said the Lion airily. “She was deprived of a mother’s love, is how I’ve heard it. She was an abused child. She was addicted to medicine for her skin condition.”

“She has been unlucky in love,” said the Tin Woodman, “like the rest of us.” The Tin Woodman paused and placed his hand on the center of his chest, as if in grief.

“She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women,” said the Scarecrow, sitting up.

“She’s the spurned lover of a married man.”

“She is a married man.”

The Witch was so stunned that she nearly lost her grip on the branch. The last thing she ever cared for was gossip. Yet she had been out of touch for so long that she was astonished at the vigorous opinions of these random nobodies.

“She’s a despot. A dangerous tyrant,” said the Lion with conviction.

The Tin Woodman pulled harder than was necessary on a lock of mane. “Everything’s dangerous to you, you craven thing. I hear she’s a champion of home rule for the so-called Winkies.”

“Whoever she is, she must surely be grieving the death of her sister,” said the child, in a somber voice too rich, too sincere for one so young. The Witch’s skin crawled.

“Don’t go feeling sympathetic now. I certainly can’t.” The Tin Woodman sniffed, a bit cynically.

“But Dorothy’s right,” said the Scarecrow. “No one is exempt from grief.”

The Witch was deeply irked by their patronizing speculations. She moved around the trunk of the tree, stretching to catch a glimpse of the child. The wind was picking up, and the Scarecrow shivered. While the Tin Woodman continued fussing over the Lion’s tresses, he leaned against the Lion, who held him tenderly. “Storm on the horizon,” said the Scarecrow.

Miles off, thunder echoed. “There—is—a—Witch on the horizon,” said the Tin Woodman, tickling the Lion. The Lion got spooked and rolled on top of the Scarecrow, whimpering, and the Tin Woodman collapsed on top of them both.

“Good friends, should we be wary of that storm?” said the girl.

The rising winds moved the curtain of greenery at last, and the Witch caught sight of the girl. She was sitting with her feet tucked underneath her and her arms wrapped around her knees. She was not a dainty thing but a good-size farm girl, dressed in blue-and-white checks and a pinafore. In her lap, a vile little dog cowered and whined.

“The storm makes you skittish. It’s natural after what you’ve been through,” said the Tin Woodman. “Relax.”

The Witch’s fingers dug into the bark of the tree. She still could not see the girl’s face, just her strong forearms and the crown of her head where her dark hair was pulled back into pigtails. Was she to be taken seriously, or was she merely a blow-away dandelion seed, caught on the wrong side of the wind? If she could see the girl’s face, the Witch felt she might know.

But as the Witch craned outward from the trunk, the girl at the same time twisted her face, turning away. “That storm is coming closer, and in a hurry.” The feeling in her voice rose as the wind rose. She had a throaty vehemence, like someone arguing through the threat of impending tears. “I know storms, I know how they come upon you!”

“We’re safer here,” said the Tin Woodman.

“Certainly we are not,” answered the girl, “because this tree is the highest point around, and if lightning is to strike, it will strike here.” She clutched her dog. “Didn’t we see a shed farther up the road? Come, come; Scarecrow, if there’s lightning, you’ll burn the fastest! Come on!”

She was up and running in an ungainly way, and her companions followed in a mounting panic. As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl’s face, but of the shoes. Her sister’s shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.

If she had seen the shoes first, the Witch would never have been able to listen to the girl or her friends. But the girl’s legs had been tucked beneath her skirt. Now the Witch was reminded of her need. The shoes should be hers!—hadn’t she endured enough, hadn’t she earned them? The Witch would fall on the girl from the sky, and wrestle those shoes off her impertinent feet, if only she could.

But the storm from which the companions raced, farther and faster along the Yellow Brick Road, troubled the Witch more than it did the girl who had gone through rain and the Scarecrow whom lightning could burn. The Witch could not venture out in such a vicious, insinuating wetness. Instead, she had to tuck herself between some exposed roots of the black willow tree, where no water could endanger her, and wait for the storm to pass.

She would emerge. She always had before. The punishing political climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed her away—like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated ever to take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her. Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her capable?

No matter that the companions had hurried away. The Witch could wait. They would meet again.

The Root of Evil

From the crumpled bed the wife said, “I think today’s the day. Look how low I’ve gone.”

“Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient,” said her husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward, over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just make out the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. “The worst possible moment for my ministry. Naturally.”

The wife yawned. “There’s not a lot of choice involved. From what I hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over—if you can’t accommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It’s on a track of its own and nothing stops it now.” She pushed herself up, trying to see over the rise of her belly. “I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the baby.”

“Exert some self-control.” He came to her side and helped her sit up. “Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily as well as ethical continence.”

“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “I have no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my self, anyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”

“Think of me.” His tone had changed; he meant this.

“Frex”—she headed him off—“when the volcano’s ready there’s no priest in the world can pray it quiet.”

“What will my fellow ministers think?”

“They’ll get together and say, ‘Brother Frexspar, did you allow your wife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem to solve? How inconsiderate of you; it shows a lack of authority. You’re fired from the position.’” She was ribbing him now, for there was no one to fire him. The nearest bishop was too distant to pay attention to the particulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.

“It’s just such terrible timing.”

“I do think you bear half the blame for the timing,” she said. “I mean, after all, Frex.”

“That’s how the thinking goes, but I wonder.”

“You wonder?” She laughed, her head going far back. The line from her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegant silver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she was majestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wet fallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilege and admired her efforts to overcome it—and all the while he loved her, too.

“You mean you wonder if you’re the father”—she grabbed the bedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-upright—“or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?” She stood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug’s pace, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from the outhouse even as he began to dress for the day’s battle.

Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp of bone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face, because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: There could be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust to darken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shaded his lips. A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.

In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normal gravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its strings through the dirt. She carried a skillet in one hand and a few eggs and the whiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but only in short phrases. Frex wasn’t meant to hear her.

His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped on over leggings, Frex took from its hiding place—beneath a chest of drawers—the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in the village of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. He had been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want to come along—to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it if it was terrifying.

As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory, Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. The tinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or she listened but to something else, to something inside her. It was sound without melody—like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for its harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singing child.

Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up, calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himself again of his righteousness.

How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her, years ago, in the nursery?

Born in the morning,
Woe without warning;
Afternoon child
Woeful and wild;
Born in the evening,
Woe ends in grieving.
Night baby borning
Same as the morning.

But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies.

No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena’s mind (and editorializing as usual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We don’t go on having babies, that’s quite apparent. We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we’re slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death.

Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at all.

“Breakfast,” said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Her son would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defy the onward progress of woe.

“It is a time of crisis for our society,” recited Frex. For a man who condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.

“Every day is a great crisis for our society.” She was being flip, answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn’t hear the irony in her voice.

“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

He wasn’t talking to her so much as practicing his tirade against the coming spectacle of violence and magic. There was a side to Frex that verged on despair; unlike most men, he was able to channel it to benefit his life’s work. With some difficulty she set herself down on a bench. Whole choruses were singing wordlessly inside her head! Was this common for every labor and delivery? She would have liked to ask the nosy local women who would come around this afternoon, growling shyly at her condition. But she didn’t dare. She couldn’t jettison her pretty accent, which they found affected—but she could avoid sounding ignorant about these basic matters.

Frex noticed her silence. “You’re not angry I’m leaving you today?”

“Angry?” She raised her eyebrows, as if she had never encountered the concept before.

“History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,” said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can’t attend to both arenas at once.”

“Our child may not have a small life.”

“Now isn’t the time to argue. Do you want to distract me from holy work today? We’re facing the presence of real evil in Rush Margins. I couldn’t live with myself if I ignored it.” He meant this, and for such intensity she had fallen in love with him; but she hated him for it too, of course.

“Threats come—they’ll come again.” Her last word on the subject. “Your son will only be born once, and if this watery upheaval inside is any indication, I think it’s today.”

“There will be other children.”

She turned away so he could not see the rage in her face.

But she couldn’t sustain the fury at him. Perhaps this was her moral failing. (She wasn’t much given to worrying about moral failings as a rule; having a minister as a husband seemed to stir enough religious thought for one couple.) She lapsed sullenly into silence. Frex nibbled at his meal.

“It’s the devil,” said Frex, sighing. “The devil is coming.”

“Don’t say a thing like that on a day our child is expected!”

“I mean the temptation in Rush Margins! And you know what I mean, Melena!”

“Words are words, and what’s said is said!” she answered. “I don’t require all your attention, Frex, but I do need some of it!” She dropped the skillet with a crash on the bench that stood against the cottage wall.

“Well, and likewise,” he said. “What do you think I’m up against today? How can I convince my flock to turn away from the razzle-dazzle spectacle of idolatry? I will probably come back tonight having lost to a smarter attraction. You might achieve a child today. I look forward to failure.” Still, as he said this he looked proud; to fail in the cause of a high moral concern was satisfying to him. How could it compare with the flesh, blood, mess, and noise of having a baby?

He stood at last to leave. A wind came up over the lake now, smudging the topmost reaches of the columns of kitchen smoke. They looked, thought Melena, like funnels of water swirling down drains in narrowing, focusing spirals.

“Be well, my love,” said Frex, although he had his stern public expression on, from forehead to toes.

“Yes.” Melena sighed. The child punched her, deep down, and she had to hurry to the outhouse again. “Be holy, and I’ll be thinking of you—my backbone, my breastplate. And also try not to be killed.”

“The will of the Unnamed God,” said Frex.

“My will too,” she said, blasphemously.

“Apply your will to that which deserves it,” he answered. Now he was the minister and she the sinner, an arrangement she did not particularly enjoy.

“Good-bye,” she said, and chose the stink and relief of the outhouse over standing to wave him out of sight as he strode along the road to Rush Margins.

The Clock of the Time Dragon

Frex was more concerned for Melena than she knew. He stopped at the first fisherman’s hut he saw and spoke with the man at the half-door. Could a woman or two spend the day and if needed the night with Melena? It would be a kindness. Frex nodded with a wince of gratitude, acknowledging without words that Melena was not a great favorite in these parts.

Then, before continuing around the end of Illswater and over to Rush Margins, he stopped at a fallen tree and drew two letters from his sash.

The writer was a distant cousin of Frex’s, also a minister. Weeks earlier the cousin had spent time and valuable ink on a description of what was being called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Frex prepared himself for the day’s holy campaign by rereading about the idol clock.

I write in haste, Brother Frexspar, to catch my impressions before they fade.
The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and stands as high as a giraffe. It is nothing more than a tottering, freestanding theatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves and proscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, an invention of green painted leather, silvery claws, ruby jeweled eyes. Its skin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, and iron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled by clockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrow leathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches out sulfurous balls of flaming orange stink.
Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches, are puppets, marionettes, figurines. Creatures of folk tale. Caricatures of peasants and royalty alike. Animals and fairies and saints—our unionist saints, Brother Frexspar, stolen out from underneath us! I get enraged. The figures move on sprockets. They wheel in and out of doorways. They bend at the waist, they dance and dawdle and dally with each other.

Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this propaganda tool for wickedness that challenged the power of unionism and of the Unnamed God? The clock’s handlers were a dwarf and some narrow-waisted minions who seemed to have only enough brain capacity among them to pass a hat. Who else was benefiting besides the dwarf and his beauty boys?

The cousin’s second letter had warned that the clock was making its way next to Rush Margins. It had told a more specific story.

The entertainment began with a thrum of strings and a rattle of bones. The crowd pushed close, oohing. Within the lighted window of a stage, we saw a marriage bed, with a puppet wife and husband. The husband was asleep and the wife sighed. She made a motion with her carved hands to suggest that her husband was disappointingly small. The audience shrieked with laughter. The puppet wife went to sleep herself. When she was snoring, the puppet husband sneaked out of bed.
At this point, up above, the Dragon turned on its base, and pointed its talons into the crowd, indicating—without a doubt—a humble well digger named Grine, who has been a faithful if inattentive husband. Then the dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hither gesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maiden daughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Grine, Letta, and the blushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores.
The Dragon rested again but draped a wing over another archway, which lit up to reveal the puppet husband, wandering out in the night. Along came a puppet widow, with sprigged hair and high color, dragging along a protesting, flinty-toothed daughter. The widow kissed the puppet husband, and pulled off his leather trousers. He was equipped with two full sets of male goods, one in the front and another hanging off the base of his spine. The widow positioned her daughter on the abbreviated prong in the front, and herself took advantage of the more menacing arrangement in the rear. The three puppets bucked and rocked, emitting squeals of glee. When the puppet widow and her daughter were through, they dismounted and kissed the adulterous puppet husband. Then they kneed him, simultaneously, fore and aft. He swung on springs and hinges, trying to hold all his wounded parts.
The audience roared. Grine, the actual well digger, sweated drops as big as grapes. Letta pretended to guffaw, but her daughter had already disappeared from shame. Before the evening was out, Grine was set upon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesque anomaly. Letta was shunned. Her daughter seems to have vanished entirely. We suspect the worst.
At least Grine wasn’t killed. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don’t you agree?

Sometimes it seemed to Frex that every itinerant witch and toothless gibbering seer in Oz who could perform even the most transparent of spells had seized on the outback district of Wend Hardings to scratch out a trade. He knew that folks from Rush Margins were humble. Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding. Frex was aware that the Clock of the Time Dragon combined the appeals of ingenuity and magic—and he would have to call on his deepest reserves of religious conviction to overcome it. If his congregation should prove vulnerable to the so-called pleasure faith, succumbing to spectacle and violence—well, what next?

He would prevail. He was their minister. He had pulled their teeth and buried their babies and blessed their kitchen pots for years now. He had abased himself in their names. He had wandered with an unkempt beard and a begging bowl from hamlet to hamlet, leaving poor Melena alone in the minister’s lodge for weeks at a time. He had sacrificed for them. They couldn’t be swayed by this Time Dragon creature. They owed him.

He moved on, shoulders squared, jaw set, stomach in a sour uproar. The sky was brown with flying sand and grit. The wind rushed high over the hills with the sound of a tremulous wail, as if pushing through some fissure of rock, on a ridge beyond any Frex could see.

The Birth of a Witch

It was nearly evening by the time Frex had worked up the courage to enter the ramshackle hamlet of Rush Margins. He was in a deep sweat. He hit his heels to the ground and pumped his clenched fists, and called out in a hoarse, carrying tone. “Hist, oh ye of small confidence! Gather while ye may, for temptation is abroad, to try ye sorely!” The words were archaic, even ridiculous, but they worked. Here came the sullen fishermen, dragging their empty nets up from the dock. Here came the subsistence farmers, whose hardscrabble plots had borne little during this dry year. Before he had even begun, they all looked guilty as sin.

They followed him to the rickety steps of the canoe repair house. Frex knew that everyone expected this evil clock to arrive at any instant; gossip was as contagious as the plague. He yelled at them for their thirsty anticipation. “Ye are dull as toddlers reaching their hands to touch the pretty embers! Ye are as if spawn of dragon womb, ready to suck on teats of fire!” These were time-worn scriptural imprecations and they fell a little flat tonight; he was tired and not at his best.

“Brother Frexspar,” said Bfee, the mayor of Rush Margins, “could you perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what fresh new form temptation might take?”

“You have no mettle to resist new forms,” said Frex, spitting.

“Haven’t you been our able teacher these several years?” said Bfee. “We’ve hardly had such a good chance to prove ourselves against sin! We’re looking forward to—to the spiritual test of it all.”

The fishermen laughed and jeered, and Frex intensified his glower, but at the sound of unfamiliar wheels in the stony ruts of the road, they all turned their heads and fell silent. He had lost their attention before he had gotten started.

The clock was being drawn by four horses and escorted by the dwarf and his cohort of young thugs. Its broad roof was crowned by the dragon. But what a beast! It looked poised as if ready to spring, as if indeed invested with life. The skin of the house was decorated in carnival colors, burnished with gold leaf. The fishermen gaped as it drew near.

Before the dwarf could announce the time of the performance, before the crowd of youths could draw out their clubs, Frex leaped on the lower step of the thing—a fold-down stage on hinges. “Why is this thing called a clock? The only clock face it has is flat, dull, and lost in all that distracting detail. Furthermore, the hands don’t move: Look, see for yourselves! They’re painted to remain at one minute before midnight! All you’ll see here is mechanics, my friends: I know this for a fact. You’ll see mechanical cornfields growing, moons waxing and waning, a volcano to spew a soft red cloth done up with black and red sequins. With all this tiktok-y business, why not have a pair of circulating arms on the clock face? Why not? I ask you, I’m asking you, yes, you, Gawnette, and you, Stoy, and you, Perippa. Why no real clock here?”

They were not listening, Gawnette and Stoy and Perippa, nor were the others. They were too busy staring in anticipation.

“The answer, of course, is that the clock isn’t meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

“One minute short of judgment, my friends! If you died in the next sixty seconds, would you want to spend eternity in the suffocating depths reserved for idolaters?”

“Awful lot of noise in the neighborhood tonight,” said someone in the shadows—and the spectators laughed. Above Frex—he whirled to see—from a little door had emerged a small, yapping puppet dog, its hair dark and as tightly curled as Frex’s own. The dog bounced on a spring, and the pitch of its chatter was annoyingly high. The laughter grew. Evening fell harder, and it was less easy for Frex to tell who was laughing, who now was shouting for him to move aside so they could see.

He wouldn’t move, so he was bundled unceremoniously from his perch. The dwarf gave a poetic welcome. “All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we hear a voice of prophecy, or see a miracle play? Beneath the apparent sham and indignity of our ratlike lives, a humble pattern and meaning still applies! Come nearer, my good people, and watch what a little extra knowledge augurs for your lives! The Time Dragon sees before and beyond and within the truth of your sorry span of years here! Look at what it shows you!”

The crowd pushed forward. The moon had risen, its light like the eye of an angry, vengeful god. “Give over, let me go,” Frex called; it was worse than he had thought. He had never been manhandled by his own congregation.

The clock unfolded a story about a publicly pious man, with lamb’s wool beard and dark curly locks, who preached simplicity, poverty, and generosity while keeping a hidden coffer of gold and emeralds—in the double-hinged bosom of a weak-chinned daughter of blue blood society. The scoundrel was run through with a long iron stake in a most indelicate way and served up to his hungry flock as Roast Flank of Minister.

“This panders to your basest instincts!” Frex yelled, his arms folded and his face magenta with fury.

But now that darkness was almost total, someone came up from behind him to silence him. An arm encircled his neck. He twisted to see which damned parishioner took such liberties, but all the faces were cloaked by hoods. He was kneed in the groin and doubled over, his face in the dirt. A foot kicked him square between the buttocks and his bowels released. The rest of the crowd, however, was not watching. They were howling with mirth at some other entertainment put on by the Clock Dragon. A sympathetic woman in a widow’s shawl grabbed his arm and led him away—he was too fouled, too much in pain to straighten up and see who it was. “I’ll put you down in the root cellar, I will, under a burlap,” crooned the goodwife, “for they’ll be after you tonight with pitchforks, the way that thing is behaving itself! They’ll look for you in your lodge, but they won’t look in my keeping room.”

“Melena,” he croaked, “they’ll find her—”

“She’ll be seen to,” said his neighbor. “We women can manage that much, I guess!”

In the minister’s lodge, Melena struggled with consciousness as a pair of midwives went in and out of focus before her. One was a fishwife, the other a palsied crone; they took turns feeling her forehead, peering between her legs, and stealing glances at the few beautiful trinkets and treasures Melena had managed to bring here from Colwen Grounds.

“You chew that paste of pinlobble leaves, duckie, you do that. You’ll be unconscious before you know it,” said the fishwife. “You’ll relax, out will pop the little sweetheart, and all will be well in the morning. Thought you would smell of rosewater and fairy dew, but you stink like the rest of us. Chew on, my duckie, chew on.”

At the sound of a knock, the crone looked up guiltily from the chest she was kneeling before and rummaging through. She let the lid close with a bang and affected a position of prayer, eyes closed. “Enter,” she called.

A maiden with tender skin and high color came in. “Oh, I hoped someone would be here,” she said. “How is she?”

“Nearly out and so is the babe,” answered the fishwife. “An hour more, I reckon.”

“Well, I’m told to warn you. The men are drunk and on the prowl. They’ve been riled up by that dragon of the magic clock, you know, and are looking for Frex to kill him. The clock said to. They’ll likely stagger out here. We’d better get the wife safely away—can she be moved?”

No, I cannot be moved, thought Melena, and if the peasants find Frex tell them to kill him good and hard for me, for I never knew a pain so extraordinary that it made me see the blood behind my own eyes. Kill him for doing this to me. At this thought, she smiled in a moment of relief and passed out.

“Let’s leave her here and run for it!” said the maiden. “The clock said to kill her too, and the little dragon she’s going to give birth to. I don’t want to get caught.”

“We’ve got our own reputations to uphold,” said the fishwife. “We can’t abandon the fancy ladything in mid-delivery. I don’t care what any clock says.”

The crone, her head back in the chest, said, “Anyone for some real lace from Gillikin?”

“There’s a hay cart in the lower field, but let’s do it now,” said the fishwife. “Come, help me fetch it. You, old mother hag, get your face out of the linens and come dampen this pretty pink brow. Right-o, now we go.”

A few minutes later the crone, the wife, and the maiden were trundling the hay cart along a rarely used track through the spindles and bracken of the autumn woods. The wind had picked up. It whistled over the treeless foreheads of the Cloth Hills. Melena, sprawled in blankets, heaved and moaned in unconscious pain.

They heard a drunken mob pass, with pitchforks and torches, and the women stood silent and terrified, listening to the slurred curses. Then they pressed on with greater urgency until they came upon a foggy copse—the edge of the graveyard for unconsecrated corpses. Within it they saw the blurred outlines of the clock. It had been left here for safekeeping by the dwarf—no fool he; he could guess this particular corner of the world was the last place jumpy villagers would seek tonight. “The dwarf and his boykins were drinking in the tavern too,” said the maiden breathlessly. “There’s no one here to stop us!”

The crone said, “So you’ve been peering in the tavern windows at the men, you slut?” She pushed open the door in the back of the clock.

She found a crawl space. Pendulums hung ominously in the gloom. Huge toothed wheels looked primed to slice any trespasser into sausage rounds. “Come on, drag her in,” said the crone.

The night of torches and fog gave way, at dawn, to broad bluffs of thundercloud, dancing skeletons of lightning. Glimpses of blue sky appeared briefly, though sometimes it rained so hard that it seemed more like mud drops falling than water. The midwives, crawling on hands and knees out of the back of the clock-wagon, had their little discharge at last. They protected the infant from the dripping gutter. “Look, a rainbow,” said the senior, bobbing her head. A sickly scarf of colored light hung in the sky.

What they saw, rubbing the caul and blood off the skin—was it just a trick of the light? After all, following the storm the grass did seem to throb with its own color, the roses zinged and hovered with crazy glory on their stems. But even with these effects of light and atmosphere, the midwives couldn’t deny what they saw. Beneath the spit of the mother’s fluids the infant glistened a scandalous shade of pale emerald.

There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.

“Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing. “Shall we kill it?”

“Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”

“Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”

For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine. Perhaps in labor some bit of organic effluvia had become caught and quickly dried in the cloven place. Once toweled, she was observed to be prettily formed, with a long elegant head, forearms nicely turned out, clever pinching little buttocks, cunning fingers with scratchy little nails.

And an undeniable green cast to the skin. There was a salmon blush in the cheeks and belly, a beige effect around the clenched eyelids, a tawny stripe on the scalp showing the pattern of eventual hair. But the primary effect was vegetable.

“Look what we get for our troubles,” said the maiden. “A little green pat of butter. Why don’t we kill it? You know what people will say.”

“I think it’s rotten,” said the fishwife, and checked for the root of a tail, counted fingers and toes. “It smells like dung.”

“That is dung you’re smelling, you idiot. You’re squatting in a cow pattypie.”

“It’s sick, it’s feeble, that’s why the color. Lose it in the puddle, drown the thing. She’ll never know. She’ll be out for hours in her ladylike faints.”

They giggled. They cradled the infant in the crook of their arms, passing it around to test it for weight and balance. To kill it was the kindest course of action. The question was how.

Then the child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, and the child bit the finger off at the second knuckle. It almost choked on the gush of blood. The digit dropped out of its mouth into the mud like a bobbin. The women catapulted into action. The fishwife lunged to strangle the girl, and the crone and the maiden flared up in defense. The finger was dug out of the mire and shoved in an apron pocket, possibly to sew back onto the hand that had lost it. “It’s a cock, she just realized she didn’t have one,” screeched the maiden, and fell on the ground laughing. “Oh, beware the stupid boy first tries to please himself with her! She’ll snip his young sprout off for a souvenir!”

The midwives crawled back into the clock and dropped the thing at its mother’s breast, afraid to consider mercy murder for fear of what else the baby might bite. “Maybe she’ll chop the tit next, that’ll bring Her Drowsy Frailness around quick enough,” the crone chuckled. “Though what a child, that sips blood even before its first suck of mother’s milk!” They left a pipkin of water nearby, and under cover of the next squall they went squelching away, to find their sons and husbands and brothers, and berate and beat them if they were available, or bury them if not.

In the shadows, the infant stared overhead at the oiled and regular teeth of time’s clock.

Maladies and Remedies

For days Melena couldn’t bear to look at the thing. She held it, as a mother must. She waited for the groundwater of maternal affection to rise and overwhelm her. She did not weep. She chewed pinlobble leaves, to float away from the disaster.

It was a she. It was a her. Melena practiced conversions in her thinking when she was alone. The twitching, unhappy bundle was not male; it was not neutered; it was a female. It slept, looking like a heap of cabbage leaves washed and left to drain on the table.

In a panic, Melena wrote to Colwen Grounds to drag Nanny from her retirement. Frex went ahead in a carriage to collect Nanny from the way station at Stonespar End. On the trip back, Nanny asked Frex what was wrong.

“What is wrong.” He sighed, and was lost in thought. Nanny realized she had chosen her words poorly; now Frex was distracted. He began to mumble in a general way about the nature of evil. A vacuum set up by the inexplicable absence of the Unnamed God, and into which spiritual poison must rush. A vortex.

“I mean what is the state of the child!” retorted Nanny explosively. “It’s not the universe but a single child I need to hear about, if I’m going to be any help! Why does Melena call for me instead of for her mother? Why is there no letter for her grandfather? He’s the Eminent Thropp, for goodness sakes! Melena can’t have forgotten her duties so thoroughly, or is life out there in the country worse than we thought?”

“It’s worse than we thought,” said Frex grimly. “The baby—you had better be prepared, Nanny, so you don’t scream—the baby is damaged.”

“Damaged?” Nanny’s grip on her valise tightened and she looked out over the red-leafed pearlfruit trees by the side of the road. “Frex, tell me everything.”

“It’s a girl,” said Frex.

“Damage indeed,” said Nanny mockingly, but Frex as usual missed the dig. “Well, at least the family title’s preserved for another generation. Has she got all her limbs?”

“Yes.”

“Any more than she needs?”

“No.”

“Is she sucking?”

“We can’t let it. It has extraordinary teeth, Nanny. It has shark’s teeth, or something like.”

“Well she won’t be the first child to grow on a bottle or a rag instead of a tit, don’t worry about that.”

“It’s the wrong color,” said Frex.

“What color is the wrong color?”

For a few moments Frex could only shake his head. Nanny did not like him and she would not like him, but she softened. “Frex, it can’t be that bad. There’s always a way out. Tell Nanny.”

“It’s green,” he finally said. “Nanny, it’s green as moss.”

“She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s not for heaven’s sake.” Frex began to weep. “Heaven is not improved by it, Nanny; and heaven does not approve. What are we to do!”

“Hush.” Nanny detested weeping men. “It can’t be as bad as all that. There isn’t a sniff of low blood in Melena’s veins. Whatever blight the child has will respond to Nanny’s treatment. Trust Nanny.”

“I trusted in the Unnamed God,” sobbed Frex.

“We don’t always work at cross purposes, God and Nanny,” said Nanny. She knew this was blasphemous, but she couldn’t resist a gibe as long as Frex’s resistance was down. “But don’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to Melena’s family. We’ll sort this all out in a flash, and no one need know. The baby has a name?”

“Elphaba,” he said.

“After Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall?”

“Yes.”

“A fine old name. You’ll use the common nickname Fabala, I suppose.”

“Who even knows if she’ll live long enough to grow into a nickname.” Frex sounded as if he hoped this would be the case.

“Interesting country, are we in Wend Hardings yet?” Nanny asked, to change the subject. But Frex had folded up inside, barely bothering to guide the horses onto the correct track. The country was filthy, depressed, peasant-ridden; Nanny began to wish she had not set out in her best traveling gown. Roadside robbers might expect to find gold on such a refined-looking older woman, and they would be right, for Nanny sported a golden garter stolen years ago from Her Ladyship’s boudoir. What a humiliation, if the garter should turn up these years later on Nanny’s well-turned if aging thigh! But Nanny’s fears were unfounded, for the carriage arrived, without incident, in the yard of the minister’s cottage.

“Let me see the baby first,” said Nanny. “It will be easier and fairer on Melena if I know what we’re dealing with.” And this wasn’t hard to arrange, as Melena was out cold thanks to pinlobble leaves, while the baby in a basket on the table wailed softly.

Nanny drew up a chair so she wouldn’t hurt herself if she fainted dead away. “Frex, put the basket on the floor where I can look into it.” Frex obliged, and then went to return the horses and carriage to Bfee, who rarely needed them for mayoral duties but loaned them out to earn a little political capital.

The infant was wrapped in linens, Nanny saw, and the baby’s mouth and ears were strapped with a sling. The nose looked like a knob of bad mushroom, poking up for air, and the eyes were open.

Nanny leaned closer. The child couldn’t be, what, three weeks old? Yet as Nanny moved from side to side, looking at the profile of the forehead from this angle and that, so as to judge the shape of the mind, the girl’s eyes tracked her back and forth. They were brown and rich, the color of overturned earth, flecked with mica. There was a network of fragile red lines at each soft angle where the eyelids met, as if the girl had been bursting the blood threads from the exertion of watching and understanding.

And the skin, oh yes, the skin was green as sin. Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

She reached out and let her finger drift across the baby’s cheek. The infant flinched, and her backbone arched, and the wrapping, which was tucked securely around the child from neck to toe, split open like a husk. Nanny gritted her teeth and was determined not to be cowed. The baby had exposed herself, sternum to groin, and the skin on her chest was the same remarkable color. “Have you even touched this child yet, you two?” murmured Nanny. She put her hand palm down on the child’s heaving chest, her fingers covering the almost invisible baby nipples, then slid her hand down so she could check the apparatus below. The child was wet and soiled but felt made according to standard design. The skin was the same miracle of pliant smoothness that Melena had possessed as an infant.

“Come to Nanny, you horrid little thing you.” Nanny leaned to pick the baby up, mess and all.

The baby swiveled to avoid the touch. Her head beat itself against the rush bottom of the basket.

“You’ve been dancing in the womb, I see,” said Nanny, “I wonder to whose music? Such well-developed muscles! No, you’re not getting away from me. Come here, you little demon. Nanny doesn’t care. Nanny likes you.” She was lying through her teeth, but unlike Frex she believed some lies were sanctioned by heaven.

And she got her hands on Elphaba, and settled her on her lap. There Nanny waited, crooning and every now and then looking away, out the window, to recover herself and keep from vomiting. She rubbed the baby’s belly to calm the girl down, but there was no calming her down, not yet anyway.

Melena propped herself up on her elbows in the late afternoon when Nanny brought a tray with tea and bread. “I have made myself at home,” said Nanny, “and I’ve made friends with your tiny darling. Now come to your senses, sweetheart, and let me give you a kiss.”

“Oh, Nanny!” Melena allowed herself to be coddled. “Thank you for coming. Have you seen the little monster?”

“She’s adorable,” said Nanny.

“Don’t lie and don’t be soft,” said Melena. “If you’re going to help you must be honest.”

“If I’m going to help, you must be honest,” said Nanny. “We need not go into it now, but I will have to know everything, my sweet. So we can decide what’s to be done.” They sipped their tea, and because Elphaba had fallen asleep at last, it seemed for a few moments like the old days at Colwen Grounds, when Melena would come home from afternoon walks with lithesome young gentry on the make, and boast of their masculine beauty to a Nanny who pretended she had not noticed.

In fact, as the weeks went on, Nanny noticed quite a few disturbing things about the baby.

For one thing, Nanny tried to remove the baby’s bandages, but Elphaba seemed intent on biting her own hands off, and the teeth inside that pretty, thin-lipped mouth were indeed monstrous. She would bite a hole through the basket if she were left unfettered. She went after her own shoulder and scraped it raw. She looked as if she were strangling.

“Can’t a barber be had to pull the teeth out?” Nanny asked. “At least until the baby learns some self-control?”

“You’re out of your mind,” Melena said. “It will be all over the valley that the little marrow is green. We’ll keep the jaw strapped up until we solve the skin problem.”

“However in the world did her skin come green?” Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breathe again.

Nanny interviewed Frex out in the yard. After the double blow of the birth and his public embarrassment, he was not yet up to professional engagements and sat whittling praying beads out of oak, scoring and inscribing them with emblems of the Namelessness of God. Nanny set Elphaba down inside—she had an unreasonable fear of being overheard by this infant, and, worse, of being understood—and Nanny sat scooping out a pumpkin for supper.

“I don’t suppose, Frex, that you have green in your family background,” she began, knowing full well that Melena’s powerful grandfather would have confirmed such a predisposition before agreeing to let his granddaughter marry a unionist minister—of all the chances she had!

“Our family isn’t about money or about earthly power,” said Frex, taking no offense for once. “But I’m descended in a direct line from six ministers before me, father to son. We’re as well regarded in spiritual circles as Melena’s family is in parlors and at the court of Ozma. And no, there is no green, anywhere. I never heard of such a thing before in any family.”

Nanny nodded and said, “Well all right, I was only asking. I know you’re gooder than goblin martyrs.”

“But,” Frex said humbly, “Nanny, I think I caused this thing to happen. My tongue slipped on the day of the birthday—I announced that the devil was coming. I meant the Clock of the Time Dragon. But suppose those words unlocked room for the devil?. . . ”

“The child is no devil!” snapped Nanny. She’s no angel either, she thought, but kept it to herself.

“On the other hand,” Frex continued, sounding more secure, “she may have been cursed by Melena, accidentally, who took my remark the wrong way and wept about it. Maybe Melena opened up inside herself a window through which an unattached sprite entered and colored the child.”

“On the very day she is to be born?” said Nanny. “That’s a capable sprite. Is your goodness so exalted you attract the truly high-powered among the Spirits of Aberration?”

Frex shrugged. A few weeks earlier he would have nodded, but his confidence was shattered with his abject failure in Rush Margins. He did not dare suggest what he feared: The child’s abnormality was a punishment for his failure to protect his flock from the pleasure faith.

“Well . . .” Nanny asked practically, “if through a curse the goods were damaged, then through what might the ill be overturned?”

“An exorcism,” said Frex.

“Are you empowered?”

“If I’m successful at changing her, we’ll know that I’m empowered,” said Frex. But now that he had a goal, his spirits brightened. He would spend some days in fasting, rehearsing prayers, and collecting supplies for the arcane ritual.

When he was off in the woods, and Elphaba napping, Nanny perched on the side of Melena’s hard marriage mattress.

“Frex wonders if his prediction that the devil was coming caused a window in you to open, letting an imp pass through to spoil the baby,” said Nanny. She was crocheting an edge of lace, clumsily; she had never excelled at piecework, but she liked handling the polished ivory crochet hook. “I wonder if you opened another window?”

Melena, groggy from pinlobble leaves as usual, arched an eyebrow in confusion.

“Did you sleep with someone other than Frex?” Nanny asked.

“Don’t be mad!” said Melena.

“I know you, honey,” said Nanny. “I’m not saying you’re not a good wife. But when you had the boys buzzing around you in your parents’ orchard you changed your perfumed undergarments more than once a day. You were lusty and sneaky and good at it. I’m not looking down at you. But don’t pretend to me that your appetites weren’t healthy.”

Melena buried her face in the pillow. “Oh for those days!” she wailed. “It’s not that I don’t love Frex! But I hate being better than the local peasant idiots!”

“Well, now this green child brings you down to their level, you ought to be pleased,” said Nanny meanly.

“Nanny, I love Frex. But he leaves me alone so often! I would kill for some tinker to pass by and sell me more than a tin coffeepot! I would pay well for someone less godly and more imaginative!”

“That’s a question for the future,” said Nanny sensibly. “I’m asking you about the past. The recent past. Since your marriage.”

But Melena’s face was vague and blurry. She nodded, she shrugged, she rocked her head.

“The obvious theory is an elf,” said Nanny.

“I wouldn’t have sex with an elf!” Melena shrieked.

“No more would I,” said Nanny, “but the green does give one pause. Are there elves in the neighborhood?”

“There’s a gaggle of them, tree elves, up over the hill someplace, but if possible they are more moronic than the fair citizens of Rush Margins. Really, Nanny, I’ve never even seen one, or only from a distance. The idea is repulsive. Elves giggle at everything, do you know that? One of them falls out of an oak and smashes his skull like a rotten turnip, and they gather and giggle and then forget about him. It’s insulting of you even to bring it up.”

“Get used to it, if we don’t find a way out of this quagmire.”

“Well, the answer is no.”

“Then someone else. Someone handsome enough on the outside, but carrying a germ that maybe you caught.”

Melena looked shocked. She hadn’t thought of her own health since Elphaba was born. Could she be at risk?

“The truth,” said Nanny. “We must know.”

“The truth,” said Melena distantly. “Well, it is unknowable.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know the answer to your question.” And Melena explained. Yes, the cottage was off the beaten track, and of course she never passed more than the curtest greetings with local farmers and fishermen and thickheads. But more travelers took to the hills and woods than you would credit. Often she had sat, listless and lonely, while Frex was off preaching, and she had found comfort in giving passersby a simple meal and a buoyant conversation.

“And more?”

But on those boring days, Melena muttered, she had taken to chewing pinlobble leaves. When she would awake, because the sun was setting or Frex was there frowning or grinning at her, she remembered little.

“You mean you indulged in adultery and you don’t even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it?” Nanny was scandalized.

“I don’t know that I did!” said Melena. “I wouldn’t choose to, I mean not if I was thinking clearly. But I remember once when a tinker with a funny accent gave me a draft of some heady brew from a green glass bottle. And I had rare expansive dreams, Nanny, of the Other World—cities of glass and smoke—noise and color—I tried to remember.”

“So you could well have been raped by elves. Won’t your grandfather be pleased to learn how Frex is taking care of you.”

“Stop!” cried Melena.

“Well, I don’t know what’s to be done!” Nanny lost her temper at last. “Everyone’s being irresponsible! If you can’t remember whether your marriage vows have been broken or not, there’s not much good in acting like an offended saint.”

“We can always drown the baby and start over.”

“Just try drowning that thing,” muttered Nanny. “I pity the poor lake asked to take her in.”

Later, Nanny went through Melena’s small collection of medicines—herbs, drops, roots, brandies, leaves. She was wondering, without much hope, if she could invent something that might cause the girl’s skin to blanch. In the back of the chest Nanny found the green glass bottle spoken of by Melena. The light was bad and her eyes weren’t strong, but she could make out the words MIRACLE ELIXIR on a piece of paper pasted to the front.

Though she had a native skill in healing, Nanny was unable to come up with a skin-changing potion. Bathing the child in cow’s milk didn’t make the skin white, either. But the child would not allow herself to be lowered into a pail of lake water; she twisted like a cat in panic. Nanny kept on with the cow’s milk. It left a horrid sour stink if she did not rub it off thoroughly with a cloth.

Frex organized an exorcism. It involved candles and hymns. Nanny watched from a distance. The man was beady-eyed, perspiring with effort even though the mornings were colder and colder. Elphaba slept in her binding cloth in the middle of the carpet, oblivious to the sacrament.

Nothing happened. Frex fell, exhausted and spent, and cradled his green daughter within the crook of his arm, as if finally embracing the proof of some undisclosed sin. Melena’s face hardened.

There was only one thing left to try. Nanny gathered the courage to bring it up on the day she was to leave back for Colwen Grounds.

“We see that peasant treatments don’t work,” said Nanny, “and spiritual intercession has failed. Do you have the courage to think about sorcery? Is there someone local who could magick the green venom out of the child?”

Frex was up and lashing out at Nanny, swinging his fists. Nanny fell backward off her stool, and Melena bobbed about her, shrieking. “How dare you!” cried Frex. “In this household! Isn’t this green girl insult enough? Sorcery is the refuge of the amoral; when it isn’t out-and-out charlatanism, it is dangerously evil! Contracts with the demons!”

Nanny said, “Oooh, preserve me! You fine, fine man, don’t you know enough to fight fire with fire?”

“Nanny, enough,” said Melena.

“Hitting a feeble old woman,” said Nanny, hurt. “Who only tries to help.”

The next morning Nanny packed her valise. There was nothing more that she could do, and she wasn’t willing to live the rest of her life with a fanatical hermit and a ruined baby, even for the sake of Melena.

Frex drove Nanny back to the inn at Stonespar End, for the coach-and-four to take her home. Nanny knew Melena might still think about killing the child, but somehow she doubted it. Nanny held her valise to her ample bosom, fearing bandits again. Inside her valise was hidden her gold garter (she could always claim it had been planted there without her knowledge, whereas it would have been hard to claim it had been planted on her leg in the same circumstances). She also had squirreled away the ivory crochet hook, three of Frex’s prayer beads because she liked the carvings, and the pretty green glass bottle left behind by some itinerant salesman selling, apparently, dreams and passion and somnolence.

She didn’t know what she thought. Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory? Or was she merely a physical ailment, a blight like a misshapen apple or a five-legged calf? Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

The Quadling Glassblower

For one short, wet month, early in the next year, the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower. Melena went about the yard in a state of mild undress, so that she could feel the sun on her pale skin and the deep warmth she had missed all winter. Strapped in her chair in the doorway, Elphaba, now a year and a half old, hit her breakfast minnow with the bowl of her spoon. “Oh, eat the thing, don’t mash it,” said Melena, but mildly. Since the child’s chin-sling had been removed, mother and daughter had begun to pay some attention to each other. To her surprise, Melena sometimes found Elphaba endearing, the way a baby should be.

This view was the only thing she had seen since leaving the elegant mansion of her family, the only thing she would ever gaze upon again—the windswept surface of Illswater, the distant dark stone cottages and chimneys of Rush Margins on the other side, the hills lying in a torpor beyond. She would go mad; the world was nothing but water and want. If a frolic of elves scampered through the yard she would leap on them for company, for sex, for murder.

“You father is a fraud,” she said to Elphaba. “Off finding himself all winter, leaving me with only you for company. Eat that breakfast, for you’ll get no more if you throw it on the ground.”

Elphaba picked up the fish and threw it on the ground.

“Your father is a charlatan,” continued Melena. “He used to be very good in bed for a religious man, and this is how I know his secret. Holy men are supposed to be above earthly pleasures, but your father enjoyed his midnight wrestling. Once upon a time! We must never tell him we know he’s a humbug, it would break his heart. We don’t want to break his heart, do we?” And then Melena burst into a high peal of laughter.

Elphaba’s face was unsmiling, unchanging. She pointed to the fish.

“Breakfast. Breakfast in the dirt. Breakfast for the bugs,” Melena said. She dropped the collar of her spring robe a little lower and the pink yoke of her bare shoulders gyrated. “Shall we go walk by the edge of the lake today and maybe you’ll drown?”

But Elphaba would never drown, never, because she would not go near the lake.

“Maybe we’ll go out in a boat and tip over!” Melena shrieked.

Elphaba cocked her head to one side as if listening for some part of her mother not intoxicated with leaves and wine.

The sun swept out from behind a cloud. Elphaba scowled. Melena’s robe dropped lower. Her breasts worked their way out from between the dirty ruffles of the collar.

Look at me, thought Melena, showing my breasts to the child I couldn’t give milk to for fear of amputation. I who was the rose of Nest Hardings, I who was the beauty of my generation! And now I am reduced to company I don’t even want, my own squirming thorny little girl. She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She’s about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments of life. In which Rush Margins is amply supplied. Mercy from the Unnamed God, she’s a creep, she is. She is.

“Or we might take a walk in the woods today and pick the last of the winter berries.” Melena was full of guilt at her lack of motherly feeling. “We can put them in a pie. Can we put them in a pie? Shall we, honey?”

Elphaba didn’t speak yet, but she nodded, and began to wiggle to get down. Melena started a clapping game Elphaba took no notice of. The child grunted and pointed to the ground, and arched her long elegant legs to illustrate her desire. Then she gestured to the gate leading from the kitchen garden and the hen yard.

There was a man at the uprights of the gate, leaning, shy and hungry-looking, with skin the color of roses at twilight: a dusky, shadowy red. He had a couple of leathern satchels on his shoulders and back, and a walking staff, and a dangerously handsome, hollow-looking face. Melena screeched and caught herself, directed her voice to a lower register. It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone but a whining toddler. “Good glory, you startled us!” she cried. “Are you searching for some breakfast?” She had lost the social touch. For instance, her breasts should not be staring at him so. Yet she did not clasp her gown.

“Please to forgive a sudden appearance by a strange foreigner at Lady’s gate,” said the man.

“Forgiven, of course,” she said impatiently. “Come in where I can see you—come in, come in!”

Elphaba had seen so few other people in her life that she hid one eye behind her spoon, and peeked with the other eye.

The man approached. His movements showed the clumsiness of exhaustion. He was large of ankle and thick of foot, slender about the waist and shoulders, and thick again in the neck—as if he had been made on a lathe, and worked too briefly at the extremities. His hands, letting down the satchels, seemed like beasts with minds of their own. They were outsized and splendid.

“Traveler not to know where he is,” said the man. “Two nights to cross the hills from Downhill Cornings. To look for the inn at Three Dead Trees. To rest.”

“You’re lost, you’ve veered,” said Melena, deciding not to be perplexed at his scrambled words. “No matter. Let me fix you a meal and you can tell me your story.” Her hands were at her hair, which once used to be thought precious as spun brass. At least it was clean.

The man was sleek and fit. When he removed his cap his hair fell out in greasy hanks, sunset red. He washed at the pump, stripping off his shirt, and Melena noticed it was nice to see a waist on a man again (Frex, bless him, had run to plumpness in the year-and-some since Elphaba’s birth). Were all Quadlings this delicious dusty rose color? The man’s name, Melena learned, was Turtle Heart, and he was a glassblower from Ovvels, in little-known Quadling Country.

She bundled up her breasts at last, reluctantly. Elphaba squawked to be let loose, and without so much as flinching the visitor unbuckled her and swept her in the air and caught her again. The child crowed with surprise, even delight, and Turtle Heart repeated the trick. Melena took advantage of his concentration on the brat to scoop up the uneaten minnow from the dirt and rinse it off. She plopped it among the eggs and mashed tar root, hoping that Elphaba would not suddenly learn to speak and embarrass her. It would be just like the child to do that.

But Elphaba was too charmed by this man to fuss or complain. She didn’t even whine when Turtle Heart finally came to the bench and sat to eat. She crawled between his sleek, hairless calves (for he had shucked off his leggings) and she moaned some private tune with a satisfied smirk on her face. Melena found herself jealous of a female not yet two years old. She wouldn’t have minded sitting on the ground between Turtle Heart’s legs.

“I’ve never met a Quadling before,” she said, too loudly, too brightly. The months of solitude had made her forget her manners. “My family would never have Quadlings in to dine—not that there were many, or even any for all I know, in the farmlands around my family’s estate. The stories make out that Quadlings were sneaky and incapable of telling the truth.”

“How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie?” He smiled at her.

She melted like butter on warm bread. “I’ll believe anything you say.”

He told her of the life in the outreaches of Ovvels, the houses rotting gently into the swamp, the harvest of snails and murkweed, the customs of communal living and ancestor worship. “So you believe your ancestors are with you?” she prodded. “I don’t mean to be nosy but I’ve become interested in religion despite myself.”

“Does Lady to believe ancestors are with her?”

She could hardly focus on the question, so bright were his eyes, and so wonderful it was to be called Lady. Her shoulders straightened. “My immediate ancestors couldn’t be farther away,” she admitted. “I mean my parents—they’re still living, but so uninteresting to me they might as well be dead.”

“When dead they may to visit Lady often.”

“They are not welcome. Go away.” She laughed, shooing. “You mean ghosts? They’d better not. That’s what I’d call the worst of both worlds—if there is an Other Land.”

“There is an otherworld,” he said with certainty.

She felt chilled. She scooped Elphaba up and hugged her tightly. Elphaba sagged as if boneless in her arms, neither fussing nor returning the hug, just falling limp from the novelty of being touched. “Are you a seer?” said Melena.

“Turtle Heart to blow glass,” he said. He seemed to mean that as an answer.

Melena was suddenly reminded of the dreams she used to have, of exotic places she knew she was too dull to invent. “Married to a minister, and I don’t know that I believe in an otherworld,” she admitted. She hadn’t meant to say that she was married, although she supposed the child implicated her.

But Turtle Heart had finished talking. He put down his plate (he had left the minnow) and he took from his satchels a small pot, a pipe, and some sacks of sand and soda ash and lime and other minerals. “Might Turtle Heart to thank Lady for her welcome?” he asked; she nodded.

He built up the kitchen fire and sorted and mixed his ingredients, and arranged utensils, and cleaned the bowl of his pipe with a special rag folded in its own pouch. Elphaba sat clumplike, her green hands on her green toes, curiosity on her sharp pinched face.

Melena had never seen glass blown, just as she had never seen paper made, cloth woven, or logs hewn from tree trunks. It seemed as marvelous to her as the local stories of the traveling clock that had hexed her husband into the professional paralysis from which he still hadn’t quite escaped—though he tried.

Turtle Heart hummed a note through his nose or the pipe as he blew an irregular bulb of hot greenish ice. It steamed and hissed in the air. He knew what to do with it; he was a wizard of glass; Melena had to hold Elphaba back to keep her from burning her hands as she reached for it.

In what seemed like no time at all, in what felt like magic, the glass had gone from being semiliquid and abstract to a hardening, cooling reality.

It was a smooth, impure circle, like a slightly oblong plate. All the while Turtle Heart worked with it, Melena thought of her own character, going from youthful ether to hardening shell, transparently empty. Breakable, too. But before she could lose herself in remorse, Turtle Heart took her two hands and passed them near, but not touching, the flat surface of the glass.

“Lady to talk with ancestors,” he said. But she would not struggle to connect with old boring dead people in the Other Land, not when his huge hands covered hers. She breathed through her nose to suppress the smell of breakfast in an unwashed mouth (fruit and one glass of wine, or was it two?). She thought she might well faint.

“Look in glass,” he urged her. She could only look at his neck and his raspberry-honey-colored chin.

He looked for her. Elphaba came and steadied herself with a small hand on his knee and peered in, too.

“Husband is near,” said Turtle Heart. Was this prophecy through a glass dish or was he asking her a question? But he went on: “Husband is traveling on a donkey and to bring elderly woman to visit you. Is ancestor to visit?”

“Is old nursemaid, probably,” Melena said. She was sloping downward into his crippled syntax, in unabashed sympathy. “Can you really to see that in there?”

He nodded. Elphaba nodded too, but at what?

“How much time do we have before he gets here?” she asked.

“Till this evening.”

They did not speak another word until sunset. They banked the fire and hooked Elphaba to a harness, and sat her down in front of the cooling glass, which they hung on a string like a lens or a mirror. It seemed to mesmerize and calm her; she did not even gnaw absentmindedly at her wrists or toes. They left the door to the cottage open so that, from time to time, they could peer out from the bed to check on the child who, in the glare of a sunny day, would not be able to focus her eyes to see in the house shadows, and who anyway never turned to look. Turtle Heart was unbearably beautiful. Melena dragon-snaked with him, covered him with her mouth, poured him in her hands, heated and cooled and shaped his luminosity. He filled her emptiness.

They were washed, and dressed, with supper mostly made, when the donkey brayed a half mile down the lake. Melena blushed. Turtle Heart was back at the pipe, blowing again. Elphaba turned and looked in the direction of the donkey’s serrated statement. Her lips, which always looked almost black against the new-apple color of her skin, twisted tight, chewed against each other. She bit her lower lip as if thinking, but she did not bleed; she had learned to manage the teeth somewhat, through trial and error. She put her hand on the shining disc. The glass circlet caught the last blue of the sky, until it looked like a magic mirror showing nothing but silver-cold water within.

Geographies of the Seen and the Unseen

All the way from Stonespar End, where Frex met her coach, Nanny complained. Lumbago, weak kidneys, fallen arches, aching gums, sore haunches. Frex wanted to say, And how about your swollen ego? Though he had been out of circulation for a while, he knew such a remark would be rude. Nanny flounced and petted herself, clinging determinedly to her seat until they arrived at the lodge near Rush Margins.

Melena greeted Frex with affecting shyness. “My breastplate, my backbone,” she murmured. She was slender after a hard winter, her cheekbones more prominent. Her skin looked scoured as if by an artist’s scratch brush—but she had always had the look of an etching-in-the-flesh. She was usually bold with her kisses and he found her reticence alarming until he realized there was a stranger in the shadows. Then, after introductions, Nanny and Melena fussed to get a meal on the table, and Frex put out some oats for the sorry nag who had to pull the carriage. When this was done he went to sit in the spring evening light and to meet his daughter again.

Elphaba was cautious around him. He found in his pouch a trinket he’d whittled for her, a little sparrow with a cunning beak and upraised wings. “Look, Fabala,” he whispered (Melena hated the derivative, so he used it: it was his and Elphaba’s private bond, the father-daughter pact against the world). “Look what I found in the forest. A little maplewood bird.”

The child took the thing in her hands. She touched it softly, and put its head in her mouth. Frex steeled himself to hear the inevitable splintering, and to hold back his sigh of disappointment. But Elphaba did not bite. She sucked the head and looked at it again. Wet, it had greater life.

“You like it,” Frex said.

She nodded, and began to feel its wings. Now that she was distracted, Frex could draw her between his knees. He nuzzled his crinkly-bearded chin into her hair—she smelled like soap and wood smoke, and the char on toast, a good healthy smell—and he closed his eyes. It was good to be home.

He had spent the winter in an abandoned shepherd’s hut on the windward slope of Griffon’s Head. Praying and fasting, moving deeper inside and then further outside himself. And why not? At home, he had felt the scorn of the people of the whole claustrophobic valley of Illswater; they had connected the Time Dragon’s slanderous story of a corrupt minister with the arrival of a deformed child. They had drawn their own conclusions. They avoided his chapel services. So a sort of hermit’s life, at least in small intervals, had seemed both penance and preparation for something else, something next—but what?

He knew this life wasn’t what Melena had originally expected, marrying him. With his bloodlines, Frex had looked primed for an elevation to proctor or even, eventually, bishop. He had imagined the happiness Melena would have as a society dame, presiding over feast day dinners and charity balls and episcopal teas. Instead—he could see her in the firelight, grating a last, limp winter carrot onto a pan of fish—here she wasted away, a partner in a difficult marriage on a cold, shadowy lakeshore. Frex had a notion that she wasn’t sorry to see him go off from time to time, so that she could be glad to see him come back.

As he ruminated, his beard tickled Elphaba’s neck, and she snapped the wings off her wooden sparrow. She sucked on it like a whistle. Twisting away from him, she ran to a glass lens hanging from the projecting eave, and swatted at it.

“Don’t, you’ll break that!” said her father.

“She cannot to break that.” The traveler, the Quadling, came from the sink where he had been washing up.

“She just turned her toy into a cripple,” Frex said, pointing at the ruined birdling.

“She is herself pleased at the half things,” Turtle Heart said. “I think. The little girl to play with the broken pieces better.”

Frex didn’t quite get it, but nodded. He knew that months away from the human voice made him clumsy at first. The boy from the inn, who had climbed Griffon’s Head to deliver Nanny’s request to be picked up at Stonespar End, had obviously thought Frex a wild man, grunting and unkempt. Frex had had to quote a little of the Oziad to indicate some sort of humanity—“Land of green abandon, land of endless leaf”—it was all that would come to him.

“Why can’t she break it?” asked Frex.

“Because I do not to make it to be broken,” answered Turtle Heart. But he smiled at Frex, not aggressively. And Elphaba wandered around with the shiny glass as if it were a toy, catching shadows, reflections, lights on its imperfect surface, almost as if she were playing.

“Where are you going?” asked Frex, just as Turtle Heart was saying, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Munchkinlander,” said Frex.

“I to think all Munchkins to be shorter than I or you.”

“The peasants, the farmers, yes,” Frex said, “but anyone with bloodlines worth tracing married into height somewhere along the way. And you? You’re from Quadling Country.”

“Yes,” said the Quadling. His reddish hair had been washed and was drying into an airy nimbus. Frex was glad to see Melena so generous as to offer a passerby water to bathe in. Perhaps she was adjusting to country life after all. Because, mercy, a Quadling ranked about as low on the social ladder as it was possible to get and still be human.

“But I to understand,” said the Quadling. “Ovvels is a small world. Until I to leave, I am not to know of hills, one beyond the other and from the spiny backbones a world so wide around. The blurry far away to hurt my eyes, for I cannot to make it seen. Please sir to describe the world you know.”

Frex picked up a stick. In the soil he drew an egg on its side. “What they taught me in lessons,” he said. “Inside the circle is Oz. Make an X”—he did so, through the oval—“and roughly speaking, you have a pie in four sections. The top is Gillikin. Full of cities and universities and theatres, civilized life, they say. And industry.” He moved clockwise. “East, is Munchkinland, where we are now. Farmland, the bread basket of Oz, except down in the mountainous south—these strokes, in the district of Wend Hardings, are the hills you’re climbing.” He bumped and squiggled. “Directly south of the center of Oz is Quadling Country. Badlands, I’m told—marshy, useless, infested with bugs and feverish airs.” Turtle Heart looked puzzled at this, but nodded. “Then west, what they call Winkie Country. Don’t know much about that except it’s dry and unpopulated.”

“And around?” said Turtle Heart.

“Sandstone deserts north and west, fleckstone desert east and south. They used to say the desert sands were deadly poison; that’s just standard propaganda. Keeps invaders from Ev and Quox from trying to get in. Munchkinland is rich and desirable farming territory, and Gillikin’s not bad either. In the Glikkus, up here”—he scratched lines in the northeast, on the border between Gillikin and Munchkinland—“are the emerald mines and the famous Glikkus canals. I gather there’s a dispute whether the Glikkus is Munchkinlander or Gillikinese, but I have no opinion on that.”

Turtle Heart moved his hands over the drawing in the dirt, flexing his palms, as if he were reading the map from above. “But here?” he said. “What is here?”

Frex wondered if he meant the air above Oz. “The realm of the Unnamed God?” he said. “The Other Land? Are you a unionist?”

“Turtle Heart is glassblower,” said Turtle Heart.

“I mean religiously.”

Turtle Heart bowed his head and didn’t meet Frex’s eye. “Turtle Heart is not to know what name to call this.”

“I don’t know about Quadlings,” said Frex, warming to a possible convert. “But Gillikinese and Munchkinlanders are largely unionist. Since Lurlinist paganism went out. For centuries, there have been unionist shrines and chapels all over Oz. Are there none in Quadling Country?”

“Turtle Heart does not to recognize what is this,” he said.

“And now respectable unionists are going in droves over to the pleasure faith,” said Frex, snorting, “or even tiktokism, which hardly even qualifies as a religion. To the ignorant everything is spectacle these days. The ancient unionist monks and maunts knew their place in the universe—acknowledging the life source too sublime to be named—and now we sniff up the skirts of every musty magician who comes along. Hedonists, anarchists, solipsists! Individual freedom and amusement is all! As if sorcery had any moral component! Charms, alley magic, industrial-strength sound and light displays, fake shape-changers! Charlatans, nabobs of necromancy, chemical and herbal wisdoms, humbug hedonists! Selling their bog recipes and crone aphorisms and schoolboy spells! It makes me sick.”

Turtle Heart said, “Shall Turtle Heart to bring you water, shall Turtle Heart to lie you down?” He put fingers soft as calfskin on the side of Frex’s neck. Frex shivered and realized he had been shouting. Nanny and Melena were standing in the doorway with the pan of fish, silent.

“It’s a figure of speech, I’m not sick,” he said, but he was touched at the concern the foreigner had shown. “I think we’ll eat.”

And they did. Elphaba ignored her food except to prod the eyes out of the baked fish and to try to fit them onto her wingless bird. Nanny grumbled good-naturedly about the wind off the lake, her chills, her backbone, her digestion. Her gas was apparent from more than a few feet away and Frex moved, as discreetly as possible, to be upwind. He found himself sitting next to the Quadling on the bench.

“So is all that clear to you?” Frex pointed a fork at the map of Oz.

“Is Emerald City to be where?” said the Quadling, fish bones poking out from between his lips.

“Dead center,” Frex said.

“And there is Ozma,” said Turtle Heart.

“Ozma, the ordained Queen of Oz, or so they say,” Frex said, “though the Unnamed God must be ruler of all, in our hearts.”

“How can unnamed creature to rule—” began Turtle Heart.

“No theology at dinner,” sang out Melena, “that’s a house rule dating from the start of our marriage, Turtle Heart, and we obey it.”

“Besides, I still harbor a devotion to Lurline.” Nanny made a face in Frex’s direction. “Old folks like me are allowed to. Do you know about Lurline, stranger?”

Turtle Heart shook his head.

“If we have no theology then we surely have no arrant pagan nonsense—” began Frex, but Nanny, being a guest and invoking a touch of deafness when it suited her, plowed on.

“Lurline is the Fairy Queen who flew over the sandy wastes, and spotted the green and lovely land of Oz below. She left her daughter Ozma to rule the country in her absence and she promised to return to Oz in its darkest hour.”

“Hah!” said Frex.

“No hahs at me.” Nanny sniffed. “I’m as entitled to my beliefs as you are, Frexspar the Godly. At least they don’t get me into trouble as yours do.”

“Nanny, govern your temper,” said Melena, enjoying this.

“It’s rubbish,” said Frex. “Ozma rules in the Emerald City, and anyone who’s seen her, or paintings of her, knows that she’s from Gillikinese stock. She’s got the same broad band of forehead, the slightly gapped front teeth, the frenzy of curling blond hair, the quick shifts of mood—usually into anger. All characteristic of Gillikinese peoples. You’ve seen her, Melena, tell him.”

“Oh, she is elegant in her way,” Melena admitted.

“The daughter of a Fairy Queen?” said Turtle Heart.

“More nonsense,” said Frex.

“Not nonsense!” snapped Nanny.

“They think she bears herself again and again like a pfenix,” said Frex. “Hah and double hah. There’ve been three hundred years of very different Ozmas. Ozma the Mendacious was a dedicated maunt, who lowered rulings in a bucket down from the topmost chamber in a cloister tower. She was as mad as a bung beetle. Ozma the Warrior conquered the Glikkus, at least for a time, and commandeered the emeralds with which to decorate the Emerald City. Ozma the Librarian did nothing but read genealogies for her whole life long. Then there was Ozma the Scarcely Beloved, who kept pet ermines. She overtaxed the farmers to begin the road system of yellow brick that they’re still struggling to complete, and much luck to them, I say.”

“Who is Ozma now?” asked Turtle Heart.

“Actually,” said Melena, “I had the pleasure to meet the last Ozma at a social season in the Emerald City—my grandfather the Eminent Thropp had a town house. The winter I was fifteen I was brought out into society there. She was Ozma the Bilious, because of a bad stomach. She was the size of a lake narwhal, but she dressed beautifully. I saw her with her husband, Pastorius, at the Oz Festival of Song and Sentiment.”

“She is no longer the Queen?” asked Turtle Heart, confused.

“She died in an unfortunate accident involving some rat poison,” said Frex.

“Died,” said Nanny, “or her spirit moved next into her child, Ozma Tippetarius.”

“The current Ozma is just about the age of Elphaba,” said Melena, “so her father, Pastorius, is the Ozma Regent. The good man will rule until Ozma Tippetarius is old enough to take the throne.”

Turtle Heart shook his head. Frex was annoyed because they had spent so much time talking about the worldly ruler and ignored the eternal realm, and Nanny lapsed into a bout of indigestion for which they all were very sorry, olfactorily speaking.

Anyway, even being irritated, Frex was glad to be home. Because of the beauty of Melena—she was almost glowing tonight as the sun left the sky—and because of the surprise of Turtle Heart, smiling and un-self-conscious next to him. Maybe because of Turtle Heart’s religious emptiness, which Frex found challenging and appealing, almost tempting.

“Then there’s the dragon beneath Oz, in a hidden cavern,” Nanny was saying to Turtle Heart. “The dragon who has dreamt the world, and who will burn it in flames when he awakes—”

“Shut up that superstitious codswallop!” shouted Frex.

Elphaba, on all fours, advanced on the uneven planks of the flooring. She bared her teeth—as if she knew what a dragon was, as if she were pretending—and roared. Her green skin made her more persuasive, as if she were a dragon child. She roared again—“Oh sweetheart, don’t,” said Frex—and she peed on the floor, and sniffed her urine with satisfaction and disgust.

Child’s Play

One afternoon toward the end of summer, Nanny said, “There’s a beast abroad. I’ve seen it at dusk several times, lurking about in the ferns. What sorts of creatures are native to these hills anyway?”

“You don’t find anything larger than a gopher,” said Melena. They were at the side of the brook, working at laundry. The small spring wetness had long since ceased, and the drought had clamped its hand down again. The stream was only a thin trickle. Elphaba, who would not come near the water, was stripping a wild pear tree of its stunted crop. She clung to the trunk with her hands and out-turned feet, and threw her head around, catching the sour fruit with her teeth and then spitting seeds and stem on the ground.

“This is larger than a gopher,” said Nanny. “Trust me. Have you bears? It could have been a bear cub, though it moved mighty fast.”

“No bears. There’s the rumor of rock tigers on the felltop, but they tell me not a single one has been sighted in ages. And rock tigers are notoriously skittish and shy. They don’t come near human dwellings.”

“A wolf then? Are there wolves?” Nanny let the sheet droop in the water. “It could have been a wolf.”

“Nanny, you think you’re in the desert. Wend Hardings is desolate, I agree, but it’s a tame barrenness for all that. You’re alarming me with your wolf and your tiger talk.”

Elphaba, who would not speak yet, made a low growl in the pocket of her throat.

“I don’t like it,” said Nanny. “Let’s finish up and dry these things back at the house. Enough is enough. Besides, I have other things I want to say to you. Let’s give the child to Turtle Heart and let’s go off somewhere.” She shuddered. “Somewhere safe.”

“What you have to say you can say within earshot of Elphaba,” said Melena. “You know she doesn’t understand a word.”

“You confuse not speaking with not listening,” said Nanny. “I think she understands plenty.”

“Look, she’s smearing fruit on her neck, like a cologne—”

“Like a war paint, you mean.”

“Oh, dour Nanny, stop being such a goose and scrub those sheets harder. They’re filthy.”

“I need hardly ask whose sweat and leakage this is . . .”

“Oh you, no you needn’t ask, but don’t start moralizing at me—”

“But you know Frex is bound to notice sooner or later. These energetic afternoon naps you take—well, you always had an eye for the fellow with a decent helping of sausage and hard-boiled eggs—”

“Nanny, come, this is none of your affair.”

“More’s the pity,” said Nanny, sighing. “Isn’t aging a cruel hoax? I’d trade my hard-won pearls of wisdom for a good romp with Uncle Flagpole any day.”

Melena flipped a handful of water in Nanny’s face to shut her up. The older woman blinked and she said, “Well, it’s your garden, plant there what you choose and reap what you may. What I want to talk about is the child, anyway.”

The girl was now squatting behind the pear tree, eyes narrowed at something in the distance. She looked, thought Melena, like a sphinx, like a stone beast. A fly even landed on her face and walked across the bridge of her nose, and the child didn’t flinch or squirm. Then, suddenly, she leaped and pounced, a naked green kitten after an invisible butterfly.

“What about her?”

“Melena, she needs to get used to other children. She’ll start talking a little bit if she sees that other chicks are talking.”

“Talking among children is an overrated concept.”

“Don’t be glib. You know she needs to get used to people other than us. She’s not going to have an easy time of it anyhow, unless she sheds her greeny skin as she grows up. She needs the habits of conversation. Look, I give her chores to do, I warble nursery rhymes at her. Melena, why doesn’t she respond like other children?”

“She’s boring. Some children just are.”

“She ought to have other pups to play with. They would infect her with a sense of fun.”

“Frankly, Frex doesn’t expect a child of his to be interested in fun,” said Melena. “Fun is counted for overmuch in this world, Nanny. I agree with him on that.”

“So your dragon-snaking with Turtle Heart is what—devotional exercises?”

“I said don’t be catty, please!” Melena focused on the toweling, beating it with annoyance. Nanny would go on about this; she was up to something. And Nanny had hit the nail on the head. There crept Turtle Heart into the cool shadows of the cottage, when Melena was tired from a morning’s work in the vegetable garden. He covered her with a sense of holiness, and it was more than her undergarments that would drop away from her when they tumbled panting onto the bedclothes. She would lose her sense of shame.

She knew this did not follow conventional reason. Nevertheless, should a tribunal of unionist ministers call her to court for adultery, she would tell the truth. Somehow Turtle Heart had saved her and restored her sense of grace, of hope in the world. Her belief in the goodness of things had been dashed into bits when little green Elphaba crawled into being. The child was extravagant punishment for a sin so minor she didn’t even know if she had committed it.

It was not the sex that saved her, though the sex was mighty vigorous, even frightening. It was that Turtle Heart didn’t blush when Frex showed up, that he didn’t shrink from beastly little Elphaba. He set up shop in the side yard, blowing glass and grinding it, as if life had brought him here just to redeem Melena. Wherever else he might have been heading had been forgotten.

“Very well, you old interfering cow,” said Melena. “For the sake of argument, what do you propose?”

“We must take Elphie to Rush Margins and find some small children for her to play with.”

Melena sat back on her haunches. “But you have to be jesting!” she cried. “Slow and deliberate as Elphaba is, at least she’s unharmed here! I may not be able to summon much maternal warmth, but I feed her, Nanny, and I keep her from hurting herself! How cruel, to inflict the outside world on her! A green child will be an open invitation for scorn and abuse. And children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint. We might as well go throw her in the lake she’s so terrified of.”

“No no no,” said Nanny, putting her fat hands on her own knees; her voice was thick with determination. “Now I am going to argue with you about this, Melena, until you give in. Time in its wisdom will bring you around to my way of thinking. Listen to me. Listen to me. You are only a pampered little rich girl who flitted about from music lessons to dance lessons with neighborhood children equally rich and stupid as you. Of course there’s cruelty. But Elphaba must learn who she is and she must face down cruelty early. And there will be less of it than you expect.”

“Don’t play Nanny Goddess with me. I won’t have it.”

“Nanny is not giving up,” said Nanny, just as fiercely. “I have a long-range view of your happiness as well as hers, and believe me, if you don’t give her the weapons and armor with which she can defend herself against scorn, she’ll make your life miserable as hers will be miserable.”

“And the weapons and armor she’ll learn from the dirty urchins of Rush Margins?”

“Laughter. Fun. Teasing. Smiling.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not above blackmailing you about this, Melena,” said Nanny. “I can wander into Rush Margins this afternoon and find where Frex is trying to hold his revival meeting and whisper a few words to him. While Frex is busy cranking up the religious ardor of Rush Margins sluggards, would he be interested in knowing what his wife is up to with Turtle Heart?”

“You are a miserable old fiend! You are a foul, unethical bully!” cried Melena.

Nanny grinned with pride. “No later than tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll go in tomorrow and get her life started.”

In the morning a stiff, unforgiving wind galloped from the heights. It picked up old leaves and the remains of failed crops and kitchen gardens. Nanny pulled a shawl across her rounded shoulders and tugged a bonnet over her brow. Her eyes were full of marginal beasts; she kept turning to see a slinking cat-thing or a vixen dissolve into clots of skeleton leaves and debris.

Nanny found a blackthorn staff as if to aid her over stones and ruts, but she hoped to be ready to wield it against some hungry beast. “The land is dry and cold,” she observed, almost to herself. “And so little rain! Of course the big beasts would be driven from the hills. Let’s walk together, no running ahead, little green.”

They made their way in silence: Nanny fearful, Melena angry at having to miss her afternoon dalliance, and Elphaba like a windup toy, one foot solidly in front of the other. The margins of the lake had receded, and some of the crude docks were now walkways over pebble and drying greenrot, with the water pulled back beyond their reach.

Gawnette’s was a dark stone cottage with a roof of moldering thatch. Because of a bad hip, Gawnette was no good at hauling the fishing nets or at kneeling over the wasting vegetable gardens. She had a mess of small children in various stages of undress, squawling and sulking and trotting around the dirty yard in a little pack. She looked up as the minister’s family approached.

“Good day, and you must be Gawnette,” said Nanny brightly. She was pleased to open the gate and be safely inside the garden, even of this hovel. “Brother Frexspar told us we would find you here.”

“Sweet Lurline, what they say is true!” said Gawnette, making a holy sign against Elphaba. “I thought it vicious lies, and here she is!”

The children had slowed to a walk. They were boys and girls, brown-faced and white, all of them filthy, all of them keen on something new. Though they kept walking, playing some game of endurance or make-believe, their eyes never left Elphaba.

“You know this is Melena—of course you do—and I am their Nanny,” said Nanny. “We’re pleased to meet you, Gawnette.” She slid a glance at Melena and bit her upper lip and nodded.

“Very pleased, I’m sure,” said Melena stonily.

“And we need some advice, for you come well recommended,” said Nanny. “The little girl has problems, and the best of our thinking just doesn’t seem to bring forth any good ideas.”

Gawnette leaned forward, suspicious.

“The child is green,” whispered Nanny confidentially. “You may not have noticed, being attracted by her charm and warmth. Of course, we know the good people of Rush Margins wouldn’t let a thing like that bother them. But because she is green, she is shy. Look at her. Little frightened spring turtle. We need to draw her out, make her happier, and we don’t know how.”

“She’s green all right,” said Gawnette. “No wonder useless Brother Frexspar retired from his preaching for so long!” She threw back her head and laughed raucously, unkindly. “And he’s only now had the nerve to take it up again! Well, that’s balls if ever I heard it!”

“Brother Frexspar,” interrupted Melena coldly, “reminds us of the scriptures—‘No one knows the color of a soul.’ Gawnette, he suggested I remind you of that very text.”

“Did he now,” mumbled Gawnette, chastised. “Well then, what do you want with me?”

“Let her play, let her learn, let her come here and be minded by you. You know more than we do,” said Nanny.

The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible. They sat down.

“I don’t know if they’d take to her,” said Gawnette, holding out a while. “And you know my hip doesn’t let me hop up and stop them when they get going.”

“Let’s see. And of course there’d be some payment, some cash, Melena fully agrees,” said Nanny. The barren vegetable plot had caught her attention. This was poverty. Nanny gave Elphaba a push. “Well, go on in, child, and see what’s what.”

The girl didn’t budge, didn’t blink. The children came near to her. There were five boys and two girls. “What an ugly pug,” said one of the older boys. He touched Elphaba on the shoulder.

“Play nicely now,” said Melena, about to leap up, but Nanny kept her hand out to say, Stay down.

“Tag, let’s tag,” said the boy, “who’s the greenfly?”

“Not it, not it!” The other children shrieked, and rushed in to brush Elphaba with their hands, and then raced away. She stood for a minute, unsure, her own hands down and clenched, and then she ran a few steps, and stopped.

“That’s the way, healthful exercise,” said Nanny, nodding. “Gawnette, you’re a genius.”

“I know my chicks,” said Gawnette. “Don’t say I don’t.”

Herdlike, the children rushed in again, tapping and darting away, but the girl would not chase them. So they neared her once more.

“Is it true you got a Quadling muckfrog staying with you too?” said Gawnette. “Is it true he only eats grass and dung?”

“I beg your pardon!” cried Melena.

“That’s what they say, is it true?” said Gawnette.

“He’s a fine man.”

“But he’s a Quadling?”

“Well—yes.”

“Don’t bring him around here then, they spread the plague,” said Gawnette.

“They spread no such thing,” snapped Melena.

“No throwing, Elphie dear,” called Nanny.

“I’m only saying what I hear. They say at night that Quadlings fall asleep and their souls climb out through their mouths and go abroad.”

“Stupid people say a lot of stupid things.” Melena was curt and too loud. “I have never seen his soul climb out of his mouth while he was sleeping, and I’ve had plenty of opportu—”

“Darling, no rocks,” shrilled Nanny. “None of the other children have rocks.”

“Now they do,” observed Gawnette.

“He is the most sensitive person I’ve ever met,” said Melena.

“Sensitive isn’t much use to a fishwife,” said Gawnette. “How about to a minister and a minister’s wife?”

“Now there’s blood, how vexing,” said Nanny. “Children, let Elphie up so I can wipe that cut. And I didn’t bring a rag. Gawnette?”

“Bleeding is good for them, makes them less hungry,” said Gawnette.

“I rate sensitive a good sight higher than stupid,” said Melena, seething.

“No biting,” said Gawnette to one of the little boys, and then, seeing Elphaba open her mouth to retaliate, raised herself to her feet, bad hip or no, and screamed, “no biting, for the love of mercy!”

“Aren’t children divine?” said Nanny.

Darkness Abroad

Every second or third day Nanny took Elphaba by the hand and waddled the shadowy road to Rush Margins. There Elphaba mingled with the greasy children under the eyes of sullen Gawnette. Frex had moved out again (was it confidence or desperation?)—he was scaring miserable hamlets with his frenzied beard and his collected opinions on faith. Gone for eight, ten days at a time. Melena practiced piano arpeggios on a tuneless mock keyboard Frex had carved for her, to perfect scale.

Turtle Heart seemed to wilt and parch as autumn came on. Their afternoons of dalliance began to lose the heat of urgency, and developed in warmth. Melena had always appreciated the attentions of Frex, and been attentive to him, but somehow his body had not been as supple as Turtle Heart’s. She drifted off to sleep with Turtle Heart’s mouth on one of her nipples and his hands—his big hands—roaming like sentient pets. She imagined that Turtle Heart divided his body when her eyes were closed; his mouth roamed, his cock rose and nudged and leaned, his breath was somewhere other than his mouth, hissing elegantly into her ear, wordlessly, his arms were like stirrups.

Still she didn’t know him, not the way she knew Frex; she could not see through him as she could most people. She put this down to his majestic bearing, but Nanny, ever watchful, remarked one evening that it was just that his ways were the ways of a Quadling and Melena had never even acknowledged that he came from a different culture than she did.

“Culture, what’s culture,” Melena said lazily. “People are people.”

“Don’t you remember your nursery rhymes?” Nanny put aside her sewing (with relief) and recited.

“Boys study, girls know,
That’s the way that lessons go.
Boys learn, girls forget,
That’s the way of lessons yet.
Gillikinese are sharp as knives,
Munchkinlanders lead corny lives,
Glikkuns beat their ugly wives,
Winkies swarm in sticky hives.
But the Quadlings, Oh the Quadlings,
Slimy stupid curse-at-godlings,
Eat their young and bury their old
A day before their bodies get cold.
Give me an apple and I’ll say it again.

“What do you know of him?” Nanny asked. “Is he married? Why did he leave Lower Slimepit or wherever he comes from? Naturally, it’s not my place to ask such personal questions—”

“Since when did you ever know your place or keep it, either?”

“When Nanny leaves her place, believe me, you’ll know,” said Nanny.

One evening in early autumn, for fun they built up a fire in the yard. Frex was home and good-humored, and Nanny was thinking of heading back to Colwen Grounds, which made Melena good-humored too. Turtle Heart put together a supper, a distasteful goulash of small sour new apples and cheese and bacon.

Frex was feeling expansive. The effect of that blasted tiktok contrivance, the Clock of the Time Dragon, had been wearing off at last—thank the Unnamed God—and the graceless poor had been turning out to hear Frex harangue them. A two-week mission at Three Dead Trees had been a success. Frex had been rewarded with a small wallet of brass coins and barter tokens, and the glow of devotion or even lust on the face of more than one penitent.

“Perhaps our time here is limited,” said Frex, sighing with contentment and clasping his arms behind his head—the typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise. Her husband went on. “Perhaps the road from Rush Margins leads us on to higher things, Melena. Grander stations in life.”

“Oh please,” she said. “My family rose from humble beginnings for nine generations, to produce me with my ankles in the mud out here in the middle of nowhere. I don’t believe in higher things.”

“I mean the lofty ambitions of the spirit. I don’t mean to storm the Emerald City and become personal confessor to the Ozma Regent.”

“Why not put yourself forward to be confessor to Ozma Tippetarius?” Nanny asked. She could see herself rising in courtly Emerald City society if Frex had such a position. “So what if the royal baby is only, what, two years old? Three? So we have government by a male regent again. It’s only for a limited engagement—like most male encounters. You’re young still—she’ll grow up—you’ll be well-placed to influence policy . . .”

“I don’t care about ministering to anyone in court, not even an Ozma the Fanatically Devout.” Frex lit a sallowwood pipe. “My mission is to the downtrodden and humble.”

“Goodness should to travel to Quadling Country,” said Turtle Heart. “Downtrodden there.”

Turtle Heart didn’t often speak of his past, and Melena remembered Nanny’s gibe about her lack of curiosity. She waved the pipe smoke away and said, “Why did you leave Ovvels anyway?”

“Horrors,” he said.

Elphaba, who had been hoping for ants to crawl across the grinding stone so she could mash them with a rock, looked up across the shallow basin of the stone. The others waited for Turtle Heart to go on. Melena’s heart lifted uneasily—she had a sudden premonition of things changing right here, this very evening, this most splendid gentle night, things going awry just when they had managed to settle down.

“What sort of horrors?” said Frex.

“I feel a chill. I’ll get a shawl,” said Melena.

“Or minister to Pastorius! The Ozma Regent! Why not, Frex?” Nanny said. “I’m sure with Melena’s family connections you could twist an invitation—”

“Horrors,” said Elphaba.

It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the moon, a lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause.

“Horrors?” Elphaba said again, looking around. Though her mouth was serious, her eyes glowed; she had realized her own accomplishment. She was nearly two years old. The big sharp teeth in her mouth could not keep her words locked inside her anymore. “Horrors,” she tried in a whisper. “Horrors.”

“Come to Nanny, darling. Come sit on my lap and hush for a while.”

She obeyed, but sat forward, apart from Nanny’s cushiony bosom, allowing Nanny’s arms to ring around her waist but no contact more than that. She stared at Turtle Heart and waited.

And Turtle Heart said in an awed voice, “Turtle Heart is thinking the child to speak for the first time.”

“Yes,” said Frex, exhaling a ring of smoke, “and she’s asking about the horrors. Unless you don’t care to tell us? . . .”

“Turtle Heart to say little. Turtle Heart to work in glass, and to leave words for the Goodness and the Lady and the Nanny. And now for the Girl.”

“Say a little, though. Since you brought it up.”

Melena shivered; she hadn’t gone for the shawl. She could not move. She was heavy as stone.

“Workers from the Emerald City and other places, they to come to Quadling Country. They to look and taste and sample the air, the water, the soil. They to plan the highway. Quadlings to know this is wasted time and wasted effort. They do not to listen to Quadling voices.”

“Quadlings aren’t road engineers, I suspect,” said Frex evenly.

“The country is delicate,” said Turtle Heart. “In Ovvels the houses to float between trees. Crops to grow on small platforms hooked by ropes. Boys to dive in shallow water for vegetable pearls. Too many trees and there is not enough light for crops and health. Too few trees and the water rises and roots of plants floating on top cannot to stretch to soil. Quadling Country is poor country but beauty rich. It only to support life by careful planning and cooperation.”

“So resistance to the Yellow Brick Road—”

“Is only part of the story. Quadlings cannot to convince road builders, who want to build up dikes of mud and stone and to cut Quadling Country in pieces. Quadlings to argue, and to pray, and to testify, and cannot to win with words.”

Frex held his pipe in his two hands and watched Turtle Heart speak. Frex was drawn to him; Frex was always drawn to intensity.

“Quadlings consider to fight,” said Turtle Heart. “Because they think this is only the start. When the builders to test soil and to sift water, they to learn of things Quadlings are smart for ever, but Quadlings to keep still.”

“Things you know?”

“Turtle Heart to speak of rubies,” he said with a great sigh. “Rubies under the water. Red as pigeon blood. Engineers to say: Red corundum in bands of crystalline limestone under swamp. Quadlings to say: The blood of Oz.”

“Like the red glass you make?” said Melena.

“Ruby glass to come by adding gold chloride,” said Turtle Heart. “But Quadling Country to sit atop real deposits of real rubies. And the news is sure to go to the Emerald City with the builders. What to follow is horror upon horror.”

“How do you know?” snapped Melena.

“To look in glass,” said Turtle Heart, pointing to the roundel he had made as a toy for Elphaba, “is to see the future, in blood and rubies.”

“I don’t believe in seeing the future. That smacks of the pleasure faith,” said Frex fiercely. “The fatalism of the Time Dragon. Pfaah. No, the Unnamed God has an unnamed history for us, and prophecy is merely guesswork and fear.”

“Fear and guesswork is enough to make Turtle Heart to leave Quadling Country, then,” said the Quadling glassblower without apology. “Quadlings do not to call their religion a pleasure faith, but they to listen to signs and to watch for messages. As the water to run red with rubies it will to run with the blood of Quadlings.”

“Nonsense!” Frex fussed, red himself. “They need a good talking-to.”

“Besides, isn’t Pastorius a simpleton?” said Melena, who alone of them could claim an informed opinion on the royal house. “What will he do until Ozma is of age but ride the hunt, and eat Munchkinlander pastries, and fuck the odd housemaid on the side?”

“The danger is a foreigner,” said Turtle Heart, “not a home-grown king or queen. The old women, and the shamans, and the dying: They to see a stranger king, cruel and mighty.”

“What is the Ozma Regent doing, planning roadworks into that godforsaken mire anyway?” Melena asked.

“Progress,” said Frex, “same as the Yellow Brick Road through Munchkinland. Progress and control. The movement of troops. The regularization of taxes. Military protection.”

“Protection from whom?” said Melena.

“Ahh,” said Frex, “always the important question.”

“Ahh,” said Turtle Heart, almost in a whisper.

“So where are you going?” said Frex. “Not that you need leave here, of course. Melena loves having you around. We all do.”

“Horrors,” said Elphaba.

“Hush now,” said Nanny.

“Lady is kind and Goodness is kind to Turtle Heart. Who did not mean to stay more than a day. Turtle Heart was on his way to the Emerald City and to get lost. Turtle Heart to hope to beg audience with Ozma—”

“Ozma Regent, now,” interjected Frex.

“—and to plead mercy for Quadling Country. And to warn of brutal stranger—”

“Horrors,” said Elphaba, clapping her hands together in delight.

“The child to remind Turtle Heart of his duties,” he said. “To talk of it brings duties back out of the pain of the past. Turtle Heart to forget. But when words are to speak in the air, actions must to follow.”

Melena glared hatefully at Nanny, who had dropped the girl on the ground and begun to busy herself with collecting the supper dishes. See what comes of prying and nosiness, Nanny? See? Just the dissolution of my only earthly happiness, that’s all. Melena turned her face from her horrid child, who seemed to be smiling, or was that wincing? She looked at her husband with despair. Do something, Frex!

“Perhaps this is the higher ambition we seek,” he was murmuring. “We should travel to Quadling Country, Melena. We should leave the luxury of Munchkinland and try ourselves in the fire of a truly needy situation.”

“The luxury of Munchkinland?” Melena’s voice was screechy.

“When the Unnamed God speaks through a lowly vessel,” began Frex, gesturing at Turtle Heart, who was looking desperate again, “we can choose to hear or we can choose to harden our hearts—”

“Well, hear this, then,” said Melena, “I’m pregnant, Frex. I can’t travel. I can’t move. And with a new infant to watch as well as Elphaba to raise, it’s too much to suggest tramping around Mudland.”

After the stillness had lost some of its steam, she continued, “Well, I didn’t intend to tell you like this.”

“Congratulations,” said Frex coldly.

“Horrors,” said Elphaba to her mother. “Horrors, horrors, horrors.”

“That’s enough thoughtless chatter for one night,” said Nanny, taking charge. “Melena, you will catch a chill sitting out here. Summer nights are turning colder again. Come inside and let’s let that be that.”

But Frex got himself up and went to kiss his wife. It was not clear to anyone whether he suspected that Turtle Heart was the father, nor was it clear to Melena which one, her husband or her lover, was the father. She didn’t actually care. She just didn’t want Turtle Heart to leave, and she hated him fiercely for being so suddenly riven with moral feeling for his miserable people.

Frex and Turtle Heart conversed in low voices that Melena could not make out. They sat by the fire with their heads low together, and Frex had his arm on Turtle Heart’s shaking shoulders. Nanny readied Elphaba for bed, left her outside with the men, and came to sit on Melena’s bed with a glass of hot milk on a tray and a small bowl of medicinal capsules.

“Well, I knew this was coming,” said Nanny calmly. “Drink the milk, dear, and stop sniveling. You’re behaving like a child again. How long have you known?”

“Oh, six weeks,” said Melena. “I don’t want milk, Nanny, I want my wine.”

“You’ll drink milk. No more wine till the baby’s born. You want another disaster?”

“Drinking wine doesn’t change the skin color of embryos,” said Melena. “I may be a dolt but I know that much about biology.”

“It’s bad for your frame of mind, nothing more and nothing less. Drink the milk and swallow one of these capsules.”

“What for?”

“I did what I told you I’d do,” said Nanny in a conspiratorial voice. “Last fall I poked around the Lower Quarter of our fair capital on your behalf—”

The young woman was suddenly engaged. “Nanny you didn’t! How clever! Weren’t you terrified?”

“Of course I was. But Nanny loves you, however stupid you are. I found a store marked with the secret insignia of the alchemist’s trade.” She wrinkled her nose in recollection of the smell of rotting ginger and cat piss. “I sat down with a saucy-looking old biddy from Shiz, a crone named Yackle, and drank the tea and upended the cup so she could read the leaves. Yackle could barely see her own hand, much less read the future.”

“A real professional,” Melena said dryly.

“Your husband doesn’t believe in predictions, so keep your voice down. Anyway, I explained about the greenness of your first child, and the difficulty of knowing exactly why it had happened. We don’t want a recurrence, I said. So Yackle ground up some herbs and minerals, and roasted it with oil of gomba, and said some pagan prayers and for all I know she spit in it, I didn’t watch too closely. But I paid for a nine months’ supply, to be begun as soon as you’re sure you’ve conceived. We’re a month late maybe, but this’ll be better than nothing. I have supreme confidence in this woman, Melena, and you should too.”

“Why should I?” said Melena, swallowing the first of nine capsules. It tasted like boiled marrow.

“Because Yackle predicted greatness for your children,” said Nanny. “She said Elphaba will be more than you credit, and your second will follow suit. She said not to give up on your life. She said history waits to be written, and this family has a part in it.”

“What does she say about my lover?”

“You are a pest,” said Nanny. “She said to rest and not to worry. She gives her blessing. She is a filthy whore but she knows what she’s talking about.” Nanny didn’t mention that Yackle was certain the next child would be a girl too. There was too much chance Melena would try to abort her, and Yackle sounded quite sure that history belonged to two sisters, not a single girl.

“And you got home safely? Did anyone suspect?”

“Who would suspect innocent old Nanny of trading in illegal substances in the Lower Quarter?” laughed Nanny. “I do my knitting and mind my own business. Now go to sleep, my love. Nix to the wine for the next few months, and stay the course with this medicine, and we’ll have for you and Frex a decent, healthy child, which will provide no end of recovery for your marriage.”

“My marriage is perfectly fine,” said Melena, snuggling down under the covers—the capsule had a kick, but she didn’t want Nanny to know—“as long as we don’t go wading off into the muddy sunset.”

“The sun sets in the west, not in the south,” said Nanny soothingly. “It was a masterly stroke to bring up the pregnancy tonight, my dear. I wouldn’t come to visit you if you went paddling off into Quadling Country, by the way. I’m fifty years old this year, you know. There are some things Nanny is really too old to do.”

“Well nobody better go anywhere,” said Melena, and began to fall asleep.

Nanny, pleased with herself, glanced out the window again as she prepared to retire. Frex and Turtle Heart were still deep in conversation. Nanny was sharper than she let on; she had seen Turtle Heart’s face when he was remembering the threat to his people. It had opened like a hen’s egg, and the truth had fluttered and wobbled out of it just as naive as a yellow chick. And as fragile. No wonder Frex was sitting nearer to the beleaguered Quadling than Nanny thought was altogether decent. But there seemed no end of oddity to this family.

“Send the girl in so I can put her down,” she called from the window, partly to interrupt their intimacy.

Frex looked around. “She’s in, isn’t she?”

Nanny glanced. The child was not given to hiding games, neither here nor with the brats in the village. “No, isn’t she with you?”

The men turned and looked. Nanny thought she saw a blur of movement in the blue shadows of the wild yew. She stood up and held on to the window ledge. “Well, find her. It’s the prowling hour.”

“There’s nothing here, Nanny, it’s your overactive imagination,” drawled Frex, but the men were up quickly, and looking around.

“Melena, dear, don’t sleep yet; do you know where Elphaba is? Did you see her wander off?” said Nanny.

Melena struggled to lift herself to one elbow. She stared through her hair and her inebriation. “What are you on about?” she asked in a slur, “who is wandering off?”

“Elphaba,” Nanny said. “Come on, you better get up. Where could she be. Where could she be.” She started to help Melena up, but it was happening too slowly, and Nanny’s heart was beginning to beat fast. She fixed Melena’s hands to the bedposts, saying, “Now come on, Melena, this is not good,” and she reached for her blackthorn staff.

“Who?” said Melena. “Who’s lost?”

The men were calling in the purple gloaming. “Fabala! Elphaba! Elphie! Little frog!” They circled out away from the yard, away from the dying embers of the dinner fire, peering and hitting at the lower branches of bushes. “Little snake! Lizard girl! Where are you?”

“It’s the thing, the thing has come down from the hills, whatever it is!” cried Nanny.

“There’s no thing, you old fool,” said Frex, but he leaped more and more vigorously from rock to rock behind the lodge, smacking branches aside. Turtle Heart stood still, his hands out to the sky, as if trying to receive the faint light of the first stars into his palms.

“Is it Elphaba,” called Melena from the door, finally focusing, and stepping forward in her nightgown. “Is the child gone?”

“She’s wandered off, she’s been taken,” said Nanny fiercely, “these two idiots were flirting like schoolgirls, and the beast from the hills is abroad!”

Melena called, her words mounting in pitch and terror, “Elphaba! Elphaba, you listen to me! Come here this instant! Elphaba!”

The wind alone answered.

“She is not far,” said Turtle Heart after a moment. In the deepening dark he was almost invisible while Melena in her white poplin glowed like an angel, as if lit from within. “She is not far, she just is not here.”

“What the devil do you mean,” Nanny said, weeping, “with your riddles and your games?”

Turtle Heart turned. Frex had come back to him, to throw an arm around him and hold him up, and Melena came forward to his other side. He sagged for a minute, as if fainting; Melena cried out in fright. But Turtle Heart straightened up, and began to move forward, and they headed toward the lake.

“Not the lake, not that girl, she can’t abide water, you know that,” called Nanny, but she was rushing forward now, using her staff to feel the ground ahead of her so she wouldn’t stumble.

This is the end, thought Melena. Her brain was too foggy to think anything else, and she said it again and again, as if to prevent it from being true.

This is the beginning, thought Frex, but of what?

“She is not far, she is not here,” said Turtle Heart again.

“Punishment for your wicked ways, you two-faced hedonists,” Nanny said.

The ground sloped toward the still, receded margin of the lake. First at their feet, then at their waists and higher, the beached dock rose, like a bridge to nowhere, ending in air.

Beneath the dock in the dry shadows there were eyes.

“Oh, sweet Lurline,” whispered Nanny.

Elphaba was sitting under the dock with the looking glass that Turtle Heart had made. She held it in two hands, and stared at it with one eye closed. She peered, she squinted; her open eye was distant and hollow.

Reflection from the starlight off the water, thought Frex, hoped Frex, but he knew the bright vacant eye was not lit by starlight.

“Horrors,” murmured Elphaba.

Turtle Heart tumbled to his knees. “She sees him coming,” he said thickly, “she sees him to come; he is to come from the air; is arriving. A balloon from the sky, the color of a bubble of blood: a huge crimson globe, a ruby globe: he falls from the sky. The Regent is fallen. The House of Ozma is fallen. The Clock was right. A minute to judgment.”

He fell over, almost into Elphaba’s small lap. She didn’t seem to notice him. Behind her was a low growl. There was a beast, a felltop tiger, or some strange hybrid of tiger and dragon, with glowing orangey eyes. Elphaba was sitting in its folded forearms as if on a throne.

“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”

Galinda

I

Wittica, Settica, Wiccasand Turning, Red Sand, Dixxi House, change at Dixxi House for Shiz; stay aboard this coach for all points East; Tenniken, Brox Hall, and all destinations to Traum”—the conductor paused to catch his breath—“next stop Wittica, Wittica next!”

Galinda clutched her parcel of clothes to her breast. The old goat who sprawled on the seat across from her was missing the Wittica stop. She was glad that trains made passengers sleepy. She didn’t want to keep avoiding his eye. At the last minute before she was to board the train, her minder, Ama Clutch, had stepped on a rusty nail and, terrified of the frozen-face syndrome, had begged permission to go to the nearest surgery for medicines and calming spells. “I can surely get myself to Shiz alone,” Galinda had said coldly, “don’t bother with me, Ama Clutch.” And Ama Clutch hadn’t. Galinda hoped that Ama Clutch would suffer a little frozenness of jaw before being well enough to show up in Shiz and chaperone Galinda through whatever was to come.

Her own chin was set, she believed, to imply a worldly boredom with train travel. In fact she had never been more than a day’s carriage ride away from her family home in the little market town of Frottica. The railway line, laid down a decade ago, had meant that old dairy farms were being cut up for country estates for the merchants and manufacturers of Shiz. But Galinda’s family continued to prefer rural Gillikin, with its fox haunts, its dripping dells, its secluded ancient pagan temples to Lurline. To them, Shiz was a distant urban threat, and even the convenience of rail transportation hadn’t tempted them to risk all its complications, curiosities, and evil ways.

Galinda didn’t see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet. The sway of her head made her creamy ringlets swing, catching the light, like so many jostling stacks of coins. Her lips were perfect, as pouted as an opening maya flower, and colored as brilliantly red. Her green traveling gown with its inset panels of ochre musset suggested wealth, while the black shawl draping just so about the shoulders was a nod to her academic inclinations. She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart.

But there was more than one way to be smart.

She was seventeen. The whole town of Frottica had seen her off. The first girl from the Pertha Hills to be accepted at Shiz! She had written well in the entrance exams, a meditation on Learning Ethics from the Natural World. (“Do Flowers Regret Being Plucked for a Bouquet? Do the Rains Practice Abstinence? Can Animals Really Choose to Be Good? Or: A Moral Philosophy of Springtime.”) She had quoted excessively from the Oziad, and her rapturous prose had captivated the board of examiners. A three-year fellowship to Crage Hall. It wasn’t one of the better colleges—those were still closed to female students. But it was Shiz University.

Her companion in the compartment, waking up when the conductor came back through, stretched his heels as he yawned. “Would you be so kind as to reach my ticket, it’s in the overhead,” he said. Galinda stood and found the ticket, aware that the bearded old thing was eyeing her comely figure. “Here you are,” she said, and he answered, “Not to me, dearie, to the conductor. Without opposable thumbs, I have no hope of managing such a tiny piece of cardboard.”

The conductor punched the ticket, and said, “You’re the rare beast that can afford to travel first class.”

“Oh,” said the goat, “I object to the term beast. But the laws still allow my traveling in first class, I presume?”

“Money’s money,” said the conductor, without ill will, punching Galinda’s ticket and returning it to her.

“No, money’s not money,” said the goat, “not when my ticket cost double what the young lady’s did. In this case, money is a visa. I happen to have it.”

“Going up to Shiz, are you?” said the conductor to Galinda, ignoring the goat’s remark. “I can tell by that academic shawl.”

“Oh well, it’s something to do,” said Galinda. She didn’t care to talk to conductors. But when he continued along down the carriage, Galinda found that she liked even less the baleful look that the goat was giving her.

“Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked.

“I have already learned not to speak to strangers.”

“Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.”

“I am disinclined to know you.”

“I am a Fellow of Shiz University, on the Faculty of Biological Arts.”

You are a shabby dresser, even for a goat, Galinda thought. Money isn’t everything. “Then I must overcome my natural shyness. My name is Galinda. I am of the Arduenna Clan on my mother’s side.”

“Let me be the first to welcome you to Shiz, Glinda. This is your first year?”

“Please, it is Galinda. The proper old Gillikinese pronunciation, if you don’t mind.” She could not bring herself to call him sir. Not with that horrid goatee and the tatty waistcoat that looked cut from some public house carpet.

“I wonder what you think of the Wizard’s proposed Banns on travel?” The goat’s eyes were buttery and warm, and frightening. Galinda had never heard of any Banns. She said as much. Dillamond—was it Doctor Dillamond?—explained in a conversational tone that the Wizard had thoughts of restricting Animal travel on public conveyances except in designated transports. Galinda replied that animals had always enjoyed separate services. “No, I am speaking of Animals,” said Dillamond. “Those with a spirit.”

“Oh, those,” said Galinda crudely. “Well, I don’t see the problem.”

“My, my,” said Dillamond. “Don’t you indeed?” The goatee quivered; he was irritated. He began to hector her about Animal Rights. As things now stood, his own ancient mother couldn’t afford to travel first class, and would have to ride in a pen when she wanted to visit him in Shiz. If the Wizard’s Banns went through the Hall of Approval, as they were likely to do, the goat himself would be required by law to give up the privileges he had earned through years of study, training, and saving. “Is that right for a creature with a spirit?” he said. “From here to there, there to here, in a pen?”

“I quite agree, travel is so broadening,” said Galinda. They endured the rest of the trip, including the change across the platform at Dixxi House, in a frosty silence.

Seeing her fright at the size and bustle of the terminus at Shiz, Dillamond took pity and offered to engage a carriage to take her to Crage Hall. She followed him, looking as unmortified as she could manage. Her luggage came behind, on the backs of a couple of porters.

Shiz! She tried not to gawp. Everyone hustling on business, laughing and hurrying and kissing, dodging carriages, while the buildings of Railway Square, brownstone and bluestone and covered with vine and moss, steamed softly in the sunlight. The animals—and the Animals! She had scarcely ever come across even the odd chicken squawking philosophically in Frottica—but here was a quartet of tsebras at an outdoor café, dressed flashily in black-and-white satin stripes on the bias to their inborn design; and an elephant on its hind legs directing traffic; and a tiger dressed up in some sort of exotic religious garb, a kind of monk or maunt or nun or something. Yes, yes, it was Tsebras, and Elephant, and Tiger, and she supposed Goat. She would have to get used to enunciating the capital letters or else she would show off her country origins.

Mercifully, Dillamond found her a carriage with a human driver, and directed him to Crage Hall and paid him in advance, for which Galinda had to come up with a weak smile of appreciation. “Our paths will cross again,” said Dillamond, gallantly if curtly, as if putting forth a prophecy, and he disappeared as the carriage jolted forward. Galinda sank back into the cushions. She began to be sorry that Ama Clutch had punctured her foot with a nail.

Crage Hall was only twenty minutes from Railway Square. Behind its own bluestone walls, the complex was set with large watery-glass windows in lancet formation. A tessellation of quatrefoils and blind multifoils ran riot at the roofline. The appreciation of architecture was Galinda’s private passion, and she pored over the features she could identify, although the vines and flatmoss fudged many of the finer details of the buildings. Too soon she was whisked inside.

The Headmistress of Crage Hall, a fish-faced upper-class Gillikinese woman wearing a lot of cloisonné bangles, was greeting new arrivals in the atrium. The Head eschewed the drabness of professional women’s dress that Galinda had expected. Instead the imposing woman was bedecked in a currant-colored gown with patterns of black jet swirling over the bodice like dynamic markings on sheet music. “I am Madame Morrible,” she said to Galinda. Her voice was basso profundo, her grip crippling, her posture military, her earrings like holiday tree ornaments. “Flourishes all around, and a quick cup of tea in the parlor. Then we’ll assemble in the Main Hall and sort you out as to roomies.”

The parlor was filled with pretty young women, all wearing green or blue and trailing black shawls like exhausted shadows behind them. Galinda was glad for the natural advantages of her flaxen hair, and stood by a window so the light could dazzle itself off her curls. She hardly sipped the tea. In a side room, the attendant Amas were serving themselves from a metal urn, and laughing and yakking already as if they were old friends from the same village. It was somewhat grotesque, all those dumpy women smiling at each other, making marketplace noise.

Galinda hadn’t read the fine print very closely. She hadn’t realized there would be a need for “roomies.” Or perhaps had her parents paid extra so she could have a private room? And where would Ama Clutch stay? Looking about her, she could tell that some of these dollies came from families much better off than hers. The pearls and diamonds on them! Galinda was glad she had chosen a simple silver collar with mettanite struts. There was something vulgar about traveling in jewels. As she realized this truth, she codified it into a saying. At the earliest perfect opportunity she would bring it out as proof of her having opinions—and of having traveled. “The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing,” she murmured, trying it out, “while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.” Good, very good.

Madame Morrible counted heads, gripped a cup of tea, and shooed everyone into the Main Hall. There Galinda learned that allowing Ama Clutch to go looking for a surgery had been a colossal mistake. Apparently all that chatter among Amas hadn’t been frivolous and social. They had been instructed to sort out among them whose young lady would room with whose. The Amas had been relied upon to get to the nub of the matter more quickly than the students themselves. No one had spoken for Galinda—she had gone unrepresented!

After the forgettable welcome remarks, as couple by couple the students and Amas left to locate their lodgings and settle in, Galinda found herself growing pale with embarrassment. Ama Clutch, the old fool, would have fixed her up nicely with someone just a notch or two above on the social ladder! Near enough that Galinda would suffer no shame, and above enough to make it worth the while of socializing. But now, all the better young misses were linked together. Diamond to diamond, emerald to emerald, for all she could tell! As the room began to empty, Galinda wondered if she shouldn’t go up and interrupt Madame Morrible and explain the problem. Galinda was, after all, an Arduenna of the Uplands, at least on one side. It was a hideous accident. Her eyes teared up.

But she hadn’t the nerve. She stayed perched on the edge of the fragile, stupid chair. Except for her, all the centre of the room had cleared out now, and the shyer, more useless girls were left, around the edges, in the shadows. Surrounded by an obstacle course of empty gilded chairs, Galinda alone sat like an unclaimed valise.

“Now the rest of you are here without Amas, I understand,” said Madame Morrible, a bit sniffily. “Since we require chaperonage, I will assign each of you to one of the three dormitories for freshers, which sleep fifteen girls each. There is no social stigma to the dormitory, I might add. None at all.” But she was lying, and not even convincingly.

Galinda finally stood up. “Please, Madame Morrible, there is a mistake. I am Galinda of the Arduennas. My Ama took a nail in her foot on the voyage and was detained for a day or two. I am not in the dormitory class, you see.”

“How sad for you,” said Madame Morrible, smiling. “I’m sure your Ama will be pleased to be a chaperone in, shall we say, the Pink Dormitory? Fourth floor on the right—”

“No, no, she would not,” interrupted Galinda, quite bravely. “I am not here to sleep in a dormitory, Pink or otherwise. You have misunderstood.”

“I have not misunderstood, Miss Galinda,” said Madame Morrible, growing even more fishlike as her eyes began to bulge. “There is accident, there is tardiness, there are decisions to be made. As you were not equipped, through your Ama, to make your own decision, I am empowered to make it for you. Please, we are busy and I must name the other girls who will join you in the Pink Dormitory—”

“I would have a private word with you, Madame,” said Galinda in desperation. “For myself, dormitory partners or a single roomie, it is no matter. But I cannot recommend that you ask my Ama to oversee other girls, for reasons I may not say in public.” She was lying as fast as she could, and better than Madame Morrible, who seemed at least intrigued.

“You strike me as impertinent, Miss Galinda,” she said mildly.

“I have not yet struck you, Madame Morrible.” Galinda delivered the daring line with her sweetest smile.

Madame Morrible chose to laugh, thank Lurline! “A spark of spunk! You may come to my chambers this evening and tell me the story of your Ama’s shortcomings, as I should know them. But I will compromise with you, Miss Galinda. Unless you object, I will have to ask your Ama to chaperone both you and another girl, one who comes without an Ama. For you see, all the other students with Amas are already paired off, and you are the odd one out.”

“I am certain my Ama could manage that, at least.”

Madame Morrible scanned the page of names, and said, “Very well. To join Miss Galinda of the Arduennas in a double room—shall I invite the Thropp Third Descending, of Nest Hardings, Elphaba?”

No one stirred. “Elphaba?” said Madame Morrible again, adjusting her bangles and pressing two fingers at the bottom of her throat.

The girl was in the back of the room, a pauper in a red dress with gaudy fretwork, and in clumpy, old-people’s boots. At first Galinda thought what she saw was some trick of the light, a reflection off the adjacent buildings covered in vines and flatmoss. But as Elphaba moved forward, lugging her own carpetbags, it became obvious that she was green. A hatchet-faced girl with putrescent green skin and long, foreign-looking black hair. “A Munchkinlander by birth, though with many childhood years spent in Quadling Country,” read Madame Morrible from her notes. “How fascinating for us all, Miss Elphaba. We shall look forward to hearing tales of exotic climes and times. Miss Galinda and Miss Elphaba, here are your keys. You may take room twenty-two on the second floor.”

She smiled broadly at Galinda as the girls came forward. “Travel is so broadening,” she intoned. Galinda started, the curse of her own words lobbed back at her. She curtseyed and fled. Elphaba, eyes on the floor, followed behind.

2

By the time Ama Clutch arrived the next day, her foot bandaged to three times its natural size, Elphaba had already unpacked her few belongings. They hung raglike on hooks in the cupboard: thin, shapeless shifts, shamed into a corner by the fulsome hoops and starched bustles and padded shoulders and cushioned elbows of Galinda’s wardrobe. “I am happy as cheese to be your Ama too, don’t matter to me,” said Ama Clutch, smiling broadly in Elphaba’s direction, before Galinda had a chance to get Ama Clutch alone and demand that her minder refuse. “Of course my Papa is paying you to be my Ama,” said Galinda meaningfully, but Ama Clutch answered, “Not as much as all that, duckie, not as much as all that. I can be making up my own mind.”

“Ama,” said Galinda when Elphaba had left to use the mildewy facilities, “Ama, are you blind? That Munchkinlander girl is green.”

“Odd, isn’t it? I thought all Munchkinlanders were tiny. She’s a proper height, though. I guess they come in a variety of sizes. Oh, are you bothered by the green? Well, it might do you some good, if you let it. If you let it. You affect worldly airs, Galinda, but you don’t know the world yet. I think it’s a lark. Why not? Why ever not?”

“It’s not yours to organize my education, worldly or otherwise, Ama Clutch!”

“No, my dear,” said Ama Clutch, “you’ve made this mess all by your lonesome. I’m merely being of service.”

So Galinda was stuck. Last night’s brief interview with Madame Morrible had not provided any escape route, either. Galinda had arrived promptly, in a dotted morpheline skirt with lace bodice, a vision, as she’d said to herself, in nocturnal purples and midnight blues. Madame Morrible bade her enter the reception room, in which a small cluster of leather chairs and a settee were drawn up before an unnecessary fire. The Head poured mint tea and offered crystallized ginger wrapped in pearlfruit leaves. She indicated a chair for Galinda, but herself stood by the mantelpiece like a big game hunter.

In the best tradition of the upper-class savoring its luxuries, they sipped and nibbled in silence at first. This gave Galinda the chance to observe that Madame Morrible was fishlike not merely in countenance, but in dress: Her loose-fitting cream foxille flowed like a huge airy bladder from the high frilled neckline to the knees, where it was tightly gathered and dropped straight to the floor, hugging the calves and ankles in neat, anticlimactic pleats. She looked for all the world like a giant carp in a men’s club. And a dull, bored carp at that, not even a sentient Carp.

“Now your Ama, my dear. The reason she is incapable of supervising a dormitory. I’m all ears.”

Galinda had taken all afternoon to prepare. “You see, Madame Head, I didn’t like to say it publicly. But Ama Clutch suffered a terrible fall last summer when we were picnicking in the Pertha Hills. She reached for a handful of wild mountain thyme and went pitching over a cliff. She lay for weeks in a coma, and when she emerged she had no memory of the accident at all. If you asked her about it, she wouldn’t even know what you meant. Amnesia by trauma.”

“I see. How very tiresome for you. But why does this make her unequal to the job I proposed?”

“She has become addled. Ama Clutch, on occasion, gets confused as to what has Life and what doesn’t. She will sit and talk to, oh, say, a chair, and then relate its history back to us. Its aspirations, its reservations—”

“Its joys, its sorrows,” said Madame Morrible. “How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.”

“But, silly as this is, and a cause for hours of merriment, the corollary ailment is more alarming. Madame Morrible, I must tell you that Ama Clutch sometimes forgets that people are alive. Or animals.” Galinda paused, then added, “Or Animals, even.”

“Go on, my dear.”

“It is all right for me, because Ama has been my Ama all my life, and I know her. I know her ways. But she can sometimes forget a person is there, or needs her, or is a person. Once she cleaned a wardrobe and tipped it over onto the houseboy, breaking his back. She didn’t register his screaming right there, right at her feet. She folded the nightclothes and had a conversation with my mother’s evening gown, asking it all sorts of impertinent questions.”

“What a fascinating condition,” said Madame Morrible. “And how vexing for you, really.”

“I couldn’t have allowed her to accept responsibility for fourteen other girls,” Galinda confided. “For me, alone, there is no problem. I love the foolish old woman, in a way.”

Madame Morrible had said, “But what of your roomie? Can you jeopardize her well-being?”

“I didn’t ask for her.” Galinda looked the Head in her glazed, unblinking eye. “The poor Munchkinlander appears to be used to a life of distress. Either she will adjust or, I assume, she will petition you to be removed from my room. Unless, of course, you feel it your duty to move her for her own safety.”

Madame Morrible said, “I suppose if Miss Elphaba cannot live with what we give her, she will leave Crage Hall on her own accord. Don’t you think?”

It was the we in what we give her: Madame Morrible was binding Galinda into a campaign. They both knew it. Galinda struggled to maintain her autonomy. But she was only seventeen, and she had suffered that same indignity of exclusion in the Main Hall just hours ago. She didn’t know what Madame Morrible could have against Elphaba except the looks of her. But there was something, there was clearly something. What was it? She sensed it to be wrong somehow. “Don’t you think, dear?” said Madame Morrible, bowing a bit forward like a fish arching in a slow-motion leap.

“Well, of course, we must do what we can,” said Galinda, as vaguely as possible. But she seemed the fish, and caught on a most clever hook.

Out of the shadows of the reception room came a small tiktok thing, about three feet high, made of burnished bronze, with an identifying plate screwed into its front. The plate said Smith and Tinker’s Mechanical Man, in ornate script. The clockwork servant collected the empty teacups and whirred itself away. Galinda didn’t know how long it had been there, or what it had heard, but she had never liked tiktok creatures.

Elphaba had a bad case of what Galinda called the reading sulks. Elphaba didn’t curl up—she was too bony to curl—but she jackknifed herself nearer to herself, her funny pointed green nose poking in the moldy leaves of a book. She played with her hair while she read, coiling it up and down around fingers so thin and twiglike as to seem almost exoskeletal. Her hair never curled no matter how often Elphaba twined it around her hands. It was beautiful hair, in an odd, awful way, with a shine like the pelt of a healthy giltebeest. Black silk. Coffee spun into threads. Night rain. Galinda, not given to metaphor on the whole, found Elphaba’s hair entrancing, the more so because the girl was otherwise so ugly.

They didn’t talk much. Galinda was too busy forging alliances with the better girls who had been her rightful roomie prospects. No doubt she could switch rooms at half-term, or at any rate next fall. So Galinda left Elphaba alone, and she flew down the hall to gossip with her new friends. Milla, Pfannee, Shenshen. Just as in children’s books about boarding school, each new friend was wealthier than the one before.

At first Galinda didn’t mention who her roomie was. And Elphaba showed no sign of expecting Galinda’s company, which was a relief. But the gossip had to start sooner or later. The first wave of discussion about Elphaba concerned her wardrobe and her evident poverty, as if her classmates were above noticing her sickly and sickening color. “Someone told me that Madame Head had said Miss Elphaba was the Thropp Third Descending from Nest Hardings,” said Pfannee, who was also a Munchkinlander, but one of diminutive stock, not full-size like the Thropp family. “The Thropps are highly regarded in Nest Hardings and even beyond. The Eminent Thropp put together the area’s militia and tore up the Yellow Brick Road that the Ozma Regent had been laying in when we all were small—before the Glorious Revolution. There was no callousness in the Eminent Thropp or his wife or family, including his granddaughter Melena, you can be assured.” By callousness, of course, Pfannee meant greenness.

“But how the mighty have fallen! She’s as ragged as a gypsy,” observed Milla. “Have you ever seen such tawdry dresses? Her Ama should be sacked.”

“She has no Ama, I think,” said Shenshen. Galinda, who knew for sure, said nothing.

“They said she had spent time in Quadling Country,” Milla went on. “Perhaps her family had been exiled as criminals?”

“Or they were speculators in rubies,” said Shenshen.

“Then where’s the wealth?” snapped Milla. “Speculators in rubies did very well, Miss Shenshen. Our Miss Elphaba doesn’t have two barter tokens to rub together and call her own.”

“Perhaps it’s a kind of religious calling? A chosen poverty?” suggested Pfannee, and at this nonsense they all threw back their heads and chortled.

Elphaba, coming into the buttery for a cup of coffee, caused them to escalate into louder roars of laughter. Elphaba did not look over at them, but every other student did glance their way, each girl longing to be included in the jollity, which made the four new friends feel just fine.

Galinda was slow coming to terms with actual learning. She had considered her admission into Shiz University as a sort of testimony to her brilliance, and believed that she would adorn the halls of learning with her beauty and occasional clever sayings. She supposed, glumly, that she had meant to be a sort of living marble bust: This is Youthful Intelligence; admire Her. Isn’t She lovely?

It hadn’t actually dawned on Galinda that there was more to learn, and furthermore that she was expected to do it. The education all the new girls chiefly wanted, of course, had nothing to do with Madame Morrible or the prattling Animals at lecterns and on daises. What the girls wanted wasn’t equations, or quotations, or orations—they wanted Shiz itself. City life. The broad, offensive panoply of life and Life, seamlessly intertwined.

Galinda was relieved that Elphaba never took part in the outings the Amas organized. Since they often stopped at a lunchroom for a modest meal, the weekly brigade became known informally as the Chowder and Marching Society. The university district was aflame with autumn color, not just of dying leaves, but also of fraternity pennants, fluttering from rooftop and spire.

Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shiz. Here and there, mostly in protected College yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then, in dizzying succession, unparalleled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those festering ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or, as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propagated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.

Besides architecture, the excitement was tame, to be sure. On one notable occasion, which no Crage Hall girl present ever forgot, the senior boys from Three Queens College across the canal, for a lark and a dare, had tanked themselves up with beer in the middle of the afternoon, had hired a White Bear violinist, and had gone down to dance together under the willow trees, wearing nothing but their clinging cotton drawers and their school scarves. It was deliciously pagan, as they had set an old chipped statue of Lurline the Fairy Queen on a three-legged stool, and she seemed to smile at their loose-limbed gaiety. The girls and the Amas pretended shock, but poorly; they lingered, watching, until horrified proctors from Three Queens came rushing out to round the revelers up. Near nudity was one thing, but public Lurlinism—even as a joke—bordered on being intolerably retrograde, even royalist. And that did not do in the Wizard’s reign.

One Saturday evening, when the Amas had a rare night off and had taken themselves in to a pleasure faith meeting in Ticknor Circus, Galinda had a brief and silly squabble with Pfannee and Shenshen, after which she retired early to her bedchamber, complaining of a headache. Elphaba was sitting up in her bed with the commissary brown blanket tucked around her. She was hunched forward over a book, as usual, and her hair hung down like brackets on either side of her face. She looked to Galinda like one of those etchings—the natural history books were full of them—of odd Winkie mountain women who hide their strangeness with a shawl over the head. Elphaba was munching on the pips of an apple, having eaten all the rest of it. “Well, you look cozy enough, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, challengingly. In three months it was the first social remark she had managed to make to her roomie.

“Looks are only looks,” said Elphaba, not looking up.

“Will it break your concentration if I sit in front of the fire?”

“You cast a shadow if you sit just there.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Galinda, and moved. “Mustn’t cast shadows, must we, when urgent words are waiting to be read?”

Elphaba was back in her book already, and didn’t answer.

“What the dickens are you reading, night and day?”

It seemed as if Elphaba were coming up for air from a still, isolated pool. “While I don’t read the same thing every day, you know, tonight I am reading some of the speeches of the early unionist fathers.”

“Why ever would anyone want to do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to read them. I’m just reading them.”

“But why? Miss Elphaba the Delirious, why, why?”

Elphaba looked up at Galinda and smiled. “Elphaba the Delirious. I like it.”

Before she had a chance to bite it back, Galinda returned the smile, and at the same time a sweeping wind sent a handful of hail against the glass, and the latch broke. Galinda leaped to swing the casement shut, but Elphaba scuttled to the far corner of the room, away from the wet. “Give me the leather luggage grip, Miss Elphaba, from inside my satchel—there on the shelf, behind the hatboxes—yes—and I’ll secure this until we can get the porter to fix it tomorrow.” Elphaba found the strap, but in doing so the hat boxes tumbled down, and three colorful hats rolled out onto the cold floor. While Galinda scrabbled up on a chair to organize the window shut again, Elphaba returned the hats to their boxes. “Oh, try it on, try that one on,” said Galinda. She meant to have something to laugh at, to tell Misses Pfannee and Shenshen about and so to work her way back into their good graces.

“Oh, I daren’t, Miss Galinda,” Elphaba said, and went to set the hat away.

“No, do, I insist,” Galinda said, “for a lark. I’ve never seen you in something pretty.”

“I don’t wear pretty things.”

“What’s the harm?” said Galinda. “Just here. No one else need see you.”

Elphaba stood facing the fire, but turned her head on her shoulders to look long and unblinkingly at Galinda, who had not yet hopped down from the chair. The Munchkinlander was in her nightgown, a drab sack without benefit of lace edging or piping. The green face above the wheat-gray fabric seemed almost to glow, and the glorious long straight black hair fell right over where breasts should be if she would ever reveal any evidence that she possessed them. Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it?—like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You’d almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense—more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her enough like herself.

“Oh, put the damn hat on, really,” said Galinda, for whom, where introspection was concerned, enough was enough.

Elphaba obliged. The thing was the lovely roundel bought from the best milliner in the Pertha Hills. It had orangey swags and a yellow lace net that could be draped to achieve varying degrees of disguise. On the wrong head it would look ghastly, and Galinda expected to have to bite the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. It was the kind of superfeminine thing boys in a pantomime wore when they pretended to be girls.

But Elphaba dropped the whole sugary plate onto her strange pointed head, and looked at Galinda again from underneath the broad brim. She seemed like a rare flower, her skin stemlike in its soft pearlescent sheen, the hat a botanical riot. “Oh Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “you terrible mean thing, you’re pretty.”

“Oh, and now you have lied, so go confess to the unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “Is there a looking glass?”

“Of course there is, down the hall in the lavatory.”

“Not there. I’m not going to be seen by those ninnies in this.”

“Well then,” decided Galinda, “can you find an angle without hiding the firelight, and look at your reflection in the dark window?”

They both gazed at the green and flowery spectre reflected in the watery old glass, surrounded by the blackness, driven through with the wild rain beyond. A maplefruit leaf, shaped like a star with blunted points, or like a heart grown lopsided, suddenly whirled out of the night and plastered itself on the reflection in the glass, gleaming red and reflecting the firelight, just where the heart would be—or so it seemed from the angle at which Galinda stood.

“Entrancing,” she said. “There’s some strange exotic quality of beauty about you. I never thought.”

“Surprise,” said Elphaba, and then nearly blushed, if darker green constituted a blush—“I mean, surprise, not beauty. It’s just surprise. ‘Well, what do you know.’ It’s not beauty.”

“Who am I to argue,” said Galinda, tossing her curls and striking a pose, and Elphaba actually laughed at that, and Galinda laughed back, partly horrified as she did so. Elphaba tore the hat off then, and returned it to its box, and when she picked up her book again Galinda said, “So what is Beauty reading anyway? I mean really, tell me, why the old sermons?”

“My father is a unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “I’m just curious what it’s all about, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?”

Elphaba didn’t answer. Her face took on a solid, waiting look, like that of an owl just about to go for a mouse.

“So what’re they on about? Anything interesting?” said Galinda. No sense giving up now, there was nothing else to do and she was too wrought up by the storm to sleep.

“This one is thinking about good and evil,” said Elphaba. “Whether they really exist at all.”

“Oh, yawn,” said Galinda. “Evil exists, I know that, and its name is Boredom, and ministers are the guiltiest crew of all.”

“You don’t really think that?”

Galinda didn’t often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversation was flow. “Well, I didn’t mean to insult your father, for all I know he is an entertaining and lively preacher.”

“No, I mean do you think evil really exists?”

“Well, how do I know what I think?”

“Well, ask yourself, Miss Galinda. Does evil exist?”

“I don’t know. You say. Does evil exist?”

“I don’t expect to know.” The look went slanty and inwards somehow, or was it the hair swinging forward like a veil again?

“Why don’t you just ask your father? I don’t understand. He should know, that’s his job.”

“My father taught me a lot,” Elphaba said slowly. “He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.”

“Oh, well, tell that to our boring minister at home. He has all the answers, and charges for them, too.”

“But maybe there’s something to what you say,” said Elphaba. “I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”

“You’re writing a poem, it sounds like. Why ever would a girl be interested in evil?”

“I’m not interested in it. It’s just what the early sermons are all on about. So I’m thinking about what they’re thinking about, that’s all. Sometimes they talk about diet and not eating Animals, and then I think of that. I just like to think about what I’m reading. Don’t you?”

“I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.” Galinda smiled. “I dress to kill, though.”

There was no response from Elphaba. Galinda, usually pleased that she knew the correct way to steer every conversation into a paean to herself, was flummoxed. She lamely ventured on, annoyed at having to expend the effort. “Well, whatever did those old brutes think about evil, then?”

“It’s hard to say exactly. They seemed to be obsessed with locating it somewhere. I mean, an evil spring in the mountains, an evil smoke, evil blood in the veins going from parent to child. They were sort of like the early explorers of Oz, except the maps they made were of invisible stuff, pretty inconsistent one with the other.”

“And where is evil located?” Galinda asked, flopping onto her bed and closing her eyes.

“Well, they didn’t agree, did they? Or else what would they have to write sermons arguing about? Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity.”

“Well I wouldn’t know an evil thing if it fell on me,” said Galinda.

“The early unionists, who were a lot more Lurlinist than unionists are today, argued that some invisible pocket of corruption was floating around the neighborhood, a direct descendent of the pain the world felt when Lurline left. Like a patch of cold air on a warm still night. A perfectly agreeable soul might march through it and become infected, and then go and kill a neighbor. But then was it your fault if you walked through a patch of badness? If you couldn’t see it? There wasn’t ever any council of unionists that decided it one way or the other, and nowadays so many people don’t even believe in Lurline.”

“But they believe in evil still,” said Galinda with a yawn. “Isn’t that funny, that deity is passé but the attributes and implications of deity linger—”

“You are thinking!” Elphaba cried. Galinda raised herself to her elbows at the enthusiasm in her roomie’s voice.

“I am about to sleep, because this is profoundly boring to me,” Galinda said, but Elphaba was grinning from ear to ear.

In the morning Ama Clutch regaled them both with tales of the night out. There was a talented young witch in nothing but shocking pink undergarments, adorned with feathers and beads. She sang songs to the audience and collected food tokens in her cleavage from the blushing undergraduate men in the nearer tables. She did a little domestic magic, turning water into orange juice, changing cabbages into carrots, and running knives through a terrified piglet, which spouted champagne instead of blood. They all had a sip. A terrible fat man with a beard came on and chased the witch around as if he would kiss her—oh, it was too funny, too funny! In the end the whole cast and audience together stood and sang “What We Don’t Allow in the Public Halls (In Fact Is for Sale in the Cheaper Stalls).” The Amas had a riotous good time, every one of them.

“Really,” said Galinda sniffily. “The pleasure faith is so—so common.”

“But I see the window broke,” said Ama Clutch. “I hope it wasn’t boys trying to climb in.”

“Are you mad?” said Galinda. “In that storm?”

“What storm?” said Ama Clutch. “That don’t make sense. Last night was as calm as moonlight.”

“Hah, that was some show,” said Galinda. “You were so caught up in pleasure faith you lost your bearings, Ama Clutch.” They went down to breakfast together, leaving Elphaba still asleep, or pretending to be asleep maybe. Though as they walked along the corridors, sun through the broad windows making racks of light on the cold slate floors, Galinda did wonder about the capriciousness of weather. Was it even possible for a storm to pitch itself against one part of town and overlook another? There was so much about the world she didn’t know.

“She did nothing but chatter about evil,” said Galinda to her friends, over buttered brisks with ploughfoot jelly. “Some inside tap was turned on, and prattle just poured out of her. And, girls, when she tried on my hat, I could’ve died. She looked like somebody’s maiden aunt come up out of the grave, I mean as frumpy as a Cow. I endured it only for you, so I could tell you all; otherwise I’d have expired with glee on the spot. It was so very much!”

“You poor thing, to have to be our spy and stand the shame of that grasshopper roomie!” said Pfannee devoutly, clasping Galinda’s hand. “You’re too good!”

3

One evening—the first evening of snow—Madame Morrible held a poetry soiree. Boys from Three Queens and Ozma Towers were invited. Galinda brought out her cerise satin gown with the matching shawl and slippers and an heirloom Gillikinese fan, painted with a pattern of ferns and pfenix. She arrived early to lay claim to the upholstered chair that would best set off her own attire, and she dragged the chair over to the bookshelves so that the light from library tapers would gently fall on her. The rest of the girls—not only the freshers, but the sophisters and seniors—entered in a whispering clot and arranged themselves on sofas and lounges in Crage Hall’s nicest parlor. The boys who came were somewhat disappointing; there weren’t that many, and they looked terrified, or giggled with one another. Then the professors and doctors arrived, not just the Animals from Crage Hall, but the boys’ professors too, who were mostly men. The girls began to be glad they had dressed well, for while the boys were a spotty bunch, the male professors had grave and charming smiles.

Even some of the Amas came, though they sat behind a screen at the back of the room. The sound of their knitting needles going at a rapid rate was soothing to Galinda, somehow. She knew Ama Clutch would be there.

The double doors at the end of the parlor were swept open by that little bronze industrial crab Galinda had met on her first evening at Crage Hall. It had been especially serviced for the occasion; you could still detect the cutting scent of metal polish. Madame Morrible then made an entrance, severe and striking in a coal black cape, which she let drop to the floor (the thingy picked it up and slung it over a sofa back); her gown was a fiery orange, with abalone lake shells stitched all over it. Despite herself Galinda had to admire the effect. In tones even more unctuous than usual, Madame Morrible welcomed the visitors and led polite applause at the notion of Poetry and Its Civilizing Effects.

Then she spoke on the new verse form sweeping the social parlors and poetry dens of Shiz. “It is known as the Quell,” said Madame Morrible, in her Headmistress’s smile displaying an impressive assembly of teeth. “The Quell is a brief poem, uplifting in nature. It pairs a sequence of thirteen short lines with a concluding, unrhyming apothegm. The reward of the poem is in the revealing contrast between rhyming argument and concluding remark. Sometimes they may contradict each other, but always they illuminate and, like all poetry, sanctify life.” She beamed like a beacon in a fog. “Tonight especially, a Quell might serve as an anodyne to the unpleasant disruptions we have been hearing about in our nation’s capital.” The boy students looked at least alert, and all the professors nodded, though Galinda could tell none of the girl students had a clue as to what “unpleasant disruptions” Madame Morrible was prattling on about.

A third-year girl at the hammer-strung keyboard clattered out a couple of chords, and the guests cleared their throats and looked at their shoes. Galinda saw Elphaba arrive in the back of the room, dressed in her usual casual red shift, two books under her arm and a scarf wound around her head. She sank into the last empty chair, and bit into an apple just as Madame Morrible was drawing in a dramatic breath to begin.

Sing a hymn to rectitude,
Ye forward-thinking multitude.
Advance in humble gratitude
For strictest rules of attitude.
To elevate the Common Good
In Brotherhood and Sisterhood
We celebrate authority.
Fraternity, Sorority,
United, pressing onward, we
Restrict the ills of liberty.
There is no numinosity
Like Power’s generosity
In helping curb atrocity.
Bear down on the rod and foil the child.

Madame Morrible lowered her head to signify that she was done. There was a rumbling of indistinct comments. Galinda, who didn’t know much about Poetry, thought perhaps this was the accepted way of appreciating it. She grumbled a little bit to Shenshen, who sat in a straightback chair to one side, looking dropsical. Wax from the taper was about to drip onto Shenshen’s silk-shouldered white gown with the lemon-chiffon swags, and ruin it, most likely, but Galinda decided Shenshen’s family could afford to replace a gown. She kept still.

“Another,” said Madame Morrible. “Another Quell.”

The room grew silent, but a little uneasily so?

Alas! For impropriety,
The guillotine of piety.
To remedy society
Indulge not to satiety
In mirth and shameless gaiety.
Choose sobering sobriety.
Behave as if the deity
Approaches in its mystery,
And greet it with sonority.
Let your especial history
Be built upon sorority
Whose Virtues do exemplify,
And Social Good thus multiply.
Animals should be seen and not heard.

Again, there was mumbling, but it was of a different nature now, a meaner key. Doctor Dillamond harrumphed and beat a cloven hoof against the floor, and was heard to say, “Well that’s not poetry, that’s propaganda, and it’s not even good propaganda at that.”

Elphaba sidled over to Galinda’s side with her chair under her arm, and plunked it down between Galinda and Shenshen. She put her bony behind on its slatted seat and leaned to Galinda and asked, “What do you make of this?”

It was the first time Galinda had ever been addressed by Elphaba in public. Mortification bloomed. “I don’t know,” she said faintly, looking in the other direction.

“It’s a cleverness, isn’t it?” said Elphaba. “I mean that last line, you couldn’t tell by that fancy accent whether it was meant to be Animals or animals. No wonder Dillamond’s furious.”

And he was. Doctor Dillamond looked around the room as if trying to marshal the opposition. “I’m shocked, shocked,” he said. “Deeply shocked,” he amended, and he marched out of the room. Professor Lenx, the Boar who taught math, left too, accidentally crushing an antique gilded sideboard through trying to avoid stepping on Miss Milla’s yellowlace train. Mister Mikko, the Ape who taught history, sat dolefully in the shadows, too confused and ill at ease to make a move. “Well,” said Madame Morrible in a carrying tone, “one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the Right of Art.”

“I think she’s bonkers,” said Elphaba. Galinda found it too horrible. What if even one of the pimply boys saw Elphaba whispering to her! She’d never hold her head up in society again. Her life was ruined. “Shhh, I’m listening, I love poetry,” Galinda told her sternly. “Don’t talk to me, you’re ruining my evening.”

Elphaba sat back, and finished her apple, and they both kept listening. The grumbling and murmuring grew louder after each poem, and the boys and girls began to relax and look around at one another.

When the last Quell of the evening had knelled (to the cryptic aphorism “A witch in time saves nine”), Madame Morrible retired to uneven applause. She allowed her bronze servant to administer tea to the guests, and then the girls, and finally the Amas. In a heap of rustling silk and clicking abalone lake shells, she received compliments from the male professors and some of the braver boys, and begged them to sit near her so she could enjoy their criticisms. “Do tell the truth. I was overly dramatic, wasn’t I? It is my curse. The stage called, but I chose a life of Service to Girls.” She lowered her eyelashes in modesty as her captive audience mumbled a lukewarm protest.

Galinda was still trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing company of Elphaba, who kept on about the Quells and what they meant, and if they were any good. “How do I know, how should I know, we’re first-year girls, remember?” said Galinda, yearning to swish over to where Pfannee, Milla, and Shenshen were squeezing lemons into the teacups of a few edgy boys.

“Well, your opinion is as good as hers, I think,” said Elphaba. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”

A boy came up to them. Galinda thought he wasn’t much to look at, but anything was better than the green leech at her side. “How do you do?” said Galinda, not even waiting for him to get up his nerve. “It’s so nice to meet you. You must be from, let’s see—”

“Well, I’m from Briscoe Hall, actually,” he said. “But I’m a Munchkinlander originally. As you can tell.” And she could, for he hardly came up to her shoulder. He wasn’t bad looking for all that. A spun-cotton mess of ill-combed golden hair, a toothy smile, a better complexion than some. The evening tunic he wore was a provincial blue, but there were flecks of silver thread running through it. He was trim, nicely so. His boots were polished and he stood a little bandy-legged, feet pointed out.

“This is what I love,” said Galinda, “meeting strangers. This is Shiz at its finest. I am Gillikinese.” She just managed to keep herself from adding, of course, for she believed it evident in her attire. Munchkinlander girls had a habit of quieter dress, so understated that they were often mistaken, in Shiz, for servants.

“Well then, hello to you,” said the boy. “My name is Master Boq.”

“Miss Galinda of the Arduennas of the Uplands.”

“And you?” said Boq, turning to Elphaba. “Who are you?”

“I’m leaving,” she said. “Fresh dreams, all.”

“No, don’t leave,” said Boq. “I think I know you.”

“You don’t know me,” said Elphaba, pausing as she turned. “However could you know me?”

“You’re Miss Elphie, aren’t you?”

“Miss Elphie!” cried Galinda gaily. “How delightful!”

“How do you know who I am?” said Elphaba. “Master Boq from Munchkinland? I don’t know you.”

“You and I played together when you were tiny,” said Boq. “My father was the mayor of the village you were born in. I think. You were born in Rush Margins, in Wend Hardings, weren’t you? You’re the daughter of the unionist minister, I forget his name.”

“Frex,” said Elphaba. Her eyes looked slanted and wary.

“Frexspar the Godly!” said Boq. “That’s right. You know they still talk about him, and your mama, and the night the Clock of the Time Dragon came to Rush Margins. I was two or three years old and they took me to see it, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that you were in a play set with me when I was still in short pants. Do you remember Gawnette? She was the woman who minded us. And Bfee? He is my dad. Do you remember Rush Margins?”

“This is all smoke and guesswork,” said Elphaba. “How can I contradict? Let me tell you about what happened in your life before you can remember it. You were born a frog.” (This was unkind, as Boq did have an amphibious look about him.) “You got sacrificed to the Clock of the Time Dragon and were turned into a boy. But on your marriage night when your wife opens her legs you’ll turn back into a tadpole and—”

“Miss Elphaba!” cried Galinda, flicking open her fan to wave the flush of shame from her face. “Your tongue!”

“Oh well, I have no childhood,” said Elphaba. “So you can say what you like. I grew up in Quadling Country with the marsh people. I squelch when I walk. You don’t want to talk to me. Talk to Miss Galinda, she’s much better in parlors than I am. I have to go now.” Elphaba nodded a good night salute and escaped, almost at a run.

“Why did she say all that?” said Boq, no embarrassment in his voice, just wonder. “Of course I remember her. How many green people are there?”

“It’s just possible,” considered Galinda, “that she didn’t like being recognized on account of her skin color. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps she’s sensitive about it.”

“She must know that it’s what people would remember.”

“Well, as far as I am aware, you are right about who she is,” Galinda went on. “They tell me her great-grandfather is the Eminent Thropp of Colwen Grounds in Nest Hardings.”

“That’s the one,” Boq said. “Elphie. I never thought I’d see her again.”

“Won’t you have some more tea? I’ll call the server,” Galinda said. “Let us sit here and you can tell me all about Munchkinland. I am aquiver with curiosity.” She perched herself back on the chair-in-sympathetic-colors and looked her very best. Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.

When Galinda retired that evening, Elphaba was already in bed, blankets pulled up over her head, and a patently theatrical snore issuing forth. Galinda huffed herself into bed with a wump, annoyed that she could feel rejected by the green girl.

In the week that followed much was said about the evening of Quells. Doctor Dillamond interrupted his biology lecture to call for a response from his students. The girls didn’t understand what a biological response to poetry might be and sat silent at his leading questions. He finally exploded, “Doesn’t anyone make the connection between the expression of those thoughts and what’s been going on in the Emerald City?”

Miss Pfannee, who didn’t believe she was paying tuition in order to be yelled at, snapped back at him. “We don’t have the tiniest notion what’s going on in the Emerald City! Stop playing games with us; if you have something to say, say it. Don’t bleat so.”

Doctor Dillamond stared out the windows and seemed to be trying to control his temper. The students were thrilled with the little drama. Then the Goat turned and in a milder voice than they expected he told them that the Wizard of Oz had proclaimed Banns on Animal Mobility, effective several weeks ago. This meant not only that Animals were restricted in their access to travel conveyances, lodgings, and public services. The Mobility it referred to was also professional. Any Animal coming of age was prohibited from working in the professions or the public sector. They were, effectively, to be herded back to the farmlands and wilds if they wanted to work for wages at all.

“What do you think Madame Morrible was saying when she ended that Quell with the epigram Animals should be seen and not heard?” asked the Goat tersely.

“Well, anyone would be upset,” said Galinda. “I mean, any Animal. But it’s not as if your job is threatened, is it? Here you are, still teaching us.”

“What about my children? What about my kids?”

“Do you have kids? I didn’t know you were married.”

The Goat closed his eyes. “I’m not married, Miss Galinda. But I might be. Or I may. Or perhaps I have nieces and nephews. They have already been banned effectively from studying at Shiz because they can’t hold a pencil to write an essay with. How many Animals have you ever seen in this paradise of education?” Well, it was true; there were none.

“Well, I do think it’s pretty dreadful,” said Galinda. “Why would the Wizard of Oz do such a thing?”

“Why indeed,” said the Goat.

“No, really, why. It’s a real question. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” The Goat turned to his rostrum and shoved some papers this way and that, and was then seen pawing a handkerchief from a lower shelf, and blowing his nose. “My grandmothers were milking-Goats at a farm in Gillikin. Through their lifelong sacrifices and labors they purchased the help of a local schoolteacher to educate me and to take dictation when I went for my exams. Their efforts are about to go to waste.”

“But you can still teach!” said Pfannee petulantly.

“The thin edge of the wedge, my dear,” said the Goat, and dismissed the class early. Galinda found herself glancing over toward Elphaba, who had a strange, focused look. As Galinda fled the classroom, Elphaba approached the front of the room, where Doctor Dillamond stood shaking in uncontrolled spasms, his horned head bowed.

A few days later, Madame Morrible gave one of her occasional open lectures on Early Hymns and Pagan Paeans. She called for questions, and the entire assembly was startled to see Elphaba unfold herself from her customary fetal position in the back of the room and address the Head.

“Madame Morrible, if you please,” said Elphaba, “we never had an opportunity to discuss the Quells that you recited in the parlor last week.”

“Discuss,” said Madame Morrible with a generous though shooing wave of the bangled hands.

“Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animal Mobility.”

“Doctor Dillamond, alas,” said Madame Morrible, “is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a Goat, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn’t understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?”

“I don’t believe I can, Madame.”

“Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without.”

“So that phrase that he objected to—Animals should be seen and not heard—that was ironic?” continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumple in a sudden attack of the spleen.

“One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose,” said Madame Morrible.

“How do you choose?” said Elphaba.

“How impertinent!” said Madame Morrible.

“Well, but I don’t mean impertinence. I’m trying to learn. If you—if anyone—thought that statement was true, then it isn’t in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It’s just argument and conclusion, and I don’t see the irony.”

“You don’t see much, Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible. “You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one’s own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright.” She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba’s skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking.

“But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond,” said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up.

“In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animals should not be heard,” snapped Madame Morrible.

“Do you mean that ironically?” said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face, and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

4

When the second semester began, and Galinda was still saddled with Elphaba as a roomie, she made a brief protest to Madame Morrible. But the Head would allow no shifting, no rearranging. “Far too upsetting for my other girls,” she said. “Unless you’d like to be removed to the Pink Dormitory. Your Ama Clutch seems, to my watchful eye, to be recovering from the ailments you described when first we met. Perhaps now she is up to overseeing fifteen girls?”

“No, no,” said Galinda quickly. “There are recurrences from time to time, but I don’t mention them. I don’t like to be a bother.”

“How thoughtful,” said Madame Morrible. “Bless you, sweet thing. Now my dear, I wonder if we might take a moment, as long as you’ve come in for a chat, to discuss your academic plans for next fall? As you know, second year is when girls choose their specialties. Have you given it any thought?”

“Very little,” said Galinda. “Frankly, I thought my talents would just emerge and make it clear whether I should try natural science, or the arts, or sorcery, or perhaps even history. I don’t think I’m cut out for ministerial work.”

“I’m not surprised that one such as you should be in doubt,” said Madame Morrible, which wasn’t greatly encouraging to Galinda. “But may I suggest sorcery? You could be very good at it. I pride myself on knowing this sort of thing.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Galinda, though her early appetite for sorcery had waned once she’d heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them.

“In the event you choose sorcery, it might—just might—be possible to find for you a new roomie,” said Madame Morrible, “given that Miss Elphaba has already told me her interests lie in the natural sciences.”

“Oh well then, I certainly will give it a great deal of thought,” said Galinda. She struggled with unnamed conflicts within her. Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad—oh—dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions. Galinda always felt as if she couldn’t see the whole picture. It was disconcerting, and to her credit at least Galinda felt inside herself the ripping apart of some valuable fabric—was it integrity?—when she sat in Madame Morrible’s parlor and drank the perfect tea.

“For the sister, I hear, is eventually coming up to Shiz,” concluded Madame Morrible a few minutes later, as if silence had not intervened, and several tasty biscuits, “because there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And that, I understand, would be dreadful. You would not like it. The sister being as she is. Undoubtedly spending much time in Miss Elphaba’s room, being tended to.” She smiled wanly. A puff of powdery aroma came forward from the flank of her neck, almost as if Madame Morrible could somehow dispense a pleasant personal odor at will.

“The sister being as she is.” Madame Morrible tutted and wagged her head back and forth as she saw Galinda to the door. “Miserable, really, but I suppose we shall all pull together and cope. That is sorority, isn’t it?” The Head grasped her shawl and put a gentle hand on Galinda’s shoulder. Galinda shivered, and was sure Madame Morrible felt it, knew it, but the Head never registered a sign of it. “But then, my use of sorority—how ironic. Too witty. Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” She squeezed Galinda’s shoulder blade as if it were a bicycle handle, almost harder than was proper for a woman to do. “We can only hope—ha ha—that the sister comes with some veils of her own! But that’s a year yet. Meanwhile we have time. Think about sorcery, would you? Do. Now good-bye, my pet, and fresh dreams.”

Galinda walked back to her room slowly, wondering what Elphaba’s sister was like to provoke those catty remarks about veils. She wanted to ask Elphaba. But she couldn’t think of how to do it. She didn’t have the nerve.

Boq

3

Come on out,” said the boys. “Come out.” They were leaning in the archway to Boq’s room, a pell-mell clot of them, backlit by the oil lamp in the study beyond. “We’re sick of books. Come with us.”

“Can’t,” said Boq. “I’m behind in irrigation theory.”

“Fuck your irrigation theory when the pubs are open,” said the strapping Gillikinese bucko named Avaric. “You’re not going to improve your grades at this late date, with the exams almost over and the examiners half-crocked themselves.”

“It’s not the grades,” said Boq. “I just don’t understand it yet.”

“We’re off to the pub, we’re off to the pub,” chanted some boys who, it seemed, had gotten a head start. “Fuck Boq, the ale is waiting, and it’s already aged enough!”

“Which pub, then, maybe I’ll join you in an hour,” Boq said, sitting firmly back in his chair and not lifting his feet to the footstool, as he knew that this might incite his classmates to hoist him to their shoulders and carry him off with them for an evening of debauchery. His smallness seemed to inspire such banditry. Feet square on the floor made him look more planted, he figured.

“The Boar and Fennel,” said Avaric. “They’ve got a new witch performing. They say she’s hot. She’s a Kumbric Witch.”

“Hah,” said Boq, unconvinced. “Well, go on and get a good view. I’ll come along when I can.”

The boys rambled away, rattling doors of other friends, knocking aslant the portraits of old boys now grown into august patrons. Avaric stood in the archway and waited a minute longer. “We might ditch some of the boors and take a select few of us off to the Philosophy Club,” he said enticingly. “Later on, I mean. It’s the weekend, after all.”

“Oh, Avaric, go take a cold shower,” said Boq.

“You admitted you were curious. You did. So why not an end-of-semester treat?”

“I’m sorry I ever said I was curious. I’m curious about death, too, but I can wait to find out, thank you. Get lost, Avaric. Better go catch up with your friends. Enjoy the Kumbric antics, which by the way I expect is false advertising. Kumbric Witch talents went out hundreds of years ago. If indeed they ever existed.”

Avaric turned up the second collar of his tunic-jacket. The inside was lined with a deep red velvet plush. Against his elegant shaven neck the lining seemed like a single ribbon of privilege. Boq found himself, once again, making mental comparisons between himself and handsome Avaric, and coming up—well, coming up short. “What, Avaric,” he said, as impatient with himself as he was with his friend.

“Something has happened to you,” said Avaric. “I’m not that dull. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” said Boq.

“Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. For you’re not that good a liar, and I’m not that stupid. Even for a dissipated Gillikinese of decaying nobility.” His expression was soft, and Boq, momentarily, was tempted. His mouth opened as he thought of what to say, but at the sound of bells in Ozma Towers, chiming the hour, Avaric’s head turned just a fraction. For all his concern, Avaric wasn’t entirely here. Boq closed his mouth, thought some more, and said, “Call it Munchkinlander stolidity. I won’t lie, Avaric, you’re too good a friend to lie to. But there’s nothing to say now. Now go on and enjoy yourself. But be careful.” He was about to add a word of warning against the Philosophy Club, but checked it. If Avaric was annoyed enough, then Boq’s nannyish worrying might backfire and goad Avaric into going there.

Avaric came forward and kissed him on both cheeks and on the forehead, an upper-class northern custom that always made Boq profoundly ill at ease. Then with a wink and a dirty gesture, he disappeared.

Boq’s room looked out over a cobblestoned alley, down which Avaric and his cronies were swooping and weaving. Boq stood back, in the shadows, but needn’t have worried; his friends weren’t thinking of him now. They had made it through the halfway point in their exams and had a breather for a couple of days. After the exams, the campus would lie vacant except for the more befuddled of the professors and the poorer of the boys. Boq had lived through this before. He preferred study, however, to scrubbing old manuscripts with a five-haired teck-fur brush, which was what he would be employed to do in the Three Queens library all summer long.

Across the alley ran the bluestone wall of a private stable, attached to some mansion house a few streets away on a fashionable square. Beyond the stable roof you could see the rounded tops of a few fruit trees, in the kitchen garden of Crage Hall, and above them glowed the lancet windows of the dormitories and classrooms. When the girls forgot to draw their drapes—which was astoundingly often—you could see them in various stages of undress. Never the whole body naked, of course; in that case he would have looked away, or told himself sternly that he had better. But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust. It was an education in lingerie if nothing else. Boq, who had no sisters, merely looked.

The Crage Hall dormitory was just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the individual girls. And Boq was flushed with desire to see his heartthrob again. Damn! Double damn! He couldn’t concentrate. He’d be sent down if he queered his exams! He’d let down his father, old Bfee, and his village, and the other villages.

Hell and hell. Life was hard and barley just wasn’t enough. Boq found himself suddenly leaping over the footstool, grabbing his student cape, charging down the corridors, and plummeting around the stone spiral stairs in the corner tower. He couldn’t wait any more. He had to do something, and an idea had come to him.

He nodded to the porter on duty, turned left out of the gate, and hurried along the road, in the dusk avoiding as best he could the generous heaps of horse manure. At least with his classmates off gallivanting, he would make no fool of himself in their line of vision. There wasn’t a soul left in Briscoe. So he turned left, then left again, and soon was pacing the alley by the stable. A rick of cordwood, the protruding edge of a swollen shutter, the iron bracket of a hoist. Boq was small but he was nimble too, and with hardly a scrape of his knuckles he had swung himself to the tin gutter of the stable, and then was scrabbling like a lake crab up the steeply pitched roof.

Aha! He might have thought of this weeks ago, months ago! But the night that all the boys would be out celebrating, the night he could be sure he himself wouldn’t be seen from Briscoe Hall: that was tonight, and maybe only tonight. Some fate had insisted he resist Avaric’s invitation out. For now he was mounted on the stable roof, and the wind coursing through the wet leaves of the crawberry and pear trees made a soft fanfare. And there proceeded the girls into their hall—as if they’d been waiting in the corridor until he was properly positioned—as if they’d known he was coming!

Closer up they were not, on the whole, as pretty. . .

But where was the one?

And pretty or not, they were clear. The fingers they dove into clumps of satin bow, to untie them, the fingers they peeled gloves off with, and worked cunning rows of forty miniature pearl buttons with, the fingers they loaned to each other, at the inside laces and the private places that college boys knew only by mythology! The unexpected tufts of hair—how tender! How marvelously animallike! His hands clenched and unclenched themselves, of their own accord, but hungry for what he hardly knew—and where was she?

“What the hell are you doing up there?”

So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child’s toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was loudly knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.

“Oh, brilliant,” said the voice. “The trees are dropping their fruits early this year.”

He had a last, lost hope that the person speaking would be his love. He tried to look urbane, though his spectacles had bounced somewhere.

“How do you do,” he said uncertainly, sitting up. “This isn’t how I intended to arrive.”

Barefoot and aproned, she came out from behind an arbor of pink Pertha grapes. It wasn’t she, it wasn’t the one. It was the other one. He could tell even without his glasses. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, trying not to sound devastated.

She had a colander with baby grapes in it, the sour ones used in spring salads. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, coming closer. “I know you.”

“Master Boq, at your service.”

“You mean Master Boq, in my lettuces.” She picked up his spectacles from the runner beans, and handed them back.

“How are you, Miss Elphie?”

“I am not as tart as a grape and not as squished as a lettuce,” she said. “How are you, Master Boq?”

“I am,” he said, “considerably embarrassed. Am I going to get in trouble here?”

“I can arrange it if you like.”

“Don’t go to the effort. I’ll let myself out the way I came in.” He looked up at the pear tree. “Poor thing, I’ve splintered some good-size limbs.”

“Pity the poor tree. Why would you do that to it?”

“Well, I was startled,” he said, “and I had a choice: either flip myself like a wood nymph through the leaves. Or else just climb quietly down on the other side of the stable, into the street, and go back to my life. Which would you choose?”

“Ah, that’s the question,” she said, “but I’ve always learned that the first thing to do is deny the question’s validity. Myself, being startled, I would neither climb quietly streetward, nor would I trip noisily treeward and lettucebound. I would turn myself inside out to make myself lighter, I would hover until the air pressure outside me had stabilized. Then I would let the underside of my skin settle, one toe at a time, back on the roof.”

“And would you then reverse your skin?” he said, entertained.

“Depends on who was standing there and what they wanted, and whether I minded. Also depends on what color the underside of my skin turns out to be. Never having reversed myself, you know, I can’t be sure. I always thought it might be horrid to be pink and white like a piglet.”

“It often is,” said Boq. “Especially in the shower. You feel like an underdone—” But he stopped. The nonsense was becoming too personal. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I startled you and I didn’t mean to.”

“You were looking at the tops of the fruit trees, examining the new growth, I assume?” she said, amused.

“Indeed,” he answered coldly.

“Did you see the tree of your dreams?”

“The tree of my dreams is of my dreams, and I don’t speak of that to my friends nor to you, whom I hardly know.”

“Oh, but you know me. We were in a child play set together, you reminded me when we met last year. Why, we’re nearly brother and sister. You can certainly describe your favorite tree to me, and I’ll tell you if I know where she grows.”

“You mock me, Miss Elphie.”

“Well, that I don’t mean to do, Boq.” She used his name without the honorific in a gentle way, as if to underscore her comment about their being like siblings. “I suspect you want to know about Miss Galinda, the Gillikinese girl you met at Madame Morrible’s poetry slaughter last autumn.”

“Perhaps you do know me better than I thought.” He sighed. “Could I hope she thinks of me?”

“Well, you could hope,” said Elphaba. “It would be more efficient to ask her and have done with it. At least you’d know.”

“But you’re a friend of hers, aren’t you? Don’t you know?”

“You don’t want to rely on what I know or not,” said Elphaba, “or what I say I know. I could be lying. I could be in love with you, and betray my roomie by lying about her—”

“She’s your roomie?”

“You’re very surprised at that?”

“Well—no—just—just pleased.”

“The cooks will be wondering what dialogues with the asparagus I’m having now,” Elphaba said. “I could arrange to bring Miss Galinda here some evening if you like. Sooner rather than later, so as to kill your joy the more neatly and entirely. If that is what’s to happen,” she said, “but as I say, how do I know? If I can’t predict what we’ll have for pudding, how can I predict someone’s affections?”

They set a date for three nights hence, and Boq thanked Elphaba fervently, shaking her hand so hard his spectacles jounced on his nose. “You’re a dear old friend, Elphie, even if I haven’t seen you in fifteen years,” he said, giving her back her name without its honorific. She withdrew beneath the boughs of the pear trees and disappeared down the walkway. Boq found his way out of the kitchen garden and back to his room, and reviewed his books again, but the problem wasn’t solved, no, not solved. It was exacerbated. He couldn’t concentrate. He was still awake to hear the noisy clatterings, the hushings, the crashings, and the muttered balladeerings, when the drunken boys returned to Briscoe Hall.

2

Avaric had left for the summer, once the exams were done, and Boq either had flimflammed his way through or disgraced himself, in which case there was little to lose now. This first rendezvous with Galinda might be the last. Boq bothered with his clothes more than usual, and got an opinion on how to fix his hair from the new look in the cafés (a thin white ribbon around the crown of his head, pulling his hair straight from the nub, so that it burst into curls beneath, like froth exploding from an overturned basin of milk). He cleaned his boots several times over. It was too warm for boots but he had no evening slippers. Make do, make do.

On the appointed evening he retraced his way and, on the stable roof, found that a fruit picker’s ladder had been left leaning up against the wall, so he need not descend through the leaves like a vertiginous chimpanzee. He picked his way carefully down the first few rungs, then jumped manfully the rest of the way, avoiding the lettuces this time. On a bench under the wormnut trees sat Elphaba, her knees drawn casually up to her chest and her bare feet flat on the seat of the bench, and Galinda, whose ankles were crossed daintily and who hid behind a satin fan, and who was looking in the other direction anyway.

“Well, my stars and garters, a visitor,” said Elphaba. “Such a surprise.”

“Good evening, ladies,” he said.

“Your head looks like a hedgehog in shock, what did you do to yourself?” said Elphaba. At least Galinda turned to see, but then she disappeared behind the fan again. Could she be so nervous? Could her heart be faint?

“Well I am part Hedgehog, didn’t I tell you?” said Boq. “On my grandfather’s side. He ended up as cutlets for Ozma’s retinue one hunting season, and a tasty memory for all. The recipe is handed down in the family, pasted into the picture album. Served with cheese and walnut sauce. Mmmm.”

“Are you really?” said Elphaba. She put her chin on her knees. “Really Hedgehog?”

“No, it was a fancy. Good evening, Miss Galinda. It was good of you to agree to meet me again.”

“This is highly improper,” said Galinda. “For a number of reasons, as you well know, Master Boq. But my roomie would give me no rest until I said yes. I can’t say that I am pleased to see you again.”

“Oh, say it, say it, maybe it’ll make it true,” said Elphaba. “Try it out. He’s not so bad. For a poor boy.”

“I am pleased that you are so taken with me, Master Boq,” said Miss Galinda, working at courtesy. “I am flattered.” She clearly was not flattered, she was humiliated. “But you must see that there can be no special friendship between us. Apart from the matter of my feelings, there are too many social impediments for us to proceed. I only agreed to come so that I could tell you this in person. It seemed only fair.”

“It seemed only fair and it might be fun, too,” said Elphaba. “That’s why I’m hanging around.”

“There’s the issue of different cultures, to start,” said Galinda. “I know you are a Munchkinlander. I am a Gillikinese. I will need to marry one of my own. It is the only way, I’m sorry”—she lowered her fan and lifted her hand, palm out, to stop his protest—“and furthermore you are a farmer, from the agricultural school, and I require a statesman or a banker from Ozma Towers. This is just how things are. Besides,” said Galinda, “you’re too short.”

“What about his subversion of custom by coming here this way, what about his silliness?” said Elphaba.

“Enough,” said Galinda. “That’ll do, Miss Elphaba.”

“Please, you’re too certain of yourself,” said Boq. “If I may be so bold.”

“You’re not so bold at all,” said Elphaba, “you’re about as bold as tea made from used leaves. You’re embarrassing me with hanging back so. Come on, say something interesting. I’m starting to wish I’d gone to chapel.”

“You’re interrupting,” said Boq. “Miss Elphie, you’ve done a wonderful thing to encourage Miss Galinda to meet me, but I must ask you to leave us alone to sort things out.”

“Neither of you will understand what the other is saying,” said Elphaba calmly. “I’m a Munchkinlander by birth anyway, if not by upbringing, and I’m a girl by accident if not by choice. I’m the natural arbiter between you two. I don’t believe you can get along without me. In fact if I leave the garden you’ll cease to decipher each other’s language entirely. She speaks the tongue of Rich, you speak Clotted Poor. Besides, I paid for this show by wheedling Miss Galinda for three days running. I get to watch.”

“It would be so good of you to stay, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “I require a chaperone when with a boy.”

“See what I mean?” Elphaba said to Boq.

“Then if you must stay, at least let me talk,” Boq said. “Please let me speak, just for a few minutes. Miss Galinda. What you say is true. You are highborn and I am common. You are Gillikinese and I, Munchkinlander. You have a social pattern to conform to, and so do I. And mine doesn’t include marrying a girl too wealthy, too foreign, too expectant. Marriage isn’t what I came here to propose.”

“See, I’m glad I didn’t leave, this is just getting good,” said Elphaba, but clamped her lips shut when they both glared at her.

“I came here to propose that we meet from time to time, that’s all,” said Boq. “That we meet as friends. That, free of expectations, we come to know each other as dear friends. I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadowlight; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the pfenix in circles of flight—”

“This sounds rehearsed,” said Elphaba.

“You are the mythical sea,” he concluded, all his eggs in one basket.

“I’m not much for poetry,” said Galinda. “But you’re very kind.” She had seemed to perk up a little at the compliments. Anyway the fan was moving faster. “I don’t really understand the point of friendship, as you call it, Master Boq, between unmarried people of our age. It seems—distracting. I can see it might lead to complications, especially as you confess to an infatuation I cannot hope to return. Not in a million years.”

“It’s the age of daring,” said Boq. “It’s the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.”

“I don’t know if alive quite covers it,” said Elphaba. “This sounds scripted to me.”

Galinda rapped Elphaba on the head with her fan, which folded smartly up and opened just as neatly again, an elegant practiced gesture that impressed all of them. “You’re being tiresome, Miss Elphie. I appreciate your company but I didn’t request a running commentary. I’m perfectly capable of deciding the merits of Master Boq’s recital myself. Let me consider his stupid idea. Lurline above, I can hardly hear myself think!”

Losing her temper, Galinda was prettier than ever. So that old saw was true, too. Boq was learning so much about girls! Her fan was dropping. Was that a good sign? If she hadn’t had some affection for him, would she have worn a dress with a neckline that dipped just a tad lower than he had dared hope? And there was the essence of rose water on her. He felt a surge of possibility, an inclination to rub his lips on the place where her shoulder became her neck.

“Your merits,” she was saying. “Well, you’re brave, I suppose, and clever, to have figured this out. If Madame Morrible ever found you here we’d be in severe trouble. Of course you might not know that, so scratch the bravery part. Just clever. You’re clever and you’re sort of, oh, well, I mean to look at—”

“Handsome?” suggested Elphaba. “Dashing?”

“You’re fun to look at,” decided Galinda.

Boq’s face fell. “Fun?” he said.

“I’d give a lot to achieve fun,” Elphaba said. “The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they’re usually referring to digestion—”

“Well, I might be all or none of the things you say,” said Boq staunchly, “but you will learn that I am persistent. I will not let you say no to our friendship, Galinda. It means too much to me.”

“Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate,” said Elphaba. “See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?”

“Elphaba!” they both cried at her.

“My word, duckie!” said a voice behind them, and all three turned. It was some middle-aged minder in a striped apron, her thinning gray hair twisted in a knot on her head. “What are you getting yourself up to?”

“Ama Clutch!” Galinda said. “How did you think to look for me here?”

“That Tsebra cook told me some yacky-yacky was going on out here. You think they’re blind in there? Now who is this? This don’t look good at all, not to me.”

Boq stood. “I am Master Boq of Rush Margins, Munchkinland. I am nearly a third-year fellow at Briscoe Hall.”

Elphaba yawned. “Is this show over?”

“Well, I am shocked! A guest don’t get shown into the vegetable garden, so I guess you arrived uninvited! Sir, get yourself gone from here before I be calling the porters to remove you!”

“Oh, Ama Clutch, don’t make a scene,” said Galinda, sighing.

“He’s hardly developed enough to worry about,” pointed out Elphaba. “Look, he’s still beardless. And from that we can deduce—”

Boq said in a rush, “Perhaps this is all wrong. I did not come here to be abused. Forgive me, Miss Galinda, if I have failed even to amuse you. As for you, Miss Elphaba”—his voice was as cold as he could make it, and that was colder than he’d ever heard it himself—“I was wrong to have trusted in your compassion.”

“Wait and see,” said Elphaba. “Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. Meanwhile, why don’t you come back sometime?”

“There is no second time to this,” said Ama Clutch, tugging at Galinda, who was proving as sedentary as set cement. “Miss Elphaba, shame on you for encouraging this scandal.”

“Nothing here has been perpetrated but badinage, and bad badinage at that,” said Elphaba. “Miss Galinda, you’re mighty stubborn there. You’re planting yourself in the vegetable garden for good in the hopes that this Boy Visitation might occur again? Have we misread your interest?”

Galinda stood at last with some dignity. “My dear Master Boq,” she said, as if dictating, “it was ever my intention to dissuade you from pursuing me, in romantic attachment or even in friendship, as you put it. I had not meant to bruise you. It is not in my nature.” At this Elphaba rolled her eyes, but for once kept her mouth shut, perhaps because Ama Clutch had dug her fingernails into Elphaba’s elbow. “I will not deign to arrange another meeting like this. As Ama Clutch reminds me, it is beneath me.” Ama Clutch hadn’t exactly said that, but even so, she nodded grimly. “But if our paths cross in a legitimate way, Master Boq, I will do you the courtesy at least of not ignoring you. I trust you will be satisfied with that.”

“Never,” said Boq with a smile, “but it’s a start.”

“And now good evening,” said Ama Clutch on behalf of them all, and steered the girls away. “Fresh dreams, Master Boq, and don’t come back!”

“Miss Elphie, you were horrible,” he heard Galinda say, while Elphaba twisted around and waved good-bye with a grin he could not clearly read.

3

So the summer began. Since he passed the exams, Boq was free to plan one last year at Briscoe Hall. Daily he hied himself over to the library at Three Queens, where under the watchful eye of a titanic Rhinoceros, the head archival librarian, he sat cleaning old manuscripts that clearly weren’t looked at more than once a century. When the Rhino was out of the room, he had flighty conversations with the two boys on either side of him, classic Queens boys, full of gibbering gossip and arcane references, teasing and loyal. He enjoyed them when they were in good spirits, and he detested their sulks. Crope and Tibbett. Tibbett and Crope. Boq pretended confusion when they got too arch or suggestive, which seemed to happen about once a week, but they backed off quickly. In the afternoons they would all take their cheese sandwiches by the banks of the Suicide Canal and watch the swans. The strong boys at crew, coursing up and down the canal for summer practice, made Crope and Tibbett swoon and fall on their faces in the grass. Boq laughed at them, not unkindly, and waited for fate to deliver Galinda back into his path.

It wasn’t too long a wait. About three weeks after their vegetable garden liaison, on a windy summer morning, a small earthquake caused some minor damage in the Three Queens library, and the building had to be closed for some patching. Tibbett, Crope, and Boq took their sandwiches, with some beakers of tea from the buttery, and they flopped down at their favorite place on the grassy banks of the canal. Fifteen minutes later, along came Ama Clutch with Galinda and two other girls.

“I do believe we know you,” said Ama Clutch as Galinda stood demurely a step behind. In cases such as these it was the servant’s duty to elicit names from the strangers in the group, so that they might greet each other personally. Ama Clutch registered out loud that they were Masters Boq, Crope, and Tibbett, meeting Misses Galinda, Shenshen, and Pfannee. Then Ama Clutch moved a few feet away to allow the young people to address one another.

Boq leaped up and gave a small bow, and Galinda said, “As in line with my promise, Master Boq, may I enquire how you’re keeping?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Boq.

“He’s ripe as a peach,” said Tibbett.

“He’s downright luscious, from this angle,” said Crope, sitting a few steps behind, but Boq turned and glared so fiercely that Crope and Tibbett were chastened, and fell into a mock sulk.

“And you, Miss Galinda?” continued Boq, searching her well-
composed face. “You are well? How thrilling to see you in Shiz for the summer.” But that wasn’t the right thing to say. The better girls went home for the summer, and Galinda as a Gillikinese must feel it deeply that she was stuck here, like a Munchkinlander or a commoner! The fan came up. The eyes went down. The Misses Shenshen and Pfannee touched her shoulders in mute sympathy. But Galinda sallied on.

“My dear friends the Misses Pfannee and Shenshen are taking a house for the month of Highsummer on the shores of Lake Chorge. A little fantasy house near the village of Neverdale. I’ve decided to make my holiday there instead of taking that tiresome trek back to the Pertha Hills.”

“How refreshing.” He saw the beveled edges of her lacquered fingernails, the moth-colored eyelashes, the glazed and buffed softness of cheek, the sensitive tuck of skin just at the cleft of her upper lip. In the summer morning light, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

“Steady,” said Crope, and he and Tibbett jumped up and they each caught Boq by an elbow. He then remembered to breathe. He couldn’t think of anything else to say though, and Ama Clutch was turning her handbag around and around in her hands.

“So we’ve got jobs,” said Tibbett, to the rescue. “The Three Queens library. We’re housekeeping the literature. We’re the cleaning maids of culture. Are you working, Miss Galinda?”

“I should think not,” said Galinda. “I need a rest from my studies. It has been a harrowing year, harrowing. My eyes are still tired from reading.”

“How about you girls?” said Crope, outrageously casual. But they only giggled and demurred and inched away. This was their friend’s encounter, not theirs. Boq, regaining his composure, could feel the group beginning to shift itself into motion again. “And Miss Elphie?” he enquired, to hold them there. “How is your roomie?”

“Headstrong and difficult,” said Galinda severely, for the first time speaking in a normal voice, not the faint social whisper. “But, thank Lurline, she’s got a job, so I get some relief. She’s working in the lab and the library under our Doctor Dillamond. Do you know of him?”

“Doctor Dillamond? Do I know of him?” said Boq. “He’s the most impressive biology tutor in Shiz.”

“By the by,” said Galinda, “he’s a Goat.”

“Yes, yes. I wish he would teach us. Even our professors acknowledge his prominence. Apparently, years ago, back in the reign of the Regent, and before, he used to be invited annually to lecture at Briscoe Hall. But the restrictions changed even that, so I’ve never really met him. Just to see him at that poetry evening, last year, so briefly, was a treat—”

“Well he does go on,” said Galinda. “Brilliant he may be, but he has no sense of when he’s become tedious. Anyway, Miss Elphie’s hard at work, doing something or other. She will go on about it, too. I think it’s contagious!”

“Well, a lab, it breeds things,” said Crope.

“Yes,” said Tibbett, “and incidentally may I add that you’re every bit as lovely as Boq gushes you are. We’d put it down to an overactive imagination born of affectional and physical frustration—”

“You know,” said Boq, “between your Miss Elphie and my erstwhile friends here, we have no real hope of friendship at all. Shall we organize a duel and kill each other instead? Count off ten paces, turn and shoot? It would save so much bother.”

But Galinda didn’t approve of such joking. She nodded in a dismissive way, and the group of females moved out along the graveled path, following the curve of the canal. Miss Shenshen was heard to say in a deep, breathy voice, “Oh, my dear, he is sweet, in a toylike way.”

The voice faded out, Boq turned to rail at Crope and Tibbett, but they fell to tickling him and they all collapsed in a heap on the remains of their lunch. And since there was no hope in changing them, Boq abandoned the impulse to correct his friends. Really, what difference did their callow banter make if Miss Galinda found him so impossible?

A week or two later, on his afternoon off, Boq took himself in to Railway Square. He lingered at a kiosk, staring. Cigarettes, ersatz love charms, naughty drawings of women undressing, and scrolls painted with lurid sunsets, overladen with one-line inspirational slogans. “Lurline Lives on Within Each Heart.” “Safe Keep the Wizard’s Laws, and the Wizard’s Laws Will Keep You Safe.” “I Pray to the Unnamed God That Justice Will Walk Abroad in Oz.” Boq noted the variety: the pagan, the authoritarian, and the old-fashioned unionist impulses.

But nothing directly sympathetic to the royalists, who had gone underground in the sixteen harsh years since the Wizard had first wrested power from the Ozma Regent. The Ozma line had been Gillikinese originally, and surely there were active pockets of resistance to the Wizard? But Gillikin had, in fact, thrived under the Wizard, so the royalists kept mum. Besides, everyone had heard the rumors of strict court action against turncoats and peristrophists.

Boq bought a broadsheet published out of the Emerald City—several weeks old, but it was the first he’d seen in some time—and he settled down at a café. He read about the Emerald City Home Guard suppressing some Animal dissenters, who were making a nuisance of themselves in the palace gardens. He looked for news of the provinces, and found a filler about Munchkinland, which continued experiencing near-drought conditions; occasional thunderbursts would drench the ground, but the water would run off or sink uselessly into the clay. They said that hidden subterranean lakes underlay the Vinkus region, that water resources there could serve the whole of Oz. But the idea of a canal system across the entire country made everyone laugh. The expense! There was great disagreement between the Eminences and the Emerald City as to what was to be done.

Secession, thought Boq seditiously, and looked up to see Elphaba, alone, without even a nanny or Ama, standing over him.

“What a delicious expression you have on your face, Boq,” she said. “It’s much more interesting than love.”

“It is love, in a way,” said Boq, then remembered himself, and leaped to his feet. “Won’t you join me? Please, take a seat. Unless you’re worried about being unchaperoned.”

She sat down, looking a bit etiolated, and allowed him to call for a cup of mineral tea. She had a parcel in brown paper and string under her arm. “A few trinkets for my sister,” she said. “She’s like Miss Galinda, she loves the fancy outside of things. I found a Vinkus shawl in the bazaar, red roses on a black background, with black and green fringe. I’m sending it to her, and a pair of striped stockings that Ama Clutch knitted for me.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said. “Was she in the play group we were in together?”

“She’s three years younger,” Elphaba said. “She’ll come to Crage Hall before long.”

“Is she as difficult as you are?”

“She’s difficult in a different way. She’s crippled, pretty severely, is my Nessarose, so she’s a handful. Even Madame Morrible doesn’t quite know the extent of it. But by then I’ll be a third-year girl and will have the nerve to stand up to the Head, I guess. If anything gives me nerve, it’s people making life hard for Nessarose. Life is already hard enough for her.”

“Is your mama raising her?”

“My mother is dead. My father is in charge, nominally.”

“Nominally?”

“He’s religious,” said Elphaba, and made the circling palms gesture that indicated you could grind millstone against millstone all you liked, but there wasn’t any quern in the land that could produce flour if there was no grain to grind.

“It sounds very hard for you all. How did your mama die?”

“She died in childbirth, and this is the end of the personal interview.”

“Tell me about Doctor Dillamond. I hear you’re working for him.”

“Tell me about your amusing campaign for the heart of Galinda the Ice Queen.”

Boq really wanted to hear about Doctor Dillamond, but was derailed by Elphaba’s remark. “I will keep on, Elphie, I will! When I see her I’m so smitten with longing, it’s like fire in my veins. I can’t speak, and the things I think about are like visions. It’s like dreaming. It’s like floating in your dreams.”

“I don’t dream.”

“Tell me, is there any hope? What does she say? Does she ever even imagine that her feelings for me might change?”

Elphaba sat with her two elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her face, her two forefingers leaning against each other and against her thin, grayish lips. “You know, Boq,” she said, “the thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things. When her mind is really working, she could, if led, think on you—even, I suspect, somewhat fondly. I suspect. I don’t know. But when she slides back into herself, I mean into the girl who spends two hours a day curling that beautiful hair, it’s as if the thinking Galinda goes into some internal closet and shuts the door. Or as if she’s in hysterical retreat from things that are too big for her. I love her both ways, but I find it odd. I wouldn’t mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don’t know the way out.”

“I propose you’re being hard on her, and you’re certainly too forward,” said Boq sternly. “Were she sitting here I think she’d be astounded to hear you speak so freely.”

“I’m just trying to behave as I think a friend should behave. Granted, I haven’t had much practice.”

“Well, I question your friendship with me, if you consider Miss Galinda your friend too, and if that’s how you tear a friend apart in her absence.”

Though Boq was irritated, he found that this was a more lively discussion than the conventional patter he and Galinda had so far exchanged. He didn’t want to burn Elphaba off with criticism. “I’m ordering you another mineral tea,” he said, in an authoritative voice, his father’s voice in fact, “and then you can tell me about Doctor Dillamond.”

“Skip the tea, I’m still nursing this one and you have no more money than I do, I bet,” said Elphaba, “but I’ll tell you about Doctor Dillamond. Unless you are too affronted at the slice and angle of my opinions.”

“Please, perhaps I am wrong,” said Boq. “Look, it’s a nice day, we’re both off the campus. How do you come to be out alone, by the way? Is your escape sanctioned by Madame Morrible?”

“Take a guess about that,” she said, grinning. “Once it was clear that you could come and go from Crage Hall by way of the vegetable garden and the roof of the adjacent stable, I decided I could too. I’m never missed.”

“That’s hard for me to believe,” said he, daringly, “for you’re not the kind who blends into the woodwork. Now tell me about Doctor Dillamond. He’s my idol.”

She sighed, and set the package down on the table at last, and settled in for a long chat. She told him about Doctor Dillamond’s work in natural essences, trying to determine by scientific method what the real differences were between animal and Animal tissue, and between Animal and human tissue. The literature on the matter, she had learned from doing the legwork herself, was all couched in unionist terms, and pagan terms before that, and they didn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. “Don’t forget Shiz University was originally a unionist monastery,” said Elphaba, “so despite the anything-goes attitude among the educated elite, there are still bedrocks of unionist bias.”

“But I’m a unionist,” said Boq, “and I don’t see the conflict. The Unnamed God is accommodating to many ranges of being, not just human. Are you talking about a subtle bias against Animals, interwoven into early unionist tracts, and still in operation today?”

“That’s certainly what Doctor Dillamond thinks. And he’s a unionist himself. Explain that paradox and I’d be glad to convert. I admire the Goat intensely. But the real interest of it to me is the political slant. If he can isolate some bit of the biological architecture to prove that there isn’t any difference, deep down in the invisible pockets of human and Animal flesh—that there’s no difference between us—or even among us, if you take in animal flesh too—well, you see the implications.”

“No,” said Boq, “I don’t think I do.”

“How can the Banns on Animal Mobility be upheld if Doctor Dillamond can prove, scientifically, that there isn’t any inherent difference between humans and Animals?”

“Oh, now that’s a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future,” said Boq.

“Think about it,” said Elphaba. “Think, Boq. On what grounds could the Wizard possibly continue to publish those Banns?”

“How could he be persuaded not to? The Wizard has dissolved the Hall of Approval indefinitely. I don’t believe, Elphie, that the Wizard is open to entertaining arguments, even by as august an Animal as Doctor Dillamond.”

“But of course he must be. He’s a man in power, it’s his job to consider changes in knowledge. When Doctor Dillamond has his proof, he’ll write to the Wizard and begin to lobby for change. No doubt he’ll do his best to let Animals the land over know what he’s intending, too. He isn’t a fool.”

“Well I didn’t say he was a fool,” said Boq. “But how close do you think he is to getting firm evidence?”

“I am a student handmaid,” said Elphaba. “I don’t even understand what he means. I’m only a secretary, an amanuensis—you know he can’t write things himself, he can’t manage a pen with his hoofs. I take dictation and I file and I dash to the Crage Hall library and look things up.”

“Briscoe Hall library would be a better place to hunt for that kind of material,” said Boq. “Even Three Queens, where I work this summer, has stacks of documents from the monks’ observations of animal and vegetable life.”

“I know I am not traditionally presented,” said Elphaba, “but I believe on the grounds of being a girl I am excluded from the Briscoe Hall library. And on the grounds of being an Animal so too, now at least, is Doctor Dillamond. So those valuable resources are off limits to us.”

“Well,” said Boq carelessly, “if you knew exactly what you wanted . . .
I have access to the stacks in both collections.”

“And when the good Doctor is finished ferreting out the difference between Animals and people, I will propose he apply the same arguments to the differences between the sexes,” said Elphaba. Then she registered what Boq had said, and stretched out her hand, almost as if to touch him. “Oh Boq. Boq. On behalf of Doctor Dillamond, I accept your generous offer of help. I’ll get the first list of sources to you within the week. Just leave my name out of it. I don’t care so much about incurring Horrible Morrible’s wrath against myself, but I don’t want her taking out her annoyance on my sister, Nessarose.”

She downed the last of her tea, gathered her parcel, and had sprung up almost before Boq could pull himself to his feet. Various customers, lingering over their elevenses with their own broadsheets or novellas, looked up at the ungainly girl pushing out the doors. As Boq settled back down, hardly yet registering what he had gotten himself into, he realized, slowly but thoroughly, that this morning there were no Animals taking their morning tea in here. No Animals at all.

4

In years to come—and Boq would live a long life—he would remember the rest of the summer as scented with the must of old books, when ancient script swam before his eyes. He sleuthed alone in the musty stacks, he hovered over the mahogany drawers lined with vellum manuscripts. All season long, it seemed, the lozenge-paned windows between bluestone mullions and transoms misted over again and again with flecks of small but steady rain, almost as brittle and pesky as sand. Apparently the rain never made it as far as Munchkinland—but Boq tried not to think about that.

Crope and Tibbett were coerced into researching for Doctor Dillamond, too. At first they had to be dissuaded from going about their forays in costumes of disguise—fake pince-nez, powdered wigs, cloaks with high collars, all to be found in the well-stocked locker of the Three Queens Student Theatrical and Terpsichorean Society. But when convinced of the seriousness of the mission, they fell to with gusto. Once a week they met Boq and Elphaba in the café in Railway Square. Elphaba showed up, during these misty weeks, entirely swathed in a brown cloak with a hood and veil that hid all but her eyes. She wore long, frayed gray gloves that she boasted buying secondhand from a local undertaker, cheap for having been used in funeral services. She sheathed her bamboo-pole legs in a double thickness of cotton stocking. The first time Boq saw Elphaba like this, he said, “I just barely manage to convince Crope and Tibbett to lose the espionage drag, and you come in looking like the original Kumbric Witch.”

“I don’t dress for your approval, boys,” she said, shucking her cloak and folding it inside out so that the wet wool never touched her. On the occasion when another café patron would come through, shaking water off an umbrella, Elphaba always recoiled, flinching if she was caught by even a scattering of drops.

“Is that religious conviction, Elphie, that you keep yourself so dry?” said Boq.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I’m beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.”

“Hence,” observed Crope, “your aversion to all water. Without your knowing it, it might be a baptismal splash, and then your liberty as a free-range agnostic would be curtailed.”

“I thought you were too self-absorbed to notice my spiritual pathology,” said Elphaba. “Now, boys, what’ve we got today?”

Every time, Boq thought: Would that Galinda were here. For the casual camaraderie that grew up among them during these weeks was so refreshing—a model of ease and even wit. Against convention they had dropped the honorifics. They interrupted one another and laughed and felt bold and important because of the secrecy of their mission. Crope and Tibbett cared little about Animals or the Banns—they were both Emerald City boys, sons, respectively, of a tax collector and of a palace security advisor—but Elphaba’s passionate belief in the work enlivened them. Boq himself grew more involved, too. He imagined Galinda drawing her chair up with them, losing her upper-crust reserve, allowing her eyes to glow with a shared and secret purpose.

“I thought I knew all the shapes of passion,” Elphaba said one bright afternoon. “I mean, growing up with a unionist minister for a father. You come to expect that theology is the fundament on which all other thought and belief is based. But boys!—this week, Doctor Dillamond made some sort of a scientific breakthrough. I’m not sure what it was, but it involved manipulating lenses, a pair of them, so he could peer at bits of tissue that he had laid on a transparent glass and backlit by candlelight. He began to dictate, and he was so excited that he sang his findings; he composed arias out of what he was seeing! Recitatives about structure, about color, about the basic shapes of organic life. He has a horrible sandpapery voice, as you might imagine for a Goat; but how he warbled! Tremolo on the annotations, vibrato on the interpretations, and sostenuto on the implications: long, triumphant open vowels of discovery! I was sure someone would hear. I sang with him, I read his notes back to him like a student of musical composition.”

The good Doctor was emboldened by his findings, and he required that their digging become more and more focused. He did not want to announce any breakthroughs until he had figured out the most politically advantageous way to present them. Toward the end of the summer the push was on to find Lurlinist and early unionist disquisitions on how the Animals and the animals had been created and differentiated. “It’s not a matter of uncovering a scientific theory by a prescientific company of unionist monks or pagan priests and priestesses,” explained Elphaba. “But Doctor Dillamond wants to authenticate the way our ancestors thought about this. The Wizard’s right to impose unjust laws may be better challenged if we know how the old codgers explained it to themselves.”

It was an interesting exercise.

“In one form or another, we all know some of the origin myths that predate the Oziad,” said Tibbett, throwing his blond bangs back with a theatrical flourish. “The most coherent one has our dear putative Fairy Queen Lurline on a voyage. She was tired of travel in the air. She stopped and called from the desert sands a font of water hidden deep beneath the earth’s dry dunes. The water obeyed, in such abundance that the land of Oz in all its febrile variety sprang up almost instantly. Lurline drank herself into a stupor and went for a long rest on the top of Mount Runcible. When she awoke, she relieved herself copiously, and this became the Gillikin River, running around the vast tracts of the Great Gillikin Forest and skirting through the eastern edges of the Vinkus, and coming to a stop at Restwater. The animals were terricolous and thus of a lower order than Lurline and her retinue. Don’t look at me like that, I know what that word means—I looked it up. It means living on or near the ground.

“The animals had come into their being as rolled clots of earth dislodged from the exuberant plant growth. When Lurline let loose, the animals thought the raging stream was a flood, sent to drown their fresh new world, and they despaired of their existence. In a panic they flung themselves into the torrent and attempted to swim through Lurline’s urine. Those who became intimidated and turned back remained animals, beasts of burden, slaughtered for flesh, hunted for fun, counted as profit, admired as innocent. Those who swam on and made it to the farther shore were given the gifts of consciousness and language.”

“What a gift, to be able to imagine your own death,” muttered Crope.

“Thus, Animals. Convention, as long ago as history can remember, divides the animals and Animals.”

“Baptism by piss,” said Elphaba. “Is that a subtle way both to explain the talents of Animals and to denigrate them at the same time?”

“And what of the animals who drowned?” asked Boq. “They must have been the real losers.”

“Or the martyrs.”

“Or the ghosts who live underground now and stop up the water supply so the fields of Munchkinland dry up today.”

They all laughed and had more tea brought to the table.

“I’ve found some later scriptures with a more unionist slant,” Boq said. “They tell a story that I guess would be derived from the pagan narrative, but it has been cleaned up some. The flood, occurring sometime after creation and before the advent of humankind, wasn’t a massive piss by Lurline, but the sea of tears wept by the Unnamed God on the god’s only visit to Oz. The Unnamed God perceived the sorrow that would overwhelm the land throughout time, and bawled in pain. The whole of Oz was a mile deep in saltwater tides. The animals kept afloat by means of the odd log, the uprooted tree. Those who swallowed enough of the tears of the Unnamed God were imbued with a fulsome sympathy for their kin, and they began to construct rafts from the flotsam. They saved their kind out of mercy, and from their kindness they became a new, sentient lot: the Animals.”

“Another kind of baptism, from within,” said Tibbett. “Ingestion. I like it.”

“But what of the pleasure faith?” said Crope. “Can a witch or a sorcerer take an animal and, through a spell, create an Animal?”

“Well, that’s the thing I’ve been looking into,” said Elphaba. “The pleasure faithers—the pfaithers—say that if anything—Lurline or the Unnamed God—could have done it once, magic could do it again. They even hint that the original distinction between Animals and animals was a Kumbric Witch spell, so strong and enduring it has never worn off. This is dangerous propaganda, malice incarnate. No one knows if there is such a thing as a Kumbric Witch, let alone if there ever was. Myself, I think it’s a part of the Lurlinist cycle that’s gotten detached and developed independently. Arrant nonsense. We have no proof that magic is so strong—”

“We have no proof that god is so strong,” interrupted Tibbett.

“Which strikes me as being as good an argument against god as it is against magic,” said Elphaba, “but never mind that. The point is, if it is an enduring Kumbric spell, centuries old, it may be reversible. Or it may be perceived to be reversible, which is just as bad. In the interim, while sorcerers are at work experimenting with charms and spells, the Animals lose their rights, one by one. Just slowly enough so that it’s hard to see as a coherent political campaign. It’s a dicey scenario, and one that Doctor Dillamond hasn’t figured out—”

At this point Elphaba hitched the burnoose part of her cloak up over her head, and disappeared into the shadows of its folds. “What?” said Boq, but she put a finger to her lips. Crope and Tibbett, as if on cue, launched into some silly banter about their professional goals of being abducted by pirates of the desert and made to dance the fandango dressed only in slave shackles. Boq saw nothing amiss: A couple of clerks reading the racing forms, some genteel ladies with their lemonades and novellas, a tiktok creature buying coffee beans by the pound, a parody of an old professor figuring out some theorem by arranging and rearranging some sugar cubes along the edge of his butter knife.

A few minutes later, Elphaba relaxed. “That tiktok thing works at Crage Hall. I think it’s called Grommetik. Usually it shadows Madame Morrible like a lovesick puppy. I don’t think it saw me.”

But she was too jittery to continue the conversation, and after she made sure their next assignments were clear, the crew disbanded into the misty streets.

5

Two weeks before Briscoe Hall reconvened for the new semester, Avaric returned from his home, the seat of the Margreave of Tenmeadows. He was bronzed with summer leisure and eager for fun. He mocked Boq for having struck up friendships with boys from Three Queens, and under other circumstances Boq would probably have let his new alliance with Crope and Tibbett lapse. But they were all engaged in Doctor Dillamond’s research now, and Boq just put up with Avaric’s taunting.

Elphaba remarked one day that she had had a letter from Galinda, away with her friends on Lake Chorge. “Can you believe it, she proposed I take a coach and come visit for a weekend,” said Elphaba. “She must really be bored out of her mind with those society girls.”

“But she’s society herself, how could she be bored?” asked Boq.

“Don’t ask me to explain the nuances of that circle,” said Elphaba, “but I suspect that our Miss Galinda isn’t quite as society as she makes out.”

“Well, Elphie, when are you going?” asked Boq.

“Never,” said Elphaba. “This work is too important.”

“Let me see the letter.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Bring it to me.”

“What are you on about?”

“Maybe she needs you. She always seems to need you.”

“She needs me?” Elphaba laughed, coarsely, loudly. “Well I know you’re besotted and I feel somewhat responsible. I’ll show you the letter next week. But I’m not going to go just to give you a vicarious thrill, Boq. Friend or no friend.”

The next week she unfolded the letter.

My dear Miss Elphaba,
I am bade to write to you by my hostesses the Misses Pfannee of Pfann Hall and Shenshen of the Minkos Clan. We are having a lovely summer at Lake Chorge. The air is calm and sweet and all is as pleasant as anything. If you would like to visit us for three or four days before school begins, we know you have been hard at work all summer and so. A little change. If you would like to come no need to write if you would like to visit. Just arrive by coach at Neverdale and come by foot or hire a hansom cab, it’s just a mile or two by the bridge. The house is dear, covered in roses and ivy, it’s called the “Caprice-in-the-Pines.” Who wouldn’t love it here! I do hope you can come! I do very specially hope so for reasons I dare not write. I cannot advise you as to chaperones as Ama Clutch is already here and so is Ama Clipp and Ama Vimp. You can decide. We hope for long hours of amusing conversation. Ever your loving friend,

Miss Galinda
of the Arduennas of the Upland
33 Highsummer, midday
at “Caprice-in-the-Pines”

“But you must go!” Boq cried. “Look how she writes to you!”

“She writes like someone who doesn’t write very often,” Elphaba observed.

“‘I do hope you can come!’ she says. She needs you, Elphie. I insist that you go!”

“Oh you do? Why don’t you go then?” said Elphaba.

“I hardly can go without having been invited.”

“Well that’s easy enough. I’ll write and tell her to invite you.” Elphaba reached for a pencil in her pocket.

“Don’t patronize me, Miss Elphaba,” said Boq sternly. “This must be taken seriously.”

“You are lovesick and deluded,” said Elphaba. “And I don’t like your retreating back to ‘Miss Elphaba’ to punish me for disagreeing with you. Besides, I can’t go. I have no chaperone.”

“I’ll be your chaperone.”

“Hah! As if Madame Morrible would allow that!”

“Well—how about”—Boq tossed it around—“how about my friend Avaric? He’s the son of a margreave. He’s spotless by virtue of his station. Even Madame Morrible would quail before a margreave’s son.”

“Madame Morrible wouldn’t quail before a hurricane. Besides, have you no concern for me? I don’t feel like traveling with this Avaric.”

“Elphie,” said Boq, “you owe me. I’ve been helping you out all summer, and I’ve had Crope and Tibbett helping too. Now you have to pay me back. You ask Doctor Dillamond for a few days off, and I’ll ask Avaric, who is bursting to do something. The three of us will go to Lake Chorge. Avaric and I will rent a room in an inn, and we’ll stay a very short time. Just long enough to make sure that Miss Galinda is all right.”

“It’s you I’m worried about, not her,” said Elphaba, and Boq could see that he had won.

Madame Morrible would not release Elphaba in the care of Avaric. “Your dear father would never forgive me,” she said. “But I am not the Horrible Morrible you think of me. Oh yes, I know your little pet names for me, Miss Elphaba. Amusing and juvenile! I am concerned for your welfare. And with all your hard work all summer, I see that you have grown, oh, shall we say, verdigrisian? So I shall make a compromise proposal. Provided that you can convince Master Avaric and Master Boq to travel with you and my own little Grommetik, whom I will loan in your care and to care for you, I shall permit your little summer fun.”

Elphaba, Boq, and Avaric rode in the coach, and Grommetik was made to ride on top with the luggage. Elphaba met Boq’s eyes from time to time, grimacing, but she ignored Avaric, to whom she had taken an instant dislike.

When he had finished with the pages of his racing form, Avaric teased Boq about this trip. “I should have known when I left for the summer that you were mooning about in the throes of love! You developed this serious set of chin, it misled me. I thought it was consumption at least. You should have come out with me that night before I left! A visit to the Philosophy Club would have been just what the doctor ordered.”

Boq was mortified to have such a dive mentioned in the presence of a female. But Elphaba seemed to take no offense. Perhaps she didn’t know what it was. He tried to steer Avaric away from the subject.

“You don’t know Miss Galinda, but you will find her charming,” he said. “I guarantee that.” And she will probably find you charming, he thought, a bit late in the day. But he was even willing to live with that, if it was the price of helping Galinda out of a tricky situation.

Avaric was regarding Elphaba with contempt. “Miss Elphaba,” he said formally, “does your name imply any elf blood in your background?”

“What a novel idea,” said Elphaba. “If there were, I suppose my limbs would be as brittle as uncooked pasta, and come apart with the slightest of pressure. Would you care to apply some force?” She proffered a forearm, green as a spring limeberry. “Do, I beg you, so we can settle this question for once, for all. We shall conclude that the relative force you need to break my arm—as opposed to other arms you have broken—is proportionate to the relative amount of human versus elfin blood in my veins.”

“I certainly will not touch you,” said Avaric, managing to say many things at once.

“The elf in the self regrets,” said Elphaba. “Were you to have dismembered me, I might have been posted back to Shiz in small pieces and been spared the tedium of this forced holiday. And this company.”

“Oh, Elphie.” Boq sighed. “This isn’t a good start, you know.”

“I think it’s swell,” said Avaric, glaring.

“I didn’t think friendship required this much,” snapped Elphaba to Boq. “I was better off before.”

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived in Neverdale and settled at the inn, and made their way by foot along the lake to Caprice-in-the-Pines.

Two older women were in the sunlight by the portico, shelling string beans and wristwrenchers. The one Boq recognized was Ama Clutch, Galinda’s chaperone; the other must be the minder of Miss Shenshen or Miss Pfannee. They started at the sight of the procession coming up the drive, and Ama Clutch leaned forward, the string beans spilling out of her lap. “Well, I never,” she said as they drew near, “it’s Miss Elphie herself. My uncle’s whiskers. I never did.” She pulled herself to her feet and clasped Elphaba into her arms. Elphaba stood as stiff as a plaster figure.

“Give us a minute to be catching our breath, duckies,” said Ama Clutch. “Whatever in the blameless heaven are you doing here, Miss Elphaba? It don’t seem possible.”

“I have been invited by Miss Galinda,” said Elphaba, “and my fellow travelers here insisted they wanted to accompany me. So I find myself compelled to accept.”

“I know nothing of this,” said Ama Clutch. “Miss Elphaba, let me take that heavy reticule and find you something clean to put on. You must be frayed from the voyage. You gentlemen will be staying in the village, of course. But for now, the girls are in the summerhouse at the edge of the lake.”

The travelers made their way along a path interrupted with stone steps at the steeper parts. Grommetik took longer at steps and was left behind, and no one was inclined to stay and lend a hand to a figure with such a hard skin and clockwork thoughts. Skirting the final growth of hollyflight bushes, they came upon the gazebo.

It was a skeleton house of unstripped logs, six sides open to the breezes, with a fretwork of arabesquing twigs, and Lake Chorge a mighty field of blue beyond. The girls were sitting on steps and in wicker chairs, and Ama Clipp was lost in some smallwork involving three needles and many colors of thread.

“Miss Galinda!” broke out Boq, needing his to be the first voice heard.

The girls raised their heads. In evanescent summer frocks, free of hoops and bustles, they looked like birds about to scatter.

“Holy terror!” said Galinda, her jaw dropping. “What’re you doing here!”

“I’m not decent!” shrieked Shenshen, drawing attention to her unshod feet and pale exposed ankles.

Pfannee bit one corner of her lip and tried to revise her smirk into a smile of welcome.

“I am not staying for long,” said Elphaba. “By the way, girls, this is Master Avaric, the Margreave Descending from Tenmeadows, Gillikin. And this is Master Boq from Munchkinland. They’re both at Briscoe Hall. Master Avaric, as if you can’t tell by the lovesick expression in Boq’s face, this is Miss Galinda of the Arduennas, and Miss Shenshen and Miss Pfannee, who can outline their own pedigrees perfectly well.”

“But how enchanting, and how naughty,” said Miss Shenshen. “Miss Elphaba who-never-gives-us-the-time-of-day, you have redeemed yourself for all time by this pleasant surprise. How do you do, gentlemen.”

“But,” stammered Galinda, “but why are you here? What’s wrong?”

“I am here because I stupidly mentioned your invitation to Master Boq, who saw it as a sign from the Unnamed God that we should visit.”

But at this Miss Pfannee could control herself no longer, and fell on the floor of the gazebo, writhing in laughter. “What,” said Shenshen, “what?”

“But what invitation are you talking about?” asked Galinda.

“I don’t need to show you,” said Elphaba. For the first time since Boq had known her, she looked confused. “Surely I don’t need to bring it out—”

“I believe I have been set up to be mortified,” said Galinda, glaring at the helpless Pfannee. “I am being humiliated for sport. This is not funny, Miss Pfannee! I have half a mind to—to kick you!”

Just then Grommetik made it around the edge of the hollyflight bush. The sight of the stupid copper thing teetering on the edge of a stone step made Shenshen collapse against a column and join Pfannee in uncontrollable laughter. Even Ama Clipp smiled to herself as she began to put away her materials.

‘’But what is going on?” said Elphaba.

“Were you born to plague me?” Galinda said tearfully to her roomie. “Did I ask for your association?”

“Don’t,” said Boq. “Don’t, Miss Galinda, please don’t say another word. You’re upset.”

“I—wrote—the—letter,” heaved Pfannee between her gales of laughter. Avaric began to chuckle, and Elphaba’s eyes went wide and a little unfocused.

“You mean you didn’t write to invite me to visit here?” said Elphaba to Galinda.

“Oh, dear no, I did not,” said Galinda. In her anger she was beginning to regain some control, even though, Boq guessed, damage had been done for good. “My darling Miss Elphaba, I wouldn’t have dreamed of exposing you to such thoughtless cruelties as these girls perpetrate on each other and on me for sheer amusement. Besides, you have no place in a setting like this.”

“But I’ve been invited,” said Elphaba. “Miss Pfannee, you wrote that letter instead of Miss Galinda?”

“You ate it up!” chortled Pfannee.

“Well this is your home and I accept your invitation even if it was written under false pretenses,” Elphaba said, her voice evenly matter-of-fact as she stared into Miss Pfannee’s narrowed eyes. “I’ll go up and unpack my bags.”

She strode away. Only Grommetik followed. The air went stale with things unsaid. By and by Pfannee’s hysteria grew quieter, and she merely snorted and wheezed, and then grew still, lying vaporishly and unkempt on the flagstone floor of the gazebo.

“Well you all needn’t pierce me with your sniffy attitudes,” she said at last. “It was a joke.”

Elphaba stayed in her room for a day. Galinda came and went with a dinner. On occasion she would stay for a few minutes. So the boys took to swimming and rowing on the lake with the girls. Boq tried to fan in himself an interest in Shenshen or Pfannee, who certainly were coquettish enough. But they both seemed besotted with Avaric.

At last Boq cornered Galinda on the porch and pleaded with her to talk with him. She agreed, a measure of her demure demeanor returning, and they sat a short distance apart on a swing. “I suppose I’m to blame for not seeing through that ruse,” said Boq. “Elphie wasn’t inclined to accept that invitation. I made her.”

“What is this Elphie?” said Galinda. “Where has propriety gone this summer, I ask you?”

“We’ve become friends.”

“Well, I can promise to have gathered that. Why did you make her accept an invitation? Didn’t you know I’d never write such a thing?”

“How should I know that? You’re her roomie.”

“By executive order of Madame Morrible, not by choice! I care to have that remembered!”

“I didn’t know. You seem to get along.”

She sniffed, and curled a lip, but it seemed to be a remark to herself.

Boq continued, “If you’ve been woefully humiliated, why don’t you leave?”

“Perhaps I shall,” she said. “I’m considering. Elphaba says that to leave is to admit defeat. Yet if she comes out of her hiding and begins to trip along with the rest of you—and me—the joke will be unbearable. They don’t like her,” she explained.

“Well neither do you, I’d say!” said Boq, in an explosive whisper.

“It’s different, I have a right and a reason,” she retorted. “I am forced to put up with her! And all because my stupid Ama stepped on a rusty nail in the railway station in Frottica and missed the orientation! My whole academic career up in smoke because of my Ama’s carelessness! When I’m a sorcerer I’ll have my revenge on her for that!”

“You could say that Elphaba brought us together,” said Boq softly. “I’m closer to her and so I’m closer to you.”

Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, “Boq, you know despite myself I think you’re a little sweet. You’re a little sweet and you’re a little charming and you’re a little maddening and you’re a little habit-forming.”

Boq held his breath.

“But you’re little!” she concluded. “You’re a Munchkin, for god’s sake!”

He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.

The next day Elphaba, Galinda, Boq, and Grommetik—and of course Ama Clutch—made the six-hour trip back to Shiz with fewer than a dozen remarks among them. Avaric stayed behind to disport himself with Pfannee and Shenshen. The pestering rain took up at the outskirts of Shiz, and the august facades of Crage Hall and Briscoe Hall were nearly obliterated with mist by the time they were, at last, home.

6

Boq didn’t have time or inclination to remark on his romance when he saw Crope and Tibbett. The Rhino librarian, having paid scant attention to the boys or their progress all summer, had suddenly cottoned on to how little had been achieved, and was all rheumatic huffs and watchful eyes. The boys chattered little, they brushed and cleaned vellum and rubbed finfoot oil on leather bindings and polished brass clasps. Only a few days left of this tedium.

One afternoon Boq let his eye drift down the codex he was handling. Usually he worked without attention to the subject matter of the materials, but his eye was drawn to the bright red paint applied in the illustration. It was a picture—maybe four, five hundred years old?—of a Kumbric Witch. Some monk’s visionary zeal or anxiety about magic had inspired his brush. The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretched patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowned. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast’s wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk’s hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn’t match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq’s eye. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue. He guessed by the jeweled tones of the work that the document hadn’t been opened in centuries.

Dramatically, or teleologically, this image seemed some sort of a hybrid of the creation myths of the Animals. Here were the flood waters, whether they derived from legends of Lurline or the Unnamed God, whether they were rising or sinking. Was the Kumbric Witch interfering with or accomplishing the ordained fate of the beasts? Though in a script too crabbed and archaic for Boq to decipher, perhaps this document supported the fable of a Kumbric Witch spell that gave the Animals the gifts of speech, memory, and remorse. Perhaps it merely refuted it, but glowingly. Any way you looked at it there was the syncretism of myth, myth’s happy appetite to engorge on narrative strains. Maybe this painting was the suggestion of some alarmed monk that the Animals received their strengths through yet another sort of baptism, by nursing at the teat of the Kumbric Witch? Inducted through the milk of the Witch?

Such analysis wasn’t his strong point. He had a hard enough time with the nutrients and common pests of barley. He should do the unthinkable and deliver this actual scroll to Doctor Dillamond. It would be valuable to know about.

Or maybe, he thought as he hurried to meet Elphaba, the thing safely smuggled into the deep pocket of his cape and out of the Three Queens library, maybe the Witch wasn’t feeding the drenched animal, but killing it? Sacrificing it to stay the floods?

Art was way beyond him.

He had run into Ama Clutch in the bazaar and begged her to deliver a note to Elphaba. The good woman seemed more sympathetic than usual to him; was Galinda singing his praises in the privacy of her room?

It was his first time to see the funny green jumping bean since arriving back in Shiz. And there she was, on time, arriving at the café as requested, in a gray ghost of a dress, with a knitted overpull fraying at the sleeves, and a man’s umbrella, big and black and lancelike when rolled up. Elphaba sat down with a graceless fromp, and examined the scroll. She looked at it more closely than she would bring herself to look at Boq. But she listened to his exegesis, and thought it feeble. “What prevents this from being the Fairy Queen Lurline?” she asked.

“Well, the accoutrements of glamour are missing. I mean the golden nimbus of hair. The elegance. The transparent wings. The wand.”

“Those silver shoes are pretty gaudy.” She munched on a dry biscuit.

“It doesn’t look like a portrait of determination or—what do I mean—genesis. It looks reactive rather than proactive. That figure is at the very least confused, don’t you think?”

“You’ve been hanging around Crope and Tibbett too long, go back to your barley,” she said, pocketing the thing. “You’re getting vague and artsy. But I’ll give it to Doctor Dillamond. I’ll tell you, he keeps making breakthroughs. This business of opposing lenses has opened up a whole new world of corpuscular architecture. He let me look once, but I couldn’t make out much except for stress and bias, color and pulse. He’s very excited. The problem I see now is getting him to stop—I think he’s on the verge of founding a whole new branch of knowledge, and every day’s findings provoke a hundred new questions. Clinical, theoretical, hypothetical, empirical, even ontological, I guess. He’s been staying up late at night in the labs. We can see his lights on when we pull the drapes at night.”

“Well, does he need anything more from us? I only have two days left in that library, and then school starts.”

“I can’t get him to focus. I think he’s just putting together what he’s got.”

“How about Galinda, then,” he said, “if we’re done with academic espionage for the time being? How is she? Does she ask for me?”

Elphaba allowed herself to look at Boq. “No. Galinda really hasn’t said anything about you. To give you hope you don’t deserve, I should add she’s hardly said anything to me at all, either. She’s in a heavy sulk.”

“When will I see her again?”

“Does it mean that much to you?” She smiled wanly. “Boq, does she really mean that much to you?”

“She is my world,” he answered.

“Your world is too small if she is it.”

“You can’t criticize the size of a world. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it and I can’t deny it.”

“I should say you look silly,” she said, draining the last drops of lukewarm tea from her cup. “I should say you’ll look back on this summer and cringe. She may be lovely, Boq—no, she is lovely, I agree—but you’re worth a dozen of her.” At his shocked expression she threw up her hands. “Not to me! I don’t mean me! Please, that stricken look! Spare me!”

But he wasn’t sure if he believed her. She gathered her things in a hurry and rushed out, knocking the spitoon over in a clatter, slicing her big umbrella right through someone’s newspaper. She didn’t look both ways as she lunged across Railway Square and was nearly mowed down by an old Ox on a cumbersome tricycle.

7

The next time Boq saw Elphaba and Galinda, all thoughts of romance fled. It was in the small triangular park outside the gate of Crage Hall. He had been just happening by, once again, this time with Avaric in tow. The gates had opened and Ama Vimp had come flouncing out, face white and nose dripping, and a flurry of girls poured out after her. Among them were Elphaba and Galinda and Shenshen and Pfannee and Milla. Free of their walls, the girls huddled in chattering circles, or stood beneath the trees in shock, or hugged each other, and wailed, and wiped each other’s eyes.

Boq and Avaric hurried up to their friends. Elphaba had her shoulders high, like a cat’s bony yoke, and hers was the only dry face. She stayed arm’s length away from Galinda and the others. Boq longed to take Galinda in his arms, but she didn’t look at him more than once before diving her face into Milla’s teck-fur collar.

“What is it? What has happened?” said Avaric. “Miss Shenshen, Miss Pfannee?”

“It’s too horrible,” they cried, and Galinda nodded, and her nose ran messily along the shoulder seam of Milla’s blouse. “The police are there, and a doctor, but it seems to be—”

“What,” said Boq, and turned to Elphaba. “Elphie what is it, what?”

“They found out,” she said. Her eyes were glazed like old Shizian porcelain. “Somehow the bastards found out.”

The gate creaked open again, and petals of early autumn vineflowers, blue and purple, came dancing over the college wall. They hung, and stepped like butterflies, and fell slowly, as three caped policemen and a doctor in a dark cap emerged carrying a stretcher. A red blanket had covered the patient, but the wind that tossed the petals caught a corner of the blanket and pulled it back in a triangular fold. The girls all shrieked and Ama Vimp ran forward to tuck the blanket down, but in the sunlight all had looked down and seen the twisted shoulders and back-thrown head of Doctor Dillamond. His throat was still knotted with congealed ropes of black blood, where it had been slit as thoroughly as if he had wandered into an abattoir.

Boq sat down, disgusted and alarmed, hoping he had not seen death, just a horrible treatable wound. But the police and doctor weren’t hurrying, there was no reason to hurry now. Boq fell back against the wall, and Avaric, who had never seen the Goat before, held Boq’s hands tightly with one hand and covered his own face with the other.

Before long Galinda and Elphaba sank down beside him, and there was some weeping, some long weeping, before words could be spoken. At last Galinda told the story.

“We went to bed last night—and Ama Clutch got up to pull the drapes closed. As she does. And she looks down and says almost to herself, ‘Well there’s the lights on, Doctor Goat is at it again.’ Then she peers a little closer, down the yard, and says, ‘Well now isn’t that funny?’ And I don’t pay any attention, I’m just sitting there staring, but Elphaba says, ‘What’s funny, Ama Clutch?’ And Ama Clutch just pulls the drape very tightly and says in a funny voice, ‘Oh, nothing, my ducks. I’ll just step down to check and make sure everything’s all right. As long as you girls are abed.’ She says good night and she leaves, and I don’t know if she goes down there or what, but we both fall asleep and in the morning she isn’t there with the tea. She always gets the tea! She always does!”

Galinda gave herself to tears, sinking and then raising herself to her knees and trying to tear her black silk gown with the white epaulets and the white bobbing. Elphaba, dry-eyed as a desert stone, continued.

“We waited until after breakfast, but then we went to Madame Morrible’s,” said Elphaba, “and told her that we didn’t know where Ama Clutch was. And Madame Morrible said that Ama Clutch had had a relapse during the night and was recovering in the infirmary. She wouldn’t let us in to see her at first, but then when Doctor Dillamond didn’t show up for our first lecture of the semester, we wandered over there and just pushed our way in. Ama Clutch was in a hospital bed. Her face looked funny, like the last pancake of the batch, the way it goes all wrong. We said, ‘Ama Clutch, Ama Clutch, what has happened to you?’ She didn’t say anything even though her eyes were open. She didn’t seem to hear us. We thought maybe she was asleep or in shock, but her breathing was regular and her color was good even though her face seemed awry. Then as we were leaving she turned and she looked at the bedside table.

“Next to a medicine bottle and a cup of lemon water there was a long rusty nail on a silver tray. She reached a shaky hand out to the nail and picked it up and held it in her palm, tenderly, and she talked to it. She said something like, ‘Oh well then, I know you didn’t mean to stab my foot last year. You were only trying to get my attention. That’s what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for. Well, don’t you worry Nail, because I’m going to love you just as much as you need. And after I have a little nap you can tell me how you came to be holding up the platform of the railway station at Frottica, for it seems quite a leap from your early years as a common hook for a CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign in that dingy hotel you were talking about.”’

But Boq could not listen to this blather. He could not take in the story of a live Nail while a dead Goat was being prayed over by hysterical faculty members. Boq could not listen to the sounds of the prayers for the repose of the Animal’s spirit. He could not watch the departure of the corpse, when they trundled it away. For it had been clear, with a glimpse of the Goat’s still face, that whatever had given the doctor his enlivening character had already disappeared.

The Charmed Circle

3

There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who had seen the corpse that the word, the correct word, was murder. The way the pelt about the neck had bunched up, caked together like an improperly cleaned worker’s paintbrush; the raw amber hollow in the eye. The official story was that the doctor had broken a magnifying lens and stumbled against it, cutting an artery in the process—but nobody believed it.

The only one they could think of to ask, Ama Clutch, merely smiled when they came to visit, with handfuls of pretty yellowing leaves or a plate of late Pertha grapes. She devoured the grapes and chatted with the leaves. It was an ailment no one had ever seen before.

Glinda—for out of some belated apology for her initial rudeness to the martyred Goat, she now called herself as he had once called her—Glinda seemed to be stricken dumb before the fact of Ama Clutch. Glinda wouldn’t visit, nor discuss the poor woman’s condition, so Elphaba sneaked in once or twice a day. Boq assumed that Ama Clutch suffered a passing malady. But after three weeks Madame Morrible began to make sounds of concern that Elphaba and Glinda—still roomies—had no chaperone. She suggested the common dormitory for them both. Glinda, who would no longer go to see Madame Morrible on her own, nodded and accepted the demotion. It was Elphaba who came up with a solution, mostly to salvage some shred of Glinda’s dignity.

Thus it was that ten days later Boq found himself in the beer garden of the Cock and Pumpkins, waiting for the midweek coach from the Emerald City. Madame Morrible didn’t allow Elphaba and Glinda to join him, so he had to decide for himself which two of the seven passengers alighting were Nanny and Nessarose. The deformities of Elphaba’s sister were well concealed, Elphaba had warned him; Nessarose could even descend from a carriage with grace, providing the step was secure and the ground flat.

He met them, said hello. Nanny was a stewed plum of a woman, red and loose, her old skin looking ready to trail off but for the tucks at the corners of the mouth, the fleshy rivets by the edges of the eyes. More than a score of years in the badlands of Quadling Country had made her lethargic, careless, and saturated with resentment. At her age she ought to have been allowed to nod off in some warm chimney nook. “Good to see a little Munchkinlander,” she murmured to Boq. “It’s like the old times.” Then she turned and said into the shadows, “Come, my poppet.”

Had he not been warned, Boq wouldn’t have taken Nessarose as Elphaba’s sister. She was by no means green, or even blue-white like a genteel person with bad circulation. Nessarose stepped from the carriage elegantly, gingerly, strangely, sinking her heel to touch the iron step at the same time as her toe. Walking as oddly as she did, she drew attention to her feet, which kept eyes away from the torso, at least at first.

The feet landed on the ground, driven there with a ferocious intention to balance, and Nessarose stood before him. She was as Elphaba had said: gorgeous, pink, slender as a wheat stalk, and armless. The academic shawl over her shoulders was cunningly folded to soften the shock.

“Hello, good sir,” she said, nodding her head very slightly. “The valises are on top. Can you manage?” Her voice was as smooth and oiled as Elphaba’s was serrated. Nanny propelled Nessarose gently toward the hansom cab that Boq had engaged. He saw that Nessarose did not move well without being able to lean backward against a steadying hand.

“So now Nanny has to see the girls through their schooling,” said Nanny to Boq as they rode along. “What with their sainted mother in her waterlogged grave these long years, and their father off his head. Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. Madness is the most shining way. The elderly man, the Eminent Thropp, he’s still alive, and sensible as an old ploughshare. Survived his daughter and his granddaughter. Elphaba is the Thropp Third Descending. She’ll be the Eminence one day. As a Munchkinlander, you know about such things.”

“Nanny don’t gossip, it hurts my soul,” Nessarose said.

“Oh my pretty, don’t you fret. This Boq is an old friend, or as good as,” said Nanny. “Out in the swamps of Quadling hell, my friend, we’ve lost the art of conversation. We croak in chorus with what’s left of the froggie folk.”

“I intend to have a headache from shame,” said Nessarose, charmingly.

“But I knew Elphie when she was a small thing,” said Boq. “I’m from Rush Margins in Wend Hardings. I must’ve met you too.”

“Primarily I preferred to reside at Colwen Grounds,” said Nanny. “I was a mortal comfort to the Lady Partra, the Thropp Second Descending. But occasionally I visited Rush Margins. So I may have met you when you were young enough to run around without trousers.”

“How do you do,” said Nessarose.

“The name is Boq,” said Boq.

“This is Nessarose,” said Nanny, as if it were too painful for the girl to introduce herself. “She was to come up to Shiz next year, but we have learned there’s a problem with some Gillikinese minder going loopy. So Nanny is called to step in, and can Nanny leave her sweet? You see why not.”

“A sad mystery, we hope for improvement,” said Boq.

At Crage Hall, Boq witnessed the reunion of the sisters, which was warm and gratifying. Madame Morrible had her Grommetik thing wheel out tea and brisks for the Thropp females, and for Nanny, Boq, and Glinda. Boq, who had begun to worry about Glinda’s retreat into silence, was relieved to see Glinda cast a hard, appraising eye over the elegant dress of Nessarose. How could it be, he wondered if Glinda was wondering, that two sisters should each be disfigured, and should clothe themselves so unlike? Elphaba wore the humblest of dark frocks; today she was in a deep purple, almost a black. Nessarose, balanced on a sofa next to Nanny, who assisted by lifting teacups and crumpling buttery bits of crumpet, was in green silks, the colors of moss, emerald, and yellow-green roses. Green Elphaba, sitting on her other side and lending her support between the shoulders as she tilted her head back to sip her tea, looked like a fashion accessory.

“The whole arrangement is highly unusual,” Madame Morrible was saying, “but we don’t have unlimited room to accommodate peculiarities, alas. We’ll leave Miss Elphaba and Miss Galinda—Glinda is it now, dear? How novel—we’ll leave those two old pals as they are, and we’ll set you up, Miss Nessarose, with your Nanny in the adjoining room that poor old Ama Clutch had. It’s small but you must think of it as cozy.”

“But when Ama Clutch recovers?” asked Glinda.

“Oh, but my dear,” said Madame Morrible, “such confidence the young have! Touching, really.” She continued in a more steely voice. “You have already told me of the long-standing recurrence of this unusual medical condition. I can only assume this has deteriorated into a permanent relapse.” She munched a biscuit in her slow, fishy way, her cheeks going in and out like the leather flaps of a bellows. “Of course we can all hope. Not much more than that, I’m afraid.”

“And we can pray,” Nessarose said.

“Oh well yes, that,” said the Head. “That goes without saying among people of good breeding, Miss Nessarose.”

Boq watched Nessarose and Elphaba both blush. Glinda excused herself and went away. The usual pang of panic Boq felt at her departure was softened by knowing he would see her again in life sciences next week, for, with the new prohibitions on Animal hiring, the colleges had decided to give assembly lectures to all the students from all the colleges, at once. Boq would see Glinda at the first coeducation lecture ever held at Shiz. He couldn’t wait.

Though she had changed. She had surely changed.

2

Glinda was changed. She knew it herself. She had come to Shiz a vain, silly thing, and she now found herself in a coven of vipers. Maybe it was her own fault. She had invented a nonsense disease for Ama Clutch, and Ama Clutch had come down with it. Was this proof of an inherent talent of sorcery? Glinda opted to specialize in sorcery this year, and accepted it as her punishment that Madame Morrible didn’t change her roomie as promised. Glinda no longer cared. Beside Doctor Dillamond’s death, a lot of other matters now seemed insignificant.

But she didn’t trust Madame Morrible either. Glinda had told nobody else that stupid and extravagant lie. So now she would no longer allow Madame Morrible so much as a fingerhold into her life. And Glinda still didn’t have the nerve to confess her unintentional crime to anyone. While she fretted, Boq, that pesky little flea, kept zizzing around her looking for attention. She was sorry she had let him kiss her. What a mistake! Well, all that was behind her now, that trembling on the edges of social disaster. She had seen the Misses Pfannee et cetera for what they were—shallow, self-serving snobs—and she would have no more to do with them.

So Elphaba, no longer a social liability, had all the potential of becoming an actual friend. If being saddled with this broken doll of a baby sister didn’t interfere too much. It was only with prodding that Glinda had gotten Elphaba to talk at all about her sister, so that Glinda might be prepared for Nessarose’s arrival and the enlargement of their social circle.

“She was born at Colwen Grounds, when I was about three,” Elphaba had told her. “My family had gone back to Colwen Grounds for a short stay. It was one of those times of intense drought. Our father told us later, after our mother had died, that Nessarose’s birth had coincided with a temporary resurgence of well water in the vicinity. They’d been doing pagan dances and there was a human sacrifice.”

Glinda had stared at Elphaba, who sounded at once unwilling and offhand.

“A friend of theirs, a Quadling glassblower. The crowd, incited by some rabble-rousing pfaithers and a prophetic clock, fell on him and killed him. A man named Turtle Heart.” Elphaba had pressed the palms of her hands over the high uppers of her stiff black secondhand shoes, and kept her eyes trained on the floor. “I think that was why my parents became missionaries to the Quadling people, why they never went back to Colwen Grounds or Munchkinland.”

“But your mother died in childbirth?” said Glinda. “How could she have been a missionary?”

“She didn’t die for five years,” said Elphaba, looking at the folds of her dress, as if the story were an embarrassment. “She died when our younger brother was born. My father named him Shell, after Turtle Heart, I think. So Shell and Nessarose and I lived the lives of gypsy children, slopping around from Quadling settlement to settlement with Nanny and our father, Frex. He preached, and Nanny taught us and raised us up and kept house such as we ever had, which wasn’t much. Meanwhile the Wizard’s men began draining the badlands to get at the ruby deposits. It never worked, of course. They managed to chase the Quadlings out and kill them, round them up in settlement camps for their own protection and starve them. They despoiled the badlands, raked up the rubies, and left. My father went barmy over it. There never were enough rubies to make it worth the effort; we still have no canal system to run that legendary water from the Vinkus all the way cross-country to Munchkinland. And the drought, after a few promising reprieves, continues unabated. The Animals are recalled to the lands of their ancestors, a ploy to give the farmers a sense of control over something anyway. It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”

“We were talking about your childhood,” said Glinda.

“Well that’s it, that’s all part of it. You can’t divorce your particulars from politics,” Elphaba said. “You want to know what we ate? How we played?”

“I want to know what Nessarose is like, and Shell,” said Glinda.

“Nessarose is a strong-willed semi-invalid,” said Elphaba. “She’s very smart, and thinks she is holy. She has inherited my father’s taste for religion. She isn’t good at taking care of other people because she has never learned how to take care of herself. She can’t. My father required me to baby-sit her through most of my childhood. What she will do when Nanny dies I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to take care of her again.”

“Oh, what a hideous prospect for a life,” said Glinda, before she could stop herself.

But Elphaba only nodded grimly. “I can’t agree with you more,” she said.

“As for Shell—” continued Glinda, wondering what fresh pain she might tread upon.

“Male, and white, and whole,” she said. “He’s now about ten, I guess. He’ll stay at home and take care of our father. He is a boy, just as boys are. A little dull, maybe, but he hasn’t had the advantages we’ve had.”

“Which are?” prompted Glinda.

“Even for a short time,” said Elphaba, “we had a mother. Giddy, alcoholic, imaginative, uncertain, desperate, brave, stubborn, supportive woman. We had her. Melena. Shell had no mother but Nanny, who did her best.”

“And who was your mother’s favorite?” said Glinda.

“Can’t tell that,” said Elphaba casually, “don’t know. Would have been Shell, probably, since he’s a boy. But she died without seeing him so she didn’t even get that small consolation.”

“Your father’s favorite?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Elphaba, jumping up and finding her books on her shelf, and getting ready to run out and stop the conversation in its tracks. “That’s Nessarose. You’ll see why when you meet her. She’d be anyone’s favorite.” She skidded out of the room with no more than a brief flurry of green fingers, a good-bye.

Glinda wasn’t so sure she favored Elphaba’s sister. Nessarose seemed so demanding. Nanny was overly attentive, and Elphaba kept suggesting adjustments in their living arrangements to make things perfect. Hitch the drapes to this angle instead of that, to keep the touch of the sun off Nessarose’s pretty skin. Can we have the oil lamp turned up high so Nessarose can read? Shhh, no chatting after hours; Nessarose has retired and she is such a light sleeper.

Glinda was a bit awed by Nessarose’s freaky beauty. Nessarose dressed well (if not extravagantly). She deflected attention from herself, though, by a system of little social tics—the head lowered in a sudden onslaught of devotion, the eyes batting. It was especially moving—and irritating—to have to wipe away a trickle of tears brought on by some epiphany in Nessarose’s rich inner spiritual life of which bystanders could have no inkling. What did one say?

Glinda began to retreat into her studies. Sorcery was being taught by a louche new instructor named Miss Greyling. She had a gushing respect for the subject but, it soon became apparent, little natural ability. “At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change,” she would flute at them. But when the chicken she tried to turn into a piece of toast became instead a mess of used coffee grounds cupped in a lettuce leaf, the students all made a mental note never to accept an invitation to dine with her.

In the back of the room, creeping with pretend invisibility so that she might observe, Madame Morrible shook her head and clucked. Once or twice she could not stop herself from interfering. “No dab hand in the sorcerer’s parlor I,” she would protest, “yet surely Miss Greyling you’ve omitted the steps to bind and convince? I’m merely asking. Let me try. You know I take a special pleasure in our training of sorceresses.” Inevitably Miss Greyling sat on what was left of a previous demonstration, or dropped her purse, collapsing into a heap of shame and mortification. The girls giggled, and didn’t feel that they were learning much.

Or were they? The benefit of Miss Greyling’s clumsiness was that they were not afraid to try for themselves. And she didn’t stint at enthusiasm if a student managed to accomplish the day’s task. The first time Glinda was able to mask a spool of thread with a spell of invisibility, even for a few seconds, Miss Greyling clapped her hands and jumped up and down and broke a heel off her shoe. It was gratifying, and encouraging.

“Not that I have any objection,” said Elphaba one day, when she and Glinda and Nessarose (and, inevitably, Nanny) sat under a pearlfruit tree by the Suicide Canal. “But I have to wonder. How does the university get away with teaching sorcery when its original charter was so strictly unionist?”

“Well, there isn’t anything inherently either religious or nonreligious about sorcery,” said Glinda. “Is there? There isn’t anything inherently pleasure faithist about it either.”

“Spells, changings, apparitions? It’s all entertainment,” said Elphaba. “It’s theatre.”

“Well, it can look like theatre, and in the hands of Miss Greyling it often looks like bad theatre,” admitted Glinda. “But the gist of it isn’t concerned with application. It’s a practical skill, like—like reading and writing. It’s not that you can, it’s what you read or write. Or, if you’ll excuse the play on words, what you spell.”

“Father disapproved mightily,” Nessarose said, in the dulcet tones of the unflappably faithful. “Father always said that magic was the sleight of hand of the devil. He said pleasure faith was no more than an exercise to distract the masses from the true object of their devotion.”

“That’s a unionist talking,” said Glinda, not taking offense. “A sensible opinion, if what you’re up against is charlatans or street performers. But sorcery doesn’t have to be that. What about the common witches up in the Glikkus? They say that they magick the cows they’ve imported from Munchkinland so they don’t go mooing over the edge of some precipice. Who could ever afford to put a fence on every ledge there? The magic is a local skill, a contribution to community well-being. It doesn’t have to supplant religion.”

“It may not have to,” said Nessarose, “but if it tends to, then have we a duty to be wary of it?”

“Oh, wary, well, I’m wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned,” said Glinda. “That doesn’t mean I stop drinking water.”

“Well, I don’t even think it’s so big an issue,” said Elphaba. “I think sorcery is trivial. It’s concerned with itself mostly, it doesn’t lead outward.”

Glinda concentrated very hard and tried to make Elphaba’s leftover sandwich elevate outward over the canal. She only succeeded in exploding the thing in a small combustion of mayonnaise and shredded carrot and chopped olives. Nessarose lost her balance laughing, and Nanny had to prop her up again. Elphaba was covered in bits of food, which she picked off herself and ate, to the disgust and laughter of everyone else. “It’s all effects, Glinda,” she said. “There’s nothing ontologically interesting about magic. Not that I believe in unionism either,” she protested. “I’m an atheist and an aspiritualist.”

“You say that to shock and scandalize,” said Nessarose primly. “Glinda, don’t listen to a word of her. She always does this, usually to make Father irate.”

“Father’s not around,” Elphaba reminded her sister.

“I stand in for him and I am offended,” said Nessarose. “It’s all very well to turn your nose up at unionism when you have been given a nose by the Unnamed God. It’s quite funny, isn’t it, Glinda? Childish.” She looked spitting angry.

“Father’s not around,” said Elphaba again, in a tone that verged on the apologetic. “You needn’t rush to public defense of his obsessions.”

“What you term his obsessions are my articles of faith,” she said with a chilly clarity.

“Well you’re not a bad sorceress, for a beginner,” said Elphaba, turning to Glinda. “That was a pretty good mess you made of my lunch.”

“Thank you,” Glinda said. “I didn’t mean to pelt you with it. But I am getting better, aren’t I? And out in public.”

“A shocking display,” Nessarose said. “That’s exactly what Father would have deplored about sorcery. The allure is all in the surface.”

“I agree, it still tastes like olives,” Elphaba said, finding a clump of black olive in her sleeve and holding it out on the tip of her finger to her sister’s mouth. “Taste, Nessa?”

But Nessarose turned her face away and lost herself in silent prayer.

3

A few days later Boq managed to catch Elphaba’s eye at the break of their life sciences class, and they met up in an alcove off the main corridor. “What do you think of this new Doctor Nikidik?” he asked.

“I find it hard to listen,” she said, “but that’s because I still want to hear Doctor Dillamond and I can’t believe he’s gone.” On her face was a look of gray submission to impossible reality.

“Well that’s one of the things I’m curious about,” he said. “You told me all about Doctor Dillamond’s breakthrough. Do you know if his lab has been cleared out yet? Maybe there’s something there worth finding. You took the notes for him, couldn’t they be the basis of some proposal, or at least some further study?”

She looked at him with a wiry, strong expression. “Do you think I’m not way ahead of you?” she asked. “Of course I went tramping through there the day his body was found. Before anyone could lace up the door with padlocks and binding spells. Boq, do you take me for a fool?”

“No, I don’t take you for a fool, so tell me what you found,” he said.

“His findings are well hidden away,” she said, “and though there are colossal holes in my training, I am studying it on my own.”

“You mean you’re not going to show me?” He was shocked.

“It was never your particular interest,” she said. “Besides, until there’s something to prove, what’s the point? I don’t think Doctor Dillamond was there yet.”

“I am a Munchkinlander,” he answered proudly. “Look, Elphie, you’ve more or less convinced me what the Wizard is up to. The confining of Animals back onto farms—to give the dissatisfied Munchkinlander farmers the impression he’s doing something for them—and also to provide forced labor for the sinking of useless new wells. It’s vile. But this affects Wend Hardings and the towns that sent me here. I have a right to know what you know. Maybe we can figure it out together, work to make a change.”

“You have too much to lose,” she said. “I’m going to take this on myself.”

“Take what on?”

She only shook her head. “The less you know the better, and I mean for your sake. Whoever killed Doctor Dillamond doesn’t want his findings made public. What kind of a friend would I be to you if I put you at risk too?”

“What kind of friend would I be to you if I didn’t insist?” he retorted.

But she wouldn’t tell him. When he sat next to her during the rest of the class and passed her little notes, she ignored them all. Later he thought that they might have developed a genuine impasse in their friendship had the odd attack on the newcomer not occurred during that very session.

Doctor Nikidik had been lecturing on the Life Force. Entwining around each wrist the two separate tendrils of his long straggly beard, he spoke in falling tones so that only the first half of each sentence made it to the back of the room. Hardly a single student was following. When Doctor Nikidik took a small bottle from his vest pocket and mumbled something about “Extract of Biological Intention,” only the students in the front row sat up and opened their eyes. For Boq and Elphaba, and everyone else, the patter ran—“A little sauce for the soup mumble mumble, as if creation were an unconcluded mumble mumble mumble, notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient mumble mumble mumble, and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the mumble mumble mumble, behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of mumble mumble mumble.”

A frisson of excitement had woken everyone up. The Doctor uncorked the smoky bottle and made a jerky movement. They could all see a small puff of dust, like an effervescence of talcum powder, jostle itself in a swimming plume in the air above the neck of the bottle. The Doctor rowed his hands a couple of times, to start the air currents eddying upward. Keeping some rare sort of spatial coherence, the plume began to migrate upward and over. The ooohs that the students were inclined to make were all postponed. Doctor Nikidik held a finger out to them to shush them, and they could tell why. A vast intake of breath would change the pattern of air currents and divert the floating musk of powder. But the students began to smile, despite themselves. Above the stage, amid the standard ceremonial stags’ horns and brass trumpets on braid, hung four oil portraits of the founding fathers of Ozma Towers. In their ancient garb and serious expressions they looked down on today’s students. If this “biological intention” were to be applied to one of the founding fathers, what would he say, seeing men and women students together in the great hall? What would he have to say about anything? It was a grand moment of anticipation.

But when a door to the side of the stage opened, the mechanics of the air currents were disturbed. A student looked in, puzzled. A new student, oddly dressed in suede leggings and a white cotton shirt, with a pattern of blue diamonds tattooed on the dark skin of his face and hands. No one had seen him before, or anyone like him. Boq clutched Elphaba’s hand tightly and whispered, “Look! A Winkie!”

And so it seemed, a student from the Vinkus, in strange ceremonial garb, coming late for class, opening the wrong door, confused and apologetic, but the door had shut behind him and locked from this side, and there were no nearby seats available in the front rows. So he dropped where he was and sat with his back against the door, hoping, no doubt, to look inconspicuous.

“Drat and damn, the thing’s been shabbed off course,” said Doctor Nikidik. “You fool, why don’t you come to class on time?”

The shining mist, about the size of a bouquet of flowers, had veered upward in a draft, and it bypassed the ranks of long-dead dignitaries waiting an unexpected chance to speak again. Instead it cloaked one of the racks of antlers, seeming for a few moments to hang itself on the twisting prongs. “Well, I can scarcely hope to hear a word of wisdom from them, and I refuse to waste any more of this precious commodity on classroom demonstrations,” said Doctor Nikidik. “The research is still incomplete and I had thought that mumble mumble mumble. Let you discover for yourselves if mumble mumble mumble. I should hardly wish to prejudice your mumble.”

The antlers suddenly took a convulsive twist on the wall, and wrenched themselves out of the oaken paneling. They tumbled and clattered to the floor, to the shrieking and laughing of the students, especially because for a minute Doctor Nikidik didn’t know what the uproar was about. He turned around in time to see the antlers right themselves and wait, quivering, twitching, on the dais, like a fighting cock all nastied up and ready to go into the ring.

“Oh well, don’t look at me,” said Doctor Nikidik, collecting his books, “I didn’t ask for anything from you. Blame that one if you must.” And he casually pointed at the Vinkus student, who was cowering so wide-eyed that the more cynical of the older students began to suspect this was all a setup.

The antlers stood on their points and skittered, crablike, across the stage. As the students rose in a common scream, the antlers scrabbled up the body of the Vinkus boy and pinned him against the locked door. One wing of the rack caught him by the neck, shackling him in its V yoke, and the other reared back in the air to stab him in the face.

Doctor Nikidik tried to move fast, and fell to his arthritic knees, but before he could right himself two boys were up on the stage, out of the front row, grabbing the antlers and wrestling them to the ground. The Vinkus boy shrieked in a foreign tongue. “That’s Crope and Tibbett!” said Boq, jouncing Elphaba in the shoulder, “look!” The sorcery students were all jumping on their seats and trying to lob spells at the murderous antlers, and Crope and Tibbett found their grips and lost them and found them again, until at last they succeeded in breaking off one driving tine, then another, and the pieces, still twitching, fell to the stage floor without further momentum.

“Oh the poor guy,” said Boq, for the Vinkus student had slumped down and was volubly weeping behind his blue-diamonded hands. “I never saw a student from the Vinkus before. What an awful welcome to Shiz.”

The attack on the Vinkus student provoked gossip and speculation. In sorcery the next day Glinda asked Miss Greyling to explain something. “How could Doctor Nikidik’s Extract of Biological Intention or whatever it was, how could it fall under the heading of life sciences when it behaved like a master spell? What really is the difference between science and sorcery?”

“Ah,” said Miss Greyling, choosing this moment to apply herself to the care of her hair. “Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled”—at this she jabbed herself with a hair pin and yelped—“it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.” She began to weep softly with the force of her own rhetoric. “Can there be a higher desire than to change the world? Not to draw Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?”

At teatime, still awed and amused, Glinda reported Miss Greyling’s little heartfelt speech to the two Thropp sisters. Nessarose said, “Only the Unnamed God creates, Glinda. If Miss Greyling confuses sorcery with creation she is in grave danger of corrupting your morals.”

“Well,” said Glinda, thinking of Ama Clutch on the bed of mental pain Glinda had once imagined for her, “my morals aren’t in the greatest shape to start out with, Nessa.”

“Then if sorcery is to be helpful at all, it must be in reconstructing your character,” said Nessarose firmly. “If you apply yourself in that direction, I suspect it will be all right in the end. Use your talent at sorcery, don’t be used by it.”

Glinda suspected that Nessarose might develop a knack for being witheringly superior. She winced in advance, even while taking Nessarose’s suggestion to heart.

But Elphaba said, “Glinda, that was a good question. I wish Miss Greyling had answered it. That little nightmare with the antlers looked more like magic than science to me, too. The poor Vinkus fellow! Suppose we ask Doctor Nikidik next week?”

“Who ever would have the courage to do that?” cried Glinda. “Miss Greyling is at least ridiculous. Doctor Nikidik, with that lovable bumbling mumbling incoherent way he has—he’s so distinguished.”

At the life sciences lecture the following week, all eyes were on the new Vinkus boy. He arrived early and settled himself in the balcony, about as far from the lectern as he could get. Boq had the suspicion of nomads all settled farmers possessed. But Boq had to admit that the expression in the new boy’s eyes was intelligent. Avaric, sliding into the seat next to Boq, said, “He’s a prince, they say. A prince without a purse or a throne. A pauper noble. In his particular tribe, I mean. He stays at Ozma Towers and his name is Fiyero. He’s a real Winkie, full-blood. Wonder what he makes of civilization?”

“If that was civilization, last week, he must long for his own barbaric kind,” said Elphaba from the seat on the other side of Boq.

“What’s he wearing such silly paint for?” said Avaric. “He only draws attention to himself. And that skin. I wouldn’t want to have skin the color of shit.”

“What a thing to say,” said Elphaba. “If you ask me, that’s a shitty opinion.”

“Oh please,” said Boq. “Let’s just shut up.”

“I forgot, Elphie, skin is your issue too,” said Avaric.

“Leave me out of this,” she said. “We just had lunch, and you give me dyspepsia, Avaric. You and the beans we had at lunch.”

“I’m changing my seat,” warned Boq, but Doctor Nikidik came in just then, and the class rose to its feet in routine respect, then settled back noisily, chummily, chattering.

For a few minutes Elphaba waved her hand to get the Doctor’s attention, but she was sitting too far back and he was burbling on about something else. She finally leaned over to Boq and said, “At the recess I’ll change my seat and go forward so he can see me.” Then the class watched as Doctor Nikidik finished his inaudible preamble and beckoned a student to open the same door at the side of the stage that Fiyero had stumbled through the previous week.

In came a boy from Three Queens rolling a table like a tea tray. On it, crouched as if to make itself as small as possible, was a lion cub. Even from the balcony they could sense the terror of the beast. Its tail, a little whip the color of mashed peanuts, lashed back and forth, and its shoulders hunched. It had no mane to speak of yet, it was too tiny. But the tawny head twisted this way and that, as if counting the threats. It opened its mouth in a little terrified yawp, the infant form of an adult roar. All over the room hearts melted and people said “Awwwwww.”

“Hardly more than a kitten,” said Doctor Nikidik. “I had thought to call it Prrr, but it shivers more often than it purrs, so I call it Brrr instead.”

The creature looked at Doctor Nikidik, and removed itself to the far edge of the trolley.

“Now the question of the morning is this,” said Doctor Nikidik. “Picking up from the somewhat skewed interests of Doctor Dillamond, who mumble mumble. Who can tell me if this is an Animal or an animal?”

Elphaba didn’t wait to be called on. She stood up in the balcony and launched her answer out in a clear, strong voice. “Doctor Nikidik, the question you asked was who can tell if this is an Animal or an animal. It seems to me the answer is that its mother can. Where is its mother?”

A buzz of amusement. “Caught in the swamp of syntactical semantics, I see,” said the Doctor merrily. He spoke louder, as if having only now realized that there was a balcony in the hall. “Well done, Miss. Let me rephrase the question. Will someone here venture a hypothesis as to the nature of this specimen? And give a reason for such an assessment? We see before us a beast at a tender age, long before any such beast could command language if language were part of its makeup. Before language—assuming language—is this still an Animal?”

“I repeat my question, Doctor,” sang out Elphaba. “This is a very young cub. Where is its mother? Why is it taken from its mother at such an early age? How even can it feed?”

“Those are impertinent questions to the academic issue at hand,” said the Doctor. “Still, the youthful heart bleeds easily. The mother, shall we say, died in a sadly timed explosion. Let us presume for the sake of argument that there was no way of telling whether the mother was a Lioness or a lioness. After all, as you may have heard, some Animals are going back to the wild to escape the implications of the current laws.”

Elphaba sat down, nonplused. “It doesn’t seem right to me,” she said to Boq and Avaric. “For the sake of a science lesson to drag a cub in here without its mother. Look how terrified it is. It is shivering. And it can’t be cold.”

Other students began to venture opinions, but the Doctor shot them down one by one. The point being, apparently, that without language or contextual clues, at its infant stages a beast was not clearly Animal or animal.

“This has a political implication,” said Elphaba loudly. “I thought this was life sciences, not current events.”

Boq and Avaric shushed her. She was getting a terrible reputation as a loudmouth.

The Doctor dragged the episode out long after everyone had digested the point. But finally he turned and said, “Now do you think that if we could cauterize that part of the brain that develops language, we could eliminate the notion of pain and thus its existence? Early tests on this little tom lion show interesting results.” He had picked up a small hammer with a rubber head, and a syringe. The beast drew itself up and hissed, and then backed up and fell on the floor, and streaked toward the door, which had closed and locked from this side as it had the previous week.

But it wasn’t only Elphaba who was on her feet yelling. Half a dozen students were shouting at the Doctor. “Pain? Eliminate pain? Look at the thing, it’s terrified! It already gets pain! Don’t do that, what are you, crazy?”

The Doctor paused, visibly tightening his grip on the mallet. “I will not preside over such shocking refusal to learn!” he said, affronted. “You are leaping to harebrained conclusions based on sentiment and no observation. Bring the beast here. Bring it back. Young lady, I insist. I shall be quite cross.”

But two girls from Briscoe Hall disobeyed and ran out of the room carrying the clawing lion club in an apron between them. The room collapsed in an uproar and Doctor Nikidik stalked off the stage. Elphaba turned to Boq and said, “Well, I guess I don’t get to ask Glinda’s good question about the difference between science and sorcery, do I? We were definitely headed down a different path today.” But her voice was shaking.

“You felt for that beast, didn’t you?” Boq was touched. “Elphie, you’re trembling. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, but you’ve nearly gone white with passion. Come on, let’s sneak out and get a tea at the café at Railway Square, for old times’ sake.”

4

Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between the initial shyness and prejudice on the one hand and eventual repugnance and betrayal on the other. For Boq it seemed that his summer obsession with the-then-Galinda made sense if only to usher in this following, more mature comfort with a circle of friends who had begun to feel inevitably and permanently connected.

The boys still weren’t allowed access to Crage Hall, nor the girls to the boys’ schools, but the city centre area of Shiz became an extension of the parlors and lecture halls in which they were allowed to mingle. On a midweek afternoon, on a weekend morning, they would meet by the canal with a bottle of wine, or in a café or student watering hole, or they would walk about and discuss the fine points of Shiz architecture, or they would laugh about the excesses of their teachers. Boq and Avaric, Elphaba and Nessarose (with Nanny), Glinda, and sometimes Pfannee and Shenshen and Milla, and sometimes Crope and Tibbett. And Crope brought Fiyero along and introduced him, which frosted Tibbett for a week or so until the evening that Fiyero said, in his shy formal way, “Of course—I have been married for some time. We marry young in the Vinkus.” The others were agog at the notion, and felt juvenile.

To be sure, Elphaba and Avaric needled each other mercilessly. Nessarose tried everyone’s patience with her religious rantings. Crope’s and Tibbett’s stream of saucy remarks got them dumped in the canal more than once. But Boq was relieved to find that his crush on Glinda was lifting somewhat. She sat on the edge of the picnic blanket with a look of self-reliance, and she diverted conversation away from herself. He had loved the girl who had loved the glamour in herself, and that girl seemed to have disappeared. But he was happy to have Glinda as a friend. Well, in a nutshell: he had loved Galinda and this now was Glinda. Someone he could no longer quite figure out. Case closed.

It was a charmed circle.

All the girls steered clear of Madame Morrible while they could. One cold evening, however, Grommetik came hunting for the Thropp sisters. Nanny huffed and wound the strings of a fresh apron around her waist, and prodded Nessarose and Elphaba downstairs toward the parlor of the Head.

“I hate that Grommetik thing,” said Nessarose. “However does it work, anyway? Is it clockwork or is it magicked, or some combination of the two?”

“I always imagined a bit of nonsense—that there was a dwarf inside, or an acrobatic family of elves each working a limb,” said Elphaba. “Whenever Grommetik comes around, my hand gets a strange hunger for a hammer.”

“I can’t imagine,” Nessarose said. “Hand hunger, I mean.”

“Hush, you two, the thing has ears,” Nanny said.

Madame Morrible was glancing through the financial papers, making a few marks in the margin before she deigned to acknowledge her students. “This won’t take but a moment,” she said. “I’ve had a letter from your dear father, and a package for you. I thought it kindest to deliver the news myself.”

“News?” said Nessarose, blanching.

“He could have written to us as well as to you,” said Elphaba.

Madame Morrible ignored her. “He writes to ask of Nessarose’s health and progress, and to tell you both that he is going to undertake a fast and penance for the return of Ozma Tippetarius.”

“Oh, the blessed little girl,” said Nanny, warming to one of her favorite subjects. “When the Wizard took over the Palace all those years ago and he had the Ozma Regent jailed, we all thought that the sainted Ozma child would call down disaster upon the Wizard’s head. But they say she’s been spirited away and frozen in a cave, like Lurlina. Has Frexspar got the mettle to melt her—is now her time to return?”

“Please,” said Madame Morrible to the sisters, with a sour glance at Nanny, “I haven’t asked you here so that your Nanny could discuss this contemporary apocrypha, nor to slander our glorious Wizard. It was a peaceful transition of power. That the Ozma Regent’s health failed while under house arrest was a mere coincidence, nothing more. As to the power of your father to raise the missing royal child from some unsubstantiated state of somnolence—well, you’ve as much as admitted to me that your father is erratic, if not mad. I can only wish him health in his endeavors. But I feel it my duty to point out to you girls that we do not smile on seditious attitudes at Crage Hall. I hope you have not imported your father’s royalist yearnings into the dormitories here.”

“We assign ourselves to the Unnamed God, not to the Wizard nor to any possible remnant of the Royal Family,” Nessarose said proudly.

“I have no feeling on the matter at all,” muttered Elphaba, “except that Father loves lost causes.”

“Very well,” said the Head. “As it should be. Now I have had a package for you.” She handed it to Elphaba, but added, “It is for Nessarose, I think.”

“Open it, Elphie, please,” said Nessarose. Nanny leaned forward to look.

Elphaba undid the cord and opened the wooden box. From a pile of ash shavings she withdrew a shoe, and then another. Were they silver?—or blue?—or now red?—lacquered with a candy shell brilliance of polish? It was hard to tell and it didn’t matter; the effect was dazzling. Even Madame Morrible gasped at their splendor. The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.

“He writes that he bought them for you from some toothless tinker woman outside Ovvels,” said Madame Morrible, “and that he dressed them up with silver glass beads that he made himself—that someone had taught him to make?—”

“Turtle Heart,” said Nanny darkly.

“—and”— Madame Morrible flipped the letter over, squinting—“he says he had hoped to give you something special before you left for university, but in the sudden circumstances of Ama Clutch’s sickness . . . blah blah . . . he was unprepared. So now he sends them to his Nessarose to keep her beautiful feet warm and dry and beautiful, and he sends them with his love.”

Elphaba drove her fingers through the curlicues of shavings. There was nothing else in the box, nothing for her.

“Aren’t they gorgeous!” Nessarose exclaimed. “Elphie, fix them on my feet, would you please? Oh, how they sparkle!”

Elphaba went on her knees before her sister. Nessarose sat as regal as any Ozma, spine erect and face glowing. Elphaba lifted her sister’s feet and slipped off the common house slippers, and replaced them with the dazzling shoes.

“How thoughtful he is!” said Nessarose.

“Good thing you can stand on your own two feet, you,” muttered Nanny to Elphaba, and put her old hand patronizingly on Elphaba’s shoulder blades, but Elphaba shrugged it away.

“They’re just gorgeous,” said Elphaba thickly. “Nessarose, they’re made for you. They fit like a dream.”

“Oh, Elphie, don’t be cross,” Nessarose said, looking down at her feet. “Don’t ruin my small happiness with resentment, will you? He knows you don’t need this kind of thing . . .”

“Of course not,” said Elphaba. “Of course I don’t.”

That evening the friends risked breaking curfew by ordering another bottle of wine. Nanny tutted and fretted, but as she kept downing her portion as neatly as anyone else, she was overruled. Fiyero told the story of how he had been married at the age of seven to a girl from a neighboring tribe. They all gawped at his apparent lack of shame. He had only seen his bride once, by accident, when they were both about nine. “I won’t really take up with her until we are twenty, and I’m now only eighteen,” he added. With the relief of imagining he might still be as virginal as the rest of them, they ordered yet another bottle of wine.

The candles guttered, a small autumnal rain fell. Though the room was dry, Elphaba drew her cloak about her as if anticipating the walk home. She had gotten over the sting of being overlooked by Frex. She and Nessarose began to tell funny stories about their father, as if to prove to themselves and to everyone else that nothing was amiss. Nessarose, who wasn’t much of a drinker, allowed herself to laugh. “Despite my appearance, or maybe because of it, he always called me his beautiful pet,” she said, alluding to her lack of arms for the first time in public. “He would say, ‘Come here, my pet, and let me give you a piece of apple.’ And I would walk over as best I could, tilting and tottering if Nanny or Elphie or Mother wasn’t around to support me, and fall into his lap, and lean up smiling, and he’d drop small pieces of fruit into my mouth.”

“What did he call you, Elphie?” asked Glinda.

“He called her Fabala,” interrupted Nessarose.

“At home, at home only,” Elphaba said.

“True, you are your father’s little Fabala,” crooned Nanny, almost to herself, just outside the circle of smiling faces. “Little Fabala, little Elphaba, little Elphie.”

“He never called me pet,”’ said Elphaba, raising her glass to her sister. “But we all know he told the truth, as Nessarose is the pet in the family. Hence those splendid shoes.”

Nessarose blushed and accepted a toast. “Ah, but while I had his attention because of my condition, you captured his heart when you sang,” she said.

“Captured his heart? Hah. You mean I performed a necessary function.”

But the others said to Elphaba, “Oh, do you sing? Well then! Sing, sing, you must! Another bottle, another glass, push back the chair, and before we leave for the night, you must sing! Go on!”

“Only if the others will,” said Elphaba, bossily. “Boq? Some Munchkinlander spinniel? Avaric, a Gillikinese ballad? Glinda? Nanny, a lullaby?”

“We know a dirty round, we’ll go next if you go,” said Crope and Tibbett.

“And I will sing a Vinkus hunting chant,” said Fiyero. Everyone chortled with pleasure and clapped him on the back. So then Elphaba had to stand, push her chair aside, clear her throat and sound a note into her cupped hands, and start. As if she were singing for her father, again, after all this time.

The bar mother slapped her rag at some noisy older men to shush them, and the dart players dropped their hands to their sides. The room quieted down. Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen.

Boq did too. Elphaba had an okay voice. He saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck. No, he wasn’t giving her credit: Elphaba had a good voice. It was controlled and feeling and not histrionic. He listened through to the end, and the song faded into the hush of a respectful pub. Later, he thought: The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

“You next, you promised,” cried Elphaba, pointing at Fiyero, but nobody would sing again, because she had done so well. Nessarose nodded to Nanny to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Elphaba says she’s not religious but see how feelingly she sings of the afterlife,” said Nessarose, and for once no one was inclined to argue.

5

Early one morning, when the world was hoary with rimefrost, Grommetik arrived with a note for Glinda. Ama Clutch, it seemed, was on her way out. Glinda and her roommates hurried to the infirmary.

The Head met them there, and led them to a windowless alcove. Ama Clutch was thrashing about in the bed and talking to the pillowcase. “Don’t put up with me,” she was saying wildly, “for what will I ever do for you? I will abuse your good nature, duckie, and rest my oily locks upon your fine close weave and I will be picking with my teeth at your lacy appliquéd edge! You are a stupid nuisance to allow it, I say! I don’t care about notions of service! It’s all bunk, I tell you, bunk!”

“Ama Clutch, Ama Clutch, it’s me,” said Glinda. “Listen, dear, it’s me! It’s your little Galinda.”

Ama Clutch turned her head from side to side. “Your protest is insulting to your forebears!” she went on, rolling her eyes toward the pillowcase again. “Those cotton plants on the banks of Restwater didn’t allow themselves to be harvested so you could lie down like a mat and let any filthy person slobber all over you with night drool! It don’t make a lick of sense!”

“Ama!” Glinda wept. “Please! You’re raving!”

“Aha, I see you have nothing to say to that,” said Ama Clutch with satisfaction.

“Come back, Ama, come back, one more time before you go!”

“Oh sweet Lurline, this is dreadful,” Nanny said. “Darlings, if I ever get like this, poison me, will you?”

“She’s going, I can see it,” Elphaba said. “I saw it enough in Quadling Country, I know the signs. Glinda, say what you need to say, quickly.”

“Madame Morrible, may I have privacy?” Glinda said.

“I will stay by your side and support you. It’s my duty to my girls,” said the Head, settling her hamlike hands determinedly on her waist. But Elphaba and Nanny got up and elbowed her out of the alcove, down the hall, and through the door and closed it and locked it. Nanny clucked all the while, saying, “Now, isn’t that nice of you, Madame Head, but no need. No need at all.”

Glinda gripped Ama Clutch’s hand. Beads of white sweat were forming like potato water on the servant’s forehead. She struggled to pull her hand away but her strength was going. “Ama Clutch, you’re dying,” Glinda said, “and it’s my fault.”

“Oh stop,” Elphaba said.

“It is,” Glinda said fiercely, “it is.”

“I’m not arguing that,” said Elphaba, “I just mean cut yourself out of the conversation; this is her death, not your interview with the Unnamed God. Come on. Do something!”

Glinda grabbed the hands, both hands, even tighter. “I am going to magick you back,” she said between gritted teeth. “Ama Clutch, you do as I say! I’m still your employer and your better, and you have to obey me! Now listen to this spell and behave yourself!”

The Ama’s teeth gnashed, the eyes rolled, and the chin twisted knobbily, as if trying to impale some invisible demon in the air above her bed. Glinda’s eyes shut and her jaw worked, and a thread of sound, syllables incoherent even to herself, came spooling out from her blanched lips. “Hope you don’t explode her like a sandwich,” muttered Elphaba.

Glinda ignored this. She hummed and worked, she rocked and panted. Ama Clutch’s eyelids moved so frantically over the closed eyes that it looked as if her eye sockets were chewing her own eyes. “Magicordium senssus ovinda clenx,” Glinda concluded out loud, “and if that doesn’t do it, I give up; even the smells and bells of a full kit wouldn’t help, I think.”

On the straw pallet Ama Clutch fell back. A little blood ran from the outer edge of each eye. But the wild turning motion of the focus had shuttered itself down. “Oh my dear,” she murmured, “so you’re all right then, or am I dead now?”

“Not yet,” said Glinda. “Yes, dear Ama, yes, I’m fine. But sweetheart, I think you’re going.”

“Of course I am, the Wind is here, can’t you hear it?” Ama Clutch said. “No matter. Oh there’s Elphie, too. Good-bye, my ducks. Stay out of the Wind until the time is right or you’ll be blown in the wrong direction.”

Glinda said, “Ama Clutch, I have something to say to you—I have to make my apology—”

But Elphaba leaned forward, cutting Glinda off from Ama Clutch’s line of sight, and said, “Ama Clutch, before you go, tell us who killed Doctor Dillamond.”

“Surely you know that,” Ama Clutch said.

“Make us sure,” Elphaba said.

“Well, I saw it, I mean nearly. It had just happened and the knife was still there”—Ama Clutch worked for breath—“smeared with blood that hadn’t had a chance to dry.”

“What did you see? This is important.”

“I saw the knife in the air, I saw the Wind come to take Doctor Dillamond away, I saw the clockwork turn and the Goat’s time stop.”

“It was Grommetik, wasn’t it,” Elphaba murmured, trying to get the old woman to speak the words.

“Well, that’s what I’m saying, duckie,” said Ama Clutch.

“And did it see you, did it turn on you?” cried Glinda. “Did that make you ill, Ama Clutch?”

“It was my time to be ill,” said Ama Clutch gently, “so I couldn’t complain. And it is my time to die, so leave me be. Just hold my hand, dear.”

“But the fault is mine—” began Glinda.

“You would do me more good if you hushed, sweet Galinda, my duck,” said Ama Clutch gently, and patted Glinda’s hand. Then she closed her eyes and breathed in and out a couple of times. They sat there in a silence that seemed peculiarly servant-class-Gillikinese, though it was hard, later on, to explain why. Outside, Madame Morrible moved up and down the floorboards, pacing. Then they imagined they heard a Wind, or an echo of a Wind, and Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth.

6

The funeral was modest, a love-her-and-shove-her affair. Glinda’s close friends attended, filling two pews, and in the second tier of the chapel a flock of Amas made a professional coterie. The rest of the chapel was empty.

After the corpse in its winding sheet slid along the oiled chute to the furnace, the mourners and colleagues retired to Madame Morrible’s private parlor, where she proved to have sanctioned no expense in the refreshments. The tea was ancient stock, stale as sawdust, the biscuits were hard, and there was no saffron cream or tamorna marmalade. Glinda said reprovingly to the Head, “Not even a small bowl of cream?” and Madame Morrible answered, “My girl, I try to protect my charges from the worst of the food shortages by judicious shopping and by going without myself, but I am not wholly responsible for your ignorance. If only people would obey the Wizard absolutely, there would be abundance. Don’t you realize that conditions verge on famine and cows are dying of starvation two hundred miles from here? This makes saffron cream very dear in the market.” Glinda began to move away, but Madame Morrible reached out a raft of cushiony, bulbous, bejeweled fingers. The touch made Glinda’s blood run cold. “I should like to see you, and Miss Nessarose, and Miss Elphaba,” said the Head. “After the guests leave. Please wait behind.”

“We’re nabbed for a lecture,” whispered Glinda to the Thropp sisters. “We have to be yelled at.”

“Not a word about what Ama Clutch said—or that she came back,” said Elphaba urgently. “Got that, Nessa? Nanny?”

They all nodded. Boq and Avaric, making their good-byes, said that the group was reconvening at the pub in the Regent’s Parade. The girls agreed to meet them there after their interview with the Head. They would manage a more honest memorial service for Ama Clutch at the Peach and Kidneys.

When the small crowd had dispersed, only Grommetik clearing away the cups and crumbs, Madame Morrible herself banked up the fire—a gesture of chumminess lost on no one—and sent Grommetik away. “Later, thingy,” she said, “later. Go lubricate yourself in some closet somewhere.” Grommetik wheeled away with, if it was possible, an offended air. Elphaba had to repress an urge to kick it with the tip of her stout black walking boot.

“You too, Nanny,” Madame Morrible said. “A little break from your labors.”

“Oh no,” Nanny said. “Nanny doesn’t leave her Nessa.”

“Yes Nanny does. Her sister is perfectly capable of caring for her,” said the Head. “Aren’t you, Miss Elphaba? The very soul of charity.”

Elphaba opened her mouth—the word soul always provoked her, Glinda knew—but closed it again. She made a wincing nod toward the door. Without a word, Nanny got up to leave, but before the door closed behind her Nanny said, “It’s not my place to complain, but really: no cream? At a funeral?”

“Help,” said Madame Morrible when the door closed, but Glinda wasn’t sure if this was a criticism of servants or a bid for sympathy. The Head rallied herself by arranging her skirts and the vents and braids of her smart parlor jacket. In orangey copper sequins she looked like a huge, upholstered, upended goldfish goddess. How ever did she get to be Head? Glinda wondered.

“Now that Ama Clutch has gone to ash, we shall, nay, we must move bravely on,” Madame Morrible began. “My girls, may I first ask you to recount the sad story of her last words. It is essential therapy in your recovery from grief.”

The girls didn’t look at one another. Glinda, in this situation the spokesperson, took a breath and said, “Oh, she spewed nonsense to the last.”

“No surprise, the dotty old thing,” said Madame Morrible, “but what nonsense?”

“We couldn’t make it out,” said Glinda.

“I had wondered if she talked about the death of the Goat.”

Glinda said, “Oh the Goat? Well I could hardly tell—”

“I suspected that, in her deranged condition, she might return to that critical moment. The dying often try to make sense, at the last possible moment, of the puzzles of their lives. Useless effort, of course. No doubt Ama Clutch was puzzled by what she came across, the Goat’s body, the blood. And Grommetik.”

“Oh?” said Glinda faintly. The sisters beside her were careful not to stir.

“That terrible morning I was up early—at my spiritual meditations—and I noticed the light in Doctor Dillamond’s lab. So I sent Grommetik over with a cheering pot of tea for the old Goat. Grommetik found the Animal slumped over a broken lens; he’d apparently stumbled and severed his own jugular vein. Such a sad accident, born of academic zeal (not to say hubris) and a pitiful lack of common sense. Rest, we all need rest, the brightest of us need our rest. Grommetik in its confusion felt for a pulse—none to be found—and I surmise that is just when Ama Clutch arrived. To see dear Grommetik splashed with the spurts of a strong circulatory pulse. Ama Clutch arrived out of nowhere and none of her business, I might add, but let’s not malign the dead, shall we?”

Glinda gulped back new tears, and did not mention that Ama Clutch had mentioned seeing something unusual the evening before, and had wandered out to check.

“I did always think that the shock of all that blood might have been the final straw that sent Ama Clutch pitching back into her ailment. Incidentally, you see why I dismissed Grommetik just now. It’s still very sensitive and suspects, I believe, that Ama Clutch thought it responsible for the Goat’s slaughter.”

Glinda said waveringly, “Madame Morrible, you should know that Ama Clutch had never suffered such a disease as I described to you. I invented it. But I didn’t assign it. I didn’t commit it to her, or her to it.”

Elphaba looked at Madame Morrible steadily, keeping her interest modest. Nessarose’s eyelashes fluttered. If Madame Morrible knew Glinda’s news already, her face didn’t give her away. She looked as placid as a tethered rowboat. “Well, this only lends weight to my observations,” she allowed. “There is an imaginative, even a prophetic power in your pointed little society skull, Miss Glinda.”

The Head stood, her skirts rustling, wind through a field of wheat. “What I say now I say in strictest confidence. I expect my girls to obey my command. Are we agreed?” She seemed to take their stunned silence as assent. She looked down on them. That’s why she seems so like a fish, Glinda suddenly thought. She hardly ever blinks.

“By an authority vested in me that is too high to be named, I have been charged with a crucial task,” said the Head. “A task essential to the internal security of Oz. I have been working to fulfill this task for some years, and the time is right, and the goods are at my disposal.” She scrutinized them. They were the goods.

“You will not repeat what you hear in this room,” she said. “You will not want to, you will not choose to, and you will not be able to. I am wrapping each one of you in a binding cocoon as regards this very sensitive material. No”—she held up a hand at Elphaba’s protest—“no you have no right to object. The deed is already done and you must listen and be open to what I say.”

Glinda tried to examine herself to see if she felt wrapped, or bound, or spell-chilled. But she only felt frightened and young, which may be close to the same thing. She glanced at the sisters. Nessarose in her dazzling shoes was back in her chair, nostrils dilating in fright or excitement. Elphaba on the other hand looked as stolid and cross as usual.

“You live in a little womb here, a tight little nest, girl with girl. Oh I know you have your silly boys on the edge, forgettable things. Good for one thing only and not even reliable at that. But I digress. I must say that you know little or nothing of the state of the nation today. You have no sense of the pitch of unrest to which things have mounted. Setting communities on edge, ethnic groups against one another, bankers against farmers and factories against shopkeepers. Oz is a seething volcano threatening to erupt and burn us in its own poisonous pus.

“Our Wizard seems strong enough. Ah, but is he? Is he really? He has a grasp of internal politics. He’s no slouch at negotiating rates of exchange with the bloodsuckers of Ev or Jemmicoe or Fliaan. He rules the Emerald City with an industry and an ability that the decaying knob-jawed Ozma line never dreamed of. Without him we’d have been swept away in firestorm, years ago. We can but be grateful. A strong fist does wonders in a rotten situation. Walk softly but carry a bit stick. I see I offend. Well, a man is always good for the public face of power, no?

“Yes. But things are not always as they seem. And it has been clear for some time that the Wizard’s bag of tricks would not do forever. There are bound to be popular uprisings—the stupid, senseless kind, in which strong dumb people enjoy getting killed for the sake of political changes that’ll be rolled back within the decade. Adds such meaning to meaningless lives, don’t you think? One can’t imagine any other reason for it. At any rate, the Wizard needs some agents. He requires a few generals. In the long run. Some people with managing skills. Some people with gumption.

“In a word, women.

“I have called you three girls in here. You are not women yet, but the moment is closing in on you, faster than you might think. Despite my opinion as to your behavior, I have had to single you out. There is more in each one of you than meets the eye. Miss Nessarose, being the newest, you are the most hidden to me, but once you outgrow that fetching habit of faith you will display a ferocious authority. Your bodily disorder is of no significance here. Miss Elphaba, you are an isolate, and even in my binding spell you sit there stewing in scorn of every word I say. This is evidence of great internal power and force of will, something I deeply respect even when marshaled against me. You have shown no sign of interest in sorcery and I don’t claim you have any natural aptitude. But your splendid lone-wolf spit and spirit can be harnessed, oh yes it can, and you needn’t live a life of unfulfilled rage. And Miss Glinda: You have surprised yourself with the talents at sorcery you possess. I knew you would. I had hoped your inclinations might rub off on Miss Elphaba, but that they haven’t is only firmer proof of Miss Elphaba’s iron character.

“I see in your eyes you all question my methods. You think, somewhat wildly: Did Horrible Morrible cause that nail to pierce my Ama Clutch’s foot, making me have to room with Elphaba? Did she cause Ama Clutch to come downstairs and find the dead Goat, the better to get her out of the way and require Nanny and thus Nessarose to show up on the scene? How flattering that you even imagine I have such power.”

The Head paused and came near to blushing, which in her was something like the separating of cream on a flame set too high. “I am a handmaiden at the service of superiors,” she continued, “and my special talent is to encourage talent. In my own small way I have been called to a vocation of education, and here I make my little contributions to history.

“Now to be specific. I want you to consider your futures. I would like to name you, to baptize you as it were, as a trio of Adepts. In the long run I would like to assign you behind-the-scenes ministerial duties in different parts of the country. I am empowered to do this, remember, by those whose boot straps I am not worthy to lick.” But she looked smug, as if she thought herself quite worthy enough, indeed, of attention from these mysterious forces. “Let us say you will be secret partners of the highest level of government. You will be anonymous ambassadors of peace, helping to restrain the unruly element among our less civilized populations. Nothing is decided yet, of course, and you do have a say in the matter—a say to me, and not to each other nor anyone else, as the spell goes—but I would like you to think about it. I need—eventually—to place an Adept in Gillikin somewhere. Miss Glinda, with your middle-range social position and your transparent ambitions, you can slime your way into ballrooms of margreaves and still be at home in the pigsties. Oh, don’t squirm so, your good blood is only on one side and it’s not a terribly refined strain anyway. The Adept of Gillikin, Miss Glinda? Does it appeal?”

Glinda could only listen. “Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible, “full of the teenage scorn of inherited position, you are nonetheless the Thropp Third Descending, and your great-grandfather, the Eminent Thropp, is in his dotage. One day you will inherit what is left of Colwen Grounds, that pretentious pile in Nest Hardings, and you could manage to be the Adept of Munchkinland. Your unfortunate skin condition notwithstanding—indeed, perhaps because of it—you have developed a feistiness and an iconoclasm that is just faintly appealing when it doesn’t nauseate. It will come in service. Believe me.

“And Miss Nessarose,” she went on, “having grown up in Quadling Country, you will want to return there with Nanny. The social situation in Quadling Country is such a mess, what with the decimation of the squelchy froglet population, but it may come back, in small measure, and there should be someone to oversee the ruby mines. We need someone to look after things in the South. Once you recover from your religious mania, it’ll be a perfect setting. You don’t expect a life of high society anyway, not without arms. After all, how can one dance without arms?

“As for the Vinkus, we don’t imagine we’ll need an Adept stationed there, at least not in your lifetimes. The master plans eradicate any appreciable population in that godforsaken place.”

Here the Head paused and looked around. “Oh, girls. I know you are young. I know this grieves you. You mustn’t think of it as a prison sentence, though, but an opportunity. You ask yourselves: How will I grow in a position, albeit a silent one, of prominence and responsibility? How may my talents flourish? How, my dears, how may I help my Oz?”

Elphaba’s foot twisted, caught the edge of a side table, and a cup and saucer fell to the floor and smashed.

“You’re so predictable,” said Madame Morrible, sighing. “That’s what makes my job so easy. Now girls, bound as you are to an oath of silence, I bid you to go away and think on what I have said. Please don’t even try to discuss it together as it’ll just give you a headache and cramps. You won’t be able to manage it. Sometime in the next semester I will call each of you in here and you can give me your answer. And if you should choose not to help your country in its hour of need . . .” She clasped her hands in a parody of despair. “Well, you are not the only fish in the sea, are you?”

The afternoon had turned glowery, with heaps of plum-colored clouds in the north, beyond the bluestone spires and steeples. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since the morning, and the girls kept their shawls pulled close as they walked to the pub. Nanny, shivering in the dirty wind, cried, “And what did the old busybody have to say that I couldn’t be allowed to hear?”

But there was nothing they could say. Glinda couldn’t even meet the others’ eyes. “We’ll lift a glass of champagne for Ama Clutch,” said Elphaba finally, “when we get to the Peach and Kidneys.”

“I’d settle for a spoonful of real cream,” said Nanny. “How pinching that old sow is. No respect for the dead.”

But Glinda found that the binding spell was deeper, cut closer than she had even understood. It wasn’t merely that they couldn’t talk about it. Already she had begun—to lose the words about it, to falter in her thinking, to fail to commit the interview to memory. There was the proposal. It was a proposal, wasn’t it? Of some questionable proposition in (was it) the civil service? Doing some—some ballroom dancing, which didn’t make sense. Some laughing, a glass of champagne, a handsome man taking off his cummerbund and pressing his starched cuffs against her neck, nibbling the teardrop-shaped rubies at her ears . . . Talk softly but carry a bit stick. Or was it not a proposal but a prophecy? A little friendly encouragement about the future? And she had been alone, the others hadn’t been listening. Madame Morrible had spoken directly to her. A lovely testimony to Glinda’s . . . potential. The chance to rise. Walk softly but marry a big prick. A man draping his evening tie on a bedstead and rolling his diamond studs, nudging them with his nose, down the declivity of her superior neck . . . It was a dream, Madame Morrible couldn’t have said that! She must be dazed with grief. Poor Ama Clutch. It had only been a quiet word of condolence from the dear and self-effacing Head, who found it hard to speak in public. But a man’s tongue between her legs, a spoonful of saffron cream . . .

Nessarose said, “Catch her, I can’t, I’m—” and she sagged against Nanny’s bosom, and Glinda swooned at the same moment. Elphaba thrust out strong arms and scooped Glinda in mid-collapse. Glinda didn’t really lose consciousness, but the uncomfortable physical nearness of hawk-faced Elphaba after that undesired act of desire made her want to shiver with revulsion and to purr at the same time. “Steady on, girl, not here,” said Elphaba, “resist, come on!” Resist was just what Glinda didn’t want to do. But after all, in the shadow of an apple cart, on the edge of the market where merchants were selling the last fish of the day, cheap, well, this was hardly the place. “Tough, tough skin,” said Elphaba, appearing to pull words from the back of her throat. “Come on, Glinda—you’ve got better brains—come on! I love you too much, snap out of it, you idiot!”

“Well, really,” she said as Elphaba dumped her on a heap of moldy packing straw. “No need to be so romantic about it!” But she felt better, as if a wave of illness had just passed.

“You girls, I tell you, the faints, it comes from those tight shoes,” said Nanny, huffing and loosening Nessarose’s glamorous footwear. “Sensible folk wear leather or wood.” She massaged Nessarose’s insteps for a minute, and Nessarose moaned and arched her back, but began in a few moments to breathe more normally.

“Welcome back to Oz,” said Nanny after a while. “What goodies were you all snacking on, in there with the Head?”

“Come on, they’re waiting,” said Elphaba. “No sense dawdling. Anyway, I’m afraid it might rain.”

At the Peach and Kidneys, the rest of the gang had commandeered a table in an alcove several steps above the main floor. They were well into their cups by that point in the afternoon, and it was clear tears had been shed. Avaric sat slouched against the brick wall of the student den, one arm slung around Fiyero and his legs stretched out in Shenshen’s lap. Boq and Crope were arguing about something, anything, and Tibbett was singing an interminable song to Pfannee, who looked as if she wanted to drive a dart into the thick of his thigh. “Ahh, the ladies,” slurred Avaric, and made as if to rise.

They sang, and chattered, and ordered sandwiches, and Avaric plunked down an embarrassment of coins to demand a salver of saffron cream, in Ama Clutch’s memory. Money did wonders and the cream was found in the larder, which gave Glinda an uneasy feeling, though she didn’t know why. They spooned the airy mounds into one another’s mouths, sculpted with it, mixed it in their champagne, threw it in small gobbets at one another until the manager came over and told them to get the hell out. They complied, grumbling. They didn’t know it was the last time they would all be together, or they might have lingered.

A brisk rain had come and gone, but the streets were still noisy with runoff, and the lamplight glistened and danced in the silvery black curvetts of water caught among the cobbles. Imagining the possible brigand in the shadows, or the hungry wanderer lurking nearby, they stood close together. “I’ve got an idea,” said Avaric, putting one foot this way and the other that, as if he were as flexible as a man of straw. “Who’s man enough for the Philosophy Club tonight?”

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Nanny, who hadn’t had that much to drink.

“I want to go,” whined Nessarose, swaying more than usual.

“You don’t even know what it is,” said Boq, giggling and hiccuping.

“I don’t care, I don’t want to leave tonight,” Nessarose said. “We only have one another and I don’t want to be left out, and I don’t want to go home!”

“Hush Nessa, hush hush, my pretty,” said Elphaba. “That’s not the place for you, or me either. Come on, we’re going home. Glinda, come on.”

“I have no Ama now,” said wide-eyed Glinda, stabbing a finger toward Elphaba. “I am my own agent. I want to go to the Philosophy Club and see if it’s true.”

“The rest can do what they want but we’re going home,” said Elphaba.

Glinda veered over toward Elphaba, who was homing in on a very uncertain-looking Boq. “Now Boq, you don’t want to go to that disgusting place, do you?” Elphaba was saying. “Come on, don’t let the boys make you do something you don’t want.”

“You don’t know me,” he said, appearing to address the hitching post. “Elphie, how do you know what I want? Unless I find out? Hmmm?”

“Come with us,” said Fiyero to Elphaba. “Please, if we ask you politely?”

“I want to go too,” whined Glinda.

“Oh, come, Glinny-dinny,” said Boq, “maybe they’ll pick us. For old times’ sake, as never was.”

The others had awakened a slumbering cab driver and hired his services. “Boq, Glinda, Elphie, come on,” Avaric called from the window. “Where’s your nerve?”

“Boq, think about this,” Elphaba urged.

“I always think, I never feel, I never live,” he moaned. “Can’t I live once in a while? Just once? Just because I’m short I’m not an infant, Elphie!”

“Not till now,” said Elphaba. Rather smarmy tonight, thought Glinda, and wrenched herself away to climb into the cab. But Elphaba grabbed her by the elbow and pivoted her around. “You can’t,” she whispered. “We’re going to the Emerald City.”

“I’m going to the Philosophy Club with my friends—”

“Tonight,” hissed Elphaba. “You little idiot, we have no time to waste on sex!”

Nanny had led Nessarose away already, and the cabbie clucked his reins and the equipage lumbered away. Glinda stumbled and said, “What did you think you were just about to say? To say?”

“I already said it and I’m not saying it again,” said Elphaba. “My dear, you and I are going back to Crage Hall tonight only to pack a valise. Then we’re away.”

“But the gates’ll be locked—”

“It’s over the garden wall,” said Elphaba, “and we’re going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay.”

7

Boq could not believe he was heading to the Philosophy Club at last. He hoped he wouldn’t vomit at a crucial moment. He hoped he would remember the whole thing tomorrow, or at least some kernel of it, despite the headache forming vengefully in the hollows at his temples.

The place was discreet, though it was the best known dive in Shiz. It hid behind a facade of paneled-up windows. A couple of Apes roamed the street in front, bouncing troublemakers ahead of time. Avaric counted the party carefully as they fell from the cab. “Shenshen, Crope, me, Boq, Tibbett, Fiyero, and Pfannee. Seven. Boy how’d we all fit in the cab, could hardly fit us I’d think.” He paid the cabbie and tipped him, in some obscure homage still to Ama Clutch, and then pushed to the front of the silent knot of companions. “Come on, we’re the right age and the right drunk,” he said, and to the shadowed face at the window, “Seven. Seven of us, good sir.”

The face came forward to the glass and leered at him. “The name is Yackle, and I’m not a sir nor am I good. What kind are you up to tonight, Master Fellow?” Speaking through the pane was a crone, with random teeth and a shiny white-pink wig slipping westwards off her pearly scalp.

“Kind?” said Avaric, then more bravely, “Any kind.”

“I mean the tickets, sweetbread. Strutting and strumming on the sprung floor, or strumpeting in the old wine cellars?”

“The works,” said Avaric.

“You understand house rules? The locked doors, the if-you-pay-you-play policy?”

“Give us seven, and hurry up about it. We’re not fools.”

“You never are fools,” said the beastly woman. “Well, here you are then, and come what may. Or who may.” She affected a stance of virtue, like a painting of a unionist virgin saint. “Enter and be saved.”

The door swung open, and they went down a flight of uneven brick steps. At the bottom of the flight was a dwarf in a purple burnoose. He looked at their tickets, and said, “Where are you soft things from? Out of town?”

“We’re all at the university,” said Avaric.

“A motley crew. Well, you’ve seven-of-diamond tickets. See here, the seven red diamonds printed here, and here.” He said, “Have a drink on the house, watch the girlie show, and dance a little if you want. Every hour or so I close this street door and open the next.” He pointed to a huge oak door, barred with two monstrous timbers in iron hasps. “You all go in together or you don’t go in at all. That’s the rule of the house.”

There was a chanteuse singing a send-up of “What Is Oz Without Ozma,” and teasing herself with a parrot-colored feather boa. A small band of elves—real elves!—tootled and rattled out a tinny accompaniment. Boq had never seen an elf, even though he knew there was a colony of them not far from Rush Margins. “How weird,” he said, inching forward. They looked like hairless monkeys, naked but for little red caps, and without any appreciable sex characteristics. They were as green as sin. Boq turned to say, Look, Elphie, it’s like you had a passel of babies, but he didn’t see her and remembered then that she hadn’t come. Nor had Glinda, apparently. Damn.

They danced. The crowd was the most mixed Boq had seen in some time. There were Animals, humans, dwarfs, elves, and several tiktok things of incomplete or experimental gender. A squadron of well-built blond boys circulated with tumblers of rotgut squash wine, which the friends drank because it was free.

“I don’t know if I want to go any more daring than this,” said Pfannee to Boq at one point. “I mean, look, that hussy of a Baboon is almost out of her dress. Perhaps we should call it a night.”

“Do you think?” said Boq. “I mean, I’m game, but if you’re feeling uneasy.” Oh hurrah, a way out. He was feeling uneasy himself. “Well let’s get Avaric. He’s over there nosing up to Shenshen.”

But before they could make their way across the crowded dance floor, the elves began to let out a banshee screech, and the singer thrust out her hip and said, “That’s the mating call, dollies! Ladies and gentle-friends! We’re doing, and I do mean doing”—she glanced at a note in her hand—“five black clubs, three black clubs, six red hearts, seven red diamonds, and—on their honeymoon, isn’t it sweet”—she simulated gagging—“two black spades. Up to the mouth of everlasting bliss, fraidies and gentlehens.”

“Avaric, no,” said Boq.

But the crone from the front, who called herself Yackle, came knocking through the hall—having apparently locked up the front door for the time being—and she remembered the holders of the designated cards, and brought them forward with a smile. “All rides, all riders, on the ready,” she said, “here we be, at the shank end of the evening! Lighten up, lads, it’s not a funeral, it’s an entertainment!” It had been a funeral, Boq remembered, trying to invoke the warm, self-effacing spirit of Ama Clutch. But the time to back out, if such a time existed, had passed.

They were swept through the oak doors and along a slightly sloping passage whose walls were padded in red and blue velvet. A merry tune was playing farther on, a dancing ragged melody. A smell of roasting timm leaves—sweet and softening, you could almost feel them turning up their purplish edges. Yackle led the way, and the twenty-three revelers processed, in a confused state of apprehension, elation, and randiness. The dwarf followed behind. Boq took stock, as best his stumbling mind could manage. An erect Tiger in hip boots and a cape. A couple of bankers and their evening consorts, all wearing black masques: as a protection against blackmail or as an aphrodisiac? A party of merchants from Ev and Fliaan, in town on business. A couple of women rather long in the tooth, bedecked in costume jewelry. The honeymoon couple were Glikkuns. Boq hoped that his crowd wasn’t gawping as much as the Glikkuns were. As he glanced around, only Avaric and Shenshen looked eager—and Fiyero, possibly because he hadn’t yet grasped what this was all about. The others looked more than a little squeamish.

They entered a small dark theatre-in-the-round, with the space for the public divided into six stalls. Above, the ceiling was lost in a stony blackness. Tapers fluttered, and a hollow music issued through fissures in the wall, increasing an unearthly air of dislocation and otherness. The stalls circled and faced the central stage, which was enshrouded in black drapes. The stalls were separated from one another by vertical strips of latticed wood and slats of mirror. All the parties were being mixed up, all friends and partners separated. Was there incense in the air too? It seemed to make Boq’s mind split in half, like a husk, and allow a tenderer, complacent mind to emerge. The softer, more bruisable aspect, the private intention, the surrendering self.

He felt he was knowing less and less, and it was more and more beautiful to do so. Why had he been alarmed? He was sitting on a stool, and around him in the stall sat, almost preternaturally near, a man in a black masque, an Asp he hadn’t noticed before, the Tiger whose breath ran hot and meaty on his neck, a beautiful schoolgirl, or was that the bride on her honeymoon? Did the whole stall then tilt forward, like a gently swung bucket? Anyway, they leaned together toward the central dais, an altar of veils and sacrifices. Boq loosened his collar and then his belt, felt the gingery appetite between heart and stomach and the resulting stiffening apparatus below that. The music of pipes and whistles was slowing, or was it that as he watched and waited and breathed so, so slowly, that the secret area inside himself uncloaked itself, where nothing mattered?

The dwarf, in a darker hood now, appeared on the stage. He could see from his vantage point into all the stalls but the revelers in separate stalls couldn’t see one another. The dwarf leaned and reached a hand here, there, welcoming, beckoning. He encouraged from one stall the figure of a woman, from another a man (was it Tibbett?), and from the stall where Boq sat he gestured to the Tiger. Boq felt only faintly sorry not to be chosen himself as he watched the dwarf pass a smoking vial beneath the nostrils of the three acolytes, and help them to remove their clothes. There were shackles, and a tray of scented oils and emollients, and a chest whose contents were still in shadow. The dwarf bound black blindfolds around the heads of the scholars.

The Tiger was pacing on all fours and growling softly, tossing his head back and forth in distress or excitement. Tibbett—for it was he, though nearly out of consciousness—was made to lie on his back on the floor of the stage. The Tiger strode over him and stood still while the dwarf and his assistants lifted Tibbett and tied his wrists together, around the Tiger’s chest, and his ankles around the Tiger’s pelvis, so Tibbett hung beneath the Tiger’s belly, like a trussed pig, his face lost in the Tiger’s chest hair.

The woman was set on a sloping stool, almost like a huge tilting bowl, and the dwarf tucked something aromatic and runny up in the shadowy regions. Then the dwarf pointed to Tibbett, who was beginning to twist and moan into the Tiger’s chest. “Let X be the Unknown God,” said the dwarf, poking Tibbett in the ribs. The dwarf then slapped the Tiger on his flank with a riding crop, and the Tiger strained forward, positioning his head between the woman’s legs. “Let Y be the Dragon of Time in its cave,” said the dwarf, hitting the Tiger again.

As he laced the woman into the half-shell, stroking her nipples with a glowing salve, he handed her a riding crop with which she could lash at the Tiger’s flanks and face. “And let Z be the Kumbric Witch, and let us see if she exists tonight . . .” The crowd drew nearer, almost participants themselves, and the musky sense of adventure made them tear at their own buttons and nibble their own lips, leaning in, in, in.

“Such are the variables in our equation,” said the dwarf as the room darkened even further. “So now, let the true, clandestine study of knowledge begin.”

8

The industrialists of Shiz, from an early stage wary of the growing power of the Wizard, had elected not to lay down the rail line from Shiz to the Emerald City as originally planned. Therefore, it was a good three days’ journey from Shiz to the Emerald City—and this was in the best of weather, for the wealthy who could pay for a constant change of horses. For Glinda and Elphaba it took more than a week. A bleak, cold-scoured week, as the winds of autumn ripped the leaves off trees with a dry screech and a rattle of brittle, protesting limbs.

They rested, like other third-class travelers, in the back rooms above inn kitchens. In a single lumpy bed, they huddled together for warmth and encouragement and, Glinda told herself, protection. The ostlers cooed and shrieked in the stableyard below, the kitchen maids came and went noisily, at odd hours. Glinda would start as if from a frightful dream, and nestle in nearer to Elphaba, who seemed at night never to sleep. Daytimes, the long hours spent in poorly sprung carriages, Elphaba would nod off against Glinda’s shoulder. The land outside grew less succulent and varied. Trees were crabbed, as if conserving their strength.

And then the sandy scrubland was domesticated by farm life. Overgrazed fields were dotted with cows, their withers shriveled and papery, their lowing desperate. An emptiness settled in the farmyards. Once Glinda saw a farm woman standing on her doorstep, hands sunk deep in apron pockets, face lined with grief and rage at the useless sky. The woman watched the carriage pass, and her face showed a yearning to be on it, to be dead, to be anywhere else other than on this carcass of a property.

The farms gave way to deserted mills and abandoned granges. Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city. She supposed it was her Gillikinese superiority asserting itself. She was glad of it.

The carriage passed through one of the northern gates, and the scramble of life aroused itself again, but in an urban key, less restrained and self-forgiving than that of Shiz. The Emerald City was not amused by itself, nor did it consider amusement a proper attitude for a city. Its high self-regard sprang up in public spaces, ceremonial squares, parks and facades and reflecting pools. “How juvenile, how devoid of irony,” murmured Glinda. “The pomp, the pretension!”

But Elphaba, who had passed through the Emerald City only once before, on her way up to Shiz, had no interest in architecture. She had her eyes glued on the people. “No Animals,” she said, “not so you can see, anyway. Maybe they have all gone underground.”

“Underground?” said Glinda, thinking of legendary menaces like the Nome King and his subterranean colony, or dwarves in their mines in Glikkus, or the Time Dragon of the old myths, dreaming the world of Oz from his airless tomb.

“In hiding,” said Elphaba. “Look, the poor—I mean are they the poor? The hungry of Oz? From the failed farms? Or is it just the—the surplus? The expendable human selvage? Look at them, Glinda, this is a real question. The Quadlings, having nothing, looked—more—than these—”

Off the boulevard on which they rode branched alleys, where shelves of tin and cardboard served as roofs for the flood of indigents. Many of them were children, though some were the diminutive Munchkinlanders, and some were dwarves, and some were Gillikinese bowed with hunger and strain. The carriage moved slowly, and faces stood out. A Glikkun youth with no teeth and no feet or calves, on his stumpy knees in a box, begging. A Quadling—“Look, a Quadling!” said Elphaba, grabbing Glinda’s wrist. Glinda caught a glimpse of a ruddy brown woman in a shawl, lifting a small apple to the child in a sling around her neck. Three Gillikinese girls dressed like women for hire. More children in a pack, running and squealing like piglets, pressing up against a merchant, to pick his pockets. Rag merchants with pushcarts. Kiosk keepers whose goods lay locked beneath safety grilles. And a sort of civil army, if you could call it that, strolling in foursomes on every second or third street, brandishing clubs, angular with swords.

They paid the carriage master and walked with their parcels of clothes toward the Palace. It rose, in stepped-back fashion, a growth of domes and minarets, high flared buttresses in green marble, blue agate screens in the recessed windows. Central and most prominent, the broad, gentle-browed canopies of the pagoda lifted over the Throne Room, covered with hammered scales of virgin gold, brilliant in the late afternoon gloom.

Five days later they had made it past the gatekeeper, the receptionists, and the social secretary. They had sat for hours awaiting a three-minute interview with the Commander-General of Audiences. Elphaba, a hard, twisted look on her face, had managed to eject the words “Madame Morrible” from between her clamping lips. “Tomorrow at eleven,” said the Commander-General. “You will have four minutes between the Ambassador to Ix and the Matron of the Ladies’ Home Guard Social Nourishment Brigade. Dress code is formal.” He handed them a card of regulations that, being unequipped with courtly dress, they were obliged to ignore.

At three the following afternoon (everything running late), the Ambassador to Ix left the Throne Room looking agitated and splenetic. Glinda fluffed the bedraggled feathers in her traveling hat for the eightieth time, and sighed, “Now you’re the one who says what should be said.” Elphaba nodded. To Glinda she looked tired, terrified, but strong, as if her form were knit with iron and whiskey instead of bones and blood. The Commander-General of Audiences appeared in the doorway of the waiting salon.

“You have four minutes,” he said. “Do not approach until you are bade to do so. Do not speak until you are addressed. Do not venture a remark unless it is to answer a comment or question. You may refer to the Wizard as ‘Your Highness.’”

“That sounds pretty regal to me. I thought that royalty had been—” But here Glinda elbowed Elphaba to make her shut up. Really, Elphaba had no common sense sometimes. They hadn’t come so far just to be turned away because of adolescent radicalism.

The Commander-General took no notice. As they approached a set of tall double doors, carved with sigils and other occult hieroglyphs, the Commander-General mentioned, “The Wizard is not in a good humor today due to the reports of a riot in the Ugabu district in the north of Winkie Country. I should be prepared for what I find, were I you.” Two stoical doormen opened the doors then, and they passed through.

But the throne did not lie before them. Instead, the antechamber led left, and through an archway there was another, but on a shifting axis to the right, and another beyond that, and another. It was like looking through a reflection of a corridor in mirrors set opposite each other; it veered inward. Or, thought Glinda, like processing through the narrowing, deviating chambers of a nautilus. They made a circuit through eight or ten salons, each slightly smaller than the other, each steeped in a curdled light that fell from leaded panes above. At last the antechambers concluded at an archway into a cavernous circular hall, higher than it was wide, and dark as a chapel. Antique wrought-iron stands held ziggurats of molded beeswax burning with a multitude of wicks, and the air was close and slightly floury. The Wizard was absent, though they saw the throne on a circular dais, inset emeralds gleaming dully in the candlelight.

“He stepped out to use the toilet,” said Elphaba. “Well, we’ll wait.”

They stood at the archway, not daring to venture farther without invitation.

“If we only have four minutes, I hope this doesn’t count,” said Glinda. “I mean, it took us two minutes just to get from there to here.”

“At this point—” said Elphaba, and then, “Shhhhh.”

Glinda shhhhhhed. She didn’t think she heard anything, then she wasn’t sure. There was no change that she could identify in the gloom, but Elphaba looked like a pointer on alert. Her chin was out, her nose high and nostrils flared, her dark eyes squinting and widening.

“What,” said Glinda, “what?”

“The sound of—”

Glinda heard no sounds, unless it was the hot air lifting from the flames into the chilly shadows between dark rafters. Or was it the rustle of silk robes? Was the Wizard approaching? She looked this way and that. No—there was a rustle, a sort of hiss, as of bacon rashers in a skillet. The candle flames suddenly all genuflected, obeisant to a sour wind that beat from the area of the throne.

Then the dais was pelted with thick drops of rain, and a shudder of homegrown thunder blatted out, more dropped kitchen kettles than timpani. On the throne was a skeleton of dancing lights; at first Glinda thought lightning, but then she realized it was luminescent bones hitched together to suggest something vaguely human, or at least mammalian. The rib cage flexed open like two fretted hands, and a voice spoke in the storm, not from the skull but from the dark eye of the storm where the heart of the lightning creature should be, in the tabernacle of the rib cage.

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” it said, and shook the room with its related weather. “Who are you?”

Glinda glanced at Elphaba. “Go on, Elphie,” she said, nudging her. But Elphaba looked terrified. Well, of course, the rain. She had that thing about rainstorms.

“Whooo arrrre youuuu?” bellowed the thing, the Wizard of Oz, whatever.

“Elphie,” hissed Glinda. Then, “Oh, you useless thing, all talk and no—I’m Glinda from Frottica, if you please, Your Highness, descended matrilineally from the Arduennas of the Upland, and this if you please is Elphaba, the Thropp Third Descending from Nest Hardings. If you please.”

“And if I don’t please?” said the Wizard.

“Oh really, how like a child,” said Glinda under her breath. “Elphie, come on, I can’t say why we’re here!”

But the banal comment of the Wizard’s seemed to snap Elphaba out of her terror. Staying where she was at the edge of the room, gripping Glinda’s hand for support, Elphaba said, “We’re students of Madame Morrible at Crage Hall in Shiz, Your Highness, and we’re in possession of some vital information.”

“We are?” said Glinda. “Thanks for telling me.”

The small rain seemed to let up a bit, though the room stayed dark as an eclipse. “Madame Morrible, that paragon of paradoxes,” said the Wizard. “Vital information of her, I wonder?”

“No,” said Elphaba. “That is, it is not for us to interpret what we hear. Gossip is unreliable. But—”

“Gossip is instructive,” said the Wizard. “It tells which way the wind is blowing.” The wind then blew in the direction of the girls, and Elphaba danced back to avoid being spattered. “Go ahead, girls, gossip.”

“No,” said Elphaba. “We’re here on more important business.”

“Elphie!” said Glinda. “Do you want to get us thrown in prison?”

“Who are you to decide what is important business?” roared the Wizard.

“I keep my eyes open,” said Elphaba. “You didn’t call us here to ask for our gossip; we came with our own agenda.”

“How do you know I didn’t call you here?”

Well, they didn’t know, especially after whatever it was had happened to them at tea with Madame Morrible. “Scale down, Elphie,” whispered Glinda, “you’re making him mad.”

“So what?” Elphaba said. “I’m mad.” She spoke up again. “I have news of the murder of a great scientist and a great thinker, Your Highness. I have news of important discoveries that he was making, and their suppression. I have every interest in the pursuit of justice and I know you do too, so that the amazing revelations of Doctor Dillamond will help you to reverse your recent judgments on the rights of Animals—”

“Doctor Dillamond?” said the Wizard. “Is that all this is about?”

“It is about an entire population of Animals systematically deprived of their—”

“I know of Doctor Dillamond and I know of his work,” said the glowing bones of the Wizard, snorting. “Derivative, unauthenticated, specious garbage. What you’d expect of an academic Animal. Predicated on shaky political notions. Empiricism, quackery, tomfoolery. Cant, rant, and rhetoric. Were you taken in perhaps by his enthusiasm? His Animal passion?” The skeleton danced a jig, or perhaps it was a twitch of disgust. “I know of his interests and his findings. I know little of what you call his murder and I care less.”

“I am not a slave to emotions,” Elphaba said sternly. She was pulling papers from her sleeve, where she had apparently rolled them up around her arm. “This is not propaganda, Your Highness. This is a well-argued Theory of Consciousness Inclination, is what he calls it. And you will be amazed to learn of his discoveries! No right-thinking ruler can afford to ignore the implica—”

“That you presume me to be right-thinking is touching,” said the Wizard. “You may drop the things where you stand. Unless you prefer to approach?” The lightning-marionette grinned and stretched out its arms. “My pet?”

Elphaba dropped the papers. “Good, my Lord,” she said in a piercing, pretentious voice, “I shall take you to be right-thinking, for did I not, I should be obliged to join an army against you.”

“Oh hell, Elphie,” said Glinda, then more loudly, “she doesn’t speak for the both of us, Your Highness, I’m an independent person here.”

“Please,” said Elphaba, at once hard and soft, proud and pleading. Glinda realized she had never before witnessed Elphaba wanting anything. “Please, sir. The hardship on the Animals is more than can be borne. It isn’t just the murder of Doctor Dillamond. It’s this forced repatriation, this—this chattelizing of free Beasts. You must get out and see the sorrow. There is talk of—there is worry that the next step will be slaughter and cannibalism. This isn’t merely youthful outrage. Please, sir. This is not untrammeled emotion. What’s happening is immoral—”

“I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral,” said the Wizard. “In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.”

“If not immoral, then what word can I use to imply wrong?” said Elphaba.

“Try mysterious and then relax a little. The thing is, my green girlie, it is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders, and why we exist.”

“But then nothing would keep me from assassinating you, did I not know what wrong was.”

“I don’t believe in assassination, I don’t even know what it means,” Glinda called. “Yoo hoo. I’m going to take my leave now while I’m still alive.”

“Wait,” said the Wizard. “I have something to ask you.”

They stood still. They stood for minutes. The skeleton fingered its ribs, played them like the brittle strings of a harp. Music like stones turning over in a streambed. The skeleton collected its lighted teeth from its jaws and juggled them. Then it tossed them at the seat of the throne, where they exploded in candy-colored flashes. The rain was running down a drain in the floor, Glinda noticed.

“Madame Morrible,” said the Wizard. “Agent provocateur and gossip, crony and companion, teacher and minister. Tell me why she sent you here.”

“She didn’t,” said Elphaba.

“Do you even know the meaning of the word pawn?” shrieked the Wizard.

“Do you know what resistance means?” Elphaba shot back.

But the Wizard only laughed instead of killing them on the spot. “What does she want of you?”

Glinda spoke up; it was about time. “A decent education. For all her bombastic ways she’s a capable administrator. It can’t be easy.” Elphaba was staring at her with a queer, slanted look.

“Has she brought you in—?”

Glinda didn’t quite understand. “We’re only sophisters. We have only begun to specialize. I in sorcery, Elphaba in life sciences.”

“I see.” The Wizard seemed to consider. “And after you graduate next year?”

“I suppose I’ll go back to Frottica and get married.”

“And you?”

Elphaba didn’t answer.

The Wizard turned itself around, broke off its femurs, and pounded the seat of the throne as if it were a kettledrum. “Really, this is getting ridiculous, it’s all pleasure faith showbiz,” said Elphaba. She took a step or two forward. “Excuse me, Your Highness? Before our time is up?”

The Wizard turned back. Its skull was on fire, a fire not quenched by the thickening curtain of rain. “I shall say one last thing,” the Wizard ventured, in a voice like a groan, a voice of one in pain. “I shall quote from the Oziad, the hero tale of ancient Oz.”

The girls waited.

The Wizard of Oz recited:

“Then hobbling like a glacier, old Kumbricia
Rubs the naked sky till it rains with blood.
She tears the skin off the sun and eats it hot.
She tucks the sickle moon in her patient purse.
She bears it out, a full-grown changeling stone.
Shard by shard she rearranges the world.
It looks the same, she says, but it is not.
It looks as they expect, but it is not.

“Beware whom you serve,” said the Wizard of Oz. Then he was gone, and the gutters in the floor gurgled, and the candles went instantly out. There was nothing for them to do but retrace their steps.

At the carriage, Glinda had settled in and made a little nest for them in the desirable forward-facing seat, guarding Elphaba’s place against three other passengers. “My sister,” she lied, “I am saving this seat for my sister.” And how I have changed, she thought, in a year and some. From despising the colored girl to claiming we are blood! So university life does change you in ways you cannot guess. I may be the only person in all the Pertha Hills ever to meet our Wizard. Not on my own steam, not of my initiative—still, I was there. I did it. And we’re not dead.

But we didn’t accomplish much.

Then, there was Elphie, at last, barreling along the paving stones with her elbows jutting and her thin bony torso swathed against the elements, as usual, in a cape. She came up through the crowd, batting at more refined passengers to get past, and Glinda shoved open the door. “Thank heavens, I thought you’d be late,” she said. “The driver is eager to leave. Did you get a lunch for us?”

Elphaba tossed in her lap a couple of oranges, a hunk of unrepentant cheese, and a loaf of bread that filled the compartment with pungent staleness. “This’ll have to do you till your stop this evening,” she said.

“Me, me?” said Glinda. “What do you mean, me? Have you got something better to eat for yourself?”

“Something worse, I expect,” said Elphaba, “but needs to be done. I’ve come to say good-bye. I’m not going back with you to Crage Hall. I’ll find a place to study on my own. I’ll not be part of—Madame Morrible’s—school—again—”

“No, no,” cried Glinda, “I can’t let you! Nanny will eat me alive! Nessarose will die! Madame Morrible will—Elphie, no. No!”

“Tell them I kidnapped you and made you come here, they’ll believe that of me,” said Elphaba. She stood on the mounting tread. A fat Glikkun female dwarf, having caught the gist of the drama, shifted to the more comfortable seat next to Glinda. “They needn’t look for me, Glinda, for I’m not going to be findable. I’m going down.”

“Down where? Back to Quadling Country?”

“That would be telling,” Elphaba said. “But I won’t lie to you, my dear. No need to lie. I don’t know yet where I’m going. I haven’t decided so I wouldn’t have to lie.”

“Elphie, get in this cab, don’t be a fool,” Glinda cried. The driver was adjusting the reins and yelling at Elphaba to sod off.

“You’ll be all right,” Elphaba said, “now you’re a seasoned traveler. This is just the return leg of a voyage you already know.” She put her face against Glinda’s and kissed her. “Hold out, if you can,” she murmured, and kissed her again. “Hold out, my sweet.”

The driver clucked the reins, and pitched a cry to leave. Glinda craned her head to see Elphaba drift back into the crowds. For all her singularity of complexion, it was astounding how quickly she became camouflaged in the ragamuffin variety of street life in the Emerald City. Or maybe it was foolish tears blurring Glinda’s vision. Elphaba hadn’t cried, of course. Her head had turned away quickly as she stepped down, not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence. But the sting, to Glinda, was real.

On a clammy late summer evening about three years after graduating from Shiz University, Fiyero stopped at the unionist chapel in Saint Glinda’s Square, to pass some time before meeting a fellow countryman at the opera.

Fiyero hadn’t taken to unionism as a student, but he had developed an eye for frescoes that often adorned the cubbyholes of older chapels. He was hoping to find a portrait of Saint Glinda. He had not seen Glinda of the Arduennas of the Uplands since her graduation—she had finished a year before he did. But he hoped it wouldn’t be sacrilegious to light a charmwax candle in front of Saint Glinda’s likeness, and to think of her namesake.

A service was ending, and the congregation of sensitive adolescent boys and black-scarved grandmothers drifted slowly out. Fiyero waited until the lyre player in the nave had finished fingering a tricky diminuet, then he approached her. “Do forgive me—I’m a visitor from the west.” Well obviously, with his rich ochre skin color and tribal markings. “I don’t see a sexton—a verger—a sacristan, whatever the word is—nor can I find a pamphlet to tell me—I was looking to find an ikon of Saint Glinda?”

Her face remained grave. “You’ll be lucky if it hasn’t been papered over with a poster of Our Glorious Wizard. I’m an itinerant musician, only through this way once in a while. But I think you might look in the last aisle; there’s an oratory to Saint Glinda, or used to be. Good luck.”

Locating it—a tomblike space with an archer’s slit instead of a true window—Fiyero saw, lit by a pinkish sanctuary light, a smoky image of the Saint, leaning a bit to the right. The portrait was merely sentimental and not robustly primitive, a disappointment. Water damage had made great white stains like laundry soap mistakes on the Saint’s holy garments. He couldn’t remember her particular legend, nor the uplifting way that she had gagged on death for the sake of her soul and for the edification of her admirers.

But then he saw, in the underwatery shadows, that the oratory was inhabited by a penitent. The head was bowed in prayer, and he was about to move away when it struck him that he knew who it was.

“Elphaba!” he said.

She turned her head slowly; a lace shawl dropped to her shoulders. Her hair was looped on her head and skewered with ivory hair corkscrews. Her eyes batted once or twice slowly, as if she were moving toward him from a great distance away. He had interrupted her at prayer—he hadn’t remembered her to be religious—maybe she didn’t recognize him.

“Elphaba, it’s Fiyero,” he said, moving into the doorway, blocking her exit, and also the light—suddenly he couldn’t see her face, and wondered if he heard correctly when she said, “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Elphie—I’m Fiyero—we were at Shiz,” he said. “My splendid Elphie—how are you?”

“Sir, I believe you are mistaking me for someone else,” she said, in Elphaba’s voice.

“Elphaba, the Thropp Third Descending, if I remember the nomenclature,” he said, laughing stoutly, “I’m not mistaken at all. I’m Fiyero of the Arjikis—you know me, you remember me! From Doctor Nikidik’s lectures in the life sciences!”

“You have confused yourself,” she said, “sir.” That last word sounded a bit shirty, absolutely Elphaba. “Now you don’t mind if I am about my devotions in peace?” She drew her shawl up above her head, and arranged it to fall about her temples. The chin in profile could slice a salami, and even in the low light he knew he wasn’t wrong.

“What is it?” he said. “Elphie—well, Miss Elphaba, if you require—don’t shab me off like this. Of course it’s you. There’s no disguising you. What game are you about?”

She didn’t answer him in words, but by telling her beads ostentatiously she was telling him to get lost.

“I’m not going,” he said.

“You’re interrupting my meditation, sir,” she said softly. “Do I have to call the verger and have you removed?”

“I’ll meet you outside,” he said. “How long do you need to pray? Half an hour? An hour? I’ll wait.”

“In an hour, then, across the street; there’s a small public fountain with some benches. I’ll talk with you for five minutes, five minutes only, and show you that you’ve made a mistake. Not a serious one, but increasingly annoying to me.”

“Forgive the intrusion. In an hour then—Elphaba.” He wasn’t going to let her get away with whatever game she was playing. He withdrew, however, and went to the musician at the back of the nave. “Is there another exit to this building besides the main doors?” he asked, over her spurts of arpeggio. When it was convenient to answer him, she tucked her head and moved her eyes. “Side door through to the cloister of the maunts, it’s not open to the public, but you can get out to a servants’ delivery alley through there.”

He lingered in the shadow of a pillar. In about forty minutes, a cloaked figure entered the chapel and moved, hobbling with a cane, directly to the oratory Elphie occupied. He was too far away to hear if words were exchanged, or anything else. (Perhaps the newcomer was merely another disciple of Saint Glinda, and wanted solitude to pray.) The figure didn’t linger; it left again as quickly as its stiff joints would allow.

Fiyero dropped an offering in the poor box—a note, so to avoid the clink of coin. In a quarter of the city so infested with the urban poor, his situation of comparative wealth required the penitential gift, though his motivation was characterized more by guilt than charity. Then he slipped out through the side door, into an overgrown cloister garden. Some ancient women in wheeled chairs were chortling at the far end and didn’t notice him. He wondered if Elphaba belonged to this community of monastic nuns—maunts, they were called. He now remembered that they were females living in that most paradoxical of institutions: a community of hermits. Apparently, however, their vows of silence were revoked in the decay of old age. He decided that Elphaba couldn’t have changed that much in five years. So he let himself out the servants’ entrance, into an alleyway.

Three minutes passed, and Elphaba emerged from the same servants’ entrance, as he had suspected she would. She was intent on avoiding him! Why, why? The last he had seen of her—he remembered it well!—was the day of Ama Clutch’s funeral, and the drunken party at the pub. She had fled to the Emerald City on some obscure mission, never to return, while he had been dragged off to the eye-opening joys and terrors of the Philosophy Club. Rumor held that the great-grandfather, the Eminent Thropp, had engaged agents to look for her in Shiz, in the Emerald City. From Elphaba herself there was never a postcard, never a message, never a clue. Nessarose had been inconsolable at first, and then grew to resent her sister’s putting her through this pain of separation. Nessa had lost herself deeper in religion, to the point where her friends had begun to avoid her.

Tomorrow Fiyero would make his apologies for missing the opera and standing up his business colleague. Tonight he would not lose Elphaba. As she hurried through the streets, checking over her shoulder more than once, he thought: If you were trying to lose someone, if you did think someone was on your trail, this is the time of day to do it—not because of shadows, but because of light. Elphaba kept turning corners into the summer sun that, setting, was bowling blinding shafts of light along side streets, through arcades, over the walls of gardens.

But he had had many years of practice at stalking animals under similar conditions—nowhere in Oz was the sun as much an adversary as in the Thousand Year Grasslands. He knew to squint his eyes and follow the persistence of motion, and forget about identifying by shape. He also knew how to duck sideways without tipping over or losing his balance, how to crouch suddenly, how to look for other clues that the prey had begun to move again—the startled birds, the change in sound, the disrupted wind. She could not lose him, and she could not know he was on her trail.

So he wound halfway across the city, from the elegant city centre to the low-rent warehouse district, in whose shadowy doorways the destitute made their malodorous homes. Within spitting distance of an army barracks, Elphaba stopped before a boarded-up corn exchange, ferreted a key from some inner pocket, and opened the door.

He called from a short distance, in an ordinary voice—“Fabala!” Even in the act of turning she caught herself and tried to rearrange her expression. But it was too late. She had shown that she recognized him, and she realized it. His foot was blocking the way before she could slam the heavy door shut.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“Leave me alone,” she said, “please. Please.”

“You’re in trouble, let me in.”

“You’re trouble. Stay out.” Pure Elphaba. His last doubts fled. He cracked the door open with his shoulder.

“You’re making me into a monster,” he said, grunting with the effort—she was strong. “I’m not going to rob you or rape you. I just—won’t—be ignored like that. Why?”

She gave up then, and he fell stupidly against the unplastered brick wall of the stairwell, like a pratfalling twit in a vaudeville hour. “I remembered you as full of delicacy and grace,” she said. “Did you catch something by accident, or did you study awkwardness?”

“Come on,” he said, “you force someone to behave like a clumping boor, you give them no choice. Don’t be so surprised. I can still manage grace. I can do delicacy. Half a minute.”

“Shiz got to you,” she said, eyebrows up, but mockingly; she wasn’t really surprised. “Listen to those graduate school affectations. Where’s the native boy reeking that appealing naiveté like a well-chosen musk?”

“You’re looking well too,” he said, a bit hurt. “Do you live in this stairwell or are we going someplace even a little bit homey?”

She cursed and mounted the stairs; they were covered with mouse turds and scraps of packing straw. A soupy evening light seeped in the grimy gray glass windows. At a bend in the stairs a white cat was waiting, haughty and disaffected like all its kin. “Malky, Malky, miaow miaow,” said Elphaba as she passed it, and it deigned to follow her up to the pointy arched doorway at the top of the stairs.

“Your familiar?” said Fiyero.

“Oh, that’s rich,” said Elphaba. “Well, I’d as soon be thought a witch as anything else. Why not. Here Malky, some milk.”

The room was large and seemed only casually arranged for dwelling. Originally a storeroom, it had barricaded double doors that could be swung outward, to receive or dispense sacks of grain hauled up by a winch from the street. The only natural light fell in through a couple of cracked panes of glass in a skylight open four or five inches. Pigeon feathers and white-and-bloody flux on the floor below. Eight or ten crates in a circle, as if for sitting. A bedroll. Clothes folded on a trunk. Some odd feathers, bits of bones, strung teeth, and a wizened dodo claw, brown and twisted like beef jerky: These were hung on nails pounded into the wall, and arranged for art or for a spell. A sallowwood table—a nice piece of furniture, that!—whose three arching legs tapered down into elegantly carved doe’s hooves. A few tin plates, red with white speckles, some food wrapped in cloth and cord. A pile of books at the bedside. A cat toy tied to a string. Most effectively, and gruesomely, the skull of an elephant hung on a rafter, and a bouquet of dried creamy pink roses emerged from the central hole in the hull of its cranium—like the exploding brains of a dying animal, he couldn’t help thinking, remembering Elphaba’s youthful concerns. Or maybe an homage to the putative magical talents of elephants?

Below it hung a crude glass oval, scratched and chipped, used as a looking glass, perhaps, though its reflective qualities appeared unreliable.

“So this is home,” said Fiyero as Elphaba brought out some food for the cat and ignored Fiyero some more.

“Ask me no questions and I’ll spell you no lies,” she said.

“May I sit down?”

“That’s a question”—but she was grinning—“oh, well then, sit for ten minutes and tell me about yourself. How did you of all people turn into a sophisticate?”

“Appearances are deceiving,” he said. “I can afford the garb and affect the language, but I’m still an Arjiki tribal boy underneath.”

“What is your life like?”

“Is there something to drink? Not alcohol—I’m just thirsty.”

“I don’t have running water. I don’t use it. There’s some questionable milk—at least Malky will still drink it—or perhaps there’s a bottle of ale up there on the shelf—help yourself.”

She took a little ale in a pipkin, left the rest for him.

He told her the barest outline of things. His wife, Sarima, the childhood bride grown up and grown fecund—their three children. The old Office of Public Works waterworks headquarters at Kiamo Ko, which by ambush and occupation his father had converted to a chieftain’s seat and a tribal stronghold back in the time of the Ozma Regent. The dizzying schizoid life of moving every year from the Thousand Year Grasslands in the spring and summer, where the clan hunted and feasted, to a more settled autumn and winter at Kiamo Ko. “An Arjiki prince has business interests here in the Emerald City?” said Elphaba. “If it were banking you’d be in Shiz. The business of this city is military, my old friend. What are you up to?”

“You’ve heard enough from me,” he said. “I can play coy and deceptive too, even if it’s all pretend and no dark secrets to speak of.” He guessed the quiet business of trade agreements would not impress his old friend; he was embarrassed his affairs weren’t more audacious or thrilling. “But I’ve gone on. What of you, Elphie?”

She wouldn’t say anything for a few minutes. She unrolled some dried sausage and some graying bread, and found a couple of oranges and a lemon, and put them unceremoniously on the table. In the mothy atmosphere she looked more like a shadow than a person; her green skin seemed oddly soft, like spring leaves at their tenderest, and beaten, like copper. He had an unprecedented urge to grab her wrist and make her stop moving about—if not to make her talk, at least to keep her still, so he could look at her.

“Eat this stuff,” she said at last. “I’m not hungry. You eat it, go on.”

“Tell me something,” he begged. “You left us at Shiz—you disappeared like the morning fog. Why, where to, and what then?”

“How poetic you are,” she said. “I’ve a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

But she was agitated. Her fingers twitched; she called for the cat, and then irritated it and sent it flying off her lap. Finally she said, “Oh well, this much then. But you’re never to come here again. I don’t want to have to find a new place, this is too good for me. Do you promise?”

“I will agree to consider promising, that’s all. How can I promise any more than that? I don’t know a thing yet.”

She said, hurriedly, “Well, I was fed up with Shiz. The death of Doctor Dillamond vexed me, and everybody grieved and nobody cared. Not really. It wasn’t the right place for me anyway, all those silly girls. Although I liked Glinda well enough. How is she anyway?”

“I’m not in touch. I keep expecting to run into her at some Palace reception or other. I hear through the grapevine that she married a Paltos baronet.”

Elphaba looked annoyed and her back stiffened. “Only a baronet? Not a baron or a viscount at least? What a disappointment. Her early promise was never to pan out, then.” Meant as a joke, her remark was stiff and unfunny. “Is she a mother?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking the questions now, remember?”

“Yes, but Palace receptions?” she said. “Are you in cahoots with Our Glorious Wizard?”

“I hear he’s mostly gone reclusive. I’ve never met him,” Fiyero said. “He shows up at the opera and listens behind a portable screen. At his own formal dinners he dines apart, in an adjoining chamber behind a carved marble grill. I’ve seen a profile of a stately man walking along a promenade. If that’s even the Wizard, that’s all I’ve met of him. But you, you: you. Why did you cut us all off?”

“I loved you too much to keep in touch.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said, thrashing a bit, her arms like oars rowing in the blue summer evening lightlessness.

“Yes, I am asking. Have you lived here ever since? For five years? Do you study? Do you work?” He rubbed his bare forearms as he tried to guess about her: What would she be up to? “Are you associated with the Animal Relief League, or one of those defiant little humanitarian organizations?”

“I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

“You’re evading again.”

“That’s my job,” she said. “There, that’s a clue for you, dear Fiyero.”

“Amplify.”

“I went underground,” she said softly, “and I am still underground. You’re the first one to crack my anonymity since I said good-bye to Glinda five years ago. So you now know why I can’t say any more, or why you can’t see me again. For all I know you will turn me in to the Gale Force.”

“Hah! Those martinets! You think very little of me if you think I—”

“How do I know, how could I know?” She twisted her fingers together, a puzzle of green sticks. “They march in those boots all over the poor and the weak. They terrify households at three in the morning and drag away dissenters—and break up printing presses with their axes—and hold mock trials for treason at midnight and executions at dawn. They rake over every quarter of this beautiful, false city. They harvest a crop of victims on a monthly basis. It’s government by terror. They could be massing on the street right now. Never having yet followed me, they may have followed you.”

“You’re not as hard to follow as you think,” he told her. “You’re good but not that good. I could teach you a few things.”

“I bet you could,” she said, “but you won’t, for we won’t meet again. It’s too dangerous, for you as well as for me. That’s what I mean when I say I loved you all too much to keep in touch. Do you think the Gale Force is above torturing friends and family to get at sensitive information? You’ve got a wife and children, and I’m merely an old college friend you ran into once. Clever you to have followed me. Never again, do you hear? I will move if I find you’re trailing me. I can pick up right now, and be away in thirty seconds. It’s my training.”

“Don’t do this to me,” he said.

“We’re old friends,” she said, “but we’re not even especially good friends. Don’t turn this into a sentimental rendezvous. It’s nice to see you but I don’t ever want to see you again. Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won’t be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.”

“At what—twenty three years old?—you’re playing the Lady Rebel?” he said. “It’s not becoming.”

“It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un. Though I point out you are the same age as I, and prancing about as a prince. But have you eaten enough? We have to say good-bye now.”

“We don’t,” he said, firmly. He wanted to take her hands in his—he didn’t remember that he’d ever touched her before. He corrected himself—he knew he never had.

It was almost as if she could read his mind. “You know who you are,” she said, “but you don’t know who I am. You can’t—I mean you can’t and you can’t—it’s not allowed, for one, and you’re not capable for the other. Godspeed, if they use that phrase in the Vinkus—if it’s not a curse. Godspeed, Fiyero.”

She handed him his opera cape, and held out her hand to shake his. He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.

“What do you hear of Boq?” she asked, the next time they met.

“You just won’t answer me anything about yourself, will you?” he said. He was lounging with his feet up on her table. “Why did you finally agree to let me come back if you keep yourself locked up like a prisoner?”

“I rather liked Boq, that’s all.” She grinned. “I let you come back so I could pump you for news of him, and of the others.”

He told her what he knew. Boq had married Miss Milla, of all surprising turns. She had been dragged out to Nest Hardings, and she hated it. She kept trying suicide. “His letters sent at Lurlinemas every year are hysterical; they annotate her failed attempts at killing herself like a sort of annual family report.”

“It makes me wonder, in the same circumstances, what my mother must have gone through,” said Elphaba. “The privileged childhood in the big home of the ascendancy, then the rude shock of a hard life out there in nowhere-land. In Mama’s case, from Colwen Grounds to Rush Margins, then the Quadling lowlands. It’s actually a penance of the most severe sort.”

“Like mother like daughter,” said Fiyero. “Haven’t you left a certain amount of privilege yourself, to live here like a snail? Hidden and private?”

“I remember the first time I saw you,” she said, shaking drops of vinegar over the roots and vegetables she was preparing for a supper. “It was in that lecture hall of what’s-his-name—Doctor . . .”

“Doctor Nikidik,” said Fiyero. He blushed.

“You had those beautiful markings on your face—I’d never seen such before. Did you plan that entrance, to win your way into our hearts?”

“On my honor, could I have done anything else, I would have. I was both mortified and terrified. Do you know, I thought those enchanted antlers were going to kill me? And it was prancing Crope and flibberty Tibbett who saved me.”

“Crope and Tibbett! Tibbett and Crope! I’d forgotten all about them. How are they?”

“Tibbett was never the same after that escapade at the Philosophy Club. Crope, I think, entered an arts auction house, and still flits around with the theatrical set. I see him from time to time at occasions. We don’t speak.”

“My, you’re disapproving!” She laughed. “Of course being as prurient as the next creature I always wondered what the Philosophy Club had turned out to be like. You know, in another life I’d like to see them all again. And Glinda, dear Glinda. And even nasty Avaric. What of him?”

“Avaric I do speak to. He’s most of the year installed in the Margreavate, but he has a house in Shiz. And when in the Emerald City we stay at the same club.”

“Is he still a smug boor?”

“My, you’re disapproving now.”

“I suppose I am.” They ate their dinner. Fiyero waited for her to ask more about his family. But it was their respective families they were keeping from each other, apparently: his Vinkus wife and children, her circle of agitators and insurrectionists.

The next time he came, he thought, he must wear a shirt open at the neck, so she could see that the pattern of blue diamonds on his face continued unbroken down his chest . . . Since she seemed to like that.

“Surely you don’t spend the entire autumn season in the Emerald City?” she asked one evening when the cold was drawing in.

“I’ve send word to Sarima that business is keeping me here indefinitely. She doesn’t care. How could she care? Plucked out of a filthy caravansary and married as a small child to an Arjiki prince? Her family wasn’t stupid. She’s got food, servants, and the solid stone walls of Kiamo Ko for defense against the other tribes. She’s going a little fat after her third child. She doesn’t really notice whether I’m home or not—well, she has five sisters, and they all moved in. I married a harem.”

“No!” Elphaba sounded intrigued and a little embarrassed at the idea.

“You’re right, no, not really. Sarima has proposed once or twice that her younger sisters could and would happily occupy my energies at nighttime. Once you pass over the Great Kells, the taboo against such an exercise isn’t as strong as it seems to be in the rest of Oz, so stop looking so shocked.”

“I can’t help it. Did you do it?”

“Did I ‘do it’?” He was teasing her.

“Did you sleep with your sisters-in-law?”

“No,” he said. “Not out of lofty moral standards, or a lack of interest, either. It’s just that Sarima is a shrewd wife, and everything in marriage is a campaign. I would have been in her thrall even more than I am.”

“Such a bad thing?”

“You’re not married, you don’t know: Yes, a bad thing.”

“I am married,” she said, “just not to a man.”

He raised his eyebrows. She put her hands to her face. He’d never seen her look like that—her words had shocked herself. She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, blow her nose. “Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire,” she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks.

She stood bent over like an old woman, one arm on the counter, the blanket falling from her face to the floor. “Elphie, Elphie,” he said, horrified, and lurched after her, and put his arms around her. The blanket hung between them, chin to ankles, but seemed about to burst into flame itself, or roses, or a fountain of champagne and incense. Odd how the richest images bloomed in the mind when the body itself was most alert . . .

“No,” she cried, “no, no, I’m not a harem, I’m not a woman, I’m not a person, no.” But her arms wheeled of their own accord, like windmill sails, like those magicked antlers, not to kill him, but to pin him with love, to mount him against the wall.

Malky, with a rare display of discretion, climbed to the windowsill and looked away from them.

They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

There were long days in a row when they couldn’t meet. “I have business, I have work, trust me or I shall disappear on you,” she said. “I shall write to Glinda and ask her to share the spell on how to go up in a puff of smoke. I am teasing, but I mean it, Fiyero.”

Fiyero + Fae he wrote, in the flour that spilled when she rolled out a piecrust. Fae, she had whispered, as if even to keep it from the cat, was her code name. No one in the cell could know one another’s real names.

She would not let him see her naked in the light, but since he also was not allowed to visit during the day this was hardly a problem. She waited for him on the appointed evenings, sitting naked under the blanket, reading essays on political theory or moral philosophy. “I don’t know that I understand them, I read them as poetry,” she once admitted. “I like the sound of the words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.”

“Is it changing by how you live?” he asked, turning down the light and slipping out of his clothes.

“You think all this is new to me,” she said, sighing. “You think I am such a virgin.”

“You didn’t bleed the first time,” he observed. “So what’s to think about?”

“I know what you think,” she said. “But how experienced are you, Lord Sir Fiyero, Arjiki Prince of Kiamo Ko, Mightiest Stalker of the Thousand Year Grasslands, Chiefest Chieftain in the Great Kells?”

“I am putty in your hands,” he said, truthfully. “I married a child bride and to preserve my power I haven’t been unfaithful. Until now. You are not like her,” he said. “You don’t feel like her, it doesn’t feel the same. You’re more secret.”

“I don’t exist,” she said, “so you’re still not being unfaithful, either.”

“Let’s not be unfaithful right now then,” he said, “I can’t wait,” running his hands along her ribs, down the tight plane of her stomach. She always brought his hands to her thin, expressive breasts; she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

He didn’t have enough to do during the days. Being the chieftain of the Arjiki people, he knew it was in their political interest to be tied ineluctably to the commercial hub of the Emerald City. Yet Arjiki business concerns only required Fiyero to show his face at social engagements, in board meetings and financial parlors. The rest of the time he wandered about, seeking frescoes of Saint Glinda and other saints. Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae would never tell him what she had been doing in the chapel of Saint Glinda attached to the mauntery in Saint Glinda’s Square.

One day he looked up Avaric and they had lunch. Avaric suggested a girlie show afterward, and Fiyero begged off. Avaric was opinionated, cynical, corrupt, and as good-looking as ever. There wasn’t much gossip to bring back to Elphaba.

The wind tore the leaves from the trees. The Gale Force continued to frog-march Animals and collaborators out of town. Interest rates in the Gillikin banks went soaring up—good for investors, bad for those who had adjustable rate loans. Foreclosures on a lot of valuable city-centre properties. Too early, businesses began stringing the green and gold lights of Lurlinemas, trying to woo cautious and depressed citizens into the shops.

More than anything else he wanted to walk the streets of the Emerald City with Elphaba—there was no more beautiful place to be in love, especially at dusk as the shop lights went on, golden against the blue-purple evening sky. He had never been in love before, he now saw. It humbled him. It scared him. He couldn’t bear it when their forced absence went four or five days.

“Kisses to Irji, Manek, and Nor,” he wrote on the bottom of his weekly letter to Sarima, who couldn’t write back because, among other things, she had never learned either alphabet. Somehow her silence seemed a tacit approval of this vow-shattering interlude. He didn’t write kisses to her, too. He hoped the chocolates would do.

He rolled over, tugging the blanket with him; she tugged it back. The air in the room was so cold it seemed clammy. Malky endured their thrashing legs in order to stay near them, to receive warmth, and to give whatever passes for affection in cats.

“My darling Fae,” said Fiyero. “You probably know this, and I’m not about to become a co-conspirator at whatever it is you’re working for—reducing library fines or revoking the need for cat collars or whatever. But I do keep my ears open. The Quadlings are under the thumb of the marching militia again. At least that’s what they’re saying in the lounge of the club, over newspapers and pipes. Apparently an army division has gone down into Quadling Country as far as Qhoyre, on some sort of a slash-and-burn mission. Your father, your brother, and Nessarose—are they still there?”

Elphaba didn’t answer for a while. She seemed to be working out not only what she wanted to say, but perhaps even what she could remember. Her expression was of puzzlement, even testiness. She said, “We lived in Qhoyre for a time, when I was about ten. It’s a funny little low town, built on boggy ground. Half the streets are canals. The roofs are low, the windows are grilled or louvred to provide privacy and ventilation, the air is steamy and the flora excessive—huge roundels of palmy leaf, almost like shallow quilted pillows, making a sound as they beat against each other in the wind—tirrr tirrr, tirrr tirrr.”

“I don’t know that there’s much of Qhoyre left,” said Fiyero carefully. “If the gossip I picked up is accurate.”

“No, Papa isn’t there now, thank—thank whoever, whatever, thank nothing,” continued Elphaba. “Unless things have changed. The good people of Qhoyre weren’t very responsive to missionary efforts. They’d invite Papa and me in, serve us little damp cakelets and lukewarm red mint tea. We’d all sit on low, mildewing cushions, scaring geckos and spiders into the deeper shadows. Papa would drone on about the generous nature of the Unnamed God, doing his basic xenophiliac slant. He pointed to me as proof. I would grin with horrible sweetness and sing a hymn—the only music Papa approved of. I was miserably shy and ashamed of my color, but Papa had convinced me of the value of this work. Invariably the gentle citizens of Qhoyre would capitulate out of hospitality. They’d allow themselves to be led in prayers to the Unnamed God, but you couldn’t say their hearts were in it. I think I sensed a great deal more—more dishearteningly than Papa did—how ineffectual we really were.”

“So where are they now? Papa, Nessarose, and the boy—your brother, what’s his name?”

“Shell, that’s his name. Well, Papa felt his work was farther south in Quadling Country, in the real outback. We had a series of small cramped homes around Ovvels–the Hovels in Ovvels, we called them—that dreary, beastly countryside, full of a bloody beauty.”

At his questioning expression she continued. “I mean, fifteen, twenty years ago, Fiyero, the Emerald City speculators discovered the ruby deposits there. First under the Ozma Regent, then after the coup, under the Wizard: same ugly business practices. Though under the Ozma Regent the exploitation did not require murder and brutality. Using elephants, the engineers hauled in gravel, they dammed up springs, they perfected a complicated system of strip mining under three feet of brackish groundwater. Papa thought this disarray in their little moist society was a situation ready-made for mission work. And he was right. The Quadlings struggled against the Wizard with ill-argued proclamations, they resorted to totems, but their only military weapons were slingshots. So they rallied around my father. He converted them, they went into the struggle with the zeal of the newly chastised. They were dispossessed and disappeared. All with the benefit of unionist grace.”

“My, you’re bitter.”

“I was a tool. My dear father used me—and Nessarose less so, because of her trouble moving about—he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can—they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me. If the Unnamed God could love me, how much more responsible it’d be to the unadulterated them.”

“So, my dear, you don’t care where he is, or what happens to him now?”

“How can you say that?” She sat up, steaming. “I love the mad old tunnel-visioned bastard. He really believed in what he preached. He even thought that a Quadling corpse found floating faceup in a brackwater pond—provided it had a tattoo of conversion on it somewhere—was better off than a survivor. He felt he’d written a single ticket to the Other Land assembly of the Unnamed God. I think he considered it work well done.”

“And you don’t?” Fiyero had a fairly anemic spiritual life; he felt unqualified to voice an opinion about her father’s vocation.

“Maybe it was work well done,” she said sadly. “How do I know? But not for me. Settlement by settlement we reaped converts. Settlement by settlement the civil engineering corps came in, to detonate the village life. There was no outcry throughout Oz proper. Nobody was listening. Who cared about the Quadlings?”

“But what brought him there in the first place?”

“He and Mama had had a friend, a Quadling, who died in my family home—a Quadling itinerant, a glassblower.” Elphaba frowned and closed her eyes, and would say no more. Fiyero kissed her fingernails. He kissed the V between her thumb and forefinger, he sucked on it as if it were a lemon rind. She slipped backward to allow him greater purchase.

A while later he said, “But Elphie-Fabala-Fae—are you really not worried about your father and Nessarose, and little himmy-who?”

“My father chases hopeless causes. It gives his failure at life some legitimacy. For a while he proclaimed himself a prophet of the return of the last, lost tadpole of the Ozma line. That’s over now. And my brother Shell—he is probably fifteen by now. Look Fiyero, how can I be worried about them and be worried about the campaign of the season too? I can’t course around Oz—on that broomstick there, like a storybook witch!—I’ve chosen to go underground so that I can’t worry. Besides, I know what will happen to Nessarose at least. Sooner or later.”

“What?”

“When my great-grandfather finally pops off, she’ll be the next Eminent Thropp.”

“You’re in line, I thought. Aren’t you older?”

“I’m gone, dearie, I’m magicked away in a puff of smoke. Forget it. And you know, that’ll be good for Nessarose. She’ll be a sort of local queen out there in Nest Hardings.”

“She apparently did a course in sorcery, did you know? In Shiz?”

“No, I didn’t. Well, bully for her. If she ever comes down off that plinth—the one that has words written on it along the edges in gold, reading most superior in moral rectitude—if she ever allows herself to be the bitch she really is, she’ll be the Bitch of the East. Nanny and the devoted staff at Colwen Grounds will prop her up.”

“I thought you were fond of her!”

“Don’t you know affection when you see it?” scoffed Elphaba. “I love Nessie. She’s a pain in the neck, she’s intolerably righteous, she’s a nasty piece of work. I’m devoted to her.”

“She’ll be the Eminent Thropp.”

“Better she than I,” said Elphaba dryly. “For one thing, she has great taste in shoes.”

One evening through the skylight the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

She could get so angry, though!

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the pork roll you’re devouring, in such perfect mindless affluence, is cut from a Pig,” she snapped at him once.

“Just because you’ve already eaten, you don’t need to ruin my appetite,” he protested mildly. Free-living Animals were not much in evidence in his home territory, and the few sentient creatures he’d known at Shiz had, except at the Philosophy Club that night, made little impression. The plight of the Animals had not much touched him.

“This is why you shouldn’t fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”

“Now you have put me off my lunch.” He fed the rest of the pork roll to Malky. “What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.”

“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.

“And of women?”

“Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”

“And my capacity for evil?” said Fiyero, feeling implicated and uncomfortable. “And yours?”

“Fiyero’s capacity for evil is in believing too strenuously in a capacity for good.”

“And yours?”

“Mine is in thinking in epigrams.”

“You let yourself off lightly,” he said, suddenly a little annoyed. “Is that what you’re engaged by your secret network to do? Generate witty epigrams?”

“Oh, there’s big doings afoot,” she said, uncharacteristically. “I won’t be at the center of it, but I’ll be on the fringes helping out, believe me.”

“What are you talking about? A coup?”

“Never you mind, and you’ll stay blameless. Just as you want to be.” This was nastiness on her part.

“An assassination? And so what if you do kill some General Butcher? What does that make you? A saint? A saint of the revolution? Or a martyr if you’re killed in the campaign?”

She wouldn’t answer. She shook her narrow head in irritation, then flung the rosy shawl across the room as if it infuriated her.

“What if some innocent bystander is killed as you aim for General Pig Butcher?”

“I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.”

“Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.”

“There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.”

“Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?”

“Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—”

“Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.”

“Denial? Sin?”

“No. We.”

“I don’t know why—”

“The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?”

“You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.”

“Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .”

“Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.”

“I adore your looks and I acknowledge them. Fae!”

They parted that day without speaking, and he spent the evening at the betting parlor, losing money.

The next time he saw her, he brought three green candles and three gold candles and decorated her flat for Lurlinemas. “I don’t believe in religious feast days,” she said, but relented to admit, “they are pretty, though.”

“You have no soul,” he teased her.

“You’re right,” she answered soberly. “I didn’t think it showed.”

“You’re only playing word games now.”

“No,” she said, “what proof have I of a soul?”

“How can you have a conscience if you don’t have a soul?” he asked despite himself—he wanted to keep things light, to get back onto a better footing after their last episode of moral wrestling and estrangement.

“How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how all that is born must die, sob sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that’s all. I’m a forgettable leaf on a tree.”

“Since your work is terrorism, that’s the most extreme argument for crime I’ve ever heard. You’re eschewing all personal responsibility. It’s as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnameable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.”

“What is worse, Fiyero? Suppressing the idea of personhood or suppressing, through torture and incarceration and starvation, real living persons? Look: Would you worry about saving one precious sentimental portrait in a museum of fine arts when the city around you is on fire and real people are burning to death? Keep some proportion in all this!”

“But even some innocent bystander—say an annoying society dame—is a real person, not a portrait. Your metaphor is distracting and belittling, it’s a blind excuse for crime.”

“A society dame has chosen to parade herself as a living portrait. She must be treated as such. It’s her due. That denial of it, that’s your evil, to go back to the other day. I say you save the innocent bystander if you can, even if she’s a society dame, or he’s a captain of industry thriving mightily on all these repressive moves—but not, not, not at the expense of other, realer people. And if you can’t save them, you can’t. Everything costs.”

“I don’t believe in this concept of ‘real’ or ‘realer’ people.”

“You don’t?” She smiled, not nicely. “When I do disappear again, dearie, I’ll surely be less real than I am now.” She made to simulate sex against him; he turned his head, surprised at the vigor of his aversion.

Later that night, when they had made up, she suffered a racking paroxysm and painful sweats. She would not let him touch her. “You should go away, I’m not worthy of you,” she moaned, and some time later, when she was calmer, she murmured before sleeping again, “I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

She was right. He didn’t understand. He wiped her brow with a dry towel and kept close to her. There was frost on the skylight, and they slept beneath their winter coats to keep warm.

One brisk afternoon he sent off a propitiatory package of bright wooden toys for the children and a jeweled torque for Sarima. The pack train was going around the Great Kells via the northern route. It wouldn’t deliver Lurlinemas presents to Kiamo Ko until well into the spring, but he could pretend to have sent them earlier. If the snows held off, he would be home by then, restless and chafing in the tall narrow rooms of the mountain stronghold, but maybe he would get the credit for thoughtfulness. And perhaps deserved, why not? To be sure, Sarima would be in her winter doldrums (as distinct from her spring moods, her summer ennui, and her congenital autumn condition). A torque eventually would cheer her up, at least a little.

He stopped for a coffee in a café in a neighborhood just enough off the beaten track to be both bohemian and pricey. The management apologized: The winter garden, usually heated with braziers and brazen with expensive forced flowers, had been the site of an explosion the night before. “The neighborhood is troubled; who’d have thought it?” said the manager, touching Fiyero on the elbow. “Our Glorious Wizard was to have eradicated civil unrest: wasn’t that the whole point of curfews and containment laws?”

Fiyero was not inclined to comment, and the manager took his silence for agreement. “I’ve moved a few tables into my private parlor up the stairs, if you don’t mind roughing it amidst my family memorabilia,” he said, leading the way. “Finding good Munchkinlander help to repair the damage is getting harder, too. The Munchkinlander tiktok touch, there’s nothing like it. But a lot of our friends in the service sector have gone back to their eastern farms. Scared of violence against them—well, so many of them are so small, don’t you think they seem to provoke it?—they’re all cowards.” He interrupted himself to say, “I can tell you have no Munchkinlander relatives or I wouldn’t comment this way.”

“My wife is from Nest Hardings,” said Fiyero, lying unconvincingly, but the point was made.

“I recommend the cherry chocolate frappe today, fresh and delicious,” said the manager, retreating into repentant formality, and pulling out a chair at a table near high old windows. Fiyero sat and looked out. One fretted shutter had warped and couldn’t fold back against the outer wall as designed, but there was still enough of a view. Rooflines, ornamental chimney pots, the odd high window box stuffed with dark winter pansies, and pigeons swooping and scissoring like lords of the sky.

The manager was of that peculiar stock; after so many generations in the Emerald City, it seemed a separate ethnic strand. The paintings of his family showed the bright gimlet hazel eyes, and refined receding hairlines on men and women alike (and plucked into the scalps of children, too, in the fashion of the Emerald City upwardly yearning middle class). At the sight of simpering boys in pink satin with frizzy-headed lapdogs, and girlettes in womanish dark rouge and plunging necklines (revealing their innocent lack of breasts), Fiyero felt the sudden longing, again, for his own cold and distant children. Though bruised by their particular family life—and who wasn’t?—in his memory Irji, Manek, and Nor managed more integrity than these hothouse scions of a family on the make.

But that was cruel, and he was responding to artistic convention, not to the actual children. He turned his gaze out the window when the order came, to avoid hideous art, to avoid the other people in the salon.

Having coffee in the winter garden below usually provided a view of vine-covered brick walls, shrubs, and the occasional marble statue of some improbably beautiful and vulnerably naked stripling. However, from a flight up, one could see over the wall, into an interior mews area. One part was a stables, another a neighborhood toilet, apparently; and just within the range of his vision was the wall broken by the explosion. Some sort of twisted, thorny wire netting had been erected across the opening, which led into a schoolyard.

As he watched, one of the doors of the adjacent school was pushed open, and a small crowd emerged, shaking and stretching into the sunlight. There seemed to be—Fiyero peered—a couple of elderly Quadling women and some adolescent male Quadlings, straplings with early mustaches making a bluish-colored shadow against their fine rose-rust skin. Five, six, seven Quadlings—and a couple of stout men who might have been part Gillikinese, it was hard to tell—and a family of bears. No—Bears. Smallish Red Bears, a mother and father and a toddler.

The little Bear went unerringly to some balls and hoops under the stairs. The Quadlings made a circle and began to sing and dance. The old ones, with arthritic steps, joined their hands with the teenagers and moved in a widdershins pattern, in and out, as if making a clock face that reversed the clockwise movement of time. The stocky Gillikinese men shared a cigarette and gazed out the wiry barrier across the break in the wall. The Red Bears were more dispirited. The male sat on the wooden edge of a sandlot, rubbing his eyes and combing the fur below his chin. The female moved back and forth, kicking at the ball just often enough to keep the cub occupied, then stroking the bowed head of her mate.

Fiyero sipped his drink and inched forward. If there were, what, twelve prisoners, and only a wire fence between them and freedom, why didn’t they rush it? Why were they separated into their racial and species groups?

After ten minutes the doors opened again and a Gale Forcer came out, trim and—yes, Fiyero had to admit it at last—terrifying. Terrifying in the brick red uniform with the green boots, and the emerald cross that quartered the breast of the shirt, one vertical strap from groin to high starched collar, the other strap from armpit to armpit across the pectorals. He was only a youth whose curly hair was so blond as to look nearly white in the winter sun. He stood with legs apart on the step of the school’s verandah.

Though Fiyero couldn’t hear a thing through the closed window, the soldier apparently gave a command. The Bears stiffened and the cub began to wail and clutch the ball to itself. The Gillikinese men came and stood quiescently ready. The Quadlings ignored the order and kept on with their dance. They swung their hips, and they held their arms at shoulder height, moving their hands in a semaphoric message, though what it meant Fiyero could only guess. He had never seen a Quadling before.

The Gale Forcer raised his voice. He had a truncheon in a thong loop at his waist. The cub hid behind the father, and the mother could be seen to growl.

Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile? Or are there relatives inside who will be tortured if you make a break for freedom?

It was all speculation; Fiyero couldn’t tell the dynamics of the situation, but he was riveted. He realized his hand was open, palm up against the glass of the window. Below, because the Bears had not stood to join the lineup, the soldier raised his cudgel and it came down on the skull of
the cub. Fiyero’s body jerked, he spilled his drink and the cup broke, porcelain shards on the buttery herringbone-laid oak flooring.

The manager appeared from behind a green baize door and tutted, and twitched the drapes closed, but not before Fiyero had seen one last thing. Recoiling as if he had never hunted and killed in the Thousand Year Grasslands, he averted his eyes and they wheeled upward, where he glimpsed the pale blond coins of faces—two or three dozen schoolchildren in the upper windows of the school, staring down with fascination and open mouths at the scene in their playing field.

“They have no concern for neighbors who have a business to run, bills to pay, and loved ones to feed,” snapped the manager. “You don’t need to see those antics as you enjoy your coffee, sir.”

“The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.”

“Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”

Fiyero didn’t take a replacement cup of cherry chocolate. There were racking cries from the mother Bear, and then a silence in the world outside the heavy damask drapes. Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn’t name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare to risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him. He held Elphie the tighter, trying to communicate a deeper passion without speaking it.

He noticed, too, that when she was agitated she was the more liberal in her lovemaking. He began to be able to tell when she was going to say “Not till next week.” She seemed more abandoned, more salacious, perhaps as a cleansing exercise before disappearing for a few days. One morning, as he was stealing some of the cat’s milk for his coffee, she rubbed some oil on her skin, wincing with sensitivity, and said over her shoulder of soft green marble, “A fortnight, my dear. My pet, as my father used to say. I need a fortnight of privacy now.”

He had a sudden pang, a premonition, that she was going to leave him. It was a way for her to get two weeks’ head start. “No!” he said. “That’s not on, Fae-Fae. It’s not all right, it’s too long.”

“We need it.” She expanded: “Not you and I, I mean the other we. Obviously I can’t tell you what we’re about, but the last plans for the autumn campaign are falling into place. There’s going to be an episode—I can’t say more—and I must be available to the network at all times.”

“A coup?” he said. “An assassination? A bomb? A kidnapping? What? Just the nature of it, not the specifics, what?”

“Not only can I not tell you,” she said, “I don’t even know. I’ll be told only my small part, and I’ll do it. I only know it’s a complicated maneuver with a lot of interlocking pieces.”

“Are you the dart?” he said. “Are you the knife? The fuse?”

She said (though he wasn’t convinced): “My dearie, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad. It’s all too expected. Security guards watch me like owls on a mouse. My very presence provokes alarm and heightened vigilance. No, no, the part I’ll play will be a handmaiden’s part, a little assistance in the shadows.”

“Don’t do it,” he said.

“You’re selfish,” she said, “and you’re a coward. I love you, my sweet, but your protests about this are wrongheaded. You just want to preserve my insignificant life, you don’t even have a moral feeling about whether I’m doing right or wrong. Not that I want you to, not that I care what you think about it. But I only observe, your objections are of the weakest sort. Now this isn’t something to be argued. Two weeks from tonight, come back.”

“Will the—the action—be completed by then? Who decides?”

“I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who decides, so don’t ask me.”

“Fae—” Suddenly he didn’t like her code name anymore. “Elphaba. Do you really not know who is pulling the strings that make you move? How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Wizard?”

“You are a novice at this, for all your status as a tribal prince!” she said. “Why shouldn’t I know if I was being a pawn of the Wizard? I could tell when I was being manipulated by that harridan, Madame Morrible. I learned something about prevarication and straight talking back at Crage Hall. Give me the credit for having spent some years at this, Fiyero.”

“You can’t tell me for sure who is or isn’t the boss.”

“Papa didn’t know the name of his Unnamed God,” she said, rising and rubbing oil on her stomach and between her legs, but modestly turning her back to him. “It never is the who, is it? It’s always the why.”

“How do you hear? How do they tell you what to do?”

“Look, you know I can’t say.”

“I know you can.”

She turned. “Oil my breasts, will you.”

“I’m not that stupidly male, Elphaba.”

“Yes you are”—she laughed, but lovingly—“come on.”

It was daylight, the wind roared and even shook the floorboards. The cold sky above the glass was a rare pinkish blue. She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands—as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her way.

The collapse of her reticence frightened him more than anything else.

He took some coconut oil and warmed it between his palms, and slid his hands like leathery velvet animals on her small, responding breasts. The nipples stood, the color flushed. He was already fully dressed, but recklessly he pressed himself against her mildly resisting form. One hand slid down her back; she arched against him, moaning. But perhaps, this time, not from need?

Still his hand moved down onto her buttocks, felt between her cheeks, beyond, felt the place one muscle pulled in crookedly, endearingly, felt the very faintest etching of hair beginning its crosshatch shadows, its swirl toward vortex. He worked his intelligent hand, reading the signs of her resistance.

“I have four companions,” she said suddenly, wrenching away in a motion soft enough not to disengage but to discourage. “Oh heart, I have four comrades; they don’t know who our cell leader is, it’s all done in the dark, with a masking spell to shadow the voice and distort the features. If I knew more, the Gale Force could catch me and torture it out of me, don’t you see?”

“What is your object?” he breathed, kissing her, loosening his trousers again, as if this were the first time, his tongue tracing the twisting funnel of her ear.

“Kill the Wizard,” she answered, looping her legs around him. “I am not the arrowhead, I am not the dart, I am just the shaft, the quiver—” She cupped more oil in her hand and as they slid and fell into the light, she made him bright and anguished with oil, took him deeper in than ever before.

“Even after all this time, you could be an agent for the Palace,” she said later.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m good.”

A little snow fell one week, then some more the next. The feast of Lurlinemas drew nearer. The unionist chapels, having appropriated and transformed the most visible parts of the old pagan beliefs, hung themselves shamelessly in green and gold, set out green candles and golden gongs and greenberry wreaths and gilded fruit. Along Merchant Row, shops outdid themselves (and the churches) in decor, with displays of fashionable clothes, and useless and expensive trinkets. In display windows, papier-mâché figures evoked the good Fairy Queen Lurline in her winged chariot, and her assistant, the minor fairy Preenella, who strewed gift-wrapped delights from her capacious magic basket.

He asked himself, again and again, if he was in love with Elphaba.

He also asked himself why he was so late coming to this question, after two months of a passionate affair; and if he knew what the words even meant; and if it mattered.

He chose more gifts for the kids and for sulky Sarima, that well-fed malcontent, that monster. He missed her a little; his feelings for Elphaba seemed not to vie with those for Sarima, but to complement them. No two women could be more unlike. Elphaba demonstrated the proud independence of Arjiki mountain women that Sarima, married so young, had never developed. And Elphie wasn’t just a different (not to say novel) provincial type—she seemed an advance on the gender, she seemed a different species sometimes. He caught himself with a mammoth erection just remembering that last time, and he had to hide himself behind some ladies’ scarves in a shop until it subsided.

He bought three, four, six scarves for Sarima, who didn’t wear scarves. He bought six scarves for Elphaba, who did.

The shop girl, a dull Munchkinlander midget who had to stand on a chair to reach the till, said over his shoulder, “Just in a minute, ma’am.” He turned to make room at the counter for the other customer.

“But Master Fiyero!” cried Glinda.

“Miss Glinda,” he said, flabbergasted. “What a surprise.”

“A dozen scarves,” she said. “Look, Crope, look who’s here!”

And there was Crope, a little jowly though he couldn’t be twenty-five yet, could he?—looking guiltily up from a display of feathery, plumy things.

“We must have tea,” said Glinda, “we must. Come now. Pay the nice little lady and off we fly.” In her voluminous skirts she rustled like a corps of ballerinas.

He hadn’t remembered her quite so giddy; maybe this was married life. He slid a glance at Crope, who was rolling his eyes behind her back.

“Just you put this on Sir Chuffrey’s account, and this, and this,” Glinda said, mounding things on the counter, “and have them sent along to our rooms in the Florinthwaite Club. I’ll need them for dining so have someone run over with them right now if you would. How dear. So kind. Ta ta. Boys, come along.”

She gripped Fiyero with a pinching hand and steered him away; Crope followed like a lapdog. The Florinthwaite Club was only a street or two over and they could easily have carried the purchases back themselves. Glinda capered and clattered down the grand staircase into the Oak Parlor, making enough noise so that every female resident looked up in a rewarding sort of disapproval.

“Now, you, Crope, there, so you can be Mother and pour when we’ve ordered, and dear Fiyero, you here, right next to me, that is if you’re not too married.”

They ordered tea; Glinda got used to him a bit and began to calm down.

“But really, who would have thought it?” she said, picking up a biscuit and putting it down again, about eight times in a row. “We were the great and the good at Shiz, really. Look at you, Fiyero—you’re a prince, aren’t you? Do we call you Your Highness? I never could. And you’re still married to that little child?”

“She’s grown up now, and we have a family,” Fiyero told her warily. “Three children.”

“And she’s here. I must meet her.”

“No, she’s back at our winter home in the Great Kells.”

“Then you’re having an affair,” said Glinda, “because you look so happy. Who with? Anyone I know?”

“I’m just happy to see you,” he said; and in fact he was. She looked wonderful. She had filled out some. That wraithlike beauty had bloomed but not coarsened. She was more woman than waif, and more wife than woman. Her hair was cut short in a boyish style, very becoming, and there was a tiaralike thing in her curls. “And now you’re a sorceress.”

“Oh hardly,” she said. “Can I even get that damned serving girl to hurry up with the scones and jam? I can not. Yes, I can sign a hundred greeting cards for the holiday season at one go. But it’s a very minor talent, I tell you. Sorcery is vastly overrated in the popular press. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Wizard just magick the hell out of his adversaries? No, I’m content to try to be a good partner for my Chuffrey. He’s at the exchange today, doing financial thingies. Oh do you know who else is in town? It’s too rich, Crope tell him.”

Crope, surprised to be given an opening, choked on his mouthful of tea. Glinda rushed in. “Nessarose! Can you believe it? She’s at the family home over there in Lower Mennipin Street—an address that’s come up quite a lot in the past decade, I might add. We saw her where, Crope, where? It was the Coffee Emporium—”

“It was the Ice Garden—”

“No, I remember, it was the Spangletown Cabaret! Fiyero do you know, we went to see that old Sillipede, do you remember? No you don’t, I can see it in your face. She was the singer who was performing at the Oz Festival of Song and Sentiment the day our Glorious Wizard arrived out of the sky in a balloon and orchestrated that coup! She’s making yet another of her innumerable comeback tours. She’s a bit camp now but so what, it was gales of fun. And there at a better table than we had, I might tell you, was Nessie! She was with her grandfather, or is it the great-grandfather? The Eminent Thropp? He must be eleventy-hundredy years old by now. I was shocked to see her until I realized she went merely to provide him an escort. She didn’t think much of the music—she scowled and prayed all through the entr’acte. And the Nanny was there too. Who would’ve imagined it, Fiyero—you’re a prince, and Nessarose just about installed as the next Eminent Thropp, and Avaric, of course, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, and humble little me-eee married to Sir Chuffrey, holder of the most useless title and the biggest stock portfolio in the Pertha Hills?” Glinda almost stopped for breath, but lunged on kindly, “And Crope, of course, dear Crope. Crope, tell Fiyero all about yourself, he’s dying to know, I can see it.”

Actually Fiyero was interested, if only for a rest from the staccato chatter.

“He’s shy,” Glinda pushed on, “shy shy shy, always was.” Fiyero and Crope exchanged glances and tried to keep their mouths from twitching. “He’s got this so avant-garde little palace of a loft apartment on the top floor of a doctor’s surgery, could you imagine? Stunning views, the best views in the Emerald City, and at this time of year! He dabbles a bit in painting, don’t you dear? Painting, a little musical operetta set design here and there. When we were young we thought the world revolved around Shiz. You know there’s real theatre here now, the Wizard has made this a much more cosmopolitan city, don’t you think?”

“It’s good to see you, Fiyero,” said Crope, “say something about yourself, fast, before it’s too late.”

“You cad, you kid me mercilessly,” sang Glinda. “I’ll tell him about your little affair with—well never mind. I’m not that mean.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Fiyero said, feeling even more taciturn and Vinkus than he had when he first arrived in Shiz. “I like my life, I lead my clan when they need it, which isn’t often. My children are healthy. My wife is—well, I don’t know . . .”

“Fertile,” supplied Glinda.

“Yes.” He grinned. “She’s fertile and I love her, and I’m not going to stay much longer as I’m meeting someone for a business conference across town.”

“We must meet,” said Glinda, suddenly plaintive, suddenly looking lonely. “Oh Fiyero, we’re not old yet, but we’re old enough to be old friends already, aren’t we? Look, I’ve gushed on like a debutante who forgot to splash on her Eau d’Demure. I’m sorry. It’s just that that was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness—and life isn’t the same now. It’s wonderful, but it isn’t the same.”

“I know,” he said, “but I don’t think I can meet you again. There’s so little time, and I have to go back to Kiamo Ko. I’ve been away since the late summer.”

“Look, we’re all here, me and Chuffrey, Crope, Nessarose, you—is Avaric around, we could get him? We could get together, we could have a quiet dinner together in our rooms upstairs. I promise not to be so giddy. Please, Fiyero, please, Your Highness. It would do me such an honor.” She cocked her head and put a single finger to her chin, elegantly, and he could tell she was struggling through the language of her class to say something real.

“If I think I can, I’ll let you know, but please, you mustn’t count on it,” he said. “There’ll be other times. I’m not usually in town so late in the season—this is an anomaly. My children are waiting—have you children, Glinda?”

“Chuffrey is dry as two baked walnuts,” said Glinda, making Crope choke on his tea again. “Before you go—I can see you’re getting ready to dash—dear, dear Fiyero—what do you hear from Elphaba?”

But he was prepared for this, and had readied his face to be blank, and he only said, “Now that’s a name I don’t hear every day. Did she ever turn up? Surely Nessarose must have said.”

“Nessarose says if her sister ever does turn up she’ll spit in her face,” Glinda remarked, “so we must all pray that Nessarose never loses her faith, for that would mean the evaporation of such tolerance and kindness. I think she would kill Elphaba. Nessa was abandoned, rejected, left to look after her crazy father, her grandfather-thingy, that brother, that nurse, that house, the staff—and you can’t even say single-handedly, as she doesn’t have any hands!”

“I thought I saw Elphaba once,” said Crope.

“Oh?” said Fiyero and Glinda together, and Glinda continued, “You never told me that, Crope.”

“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I was on the trolley that runs along the reflecting pool by the Palace. It was raining—some years ago now—and I saw a figure struggling with a big umbrella. I thought she was about to be blown away. A gust of wind blew the umbrella inside out and the face, a greenish face which is why I noticed, ducked down to avoid the splash of rainwater—you remember how Elphaba hated getting wet.”

“She was allergic to water,” Glinda opined. “I never knew how she kept herself so clean, and I her roommate.”

“Oil, I think,” said Fiyero. They both looked at him. “That is, in the Vinkus,” he stammered, “the elderly rub oil into their skin instead of water—I’ve always assumed that’s what Elphie did. I don’t know. Glinda, if I were to meet up with you again, what’s a good day?”

She rooted in her reticule for a diary. Crope took the opportunity to lean forward and say to Fiyero, “It really is good to see you, you know.”

“You too,” said Fiyero, surprised that he meant it. “If you ever get out into the central Kells, come stay at Kiamo Ko with us. Just send word ahead, as we’re only there for half a year at a time.”

“That’s just your speed, Crope, the wild beasts of the untamed Vinkus,” said Glinda. “I think the fashion possibilities, all those leather thongs and fringe and such, they might interest you, but I can’t see you as Mister Mountain Boy.”

“No, probably not,” agreed Crope. “Unless it affords fabulous cafés every four or five blocks, I don’t think a landscape quite developed enough for human habitation.”

Fiyero shook hands with Crope and then, remembering the rumors about poor Tibbett’s deterioration, kissed him; he threw his arms around Glinda and hugged her hard. She laced her arm through his and walked him to the door.

“Do let me shake off Crope and have you back, all to myself,” she said in a low voice, her patter evaporating into seriousness. “I can’t tell you, dear Fiyero. The past seems both more mysterious and more understandable with you right here before me. I feel there are things I could yet learn. I don’t want to wallow, dear boy, never that! But we go way back.” She held his hand between hers. “Something’s going on in your life. I’m not as dumb as I act. Something good and bad at the same time. Maybe I can help.”

“You were always sweet,” he said, and motioned to the doorman to hail a hansom cab. “How I regret that I won’t meet Sir Chuffrey.”

He moved out the doorway, across the marble entrance pavement, and turned to tip his hat at her. In the doors (the doormen held them open to enhance his parting view) she was a calm, resigned woman, neither transparent nor ineffectual—even, it might have been said, a woman full of grace. “If you should see her,” said Glinda lightly, “tell her I miss her still.”

He didn’t see Glinda again. He didn’t call at the Florinthwaite Club. He didn’t stroll past the Thropp family house in Lower Mennipin Street (though he was sorely tempted). He didn’t stop a scalper to try to get one of the tickets to Sillipede’s triumphant fourth annual comeback tour. He found himself in the Chapel of Saint Glinda in Saint Glinda Square, from which he could sometimes hear the cloistered maunts next door chanting and susurrating like a swarm of bees.

When the two weeks had passed at last, and the city was worked up to a froth over Lurlinemas, he went to see Elphaba, half-expecting she would have vanished.

But there she was, stern and loving and in the midst of making a vegetable pie for him. Her precious Malky was putting his feet in the flour and making paw prints all over the room. They talked awkwardly until Malky upset the bowl of vegetable stock, and that made them both laugh.

He didn’t tell her about Glinda. How could he? Elphaba had worked so hard to keep them all at bay, and now she was engaged in the major campaign of her life, the thing she had been working toward for five years. He did not approve of anarchy (well, he knew he was in lazy doubt about everything; doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction). But even after seeing the Bear cub struck down, he had to keep an even, cautious relationship with the Power on the throne—for the sake of his tribe.

Also, Fiyero didn’t want to make Elphie’s life harder than it was. And his selfish need to be comfortable with her surmounted his need to gossip. So he didn’t tell her Nessarose and Nanny were in town either, or had been. (For all he knew, he rationalized silently, they had already moved on.)

“I wonder,” she said that night, as the stars peered through the crazy frost pattern on the skylight, “I wonder if you should get out of town before Lurlinemas Eve.”

“Is all hell going to break loose?”

“I told you, I don’t know the whole picture; I can’t know; I shouldn’t know. But maybe some hell will break loose. Maybe it would be best for you to go.”

“I’m not going and you can’t make me.”

“I’ve been taking correspondence courses in sorcery on the side, I’ll go puff and turn you into stone.”

“You mean you’ll make me hard? I’m already hard.”

“Stop. Stop.”

“Oh you wicked woman, you have bewitched me again, look, it has a mind of its own—”

“Fiyero stop. Stop. Now look, I mean it. I want to know where you’re going to be on Lurlinemas Eve. Just so I can be sure you’re not going to get hurt. Tell me.”

“You mean we won’t be together?”

“It’s a work night for me,” she said grimly. “I’ll see you the next day.”

“I’ll wait here for you.”

“No you won’t. I think we’ve covered our tracks pretty well, but there’s still a chance even at this late date that somebody could come here to intercept me. No—you stay in your club and take a bath. Take a nice long cold bath. Got it? Don’t even go out. They say it might be snowy by then anyway.”

“It’s Lurlinemas Eve! I’m not going to spend the holiday in a bathtub all alone.”

“Well, hire some company, see if I care.”

“As if you don’t.”

“Just stay away from anything social, I mean theatre or crowds, or even restaurants, please, will you promise me that?”

“If you could be more specific I could be more careful.”

“You could be most careful if you left town completely.”

“You could be most careful if you told me—”

“Give over with that, cut it out. I don’t think I even want to know where you are, come to think of it. I just want you to be safe. Will you be safe? Will you stay inside, away from drunken pagan celebrations?”

“Can I go to chapel and pray for you?”

“No.” She looked so fierce that he didn’t even tease her about it again.

“Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?

“I love you,” said Elphaba.

“So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.”

Careful of us both, he thought.

So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all. She had swathed herself in long dark skirts, like some sort of a religious woman, and tucked up her hair inside a tall wide-brimmed hat with a crown like a cone. There was a dark scarf, purple and gold, wound around her neck, and pulled over her mouth, though she would need more than a scarf to mask that lovely prow of a nose. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves, a nicer type of accessory than she usually went in for, though he feared it was to allow for nimbler control of her hands. Her feet were lost in big, steel-toed boots like the kind worn by miners in the Glikkus.

If you didn’t know she was green, it would be hard to tell—in this dark afternoon, in this raking skittle of snow.

She didn’t look behind her; perhaps she didn’t care if she was being followed. Her circuit took her around some of the major squares of the city. She ducked in for a minute to the chapel of Saint Glinda next to the mauntery, the one where he had first seen her. Perhaps she was getting last-minute instructions, but she didn’t try to give him (or anyone else) the slip. She emerged in a minute or two.

Or perhaps—perish the thought—she was actually praying for guidance and strength?

She crossed the Law Courts Bridge, she wandered along the Ozma Embankment and cut diagonally through the abandoned rose gardens of the Royal Mall. The snow pestered her; she kept twining her cape the more tightly around; the silhouette of her thin, dark-stockinged legs in those huge comical boots showed up against the snowy blankness of the Oz Deer Park (now of course bereft of Deer and deer). She marched, head tucked down, past the cenotaphs and obelisks and memorial tablets to the Magnificent Dead of this escapade or that. The decades—Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love—the decades looked on and didn’t notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn’t see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

But the Wizard must not be her aim. She must have told the truth in saying that she was too untried, and too obvious, to be selected as the Wizard’s assassin. She must be involved in a diversionary tactic, or in taking out a possible successor or high-level ally. For tonight the Wizard would be opening the antiroyalist, revisionist Exhibit of Struggle and Virtue at the People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics near the Palace. Yet at the top of the Shiz Road Elphaba struck out sideways, away from the Palace district, cutting through the small, fashionable district of Goldhaven. The homes of the filthy rich were guarded by mercenaries, and she clopped past them on the pavements, past the stableboys out sweeping the snow off the pavement with their brooms. She did not look up or down or back over her shoulder. Fiyero guessed he was the more ostentatious figure, striding in his opera cape in the snow a hundred paces behind.

At the edge of Goldhaven was perched a small bluestone jewel of a theatre, the Lady’s Mystique. In the shallow but elegant square before it, white lights and gold and green spangles hung in profusion, looped from streetlight to streetlight. Some holiday oratorio or other was scheduled—he could only read SOLD OUT on the board in front—and the doors weren’t yet opened. The crowd was gathering, some vendors sold hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses, and a crowd of self-approving youngsters amused themselves and bothered some elderly people by singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow came down on all, on the lights, the theatre, the crowds; it landed in the hot chocolate, it was churned to mush and ice on the bricks.

Bravely, foolishly—without decision or choice, it felt like—Fiyero climbed the steps of a nearby private library, to keep an eye on Elphaba, who lost herself in the crowd. Was there to be a murder in the theatre? Was there to be arson, the innocent sybarites roasted like chestnuts? Was it a single mark, an appointed victim, or was it mayhem and disaster, the more, the worse, the better?

He didn’t know if he was there to prevent what she was about to do, or to save whomever he could from the catastrophe, or to tend anyone hurt accidentally, or even maybe just to witness it, so he could know more about her. And love her or not love her, but know which of the two it was.

She was circulating through the crowd, as if trying to locate someone. He believed, incredibly, that she didn’t know he was there—was she so intent on finding the right victim, and he didn’t fill the bill? Could she not feel her lover in the same open-air square with her as the wind moved the curtains of snow?

A phalanx of Gale Forcers appeared from an alley between the theatre and a school next door. They took up their places before the bank of glass doors in front. Elphaba mounted the steps of an ancient wool market, a kind of stone gazebo. Fiyero saw that she had something under her cloak. Explosives? Some magic implement?

Did she have colleagues in the square? Were they lining themselves up one with another? The crowd kept getting thicker, as the hour for the oratorio drew near. Inside the glass doors, house management was busy lining up stanchions and stringing velvet ropes to promote a genteel entry into the hall. Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.

A carriage came around the corner of a building on the far side of the square. It couldn’t come right up to the doors of the theatre, as the crowds were too dense, but it proceeded as far as it was able. Sensing the presence of someone with authority, the crowd drew a little still. Could this be the elusive Wizard, on an unannounced visit? A coachman in a teck-fur headpiece flung the door open, and reached his hand in to assist the passenger in alighting.

Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.

Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.

He saw that Elphaba knew that this was the one she must kill; she had known this; in an instant all was dead clear. If she was caught and captured and tried, her motivation couldn’t be more wonderful—she was merely a mad student from Madame Morrible’s own Crage Hall, she carried a grudge, she never forgot. It was too perfect.

But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?

Elphaba’s cape twitched; her hand went up and down inside it, as if priming something. Madame Morrible was growling a greeting to the crowd, which, while not necessarily knowing who she was, appreciated the spectacle if not the bulk of her arrival.

The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.

But then were thrown open the front doors of the building Madame Morrible was walking past—not the theatre, but the adjacent school, Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. Out the doors swarmed a cluster, a little upper-class mob of schoolgirls. What were they doing in school on a Lurlinemas Eve? Fiyero caught Elphaba looking wildly surprised. The girls were six or seven, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity, spooned into furry muffs and tucked into furry scarves and tipped into boots with furry edges. They were laughing and singing, raucous and rough as the elite adults they would become, and in their midst was a pantomime player, someone being the Fairy Preenella. It was a man, as the convention had it, a man done up in silly clownlike makeup, and mock bouncing bosom, and a wig and extravagant skirts, and a straw hat, and a huge basket with trinkets and treasures spilling out. “Oh la, socie-tee,” he fluted at Madame Morrible, “even Fairy Preenella can have a present for the Lucky Pedestrian.”

For a moment Fiyero thought the man in drag was going to pull out a knife and kill Madame Morrible right in front of the children. But no, espionage was organized but not that organized—this was a real accident, a disruption. They hadn’t figured on there being a school occasion this evening, nor on a screaming flock of schoolgirls greedily tugging at an actor in skirts and falsetto.

Fiyero turned back to look at Elphaba. Her face struggled with disbelief. The children were in the way of whatever she was supposed to do. They were a small unruly mob, chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him/her, grabbing for presents. The children were the accidental context—noisy, innocent daughters of tycoons, despots, and butcher generals.

He could see Elphaba working, he could see her hands fighting with each other, to do it anyway, to keep from doing it—whatever it was.

Madame Morrible pushed on, like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, devil come what may, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him.

The audience filed into the theatre. The children shrieked their song in the street, awash with greed and joy. The carriage that had brought Madame Morrible around was able to draw up in front of the theatre and start its long wait for her to come out again. Fiyero paused, unsure, in case there was a backup plan, in case Elphaba had something else up her sleeve, in case the theatre exploded.

Then he began to worry that, in the few minutes of losing sight of her, Elphaba had been rounded up by the Gale Force. Could they have whisked her out of sight that fast? What should he do if she became one of the disappeared?

At a clip, he headed back across town. Mercifully he found a waiting cab, and he had the cab drive him directly to the street of warehouses adjacent to the military garrison in the city’s ninth district.

In a state of profound agitation he arrived back at Elphaba’s little eyrie atop the corn exchange. As he climbed the stairs, his bowels turned suddenly to water, and it was only with effort he managed to make it to the chamber pot. His insides slopped noisily, wetly out, and he held his perspiring face in his hands. The cat was perched atop the wardrobe, glaring down at him. Voided, washed down, and at least loosely done up again, he tried to coax Malky with a bowl of milk. She would have none of it.

He found a couple of dried crackers, and ate them miserably, and then pulled on the chain to open the skylight, to help air the room. A couple of plops of snow fell in and sat there not melting, it was that cold in the damn place. He went to build up a fire, pulled open the iron door of the stove.

The fire caught, then flared, and the shadows detached themselves and moved as shadows will, but these shadows moved fast, across the room, at him before he could register what they were. Except that there were three, or four, or five, and they were wearing black clothes, and black char on their faces, and their heads were wrapped in colored scarves like the ones he had bought for Elphaba, for Sarima. On the shoulder of one he saw the glint of a gilded epaulet: a senior member of the Gale Force. There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat then scarpered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.

The youngest maunt was obliged to answer the convent door if the bell sounded during mealtime. In fact she was clearing away the remains of pumpkin soup and rye brisks, the other maunts already wafting, in a cerebral mood, toward their cloister chapel upstairs. She hesitated before deciding to answer the bell—in another three minutes she too would have been losing herself in devotions, and the bell would have gone unheeded. She had rather get the dishes to soak, frankly. But the seasonal cheer bullied her into charity.

She opened the huge door to find a figure crouched like a monkey in the dark corner of the stone porch. Beyond, snow was wrinkling the facade of the adjacent Church of Saint Glinda, making it look like a reflection in water, only right way up. The streets were empty and a noise of choirs came filtering out of the candle-lit church.

“What is it?” said the novice, remembering then to add, “Good Lurlinemas, my friend.”

She decided, once she saw the blood on the odd green wrists, and the darting look in the eyes, that holiday decency required her to drag the creature inside. But she could hear her sister maunts assembling in their private chapel, and the mother maunt beginning to sing a prelude in her silvery contralto. This was the novice’s first big liturgical event as a member of this community, and she didn’t want to miss a moment of it.

“Come with me, dolly,” she said, and the creature—a young woman a year or two older than she was—managed to straighten up enough to walk, or hobble, like a cripple, like a person so malnourished that their extensors cannot flex and their limbs look as if they are about to snap.

The novice stopped in a washroom to rinse the blood off the wrists, and to make certain that it was indeed splattered mess from the beheading of some hen for a holiday supper, and not a sad attempt at suicide. But the stranger recoiled from the sight of water, and looked so deranged and unhappy that the novice stopped. She used a dry towel instead.

The maunts were beginning antiphonal chants upstairs! How maddening! The novice took the path of least resistance. She dragged the forlorn thing down toward the winter salon, where the old retired biddies lived out their lives in a haze of amnesia and the discreetly placed clumps of marginium plants, whose sweet miasma helped mask the odors of the old and incontinent. The crones lived in a time of their own, they couldn’t be carted upstairs to the sacred chapel anyway.

“Look, I’ll sit you down here,” she said to the woman. “I don’t know if you need sanctuary or food or a bath or forgiveness, whatever. But you can stop here, warm and dry and safe and quiet. I’ll come back to you after midnight. It’s the feast day, you see. It’s the vigil service. Watch and wait, and hope.”

She pushed the hunted, haunted woman into a soft chair, and found a blanket. Most of the crones were snoring away, their heads nodding on their breastbones, dribbling softly onto bibs ornamented with green and gold berries and leaves. A few were telling their beads. The courtyard, open in summer, was now welled in with glass panels for the winter, so it looked like a square fish tank in an aquarium; snow falling in it always made them peaceful.

“Look, you can see the snow, white as the grace of the Unnamed God,” said the novice, remembering her pastoral requirements. “Think on that, and rest, and sleep. Here’s a pillow. Here’s a stool for your feet. Upstairs we’ll be singing and praising the Unnamed God. I’ll pray for you.”

“Don’t—” said the green ghostly guest, then slumped her head against the pillow.

“It’s my pleasure to,” said the novice, a bit aggressively, and fled, just in time to catch the processional hymn.

For a while the winter salon was still. It was like a fishbowl into which a new acquisition has been dropped. The snow moved as if done by a machine, gently and mesmerizingly, with a soft churr. The blossoms of the marginium plants closed a bit in the strengthening cold of the room. Oil lamps issued their funereal crepe ribbons into the air. On the other side of the garden—hardly visible through the snow and the two windows—a decrepit maunt, with a more precise grasp of the calendar than her sisters, began to hum a saucy old pagan hymn to Lurline.

Up to the shivering figure of the newcomer came one of the elders, inching forward in a wheeled chair. She leaned forward and sniffed. From a cloak of plaid blanket, blue and ivory, she pawed her old hands along the armrests. She reached out and touched Elphaba’s hand.

“Well, the poor dolly is sick, the poor dolly is tired,” said the ancient thing. Her hands felt, as the novice’s had done, for open wounds on the wrists. Nothing. “Though intact, the poor dolly is in pain,” she said, as if approving. A dome of near-balding scalp came into view under the hood of the blanket. “The poor dolly is faint, the poor dolly is faltering,” she went on. She rocked a bit and pressed Elphaba’s hands between her own, as if to warm them, but it was doubtful that her anemic and incompetent old circulatory system could heat a stranger when it could scarcely heat herself. Still she kept on. “The poor poppet is failure itself,” she murmured. “Happy holidays to one and all. Come my dear, lay your breast on old Mother’s bosom. Old Mother Maunt will set things right.” She couldn’t quite pull Elphaba out of her position of dreamless, sleepless grief. She could only keep Elphaba’s hands tightly clutched within her own, as a sepal sockets the furls of young petal. “Come, my precious and all will be well. Rest in the bosom of mad Mother Yackle. Mother Yackle will see you home.”

The Voyage Out

On the day the seven-year maunt was to leave, Sister Bursar took the huge iron key from her bosom and unlocked the store chamber, and said, “Come in.” She pulled from the press three black shifts, six camisoles, gloves, and a shawl. She also handed over the broom. Finally, for emergencies, a basket of simples—herbs and roots, tinctures, rues, salves and balms.

There was paper, too, though not much: a dozen pages or so, in different shapes and thicknesses. Paper was in ever shorter supply in all of Oz. “Make it last, make it important,” advised Sister Bursar. “You’re a bright one, for all your sulks and silences.” She found a pen. A pfenix feather, known for the endurance and strength of the quill. Three pots of black ink, sealed under knobby wristholds of wax.

Oatsie Manglehand was waiting in the ambulatory with the old Superior Maunt. The convent was paying a decent penny for this service, and Oatsie needed the fees. But she didn’t like the look of the sullen maunt that Sister Bursar ushered in. “This is your passenger,” said the Superior Maunt. “Her name is Sister Saint Aelphaba. She’s spent many years in solitary life and in nursing. The habit of gossip is lost. But it’s time for her to move on, and move on she will. You’ll find her no trouble.”

Oatsie looked the passenger over and said, “The Grasstrail Train doesn’t promise the survival of its party, Mother. I’ve led two dozen trips these past ten years or so, and there have been more casualties than I like to admit.”

“She leaves of her own free will,” said the Superior Maunt. “Should she wish to return at any point, we would take her in. She is one of us.”

She didn’t look one of anything to Oatsie, neither flesh nor fowl, neither idiot nor intellectual. Sister Saint Aelphaba just stared at the floor. Though she seemed to be about thirty, she had a sallow, adolescent look about her.

“And there’s the luggage—you can manage it?” The Superior Maunt pointed to the small heap of supplies in the immaculate forecourt in front of the mauntery. Then she turned to the departing maunt. “Sweet child of the Unnamed God,” said the Superior Maunt, “you go from us to conduct an exercise in expiation. You feel there is a penalty to pay before you may find peace. The unquestioning silence of the cloister is no longer what you need. You are returning to yourself. So we send you from us with our love and with our expectations of your success. Godspeed, my good sister.”

The passenger kept her eyes trained on the ground and did not answer.

The Superior Maunt sighed. “We must be off to our devotions.” She peeled a few notes from a roll of money kept in the recesses of her veils, and handed them over to Oatsie Manglehand. “This should see you through, and more besides.”

It was a healthy amount. Oatsie stood to earn a lot from escorting this taciturn woman through the Kells—more than from the whole rest of her party combined. “You are too good, Mother Maunt,” she said. She took the cash with her strong hand, and made a gesture of deference with her limp one.

“No one is too good,” said the Superior Maunt, but nicely, and retired with surprising speed behind the cloister doors. Sister Bursar said, “You’re on your own now, Sister Elphie, and may all the stars smile you on your way!” and she disappeared as well. Oatsie went to load the luggage and supplies in the wagon. There was a small, chunky ragamuffin boy asleep behind the trunk. “Off with you,” said Oatsie, but the boy muttered, “I’m to go too, that’s what they told me.” When Sister Saint Aelphaba neither confirmed nor denied this plan, Oatsie began to understand why the payment to take the green maunt away had been more than generous.

The Cloister of Saint Glinda was located in the Shale Shallows, twelve miles southwest of the Emerald City. It was an outpost mauntery, under the aegis of the one in town. Sister Saint Aelphaba had spent two years in town and five years here, according to the Mother Maunt. “You want to be called Sister still, now that you’re sprung from that holy prison?” asked Oatsie as she clucked the reins and urged the packhorses on.

“Elphie is fine,” said the passenger.

“And the boy, what’s he called?”

Elphie shrugged.

The coach met the rest of the caravan a few miles on. There were four wagons in all, and fifteen travelers. Elphie and the boy were the last to join. Oatsie Manglehand outlined the proposed route: south along the edge of Kellswater, west through Kumbricia’s Pass, northwest through the Thousand Year Grasslands, stopping at Kiamo Ko, and then wintering a bit farther northwest. The Vinkus was uncivilized land, Oatsie told them, and there were tribal groups to be wary of: the Yunamata, the Scrow, the Arjiki. And there were animals. And spirits. They would need to stick together. They would need to trust one another.

Elphie showed no sign of listening. She fiddled with the pfenix feather and drew patterns in the soil between her feet, coiling shapes like dragons writhing or smoke rising. The boy squatted eight or ten feet away, wary and shuttered. He seemed to be her page, for he managed her bags and attended her needs, but they did not look at each other, or speak. Oatsie found it strange in the extreme, and hoped it didn’t augur ill.

The Grasstrail Train set off at sunset, and made only a few miles before its first camp at a streambed. The party—mostly Gillikinese—chattered in nervous amazement at their courage, to go so far afield from the safety of central Oz! All for different reasons: for business, for family needs, to pay a debt, to kill an enemy. The Vinkus was a frontier, and the Winkies a beknighted, bloodthirsty folk who knew little about indoor plumbing or the rules of etiquette so the party regaled itself in song. Oatsie took part for a short time, but she knew there was hardly one among them who wouldn’t prefer to stay where they were and avoid the depths of the Vinkus altogether. Except perhaps that Elphie, who was keeping pretty much to herself.

They left the rich edge of Gillikin behind. The Vinkus began with a mesh of pebbles spread on brown wet soil. At night the Lizard Star pointed the direction: south, south along the edge of the Great Kells, to the dangerous gap of Kumbricia’s Pass. Pines and black starsaps stood up like teeth on every embankment. By day they were welcoming, sometimes giving shade. By night they towered, and harbored snatchowls and bats.

Elphie was often awake at night. Thought was returning to her, perhaps expanding under the fierce openness, where the birds cried in falling voices, and the meteors stitched omens into the sky. Sometimes she tried to write with her pfenix feather; sometimes she sat and thought words out, and didn’t commit them to paper.

Life outside the cloister seemed to cloud up with such particularity—the shape of her seven years past was already being crowded out. All that undifferentiated time, washing terra-cotta floors without dipping her hands in the bucket—it took hours to do a single room, but no floor was ever cleaner. Making wine, taking in the sick, working in the infirmary wing, which had reminded her briefly of Crage Hall. The benefit of a uniform was that one need not struggle to be unique—how many uniquenesses could the Unnamed God or nature create? One could sink selflessly into the daily pattern, one could find one’s way without groping. The little changes—the red bird landing on the windowsill, and that was spring—the leaves to rake from the terrace, and that was fall—they were enough. Three years of absolute silence, two years of whisper, and then, moved up (and outward) by the decision of the Superior Maunt, two years on the ward for incurables.

There, for nine months—thought Elphie under the stars, picturing it to herself as if telling someone else—she tended the dying, and those too clumsy to die. She grew to see dying as a pattern, beautiful in its way. A human form is like a leaf, it dies in a set piece unless something interferes: first this, then that, then this. She might have gone on as a nurse forever, arranging wrists in a pleasing pattern above starched bedsheets, reading the nonsense words of scripture that seemed to help so. She could manage the dying.

Then, a year ago, pale invalid Tibbett was carted to the Home for the Incurables. He wasn’t too far gone to recognize her even behind her veil and silences. Weak, unable to shit or piss without help, his skin falling in rags and parchment, he was better at life than she was. He selfishly required that she be an individual, and he addressed her by her name. He joked, he remembered stories, he criticized old friends for abandoning him, he noticed the differences in how she moved from day to day, how she thought. He reminded her that she did think. Under the scrutiny of his tired frame she was re-created, against her will, as an individual. Or nearly.

At last he died, and the Superior Maunt had said that it was time for her to go and atone for her mistakes, though not even the Superior Maunt knew what they were. When that was done?—well, she was still a young woman, she could raise a family. Take her broom and remember: obedience and mystery.

“You can’t sleep,” said Oatsie one night as Elphie sat under the stars.

But though her thoughts were rich and complicated, her words were poor, and she merely grunted. Oatsie made a few jokes at which Elphie tried to smile, but Oatsie laughed enough for both of them. Big, full laughs. It made Elphie tired.

“Isn’t that cook a piece of work?” said Oatsie, and told some episode that seemed pointless, and she chortled at her own story. Elphie tried to enjoy, tried to grin, but above her the stars grew thicker, more like glittering fishspawn than salt; they turned on their stalks with a cursing, grinding sound, if only she could hear it. She couldn’t hear it; Oatsie was too coarse and loud.

There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.

Before long they came to the edge of Kellswater, a murderous slice of water lying as if cleft from the side of a thundercloud. It was all gray, no lights on it. “That,” said Oatsie, “is why the horses don’t drink from it, nor travelers; that’s why it was never tapped in aqueducts and run to the Emerald City. It’s dead water. And you thought you’d seen it all.” Still, the travelers were impressed. A lavender heaviness arose on its western edge—the first hint of the Great Kells, the mountains that separated the Vinkus from the rest of Oz. From here the mountains appeared as thin as gas.

Oatsie demonstrated the use of the fog charm in the event of an attack by a band of Yunamata hunters. “Are we going to be attacked?” asked the boy who seemed to be Elphie’s page. “I’ll get ’em dead before no one knows what’s on.” The fear rose up from him and caught on in the others. “We usually do well,” said Oatsie, “we just need to be prepared. They can be friends. If we are friends.”

The caravan straggled by day, four wagons keeping their distance, accompanied by nine horses, two cows, a bull, a heifer, and various chickens without much personality. The cook had a dog named Killyjoy who seemed to Elphie a Makejoy instead, a panting, sniffy thing. Some people thought for a time he might actually be a Dog, in hiding, but they gave up that idea. “Hah,” Elphie said to the others, “have you spoken to Animals so seldom that you can’t remember the difference anymore?” No, he was just a dog, but a most glorious doggy dog, full of rages and exaggerated devotions. Killyjoy was a mountain breed, part Linster collie, part Lenx terrier, and maybe part wolf. His nose went up like a butter curl, in gray-black ridges and ribs. He could not be kept from hunting but he did not catch much either. By night, when the wagons squared off together, the cooking fire within, the animals just nearby, without, and the singing began at last, Killyjoy hid under the wagon.

Oatsie heard the boy tell the dog his name. “I’m Liir,” said the boy. “You can be my dog, sort of.” She had to smile. The fat child was not good at making friends, and a lonely child should have a dog.

Kellswater slipped back, out of sight. Some felt safer away from it. Almost hourly the Great Kells rose and thickened, the color now like the brown rind of a butterdew melon. Still the track meandered along the valley, the Vinkus River on its right, the mountains beyond it. Oatsie knew several places to ford, but they weren’t clearly marked. While they searched, Killyjoy caught a valley grite at last. He bled and whined, and was treated for poison. Liir let him ride in his arms, which made Elphie faintly jealous. She was almost amused to note in herself such a turgid, old-fashioned feeling as jealousy.

The cook was angry that Killyjoy preferred someone else’s company more than his—he shook his ladle overhead as if summoning the wrath of angel chefs among the stars. Elphie thought of him as a butcher cook, as he seemed to have no scruples about shooting rabbits and eating them. “How do you know they’re not Rabbits?” she said, and she wouldn’t touch a bite.

“Quiet, you, or I’ll cook that little boy instead,” he answered.

She tried to raise with Oatsie the notion of firing the cook, but Oatsie would not listen. “We’re coming in to Kumbricia’s Pass,” she said, “my mind is on other matters.”

They couldn’t help but feel the unsettling eroticism of the landscape. From the eastern approach, the Kumbricia Pass looked like a woman lying on her back, her legs spread apart, welcoming them.

Up in the slopes, the pine boughs shaded the sun, the wild pears tangled their twisted branches together as if wrestling. A sudden dampness, a new private climate—the bark ran wet, the air sank heavily against the skin like half-laundered toweling. Once inside the forest, the travelers could not see the hills. Everything smelled of ferns and fiddle greens. And on the shores of a small lake stood a dead tree. It harbored a community of bees, at their work of chamber music and honey.

“I want to take them with us,” said Elphie. “I’ll talk to them and see if they’ll come.”

There had been bees in the kitchen garden at Crage Hall, and again at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. Elphie was entranced by them. But Liir was terrified, and the cook threatened to disappear and leave the group traumatized by an inability to do a really top-notch bechamel sauce in the wilderness. Discussion was waged. An old man in the party, heading westward to die because of some midnight vision, ventured as to how a little honey would improve the tasteless sparrowleaf tea. A Glikkun mail-order bride agreed. Oatsie, of sentimental enthusiasms when least expected, voted for honey. So Elphie climbed the tree and talked to the bees, and they came along in a swarm, but most travelers stayed in the other wagons, suddenly scared of every fleck of dust that flitted against the skin.

They sent out a request, using drums and mist, to attract the attention of a hired rafiqi, for caravans were not allowed to move through the lands of different Vinkus tribes without a guide to negotiate permissions and fees. Bored one evening, and responding to the gloom, the travelers fell to discussing the legend of the Kumbric Witch. Who comes first, the Fairy Queen Lurline or the Kumbric Witch?

Igo, the sick old man, quoted the Oziad, and reminded them all of how creation worked: the Dragon of Time created the sun and the moon, and Lurline cursed them and said that their children wouldn’t know their own parents, and then the Kumbric Witch came along and the flood, the battle, the spilling of evil in the world.

Oatsie Manglehand disagreed. She said, “You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.”

“Can this be true?” asked Igo, with interest.

“Surely there is the handful of nursery märchen that start, ‘Once in the middle of a forest lived an old witch’ or ‘The devil was out walking one day and met a child,’” said Oatsie, who was showing that she had some education as well as grit. “To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”

“It certainly is true that tales of the Kumbric Witch abound,” agreed Igo. “Every other witch is just a shadow, a daughter, a sister, a decadent descendant; the Kumbric Witch is the model further back than which it seems impossible to go.”

Elphie remembered the ambiguous scroll painting of the Kumbric Witch—was it she?—found in the library of Three Queens, that summer long ago: standing in shiny shoes, straddling a continent, nursing or choking a beast.

“I don’t believe in the Kumbric Witch, even in Kumbricia’s Pass,” boasted the cook.

“You don’t believe in Rabbits either,” snarled Elphie, suddenly annoyed. “The question is, does the Kumbric Witch believe in you?”

“Temper,” sang out Oatsie, and turned it into a singalong song. Elphie stamped away. This was too much like her childhood, discussions with her father and Nessarose about where evil begins. As if one could ever know! Her father used to orchestrate proofs about evil as a way of persuading his flock to convert. Elphie had come to think, back in Shiz, that as women wore cologne, men wore proofs: to secure their own sense of themselves, and thus to be attractive. But surely evil was beyond proof, just as the Kumbric Witch was beyond the grasp of knowable history?

2

The rafiqi arrived, a thin, balding man with battle scars. There might be trouble from the Yunamata this year, he told them. “The caravan comes after a season of dirty forays by cavalry from the Emerald City. Winkie roundup,” he complained. It wasn’t clear if he was talking about a local argument over a drunken slight to a Vinkus maiden or about a slave trade and resettlement camps.

The camp was broken, the lake left behind, and the silent forest continued for a half a day. Sunlight speared through the canopy from time to time, but it was a thin, egg yolk light, and seemed always to be off to the side, never spotlighting down on the path ahead. It was eerie, as if Kumbricia herself were moving along beside them, hidden, unbidden, passing from tree to tree, sliding behind rocks, waiting in shadowy depths, watching and listening. The ailing old man wailed nasally, and prayed to emerge from this mystery wood before he died, or his spirit might never find its way out. The boy wept like a girl. The cook wrung the neck of a chicken.

Even the bees stopped humming.

In the middle of the night the cook disappeared. There was consternation among all except Elphie, who didn’t care. Was it a kidnapping, or a sleepwalking episode, or a suicide? Were the angry Yunamata near, and watching? Was it Kumbricia herself taking revenge on them for discussing her so glibly? There were many opinions, and the breakfast eggs were runny and inedible.

Killyjoy did not notice the cook’s disappearance. He snuggled, grinning in his coma-sleep, closer to Liir.

The bees went into some sort of mysterious hibernation inside the joint of tree trunk brought along to make them happy. Killyjoy, still smarting from grite poison, slept twenty-two hours a day. The travelers, afraid of being overheard, stopped talking altogether.

Toward the evening the pines at last began to thin, and the forest to shift to stag-head oak, which with its broader branches let in more of the sky—a pasty yellow sky, but at last a sky—and then there was a cliff edge. They had climbed higher than anyone had quite realized; beneath and beyond stretched the rest of Kumbricia’s Pass, a journey of four or five days. Beyond that was the beginning of the Thousand Year Grasslands.

No one was sorry for the light and room that the sky afforded. Even Elphie felt her heart lift, unexpectedly.

In the middle of the night the Yunamata arrived. They brought gifts of dried fruit and sang tribal songs, and made those who would dance get up and dance. The travelers were more terrified of their hospitality than of the attack that they had expected.

As Elphie thought about it, the Yunamata seemed soft, compliant folk, only as fearful and fearless as schoolgirls—at least that was all they showed. They were cavorting, opinionated; they reminded her of the Quadlings with whom she had grown up. Perhaps ethnically they were distant cousins. Long lashes. Narrow elbows. Babylike supple wrists. Oblong heads and thin concentrated lips—even with their foreign tongue they made her feel at home.

The Yunamata left in the morning, complaining rudely about the runniness of the breakfast eggs. The rafiqi said that the Yunamata would make no further trouble. Even he seemed disappointed, as if his employment hadn’t been required.

There was no word about the cook. The Yunamata didn’t seem to know anything about him.

As the caravan continued its descent, the sky opened up again, brisk and autumnal, wide as remorse. From there to there!—the eye could hardly take it in. The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake. The wind made strokes across it, as if spelling things in a language of curls and stripes. No wildlife was visible from this distance, though there were tribal fires here and there. Kumbricia’s Pass was left behind, or nearly.

Then a Yunamata messenger came on swift leathery feet, arriving from the Pass behind them, to share the news that a body had been found at the base of a cliff. Perhaps it was the cook; it was thought to be a man, but the surface of the corpse was so swollen with lesions that the particulars were lost. “It was the bees,” said someone, full of rage.

“Oh, was it?” came Elphie’s calm voice. “They’ve been asleep for so long. Wouldn’t there have been screams if they’d attacked a man in the middle of the night? Did the bees sting his throat first, to swell his vocal cords shut? Very talented bees, those.”

“It was the bees,” was the mutter, and the implication was clear. You too.

“Oh, I forgot the size of the human imagination,” Elphie said meanly. “How very large it is, after all.”

But she wasn’t upset, not really. For Killyjoy was back to himself, at last, and the bees woke up too. Perhaps the high altitudes at the top of the Kumbricia Pass had given them such sleep. Elphie began to prefer their company to the rest of the travelers. As they woke up, coming down from the heights, she felt herself more and more awake, too.

The rafiqi pointed out on the horizon several mounding coils of smoke. At first the travelers guessed they were windstorms, but Oatsie soothed them and alarmed them: It was evening fires for a large encampment. Scrow. It was autumn hunting season, though nothing had been seen of any game bigger than a hare or a grass fox (its brush a wild swipe of bronze on melting golden meadow, its feet in black stockings like a serving maid’s). Killyjoy was ecstatic with the possibilities of encounter; he could hardly bear to rest at night. Even in his dreams he twitched with the hunt.

The travelers feared the Scrow more than they had the Yunamata. The rafiqi did not say much to allay their fears. He was more tentative than it had first seemed; perhaps the job of negotiating among suspicious peoples required caution. Liir idolized him hopelessly, after only a few days of travel. Elphie thought: Such silly things, children—and so embarrassing—because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

She felt in herself a jolt of pleasurable expectation over the thought of approaching the Scrow. Along with so much else, she had forgotten what pleasurable expectation was. As night fell, everyone seemed more alert, out of fear and excitement. The skies throbbed with turquoise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.

3

It was noon when the caravan pulled up to the edge of the Scrow camp. A committee of Scrow had ridden to their domestic margin, where the sand-colored tents petered out into untrampled grass—men and women alike sat on horseback, about seven or eight of them, in blue ribbons and ivory bangles. Also, obviously senior, was a huge slab of an old woman carried in a palanquin of some sort, its frame all hung round with tambours and clinking amulets and gauzy veils. She let the rafiqi and the tribal paladins trade compliments or insults. After a while she grunted a direction and her curtains were withdrawn so she could see. She had an overhung lip, so large that it doubled back on itself like an upside-down spout on a pitcher. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. On her shoulders sat two dyspeptic-looking crows. Their feet were shackled in gold links and attached to loops in her ornamental collar, into which the old woman had dribbled traces of the fruit she had been eating as she waited. Her shoulders were speckled with crow droppings.

“The Princess Nastoya,” said the rafiqi at last.

She was the filthiest, least-educated princess anyone had ever seen, yet she had some dignity; even the most ardent democrat among the travelers genuflected. She laughed raucously. Then she bade her bearers lug her away to someplace less tedious.

The Scrow camp was arranged in concentric circles, with the Princess’s tent in the middle, prettied up with extensions of faded striped baldaquins on all sides. It was a little airy palace in silks and cotton muslin. Her advisors and concubine-husbands seemed to live in the nearest circle (and a scrawny lot the husbands were, thought Elphie, but perhaps they were chosen for timidity and scrawniness, to make her seem ever the larger). Beyond the Princess’s settlement ranged four hundred tents, which meant maybe a thousand people altogether. A thousand humans, with their poached-salmon skin, their moistly protruding eyes (but sensitive, in lowered gazes, to avoid being met), their handsome generous noses, and big buttocks, and wide rolling hips, men and women alike.

Most of the caravan travelers stayed glued to the doors of their wagons, imagining crime just beyond the nearest tent. But Elphie found it impossible to keep still, with all this newness beckoning. When Elphie walked, there were gasps, and the adults shyly retreated out of her path. But only ten minutes had passed before there were sixty children in a noisy crowd, following behind, running ahead, like a cloud of midges.

The rafiqi advised caution, advised return to the camp; but childhood in the Quadling badlands had made Elphaba not only bold, but curious. There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.

After the evening meal, a delegation of erect old Scrow dignitaries approached the Grasstrail Train and entered into a lengthy palaver with the rafiqi. In the end, the rafiqi translated the message: a small band was invited—requested—(ordered?)—to the Scrow shrine. It would take an hour by camel. For her sin of skin color, presumably, or possibly for having had the nerve to take a solitary stroll through the Scrow tent city, Elphie was told to join Oatsie, the rafiqi, Igo for his venerable age, and one of the financial adventurers—named Pinchweed, or maybe that was just a nasty nickname.

By the light of sallowwood torches, the camels, in glittering caparisons, lurched and lumbered on a worn track. It was like going up and down a staircase at the same time. Elphie sat above the grass, a vantage point over the great flickering surface. Although the ocean was only an idea sprung out of mythology, she could almost see where it came from—there were small grasshawks launching themselves like fish leaping out of the spume, nipping at the fireflies, pocketing them, then falling back in a dry splash. Bats passed, making a guttering, sputtering sound that ended in an extinguishing swoop. The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. Nothing more need have happened; it seemed enough to Elphaba to find herself capable of such a weird ecstatic response to soft color and safe space. But no, on—on.

Eventually Elphie noticed a plantation of trees, carefully tended in this devastating openness. First a stand of scrub spruce, contorted by the winds into gnarled figures of split bark and hissing needles—and the pagan odor of sap. Beyond, a rise of higher hedges, then, yet higher trees. It was the circular pattern of the Scrow encampment again. The party passed into it in silence, as through a maze, along curving corridors of whispering brush, moving from outer to inner circles lit by oil lamps hammered to carven posts.

Within, at the center, was the Princess Nastoya girded in a native costume of leather and grass made all the more effective by a length of striped purple and white toweling she must have bargained from some traveler or other. She stood, distracted and breathing heavily, leaning on stout walking sticks; around her, sarsen stones like gapped teeth resembled a stone cage through which she could hardly pass, given her bulk.

The guests joined the hosts in eating, drinking, and smoking on a pipe with a bowl carved like a crow’s head. Crows ranged all around on the tops of the sarsens, twenty, thirty, forty? Elphie’s head spun, the moon rose, the plain at night, invisible from the secret garden of the green maze, wheeled about like a child’s top. She could almost hear the spinning. The Scrow elders chanted in a drone.

When the drone died out, the Princess Nastoya raised her head.

The huge wattles of old flesh beneath her small chin wobbled. Her toweling fell to the ground. She was naked and old and strong; what had seemed like boredom was revealed as patience, memory, control. She shook the very hair off her head and it uncoiled down her back and disappeared. Her feet moved massively, as if seeking the best purchase, like columns, like pillars of stone. She dropped her arms forward and her back was a dome; still her head was up, her eyes the brighter, her nose working mightily; she was an Elephant.

An Elephant goddess, Elphie thought, her mind recoiling in terror and delight, but the Princess Nastoya said, “No.” She spoke through the rafiqi still; he had obviously seen this before, though with the alcohol he stuttered and had to search for words.

One by one she asked the intentions of the travelers.

“Money and commerce,” said Pinchweed, shocked into honesty: money and commerce and pillage and plunder at whatever cost.

“A place to die where I can rest, and my spirit go abroad,” ventured Igo.

“Safety and movement, out of harm’s way,” said Oatsie spunkily, by which it was clear she meant: out of men’s way.

The rafiqi indicated that Elphie’s own answer was still needed.

In the presence of such an Animal, Elphie could not stay aloof. So she spoke it as best as she could. “To retire from the world after making sure of the safety of the survivors of my lover. To face his widow, Sarima, in guilt and responsibility, and then to remove myself from the darkening world.”

The Elephant told the others, except the rafiqi, to leave.

The Elephant raised her trunk and sniffed the wind. Her rheumy old eyes blinked slowly and her ears moved back and forth, raking the air for nuance. She pissed hugely in a steaming flow, with dignity and nonchalance, eyes firmly latched on Elphaba.

Through the rafiqi, the Elephant then said, “Daughter of the dragon, I too am under a spell. I know how it may be broken—but I choose to live as a changeling. An Elephant is a hunted thing in these times. The Scrow approve of me. They have worshipped elephants from the time before language, the time before history began. They know I am not a goddess. They know I am a beast who chooses magical incarceration as a human over the dangerous liberty of my own powerful form.

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”

Elphie could only look, she could not speak.

“But the choice to save yourself can itself be deadly,” said the Princess Nastoya.

Elphie nodded, looked away, looked back.

“I will give you three crows as your familiars,” said the Princess. “You are in hiding as a witch now. That is your guise.” She spoke a word to the crows, and three mangy, evil-looking things came and waited nearby.

“A witch?” Elphaba said. What her father would think! “Hiding from what?”

“We have the same enemy,” replied the Princess. “We are both at risk. If you need help send the crows. If I am still alive, as an old matriarch monarch, or as a free Elephant, I’ll come to your aid.”

“Why?” asked Elphie.

“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face,” she answered.

The Princess said more. It had been years—more than a decade—since Elphie had been able to talk to an Animal. Who, Elphie asked the Princess, had enchanted her? But the Princess Nastoya wouldn’t say—in part as self-protection, for the death of the enchanter could sometimes mean the revocation of binding spells, and her curse was her safety.

“But is life worth living in the wrong form?” said Elphie.

“The interior doesn’t change,” she answered, “except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.”

“I have no interior,” said Elphaba.

“Something told those bees to kill the cook,” said the Princess Nastoya, with a glitter in her eye. Elphaba felt herself go pale.

“I didn’t!” she said. “No, it couldn’t have been me! And how did you know?”

“You did, on some level. You are a strong woman. And I can hear bees, you know. My ears are keen.”

“I would like to stay here with you,” said Elphaba. “Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That’s all I want—to do no harm.”

“By your own admission, you have a job to do,” said the Princess. She curled her trunk around Elphaba’s face, feeling its contours and truths. “Go and do it.”

“May I return to you?” asked Elphie.

But the Princess wouldn’t answer. She was tiring—she was an old old thing even for an Elephant. Her trunk went back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. Then the great nose-hand came forward and set itself with wonderful weight and precision on Elphaba’s shoulders, and curled a bit around her neck. “Listen to me, sister,” she said. “Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”

Elphaba could not answer, so shocked was she at the touch. She backed away when dismissed, her mind all but out of her.

Then the return on camels across the shuddering colors of night grass: hypnotic, vague, and distressing.

Yet there was blessing in this night. Elphaba had forgotten blessing, too—like so much else.

4

They left the Scrow encampment and the Princess Nastoya behind. The Grasstrail Train moved in a circle north, now, a wide arch.

Igo died, and was buried in a sandy mound. “Give his spirit movement and flight,” said Elphie at the ceremony.

The rafiqi admitted later that he had thought one of the guests of the command meeting with the Princess Nastoya was to be sacrificed in a ritual slaughter. It had happened before. The Princess, though coping with her dilemma, was not above a sense of revenge. It was the honesty of Pinchweed that saved him, as he was the obvious choice. Or perhaps Igo wore the prospect of his death closer to the surface than humans could see, and the Elephant took pity.

The crows were annoying; they pestered the bees, shat all over the wagon, teased Killyjoy. The Glikkun, Raraynee, stopped at a well, met her isolated widower husband-to-be, and left the Grasstrail Train. The toothless new husband already had six motherless children, and they took to Raraynee like orphaned ducklings behind a farm dog. There were only ten travelers left.

“Now we’re entering Arjiki tribal lands,” said the rafiqi.

The first Arjiki band approached a few days later. They wore nothing so splendid as what Fiyero had worn, in the way of blue markings—these were nomads, shepherds, rounding up the sheep from the western foothills of the Great Kells for their annual counting and, it seemed, sale to the East. Still, just the handsome look of them ripped Elphie’s heart into pieces. Their wildness. Their otherness. This may be a punishment to the hour of my death, she thought.

The Grasstrail Train by now was down to only two wagons: in one, the rafiqi, Oatsie, Liir the boy, Pinchweed the entrepreneur, and a Gillikinese mechanic named Kowpp. In the other, Elphie herself, and the bees, the crows, and Killyjoy. Already she had, it seemed, been accepted as a witch. It was not an entirely unlikable disguise.

Kiamo Ko was just a week away.

The Grasstrail Train turned eastward, into the steel gray passes of the steep Great Kells. Winter was almost here, and the last travelers were grateful that the snows had held off. Oatsie intended to stop the winter in an Arjiki camp some twenty miles on. In the spring she would head back to the Emerald City, making the northern route through Ugabu, and the Pertha Hills of Gillikin. Elphie thought of sending a note to Glinda, if after all these years she was still there—but, being unable to decide yes, she decided no.

“Tomorrow,” said Oatsie, “we’ll see Kiamo Ko. The mountain stronghold of the ruling clan of the Arjikis. Are you ready, Sister Elphie?”

She was teasing, and Elphie didn’t like it. “I am no longer a sister, I am a witch,” she said, and tried to think poisonous thoughts at Oatsie. But Oatsie was a stronger person than the cook, apparently, for she just laughed and went on her way.

The Grasstrail Train stopped on the side of a small tarn. The others said its water was refreshing, though icy cold; Elphie didn’t know or care about that. But in the middle was an island—a tiny thing, the size of a mattress, sprouting one leafless tree like an umbrella that has lost its fabric.

Before Elphaba could quite make it out—the evening light came early at this time of year, and even earlier in the mountains—Killyjoy had plunged feverishly into the water, and splashed and swum his way to the island, intent on some small movement or interesting scent he had picked up. He ferreted in the sedge, and then clamped his teeth—the most wolflike of his features—gently around the skull of a small beast in the grass.

Elphie couldn’t see but it looked like a baby.

Oatsie screamed, Liir quivered like a blob of jelly, Killyjoy released his grip, but only to get a further hold; he was drooling over the scalp of the thing he had caught.

There was no way to go through the water—that would be death—

But her feet went out anyway—

They hit the water hard, the water hit hard back—

The water turned to ice as she ran—foot by foot of ice under foot by foot of hurry. A silvering plate formed instantly, cantilevering forward, making a cold safe bridge to the island—

Where Killyjoy could be scolded, and the baby saved, though she hadn’t dared hope she could be in time. She pried Killyjoy’s jaws apart, and scooped up the thing. It shivered in terror and the cold. Its bright black eyes were alert and watching, ready to upbraid or condemn or love, same as any capable adult thing.

The others were surprised to see it, as surprised as they’d been to see the ice form, perhaps by some magic spell left on the tarn from some passing wizard or witch. It was a small monkey—of the variety called the snow monkey. A baby abandoned by its mother and its tribe, or maybe separated by accident?

It didn’t think much of Killyjoy but it liked the warmth of the wagon.

They pitched their camp halfway up the perilous slope to Kiamo Ko. The castle rose in steep black angles out of black rock. Elphie could see it perched above them like an eagle with folded wings; its conical-roofed towers, its battlements and bartizans, its portcullis and arrow-slit windows—they all belied its original intention as the head of a waterworks. Below it wound a powerful tributary of the Vinkus River on which the Ozma Regent once had meant to build a dam and channel water into the center of Oz—back when the droughts were their most threatening. Fiyero’s father had taken this stronghold by siege and storm and made it the seat of the Arjiki princes, before dying and leaving the clan leadership to his only son, if Elphaba remembered rightly.

The small luggage was packed, the bees hummed (their melodies ever more amusing as she listened, week by week), Killyjoy was still sulking over being denied the kill, the crows sensed that a change was coming and wouldn’t eat dinner. The monkey, who was called Chistery because of the sound he made, chittered and chattered now that he was warm and safe.

Around the campfire good-byes were spoken, a few toasts, even a few regrets. The sky was blacker than it had been before: perhaps it was the contrast of the whiteness of snowy peaks all around. Liir showed up with a parcel of clothing and some sort of musical instrument, and said good-byes too.

“Oh, so you’re stopping here, are you?” said Elphie.

“Yes,” he said, “with you.”

“With the crows, with the monkey, with the bees, with the dog, and with the Witch?” she said. “With me?”

“Where else can I go?” he asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered.

“I can take care of the dog,” he said calmly. “I can collect the honey for you.”

“It makes no difference to me,” she said.

“All right,” he said, and so Liir prepared to enter his father’s house.

The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko

3

Sarima,” said her youngest sister, “wake up. Naptime’s over. We have a houseguest at supper, and I need to know if we have to kill a hen. There are so few left, and what we give the traveler we miss all winter in eggs . . . What do you think?”

The Dowager Princess of the Arjikis groaned. “Details, details,” she said, “can’t I train you to figure out anything for yourself?”

“Very well,” snapped the sister, “I shall decide, and then you can go without your morning egg when we’re one short.”

“Oh Six, don’t mind me,” said Sarima, “it’s just that I’m scarcely awake. Who is it? Some patriarch with bad breath, who plans to bore us with tales of the hunting he did fifty years ago? Why do we allow it?”

“It’s a woman—more or less,” said Six.

“Now that’s uncalled for,” said Sarima, sitting up. “We are none of us the blushing nymphs we once were, Six.” From across the room she saw herself reflected in the wardrobe glass: pale as milk pudding, her still pretty face nestled in the puddles of fat that fell according to the laws of gravity. “Just because you’re the youngest, Six, and can still locate your waist, there’s no need to be unkind.”

Six pouted. “Well, it’s just a woman, then: so chicken or no? Tell me now so Four can hack off its head and get to plucking, or we won’t eat before midnight.”

“We’ll have fruit and cheese and bread and fish. Is there fish in the fishwell, I suppose?” Yes, there was. Six turned to go, but remembered to say, “I brought you a glass of sweet tea, it’s there on your vanity.”

“Bless you. Now tell me, without sarcasm if you please, what’s our guest like, really?”

“Green as sin, thin and crooked, older than any of us. Dressed in black like an old maunt—but not all that old. I’d guess about, oh, thirty, thirty-two? She won’t give her name.”

“Green? How divine,” said Sarima.

“Divine isn’t the word that comes to mind,” said Six.

“You don’t mean green with jealousy—you mean actually green?”

“Maybe it’s from jealousy, I could not say, but she is surely green. Genuine grass green.”

“Oh la. Well, I’ll wear white tonight so as not to clash. Is she alone?”

“She came in with the caravan we saw down in the valley yesterday. She stopped here with a little company of beasts—a wolfdog, a hive of bees, a youth, some crows, and a baby monkey.”

“What’ll she do with all of them in the mountains in winter?”

“Ask her yourself.” Six wrinkled her nose. “She made me shudder.”

“Half-set gelatin makes you shudder. When’s dinner tonight?”

“Seven chimes and a half. She turns my stomach.”

Six left, having run out of expressions of disgust, and Sarima had her tea in bed until her bladder complained. Six had banked up the fire and drawn the curtains, but Sarima pulled them back to look down into the courtyard. Kiamo Ko boasted corner turrets and towers, built on massive circular salients thrusting upward from the stone of the mountain itself. After the Arjiki clan had wrested the building from the waterworks commission, they had added toothy crenellations for defense. Despite the reworkings, the plan of the house was still simple. It was built in the general shape of a U, a central hall with two long narrow wings thrusting forward around a steeply pitched yard. When it rained, the water churned over the cobbles, and slipped out under the carved gates of iron oak and jasper panels, past the sickly cluster of village houses nestled up against the castle’s outside walls. At this hour the courtyard was charcoal gray. Cold and filthy with scraps of hay and bits of leaf flying in the wind. There was a light in the old cobbler’s shed, and smoke spinning from the chimney that badly wanted repointing—like everything else in this decaying manse. Sarima was glad the guest hadn’t been shown into the house proper. As Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, she enjoyed the privilege of welcoming a traveler into the private chambers of Kiamo Ko.

After bathing, she dressed in a white shift with white piping, and put on the beautiful torque that had arrived, like a message from the Other Land, from her dear departed husband several months after the Incident. Out of habit Sarima shed a few tears admiring herself within the flat embrace of its jeweled, segmented collar. If it was too dressy for this itinerant, Sarima could always drape a napkin over it. But she would still know it was there. Even before her tears had dried she was humming, looking forward to the novelty of a guest.

She peeped in on the children before going down. They were jumpy; strangers always did that to them. Irji and Manek, twelve and eleven, were almost old enough to want to bust out of this nest of venomous doves. Irji was soft and cried a lot, but Manek was a little bantam, always had been. If she let them go off to the Grasslands with the clan, in the summer migration, they both might have their throats slit—there were too many clansmen to claim leadership for themselves or their sons. So Sarima had kept her boys near.

Her daughter, Nor, long-legged and thumb-sucking at nine years old, still needed a lap to crawl into before going to sleep. Dressed for the meal, Sarima was inclined to forbid it, but relented. Nor had a delicate lisp and she said wunning in the wain for running in the rain. She befriended stones and candles and blades of grass that grew against all logic in the cracks of the coping stones around the windows. She sighed and rubbed her face against the torque and said, “There’s a boy too, Mama. We played with him in the mill yard.”

“What’s he like? Is he green too?”

“Nah. He’s all right. He’s a big baby—fat and strong, and Manek was throwing stones at him to see how far they would bounce off him. He let him do it. Maybe if you’re so fat it doesn’t hurt?”

“I doubt it. What’s his name?”

“Liir. Isn’t that a queer name?”

“It sounds foreign. And his mother?”

“I don’t know her name and I don’t think she’s his mother. He wouldn’t say when we asked. Irji said he must be a bastard. Liir said he didn’t care. He’s nice.” She moved her right thumb to her mouth, and with her left hand felt the cloth of Sarima’s gown just below the torque, until she found a nipple, and she ran her thumb over it lovingly as if it were a small pet. “Manek made him pull down his trousers so we could make sure his thing wasn’t green.”

Sarima disapproved—on the grounds of hospitality if nothing else—but was compelled to ask, “And what did you see?”

“Oh well you know.” Nor turned her head into her mother’s neck, and then sneezed from the powder with which Sarima kept her chins from chafing. “Stupid-looking boy’s thing. Smaller than Manek and Irji. But not green. I was so bored I didn’t look much.”

“Neither would I. That was very rude.”

“I didn’t make him do it. Manek did!”

“Well, no more of that. Now let’s have a story before sleeping. I’ve got to go down soon, so a short one. What do you want to hear, my little one?”

“I want to hear the story of the Witch and the fox babies.”

With less drama than usual Sarima rattled through the tale of how the three fox babies were kidnapped and caged and fed to fatness, in preparation for a cheese-and-foxling casserole, and how the Witch went to get fire from the sun to cook them. But when the Witch came back to her cave, exhausted and in possession of father flame, the foxlings outwitted her by singing a lullaby to make her sleep. When the Witch’s arm fell, the flame from the sun burned the door off the cage, and out the foxlings ran. Then they howled down old mother moon to come and stand as an unmovable door in the entrance of the cave. Sarima ended with the traditional back-and-forth. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

“Did she ever come out?” asked Nor, doing her line from an almost hypnagogic state.

“Not yet,” said Sarima, kissing and biting her daughter on the wrist, which made them both giggle, and then lights out.

The stairs from Sarima’s private apartment ran without railings down into the castle keep, hugging first one wall and then, after the corner, another. She descended the first flight full of grace and self-possession, her white skirts billowing, her torque a yoke of soft colors and precious metals, her face a careful composition of welcome.

At the landing she saw the traveler, sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking up at her.

She made it down the second flight to the flagstoned level, aware of the cynicism that seethed beneath her loyal remembrance of Fiyero, aware of her overbite; of her lost prettiness; of her weight; of the silliness of being the doyenne over nothing but irritating children and backbiting younger sisters; of the thin pretense of authority that scarcely masked her fear of the present, the future, and even the past.

“How do you do,” she managed.

“You are Sarima,” said the woman, standing, her stalactite of chin thrust forward like a rotted swede.

“Likely to be!” she said, glad of the torque; it seemed like a shield now, to protect her heart from being punctured by that chin. “Greetings to you, my friend. Yes, I am Sarima, mistress of Kiamo Ko. Where do you come from, and how are you called?”

“I come from the back of the wind,” said the woman, “and I have given up my name so often I don’t like to bring it out again for you.”

“Well, you are welcome here,” said Sarima as smoothly as she could, “but if we have nothing else to call you by, you will have to be Auntie. Will you come in to dine? We’ll be serving out soon.”

“I won’t eat until we speak,” said the guest. “Not under your roof in false pretenses for one night; I’d rather lie at the bottom of a lake. Sarima, I know who you are. I went to school with your husband. I’ve known about you for a dozen years or so.”

“Of course,” said Sarima then, things clicking. The old, treasured details of her husband’s life came rushing up. “Of course Fiyero talked of you—and of your sister, Nessie, right? Nessarose. And of the glamorous Glinda, with whom I think he was a little in love, and the playful inverted boys, and Avaric, and solid old Boq! I had wondered if that happy time of his life was always to be self-contained, always his and never mine—you are good to have come to call. I should have liked a season or two at Shiz, but I didn’t have the brains, I fear, nor my family the money. I would have remembered you in a minute, well, the color of your skin, there’s nothing like it, is there? Or am I too provincial?”

“No, it’s unique,” said the guest. “Before we say ten sentences of polite nonsense to each other, I have to tell you something, Sarima. I think I was the cause of Fiyero’s death—”

“Well, you’re not the only one,” interrupted Sarima, “it’s a national pastime out here, blaming oneself for the death of a prince. An opportunity for public grieving and atonement, which I secretly believe people enjoy just a little bit.”

The guest twisted her fingers, as if to pry open a space for herself in Sarima’s opinions. “I can tell you how, I want to tell you—”

“Not unless I want to hear it, which is my prerogative. This is my house and I choose to hear what I want.”

“You must hear it, so that I can be forgiven,” said the woman, turning her shoulders this way and that, almost as if she were a beast of burden with an invisible yoke on her.

Sarima did not like to be ambushed in her own home. Time enough to consider these sudden implications. When she felt up to it. And not until. She reminded herself that she was in charge. And thus she could afford to be kind.

“If I remember rightly,” said Sarima—her mind was racing with memory—“you’re the one, Fiyero talked of you, of course—Elphaba, that’s it—you’re the one who didn’t believe in the soul. I remember that much, so what’s to forgive, dearie? I know you’re travel weary—it’s impossible to get here without being travel weary—and you need a good hot meal and a few nights of sleep, and we’ll chat some morning next week?”

Sarima linked her arm with Elphaba’s. “But I’ll preserve your name from them, if you like,” said Sarima. She walked Elphaba through the tall warped oak doors into the dining hall and called, “Look who’s here, Auntie Guest.” The sisters were standing beside their chairs, hungry and curious and impatient. Four had the ladle in the tureen, stirring; Six had dressed in a hostile puce; Two and Three, the twins, looked piously at their prayer cards; Five was smoking and blowing concentric rings toward the platter of yellow eyeless fish they had dragged up from the underground lake. “Sisters, rejoice, an old friend of Fiyero’s has come to share fond memories and enliven our lives. Welcome her as you do me.” Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, as the sisters all resented and despised Sarima. Why had she married someone who would die so early and condemn them not just to spinsterhood but to deprivation and denial?

Elphaba didn’t speak through the entire meal or look up from her plate. She devoured the fish, though, and the cheese and the fruit. Sarima deduced from her eating habits that she had lived under a rule of silence at meals, and wasn’t surprised, later, to hear about the mauntery.

They took a glass of precious sherry in the music room, and Six entertained them with a wobbling nocturne. The guest looked miserable, which made the sisters happy. Sarima sighed. The one thing that could be said about the guest was this: She was older than Sarima. Perhaps, for the short while of her stay, Elphaba would come out of that sulk and lend an ear to hear how troubling and trying Sarima’s life was. It would be nice to chat with someone not in the family.

2

A week passed before Sarima said to Three, “Please tell our Auntie Guest that I’d like to see her tomorrow for elevenses in the Solar.” Sarima thought that Elphaba had had enough time now to get the measure of things. The suffering green woman was in some sort of slow-motion thrall, or fit. She moved jerkily, stalking about the courtyard, or stamping in to meals as if trying to poke holes in the flooring with her heels. Her elbows were always bent at right angles, and her hands clenched and unclenched themselves.

Sarima felt stronger than ever, which wasn’t very. It did her some good to have a contemporary around, however thwarted she might be. The sisters disapproved of Sarima’s cordiality, but the higher mountain passes were already closed for the winter, and you just couldn’t send a stranger packing into the treacherous valleys. The sisters conferred in their parlor, as they busied themselves knitting hateful gray potholders for the undeserving poor at Lurlinemas. She’s sick, they said; she’s inert, unfinished (even more than they were, was the unspoken corollary, an immensely gratifying notion); she’s damned. And is that fat balloon of a boy her son, or a child slave, or is he one of her familiars? Behind Sarima’s back they called the woman living in the cobbleshed Auntie Witch, echoing the old legends of Kumbricia, which were viler—and more persistent—in the Kells than elsewhere in Oz.

It was Manek, Sarima’s middle child, who was the most curious. One morning, as the boys all stood on a battlement pissing over the side (a game poor Nor had to pretend no interest in), Manek said, “What if we peed on Auntie? Would she scream?”

“She’d turn you into a toad,” said Liir.

“No, I mean would it hurt her? She looks like water gives her the aches and shakes. Does she even drink it? Or does it make her insides hurt?”

Liir, not an especially observant child, said, “I think she doesn’t drink it. Sometimes she washes things, but she uses sticks and brushes. We better not pee on her.”

“And what does she do with all those bees and the monkey? Are they magic?”

“Yeah,” said Liir.

“What kind of magic?”

“I don’t know.” They stepped away from the dizzying drop and Nor came running up. “I have a magic straw,” she said, holding up a brown bristle. “From the Witch’s broom.”

“Is the broom magic?” said Manek to Liir.

“Yes. It can sweep the floor real fast.”

“Can it talk? Is it enchanted? What does it say?”

They got more interested, and Liir bloomed and blushed under their curiosity. “I can’t tell. It’s a secret.”

“Is it still a secret if we push you off the tower?”

Liir considered. “What do you mean?”

“Will you tell us or we’ll do it.”

“Don’t push me off the tower, you oafs.”

“If the broom is magic it’ll come flying by and save you. Besides, you’re so fat you’d probably bounce.”

Irji and Nor laughed at that, despite themselves. It made a very funny picture in their minds.

“We only want to know what secrets the broom says to you,” said Manek with a big smile. “So tell us. Or we’ll push you off.”

“You’re not being nice, he’s company,” said Nor. “Come on, let’s go find some mice in the pantry and make friends.”

“In a minute. Let’s push Liir off the roof first.”

“No,” said Nor, beginning to cry. “You boys are so mean. Are you sure that broom is magic, Liir?”

But Liir by now didn’t want to say any more.

Manek tossed a pebble off the roof and it seemed a very long time before the ping of impact.

Liir’s face had, in a matter of moments, developed deep black pockets under the eyes. He held his hands down by his sides like a traitor at a court martial. “The Witch’ll be so mad at you that she will hate you,” Liir said.

“I don’t think so,” said Manek, taking a step forward. “She won’t care. She likes the monkey more than she likes you. She won’t even notice if you’re dead.”

Liir gasped for air. Although he had just peed, the front of his baggy trousers turned dark with wet. “Look, Irji,” said Manek, and his older brother looked. “He’s not even very good at being alive is he? It’s not like it would be much of a loss. Come on, Liir, tell me. What did the damned broom say to you?”

Liir’s upper torso was going in and out like a bellows. He whispered, “The broom told me—that—that—you’re all going to die!”

“Oh, is that all,” said Manek. “We already knew that. Everybody dies. We knew that already.”

“You did?” said Liir, who hadn’t.

“Come on,” Irji said, “come on, let’s catch some mice in the pantry and we can cut off their tails and use Nor’s magic straw to prick their eyes.”

“No!” said Nor, but Irji had swiped the straw from her. Manek and Irji went clattering, loose-limbed as marionettes, along the parapet
and down the stairs. With a huge, aggrieved sigh, Liir composed himself and adjusted his clothes, and followed them like a condemned dwarf laborer in the emerald mines. Nor stayed behind, her arms folded defiantly, her chin working with frustration. Then she spit over the edge and felt better, and chased after the boys.

At midmorning, Six showed the guest into the Solar. With a smirk behind Auntie’s back, she deposited a tray of cruel little biscuits, hard as slate, on a table covered with a carpet gone brown and patternless. Sarima, having made her way through what she could of her daily spiritual ablutions, felt ready.

“You’ve been here a week and it’s likely to be longer,” said Sarima, allowing Six to pour out some gallroot coffee before dismissing her. “The trail north is snowed in by now, and there’s not a safe haven between here and the plains. The winters are hard in the mountains, and while we can make do with our stores and our own company, we treasure a change. Milk? I do not know exactly what you had—intended. Once you had visited us sufficiently, I mean.”

“There are rumors of caves in these Kells,” Elphaba said, almost more to herself than to Sarima. “I lived for some years at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, outside of the Emerald City. Dignitaries would visit, and while we were often under a vow of silence, nonetheless people would talk of what they knew. Monastic cells. I had thought, when I was done here, that I might take myself to a cave and—and—”

“And set up housekeeping,” said Sarima, as if this were as usual as marrying and bearing babies. “Some do it, I know. There’s an old hermit on the western slope of Broken Bottle—that’s a peak nearby—they say he’s been there for some years, and has reverted to a more primitive moment of nature. Of his nature, I mean.”

“A life without words,” Elphie said, looking in her coffee and not drinking it.

“They say this hermit has forgotten about personal hygiene,” said Sarima, “which, given how the boys smell when they go unwashed for a couple of weeks, strikes me as nature’s defense against marauding beasts.”

“I didn’t expect to be here for a long time,” Elphie said, twisting her head on her neck like a parrot and looking at Sarima in an odd way. Oh, beware, thought Sarima carefully, though she tended to like this guest: Beware, she’s taking the direction of the discussion into her own hands. This won’t do. But the guest went on: “I had thought that I would have a night or two, maybe three, and could find myself a hidey-hole before winter set in. I was working on the wrong calendar, I was thinking of how, and when, winter came to Shiz and the Emerald City. But you’re six weeks ahead here.”

“Ahead in the autumn and behind in the spring, alas,” said Sarima. She took her feet off her hassock and placed them on the floor, flatly, to indicate seriousness. “Now, my new friend, there are some things I need to say to you.”

“I have things too,” Elphie said, but Sarima went on this time.

“You will think me an unpolished person, and you are right of course. Oh, when I was selected to be a child bride, a good governess was hired from Gillikin to teach me and my sisters how to use verbs and pronouns and salad forks. And lately I have begun to master reading. But most of what I picked up about polite behavior was from what Fiyero was good enough to instruct me in when he returned from his education. No doubt I make social mistakes. You have every right to snigger behind my back.”

“I am not given to sniggering,” snapped Elphaba.

“As it may be. But I still have opinions, and I’m observant even if unschooled. Despite my sheltered life, married at the age of seven as you may know, raised and reared behind castle curtain walls. I trust my own sense of things and won’t be dissuaded. So let me continue,” she said, as Elphaba tried to interrupt. “There is plenty of time and the sun is nice in here, isn’t it? My little hideaway.

“It seems to me that you have come here to—shall we say—relieve yourself of some sad business or other. You have the look about you. Don’t be startled, my dear, if there’s a look I do recognize, it’s the look of someone carrying a burden. Remember, I listen to my sisters, year in and year out, as they graciously share with me all the ways they hate me, and why.” She smiled, amused at her own wit. “You want to throw down your burden, throw it down at my feet, or across my shoulders. You want perhaps to weep a little, to say good-bye, and then to leave. And when you leave here you will walk right out of the world.”

“I will do no such thing,” said Elphie.

“You will indeed, even if you don’t know it. You will have nothing left to tie you to the world. But I know my own limits, Auntie Guest, and I know what you’re here for. You told me. You told me in the hall, you said you felt you were responsible for Fiyero’s death—”

“I—”

“Don’t. Just don’t. This is my home, I am a nominal Dowager Princess of Duckshit, but I have a right to hear and I have a right not to hear. Even to make a traveler feel better.”

“I—”

“Don’t.”

“But I don’t want to burden you, Sarima, I want to unburden you with the truth—if you permit me, you are the larger, the lighter; forgiveness blesses the donor as well as the receiver.”

“I’ll overlook that remark about my being the larger,” said Sarima. “But I still have the right to choose. And I think you wish me ill. You wish me ill and you don’t even know it. You want to punish me for something. Maybe for not being a good enough wife to Fiyero. You wish me ill and you fool yourself to think it’s some therapeutic course of tablets.”

“Do you know how he died, at least?” said Elphaba.

“I know it was a violent action, I know his body was never found, I know it was in a little love nest,” said Sarima, for a minute losing her resolve. “I don’t care to know who it was exactly, but I have heard enough about that vile Sir Chuffrey to have my strong opin—”

“Sir Chuffrey!”

“I said no. I said no more. Now I have an offer to make of you, Auntie, if you will have it. You and the boy may move into the southeast tower if you like. There are a couple of big round rooms with high ceilings, and good light, and you’ll be out of that drafty cobbleshed, and warmer. You’ll have your own staircase to come and go into the main hall, and you won’t bother the girls and they won’t trouble you. You can’t stay in that cobbleshed all winter. The boy has been looking pale and blubbery, I think he’s always cold. You’re there on the condition, I’m afraid, that you accept my firmest word on these matters. I don’t care to discuss my husband or the affairs of his death with you.”

Elphaba looked horror-struck, and beaten. “I have no choice but to accept,” she said, “at least for the time being. But I warn you, I intend to befriend you so thoroughly that you will change your mind. And I do think you need to hear things, you need to talk about them, as I do—and I can’t leave into the wilderness until I have your solemn promise of—”

“Enough!” said Sarima. “Call the porter from the gatehouse and have him bring your luggage to the tower. Come, I’ll show you. You haven’t touched your coffee.” She stood. For an awkward moment there was respect and suspicion, in equal measure, simmering on the carpet like the dust in the sunbeams. “Come,” Sarima said, more softly, “at the very least you need to be warm. You must be able to say that much of us country mice here at Kiamo Ko.”

3

As far as Elphaba was concerned, it was a witch’s room, and she reveled in it. Like all good witch’s rooms in children’s stories, it was a room with bowed walls, following the essential form of a tower. It had one broad window that, since it faced east, away from the wind, could be unbarred and opened without blowing everyone and everything out into the snowy valleys. Beyond, the Great Kells were a rank of sentinels, purple-black when the winter sun rose over them, draining into blue-white screens as the sun moved overhead, and going golden and ruddy in the late afternoon. There were sometimes rumbling collapses of ice and scree.

The winter gripped the house. Elphaba learned soon enough to stay put unless she was sure another room had a warmer fire. And except for Sarima, she didn’t care for the other human company the house afforded. Sarima lived in the west wing, with the children: the boys Irji and Manek, the girl Nor. Sarima’s five sisters lived in the east wing—they were called numbers Two through Six, and if they had ever had other names they had withered away from disuse. By right of their unmarriageability, the sisters claimed the best rooms in the place, although Sarima had the Solar. Where Liir curled up to sleep Elphaba did not know, but he reappeared every morning to change the rags at the bottom of the crows’ perch. He brought her cocoa, too.

Lurlinemas drew near, and out came some tired decorations from which the gilt had all but vanished. The children spent a whole day tying baubles and toys to the archways, making the grown-ups bump their heads and curse. Manek and Irji took a saw and without permission went beyond the castle walls to claim some boughs of spruce and sprigs of holly. Nor stayed behind and painted scenes of happy life in the castle on sheets of paper that she and Liir had found in Auntie Witch’s room. Liir said he couldn’t draw, so he wandered off and disappeared, perhaps to stay clear of Manek and Irji. The house fell still until there was a flurry of copper pans thrown about the kitchen. Nor went running to see, and Liir arrived from some hiding cubby to look too.

It was Chistery. The monkey was having a fit, and all the sisters, baking gingerbread, were throwing gobbets of batter at him, trying to knock him off the wheel that hung, noisy with swinging utensils, above the worktable.

“How’d he get in here?” said Nor.

“Get him out, Liir, call him!” said Two. But Liir had no more authority over Chistery than they did. The monkey flew to the top of a wardrobe, then to a huge dried goods canister, and he pulled open a drawer and found a precious store of raisins, which he stuffed in his mouth. Six said, “Go get the ladder from the hall, you two, and bring it here,” but when they had, Chistery was back on the wheel, making it whirl and clatter like a roundabout at a carnival.

Four put a lump of mashed melon in a bowl. Five and Three took off their aprons, ready to rush him when he came down. Chistery was still eyeing the fruit when the door smacked open against the wall and Elphaba came lolloping in. “All this commotion, how can you hear yourselves think?” she cried, and then took in the sight of Chistery, suddenly abject and remorseful, and of the sisters, poised to ensnare him in their floury aprons.

“What the hell is this?” she said.

“No need to yell,” said Two sulkily, quietly, but they put down their aprons.

“I mean, what is this? What is really going on here? You all look like Killyjoy, with blood lust in your faces! You’re white with rage at this poor beast!”

“I think it’s not rage, it’s flour,” said Five, which made them giggle.

“You filthy savages,” said Elphie. “Chistery come here, come down here. Right now. You women deserve to be unmarried, so you don’t bring any little savage creepy children into the world. Don’t you ever lay a hand on this monkey, do you hear me? And how did he get out of my room anyway? I was in the Solar with your sister.”

“Oh,” said Nor, remembering, “oh, Auntie, I’m sorry. It was us.”

“You?” She turned and looked at Nor as if for the first time, and Nor didn’t like it much. She shrank back against the door of the cold cellar. “What were you skulking about in my room for?” said Elphie.

“Some paper,” said Nor faintly, and in a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble, said, “I made some paintings for everybody, do you want to see, come here.”

Chistery in her arms, Elphaba followed them into the drafty hall, where the wind under the front door was making the papers flutter against the carved stone. The sisters came too, a safe distance behind.

Elphie got very quiet. “This is my paper,” she said. “I didn’t say you could use it. Look, it has words on the back. Do you know what words are?”

“Of course I do, do you think I am slow?” responded Nor sassily.

“You leave my papers alone,” said Elphaba. She and Chistery then flew up the steps, and the door to the tower slammed behind them.

“Who wants to help roll out the gingerbread?” said Two, relieved that skulls hadn’t been knocked together. “And this hall looks very pretty, chickadees, I’m sure Preenella and Lurline will be impressed tonight.” The children went back into the kitchen and made gingerbread people, and crows, and monkeys, and dogs, but they couldn’t do bees, they were too small. When Irji and Manek came in, dumping snowy greens on the slate floor, they helped at the gingerbread shapes too, but they made naughty shapes that they wouldn’t show the younger children, and they kept gobbling up the raw dough and laughing hysterically at it, which made everyone else testy.

In the morning the children awoke and ran downstairs to see if Lurline and Preenella had been there. Sure enough, there was a brown wicker basket with a green and gold ribbon on it (a basket and a ribbon that Sarima’s children had seen many years in a row), and in it were three small colored boxes, each one with an orange, a puppet, a small sack of marbles, and a gingerbread mouse.

“Where’s mine?” said Liir.

“Don’t see one with your name on it,” said Irji. “Look: Irji. Manek. Nor. Guess Preenella left it for you at your old house. Where did you used to live?”

“I don’t know,” said Liir, and started to cry.

“Here, you can have the tail of my mouse, just the tail,” said
Nor kindly. “First you have to say, May I please have the tail of your mouse?”

“May I please have the tail of your mouse,” said Liir, though his words were almost unintelligible.

“And I promise to obey you.”

Liir mumbled on. The exchange was eventually completed. From shame, Liir didn’t mention the oversight. Sarima and the sisters never took it in.

Elphaba didn’t show her face all day, but she sent down a message that Lurlinemas Eve and Lurlinemas always made her ill, and she was taking a few days in solitary comfort, and she wanted to be disturbed neither with meals, nor visitors, nor noise of any kind.

So while Sarima took herself off to her private chapel to remember her dear husband on this holy day, the sisters and the children all sang carols as loudly as they could.

4

A few weeks later, when the children were having snowball battles, and Sarima was concocting some medicinal toddy in the kitchen, Elphie left her room at last and skulked down the stairs and knocked on the door of the sisters’ parlor.

They didn’t like it, but they felt obliged to welcome her. The silver tray with bottles of hard liquor, the precious crystal carried on donkey all the way from Dixxi House in Gillikin, the prettiest and red-richest of native carpets on the floor, the luxury of fireplaces at both sides of the room, each blazing merrily—well, they would have toned it down some had they had any warning. As it was, Four hid in the sofa cushions the leather volume from which she had been reading aloud, a racy history of a poor young woman beset by an abundance of handsome suitors. It had been a gift from Fiyero once, the best gift he had ever sent the sisters—also the only one.

“Would you like some lemon barley water?” said Six, ever the servant until the day she died, unless by luck everyone else died sooner.

“Yes, all right,” Elphaba said.

“Do take a seat—this seat here, you’ll find it most comfy.”

Elphie didn’t look as if she wanted to be comfy, but she sat there anyway, stiff and uneasy in that quilted cocoon of a room.

She took the tiniest sip possible from her drink, as if suspecting hellebore.

“I suppose I need to apologize for that flurry over Chistery,” she said. “I know I am your guest here at Kiamo Ko. I just flew off the handle.”

“Well, you did just that,” started Five, but the others said, “Oh, think nothing of it, we all have days like that, in fact for us it usually happens on the same day, it’s been that way for years . . .”

“It’s very taxing,” Elphie said with some effort. “I spent many years under a vow of silence, and I haven’t always learned how—loud—it is permissible to get. Besides that, this is a foreign culture, in a way.”

“We Arjikis have always been proud of being able to speak to any other citizen in Oz,” said Two. “We are as equally at home with the ragged vagabond Scrow to our south as with the elite in the Emerald City to our east.” Not that they’d ever been out of the Vinkus.

“A little nibble?” said Three, bringing out a tin of marzipan fruits.

“No,” Elphie said, “but I wonder what you could tell me of your sister’s particular sadness.”

They sat poised, tempted, and suspicious.

“I enjoy my chats with her in the Solar,” said Elphie, “but whenever the talk gets around to her departed husband—whom as you may realize I myself knew—she is unwilling to discuss a thing.”

“Oh, well, it was so sad,” said Two.

“A tragedy,” said Three.

“For her,” said Four.

“For us,” said Five.

“Auntie Guest, take a little orange liqueur in your lemon barley,” said Six, “it comes from the balmy slopes of the Lesser Kells and is quite a luxury.”

“Well, just a drop,” said Elphie, but didn’t sip it. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward and said, “Please tell me how she learned of Fiyero’s death.”

There was a silence. The sisters avoided casting glances at one another, busying themselves with the pleats of their skirts. After a pause, it was Two who said, “That sad day. It stings in the memory still.”

The others adjusted themselves in their seats, turning slightly toward her. Elphaba blinked twice, looking like one of her own crows.

Two told the tale, without sentiment or drama. One of Fiyero’s business colleagues, an Arjiki trader, had come through the mountain pass at the first spring thaw, on the back of a mountain skark. He asked to meet with Sarima and insisted her sisters be around to support her at his woeful news. He told them how, on Lurlinemas, he had received at his club an anonymous message that Fiyero had been murdered. There was an address in a disreputable area—not even a residential neighborhood. The clansman hired a couple of brutes and broke down the door of the warehouse. Inside was a small apartment hidden upstairs, a place of assignation, obviously. (The clansman reported this without flinching, perhaps as a power-mongering maneuver.) There was evidence of struggle and massive quantities of blood, so thick in places that it was still tacky. The body had been removed, and it was never recovered.

Elphaba only nodded, grimly, at this recounting.

“For a year,” continued Two, “our dear distraught Sarima refused to believe he was really dead. We would not have been surprised at a ransom note. But by the following Lurlinemas, when no further word about it had arrived, we had to accept the inevitable. Besides, the clan had gone on as long as it could with an ad hoc collaborative leadership; they demanded a single chief, and one was put forward, and he’s served well. When Irji comes of age he may claim the rights of progenitorship, if he’s bold enough; he is not yet bold at all. Manek is the more obvious candidate, but he’s only second in line.”

“And what does Sarima believe happened?” said Elphie. “And you? All of you?”

Now that the grimmest part of the story had been told, the other sisters felt they could chime in. It emerged that Sarima had for some years suspected Fiyero of having an affair with an old college chum named Glinda, a Gillikinese girl of legendary beauty.

“Legendary?” Elphie said.

“He told us all how charming she was, how self-effacing, what grace and sparkle—”

“Is it all that likely he’d gush on and on about a woman he was committing adultery with?”

“Men,” said Two, “are, as we all know, both cruel and cunning. What better ruse than to admit fervently and often that he admired her? Sarima had no grounds on which to accuse him of slyness and deception. He never stopped being attentive to her—”

“In his cold, morose, withdrawn, embittered fashion,” interjected Three.

“Hardly the thing one reads about in novels,” said Four.

“If one read novels,” said Five.

“Which we don’t,” said Six, closing her lips over a marzipan pear.

“And so Sarima believes her husband was carrying on with this—this—”

“This dazzler,” said Two. “You must have known her, didn’t you go to Shiz?”

“I knew her a bit,” Elphie said, her mouth forgetting to shut itself. She was having a hard time keeping up with the multiple narrators. “I haven’t seen her in years.”

“And it is clear in Sarima’s mind what happened,” said Two. “Glinda was—for all I know still is—married to a wealthy older gentleman named Sir Chuffrey. He must have suspected something, and had her followed, and found out what was going on. Then he had some thugs kill the bastard. I mean poor Fiyero. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“It’s entirely plausible,” Elphie said slowly. “But is there any proof?”

“No proof at all,” said Four. “If there were, family honor would have required a retributive murder of Sir Chuffrey. But he may still be in robust good health. No, it’s only a theory, but it’s what Sarima believes.”

“Clings to,” said Six.

“And why not,” said Five.

“It’s her prerogative,” said Three.

“Everything’s her prerogative,” said Two sadly. “Besides, think of it. If your husband were murdered, wouldn’t it be easier to bear if you thought he deserved it, even just a little?”

“No,” Elphie said, “I don’t think it would.”

“Neither do we,” admitted Two, “but we think that’s what she thinks.”

“And you?” Elphie asked, studying the pattern in the carpet, the blood red lozenges, the thorny margins, the beasts and acanthus leaves and rose medallions. “What do you think?”

“We hardly can be expected to subscribe to a unanimous opinion,” said Two, but she barreled ahead anyway. “It seems reasonable to suppose that unbeknownst to us, Fiyero had gotten involved in some political enterprise in the Emerald City.”

“A stay that was to be a month became four,” said Four.

“Had he political—sensibilities?” said Elphaba.

“He was the Prince of the Arjikis,” Five reminded them all. “He had connections—responsibilities—allegiances—who of us could guess at them? It was his duty to have opinions on things we shouldn’t need to know about.”

“Was he sympathetic to the Wizard?” said Elphie.

“Are you saying was he involved in any of those campaigns? Those—pogroms? First the Quadlings, then the Animals?” said Three. “You look surprised that we should know about these things. Do you think we’re so very removed from the rest of Oz?”

“We are removed,” said Two. “But we listen to talk. We like to feed travelers when they come to stop. We know life can be rotten out there.”

“The Wizard is a despot,” said Four.

“Our home is our castle,” said Five at the same time. “Some removal from all this is healthy. We retain our moral fiber, unsullied.”

They all smirked, simultaneously.

“But do you think Fiyero had an opinion about the Wizard?” Elphaba asked again, pressing with some urgency.

“He kept his own counsel,” snapped Two. “For the sake of sweet Lurline, dear Auntie, he was a prince and a man!—and we were nothing but his younger, dependent sisters-in-law! Do you think he would confide in us? He could have been a high-level crony of the Wizard for all we know! He surely would’ve had liaisons with the Palace, he was a prince. Even if only of our small tribe. What he did with those liaisons—how are we to say? But we don’t think he died as the victim of a jealous husband. Maybe we’re sheltered, but we don’t. We think he got caught in the crossfire of some fringe struggle. Or he was found out in the act of betrayal of one excitable group or other. He was a handsome man,” said Two, “and none of us would deny it, then or now. But he was intense and private and we doubt he’d have loosened up enough to have an affair.” By the smallest gesture—a sucking in of her abdomen and a squaring of her shoulders—Two betrayed the foundation of her position: How could he have succumbed to this Glinda’s charms if he had been able to resist his own sisters-in-law?

“But,” Elphie asked in a small voice, “do you really think he was a spy for someone?”

“Why was his body never found?” said Two. “If it had been a jealous rage, his body needn’t have been removed. Perhaps he hadn’t died yet. Perhaps he was taken to be tortured. No, in our limited experience, we think that this smacks of treachery of a political stripe, not a romantic one.”

“I—” said Elphaba.

“You’re pale, dear. Six, please, a beaker of water—”

“No,” said Elphaba. “It’s just so—one never thought at the time—I never. Shall I tell you what little I know of it? And perhaps you can mention it to Sarima.” She began to pace. “I saw Fiyero—”

But, at the oddest possible moment, family solidarity kicked in. “Dear Auntie Guest,” said Two, in a responsible tone, “we are under the strictest orders from our sister not to allow you to tire yourself by chatting about Fiyero and the sad circumstances of his death.” Clearly Two had to work to get this out, as the appetite to hear what Elphaba had to say was huge. Stomachs were rumbling for the meat of it. But propriety won out, or fear of Sarima’s wrath if she were to find out. “No,” said Two again, “no, I’m afraid we mustn’t express undue interest. We may not listen and we will not tell Sarima what we hear.”

In the end, Elphaba left them, drooping. “Another time,” she kept saying, “when you’re ready, when she’s ready. You see it’s essential; there’s so much grief she could be released from—and that she herself could lift, too—”

“Good-bye for now,” they said, and the door closed behind her. The fires in the twin fireplaces mirrored back and forth across the room, and they took up positions of frustrated worthiness, at having to obey their older sister—curse her to hell.

5

Ice crusted the roofs, dislodged tiles, and dripped dirtily into the private chambers, the music room, the towers. Elphaba took to wearing her hat indoors to avoid the random icy dart on her scalp. The crows were mildewy around the beak and had algae between the claws. The sisters finished their novel, and collectively sighed—for life, for life!—and began to read it again, as they had done for eight years. In the fierce updraft from the valley, the snow seemed as often to be rising as falling. The children adored it.

One glum afternoon Sarima bedecked herself in red woolen wraps and, out of boredom, went wandering through musty, disused rooms. She located a staircase in a trapezoidal, slanting shaft—perhaps this high alcove leaned against the side of the gable you couldn’t see, she wasn’t good at imagining architecture in three dimensions. She mounted the stairs anyway. At the top, through a crude grillwork, she saw a figure in the white gloom. Sarima coughed so as not to startle her.

Elphaba was bent almost double over a huge folio laid out on a carpenter’s work bench. She turned, surprised but not very, and said, “We’ve had the same inclination, how curious.”

“You’ve found some books, I’d completely forgotten,” said Sarima. She could read now, but not well, and books made her feel inferior. “I couldn’t tell you what they’re all about. So many words, you’d hardly think the world deserved such scrutiny.”

“Over here is an archaic geography,” said Elphie, “and some records of usufruct pacts among various families of the Arjiki—I bet there are leaders who would be very happy to see these. Unless they’re outdated. Some texts that Fiyero had in Shiz—I recognize them too, the life sciences course of studies.”

“And this big thing—purple pages and silver ink, how grand.”

“I found it on the floor of this wardrobe. It seems to be a Grimmerie,” Elphie said, running her hand down a page only softly buckled with moisture. It made a pretty contrast, her hand on the vellum.

“What is that, besides beautiful?”

“As I understand it,” Elphie said, “a sort of encyclopedia of things numinous. Magic; and of the spirit world; and of things seen and unseen; and of things once and future. I can only make out a line here or there. Look how it scrambles itself as you watch.” She pointed to a paragraph of hand-lettered text. Sarima peered. Though her skill at reading was minimal, she gaped at what she saw. The letters floated and rearranged themselves on the page, as if enlivened. The page was changing its mind as they watched it. The letters clotted together in a big black snarl, like a mound of ants. Then Elphaba turned a page. “Here, this section is a book of beasts.” There were elegant, attenuated drawings in blood red and gold leaf, on the front and rear elevations of (it seemed) an angel, with notes in a fine hand on the aerodynamic aspects of holiness. The wings flexed up and down and the angel smiled with a saucy sort of sanctity. “And a recipe on this page. It says ‘Of apples with black skin and white flesh: to fill the stomach with greed unto Death.’”

“I remember this book now,” Sarima said. “I do remember how it came to be here, I even put it up here myself; I had forgotten. Well, books are so easy to set aside, aren’t they?”

Elphie looked up, her eyes leveling out under her smooth, rocklike brow. “Tell me, Sarima, please.”

The Dowager Princess of Kiamo Ko was flustered. She went to a small window and tried to open it, but encrustations of ice prevented her. So she sat down in a flump on a packing crate and told Elphaba the story. She couldn’t remember exactly when, but it was a long time ago, when everyone was young and slim. Beloved Fiyero was still alive but he was off in the Grasslands with the tribe. Complaining of a headache, she was home in the castle all alone. The bell at the drawbridge sounded and she went to see who it was.

“Madame Morrible,” Elphaba said. “Some Kumbric Witch or other.”

“No, it was no madame. It was an elderly man in a tunic and leggings, with a cloak badly in need of attention by a seamstress. He said he was a sorcerer, but perhaps he was just mad. He asked for a meal and a bath, which he got, and then he said he wanted to pay by giving me this book. I told him with a castle to run I didn’t have much time for frivolity, reading and such. He said never mind.”

Sarima drew her robes about her, and traced a pattern in the cold dust on a nearby stack of codexes. “He told me a fabulous tale and persuaded me to take this thing from him. He said that it was a book of knowledge, and that it belonged in another world, but it wasn’t safe there. So he had brought it here—where it could be hidden and out of harm’s way.”

“What a load of tripe,” said Elphie. “If it came from another world I shouldn’t be able to read any of it. And I can make out a little.”

“Even if it’s as magic as he says?” said Sarima. “But you know, I believed him. He said there was more congress between worlds than anyone would credit, that our world has attributes of his, and his of ours, a kind of leakage effect, or an infection maybe. He had a long fringy white-and-gray beard, and a very kind and abstracted manner, and he smelled of garlic and sour cream.”

“Indisputable proof of other-worldliness—”

“Don’t mock me,” said Sarima blandly, “you’ve asked me, so I’m telling you. He said it was too powerful to be destroyed, but too threatening—to that other place—to be preserved. So he made a magic trip or something and came here.”

“Kiamo Ko called to him and he couldn’t resist her attractions—”

“He said we were isolated, and a stronghold,” said Sarima, “and I couldn’t disagree! And what did it mean to me to take another book? We just lugged it up here, and put it with the rest. I don’t even know if I told anyone about it. Then he blessed me and left. He walked with an oakthorn staff over the Locklimb Trail.”

“Can you really say you thought the man who brought this here was a sorcerer?” said Elphie. “And that this book comes from—another world? Do you even believe in other worlds?”

“I find it a great effort to believe in this one,” said Sarima, “yet it seems to be here, so why should I trust my skepticism about other worlds? Don’t you believe?”

“I tried to, as a child,” said Elphie. “I made an effort. The mothy, gormless, indistinct sunrise of salvation world—the Other Land—I couldn’t get it, I couldn’t focus. Now I just think it’s our own lives that are hidden from us. The mystery—who is that person in the mirror—that’s shocking and unfathomable enough for me.”

“Well he was a very nice sorcerer, or madman, or whatever.”

“Maybe it was some agent loyal to the Ozma Regent,” said Elphie. “Secreting some ancient Lurlinist tract here. Anticipating a revival of royalism, a Palace coup, worried about the kidnapped, sleep-charmed Ozma Tippetarius, coming in disguise to hide this document far away, but still retrievable. . . .”

“You are full of conspiracy theories,” said Sarima. “I’ve noticed that about you. This was an elderly gentleman, very elderly. And he spoke with an accent. He surely was a wandering magician from some other place. And hasn’t he been right? The thing has sat here, forgotten, for what, ten years or more already.”

“May I take it and look at it?”

“I don’t care. He never said not to read it,” said Sarima. “At the time I perhaps couldn’t read at all—I forget. But look at that beautiful angel there! Do you really mean to say you don’t believe in the Other Land? In an afterlife?”

“Just what we need.” Elphaba snorted as she picked up the tome. “A post Vale-of-Tears Vale-of-Tears.”

6

One morning, after Six had tried and given up once again at some sort of lessons for the children, Irji suggested an indoor game of hide-and-seek. They drew straws and Nor lost, so she hid her eyes and counted. When she got bored with waiting she called out “One hundred!” and looked about.

She tagged Liir first. Though he liked to disappear alone for hours at a time, he was bad at hiding when it was required of him. So they hunted together for the older boys, and found Irji in Sarima’s Solar, crouching behind the velvet ruffles suspended from the perch of a stuffed gryphon.

But Manek, the best at hiding, couldn’t be found. Not in the kitchen, the music room, the towers. Running out of ideas, the children even dared to go down into the musty basement.

“There’s tunnels from here all the way to hell,” said Irji.

“Where? Why?” said Nor, and Liir echoed.

“They’re hidden. I don’t know where. But everybody says so. Ask Six. I think because this used to be a waterworks headquarters—it did. Hell burns so hot they need water, and the devils tunneled up to here.”

Nor said, “Look, Liir, here’s the fishwell.”

In the center of a low-vaulted room, damp with moisture beaded up on its stone walls, stood a low well with a wooden lid. There was a simple device with a chain and a stone for shifting the lid sideways. It was child’s play to uncover the shaft.

“Down there,” said Irji, “is where we get the fish we eat. Nobody knows if there’s a whole lake down there or if it’s bottomless, or if you can go down right to hell.” He moved the rushlight about, and there was a round of black water shining back a reflection, in chips and circles of chilly white light.

“Six says there’s a gold carp in there,” said Nor. “She saw it once. Biggest old thing, she thought it was a floating brass kettle bobbing to the surface, and then it turned and looked at her.”

“Maybe it was a brass kettle,” said Liir.

“Kettles don’t have eyes,” said Nor.

“Anyway, Manek’s not here,” said Irji. “Is he?” He called, “Hello, Manek,” and the echo rolled and dissolved in the wet dark.

“Maybe Manek went down to hell in one of those tunnels,” said Liir.

Irji swung the lid back on the fishwell. “But you’re it, Nor, I’m not going to look down here anymore.”

They gave themselves the creeps, and raced back upstairs. Four yelled at them for making too much noise.

Nor found Manek at last on the stairs outside the door to Auntie Guest’s rooms. “Shhh,” he said as they came near, and Nor tapped him anyway, saying, “You’re out.”

“Shhh,” he said again, more urgently.

They took turns looking through the crack in the weathered grain of the door.

Auntie had her finger in a book, and she was mumbling things to herself, sounding them out this way and that. On the dresser next to her squatted Chistery, in an uneasy, obedient silence.

“What’s happening?” said Nor.

“She’s trying to teach him to talk,” said Manek.

“Let me look,” said Liir.

“Say spirit,” said Auntie in a kind voice. “Say spirit. Spirit. Spirit.”

Chistery twisted his mouth to one side, as if considering it.

“There is no difference,” said Auntie to herself, or maybe to Chistery. “The strands are the same, the skeins are the same; the rock remembers; the water has memory; the air has a past for which it can be held accountable; the flame renews itself like a pfenix. What is an animal, but made of rock and water and fire and ether! Remember how to speak, Chistery. You are animal, but Animal is your cousin, damn you. Say spirit.”

Chistery picked a nit off his chest and ate it.

“Spirit,” sang Auntie, “there is spirit, I know it. Spirit!”

“Spit,” said Chistery, or something like it.

Irji shoved Manek aside and the children almost fell through the door trying to see Auntie laugh and dance and sing. She picked up Chistery and hugged him, and said, “Spirit, oh spirit, Chistery! There is spirit! Say spirit!”

“Spit, spit, spit,” said Chistery, unimpressed with himself. “Spite.”

But Killyjoy woke from a nap at the sound of a new voice.

“Spirit,” said Auntie.

“Speared,” said Chistery patiently. “Spared. Spored. Sput sput sput. Spat spate spit, speed spurt spot.”

“Spirit,” said Auntie, “oh, my Chistery, we’ll find ourselves a link with Doctor Dillamond’s old work yet! There is a universal design among us all, could we get in deeply enough to see! Everything is not in vain! Spirit, my friend, spirit!”

“Sport,” said Chistery.

The children couldn’t stop laughing. They clattered down the stairs and fell into the dormitory, and giggled into the bedclothes.

They didn’t mention what they saw to Sarima or the sisters. They were afraid Auntie would be stopped, and they all wanted Chistery to learn enough language so that he could play with them.

One windless day, when it seemed they must get out of Kiamo Ko or expire of boredom, Sarima had the idea that they go skating on a nearby pond. The sisters agreed, and dug out the rusting skates Fiyero had brought back from the Emerald City. The sisters baked caramel sweets and prepared flasks of cocoa, and even decorated themselves with green and gold ribbons, as if it were a second Lurlinemas. Sarima adorned herself in a brown velvet robe with fur tippets, the children put on extra trousers and tunics, and even Elphaba came along, in a thick cloak of purple brocade and heavy Arjiki goatskin boots, and mittens, carrying her broom. Chistery lugged along a basket of dried apricots. The sisters in sensible men’s tribal overcoats, belted and latched, drew up the rear.

The villagers had cleared the snow off the center of the pond. It was a ballroom dance floor of silver plate, engraved with the flourishes of a thousand arabesques, mounded round with pillows and bolsters of snow to provide a safe repose for skaters who forget how to brake or turn. In the fierce sunlight, the mountains looked razor sharp against the blue; great snowy egrets and ice griffons wheeled high above. The ice rink was already noisy with screaming urchins and lurching adolescents (taking every opportunity to tumble and heap each other cozily in suggestive positions). Their elders moved more slowly, processionally around the ice. The crowd fell silent as the household of Kiamo Ko approached, but, children being children, the silence didn’t last for long.

Sarima ventured out onto the ice, her sisters in a knot around her with linked arms. Being largish, Sarima was nervous of falling, nor were her ankles strong. But before long she had remembered how things went—this foot, then that, long languorous strides—and the uneasy meeting of social classes was accomplished. Elphaba looked like one of her crows: knees out, elbows flailing, rags flapping, gloved hands raking for balance.

After the adults had had enough excitement (but the children were only still warming up) Sarima and the sisters and Elphie collapsed on some bearskins that the citizenry had spread out for them.

“In the summer,” said Sarima, “we have a huge bonfire and slaughter some pigs, before the men descend to the plains, or the boys ascend to the slopes to guard the sheep and the goats. They all come into the castle for a chew of pork and a few tankards of ale. And of course, any time there’s a mountain lion or a particularly nasty bear, we let them into the keep until the beast is killed or wanders away.” She smiled with noblesse oblige in an abbreviated way, off into the middle distance, though the locals were ignoring the castle folk by now. “Auntie dear, you looked quite the sight in that robe, and poking along with that broom.”

“Liir says it’s a magic broom,” said Nor, who had run up to throw a handful of granular snowflakes into her mother’s face. Elphaba turned her head quickly and tugged her collar up to avoid ricocheting snow spray. Nor laughed unkindly in a beautiful phrase like a woodwind, and scampered away.

“So tell us how your broom came to be magic,” said Sarima.

“I never said it was magic. I got it from an elderly maunt named Mother Yackle. She took me under her wing, when she was alert enough, and gave me—well, guidance, I suppose you’d call it.”

“Guidance,” said Sarima.

“The old maunt said the broom would be my link to my destiny,” said Elphie. “I assume she meant that my destiny was domestic. Not magic.”

“Join the sisterhood.” Sarima yawned.

“I never knew if Mother Yackle was completely mad or a wise, prophetic old hen,” said Elphie, but the others weren’t listening, so she lapsed into silence.

After a while Nor came flinging herself into her mother’s lap again. “Tell me a story, Mama,” she said. “Those boys are nasty.”

“Boys are vexing creatures,” agreed her mother. “Sometimes. Shall I tell you the story of when you were born?”

“No, not that,” said Nor, yawning. “A real story. Tell me about the Witch and the fox babies again.”

Sarima protested, knowing full well that the children considered Auntie Guest a witch. But Nor was stubborn and Sarima relented, and told the tale. Elphaba listened. Her father had taught her moral precepts, had lectured her about responsibility; Nanny had gossiped; Nessarose had whined. But no one had told stories to her when she was young. She pulled herself forward a little so she could hear over the noise of the crowd.

Sarima recited the tale with little dramatic involvement, but even so, Elphaba felt a twinge when she heard the conclusion. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

“Did she ever come out?” recited Nor, eyes gleaming with the fun of the ritual.

“Not yet,” answered Sarima, and leaned forward, pretending to bite Nor on the neck. Nor squealed and jiggled herself away, and ran to rejoin the boys.

“I think that’s shameful, even if it’s just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil,” said Elphaba. “Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It’s shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.”

“Don’t,” Sarima said. “For one thing, that’s where Fiyero is waiting for me. And you know it.”

Elphaba’s jaw dropped. When she least expected it, Sarima always seemed ready to rush in with a surprise attack. “In the afterlife?” said Elphie.

“Oh, what you do take against,” said Sarima. “I pity the community of the afterlife when they’re asked to welcome you in. What a sour apple you always are.”

7

She’s crazy,” said Manek knowledgeably. “Everyone knows that you can’t teach an animal to talk.”

They were in the abandoned summer stable, jumping off a loft, making puffs of hay and snow billow in the patchy light.

“Well, what is she doing with Chistery then?” asked Irji. “If you’re so sure of it?”

“She’s teaching him to mimic, like a parrot,” said Manek.

“I think she’s magic,” said Nor.

“You, you think everything’s magic,” Manek said. “Stupid girl.”

“Well, everything is,” said Nor, launching herself away from the boys as a further editorial comment on their skepticism.

“Do you really think she’s magic?” said Manek to Liir. “You know her better than any of us. She’s your mother.”

“She’s my Auntie, isn’t she?” Liir said.

“She’s our Auntie, she’s your mother.”

“I know,” said Irji, pretending full immersion in the topic to avoid another jump. “Liir is Chistery’s brother. Liir is what Chistery was like before she taught him how to talk. You’re a monkey, Liir.”

“I’m not a monkey,” said Liir, “and I’m not magicked.”

“Well, let’s go ask Chistery,” said Manek. “Is this the day that Auntie has her coffee with Mama? Let’s go see if Chistery has learned enough words to answer some questions.”

They scampered up the stone spiral staircase to Auntie Witch’s apartment.

True, she was gone, and there was Chistery nibbling on some nutshells, and Killyjoy dozing by the fire, growling in his sleep, and the bees doing their ceaseless chorus. The children didn’t like bees much, nor did they care for Killyjoy. Even Liir had lost interest in the dog once he had children to play with. But Chistery was a favorite. “Sweet thing, oh the little baby,” said Nor. “Here, you little beast, come to Auntie Nor.” The monkey looked doubtful, but then on knuckles and capable feet he swung across the floor and vaulted into her arms. He inspected her ears for treats, peered over her shoulders at the boys.

“You tell us, Chistery boy, is Auntie Witch really magic?” said Nor. “Tell us all about Auntie Witch.”

“Watch Witch,” said Chistery, playing with his fingers. “Which wretch which?” They could have sworn it was a question, the way his forehead wrinkled like eyebrows.

“Are you under a spell?” said Manek.

“Spell ill. Spoil spell,” answered Chistery. “Spill all.”

“How do we spoil the spell? How do we turn you back to a boy?” asked Irji, the oldest but just as caught up as the others. “Is there a special way?”

“Why way?” said Chistery. “We woo, we weigh woe. Why?”

“Tell us what to do,” said Nor, petting him.

“Do, die,” said Chistery.

“Great,” said Irji. “So we can’t break the spell you’re under?”

“Oh, he’s only babbling,” Elphaba said from the doorway. “Look, I have visitors I didn’t even invite.”

“Oh hello, Auntie,” they said. They knew they shouldn’t be there. “He’s talking, sort of. He’s magicked.”

“He mostly just repeats what you say,” said Elphaba, moving closer. “So leave him alone. You’re not allowed here.”

They said, “Sorry,” and left. Back in the boys’ room, they fell on the mattress and roared until they wept, and couldn’t say what was so funny. Maybe it was the relief of having escaped without harm from the Witch’s rooms, even though they had no business there. The children decided they were no longer scared of Auntie Witch.

8

They were tired of being housebound, but finally it was raining out instead of snowing. They played hide-and-seek a lot, waiting for the rain to lift so they could go outside.

One morning, Nor was it. She kept finding Manek easily, because Liir always hid near him and gave him away. Manek lost his patience. “I always get caught, because you’re so hopeless. Why can’t you hide well?”

“I can’t hide in the well,” Liir said, misunderstanding.

“Oh yes you can,” Manek said, delighted.

The next round began, and Manek led Liir right down the basement steps. The basement was even damper than usual, with the groundwater seeping through the foundation stones. When they swiveled the lid off the fishwell, they could see the water level had risen. But it was still a good twelve or fourteen feet down.

“This’ll just be fine,” Manek said, “look, if we loop the rope over this hook, the bucket will hold steady enough for you to climb in it. Then when I let the crank out, the bucket will slowly slide down the side of the well. I’ll stop it before it gets to the water, don’t worry. Then I’ll put the lid on and Nor will look and look! She’ll never find you.”

Liir peered into the clammy shaft. “What if there are spiders?”

“Spiders hate water,” said Manek authoritatively. “Don’t worry about spiders.”

“Why don’t you do it?” said Liir.

“You’re not strong enough to lower me, that’s why,” said Manek patiently.

“Don’t hide far away,” said Liir. “Don’t let me down too far. Don’t push the cover on all the way, I don’t like the dark.”

“You’re always complaining,” Manek said, giving him a hand. “That’s why we don’t like you, you know.”

“Well, everybody’s mean to me,” Liir said.

“Crouch down now. Hold on to the ropes with both hands. If the bucket scrapes against the wall a little bit just push yourself away. I’ll let it down slowly.”

“Where are you going to hide?” Liir said. “There isn’t anyplace else in this room.”

“I’ll hide under the stairs. She’ll never find me in the shadows, she hates spiders.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any spiders!”

“She thinks there are,” Manek said. “One two three. This is really a good idea, Liir. You’re so brave.” He grunted with the effort. Liir was heavier in the bucket than he had figured, and the rope spooled too quickly. It jammed in the joint between the windlass and the struts, and the bucket stopped and smashed against the wall with an echoing thud.

“That was too fast,” came Liir’s voice, ghostly in the gloom.

“Oh, don’t be a sissy,” Manek said. “Now shhh, I’m going to pivot the cover back on partway, so she won’t guess. Don’t make any noise.”

“I think there’s fish down here.”

“Of course there are, it’s a fishwell.”

“Well, I’m awfully near the water. Do they jump?”

“Yes they jump, and they have sharp teeth, you ninny, and they like fat little boys,” said Manek. “Of course they don’t jump. Would I put you in danger like that if they did? Honestly, you don’t trust me at all, do you?” He sighed, as if disappointed beyond words, and when the cover slid all the way on instead of part way, he noted without surprise that Liir was too hurt to complain.

Manek hid under the stairs for a little while. When Nor didn’t come down he decided that behind the altar skirts of the old musty chapel would be an even better hiding place. “Be right back, Liir,” he hissed, but since Liir didn’t answer Manek guessed he was still nursing his grievances.

Sarima was taking a rare turn in the kitchen, concocting a stew out of limp vegetables from the keeping room. The sisters were having a dance recital amongst themselves in the music room overhead. “Sounds like a herd of elephants,” Sarima said, when Auntie Guest came wandering through, looking for something to snack on.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Elphaba. “You know, I have a complaint to lodge against your children.”

“The sweet little vandals, what now,” Sarima said, stirring. “Have they been putting spiders in your bedsheets again?”

“I wouldn’t mind spiders. At least the crows could eat them. No, Sarima, the children rifle through my belongings, they tease Chistery unmercifully, and they will not listen when I talk to them. Can’t you do anything with them?”

“What’s to be done?” said Sarima. “Here, taste this rutabaga, is it gone to the dogs?”

“Even Killyjoy wouldn’t touch this,” decided Elphie. “You better stick with the carrots. I think those children are ungovernable, Sarima. Oughtn’t they be off to school?”

“Oh yes, in a better life they would be, but how can they?” said their mother placidly. “I’ve already told you that they’re sitting targets for ambitious Arjiki tribesmen. It’s bad enough even to let them run around on the slopes near Kiamo Ko in the summer, I never know when they’re going to be found, trussed, and bled like a pig, and brought home for burying. It’s the cost of widowhood, Auntie; we must do the best we can.”

“I was a good child,” Elphie said stoutly. “I took care of my little sister, who was horribly disfigured from birth. I obeyed my father, and my mother until she died. I tramped around as a missionary child and gave testimonials to the Unnamed God even though I was essentially faithless. I believed in obedience, and I don’t believe it hurt me.”

“Then what did hurt you?” asked Sarima wittily.

“You won’t listen,” said Elphie, “so I won’t even say. But for whatever reasons, your children are ungovernable. I disapprove of your lax ways.”

“Oh, children are good at heart,” Sarima said, intent on scraping carrots. “They are so innocent and gay. It cheers me up to see them dashing about the house in this game or that. All too soon these precious days will be past, dear Auntie, and then we will look back on when this house was filled with peals of childish laughter.”

“Fiendish laughter.”

“There is something inherently good about children,” said Sarima decidedly, warming to the subject. “You know that little Ozma, who all those years ago was deposed by the Wizard? They say that she is off someplace, frozen in a cave—perhaps even in the Kells, for all I know. She’s preserved in her childhood innocence because the Wizard hasn’t the courage to kill her. One day she’ll come back to rule Oz, and she’ll be the best and wisest sovereign we ever had, because of the wisdom of youth.”

“I’ve never believed in child saviors,” Elphaba said. “As far as I’m concerned, children are the ones who need saving.”

“You’re just cross because the children have such high spirits.”

“Your children are evil sprites,” Elphie said, in a snit.

“My children aren’t evil, nor were my sisters and I evil children.”

“Your children aren’t good,” said Elphie.

“Well, how do you judge Liir in this regard, then?”

“Oh, Liir,” Elphie said, and made an expression, and said pfaaaah, with her tongue and hands. Sarima was about to pursue this—a matter she had long been curious about—when Three came rushing into the kitchen.

“The passes below us must have melted sooner than usual,” she said, “for we have sighted a caravan struggling its way over the Locklimb Trail, coming from the north! It’ll be here by tomorrow!”

“Oh, rapture,” Sarima said, “and the castle such a mess! This always happens. Why don’t we learn? Quick, call the children and we’ll have to organize a scrub and polish. You never know, Auntie, it could be an honored guest. You have to be prepared.”

Manek and Nor and Irji came running from their game. Three told them the news, and they immediately had to dash up the highest tower to see what they could see through the slackening rain, and to wave aprons and handkerchiefs. Yes, there was a caravan, five or six skarks and a small wagon, pulling through the snow and the mud, having trouble fording this stream, stopping to mend a split wheel, stopping to feed the skarks! It was a wonderful treat, and all through the dinner meal of vegetable soup the children chattered away at the surprises they might find among the passengers in the caravan. “They’ve never stopped thinking their father is going to come back,” said Sarima under her breath to Elphaba. “This excitement is a hope for him, though they don’t remember it.”

“Where is Liir?” asked Four, “it’s a perfect waste of good soup when he doesn’t show up on time. He shan’t get any if he comes whining to me afterward. Children, where is Liir?”

“He was playing with us earlier. Maybe he fell asleep,” said Irji.

“Let’s go set a bonfire and smoke the travelers a hello,” said Manek, leaping from the table.

9

It was lunchtime when the skarks and the wagon began the final, difficult ascent up the slope to the castle portcullis and the gates of jasper and oak. The townspeople came out from their hovels and leaned their weight against the carriage, helping it through the ruts of mud and ice, until at last it turned in and crossed the open drawbridge. Elphaba, her curiosity as piqued as anyone else’s, stood with the Dowager Princess of the Arjikis and her sisters on a parapet above the crudely carved front doorway. The children waited in the cobblestoned yard below, all but Liir.

The leader, a grizzed young man, made the faintest mountain obeisance to Sarima. The skarks defecated sloppily on the cobbles, to the delight of the children, who had never seen skark fewmets before. Then the leader went to the cabin and opened the door, and climbed inside. They could hear his voice, raised loudly as if talking to someone hard of hearing.

They waited. The sky was a piercing blue, really almost a spring blue, and the icicles hung from the eaves in dangerous daggers, melting like mad. The sisters all sucked in their stomachs, cursing the extra piece of gingerbread, the honeyed cream in the coffee, vowing to do better. Please, sweet Lurlina, let it be a man.

The leader came out again, and proffered a hand, and he helped a figure alight from the cabin: an old, creaky-limbed figure, in sad dark skirts and a hideously out-fashioned bonnet, even from the provincial point of view.

But Elphaba was leaning forward, cleaving the air with her sharp chin and hatchet nose, and sniffing like a beast. The visitor turned and the sun struck her face.

“Good glory,” breathed Elphie. “It’s my old Nanny!” And she left the parapet to run and gather the old woman in her arms.

“Human feeling, will you look at that,” said Four, sniffily. “I wouldn’t have guessed her capable.” For Auntie Guest was all but sobbing with pleasure.

The caravan leader wouldn’t stay for a meal, but Nanny with her valises and trunks clearly did not intend to go any farther. She settled in a small musty room just below Elphaba’s, and took the endless time it takes the elderly to make her toilet. By the time she was ready to be sociable, dinner was served. A gamey old hen, more rope than flesh, lay in a thin pepper sauce on one of the good salvers. The children were dressed in their best, and allowed this once to dine in the formal hall. Nanny came in on the arm of Elphaba, and sat at her right hand. Because this was a visitor to Elphie, the sisters had kindly put Elphie’s napkin ring at the foot of the table, opposite Sarima—a place by custom left vacant, in honor of poor dead Fiyero. It was a big mistake, and they would recognize it almost immediately, as Elphaba never relinquished her advancement. But for now all was smiles and savory hospitality. The only small annoyance (besides that Nanny wasn’t a young eligible princeling looking for a bride) was that Liir still conducted his campaign of sullen disappearance. The children didn’t know where he was.

Nanny was a tired and fruity old woman, skin cracked like dried soap, hair thin and yellowy white, hands with veins as prominent as the cords around a good Arjiki goat cheese. She communicated wheezily, with lots of pauses to breathe and think, that she had heard through someone named Crope, in the Emerald City, that her old charge Elphaba had attended Tibbett in his last days at the Cloister of Saint Glinda outside the Emerald City. No one in the family had heard from Elphaba in years and years, and Nanny had decided to take it upon herself to find her. The maunts were reluctant at first, but Nanny had persisted, and then she had waited until a new caravan was ready to leave. The maunts had told her about Elphaba’s mission in Kiamo Ko, and Nanny had booked passage the following spring. And here she was.

“And of the outside world?” asked Two eagerly. Let them catch up on family gossip on their own time.

“What do you mean?” said Nanny.

“Politics, science, fashion, the arts, the driving edge!” said Two.

“Well, our redoubtable Wizard has crowned himself Emperor,” said Nanny. “Did you know that?”

They hadn’t heard. “By whose authority?” asked Five, scoffing, “And furthermore, Emperor over what?”

“There isn’t anyone who has any more authority, he said,” said Nanny calmly, “and who could argue with that? He’s in the business of handing out honors annually as it is. He just tacked on an extra one for himself. As for Emperor over what, I couldn’t say. Some people whisper that this implies expansionist aims. But where he could expand to—I couldn’t say, I just couldn’t. Into the desert? Beyond, to Quox, or Ix, or Fliaan?”

“Or does he mean to have a more tight-fisted hold on terrain he’s only loosely governed,” asked Elphaba, “like the Vinkus?” She felt a chill, like an old wound deep beneath her breastbone.

“No one is particularly happy,” said Nanny. “There is an enforced conscription now, and the Gale Force threatens to outnumber the Royal Army. One doesn’t know if there could be an internal struggle for power, and the Wizard is preparing against an eventual takeover attempt. How can one have an opinion about such things? Old and female as we are?” She smiled to include them all. The sisters and Sarima glared as youthfully as they could back at her.

10

The next day hardly dawned at all, so gloomy with rain, so glowery with featureless clouds.

In the parlor, waiting for Nanny to emerge and continue her obligation of entertaining them, the sisters and Sarima discussed what new facts they had learned about their Auntie Guest. “Elphaba,” mused Two. “It’s a pretty enough name. Where does it come from?”

“I remember,” said Five, who had once gone through a faintly religious phase when she realized marriage possibilities were growing dim. “I had a Lives of the Saints once. Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall—she was a Munchkinlander mystic, six or seven centuries ago. Don’t you remember? She wanted to pray, but she was of such beauty that the local men kept pestering her for—attention.”

They all sighed, in chorus.

“To preserve her sanctity, she went into the wilderness with her holy scriptures and a single bunch of grapes. Wild beasts threatened her, and wild men hunted after her, and she was sore distressed. Then she came upon a huge waterfall coursing off a cliff. She said, ‘This is my cave,’ and took off all her clothes, and she walked right through the screen of pounding water. Beyond was a cavern hollowed out by the splashing water. She sat down there, and in the light that came through the wall of water she read her holy book and pondered on spiritual matters. She ate a grape every now and then. When at last she had finished her grapes, she emerged from the cave. Hundreds of years had passed. There was a village built on the banks of the stream, and even a milldam nearby. The villagers shrank in horror, for as children they had all played in the cavern behind the waterfall—lovers had trysted there—murders and foul deeds had taken place there—treasure had been buried there—and never had anyone ever seen Saint Aelphaba in her naked beauty. But all Saint Aelphaba had to do was open her mouth and speak the old speech, and they all knew that it must be she, and they built a chapel in her honor. She blessed the children and the elderly, and heard the confessions of the middle-aged, and healed some sick and fed some hungry, that sort of stuff, and then disappeared behind the waterfall again with another bunch of grapes. I think a bigger bunch this time. And that’s the last anyone has seen of her.”

“So you can disappear and not be dead,” said Sarima, looking out the window a little dreamily, past the rain.

“If you’re a saint,” said Two pointedly.

“If you even believe it,” said Elphaba, who had come into the parlor during the end of the recitation. “The reemerging Saint Aelphaba might have been some hussy from the next town over who wanted to give gullible peasants a good going over.”

“That’s doubt for you, it scours hope out of everything,” Sarima said dismissively. “Auntie, you kill me sometimes, you really do.”

“I think it would be charming to call you Elphaba,” said Six, “because that is a charming story. And it’s nice to hear your real name on Nanny’s lips.”

“Don’t you try it,” said Elphie. “If Nanny can’t help herself, so be it; she’s ancient and it’s hard to change. But not you.”

Six pursed her lips as if to make an argument, but just then there was a clattering of feet from downstairs, and Nor and Irji burst into the room.

“We found Liir!” they said. “Come on, we think he’s dead! He’s fallen in the fishwell!”

They all pounded down the stairs to the basement. Chistery had been the one to find him. The snow monkey’s nose had wrinkled when he and the boys passed the fishwell, and he had whined, and whimpered, and tugged at the weighted cover. Nor and Irji had had an idea to lower him down in the bucket then, but when they swiveled the cover off, the lurid gleam of light on pale human flesh had terrified them.

Manek came running when he heard the noise of his mother and the others exclaiming before the well. They pulled Liir up. The water had risen, what with continued melting and the further rain. Liir was like a corpse left in a stream, bloated. “Oh, is that where he was,” said Manek in a funny voice. “You know he said he wanted to go down in that fishwell once.”

“Get away, children, you shouldn’t see this, go upstairs,” Sarima said, scolding. “Come on now, behave, upstairs for you.” They didn’t know what they were looking at and they were afraid to look too closely.

“I cannot believe it, this is so terrible,” said Manek excitedly, and Elphaba gave him a sharp, hateful look.

“Obey your mother,” she snapped, and Manek made a nasty face, but he and Irji and Nor clomped upstairs, and huddled around the open doorway at the top to listen, and peer.

“Oh, who has the art of medicine in their hands, have you, Auntie?” asked Sarima. “Quick now, there may be time. You have the arts, don’t you, you studied the life sciences! What can you do?”

“Irji, go get Nanny, tell her it’s an emergency,” shouted Elphie. “We’ll bring him up to the kitchen, gently now. No, Sarima, I don’t know enough.”

“Use your spells, use your magic!” exclaimed Five.

“Bring him back,” urged Six, and Three added, “You can do it, don’t be hidden and shy about it now!”

“I can’t bring him back,” said Elphaba, “I can’t! I have no aptitude for sorcery! I never did! That was all a foolish campaign of Madame Morrible’s, which I rejected!” The six sisters looked at her askance.

Irji escorted Nanny to the kitchen, Nor brought the broom, Manek brought the Grimmerie, and the sisters and Sarima brought the body of Liir, dripping and bloated, and laid him on the butcher’s block. “Oh, now who’s this one,” mused Nanny, but got to work pumping the legs and the arms, and set Sarima to pressing in at the abdomen.

Elphaba flipped through the Grimmerie, she screwed up her face and hit herself on the temple with her fists, and wailed, “But I have no personal experience with a soul—how can I find his if I don’t know what one looks like?”

“He’s even fatter than usual,” said Irji.

“If you prick his eyes out with a magic straw from the magic broom, his soul will come back,” said Manek.

“I wonder why he went in the fishwell?” said Nor. “I never would.”

“Holy Lurlina, mercy on us, mercy!” said Sarima, weeping, and the sisters began to mumble the service of the dead, honoring the Unnamed God for the life departed.

“Nanny can’t do everything,” snapped Nanny, “Elphaba, be some help! You’re just like your mother in a crisis! Put your mouth on his and push air into his lungs! Go on!”

Elphaba wiped the wet off Liir’s pasty face with the edge of her sleeve. The face stayed where it was pushed. She grimaced, and nearly vomited, and spit something into a bucket, and then she sank her mouth down on the child’s, and breathed out, pushing into the sour passage her own sour breath. Her fingers tensed at the sides of the butcher’s block, gouging splinters, as if in an ecstasy of sexual tension. Chistery breathed along with her, breath for breath.

“He smells like fish,” Nor said under her breath.

“If that’s what you look like when you drown, I’d rather burn to death,” said Irji.

“I’m just not going to die,” Manek said, “and nobody can make me.”

The body of Liir began to choke. They thought at first it was an involuntary reaction, air from Elphaba’s mouth pocketing and blurting out again, and then there was a small stream of yellowish yuck. Then Liir’s eyelids moved, and his hand twitched of its own accord.

“Oh mercy,” Sarima murmured. “It’s a miracle. Thank you Lurlina! Bless you!”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Nanny. “He may still die of exposure. Quick now, off with his clothes.”

The children watched the silly indignity of grown-up women tearing stupid Liir’s trousers and tunic off. They rubbed him all over with lard. This gave the children a case of the giggles, and made Irji feel very funny in his trousers, for the first time in his life. Then they wrapped Liir in a woolen blanket, which made quite a mess, and prepared to put him to bed.

“Where does he sleep?” said Sarima.

They all looked at one another. The sisters looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba looked at the children.

“Oh, sometimes on the floor in our room, sometimes on the floor in Nor’s,” said Manek.

“He wants to sleep in my bed too but I push him out,” said Nor. “He’s too fat, there’d be no room for me and my dollies.”

“He doesn’t even have a bed?” Sarima coldly asked Elphie.

“Well, don’t ask me, this is your house,” said Elphie.

And Liir stirred somewhat, and said, “The fish talked to me. I talked to the fish. The goldfish talked to me. She said she was. . . .”

“Hush, little one,” said Nanny, “time for that later.” She glared around at the women and children in the kitchen. “Well, it shouldn’t take Nanny to have to find him a proper bed, but if there’s none other for him he can come up to my room, and I’ll sleep on the floor!”

“Of course not, the very idea,” began Sarima, bustling ahead.

“Barbarians, the lot of you!” snapped Nanny.

For which no one in Kiamo Ko ever forgave her.

Sarima lectured Auntie Guest severely for what had happened to Liir. Elphaba tried to say that it was not her doing, it was not her fault. “It was some boys’ trick, some game, some dare,” she said. Their accusations spent, they fell to talking about the differences between boys and girls.

Sarima told Auntie Guest what she knew of the boys’ initiation rite in the tribe. “They are taken out in the grasslands, and left with nothing but a loincloth and a musical instrument. They are required to call forth spirits and animals out of the night, to converse with them, to learn from them, to soothe them if they need soothing, to fight them if they need fighting. The child who dies at night clearly lacks the discretion to decide if its company needs fighting, or soothing. So it is correct that he should die young and not burden the tribe with his foolishness.”

“What do the boys say of spirits who approach them?” asked Auntie Guest.

“Boys say very little, especially about the spirit world,” she answered. “Nonetheless, you pick up what you pick up. And I think some of the spirits are very patient, very wearing, very obdurate. The lore supposes there should be conflict, hostility, battle, but I wonder, in contact with spirits, if what the boy needs is a good helping of cold anger.”

“Cold anger?”

“Oh yes, don’t you know that distinction? Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.”

“Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering.

Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.” She glared at Elphaba, pinning her with unspoken accusations about Fiyero, about Liir.

Elphaba thought about this. She thought about hot anger and cold anger, and if it divided by the sexes, and which she felt, if either, if ever. She thought about her mother dying young, and her father with his obsessions. She thought about the anger that Doctor Dillamond had had—an anger that drove him to study and research. She thought about the anger that Madame Morrible could barely disguise, as she tried to seduce the college girls into the secret service of government.

She sat and thought about it the following morning as she watched the strengthening sun beat down on the mounds of snow on the sloping tiled roofs below. She watched the sun bleed ice water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

In a fashion—without any way to confirm it, of course—she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts . . .

Liir survived, but Manek did not. The icicle that Elphaba trained her gaze on, thinking on the weapons one needed to fight such abuse—it broke like a lance from the eaves, and drove whistling downward, and caught him in the skull as he went out to find some new way of beleaguering Liir.

Uprisings

I

They’re calling you a witch, do you know that?” said Nanny. “Now why ever is that?”

“Silliness and stupidity,” said Elphaba. “When I arrived I was distanced from my name, after my years at the mauntery, where I was called Sister Saint Aelphaba. Elphaba seemed like the name of someone long ago. I told them to call me Auntie. Though I never felt like anyone’s Auntie, nor would I know what it felt like. I never had any aunts or uncles.”

“Hmmm,” said Nanny, “I don’t think you’re much of a witch. Your mother would be scandalized, bless her soul. Your father too.”

They were walking in the apple orchard. A cloud of blossoms thickened the air with scent. The Witch’s bees were having a field day, humming throatily. Killyjoy sat wagging his tail in the shadow of Manek’s tombstone, placed near the wall. The crows had relay races overhead, scaring away all other birds except the eagles. Irji and Nor and Liir, at Nanny’s insistence, had been taken into the schoolroom of the village. Kiamo Ko was blissfully quiet until midday.

Nanny was seventy-eight. She walked with a cane. She hadn’t given up on her little efforts toward beauty, though now they seemed to coarsen rather than dignify her. Her powder was on too thick, her lip rouge smeared and off center, and the flimsy lace shawl was useless in the updraft from the valley. For her part, Nanny thought that Elphaba was looking poorly, as if she were going moldy from the inside out. Pale. A disintegration of sorts. Elphaba didn’t seem to care for her beautiful hair at all, keeping it knotted up out of sight underneath that ridiculous hat. And the black gown needed a good washing and airing.

They stopped at a lopsided wall, and leaned against it. The sisters were gathering flowers a few fields away, and Sarima ballooned along. In her dark mourning gown she resembled a huge dangerous cocoon broken loose from its mooring. It was good to hear her laugh again, even if falsely; light had that strange, ameliorative effect on everybody, even Elphaba.

Nanny had told Elphie about her family. The Eminent Thropp had died at last. In Elphaba’s absence and presumed death, the mantle of Eminence had fallen to Nessarose. So the younger sister was now ensconced in Colwen Grounds, issuing dogmatic statements about faith and blame. Frex was there with her too, his career of ministry almost at an end. As he gave up the effort his mind was returning to balance. Shell? He came and went. Rumors abounded that he was an agitator for Munchkinland’s secession from Oz. He had grown up handsome and fine, in Nanny’s biased opinion: straight of limb, clear of skin, direct of speech, bold of heart. He was now in his early twenties.

“And what does Nessarose think of secession?” Elphie had asked. “Her opinion about it will be important if she’s the Eminent Thropp now.”

Nanny reported that Nessarose had grown to be far cleverer than anyone anticipated. She kept her cards close to her chest and issued vague statements about the revolutionary cause, statements that could be read several ways, depending on the audience. Nanny assumed Nessarose intended to set up some sort of theocracy, incorporating into the governing laws of Munchkinland her own restrictive interpretation of unionism. “Your sainted father Frex himself doesn’t know if this would be a good or bad thing, and keeps silent on the matter. He’s not much for politics, he prefers the mystical realm.” There was, Nanny observed, even some local support for Nessarose’s plans. But since Nessarose governed her remarks well, the Wizard’s armed forces garrisoned in the area could find no excuse to arrest her. “She’s adept at this,” Nanny admitted. “Shiz taught her well. She stands on her own two feet now.”

The word adept sent chills down Elphie’s spine. Was Nessarose even now responding to some sort of spell that Madame Morrible had placed on her, those foggy years ago in the parlor at Crage Hall? Was she in fact a pawn, an Adept of the Wizard, or of Madame Morrible? Did she know why she did what she did? For that matter, was Elphaba herself merely a playing piece of a higher, evil power?

The recollection of Madame Morrible’s proposals for their careers—hers, and Nessarose’s, and Glinda’s—had come back to Elphie with a shock following the recovery of Liir from his saturation and near drowning last winter. When he finally came around enough to answer questions about how he had come to be in the fishwell, he could only say “The fish talked to me, she told me to come down.” Elphie knew in her heart that it was Manek, horrible evil Manek, who had tortured the boy unmercifully and openly all winter. She didn’t care that Manek died, even if Manek was the precious son of Fiyero. Any torturer was fair game for javelin icicles. But she had to pause, gulping, at what Liir had said next. He said, “The fish told me she was magic. She said that Fiyero was my father, and that Irji and Manek and Nor are my brothers and my sister.”

“Goldfish don’t talk, sweetheart!” Sarima said. “You’re imagining things. You were down there too long and your brain got waterlogged.”

Elphaba had yearned toward Liir, a strange, unhappy compulsion. Who was this boy who lived in her life? Oh, she knew more or less where he came from, but who he was—it seemed to make a difference, for the first time in her life. She had reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. He had twitched it off; he was not used to such a gesture. And she had felt rebuffed.

“Want to see my pet mouse, Liir?” said Nor, who had been warm to the boy during his convalescence. Liir always chose the company of his peers over questioning by the grown-ups, and it was impossible to pry further information out of him about his ordeal. He didn’t seem much changed, except that with Manek dead, Liir charged around Kiamo Ko with greater zest and liberty.

And Sarima had looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba thought the hour of her liberation was at hand at last. “How silly of the boy, he’s delusional,” Sarima had said at last. “The idea of Fiyero being his father. Fiyero didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and look at the boy.”

Under the terms of her welcome, Elphaba could not prod Sarima to change her mind, but she stared at her hostess, willing her to accept the facts. But she wouldn’t. “And whoever might the mother be?” said Sarima blandly, touching the hem of her skirt softly. “It’s preposterous beyond words.”

For the first time, Elphie wished that Liir had at least an undertone of green in his skin.

Sarima had swept away, to weep in her chapel for her husband, for her second son.

And the terms of Elphie’s imprisonment—as an unwilling traitor, as an exiled maunt, as a hapless mother, as a failed insurrectionist, as a Witch in disguise—remained unchanged.

Though the idea of a Goldfish or a Carp in the fishwell telling such things to Liir—was there any possibility in that? Or had Madame Morrible the ability to change her shape, to live in cold darkness, to slip in and observe what Elphie was up to? Liir had no imagination to speak of, he couldn’t have come up with that by himself. Could he?

When she went to look in the fishwell, many times at all hours of the day or night, the old carp—or Carp—stayed out of sight.

“I’m glad to hear Nessarose is on her two feet,” said Elphaba at last, coming back to the orchard from her musings. Nanny was gnawing at a piece of sugar candy.

“I mean that literally, you know,” said Nanny through her spittle. “She doesn’t need to be propped up anymore. Not figuratively or literally. She can stand on her own, stand and sit.”

“Without benefit of arms? I don’t believe it,” said the Witch.

“You’ll have to. Do you remember that pair of shoes that Frex had decorated for her?”

Of course Elphaba remembered! The beautiful shoes! Her father’s sign of devotion to his second daughter, his desire to accentuate her beauty and draw attention away from her deformity.

“Well, old Glinda of the Arduennas, remember her? Married to Sir Chuffrey, and gone a bit to seed, in my humble opinion. She came to Colwen Grounds a couple of years ago. She and Nessarose had a wild old time, remembering college days. And she put those very same shoes through something of an enchantment. Don’t ask me. Magic was never my cup of tea. The shoes allowed Nessarose to sit and stand and walk without support. She is never without them. She claims they give her moral virtue too, but then she has buckets more of that than she needs. You’d be surprised how superstitious Munchkinlanders have become these days.” Nanny sighed. “That’s why I was free to look you up, dearie. The magic shoes made me redundant. Nanny is out of a job.”

“You’re too old to work, you sit and enjoy the sun,” said Elphaba. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

“You talk as if this is your house,” said Nanny. “As if you have the right to issue such invitations.”

“Until I’m allowed to leave, this is my house,” said Elphie. “I can’t help it.”

Nanny shaded her eyes and looked out over the mountains, which in the midday light looked like polished horn. “It’s too rich, to think of you being a Witch, after a fashion anyway, and your sister trying out as resident Saint. Who would have thought, back in those muddy years in the Quadling badlands? I don’t think you’re a Witch, whatever you say. But one thing I do want to know. Is Liir your son?”

Elphaba shivered, though her heart, deep inside its pocket of cold, roiled in hot energy. “It is not a question I can answer,” she said sadly.

“You needn’t keep anything from me, dearie. Remember, Nanny was nursemaid to your mother too, and a more outgoing, sensual woman I have yet to meet. Convention didn’t bind her, not in youth nor in married life.”

“I don’t think I want to hear about this,” said Elphie.

“Then let’s talk about Liir. What in blazes can you mean, you can’t answer a simple question like that? Either you conceived him and bore him, or you didn’t. As far as I know in this world there are no other stories.”

“What I mean,” said Elphaba “and the only remark about it I will ever make is this. When I first went to the mauntery, under the kind offices of Mother Yackle, I was in no state to know what was happening to me, and I spent about a year in a deathly sleep. It’s just possible I brought a child to term and delivered it. I was another full year recovering. When I was first assigned duties, I worked with the sick and the dying, and also with abandoned children. I had no more congress with Liir than with any other of several dozen brats. When I left the mauntery to come here, it was under the condition that I would take Liir with me. I didn’t question the instruction—one doesn’t question the instructions of superiors. I have no motherly warmth toward the boy”—she gulped, in case this was no longer true—“and I don’t feel as if I’ve ever gone through the experience of bearing a child. I don’t quite believe myself capable, in fact, although I’m willing to concede that this may be simply ignorance and blindness. But that’s all there is to say about it. I’ll say no more, and no more will you.”

“Have you an obligation to be motherly to him then, despite the mystery?”

“The only other obligations I’m under are the ones I assign to myself. And that, Nanny, is that.”

“You are too tart, this situation makes you unhappy. But if you think I came here to raise yet another generation of Thropps, forget it. Nanny is in her senility now, remember, and happily so.”

But Elphaba couldn’t help noting that in the weeks that followed, Nanny began to attend to Liir’s needs more lovingly than she did the needs of Nor and Irji. Elphaba registered it with shame, for she also saw how willingly Liir responded to Nanny’s attention.

In telling tales of Shell’s derring-do—her racy old heart pitter-pattering almost visibly beneath her breastbone—Nanny revealed details of the Wizard’s campaigns. It made Elphaba furious, for she had kept hoping to lose interest in the ways of evil men.

Nanny buzzed on about the Wizard’s having mounted a new kind of youth camp, the Emperor’s Garden—a pretty, euphemistic name. All Munchkinlander children from four to ten were required to attend, in month-long summer residencies. The children were sworn to secrecy—a great game for them, no doubt. Nanny told a long-winded tale, more suited to toothless cronies in a fireside inglenook than to a dinner table with upright and repressed Arjiki spinsters, of how Shell, dear stranger brother Shell, disguised himself as a potato man doing deliveries. And got in the gates. Oh la, the many amusing adventures of a rake! The Camp General’s nubile daughter in deshabille, Shell’s inventive alibis, his dalliances, his narrow escapes! Almost being discovered at his liaisons—by children! What a lark! Nanny remained a mouthy old peasant at heart despite her airs. Elphaba thought: She hardly comprehends she is talking about indoctrination, betrayal, forced conscription of children into low-level warfare. With Elphie’s newfound awareness of Liir hovering at the edges of her life, bumbling gently through her days, she found these tales of indoctrinated children horrifying and repugnant.

She went to the Grimmerie and hauled open its massive cover—leather ornamented with golden hasps and pins, and tooled with silver leaf—and pored through the tome to find what makes people thirst for such authority and muscle. Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being?

She looked for a recipe for the overthrow of a regime. She found much on power, and damage, but little on strategy.

The Grimmerie described poisoning the lips of goblets, charming the steps of a staircase to buckle, agitating a monarch’s favorite lapdog to make a fatal bite in an unwelcome direction. It suggested the nocturnal insertion, through any convenient orifice, of a fiendish invention, a thread like a piano wire, part tapeworm and part burning fuse, for a particularly painful demise. All of this seemed carnival sleight of hand to Elphaba. What was more interesting, in her reading, was a small drawing she saw next to a section marked Evil Particulars. The drawing—done, if you would believe gullible Sarima, in some world other than theirs—was a clever sketch of a broad-faced woman-fiend. Written in an angular, bronchiating script with elegant tapering serifs, all around the illustration, were the words YAKAL SNARLING. Elphaba looked again. She saw a creature part woman, part grassland jackal, its jaws open, its hand-paw lifted to rip the heart out of a spiderweb. And the creature reminded her of old Mother Yackle from the mauntery.

Conspiracy theories, as Sarima had said, seemed to bedevil her thinking. She turned the page.

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant—nothing useful. Armies of holy angels were not answerable to her. Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful—if that ever happened anymore.

2

In truth, the family was devastated over Manek’s death. There was an unspoken feeling, that somehow Liir’s life had been saved at the expense of Manek’s. The sisters suffered from that most dreadful of losses: the theft of the adult Manek from their lives. Their sad lot had been bearable all these years because Manek was going to be the man Fiyero had been, and maybe more. They realized in retrospect that they had expected Manek to restore the fallen fortunes of Kiamo Ko.

Feckless Irji had no more sense of destiny than a prairie dog. And Nor was a girl, more flighty and distractible than usual. So Sarima, behind her gestures of ecstatic acceptance of life (its joys, its sorrows, its mysteries, as she was fond of elaborating), became more aloof. Never close to her sisters, she began to take her meals alone in the Solar.

Irji and Nor, who had enjoyed a sort of allegiance from time to time against the headstrong malice of Manek, had less to bind them together now. Irji began to moon about in the old unionist chapel, teaching himself to read better by scrutinizing moldy hymnals and breviaries. Nor didn’t like the chapel—she thought the ghost of Manek lingered there, as that was the last place she had seen his body in the unwrapped shroud—so she tried to ingratiate herself with Auntie Witch—but to no avail. “You are out to make mischief with Chistery,” snapped Elphie, “and I’ve work to do. Go bother someone else.” She aimed a kick at Nor, who, whimpering and screaming as if it had hit home, left in a funk.

Nor took to wandering—now that the summer was coming in—down the high valley, the one with the stream at its bottom—and up the other side, where the sheep were nibbling on the best grass they would get all year. In previous years she would either have been with her brothers, or she would have been forbidden to go climbing alone. This year no one was paying enough attention to her to forbid it. She wouldn’t have minded being forbidden, she wouldn’t have minded the strap even. She was lonely.

One day she wandered particularly far down the valley, luxuriating in the strength and endurance of her strong legs. She was only ten, but a strapping, mature ten. She had hiked her green skirt up into her belt, and because the sun was high and strong, she had shucked off her blouse and tied it like a bandanna around her head. She hardly had a swelling here or there on her chest with which to startle any sheep, and anyway she expected to be able to spot a shepherd from miles away.

How in the world did I come to be here, of all places in Oz, she asked herself, freshly treading upon the terrain of reflection. Here I am, a girl on a mountain, nothing but wind and sheep and grass like an emerald brushfire, green and golden as Lurlinemas decorations, silky in the updraft, coarse in the downdraft. Just me and the sun and the wind. And that group of soldiers coming out from behind the rock.

She slid down onto her back in the grass, fixed up her blouse, and raised herself to her elbows, hiding.

They were not soldiers such as she had seen before. They were not Arjiki men in their ceremonial brasses and helmets, with their spears and shields. These were men in brown uniforms and caps, with muskets or something slung over their shoulders. They were wearing a kind of boot rather high and inappropriate for hill walking, and when one of them had stopped and was fiddling with a nail or a stone in his boot, his arm disappeared inside it right up to his elbow.

There was a green stripe down the front of their uniforms, and a bar across it, and Nor felt cold with an unfamiliar sense of anticipation. At the same time she wanted to be seen. What would Manek have done? she asked herself. Irji would run, Liir would puzzle and dither, but Manek? Manek would have marched right up to them and found out what was going on.

And so would she. She checked once again to make sure her buttons were done up, and then she strode down the slope toward them. By the time she had got all their attention, and the man with the boot off had slipped it back on, she was beginning to rethink the wisdom of the plan. But it was too late to run away now.

“Hail,” she said in a formal way, using the language of the east, not her own Arjiki vernacular. “Hail, and halt. I am the Princess Daughter of the Arjikis, and this is my valley you are marching your big black boots along.”

It was broad noon when she delivered them into the castle keep of Kiamo Ko. The sisters were in their summer laundry yard, beating carpets themselves because they didn’t trust the local scrubwives to treat them respectfully enough. The sound of boots on cobbles brought the sisters running through an archway, all flushed and dusty, hair wrapped in cotton scarves. Elphaba heard the noise, too, and threw her window open and stared. “Not an inch farther until I come down,” she called, “or I’ll turn you all to rodents. Nor, come away from them. All of you, come away.”

“I shall fetch the Dowager Princess,” said Two, “if it please you gentlemen.”

But by the time Sarima arrived, drowsy from a nap, Elphaba had descended, her broom over her shoulder, her eyebrows up to her scalp. “You have no invitation here,” said Elphie, looking more like a Witch than ever in her mauntish skirts, “so just how welcome would you like to be made? Who is in charge here? You? Who’s the senior one leads this mission? You?”

“If you please, Madame,” said someone, a strapping Gillikinese man of about thirty. “I am the Commander—the name is Cherrystone—and I’m under the Emperor’s orders to requisition a house large enough to shelter our party while we are in this district of the Kells. We are doing a survey of the passes to the Thousand Year Grasslands.” He produced a sweat-stained document from inside his shirt.

“I found them, Auntie Witch,” said Nor proudly.

“Go away. Go inside,” said Elphaba to the girl. “You men aren’t welcome here and the girl has no right to invite you. Turn around and march yourself out over that drawbridge at once.” Nor’s face fell.

“This is not a request, it is an order,” said Commander Cherrystone in an apologetic tone.

“This isn’t a suggestion, it’s a warning,” said Elphaba. “Go, or suffer the consequences.”

Sarima by now had taken in enough to step forward, her sisters buzzing in a thrill around her. “Auntie Guest,” she said, “you forget the code of the mountains, the same code by which you came to lodge here, and your old Nanny after you. We do not turn visitors away. Please, sirs, excuse our excitable friend. And excuse us. It has been some time since we saw soldiers in uniform.”

The sisters were primping away as best they could at such short notice.

“I won’t have it, Sarima,” Elphaba said, “you’ve never been out of here, you don’t know who these men are or what they will do! I won’t have it, do you hear?”

“It’s the high spirits, the determination, it makes her so much fun to have around,” said Sarima a trifle meanly, as in general she really did enjoy Elphaba’s company. But she did not like having her authority usurped. “Gentlemen, this way. I’ll show you where you can wash up.”

Irji wasn’t sure what to make of military men, and wouldn’t go very near. Whether he was afraid of being conscripted or enchanted he couldn’t say. He dragged a sleeping roll down into the chapel and slept there, now that it was warm enough. It was Nanny’s opinion he was going weird. “Believe me, after a life looking after your dear mother’s devout husband, Frex, and your sister after that, I know a religious lunatic when I see one,” she said to Elphaba. “That boy ought to be taking some lessons from these men in manliness, whatever else is going on here.”

On the other hand, Liir was in heaven. He followed Commander Cherrystone around unless he was turned back, and he fetched water for the men and polished their boots, in a surfeit of ill-concealed romance. The tramping they did, reconnoitering about the local valleys, mapping the places to ford the river, pinpointing spots for beacons, gave Liir more exercise and fresh air than he had ever had before. His spine, which had threatened to become curved like the arc of a mountain harp, seemed to straighten out. The soldiers were indifferent to him, but they were not manifestly unkind, and Liir took this as approval and fondness.

The sisters regained some sense when they stopped to consider what class of men would go into the army. But it wasn’t easy.

Sarima alone seemed unperturbed by the disturbance to their routine. She cast about among the villagers and called in favors to help her feed the host of soldiers, and in mixed resentment and fear her neighbors came up with milk, eggs, cheese, and vegetables. There was stouch or garmot from the fishwell almost every evening. And the summer game, of course—quail, hill pfenix, baby roc—which the men proved a dab hand at bringing in themselves. Nanny suspected that the reconnaissance team was helping Sarima over her grief, bringing her back to the family table at least.

But Elphaba was furious at them all. She and the Commander had words every day. Elphie forbade him to allow Liir to tag along—and she forbade Liir himself—to absolutely no effect. Her first true motherly feelings were of incompetence and of being blithely ignored as inconsequential. She could not understand how the human race had ever managed to develop past a single generation. She continually wanted to strangle Liir, as a means of saving him from smooth-talking father figures.

As Elphie tried harder to ferret out the nature of his mission, with every sidestepping pleasantry Commander Cherrystone grew more icy and polite. The one thing Elphaba had never been able to manage was a parlor manner, and this soldier—of all people—was a master at it. It made her feel as she had felt among the society girls at Crage Hall. “Pay those soldiers no mind, they’ll go away eventually,” said Nanny, who was at the time of her life when everything was either the final fatal crisis or a dismissible matter indeed.

“Sarima says that she has rarely seen any of the Wizard’s forces in the Vinkus. This was always arid, lifeless, of little interest to the farmers and merchants of northern and eastern Oz. The tribes have lived here for decades, centuries I suppose, with nothing but the occasional cartographer passing through and beating a quick retreat. Don’t you think this suggests some sort of campaign in these parts? What else can it suggest?”

“Look at how long it has taken these young men to recuperate from their overland trek,” said Nanny. “This is surely just a reconnaissance mission, as they say. They’ll get their information and then leave. Besides, everyone is always telling me, the whole damn place is swamped in snow or mud for two thirds of the year. You’re a worrier, you always were. The way you gripped the Quadlings we used to proselytize, as if they were your own private dolls! How you went on when they were relocated or whatever! It used to trouble your mother no end, believe me.”

“It’s been well documented that the Quadlings were being exterminated, and we were witnesses,” said Elphaba strictly. “You too, Nanny.”

“I look after my young, I can’t look after the world,” said Nanny, quaffing a cup of tea and scratching Killyjoy’s nose. “I look after Liir, which is more than you do.”

Elphaba didn’t think it worth her while to lambaste the old biddy. She flipped through the Grimmerie again, trying to find some small spell of binding with which she could close the castle gates against the men. She wished she had at least sat in on Miss Greyling’s class in magic at school.

“Of course your mother was worried about you, she always was,” said Nanny. “You were such an odd little thing. And the trials that poor woman had! You remind me of her now, only you’re more rigid than she was. She could really let her hair down. Do you know, she was so upset with having you be a girl—she was so convinced you’d be a boy—she sent me to the Emerald City to find an elixir to ensure . . .” But Nanny stopped, muddled. “Or was that elixir to prevent her next child from being born green? Yes, that was it.”

“Why did she want me to be a boy?” said Elphaba. “I would have obliged her if I’d had a say in the matter. Not to be simplistic, but it always made me feel horrible, to know how I’d disappointed her so early on. Not to mention the looks.”

“Oh, don’t credit her with nasty motives,” said Nanny. She eased her shoes off and rubbed the backs of her feet with her cane. “Melena had hated her life at Colwen Grounds, you know. That’s why she contrived to fall in love with Frex and get out of there. Her grandfather the Eminent Thropp had made it all too clear that she would inherit the title. The Munchkinlander title descends through the female line unless there are no daughters. The family seat, and all its attendant responsibilities, would go from him, to Lady Partra, to Melena, and then to the first daughter Melena had. She was hoping to have only sons, to keep them out of that place.”

“She always talked about it so lovingly!” said Elphaba, astounded.

“Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone. But for a young person, trained up in all that wealth and responsibility—well, she hated it. She revolted by having sex early and often, with anyone who would oblige, and she as good as ran off with Frex, who was the first suitor she had who loved her for herself and not her position and inheritance. She thought a daughter of hers would find it equally deadly, so she wanted sons.”

“But that makes no sense. If she had sons and no daughters, then her oldest son would inherit. If I’d been a boy without sisters, I’d still have been stuck in the same mess.”

“Not necessarily,” said Nanny. “Your mother had one older sister, who was born with a permanent case of overwrought nerves, maybe also lacking in the brains department. She was housed off-grounds. But she was old enough to breed, and healthy enough, and was just as likely to bear a daughter. If she had borne a daughter first, her daughter would have inherited the title of Eminence, and the estate and fortunes with it.”

“So I have a mad aunt,” said the Witch. “Maybe madness runs in the family. Where is she now?”

“Died of the flu when you were still a small child, and left no issue. So Melena’s hopes were dashed. But that was her thinking, back in those brash, brave days of youthful blunder.”

Elphaba had few memories of her mother, and they were warm, sometimes searing. “But what’s this about her taking medicine to prevent Nessarose from being born green?”

“I got her some tablets in the Emerald City, from some gypsy woman,” said Nanny. “I explained to the beastly creature what had happened—I mean that you’d been born an unfortunate color, and those teeth—thank Lurline your second set were more human!—and the gypsy woman made some silly prophecy about two sisters being instrumental in the history of Oz. She gave me some powerful pills. I’ve always wondered if the pills were the cause of Nessarose’s affliction. I wouldn’t mess with gypsy potions anymore, believe me. Not with what we know these days.” She smiled, having long ago forgiven herself of any culpability in the whole affair.

“Nessarose’s affliction,” mused Elphaba. “Our mother took some gypsy remedy, and bore a second daughter without arms. It was either green or armless. Mama didn’t have very good luck at girls, did she.”

“Shell, however, is a sight for sore eyes,” said Nanny rosily. “Then, who is to say it was all your mother’s fault? First there was the confusion about who was really Nessarose’s father, and then the pills from that old Yackle person, and your father’s moodiness—”

“Yackle person? What do you mean?” asked Elphaba, starting. “And who the hell was Nessarose’s father if it wasn’t Papa?”

“Oh la,” said Nanny, “pour me another cup of tea and I’ll tell you all. You’re old enough now, and Melena’s long dead.” She meandered through a story about the Quadling glassblower named Turtle Heart, and Melena’s uncertainty whether Nessarose was his child or Frex’s, and the visit to Yackle, about whom she could remember nothing else but the name, the pills, and the prophecy, can’t pull teeth from a hen so stop trying. She didn’t mention (and she never had) how depressed Melena became when Elphaba was born. There was no point.

Elphie listened to all this, impatient and annoyed. On the one hand she wanted to throw it out the window: The past was immaterial. On the other, things fell into a slightly different order now. And that Yackle! Was the name just a coincidence? She was tempted to show Nanny the picture of Yakal Snarling in the Grimmerie, but resisted. No sense alarming the old woman, or giving her the nighttime frights.

So the two women poured each other tea and restrained themselves from painful observations about the past. But Elphaba began to fret about Nessarose. Perhaps Nessie didn’t want the position of Eminence, and was just as incarcerated there as her older sister was here. Perhaps Elphaba owed her the chance of liberty. Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless?

3

Nor was beside herself. In a short time her whole life had changed, so utterly. The world was more magic than ever, but it seemed lodged inside her now, not outside. Her body was waiting to flame, to blossom, and no one seemed to care or to notice.

Liir had become a water boy for the expeditionary soldiers. Irji spent his time composing long devotional libretti in honor of Lurlina. In a state of uncertainty over the men in residence, the sisters remained confined to their chambers by their own inclination, yet quivering with readiness should things change. Nothing could change, as convention dictated, unless Sarima married again, and then they would be free to court. Their domestic campaigns to throw Commander Cherrystone and Sarima together, however, met with no success. They redoubled their efforts. Three even approached Auntie Witch for a love potion from that magic encyclopedia. “Hah,” said Elphaba, “that’ll be the day,” and that was that about that.

Nor, bereft of companionship, took to hanging around the men’s dormitory, trying to pitch in with chores that Liir wasn’t asked to do, that men didn’t much care about. She hung out their cloaks in the sun. She polished their buttons. She brought them flowers from the hills. She prepared a tray of summer fruits and cheeses that seemed to please them, especially when she served them herself. One young, dark, balding soldier with a captivating smile liked her to pop the orange segments right in his lips, and he sucked the juice from her fingers, to the mingled enjoyment and envy of the others. “Sit on my lap,” he said, “and let me feed you.” He offered her a strawberry, but she wouldn’t sit on his lap—and she loved refusing.

One day she decided to treat them to a full-scale chamber cleaning. They were out doing an inventory of the vineyards on the lower slopes and would be gone all day. Nor arrayed herself with rags, yoked herself with buckets, and since Auntie Witch was deep in conversation with Nanny about, it seemed, Sarima, Nor swiped the Witch’s broom, for its thicker brush and longer handle. She headed to the barracks.

She couldn’t read much, so she ignored the letters and maps that spilled from the leathern satchels left carelessly slung over the back of a chair. She tidied the trunks, and swept, and in the effort raised a lot of dust, and felt warm.

She took off her blouse, and slung one of the men’s rough capes over her sun-browned shoulders. It gave off such a heady aroma of maleness, even after its airing, that she nearly swooned. She lay down on someone’s pallet with the cape just slightly falling open, so that she could imagine falling asleep and having the men return and see the beautiful line of flat skin that ran between her fresh new breasts. She considered pretending to fall asleep. But she knew she wouldn’t do this. She sat up, dissatisfied with the possibilities, and reached out to grab the nearest thing—it happened to be the broom—so she could whack something in frustration.

The broom was out of reach, but it lunged a little toward her. It came across the floor of its own accord. She saw it. The broom was magic.

She touched it, almost fearfully, as if she guessed it had intentions. It felt no different from an ordinary broom. It merely moved, as if guided by the hand of an invisible spirit. “What tree are you whittled from, what field are you mown from?” she asked it, almost tenderly, but she expected no answer and she got none. The broom quivered, and elevated itself a little off the floor, as if waiting.

The cape had a hood on it, and she drew this up over her face. Then she hiked her summer skirt to her knees, and threw one leg over the broom, to ride it as a child rides a hobby horse.

The thing rose, tentatively, so she could keep her balance by trailing her toes on the floor, correcting, correcting—the center of gravity was high, and the span was so narrow. The top of the handle tilted farther up, and she slid down the shaft until she was caught against the brush top, as if it were a saddle of sorts. She held on tightly; her legs, especially in the upper thigh, felt as if they were swelling, the better to clench the handle between them. The large window at the end of the room hung open, for air and light, and the broom moved a couple of feet across the floor, until it had reached the sill.

Then the broom rose a few feet, and carried her out the window. Nor’s stomach pitched, and her heels beat against the underside of the brush. Mercifully she had emerged not in the castle courtyard, where she would likely be seen, but on the other side, where the land did not fall away quite so far and fast. Nor wailed softly in the strangeness and ecstasy of the adventure. The cape flared out, exposing her chest, and how could she ever have imagined she wanted to be seen without a blouse? “Oh oh,” she cried, but whether to the broom or to some guardian spirit, she did not know. She shuddered with exposure and shock, and the broom rose higher and higher, until it had come to a level with the uppermost window, which was in the Witch’s tower.

The Witch and her nanny were watching, open-mouthed, with cups of tea halfway to their lips.

“You come down from there at once,” ordered the Witch. Nor didn’t know if it was she who was being addressed, or the broom. She had no reins to tug, no words of magic to wield. However the broom, apparently chastened, turned back, descended, and made a somewhat clumsy landing on the floor of the men’s barracks. Nor flung herself off, weeping and shivering, and reclothed herself properly. She didn’t want to touch the broom again, but when she picked it up the life had gone out of it, and she carried it up to the Witch’s apartments expecting a severe reprimand.

“What were you doing with my broom?” barked the Witch.

“I was cleaning the soldiers’ quarters,” gabbled Nor. “It’s such a mess, their papers all over, their clothes, their maps . . .”

“Keep your hands off my things, you,” said the Witch. “What kinds of papers?”

“Plans, maps, letters, I don’t know,” said Nor, regaining her spunk, “go look for yourself. I didn’t pay attention.”

The Witch took the broom and appeared to consider hitting Nor with it. “Don’t be a fool, Nor. Stay away from those men,” she said coldly. “Stay away from them!” She raised the broom like a truncheon. “They’ll hurt you as soon as spit at you. Stay away from them, I say. And stay away from me!”

Elphaba remembered that the broom was given her by Mother Yackle. The young woman had seen the old maunt as crippled, senile, a bother, but now Elphaba looked back and wondered if there was more to her than met the eye. Was that broom magicked by Mother Yackle, with a vestige of some Kumbricial instinct? Or did Nor have a power developing in her, and did she bring it out in the senseless broom? Nor apparently was a fervid believer in magic; maybe the broom was waiting to be believed in. Would it fly for Elphaba, too?

One night when everyone else had retired, Elphaba brought the broom out to the courtyard. She felt a little foolish, crouching down on the broom like a child on a hobbyhorse. “Come on, fly, you fool thing,” she muttered. The broom twitched back and forth in a naughty way, enough to raise welts in her inner thighs. “I’m not a blushing schoolgirl, stop that nonsense,” said Elphaba. The broom rose a foot and a half and then dumped Elphie on her rear end.

“I’ll set you afire and that’ll be the end of you,” said Elphaba. “I’m too old for this sort of indignity.”

It took five or six nights of trying before she managed even to hover six feet off the ground. She had been useless in sorcery. Was she doomed to be useless at everything? It was a pleasure, finally, to scare the barn owls and bats senseless. And it was good to be abroad. When she had more confidence, she wobbled far down the valley to the remains of the Ozma Regent’s attempt at a dam; she rested and hoped that she wouldn’t have to walk back. She didn’t. The broom was resistant to her intention, but she could always threaten it with fire.

She felt like a night angel.

In midsummer, an Arjiki trader came along with pots and spoons and spools of thread, and he carried with him some letters left at an outpost farther north. Among them was a note from Frex—apparently Nanny had told him of her intentions to hunt Elphaba down, and he wrote to the mauntery, which had forwarded the letter on to Kiamo Ko in the Vinkus. Frex wrote that Nessarose had orchestrated a revolt, and that Munchkinland—or most of it anyway—had seceded from Oz, and set itself up as an independent state.

Nessarose as the Eminent Thropp had become the political head of state. Frex apparently thought this was Elphaba’s birthright, and that she should come to Colwen Grounds and challenge her sister for it. “It may be she isn’t the right woman for the job,” he wrote, though Elphaba found his apprehension surprising. Wasn’t Nessarose the warmly spiritual daughter that Elphie could never be?

Elphaba had no thirst for leadership, and did not want to challenge Nessarose in any way. But now that the broom seemed able to carry her for long distances, she wondered if she could fly by night to Colwen Grounds, and spend a few days seeing Papa, Nessie, and Shell once again. It had been a dozen years since she left Nessie in Shiz, drunk and sobbing following the death of Ama Clutch.

For Munchkinland to be free of the Wizard’s iron grip!—that alone would be worth the trip. It made Elphie grin a bit at herself, to feel her old contempt for the Wizard flare up. Perhaps this was what healing meant, after all.

To be safe, one afternoon Elphaba went through the soldiers’ empty barracks. She pawed through their papers. All the documents related to issues of mapping and geological survey. Nothing else. There seemed to be no hidden agenda of threat to the Arjikis or the other Vinkus tribes.

The earlier she went, the sooner she would return. And it would be better if no one know. So she told everyone she was taking a period of isolation in her tower, and she wanted neither food nor visitors for some days. When midnight struck, she set out for Colwen Grounds, now the home of her powerful sister.

4

She slept by daylight in the shadows of barns, the overhang of eaves, the lee of chimneys. She traveled by night. In the gloom, Oz spread out below—she hovered above it at about eighty feet, near as she could reckon—and the countryside made its geographical transformations with the ease of a vaudeville backdrop on rollers. The hardest passage was down the steep flanks of the Great Kells. Once free of the mountains, however, she saw Oz level out into the rich alluvial plain of the Gillikin River.

She flew along the waterway, above trading vessels and islands, until it fed at last into Restwater, Oz’s largest lake. She kept to its southern edge, and took a whole night to traverse it, as it endlessly lapped in black oily silk waves, into sedge and swamp. She had trouble finding the mouth of the Munchkin River, which drained into Restwater from the eastern direction. Once she did, though, it was easy to locate the Yellow Brick Road. The farmland beyond grew even more lush. The effects of the drought, so drastic in her childhood, had been eradicated, and dairy farms and small villages seemed to prosper, happy as a child’s toy town set, cunning and cozy in the wrinkled, nappy land of arable soil and accommodating climate.

The farther east she went, however, the more torn up the highway became. Crowbars had pried out bricks, trees had been felled and brush walls erected. It looked as if a few of the smaller bridges had been dynamited. A safeguard against retaliation by the Wizard’s army?

Seven days after leaving her chambers at Kiamo Ko, Elphaba flew into the hamlet of Colwen Grounds, and slept under a green bay tree. When she awoke, she asked a merchant for the great house, and he tremblingly pointed her the way, as if she were a demon. So a green skin still gives Munchkinlanders the creeps, she observed, and walked the last couple of miles, and arrived at the front gates of Colwen Grounds a little after breakfast.

She had heard her mother speak of Colwen Grounds, wistfully and angrily, as they had slopped in waterproof boots through six inches of Quadling Country water. Elphie’s years in the smug antiquity of Shiz, and the pomp of the Emerald City, ought to have prepared her for an imposing mansion. But she was startled, even shocked, at the grandeur of Colwen Grounds.

The gate was gilded, the forecourt swept clean of every scrap of grass and dung, and a bank of topiary saints in terra-cotta pots lined the balcony above the massive front door. Dignitaries with ribbons denoting new rank and prestige in the Free State of Munchkinland, she guessed, stood in small groups to one side. Coffee cups in hand, the officials had apparently just finished an early morning privy council meeting. Inside the gate, swordsmen stepped neatly up and barred her way. She began to protest—instantly branded a menace and a loon, she could see—and she was about to be ejected when a figure wandered into view from around the corner of a folly, and called for them to stop.

“Fabala!” he said.

“Yes, Papa, I’m here,” she answered, with a child’s politeness.

She turned. The dignitaries paused in their discussions, and then resumed, as if realizing that overhearing this reunion would be the height of rudeness. The guards withdrew their barrier when Frex approached. His hair was thin and long and caught up by a rawhide implement, as it always had been. His beard was the color of cream and reached his waist when he took his hands away from it.

“This is the sister of the Eminence of the East,” said Frex, staring at Elphaba, “and my oldest daughter. Let her pass through, dear men, now and every time she approaches.” He reached and caught her hand, and turned his head as a bird might to see her through one capable eye. The other eye, she realized, was dead.

“Come, we will greet each other in private, away from this attention,” said Frex. “My word, Fabala, you have become your mother in these long years!” He linked his arm into hers, and they went into the building through a side door and found a small salon done up in saffron silks and plum velvet cushions. The door closed behind them. Frex lowered himself cautiously to the sofa and patted the upholstery next to him. She sat down, wary, tired, astonished at the wealth of her own feeling for him. She was full of need. But, she reminded herself, you’re a grown woman.

“I knew you would come if I wrote,” he said. “Fabala, I always knew that.” He wrapped her in his arms, stiffly. “I may cry for a minute.” When he was through, he asked her where she had gone, and what she had done, and why she had never come back.

“I was not sure there was a back to come to,” she answered, realizing the truth of it as she spoke. “When you finished converting a town, Papa, you moved on to new fields. Your home was in the pasture of souls; mine never was. Besides, I had my own work to do.” She added, a moment later, in a low voice, “Or I thought I did.”

She mentioned her years in the Emerald City, but did not say why.

“And was Nanny right? Were you a maunt? I didn’t raise you for such submission,” he said. “I’m surprised. Such conformity and obedience—”

“I was no more a maunt than I ever was a unionist,” she chided him gently, “but I lived with the maunts. They did good work, whatever the error or inspiration of their beliefs. It was a time of recuperation from a difficult passage. And then, last year, I went to the Vinkus, and I guess I’ve made my home there, although for how long I cannot say.”

“And what do you do?” he said. “Are you married?”

“I’m a witch,” she answered. He recoiled, peered through the working eye to see if she spoke in jest.

“Tell me about Nessie before I see her, and Shell,” she said. “Your letter sounded as if you thought she needed help. I’ll do what I can in the short while I can be here.”

He told her about her sister’s rise to Eminence, and the secession in the late spring. “Yes, yes, I know of it but not why,” she said, prodding. So he described the burning of a grange where opposition meetings had been gathering, the reported rape of a couple of Munchkinlander maidens following a cotillion of the Wizard’s army garrisoned near Dragon Cupboard. He mentioned the Massacre at Far Applerue and the heavy taxation on farm crops. “The last straw,” he said, “as far as Nessie was concerned, anyway, was the callow despoiling by the Wizard’s soldiers of simple country meetinghouses.”

“Unlikely last straw,” said Elphaba. “Isn’t the back room of a colliery as holy a place to pray as a meetinghouse? I mean, according to teaching?”

“Well, teaching,” said Frex. He shrugged; such distinctions were beyond him now. “Nessie was incensed, and communicated her outrage, and before she knew it the spark had been thrown out and the tinder caught. Within a week of her firing off a furious letter to the Emperor Wizard himself—a dangerous and seditious act—the revolutionary fever had coalesced around her. It happened right here in the forecourt of Colwen Grounds. It was magnificent, and you’d have guessed Nessie was groomed for treason. She addressed the senior men among the farming communities both near and far, and kept her religious agenda in check, sensibly, I think. So her appeal for their support was overwhelmingly answered. There was a unanimous approval for secession.”

Papa’s gone pragmatic in his old age, Elphaba observed with some surprise.

“But how did you slip through the border patrols?” he asked. “Things being what they are—hotting up, as they say.”

“I just flew right through, a little black bird at nighttime,” she answered, smiling at him, and touching his hand. It was glazed and mottled pink, like a lake lobster on the boil. “But what I don’t know, Papa, is why you called me here. What do you expect me to do?”

“I had thought you might join your sister in her seat of authority,” he said, with the simple-minded hope of one whose family has been too long apart. “I know who you are, Fabala. I doubt you have much changed over the years. I know your cunning and your conviction. I also know that Nessie is at the mercy of her religious voices, and she could slip and undo the terrible good she is helping to create right now by being a focal figure for resistance. If that happens, it will not go well for her.”

So I am to be a whipping girl, thought Elphaba, I am to be a first line of defense. Her pleasure evaporated.

“And it will not go well for them, the eager supporters,” Frex said, waving a hand to indicate most of Munchkinland. His face sagged—his smile was an effort too, she thought coolly—and his shoulders fell. “They have had more than a generation of gentle dictatorship from our Glorious Wizard scoundrel—oh, even I forget, we’re now in the Free State of Munchkinland—these farmers surely underestimate the size of the eventual retaliation. In fact, Shell has found from reliable sources that the stockpiles of grain in the Emerald City are massive, and we can be left for some time without needing to be overrun. Short of routing some divisions of soldiers across the border, and jailing some drunken hooligans, this has been a most genteel disengagement so far. We are deluded into believing we are safe. I mean Nessie is deluded too, I think. You, I have always felt, had a clearer mind about you. You can help her prepare, you can provide the balance and the support.”

“I always did that, Papa,” she said. “In childhood and at college. Now I am told she can stand up for herself.”

“You’ve heard of my precious shoes,” he said. “I bought them from a decrepit crone, and then I retooled them for Nessa with my own hands, using skills in glass and metal that I had once learned from Turtle Heart. I made them to give her a sense of beauty, but I didn’t expect them to be enchanted by someone else. I am not sorry they are. But Nessa now thinks she needs no one, to help her stand or help her govern. She listens less than ever. In some ways I think those shoes are dangerous.”

“I wish you had made them for me, Papa,” she said in a quiet voice.

“You didn’t need them. You had your voice, your intensity, even your cruelty as your armor.”

“My cruelty!” She reared back.

“Oh, you were a fiendish little thing,” said Frex, “but so what, children grow into and out of themselves. You were a terror when you first were around other children. You only calmed down when we began to travel and you got to hold the baby. It was Nessarose who tamed you, you know. You have her to thank; she was holy and blessed even from the day she was born. Even as an infant, she soothed your wildness with her obvious need. You don’t remember that, I suppose.”

Elphie wasn’t able to remember, she wasn’t able to think about all that. Even the idea of being cruel was slipping from her. Instead, she was trying to feel fondness toward her father, despite the exhaustion of being commandeered to be a second lieutenant once again, in service of dear needy Nessarose. She concentrated on her father’s concern for the citizens of Munchkinland. Ever a pastoral sensibility, his. Though rejecting his theology, she adored him for his commitment.

“I must hear more about Turtle Heart one day,” she said in a light voice, “but now, I suppose I should go greet my sister. And I will think about what you say, Papa. I can’t imagine being part of a governmental troika, with you and Nessarose—or a committee, should Shell be involved too. But I’ll suspend judgment for a while. And Shell, Papa, how is he?”

“Behind enemy lines, so they say,” Frex answered as she got up to leave. “He is a foolhardy boy and will be among the first casualties, once this really gets going. He resembles you in some ways.”

“He’s gone green?” she asked, amused.

“He’s stubborn as sin stains,” he answered.

Nessarose was secluded in an upstairs parlor, conducting her morning meditation. Frex saw that Elphaba was given license to wander about the house and demesne. After all, in another configuration of events, Elphaba could have been (or could yet become) the Eminent Thropp, the Eminence of the East, the nominated head of the Free State of Munchkinland. Frex watched his green daughter amble down marble corridors, dragging her broom like a charwoman, gazing at the ormolu, the damask, the fresh flowers, the servants in livery, the portraits. He felt, as always, a twinge of pain deep in his breast, for the hidden and unknowable things that he had done wrong in raising her. But he was glad that she was here at last.

Elphaba found her way into a private chapel at the end of a hall of polished mahogany. It was baroque rather than ancient, and it was in the midst of being redecorated. Nessarose must have ordered the frescoes to be whitewashed; perhaps the succulent images would distract people from their meditative tasks. Elphie sat on a bench on the side, amidst buckets of limestone wash and paintbrushes and ladders. She did not pretend to pray, though she felt very uneasy about this whole thing. She trained her gaze, to focus her mind, on a huge section still boasting its images. It featured several rotund angels levitating with the aid of sizable wings. Their garments had been cut to accommodate the anatomical irregularity, she saw. They were rather full-bodied dames, but the wings weren’t bulging with straining arteries nor snapping at the tip. The artist had considered the optimal length and breadth of wing required to hoist ample ladies aloft. The formula looked to be about three times wing length to the length of arm, corrected perhaps to account for the portliness. If you could sweep your way to the Other Land on wings, what about on a broom? she wondered. And realized she must be very tired; usually she’d cut off senseless speculation about unionist nonsense like an afterlife, a Beyond, an Other Land.

I should remember my lessons from that life sciences course, she thought. All the devastating borders of knowledge Doctor Dillamond was about to cross. I almost understood some of it. I could stitch wings onto Chistery. He could join me in flight. What a lark.

She rose and went to find her sister.

Nessarose was less surprised to see Elphaba than Elphie would have guessed. Perhaps, Elphie considered, it was because Nessa had become used to being the center of attention. Then again, she had always been the center of attention. “Darling Elphie,” she said, looking up from a pair of identical books some attendant had laid out, next to each other, so she could read four pages without calling for someone to turn the page. “Give us a kiss.”

“Oh there, then,” Elphie said, obliging. “How are you, Nessie? You look fine.”

Nessarose stood, in her beautiful shoes, and smiled brilliantly. “The grace of the Unnamed God gives me strength, as ever,” she said.

But Elphaba could not be annoyed. “You have risen, and I don’t just mean to your feet,” she said. “History has chosen you for a role, and you’ve accepted it. I’m proud of you.”

“You needn’t be proud,” said Nessarose. “But thank you, dear. I thought you’d probably come. Did Father drag you here to take care of me?”

“No one dragged me here, but Papa did write.”

“So all those years in solitude, and political turmoil brings you out at last. Where were you?”

“Here and there.”

“You know we thought you’d died,” said Nessarose. “Drape that shawl around my shoulders and fix it with a pin, will you, so I needn’t call a maid? I mean that awful, awful time when you left me alone in Shiz. I am still furious with you about it, I just remembered.” She curled her lip, prettily; Elphaba was glad to see she possessed at least a residual sense of humor.

“We were all young then, and perhaps I was wrong,” said Elphie. “It didn’t do you any lasting harm, anyway. At least not so I can see.”

“I had to put up with Madame Morrible all by myself, for two more years. Glinda was a help for a while, then she graduated and went on. Nanny was my salvation, but she was old even then. She’s gone on to you lately, hasn’t she? Well, back then I felt horribly alone. Only my faith saw me through.”

“Well, faith will do that,” said Elphie, “if you’ve got it.”

“You speak as one still living in the shadowland of doubt.”

“In fact I think we have more important things to discuss than the state of my soul or lack thereof. You have a revolution on your hands—sorry, I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit!—and you’re the resident commander general. Congratulations.”

“Oh, tiresome events of the distracting world, yes yes,” said Nessarose. “Look, it’s just beautiful out there in the gardens. Let’s go walk for a bit and get some air. You look green about the gills—”

“All right, I deserved that—”

“—and there’s plenty of time to go into diplomatic matters. I have a meeting in a little while, but there’s time for a stroll. You should get to know this place. Let me show it to you.”

5

Elphaba could only get Nessarose’s attention for small snatches of time. However dismissive of the demands of leadership, Nessarose was clearheaded about her schedule, and spent hours preparing for meetings.

And at first the discussion was frivolous—family memories, school days. Elphie was impatient to get around to the meat of the matter here. But Nessarose wouldn’t be rushed. Sometimes she let Elphie sit in when she held audiences with citizens. Elphie wasn’t entirely pleased with what she saw.

One afternoon an old woman from some hamlet in the Corn Basket came in. She made obeisance in a most disgusting and obsequious manner, and Nessarose seemed to shine back at her with glory. The woman complained that she had a maid who, having fallen in love with a woodcutter, wanted to leave her service to get married. But the old woman had already given three sons to the new local militia for defense, and she and the maid were all the labor available to bring in the crops. If the maid ran off with her woodcutter, the crops would spoil and she would be ruined. “And all for the sake of liberty,” she concluded bitterly.

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” said the Eminence of the East.

“I can give you two Sheep and a Cow,” said the woman.

“I have livestock—” said Nessarose, but Elphaba interrupted and said, “Did you say Sheep? A Cow? You mean Animals?”

“My very own Animals,” the woman replied proudly.

“How do you come to own Animals?” Elphaba asked, her teeth clenched. “Are Animals no more than chattel now in Munchkinland?”

“Elphie, please,” said Nessarose quietly.

“What will you take to release them?” demanded Elphie, in a passion.

“I already said. Do something about this woodcutter.”

“What do you have in mind?” interrupted Nessarose, displeased that her sister was usurping her role as arbiter of justice.

“I brought you his axe. I thought you might bewitch it and cause it to kill him.”

“Fie,” said Elphaba, but Nessarose said, “Oh well, that wouldn’t be very nice.”

“Very nice?” Elphie said. “No indeed it wouldn’t be very nice, Nessie.”

“Well, you’re the legal answer around here,” said the old woman stoutly. “What do you suggest?”

“I might bewitch his axe and let it slip,” said Nessarose thoughtfully, “just enough perhaps to cut off his arm. I know from experience that a person without an arm isn’t as desirable to the opposite sex as one fully armed.”

“Fair enough,” said the woman, “but if it doesn’t work I’ll come back and you’ll do more, for the same price. Sheep and a Cow don’t come cheap around here, you know.”

“Nessarose, you’re not a witch, no, I don’t believe it,” said Elphie. “You don’t do spells, of all things!”

“The righteous person can work miracles in the honor of the Unnamed God,” said Nessarose calmly. “Show me that axe, if you’ve brought it.”

The old woman held forward a woodcutter’s axe, and Nessarose knelt down near it, as if she were praying. It was an odd, even a frightening thing, to see that narrow armless body able to lean forward, unaided and off balance, and then, when the spell was through, able to right itself. Those are some shoes, thought Elphie soberly, bitterly. Glinda has got some power in her, for all her social dazzle, or maybe the power comes from the love of our father for his Nessie. Or some combination. And if Nessarose isn’t pulling the wool over this old biddy’s eyes, she’s become a sorceress too, by whatever name she chooses to call it.

“You are a witch,” said Elphaba again; she couldn’t help it. This perhaps was a mistake, as the old woman was just thanking Nessarose for her efforts. “I’ll bring the Animals by the barn out back,” she said. “They’re tethered in town.”

“Animals! Tethered!” exclaimed Elphie, seething.

“Thank you, Miss Eminence,” said the old woman. “The Eminence of the East. Or should I call you the Witch of the East?” She grinned toothily, having gotten her way, and went out the door carrying the enchanted axe over her shoulder the way a strapping young lumberjack would do.

They weren’t to be alone again for a while. Elphaba went prowling around the stable and sheds until she found an attendant who could point her toward the two Sheep and the Cow. They were in a pen with clean straw, each one facing a different corner, chewing in abstraction.

“You’re the new Animals, brought here by that old vengeful fiend,” said Elphaba. The Cow looked over as if unaccustomed to being addressed. The Sheep made no sign of having understood.

“What’s your beef?” said the Cow, in a dark humor.

“I’ve been living in the Vinkus,” said Elphie. “There aren’t many Animals there. At one time I was an agitator in the Animal Rights grassroots sweep—I don’t really know how things stand for Munchkinlander Animals now. What can you tell me?”

“I can tell you to mind your own business,” said the Cow.

“And the Sheep?”

“These Sheep can tell you nothing, they’ve gone dumb.”

“Are they—sheep? Does that happen?”

“They talk about humans becoming vegetables—or nuts—or even fruits,” said the Cow, “but they don’t mean it literally. Sheep don’t become sheep, they become mute Sheep. They don’t really need to be discussed here as if they’re not listening, by the way.”

“Of course. My apologies,” she said to the Sheep, one of whom blinked balefully. To the Cow she added, “I’d rather call you by your name.”

“I’ve given up using my name in public,” said the Cow. “It’s not afforded me any individual rights to have an individual name. I reserve it for my private use.”

“I understand that,” said Elphaba. “I feel the same. I’m just the Witch now.”

“Her Eminence herself?” A gummy rope of spittle dropped from the Cow’s jaw. “I’m flattered. I didn’t know you called yourself Witch, I thought that was just a nasty backfield nickname. The Witch of the East.”

“Well no. I’m her sister. I suppose I’m the Witch of the West, if you will.” She grinned. “In fact I didn’t know she was so disliked.”

The Cow had blundered. “Surely I meant no disregard to your family,” she said. “I should just keep my mouth closed and concentrate on my cud. The thing is, I’m in shock—to be sold in exchange for a witch’s spell! There’s nothing wrong with that woodcutter—oh I’ve got ears, I have, though they forget—and the thought of a warmhearted simpleton like Nick Chopper coming to harm through a witch’s spell—and I part of the barter cost—well, it’s hard to imagine how much lower one could sink in life.”

“I’ve come to free you,” Elphie said.

“By whose authority?” The Cow snorted suspiciously.

“I told you, I’m the sister of the Eminent Thropp—the Eminence of the East.” She amended herself: “The Witch of the East. It’s my prerogative here.”

“And free to go where? To do what?” said the Cow. “We’d get from here to Lower Muckslop and be roped in again. Subjected to slavery under the Wizard, and catechisms under the Eminent Thropp! We don’t exactly blend in with those creepy little Munchkinlander humans.”

“You’re gone a bit dour,” said Elphaba.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a mad Cow?” she answered. “Sweetheart, my udder is sore from their daily yanking. I am tapped for milk morning and night. I won’t even go into what it’s like to be mounted by a—well, just never mind. But worst, my children have been fattened on milk and slaughtered for veal. I could hear their cries from the abattoir, they didn’t even bother to move me out of hearing range!” Here she turned her head to the wall, and the Sheep came up on either side of her, pressing like a living pair of warm bookends against her lower sides and underbelly.

Elphaba said, “I can’t be sorrier or more ashamed. Look, I was working with Doctor Dillamond—have you heard of him?—in Shiz, years ago. I went to the Wizard himself to protest what was happening . . .”

“Oh, the Wizard doesn’t show himself to the likes of us,” said the Cow, after she had regained her composure. “I don’t feel like talking anymore. Everybody’s on your side until they want something from you. The Eminent Nessarose has probably brought us in order to impress us into some religious ceremonial procession. My silken flanks tarted up with garlands or the like. And we all know what happens next.”

“Now you must be wrong in that,” said the Witch. “I do object. Nessarose is a strict unionist. They don’t go in for—blood sacrifice—”

“Times change,” said the Cow. “And she’s got a population of ill-educated, nervous subjects to pacify. What, pray tell, works better than ritual slaughter?”

“But however could it come to this?” said the Witch. “Assuming you’re telling the truth? This is farming country. You ought to be well established here.”

“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories,” said the Cow. “I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant too. Anyway, that’s one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land. The Wizard sets the standard for it, and the society follows suit like a bunch of sheep. Forgive the slanderous reference,” she said, nodding to her companions in the pen. “It was a slip.”

Elphaba threw open the gate of the pen. “Come on, you’re free,” she said. “What you make of it is your own affair. If you turn it down, it’s on your own heads.”

“It’s on our own heads if we walk out, too. Do you think a Witch who would charm an axe to dismember a human being would pause over a couple of Sheep and an annoying old Cow?”

“But this might be your only chance!” Elphaba cried.

The Cow moved out, and the Sheep followed. “We’ll be back,” she said. “This is an exercise in your education, not ours. Mark my words, my rump’ll be served up rare on your finest Dixxi House porcelain dinner plates before the year is out.” She mooed a last remark—“I hope you choke”—and, tail swishing the flies, she meandered away.

6

An ambassador from the Glikkus, darling,” Nessarose said, when Elphaba demanded a meeting. “Really, I can’t turn her away. She’s come to discuss mutual defense pacts in the event that the Glikkus secedes next. She thinks there are agents trailing her family, and she needs to leave on her return journey tonight. But we’ll dine together, just like old times? You, me, and my server?”

Elphaba had no choice but to while away another afternoon. She located Frex and persuaded him to go for a stroll out beyond the ornamental ponds and pristine lawns, where the woods came up to the back edge of Colwen Grounds. He walked so stiffly, so slowly, it was torture; she was a strider. But she kept herself in check.

“How do you find your sister?” he asked her. “After all these years? Much changed?”

“She was always confident, in her way,” Elphie said reservedly.

“I never thought so, and I don’t now,” Frex said. “But I think it was a good act, and it’s gotten better.”

“What really did you ask me to come here for, Papa?” Elphaba said. “I haven’t much time, you know. You must be frank.”

“You would make a smarter Eminence than Nessie,” he said.
“And it’s your birthright. Yes, I know the strict rules of title inheritance weren’t important to your mother. I just think that the people of Munch-kinland would do better with you at the helm. Nessa is—too devout, if such a thing exists. Too devout to be a central figure in public life, anyway.”

“This may be the only respect in which I take after my mother,” Elphaba said, “but an inherited position is of no interest to me, and it carries no weight at all that I’m the rightful Eminence. I’ve long ago abdicated my position in the family in that respect. Nessarose has every right to abdicate hers, and then Shell can be located to stand in. Or better yet, the foolish custom can be abolished, and let the Munchkinlanders govern themselves to death.”

“Nobody ever suggested a leader isn’t just as much a scapegoat as a lowly peon,” said Frex. “Anyway, it’s possible. But I’m talking about leadership, not about rank and privilege. I’m talking about the nature of the times we live in, and the job that needs to be done. Fabala, you were always the more capable sibling. Shell is a madcap cutup, currently playing secret agent, and Nessie is a bruised little girl—”

“Oh please,” she said in disgust. “Isn’t it time to get over that?”

“She hasn’t,” he said, hurt. “Do you see her wrapped in some lover’s arms? Do you see her bearing her own children, engaging in life in a way that makes sense? She hides behind her devotion the way a terrorist hides behind his ideals—” He saw her flinch at this, and paused.

“I have known terrorists capable of love,” she said evenly, “and I have known good maunts, unmarried and childless, doing charity for stricken people.”

“Have you known Nessa to have an adult bond with anyone other than the Unnamed God?”

“You’re one to talk,” she said. “You had your wife and your children, but they came lower on the order of priorities than Quadlings waiting to be converted.”

“I did what had to be done,” he said rigidly. “I won’t be lectured by my daughter.”

“Well, I won’t be lectured by you about my everlasting duties to Nessie. I gave her my childhood, I got her going at Shiz. She’s made her life the way she wants it, and she still has choice and free will even now. And so do her subjects, who can depose her and cut off her head if her prayers get in their way.”

“She is a rather powerful woman,” Frex said sadly. Elphie glanced sideways at him, and for the first time she saw him as feckless—the kind of old man that Irji, if he survived, would grow to be. Constantly pawing at the edge of events, reacting instead of acting, mourning the past and praying for the future instead of stirring up the present.

“How did she get so powerful?” she asked, trying to be kind. “She had two good parents.”

He didn’t answer this.

They walked on and came out of the woods along the edge of a cornfield. A couple of farmhands were repairing a fence and erecting a scarecrow. “Afternoon, Brother Frexspar,” they said, doffing their caps. They looked a little askance at Elphaba. When she and her father had continued out of earshot, she said, “They were wearing a little talisman or something on their tunics, did you see it? It looked like a small straw dolly or something.”

“Oh yes, the straw man.” He sighed. “Another pagan custom that had almost gone underground, and then was revived during the Great Drought. Ignorant field-workers wear a straw man as a charm against the pests of crops: drought, crows, insects, rot. Once upon a time there was a tradition of human sacrifice about it.” He paused to catch his breath and wipe his face. “Our family friend, Turtle Heart, the Quadling—he was butchered right here in Colwen Grounds, on the day that Nessarose was born. An itinerant dwarf and a huge tiktok entertaining clock were making the circuit that year, and providing a conduit for the ugliest of human inclinations. We arrived here just in time for Turtle Heart to be nabbed. I’ve never forgiven myself for not seeing what was about to happen—but your mother was in her labor, and we’d been run out of town. I wasn’t thinking clearly enough all the way around things.”

Elphaba had heard all this before—even so. “You were in love with him,” she said, to make it easier.

“We both were, we shared him,” said Frex. “Your mother and I did. It was a lifetime ago and I don’t know why anymore; I don’t think I knew why then. I haven’t loved anyone else since your mother died, except of course my children.”

“What a brutal history of sacrifices,” she said. “I was just talking to a Cow who expects to be a blood victim. Is that possible?”

“The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments,” said Frex.

“And it’ll never change, or will it? I remember the etymology of the word Oz, at least as proposed at a lecture by our Head, Madame Morrible. She said that academics were inclined to locate the root of the term in the Gillikinese cognate oos, which carries freights of meaning about growth, development, power, generation. Even ooze, with its distant companion noun virus, is thought to belong to the same general family. The older I get, the more accurate this derivation seems to be.”

“And yet the poet of the Oziad calls it ‘Land of green abandon, land in endless leaf.’”

“Poets are just as responsible for empire building as any other professional hacks.”

“Sometimes I would give anything to get away from here, but I dread the thought of a trip across the deadly sands.”

“That’s only a legend,” said Elphie. “Papa, you taught me that the sands are no more deadly than these fields. That reminds me of the other theory, that Oz is related to the word oasis. What the nomadic peoples of the north thought of Gillikin, time beyond thinking, when Oz was first discovered and settled. Now look, Papa, you needn’t go so far. The Vinkus is nearly another country. Why don’t you come back with me?”

“I would love to, honey,” he said. “But how could I leave Nessarose? I never could.”

“Even if she’s Turtle Heart’s daughter and not yours?” she said, stingingly because stung.

“Especially if that,” he answered.

And Elphaba saw that by not knowing for sure if Nesssarose had been fathered by himself or by Turtle Heart, Frex had decided in some subrational way that she was the daughter of them both. Nessarose was the proof of their brief union—theirs, and, obviously, Melena’s as well. It didn’t matter how crippled Nessarose was; she would always be more than Elphaba, always. She would always mean more.

Elphaba and Nessarose sat in Nessa’s bedchamber. A handmaid served some soup made of cow’s stomach. Elphie, not normally squeamish, couldn’t eat it. The maid neatly spooned tiny portions into Nessie’s mouth.

“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Nessarose said. “I would like you to join me here as a sister-at-arms, to lead my circle of advisors and to manage in my absence if I should travel.”

“I have no love of Munchkinland, from what I’ve seen so far,” said Elphaba. “The people are cruel and impressed by charades, the pomp of this place is oppressive, and I do believe you’re sitting on a powder keg.”

“All the more reason you should stay and help me,” said Nessarose. “Weren’t we raised up to expect a life of service?”

“Your shoes have made you strong,” said Elphie. “I didn’t know shoes could do that. I don’t think you need me. Don’t lose those shoes, though.” She thought: Your shoes give you an unnatural balance. You look like a serpent standing on its tail.

“Surely you remember them from before?”

“Yes, but I hear Glinda amplified them with a magic spell, or something.”

“Oh, that Glinda! What a card.” Nessie swallowed and smiled. “Well, you can have the shoes, my dear—over my dead body. I’ll rewrite my will and leave them to you. Though what they would do for you, I can hardly imagine. They didn’t grow me new arms. Perhaps enchanted shoes won’t change the color of your skin but will make you enticing enough so that it won’t matter.”

“I’m already too old to be that enticing.”

“Why you’re still in the prime of life, and so am I!” said Nessarose, laughing. “Tell me you’ve got some romancing man in a Vinkus yurt or tent or teepee or whatever it is they call home there. Come on.”

“I have been wondering something, ever since I saw you do that spell this morning,” Elphie said. “The spell over the axe.”

“Oh right. Small potatoes, that one.”

“Do you by any chance remember that time in Shiz, when Madame Morrible said she was putting us under a spell? And that we couldn’t talk to each other about it?”

“Go on. Sounds familiar. She was so creepy, wasn’t she? A master of tyranny.”

“She said she had chosen us—me, you, and Glinda—to be Adepts. To be agents of someone quite high up. To be sorceresses and, I don’t know, secret accomplices. She promised we’d be highly placed and effectual. She made us think we couldn’t ever discuss it with one another.”

“Oh yes, that. I do remember. What a witch she was.”

“Well, do you think there’s any truth to that? Do you think she had the power to bind us into silence? To make us powerful sorceresses?”

“She had the power to scare us out of our wits, but we were young and very stupid, as I remember.”

“I had the feeling at the time that she was in collusion with the Wizard, and that she ordered her tiktok thing—Grommetik, the name’s just come back to me, isn’t memory odd like that—to kill Doctor Dillamond.”

“You saw fiends with knives behind every chair, you always did,” Nessarose said. “I don’t think that Madame Morrible had any real power. She was a manipulative woman, but her power was very limited, and in our naiveté we saw her as a villain. She was merely full of self-importance.”

“I wonder. I tried to say something about it afterward. Didn’t we all faint?”

“We were innocent and horribly suggestible, Elphie.”

“And Glinda’s gone on to marry money, as Madame Morrible said. Is Sir Chuffrey still alive?”

“If you can call it that, yes. And Glinda is a sorceress, there’s no questioning that. But Madame Morrible was merely predicting things to us; she saw our talents, as an educator could be expected to do, and she advised us on how to make the most of them. What’s so surprising about that?”

“She tried to seduce us into a secret service for an unknown master. I’m not inventing this, Nessie.”

“She knew how to get to you, obviously, by appealing to your sense of conspiracy. I don’t remember such alluring nonsense.”

Elphaba fell silent. Perhaps Nessie was right. And yet here they were, a dozen years later: two Witches, in a manner of speaking. And Glinda a sorceress for the public good. It was enough to make Elphie go back to Kiamo Ko and burn that Grimmerie, and burn the broom too, for that matter.

“She always reminded Glinda of a carp,” said Nessarose. “Can you really be scared of a fish, after all these years?”

“I saw in a book once a drawing of a lake monster, or a sea monster if you believe in oceans,” said Elphie. “I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.”

“You said much the same thing about the Unnamed God once,” said Nessarose quietly.

“Oh, now please don’t start on that.”

“A soul is too valuable to ignore, Elphie.”

“Well, isn’t it good I don’t have one then, so there’s no muss, no fuss.”

“You have a soul. Everyone does.”

“How about the Cow you bartered for today, and the Sheep?”

“I’m not talking about lower orders.”

“That sort of talk offends me, Nessie. I freed those Animals today, you know.”

Nessarose shrugged. “You have some rights in Colwen Grounds. I’m not going to walk around prohibiting your little pet missions.”

“They said some pretty horrible things about how Animals are being treated here. I thought it was the Emerald City and Gillikin only; I somehow guessed Munchkinland, being more rural, would have more common sense.”

“You know,” said Nessie, indicating that the maid should wipe her mouth with a napkin, “once at a prayer service I met a soldier. He had lost a limb in a campaign against some restless Quadlings. He said every morning he slapped the stump where his arm used to be. He got the blood ringing, and after a few minutes there was a tingling sensation, and he developed a kind of phantom limb. Not all at once, and not in physical form: What he regained was a sense of what it had felt like. It would grow to the elbow, and then his memory, his bodily memory, of limbs in three-dimensional space, would extend, eventually, all the way down to his fingers. Once his phantom limb was in place, mentally, that is, he could face the day as a crippled man. Furthermore, he had better physical balance.”

Elphaba, feeling more and more like a real Witch, looked at her sister, waiting for the punch.

“I tried it for a while. For months in fact. I had Nanny massage my little knobs there. After much hard work on poor Nanny’s part, I began to develop just the beginning of a sense of what it would be like to have arms. It never went very far, until Glinda dazzled up these shoes. Now—I don’t know why, maybe they’re too tight and my circulation is complaining—after an hour on my feet, I have phantom arms. First time in my life. I can’t quite get the feel of fingers.”

“Phantom limbs,” said Elphie. “Well, I’m pleased for you.”

“You know, if you slapped yourself around, spiritually speaking,” said Nessarose, “you might develop a phantom soul, or something that felt like one. It’s a good internal guide, a soul. I suspect you might even recognize that it’s not a phantom at all—it’s a real one.”

“That’ll do, Nessie,” said Elphaba. “I don’t care to discuss my spiritual trials with you.”

“Why don’t you stay here with me, join my staff, and we can have you baptized,” said Nessarose warmly.

“Water is profoundly painful to me, as you well know, and I won’t discuss it again. I can’t pledge allegiance to anything Unnamed. It’s a sham.”

“You’re condemning yourself to a life of sadness,” Nessarose said.

“Well, that I’m already familiar with, so at least there’s nothing to jump out and surprise me.” Elphie threw down her napkin. “I can’t stay here, Nessie. I can’t help you out. I have responsibilities of my own back in the Vinkus, which you have shown precious little interest in finding out about. Oh, all right, I know, a revolution has occurred and you’re a new prime minister or something, you surely have a right to be distracted if anyone does. Either accept the burden of leadership or turn it down, but either way make sure it’s your choice in the matter, and not an accident of history, a martyrdom by default. I worry about you, but I can’t stay and be your dogsbody.”

“I’ve just been clumsy and outspoken. Don’t expect me to remember how to be sisterly in such a short while—”

“You’ve had Shell to practice on all these years,” Elphaba said sternly.

“Just like that, you’re getting up and going?” Nessarose stood too, in that sinuous, unsettling way she had. “After twelve years of separation, we have three, four days of reunion and that’s that?”

“Keep yourself well,” Elphie said, and kissed her sister on both cheeks. “I know you’ll be a good Eminence for as long as you want to be.”

“I shall pray for your soul,” promised Nessarose.

“I shall wait for your shoes,” Elphie answered.

On her way out, Elphie thought about going to say good-bye to her father, and then decided against it. She had said to him everything that she could bring herself to say. They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.

7

Taking the northern route over the Madeleines, she realized she would pass Lake Chorge. She decided to pause there, about halfway home, interested to note that she was actually glad to be heading back. She paced the edge of the lake, looking for Caprice-in-the-Pines, but she could not pick it out of the many resort villas that had sprung up since that visit in her youth.

But it wasn’t the visible terrain she was really seeing. It was the world at large. The character it seemed to have, how it seemed to refer to itself. How could Nessarose believe in the Unnamed God? Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world. In a sense, wasn’t that what Doctor Dillamond had been on about? He had imagined another true foundation of the world, defensible by proofs and experiments; he had figured out how to locate it. But she was not a visionary. Behind the blue and white marbleized paper of the lake, beyond the watered silk of the sky, Elphaba couldn’t see any deeper in.

Not about the raw material of life: the muscle structure of angels’ wings, the capillary action involved in focusing a gimlet gaze. Nor about the gooey subjects of the empyrean: not about good, if the Unnamed God was good. Not about evil, either.

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism—like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice . . . Was the Wizard a charlatan, a fraud, a despot of merely human power and failure? Did he control the Adepts—Nessarose and Glinda, and an unnamed third, for it surely wasn’t Elphie—or was it only put to him by Madame Morrible that he did, to assuage his obvious ego, his appetite for the semblance of power?

And Madame Morrible? And Yackle? Was there any connection? Were they the same person, were they harsh divinities, avatars of a power of darkness, were they poisonous flitches struck from the evil body of the Kumbric Witch? Or were they—singly, or together—old Kumbricia herself, or such as could be presumed to have survived from the heroic age of mythology into these crabbed, cramped, modern days? Did they govern the Wizard, jerk him about like a marionette?

Who is in thrall to whom?

And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh.

She left the pine-needled shores of Lake Chorge in a state of high frustration and energy. Having no confidence to decide about matters of political or theological hierarchy, she felt driven to dig up those old notes she had collected from Doctor Dillamond’s study the day after he was murdered. Something concrete under her fingertips. A magnifying lens, a surgical knife, a sterilized probe. Perhaps now she was old enough to understand what he had been getting at. He had been a unionist essentialist; she was a novice atheist. But she still might profit from his work, after all this time.

The winds were with her as far as the lower slopes of the Great Kells. Thereafter she had a harder time, both finding her way and keeping her seat. A number of times she had to dismount and walk. Fortunately it wasn’t very cold, and she came upon small clusters of nomads in the protected vales, who kept her heading in the right direction. Still, she was two weeks returning, even with the help of a broom.

Late in the afternoon, with the sun still hot and high compared to its winter habits, she toiled her way up the last slopes, Kiamo Ko raising its narrow dark profile above her. She felt like a child looking up at the top hat of a very tall gentleman. Eager to avoid ceremony and fuss, she skirted the village. Without the broom this approach would be nearly impossible; as it was, even the broom seemed to be feeling the effort. She came to a halt in the orchard, made her way to the back door, and found it open, which meant the sisters were out flower picking or some such nonsense.

The place was quiet. She grabbed a browning apple from the sideboard and trudged up the steps of her tower without running into anyone. When she passed Nanny’s room, she rattled the doorknob and said, “Nanny?”

“Oh,” came a little shriek, “you startled me!”

“May I come in?”

“Just a minute.” There was the sound of furniture being dragged away from the door. “Well, this is a fine mess, Miss Elphaba! Going off and leaving us to be murdered in our beds, or just as likely!”

“What are you talking about? Let me in.”

“And not saying a word. You had us frantic with worry—” The last piece scraped across the floor, and Nanny flung open the door. “You hideous ungrateful woman!” She fell heavily into her arms and burst into tears.

“Please, I’ve had enough drama to last me the rest of my life,” said Elphaba. “What are you going on about?”

Nanny took some while to calm down. She rummaged through her bag for some smelling salts, pulling out enough little bottles and satchels to set up her own apothecary business. There were blue glass vials, clear pillboxes, snakeskin envelopes of powders and pills, and a beautiful green glass bottle that had an old torn label on it, MIRACLE ELI-.

She administered calming agents to herself, and when she could breathe again, she said, “Well, you know—my dear—you saw I suppose, that everyone has disappeared?”

Elphaba scowled in confusion. And rising, sudden fear.

Nanny took a deep breath. “Now don’t be angry at Nanny. It’s not Nanny’s fault. Those soldiers suddenly decided that their exercises were finished. I don’t know how, maybe Nor told them you were gone? She told us; she’d been sneaking around looking for your broom, and she said you weren’t here. So maybe she mentioned it to them. You know how nice they were to her, how they adored her. The soldiers came to the front door and said that they needed to escort the entire family, Sarima and her sisters and Nor and Irji, back to their base camp, wherever it is. They didn’t require me, they said, which was very insulting indeed, and I let them know as much. Sarima asked why, and that nice Commander Cherrystone said that it was for their own protection. In case a fighting battalion comes through, he said, it won’t do to have any members of the ruling family still here, or there might be a bloody incident.”

“Coming through, a battalion? When?” Elphie hit the windowsill with her open palm.

“I’m trying to tell you. No time soon, he said; this is just advance planning. They became insistent. Those soldiers scattered the peasants in the village—I don’t think there was any killing, it all seemed quite humane, except for the chains—and only I was left behind, being too old to march down a mountain, and no relation besides. Also, they left Liir, since he was no threat and I think they’d become fond of him. But a few days later Liir disappeared, too. I’m sure he was desperately lonely for them, and he must have followed them to their camp.”

“And nobody protested?” shrieked Elphie.

“Don’t yell at me. Of course they protested. Well, Sarima fell in a heap, fainting dead away, and Irji and Nor looked after her. But the sisters, that mealy-mouthed lot, they barricaded the dining room and set fire to the chapel wing, trying to draw attention, and Three slammed a sharpening stone on the hand of Commander Cherrystone and broke every bone in his wrist, I bet. Five and Six rang the bell, but the shepherds are too far away, and it all happened too fast. Two wrote messages and tried to tie them to the feet of your crows, but they wouldn’t be liberated, they just kept roosting on the windowsills again, useless old things. Four had a great idea about boiling oil, but they couldn’t get the flame high enough. Oh, it was a merry chase here for a day or two, but of course the soldiers won. Men always win.”

Nanny continued petulantly, “And we all thought they’d ambushed you earlier, to get you out of the way. You’re the only effective one here, everyone knows that. They all think you’re a Witch. The townspeople told me that if you come back you’re to be in touch with the hamlet of Red Windmill down below the dam, you know the one. They seem to think you can rescue their royal family, such as they are. I told them it was misplaced trust, that you wouldn’t be interested, but I promised to give you the message, so there it is.”

Elphaba strode back and forth. She pulled her hair from its customary knot and shook it out, as if trying to shake away what she was hearing. “And Chistery?” she said at last.

“Cowering behind the piano in the music room, no doubt.”

“Well, this is a fine kettle of fish.”

She strode, she sat, she stroked her chin, she kicked Nanny’s chamber pot and broke it. “What have I got,” she mumbled. “There’s the broom. There’s the bees. There’s the monkey. There’s Killyjoy—did they hurt Killyjoy? There’s Killyjoy. There’s the crows. There’s Nanny. There’s the villagers, if they’re unharmed. There’s the questionable Grimmerie. It’s not a lot.”

“No, it’s not,” said Nanny, sighing. “Doom, doom, I say.”

“We can get them back,” said Elphie. “We will.”

“Count Nanny in,” said Nanny, “though I never did like those sisters, I’ll tell you.”

Elphie clenched her fists and tried to keep from striking herself. “Liir gone too,” she said. “I came here to make my apologies to Sarima, and I lost Liir in the bargain. Am I good for nothing in this life?”

Kiamo Ko was deathly still, except for old Nanny’s labored breathing as she took a catnap in her rocking chair. Killyjoy thumped his tail on the floor, happy to see his mistress. The sky was broad and hopeless beyond the windows. Elphaba was tired herself, but she couldn’t sleep. For, from time to time, she imagined she could hear the sound of water lapping against the sides of the fishwell, as if the legendary underground lake were rising to drown them all.

1

Afterward, there was a lot of discussion about what people had thought it was. The noise had seemed to come from all corners of the sky at once.

Journalists, armed with the thesaurus and apocalyptic scriptures, fumbled and were defeated by it. “A gulfy deliquescence of deranged and harnessed air” . . . “A volcano of the invisible, darkly construed” . . .

To the pleasure faithers with tiktok affections, it was the sound of clockworks uncoiling their springs and running down at a terrible speed. It was the release of vengeful energy.

To the essentialists, it seemed as if the world had suddenly found itself too crammed with life, with cells splitting by the billions, molecules uncoupling to annihilation, atoms shuddering and juggernauting in their casings.

To the superstitious it was the collapsing of time. It was the oozing of the ills of the world into one crepuscular muscle, intent on stabbing the world to its core for once and for all.

To the more traditionally religious it was the blitzkrieg of vengeful angel armies, the awful name of the Unnamed God sounding itself at last—surprise—and the evaporation of all hopes for mercy.

One or two pretended to think it was squadrons of flying dragons overhead, trained for attack, breaking the sky from its moorings by the thrash of tripartite wings.

In the wake of the destruction it caused, no one had the hubris or courage (or the prior experience) to lie and claim to have known the act of terror for what it was: a wind twisted up in a vortical braid.

In short: a tornado.

The lives of many Munchkinlanders were lost—along with square miles of topsoil from hundred of years of cultivation. The shifting margins of sand in the eastern desert covered several villages without a trace, and no survivors were left to tell the tale of their suffering. Whirling like something from a nightmare, the wind funnel drove into Oz thirty miles north of Stonespar End, and delicately maneuvered around Colwen Grounds, leaving every rose petal attached and every thorn in place. The tornado sliced through the Corn Basket, devastating the basis of the economy of the renegade nation, and petered out, as if by design, not only at the eastern terminus of the largely defunct Yellow Brick Road, but also at the precise spot—the hamlet of Center Munch—where, outside a local chapel, Nessarose was awarding prizes for perfect attendance at religious education classes. The storm dropped a house on her head.

All the children survived to pray for Nessarose’s soul at the memorial service. Perfect attendance was never more perfect.

There were a great many jokes about the disaster, naturally. “You can’t hide from destiny,” some said, “that house had her name on it.” “That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house!” “Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes, but sometimes HOME DOESN’T LIKE IT.” “What’s the difference between a shooting star and a falling house?” “One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches.” “What’s big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?” “I don’t know, but can you introduce me?”

Such a maelstrom had not been known in Oz before. Various terrorist groups claimed credit, especially when news got around that the Wicked Witch of the East—also known as the Eminent Thropp, depending on your political stripe—had been snuffed out. It was not widely understood at first that the house carried passengers. The mere presence of a house of exotic design, set down almost intact upon the platform rigged up for the visiting dignitaries, was stretching credulity enough. That creatures might have survived such a fall was either patently unbelievable or a clear indication of the hand of the Unnamed God in the affair. Predictably, there were a few blind people who suddenly cried “I can see!” a lame Pig that stood and danced a jig, only to be led away—that sort of thing. The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.

2

When the news of Nessarose’s premature death arrived at Kiamo Ko by carrier pigeon, the Witch was deep in an operation of sorts, stitching the wings of a white-crested male roc into the back muscles of one of her current crop of snow monkeys. She had more or less perfected the procedure, after years of botched and hideous failures, when mercy killing seemed the only fair thing to do to the suffering subject. Fiyero’s old schoolbooks in the life sciences, from Doctor Nikidik’s course, had given some leads. Also the Grimmerie had helped, if she was reading it correctly: She had found spells to convince the axial nerves to think skyward instead of treeward. And once she got it right, the winged monkeys seemed happy enough with their lot. She had yet to see a female monkey in her population produce a winged baby, but she still had hopes.

Certainly they had taken better to flying than they had to language. Chistery, now a patriarch in the castle menagerie, had plateaued at words of one syllable, and still seemed to have no clear idea of what he was saying.

It was Chistery, in fact, who brought the pigeon’s letter in to Elphaba’s operating salon. The Witch had him hold the fascia-slasher while she unfolded the page. Shell’s brief message told of the tornado and informed her of the memorial service, which was scheduled for several weeks later in the hope that she would receive this message in time to come.

She put the message down and went back to work, placing grief and regret away from her. It was a tricky business, wing attachment, and the sedative she had administered to this monkey wouldn’t last all morning. “Chistery, it’s time to help Nanny down the stairs, and find Liir if you can, and tell him I need to talk to him at lunch,” she said, through her gritted teeth, glancing again at her own diagrams to make sure she had the overlapping of muscle groups in the correct arrangement, front to back.

It was an achievement if Nanny could now make it to the dining room once a day. “That’s my job, that and sleeping, and Nanny does both very well,” she said every single noontime when she arrived, hungry from her exertions on the stairs. Liir put out the cheese and bread and the occasional cold joint, at which the three of them hacked and nibbled, usually in an unsocial mood, before darting off to their afternoon chores.

Liir was fourteen, and insisted he was going to accompany the Witch to Colwen Grounds. “I have never been anywhere, except that time with the soldiers,” he complained. “You never let me do anything.”

“Someone has to stay and take care of Nanny,” said the Witch. “Now there isn’t any point in arguing about it.”

“Chistery can do it.”

“Chistery can’t. He’s getting forgetful, and between him and Nanny they’d burn the place to the ground. No, there’s no more discussion about it, Liir; you’re not going. Besides, I’m going to have to travel on my broom, I think, to get there in time.”

“You never let me do anything.”

“You can do the washing up.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What’s he arguing about now, sweet thing?” asked Nanny loudly.

“Nothing,” said the Witch.

“What’s that you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you going to tell her?” said Liir. “She helped raise Nessarose, didn’t she?”

“She’s too old, she doesn’t need to know. She’s eighty-five, it’ll only upset her.”

“Nanny,” said Liir, “Nessie’s dead.”

“Hush, you useless boy, before I remove your testicles with my foot.”

“Nessie did what?” screeched Nanny, looking rheumily out at them.

“Did died dead,” intoned Chistery.

“Did what?”

“Nessie DIED,” said Liir.

Nanny began to weep at the idea before she had even confirmed it. “Can this be true, Elphie? Is your sister dead?”

“Liir, you’ll answer for this,” said the Witch. “Yes, Nanny, I cannot lie to you. There was a storm and a building collapsed. She went very peacefully, they say.”

“She went straight to the bosom of Lurlina,” said Nanny, sobbing. “Lurlina’s golden chariot came to take her home.” She patted the piece of cheese on her plate, inexplicably. Then she buttered a napkin and took a bite. “When do we leave for the funeral?”

“You’re too old to travel, dear. I’m going in a few days. Liir will stay and look after you.”

“I will not,” said Liir.

“He’s a good boy,” said Nanny, “but not as good as Nessarose. Oh, sorrowful day! Liir, I’ll take my tea in my room, I can’t sit and talk to you as if nothing’s happened.” She hauled herself to her feet, leaning on Chistery’s head. (Chistery was devoted to her.) “You know, darling,” she said to the Witch, “I don’t think the boy is old enough to see to my needs. What if the castle is attacked again? Remember what happened the last time you went away.” She made a small, accusatory moue.

“Nanny, the Arjiki militia guard this place day and night. The Wizard’s army is well housed in the town of Red Windmill down below. They have no intention of leaving that safe haven and risking decimation in these mountain passes—not after what they did. That was their skirmish, that was their campaign. Now they’re just watchdogs. They staff the outpost to report signs of an invasion or trouble from the mountain clans. You know that. You have nothing to fear.”

“I’m too old to be taken in chains like poor Sarima and her family,” Nanny said. “And how could you rescue me, if you couldn’t get them back?”

“I’m still working on that,” said the Witch into Nanny’s left ear.

“Seven years. You’re very stubborn. It’s my opinion they’re all moldering in a common grave, these seven long years. Liir, you have to thank Lurlina that you weren’t among them.”

“I tried to rescue them,” said Liir stubbornly, who had rewritten the escapade in his own mind to give himself a more heroic role. It was not longing for the companionship of soldiers, he told himself, no, it was a courageous effort to save the family! In fact, Commander Cherrystone out of kindness had had Liir tied up and left him in a sack in someone’s barn, to prevent their having to incarcerate him with the others. The Commander had not realized Liir was a bastard son of Fiyero, for Liir himself didn’t know it.

“Yes well, that’s a good boy.” Nanny was now distracted from the sad news, drifting back to the tragedy she remembered more viscerally. “Of course I did everything I could, but Nanny was an old woman even then. Elphie, do you think they’re dead?”

“I could find out nothing,” said the Witch for the ten thousandth time. “If they were spirited to the Emerald City or if they were murdered, I could not tell. You know this, Nanny. I bribed people. I spied around. I hired agents to follow every lead. I wrote to the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow for advice. I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure.”

“It was my failure, I’m sure,” said Nanny peacefully; they all knew she didn’t think so for a minute. “I should have been younger and more vigorous. I’d have given that Commander Cherrystone a piece of my mind! And now Sarima is gone, gone, and her sisters too. I suppose it’s none of our fault, really,” she concluded disingenuously, scowling at the Witch. “You had someplace to go, so you went; who can criticize you for that?”

But the image of Sarima in chains, Sarima as a decaying corpse, still withholding from the Witch her forgiveness for Fiyero’s death—it pained her like water. “Give up, you old harridan,” said the Witch, “must my own household whip me so? Go have your tea, you fiend.”

The Witch sat down at last and thought of Nessarose, and what might come. The Witch had tried to stay removed from the affairs of the political world, but she knew a change of leadership in Munchkinland could throw things out of balance—maybe to a positive effect. She felt a guilty lightness at the death of her sister.

She made a list of things to bring with her to the memorial service. Foremost was a page of the Grimmerie. In her chamber she pored over the huge musty tome, and finally she ripped out an especially cryptic page. Its letters still continued to contort beneath her eyes, sometimes scrambling and unscrambling as she looked, as if they were formed by a colony of ants. Whenever she gazed at the book, meaning might emerge on a page that a day earlier had been illegible chicken scratches; and meaning sometimes disappeared as she stared. She would ask her father, who with his holy eyes would see the truth better.

3

Colwen Grounds was draped in black swags and purple bunting. When the Witch arrived, she was greeted by a one-man less-than-welcoming committee, a bearded Munchkinlander named Nipp, who seemed to be concierge, janitor, and acting Prime Minister. “Your lineage no longer allows you any particular liberties in Munchkinland,” she was told. “With the death of Nessarose, the honorific of Eminence is at last abolished.” The Witch didn’t much care, but she wasn’t inclined to accept a unilateral dictum without a retort. She answered, “It is abolished when I accept that it is abolished.” Not that the honorific had been used much in recent years; according to the occasional rambling letter from Frex, Nessarose had begun to be amused by the slur of “Wicked Witch of the East,” and had considered it a public penance worthy of a person with such high moral standing. She even took to referring to herself as such.

Nipp showed her to her room. “I don’t need much,” said the Wicked Witch of the West (as, in contrast, she allowed herself to be called, at least by these Munchkinlander upstarts). “A bed for a couple of days, and I’d like to see my father and attend the service. I’ll collect a few things, and be off soon. Now, do you know if our brother, Shell, will be here?”

“Shell has disappeared again,” said Nipp. “He left his regards. There is a mission he is undertaking in the Glikkus, it can’t wait. Some of us think he is defecting, worried about a change in government here now that the tyrant is dead. As well he might,” he added coldly. “Have you fresh towels?”

“I don’t use them,” said the Witch, “it’s all right. Go away now.” She was very tired, and sad.

At sixty-three, Frex was even balder, and his beard whiter, than he had been last time. His shoulders hunched in, as if trying to meet each other, his head sank into a natural cavity made by a deteriorating spine and neck. He sat covered by a blanket on the verandah. “And who is this,” he said when the Witch came up and sat next to him. She realized his sight had nearly gone for good.

“It’s your other daughter, Papa,” she said, “the one that’s left.”

“Fabala,” he said, “what will I do without my pretty Nessarose? How will I live without my pet?”

She held his hand until he fell asleep, and wiped his face though his tears burned her skin.

The liberated Munchkinlanders were destroying the house. The Witch had no use for frippery, but it seemed a shame to waste a property this way. Desecration was so shortsighted; didn’t they know that, however they now decided to live, Colwen Grounds could be their parliament building?

She spent time with her father, but they didn’t speak much. One morning, when he was more alert and energetic than usual, he asked her if she really was a witch. “Oh well, what’s a witch? Who has ever trusted language in this family?” she replied. “Father, will you look at something for me? Will you tell me what you see?” She withdrew from an inner pocket the page from the Grimmerie and she unfolded it like a large napkin on his lap. He ran his hands over it, as if he could pick up meaning through his fingertips, and then held it near, peering and squinting.

“What do you see?” she asked. “Can you tell me the nature of this writing? Is it for good or for ill?”

“The markings are crisp enough, and large. I ought to be able to make it out.” He turned it upside down. “But little Fabala, I can’t read this alphabet. It is in a foreign tongue. Can you?”

“Well, sometimes I seem to be able to, but the talent is fleeting,” said the Witch. “I don’t know if it’s my eyes or if it’s the manuscript that’s being tricky.”

“You always had strong eyes,” said her father. “Even as a toddler you could see things no one else could.”

“Hah,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You had a looking glass that sweet Turtle Heart made for you, and you looked in it as if you could see other worlds, other times.”

“I was probably looking at myself.”

But they both knew that wasn’t true, and Frex, for once, said so. “You didn’t look at yourself,” he said, “you hated to. You hated your skin, your sharp features, your strange eyes.”

“Where did I learn that hate?” she asked.

“You were born knowing it,” he said. “It was a curse. You were born to curse my life.” He patted her hand affectionately, as if he didn’t mean much by this. “When you lost your weird baby teeth, and your second teeth came in normally, we all relaxed a little. But for the first couple of years—until Nessarose was born—you were a little beast. Only when saintly Nessarose was delivered to us, even more scarred than you, did you settle down like a normal child.”

“Why was I cursed to be different?” she said. “You are a holy man, you must know.”

“You are my fault,” he said. Despite his words he was somehow pinning blame on her instead of himself, though she still wasn’t clever enough to see how this was done. “For what I had failed to do, you were born to plague me. But don’t worry yourself about it now,” he added, “that’s all long ago.”

“And Nessarose?” she asked. “How do the weights and balances of shame and guilt account for her?”

“She is a portrait of the lax morals of your mother,” Frex said calmly.

“And that’s why you could love her so much,” said the Witch. “Because her human frailty wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t stew so, you always stewed,” Frex said. “And now she is dead, so what does it matter?”

“My life is still running on.”

“But mine is running out,” he answered, sadly. So she put his hand back on his lap, and kissed him gently, and folded up the page of the Grimmerie and tucked it in her pocket. Then she turned to greet the person approaching them across the lawn. She thought it was someone with tea (Frex was still accorded a measure of service, due to his age and his mildness, and, she supposed, his vocation), but she stood and pressed down the front of her homespun black skirt when she saw who it was.

“Miss Glinda of the Arduennas,” she said, her heart churring.

“Oh, you came, I knew you would,” said Glinda. “Miss Elphaba, the last true Eminent Thropp, no matter what they say!”

Glinda approached slowly, either through age or shyness, or because her ridiculous gown weighed so much that it was hard for her to get up enough steam to stride. She looked like a huge Glindaberry bush, was all the Witch could think; under that skirt there must be a bustle the size of the dome of Saint Florix. There were sequins and furbelows and a sort of History of Oz, it seemed, stitched in trapunto in six or seven ovoid panels all around the skirting. But her face: beneath the powdered skin, the wrinkles at eyelid and mouth, was the face of the timid schoolgirl from the Pertha Hills.

“You haven’t changed a whit,” said Glinda. “Is this your father?”

The Witch nodded but shushed her; Frex had dropped off again. “Come, we’ll walk in the gardens before they root up the roses out of some beknighted attempt at eradicating injustice.” The Witch took Glinda’s arm. “Glinda, you look hideous in that getup. I thought you’d have developed some sense by now.”

“When in the provinces,” she said, “you have to show them a little style. I don’t think it’s so bad. Or are the satin bells at the shoulder a bit too too?”

“Excessive,” agreed the Witch. “Someone get the scissors; this is a disaster.”

They laughed. “My dear, what they’ve done to this grand old place,” said Glinda. “Look, those pediments are meant to support graven urns, and those revolutionary slogans are painted all over that exquisite belvedere. I hope you’ll have something done, Elphie. There isn’t a belvedere to match that outside of the capital.”

“I never had the love of architecture that you did, Glinda,” said the Witch. “I just read the slogans: she walked all over us. Why shouldn’t they paint all over her belvedere? If she did in fact walk all over them?”

“Tyrants come and go, belvederes are forever,” said Glinda. “I can recommend topnotch restorers the moment you ask.”

“I hear you were one of the first on the scene,” said the Witch, “when Nessarose died. How did that come to be?”

“Sir Chuffrey—my hubby—he has some investments in pork futures, you know, and Munchkinland is trying to diversify its economic base so as not to be at the mercy of Gillikin banks and the Emerald City Corn Exchange. You never know what relationship might develop between Munchkinland and the rest of Oz, and it’s best to be prepared. So where Sir Chuffrey does business, I do good. It’s a partnership made in heaven. You know I have more money than I can give away?” She giggled and squeezed the Witch’s arm. “I never imagined that doing public charity would provide such a rush.”

“So you were here in Munchkinland—?”

“Yes, I had been at an orphanage on the shores of Mossmere, and for a lark I thought I’d go to the game park—they have dragons there now, and I’d never seen a dragon—so I was scarcely a dozen miles away when the storm hit. We had terrible winds even there; I cannot imagine how a ceremony could have been in progress in Center Munch. In Mossmere there were whole sections of the park closed to visitors due to the fear of falling trees and escaping Animals—”

“Oh, so they call it a game park, with Animals?” said the Witch.

“You must go, dear, it’s a lark. Well, as I was saying, the house came right out of the blue, and I suppose I mean that literally—if they’d sensed a big storm, they’d surely have canceled the event and run for cover. Anyway, the news system is very advanced now in parts of Munchkinland; Nessarose herself oversaw a system of beacons and tiktok code signals, to warn of invasions from the Wizard and points west. So it was only a matter of minutes before the news was being flashed in all directions. I commandeered a Mature Pfenix and asked her to bring me to Center Munch, and I arrived before most of the locals had quite figured out what had hit them.”

“Tell me about it,” said the Witch.

“You’ll be pleased to hear there was no blood. I venture to guess there were massive internal injuries, but there was no blood. Of course Nessarose’s last few devoted followers thought this meant her spirit was taken up intact, and that she suffered little. I don’t imagine she suffered much, not with that kind of clonk on the noggin. Her more unhappy subjects, who were the greater in number, thought it a droll act of Lurlina, releasing them from Nessarose’s particular sort of fundamentalist bondage. There was revelry when I arrived, and much feting of the funny girl and the dog who seem to have lived in the house.”

“Oh, who’s that?” said the Witch, who hadn’t heard this part.

“Well, you know how Munchkinlanders bow and scrape no matter what their democratic inclinations. No sooner had I arrived than they deferred to me, introducing me as a witch. I tried to correct them, a sorceress is really much more apt, but never mind. It was no doubt the outfit, it cowed them. I was in a salmon-pink fantasy that day, and really it suited me.”

“Go on,” said the Witch, who had never liked talking about clothes.

“Well, the child introduced herself: Dorothy from Kansas. I didn’t know the place, and said as much. She appeared as much surprised as anyone else about what had happened, and she had a nasty little pooch yapping about her heels. Tata or Toto or something. Toto. So this Dorothy was in some state of shock, I can tell you. A fairly homely little girl with little fashion sense, but I suppose that comes later in life for some than others.” She glanced sideways at the Witch. “Much later, in some cases.” And they both chuckled at that.

“Dorothy supposed she should try to get back to her home, but as she couldn’t remember having studied anything about Oz in school, nor could I recall a place named Kansas, we decided that she should look for help elsewhere. The fickle Munchkinlanders seemed ready to nominate her as Nessie’s successor, which would have angered Nipp and all those ministers in Colwen Grounds who’ve spent their careers jockeying for position when and if Nessarose ever saw fit to die. Besides, there may be other developments afoot. Dorothy might have gotten in the way.”

“An eye to public affairs, well, somehow I’m not surprised,” said the Witch, in fact quite pleased. “I always knew you were in there somewhere, Glinda.”

“Well, I thought the better move would be to get Dorothy out of Munchkinland before a civil war tore this place up even worse than it already is. There are factions, you know, who support the re-annexation of Munchkinland by Oz. It would do the girl no good to get caught in the crossfire of opposing interests.”

“Oh, so she’s not here,” said the Witch. “I had thought I’d meet her.”

“Dorothy? Now you’re not going to take against her, are you?” said Glinda. “She’s a child, really. Big by Munchkinlander standards, of course, but a squat little thing nonetheless. She’s an innocent, Elphie; I can see by the gleam in your eye that you’re up to your old paranoia thing again. She wasn’t piloting that house, you know, she was trapped in it. This would be one struggle you’d do well just to leave alone.”

The Witch sighed. “You may be right. You know, I’m getting used to stiff muscles in the morning. Sometimes I think that vengeance is habit forming too. A stiffness of the attitude. I keep hoping that the Wizard will be toppled in my lifetime, and this aim seems to be at odds with happiness. I suppose I can’t take on avenging the death of a sister I didn’t get on all that well with anyway.”

“Especially if the death is an accident,” Glinda said.

“Glinda,” said the Witch, “I know you must remember Fiyero, and you have heard of his death. Fifteen years ago.”

“Of course,” said she. “Well, I heard he died, under mysterious circumstances.”

“I knew his wife,” said the Witch, “and his in-laws. It was suggested to me once that he had been carrying on an affair with you in the Emerald City.”

Glinda turned yellow-pink. “My dear,” she said, “I was fond of Fiyero and he was a good man and a fine statesman. But among other things, you will remember he was dark-skinned. Even if I took up dalliances—an inclination I believe rarely benefits anyone—you are once again being suspicious and cranky to suspect me and Fiyero! The idea!”

And the Witch realized, sinkingly, that this was of course true; the ugly skill at snobbery had returned to Glinda in her middle years.

But for her part, Glinda had no real inkling that the Witch was implicating herself as Fiyero’s adulterous lover. Glinda was too fussed to listen that closely. The Witch in fact alarmed her a little. It was not just the novelty of seeing her again, but the strange charisma Elphaba possessed, which had always put Glinda in the shade. Also there was the thrill, basis indeterminable, which made Glinda shy, and caused her to rush her words, and to speak in a false high voice like an adolescent. How quickly you could be thrown back to the terrible uncertainty of your youth!

For when she chose to remember her youth at all, she could scarcely dredge up an ounce of recollection about that daring meeting with the Wizard. She could recall far more clearly how she and Elphie had shared a bed on the road to the Emerald City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

They walked for a way in a restless silence.

“Things might begin to improve now,” said the Witch after a time. “I mean Munchkinland will be a mess for a while. A tyrant is terrible, but at least he or she imposes order. The anarchy that follows the deposition of a tyrant can be bloodier than before. Still, things may work out all right. Father always said that when left to themselves, the Munchkinlanders had a great deal of common sense. And Nessie was, for all practical purposes, a foreigner. She was raised in Quadling Country, and you know, she may have been half Quadling herself, I’ve come to realize. She was a foreign queen on this soil, despite her inherited title. With her gone, the Munchkinlanders might just right themselves.”

“Bless her soul,” said Glinda. “Or do you still not believe in the soul?”

“I can make no comment on the souls of others,” said the Witch.

They walked some more. Here and there the Witch saw, as before, the totemic straw men, pinned to tunics, and erected like effigies in the corners of fields. “I find them somewhat creepy,” she said to Glinda. “Now one other thing I want to ask you; I asked this of Nessa once. Do you remember Madame Morrible’s corralling us into her parlor, and proposing we become three Adepts, three high witches of Oz? Sort of secret local priestesses, shaping public policy behind the scenes, contributing to the stability—or instability—of Oz as required by some unnamed higher authority?”

“Oh, that farce, that melodrama, how could I forget it?” said Glinda.

“I wonder if we were put under a spell then? Do you remember, she said we couldn’t talk about it, and it didn’t seem that we could?”

“Well we are talking about it, so if there was any truth to it, which I doubt, it’s certainly worn off by now.”

“But look what’s happened to us. Nessarose was the Wicked Witch of the East—you know that’s what they called her, don’t pretend to be so shocked—and I have a stronghold in the West, and I seem to have rallied the Arjikis around me, by dint of the absence of their ruling family—and there you are, sitting pretty in the North with your bank accounts and your legendary skills at sorcery.”

“Legendary nothing; I simply see to it that I am admired in the right circles,” said Glinda. “Now, my memory is just as good as yours. And Madame Morrible proposed that I be an Adept of Gillikin, but that you be an Adept of Munchkinland, and Nessa be an Adept of Quadling Country. The Vinkus she didn’t think worth bothering about. If she was seeing the future, she got it wrong. She got you and Nessa all wrong.”

“Forget the details,” said the Witch tartly. “I just mean, Glinda, is it possible we could be living our entire adult lives under someone’s spell? How could we tell if we were the pawns of someone’s darker game? I know, I know, I can see it in your face: Elphie, you’re sniffing conspiracy theories again. But you were there. You heard what I heard. How do you know your life hasn’t been pulled by the strings of some malign magic?”

“Well, I pray a lot,” said Glinda, “not terribly genuinely, I admit, but I try. I think the Unnamed God would have mercy on me and give me the benefit of the doubt, and release me from a spell if I had accidentally fallen under one. Don’t you? Or are you still so atheistic?”

“I have always felt like a pawn,” said the Witch. “My skin color’s been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life’s work of my own, I haven’t found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.”

“I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”

“Well, I wonder,” said the Witch.

They walked on. Graffiti was splattered on the sides of the granite plinths of statues. NOW THE SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT. Glinda tchtched. “Animal husbandry?” she said.

They crossed a little bridge. Bluebirds twinkled music above them like a sentimental entertainment.

“I sent this Dorothy, this girl, on to the Emerald City,” said Glinda. “I told her I’d never seen the Wizard—well, I had to lie, don’t look at me like that; if I told her the truth about him she would never have left here. I told her to ask him to send her home. With his reconnaissance spies all over Oz, and no doubt elsewhere, he has heard of Kansas, I’m sure. Nobody else has.”

“That was a cruel thing to do,” said the Witch.

“She’s such a harmless child, no one should take her seriously,” said Glinda carelessly. “If the Munchkinlanders started rallying around her, reunification might be a more bloody affair than we all hope.”

“So you hope for reunification?” muttered the Witch, disgusted. “You support it?”

“Besides,” Glinda went on blithely, “having some motherly instinct somewhere inside this pushed-up bosom of mine, I gave her Nessa’s shoes as a sort of protection.”

“You what?” The Witch whirled and faced Glinda. For a moment she was dumb with rage, but only for a moment. “Not only does she come whomping out of the sky and stepping her big clumsy house all over my sister, but she gets the shoes too? Glinda, those shoes weren’t yours to give away! My father made them for her! And furthermore, Nessa promised I could have them when she died!”

“Oh yes,” said Glinda in a false calm, surveying the Witch up and down, “and they would make the perfect accessory for that glass-of-fashion outfit you have on. Come on, Elphie, since when have you cared about shoes, of all things? Look at those army boots you have on!”

“Whether I’d wear them or not is none of your concern. You can’t go handing out a person’s effects like that, what right had you? Papa reshaped those shoes from skills he learned from Turtle Heart. You’ve stuck your fancy wand in where it wasn’t wanted!”

“I’ll remind you,” said Glinda, “that those shoes were coming apart until I had them resoled, and I laced them through with a special binding spell of my own. Neither your father nor you did that much for her. Elphie, I stood by her when you abandoned her in Shiz. As you abandoned me. You did, don’t deny it, stop those lightning bolt looks at me, I won’t have it. I became her surrogate sister. And as an old friend I gave her the power to stand upright by herself through those shoes, and if I made a mistake I’m sorry, Elphie, but I still feel they were more mine to give away than yours.”

“Well, I want them back,” said the Witch.

“Oh, put it behind you, will you, they’re only shoes,” said Glinda, “you’re behaving as if they’re holy relics. They were shoes, and a bit out of style, truth be told. Let the girl have them. She has nothing else.”

“Look how the people here thought of them,” said the Witch; she pointed to a stable on which was scrawled, in broad red letters, walk all over you you old witch.

“Please, give it a rest,” said Glinda, “I have such a headache coming on.”

“Where is she?” said the Witch. “If you won’t retrieve them, I’ll get them myself.”

“If I’d known you wanted them,” said Glinda, trying to make things all right, “I’d have saved them for you. But you have to see, Elphie, the shoes couldn’t stay here. The ignorant pagan Munchkinlanders—Lurlinists all, once you scratch the skin—they had put too much credit in those silly shoes. I mean, a magic sword I could understand, but shoes? Please. I had to get them out of Munchkinland.”

“You are working in collusion with the Wizard to render Munchkinland ready for annexation,” said the Witch. “You have no agenda of charity, Glinda. At least don’t fool yourself. Or are you really under some rusty spell of Madame Morrible, after all this time?”

“I won’t have you snapping at me,” said Glinda. “The girl has left, she’s been on the road for a week now, she headed west. I tell you, she’s only a timid child, and means no harm. She’d be distressed to know she’d taken something you wanted. There is no power in them for you, Elphie.”

The Witch said, “Glinda, if those shoes fall into the hands of the Wizard, he’ll use them somehow in a maneuver to reannex Munchkinland. By now they have too much significance to Munchkinlanders. The Wizard mustn’t have those shoes!”

Glinda reached out and touched the Witch’s elbow. “They won’t make your father love you any better,” she said.

The Witch pulled back. They stood glaring at each other. They had too much common history to come apart over a pair of shoes, yet the shoes were planted between them, a grotesque icon of their differences. Neither one could retreat, or move forward. It was silly, and they were stuck, and someone needed to break the spell. But all the Witch could do was insist, “I want those shoes.”

4

At the memorial service, Glinda and Sir Chuffrey perched in the balcony reserved for dignitaries and ambassadors. The Wizard sent a representative, resplendent in his dress reds with the emerald cross marking quadrants on his chest, a crew of bodyguards at attention all around him. The Witch sat below, and did not meet Glinda’s eyes. Frex wept until he brought on an attack of asthma, and the Witch helped him out a side door, where he could catch his breath.

After the service, the Wizard’s emissary approached the Witch. He said, “You have been invited to an audience with the Wizard. He is traveling by special diplomatic immunity, via a Pfenix, to offer his condolences to the family this evening. You will be prepared to meet him at Colwen Grounds this evening.”

“He can’t come here!” said the Witch. “He wouldn’t dare!”

“Those who now make the decisions think otherwise,” said the emissary. “Be that as it may, he comes under cover of darkness, and only to speak to you and your family.”

“My father is not up to receiving the Wizard,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it.”

“He will see you, then,” said the emissary. “He insists. He has questions of a diplomatic nature to put to you. But you are not to make this visit public, or it could go very hard on your father and your brother. And on you,” he added, as if that were not already evident.

She considered how she might use this command audience to her own advantage: Sarima, the safety of Frex, the fate of Fiyero. “I agree,” she concluded. “I will meet him.” And, despite herself, she was glad for a moment that Nessarose’s magicked shoes were safely out of the vicinity.

As the vesper bells rang, the Witch was summoned from her room by a Munchkinlander maid. “You will have to submit to a search,” said the Wizard’s emissary, meeting her in an antechamber. “You must understand the protocol here.”

She concentrated on her fury as she was probed and prodded by the officers who ringed the waiting area. “What is this?” they said when they found the page of the Grimmerie in her pocket.

“Oh that,” she said, thinking fast. “His Highness will want to see that.”

“You can bring nothing in with you,” they told her, and they took the page from her.

“By my bloodlines, I can reinstate the office of the Eminent Thropp tonight and have your leader arrested,” she called after them. “Do not tell me what I can and cannot do in this house.”

They paid her no mind and ushered her into a small chamber, bare but for a couple of upholstered chairs set upon a flowery carpet. Along the baseboards, dust mice rolled in the draft.

“His Highness, the Emperor Wizard of Oz,” said an attendant, and withdrew. For a minute the Witch sat alone. Then the Wizard walked into the room.

He was without disguise, a plain-looking older man wearing a high-collared shirt and a greatcoat, with a watch and fob hanging from a waistcoat pocket. His head was pink and mottled, and tufts of hair stuck out above his ears. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down, motioning the Witch to sit, too. She did not sit.

“How do you do,” he said.

“What do you want with me,” she answered.

“There are two things,” he said. “There is what I had come here to say to you, and then there is the matter of what you bring to my attention.”

“You talk to me,” she said, “for I have nothing to say to you.”

“There is no point in beating around the bush,” he said. “I would like to know your intentions about your position as the last Eminence.”

“Had I any intention,” she said, “it would be none of your business.”

“Ah, alas, it is my business, for reunification is under way,” said the Wizard, “even as we speak. I understand that Lady Glinda, bless her well-meaning foolishness, has sensibly evacuated both the unfortunate girl and the totemic shoes from the district, which should make annexation less troublesome. I should like to have those shoes in my possession, to prevent their giving you ideas. So you see, I need to know your intentions in the matter. You were not, I take it, in warm sympathy with your sister’s style of religious tyranny, but I hope you do not intend to set up shop here. If you do, we must strike a little bargain—something I was never able to do with your sister.”

“There is little for me here,” said the Witch, “and I am not suited to govern anyone, not even myself, it seems.”

“Besides, there’s the small matter of the army at—is it Red Windmill?—the town below Kiamo Ko.”

“So that’s why they’ve been there all these years,” said the Witch.

“To keep you in check,” he said. “An expense, but there you are.”

“To spite you, I should reclaim the title of Eminence,” said the Witch. “But I care little for these foolish people. What the Munchkinlanders do now is of no interest to me. As long as my father is left unharmed. If that is all—”

“There is the other matter,” he said. His manner became more lively. “You brought a page with you. I wonder where you got it?”

“That is mine and your people have no right to it.”

“What I want is to know where you got it, and where I can find the rest.”

“What will you give me if I tell you?”

“What could you want from me?”

This was why she had agreed to meet him. She drew a deep breath, and said, “To know if Sarima, Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, is still alive. And where I might find her, and how I might negotiate her freedom.”

The Wizard smiled. “How all things work together. Now isn’t it interesting that I could guess of your concern.” He waved a hand. Unseen attendants outside the open door ushered in a dwarf in clean white trousers and tunic.

No, it wasn’t a dwarf, she saw; it was a young woman crouching. Chains sewn into the collar of her tunic ran through her clothes to her ankles, keeping her bent over; the chains were only two or three feet long. The Witch had to peer to see for sure that it was Nor. She would be sixteen by now, or seventeen. The age that Elphie had been when she went up to Crage Hall at Shiz.

“Nor,” said the Witch, “Nor, are you there?”

Nor’s knees were filthy and her fingers curled around the links of her bondage. Her hair was cut short, and welts were visible beneath the patchy tresses. She tossed her head as if listening to music, but she would not shift her gaze toward Elphaba.

“Nor, it’s Auntie Witch. I’ve come to bargain for your release, at last,” said the Witch, improvising.

But the Wizard motioned the unseen attendants to usher Nor out of sight. “I’m afraid that is not possible,” he said. “She is my protection from you, you see.”

“The others?” said the Witch. “I must know.”

“Everything is undocumented,” said the Wizard, “but I believe Sarima and her sisters are all dead.”

The Witch’s breath caught in her chest. The last hopes of forgiveness gone! . . . but the Wizard was continuing. “Perhaps some underling who had no authority in the matter had an appetite for a bloodbath. It’s so hard to get reliable help in the armed forces.”

“Irji?” said the Witch, gripping her elbows.

“Now he had to die,” said the Wizard apologetically. “He was the next in line to be Prince, wasn’t he?”

“Tell me it was not brutal,” said the Witch. “Oh, tell me so!”

“The Paraffin Necklace,” admitted the Wizard. “Well, it was a public affair. A statement needed to be made. There now, against my better judgment, I have told you what you wanted to know. Now it is your turn. Where can I find the book that this page is from?” The Wizard took the paper out of his pocket and pressed it out onto his lap. His hands were trembling. He looked at the page. “A spell for the Administration of Dragons,” he said, wonderingly.

“Is that what it is?” she said, surprised. “I could not be sure.”

“Of course. You must have a hard time making this out,” he said. “You see, it does not come from this world. It comes from my world.”

He was mad, obsessed with other worlds. Like her father.

“You are not telling the truth,” said the Witch, hoping she was right.

“Oh, what care I for the truth,” he said, “but I am truthful, as it happens.”

“Why would you want that?” said the Witch, trying to buy some time, trying to figure out how she could barter for Nor’s life. “I don’t even know what it is. I don’t believe you do either.”

“I do,” he said. “This is an ancient manuscript of magic, generated in a world far away from this one. It was long thought to be merely legendary, or else destroyed in the dark onslaughts of the northern invaders. It had been removed from our world for safety by a wizard more capable than I. It is why I came to Oz in the first place,” he continued, almost talking to himself, as old men are prone to do. “Madame Blavatsky located it in a crystal ball, and I made the appropriate sacrifices and—arrangements—to travel here forty years ago. I was a young man, full of ardor and failure. I had not intended to rule a country here, but just to find this document and return it to its own world, and to study its secrets there.”

“What kind of sacrifices?” she said. “You do not stint from murder here.”

“Murder is a word used by the sanctimonious,” he said. “It is an expedient expression with which they condemn any courageous action beyond their ken. What I did, what I do, cannot be murder. For, coming from another world, I cannot be held accountable to the silly conventions of a naive civilization. I am beyond that lisping childish recital of wrongs and rights.” His eyes did not burn as he spoke; they were sunk behind veils of cold blue detachment.

“If I give the Grimmerie to you, will you go?” she said. “Give me Nor and take your brand of evil and leave us alone at last?”

“I am too old to travel now,” he said, “and why should I give up what I have worked for all these years?”

“Because I will use this book and destroy you with it if you don’t,” she said.

“You cannot read it,” he said. “You are of Oz and you cannot do such a thing.”

“I can read more of it than you suspect,” she said. “I do not know what it all means. I have seen pages about unleashing the hidden energies of matter. I have seen pages about tampering with the orderly flow of time. I have seen disquisitions about weapons too vile to use, about how to poison water, about how to breed a more docile population. There are diagrams of weapons of torture. Though the drawings and the words seem misty to my eyes, I can continue to learn. I am not too old.”

“Those are ideas of great interest to our times,” he said, though he seemed surprised that she had taken in as much as she had.

“Not to me,” she said. “You have done enough already. If I give it to you, will you surrender Nor to me?”

“You should not trust my promise,” he said, sighing. “Really, my child.” But he continued to stare at the page she had handed over to him. “One might learn how to subjugate a dragon to one’s own purposes,” he mused, and flipped the page over to read what was on the back.

“Please,” she said. “I think I have never begged for anything before in my life. But I beg of you. It is not right that you should be here. Assuming for a moment you can sometimes tell the truth—go back to that other world, go anywhere, just leave the throne. Leave us alone. Take the book with you, do with it what you will. Let me accomplish at least this in my life.”

“In exchange for my telling you about the kith and kin of your beloved Fiyero, you are to tell me where this book is,” he reminded her.

“Well, I won’t,” she answered. “I have revised my offer. Give me Nor, and I will get you the Grimmerie. The book is already hidden so deeply that you will never find it. You have not the skill.” She hoped she was being persuasive.

He stood and pocketed the page. “I shall not have you executed,” he said. “At least, not at this audience. I will have that book, for here or for there. You cannot bind me to a promise, I am beyond being bound by words. I will think of what you have said. But meanwhile, I will keep my young slave-girl at my side. For she is my defense against your anger.”

“Give her to me!” said the Witch. “Now, now, now: Act like a man, not like a mountebank! Give her to me and I will send you that book!”

“It is for others to bargain,” said the Wizard. Rather than sounding offended, he seemed merely depressed, as if he were talking to himself instead of to her. “I do not bargain. But I do think. I will wait and see how the reunification with Munchkinland goes, and if you do not interfere, I may be kindly disposed to think about what you have said. But I do not bargain.”

The Witch breathed in deeply. “I have met you before, you know,” she said. “You once granted me an interview in the Throne Room, when I was a schoolgirl from Shiz.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Oh, of course—you must have been one of the darling girls of Madame Morrible. That wonderful aid and helpmeet. In her dotage now, but in her heyday, what she taught me about breaking the spirits of willful young girls! No doubt, like the rest, you were taken with her?”

“She tried to recruit me to serve some master. Was it you?”

“Who can say. We were always hatching some plot or other. She was good fun. She would never be as crude as that”—he pointed to the open door through which crouching Nor could still be seen, humming to herself—“she could manage girl students with much greater finesse!” He was about to leave the room, but he turned back at the door. “You know, now I remember. It was she who warned me about you. She told me you had betrayed her, you had rejected her offers. She was the one who advised me to have you watched. It is because of her that we found out about your little romance with the diamond-skinned prince.”

“No!”

“So you met me before. I had forgotten. In what form did I appear?”

She had to clutch herself to keep from vomiting. “You were a skeleton with lighted bones, dancing in a storm.”

“Oh, yes. That was clever, that was. Were you impressed?”

“Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.”

“And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”

“Wait,” she called as he headed away through the panel, “wait, please. How will I receive your answer?”

“I will send a messenger to you before the year is out,” he said. The panel slammed tightly behind him.

She fell to her knees, her forehead dropping almost to the floor. At her sides her fists clenched. She had no intention of surrendering the Grimmerie to such a monster, ever. If need be she would die to keep it out of his hands. But could she arrange a deception so that he would surrender Nor to her first?

She left a few days later, first making sure that her father was not to be turned out of his room in Colwen Grounds. He did not want to join her in the Vinkus; he was too old to make the journey. Besides, he thought that Shell would come back sooner or later looking for him. The Witch knew that Frex wouldn’t live long, grieving so for Nessarose. She tried to put away her anger at him when she said good-bye for what she suspected was the last time.

As she strode through the forecourt of Colwen Grounds, she crossed paths once again with Glinda. But both women averted their eyes and hurried their feet along their opposing ways. For the Witch, the sky was a huge boulder pressing down on her. For Glinda it was much the same. But Glinda wheeled about, and cried out, “Oh Elphie!”

The Witch did not turn. They never saw each other again.

5

She knew that she couldn’t afford the time to mount a full-scale chase against this Dorothy. Glinda ought to be hiring accomplices to track those shoes down; it was the least she could do, with her money and her connections. Still, the Witch stopped here and there along the Yellow Brick Road, and asked those taking an afternoon tipple at a roadside public house if they had seen a foreign girl in blue and white checks, walking with a small dog. There was some animated discussion as the patrons of the pub struggled to decide whether the green Witch intended the child harm—apparently the child had that rare skill of enchanting strangers—but when they had satisfied themselves that no harm was likely, they responded. Dorothy had come through a few days ago, and it was said that she had spent the night with someone a mile or two down the road, before continuing on. “The well-kept house with the yellow domed roof,” they said, “and the minaret-chimney. You can’t miss it.”

The Witch found it, and she found Boq on a bench in the yard, dandling a baby on his knee.

“You!” he said. “I know why you’re here! Milla, look, who’s here, come quickly! It’s Miss Elphaba, from Crage Hall! In the flesh!”

Milla came, a couple of naked children clutching her apron strings. Flushed from laundry, she lifted her straggling hair out of her eyes and said, “Oh my, and we forgot to dress in our finery today. Look who’s come to laugh at us in our rustic state.”

“Isn’t she something!” said Boq fondly.

Milla had kept her figure, though there were four or five offspring in evidence, and no doubt more out of sight. Boq had gone barrel-chested, and his fine spiky hair had grown prematurely silver, giving him a dignity he had never had as an undergraduate. “We heard about your sister’s death, Elphie,” he said, “and we sent our condolences to your father. We didn’t know where you were. We heard you had come here following Nessie’s ascension to governor of Munchkinland, but we didn’t know where you went back to when you left. It’s good to see you again.”

The sourness that she had felt over Glinda’s betrayal was ameliorated by Boq’s common courtesy and direct speech. She had always liked him, for his passion and for his sense. “You are a sight, you are,” she said.

“Rikla, get up off that stool and let our guest have a seat,” said Milla to one of the children. “And Yellowgage, run to Uncle’s and borrow some rice and onions and yogurt. Hurry now, so I can start a meal.”

“I won’t be staying, Milla, I’m in a hurry,” said the Witch. “Yellowgage, don’t bother. I’d love to spend some time, and catch up on all your news, but I’m trying to locate this girl stranger, who passed by here, someone said, and stayed a night or two.”

Boq shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, she did that, Elphie. What do you want with her?”

“I want my sister’s shoes. They belong to me.”

Boq seemed as surprised as Glinda had. “You weren’t ever into fancy trappings like society shoes,” he said.

“Yes, well, perhaps I’m about to make my belated debut in Emerald City society at last, and have a coming-out ball.” But she was being tart with Boq, and didn’t want that. “It’s a personal matter, Boq; I want the shoes. My father made them and they’re mine now, and Glinda gave them to this girl without my permission. And woe betide Munchkinland if they fall into the Wizard’s hands. What is she like, this Dorothy?”

“We adored her,” he said. “Plain and straightforward as mustard seed. She shouldn’t have any problems, although it’s a long walk for a child, from here to the Emerald City. But all who see her are bound to help her, I’d say. We sat up till the moon rose, chatting about her home, and Oz, and what she might expect on the road. She hasn’t traveled widely before this.”

“How charming,” said the Witch. “How novel for her.”

“Are you brewing one of your campaigns?” said Milla suddenly, cannily. “You know, Elphie, when you didn’t come back from the Emerald City with Glinda that time, everyone said you’d gone mad, and had become an assassin.”

“People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

“You’re not wicked,” said Boq.

“How do you know? It’s been so long,” said the Witch, but she smiled at him.

Boq returned the smile, warmly. “Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

“Like Nessarose,” said Milla meanly, but she was telling the truth, too, and they all nodded.

The Witch took one of Boq’s children on her knee and clucked at it absentmindedly. She liked children no more than she ever had, but years of dealing with monkeys had given her an insight into the infant mentality she had never grasped before. The baby cooed and wet itself with pleasure. The Witch handed it back quickly before the wet could soak through her skirt.

“Regardless of the shoes,” said the Witch, “do you think a child like that should be sent unarmed straight into the jaws of the Wizard? Has she been told what a monster he is?”

Boq looked uncomfortable. “Well, Elphie, I don’t like speaking ill of the Wizard. I’m afraid there are too many pitchers with big ears in this community, and you never know who is on what side. Between you and me, I hope Nessa’s death will result in some sort of a sensible government, but if we are overrun with an invading army in two months I wouldn’t want it bruited about that I’d been bad-mouthing the invaders. And there are rumors of reunification.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re hoping for that,” she said, “not you too.”

“I’m not hoping for anything, except for peace and quiet,” he said. “I have enough trouble getting crops out of these rocky fields. That’s what I was in Shiz to learn, do you remember?—agriculture. I’ve put the best of my efforts into our small holdings, and we only manage to eke out a living.”

But he looked rather proud about it, and so did Milla.

“And I guess you have a couple of Cows in your barn,” said the Witch.

“Oh, you’re testy. Of course we don’t. Do you think I could forget what we worked for—you and Crope and Tibbett and I? It was the high point of a very quiet life.”

“You didn’t have to have a quiet life, Boq,” said the Witch.

“Don’t be superior. I didn’t say I was sorry for it, neither the excitement of a righteous campaign nor the relief of a family and a farm. Did we ever do any good back then?”

“If nothing else,” said the Witch, “we helped Doctor Dillamond. He was very much alone in his work, you know. And the philosophical basis for the resistance grew out of his pioneering hypotheses. His findings outlived him; they still do.” She did not mention her own experiments with the winged monkeys. Her practical applications were directly derived from Doctor Dillamond’s theories.

“We had no idea we were at the end of a golden age,” Boq said, sighing. “When’s the last time you saw an Animal in the professions?”

“Ah, don’t get me started,” the Witch said. She couldn’t stay seated.

“Do you remember, you hoarded those notes of Dillamond’s. You never really let me know what they were all about. Did you make any use of them?”

“I learned enough from his research to keep questioning,” said the Witch, but she felt bombastic, and wanted to stop talking. It made her feel too sad, too desperate. Milla saw this, and with a brusque charity declared, “Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we’re the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we’re in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”

“The Wizard doesn’t,” said the Witch.

“Well, Madame Morrible does,” said Milla. “Or so Shenshen told me in her last letter.”

“Oh?” said the Witch.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Boq. “Though from her bed of pain Madame Morrible continues to advise our Emperor Wizard on policy matters about education. I’m surprised that Glinda didn’t send Dorothy to Shiz to study with Madame Morrible. Instead she directed her to the Emerald City.”

The Witch could not picture Dorothy, but for a moment she saw the stooped figure of Nor. She saw a crowd of girls like Nor, in chains and yokes, drifting around Madame Morrible the way those schoolgirls had, all those years ago.

“Elphie, sit down again, you don’t look well,” said Boq. “This is a hard time for you. You didn’t get along well with Nessarose, I seem to remember.”

But the Witch didn’t want to think of her sister. “It’s a rather ugly name, Dorothy,” she said. “Don’t you think?” She sat back down heavily, and Boq relaxed on a stool a few feet away.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Actually we had a chat about it. She said that the King of her homeland was a man named Theodore. Her teacher explained that the name meant Gift of God, and that this was a sign that he was ordained to be King or Prime Minister. Dorothy remarked that Dorothy was a sort of backward Theodore, but the teacher looked it up and said no, Dorothy meant Goddess of Gifts.”

“Well, I know what she can give me,” said the Witch. “She can give me my shoes. Are you trying to say that you think she was a gift of God, or that she is some sort of queen or goddess? Boq, you used not to go in for superstition.”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m having a conversation on word derivations,” he answered calmly. “Let others more enlightened than I ferret out the hidden meanings of life. But I do think it interesting that her name so resembles the name of her king.”

Milla said, “Well, I think she’s a holy little girl, ordinary and sanctified just as any child is, no more no less. Yellowgage, get your paws off that lemon tart, I can see you from here, or I’ll whip you from now to eternity. The Dorothy child reminded me of what Ozma might have been like, or might yet be like, if she ever comes out of the deep sleep she’s supposed to be enchanted into.”

“She sounds like a little fright,” said the Witch. “Ozma, Dorothy—all this talk about savior children. I have always detested it.”

“You know what it is?” said Boq, thinking carefully. “Since we’re talking about the old days, it comes back to me . . . I wonder if you remember that medieval painting I once found in the library at Three Queens? The one with the female figure cradling the beast? There was a sort of tenderness and awfulness in that painting. Well, there’s something in Dorothy that reminds me of that unnamed figure. You might even call it the Unnamed Goddess—is that sacrilegious or what? Dorothy has this sweet charity toward her dog, a pretty dreadful little beast. And whiffy? You wouldn’t believe how repugnant. Once she swooped the dog up in her arms and bent over it, crooning to it, in just the same pose as that medieval figure. Dorothy is a child, but she has a heaviness of bearing like an adult, and a gravity you don’t often find in the young. It’s very becoming. Elphie, I was charmed by her, to tell you the truth.” He cracked a couple of walnuts and eastern macarands, and passed them around. “I am sure you will be, too.”

“I would like to avoid her at all costs, at the sound of it,” said the Witch. “The last thing I’m in a mood for these days is to be charmed by juvenile purity. But I insist on recovering my property.”

“The shoes are very magic, are they?” said Milla. “Or is it just symbolic?”

“How do I even know?” said the Witch. “I haven’t ever put them on. But if I could get them and they could walk me out of this parlous life, I wouldn’t be sorry.”

“Anyway, everyone blamed the shoes for Nessa’s tyranny. I think it’s good of Glinda to have gotten them out of Munchkinland. The child is smuggling them abroad without even knowing it.”

“Glinda has sent the girl to the Emerald City,” said the Witch pointedly. “If the Wizard gets hold of them, it’ll be a license to march into Munchkinland. And you’re fools to sit on the fence as if it makes no difference whether he does or not.”

“You’ll stay for something, at least some tea,” said Milla soothingly. “Look, I’ve had Clarinda make a fresh pot, and we’ve saffron cream. Remember the saffron cream party after Ama Clutch’s funeral?”

The Witch breathed heavily for a moment; there was a pain in her esophagus. She did not like to remember those trying times. And Glinda had known full well that Madame Morrible was behind the death of Ama Clutch. Now as Lady Glinda she was part of the same ruling class. It was hideous. And Dorothy, whatever her origins, was still only a child, and they were using her to help rid Munchkinland of those damned totemic shoes. Or to get the shoes to the Wizard. Just as Madame Morrible had used her students as Adepts.

“I can’t stop here chattering like an idiot,” she cried, startling them, spilling the bowl of nuts to the ground. “Didn’t we waste enough time talking ourselves to death in school?” She grabbed for her broom and her hat.

Boq looked startled and almost fell backward off his seat. “Well, Elphie, why are you taking offense—?”

She was beyond answering. She whirled in a small cyclone of black skirts and scarves, and ran out to the road.

She hurried on foot along the Yellow Brick Road, hardly realizing that a plan was forming in her mind. But she was thinking so hard that for a while she completely forgot she was carrying her broom, and it was only when she paused to rest, and leaned on it, that she remembered it.

Boq, Glinda, even her father, Frex: how disappointing they all seemed now. Had these folks deteriorated in virtue since their youth, or had she been too naive then to see them for what they were? She felt disgusted with people, and longed to be home. She was too out of sorts to seek lodging in an inn or a public house. It was warm enough to stay outside and rest.

She lay awake at the edge of a field of barley. The moon rose, huge as it sometimes is when first breaking over the horizon. It backlit a stake with a crossbar, standing as if awaiting a body to crucify, or a scarecrow to hang.

Why hadn’t she joined forces with Nessarose, and raised armies against the Wizard? Old family resentments had gotten in the way.

Nessarose had asked for help in governing Munchkinland, and the Witch had denied her request. Instead the Witch had gone back to Kiamo Ko these seven years. She had squandered the chance to merge forces with her sister.

Virtually every campaign she’d set out for herself had ended in failure.

She squirmed in the light of the moon, and at midnight, tortured by the thoughts of Nessa’s death—the physical fact of being squished like a bug finally taking on some imaginative shape in the Witch’s fantasies—she arose, and took a new path. Dorothy would no doubt follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, and someone as exotic as she could be easily located anywhere along the route. The Witch would go and try to accomplish the task set out for herself fifteen years ago. Madame Morrible still waited to be killed.

6

Shiz was a money factory now. The Colleges, occupying an historic district, remained largely unchanged, but for some contemporary dormitories and flashy athletic buildings. Outside the university district, however, Shiz had thrived in the war-alert economy. A huge monument in brass and marble, The Spirit of Empire, dominated what was left of Railway Square, and the air and light around it was cut off by hulking industrial buildings, spewing black columns of filth into the air. The bluestone was now grimestone. The air itself seemed warm and earnest—the ten thousand exhalations of a city panting every second to increase its wealth. The trees were shriveled and gray. And not a single Animal in sight.

Crage Hall looked absurdly older and newer at once. The Witch chose not to bother the porter, and flew herself up over the wall into the kitchen garden, where once Boq had tumbled off an adjoining roof, almost into her lap. The back lawn beyond the orchard was gone, and in its place stood a stone structure, above whose gleaming poxite doors was carved THE SIR CHUFFREY AND LADY GLINDA CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC AND THE THEATRICAL ARTS.

Three girls came hurrying down the path, chattering away, their books clutched close to their bosoms. They gave the Witch a start, as if they were ghosts of Nessarose, Glinda and herself. She had to hold on to her broomstick and steady herself. She had not taken in how far she had come, how much she had aged.

“I need to see the Head,” she said, startling them.

But one recovered her youthful aplomb and pointed the way. The Head’s office was still in Main Hall. “You’ll find her in,” they said. “She’s always in at this hour of the morning, having tea by herself or with contributors.”

Security must be greatly relaxed if none of them questions my being in the kitchen garden, thought the Witch. All the better; I may even escape unstopped.

The Head had a secretary now, a plump older gentleman with a goatee. “She’s not expecting you?” he said. “I’ll see if she’s free.” He returned and said, “Madame Head will see you now. Would you like to leave your broom in the umbrella stand?”

“How kind. No thanks,” said the Witch, and walked through.

The Head rose from a leather armchair. She wasn’t Madame Morrible anymore; she was a small pinky white woman with copper-colored curls and an energetic manner. “I didn’t catch your name?” she said politely. “You’re an old girl, but I’m a new one”—she laughed at her own witticism, and the Witch did not—“and I’m afraid I haven’t yet grasped the truth: dozens of old girls come back every month to relive the pleasant moments of their growing up here. Please, may I have your name, and I’ll call for some tea.”

With some effort, the Witch said, “I was called Miss Elphaba when I was here, more years ago than I realized could be possible. In fact I won’t take tea, I can’t stay long. I was misinformed. I was hoping to see Madame Morrible? Do you know of her whereabouts?”

“Well, is this good luck or is it bad?” said the current Head. “Up till very recently she has spent part of every semester in the Emerald City, consulting with His Highness himself, on education policies through Loyal Oz. But she’s recently returned to her retirement apartment in the Doddery—I’m sorry, that’s a joke of the girls and it slipped out. It is called the Daughter Building, really, as it was financed by the generous daughters of Crage Hall, our alums. You see, her health has deteriorated, and—though I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings—I fear she is very near the end.”

“I’d love to pop in and say hello,” said the Witch. Playacting had never suited her, and it was only because the new Head was so young, such a fool, such a girl herself, that the Witch could get away with it. “I was a great favorite of hers, you know; it would give her a wonderful surprise.”

“I’ll call Grommetik to take you there,” said the Head. “But I should ask Madame Morrible’s nurse first if she’s up to a visit.”

“Don’t call Grommetik, I can find my own way. I will chat with the nurse, and I will only stop in for a moment. And then I’ll come back here before I leave, I promise, and perhaps I can see my way clear to making a contribution toward the annual fund, or some little endowment drive you must be mounting at present?”

To the best of her recollection she had never lied before in her life.

The Doddery was a broad round tower, like a squat silo, sitting adjacent to the chapel in which Doctor Dillamond had been eulogized. A scout, passing by with buckets and brooms, told the Witch that Madame Morrible was one flight up, behind the door with the Wizard’s standard mounted on it.

A minute later the Witch stood looking at the Wizard’s standard. A balloon with a basket beneath it, commemorating his spectacular arrival in the Emerald City, and crossed swords below. From a few feet away it looked like a huge skull, and the basket a leering jaw, and the crossed swords a forbidding X. The doorknob turned under her tug, and she entered the apartments.

There were several rooms, all cluttered with school memorabilia and tokens of esteem from various Emerald City institutions, including the Palace of the Emperor. The Witch passed through a sort of parlor, with a fire burning in it despite the warmth of the season, and a kitchen-scullery area. To one side was a water closet, and the Witch could hear the sound of someone sobbing inside, and the blowing of a nose. The Witch pushed a dresser against the door, and continued on into a sleeping chamber.

Madame Morrible was propped halfway up in a huge bed shaped like a pfenix. A carved gold pfenix neck and head emerged from the headboard, and the sides of the bed simulated the bird’s wings. Its feet joined at the footboard. The idea of its tail feathers had apparently defeated the ingenuity of the cabinetmaker, for there weren’t any. It was a bird in an awkward position, actually, as if being blown backward through the air by gunshot, or as if laboring in a human way to deliver itself of the great mound of flesh sitting on its stomach and reclining against its breast.

On the floor was a pile of the financial papers, and an old-fashioned pair of spectacles was set on top of them. But the time for reading was past.

Madame Morrible rested in a gray mound, her hands folded upon her belly, and her eyes open and shallow, without motion. She was still like a mammoth Carp, in all but the fishy smell—a candle had been so recently lit that the stink of the match’s sulfur still lingered in the room.

The Witch pulled at her broom. From the other room came a pounding on the door of the water closet. “Did you think you would always be safe by hiding behind schoolchildren?” said the Witch, beyond herself, beyond caring, and she raised her broom. But Madame Morrible made a sluggish, indifferent corpse.

The Witch struck Madame Morrible with the flat of the broom, on the side of the head and the face. It made no mark. Then the Witch searched the mantelpiece for the testimonial trophy with the biggest marble base, and she bashed in Madame Morrible’s skull with it, with a sound like a splitting of firewood.

She left it in the old woman’s arms. Its statement could be read by all, except the carved pfenix who would be looking at it upside down. IN APPRECIATION OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DONE, it said.

7

The Witch had waited fifteen years, but her timing was off by five minutes. So the temptation to go back and dismember Grommetik was intense. But the Witch resisted. She didn’t care if she was sentenced and executed for the battery of Madame Morrible’s corpse, but she didn’t want to be caught because of vengeance against a machine.

She took a meal at a café and glanced at the tabloids. Then she wandered in the shopping district. Never one for frippery, she was intensely bored, but she wanted to hear them talking about the death of Madame Morrible. She was waiting for the reviews, as it were. And she would never come back to Shiz, she suspected, nor to any other city. This was her last chance to see Loyal Oz in action.

As the afternoon wore on, however, she began to worry. What if there was a cover-up? What if the current Head, to avoid scandal, hushed up the news of the assault? Especially a crime against one so close to the Emperor? The Witch began to fret that she would be denied the credit for her deed. She racked her brains for someone to confess to, someone who would be sure to rush to the authorities. What about Crope, or Shenshen, or Pfannee? Or, for that matter, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, nasty Avaric?

The town house of the Margreave was set out in the deer park at the edge of Shiz. It was late afternoon by the time she reached the Emperor’s Green, as it was now called. Private residences were dotted about the expanse, each protected by its own security force, high walls lined with broken glass bottles, fierce dogs. The Witch had a way with dogs and high walls didn’t bother her. She welcomed herself over the wall onto a terrace, where a maid tending a floxflower bed had a conniption and resigned on the spot. The Witch found Avaric in his study, signing some documents with a huge plumed pen, and sipping some honey-colored whiskey in a crystal glass. “I said that I won’t come out for cocktails, you’re on your own, can’t you listen?” he began, but then he saw who it was.

“However did you get in here without being announced?” he said. “I know you. Don’t I?”

“Of course you do, Avaric. I’m the green girl of Crage Hall.”

“Oh yes. What was your name?”

“My name was Elphaba.”

He lit a lamp—the afternoon was darkening, or perhaps clouding over now—and they looked at each other. “Have a seat, then. I suppose if society forces itself in one’s study door, one has no further right to deny it. A drink?”

“A wee one.”

Alone of them all, he, who had been too handsome to believe, had grown better looking. He wore his hair swept back; it was rich and full, the color of polished nickel, and he clearly had the benefit of a life of exercise and rest, for his figure was strong and slim, his bearing erect, his color good. Those born with advantages know how to capitalize on them, observed the Witch, after her first sip.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he said, seating himself across from her with a freshened drink in his own hands. “Or is the whole world playing reprises today?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I had a walk at noon,” he said, “in the park, with my bodyguards, as usual. And I came across a carnival entertainment set up there. It opens tomorrow, I think, and the park will be mobbed with clever students, household servants and factory workers, and with greasy gabbling families from Little Glikkus. There were the usual cast of children caught up in the allure of a good circus act, mostly teenage boys helping out, no doubt having run away from tiresome families and small provincial towns. But the guy in charge was a bloody little dwarf.”

“Bloody, how do you mean?” asked the Witch.

“I mean offensive, pardon my slang. We’ve all seen dwarves before, that’s not the point. It’s just that I had seen this very dwarf before. I recognized him from years ago.”

“Fancy that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have thought anything more of it, but then you show up this afternoon from more or less the same zone of memory. Weren’t you there, yourself? Didn’t you go with us to the Philosophy Club that night, we got so drunk, and they had that charmed-sex thing, and that effeminate Tibbett got so wasted and lost his mind and just about everything else when that Tiger . . . ? You were there, surely.”

“I don’t think I was.”

“Weren’t you? Boq was, squiggly little Boq, and Pfannee, and Fiyero, I think, and some others. Don’t you remember? There was that hag who called herself Yackle, and the dwarf, and they let us in, and they were so creepy? Anyway, doesn’t matter—it’s just—”

“Not Yackle,” said the Witch. She dropped her drink. “This is insanity, my ears are having delusions. Everyone is right, I’m paranoid. No, Avaric, I refuse to admit you could remember someone’s name for twenty years like that.”

“She was a balding gypsy woman with a wig, and sort of chestnut-colored eyes, in thick with this dwarf. I don’t know what he was called. Why shouldn’t I remember it?”

“You didn’t remember my name.”

“You didn’t scare me half as much. In fact you never scared me.” He laughed. “I was probably pretty nasty to you. I was an asshole back then.”

“You still are.”

“Well, practice makes perfect, and more than once I’ve been called a perfect asshole.”

“I came by to tell you that I killed Madame Morrible today,” said the Witch. She was so proud of the phrase; it seemed less false when said aloud. Maybe it was true. “I killed her. I wanted someone who would be believed to know about it.”

“Oh, why ever did you do that?”

“You know, the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.” She sat up a little straighter. “Because she deserved it.”

“The Avenging Angel of Justice is now green?”

“A pretty good disguise, don’t you think?” They both grinned.

“So about this Madame Morrible, whom you claim to have killed? Did you know that she gathered your friends and associates together and gave us a little lecture after you’d run away?”

“You were never my friend.”

“I was too near to be excused. I remember the situation. Nessarose was mortified and shattered by the whole thing. Madame Morrible took out your records and read to us a profile of your character as assessed by your various teachers. We were warned about your spikiness, your fringiness, what were the words they used? I can’t remember that, they weren’t memorable words. But we were told you might try to recruit us in some sort of juvenile attempt to galvanize some sort of student uprising. You were to be avoided at all costs.”

“And Nessarose was mortified, well, that figures,” said the Witch grimly.

“Glinda too,” said Avaric. “She went through another slide, like the one she went into after Doctor Dillamond fell on his magnifying lens—”

“Oh please, is that hoary old lie still in circulation?”

“—oh all right, was brutally murdered by brigands unknown, have it your way. Brigands in the form of Madame Morrible, that’s what you mean me to suppose. So why really did you do it?”

“Madame Morrible had a choice. No one was better placed than she to see that her students got an education and not a brainwashing. By hooking up with the Emerald City, she sold out all her students who believed that a liberal education meant learning to think for themselves. Besides, she was a vile fiend, and she did conspire to have Doctor Dillamond murdered. No matter what you say.”

But the Witch stopped herself short, hearing in her words about Madame Morrible—she had a choice—an echo of what the Elephant Princess Nastoya had once said to her: No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst—there is always choice.

Avaric was rattling on. “And you’ve had her murdered. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as we boys used to chant on the playground, usually when we were on the ground with someone’s knee on our groin. Why don’t you stay for a meal? We’ve got guests, a clever bunch.”

“So you can call the police? No thanks.”

“I won’t call the police. You and I, we’re above petulant justice like that.”

The Witch believed him. “All right,” she said. “Who are you married to, by the way? Did you get married to Pfannee, or Shenshen, or someone else? I can’t remember.”

“Whoever,” said Avaric, pouring another finger of whiskey. “I can’t keep small details in my mind, never could.”

The Margreave’s pantry was fulsome, his cook a genius, and his wine cellar unparalleled. The guests tucked into snails and garlic, roast crest of fallowhen with cilantro and clementine chutney, and the Witch allowed herself a sumptuous helping of lime tart with saffron cream. The crystal goblets were never empty. The conversation was exalted and loopy, and by the time the Margreavess led them to the comfortable chairs in the drawing room, the plaster appliqué on the ceiling seemed to swirl like the cigarette smoke.

“Why, you’re flushed,” said Avaric. “You ought to have been a tippler all along, Elphaba.”

“I’m not sure red wine agrees with me,” she said.

“You’re in no condition to go anywhere. The maid will do up one of the corner rooms. It’s lovely, there’s a view clear to the pagoda on the island.”

“I don’t care for prepared views.”

“Don’t you want to wait for the morning papers, to see if they got it right? If they got it at all?”

“I’ll ask you to send me one. No, I must go, I feel the need of some fresh air. Avaric—Madame—friends—it’s been a surprise and I suppose a pleasure.” But she felt grudging as she said it.

“A pleasure to some,” said the Margreavess, who hadn’t approved of the conversation. “I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion.”

“Oh, but come,” the Witch said, “is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to ask ourselves such serious questions?”

“Well, I stick with my suggestion,” said Avaric. “Evil isn’t doing bad things, it’s feeling bad about them afterward. There’s no absolute value to behavior. First of all—”

“Institutional inertia,” claimed the Witch. “But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?”

“That’s why I say it’s merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed,” said a copper magnate. “And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible.”

“It’s an absence of good, that’s all,” said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz Informer. “The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.”

“Pigspittle,” said Avaric. “Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn’t progress . . .”

“I think it’s a presence, not an absence,” said an artist. “Evil’s
an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us.”

“Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?”

“Oh go on with you,” said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity.”

“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty . . .”

“It’s a power, like wind . . .”

“It’s an infection . . .”

“It’s metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation—”

“Blame it on the Unnamed God, then.”

“But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?”

“It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less—”

“I like pain, if I’m wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me—”

“No, you’re all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart—the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience—”

“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”

“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite.”

“I won’t have this talk in my drawing room,” said the Margreavess, near tears. “You’ve been behaving all night as if an old woman hadn’t been slaughtered in her bedclothes. Didn’t she have a mother too? Didn’t she have a soul?”

Avaric yawned and said, “You’re so tender and naive. When it’s not embarrassing it’s quite appealing.”

The Witch stood up, sat down quickly, and stood up again, aided by her broom.

“Why did you do it?” asked the hostess with spirit.

The Witch shrugged. “For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”

But as she wobbled toward the door, she said, “You know, you’re all a pack of fools. You ought to have turned me in instead of entertaining me all evening.”

“You entertained us,” said Avaric broadly, gallantly. “This’ll end up being the dinner party of the season. Even if you’ve been lying all evening about killing this old schoolmarm. What a treat.” The dinner guests drolly applauded her.

“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it—the human side, say—and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”

8

The moon was up again, a little less swollen than the night before. The Witch didn’t trust herself to ride on the broom, so she meandered in a zigzaggy way across the greensward. She would find a place to nap outside of the claustrophobia of a society den.

She came upon the construction that Avaric had talked about. It was an old, early tiktok thing, a sort of portable stupa made of carved wood and figurines, too variegated and numerous for the Witch to comprehend tonight. Perhaps there was a running board where she could rest underneath, a platform elevated just a couple of inches off the dampish ground. She peered, and moved forward.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

A Munchkinlander, no, a dwarf, stood in her way. He had a cudgel in one hand, and was thwacking it into the thick leathery palm of his other hand.

“Going to sleep, when I can,” she said. “So you’re the dwarf, and this is the thing Avaric talked about.”

“The Clock of the Time Dragon,” he said, “open for business tomorrow night, and not until.”

“I’ll be dead and gone by tomorrow night,” she said.

“No you won’t,” he answered.

“Well, gone anyway.” She looked at it and straightened up, then something came back to her. “I wonder how you knew Yackle,” she said.

“Oh, Yackle,” he said. “Who doesn’t know Yackle? Not such a surprise.”

“Was she killed today?” said the Witch. “By any chance?”

“No chance,” he answered.

“Who are you?” She was afraid, suddenly, after all this headiness of sorrow and violence.

“Oh, the least significant little one,” he said.

“Who do you work for?”

“Who haven’t I worked for?” said the dwarf. “The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man. But I have no name in this world, so don’t bother with me.”

“I’m drunk and disorderly,” she said, “and I cannot take any more riddles. I killed someone today, I can kill you too.”

“You didn’t kill her, she was already dead,” said the dwarf calmly. “And you can’t kill me, for I’m immortal. But you try very hard at life, and so I will tell you this. I am the guardian of the book, and I was brought to this dreaded, forsaken land to watch over the book’s history, to keep it from getting back to where it comes from. I am not good, I am not bad; but I am locked here, condemned to a deathless life to guard the book. I don’t care what happens to you or anyone else, but I protect the book: that is my charge.”

“The book?” She was struggling to understand; she felt drunker the more she heard.

“What you call the Grimmerie. It has other names—no matter.”

“Then why don’t you take it, why don’t you have it?”

“I don’t work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives. I interfere only to keep the book safe. To some extent I can see what’s coming, and to that extent I meddle in the affairs of men and beasts.” He jigged like a little fiend. “You see me here, you see me there. Having second sight is a great advantage in the security business.”

“You work with Yackle.”

“We sometimes have the same intentions, and we sometimes do not. Her interest seems to be different from mine.”

“Who is she? What is her interest? Why do you hover at the edges of my life?”

“In the world I come from, there are guardian angels,” said the dwarf, “but so far as I can work it out, she is an opposite number, and her concern is you.”

“Why do I deserve such a fiend? Why is my life so plagued? Who positioned her to influence my life?”

“There are things I don’t know, and things I do,” said the dwarf. “Who Yackle answers to, if anyone, if anything, is beyond my realm of knowledge or interest. But why you? You must know this. For you”—the dwarf spoke in a bright, offhand tone—“are neither this nor that—or shall I say both this and that? Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. Can you be so dull that you have not figured this out?”

“Show me something,” she said. “I do not know what you mean. Show me something the world hasn’t shown me yet.”

“For you, a pleasure.” He disappeared, and there was the sound of mechanical parts being wound up, moving against one another, the grind of lubricated gears, the slap of leather belts, the chuck-chuck of pendulums swinging. “A private audience with the Time Dragon itself.”

At the top, a beast prowled, flexing its wings in a dance of gestures, both bidding welcome and holding at bay. The Witch stared.

A small area halfway up was illuminated. “A three-act play,” came the voice of the dwarf, from deep within. “Act One: The Birth of Holiness.”

Later she could not have said how she knew what it was, but what she saw, in an abbreviated pantomime, was the life of Saint Aelphaba. The good woman, the mystic and recluse, who disappeared to pray behind a waterfall. The Witch flinched to see the saint walk straight through the waterfall (a guttering spout overhead drained real water out into a hidden tray below). She waited for the tiktok saint to come out, but she didn’t come, and eventually the lights went out.

“Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

“Wait, the Saint didn’t emerge as the tales say she did,” said the Witch. “I want my money’s worth or not at all, please.”

“Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

Lights came up on another little stage. There was a credible likeness of Colwen Grounds painted on a cardboard backdrop beyond. A figurine who was Melena kissed her parents good-bye and went off with Frex, a handsome little puppet with a short black beard and a jaunty step. They stopped in a small hut, and Frex kissed her and continued on to preach. All through the rest of the scene he was off to one side, yammering away to some peasants who were busy screwing each other on the ground before him, hacking each other to pieces and eating their sexual parts, which ran with a real gravy; you could smell the garlic and sauteed mushrooms. Melena, at home, yawned and waited, and teased her pretty hair. Along came a man whom the Witch could not identify at first. He had a small black bag and from it he extracted a green glass bottle. He gave it to Melena to drink, and when she had, she fell into his arms, either stupefied and drunk as the Witch was tonight, or liberated. It wasn’t clear. The traveler and Melena made love in the same bouncy rhythm as Frex’s parishioners. Frex started to dance to the rhythm himself. Then, when the act of love was done, the traveler pulled himself off Melena. He snapped his fingers, and a balloon with a basket beneath descended from the fly space above. The traveler got in. It was the Wizard.

“Oh, nonsense,” said the Witch. “This is pure poppycock.”

The lights dimmed. The voice of the dwarf sounded from inside the contraption. “Act Three,” he said. “The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked.”

She waited, but no area was illuminated, no puppet moved.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” he answered.

“Where’s the end of the play?”

He stuck his head out of a trap door and winked at her. “Who said the end was written yet?” he answered, and slammed the door shut. Another door opened, just by the Witch’s hand, and a tray slid out. Lying on it was an oval looking glass, cracked along one side, scratched on its surfaces. It looked like the glass she had had since childhood, the one she used to imagine she could see the Other Land in, back when she believed in such a thing. The last she remembered of the oval glass was in her hideaway digs in the Emerald City. Inside the glass lived reflections of a young and beautiful Fiyero, and a young and impassioned Fae. The Witch took the mirror and hid it in her apron, and wandered away.

There was nothing in the morning papers about the death of Madame Morrible. The Witch, with a treacherous headache, decided that she could wait no longer. Either Avaric and his beastly companions would spread the rumors, or they wouldn’t. There was nothing left to be done.

Just let word get to the Wizard, though, said the Witch to herself. I would like to be a fly on the wall of his bunker when that happens. Let him think I killed her. Let that be how the news goes.

9

She returned to Munchkinland in a punishing journey, exhausting herself. She had slept so little, and her head still throbbed. But she was proud of herself. She arrived in the front yard of Boq’s cottage, and called for the family to come.

Boq was out in the field, and one of his children had to be dispatched to fetch him. When he came running, he had an adze in one hand. “I wasn’t expecting you, it took me a minute,” he said, panting.

“You’d have run quicker if you’d left your blade behind,” she noted.

But he didn’t drop it. “Elphie, why have you come back?”

“To tell you what I have done,” she said. “I thought you would like to know. I have killed Madame Morrible, and she can no longer harm anyone.”

But Boq did not look pleased. “You took against that old woman?” he said. “Surely she was beyond the point of hurting anyone now?”

“You’ve made the mistake that everyone makes,” said the Witch, cruelly disappointed. “Don’t you know there is no such point?”

“You had worked to protect the Animals,” said Boq. “But you did not intend to sink to the level of those who brutalized them.”

“I have fought fire with fire,” said the Witch, “and I ought to have done it sooner! Boq, you’ve become an equivocating fool.”

“Children,” said Boq, “run inside and find your mother.”

He was scared of her.

“You’re sitting on the fence,” she said. “Here your precious Munchkinland is going to be sucked back into the folds of Royal Oz, under His Highness the Emperor Wizard. And you see what Glinda is up to, and you send that child on her way with the shoes that belong to me. You took a stand when you were young, Boq! How can you have—spoiled so!”

“Elphie,” said Boq, “look at me. You are beside yourself. Have you been drinking? Dorothy is just a child. You may not retell this to make her into some sort of fiend!”

Milla, alerted to the tension in the front yard, came out and stood behind Boq. She carried a kitchen knife. Whispering noisily, the children watched from the window.

“You do not need to defend yourselves with knives and adzes,” said the Witch coldly. “I had thought you would care to know about Madame Morrible.”

“You are shaking,” said Boq. “Look, I will put down this thing. Clearly you are upset. Nessa’s death has been hard on you. But you must get control of yourself, Elphie. Don’t take against Dorothy. She is an innocent creature. She’s all alone. I beg of you.”

“Oh, don’t beg, don’t beg,” said the Witch, “I could not abide begging, from you, of all people!” She ground her teeth and clenched her fists. “I will promise you nothing, Boq!”

And this time she got on her broom and flew away. Recklessly, she mounted the sides of air currents, until the ground below had lost any detail sharp enough to cause her pain.

She was beginning to feel too long away from Kiamo Ko. Liir was an idiot, headstrong and lily-livered by turns, and Nanny sometimes forgot where she was. The Witch didn’t want to think about yesterday, the death of Madame Morrible, the accusations made by the puppet play. She could hardly be more averse to the Wizard than she already was; if there was a shred of possibility to that sick idea of his having fathered her, it only made her hate him the more. She would ask Nanny about it when she got home.

When she got home. She was thirty-eight, and just realizing what it felt like to have a sense of home. For that, Sarima, thank you, she thought. Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

But she decided to head toward Kiamo Ko by following the Yellow Brick Road. She would make one last try for the shoes. She had nothing left to lose. If the shoes fell into the hands of the Wizard, he would use them to bolster his claim to Munchkinland. Maybe, if she tried, she could shrug her shoulders and leave Munchkinland to its own fate—but damn it, the shoes were hers.

She finally found a peddler who had seen Dorothy. He stopped by the side of his wagon and rubbed the ears of his donkey as he discussed it with her. “She passed here a few hours ago,” he said, chewing on a carrot and sharing it with the donkey. “No, she wasn’t alone. She had a ragamuffin crew of friends with her. Bodyguards, I suspect.”

“Oh, the poor frightened thing,” said the Witch. “Who? Munchkinlander beefcake boys, I wonder?”

“Not exactly,” said the peddler. “There was a straw man, and a tin woodman, and a big cat who hid in the bushes when I passed—a leopard maybe, or a cougar.”

“A man of straw?” said the Witch. “She’s awakening the figures of myth, she’s charming them to life? This must be some attractive child. Did you notice her shoes?”

“I wanted to buy them from her.”

“Yes! Yes, did you?”

“Not for sale. She seemed very attached to them. They were given her by a Good Witch.”

“Pigspittle, they were.”

“None of my affair either way,” said the peddler. “Can I interest you in anything?”

“An umbrella,” said the Witch. “I’ve come out without one, and it looks nasty.”

“I remember the good old days of the drought,” said the peddler, fishing out a somewhat worn umbrella. “Ah, here’s the bumbershoot. Yours for a nickel florin.”

“Mine for free,” said the Witch. “You wouldn’t deny a poor old woman in need, would you, my friend?”

“Not and live to tell about it, I see,” he answered, and went on his way uncompensated.

But as the wagon passed, the Witch heard another voice: “Of course, no one asks a beast of burden, but it’s my opinion she’s Ozma come out of the deep sleep chamber, and marching on Oz to restore herself to the throne.”

“I hate royalists,” said the peddler, and lashed out with a crop. “I hate Animals with attitude.” But the Witch could not stop to intervene. So far she had been unable to save Nor, she had been incompetent at bargaining with the Wizard. She had been a moment too late to murder Madame Morrible—or had she been just in time? Either way, she should not try what was clearly beyond her.

10

The Witch trembled on the lip of an updraft. She had brought the broom higher than ever before; she was in a state of exhilaration and panic. Should she pursue Dorothy, should she snatch those shoes away—and what were her real motives? Was it to keep them out of the hands of the Wizard, just as Glinda had wanted them out of the hands of power-hungry Munchkinlanders? Or was it to snatch back some small shred of Frex’s attention, whether she had ever deserved it or not?

Beneath the broom, clouds began to gauze the view of rock-freckled hills and patchwork meadows of melon and corn. The thin twists of vapor looked like the marks of erasure made by a schoolchild’s rubber, streaking whitely along a watercolor sketch of a landscape. What if she should just keep on, urging the broom higher, yanking it up? Would it splinter as it beat itself against the heavens?

She could give up these efforts. She could forsake Nor. She could release Liir. She could abandon Nanny. She could surrender Dorothy. She could give up the shoes.

But a wind came up, a shoulder of hard air leaning onto her left side. She could not force the broom against it. She was driven sideways, and down, until the Yellow Brick Road once again etched a golden thread between forests and fields. There was a storm on the horizon, slotting bars of brownish rain between lavender-gray clouds and gray-green fields. She hadn’t much time.

Then she thought she caught sight of them below, and dove down to see. Were they stopping to rest beneath a black willow tree? If so, she could finish things up now.

11

By the time the storm lifted—and the Witch awoke from what she now identified as a horrible hangover—she wasn’t sure it was the same day. She wasn’t even sure she had gotten near them—could she have let them slip through her fingers like that? But whatever the case, delusion or foggy memory, the Witch didn’t dare follow them into the Emerald City. Madame Morrible had many friends in this rotten regime, and the news would have gotten through by now. There might even be search parties out for the Witch. So be it.

Though it galled her, for the time being she had to give up on the idea of reclaiming Nessa’s shoes. She scarcely rested during the entire trip back to Kiamo Ko, except to stop and pick some berries, and nibble some nuts and sweet roots, to keep her strength up.

The castle had not been burned down. The Wizard’s reconnaissance army was still camped at its outpost near Red Windmill in a state of bored readiness. Nanny was busy crocheting a pretty casket cover for her own funeral, and making guest lists. Most of the guests were already in the Other Land, presuming that for Nanny there was an Other Land. “How nice it would be to see Ama Clutch again, I quite agree,” shouted the Witch, giving Nanny’s shoulders a squeeze. “I always liked her. She had more character than that simpering Glinda.”

“You were devoted to Glinda, you were,” said Nanny. “Everyone knew it.”

“Well, no more,” said the Witch. “The traitor.”

“You smell of blood, go wash up,” said Nanny. “Is it your time?”

“I never wash, you know that. Where’s Liir?”

“Who?”

“Liir.”

“Oh, around somewhere.” She smiled. “Look in the fishwell!”

By now an old family joke.

“What new nonsense is this?” said the Witch, finding Liir in the music room.

“They were right all along,” he said. “Look what I finally caught, after all these years.”

It was the golden carp that had long haunted the fishwell. “Oh, I admit that it was dead and I brought it up with the bucket, not a hook or a net. But even so. Do you think we’ll ever be able to tell them we finally caught it?”

All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.

“We can only hope so,” she said. She wondered, faintly, if it was
immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked? “Everything else was all right while I was gone?”

“Just fine,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re back.”

She grunted, and went to greet Chistery and the chattering kin.

In her room she hung the old glass with a cord and a nail, and kept from looking at it. She had the horrible feeling that she would see Dorothy, and she didn’t want to see her again. The child reminded her of someone. It was that unquestioning directness, that gaze unblinkered by shame. She was as natural as a raccoon—or a fern—or a comet. The Witch thought: Is it Nor? Is it that Dorothy reminds me of how Nor was at this age?

But back then the Witch had not cared for Nor, not really, even though her face had been a small, velvet reworking of Fiyero’s. Except for Nessarose, and Shell, the Witch had never warmed to the glowing promise of children. She had always felt more alone in this regard than in her color.

No—and now her glance did fall on the tired old looking glass, despite her intentions. She thought: the Witch with her mirror. Who do we ever see but ourselves, and that’s the curse—Dorothy reminds me of myself, at that age, whatever it is . . .

. . . The time in Ovvels. There is the green girl, shy, gawky, and humiliated. To avoid the pain of damp feet, splashing around in clammy leggings made of swampcalf hide and waterproof boots. Mama, pregnant with Shell, huge as a barge. Mama praying nonstop for months that she might at last bring a healthy child into the world. Mama dumping the bottles of liquor and the pinlobble leaves into the mud.

Nanny tends to little Nessa, papoosing her around in the daily hunt for charfish, needle flowers, and broad bean vines. Nessa can see but she cannot touch: what a curse for a child! (No wonder she believed in things she couldn’t see—nothing is provable by touch.) For his atonement, Papa takes the green girl with him on an expedition to the relatives of Turtle Heart, a many-branched family living in a nest of huts and walkways suspended in a grove of broad, rotting suppletrees. The Quadlings, who are more comfortable on their haunches, duck their heads. The smell of raw fish in their homes, on their skin. They are frightened of the unionist minister, finding them out in their squalid hamlet. I have no firm memory of individuals, but for one old matriarch, toothless and proud.

The Quadlings come up, after a period of shyness, not to the minister but to me, the green girl. She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she, impenetrably mysterious and dense—she stands as Dorothy stood, some inborn courage making her spine straight, her eyes unblinking. Her shoulders back, her hands at her side. Submissive to the stroke of their fingers on her face. Unflinching in the cause of missionary work.

Papa asks forgiveness for the death of Turtle Heart, maybe some five years earlier. He says it is his fault. He and his wife had both fallen in love with the Quadling glassblower. What can I give you to make up for it, he says. Elphaba the girl thinks he is mad, she thinks they are not listening, they are mesmerized by her weirdness. Please forgive me, he says.

The matriarch alone responds to these words; maybe she is the only one who actually remembers Turtle Heart. She has a look of someone caught venturing out from beneath a rock. Well, in a people whose moral code is so lax, so little is wrong. For her this encounter is a mysterious, complicated transaction.

She says something like, We don’t shrive, we don’t shrive, and not for Turtle Heart, no, and she strikes Papa on the face with a reed, cutting him with thin stripes. I was only a witness, I was not really alive then, but I saw: This was when Papa began to lose his way, it dates from this whipping.

I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable. He blanches, onion white behind the blood-pearled perforations of her attack. Maybe she has every right to do what she’s done, but in Papa’s life she’s become old Kumbricia.

I see her, willful, proud: Her moral system doesn’t allow for forgiveness, and she is just as incarcerated as he, but she doesn’t know it. She grins, all gums and menace, and rests the reed on her collarbone, where its fletching tip falls like a necklace around her own neck.

He points to me, and says—not to me, but to them all—Isn’t this punishment enough?

Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.

I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame. Neither Dorothy nor young Elphaba can speak of this, but the belief of it is in both our faces . . .

The Witch had taken the green glass bottle, whose label still read MIRACLE ELI-, and placed it on her bedside table. She took a spoonful of the ancient elixir before sleeping, hoping for miracles, seeking some version of the fabulous alibi Dorothy was unwinding, that she had come from a country somehow other—not the real states across the desert, but a whole separate geophysical existence. Even metaphysical. The Wizard made such a claim for himself, and if the dwarf was right, the Witch had this ancestry too. At night she tried to train herself to look on the periphery of her dreams, to note the details. It was a little like trying to see around the edges of a mirror, but, she found, more rewarding.

But what did she get? Everything flickered, like a guttering candle but more harshly, more stridently. People moved in short, jerky motions. They were colorless, they were vapid, they were drugged, they were manic. Buildings were high and cruel. Winds were strong. The Wizard stepped in and out of these pictures, a very humble-looking man in this context. In one window, in a shop from which the Wizard was emerging rather dejectedly, she thought, she caught some words once, and willed herself with tremendous effort to wake up so she could write them down. But they didn’t make any sense to her. NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

Then one night she had a nightmare. Again the Wizard began it. He walked over some hills of sand, with tall gray grasses blowing in a fierce gale—a thousand thousand grasses like the scratchy sedge with which the old Quadling matriarch had struck Frex—and the Wizard stopped along a broad flat stretch. He stepped out of his clothes, and looked at a timepiece in his hands, as if memorizing an historic instant. Then he walked forward, naked and broken. When the Witch realized what he was approaching, she tried to back out of the dream with a howl, but could not manage to disengage herself. This was the mythical ocean, and the Wizard walked into water up to his knees, his thighs, his waist; he paused and shivered, and slopped water over the rest of himself as a kind of penance. Then he kept walking, and disappeared entirely into the sea, as Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall had disappeared behind her watery veil. The sea rocked like an earthquake, vomiting against the sandy shore, pounding in a kettledrum commotion. There was no Other Side to it. It threw the Wizard back, again and again, though again and again he forged in, more and more exhausted. The stoicism, the determination: no wonder he had managed to overcome a nation. The dream ended with him washed back on shore one last time, weeping with frustration.

She woke, gagging, terrified beyond telling, salt in her nostrils. Thereafter she avoided the miracle elixir. Instead, she concocted a potion derived both from Nanny’s recipe book and the Grimmerie’s marginalia, on how to keep awake. If she fell asleep again, she would be prey to that vision of earthly destruction, and she would rather die.

Nanny didn’t have very much to say about nightmares. “Your mother had them too,” she remarked at last. “She used to say she saw the unknown city of anger in her dreams. She was so enraged over how you turned out, you know—I mean physically, dear, don’t look like that at me: a green girl isn’t easy for any mother to explain away—that she gulped down those pills like candy when Nessarose was expected. If Nessarose were still around to take up a grudge, she could blame you, in a way, for what happened to her.”

“But where did you get that green bottle?” said the Witch into Nanny’s good ear. “Look at it, Nanny dear, and try to remember.”

“I suspect I bought it at a jumble sale,” she said. “I could stretch a penny, believe me.”

You could stretch the truth even further, thought the Witch. She suppressed a desire to smash the green glass. How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are, thought the Witch. None of us breaks free.

12

One afternoon a few weeks later, Liir came back from a ramble all hot and bothered. The Witch hated to hear that he had been hobnobbing again with the Wizard’s soldiers down in Red Windmill.

“They had news, a dispatch from the Emerald City,” he said. “A delegation of strangers got in to see the Wizard. And just a girl! Dorothy, they said, a girl from the Other Land. And some friends. The Wizard hasn’t allowed an audience with his subjects in years—he works through ministers, they say. A lot of soldiers think he died long ago, and it’s a Palace plot to safeguard the peace. But Dorothy and her friends got in, and they saw him, and told everyone what it was like!”

“Well well,” said the Witch. “Imagine that. All of Oz, Loyal and Otherwise, is yapping about this Dorothy. What did the fools say next?”

“The dispatch soldier said that the guests asked the Wizard to grant them some wishes. The Scarecrow asked for a brain, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman asked for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion asked for courage.”

“And I suppose Dorothy asked for a shoe horn?”

“Dorothy asked to be sent home.”

“I hope she gets her wish. And?”

But Liir got coy.

“Oh come on, I’m too old to be put off my supper by gossip,” she snapped.

Liir looked flushed with guilty pleasure. “The soldiers said that the Wizard had rejected the odd requests.”

“And you’re so very surprised?”

“The Wizard told Dorothy that he would grant them their wishes—when they had—when they had—”

“You haven’t stuttered in years. Don’t start again, or I’ll beat you.”

“Dorothy and his friends have to come here and kill you,” he finished. “The soldiers said it’s because you murdered an old lady in Shiz, a famous old lady, and you’re an assassin. Also you’re crazy, they said.”

“I’m a more likely murderer than those incompetent vagabonds could be,” she said. “He was just trying to get rid of them. Probably he’s instructed his own Gale Forcers to slit the girl’s throat as soon as she’s safely out of the limelight.” And no doubt the Wizard had confiscated the shoes. It galled her. But how flattered she felt that the news of her attack had gotten out. By now she was sure she had killed Madame Morrible. It only made sense that she had.

But Liir shook his head. “The funny thing,” he said, “is that Dorothy is called Dorothy Gale. The soldiers at Red Windmill said the Gale Forcers wouldn’t touch her, they’re too superstitious.”

“What do these soldiers know of intrigue, stationed here out at the edge of the moon?”

Liir shrugged. “Aren’t you impressed that the Wizard of Oz even knows who you are? Are you a murderer?”

“Oh Liir, you’ll understand when you’re older. Or anyway not understanding will become second nature, and it won’t matter. I wouldn’t harm you, if that’s what you mean. But you sound so surprised that I should be known in the Emerald City. Just because you disobey me and treat me like refuse, do you think the whole world does?” Yet she was pleased. “But you know, Liir, if there’s even the slightest chance that there’s any truth to these rumors, you had better stay away from Red Windmill for a while. They might kidnap you and hold you for ransom until I give myself up to this schoolgirl and her needy companions.”

“I want to meet Dorothy,” he said.

“You’re not that age already, please preserve us,” she said. “I always intended to pickle you before you got to puberty.”

“Well, I’m not getting kidnapped, so don’t worry,” he said. “Besides, I want to be here when they get here.”

“Worry is the last thing I’d do if you got kidnapped,” she answered. “It’d be your own damn fault, and a great relief to me to have one less mouth to feed.”

“Oh well, then who’d carry the firewood up all those stairs every winter?”

“I’ll hire that Nick Chopper fellow. His axe looks pretty sharp to me.”

“You’ve seen him?” Liir’s mouth dropped open. “No, you haven’t!”

“I have, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Who says I don’t travel in the best circles?”

“What’s she like?” he said, his face eager and bright. “You must have seen Dorothy too. What’s she like, Auntie Witch?”

“Don’t you Auntie me, you know that makes me sick.”

He pestered without stopping until finally she had to screech at him. “She’s a beautiful little dolt who believes everything everybody says to her! And if she gets here and you tell her you love her, she’ll probably believe you! Now get out of here, I have work to do!”

He lingered at the door, and said, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?”

“A little peace and quiet.”

“No, really.”

She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—”

He blinked at her.

“And you?” she said in a quieter voice. “What do you want Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?”

“A father,” he answered.

13

She wondered, briefly, if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and thought about what she had said.

A person who doesn’t believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can’t believe in a soul.

If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?

The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

Perhaps in our age’s generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.

For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick.

More appealing—she now saw, for once—the old-timers’ notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can’t ever be suspected of a surprise visit.

And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?

14

Sometimes she napped, against her will, her chin sagging on her chest, sometimes driving right down to the tabletop, jarring her teeth and rattling her jaw, and startling herself awake.

She had taken to standing at the window, looking down in the valley. It would be weeks before Dorothy and her band arrived, if indeed they hadn’t already been murdered and their corpses burned, just as Sarima’s must have been.

One night Liir came back from a visit to the barracks. He was teary and inarticulate, and she tried not to care about it, but was too curious to let it go. Finally he told her. One of the soldiers had proposed to his fellows that when Dorothy and friends arrive, the friends be killed and Dorothy be tied up for a little amusement among the lonely, randy men.

“Oh, men will have their fantasies,” said the Witch, but she was troubled.

What had made Liir cry was that his friends had reported the soldier’s remarks to their superior. The soldier had been stripped and castrated, and nailed to the windmill. His body rotated in circles as the vultures came and tried to peck at his entrails. He still wasn’t even dead.

“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.” But she was struck at the vehemence of the Commander’s response against one of his own. So Dorothy might well be alive still, and was apparently under orders of protection from the highest military offices in the land.

Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir.

“Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?”

Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.

She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight?

If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she?

They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence.

She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow.

She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.

She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other effect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.”

It would take brains to think up such a plan.

She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would be able to find them, and lead them home rejoicing.

And though she tried not to sleep, on occasion she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.

15

There was a day, in the first gusts of autumn, that the banners and standards of the camp below were shifted and bugles blew tinnily up the slopes to the castle. By this the Witch guessed that the troupe had arrived in Red Windmill, and were being given a royal welcome. “They’ve come so far, they won’t wait now,” she said. “Go, Killyjoy, go find them and show them the quickest way here.”

She loosed the senior dog, and so strong were his exhortations that the entire pack of his kin went racing along with him, howling with joy and frantic to do their duty.

“Nanny,” cried the Witch, “put on a clean petticoat and change your apron, we’ll have company by nightfall!”

But the dogs didn’t come back, all afternoon and into the gloaming, and the Witch could see why. With a telescopic eye in a cylindrical casing—invented by the Witch along the lines of Doctor Dillamond’s discovery about opposing lenses—she followed a shock of carnage. Dorothy and the Lion trembled with the Scarecrow beyond while the Tin Woodman struck the heads of her beasts one after the other with his axe. Killyjoy and his wolfy relations lay scattered like dead soldiers on a field of retreat.

The Witch danced with rage, and summoned Liir. “Your dog is dead, look what they did!” she cried. “Look and make sure that I didn’t only imagine it!”

“Well, I didn’t like that dog very much anymore,” said Liir. “He had a good long life, anyway.” He concurred, tremblingly, but then trained the glass on the slope again.

“You fool, that Dorothy is not for messing with!” she cried, slapping the instrument out of his hand.

“You’re awfully on edge for someone about to have company,” he said sullenly.

“They are supposed to be coming to kill me, if you remember,” she said, although she had forgotten that, as she had forgotten her desire for the shoes until she saw them again in the glass. The Wizard had not demanded them of Dorothy! Why not? What fresh campaign of intrigue was this?

She wheeled about her room, whipping pages of the Grimmerie back and forth. She recited a spell, did it wrong, did it again, and then turned and tried to apply it to the crows. Though the original three crows had long since fallen stiffly from the top of the door frame, there were plenty of others in residence still, rather inbred and silly, but suggestible in a stupid, moblike way.

“Go,” she said. “Look with your eyes more closely than I can, pull the mask off the Scarecrow so we can know who he is. Get them for me. Peck out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion. And three of you, go on ahead to the old Princess Nastoya, out there in the Thousand Year Grasslands, for the time is coming when we will be reunited, all of us. With the help of the Grimmerie, the Wizard may topple at last!”

“I never know what you’re talking about anymore,” said Liir. “You can’t blind them!”

“Oh, watch me,” snarled the Witch. The crows blew away in a black cloud and dropped like buckshot through the sky, down the jagged precipices, until they came to the travelers.

“A pretty sunset, is there?” said Nanny, coming up to the Witch’s room in one of her rare forays, Chistery as always providing service.

“She’s sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!”

“What?”

“She’s BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!”

“Well, that’s one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”

“Will you lunatics hush up?” The Witch was twitching as if with a nervous disorder; her elbows flapped, as if she were a crow herself. She gave out a long howl when she found them in the glass.

“What, what, let me see,” said Liir, grabbing the thing. He explained to Nanny, because the Witch was almost beyond speech by now. “Well, I guess the Scarecrow knows how to scare crows, all right.”

“Why, what’s he done?”

“They’re not coming back, that’s all I’ll say,” said Liir, glancing at the Witch.

“It still could be him,” she said at last, breathing heavily. “You might get your wish yet, Liir.”

“My wish?” He didn’t remember asking for a father, and she didn’t bother to remind him. Nothing had yet suggested to her that the Scarecrow wasn’t a man in disguise. She would not need forgiveness if Fiyero had not died!

The light was failing, and the odd band of friends was making good time up the hill. They had come without an escort of soldiers, perhaps because the soldiers really believed that Kiamo Ko was run by a Wicked Witch.

“Come on, bees,” said the Witch, “work with me now. All together on this one, honeys. We need a little sting, we need a little zip, we want a little nasty, can you give us a little jab? No, not us, listen when I talk to you, you simpletons! The girl on the hill below. She’s after your Queen Bee! And when you’re through with your job, I’ll go down and collect those shoes.”

“What’s that old hag blathering about now?” said Nanny to Liir.

The bees were alert to the pitch in the Witch’s voice, and they rose to swarm out the window.

“You watch, I can’t look,” said the Witch.

“The moon is just like a pretty peach rising over the mountains,” said Nanny with the telescope to her old cataracted eye. “Why don’t we put in some peach trees instead of all those infernal apples in the back?”

“The bees, Nanny. Liir, take that from her and tell me what happens.”

Liir gave a blow-by-blow recounting. “They’re swooping down, they look like a genie or something, all flying in a big clump with a straggly tail. The travelers see them coming. Yes! Yes! The Scarecrow is taking straw out of his chest and leggings, and covering the Lion and Dorothy, and there’s a little dog, too. So the bees can’t get through the straw, and the Scarecrow is all in pieces on the ground.”

It couldn’t be. The Witch grabbed the eyepiece. “Liir, you are a filthy liar,” she shouted. Her heart roared like a wind.

But it was true. There was nothing but straw and air inside the Scarecrow’s clothes. No hidden lover returning, no last hope of salvation.

And the bees, having none left to attack but the Tin Woodman, flung themselves against him, and dropped in black heaps on the ground, like charred shadows, their stingers blunted on his fenders.

“You’ve got to give our guests credit for ingenuity,” said Liir.

“Will you shut up before I tie your tongue in a knot?” said the Witch.

“I suppose I should start down and get some hors d’oeuvres going, they’ll be peckish after these ordeals you’re setting them,” said Nanny. “Have you an opinion as to cheese and crackers or fresh vegetables with pepper sauce?”

“I say cheese,” said Liir.

“Elphaba? What’s your opinion?”

But she was too busy doing research in the Grimmerie. “It’s up to me, as always was the case,” said Nanny. “I get to do all the work. I’m supposed to be teary with joy, at my age. You’d think I could rest my feet for once, but no. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”

“Always the godfather, never the god,” said Liir.

“Will you two please have mercy on me! Now go on, Nanny, if you’re going!” Nanny headed out the door as fast as her old limbs could take her. The Witch said, “Chistery, let her go under her own steam, I need you here.”

“Sure, let me tumble to my death, delighted to be of service,” said Nanny. “It’s going to be cheese, for that.”

The Witch explained to Chistery what she wanted. “This is foolish. It’ll be dark before long, and they’ll tumble over some cliff and die. The poor dears, I’d rather not. I mean the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, they can tumble all they want, and not be much hurt, I imagine. A good tinsmith could repair a battered torso. But bring me Dorothy and the Lion. Dorothy has my shoes, and I have a rendezvous with the Lion. We’re old friends. Can you do this?”

Chistery squinted, nodded, shook his head, shrugged, spat.

“Well try, what good are you if you don’t try,” she said. “Off with you, and your cronies with you.”

She turned to Liir. “There, are you satisfied? I haven’t asked them to be killed. They’re being escorted here as our guests. I’ll get the shoes and let them go on their way. And then I’ll walk this Grimmerie into the mountains and live in a cave. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Who needs forgiveness now? Well?”

“They’re coming to kill you,” he said.

“Yes, and aren’t you just breathless with anticipation for that!”

“I’ll protect you,” he said, uneasily, and then added, “but not to the extent of harming Dorothy.”

“Oh, go set the table, and tell Nanny to forget the cheese and crackers, and go with the vegetables.” She shook her broom at him. “Go, I tell you, when I tell you to go!”

When she was alone, she sank in a heap. Either phenomenal luck lay with these travelers, or they had enough courage, brains, and heart among them to do quite well. She was taking the wrong approach, clearly. She should welcome the child, explain the situation nicely, and get the damned shoes while she could. With the shoes, with the help of the Princess Nastoya, maybe there would be vengeance against the Wizard yet. Anyway, the Grimmerie would be hidden. One way or the other. And the shoes removed outside the Wizard’s reach.

But the shock of the death of her familiars made her blood run cold inside her. She could feel her thoughts and intentions tumbling over and over one another. And she wasn’t really sure what she would do when face-to-face with Dorothy.

16

Liir and Nanny stood on either side of the doorway, smiling, when Chistery and his companions came down with an ill-judged whump, dumping their passengers onto the cobbles of the inner courtyard. The Lion moaned in pain and wept from vertigo. Dorothy sat up, clutching the small dog in her arms, and said, “And where might we be now?”

“Welcome,” said Nanny, genuflecting.

“Hello,” said Liir, twisting one foot around the other and falling over into a bucket of water.

“You must be tired after your long trip,” said Nanny. “Would you like to freshen up some before we have a little light meal? Nothing fancy, you know, we’re way off the beaten track.”

“This is Kiamo Ko,” said Liir, beet red and standing up again. “The stronghold of the Arjiki tribe.”

“This is still Winkie territory?” said the girl anxiously.

“What’d she say, the little poppins, tell her to speak up,” said Nanny.

“It’s called the Vinkus,” said Liir. “Winkie is a kind of insult.”

“Oh goodness, I wouldn’t want to offend anyone!” she said. “Mercy, no.”

“Aren’t you a pretty little girl, all your arms and legs in the right place, and such delicate sensible inoffensive skin,” said Nanny, smiling.

“I’m Liir,” he said, “and I live here. This is my castle.”

“I’m Dorothy,” she said, “and I’m very worried about my friends—the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow. Oh, please, can’t somebody do something for them? It’s dark, and they’ll be lost!”

“They can’t be hurt. I’ll go get them tomorrow in the daylight,” said Liir. “Promise. I’d do anything. Really, anything.”

“You’re so sweet, just like everyone else here,” said Dorothy. “Oh, Lion, are you all right? Was it terrible?”

“If the Unnamed God had wanted Lions to fly, he’d have given them hot-air balloons,” said the Lion. “I’m afraid I lost my lunch somewhere over the ravine.”

“Warm welcomes,” Nanny chirped. “We’ve been expecting you. I’ve worn my fingers to the bone, making a little something. It’s not much, but everything we have is yours. That’s our motto here in the mountains. The traveler is always welcome. Now let’s go find some hot water and soap at the pump, shall we, and then go in.”

“You’re too kind—but I need to find the Wicked Witch of the West,” Dorothy said. “I said THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST. I’m so sorry to trouble you. And it looks like a perfectly wonderful castle. Perhaps on the way back, if my travels take me this way.”

“Oh, well, she lives here, too,” said Liir. “With me. Don’t worry, she’s here.”

Dorothy looked a little pale. “She is?”

The Witch appeared at the doorway. “She is indeed, and here she is,” she said, and came down the steps at a clip, her skirts whirling, her broom hurrying to keep up. “Well, Chistery, you did good work! I’m glad to see all my efforts haven’t been for naught. You, Dorothy, Dorothy Gale, the one whose house had the nerve to make a crash landing on my sister!”

“Well, it wasn’t my house, in a legal sense, strictly speaking,” said Dorothy, “and in fact it hardly belonged much to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, except for maybe a couple of windows and the chimney. I mean the Mechanics and Farmers First State Bank of Wichita holds the mortgage, so they’re the responsible parties. I mean if you need to be in touch with someone. They’re the bank that cares,” she explained.

The Witch felt suddenly, oddly calm. “It’s nothing to me who owns the house,” she said. “The fact is that my sister was alive before you arrived, and now she’s dead.”

“Oh, and I’m so very sorry about that,” said Dorothy nervously. “Really I am. I’d have done anything to avoid it. I know how terrible I’d feel if a house fell on Auntie Em. Once a board in the porch roof fell on her. She had a big bump on her head and sang hymns all afternoon, but by evening she was her old cranky self.”

Dorothy tucked her little dog under her arm and went up and took the Witch’s hands in hers. “Really I’m sorry,” she insisted. “It’s a terrible thing to lose someone. I lost my parents when I was small, and I remember.”

“Get off me,” said the Witch, “I hate false sentiment. It makes my skin crawl.”

But the girl held on, with a ragged sort of intensity, and said nothing, just waited.

“Let go, let go,” said the Witch.

“Were you close to your sister?” asked Dorothy.

“That’s not the point,” she snapped.

“Because I was very close to my Mama, and when she and Papa were lost at sea, I could hardly bear it.”

“Lost at sea, how do you mean,” said the Witch, detaching herself from the clinging child.

“They were on their way to visit my grandmama in the old country, because she was dying, and a storm came up and their ship went over and broke in half and sank to the bottom of the sea. And they drowned, every soul onboard.”

“Oh, so they had souls,” said the Witch, her mind recoiling at the image of a ship in all that water.

“And still do. That’s all they have left, I suspect.”

“Please will you not cling so. And come in for something to eat.”

“Come on, you too,” said the girl to the Lion, and it sulkily rolled onto its big padded paws and followed along.

So now we turn into a restaurant, thought the Witch darkly. What, shall I send a flying monkey down to Red Windmill to engage a violinist, for mood music? What a most peculiar murderer she is turning out to be.

The Witch began to think about how she might disarm the girl. It was hard to tell what her weapons were, except for that sort of inane good sense and emotional honesty.

During dinner Dorothy began to cry.

“What, she would have preferred the vegetables to the cheese?” said Nanny.

But the girl would not answer. She set both her hands on the scrubbed oaken tabletop, and her shoulders shook with grief. Liir longed to get up and wrap his arms around her. The Witch nodded grimly that he was to stay put. He whacked his milk mug hard on the table, in annoyance.

“It’s all very nice,” Dorothy said at last, sniffling, “but I am so worried for Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. Uncle Henry frets so when I’m just a wee bit late from the schoolhouse, and Auntie Em—well, she can be so cross when she’s upset!”

“All Aunties are cross,” said Liir.

“Eat up, for who knows when another meal will come your way,” said the Witch.

The girl tried to eat, but kept dissolving in tears. Eventually Liir began to tear up, too. The little dog, Toto, begged for scraps, which made the Witch think of her own losses. Killyjoy, who had been with her eight years, a fly-ridden corpse going stiff on the hill among all his progeny. She cared less about the bees and the crows, but Killyjoy was her special pet.

“Well, this is some party,” said Nanny. “I wonder if I should have prettied things up with a candle.”

“Kindle candle can dull,” said Chistery.

Nanny lit a candle and sang “Happy Birthday to You,” to make Dorothy feel better, but no one joined in.

Then silence fell. Only Nanny kept eating, finishing the cheese and starting on the candle. Liir was turning white and pink by turns, and Dorothy had begun to stare blankly at a knothole in the polished wood of the trestle table. The Witch scratched her fingers with her knife, and ran the blade along her forefinger softly, as if it were the feather of a pfenix.

“What’s going to happen to me,” said Dorothy, lapsing into a monotone. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Nanny, Liir,” said the Witch, “take yourselves off to the kitchen. Bring the Lion with you.”

“Is that old bag talking to me?” Nanny asked Liir. “Why’s the little girl crying, our food not good enough for her?”

“I’m not leaving Dorothy’s side!” said the Lion.

“Don’t I know you?” said the Witch in a low, even voice. “You were the cub they did experiments with in the science lab at Shiz long ago. You were terrified then and I spoke up for you. I’ll save you again if you behave.”

“I don’t want to be saved,” said the Lion petulantly.

“I know the feeling,” said the Witch. “But you can teach me something about Animals in the wild. Whether they revert, or how much. I take it you were raised in the wild. You can be of service. You can protect me when I go out of here with my Grimmerie, my book of magicks, my Malleus Maleficarum, my mesmerizing incunabulum, my codex of scarabee, fylfot and gammadion, my text thaumaturgical.”

The Lion roared, so suddenly they were all jolted in their seats, even Dorothy. “Thunder at night, devil’s delight,” observed Nanny, glancing out the window. “I better take in the laundry.”

“I’m bigger than you,” said the Lion to the Witch, “and I’m not letting Dorothy alone with you.”

The Witch swooped down and gathered the little dog in her arms. “Chistery, go dump this thing in the fishwell,” she said. Chistery looked dubious, but scampered away with Toto under his arm like a yapping furry loaf of bread.

“Oh no, save him, someone!” said Dorothy. The Witch shot out her hand and pinned her to the table, but the Lion had catapulted into the kitchen after the snow monkey and Toto.

“Liir, lock the kitchen door,” shouted the Witch. “Bar it so they can’t come back.”

“No, no,” cried Dorothy, “I’ll go with you, just don’t hurt Toto! He’s done nothing to you!” She turned to Liir, and said, “Please don’t let that monkey hurt my Toto. The Lion is useless, don’t trust him to save my little dog!”

“Do I take it we’ll have pudding by the fire?” said Nanny, looking up brightly. “It’s caramel custard.”

The Witch took Dorothy’s hand and began to lead her away. Liir suddenly leaped over and took hold of Dorothy’s other hand. “You old hag, let her alone,” he shouted.

“Liir, really, you pick the most awkward times to develop character,” said the Witch wearily, quietly. “Don’t embarrass yourself and me with this charade of courage.”

“I’ll be all right—just take care of Toto,” said Dorothy. “Oh Liir, take care of Toto, no matter what—please. He needs a home.”

Liir leaned over and kissed Dorothy, who fell against the wall in astonishment.

“Release me,” mumbled the Witch. “Whatever my faults, I don’t deserve this.”

17

She pushed Dorothy ahead of her into the tower room, and locked the door behind her. The long period of sleeplessness was making her head spin. “What have you come for,” she said to the girl. “I know why you have tramped all the way from the Emerald City—but go on, tell me to my face! Have you come to murder me, as the rumors say—or do you carry a message from the Wizard, maybe? Is he now willing to bargain the book for Nor? The magic for the child? Tell me! Or—I know—he has instructed you to steal my book! Is it that!”

But the girl only backed away, looking left and right, for an escape. There was no way out except the window, and that was a deadly fall.

“Tell me,” said the Witch.

“I am all alone in a strange land, don’t make me do this,” said the girl.

“You came to kill me and then to steal the Grimmerie!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“First give me the shoes,” said the Witch, “for they’re mine. Then we’ll talk.”

“I can’t, they won’t come off,” said the girl, “I think that Glinda put a spell on them. I’ve been trying to get them off for days. My socks are so sweaty, it’s not to be believed.”

“Give them me!” snarled the Witch. “If you go back to the Wizard with them, you’ll be playing right into his hands!”

“No, look, they’re stuck!” shouted the girl. She kicked at one heel with the other toe. “Look, see, I’m trying, I’m trying, they won’t come off, honest, promise! I tried to give them to the Wizard when he demanded them, but they wouldn’t come off! There’s something the matter with them, they’re too tight or something! Or maybe I’m growing.”

“You have no right to those shoes,” said the Witch. She circled. The girl backed away, stumbling over furniture, knocking over the beehive, and stepping on the queen bee, who had emerged from the fragments.

“Everything I have, every little thing I have, dies when you come across it,” said the Witch. “There’s Liir down below, ready to throw me over for the sake of a single kiss. My beasts are dead, my sister is dead, you strew death in your path, and you’re just a girl! You remind me of Nor! She thought the world was magic, and look what happened to her!”

“What, what happened?” said Dorothy, pitiably playing for time.

“She found out just how magic it was, she was kidnapped, and lives her miserable life as a political prisoner!”

“But so have you kidnapped me, and I asked for none of it, nothing. You must have mercy.”

The Witch came near and grabbed the girl by the wrist. “Why do you want to murder me,” she said. “Can you really believe the Wizard will do as he says? He doesn’t know what truth means, so he does not even know how he lies! And I did not kidnap you, you fool! You came here of your own accord, to murder me!”

“I didn’t come to murder anyone,” said the girl, shrinking back.

“Are you the Adept?” said the Witch suddenly. “Aha! Are you the Third Adept? Is that it? Nessarose, Glinda and you? Did Madame Morrible conscript you for service to the hidden power? You work in collusion: my sister’s shoes, my friend’s charm, and your innocent strength. Admit it, admit you’re the Adept! Admit it!”

“I’m not adept, I’m adopted,” said the girl. “I’m sure not adept at anything, can’t you tell that?”

“You’re my soul come scavenging for me, I can feel it,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have a soul; with a soul there is everlastingness, and life has tortured me enough.”

The Witch pulled Dorothy back to the corridor, and stuck the end of her broom in a torch fire. Nanny was hobbling up the stairs leaning on Chistery, who had some dishes of pudding on a tray. “I locked the whole lot of them in the kitchen until they stop their roughhousing,” Nanny was muttering. “Such a hubbub, such a racket, such a wild rumpus, Nanny won’t have it, Nanny is too old. They’re all beasts.”

Below, in the dusty recesses of Kiamo Ko, the dog barked once or twice, the Lion roared and pounded against the kitchen door, and Liir shrieked, “Dorothy, we’re coming!” But the Witch turned and shot out her foot, and toppled Nanny over. The old woman rolled and slid, oohing and woohing, down the stairs, Chistery chasing after her in consternation. The kitchen door had burst its hinges, and the Lion and Liir came tumbling out, falling over the big heap of Nanny at the foot of the stairs. “Up, you, up,” shouted the Witch, “I’ll have done with you before you have done with me!”

Dorothy had wrenched herself free and dashed up the corkscrew stairs of the tower ahead of the Witch. There was only one exit, and that was to the parapet. The Witch followed in good speed, needing to finish the deed before the Lion and Liir arrived. She would get the shoes, she would take the Grimmerie, she would abandon Liir and Nor, and disappear into the wilderness. She would burn the book and the shoes, and then she would bury herself.

Dorothy was a dark shape, huddled over, retching on the stones.

“You haven’t answered my question,” said the Witch, poking the torch up high, releasing spectres and ghosts among the shadows of the castellations. “You’ve come hunting me down, and I want to know. Why will you murder me?”

The Witch slammed the door behind her and locked it. All the better.

The girl could only gasp.

“You think they’re not telling stories about you all over Oz? You think I don’t know the Wizard sent you here to bring back proof that I was dead?”

“Oh, that,” said Dorothy, “that is true, but that’s not why I came!”

“You can’t possibly be a competent liar, not with that face!” The Witch held the broom up at an angle. “Tell me the truth, and when you’ve finished, then I’ll kill you, for in times like these, my little one, you must kill before you are killed.”

“I couldn’t kill you,” said the girl, weeping. “I was horror-struck to have killed your sister. How could I kill you too?”

“Very charming,” said the Witch, “very nice, very touching. Then why did you come here?”

“Yes, the Wizard said to murder you,” Dorothy said, “but I never intended to, and that’s not why I came!”

The Witch held the burning broom even higher, closer, to look in the girl’s face.

“When they said . . . when they said that it was your sister, and that we had to come here . . . it was like a prison sentence, and I never wanted to . . . but I thought, well, I would come, and my friends would come with me to help . . . and I would come . . . and I would say . . .”

“Say what,” cried the Witch, on the edge.

“I would say,” said the girl, straightening up, gritting her teeth, “I would say to you: Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!”

The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what? A fragment of the brush of the broom fluttered off, and lit on her skirt, and there was a run of flames in her lap, eating up the dryest tinder in the Vinkus. “Oh, will this nightmare never end,” screamed Dorothy, and she grabbed at a bucket for collecting rainwater that, in the sudden flare-up of light, had come into view. She said, “I will save you!” and she hurled the water at the Witch.

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.

They become others; they become Nanny in her prime, tart and officious; and Ama Clutch and Ama Vimp and the other Amas, lumped together now in a maternal blur. They become Boq, sweet and lithe and earnest, as yet unbowed; and Crope and Tibbett in their funny, campy anxiety to be liked; and Avaric in his superiority. And Glinda in her gowns, waiting to be good enough to deserve what she gets.

And the ones whose stories are over: Manek and Madame Morrible and Doctor Dillamond and most of all Fiyero, whose blue diamonds are the blues of water and of sulfurous fire both. And the ones whose stories are curiously unfinished—was it to be like this?—the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, whose help could not arrive in time; and Liir, the mysterious foundling boy, pushing out of his pea pod. Sarima, who in her loving welcome and sisterliness would not forgive, and Sarima’s sisters and children and future and past . . .

And the ones who fell to the Wizard, including Killyjoy and the other resident creatures; and behind them the Wizard himself, a failure until he exiled himself from his own land; and behind him Yackle, whoever she was, if anyone, and the anonymous Adepts, if they existed, and the dwarf, who had no name to share.

And the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.

18

Oz stretched out from Kiamo Ko a good several hundred miles to the west and north, and even farther to the east and south. On the night the Wicked Witch of the West died, anyone with the eyes to see so well could have looked out from the parapet. Westward, the moon was rising over the Thousand Year Grasslands. Though the peaceful Yunamata refused to join them, the Arjiki clans and the Scrow were meeting to consider a pact of alliance, given the Wizard’s armies massing up in Kumbricia’s Pass. The Arjiki chieftain and the Princess Nastoya agreed to send a delegation to the Witch of the West, and ask for guidance and support. As they toasted her and wished her well, not an hour after her death, the messenger crows Elphaba had dispatched for help were swooped upon by nocturnal rocs and devoured.

The moon ran silver up and down the sides of the Great Kells, and silver shadows settled in the valleys of the Lesser Kells. The scorpions of the Sour Sands came out to sting, the skark of the Thursk Desert mated in their nests. At the Kvon Altar practitioners of a sect so obscure that it had no name made their nightly oblations for the souls of the dead, assuming, as most do, that the dead had had souls.

The Quadling Country, a wasteland of mud and frogs, rotted quietly all night, except for an incident in Qhoyre. A Crocodile entered a nursery and chewed up a small baby. The Animal was destroyed, and both corpses were burned, with loud wailing and anger.

In Gillikin, the banks turned over their money to keep it fresh and vibrant, the factories turned over their wares, the merchants turned over their wives, the students in Shiz turned over intellectual propositions, and the tiktok labor force met secretly, in what had used to be the Philosophy Club, to hear the freed and grieving Grommetik talk class revolution. Lady Glinda had a bad night, a night of shakes and regret and pain; she guessed it was the early signs of gout from her rich diet. But she sat up half the night and lit a candle in a window, for reasons she couldn’t articulate. The moon passed overhead in its path from the Vinkus, and she felt its accusatory spotlight, and moved back from the tall windows.

Across the low ridge of hills known as the Madeleines, into the Corn Basket, looking into the windows of Colwen Grounds, the moon continued its journey. Frex was asleep, dreaming of Turtle Heart and yes, of Melena, his beautiful Melena, making him breakfast on the day he went in to preach against the evil clock. Melena was a froth of beauty, huge as a world, spinning him courage, daring, love. Frex hardly stirred when Shell tiptoed in, back from some clandestine rendezvous, and came to sit by the side of his bed. Shell wasn’t sure he noticed, he wasn’t sure his father really woke up. “What I never could understand was the teeth,” mumbled Frex, “why the teeth?”

“Who knows why?” said Shell fondly, not understanding the dreamy murmur.

The moon on the Emerald City? It couldn’t be seen; lights too bright, energy too high, spirits too wired. No one looked for it. In a room, surprisingly bare and simple for one so powerful and elevated, the sleepless Wizard of Oz wiped his brow, and wondered how long his luck would hold out. He had been wondering the same thing for forty years, and he had hoped that luck would begin to seem habitual, deserved. But he could hear the very mice chewing away at the foundations of his Palace. The arrival of that Dorothy Gale, from Kansas, was a summons, he knew it; he knew it when he saw her face. There was no point in searching after the Grimmerie any longer. His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

He had sent Dorothy, locked in those shoes as she was, to kill the Witch. He had sent a girl in to do a man’s job. If the Witch was the victor—well, that was the troublesome girl out of the way, then. Perversely, though, in a fatherly way, he half hoped Dorothy would get through her trials all right.

It became a celebrated event, the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was hailed as political assassination or a juicy murder. Dorothy’s description of what had happened was deemed self-delusion, at best, or a bald-faced lie. Murder or mercy killing or accident, in an indirect way it helped rid the country of its dictator.

Dorothy, more stunned than ever, made her way back to the Emerald City with the Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and Liir. There Dorothy had her second famous audience with the Wizard. Perhaps he again tried to pry the slippers off her for his own purposes, and perhaps Dorothy outwitted him, spurred by the Witch’s warnings. At any rate, she presented him with something from the Witch’s house to prove that she had been there. The broom had been burnt beyond recognition, and the Grimmerie had seemed too cumbersome to carry, so she brought the green glass bottle that said MIRACLE ELI- on the paper glued to the front.

It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived—a hot-air balloon—just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

A lot of nonsense has been circulated about how Dorothy left Oz. There are some who say that she never did; they say as they said of Ozma before her that she is in hiding, in disguise, patient as a maiden, waiting to come back and show herself again. Others insist she flew up into the sky like a saint ascending to the Other Land, waving her apron giddily and clutching that damn fool dog.

Liir disappeared into the sea of humanity in the Emerald City, to hunt for his half-sister, Nor. He was not heard of again for some time.

Whatever may have happened to the original shoes, everyone remembered them as beautiful, even stunning. Well-fashioned name-brand imitations were always available and never went out of style for very long. The shoes or their replicas, with their suggestion of residual magic, cropped up at so many public ceremonies that, like the relics of saints, they began to multiply to fill the need.

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is—alas, or perhaps thank mercy—no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

“And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time.”

“And did she ever come out?”

“Not yet.”

Map of the Land of Oz

Reader’s Group Guide

1. Gregory Maguire fashioned the name of Elphaba (pronounced EL-fa-ba) from the initials of the author of The Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum—L-F-B—Elphaba. Wicked derives some of its power from the popularity of its source material. Does meeting up with familiar characters and famous fictional situations require more patience and effort on the part of the reader, or less?

2. Wicked flips the Oz we knew from the classic movie on its head. To what extent does Maguire’s vision of Oz contradict the Oz we’re familiar with? How have Dorothy and the other characters changed or remained the same? Has Wicked changed your conception of the original? If so, how?

3. The novel opens with a scene in which the Witch overhears Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman gossiping about her. She’s “possessed by demons,” they say. “She was castrated at birth . . . she was an abused child . . . she’s a dangerous tyrant.” How does this scene set the stage for the story, and what themes does it introduce?

4. What is the significance of Elphaba’s green skin? What are the rewards of being so different, and what are the drawbacks? In Oz—and in the real world—what are the meanings associated with the color green, and are any of them pertinent to Elphaba’s character?

5. One of Wicked’s key themes is the nature and roots of evil. What are the theories that Maguire sets out? Is Elphaba evil? Are her actions evil? Is there such a thing as evil, a free-floating power in the universe like time or gravity? Or is evil an attribute of the actions of human beings? (Hint: Turn to pages 231 and 370 for scenes that will draw you into the conversation.)

6. Discuss the importance of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Does the Clock simply reflect events, or does it shape them? Why is it significant that Elphaba was born inside it? that Turtle Heart was killed by it? What revelations does it offer to Elphaba and the reader when she reencounters it at the end of the book?

7. The first section of the book ends powerfully but enigmatically when the young Elphaba is discovered under the dock, cradled in the paws of a magical beast as if sitting on a throne. How do you interpret this scene, and what do you think it foretells, if anything?

8. The place of Animals in society is an important theme in Wicked. Why does Elphaba make it her mission to fight for Animal rights? How else does social class define Oz, and why?

9. “[Galinda] reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet” (page 65). Discuss the transformation of Galinda, shallow Shiz student, to Glinda the Good Witch. How does she change—and by how much? What is her eventual “significance,” both in Oz and in the story?

10. Discuss the ways in which Elphaba’s determination and willfulness lend purpose and order to her life, and the cost of being such a strong character. Elphaba isn’t the only strong female character in Wicked. How do Nessarose, Glinda, and Sarima deal with issues of power and control? Where do each of them draw strength from? Is the world of Maguire’s Oz more or less patriarchal than millennial America?

11. Wicked is an epic story, built along the lines of a Shakespearean or Greek tragedy, in which the seeds of Elphaba’s destiny are all sown early in the novel. How much of Elphaba’s career is predestined, and how much choice does she have? Do you think that she was no more than a puppet of the Wizard or Madame Morrible, as she fears?

12. Early in their unlikely friendship, Galinda catches a glimpse of Elphaba and thinks she “looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life” (pages 78–79). Discuss the dual, and sometimes contradictory, nature of Elphaba’s character. Why does Elphaba insist that she doesn’t have a soul?

13. Who or what is Yackle? Where does she appear in the story, and what role does she serve in Elphaba’s life? Is she good or evil—both or neither?

14. Was Elphaba’s story essentially a tragedy or a triumph? Did she fail at every major endeavor, and thus fail at life; or because she refused to give up or change to suit the opinions of others, was her life a success? Is there a possibility that Dorothy’s “baptismal splash” redeemed Elphaba on her deathbed, or was this the final indignity in a life of miserable mistakes?

E-Book Extras

INTRODUCTION.

Folk lore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.

L. FRANK BAUM.

CHICAGO, APRIL, 1900.

LIST OF CHAPTERS.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.—The Cyclone.

CHAPTER II.—The Council with The Munchkins.

CHAPTER III.—How Dorothy Saved the Scarecrow.

CHAPTER IV.—The Road Through the Forest.

CHAPTER V.—The Rescue of the Tin Woodman.

CHAPTER VI.—The Cowardly Lion.

CHAPTER VII.—The Journey to The Great Oz.

CHAPTER VIII.—The Deadly Poppy Field.

CHAPTER IX.—The Queen of the Field Mice.

CHAPTER X.—The Guardian of the Gates.

CHAPTER XI.—The Wonderful Emerald City of Oz.

CHAPTER XII.—The Search for the Wicked Witch.

CHAPTER XIII.—How the Four were Reunited.

CHAPTER XIV.—The Winged Monkeys.

CHAPTER XV.—The Discovery of Oz the Terrible.

CHAPTER XVI.—The Magic Art of the Great Humbug.

CHAPTER XVII.—How the Balloon was Launched.

CHAPTER XVIII.—Away to the South.

CHAPTER XIX.—Attacked by the Fighting Trees.

CHAPTER XX.—The Dainty China Country.

CHAPTER XXI.—The Lion Becomes the King of Beasts.

CHAPTER XXII.—The Country of the Quadlings.

CHAPTER XXIII.—The Good Witch Grants Dorothy’s Wish.

CHAPTER XXIV.—Home Again.

This book is dedicated to my good friend and comrade.
My Wife

~ L. F. B.

Chapter I.

The Cyclone.

DOROTHY LIVED IN the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long, silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.

To-day, however, they were not playing. Uncle Henry sat upon the door-step and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. Dorothy stood in the door with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky too. Aunt Em was washing the dishes.

From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and Uncle Henry and Dorothy could see where the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm. There now came a sharp whistling in the air from the south, and as they turned their eyes that way they saw ripples in the grass coming from that direction also.

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.

“There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called to his wife; “I’ll go look after the stock.” Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.

Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.

“Quick, Dorothy!” she screamed; “run for the cellar!”

Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap-door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was half way across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.

A strange thing then happened.

The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.

The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact center of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather.

It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle.

Toto did not like it. He ran about the room, now here, now there, barking loudly; but Dorothy sat quite still on the floor and waited to see what would happen.

Once Toto got too near the open trap-door, and fell in; and at first the little girl thought she had lost him. But soon she saw one of his ears sticking up through the hole, for the strong pressure of the air was keeping him up so that he could not fall. She crept to the hole, caught Toto by the ear, and dragged him into the room again; afterward closing the trap-door so that no more accidents could happen.

Hour after hour passed away, and slowly Dorothy got over her fright; but she felt quite lonely, and the wind shrieked so loudly all about her that she nearly became deaf. At first she had wondered if she would be dashed to pieces when the house fell again; but as the hours passed and nothing terrible happened, she stopped worrying and resolved to wait calmly and see what the future would bring. At last she crawled over the swaying floor to her bed, and lay down upon it; and Toto followed and lay down beside her.

In spite of the swaying of the house and the wailing of the wind, Dorothy soon closed her eyes and fell fast asleep.

Chapter II.

The Council with

The Munchkins.

SHE WAS AWAKENED by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened; and Toto put his cold little nose into her face and whined dismally. Dorothy sat up and noticed that the house was not moving; nor was it dark, for the bright sunshine came in at the window, flooding the little room. She sprang from her bed and with Toto at her heels ran and opened the door.

The little girl gave a cry of amazement and looked about her, her eyes growing bigger and bigger at the wonderful sights she saw.

The cyclone had set the house down, very gently—for a cyclone—in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

While she stood looking eagerly at the strange and beautiful sights, she noticed coming toward her a group of the queerest people she had ever seen. They were not as big as the grown folk she had always been used to; but neither were they very small. In fact, they seemed about as tall as Dorothy, who was a well-grown child for her age, although they were, so far as looks go, many years older.

Three were men and one a woman, and all were oddly dressed. They wore round hats that rose to a small point a foot above their heads, with little bells around the brims that tinkled sweetly as they moved. The hats of the men were blue; the little woman’s hat was white, and she wore a white gown that hung in plaits from her shoulders; over it were sprinkled little stars that glistened in the sun like diamonds. The men were dressed in blue, of the same shade as their hats, and wore well-polished boots with a deep roll of blue at the tops. The men, Dorothy thought, were about as old as Uncle Henry, for two of them had beards. But the little woman was doubtless much older: her face was covered with wrinkles, her hair was nearly white, and she walked rather stiffly.

When these people drew near the house where Dorothy was standing in the doorway, they paused and whispered among themselves, as if afraid to come farther. But the little old woman walked up to Dorothy, made a low bow and said, in a sweet voice,

“You are welcome, most noble Sorceress, to the land of the Munchkins. We are so grateful to you for having killed the Wicked Witch of the East, and for setting our people free from bondage.”

Dorothy listened to this speech with wonder. What could the little woman possibly mean by calling her a sorceress, and saying she had killed the Wicked Witch of the East? Dorothy was an innocent, harmless little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and she had never killed anything in all her life.

But the little woman evidently expected her to answer; so Dorothy said, with hesitation,

“You are very kind; but there must be some mistake. I have not killed anything.”

“Your house did, anyway,” replied the little old woman, with a laugh; “and that is the same thing. See!” she continued, pointing to the corner of the house; “there are her two toes, still sticking out from under a block of wood.”

Dorothy looked, and gave a little cry of fright. There, indeed, just under the corner of the great beam the house rested on, two feet were sticking out, shod in silver shoes with pointed toes.

“Oh dear! oh dear!” cried Dorothy, clasping her hands together in dismay; “the house must have fallen on her. What ever shall we do?”

“There is nothing to be done,” said the little woman, calmly.

“But who was she?” asked Dorothy.

“She was the Wicked Witch of the East, as I said,” answered the little woman. “She has held all the Munchkins in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day. Now they are all set free, and are grateful to you for the favour.”

“Who are the Munchkins?” inquired Dorothy.

“They are the people who live in this land of the East, where the Wicked Witch ruled.”

“Are you a Munchkin?” asked Dorothy.

“No; but I am their friend, although I live in the land of the North. When they saw the Witch of the East was dead the Munchkins sent a swift messenger to me, and I came at once. I am the Witch of the North.”

“Oh, gracious!” cried Dorothy; “are you a real witch?”

“Yes, indeed;” answered the little woman. “But I am a Good Witch, and the people love me. I am not as powerful as the Wicked Witch was who ruled here, or I should have set the people free myself.”

“But I thought all witches were wicked,” said the girl, who was half frightened at facing a real witch.

“Oh, no; that is a great mistake. There were only four witches in all the Land of Oz, and two of them, those who live in the North and the South, are good witches. I know this is true, for I am one of them myself, and cannot be mistaken. Those who dwelt in the East and the West were, indeed, wicked witches; but now that you have killed one of them, there is but one Wicked Witch in all the Land of Oz—the one who lives in the West.”

“But,” said Dorothy, after a moment’s thought, “Aunt Em has told me that the witches were all dead—years and years ago.”

“Who is Aunt Em?” inquired the little old woman.

“She is my aunt who lives in Kansas, where I came from.”

The Witch of the North seemed to think for a time, with her head bowed and her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up and said,

“I do not know where Kansas is, for I have never heard that country mentioned before. But tell me, is it a civilized country?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Dorothy.

“Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us.”

“Who are the wizards?” asked Dorothy.

“Oz himself is the Great Wizard,” answered the Witch, sinking her voice to a whisper. “He is more powerful than all the rest of us together. He lives in the City of Emeralds.”

Dorothy was going to ask another question, but just then the Munchkins, who had been standing silently by, gave a loud shout and pointed to the corner of the house where the Wicked Witch had been lying.

“What is it?” asked the little old woman; and looked, and began to laugh. The feet of the dead Witch had disappeared entirely and nothing was left but the silver shoes.

“She was so old,” explained the Witch of the North, “that she dried up quickly in the sun. That is the end of her. But the silver shoes are yours, and you shall have them to wear.” She reached down and picked up the shoes, and after shaking the dust out of them handed them to Dorothy.

“The Witch of the East was proud of those silver shoes,” said one of the Munchkins; “and there is some charm connected with them; but what it is we never knew.”

Dorothy carried the shoes into the house and placed them on the table. Then she came out again to the Munchkins and said,

“I am anxious to get back to my Aunt and Uncle, for I am sure they will worry about me. Can you help me find my way?”

The Munchkins and the Witch first looked at one another, and then at Dorothy, and then shook their heads.

“At the East, not far from here,” said one, “there is a great desert, and none could live to cross it.”

“It is the same at the South,” said another, “for I have been there and seen it. The South is the country of the Quadlings.”

“I am told,” said the third man, “that it is the same at the West. And that country, where the Winkies live, is ruled by the Wicked Witch of the West, who would make you her slave if you passed her way.”

“The North is my home,” said the old lady, “and at its edge is the same great desert that surrounds this Land of Oz. I’m afraid, my dear, you will have to live with us.”

Dorothy began to sob, at this, for she felt lonely among all these strange people. Her tears seemed to grieve the kind-hearted Munchkins, for they immediately took out their handkerchiefs and began to weep also. As for the little old woman, she took off her cap and balanced the point on the end of her nose, while she counted “One, two, three” in a solemn voice. At once the cap changed to a slate, on which was written in big, white chalk marks:

“let dorothy go to the city of emeralds.”

The little old woman took the slate from her nose, and, having read the words on it, asked,

“Is your name Dorothy, my dear?”

“Yes,” answered the child, looking up and drying her tears.

“Then you must go to the City of Emeralds. Perhaps Oz will help you.”

“Where is this city?” asked Dorothy.

“It is exactly in the center of the country, and is ruled by Oz, the Great Wizard I told you of.”

“Is he a good man?” inquired the girl, anxiously.

“He is a good Wizard. Whether he is a man or not I cannot tell, for I have never seen him.”

“How can I get there?” asked Dorothy.

“You must walk. It is a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible. However, I will use all the magic arts I know of to keep you from harm.”

“Won’t you go with me?” pleaded the girl, who had begun to look upon the little old woman as her only friend.

“No, I cannot do that,” she replied; “but I will give you my kiss, and no one will dare injure a person who has been kissed by the Witch of the North.”

She came close to Dorothy and kissed her gently on the forehead. Where her lips touched the girl they left a round, shining mark, as Dorothy found out soon after.

“The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick,” said the Witch; “so you cannot miss it. When you get to Oz do not be afraid of him, but tell your story and ask him to help you. Good-bye, my dear.”

The three Munchkins bowed low to her and wished her a pleasant journey, after which they walked away through the trees. The Witch gave Dorothy a friendly little nod, whirled around on her left heel three times, and straightway disappeared, much to the surprise of little Toto, who barked after her loudly enough when she had gone, because he had been afraid even to growl while she stood by.

But Dorothy, knowing her to be a witch, had expected her to disappear in just that way, and was not surprised in the least.

Chapter III.

How Dorothy Saved
the Scarecrow.

WHEN DOROTHY WAS left alone she began to feel hungry. So she went to the cupboard and cut herself some bread, which she spread with butter. She gave some to Toto, and taking a pail from the shelf she carried it down to the little brook and filled it with clear, sparkling water. Toto ran over to the trees and began to bark at the birds sitting there. Dorothy went to get him, and saw such delicious fruit hanging from the branches that she gathered some of it, finding it just what she wanted to help out her breakfast.

Then she went back to the house, and having helped herself and Toto to a good drink of the cool, clear water, she set about making ready for the journey to the City of Emeralds.

Dorothy had only one other dress, but that happened to be clean and was hanging on a peg beside her bed. It was gingham, with checks of white and blue; and although the blue was somewhat faded with many washings, it was still a pretty frock. The girl washed herself carefully, dressed herself in the clean gingham, and tied her pink sunbonnet on her head. She took a little basket and filled it with bread from the cupboard, laying a white cloth over the top. Then she looked down at her feet and noticed how old and worn her shoes were.

“They surely will never do for a long journey, Toto,” she said. And Toto looked up into her face with his little black eyes and wagged his tail to show he knew what she meant.

At that moment Dorothy saw lying on the table the silver shoes that had belonged to the Witch of the East.

“I wonder if they will fit me,” she said to Toto. “They would be just the thing to take a long walk in, for they could not wear out.”

She took off her old leather shoes and tried on the silver ones, which fitted her as well as if they had been made for her.

Finally she picked up her basket.

“Come along, Toto,” she said, “we will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again.”

She closed the door, locked it, and put the key carefully in the pocket of her dress. And so, with Toto trotting along soberly behind her, she started on her journey.

There were several roads near by, but it did not take her long to find the one paved with yellow brick. Within a short time she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City, her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed. The sun shone bright and the birds sang sweet, and Dorothy did not feel nearly as bad as you might think a little girl would who had been suddenly whisked away from her own country and set down in the midst of a strange land.

She was surprised, as she walked along, to see how pretty the country was about her. There were neat fences at the sides of the road, painted a dainty blue color, and beyond them were fields of grain and vegetables in abundance. Evidently the Munchkins were good farmers and able to raise large crops. Once in a while she would pass a house, and the people came out to look at her and bow low as she went by; for everyone knew she had been the means of destroying the Wicked Witch and setting them free from bondage. The houses of the Munchkins were odd looking dwellings, for each was round, with a big dome for a roof. All were painted blue, for in this country of the East blue was the favorite color.

Towards evening, when Dorothy was tired with her long walk and began to wonder where she should pass the night, she came to a house rather larger than the rest. On the green lawn before it many men and women were dancing. Five little fiddlers played as loudly as possible and the people were laughing and singing, while a big table near by was loaded with delicious fruits and nuts, pies and cakes, and many other good things to eat.

The people greeted Dorothy kindly, and invited her to supper and to pass the night with them; for this was the home of one of the richest Munchkins in the land, and his friends were gathered with him to celebrate their freedom from the bondage of the Wicked Witch.

Dorothy ate a hearty supper and was waited upon by the rich Munchkin himself, whose name was Boq. Then she sat upon a settee and watched the people dance.

When Boq saw her silver shoes he said,

“You must be a great sorceress.”

“Why?” asked the girl.

“Because you wear silver shoes and have killed the Wicked Witch. Besides, you have white in your frock, and only witches and sorceresses wear white.”

“My dress is blue and white checked,” said Dorothy, smoothing out the wrinkles in it.

“It is kind of you to wear that,” said Boq. “Blue is the color of the Munchkins, and white is the witch color; so we know you are a friendly witch.”

Dorothy did not know what to say to this, for all the people seemed to think her a witch, and she knew very well she was only an ordinary little girl who had come by the chance of a cyclone into a strange land.

When she had tired watching the dancing, Boq led her into the house, where he gave her a room with a pretty bed in it. The sheets were made of blue cloth, and Dorothy slept soundly in them till morning, with Toto curled up on the blue rug beside her.

She ate a hearty breakfast, and watched a wee Munchkin baby, who played with Toto and pulled his tail and crowed and laughed in a way that greatly amused Dorothy. Toto was a fine curiosity to all the people, for they had never seen a dog before.

“How far is it to the Emerald City?” the girl asked.

“I do not know,” answered Boq, gravely, “for I have never been there. It is better for people to keep away from Oz, unless they have business with him. But it is a long way to the Emerald City, and it will take you many days. The country here is rich and pleasant, but you must pass through rough and dangerous places before you reach the end of your journey.”

This worried Dorothy a little, but she knew that only the Great Oz could help her get to Kansas again, so she bravely resolved not to turn back.

She bade her friends good-bye, and again started along the road of yellow brick. When she had gone several miles she thought she would stop to rest, and so climbed to the top of the fence beside the road and sat down. There was a great cornfield beyond the fence, and not far away she saw a Scarecrow, placed high on a pole to keep the birds from the ripe corn.

Dorothy leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully at the Scarecrow. Its head was a small sack stuffed with straw, with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it to represent a face. An old, pointed blue hat, that had belonged to some Munchkin, was perched on this head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes, worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw. On the feet were some old boots with blue tops, such as every man wore in this country, and the figure was raised above the stalks of corn by means of the pole stuck up its back.

While Dorothy was looking earnestly into the queer, painted face of the Scarecrow, she was surprised to see one of the eyes slowly wink at her. She thought she must have been mistaken, at first, for none of the scarecrows in Kansas ever wink; but presently the figure nodded its head to her in a friendly way. Then she climbed down from the fence and walked up to it, while Toto ran around the pole and barked.

“Good day,” said the Scarecrow, in a rather husky voice.

“Did you speak?” asked the girl, in wonder.

“Certainly,” answered the Scarecrow; “how do you do?”

“I’m pretty well, thank you,” replied Dorothy politely; “how do you do?”

“I’m not feeling well,” said the Scarecrow, with a smile, “for it is very tedious being perched up here night and day to scare away crows.”

“Can’t you get down?” asked Dorothy.

“No, for this pole is stuck up my back. If you will please take away the pole I shall be greatly obliged to you.”

Dorothy reached up both arms and lifted the figure off the pole; for, being stuffed with straw, it was quite light.

“Thank you very much,” said the Scarecrow, when he had been set down on the ground. “I feel like a new man.”

Dorothy was puzzled at this, for it sounded queer to hear a stuffed man speak, and to see him bow and walk along beside her.

“Who are you?” asked the Scarecrow, when he had stretched himself and yawned. “And where are you going?”

“My name is Dorothy,” said the girl, “and I am going to the Emerald City, to ask the Great Oz to send me back to Kansas.”

“Where is the Emerald City?” he enquired; “and who is Oz?”

“Why, don’t you know?” she returned, in surprise.

“No, indeed; I don’t know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all,” he answered, sadly.

“Oh,” said Dorothy; “I’m awfully sorry for you.”

“Do you think,” he asked, “if I go to the Emerald City with you, that the Great Oz would give me some brains?”

“I cannot tell,” she returned; “but you may come with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now.”

“That is true,” said the Scarecrow. “You see,” he continued, confidentially, “I don’t mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn’t matter, for I can’t feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, as yours is, how am I ever to know anything?”

“I understand how you feel,” said the little girl, who was truly sorry for him. “If you will come with me I’ll ask Oz to do all he can for you.”

“Thank you,” he answered, gratefully.

They walked back to the road, Dorothy helped him over the fence, and they started along the path of yellow brick for the Emerald City.

Toto did not like this addition to the party, at first. He smelled around the stuffed man as if he suspected there might be a nest of rats in the straw, and he often growled in an unfriendly way at the Scarecrow.

“Don’t mind Toto,” said Dorothy to her new friend; “he never bites.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid,” replied the Scarecrow, “he can’t hurt the straw. Do let me carry that basket for you. I shall not mind it, for I can’t get tired. I’ll tell you a secret,” he continued, as he walked along; “there is only one thing in the world I am afraid of.”

“What is that?” asked Dorothy; “the Munchkin farmer who made you?”

“No,” answered the Scarecrow; “it’s a lighted match.”

Chapter IV.

The Road Through
the Forest.

AFTER A FEW the road began to be rough, and the walking grew so difficult that the Scarecrow often stumbled over the yellow brick, which were here very uneven. Sometimes, indeed, they were broken or missing altogether, leaving holes that Toto jumped across and Dorothy walked around. As for the Scarecrow, having no brains he walked straight ahead, and so stepped into the holes and fell at full length on the hard bricks. It never hurt him, however, and Dorothy would pick him up and set him upon his feet again, while he joined her in laughing merrily at his own mishap.

The farms were not nearly so well cared for here as they were farther back. There were fewer houses and fewer fruit trees, and the farther they went the more dismal and lonesome the country became.

At noon they sat down by the roadside, near a little brook, and Dorothy opened her basket and got out some bread. She offered a piece to the Scarecrow, but he refused.

“I am never hungry,” he said; “and it is a lucky thing I am not. For my mouth is only painted, and if I should cut a hole in it so I could eat, the straw I am stuffed with would come out, and that would spoil the shape of my head.”

Dorothy saw at once that this was true, so she only nodded and went on eating her bread.

“Tell me something about yourself, and the country you came from,” said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner. So she told him all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer Land of Oz. The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said,

“I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.”

“That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

The Scarecrow sighed.

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

“Won’t you tell me a story, while we are resting?” asked the child.

The Scarecrow looked at her reproachfully, and answered,

“My life has been so short that I really know nothing whatever. I was only made day before yesterday. What happened in the world before that time is all unknown to me. Luckily, when the farmer made my head, one of the first things he did was to paint my ears, so that I heard what was going on. There was another Munchkin with him, and the first thing I heard was the farmer saying,

“’How do you like those ears?’

“’They aren’t straight,’ answered the other.

“’Never mind,’ said the farmer; ‘they are ears just the same,’ which was true enough.

“’Now I’ll make the eyes,’ said the farmer. So he painted my right eye, and as soon as it was finished I found myself looking at him and at everything around me with a great deal of curiosity, for this was my first glimpse of the world.

“’That’s a rather pretty eye,’ remarked the Munchkin who was watching the farmer; ‘blue paint is just the color for eyes.’

“’I think I’ll make the other a little bigger,’ said the farmer; and when the second eye was done I could see much better than before. Then he made my nose and my mouth; but I did not speak, because at that time I didn’t know what a mouth was for. I had the fun of watching them make my body and my arms and legs; and when they fastened on my head, at last, I felt very proud, for I thought I was just as good a man as anyone.

“’This fellow will scare the crows fast enough,’ said the farmer; ‘he looks just like a man.’

“’Why, he is a man,’ said the other, and I quite agreed with him. The farmer carried me under his arm to the cornfield, and set me up on a tall stick, where you found me. He and his friend soon after walked away and left me alone.

“I did not like to be deserted this way; so I tried to walk after them; but my feet would not touch the ground, and I was forced to stay on that pole. It was a lonely life to lead, for I had nothing to think of, having been made such a little while before. Many crows and other birds flew into the cornfield, but as soon as they saw me they flew away again, thinking I was a Munchkin; and this pleased me and made me feel that I was quite an important person. By and by an old crow flew near me, and after looking at me carefully he perched upon my shoulder and said,

“’I wonder if that farmer thought to fool me in this clumsy manner. Any crow of sense could see that you are only stuffed with straw.’ Then he hopped down at my feet and ate all the corn he wanted. The other birds, seeing he was not harmed by me, came to eat the corn too, so in a short time there was a great flock of them about me.

“I felt sad at this, for it showed I was not such a good Scarecrow after all; but the old crow comforted me, saying: ‘If you only had brains in your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.’

“After the crows had gone I thought this over, and decided I would try hard to get some brains. By good luck, you came along and pulled me off the stake, and from what you say I am sure the Great Oz will give me brains as soon as we get to the Emerald City.”

“I hope so,” said Dorothy, earnestly, “since you seem anxious to have them.”

“Oh, yes; I am anxious,” returned the Scarecrow. “It is such an uncomfortable feeling to know one is a fool.”

“Well,” said the girl, “let us go.” And she handed the basket to the Scarecrow.

There were no fences at all by the road side now, and the land was rough and untilled. Towards evening they came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the road of yellow brick. It was almost dark under the trees, for the branches shut out the daylight; but the travellers did not stop, and went on into the forest.

“If this road goes in, it must come out,” said the Scarecrow, “and as the Emerald City is at the other end of the road, we must go wherever it leads us.”

“Anyone would know that,” said Dorothy.

“Certainly; that is why I know it,” returned the Scarecrow. “If it required brains to figure it out, I never should have said it.”

After an hour or so the light faded away, and they found themselves stumbling along in the darkness. Dorothy could not see at all, but Toto could, for some dogs see very well in the dark; and the Scarecrow declared he could see as well as by day. So she took hold of his arm and managed to get along fairly well.

“If you see any house, or any place where we can pass the night,” she said, “you must tell me; for it is very uncomfortable walking in the dark.”

Soon after the Scarecrow stopped.

“I see a little cottage at the right of us,” he said, “built of logs and branches. Shall we go there?”

“Yes, indeed;” answered the child. “I am all tired out.”

So the Scarecrow led her through the trees until they reached the cottage, and Dorothy entered and found a bed of dried leaves in one corner. She lay down at once, and with Toto beside her soon fell into a sound sleep. The Scarecrow, who was never tired, stood up in another corner and waited patiently until morning came.

Chapter V.

The Rescue of
the Tin Woodman.

WHEN DOROTHY AWOKE the sun was shining through the trees and Toto had long been out chasing birds and squirrels. She sat up and looked around her. There was the Scarecrow, still standing patiently in his corner, waiting for her.

“We must go and search for water,” she said to him.

“Why do you want water?” he asked.

“To wash my face clean after the dust of the road, and to drink, so the dry bread will not stick in my throat.”

“It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh,” said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully; “for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.”

They left the cottage and walked through the trees until they found a little spring of clear water, where Dorothy drank and bathed and ate her breakfast. She saw there was not much bread left in the basket, and the girl was thankful the Scarecrow did not have to eat anything, for there was scarcely enough for herself and Toto for the day.

When she had finished her meal, and was about to go back to the road of yellow brick, she was startled to hear a deep groan near by.

“What was that?” she asked, timidly.

“I cannot imagine,” replied the Scarecrow; “but we can go and see.”

Just then another groan reached their ears, and the sound seemed to come from behind them. They turned and walked through the forest a few steps, when Dorothy discovered something shining in a ray of sunshine that fell between the trees. She ran to the place, and then stopped short, with a cry of surprise.

One of the big trees had been partly chopped through, and standing beside it, with an uplifted axe in his hands, was a man made entirely of tin. His head and arms and legs were jointed upon his body, but he stood perfectly motionless, as if he could not stir at all.

Dorothy looked at him in amazement, and so did the Scarecrow, while Toto barked sharply and made a snap at the tin legs, which hurt his teeth.

“Did you groan?” asked Dorothy.

“Yes,” answered the tin man; “I did. I’ve been groaning for more than a year, and no one has ever heard me before or come to help me.”

“What can I do for you?” she enquired, softly, for she was moved by the sad voice in which the man spoke.

“Get an oil-can and oil my joints,” he answered. “They are rusted so badly that I cannot move them at all; if I am well oiled I shall soon be all right again. You will find an oil-can on a shelf in my cottage.”

Dorothy at once ran back to the cottage and found the oil-can, and then she returned and asked, anxiously,

“Where are your joints?”

“Oil my neck, first,” replied the Tin Woodman. So she oiled it, and as it was quite badly rusted the Scarecrow took hold of the tin head and moved it gently from side to side until it worked freely, and then the man could turn it himself.

“Now oil the joints in my arms,” he said. And Dorothy oiled them and the Scarecrow bent them carefully until they were quite free from rust and as good as new.

The Tin Woodman gave a sigh of satisfaction and lowered his axe, which he leaned against the tree.

“This is a great comfort,” he said. “I have been holding that axe in the air ever since I rusted, and I’m glad to be able to put it down at last. Now, if you will oil the joints of my legs, I shall be all right once more.”

So they oiled his legs until he could move them freely; and he thanked them again and again for his release, for he seemed a very polite creature, and very grateful.

“I might have stood there always if you had not come along,” he said; “so you have certainly saved my life. How did you happen to be here?”

“We are on our way to the Emerald City to see the Great Oz,” she answered, “and we stopped at your cottage to pass the night.”

“Why do you wish to see Oz?” he asked.

“I want him to send me back to Kansas; and the Scarecrow wants him to put a few brains into his head,” she replied.

The Tin Woodman appeared to think deeply for a moment. Then he said:

“Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?”

“Why, I guess so,” Dorothy answered; “it would be as easy as to give the Scarecrow brains.”

“True,” the Tin Woodman returned. “So, if you will allow me to join your party, I will also go to the Emerald City and ask Oz to help me.”

“Come along,” said the Scarecrow heartily; and Dorothy added that she would be pleased to have his company. So the Tin Woodman shouldered his axe and they all passed through the forest until they came to the road that was paved with yellow brick.

The Tin Woodman had asked Dorothy to put the oil-can in her basket. “For,” he said, “if I should get caught in the rain, and rust again, I would need the oil-can badly.”

It was a bit of good luck to have their new comrade join the party, for soon after they had begun their journey again they came to a place where the trees and branches grew so thick over the road that the travellers could not pass. But the Tin Woodman set to work with his axe and chopped so well that soon he cleared a passage for the entire party.

Dorothy was thinking so earnestly as they walked along that she did not notice when the Scarecrow stumbled into a hole and rolled over to the side of the road. Indeed, he was obliged to call to her to help him up again.

“Why didn’t you walk around the hole?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“I don’t know enough,” replied the Scarecrow, cheerfully. “My head is stuffed with straw, you know, and that is why I am going to Oz to ask him for some brains.”

“Oh, I see;” said the Tin Woodman. “But, after all, brains are not the best things in the world.”

“Have you any?” enquired the Scarecrow.

“No, my head is quite empty,” answered the Woodman; “but once I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.”

“And why is that?” asked the Scarecrow.

“I will tell you my story, and then you will know.”

So, while they were walking through the forest, the Tin Woodman told the following story:

“I was born the son of a woodman who chopped down trees in the forest and sold the wood for a living. When I grew up I too became a wood-chopper, and after my father died I took care of my old mother as long as she lived. Then I made up my mind that instead of living alone I would marry, so that I might not become lonely.

“There was one of the Munchkin girls who was so beautiful that I soon grew to love her with all my heart. She, on her part, promised to marry me as soon as I could earn enough money to build a better house for her; so I set to work harder than ever. But the girl lived with an old woman who did not want her to marry anyone, for she was so lazy she wished the girl to remain with her and do the cooking and the housework. So the old woman went to the Wicked Witch of the East, and promised her two sheep and a cow if she would prevent the marriage. Thereupon the Wicked Witch enchanted my axe, and when I was chopping away at my best one day, for I was anxious to get the new house and my wife as soon as possible, the axe slipped all at once and cut off my left leg.

“This at first seemed a great misfortune, for I knew a one-legged man could not do very well as a wood-chopper. So I went to a tin-smith and had him make me a new leg out of tin. The leg worked very well, once I was used to it; but my action angered the Wicked Witch of the East, for she had promised the old woman I should not marry the pretty Munchkin girl. When I began chopping again, my axe slipped and cut off my right leg. Again I went to the tinner, and again he made me a leg out of tin. After this the enchanted axe cut off my arms, one after the other; but, nothing daunted, I had them replaced with tin ones. The Wicked Witch then made the axe slip and cut off my head, and at first I thought that was the end of me. But the tinner happened to come along, and he made me a new head out of tin.

“I thought I had beaten the Wicked Witch then, and I worked harder than ever; but I little knew how cruel my enemy could be. She thought of a new way to kill my love for the beautiful Munchkin maiden, and made my axe slip again, so that it cut right through my body, splitting me into two halves. Once more the tinner came to my help and made me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by means of joints, so that I could move around as well as ever. But, alas! I had now no heart, so that I lost all my love for the Munchkin girl, and did not care whether I married her or not. I suppose she is still living with the old woman, waiting for me to come after her.

“My body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it and it did not matter now if my axe slipped, for it could not cut me. There was only one danger—that my joints would rust; but I kept an oil-can in my cottage and took care to oil myself whenever I needed it. However, there came a day when I forgot to do this, and, being caught in a rainstorm, before I thought of the danger my joints had rusted, and I was left to stand in the woods until you came to help me. It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one. If he does, I will go back to the Munchkin maiden and marry her.”

Both Dorothy and the Scarecrow had been greatly interested in the story of the Tin Woodman, and now they knew why he was so anxious to get a new heart.

“All the same,” said the Scarecrow, “I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.”

“I shall take the heart,” returned the Tin Woodman; “for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”

Dorothy did not say anything, for she was puzzled to know which of her two friends was right, and she decided if she could only get back to Kansas and Aunt Em it did not matter so much whether the Woodman had no brains and the Scarecrow no heart, or each got what he wanted.

What worried her most was that the bread was nearly gone, and another meal for herself and Toto would empty the basket. To be sure neither the Woodman nor the Scarecrow ever ate anything, but she was not made of tin nor straw, and could not live unless she was fed.

Chapter VI.

The Cowardly

Lion.

ALL THIS TIME Dorothy and her companions had been walking through the thick woods. The road was still paved with yellow brick, but these were much covered by dried branches and dead leaves from the trees, and the walking was not at all good.

There were few birds in this part of the forest, for birds love the open country where there is plenty of sunshine; but now and then there came a deep growl from some wild animal hidden among the trees. These sounds made the little girl’s heart beat fast, for she did not know what made them; but Toto knew, and he walked close to Dorothy’s side, and did not even bark in return.

“How long will it be,” the child asked of the Tin Woodman, “before we are out of the forest?”

“I cannot tell,” was the answer, “for I have never been to the Emerald City. But my father went there once, when I was a boy, and he said it was a long journey through a dangerous country, although nearer to the city where Oz dwells the country is beautiful. But I am not afraid so long as I have my oil-can, and nothing can hurt the Scarecrow, while you bear upon your forehead the mark of the Good Witch’s kiss, and that will protect you from harm.”

“But Toto!” said the girl anxiously; “what will protect him?”

“We must protect him ourselves, if he is in danger,” replied the Tin Woodman.

Just as he spoke there came from the forest a terrible roar, and the next moment a great Lion bounded into the road. With one blow of his paw he sent the Scarecrow spinning over and over to the edge of the road, and then he struck at the Tin Woodman with his sharp claws. But, to the Lion’s surprise, he could make no impression on the tin, although the Woodman fell over in the road and lay still.

Little Toto, now that he had an enemy to face, ran barking toward the Lion, and the great beast had opened his mouth to bite the dog, when Dorothy, fearing Toto would be killed, and heedless of danger, rushed forward and slapped the Lion upon his nose as hard as she could, while she cried out:

“Don’t you dare to bite Toto! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big beast like you, to bite a poor little dog!”

“I didn’t bite him,” said the Lion, as he rubbed his nose with his paw where Dorothy had hit it.

“No, but you tried to,” she retorted. “You are nothing but a big coward.”

“I know it,” said the Lion, hanging his head in shame. “I’ve always known it. But how can I help it?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. To think of your striking a stuffed man, like the poor Scarecrow!”

“Is he stuffed?” asked the Lion, in surprise, as he watched her pick up the Scarecrow and set him upon his feet, while she patted him into shape again.

“Of course he’s stuffed,” replied Dorothy, who was still angry.

“That’s why he went over so easily,” remarked the Lion. “It astonished me to see him whirl around so. Is the other one stuffed, also?”

“No,” said Dorothy, “he’s made of tin.” And she helped the Woodman up again.

“That’s why he nearly blunted my claws,” said the Lion. “When they scratched against the tin it made a cold shiver run down my back. What is that little animal you are so tender of?”

“He is my dog, Toto,” answered Dorothy.

“Is he made of tin, or stuffed?” asked the Lion.

“Neither. He’s a—a—a meat dog,” said the girl.

“Oh. He’s a curious animal, and seems remarkably small, now that I look at him. No one would think of biting such a little thing except a coward like me,” continued the Lion, sadly.

“What makes you a coward?” asked Dorothy, looking at the great beast in wonder, for he was as big as a small horse.

“It’s a mystery,” replied the Lion. “I suppose I was born that way. All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I’ve met a man I’ve been awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as he could go. If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever tried to fight me, I should have run myself—I’m such a coward; but just as soon as they hear me roar they all try to get away from me, and of course I let them go.”

“But that isn’t right. The King of Beasts shouldn’t be a coward,” said the Scarecrow.

“I know it,” returned the Lion, wiping a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail; “it is my great sorrow, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger, my heart begins to beat fast.”

“Perhaps you have heart disease,” said the Tin Woodman.

“It may be,” said the Lion.

“If you have,” continued the Tin Woodman, “you ought to be glad, for it proves you have a heart. For my part, I have no heart, so I cannot have heart disease.”

“Perhaps,” said the Lion thoughtfully, “if I had no heart I should not be a coward.”

“Have you brains?” asked the Scarecrow.

“I suppose so. I’ve never looked to see,” replied the Lion.

“I am going to the Great Oz to ask him to give me some,” remarked the Scarecrow, “for my head is stuffed with straw.”

“And I am going to ask him to give me a heart,” said the Woodman.

“And I am going to ask him to send Toto and me back to Kansas,” added Dorothy.

“Do you think Oz could give me courage?” asked the Cowardly Lion.

“Just as easily as he could give me brains,” said the Scarecrow.

“Or give me a heart,” said the Tin Woodman.

“Or send me back to Kansas,” said Dorothy.

“Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll go with you,” said the Lion, “for my life is simply unbearable without a bit of courage.”

“You will be very welcome,” answered Dorothy, “for you will help to keep away the other wild beasts. It seems to me they must be more cowardly than you are if they allow you to scare them so easily.”

“They really are,” said the Lion; “but that doesn’t make me any braver, and as long as I know myself to be a coward I shall be unhappy.”

So once more the little company set off upon the journey, the Lion walking with stately strides at Dorothy’s side. Toto did not approve this new comrade at first, for he could not forget how nearly he had been crushed between the Lion’s great jaws; but after a time he became more at ease, and presently Toto and the Cowardly Lion had grown to be good friends.

During the rest of that day there was no other adventure to mar the peace of their journey. Once, indeed, the Tin Woodman stepped upon a beetle that was crawling along the road, and killed the poor little thing. This made the Tin Woodman very unhappy, for he was always careful not to hurt any living creature; and as he walked along he wept several tears of sorrow and regret. These tears ran slowly down his face and over the hinges of his jaw, and there they rusted. When Dorothy presently asked him a question the Tin Woodman could not open his mouth, for his jaws were tightly rusted together. He became greatly frightened at this and made many motions to Dorothy to relieve him, but she could not understand. The Lion was also puzzled to know what was wrong. But the Scarecrow seized the oil-can from Dorothy’s basket and oiled the Woodman’s jaws, so that after a few moments he could talk as well as before.

“This will serve me a lesson,” said he, “to look where I step. For if I should kill another bug or beetle I should surely cry again, and crying rusts my jaw so that I cannot speak.”

Thereafter he walked very carefully, with his eyes on the road, and when he saw a tiny ant toiling by he would step over it, so as not to harm it. The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.

“You people with hearts,” he said, “have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart, of course I needn’t mind so much.”

Chapter VII.

The Journey to

The Great Oz.

THEY WERE OBLIGED to camp out that night under a large tree in the forest, for there were no houses near. The tree made a good, thick covering to protect them from the dew, and the Tin Woodman chopped a great pile of wood with his axe, and Dorothy built a splendid fire that warmed her and made her feel less lonely. She and Toto ate the last of their bread, and now she did not know what they would do for breakfast.

“If you wish,” said the Lion, “I will go into the forest and kill a deer for you. You can roast it by the fire, since your tastes are so peculiar that you prefer cooked food, and then you will have a very good breakfast.”

“Don’t! Please don’t,” begged the Tin Woodman. “I should certainly weep if you killed a poor deer, and then my jaws would rust again.”

But the Lion went away into the forest and found his own supper, and no one ever knew what it was, for he didn’t mention it. And the Scarecrow found a tree full of nuts and filled Dorothy’s basket with them, so that she would not be hungry for a long time. She thought this was very kind and thoughtful of the Scarecrow, but she laughed heartily at the awkward way in which the poor creature picked up the nuts. His padded hands were so clumsy and the nuts were so small that he dropped almost as many as he put in the basket. But the Scarecrow did not mind how long it took him to fill the basket, for it enabled him to keep away from the fire, as he feared a spark might get into his straw and burn him up. So he kept a good distance away from the flames, and only came near to cover Dorothy with dry leaves when she lay down to sleep. These kept her very snug and warm, and she slept soundly until morning.

When it was daylight, the girl bathed her face in a little rippling brook, and soon after they all started toward the Emerald City.

This was to be an eventful day for the travellers. They had hardly been walking an hour when they saw before them a great ditch that crossed the road and divided the forest as far as they could see on either side. It was a very wide ditch, and when they crept up to the edge and looked into it they could see it was also very deep, and there were many big, jagged rocks at the bottom. The sides were so steep that none of them could climb down, and for a moment it seemed that their journey must end.

“What shall we do?” asked Dorothy despairingly.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said the Tin Woodman; and the Lion shook his shaggy mane and looked thoughtful. But the Scarecrow said:

“We cannot fly, that is certain; neither can we climb down into this great ditch. Therefore, if we cannot jump over it, we must stop where we are.”

“I think I could jump over it,” said the Cowardly Lion, after measuring the distance carefully in his mind.

“Then we are all right,” answered the Scarecrow, “for you can carry us all over on your back, one at a time.”

“Well, I’ll try it,” said the Lion. “Who will go first?”

“I will,” declared the Scarecrow, “for, if you found that you could not jump over the gulf, Dorothy would be killed, or the Tin Woodman badly dented on the rocks below. But if I am on your back it will not matter so much, for the fall would not hurt me at all.”

“I am terribly afraid of falling, myself,” said the Cowardly Lion, “but I suppose there is nothing to do but try it. So get on my back and we will make the attempt.”

The Scarecrow sat upon the Lion’s back, and the big beast walked to the edge of the gulf and crouched down.

“Why don’t you run and jump?” asked the Scarecrow.

“Because that isn’t the way we Lions do these things,” he replied. Then giving a great spring, he shot through the air and landed safely on the other side. They were all greatly pleased to see how easily he did it, and after the Scarecrow had got down from his back the Lion sprang across the ditch again.

Dorothy thought she would go next; so she took Toto in her arms and climbed on the Lion’s back, holding tightly to his mane with one hand. The next moment it seemed as if she were flying through the air; and then, before she had time to think about it, she was safe on the other side. The Lion went back a third time and got the Tin Woodman, and then they all sat down for a few moments to give the beast a chance to rest, for his great leaps had made his breath short, and he panted like a big dog that has been running too long.

They found the forest very thick on this side, and it looked dark and gloomy. After the Lion had rested they started along the road of yellow brick, silently wondering, each in his own mind, if ever they would come to the end of the woods and reach the bright sunshine again. To add to their discomfort, they soon heard strange noises in the depths of the forest, and the Lion whispered to them that it was in this part of the country that the Kalidahs lived.

“What are the Kalidahs?” asked the girl.

“They are monstrous beasts with bodies like bears and heads like tigers,” replied the Lion; “and with claws so long and sharp that they could tear me in two as easily as I could kill Toto. I’m terribly afraid of the Kalidahs.”

“I’m not surprised that you are,” returned Dorothy. “They must be dreadful beasts.”

The Lion was about to reply when suddenly they came to another gulf across the road; but this one was so broad and deep that the Lion knew at once he could not leap across it.

So they sat down to consider what they should do, and after serious thought the Scarecrow said,

“Here is a great tree, standing close to the ditch. If the Tin Woodman can chop it down, so that it will fall to the other side, we can walk across it easily.”

“That is a first rate idea,” said the Lion. “One would almost suspect you had brains in your head, instead of straw.”

The Woodman set to work at once, and so sharp was his axe that the tree was soon chopped nearly through. Then the Lion put his strong front legs against the tree and pushed with all his might, and slowly the big tree tipped and fell with a crash across the ditch, with its top branches on the other side.

They had just started to cross this queer bridge when a sharp growl made them all look up, and to their horror they saw running toward them two great beasts with bodies like bears and heads like tigers.

“They are the Kalidahs!” said the Cowardly Lion, beginning to tremble.

“Quick!” cried the Scarecrow. “Let us cross over.”

So Dorothy went first, holding Toto in her arms; the Tin Woodman followed, and the Scarecrow came next. The Lion, although he was certainly afraid, turned to face the Kalidahs, and then he gave so loud and terrible a roar that Dorothy screamed and the Scarecrow fell over backwards, while even the fierce beasts stopped short and looked at him in surprise.

But, seeing they were bigger than the Lion, and remembering that there were two of them and only one of him, the Kalidahs again rushed forward, and the Lion crossed over the tree and turned to see what they would do next. Without stopping an instant the fierce beasts also began to cross the tree; and the Lion said to Dorothy,

“We are lost, for they will surely tear us to pieces with their sharp claws. But stand close behind me, and I will fight them as long as I am alive.”

“Wait a minute!” called the Scarecrow. He had been thinking what was best to be done, and now he asked the Woodman to chop away the end of the tree that rested on their side of the ditch. The Tin Woodman began to use his axe at once, and, just as the two Kalidahs were nearly across, the tree fell with a crash into the gulf, carrying the ugly, snarling brutes with it, and both were dashed to pieces on the sharp rocks at the bottom.

“Well,” said the Cowardly Lion, drawing a long breath of relief, “I see we are going to live a little while longer, and I am glad of it, for it must be a very uncomfortable thing not to be alive. Those creatures frightened me so badly that my heart is beating yet.”

“Ah,” said the Tin Woodman sadly, “I wish I had a heart to beat.”

This adventure made the travellers more anxious than ever to get out of the forest, and they walked so fast that Dorothy became tired, and had to ride on the Lion’s back. To their great joy the trees became thinner the further they advanced, and in the afternoon they suddenly came upon a broad river, flowing swiftly just before them. On the other side of the water they could see the road of yellow brick running through a beautiful country, with green meadows dotted with bright flowers and all the road bordered with trees hanging full of delicious fruits. They were greatly pleased to see this delightful country before them.

“How shall we cross the river?” asked Dorothy.

“That is easily done,” replied the Scarecrow. “The Tin Woodman must build us a raft, so we can float to the other side.”

So the Woodman took his axe and began to chop down small trees to make a raft, and while he was busy at this the Scarecrow found on the river bank a tree full of fine fruit. This pleased Dorothy, who had eaten nothing but nuts all day, and she made a hearty meal of the ripe fruit.

But it takes time to make a raft, even when one is as industrious and untiring as the Tin Woodman, and when night came the work was not done. So they found a cozy place under the trees where they slept well until the morning; and Dorothy dreamed of the Emerald City, and of the good Wizard Oz, who would soon send her back to her own home again.

Chapter VIII.

The Deadly

Poppy Field.

OUR LITTLE PARTY of travellers awakened next morning refreshed and full of hope, and Dorothy breakfasted like a princess off peaches and plums from the trees beside the river. Behind them was the dark forest they had passed safely through, although they had suffered many discouragements; but before them was a lovely, sunny country that seemed to beckon them on to the Emerald City.

To be sure, the broad river now cut them off from this beautiful land; but the raft was nearly done, and after the Tin Woodman had cut a few more logs and fastened them together with wooden pins, they were ready to start. Dorothy sat down in the middle of the raft and held Toto in her arms. When the Cowardly Lion stepped upon the raft it tipped badly, for he was big and heavy; but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman stood upon the other end to steady it, and they had long poles in their hands to push the raft through the water.

They got along quite well at first, but when they reached the middle of the river the swift current swept the raft down stream, farther and farther away from the road of yellow brick; and the water grew so deep that the long poles would not touch the bottom.

“This is bad,” said the Tin Woodman, “for if we cannot get to the land we shall be carried into the country of the Wicked Witch of the West, and she will enchant us and make us her slaves.”

“And then I should get no brains,” said the Scarecrow.

“And I should get no courage,” said the Cowardly Lion.

“And I should get no heart,” said the Tin Woodman.

“And I should never get back to Kansas,” said Dorothy.

“We must certainly get to the Emerald City if we can,” the Scarecrow continued, and he pushed so hard on his long pole that it stuck fast in the mud at the bottom of the river, and before he could pull it out again, or let go, the raft was swept away and the poor Scarecrow left clinging to the pole in the middle of the river.

“Good-bye!” he called after them, and they were very sorry to leave him; indeed, the Tin Woodman began to cry, but fortunately remembered that he might rust, and so dried his tears on Dorothy’s apron.

Of course this was a bad thing for the Scarecrow.

“I am now worse off than when I first met Dorothy,” he thought. “Then, I was stuck on a pole in a cornfield, where I could make believe scare the crows, at any rate; but surely there is no use for a Scarecrow stuck on a pole in the middle of a river. I am afraid I shall never have any brains, after all!”

Down the stream the raft floated, and the poor Scarecrow was left far behind. Then the Lion said:

“Something must be done to save us. I think I can swim to the shore and pull the raft after me, if you will only hold fast to the tip of my tail.”

So he sprang into the water, and the Tin Woodman caught fast hold of his tail; then the Lion began to swim with all his might toward the shore. It was hard work, although he was so big; but by and by they were drawn out of the current, and then Dorothy took the Tin Woodman’s long pole and helped push the raft to the land.

They were all tired out when they reached the shore at last and stepped off upon the pretty green grass, and they also knew that the stream had carried them a long way past the road of yellow brick that led to the Emerald City.

“What shall we do now?” asked the Tin Woodman, as the Lion lay down on the grass to let the sun dry him.

“We must get back to the road, in some way,” said Dorothy.

“The best plan will be to walk along the river bank until we come to the road again,” remarked the Lion.

So, when they were rested, Dorothy picked up her basket and they started along the grassy bank, back to the road from which the river had carried them. It was a lovely country, with plenty of flowers and fruit trees and sunshine to cheer them, and had they not felt so sorry for the poor Scarecrow they could have been very happy.

They walked along as fast as they could, Dorothy only stopping once to pick a beautiful flower; and after a time the Tin Woodman cried out,

“Look!”

Then they all looked at the river and saw the Scarecrow perched upon his pole in the middle of the water, looking very lonely and sad.

“What can we do to save him?” asked Dorothy.

The Lion and the Woodman both shook their heads, for they did not know. So they sat down upon the bank and gazed wistfully at the Scarecrow until a Stork flew by, which seeing them, stopped to rest at the water’s edge.

“Who are you, and where are you going?” asked the Stork.

“I am Dorothy,” answered the girl; “and these are my friends, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion; and we are going to the Emerald City.”

“This isn’t the road,” said the Stork, as she twisted her long neck and looked sharply at the queer party.

“I know it,” returned Dorothy, “but we have lost the Scarecrow, and are wondering how we shall get him again.”

“Where is he?” asked the Stork.

“Over there in the river,” answered the girl.

“If he wasn’t so big and heavy I would get him for you,” remarked the Stork.

“He isn’t heavy a bit,” said Dorothy eagerly, “for he is stuffed with straw; and if you will bring him back to us we shall thank you ever and ever so much.”

“Well, I’ll try,” said the Stork; “but if I find he is too heavy to carry I shall have to drop him in the river again.”

So the big bird flew into the air and over the water till she came to where the Scarecrow was perched upon his pole. Then the Stork with her great claws grabbed the Scarecrow by the arm and carried him up into the air and back to the bank, where Dorothy and the Lion and the Tin Woodman and Toto were sitting.

When the Scarecrow found himself among his friends again, he was so happy that he hugged them all, even the Lion and Toto; and as they walked along he sang “Tol-de-ri-de-oh!” at every step, he felt so gay.

“I was afraid I should have to stay in the river forever,” he said, “but the kind Stork saved me, and if I ever get any brains I shall find the Stork again and do it some kindness in return.”

“That’s all right,” said the Stork, who was flying along beside them. “I always like to help anyone in trouble. But I must go now, for my babies are waiting in the nest for me. I hope you will find the Emerald City and that Oz will help you.”

“Thank you,” replied Dorothy, and then the kind Stork flew into the air and was soon out of sight.

They walked along listening to the singing of the bright-colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy’s eyes.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” the girl asked, as she breathed in the spicy scent of the flowers.

“I suppose so,” answered the Scarecrow. “When I have brains I shall probably like them better.”

“If I only had a heart I should love them,” added the Tin Woodman.

“I always did like flowers,” said the Lion; “they seem so helpless and frail. But there are none in the forest so bright as these.”

They now came upon more and more of the big scarlet poppies, and fewer and fewer of the other flowers; and soon they found themselves in the midst of a great meadow of poppies. Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers he sleeps on and on forever. But Dorothy did not know this, nor could she get away from the bright red flowers that were everywhere about; so presently her eyes grew heavy and she felt she must sit down to rest and to sleep.

But the Tin Woodman would not let her do this.

“We must hurry and get back to the road of yellow brick before dark,” he said; and the Scarecrow agreed with him. So they kept walking until Dorothy could stand no longer. Her eyes closed in spite of herself and she forgot where she was and fell among the poppies, fast asleep.

“What shall we do?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“If we leave her here she will die,” said the Lion. “The smell of the flowers is killing us all. I myself can scarcely keep my eyes open and the dog is asleep already.”

It was true; Toto had fallen down beside his little mistress. But the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, not being made of flesh, were not troubled by the scent of the flowers.

“Run fast,” said the Scarecrow to the Lion, “and get out of this deadly flower-bed as soon as you can. We will bring the little girl with us, but if you should fall asleep you are too big to be carried.”

So the Lion aroused himself and bounded forward as fast as he could go. In a moment he was out of sight.

“Let us make a chair with our hands, and carry her,” said the Scarecrow. So they picked up Toto and put the dog in Dorothy’s lap, and then they made a chair with their hands for the seat and their arms for the arms and carried the sleeping girl between them through the flowers.

On and on they walked, and it seemed that the great carpet of deadly flowers that surrounded them would never end. They followed the bend of the river, and at last came upon their friend the Lion, lying fast asleep among the poppies. The flowers had been too strong for the huge beast and he had given up, at last, and fallen only a short distance from the end of the poppy bed, where the sweet grass spread in beautiful green fields before them.

“We can do nothing for him,” said the Tin Woodman sadly; “for he is much too heavy to lift. We must leave him here to sleep on forever, and perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Scarecrow; “the Lion was a very good comrade for one so cowardly. But let us go on.”

They carried the sleeping girl to a pretty spot beside the river, far enough from the poppy field to prevent her breathing any more of the poison of the flowers, and here they laid her gently on the soft grass and waited for the fresh breeze to waken her.

Chapter IX.

The Queen of the

Field Mice.

“WE CANNOT BE far from the road of yellow brick, now,” remarked the Scarecrow, as he stood beside the girl, “for we have come nearly as far as the river carried us away.”

The Tin Woodman was about to reply when he heard a low growl, and turning his head (which worked beautifully on hinges) he saw a strange beast come bounding over the grass towards them. It was, indeed, a great, yellow wildcat, and the Woodman thought it must be chasing something, for its ears were lying close to its head and its mouth was wide open, showing two rows of ugly teeth, while its red eyes glowed like balls of fire. As it came nearer the Tin Woodman saw that running before the beast was a little gray field-mouse, and although he had no heart he knew it was wrong for the wildcat to try to kill such a pretty, harmless creature.

So the Woodman raised his axe, and as the wildcat ran by he gave it a quick blow that cut the beast’s head clean off from its body, and it rolled over at his feet in two pieces.

The field-mouse, now that it was freed from its enemy, stopped short; and coming slowly up to the Woodman it said, in a squeaky little voice,

“Oh, thank you! Thank you ever so much for saving my life.”

“Don’t speak of it, I beg of you,” replied the Woodman. “I have no heart, you know, so I am careful to help all those who may need a friend, even if it happens to be only a mouse.”

“Only a mouse!” cried the little animal, indignantly; “why, I am a Queen—the Queen of all the field-mice!”

“Oh, indeed,” said the Woodman, making a bow.

“Therefore you have done a great deed, as well as a brave one, in saving my life,” added the Queen.

At that moment several mice were seen running up as fast as their little legs could carry them, and when they saw their Queen they exclaimed,

“Oh, your Majesty, we thought you would be killed! How did you manage to escape the great wildcat?” and they all bowed so low to the little Queen that they almost stood upon their heads.

“This funny tin man,” she answered, “killed the wildcat and saved my life. So hereafter you must all serve him and obey his slightest wish.”

“We will!” cried all the mice, in a shrill chorus. And then they scampered in all directions, for Toto had awakened from his sleep, and seeing all these mice around him he gave one bark of delight and jumped right into the middle of the group. Toto had always loved to chase mice when he lived in Kansas, and he saw no harm in it.

But the Tin Woodman caught the dog in his arms and held him tight, while he called to the mice: “Come back! come back! Toto shall not hurt you.”

At this the Queen of the Mice stuck her head out from a clump of grass and asked, in a timid voice,

“Are you sure he will not bite us?”

“I will not let him,” said the Woodman; “so do not be afraid.”

One by one the mice came creeping back, and Toto did not bark again, although he tried to get out of the Woodman’s arms, and would have bitten him had he not known very well he was made of tin. Finally one of the biggest mice spoke.

“Is there anything we can do,” it asked, “to repay you for saving the life of our Queen?”

“Nothing that I know of,” answered the Woodman; but the Scarecrow, who had been trying to think, but could not because his head was stuffed with straw, said, quickly,

“Oh, yes; you can save our friend, the Cowardly Lion, who is asleep in the poppy bed.”

“A Lion!” cried the little Queen; “why, he would eat us all up.”

“Oh, no;” declared the Scarecrow; “this Lion is a coward.”

“Really?” asked the Mouse.

“He says so himself,” answered the Scarecrow, “and he would never hurt anyone who is our friend. If you will help us to save him I promise that he shall treat you all with kindness.”

“Very well,” said the Queen, “we will trust you. But what shall we do?”

“Are there many of these mice which call you Queen and are willing to obey you?”

“Oh, yes; there are thousands,” she replied.

“Then send for them all to come here as soon as possible, and let each one bring a long piece of string.”

The Queen turned to the mice that attended her and told them to go at once and get all her people. As soon as they heard her orders they ran away in every direction as fast as possible.

“Now,” said the Scarecrow to the Tin Woodman, “you must go to those trees by the river-side and make a truck that will carry the Lion.”

So the Woodman went at once to the trees and began to work; and he soon made a truck out of the limbs of trees, from which he chopped away all the leaves and branches. He fastened it together with wooden pegs and made the four wheels out of short pieces of a big tree-trunk. So fast and so well did he work that by the time the mice began to arrive the truck was all ready for them.

They came from all directions, and there were thousands of them: big mice and little mice and middle-sized mice; and each one brought a piece of string in his mouth. It was about this time that Dorothy woke from her long sleep and opened her eyes. She was greatly astonished to find herself lying upon the grass, with thousands of mice standing around and looking at her timidly. But the Scarecrow told her about everything, and turning to the dignified little Mouse, he said,

“Permit me to introduce to you her Majesty, the Queen.”

Dorothy nodded gravely and the Queen made a courtesy, after which she became quite friendly with the little girl.

The Scarecrow and the Woodman now began to fasten the mice to the truck, using the strings they had brought. One end of a string was tied around the neck of each mouse and the other end to the truck. Of course the truck was a thousand times bigger than any of the mice who were to draw it; but when all the mice had been harnessed, they were able to pull it quite easily. Even the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman could sit on it, and were drawn swiftly by their queer little horses to the place where the Lion lay asleep.

After a great deal of hard work, for the Lion was heavy, they managed to get him up on the truck. Then the Queen hurriedly gave her people the order to start, for she feared if the mice stayed among the poppies too long they also would fall asleep.

At first the little creatures, many though they were, could hardly stir the heavily loaded truck; but the Woodman and the Scarecrow both pushed from behind, and they got along better. Soon they rolled the Lion out of the poppy bed to the green fields, where he could breathe the sweet, fresh air again, instead of the poisonous scent of the flowers.

Dorothy came to meet them and thanked the little mice warmly for saving her companion from death. She had grown so fond of the big Lion she was glad he had been rescued.

Then the mice were unharnessed from the truck and scampered away through the grass to their homes. The Queen of the Mice was the last to leave.

“If ever you need us again,” she said, “come out into the field and call, and we shall hear you and come to your assistance. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” they all answered, and away the Queen ran, while Dorothy held Toto tightly lest he should run after her and frighten her.

After this they sat down beside the Lion until he should awaken, and the Scarecrow brought Dorothy some fruit from a tree near by, which she ate for her dinner.

Chapter X.

The Guardian
of the Gate.

IT WAS SOME time before the Cowardly Lion awakened, for he had lain among the poppies a long while, breathing in their deadly fragrance; but when he did open his eyes and roll off the truck he was very glad to find himself still alive.

“I ran as fast as I could,” he said, sitting down and yawning; “but the flowers were too strong for me. How did you get me out?”

Then they told him of the field-mice, and how they had generously saved him from death; and the Cowardly Lion laughed, and said,

“I have always thought myself very big and terrible; yet such things as flowers came near to killing me, and such small animals as mice have saved my life. How strange it all is! But, comrades, what shall we do now?”

“We must journey on until we find the road of yellow brick again,” said Dorothy; “and then we can keep on to the Emerald City.”

So, the Lion being fully refreshed, and feeling quite himself again, they all started upon the journey, greatly enjoying the walk through the soft, fresh grass; and it was not long before they reached the road of yellow brick and turned again toward the Emerald City where the Great Oz dwelt.

The road was smooth and well paved, now, and the country about was beautiful; so that the travellers rejoiced in leaving the forest far behind, and with it the many dangers they had met in its gloomy shades. Once more they could see fences built beside the road; but these were painted green, and when they came to a small house, in which a farmer evidently lived, that also was painted green. They passed by several of these houses during the afternoon, and sometimes people came to the doors and looked at them as if they would like to ask questions; but no one came near them nor spoke to them because of the great Lion, of which they were very much afraid. The people were all dressed in clothing of a lovely emerald green color and wore peaked hats like those of the Munchkins.

“This must be the Land of Oz,” said Dorothy, “and we are surely getting near the Emerald City.”

“Yes,” answered the Scarecrow; “everything is green here, while in the country of the Munchkins blue was the favorite color. But the people do not seem to be as friendly as the Munchkins and I’m afraid we shall be unable to find a place to pass the night.”

“I should like something to eat besides fruit,” said the girl, “and I’m sure Toto is nearly starved. Let us stop at the next house and talk to the people.”

So, when they came to a good sized farm house, Dorothy walked boldly up to the door and knocked. A woman opened it just far enough to look out, and said,

“What do you want, child, and why is that great Lion with you?”

“We wish to pass the night with you, if you will allow us,” answered Dorothy; “and the Lion is my friend and comrade, and would not hurt you for the world.”

“Is he tame?” asked the woman, opening the door a little wider.

“Oh, yes;” said the girl, “and he is a great coward, too; so that he will be more afraid of you than you are of him.”

“Well,” said the woman, after thinking it over and taking another peep at the Lion, “if that is the case you may come in, and I will give you some supper and a place to sleep.”

So they all entered the house, where there were, besides the woman, two children and a man. The man had hurt his leg, and was lying on the couch in a corner. They seemed greatly surprised to see so strange a company, and while the woman was busy laying the table the man asked,

“Where are you all going?”

“To the Emerald City,” said Dorothy, “to see the Great Oz.”

“Oh, indeed!” exclaimed the man. “Are you sure that Oz will see you?”

“Why not?” she replied.

“Why, it is said that he never lets anyone come into his presence. I have been to the Emerald City many times, and it is a beautiful and wonderful place; but I have never been permitted to see the Great Oz, nor do I know of any living person who has seen him.”

“Does he never go out?” asked the Scarecrow.

“Never. He sits day after day in the great Throne Room of his palace, and even those who wait upon him do not see him face to face.”

“What is he like?” asked the girl.

“That is hard to tell,” said the man thoughtfully. “You see, Oz is a Great Wizard, and can take on any form he wishes. So that some say he looks like a bird; and some say he looks like an elephant; and some say he looks like a cat. To others he appears as a beautiful fairy, or a brownie, or in any other form that pleases him. But who the real Oz is, when he is in his own form, no living person can tell.”

“That is very strange,” said Dorothy, “but we must try, in some way, to see him, or we shall have made our journey for nothing.”

“Why do you wish to see the terrible Oz?” asked the man.

“I want him to give me some brains,” said the Scarecrow, eagerly.

“Oh, Oz could do that easily enough,” declared the man. “He has more brains than he needs.”

“And I want him to give me a heart,” said the Tin Woodman.

“That will not trouble him,” continued the man, “for Oz has a large collection of hearts, of all sizes and shapes.”

“And I want him to give me courage,” said the Cowardly Lion.

“Oz keeps a great pot of courage in his Throne Room,” said the man, “which he has covered with a golden plate, to keep it from running over. He will be glad to give you some.”

“And I want him to send me back to Kansas,” said Dorothy.

“Where is Kansas?” asked the man, in surprise.

“I don’t know,” replied Dorothy, sorrowfully; “but it is my home, and I’m sure it’s somewhere.”

“Very likely. Well, Oz can do anything; so I suppose he will find Kansas for you. But first you must get to see him, and that will be a hard task; for the Great Wizard does not like to see anyone, and he usually has his own way. But what do you want?” he continued, speaking to Toto. Toto only wagged his tail, for, strange to say, he could not speak.

The woman now called to them that supper was ready, so they gathered around the table and Dorothy ate some delicious porridge and a dish of scrambled eggs and a plate of nice white bread, and enjoyed her meal. The Lion ate some of the porridge, but did not care for it, saying it was made from oats and oats were food for horses, not for lions. The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman ate nothing at all. Toto ate a little of everything, and was glad to get a good supper again.

The woman now gave Dorothy a bed to sleep in, and Toto lay down beside her, while the Lion guarded the door of her room so she might not be disturbed. The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman stood up in a corner and kept quiet all night, although of course they could not sleep.

The next morning, as soon as the sun was up, they started on their way, and soon saw a beautiful green glow in the sky just before them.

“That must be the Emerald City,” said Dorothy.

As they walked on, the green glow became brighter and brighter, and it seemed that at last they were nearing the end of their travels. Yet it was afternoon before they came to the great wall that surrounded the City. It was high, and thick, and of a bright green color.

In front of them, and at the end of the road of yellow brick, was a big gate, all studded with emeralds that glittered so in the sun that even the painted eyes of the Scarecrow were dazzled by their brilliancy.

There was a bell beside the gate, and Dorothy pushed the button and heard a silvery tinkle sound within. Then the big gate swung slowly open, and they all passed through and found themselves in a high arched room, the walls of which glistened with countless emeralds.

Before them stood a little man about the same size as the Munchkins. He was clothed all in green, from his head to his feet, and even his skin was of a greenish tint. At his side was a large green box.

When he saw Dorothy and her companions the man asked,

“What do you wish in the Emerald City?”

“We came here to see the Great Oz,” said Dorothy.

The man was so surprised at this answer that he sat down to think it over.

“It has been many years since anyone asked me to see Oz,” he said, shaking his head in perplexity. “He is powerful and terrible, and if you come on an idle or foolish errand to bother the wise reflections of the Great Wizard, he might be angry and destroy you all in an instant.”

“But it is not a foolish errand, nor an idle one,” replied the Scarecrow; “it is important. And we have been told that Oz is a good Wizard.”

“So he is,” said the green man; “and he rules the Emerald City wisely and well. But to those who are not honest, or who approach him from curiosity, he is most terrible, and few have ever dared ask to see his face. I am the Guardian of the Gates, and since you demand to see the Great Oz I must take you to his palace. But first you must put on the spectacles.”

“Why?” asked Dorothy.

“Because if you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you. Even those who live in the City must wear spectacles night and day. They are all locked on, for Oz so ordered it when the City was first built, and I have the only key that will unlock them.”

He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. The Guardian of the Gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.

Then the green man fitted spectacles for the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion, and even on little Toto; and all were locked fast with the key.

Then the Guardian of the Gates put on his own glasses and told them he was ready to show them to the palace. Taking a big golden key from a peg on the wall, he opened another gate, and they all followed him through the portal into the streets of the Emerald City.

Chapter XI.

The Wonderful

Emerald City of Oz.

EVEN WITH EYES protected by the green spectacles Dorothy and her friends were at first dazzled by the brilliancy of the wonderful City. The streets were lined with beautiful houses all built of green marble and studded everywhere with sparkling emeralds. They walked over a pavement of the same green marble, and where the blocks were joined together were rows of emeralds, set closely, and glittering in the brightness of the sun. The window panes were of green glass; even the sky above the City had a green tint, and the rays of the sun were green.

There were many people, men, women and children, walking about, and these were all dressed in green clothes and had greenish skins. They looked at Dorothy and her strangely assorted company with wondering eyes, and the children all ran away and hid behind their mothers when they saw the Lion; but no one spoke to them. Many shops stood in the street, and Dorothy saw that everything in them was green. Green candy and green pop-corn were offered for sale, as well as green shoes, green hats and green clothes of all sorts. At one place a man was selling green lemonade, and when the children bought it Dorothy could see that they paid for it with green pennies.

There seemed to be no horses nor animals of any kind; the men carried things around in little green carts, which they pushed before them. Everyone seemed happy and contented and prosperous.

The Guardian of the Gates led them through the streets until they came to a big building, exactly in the middle of the City, which was the Palace of Oz, the Great Wizard. There was a soldier before the door, dressed in a green uniform and wearing a long green beard.

“Here are strangers,” said the Guardian of the Gates to him, “and they demand to see the Great Oz.”

“Step inside,” answered the soldier, “and I will carry your message to him.”

So they passed through the Palace gates and were led into a big room with a green carpet and lovely green furniture set with emeralds. The soldier made them all wipe their feet upon a green mat before entering this room, and when they were seated he said, politely,

“Please make yourselves comfortable while I go to the door of the Throne Room and tell Oz you are here.”

They had to wait a long time before the soldier returned. When, at last, he came back, Dorothy asked,

“Have you seen Oz?”

“Oh, no;” returned the soldier; “I have never seen him. But I spoke to him as he sat behind his screen, and gave him your message. He says he will grant you an audience, if you so desire; but each one of you must enter his presence alone, and he will admit but one each day. Therefore, as you must remain in the Palace for several days, I will have you shown to rooms where you may rest in comfort after your journey.”

“Thank you,” replied the girl; “that is very kind of Oz.”

The soldier now blew upon a green whistle, and at once a young girl, dressed in a pretty green silk gown, entered the room. She had lovely green hair and green eyes, and she bowed low before Dorothy as she said,

“Follow me and I will show you your room.”

So Dorothy said good-bye to all her friends except Toto, and taking the dog in her arms followed the green girl through seven passages and up three flights of stairs until they came to a room at the front of the Palace. It was the sweetest little room in the world, with a soft comfortable bed that had sheets of green silk and a green velvet counterpane. There was a tiny fountain in the middle of the room, that shot a spray of green perfume into the air, to fall back into a beautifully carved green marble basin. Beautiful green flowers stood in the windows, and there was a shelf with a row of little green books. When Dorothy had time to open these books she found them full of queer green pictures that made her laugh, they were so funny.

In a wardrobe were many green dresses, made of silk and satin and velvet; and all of them fitted Dorothy exactly.

“Make yourself perfectly at home,” said the green girl, “and if you wish for anything ring the bell. Oz will send for you to-morrow morning.”

She left Dorothy alone and went back to the others. These she also led to rooms, and each one of them found himself lodged in a very pleasant part of the Palace. Of course this politeness was wasted on the Scarecrow; for when he found himself alone in his room he stood stupidly in one spot, just within the doorway, to wait till morning. It would not rest him to lie down, and he could not close his eyes; so he remained all night staring at a little spider which was weaving its web in a corner of the room, just as if it were not one of the most wonderful rooms in the world. The Tin Woodman lay down on his bed from force of habit, for he remembered when he was made of flesh; but not being able to sleep he passed the night moving his joints up and down to make sure they kept in good working order. The Lion would have preferred a bed of dried leaves in the forest, and did not like being shut up in a room; but he had too much sense to let this worry him, so he sprang upon the bed and rolled himself up like a cat and purred himself asleep in a minute.

The next morning, after breakfast, the green maiden came to fetch Dorothy, and she dressed her in one of the prettiest gowns—made of green brocaded satin. Dorothy put on a green silk apron and tied a green ribbon around Toto’s neck, and they started for the Throne Room of the Great Oz.

First they came to a great hall in which were many ladies and gentlemen of the court, all dressed in rich costumes. These people had nothing to do but talk to each other, but they always came to wait outside the Throne Room every morning, although they were never permitted to see Oz. As Dorothy entered they looked at her curiously, and one of them whispered,

“Are you really going to look upon the face of Oz the Terrible?”

“Of course,” answered the girl, “if he will see me.”

“Oh, he will see you,” said the soldier who had taken her message to the Wizard, “although he does not like to have people ask to see him. Indeed, at first he was angry, and said I should send you back where you came from. Then he asked me what you looked like, and when I mentioned your silver shoes he was very much interested. At last I told him about the mark upon your forehead, and he decided he would admit you to his presence.”

Just then a bell rang, and the green girl said to Dorothy,

“That is the signal. You must go into the Throne Room alone.”

She opened a little door and Dorothy walked boldly through and found herself in a wonderful place. It was a big, round room with a high arched roof, and the walls and ceiling and floor were covered with large emeralds set closely together. In the center of the roof was a great light, as bright as the sun, which made the emeralds sparkle in a wonderful manner.

But what interested Dorothy most was the big throne of green marble that stood in the middle of the room. It was shaped like a chair and sparkled with gems, as did everything else. In the center of the chair was an enormous Head, without body to support it or any arms or legs whatever. There was no hair upon this head, but it had eyes and nose and mouth, and was much bigger than the head of the biggest giant.

As Dorothy gazed upon this in wonder and fear, the eyes turned slowly and looked at her sharply and steadily. Then the mouth moved, and Dorothy heard a voice say:

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?”

It was not such an awful voice as she had expected to come from the big Head; so she took courage and answered,

“I am Dorothy, the Small and Meek. I have come to you for help.”

The eyes looked at her thoughtfully for a full minute. Then said the voice,

“Where did you get the silver shoes?”

“I got them from the Wicked Witch of the East, when my house fell on her and killed her,” she replied.

“Where did you get the mark upon your forehead?” continued the voice.

“That is where the Good Witch of the North kissed me when she bade me good-bye and sent me to you,” said the girl.

Again the eyes looked at her sharply, and they saw she was telling the truth. Then Oz asked,

“What do you wish me to do?”

“Send me back to Kansas, where my Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are,” she answered earnestly. “I don’t like your country, although it is so beautiful. And I am sure Aunt Em will be dreadfully worried over my being away so long.”

The eyes winked three times, and then they turned up to the ceiling and down to the floor and rolled around so queerly that they seemed to see every part of the room. And at last they looked at Dorothy again.

“Why should I do this for you?” asked Oz.

“Because you are strong and I am weak. Because you are a Great Wizard and I am only a helpless little girl,” she answered.

“But you were strong enough to kill the Wicked Witch of the East,” said Oz.

“That just happened,” returned Dorothy, simply; “I could not help it.”

“Well,” said the Head, “I will give you my answer. You have no right to expect me to send you back to Kansas unless you do something for me in return. In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets. If you wish me to use my magic power to send you home again you must do something for me first. Help me and I will help you.”

“What must I do?” asked the girl.

“Kill the Wicked Witch of the West,” answered Oz.

“But I cannot!” exclaimed Dorothy, greatly surprised.

“You killed the Witch of the East and you wear the silver shoes, which bear a powerful charm. There is now but one Wicked Witch left in all this land, and when you can tell me she is dead I will send you back to Kansas—but not before.”

The little girl began to weep, she was so much disappointed. And the eyes winked again and looked upon her anxiously, as if the Great Oz felt that she could help him if she would.

“I never killed anything, willingly,” she sobbed; “and even if I wanted to, how could I kill the Wicked Witch? If you, who are Great and Terrible, cannot kill her yourself, how do you expect me to do it?”

“I do not know,” said the Head; “but that is my answer, and until the Wicked Witch dies you will not see your Uncle and Aunt again. Remember that the Witch is Wicked—tremendously Wicked —and ought to be killed. Now go, and do not ask to see me again until you have done your task.”

Sorrowfully Dorothy left the Throne Room and went back where the Lion and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were waiting to hear what Oz had said to her.

“There is no hope for me,” she said sadly, “for Oz will not send me home until I have killed the Wicked Witch of the West; and that I can never do.”

Her friends were sorry, but could do nothing to help her; so she went to her own room and lay down on the bed and cried herself to sleep.

The next morning the soldier with the green whiskers came to the Scarecrow and said,

“Come with me, for Oz has sent for you.”

So the Scarecrow followed him and was admitted into the great Throne Room, where he saw, sitting in the emerald throne, a most lovely Lady. She was dressed in green silk gauze and wore upon her flowing green locks a crown of jewels. Growing from her shoulders were wings, gorgeous in color and so light that they fluttered if the slightest breath of air reached them.

When the Scarecrow had bowed, as prettily as his straw stuffing would let him, before this beautiful creature, she looked upon him sweetly, and said,

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?”

Now the Scarecrow, who had expected to see the great Head Dorothy had told him of, was much astonished; but he answered her bravely.

“I am only a Scarecrow, stuffed with straw. Therefore I have no brains, and I come to you praying that you will put brains in my head instead of straw, so that I may become as much a man as any other in your dominions.”

“Why should I do this for you?” asked the Lady.

“Because you are wise and powerful, and no one else can help me,” answered the Scarecrow.

“I never grant favors without some return,” said Oz; “but this much I will promise. If you will kill for me the Wicked Witch of the West I will bestow upon you a great many brains, and such good brains that you will be the wisest man in all the Land of Oz.”

“I thought you asked Dorothy to kill the Witch,” said the Scarecrow, in surprise.

“So I did. I don’t care who kills her. But until she is dead I will not grant your wish. Now go, and do not seek me again until you have earned the brains you so greatly desire.”

The Scarecrow went sorrowfully back to his friends and told them what Oz had said; and Dorothy was surprised to find that the great Wizard was not a Head, as she had seen him, but a lovely Lady.

“All the same,” said the Scarecrow, “she needs a heart as much as the Tin Woodman.”

On the next morning the soldier with the green whiskers came to the Tin Woodman and said,

“Oz has sent for you. Follow me.”

So the Tin Woodman followed him and came to the great Throne Room. He did not know whether he would find Oz a lovely Lady or a Head, but he hoped it would be the lovely Lady. “For,” he said to himself, “if it is the Head, I am sure I shall not be given a heart, since a head has no heart of its own and therefore cannot feel for me. But if it is the lovely Lady I shall beg hard for a heart, for all ladies are themselves said to be kindly hearted.”

But when the Woodman entered the great Throne Room he saw neither the Head nor the Lady, for Oz had taken the shape of a most terrible Beast. It was nearly as big as an elephant, and the green throne seemed hardly strong enough to hold its weight. The Beast had a head like that of a rhinoceros, only there were five eyes in its face. There were five long arms growing out of its body, and it also had five long, slim legs. Thick, woolly hair covered every part of it, and a more dreadful-looking monster could not be imagined. It was fortunate the Tin Woodman had no heart at that moment, for it would have beat loud and fast from terror. But being only tin, the Woodman was not at all afraid, although he was much disappointed.

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” spake the Beast, in a voice that was one great roar. “Who are you, and why do you seek me?”

“I am a Woodman, and made of tin. Therefore I have no heart, and cannot love. I pray you to give me a heart that I may be as other men are.”

“Why should I do this?” demanded the Beast.

“Because I ask it, and you alone can grant my request,” answered the Woodman.

Oz gave a low growl at this, but said gruffly,

“If you indeed desire a heart, you must earn it.”

“How?” asked the Woodman.

“Help Dorothy to kill the Wicked Witch of the West,” replied the Beast. “When the Witch is dead, come to me, and I will then give you the biggest and kindest and most loving heart in all the Land of Oz.”

So the Tin Woodman was forced to return sorrowfully to his friends and tell them of the terrible Beast he had seen. They all wondered greatly at the many forms the great Wizard could take upon himself, and the Lion said,

“If he is a Beast when I go to see him, I shall roar my loudest, and so frighten him that he will grant all I ask. And if he is the lovely Lady, I shall pretend to spring upon her, and so compel her to do my bidding. And if he is the great Head, he will be at my mercy; for I will roll this head all about the room until he promises to give us what we desire. So be of good cheer, my friends, for all will yet be well.”

The next morning the soldier with the green whiskers led the Lion to the great Throne Room and bade him enter the presence of Oz.

The Lion at once passed through the door, and glancing around saw, to his surprise, that before the throne was a Ball of Fire, so fierce and glowing he could scarcely bear to gaze upon it. His first thought was that Oz had by accident caught on fire and was burning up; but, when he tried to go nearer, the heat was so intense that it singed his whiskers, and he crept back tremblingly to a spot nearer the door.

Then a low, quiet voice came from the Ball of Fire, and these were the words it spoke:

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?” And the Lion answered,

“I am a Cowardly Lion, afraid of everything. I come to you to beg that you give me courage, so that in reality I may become the King of Beasts, as men call me.”

“Why should I give you courage?” demanded Oz.

“Because of all Wizards you are the greatest, and alone have power to grant my request,” answered the Lion.

The Ball of Fire burned fiercely for a time, and the voice said,

“Bring me proof that the Wicked Witch is dead, and that moment I will give you courage. But so long as the Witch lives you must remain a coward.”

The Lion was angry at this speech, but could say nothing in reply, and while he stood silently gazing at the Ball of Fire it became so furiously hot that he turned tail and rushed from the room. He was glad to find his friends waiting for him, and told them of his terrible interview with the Wizard.

“What shall we do now?” asked Dorothy, sadly.

“There is only one thing we can do,” returned the Lion, “and that is to go to the land of the Winkies, seek out the Wicked Witch, and destroy her.”

“But suppose we cannot?” said the girl.

“Then I shall never have courage,” declared the Lion.

“And I shall never have brains,” added the Scarecrow.

“And I shall never have a heart,” spoke the Tin Woodman.

“And I shall never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry,” said Dorothy, beginning to cry.

“Be careful!” cried the green girl, “the tears will fall on your green silk gown and spot it.”

So Dorothy dried her eyes and said,

“I suppose we must try it; but I am sure I do not want to kill anybody, even to see Aunt Em again.”

“I will go with you; but I’m too much of a coward to kill the Witch,” said the Lion.

“I will go too,” declared the Scarecrow; “but I shall not be of much help to you, I am such a fool.”

“I haven’t the heart to harm even a Witch,” remarked the Tin Woodman; “but if you go I certainly shall go with you.”

Therefore it was decided to start upon their journey the next morning, and the Woodman sharpened his axe on a green grindstone and had all his joints properly oiled. The Scarecrow stuffed himself with fresh straw and Dorothy put new paint on his eyes that he might see better. The green girl, who was very kind to them, filled Dorothy’s basket with good things to eat, and fastened a little bell around Toto’s neck with a green ribbon.

They went to bed quite early and slept soundly until daylight, when they were awakened by the crowing of a green cock that lived in the back yard of the palace, and the cackling of a hen that had laid a green egg.

Chapter XII.

The Search for the

Wicked Witch.

THE SOLDIER WITH with the green whiskers led them through the streets of the Emerald City until they reached the room where the Guardian of the Gates lived. This officer unlocked their spectacles to put them back in his great box, and then he politely opened the gate for our friends.

“Which road leads to the Wicked Witch of the West?” asked Dorothy.

“There is no road,” answered the Guardian of the Gates; “no one ever wishes to go that way.”

“How, then, are we to find her?” enquired the girl.

“That will be easy,” replied the man; “for when she knows you are in the Country of the Winkies she will find you, and make you all her slaves.”

“Perhaps not,” said the Scarecrow, “for we mean to destroy her.”

“Oh, that is different,” said the Guardian of the Gates. “No one has ever destroyed her before, so I naturally thought she would make slaves of you, as she has all of the rest. But take care; she is wicked and fierce, and may not allow you to destroy her. Keep to the West, where the sun sets, and you cannot fail to find her.”

They thanked him and bade him good-bye, and turned toward the West, walking over fields of soft grass dotted here and there with daisies and buttercups. Dorothy still wore the pretty silk dress she had put on in the Palace, but now, to her surprise, she found it was no longer green, but pure white. The ribbon around Toto’s neck had also lost its green color and was as white as Dorothy’s dress.

The Emerald City was soon left far behind. As they advanced the ground became rougher and hillier, for there were no farms nor houses in this country of the West, and the ground was untilled.

In the afternoon the sun shone hot in their faces, for there were no trees to offer them shade; so that before night Dorothy and Toto and the Lion were tired, and lay down upon the grass and fell asleep, with the Woodman and the Scarecrow keeping watch.

Now the Wicked Witch of the West had but one eye, yet that was as powerful as a telescope, and could see everywhere. So, as she sat in the door of her castle, she happened to look around and saw Dorothy lying asleep, with her friends all about her. They were a long distance off, but the Wicked Witch was angry to find them in her country; so she blew upon a silver whistle that hung around her neck.

At once there came running to her from all directions a pack of great wolves. They had long legs and fierce eyes and sharp teeth.

“Go to those people,” said the Witch, “and tear them to pieces.”

“Are you not going to make them your slaves?” asked the leader of the wolves.

“No,” she answered, “one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.”

“Very well,” said the wolf, and he dashed away at full speed, followed by the others.

It was lucky the Scarecrow and the Woodman were wide awake and heard the wolves coming.

“This is my fight,” said the Woodman; “so get behind me and I will meet them as they come.”

He seized his axe, which he had made very sharp, and as the leader of the wolves came on the Tin Woodman swung his arm and chopped the wolf’s head from its body, so that it immediately died. As soon as he could raise his axe another wolf came up, and he also fell under the sharp edge of the Tin Woodman’s weapon. There were forty wolves, and forty times a wolf was killed; so that at last they all lay dead in a heap before the Woodman.

Then he put down his axe and sat beside the Scarecrow, who said,

“It was a good fight, friend.”

They waited until Dorothy awoke the next morning. The little girl was quite frightened when she saw the great pile of shaggy wolves, but the Tin Woodman told her all. She thanked him for saving them and sat down to breakfast, after which they started again upon their journey.

Now this same morning the Wicked Witch came to the door of her castle and looked out with her one eye that could see afar off. She saw all her wolves lying dead, and the strangers still travelling through her country. This made her angrier than before, and she blew her silver whistle twice.

Straightway a great flock of wild crows came flying toward her, enough to darken the sky. And the Wicked Witch said to the King Crow,

“Fly at once to the strangers; peck out their eyes and tear them to pieces.”

The wild crows flew in one great flock toward Dorothy and her companions. When the little girl saw them coming she was afraid. But the Scarecrow said,

“This is my battle; so lie down beside me and you will not be harmed.”

So they all lay upon the ground except the Scarecrow, and he stood up and stretched out his arms. And when the crows saw him they were frightened, as these birds always are by scarecrows, and did not dare to come any nearer. But the King Crow said,

“It is only a stuffed man. I will peck his eyes out.”

The King Crow flew at the Scarecrow, who caught it by the head and twisted its neck until it died. And then another crow flew at him, and the Scarecrow twisted its neck also. There were forty crows, and forty times the Scarecrow twisted a neck, until at last all were lying dead beside him. Then he called to his companions to rise, and again they went upon their journey.

When the Wicked Witch looked out again and saw all her crows lying in a heap, she got into a terrible rage, and blew three times upon her silver whistle.

Forthwith there was heard a great buzzing in the air, and a swarm of black bees came flying towards her.

“Go to the strangers and sting them to death!” commanded the Witch, and the bees turned and flew rapidly until they came to where Dorothy and her friends were walking. But the Woodman had seen them coming, and the Scarecrow had decided what to do.

“Take out my straw and scatter it over the little girl and the dog and the Lion,” he said to the Woodman, “and the bees cannot sting them.” This the Woodman did, and as Dorothy lay close beside the Lion and held Toto in her arms, the straw covered them entirely.

The bees came and found no one but the Woodman to sting, so they flew at him and broke off all their stings against the tin, without hurting the Woodman at all. And as bees cannot live when their stings are broken that was the end of the black bees, and they lay scattered thick about the Woodman, like little heaps of fine coal.

Then Dorothy and the Lion got up, and the girl helped the Tin Woodman put the straw back into the Scarecrow again, until he was as good as ever. So they started upon their journey once more.

The Wicked Witch was so angry when she saw her black bees in little heaps like fine coal that she stamped her foot and tore her hair and gnashed her teeth. And then she called a dozen of her slaves, who were the Winkies, and gave them sharp spears, telling them to go to the strangers and destroy them.

The Winkies were not a brave people, but they had to do as they were told; so they marched away until they came near to Dorothy. Then the Lion gave a great roar and sprang toward them, and the poor Winkies were so frightened that they ran back as fast as they could.

When they returned to the castle the Wicked Witch beat them well with a strap, and sent them back to their work, after which she sat down to think what she should do next. She could not understand how all her plans to destroy these strangers had failed; but she was a powerful Witch, as well as a wicked one, and she soon made up her mind how to act.

There was, in her cupboard, a Golden Cap, with a circle of diamonds and rubies running round it. This Golden Cap had a charm. Whoever owned it could call three times upon the Winged Monkeys, who would obey any order they were given. But no person could command these strange creatures more than three times. Twice already the Wicked Witch had used the charm of the Cap. Once was when she had made the Winkies her slaves, and set herself to rule over their country. The Winged Monkeys had helped her do this. The second time was when she had fought against the Great Oz himself, and driven him out of the land of the West. The Winged Monkeys had also helped her in doing this. Only once more could she use this Golden Cap, for which reason she did not like to do so until all her other powers were exhausted. But now that her fierce wolves and her wild crows and her stinging bees were gone, and her slaves had been scared away by the Cowardly Lion, she saw there was only one way left to destroy Dorothy and her friends.

So the Wicked Witch took the Golden Cap from her cupboard and placed it upon her head. Then she stood upon her left foot and said, slowly,

“Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke!”

Next she stood upon her right foot and said,

“Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo!”

After this she stood upon both feet and cried in a loud voice,

“Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!”

Now the charm began to work. The sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air. There was a rushing of many wings; a great chattering and laughing; and the sun came out of the dark sky to show the Wicked Witch surrounded by a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders.

One, much bigger than the others, seemed to be their leader. He flew close to the Witch and said,

“You have called us for the third and last time. What do you command?”

“Go to the strangers who are within my land and destroy them all except the Lion,” said the Wicked Witch. “Bring that beast to me, for I have a mind to harness him like a horse and make him work.”

“Your commands shall be obeyed,” said the leader. Then, with a great deal of chattering and noise, the Winged Monkeys flew away to the place where Dorothy and her friends were walking.

Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.

Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way. Then they lifted him up and flew away with him to the Witch’s castle, where he was placed in a small yard with a high iron fence around it, so that he could not escape.

But Dorothy they did not harm at all. She stood, with Toto in her arms, watching the sad fate of her comrades and thinking it would soon be her turn. The leader of the Winged Monkeys flew up to her, his long, hairy arms stretched out and his ugly face grinning terribly; but he saw the mark of the Good Witch’s kiss upon her forehead and stopped short, motioning the others not to touch her.

“We dare not harm this little girl,” he said to them, “for she is protected by the Power of Good, and that is greater than the Power of Evil. All we can do is to carry her to the castle of the Wicked Witch and leave her there.”

So, carefully and gently, they lifted Dorothy in their arms and carried her swiftly through the air until they came to the castle, where they set her down upon the front doorstep. Then the leader said to the Witch,

“We have obeyed you as far as we were able. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow are destroyed, and the Lion is tied up in your yard. The little girl we dare not harm, nor the dog she carries in her arms. Your power over our band is now ended, and you will never see us again.”

Then all the Winged Monkeys, with much laughing and chattering and noise, flew into the air and were soon out of sight.

The Wicked Witch was both surprised and worried when she saw the mark on Dorothy’s forehead, for she knew well that neither the Winged Monkeys nor she, herself, dare hurt the girl in any way. She looked down at Dorothy’s feet, and seeing the Silver Shoes, began to tremble with fear, for she knew what a powerful charm belonged to them. At first the Witch was tempted to run away from Dorothy; but she happened to look into the child’s eyes and saw how simple the soul behind them was, and that the little girl did not know of the wonderful power the Silver Shoes gave her. So the Wicked Witch laughed to herself, and thought, “I can still make her my slave, for she does not know how to use her power.” Then she said to Dorothy, harshly and severely,

“Come with me; and see that you mind everything I tell you, for if you do not I will make an end of you, as I did of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow.”

Dorothy followed her through many of the beautiful rooms in her castle until they came to the kitchen, where the Witch bade her clean the pots and kettles and sweep the floor and keep the fire fed with wood.

Dorothy went to work meekly, with her mind made up to work as hard as she could; for she was glad the Wicked Witch had decided not to kill her.

With Dorothy hard at work, the Witch thought she would go into the court-yard and harness the Cowardly Lion like a horse; it would amuse her, she was sure, to make him draw her chariot whenever she wished to go to drive. But as she opened the gate the Lion gave a loud roar and bounded at her so fiercely that the Witch was afraid, and ran out and shut the gate again.

“If I cannot harness you,” said the Witch to the Lion, speaking through the bars of the gate, “I can starve you. You shall have nothing to eat until you do as I wish.”

So after that she took no food to the imprisoned Lion; but every day she came to the gate at noon and asked,

“Are you ready to be harnessed like a horse?”

And the Lion would answer,

“No. If you come in this yard I will bite you.”

The reason the Lion did not have to do as the Witch wished was that every night, while the woman was asleep, Dorothy carried him food from the cupboard. After he had eaten he would lie down on his bed of straw, and Dorothy would lie beside him and put her head on his soft, shaggy mane, while they talked of their troubles and tried to plan some way to escape. But they could find no way to get out of the castle, for it was constantly guarded by the yellow Winkies, who were the slaves of the Wicked Witch and too afraid of her not to do as she told them.

The girl had to work hard during the day, and often the Witch threatened to beat her with the same old umbrella she always carried in her hand. But, in truth, she did not dare to strike Dorothy, because of the mark upon her forehead. The child did not know this, and was full of fear for herself and Toto. Once the Witch struck Toto a blow with her umbrella and the brave little dog flew at her and bit her leg, in return. The Witch did not bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in her had dried up many years before.

Dorothy’s life became very sad as she grew to understand that it would be harder than ever to get back to Kansas and Aunt Em again. Sometimes she would cry bitterly for hours, with Toto sitting at her feet and looking into her face, whining dismally to show how sorry he was for his little mistress. Toto did not really care whether he was in Kansas or the Land of Oz so long as Dorothy was with him; but he knew the little girl was unhappy, and that made him unhappy too.

Now the Wicked Witch had a great longing to have for her own the Silver Shoes which the girl always wore. Her bees and her crows and her wolves were lying in heaps and drying up, and she had used up all the power of the Golden Cap; but if she could only get hold of the Silver Shoes, they would give her more power than all the other things she had lost. She watched Dorothy carefully, to see if she ever took off her shoes, thinking she might steal them. But the child was so proud of her pretty shoes that she never took them off except at night and when she took her bath. The Witch was too much afraid of the dark to dare go in Dorothy’s room at night to take the shoes, and her dread of water was greater than her fear of the dark, so she never came near when Dorothy was bathing. Indeed, the old Witch never touched water, nor ever let water touch her in any way.

But the wicked creature was very cunning, and she finally thought of a trick that would give her what she wanted. She placed a bar of iron in the middle of the kitchen floor, and then by her magic arts made the iron invisible to human eyes. So that when Dorothy walked across the floor she stumbled over the bar, not being able to see it, and fell at full length. She was not much hurt, but in her fall one of the Silver Shoes came off, and before she could reach it the Witch had snatched it away and put it on her own skinny foot.

The wicked woman was greatly pleased with the success of her trick, for as long as she had one of the shoes she owned half the power of their charm, and Dorothy could not use it against her, even had she known how to do so.

The little girl, seeing she had lost one of her pretty shoes, grew angry, and said to the Witch,

“Give me back my shoe!”

“I will not,” retorted the Witch, “for it is now my shoe, and not yours.”

“You are a wicked creature!” cried Dorothy. “You have no right to take my shoe from me.”

“I shall keep it, just the same,” said the Witch, laughing at her, “and someday I shall get the other one from you, too.”

This made Dorothy so very angry that she picked up the bucket of water that stood near and dashed it over the Witch, wetting her from head to foot.

Instantly the wicked woman gave a loud cry of fear, and then, as Dorothy looked at her in wonder, the Witch began to shrink and fall away.

“See what you have done!” she screamed. “In a minute I shall melt away.”

“I’m very sorry, indeed,” said Dorothy, who was truly frightened to see the Witch actually melting away like brown sugar before her very eyes.

“Didn’t you know water would be the end of me?” asked the Witch, in a wailing, despairing voice.

“Of course not,” answered Dorothy. “How should I?”

“Well, in a few minutes I shall be all melted, and you will have the castle to yourself. I have been wicked in my day, but I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds. Look out—here I go!”

With these words the Witch fell down in a brown, melted, shapeless mass and began to spread over the clean boards of the kitchen floor. Seeing that she had really melted away to nothing, Dorothy drew another bucket of water and threw it over the mess. She then swept it all out the door. After picking out the silver shoe, which was all that was left of the old woman, she cleaned and dried it with a cloth, and put it on her foot again. Then, being at last free to do as she chose, she ran out to the court-yard to tell the Lion that the Wicked Witch of the West had come to an end, and that they were no longer prisoners in a strange land.

Chapter XIII.

The Rescue.

THE COWARDLY LION was much pleased to hear that the Wicked Witch had been melted by a bucket of water, and Dorothy at once unlocked the gate of his prison and set him free. They went in together to the castle, where Dorothy’s first act was to call all the Winkies together and tell them that they were no longer slaves.

There was great rejoicing among the yellow Winkies, for they had been made to work hard during many years for the Wicked Witch, who had always treated them with great cruelty. They kept this day as a holiday, then and ever after, and spent the time in feasting and dancing.

“If our friends, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, were only with us,” said the Lion, “I should be quite happy.”

“Don’t you suppose we could rescue them?” asked the girl, anxiously.

“We can try,” answered the Lion.

So they called the yellow Winkies and asked them if they would help to rescue their friends, and the Winkies said that they would be delighted to do all in their power for Dorothy, who had set them free from bondage. So she chose a number of the Winkies who looked as if they knew the most, and they all started away. They travelled that day and part of the next until they came to the rocky plain where the Tin Woodman lay, all battered and bent. His axe was near him, but the blade was rusted and the handle broken off short.

The Winkies lifted him tenderly in their arms, and carried him back to the Yellow Castle again, Dorothy shedding a few tears by the way at the sad plight of her old friend, and the Lion looking sober and sorry. When they reached the castle Dorothy said to the Winkies,

“Are any of your people tinsmiths?”

“Oh, yes; some of us are very good tinsmiths,” they told her.

“Then bring them to me,” she said. And when the tinsmiths came, bringing with them all their tools in baskets, she enquired,

“Can you straighten out those dents in the Tin Woodman, and bend him back into shape again, and solder him together where he is broken?”

The tinsmiths looked the Woodman over carefully and then answered that they thought they could mend him so he would be as good as ever. So they set to work in one of the big yellow rooms of the castle and worked for three days and four nights, hammering and twisting and bending and soldering and polishing and pounding at the legs and body and head of the Tin Woodman, until at last he was straightened out into his old form, and his joints worked as well as ever. To be sure, there were several patches on him, but the tinsmiths did a good job, and as the Woodman was not a vain man he did not mind the patches at all.

When at last he walked into Dorothy’s room and thanked her for rescuing him, he was so pleased that he wept tears of joy, and Dorothy had to wipe every tear carefully from his face with her apron, so his joints would not be rusted. At the same time her own tears fell thick and fast at the joy of meeting her old friend again, and these tears did not need to be wiped away. As for the Lion, he wiped his eyes so often with the tip of his tail that it became quite wet, and he was obliged to go out into the court-yard and hold it in the sun till it dried.

“If we only had the Scarecrow with us again,” said the Tin Woodman, when Dorothy had finished telling him everything that had happened, “I should be quite happy.”

“We must try to find him,” said the girl.

So she called the Winkies to help her, and they walked all that day and part of the next until they came to the tall tree in the branches of which the Winged Monkeys had tossed the Scarecrow’s clothes.

It was a very tall tree, and the trunk was so smooth that no one could climb it; but the Woodman said at once,

“I’ll chop it down, and then we can get the Scarecrow’s clothes.”

Now while the tinsmiths had been at work mending the Woodman himself, another of the Winkies, who was a goldsmith, had made an axe-handle of solid gold and fitted it to the Woodman’s axe, instead of the old broken handle. Others polished the blade until all the rust was removed and it glistened like burnished silver.

As soon as he had spoken, the Tin Woodman began to chop, and in a short time the tree fell over with a crash, when the Scarecrow’s clothes fell out of the branches and rolled off on the ground.

Dorothy picked them up and had the Winkies carry them back to the castle, where they were stuffed with nice, clean straw; and, behold! here was the Scarecrow, as good as ever, thanking them over and over again for saving him.

Now that they were reunited, Dorothy and her friends spent a few happy days at the Yellow Castle, where they found everything they needed to make them comfortable. But one day the girl thought of Aunt Em, and said,

“We must go back to Oz, and claim his promise.”

“Yes,” said the Woodman, “at last I shall get my heart.”

“And I shall get my brains,” added the Scarecrow, joyfully.

“And I shall get my courage,” said the Lion, thoughtfully.

“And I shall get back to Kansas,” cried Dorothy, clapping her hands. “Oh, let us start for the Emerald

City to-morrow!”

This they decided to do. The next day they called the Winkies together and bade them good-bye. The Winkies were sorry to have them go, and they had grown so fond of the Tin Woodman that they begged him to stay and rule over them and the Yellow Land of the West. Finding they were determined to go, the Winkies gave Toto and the Lion each a golden collar; and to Dorothy they presented a beautiful bracelet studded with diamonds; and to the Scarecrow they gave a gold-headed walking stick, to keep him from stumbling; and to the Tin Woodman they offered a silver oil-can, inlaid with gold and set with precious jewels.

Every one of the travellers made the Winkies a pretty speech in return, and all shook hands with them until their arms ached.

Dorothy went to the Witch’s cupboard to fill her basket with food for the journey, and there she saw the Golden Cap. She tried it on her own head and found that it fitted her exactly. She did not know anything about the charm of the Golden Cap, but she saw that it was pretty, so she made up her mind to wear it and carry her sun-bonnet in the basket.

Then, being prepared for the journey, they all started for the Emerald City; and the Winkies gave them three cheers and many good wishes to carry with them.

Chapter XIV.

The Winged

Monkeys.

YOU WILL REMEMBER there was no road—not even a pathway—between the castle of the Wicked Witch and the Emerald City.

When the four travellers went in search of the Witch she had seen them coming, and so sent the Winged Monkeys to bring them to her. It was much harder to find their way back through the big fields of buttercups and yellow daisies than it was being carried. They knew, of course, they must go straight east, toward the rising sun; and they started off in the right way. But at noon, when the sun was over their heads, they did not know which was east and which was west, and that was the reason they were lost in the great fields. They kept on walking, however, and at night the moon came out and shone brightly. So they lay down among the sweet-smelling yellow flowers and slept soundly until morning—all but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.

The next morning the sun was behind a cloud, but they started on, as if they were quite sure which way they were going.

“If we walk far enough,” said Dorothy, “we shall sometime come to someplace, I am sure.”

But day by day passed away, and they still saw nothing before them but the yellow fields. The Scarecrow began to grumble a bit.

“We have surely lost our way,” he said, “and unless we find it again in time to reach the Emerald City, I shall never get my brains.”

“Nor I my heart,” declared the Tin Woodman. “It seems to me I can scarcely wait till I get to Oz, and you must admit this is a very long journey.”

“You see,” said the Cowardly Lion, with a whimper, “I haven’t the courage to keep tramping forever, without getting anywhere at all.”

Then Dorothy lost heart. She sat down on the grass and looked at her companions, and they sat down and looked at her, and Toto found that for the first time in his life he was too tired to chase a butterfly that flew past his head; so he put out his tongue and panted and looked at Dorothy as if to ask what they should do next.

“Suppose we call the field-mice,” she suggested. “They could probably tell us the way to the Emerald City.”

“To be sure they could,” cried the Scarecrow; “why didn’t we think of that before?”

Dorothy blew the little whistle she had always carried about her neck since the Queen of the Mice had given it to her. In a few minutes they heard the pattering of tiny feet, and many of the small gray mice came running up to her. Among them was the Queen herself, who asked, in her squeaky little voice,

“What can I do for my friends?”

“We have lost our way,” said Dorothy. “Can you tell us where the Emerald City is?”

“Certainly,” answered the Queen; “but it is a great way off, for you have had it at your backs all this time.” Then she noticed Dorothy’s Golden Cap, and said, “Why don’t you use the charm of the Cap, and call the Winged Monkeys to you? They will carry you to the City of Oz in less than an hour.”

“I didn’t know there was a charm,” answered Dorothy, in surprise. “What is it?”

“It is written inside the Golden Cap,” replied the Queen of the Mice; “but if you are going to call the Winged Monkeys we must run away, for they are full of mischief and think it great fun to plague us.”

“Won’t they hurt me?” asked the girl, anxiously.

“Oh, no; they must obey the wearer of the Cap. Good-bye!” And she scampered out of sight, with all the mice hurrying after her.

Dorothy looked inside the Golden Cap and saw some words written upon the lining. These, she thought, must be the charm, so she read the directions carefully and put the Cap upon her head.

“Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke!” she said, standing on her left foot.

“What did you say?” asked the Scarecrow, who did not know what she was doing.

“Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo!” Dorothy went on, standing this time on her right foot.

“Hello!” replied the Tin Woodman, calmly.

“Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!” said Dorothy, who was now standing on both feet. This ended the saying of the charm, and they heard a great chattering and flapping of wings, as the band of Winged Monkeys flew up to them. The King bowed low before Dorothy, and asked,

“What is your command?”

“We wish to go to the Emerald City,” said the child, “and we have lost our way.”

“We will carry you,” replied the King, and no sooner had he spoken than two of the Monkeys caught Dorothy in their arms and flew away with her. Others took the Scarecrow and the Woodman and the Lion, and one little Monkey seized Toto and flew after them, although the dog tried hard to bite him.

The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were rather frightened at first, for they remembered how badly the Winged Monkeys had treated them before; but they saw that no harm was intended, so they rode through the air quite cheerfully, and had a fine time looking at the pretty gardens and woods far below them.

Dorothy found herself riding easily between two of the biggest Monkeys, one of them the King himself. They had made a chair of their hands and were careful not to hurt her.

“Why do you have to obey the charm of the Golden Cap?” she asked.

“That is a long story,” answered the King, with a laugh; “but as we have a long journey before us I will pass the time by telling you about it, if you wish.”

“I shall be glad to hear it,” she replied.

“Once,” began the leader, “we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. Perhaps some of us were rather too full of mischief at times, flying down to pull the tails of the animals that had no wings, chasing birds, and throwing nuts at the people who walked in the forest. But we were careless and happy and full of fun, and enjoyed every minute of the day. This was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land.

“There lived here then, away at the North, a beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress. All her magic was used to help the people, and she was never known to hurt anyone who was good. Her name was Gayelette, and she lived in a handsome palace built from great blocks of ruby. Everyone loved her, but her greatest sorrow was that she could find no one to love in return, since all the men were much too stupid and ugly to mate with one so beautiful and wise. At last, however, she found a boy who was handsome and manly and wise beyond his years. Gayelette made up her mind that when he grew to be a man she would make him her husband, so she took him to her ruby palace and used all her magic powers to make him as strong and good and lovely as any woman could wish. When he grew to manhood, Quelala, as he was called, was said to be the best and wisest man in all the land, while his manly beauty was so great that Gayelette loved him dearly, and hastened to make everything ready for the wedding.

“My grandfather was at that time the King of the Winged Monkeys which lived in the forest near Gayelette’s palace, and the old fellow loved a joke better than a good dinner. One day, just before the wedding, my grandfather was flying out with his band when he saw Quelala walking beside the river. He was dressed in a rich costume of pink silk and purple velvet, and my grandfather thought he would see what he could do. At his word the band flew down and seized Quelala, carried him in their arms until they were over the middle of the river, and then dropped him into the water.

“’Swim out, my fine fellow,’ cried my grandfather, ‘and see if the water has spotted your clothes.’ Quelala was much too wise not to swim, and he was not in the least spoiled by all his good fortune. He laughed, when he came to the top of the water, and swam in to shore. But when Gayelette came running out to him she found his silks and velvet all ruined by the river.

“The princess was angry, and she knew, of course, who did it. She had all the Winged Monkeys brought before her, and she said at first that their wings should be tied and they should be treated as they had treated Quelala, and dropped in the river. But my grandfather pleaded hard, for he knew the Monkeys would drown in the river with their wings tied, and Quelala said a kind word for them also; so that Gayelette finally spared them, on condition that the Winged Monkeys should ever after do three times the bidding of the owner of the Golden Cap. This Cap had been made for a wedding present to Quelala, and it is said to have cost the princess half her kingdom. Of course my grandfather and all the other Monkeys at once agreed to the condition, and that is how it happens that we are three times the slaves of the owner of the Golden Cap, whomsoever he may be.”

“And what became of them?” asked Dorothy, who had been greatly interested in the story.

“Quelala being the first owner of the Golden Cap,” replied the Monkey, “he was the first to lay his wishes upon us. As his bride could not bear the sight of us, he called us all to him in the forest after he had married her and ordered us always to keep where she could never again set eyes on a Winged Monkey, which we were glad to do, for we were all afraid of her.

“This was all we ever had to do until the Golden Cap fell into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West, who made us enslave the Winkies, and afterward drive Oz himself out of the Land of the West. Now the Golden Cap is yours, and three times you have the right to lay your wishes upon us.”

As the Monkey King finished his story Dorothy looked down and saw the green, shining walls of the Emerald City before them. She wondered at the rapid flight of the Monkeys, but was glad the journey was over. The strange creatures set the travellers down carefully before the gate of the City, the King bowed low to Dorothy, and then flew swiftly away, followed by all his band.

“That was a good ride,” said the little girl.

“Yes, and a quick way out of our troubles,” replied the Lion. “How lucky it was you brought away that wonderful Cap!”

Chapter XV.

The Discovery of

Oz the Terrible.

THE FOUR TRAVELLERS walked up to the great gate of the Emerald City and rang the bell. After ringing several times it was opened by the same Guardian of the Gates they had met before.

“What! Are you back again?” he asked, in surprise.

“Do you not see us?” answered the Scarecrow.

“But I thought you had gone to visit the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“We did visit her,” said the Scarecrow.

“And she let you go again?” asked the man, in wonder.

“She could not help it, for she is melted,” explained the Scarecrow.

“Melted! Well, that is good news, indeed,” said the man. “Who melted her?”

“It was Dorothy,” said the Lion, gravely.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the man, and he bowed very low indeed before her.

Then he led them into his little room and locked the spectacles from the great box on all their eyes, just as he had done before. Afterward they passed on through the gate into the Emerald City, and when the people heard from the Guardian of the Gates that Dorothy had melted the Wicked Witch of the West they all gathered around the travellers and followed them in a great crowd to the Palace of Oz.

The soldier with the green whiskers was still on guard before the door, but he let them in at once and they were again met by the beautiful green girl, who showed each of them to their old rooms at once, so they might rest until the Great Oz was ready to receive them.

The soldier had the news carried straight to Oz that Dorothy and the other travellers had come back again, after destroying the Wicked Witch; but Oz made no reply. They thought the Great Wizard would send for them at once, but he did not. They had no word from him the next day, nor the next, nor the next. The waiting was tiresome and wearing, and at last they grew vexed that Oz should treat them in so poor a fashion, after sending them to undergo hardships and slavery. So the Scarecrow at last asked the green girl to take another message to Oz, saying if he did not let them in to see him at once they would call the Winged Monkeys to help them, and find out whether he kept his promises or not. When the Wizard was given this message he was so frightened that he sent word for them to come to the Throne Room at four minutes after nine o’clock the next morning. He had once met the Winged Monkeys in the Land of the West, and he did not wish to meet them again.

The four travellers passed a sleepless night, each thinking of the gift Oz had promised to bestow upon him. Dorothy fell asleep only once, and then she dreamed she was in Kansas, where Aunt Em was telling her how glad she was to have her little girl at home again.

Promptly at nine o’clock the next morning the green-whiskered soldier came to them, and four minutes later they all went into the Throne Room of the Great Oz.

Of course each one of them expected to see the Wizard in the shape he had taken before, and all were greatly surprised when they looked about and saw no one at all in the room. They kept close to the door and closer to one another, for the stillness of the empty room was more dreadful than any of the forms they had seen Oz take.

Presently they heard a Voice, seeming to come from somewhere near the top of the great dome, and it said, solemnly:

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Why do you seek me?”

They looked again in every part of the room, and then, seeing no one, Dorothy asked,

“Where are you?”

“I am everywhere,” answered the Voice, “but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible. I will now seat myself upon my throne, that you may converse with me.” Indeed, the Voice seemed just then to come straight from the throne itself; so they walked toward it and stood in a row while Dorothy said:

“We have come to claim our promise, O Oz.”

“What promise?” asked Oz.

“You promised to send me back to Kansas when the Wicked Witch was destroyed,” said the girl.

“And you promised to give me brains,” said the Scarecrow.

“And you promised to give me a heart,” said the Tin Woodman.

“And you promised to give me courage,” said the Cowardly Lion.

“Is the Wicked Witch really destroyed?” asked the Voice, and Dorothy thought it trembled a little.

“Yes,” she answered, “I melted her with a bucket of water.”

“Dear me,” said the Voice; “how sudden! Well, come to me to-morrow, for I must have time to think it over.”

“You’ve had plenty of time already,” said the Tin Woodman, angrily.

“We shan’t wait a day longer,” said the Scarecrow.

“You must keep your promises to us!” exclaimed Dorothy.

The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little, old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out,

“Who are you?”

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” said the little man, in a trembling voice, “but don’t strike me—please don’t!—and I’ll do anything you want me to.”

Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay.

“I thought Oz was a great Head,” said Dorothy.

“And I thought Oz was a lovely Lady,” said the Scarecrow.

“And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast,” said the Tin Woodman.

“And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire,” exclaimed the Lion.

“No; you are all wrong,” said the little man, meekly. “I have been making believe.”

“Making believe!” cried Dorothy. “Are you not a Great Wizard?”

“Hush, my dear,” he said; “don’t speak so loud, or you will be overheard—and I should be ruined. I’m supposed to be a Great Wizard.”

“And aren’t you?” she asked.

“Not a bit of it, my dear; I’m just a common man.”

“You’re more than that,” said the Scarecrow, in a grieving tone; “you’re a humbug.”

“Exactly so!” declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him; “I am a humbug.”

“But this is terrible,” said the Tin Woodman; “how shall I ever get my heart?”

“Or I my courage?” asked the Lion.

“Or I my brains?” wailed the Scarecrow, wiping the tears from his eyes with his coat-sleeve.

“My dear friends,” said Oz, “I pray you not to speak of these little things. Think of me, and the terrible trouble I’m in at being found out.”

“Doesn’t anyone else know you’re a humbug?” asked Dorothy.

“No one knows it but you four—and myself,” replied Oz. “I have fooled everyone so long that I thought I should never be found out. It was a great mistake my ever letting you into the Throne Room. Usually I will not see even my subjects, and so they believe I am something terrible.”

“But, I don’t understand,” said Dorothy, in bewilderment. “How was it that you appeared to me as a great Head?”

“That was one of my tricks,” answered Oz. “Step this way, please, and I will tell you all about it.”

He led the way to a small chamber in the rear of the Throne Room, and they all followed him. He pointed to one corner, in which lay the great Head, made out of many thicknesses of paper, and with a carefully painted face.

“This I hung from the ceiling by a wire,” said Oz; “I stood behind the screen and pulled a thread, to make the eyes move and the mouth open.”

“But how about the voice?” she enquired.

“Oh, I am a ventriloquist,” said the little man, “and I can throw the sound of my voice wherever I wish; so that you thought it was coming out of the Head. Here are the other things I used to deceive you.” He showed the Scarecrow the dress and the mask he had worn when he seemed to be the lovely Lady; and the Tin Woodman saw that his terrible Beast was nothing but a lot of skins, sewn together, with slats to keep their sides out. As for the Ball of Fire, the false Wizard had hung that also from the ceiling. It was really a ball of cotton, but when oil was poured upon it the ball burned fiercely.

“Really,” said the Scarecrow, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being such a humbug.”

“I am—I certainly am,” answered the little man sorrowfully; “but it was the only thing I could do. Sit down, please, there are plenty of chairs; and I will tell you my story.”

So they sat down and listened while he told the following tale:

“I was born in Omaha—”

“Why, that isn’t very far from Kansas!” cried Dorothy.

“No; but it’s farther from here,” he said, shaking his head at her, sadly. “When I grew up I became a ventriloquist, and at that I was very well trained by a great master. I can imitate any kind of a bird or beast.” Here he mewed so like a kitten that Toto pricked up his ears and looked everywhere to see where she was. “After a time,” continued Oz, “I tired of that, and became a balloonist.”

“What is that?” asked Dorothy.

“A man who goes up in a balloon on circus day, so as to draw a crowd of people together and get them to pay to see the circus,” he explained.

“Oh,” she said; “I know.”

“Well, one day I went up in a balloon and the ropes got twisted, so that I couldn’t come down again. It went way up above the clouds, so far that a current of air struck it and carried it many, many miles away. For a day and a night I travelled through the air, and on the morning of the second day I awoke and found the balloon floating over a strange and beautiful country.

“It came down gradually, and I was not hurt a bit. But I found myself in the midst of a strange people, who, seeing me come from the clouds, thought I was a great Wizard. Of course I let them think so, because they were afraid of me, and promised to do anything I wished them to.

“Just to amuse myself, and keep the good people busy, I ordered them to build this City, and my palace; and they did it all willingly and well. Then I thought, as the country was so green and beautiful, I would call it the Emerald City. And to make the name fit better I put green spectacles on all the people, so that everything they saw was green.”

“But isn’t everything here green?” asked Dorothy.

“No more than in any other city,” replied Oz; “but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you. The Emerald City was built a great many years ago, for I was a young man when the balloon brought me here, and I am a very old man now. But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City, and it certainly is a beautiful place, abounding in jewels and precious metals, and every good thing that is needed to make one happy. I have been good to the people, and they like me; but ever since this Palace was built I have shut myself up and would not see any of them.

“One of my greatest fears was the Witches, for while I had no magical powers at all I soon found out that the Witches were really able to do wonderful things. There were four of them in this country, and they ruled the people who live in the North and South and East and West. Fortunately, the Witches of the North and South were good, and I knew they would do me no harm; but the Witches of the East and West were terribly wicked, and had they not thought I was more powerful than they themselves, they would surely have destroyed me. As it was, I lived in deadly fear of them for many years; so you can imagine how pleased I was when I heard your house had fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East. When you came to me, I was willing to promise anything if you would only do away with the other Witch; but now that you have melted her, I am ashamed to say that I cannot keep my promises.”

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

“Can’t you give me brains?” asked the Scarecrow.

“You don’t need them. You are learning something every day. A baby has brains, but it doesn’t know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.”

“That may all be true,” said the Scarecrow, “but I shall be very unhappy unless you give me brains.”

The false Wizard looked at him carefully.

“Well,” he said, with a sigh, “I’m not much of a magician, as I said; but if you will come to me to-morrow morning, I will stuff your head with brains. I cannot tell you how to use them, however; you must find that out for yourself.”

“Oh, thank you—thank you!” cried the Scarecrow. “I’ll find a way to use them, never fear!”

“But how about my courage?” asked the Lion, anxiously.

“You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

“Perhaps I have, but I’m scared just the same,” said the Lion. “I shall really be very unhappy unless you give me the sort of courage that makes one forget he is afraid.”

“Very well; I will give you that sort of courage to-morrow,” replied Oz.

“How about my heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“Why, as for that,” answered Oz, “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”

“That must be a matter of opinion,” said the Tin Woodman. “For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me the heart.”

“Very well,” answered Oz meekly. “Come to me tomorrow and you shall have a heart. I have played Wizard for so many years that I may as well continue the part a little longer.”

“And now,” said Dorothy, “how am I to get back to Kansas?”

“We shall have to think about that,” replied the little man. “Give me two or three days to consider the matter and I’ll try to find a way to carry you over the desert. In the meantime you shall all be treated as my guests, and while you live in the Palace my people will wait upon you and obey your slightest wish. There is only one thing I ask in return for my help—such as it is. You must keep my secret and tell no one I am a humbug.”

They agreed to say nothing of what they had learned, and went back to their rooms in high spirits. Even Dorothy had hope that “The Great and Terrible Humbug,” as she called him, would find a way to send her back to Kansas, and if he did she was willing to forgive him everything.

Chapter XVI.

The Magic Art of
the Great Humbug.

NEXT MORNING THE Scarecrow said to his friends:

“Congratulate me. I am going to Oz to get my brains at last. When I return I shall be as other men are.”

“I have always liked you as you were,” said Dorothy, simply.

“It is kind of you to like a Scarecrow,” he replied. “But surely you will think more of me when you hear the splendid thoughts my new brain is going to turn out.” Then he said good-bye to them all in a cheerful voice and went to the Throne Room, where he rapped upon the door.

“Come in,” said Oz.

The Scarecrow went in and found the little man sitting down by the window, engaged in deep thought.

“I have come for my brains,” remarked the Scarecrow, a little uneasily.

“Oh, yes; sit down in that chair, please,” replied Oz. “You must excuse me for taking your head off, but I shall have to do it in order to put your brains in their proper place.”

“That’s all right,” said the Scarecrow. “You are quite welcome to take my head off, as long as it will be a better one when you put it on again.”

So the Wizard unfastened his head and emptied out the straw. Then he entered the back room and took up a measure of bran, which he mixed with a great many pins and needles. Having shaken them together thoroughly, he filled the top of the Scarecrow’s head with the mixture and stuffed the rest of the space with straw, to hold it in place. When he had fastened the Scarecrow’s head on his body again he said to him,

“Hereafter you will be a great man, for I have given you a lot of bran-new brains.”

The Scarecrow was both pleased and proud at the fulfillment of his greatest wish, and having thanked Oz warmly he went back to his friends.

Dorothy looked at him curiously. His head was quite bulged out at the top with brains.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“I feel wise indeed,” he answered, earnestly. “When I get used to my brains I shall know everything.”

“Why are those needles and pins sticking out of your head?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“That is proof that he is sharp,” remarked the Lion.

“Well, I must go to Oz and get my heart,” said the Woodman. So he walked to the Throne Room and knocked at the door.

“Come in,” called Oz, and the Woodman entered and said,

“I have come for my heart.”

“Very well,” answered the little man. “But I shall have to cut a hole in your breast, so I can put your heart in the right place. I hope it won’t hurt you.”

“Oh, no;” answered the Woodman. “I shall not feel it at all.”

So Oz brought a pair of tinners’ shears and cut a small, square hole in the left side of the Tin Woodman’s breast. Then, going to a chest of drawers, he took out a pretty heart, made entirely of silk and stuffed with sawdust.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” he asked.

“It is, indeed!” replied the Woodman, who was greatly pleased. “But is it a kind heart?”

“Oh, very!” answered Oz. He put the heart in the Woodman’s breast and then replaced the square of tin, soldering it neatly together where it had been cut.

“There,” said he; “now you have a heart that any man might be proud of. I’m sorry I had to put a patch on your breast, but it really couldn’t be helped.”

“Never mind the patch,” exclaimed the happy Woodman. “I am very grateful to you, and shall never forget your kindness.”

“Don’t speak of it,” replied Oz.

Then the Tin Woodman went back to his friends, who wished him every joy on account of his good fortune.

The Lion now walked to the Throne Room and knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said Oz.

“I have come for my courage,” announced the Lion, entering the room.

“Very well,” answered the little man; “I will get it for you.”

He went to a cupboard and reaching up to a high shelf took down a square green bottle, the contents of which he poured into a green-gold dish, beautifully carved. Placing this before the Cowardly Lion, who sniffed at it as if he did not like it, the Wizard said,

“Drink.”

“What is it?” asked the Lion.

“Well,” answered Oz, “if it were inside of you, it would be courage. You know, of course, that courage is always inside one; so that this really cannot be called courage until you have swallowed it. Therefore I advise you to drink it as soon as possible.”

The Lion hesitated no longer, but drank till the dish was empty.

“How do you feel now?” asked Oz.

“Full of courage,” replied the Lion, who went joyfully back to his friends to tell them of his good fortune.

Oz, left to himself, smiled to think of his success in giving the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion exactly what they thought they wanted. “How can I help being a humbug,” he said, “when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done? It was easy to make the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Woodman happy, because they imagined I could do anything. But it will take more than imagination to carry Dorothy back to Kansas, and I’m sure I don’t know how it can be done.”

Chapter XVII.

How the Balloon
was Launched.

FOR THREE DAYS Dorothy heard nothing from Oz. These were sad days for the little girl, although her friends were all quite happy and contented. The Scarecrow told them there were wonderful thoughts in his head; but he would not say what they were because he knew no one could understand them but himself. When the Tin Woodman walked about he felt his heart rattling around in his breast; and he told Dorothy he had discovered it to be a kinder and more tender heart than the one he had owned when he was made of flesh. The Lion declared he was afraid of nothing on earth, and would gladly face an army of men or a dozen of the fierce Kalidahs.

Thus each of the little party was satisfied except Dorothy, who longed more than ever to get back to Kansas.

On the fourth day, to her great joy, Oz sent for her, and when she entered the Throne Room he said, pleasantly:

“Sit down, my dear; I think I have found the way to get you out of this country.”

“And back to Kansas?” she asked, eagerly.

“Well, I’m not sure about Kansas,” said Oz; “for I haven’t the faintest notion which way it lies. But the first thing to do is to cross the desert, and then it should be easy to find your way home.”

“How can I cross the desert?” she enquired.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” said the little man. “You see, when I came to this country it was in a balloon. You also came through the air, being carried by a cyclone. So I believe the best way to get across the desert will be through the air. Now, it is quite beyond my powers to make a cyclone; but I’ve been thinking the matter over, and I believe I can make a balloon.”

“How?” asked Dorothy.

“A balloon,” said Oz, “is made of silk, which is coated with glue to keep the gas in it. I have plenty of silk in the Palace, so it will be no trouble for us to make the balloon. But in all this country there is no gas to fill the balloon with, to make it float.”

“If it won’t float,” remarked Dorothy, “it will be of no use to us.”

“True,” answered Oz. “But there is another way to make it float, which is to fill it with hot air. Hot air isn’t as good as gas, for if the air should get cold the balloon would come down in the desert, and we should be lost.”

“We!” exclaimed the girl; “are you going with me?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Oz. “I am tired of being such a humbug. If I should go out of this Palace my people would soon discover I am not a Wizard, and then they would be vexed with me for having deceived them. So I have to stay shut up in these rooms all day, and it gets tiresome. I’d much rather go back to Kansas with you and be in a circus again.”

“I shall be glad to have your company,” said Dorothy.

“Thank you,” he answered. “Now, if you will help me sew the silk together, we will begin to work on our balloon.”

So Dorothy took a needle and thread, and as fast as Oz cut the strips of silk into proper shape the girl sewed them neatly together. First there was a strip of light green silk, then a strip of dark green and then a strip of emerald green; for Oz had a fancy to make the balloon in different shades of the color about them. It took three days to sew all the strips together, but when it was finished they had a big bag of green silk more than twenty feet long.

Then Oz painted it on the inside with a coat of thin glue, to make it air-tight, after which he announced that the balloon was ready.

“But we must have a basket to ride in,” he said. So he sent the soldier with the green whiskers for a big clothes basket, which he fastened with many ropes to the bottom of the balloon.

When it was all ready, Oz sent word to his people that he was going to make a visit to a great brother Wizard who lived in the clouds. The news spread rapidly throughout the city and everyone came to see the wonderful sight.

Oz ordered the balloon carried out in front of the Palace, and the people gazed upon it with much curiosity. The Tin Woodman had chopped a big pile of wood, and now he made a fire of it, and Oz held the bottom of the balloon over the fire so that the hot air that arose from it would be caught in the silken bag. Gradually the balloon swelled out and rose into the air, until finally the basket just touched the ground.

Then Oz got into the basket and said to all the people in a loud voice:

“I am now going away to make a visit. While I am gone the Scarecrow will rule over you. I command you to obey him as you would me.”

The balloon was by this time tugging hard at the rope that held it to the ground, for the air within it was hot, and this made it so much lighter in weight than the air without that it pulled hard to rise into the sky.

“Come, Dorothy!” cried the Wizard; “hurry up, or the balloon will fly away.”

“I can’t find Toto anywhere,” replied Dorothy, who did not wish to leave her little dog behind. Toto had run into the crowd to bark at a kitten, and Dorothy at last found him. She picked him up and ran toward the balloon.

She was within a few steps of it, and Oz was holding out his hands to help her into the basket, when, crack! went the ropes, and the balloon rose into the air without her.

“Come back!” she screamed; “I want to go, too!”

“I can’t come back, my dear,” called Oz from the basket. “Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” shouted everyone, and all eyes were turned upward to where the Wizard was riding in the basket, rising every moment farther and farther into the sky.

And that was the last any of them ever saw of Oz, the Wonderful Wizard, though he may have reached Omaha safely, and be there now, for all we know. But the people remembered him lovingly, and said to one another,

“Oz was always our friend. When he was here he built for us this beautiful Emerald City, and now he is gone he has left the Wise Scarecrow to rule over us.”

Still, for many days they grieved over the loss of the Wonderful Wizard, and would not be comforted.

Chapter XVIII.

Away to the

South.

DOROTHY WEPT BITTERLY at the passing of her hope to get home to Kansas again; but when she thought it all over she was glad she had not gone up in a balloon. And she also felt sorry at losing Oz, and so did her companions.

The Tin Woodman came to her and said,

“Truly I should be ungrateful if I failed to mourn for the man who gave me my lovely heart. I should like to cry a little because Oz is gone, if you will kindly wipe away my tears, so that I shall not rust.”

“With pleasure,” she answered, and brought a towel at once. Then the Tin Woodman wept for several minutes, and she watched the tears carefully and wiped them away with the towel. When he had finished, he thanked her kindly and oiled himself thoroughly with his jeweled oil-can, to guard against mishap.

The Scarecrow was now the ruler of the Emerald City, and although he was not a Wizard the people were proud of him. “For,” they said, “there is not another city in all the world that is ruled by a stuffed man.” And, so far as they knew, they were quite right.

The morning after the balloon had gone up with Oz, the four travellers met in the Throne Room and talked matters over. The Scarecrow sat in the big throne and the others stood respectfully before him.

“We are not so unlucky,” said the new ruler; “for this Palace and the Emerald City belong to us, and we can do just as we please. When I remember that a short time ago I was up on a pole in a farmer’s cornfield, and that I am now the ruler of this beautiful City, I am quite satisfied with my lot.”

“I also,” said the Tin Woodman, “am well pleased with my new heart; and, really, that was the only thing I wished in all the world.”

“For my part, I am content in knowing I am as brave as any beast that ever lived, if not braver,” said the Lion, modestly.

“If Dorothy would only be contented to live in the Emerald City,” continued the Scarecrow, “we might all be happy together.”

“But I don’t want to live here,” cried Dorothy. “I want to go to Kansas, and live with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.”

“Well, then, what can be done?” enquired the Woodman.

The Scarecrow decided to think, and he thought so hard that the pins and needles began to stick out of his brains. Finally he said;

“Why not call the Winged Monkeys, and ask them to carry you over the desert?”

“I never thought of that!” said Dorothy, joyfully. “It’s just the thing. I’ll go at once for the Golden Cap.”

When she brought it into the Throne Room she spoke the magic words, and soon the band of Winged Monkeys flew in through the open window and stood beside her.

“This is the second time you have called us,” said the Monkey King, bowing before the little girl. “What do you wish?”

“I want you to fly with me to Kansas,” said Dorothy.

But the Monkey King shook his head.

“That cannot be done,” he said. “We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it. There has never been a Winged Monkey in Kansas yet, and I suppose there never will be, for they don’t belong there. We shall be glad to serve you in any way in our power, but we cannot cross the desert. Good-bye.”

And with another bow, the Monkey King spread his wings and flew away through the window, followed by all his band.

Dorothy was almost ready to cry with disappointment.

“I have wasted the charm of the Golden Cap to no purpose,” she said, “for the Winged Monkeys cannot help me.”

“It is certainly too bad!” said the tender hearted Woodman.

The Scarecrow was thinking again, and his head bulged out so horribly that Dorothy feared it would burst.

“Let us call in the soldier with the green whiskers,” he said, “and ask his advice.”

So the soldier was summoned and entered the Throne Room timidly, for while Oz was alive he never was allowed to come further than the door.

“This little girl,” said the Scarecrow to the soldier, “wishes to cross the desert. How can she do so?”

“I cannot tell,” answered the soldier; “for nobody has ever crossed the desert, unless it is Oz himself.”

“Is there no one who can help me?” asked Dorothy, earnestly.

“Glinda might,” he suggested.

“Who is Glinda?” enquired the Scarecrow.

“The Witch of the South. She is the most powerful of all the Witches, and rules over the Quadlings. Besides, her castle stands on the edge of the desert, so she may know a way to cross it.”

“Glinda is a Good Witch, isn’t she?” asked the child.

“The Quadlings think she is good,” said the soldier, “and she is kind to everyone. I have heard that Glinda is a beautiful woman, who knows how to keep young in spite of the many years she has lived.”

“How can I get to her castle?” asked Dorothy.

“The road is straight to the South,” he answered, “but it is said to be full of dangers to travellers. There are wild beasts in the woods, and a race of queer men who do not like strangers to cross their country. For this reason none of the Quadlings ever come to the Emerald City.”

The soldier then left them and the Scarecrow said,

“It seems, in spite of dangers, that the best thing Dorothy can do is to travel to the Land of the South and ask Glinda to help her. For, of course, if Dorothy stays here she will never get back to Kansas.”

“You must have been thinking again,” remarked the Tin Woodman.

“I have,” said the Scarecrow.

“I shall go with Dorothy,” declared the Lion, “for I am tired of your city and long for the woods and the country again. I am really a wild beast, you know. Besides, Dorothy will need someone to protect her.”

“That is true,” agreed the Woodman. “My axe may be of service to her; so I, also, will go with her to the Land of the South.”

“When shall we start?” asked the Scarecrow.

“Are you going?” they asked, in surprise.

“Certainly. If it wasn’t for Dorothy I should never have had brains. She lifted me from the pole in the cornfield and brought me to the Emerald City. So my good luck is all due to her, and I shall never leave her until she starts back to Kansas for good and all.”

“Thank you,” said Dorothy, gratefully. “You are all very kind to me. But I should like to start as soon as possible.”

“We shall go to-morrow morning,” returned the Scarecrow. “So now let us all get ready, for it will be a long journey.”

Chapter XIX.

Attacked by the

Fighting Trees.

THE NEXT MORNING Dorothy kissed the pretty green girl good-bye, and they all shook hands with the soldier with the green whiskers, who had walked with them as far as the gate. When the Guardian of the Gates saw them again, he wondered greatly that they could leave the beautiful City to get into new trouble. But he at once unlocked their spectacles, which he put back into the green box, and gave them many good wishes to carry with them.

“You are now our ruler,” he said to the Scarecrow; “so you must come back to us as soon as possible.”

“I certainly shall if I am able,” the Scarecrow replied; “but I must help Dorothy to get home, first.”

As Dorothy bade the good-natured Guardian a last farewell she said,

“I have been very kindly treated in your lovely City, and everyone has been good to me. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.”

“Don’t try, my dear,” he answered. “We should like to keep you with us, but if it is your wish to return to Kansas, I hope you will find a way.” He then opened the gate of the outer wall and they walked forth and started upon their journey.

The sun shone brightly as our friends turned their faces toward the Land of the South. They were all in the best of spirits, and laughed and chatted together. Dorothy was once more filled with the hope of getting home, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were glad to be of use to her. As for the Lion, he sniffed the fresh air with delight and whisked his tail from side to side in pure joy at being in the country again, while Toto ran around them and chased the moths and butterflies, barking merrily all the time.

“City life does not agree with me at all,” remarked the Lion, as they walked along at a brisk pace. “I have lost much flesh since I lived there, and now I am anxious for a chance to show the other beasts how courageous I have grown.”

They now turned and took a last look at the Emerald City. All they could see was a mass of towers and steeples behind the green walls, and high up above everything the spires and dome of the Palace of Oz.

“Oz was not such a bad Wizard, after all,” said the Tin Woodman, as he felt his heart rattling around in his breast.

“He knew how to give me brains, and very good brains, too,” said the Scarecrow.

“If Oz had taken a dose of the same courage he gave me,” added the Lion, “he would have been a brave man.”

Dorothy said nothing. Oz had not kept the promise he made her, but he had done his best, so she forgave him. As he said, he was a good man, even if he was a bad Wizard.

The first day’s journey was through the green fields and bright flowers that stretched about the Emerald City on every side. They slept that night on the grass, with nothing but the stars over them; and they rested very well indeed.

In the morning they travelled on until they came to a thick wood. There was no way of going around it, for it seemed to extend to the right and left as far as they could see; and, besides, they did not dare change the direction of their journey for fear of getting lost. So they looked for the place where it would be easiest to get into the forest.

The Scarecrow, who was in the lead, finally discovered a big tree with such wide spreading branches that there was room for the party to pass underneath. So he walked forward to the tree, but just as he came under the first branches they bent down and twined around him, and the next minute he was raised from the ground and flung headlong among his fellow travellers.

This did not hurt the Scarecrow, but it surprised him, and he looked rather dizzy when Dorothy picked him up.

“Here is another space between the trees,” called the Lion.

“Let me try it first,” said the Scarecrow, “for it doesn’t hurt me to get thrown about.” He walked up to another tree, as he spoke, but its branches immediately seized him and tossed him back again.

“This is strange,” exclaimed Dorothy; “what shall we do?”

“The trees seem to have made up their minds to fight us, and stop our journey,” remarked the Lion.

“I believe I will try it myself,” said the Woodman, and shouldering his axe, he marched up to the first tree that had handled the Scarecrow so roughly. When a big branch bent down to seize him the Woodman chopped at it so fiercely that he cut it in two. At once the tree began shaking all its branches as if in pain, and the Tin Woodman passed safely under it.

“Come on!” he shouted to the others; “be quick!”

They all ran forward and passed under the tree without injury, except Toto, who was caught by a small branch and shaken until he howled. But the Woodman promptly chopped off the branch and set the little dog free.

The other trees of the forest did nothing to keep them back, so they made up their minds that only the first row of trees could bend down their branches, and that probably these were the policemen of the forest, and given this wonderful power in order to keep strangers out of it.

The four travellers walked with ease through the trees until they came to the further edge of the wood. Then, to their surprise, they found before them a high wall, which seemed to be made of white china. It was smooth, like the surface of a dish, and higher than their heads.

“What shall we do now?” asked Dorothy.

“I will make a ladder,” said the Tin Woodman, “for we certainly must climb over the wall.”

Chapter XX.

The Dainty

China Country.

WHILE THE WOODMAN was making a ladder from wood which he found in the forest Dorothy lay down and slept, for she was tired by the long walk. The Lion also curled himself up to sleep, and Toto lay beside him.

The Scarecrow watched the Woodman while he worked, and said to him:

“I cannot think why this wall is here, nor what it is made of.”

“Rest your brains and do not worry about the wall,” replied the Woodman; “when we have climbed over it, we shall know what is on the other side.”

After a time the ladder was finished. It looked clumsy, but the Tin Woodman was sure it was strong and would answer their purpose. The Scarecrow waked Dorothy and the Lion and Toto, and told them that the ladder was ready. The Scarecrow climbed up the ladder first, but he was so awkward that Dorothy had to follow close behind and keep him from falling off. When he got his head over the top of the wall the Scarecrow said,

“Oh, my!”

“Go on,” exclaimed Dorothy.

So the Scarecrow climbed farther up and sat down on the top of the wall, and Dorothy put her head over and cried,

“Oh, my!” just as the Scarecrow had done.

Then Toto came up, and immediately began to bark, but Dorothy made him be still.

The Lion climbed the ladder next, and the Tin Woodman came last; but both of them cried, “Oh, my!” as soon as they looked over the wall. When they were all sitting in a row on the top of the wall, they looked down and saw a strange sight.

Before them was a great stretch of country having a floor as smooth and shining and white as the bottom of a big platter. Scattered around were many houses made entirely of china and painted in the brightest colors. These houses were quite small, the biggest of them reaching only as high as Dorothy’s waist. There were also pretty little barns, with china fences around them; and many cows and sheep and horses and pigs and chickens, all made of china, were standing about in groups.

But the strangest of all were the people who lived in this queer country. There were milk-maids and shepherdesses, with brightly colored bodices and golden spots all over their gowns; and princesses with most gorgeous frocks of silver and gold and purple; and shepherds dressed in knee-breeches with pink and yellow and blue stripes down them, and golden buckles on their shoes; and princes with jeweled crowns upon their heads, wearing ermine robes and satin doublets; and funny clowns in ruffled gowns, with round red spots upon their cheeks and tall, pointed caps. And, strangest of all, these people were all made of china, even to their clothes, and were so small that the tallest of them was no higher than Dorothy’s knee.

No one did so much as look at the travellers at first, except one little purple china dog with an extra-large head, which came to the wall and barked at them in a tiny voice, afterwards running away again.

“How shall we get down?” asked Dorothy.

They found the ladder so heavy they could not pull it up, so the Scarecrow fell off the wall and the others jumped down upon him so that the hard floor would not hurt their feet. Of course they took pains not to light on his head and get the pins in their feet. When all were safely down they picked up the Scarecrow, whose body was quite flattened out, and patted his straw into shape again.

“We must cross this strange place in order to get to the other side,” said Dorothy; “for it would be unwise for us to go any other way except due South.”

They began walking through the country of the china people, and the first thing they came to was a china milk-maid milking a china cow. As they drew near the cow suddenly gave a kick and kicked over the stool, the pail, and even the milk-maid herself, all falling on the china ground with a great clatter.

Dorothy was shocked to see that the cow had broken her leg short off, and that the pail was lying in several small pieces, while the poor milk-maid had a nick in her left elbow.

“There!” cried the milk-maid, angrily; “see what you have done! My cow has broken her leg, and I must take her to the mender’s shop and have it glued on again. What do you mean by coming here and frightening my cow?”

“I’m very sorry,” returned Dorothy; “please forgive us.”

But the pretty milk-maid was much too vexed to make any answer. She picked up the leg sulkily and led her cow away, the poor animal limping on three legs. As she left them the milk-maid cast many reproachful glances over her shoulder at the clumsy strangers, holding her nicked elbow close to her side.

Dorothy was quite grieved at this mishap.

“We must be very careful here,” said the kind-hearted Woodman, “or we may hurt these pretty little people so they will never get over it.”

A little farther on Dorothy met a most beautifully dressed young princess, who stopped short as she saw the strangers and started to run away.

Dorothy wanted to see more of the princess, so she ran after her; but the china girl cried out, “Don’t chase me! Don’t chase me!”

She had such a frightened little voice that Dorothy stopped and said,

“Why not?”

“Because,” answered the princess, also stopping, a safe distance away, “if I run I may fall down and break myself.”

“But couldn’t you be mended?” asked the girl.

“Oh, yes; but one is never so pretty after being mended, you know,” replied the princess.

“I suppose not,” said Dorothy.

“Now there is Mr. Joker, one of our clowns,” continued the china lady, “who is always trying to stand upon his head. He has broken himself so often that he is mended in a hundred places, and doesn’t look at all pretty. Here he comes now, so you can see for yourself.”

Indeed, a jolly little Clown came walking toward them, and Dorothy could see that in spite of his pretty clothes of red and yellow and green he was completely covered with cracks, running every which way and showing plainly that he had been mended in many places.

The Clown put his hands in his pockets, and after puffing out his cheeks and nodding his head at them saucily, he said,

“My lady fair,
Why do you stare
At poor old Mr. Joker?
You’re quite as stiff
And prim as if
You’d eaten up a poker!”

“Be quiet, sir!” said the princess; “can’t you see these are strangers, and should be treated with respect?”

“Well, that’s respect, I expect,” declared the Clown, and immediately stood upon his head.

“Don’t mind Mr. Joker,” said the princess to Dorothy; “he is considerably cracked in his head, and that makes him foolish.”

“Oh, I don’t mind him a bit,” said Dorothy. “But you are so beautiful,” she continued, “that I am sure I could love you dearly. Won’t you let me carry you back to Kansas and stand you on Aunt Em’s mantle-shelf? I could carry you in my basket.”

“That would make me very unhappy,” answered the china princess. “You see, here in our own country we live contentedly, and can talk and move around as we please. But whenever any of us are taken away our joints at once stiffen, and we can only stand straight and look pretty.

Of course that is all that is expected of us when we are on mantle-shelves and cabinets and drawing-room tables, but our lives are much pleasanter here in our own country.”

“I would not make you unhappy for all the world!” exclaimed Dorothy; “so I’ll just say good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” replied the princess.

They walked carefully through the china country. The little animals and all the people scampered out of their way, fearing the strangers would break them, and after an hour or so the travellers reached the other side of the country and came to another china wall.

It was not as high as the first, however, and by standing upon the Lion’s back they all managed to scramble to the top. Then the Lion gathered his legs under him and jumped on the wall; but just as he jumped, he upset a china church with his tail and smashed it all to pieces.

“That was too bad,” said Dorothy, “but really I think we were lucky in not doing these little people more harm than breaking a cow’s leg and a church. They are all so brittle!”

“They are, indeed,” said the Scarecrow, “and I am thankful I am made of straw and cannot be easily damaged. There are worse things in the world than being a Scarecrow.”

Chapter XXI.

The Lion Becomes
the King of Beasts.

AFTER CLIMBING DOWN from the china wall the travellers found themselves in a disagreeable country, full of bogs and marshes and covered with tall, rank grass. It was difficult to walk far without falling into muddy holes, for the grass was so thick that it hid them from sight. However, by carefully picking their way, they got safely along until they reached solid ground. But here the country seemed wilder than ever, and after a long and tiresome walk through the underbrush they entered another forest, where the trees were bigger and older than any they had ever seen.

“This forest is perfectly delightful,” declared the Lion, looking around him with joy; “never have I seen a more beautiful place.”

“It seems gloomy,” said the Scarecrow.

“Not a bit of it,” answered the Lion; “I should like to live here all my life. See how soft the dried leaves are under your feet and how rich and green the moss is that clings to these old trees. Surely no wild beast could wish a pleasanter home.”

“Perhaps there are wild beasts in the forest now,” said Dorothy.

“I suppose there are,” returned the Lion; “but I do not see any of them about.”

They walked through the forest until it became too dark to go any farther. Dorothy and Toto and the Lion lay down to sleep, while the Woodman and the Scarecrow kept watch over them as usual.

When morning came, they started again. Before they had gone far they heard a low rumble, as of the growling of many wild animals. Toto whimpered a little, but none of the others was frightened, and they kept along the well-trodden path until they came to an opening in the wood, in which were gathered hundreds of beasts of every variety. There were tigers and elephants and bears and wolves and foxes and all the others in the natural history, and for a moment Dorothy was afraid. But the Lion explained that the animals were holding a meeting, and he judged by their snarling and growling that they were in great trouble.

As he spoke several of the beasts caught sight of him, and at once the great assemblage hushed as if by magic. The biggest of the tigers came up to the Lion and bowed, saying,

“Welcome, O King of Beasts! You have come in good time to fight our enemy and bring peace to all the animals of the forest once more.”

“What is your trouble?” asked the Lion, quietly.

“We are all threatened,” answered the tiger, “by a fierce enemy which has lately come into this forest. It is a most tremendous monster, like a great spider, with a body as big as an elephant and legs as long as a tree trunk. It has eight of these long legs, and as the monster crawls through the forest he seizes an animal with a leg and drags it to his mouth, where he eats it as a spider does a fly. Not one of us is safe while this fierce creature is alive, and we had called a meeting to decide how to take care of ourselves when you came among us.”

The Lion thought for a moment.

“Are there any other lions in this forest?” he asked.

“No; there were some, but the monster has eaten them all. And, besides, they were none of them nearly so large and brave as you.”

“If I put an end to your enemy will you bow down to me and obey me as King of the Forest?” enquired the Lion.

“We will do that gladly,” returned the tiger; and all the other beasts roared with a mighty roar: “We will!”

“Where is this great spider of yours now?” asked the Lion.

“Yonder, among the oak trees,” said the tiger, pointing with his fore-foot.

“Take good care of these friends of mine,” said the Lion, “and I will go at once to fight the monster.”

He bade his comrades good-bye and marched proudly away to do battle with the enemy.

The great spider was lying asleep when the Lion found him, and it looked so ugly that its foe turned up his nose in disgust. Its legs were quite as long as the tiger had said, and its body covered with coarse black hair. It had a great mouth, with a row of sharp teeth a foot long; but its head was joined to the pudgy body by a neck as slender as a wasp’s waist. This gave the Lion a hint of the best way to attack the creature, and as he knew it was easier to fight it asleep than awake, he gave a great spring and landed directly upon the monster’s back. Then, with one blow of his heavy paw, all armed with sharp claws, he knocked the spider’s head from its body. Jumping down, he watched it until the long legs stopped wiggling, when he knew it was quite dead.

The Lion went back to the opening where the beasts of the forest were waiting for him and said, proudly,

“You need fear your enemy no longer.”

Then the beasts bowed down to the Lion as their King, and he promised to come back and rule over them as soon as Dorothy was safely on her way to Kansas.

Chapter XXII.

The Country
of the Quadlings.

THE FOUR TRAVELLERS passed through the rest of the forest in safety, and when they came out from its gloom saw before them a steep hill, covered from top to bottom with great pieces of rock.

“That will be a hard climb,” said the Scarecrow, “but we must get over the hill, nevertheless.”

So he led the way and the others followed. They had nearly reached the first rock when they heard a rough voice cry out,

“Keep back!”

“Who are you?” asked the Scarecrow. Then a head showed itself over the rock and the same voice said,

“This hill belongs to us, and we don’t allow anyone to cross it.”

“But we must cross it,” said the Scarecrow. “We’re going to the country of the Quadlings.”

“But you shall not!” replied the voice, and there stepped from behind the rock the strangest man the travellers had ever seen.

He was quite short and stout and had a big head, which was flat at the top and supported by a thick neck full of wrinkles. But he had no arms at all, and, seeing this, the Scarecrow did not fear that so helpless a creature could prevent them from climbing the hill. So he said,

“I’m sorry not to do as you wish, but we must pass over your hill whether you like it or not,” and he walked boldly forward.

As quick as lightning the man’s head shot forward and his neck stretched out until the top of the head, where it was flat, struck the Scarecrow in the middle and sent him tumbling, over and over, down the hill. Almost as quickly as it came the head went back to the body, and the man laughed harshly as he said,

“It isn’t as easy as you think!”

A chorus of boisterous laughter came from the other rocks, and Dorothy saw hundreds of the armless Hammer-Heads upon the hillside, one behind every rock.

The Lion became quite angry at the laughter caused by the Scarecrow’s mishap, and giving a loud roar that echoed like thunder, he dashed up the hill.

Again a head shot swiftly out, and the great Lion went rolling down the hill as if he had been struck by a cannon ball.

Dorothy ran down and helped the Scarecrow to his feet, and the Lion came up to her, feeling rather bruised and sore, and said,

“It is useless to fight people with shooting heads; no one can withstand them.”

“What can we do, then?” she asked.

“Call the Winged Monkeys,” suggested the Tin Woodman, “you have still the right to command them once more.”

“Very well,” she answered, and putting on the Golden Cap she uttered the magic words. The Monkeys were as prompt as ever, and in a few moments the entire band stood before her.

“What are your commands?” inquired the King of the Monkeys, bowing low.

“Carry us over the hill to the country of the Quadlings,” answered the girl.

“It shall be done,” said the King, and at once the Winged Monkeys caught the four travellers and Toto up in their arms and flew away with them. As they passed over the hill the Hammer-Heads yelled with vexation, and shot their heads high in the air, but they could not reach the Winged Monkeys, which carried Dorothy and her comrades safely over the hill and set them down in the beautiful country of the Quadlings.

“This is the last time you can summon us,” said the leader to Dorothy; “so good-bye and good luck to you.”

“Good-bye, and thank you very much,” returned the girl; and the Monkeys rose into the air and were out of sight in a twinkling.

The country of the Quadlings seemed rich and happy. There was field upon field of ripening grain, with well-paved roads running between, and pretty rippling brooks with strong bridges across them. The fences and houses and bridges were all painted bright red, just as they had been painted yellow in the country of the Winkies and blue in the country of the Munchkins. The Quadlings themselves, who were short and fat and looked chubby and good natured, were dressed all in red, which showed bright against the green grass and the yellowing grain.

The Monkeys had set them down near a farm house, and the four travellers walked up to it and knocked at the door. It was opened by the farmer’s wife, and when Dorothy asked for something to eat the woman gave them all a good dinner, with three kinds of cake and four kinds of cookies, and a bowl of milk for Toto.

“How far is it to the Castle of Glinda?” asked the child.

“It is not a great way,” answered the farmer’s wife. “Take the road to the South and you will soon reach it.”

Thanking the good woman, they started afresh and walked by the fields and across the pretty bridges until they saw before them a very beautiful Castle. Before the gates were three young girls, dressed in handsome red uniforms trimmed with gold braid; and as Dorothy approached, one of them said to her,

“Why have you come to the South Country?”

“To see the Good Witch who rules here,” she answered. “Will you take me to her?”

“Let me have your name, and I will ask Glinda if she will receive you.” They told who they were, and the girl soldier went into the Castle. After a few moments she came back to say that Dorothy and the others were to be admitted at once.

Chapter XXIII.

The Good Witch

Grants Dorothy’s

Wish.

BEFORE THEY WENT to see Glinda, however, they were taken to a room of the Castle, where Dorothy washed her face and combed her hair, and the Lion shook the dust out of his mane, and the Scarecrow patted himself into his best shape, and the Woodman polished his tin and oiled his joints.

When they were all quite presentable they followed the soldier girl into a big room where the Witch Glinda sat upon a throne of rubies.

She was both beautiful and young to their eyes. Her hair was a rich red in color and fell in flowing ringlets over her shoulders. Her dress was pure white; but her eyes were blue, and they looked kindly upon the little girl.

“What can I do for you, my child?” she asked.

Dorothy told the Witch all her story; how the cyclone had brought her to the Land of Oz, how she had found her companions, and of the wonderful adventures they had met with.

“My greatest wish now,” she added, “is to get back to Kansas, for Aunt Em will surely think something dreadful has happened to me, and that will make her put on mourning; and unless the crops are better this year than they were last I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford it.”

Glinda leaned forward and kissed the sweet, upturned face of the loving little girl.

“Bless your dear heart,” she said, “I am sure I can tell you of a way to get back to Kansas.” Then she added:

“But if I do, you must give me the Golden Cap.”

“Willingly!” exclaimed Dorothy; “indeed, it is of no use to me now, and when you have it you can command the Winged Monkeys three times.”

“And I think I shall need their service just those three times,” answered Glinda, smiling.

Dorothy then gave her the Golden Cap, and the Witch said to the Scarecrow,

“What will you do when Dorothy has left us?”

“I will return to the Emerald City,” he replied, “for Oz has made me its ruler and the people like me. The only thing that worries me is how to cross the hill of the Hammer-Heads.”

“By means of the Golden Cap I shall command the Winged Monkeys to carry you to the gates of the Emerald City,” said Glinda, “for it would be a shame to deprive the people of so wonderful a ruler.”

“Am I really wonderful?” asked the Scarecrow.

“You are unusual,” replied Glinda.

Turning to the Tin Woodman, she asked:

“What will become of you when Dorothy leaves this country?”

He leaned on his axe and thought a moment. Then he said,

“The Winkies were very kind to me, and wanted me to rule over them after the Wicked Witch died. I am fond of the Winkies, and if I could get back again to the Country of the West, I should like nothing better than to rule over them forever.”

“My second command to the Winged Monkeys,” said Glinda, “will be that they carry you safely to the land of the Winkies. Your brains may not be so large to look at as those of the Scarecrow, but you are really brighter than he is—when you are well polished—and I am sure you will rule the Winkies wisely and well.”

Then the Witch looked at the big, shaggy Lion and asked,

“When Dorothy has returned to her own home, what will become of you?”

“Over the hill of the Hammer-Heads,” he answered, “lies a grand old forest, and all the beasts that live there have made me their King. If I could only get back to this forest I would pass my life very happily there.”

“My third command to the Winged Monkeys,” said Glinda, “shall be to carry you to your forest. Then, having used up the powers of the Golden Cap, I shall give it to the King of the Monkeys, that he and his band may thereafter be free for evermore.”

The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion now thanked the Good Witch earnestly for her kindness, and Dorothy exclaimed,

“You are certainly as good as you are beautiful! But you have not yet told me how to get back to Kansas.”

“Your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert,” replied Glinda. “If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.”

“But then I should not have had my wonderful brains!” cried the Scarecrow. “I might have passed my whole life in the farmer’s cornfield.”

“And I should not have had my lovely heart,” said the Tin Woodman. “I might have stood and rusted in the forest till the end of the world.”

“And I should have lived a coward forever,” declared the Lion, “and no beast in all the forest would have had a good word to say to me.”

“This is all true,” said Dorothy, “and I am glad I was of use to these good friends. But now that each of them has had what he most desired, and each is happy in having a kingdom to rule beside, I think I should like to go back to Kansas.”

“The Silver Shoes,” said the Good Witch, “have wonderful powers. And one of the most curious things about them is that they can carry you to any place in the world in three steps, and each step will be made in the wink of an eye. All you have to do is to knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go.”

“If that is so,” said the child, joyfully, “I will ask them to carry me back to Kansas at once.”

She threw her arms around the Lion’s neck and kissed him, patting his big head tenderly. Then she kissed the Tin Woodman, who was weeping in a way most dangerous to his joints. But she hugged the soft, stuffed body of the Scarecrow in her arms instead of kissing his painted face, and found she was crying herself at this sorrowful parting from her loving comrades.

Glinda the Good stepped down from her ruby throne to give the little girl a good-bye kiss, and Dorothy thanked her for all the kindness she had shown to her friends and herself.

Dorothy now took Toto up solemnly in her arms, and having said one last good-bye she clapped the heels of her shoes together three times, saying,

“Take me home to Aunt Em!”

* * * * *

Instantly she was whirling through the air, so swiftly that all she could see or feel was the wind whistling past her ears.

The Silver Shoes took but three steps, and then she stopped so suddenly that she rolled over upon the grass several times before she knew where she was.

At length, however, she sat up and looked about her.

“Good gracious!” she cried.

For she was sitting on the broad Kansas prairie, and just before her was the new farmhouse Uncle Henry built after the cyclone had carried away the old one. Uncle Henry was milking the cows in the barnyard, and Toto had jumped out of her arms and was running toward the barn, barking joyously.

Dorothy stood up and found she was in her stocking-feet. For the Silver Shoes had fallen off in her flight through the air, and were lost forever in the desert.

Chapter XXIV.

Home Again.

AUNT EM HAD just come out of the house to water the cabbages when she looked up and saw Dorothy running toward her.

“My darling child!” she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses; “where in the world did you come from?”

“From the Land of Oz,” said Dorothy, gravely. “And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to those who read this book early:
Moses Cardona, Rafique Keshavjee, Betty Levin, and
William Reiss. Their advice was always helpful.
Any imperfections that remain in the book are mine.

I should also like to thank Judith Regan,
Matt Roshkow, David Groff, and Pamela Goddard for
their enthusiastic reception of Wicked.

Finally, a word of gratitude to the friends with whom I
nattered on about evil over the past couple of years: They are
too numerous to be named in their entirety, but
they include Linda Cavanagh, Debbie Kirsch, Roger and
Martha Mock, Katie O’Brien, and Maureen Vecchione; the
gang in Edgartown, Massachusetts; and my brother,
Joseph Maguire, a few of whose ideas I have borrowed.
Please don’t sue me.

Praise for

WICKED

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Very close to being an instant classic. . . . Maguire has hit a home run his first time at bat.”

—Memphis Commercial Appeal

“Wicked is a punchy allegory that alludes to everything from Nazi Germany to Nixon’s America. It’s delightfully over the top at times, mixing serious metafiction with subtle humor and even (gasp) witch sex.”

—Boston Phoenix

“A fantasy novel that reads like Graham Greene at his best.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Gregory Maguire has taken this figure of childhood fantasy and given her a sensual and powerful nature that will stir adult hearts with fear and longing all over again.”

—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Maguire combines puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, which should . . . captivate devotees of fantasy.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Maguire’s adult fable examines some of literature’s major themes: moral ambiguity, the nature of evil, the bittersweet dividends of power, the high costs of love. Elphaba—the Wicked Witch of the West—is as scary as ever, but this time in a different way: She’s undeniably human. She’s us.”

—Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

“Starting with the Wizard of Oz material, Gregory Maguire has added greater depths and different facets, creating something altogether different and unique. It’s a magnificent work, a genuine tour de force.”

—Lloyd Alexander, author of The Chronicles of Prydain

“Gregory Maguire’s donnés in Wicked are from Baum’s land of Oz; but everything here has been recut to sparkle fresh and new, with illuminations shining in unexpected directions. Funny and serious, pulsing with imaginative energy, encompassing political thriller and moral reflection, this is truly a fabulous novel.”

—Jill Paton Walsh, author of Knowledge of Angels

“Here is a story that is at once a page-turner and a powerful stimulus to thought.”

—John Rowe Townsend, author of The Islanders

“This book is a glorious frolic, a feast of language, a study of good and evil, and a massive history of the fabulous land of Oz.”

—Jane Langton, author of The Diamond in the Window

Credits

Cover design by John Lewis

Cover Illustrations by Douglas Smith

SON
OF A
WITCH

A NOVEL

Gregory Maguire

Dedication

L. FRANK BAUM’S second Oz novel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), was dedicated to the actors David C. Montgomery and Fred A. Stone, who performed the roles of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in the first theatrical version of The Wizard of Oz.

In that spirit, Son of a Witch is dedicated to the cast and creative team of the musical Wicked, which opened on Broadway in October 2003—the night before Halloween.

To Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz, foremost and first, for their vision; to Wayne Cilento, Susan Hilferty, Eugene Lee, Joe Mantello, Stephen Oremus, Kenneth Posner, and Marc Platt and his associates, for bringing visions to life; and, among all the capable cast, most especially to Kristin Chenoweth (Galinda/Glinda), Joel Grey (The Wizard), and Idina Menzel (Elphaba), for bringing life to visions.

Epigraph

I HAVE NO FEAR that the poetry of democratic peoples will be found timid or that it will stick too close to the earth.
I am much more afraid that it…may finish up by describing an entirely fictitious country.

—Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, 1835, 1840

Epigraph

ALL COWS were like all other cows, all tigers like all other tigers—what on earth has happened to human beings?

—Harry Mulisch,
Siegfried, 2001

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Epigraph

Map

Under the Jackal Moon

The House of Saint Glinda

Abroad

Southstairs

The Service

The Emperor Apostle

One Plus One Equals Both

The Conference of the Birds

Kumbricia’s Cradle

Dragonfings

Siege

The Eye of the Witch

Raising Voices

No Place Like It

Acknowledgments

Map

Under the Jackal Moon

The House of Saint Glinda

1

SO THE TALK OF RANDOM BRUTALITY wasn’t just talk. At noontime they discovered the bodies of three young women, out on some mission of conversion that appeared to have gone awry. The novice maunts had been strangled by their ropes of holy beads, and their faces removed.

Her nerve being shaken at last, Oatsie Manglehand now caved in to the demands of her paying customers. She told the team drivers they’d pause only long enough to dig some shallow graves while the horses slaked their thirst. Then the caravan would press on across the scrubby flats known, for the failed farmsteads abandoned here and there, as the Disappointments.

Moving by night, at least they wouldn’t make a sitting target, though they might as easily wander into trouble as sidestep it. Still, Oatsie’s party was antsy. Hunker down all night and wait for horse hoofs, spears? Too hard on everyone. Oatsie consoled herself: If the caravan kept moving, she could sit forward with her eyes peeled, out of range of the carping, the second-guessing, the worrying.

With the benefit of height, therefore, Oatsie spotted the gully before anyone else did. The cloudburst at sunset had fed a small trackside rivulet that flowed around a flank of skin, water-lacquered in the new moonlight. An island, she feared, of human flesh.

I ought to turn aside before the others notice, she thought; how much more can they take? There is nothing I can do for that human soul. The digging of another trench would require an hour, minimum. An additional few moments for prayers. The project would only further agitate these clients as they obsess about their own precious mortality.

Upon the knee of the horizon balanced the head of a jackal moon, so-called because, once every generation or so, a smear of celestial flotsam converged behind the crescent moon of early autumn. The impact was creepy, a look of a brow and a snout. As the moon rounded out over a period of weeks, the starveling would turn into a successful hunter, its cheeks bulging.

Always a fearsome sight, the jackal moon tonight spooked Oatsie Manglehand further. Don’t stop for this next casualty. Get through the Disappointments, deliver these paying customers to the gates of the Emerald City. But she resisted giving in to superstition. Be scared of the real jackals, she reminded herself, not frets and nocturnal portents.

In any case, the light of the constellation alleviated some of the color blindness that sets in at night. The body was pale, almost luminous. Oatsie might divert the Grasstrail Train and give the corpse a wide berth before anyone else noticed it, but the slope of the person’s shoulders, the unnatural twist of legs—the jackal moon made her read the figure too well, as too clearly human, for her to be able to turn aside.

“Nubb,” she barked to her second, “rein in. We’ll pull into flank formation up that rise. There’s another fatality, there in the runoff.”

Cries of alarm as the news passed back, and another mutter of mutiny: Why should they stop?—were they to bear witness to every fresh atrocity? Oatsie didn’t listen. She yanked the reins of her team of horses, to halt them, and she lowered herself gingerly. She stumped, her hand on her sore hip, until she stood a few feet over the body.

Face down and genitals hidden, he appeared to have been a young man. A few scraps of fabric were still knotted about his waist, and a boot some yards distant, but he was otherwise naked, and no sign of his clothes.

Curious: no evidence of the assassins. Neither had there been about the bodies of the maunts, but that was on rockier ground, in a drier hour. Oatsie couldn’t see any sign of scuffle here, and in the mud of the gulch one might have expected…something. The body wasn’t bloody, nor decayed yet; the murder was recent. Perhaps this evening, perhaps only an hour ago.

“Nubb, let’s heave him up and see if they’ve taken his face,” she said.

“No blood,” said Nubb.

“Blood may have run off in that cloudburst. Steel yourself, now.”

They got on either side of the body and bit their lips. She looked at Nubb, meaning: It’s only the next thing, it’s not the last thing. Let’s get through this, fellow.

She jerked her head in the direction of the hoist. One, two, heave.

They got him up. His head had fallen into a natural scoop in the stone, a few inches higher than where the rain had pooled. His face was intact, more or less; that is to say, it was still there, though shattered.

“How did he get here?” said Nubb. “And why didn’t they scrape him?”

Oatsie just shook her head. She settled on her haunches. Her travelers had come forward and were congregating on the rise behind her; she could hear them rustling. She suspected that they had gathered stones, and were ready to kill her if she insisted on a burial.

The jackal moon rose a few notches higher, as if trying to see into the gulley. The prurience of the heavens!

“We’re not going to dig another grave.” That from her noisiest client, a wealthy trader from the northern Vinkus. “Not his, Oatsie Manglehand, and not yours, either. We’re not doing it. We leave him unburied and alone, or we leave him unburied with your corpse for company.”

“We don’t need to do either,” said Oatsie. She sighed. “Poor, poor soul, whoever he is. He needs no grave. He isn’t dead yet.”

2

IN TIME, when the travelers had rejoined their cronies and relatives in the Emerald City—in salons, in public houses, in taverns of exchange—they heard more chatter about the hostilities they had managed to sidestep. Rumor flourished. Forty, sixty, a hundred deaths resulting from the skirmishes between the Scrow and the Yunamata. Barbarians, the lot of them: They deserved to kill off each other. But not us.

Rumor could be wrong, of course, but it couldn’t be uninteresting. Two hundred dead. Twice that. Mass graves, and they would be found any day.

But the luxury of safety came later. First, the Grasstrail Train still had to resume its snail’s progress through the Disappointments. Geographical variety—the hills, mountains, dales and forests that made the rest of Oz so memorable, such a heartland—was in short supply here. Just flats, shales, more flats, grey as pulped newspapers.

The prospect was dispiriting, and the notion of having to carry an invalid with them didn’t improve matters. Oatsie Manglehand’s clients had paid good hard cash for her service. Some originating from as far away as Ugabu, and others having joined the group along the eastern foothills of the Great Kells, they considered their own safe travel should be Oatsie’s sole concern.

Oatsie reminded them that they didn’t have a vote. She’d never represented that her clients would travel unencumbered by waifs and strays. Indeed, by terms of their contracts, she was free of liability should any of the travelers be murdered on the trail by a fellow passenger, a stowaway, a hitchhiker, a native. Oatsie had promised to lead the caravan as safely as she could, relying on her knowledge of the terrain and its populations. That was it. Period. To that end, she’d chosen a new route intended to avoid the current hot spots of intertribal conflict, and so far so good. Right?

The invalid was loaded aboard.

Despite her bravado, Oatsie was indeed sensitive to her clients’ fears, and in a way she was glad to have the unconscious young man with them. It distracted the travelers, while he remained oblivious of their resentment.

She bedded him in the third carriage back, requisitioning from her clients the warmest of winter robes. She mounded him into a cocoon. There he languished, day and night, not so much fevered as feverless—an equally worrying condition. After a day of trying, Nubb was able to spoon a few tips of brandy between the lad’s lips, and Oatsie fancied she saw his muscles relax in a new way.

She couldn’t be certain of this. She was no doctor.

Of one thing she was sure, though. With his arrival, the mood of the Grasstrail Train changed. Why? Perhaps this: If the poor creature had been beaten to within an inch of his life, and lived, there might be hope for all of them. Think about it: His face hadn’t been scraped. People relaxed. The nasal buzz of prayers around the supper campfire gave way to a quieter mood. Song returned, in time.

We’ll make it. We deserve to. The privilege of life has been accorded us, see? We’ve been saved. Must be for a reason. Spines straightened, eyes grew bright and moist in a rapture of gratitude at the plan of the Unnamed God.

Another week and they had rounded the landmark rocks that marked their U-turn north, and they left behind them in the Disappointments the greatest threat of ambush.

In this month of Summersend, the wind flicked the strands of oakhair in the forest that grew between the lakes. Squirrels spilled nuts on the skarkskin roofs of the wagons. The air was more watery, too, though both lakes were out of sight beyond the miles of woods on either side.

As the oakhair forest thinned and they reached the Shale Shallows, the shady surround and homely walls of an old settlement solidified in the middle of walnut-colored fields. The first stone building they’d seen in six weeks. Despite its steep, aggrieved gables and pinched outbuildings, despite its battlement defenses, nothing—not even the Emerald City—could seem more welcome a sight just then.

“The Cloister of Saint Glinda,” they buzzed. “How holy it appears.”

The maunts who lived within were divided into ranks. Some took vows of silence and lived cloistered. Others took vows of indulgence. They indulged in teaching, tending the sick, and operating a hostelry for those traveling between the southern Kells and the Emerald City. So the broad carved doors were swung open when the Grasstrail Train pulled up. The welcoming committee, a band of three middle-aged maunts with well-starched collars and bad teeth, stood at attention.

They greeted Oatsie with frosty politeness. They were suspicious of any unmarried woman who had found a way to live single, apart from female community. Still, they offered her the traditional wipe of the face with sweet rosefern. A fourth maunt, sequestered behind a screen, played a welcoming anthem, poorly. Harp strings snapped, and the sound of a most unmauntish oath issued forth.

The travelers didn’t care. They were almost in heaven. To anticipate beds!—and a warm meal!—and wine!—and a captive audience, ready to thrill at the story of their journey!

In this last item, though, the maunts gave bad value for money. At once their attention was riveted by the invalid. They carried him into the loggia and hurried to collect a stretcher so he could be hauled upstairs to the infirmary.

The maunts were beginning to shift the fellow to private quarters when the Superior Maunt wafted by, fresh from her morning devotions. She greeted Oatsie Manglehand with the least of nods, and glanced upon the broken lad for a moment. Then she waved her hands: Remove him.

She said to Oatsie, “We know him. We know this one.”

“You do?” said Oatsie.

“If my memory hasn’t begun to fail me,” the Superior Maunt continued, “you should know him, as well. You took him from us some years ago. Fifteen was it, twenty? At my age I don’t apprehend the passage of time as I ought.”

“He’d have been a child twenty years ago, an infant,” said Oatsie. “I never took an infant from a mauntery.”

“Perhaps not an infant. But you took him just the same. He traveled with a disagreeable novice who served for several years in the hospice. You were conveying them to the castle stronghold of the Arjikis. Kiamo Ko.”

“He was with Elphaba?”

“Now you remember, I see you do.”

“The Wicked Witch of the West…”

“As some called her.” The Superior Maunt sniffed. “Not I. Her name here was Sister Saint Aelphaba, but I seldom called her anything. She was more or less under a vow of silence—her own. She needed no addressing.”

“You recognize him from youth to now?” said Oatsie. “You’ve seen him since?”

“No. But I do not forget a face.”

Oatsie raised her eyebrows.

“I have seen so few faces,” explained the Superior Maunt. “We will not talk now. I must have Sister Doctor here to look the boy over.”

“What was his name?”

The Superior Maunt vanished without answering.

By nightfall, as Oatsie’s clients finished their nightcaps, the next generation of rumors was launched. The man-child was the Emperor’s confessor. He was a brigand trafficking in the sex trade. He spoke in the voice of a Loon. Except for a single rib, the man-child had broken every bone in his body.

Many of the rumors were contradictory, which in the aggregate made them all more amusing.

3

IT WAS A HARD TIME. It had been a hard time, in Oz, for some time (for all time, said world-weary students). The Superior Maunt, too tired for colloquy, removed herself to her chambers and settled in a rocker. Amid trappings more severe than what her younger colleagues could tolerate, she rocked a little and thought, as coherently as she could. (It was a habit of hers, to forestall the onset of vagueness, that she review a strand of history from time to time.)

The Witch—so-called—had lived at the cloistered mauntery a decade and a half ago. One couldn’t forget that—to the Superior Maunt’s knowledge, no one else in Oz had ever been born with skin as green as new lilac leaves. But Elphaba had kept herself to herself, accepting without complaint such assignments as were meted out. She’d lived there for, what, five, six, seven years? And then, the Superior Maunt had hired Oatsie Manglehand to escort the close-lipped novice back into the civilian world. The small boy had tagged along, neither warmly included nor shooed away.

What had his name been, and where had he come from? An urchin left behind by one of the gypsy bands that scavenged for petty mushrooms among the roots of oakhair trees? The Superior Maunt couldn’t remember the lad’s provenance. Someone younger would know.

Elphaba had gone. Off to Kiamo Ko, there to stew in her own private penance. The Superior Maunt occasionally listened to testimonies of sin confessed by her sisters, but during her tenure as a maunt, Elphaba had never petitioned for an audience. Of this the Superior Maunt was quite sure. Though the nature of Elphaba’s sins had been of great interest to the under-entertained sorority, Elphaba had never obliged.

Bit by bit—the news filtered through even to an outpost like this—the maunts learned of the slow evolution of Elphaba into a Witch, by dint of her rash behavior, her unexpected family ties. (She’d been sister to Nessarose, the Wicked Witch of the East, as some said. For the love of the Unnamed God, who could have expected that?)

The Superior Maunt sighed, chiding herself for the pleasure she took in remembering her contempt for those days. How she had leapt up from her prayers and clapped her hands, to hear that the long reign of the Wizard of Oz had drawn to a close at last, and the merciless old bastard disappeared into the clouds in a hot-air balloon advertising some obscure commercial tonic. Then the surprise ascendancy to the Palace throne of Lady Chuffrey, née Glinda Arduenna, of the Uplands. A sort of prime minister pro tem, until things could be sorted out. (She’d come out of nowhere, politically speaking: money to burn, and a certain sort of style, but who might have guessed the vacuum left by the Wizard’s departure would suck in a society wife with a penchant for glitter gowns?)

“Not a terrible choice.” The Superior Maunt began talking aloud, to keep her thoughts straight. “And I say this without need to reflect nicely on our own Saint Glinda, for whom Lady Chuffrey was probably named. Or renamed herself, Galinda a rural name, Glinda the more sophisticated: the saint’s name. Clever move.” No, Glinda, as she became known popularly—a single name, like a house pet, like a lapdog!—Glinda managed to run an open court for a while, and much that had gone wrong, at least in that prior atmosphere of Wizardic secrecy, was corrected. There was an inoculation initiative, very thoughtful. Some schools for millworker girls, of all things. Good programs—expensive to run, though. It had seemed generous and intelligent from the perspective of a cloistered spinster—but what kind of perspective was that?

Then Glinda had stepped aside. Ever the dilettante, she’d grown bored with governing, people assumed, and had taken up collecting miniature furniture with a vengeance. Well, to be fair, maybe she’d been pushed out. For a while a puppet government replaced her. A right dolt, calling himself a Scarecrow. Rumors had flown that he was no real Scarecrow, that he wasn’t even the Scarecrow associated with the Visitor: Dorothy. He was just some out-of-work bum dressed up to fool the masses. Being paid every weekend at the back door, probably—but by whom? Glinda’s people? Her thwarters? The banker barons of industrial Gillikin? Who knew? In due course he was booted out by the latest nuisance, the next hollow man, reeking with glory: the sacred Emperor.

The long years since Elphaba had driven her wild broom across the sky had been quiet—on the surface. Certain atrocities had ceased, and that was good. Other atrocities replaced them. Certain diseases subsided, others had taken grip. Now something was agitating the Scrow and the Yunamata in the West, something so fierce that agents from one or both of the tribes were striking out at neutral parties.

Like the junior maunts sent out on a mission by the toadies helming the motherchapel in the Emerald City. Those sycophantic biddies! They’d cluck themselves to death if their Emperor asked it. Their emissaries, those innocent young things, had stopped here at the Cloister of Saint Glinda for nourishment and cheer. Where were their faces now, wondered the Superior Maunt. She hoped she’d never see them again, neither in her dreams nor in a parcel in the delivery of post.

She was drifting off to sleep in her rocker. She arose, groaning at the pain in her joints, and tried to pull her shutters tight. One of them stuck and had to stay as it was. She’d meant to have it seen to this afternoon, but with the arrival of the caravan, she’d forgotten.

She visited the toilet reserved for her private use, and dressed in her rough gown for the night. When she settled herself on her horsehair mattress, she hoped she would drift off quickly. It had been a taxing day.

The jackal moon looked in her window at her. The Superior Maunt turned her head so as not to meet its eye, a folk custom with which she’d been raised seven, eight decades earlier, and never shaken.

Her mind went briefly to those days in the Pertha Hills of Gillikin, days sharper and more wonderful in memory than what she could apprehend of current life. The taste of pearlfruit leaves! The water on her father’s wagon roof when the rains came. The rains came so much more often in her youth. The snow smelled of things. Everything smelled. Wonderfully or not, it was wonderful that they smelled. Now her nose hardly worked at all.

She said a prayer or two.

Liir. That was his name. Liir.

She prayed to remember it when the time came for her to wake up.

4

THE NEXT MORNING, before Oatsie Manglehand gathered her band together for the final push to the Emerald City, she took Nubb to a small plain parlor. There they met with the Superior Maunt, Sister Doctor, and Sister Apothecaire.

When the Superior Maunt sat down, the others sat. Since she abstained from morning tea, the others abstained.

“If we are to help this boy, we must share what we know,” began the Superior Maunt. “I’ve picked up all sorts of hearsay. A report from Sister Doctor, if you please.”

Sister Doctor, a beefy woman with questionable credentials but proven expertise in diagnosis, wasn’t sanguine about the prospects for the invalid. “He appears to have suffered little from exposure, so he will have been left for dead only shortly before you found him.”

Oatsie didn’t speak to this. She didn’t want to begin by contradicting a professional woman, even if she thought Sister Doctor had to be wrong.

Sister Doctor pressed on. “He is a shattered man, quite literally. It isn’t mine to guess how he came to be so wounded, but his state is like nothing I’ve ever seen. One of his legs is broken in multiple places; both his wrists are sprained. One of his shoulder blades is cracked. Many of his ribs. Four of his fingers. Three of the bones in his left foot. Not a single bone punctured the skin, however. And, apparently, no blood loss.”

Not unless the blood ran off in the rain squall, thought Oatsie, but kept still.

Sister Doctor rubbed the back of her neck and grimaced. “I spent so much time setting bones that I could do only a cursory exam of his organs. He is breathing shallowly and with difficulty. The phlegm that runs from his nose is both yellow and bloody. This suggests respiratory troubles. Sister Apothecaire has her own notions about this—”

“To start with the question of the discharge,” began Sister Apothecaire, somewhat overenthusiastically, but Sister Doctor spoke over her.

“Sister Apothecaire can speak presently. I utter no opinion about her…conjectures.”

“The heart?” asked the Superior Maunt, overriding the old tired conflict.

“Working.” Sister Doctor grunted as if in disbelief at her own answer.

“The guts?”

“The word might be wobbly. I suspect an imploded spleen or the like, and septic poisoning. There’s a funny color in the extremities and on certain contusions that I don’t care for at all.”

“What color is that?” asked the Superior Maunt.

Sister Doctor pursed her lips. “Well, I’m a bit overtired. We worked all night, you know, without resting. But I should have said there’s a green tinge to the bruises, ringed with a plum-yellowy margin.”

“Suggestive of internal bleeding, you think…or a disease? Or maybe something else?”

“He may be comatose or he may be brain-dead. I have no way of knowing. Though his heart is good, his color, as I say, is not, so circulation may be failing. The lungs have been compromised severely—whether by a preexisting condition or by some aspect of his adventures I cannot venture an opinion at this time.”

“To conclude—” The Superior Maunt rolled her hand in the air.

“Death by nightfall, maybe tomorrow morning,” said Sister Doctor.

“We could pray for a miracle,” said Nubb. Oatsie snorted.

“Sister Apothecaire will handle treatment,” said Sister Doctor, making it sound as if she thought prayer would be a wiser course.

“You could pray for a miracle,” said Sister Apothecaire to Nubb. “I have other work to do.”

“Sister Apothecaire,” said the Superior Maunt. “You have something to add?”

Sister Apothecaire pushed her spectacles down her nose, then removed them, huffed upon them, and wiped them clean on the hem of her apron. She was a Munchkin and exhibited the Munchkin farmwife’s passion for hygiene—not a bad attribute for a person in her profession. “It’s all puzzling,” she agreed. “We have made him as comfortable as we could, and as the mercy of our mission requires. With tape we have bound his limbs to splints and shims. Should he live, he may regain some degree of motor function.”

“What does that mean?” asked Oatsie. “Speak clearly to the ignorant. Me.”

“He may be able to sit up, to use his hands, if his nerves are not shot to hell. He may be able to walk, in a fashion; that is unlikely, but as I say we aim for the stars. What is more troubling is the discharge from his membranes. The nose, most obviously, but the other orifices as well. Ears, eyes, anus, penis.”

“You’ve had a chance to do some initial work in the laboratory,” prompted the Superior Maunt.

“Indeed. Just a start. I’ve found nothing definitive, nothing I haven’t seen before, either in my station here at the mauntery or in my prior position as Matron’s Assistant at the Respite of Incurables in the Emerald City.”

Sister Doctor rolled her eyes. Sister Apothecaire never lost an opportunity to publish her credentials.

“Can you supply us with a hypothesis?” asked the Superior Maunt.

“It would be rash to do so.” Even sitting, Sister Apothecaire was shorter than her peers, so her sideways glance at her disapproving colleague required her to poke her chin up, which perhaps gave her a more combative expression than she intended. “Whoever he is, I do wonder if this lad was from high altitudes. The mucous seepage may be due to the systemic collapse of arterial function due to a sudden change in air pressure. I haven’t seen such a symptom before, but the Fallows are very low ground indeed compared to the highest peaks of the Great Kells.”

The way Sister Doctor murmured “mmmmm” made it plain to all what she thought of her colleague’s hypothesis. She straightened her spine as if to say, hurry up; her longer spine gave her height over her colleague, which she liked to use to advantage.

The Superior Maunt intervened. “Do you agree with Sister Doctor that death is imminent?”

Sister Apothecaire sniffed. The two didn’t like to agree on anything, but she couldn’t help it. She nodded her head. “There may be more to learn,” she added. “The longer he hangs on, the more chance I’ll have to study his nature.”

“You will study nothing in his nature that isn’t directly related to the easing of his afflictions,” said the Superior Maunt mildly.

“But Mother Maunt! It is in my charge as an apothecaire. The syndrome he dies from may afflict others in time, and this is an opportunity to learn. To turn our noses up at it is to discount revelation.”

“I have delivered my opinion on the matter, and I expect it to be observed. Now, to you both: Is there anything we can do for him that we are not doing?”

“Notify the next of kin,” said Sister Doctor.

The Superior Maunt nodded and rubbed her eyes. She lifted a saucer of tea to her lips now, and without hesitation the others did the same.

“I propose we get one of the sisters to play music for him, then,” she concluded. “If our only contribution is to ease his death, let us do what we can.”

“Preferably not the sister who was torturing the harp when we arrived yesterday,” muttered Oatsie Manglehand.

“Have you anything to add, Oatsie?” said the Superior Maunt. “I mean aside from your critique of musical performance?”

“Only this,” said the caravan guide. I won’t bother to apologize for contradicting them, she decided. “Sister Doctor proposes that the boy would have been set upon by brigands and left to die only shortly before we found him. But the terrain out there, my friends, is flat as a rolled-out tart crust.”

“I don’t follow,” said the Superior Maunt.

“The body had to have been lying there for longer than Sister Doctor suggests. I would have seen the marauders in retreat. There was no place for them to hide. There is no tree cover. You know how bright a night it was; I could see for miles.”

“Puzzling indeed.”

“Do you use magic in your ministrations?”

“Oatsie Manglehand,” said the Superior Maunt tiredly, “we are a sorority of unionist maunts. Such a question.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with old, bowed fingers. Over her venerable figure, Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire both nodded silently to Oatsie: Yes. We do. What little we’re capable of. When we need to.

The Superior Maunt continued. “Before resting for the night, I recalled his name. The boy was named Liir. He left the mauntery with Sister Saint Aelphaba—well, Elphaba, I suppose; she never professed her vows. Do you remember the boy at all, Sister Doctor?”

“I had just arrived about the time Elphaba was setting out,” said Sister Doctor. “I remember Elphaba Thropp a little. I didn’t care for her. Her moods and silences seemed hostile rather than holy. Of the many urchins who are abandoned around here, however, I remember even less. Children don’t interest me unless they are gravely ill. Was he gravely ill?”

“He is now,” said the Superior Maunt. “And somewhere, if his mind is still able to dream, he is still a child in there, I presume.”

“Very sentimental indeed, Mother Maunt,” said Sister Doctor.

“I do remember him, now you give his name,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “Not well, of course. In the better years I make three or four separate runs, and we’re talking twelve, fifteen, eighteen years ago? I have packed more than a few children onto heaps of worldly goods, and buried some by the side of the track as well. But he was a quiet lad, unsure of himself. He shadowed Elphaba as if she were his mother. Was she his mother?”

“Oh, dubious, very dubious,” said Sister Doctor.

“There is the green tone to his bruises,” Sister Apothecaire reminded them.

“I blush when I’m embarrassed, Sister Apothecaire; this does not relate me to the radish,” said the Superior Maunt. “Well, we’ll have to ask around. Most of the older sisters who might have remembered Elphaba are dead now, and the others are in their second childhood. But Sister Cook, if she hasn’t been guzzling the cooking sherry—or perhaps if she has—she will know something. She always slips food to the children loitering in the kitchen yard, and she may remember where the boy came from.

“Meanwhile”—and the good woman rose, to signal that the meeting was done—“we will do our best with Liir, whether he be witch’s spawn or the reject of a gypsy mother. It hardly matters on one’s deathbed from whom one has been born, does it? The world is the womb now, and the Afterlife waits for one to be born into it.”

She turned rheumy eyes on Oatsie Manglehand. The wagoneer could see that the Superior Maunt was waiting, hopefully, for her own deliverance from this world and delivery unto the next. Oatsie accepted the old woman’s cool hands on her forehead, knowing the gesture was intended as a blessing, a forgiveness…perhaps a farewell.

“The wind is high,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “If we leave now and find the water level low enough at the near ford, we’ll make the far bank of the Gillikin by nightfall.”

“The Unnamed God speed your progress,” murmured the Superior Maunt, though her eyes had shunted inward, as if already on to the next problem. Indeed, she was. Before Oatsie had finished tying the strings of her boots, she heard the Superior Maunt say to her colleagues, “Now you must help me on the stairs, ladies, for I will go to visit our invalid.”

“She’s a tough old bird,” muttered Oatsie to Nubb.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Nubb. “Don’t want to stay under any roofs that house a son of a witch, even if it’s holy roofs.”

5

THE MAUNTERY, the oldest bits of which dated back several hundred years, was conventionally arranged around a courtyard. The vernacular of austere Merthic style—flattened stone columns, bricked quoins devoid of plaster or wash—was indicative of the speed with which defensible households had needed to be raised.

Up far too many stairs, the surgery included an office crammed into a closet, where Sister Doctor kept her notes and manuals. In a storage space under some eaves, Sister Apothecaire filled oaken cabinets with her unguents and restoratives, purgatives and negatives. (Small, as many Munchkins still were, she could work upright in a space too cramped for her colleague to stand upright in, so she got the private office. Endless grousing over this.)

The surgery also gave onto two largish dormitories. The right-hand chamber served the poor and ill of the domain. The left chamber was reserved for ailing maunts. Through here, behind a stout door, loomed an odd-shaped space, the finial of a corner tower. Inside, therefore, it was a round room, with narrow slitted windows looking in three directions. The room had no true walls or ceiling, just sloping rafters that met at the top of the conical space. A bedbound patient could stare up and see how the roof planking traversed the ribs. There were bats, but they were cleaner than most of the patients, so they were let be.

It’s like nothing so much as being inside a witch’s hat, thought the Superior Maunt as she paused to catch her breath. Then she pushed aside the curtain and entered.

Liir—if it was he, and she was rather certain it was—was laid upon the high bed more like a corpse than an invalid. “He’s been given no pillow?” asked the Superior Maunt in something of a whisper.

“The neck.”

“I see.” Well, there wasn’t much to see, really. His braced limbs were swathed in wide strips of gauze, his chest bound, his head undressed, and that dark hair cleaned with oil and herbs. His eyes, behind slits in the bandage, were closed. The lashes were long and feathery. “He has not been torrefied, has he? You have tucked him up like a victim of burns.”

“The skin needs tending for the sores, so we cannot fully immobilize him.”

I suspect not, thought the Superior Maunt.

Her eyes weren’t what they had been. She leaned forward and looked closely at the seams where Liir’s upper and lower eyelids met.

Then she lifted his left hand and studied his nails. His skin was clammy, like the rind of a valley-skark cheese. The fingernails were crazed.

“Pull back his loincloth.”

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire exchanged glances and did as they were bade.

The Superior Maunt had had little reason to become an expert in the male anatomy, but she showed no sign of pleasure or revulsion. She gently shifted the member this way and that, and lifted the testicles. “I ought to have brought my reading spectacles,” she murmured.

She needed help straightening up. “Very well, do him up again,” she said. Her maunts obliged.

“Sister Doctor,” said the Superior Maunt. “Sister Apothecaire. I will not have you loosen his bindings to show me the bruises you report. I rely on your perspicacity. However I make note here, and will do so formally in the Log of the House, that I observe no sign of greenness in his skin. I will tolerate no murmur belowstairs that we are harboring any sort of—aberration. If you have been indiscreet enough to propose such to your sisters, correct the damage at once. Is this understood?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and turned back to the body.

It was hard to take the measure of a man who displayed the flaccid composure of a corpse. No brow is noble when it is dead: It has no need to be. This lad seemed about as close to death as one could be and still harbor hope of recovery, yet the sense she had about him was neither tranquil nor restive.

He was a young man, with youth’s agreeable form: That much was apparent despite the bandages. The young suffer and die, too, and sometimes it is merciful, she thought. Then she was filled with an unseemly glee and selfishness that she had lived a long odd life of her own, and it wasn’t over yet. She was in better shape than this poor benighted kid.

“Mother Maunt, are you yourself?” asked Sister Doctor.

“A tremor of digestive grief, nothing more.”

She couldn’t put her finger on it. She turned to go. There was Sister Cook to interview next, and other pressing matters of the day. As Sister Apothecaire fussed with the bedclothes and Sister Doctor dived to confirm the pulse, the Superior Maunt sighed. “We will do our duty, and no more than our duty,” she reminded them.

They stood to attention. “Yes, Mother Maunt.”

Neither tranquil nor restive, she thought again: It is as if his spirit is not here. His body is not dead, but his spirit is not here. How can this be?

Blasphemy, and bad science besides, she lectured herself, and scooted away as fast as her arthritic limbs could manage.

6

THE SUPERIOR MAUNT had long since given up supervising Sister Cook. For one thing, the ancient maunt had little interest in cuisine, her stomach having been soured by too many decades of regrettable food served under bad kitchen government. Those appetites remaining to her, after all these decades, concerned feeding the spirit alone.

So, pausing at the thresholds of the mauntery’s kitchens, the Superior Maunt felt a faint queasiness.

Given where the mauntery was situated—on the back route from Quadling Country—the establishment took in its share of Quadling girls deemed too plain or unruly for marriage, or too dull for the mild professions—teacher, governess, nurse. Sometimes their families reclaimed them. More often, the girls ran away, but at least they were older and better fed when they struck out on their own.

Still, while in residence, they were as a population docile enough, and they made good kitchen assistants. Looking for Sister Cook, it occurred to the Superior Maunt that a Quadling girl might sit with the convalescent upstairs.

“Sister Cook?” called the Superior Maunt, but her voice was rusty. “Sister Cook?”

There was no reply. Into the kitchens ventured the Superior Maunt. A few quiet girls worked in a sunny corner, kneading vast tough pillows of bread dough with their bare knees. The peasant practice was generally frowned upon, but the Superior Maunt passed by the novices, pretending not to notice, as she didn’t feel up to delivering a chastisement.

Sister Liquor was high on a ladder, giving each purple glass bottle of savorsuckle brandy a quarter turn. She was singing to herself and swaying on her rung.

“Mercy,” murmured the Superior Maunt, and kept going.

The pantry offended with the promise of lunch: bread, moldiflower root, rounds of aged skark cheese, and soft blue olives, the kind even donkeys refused to eat. It’s not that hard to keep your mind on higher things when this is the daily fare, observed the Superior Maunt.

The outside door was open. Beyond the pantry, in the walled orchard, wands of pearlfruit trees twitched and shuddered in the wind. The Superior Maunt went through, as much to catch a breath of fresh air as to see the severe autumn colors of pearlfruit leaves, which shaded from granite pink to a hesitant periwinkle.

In the emerald grass near the well several novices sat on their aprons. They’d taken for a little outing one of the palsied biddies in a wheeled chair and kindly thrown a tartan over her lap. The ancient maunt—older even than the Superior Maunt, by the look of it, or more infirm, anyway—had pulled her shawl over her forehead, to keep the morning sun out of her eyes. Two of the novices were husking pearlfruit pods. A third was fingering some sort of instrument, a kind of zither or dulcimer with lengths of catgut strung along two axes, one set perpendicularly above the other. The effect of her plucking and slithering was more tympanic than melodic. Perhaps the thing was out of tune. Or the player untalented. Or even that it was a foreign way of making music. Still, the other novices seemed not to mind, indeed, even to take pleasure from the droning sounds.

They leaped to their feet at her approach, scattering their work in the grass. They were Quadlings, the younger three of them. “Girls, please,” said the Superior Maunt. “To your tasks.” Then, deferentially, “Your health, Mother.”

The older maunt nodded but didn’t look up. Her eyes were on the fingers of the girl playing.

“I was hoping to find Sister Cook,” said the Superior Maunt.

“She’s in the mushroom cellar, harvesting for a fungal soup. Shall I fetch her?” asked one of them.

“No,” said the Superior Maunt, looking one to the other. “Are you all first-years?”

“Shhhh,” said the crone.

The Superior Maunt did not like being shhh’d. “Are you professed, the lot of you?”

“Shhhh, he’s coming.”

“Mother, I have work—” said the Superior Maunt. The sister in the chair raised her wrinkled hand. She had no fingerprints, no lifelines on her right hand—no identity, no history, nothing to read, as if her hand had been burned clean of individuality through some chastening flame.

Only one old biddy had this hand. “What are you on about, Mother Yackle?” asked the Superior Maunt.

The old creature didn’t answer, didn’t look up, but she did crook one hobbled finger skyward. The Superior Maunt turned. All kinds of romance and lore about visitors from the sky, from sacred scripture to rabble-rousing prophecies. The sky was hard to ignore.

It wasn’t the sky, though, that Mother Yackle was indicating, but one of the trees. Out of it fell a ruffling cascade, like a stack of ladies’ fans sliding silkily off a credenza. A scatter of brazen feathers, red winking. A gold eye set in a pear-shaped skull.

A crimson pfenix! Male, to judge by the plumage. The species was rumored to have been nearly hunted to extinction. The last known colonies of pfenix lived in the very south of Oz, where the watery acres of marsh began at last to dry out, and a strip of jungle thought to be seven miles wide still defeated travelers to this day. This fellow—blown off course, perhaps, or deranged by disease?

The pfenix landed on the center of the musical instrument that the third girl was playing. She looked up in some alarm; she hadn’t been attending anything but her music. The pfenix craned his head and fixed first one, then another golden eye on the Superior Maunt.

“If you’re looking for the talented one,” said the pfenix—well, the Pfenix, if he spoke—“this is the one for you. I’ve been watching for an hour, and she takes little notice of anything but her music.”

The women said nothing. Talking Birds were not uncommon, but they rarely bothered to speak to human beings. What a specimen this Pfenix was! His rack of tail feathers fanned out laterally, like a turkey’s, but a Pfenix just as easily could unfurl his close-coiled camouflage feathers, which spiked globally all about him, affording a sort of private chamber of airy, concealing, fernlike fronds. A mature male Pfenix aloft in full display could look like a shimmering globe in the air.

“Do you know the boy who has been brought here?” asked the Superior Maunt, beginning to govern her own awe.

“I don’t know any boys. I don’t consort with your kind at all. I am a Red Pfenix,” he added, as if they might not have taken it in.

The Superior Maunt disapproved of vainglory in all its forms. She turned to the musician. “What’s your name?”

The girl looked up but didn’t answer. Her face was not as ruddy as some Quadlings—less red, more umber. Its shape was pleasing, proportioned along the lines of an oakhair nut: broad brow, high cheekbones, sweet swollen cheeks like a toddler’s, a small but firm chin. The Superior Maunt, who did not pay much attention to the looks of her novices, was surprised.

She was too beautiful to be a natural maunt, so she must be a moron.

“She doesn’t speak much,” said one of the novices.

“She’s been here three weeks,” added the other. “Her whispered prayers are in a dialect we can’t decipher. We think she cannot raise her voice.”

“The Unnamed God hears anyway. Where do you come from, child?”

“Sister Cook will know,” said the first novice.

“Up, girl, up,” said the Superior Maunt. “You have been chosen by a Red Pfenix. You don’t talk much, but you understand our tongue? Just the one I need.” She offered her hand to the musician, who rose, reluctantly. The Red Pfenix nestled in the grass and set to ridding himself of lice.

“Can I send for a bowl of scented water, something? Is there a way we can offer charity to you?” said the Superior Maunt. “We don’t have visits from the likes of you often. In fact, I think never.”

“I’m only passing through,” said the Red Pfenix. “There’s a Conference farther west. But the music drew me down.”

“You love music?”

“If I loved music I wouldn’t have stopped. She doesn’t play very well, does she? No, I don’t love music; it interferes with my homing devices. I was merely curious to see an instrument like this again. The sound of her playing reminded me of a time I had seen one long ago; I’d quite forgotten. But thank you for your charity. I require nothing but a little rest.”

The Red Pfenix looked at the musician, who stood shyly in her pale grey novice’s skirts. “She’s a puzzle, that one is,” said the Red Pfenix.

“Got him!” shouted Sister Cook, coming up from behind with a snare, and indeed she had. The Red Pfenix squawked and thrashed; all the eyes in his plumage contorted. The scream was horrible. “Pfenix steaks!” said Sister Cook. “I have just the recipe!”

“Let him go,” said Mother Yackle.

It was not her place to speak next, and the Superior Maunt was irritated. She knew Sister Cook was thinking: Pfenix steaks! With knobs of butter, and tarragon mustard, and small new potatoes roasted in the same pan…

“Let him go,” said the Superior Maunt, more sternly than Mother Yackle.

“Shoot,” said Sister Cook. “I spend fifteen minutes creeping up on this bird, and with my lumbago I actually manage to catch it, and you say ‘Let him go’?”

“Do not question my authority.”

“I merely question your sense,” said Sister Cook heavily. She turned the snare over, and the Red Pfenix exploded away from the orchard, cursing.

“He was on his way to a Conference,” said Mother Yackle.

“Enough,” said the Superior Maunt. “Enough of this. Sister Cook, who is this novice? Where did she come from?”

Sister Cook was grinding her teeth in annoyance at the missed opportunity. “Candle,” she muttered. “Left here by a gypsy cousin for safekeeping, said he’d be back in a year. Either she’d be mauntified by then or he’d reclaim her, but I said I’d take her on. She causes no trouble because she can’t gossip with the other girls, and she knows how to make a mean marrow gravy. I’ve had her working with Sister Sauce on the feast day roast.”

“Can you spare her?”

“Can I spare a Red Pfenix is a better question, and the answer to that one is no.”

“We don’t eat Animals,” said the Superior Maunt. “I know times have changed, but it’s in our charter. We don’t eat anything that can talk back to us, Sister Cook, and if I find you have been butchering behind my back…”

“I can hardly spare her,” said Sister Cook, looking at the musician. “But if you make her take that unnerving domingon with her, I’ll call it even.”

“Domingon, is that what it is. I’d read of them, but never seen one. Come, my daughter, domingon and all.” The Superior Maunt gestured, with as tender a smile as her crabbed old mouth could assume. The girl rose. She took the Superior Maunt’s hand in an easy, unaffected way—the other girls snickered. Yes, she must be simple.

“I had come looking to ask you what you remembered of a novice we once housed—the strange green girl, Elphaba.”

“Before my time,” snapped Sister Cook, and left.

Mother Yackle scratched her nose and yawned.

The Red Pfenix was still screaming in the sky. He circled the towers of the mauntery, safe now, and recovering the ability to be affronted. He was like a clot of blood swimming above the infirmary.

“Did you say there’s a boy in the house?” asked Mother Yackle. She let her shawl slip back, and raised her bleary, milk-clotted eyes toward the Superior Maunt. “Did he bring back the broom?”

7

THE SUPERIOR MAUNT was going to need a long rest after lunch, she knew: all these stairs. A certain penance regarding the joints. But she exerted herself, and Candle lent a willing arm without being asked, which was a good sign that the girl wasn’t hopelessly slow.

The sun was high enough overhead by now that the room had grown warmer and begun to sink into noon shadow. The young man lay as he had lain, twitchless, blanketed with an unnatural calm. Sister Apothecaire and Sister Doctor had brought their small chores close, so they could be nearby while they worked—Sister Apothecaire, the grinding of herbs in a mortar, and Sister Doctor the annotating of symptoms in a ledger. Sister Doctor sat on one side of the bed, Sister Apothecaire on the other.

“You know this novice?” said the Superior Maunt.

Her colleagues neither admitted familiarity, nor dissented.

“She’s a garden girl with an instrument called a domingon. I have heard of these but never see one. Apparently Candle has a small talent at music. Perhaps in the long hours on watch over Liir, she will develop it. Candle, meet Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. You will have seen them at table or in chapel if not elsewhere.”

It was not the professional maunts’ obligation to bow, but when Candle did not bow either, Sister Apothecaire, out of social anxiety, gave a lurching sort of bob that might have meant any number of things.

To the older women the Superior Maunt said, “There are matters more pressing for you to attend to than the continual observation of our new guest. I have a different assignment for you.”

“Mother Maunt!” replied Sister Doctor. “Far be it from me to question your discernment. But I must remind you, in loyal obeisance of course, that while you govern the spirit of this House, I supervise the health of the individual souls within it.”

“As to such treatments that may be required,” began Sister Apothecaire, but the Superior Maunt held up her hand.

“I will hear no objection. Candle seems a simple soul, but she can sit here and watch the boy. She understands my instructions. If he so much as speaks, she will let someone know. She can practice her scales and perhaps grow in skill. If he is to die, let him be comforted by the peculiar drone of her instrument. This is my wish, and I have made my point.”

She cupped her hands before her in an archaic, formal gesture that meant “be it thus” or, depending on the expression of the speaker, “enough out of you, you.”

Nevertheless, Sister Apothecaire protested. “I’m well aware of this girl, she doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. You are making a terrible mistake—”

“In this rare instance Sister Apothecaire is correct,” said Sister Doctor. “Should any wound suppurate, or a complication develop—”

“I have other jobs for you two,” said the Superior Maunt. “Your insistence at brooking my will convinces me. You two are the ones for the next job at hand.”

They paused in their flailing, affronted and curious.

“I haven’t yet told you what I recently learned about the three missionary novices from the Emerald City who stopped here some days ago,” said the Superior Maunt. “Their small party was ambushed and they were all killed. Scraped, I’m afraid. Someone will need to find out who did the deed, and why.”

She turned. “Finish your nostrums and reinforce your binding spells at once, enough to last till dinner anyway, and come with me. I shall nap briefly instead of taking a meal, and we will convene in my sectorium when the lunch prayers are concluded.”

She was untrained in their profession. How did she know they’d used several illicit binding spells? This was why she was the Superior Maunt, they guessed. She didn’t know medicine but she knew women.

There was nothing for them to do but obey. Walking slightly in advance of them, the Superior Maunt couldn’t help but smile faintly to herself. The medical women were good, solid folk. They were merely curious, curious as hell, like the rest of the House. And whatever was troubling Liir, inside or out, he would recover or decline more comfortably without being smothered by the attentions of middle-aged maunts.

The Superior Maunt paused to catch her breath. Stairs were the devil. Her two colleagues respectfully froze in place while she wheezed. The willpower of women, she thought. These two, and me besides. I make the awful choice to put them in danger. If anyone can manage the task at hand, they will. Keep them safe, she prayed.

But why do I even have to put my dear sisters in jeopardy? Because my colleagues in the motherchapel dare to send young innocent missionaries into the wild—without so much as a guide. No Oatsie Manglehand for them—just faith, innocence, and courage born of stupidity. Damn the Emerald City for leaning down upon us all. Damn those—those bath mats in the motherhouse, for yielding to the influence of the government!

She didn’t utter a private apology for the oath. She felt she’d earned the right to swear internally, now and then. When it was warranted.

8

CANDLE HARDLY GLANCED at Liir. She sat on a rush-seated chair and rubbed the calloused pads of her right fingers over the upper strings. A faint harmonic vibration buzzed in the lower strings, almost inaudible—a sensation in the air more than a sound.

The light heaved in its uncertain tides, as clouds too thin to see washed across the sky. The room chilled slightly.

Candle let her fingers wander up the frets. She was a skilled musician, more skilled even than the kitchen sisters knew—skilled, and talented besides. This domingon was missing a vital part, and couldn’t peal or chide or keen as she would like to require of it. Still, to keep her fingers alert, from the domingon’s double necks Candle drew dull incomplete sentences. They had no power to comfort; this she knew. But she would tease the lengthy imponderable sounds out into the air anyway. She had seen the Red Pfenix in the sky. So it was her playing that had called him down, was it? She could do it again, and more besides.

Abroad

1

THE DOMINGON PLAYED ON. Unheard by Liir in his state, it had its effect nonetheless.

HE WAS LIVING IN THE CASTLE called Kiamo Ko at the time, but he wasn’t present at the death of the Witch.

The Witch had locked him in the kitchen with Nanny and that jittery Lion. Showing surprising resourcefulness for one so dotty, Nanny had driven the handle of a one-egg iron skillet into the rotten wood of the doorjamb. Getting the idea, Liir and the Lion gouged at the hinges until the door fell heavily inward.

Chistery, the Witch’s Snow Monkey, had skittered ahead of them up the stairs to the Witch’s tower-top chambers. But Dorothy was already coming down, her face glutinous with tears, the badly burned broom stinking in her hands. “She’s gone,” sobbed the girl, and Liir’s heart had gone out to her—whose wouldn’t? He’d sat on the step and snaked his arm around her shoulders. He was fourteen. First attraction is awkward under any circumstances, he supposed, but this was extreme. It wasn’t as if he’d ever seen people being tender. And she was a saint from the Other Land, for pity’s sake.

The girl couldn’t control her shock, so it took Liir a while to understand what she was blubbering about. The Witch was gone. His earliest memory, his bête noire, his Auntie, his jail-keeper, his sage friend—his mother, the others had said, but there’d been no proof of that, and she’d never answered the question when he’d asked her.

Dead, dead and gone, and after her own inspection, Nanny wouldn’t let him up to the parapet to see. “The sight would turn the holy blind,” she murmured, “so it’s a good thing I’m an old sinner. And you, you’re just a young fool. Forget it, Liir.” She pocketed the key and began to warble in an unfamiliar mode, some dirge from her backwater childhood. “Sweet Lurlina, mother of mercy, shroud of the murdered, shawl of the missing…”

Nanny’s pagan pieties were somehow unconvincing. But on what basis could he say that? He’d left the unionist mauntery too young to absorb any of the tenets of faith that supported the cloistered way of life. From the distance of a skeptical adolescent, unionism seemed like a thicket of contradictions. Charity to all, but intolerance toward the heathen. Poverty ennobles, but the Bishops had to be richer than everyone else. The Unnamed God made the good world, imprisoning the rebellious human being within it, and taunting humankind with tinderbox sexuality that must be guarded against at all costs.

Lurlinism was no more sensible, to judge by how Nanny spoke of it. Random episodes of mildly erotic dalliance, as Lurlina effectively wooed Oz into being. Privately he thought it was downright stupid, though, being prettier, it was also easier to remember.

Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap of something: for Elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off—well, it didn’t seem right.

She whipped up in his mind, the first brutal memory as sudden and insistent as a bee sting. She was yelling at him. “The Wizard’s soldiers kidnapped the whole family and left you behind? Because you were useless? And you followed after them anyway, and they still managed to elude you? Are you useless?” Even then he had known she was less angry at him than frightened at what had befallen the other residents of the castle while she was away. Even then he had known she was relieved he’d been spared by virtue of being insignificant. Even then he’d smarted at the rebuke of the term. Useless.

“I’ll take the broom,” said Liir at last. “She can be buried with it.”

“I need it, to prove she’s dead,” said Dorothy. “What else would do?”

“I’ll carry it for you then,” he said.

“You’re coming with me?”

He looked around. The courtyard of the castle was more silent than he’d ever seen it. The Witch’s crows were dead, her wolves, her bees. The winged monkeys were huddled on top of the woodshed, paralyzed with grief. With the Arjiki villagers in the settlement of Red Windmill down the slope, or scattered in cottages on the leeward side of the mountain, Liir had had little contact.

So there was nothing to keep him in Kiamo Ko but Nanny. And old as she was, she would soon lapse into her usual fog of deafness and abstraction. In a week she would forget that the Witch had died. Besides, even in her best days she’d never known where Liir had come from. Neither had she seemed to care. So it was no hardship to leave her.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Yes. And I’ll carry the broom.”

It was too late to leave now, so they busied themselves instead. Liir fed the monkeys. Dorothy tried to make a meal for Nanny, who wept and said she wasn’t hungry and then ate all her portion and the Lion’s besides.

After washing up, Dorothy settled cozily in the crook of the Lion’s neck, as much to calm him as to take comfort herself. Liir climbed to the Witch’s room and looked about. Already it was as if she had never lived there.

He thought of the Grimmerie, that perplexing book of magic. He had never been able to read it. Wherever the Witch had put it last, he let it be. No matter. No Flying Monkey would be able to gibber a spell out of it, and Nanny’s eyesight was too poor to decipher its odd scrambling text. It would be too heavy to carry, anyway.

Books have their own life, he thought. Let it take care of itself.

Turning to leave, he caught sight of Elphaba’s black cape. A bit worse for wear, its hems threadbare, its collar much sampled by moths. Still, it was thick, and the days would only get colder. He put it over his narrow shoulders. It was far too large for him, so he looped the ends around his forearms. He looked, he supposed, like a small silly bat with an oversize wingspan. He didn’t care.

The horizon was frosted with a greenish smear, as if ranks of campfires from distant tribes had divined the news already and were burning an homage to Elphaba before the sun could set on the day of her death.

He could smell her in the collar of the cape, and he wept for the first time.

LIIR DIDN’T BOTHER to say good-bye to Chistery. Let the Witch’s most beloved Flying Monkey take care of himself now. Why else had she taught him language, but so that he could keen when she was gone?

On the road, the Lion and that little yapper, Toto, lagged behind with the other two who had been waiting for Dorothy—the Scarecrow, the man of tin—both of whom gave Liir a serious case of the creeps. The wind was brutal and the streaky clouds massed to the east, and if Liir wasn’t mistaken, before long rain would fall.

Dorothy asked perfunctory questions, but she was more interested in making sure they didn’t lose their way. How would he know if they went off course, he asked her—it had been seven or eight years since he’d come from the mauntery with Elphaba, and he’d never left the neighborhood of Kiamo Ko in all the time since. Dorothy had much more recent experience of the greater landscape.

“Yes, well, those Flying Monkeys carried me the last bit,” she said nervously, “and I can’t claim to have had my wits about me enough to have taken note of landmarks. Still, we’re going downslope, and that’s got to be right.”

“Everything is downslope of Kiamo Ko,” Liir told her.

“I like your confidence,” she said. “Tell me about yourself, then.”

He suspected his memories of young childhood were like anyone else’s: imprecise, suggestible, and largely devoid of emotion. He didn’t recall defining moments—maybe there weren’t any—but he did remember the sensation of things. The shafts of light slanting through the mullioned windows high up in the gallery, pinning silent maunts to their silent shadows on the stone floor. The smell of asparagus cream soup, a little maple syrup drizzled on top. The smell of snow in the air. Liir had been attached to Elphaba, somehow, he remembered that: he’d been allowed to play with his broken wooden ducky in the same room where she sat and spun wool.

“Was she your mother?” asked Dorothy. “I’m terribly sorry to have killed her if she was. I mean I’m sorry anyway, but more so if you were related.”

The girl’s directness was puzzling, and Liir wasn’t used to it. The Witch had never hidden her emotions, but nor had she explained them, and in many ways living with her had been like sharing an apartment with an ill-tempered house pet.

He tried to be honest, but there was so much he didn’t know. “I started out with her,” he said. “How, as a toddler, I came to be among the maunts, I can’t say. No one has ever told me, and the Witch wouldn’t talk about it. I remember other women from those times, Sister Cupboard and Sister Orchard, and some of the more playful ones, the novices, who kept their own names, Sister Saint Grayce, and Sister Linnet. But when it came time for Elphaba to leave, they wrapped up my small packet of clothes, too, and I was lifted up to a seat on a wagon, and we joined a party that went through the Kells, stopping here and there until we got to Kiamo Ko.”

“It’s awfully out of the way,” said Dorothy, looking around at the unpeopled slopes of pine and potterpine, and the slides of scree, and the scraggles of mountain lavender going to seed.

“She wanted to be out of the way. And besides, it’s where Fiyero had lived.”

“Your father?”

Liir was as doubtful of his paternity as he was of his maternity. “He had meant something to her, to the Witch,” he pointed out. “But what, I don’t know. I never met him. Can you imagine the Witch would sit down and pour out her heart to me?”

“I can’t imagine anything about her. Who could?”

He didn’t want to talk anymore. The death was too recent, the shock of it was beginning to wear off, and what began to show through was anger. “In a general sense, we’re going southwest, and then we’ll cut east through Kumbricia’s Pass,” he said. “I’ve learned that much by listening to Oatsie Manglehand when she comes through guiding a party. There are tribes around and about.”

“We saw no one,” said Dorothy, “not for miles.”

“They saw you,” said Liir. “They had to. That’s what they do.”

“Not nice, to be spying on us. We’re very chummy,” she said, putting on an aggressively friendly face. Any party of scouts witnessing it would do well to keep themselves hidden.

Before long the rain came, and he was glad, for it stopped their conversation, which had turned into prattle. A heavy rain, the drops like pebbles. He could see no shepherd’s hut out here, not even a clump of mountain arbor to shelter beneath. So rather than sit in the mud and let the rain wick through their undergarments, they trudged on.

Their confidence about their course ebbed, though, what with the shrouding of hilltops—all landmarks wiped out of view.

“Liir, I have no confidence in your sense of direction,” said the Tin Woodman, politely.

“Nick Chopper! You’re heartless!” said Dorothy.

“Ha bloody ha. And you’re an orphan,” he replied. “I’ll rust in this downpour. Does anyone think of that? No.”

“Don’t carp. I don’t deal well with conflict,” said the Lion. “Let’s sing a song.”

“No,” they all chorused.

“What’ll you do when you find yourself courageous—assuming the Wizard grants you what you wish?” asked the Scarecrow, to change the subject.

“Invest in the market? Join a troupe of music hall buskers? How the hell do I know?” said the Lion. “Strike out on my own, anyway, and find a better class of associates. More simpatico.”

“You?” asked the Scarecrow of the Tin Woodman.

“What will I do if I find myself with a heart?” scoffed the Tin Woodman. “Lose it constantly, I imagine.”

They slopped on. Liir didn’t think it was his place to continue the conversation, since he hadn’t been present at their initial audience with the Wizard. When no one else spoke, though, he said, “Well, Scarecrow, your turn. What’ll you do with your brains?”

“I’m thinking about it,” he answered, and would not discuss it further.

“Oh, Toto!” shrieked Dorothy suddenly. “Where’s Toto?”

“He’s wandered off to do his business,” said the Lion. “Just between you and me, it’s about time he learned to be private about it. I know you dote on him, but there is a limit.”

“He’ll be lost,” she cried. “He couldn’t find his way out of a cracker barrel. He’s not very bright, you know.”

After a respectful pause, the Tin Woodman observed, “I think we’ve all noticed that.”

“I hate to be obvious,” added the Scarecrow, “but you’d have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren’t too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.”

“There he is,” she cried, pitching up a small slope.

The clueless creature was finishing his evacuation at the base of what looked like an ancient traveler’s shrine to Lurline. A weathered statue of the pagan goddess gazed blindly out into the storm. The statue was life-size, if you accepted that goddesses have the same stature as humans. Little more than a lean-to for protecting the statue from the elements, the structure could afford no room for the travelers to crawl in out of the downpour. After a while, though, Liir thought of standing on the shoulders of the Lion and slinging the big black cape out over the shrine’s roof. Using the scorched remains of the Witch’s broom as a pole, he rigged up a black tent under which they could huddle. The Lion’s mane reeked, but at least the travelers were protected from the worst of the rain.

“This cape is larger than it looks,” said Dorothy. “And the water isn’t soaking through.”

“Maybe she hexed it waterproof. She didn’t like water,” said Liir.

“So I’ve learned,” said Dorothy.

“Who does?” added the Tin Woodman, squeaking his joints.

“Tell me more about her,” continued Dorothy.

Liir didn’t oblige. He found Dorothy congenial enough—but it had been so long since he’d had anything like friends his own age! At Kiamo Ko, when he’d first arrived with Elphaba, Fiyero’s three children had allowed him into their small society, but slackly, without much interest. The girl, Nor, had been the only one ever really to play with him. Though he had been little more to Nor than that dog was to Dorothy, a presence to boss around, Nor had been kind. That first Lurlinemas, she’d given him the tail of her gingerbread mouse, because no one had thought to make him a gingerbread mouse of his own.

And besides her? No one else to play with, once she and Irji and the rest of the ruling family—Fiyero’s survivors—had been kidnapped by the Wizard’s forces garrisoned at Red Windmill. Yes, he’d bravely followed, but fecklessly. They’d given him the slip. He had had to return to Kiamo Ko and face the screeching. Then the Witch had prohibited Liir from fraternizing any longer with Commander Cherrystone of the Gale Forcers or from making new friends among the lice-ridden urchins of Red Windmill.

So Liir had lived a lonely life. It could have been worse; he was fed and he was clothed more or less warmly. He had his chores, and the winged monkeys, largely inarticulate, at least didn’t go out of their way to move if he sat down nearby. Was there supposed to be more to a childhood? Rehearsing it to tell Dorothy, it seemed a spare, botched thing, and he suppressed most of it.

Of late, the Witch had become more irritable than usual, complaining of sleeping problems. Nanny—her nanny, at one point, and her mother’s nanny before that—was well into her eighties and good for little by way of coherent discussion. Liir had been left to talk to himself, and he’d found himself less than stimulating as a conversationalist.

Dorothy’s curiosity seemed flat to him, though, perhaps artificial. He wasn’t able to tell if she was really curious about his life, about the Witch, or if she was just marking time. Maybe steeling her own nerve by hearing the sound of her voice. He felt leery. Perhaps, the son of the Witch or no, he had inherited from exposure to Elphaba a mild sense of paranoia, as if everyone were after some scrap of vital information that they were unwilling to ask for directly.

He fussed and rolled his eyes and tried to imagine how to change the subject. He didn’t want to talk about his toddler days in the mauntery or his boyhood in Kiamo Ko. He was bereft of family, now, something of a hanger-on to Dorothy’s party, something of a guide without a clue out here in the cruel terrain. He just wanted to concentrate on the job.

He was glad, therefore, when the Lion started and said, “What’s that?”

“It’s night coming on,” said the Tin Woodman.

“Night coming on makes a sound like the Crack of Doom?” complained the Lion. “Never did before. Shhh, everyone. It wasn’t thunder. What was it? Shhh, I tell you.”

The Tin Woodman observed, “You’re the only one who’s talking—”

“Shhh, I said!”

They shhhushed.

The downpour made a symphony. An undertone of susurrus—rain at mid-distance—accompanied the solo vocalists rounding vowels of rainwater—plopp—plopp—or, as Liir thought, of Auntie Witch, Elphaba Thropp—Thropp—Thropp.

“Did you ever notice how rain sounds like a domingon?” asked the Scarecrow.

The Lion put his paw to his mouth: Shhhh. His grimace was anything but fearsome; he looked like an overgrown child in lion pajamas.

Then they heard what he was hearing, and before they could do anything about it, a stone at the base of the statue of Lurlina was shifted to one side. Up from the earth poked the paw of a creature. A badger, a beaver? Something brown, whiskered, and sensible. A slope grite of some sort, larger than its valley cousin.

“You’ve some nerve, besmirching the memory of Lurlina with your prattle,” said the Mountain Grite. His jowls made a saddlebag flapping noise as he spoke.

“Nerve,” said the Lion. “I wish.”

“We’re merely sheltering from the storm,” said Dorothy. “May we have your blessing to stay here?”

The Grite bared an impressive collection of incisors and canines.

“What business is it of yours?” said Liir. “We’re not bothering you.”

The Grite looked around, as if assessing whether he might take them on all at once and get the better of them. Apparently not. “My digs, if you want to call it that,” he said at last, “are directly below. You’re a big heavy lot, and you’re going to collapse the walls of my lodging.”

“A bad place to build,” said the Tin Man, for whom the teeth of a Mountain Grite weren’t much of a threat. “An insult to Lurlina, actually.”

“Maybe, but I dig deep, and if the whole thing gives and you tumble in, you’ll starve to death down there. And the stink of your rotting corpses won’t appeal to the spirit of Lurlina, however beloved of the natural world she is said to be.”

“The storm can’t last forever,” said Dorothy.

The Grite came forward a little. “Quite possibly I have rabies, you know. Fair warning. I bite first and I don’t ask questions.”

The Lion sighed and removed himself from the makeshift tent. Out there, the deluge sloped on him like a fountain coursing over a sculptured lion.

“We’re not going to let some overgrown rodent chase us into the storm,” said Liir. “If you bite me, I’ll bite you back, and return your own rabies to you. Go away.”

“That’s a capable awning you have.” The Grite wrinkled his face. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be. What is it?”

“It’s a cape,” said Liir. “What business is it of yours?”

“That’s the Witch’s cape,” said the Grite. “I don’t believe it. Where did you get it?”

“I took it,” said Liir.

“More fool you. She’ll have your head before nightfall.”

“She’s dead,” said Dorothy. Smugly.

The Grite’s eyes bulged, and he pushed his face nearer to Dorothy, who flinched and drew back from him: He wasn’t an especially handsome specimen of his family. “The Witch is dead? Can it be true?”

They nodded, each one of them.

“Oh, the shock of it.” The Grite clutched his paws and worried them back and forth. “The shock of it! The Witch is dead?”

The wind itself answered in a kind of obbligato descant: The Witch is dead!

“Get out of here,” said the Grite in a colder voice. “Go on.”

“I thought you’d be glad,” said Dorothy.

The retort was crisp and censorious. “We held her in considerable regard. There have always been some Animals who would have marched at her side, right to the gates of the Emerald City, had she believed in armies, had she ever given the word. You’ll find no comfort among us.”

“She was my friend,” said Liir. “Don’t confuse us with assassins.”

“You’re a fledgling. You could barely manage to befriend her cape, let alone the Witch herself.” To Dorothy he added, “Move along, little Miss Thug and accomplices, before I call on reinforcements to deal with you.” The Grite sniffed the raw air as if expecting to find proof of their assertions in the smell of the revised world. “The Witch is dead. It can’t be. Wait till Princess Nastoya hears. Wait until the Wizard hears.”

He was lost to his own ruminations, and turned to look up at the statue of Lurline. “Give us guidance!” he said. “Speak, for once.”

The storm thundered very nearby. Everyone shuddered but the Grite. “I mean, speak in a language we can understand,” he clarified. But the storm, or Lurline within its might, didn’t oblige, and indeed, moments later the worst of the downpour was done, and the thunder shunted elsewhere.

The Grite continued. “I have no reason to give comfort to mine enemy, but there you are. You may be villainous, but you are young, some of you, and perhaps might learn to repent. I’m told that Wizardic battalions are encamped on the banks of the Vinkus River. Find the Wizard’s forces and they will protect you. That’s my advice to you.”

“The Wizard’s armies will protect us?” snapped Liir. “The Wizard of Oz is a menace!”

“Of course he is. A despot, a suzerain, call it what you will. The boss. And you’ve abetted him in his campaign to wipe out the western resistance. This news will travel fast, my friends.” Every time he said the word friends, it sounded less friendly. “But take protection where you can. When the word of the death of Elphaba Thropp spreads through these hills, you’ll have a very difficult time of it. I won’t answer for what happens next. You’ve heard my advice. Heed it.”

“I’m not giving myself up to any corps of the Wizard’s army,” said Liir. “If there are forces down the eastern side, we’ll keep to our plan to veer west, and take our chances through Kumbricia’s Pass. It’ll be a longer route but a safer one.”

“Perhaps we’d better get going,” said Dorothy, nervously.

“You had better go on,” agreed the Mountain Grite. “I won’t join a posse against you, but nor will I lie to my friends about what I’ve learned here today. The clouds are passing over. If you’ve intended to take the hairpin track down the western slope of Knobblehead Pike, you’ve overshot. You’ll have to back up. You won’t reach the river valley before dark. Shelter under a black willow; you’ll find a stand of them where the track levels out and circles a bit of highland swamp. You’ll be safe there.”

“Thank you,” said Dorothy earnestly.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Liir. “Thank him for what?”

“You,” said the Grite to the Lion, “are a turncoat. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’d be especially wary if I were you. Animals don’t take lightly to traitors. If you were more of a Lion, you’d know that.”

“I did nothing!” said the Lion. “I was locked in the kitchen!” His tail twitched eight or ten times.

THE GRITE KEPT HIS WORD and ratted on them. Before the travelers had finished washing the next morning, a scouting party of Scrow appeared at the edge of the black willow grove. Riding bareback and nearly naked on their purple-white steeds, they looked like wild centaurs in the mist. Without a word but with considerable glower the Scrow contingent circled the grove. There, the travelers were kept loosely penned. Attempts to negotiate were fruitless; they had no language in common.

The languages of Oz. Liir had never thought about them. The father tongue had always seemed universal; even Dorothy spoke without peculiar inflections or special difficulty. True, the dialect of the mountain clans, the Arjikis, was characterized by the growling of syllables halfway down the throat—but the difference had made little impression on Liir. He could still understand the Arjikis.

So why would the isolated Mountain Grite speak the common tongue with clarity and effect, while the Scrow clung to a language only they understood?

Right up to the end, the Witch had kept trying to teach the winged monkeys to speak, as if to be able to testify might save their lives someday. So much bound up in language…The language of spells themselves—spells, of all things! A way to order sounds to make things shift, reveal what is hidden, conceal what isn’t…

He wished he had a skill for language. He wished he could spell magic as, with effort and increasing control, Elphaba had learned to do. He would bind the Scrow frozen, and he and his companions would walk away safely. But this was beyond him—like everything else.

The Scrow scouts tossed the travelers hanks of repugnant dried meat and smoked corn. It was clear Dorothy and company were to wait here. A day and a half later, the leader of the Scrow arrived, traveling in a slow-moving caravansary that with considerable care negotiated the path to this low-lying western ridge of Knobblehead Pike.

The party included a translator, so Liir found himself requesting an audience with the Highness behind the shabby drapes of the palanquin. He wasn’t skilled at bargaining. “The only thing I request is that we, uh, hurry,” he said. “My friend Dorothy wants to get safely to the Emerald City; she has an appointment with the Wizard. Then she intends to travel abroad somewhere.”

And I with her, he thought to add, but didn’t. Would she have me? And if not—what else am I going to do?

The translator was an old, gnarled Scrow gentleman who, despite his tribal appurtenances, had been trained in the university environs of Shiz. “Very well,” he said. “I don’t see why we should dally. It is in all of our interests, after all. Give her Highness a chance to compose herself, and we shall let you know when she’s ready.”

Dorothy said, “We don’t think much of crowned heads where I come from. Who is this Highness?” The interpreter left without answering.

“How rude,” said Dorothy. “Well, who is she, this Highness? Might it be the Ozma everybody goes on about?”

Liir explained. “The last Ozma disappeared many years ago, kidnapped as a young girl when the Wizard came to power. Nanny believed the child had been bewitched in a trance, never to grow older by a day until the moment she was released from the charm, like a fairy-tale princess. Then she would rise up and smash the mighty in their comfort, and return the monarchy to its rightful place. But Auntie Witch always pooh-poohed that. She said the child had probably been murdered long ago. The remains of the Ozma Tippetarius would be found deep in the bone bins of the Palace, along with her ancestors, if anyone were allowed to look there.”

“I believe in Ozma,” said the Scarecrow staunchly.

Mindless fool, thought Liir, but said nothing more.

The court of the Scrow didn’t keep them waiting for long. When the sun had reached its zenith, attendants unrolled a green carpet with a puckered selvage. Shapeless pillows, sour with mildew, were placed about. “Stand until her Highness is seated,” the translator said, arranging in a kind of lattice pattern the remaining hairs on his pale domed head. “Then you may be seated, too.”

She was helped out of her compartment by six retainers. Her muscles were of little use in holding up her bulk, and her large, sagging face twisted into seams of overlapping skin. She grimaced at the pain of every step. An old woman, a monolith of an ancient Scrow matron, easily the size of all her retainers standing together. Like a queen bee among drones.

Her face was scored with green and purple smudges, some sort of ceremonial marking. The waft of vetiver and lily water, pleasant enough, couldn’t entirely disguise an animal odor.

“Princess Nastoya,” said the translator in comprehensible Ozish, “may I present Dorothy Gale, of parts unknown, and her companions, a Lion, a Scarecrow, a gentleman clad in Tin, and the boy about whom you’ve been told.” He then repeated the lines in Scrow, to indicate how he would go on.

“How do you do?” said Dorothy, curtseying.

Princess Nastoya was lowered to the ground so she could regard them while reclining on her side. Her spine was preternaturally long, as if she possessed extra vertebrae. The servants propped her knees on a yellow cushion, and her elbow on another, and they arranged a small mountain of cushions behind her so she wouldn’t roll backward.

The interpreter began a flowery biography, but the Princess cut him off. Her voice was low, tympanic, as if her nasal passages were large enough for the storage of melons.

“I am sore with disbelief,” she said, the interpreter translating. “I had only known that the Witch sent out Crows to call for help. Before they could reach me, they were attacked and their flesh devoured by a posse of nocturnal rocs.”

“How do you know about the Crows?” asked Liir. “If they were eaten by rocs?”

“Nocturnal rocs are mute beasts,” said the Princess, “but the attack was witnessed by a Grey Eagle who keeps an eye on a certain district for me. He drove the rocs away from one Crow, who managed to pass on the message of the Witch’s embattlement before dying. The Eagle delivered the message to me as I was closing a convocation with some of the southern Arjiki clans.”

“The Witch ought to have been told about that,” said Liir. “She considered herself an honorary Arjiki, sort of.”

“I won’t be lectured on strategy or protocol,” replied the Princess. “In any case, I did invite her. But I never knew if my invitation got through. I was told that she was distracted with grief over the death of her sister.”

“She was…unsteady…at the end,” admitted Liir. “I’m not sure how much she could have done for you, or if she would have bothered. In truth, she was kind of a hermit. She kept to herself.” Even when it came to me, he remembered.

“I’d have put the case forcefully to her, had I gotten her attention,” asserted the Princess. “She was no fool. She saw that when the breadbasket of Munchkinland was ruinously taxed by the Emerald City’s chancellors, it had to break away and form a Free State. If pressed, we here in the west will do no less than that ourselves. My attempts to build an allegiance with the Yunamata have come to naught, and the Arjikis can enjoy their own insularity, obstinate slope dwellers!—but we Scrow will not stand by and let our Grasslands be plundered. The Wizard is amassing an army on the eastern slope of the Kells. I know how he works, you whippet.”

The Princess groaned. “She might have been a help! But it is too late. I hear through the report of a Mountain Grite that the peculiar woman is dead. Elphaba.”

The interpreter pronounced it wrong. “EL-phaba,” said Liir.

“Is the murderer here among us?” asked the Princess.

“It was an accident,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t mean it.” She put the end of one of her pigtails into her mouth and chewed it.

“The deceased was a curious creature,” said the Princess. “I only met her once, but she impressed me with her stamina. She did not seem the type to die.”

“Who does?” said Dorothy.

“Speak for yourself,” muttered the Lion. “I die a little bit every day, especially if there are unfriendly faces in the room.”

Through her factotum, the Princess continued her message. “You are in grave danger. Not least from me. Murder and theft of the Witch’s belongings, the way I see it, but even worse: doing so in collusion with the Wizard.”

Liir protested, sputtering. “Not in collusion with the Wizard!”

“Well, the Wizard of Oz did ask me to kill her,” admitted Dorothy. “No use crying over that spilt milk. He did, and I won’t lie about it. But I didn’t intend to do it. I just wanted her forgiveness for the accidental death of her sister. And then there was the bucket of water. And how was I to know? I mean, we don’t have witches back home in Kansas. We wouldn’t hear of it.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” interrupted Liir. “Listen, Princess Nastoya, please. I lived with the Witch all my life. There’s no question of theft. I am the next of kin.”

“How so?”

He couldn’t answer. The Princess pressed her point.

“Can you prove it?”

He shrugged. His skin was neither green, like Elphaba’s, nor musky ocher, like Fiyero’s children and widow. Liir was rather pasty, in fact; not a convincing specimen of anything, when you got right down to it.

“It is no matter,” said the Princess. “I would not kill you. Oh no, I would not. But others might, and I wonder if I could prevent them. We have no sway with the Arjikis, as the collapse of my recent campaign shows.”

“Why would the Wizard’s armies bother to raise a hand against us?” asked Liir. “The Witch is dead, and the ruling family of the Arjikis—the house and line of Fiyero—has been obliterated.”

“Even the daughter?” asked the Princess.

Liir’s mouth dropped. “Do you mean Nor? Have you heard otherwise about her? What can you tell me of her?”

“I have capable ears,” she answered, but continued. “Can you prove the Witch is dead?”

“You want us to bring her back to life?” Liir scoffed. “You might as well kill us now, if that’s your demand.”

The Princess indicated that she wanted to stand. “It’s the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking,” she said. It took nine men to cantilever her to her feet, and then they brought her a pair of jeweled canes as thick as newel posts. She leaned forward and fixed Liir in the eye.

“You would be of no help at treaties, you boy-calf,” she said. “But you wonder what do I want of you.”

She let her mirrored shawl slip off her shoulders, and three black ivory combs clattered to the ground from her knotted hedge of thick white hair. The air grew very still, and clammy; there was a sense of Presence. The Princess closed her eyes and droned, and her hair seemed to pick at itself, and then to gather into a sleek sliding thing, and it ran off her back into a white coil on the ground. The shapeless gown of cotton geppling shifted on her hips, appeared to draw itself up into a peplum or a bustle, and then it snaked off.

Liir had never seen an unclothed woman before, old or young—only little Nor on washday, lithe in the copper tub, when she’d been a girl of four or five. The effect of a naked Princess was startling, the print of silvery hair at the groin, the pockets of flesh folding one over the other, the bosom flattened by age and gravity. Dorothy murmured “Goodness!” as if she thought she must be witnessing exactly the opposite.

If this was magic, it was still spelling time. The Princess’s nose was lengthening, uncoiling, and the skin on her cement-colored cheeks stretched and thickened epibolically. Her eyes, which had been little more than slits in the folds of her face, lost their ovoid shape, rounded into marbles. A net of fine hairs sprouted on her brow and pate, her cheeks and chin and dramatically hostile nose. And ears:—yes, they were capable and then some.

More or less like an Elephant head, though not planted on an Elephant body.

“Perhaps I ought to have given you more warning,” she said. “It seems I’ve upset the girl.” Dorothy was retching into her apron, and her dog appeared to have had a nervous fit and passed out. “I have little use for niceties at this stage in my life, though.”

Liir didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I am an Elephant,” said the Princess Nastoya. “From the Wizard’s pogroms against the Animals, I have been in hiding as a human all these long years. I’m admired by the Scrow for my longevity and what passes for my wisdom. In exchange for their protection, for a home in the Thousand Year Grasslands, I have performed my duty as a leader. But of late, young boy-thing, I am unable to shuck off my disguise with the ease I once had. Though Elephants pretend to immortality, I believe I am dying. I must not be allowed to die in this half-form. I will die as an Elephant. But I need help.”

“How can I be of service?” asked Liir. As if I could do anything, he added to himself.

“I don’t know,” said the Princess Nastoya. “I once told Elphaba Thropp that if she needed help, she was only to send word, and I would put all my resources under her command. I never thought that the reverse would happen. That the time would come for me to apply to her for her knowledge of Animals, her native skill at spells and charms. But I have started too late, I see, for your companion has murdered my only hope.”

“Dorothy was not to know,” said Liir.

“Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too.”

“It’s disgusting, actually,” whispered the Lion to the Tin Woodman. “Do you know, my stomach is turning as we speak.”

“I don’t have a talent at spells,” said Liir. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“How do you know?” asked the Princess. “Have you tried? Have you studied?”

“I’m not a good student, and furthermore I’m not much interested.”

The huge proboscis whipped up from nowhere. Her nose-digits grabbed his chin. She would crush his skull, chin-first. “Get interested,” she said. “Get interested, or get help. If you’re not to be murdered for your crimes against Elphaba—and that might yet happen—get yourself enough knowledge from someone, somewhere, to help. Was there a book, a Grimmerie? Did Elphaba have associates? I don’t care how long it takes, but come back to me. I can’t die like this. I won’t. In the end, all disguises must drop.”

“You confuse me with someone else,” he said. “Someone with competence. Someone I never met.”

“This isn’t a request,” she said. “It’s an order. I am a colleague of Elphaba’s.” She lifted her nasal limb from Liir’s chin and blew her own horn in his face. His eyes stewed in his skull, and some of the hair at the front of his scalp was raked bloodily away by the force of the blast. “If you claim to be a relation of the Witch’s, you will figure out what to do. She always could.”

“Well, not always,” Dorothy corrected her helpfully, “as is woefully apparent at this moment in time.”

“I will pay you,” concluded the Princess, apparently addressing Liir alone. “I will keep my ears to the ground for word of your abducted friend—Fiyero’s cub, Nor. Nor, was it? Come back to me with a solution and I will tell you all I’ve been able to learn in the meantime.”

Liir couldn’t speak, but he held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture even he couldn’t read. Accepting the task? Protesting his inadequacy? Whatever—it didn’t matter. The Princess was done with them. She turned her massive Elephant head, wobbling on its all-too-human spine, and a dozen Scrow rushed to hold her up. They cloaked the acreage of her buttocks, as if to protect her from a sort of ignominy that, anyway, could never have attached itself to her. Even a half-thing, trapped in a decaying spell, she was too much herself for shame to apply.

“SHE DIDN’T KEEP ONE OF US as a hostage,” said the Lion, almost delirious. “I was sure it was going to be me. But I could never have dealt with it.”

“She trusted us,” said Liir.

They settled into a pattern of traipsing day after day, under skies of broken cloud and brittle light. To avoid the Wizardic armies, they kept to the western base of the Great Kells. In places the upright thrusts of the mountains rose from the grassland floor as cleanly as the front of a corncrib meets a level floor: one could almost mark with a pencil where the plain stopped and the slope began.

They rested where they could. At least it wasn’t a bad time of year to be making their way cross-country. They skirted the edge of the Thousand Year Grasslands, ants in single file on the fringe of a carpet of prairie. After several weeks, they reached the verdant apron that rose into the gorge known as Kumbricia’s Pass, a high and fertile valley affording the quickest way through the central Kells.

Liir remembered it vaguely from years past. The air was dense and damp, and the ground quilted with decaying vegetation. If Princess Nastoya had not been able to engage the local Yunamata tribes in a treaty against the Wizard, it was likely she hadn’t been able to extend her offer of protection through their territory, either. But the Yunamata kept themselves hidden, as was their way.

Beyond, heading downslope toward the Vinkus River and eventually the Emerald City, the world seemed cold and sore. The year was moving on. The occasional foothill farmhouses were crude, almost derelict, roofing thatch thick with mildew, gardens thin on the ground. If bread was offered, it was offered sullenly. No locals would take them in and provide anything like a mattress. The corner of a barn and a blanket crusty with pigeon droppings were the best the travelers could hope for. Still, exhausted with plodding, they slept hard and dreamlessly.

To Liir, it wasn’t a question of how many days or weeks it took to reach the Emerald City, but how many hours a day he had to trudge before he could sink back into a safe sleep again. Not sleep, something richer: blissful annihilation. So he could forget the sideways throb of his flattened heart kicking: You. You. You. He kept the thought of Elphaba there, unwillingly; it pressed painfully against membranes so interior he had never known their existence before. I hated you. You left me. So I hate you more than I used to.

The Kells dwindled, the scrubby flatland spread its wastes in fields of shattered stone. Oakhair forests began first to fringe the horizon, and then to loom with oakhair breath and the sound of wind in their leaves…Little of this registered on Liir without his wanting to say, “Look, look—the world you hated so much that you left it behind. It’s so weird. I can see why.”

He couldn’t say this. He could hardly think it, with Dorothy rabbiting on about Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and various forgettable farmhands. Elphaba, thought Liir. Elphaba, he felt. Elphaba. The world without you.

How am I to manage?

THE KELLS HAD LOOKED CLEAN, conceived by a keen architectural eye, and thrown up with confidence. By contrast, the Emerald City, on first sight, seemed organic, a metastasis of competing life-forms. Liir had never seen a settlement larger than a hamlet before, so he was flummoxed at the way the City punched itself against the horizon. Flummoxed, and daunted.

“Don’t be scared,” said Dorothy, catching his hand. “Think of it as a thousand farmsteads piled on top of one another.”

“And that isn’t a scary notion?”

“I am going to find myself here,” declared the Tin Woodman.

“I’m going to lose myself,” said the Lion.

“Just try to blend in,” said Dorothy. “Act natural.”

“Now that would be acting,” said the Tin Woodman, and barked one calf percussively against the other to underscore his point.

“Come on,” said the Scarecrow, “we’re in luck.” He indicated a motley crew of traveling players advertising a silly new show done mostly with puppets. They were amusing the guards, and in the commotion the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars and Liir managed to sidle undetected through the City’s west portal. They debouched into a broad square. Judging from the stink of skark manure, the space served as a holding pen for beasts of transport while cargos were being unloaded and bills of lading composed. Plain granite storehouses faced the yard, and bears—or possibly even Bears, talking beasts, though they weren’t talking now—were hauling sacks of grain and crates of produce. “Ho,” yelled the overseers. Some were Munchkins, a third the height of their laborers. Their landing whips loosed splatters as of red rain.

“We’re meat here, meat,” groaned the Lion. “Not that it’s all about me, but I feel so exposed.”

“The Lion’s right. Come, let’s duck down this alley,” said Liir.

“I’d expected a bit more fuss,” said Dorothy. “I mean, like it or not, the Witch is dead, and you’d think the word would have gotten out.” She held her own nose with one hand and Toto’s nose with the other. “Kansas boasts henhouses sweeter than this.”

They wandered through commercial districts, crossing wide boulevards lined with dying cypress trees. Some were splintered in half, pulled down for such tinder as they might provide. Many open spaces, around fountains memorializing successful military campaigns, were filled in with makeshift homes, some cardboard, or oilcloth stretched over chicken wire. Cooking pots stank of dinner. The broken spout from a fountain still trickled a little: a common toilet. “Ugh,” said Dorothy. “My earlier visit didn’t take me through this neighborhood.”

“You had civic guides,” guessed Liir. She nodded.

The people of the boulevards ducked behind the shawls tacked up as curtain-doors, or hid their faces in sheets of old newsprint when the travelers passed. “You’d think we were leprous,” said Liir.

“Perhaps we’re too clean,” said Dorothy. “We shame them.”

Liir didn’t think Dorothy was as clean as all that, but her eyes were bright and her step sure, and perhaps that counted more than cleanliness. “Maybe they’re used to police action against them, and they just don’t know which side we represent,” said Liir.

“Oh, really,” said the Tin Woodman. “Look at us: a man of straw, a man of tin, a Lion with a bow in his hair like a lapdog! A girl, a boy, a surly little dog. How could we possibly be authorities? We’re too—”

“Unique?” asked Dorothy.

“Lacking in camouflage?” asked the Lion.

“Fabulous?” proposed the Tin Woodman.

“Ridiculous?” asked Liir.

“All of the above,” decided the Scarecrow. But the indigent seemed not to be convinced and avoided the peculiar travelers.

WHEN THEY REACHED the great piazza before the Palace of the Wizard, Liir wanted to hang back. The Witch had despised the ruler of Oz; how could Liir show his face? “Don’t be a sissy,” said the Lion, “I’ve got that covered for us all.”

“It’s not fear,” said Liir, though it was, in part. It was also anger, he realized. How capable, how flexible anger was: he could feel it for the Witch, who had gone and died on him, and for the Wizard, the orchestrator of her murder, both at once. Then why, for Dorothy, did Liir feel nothing but an increasing exhaustion? Perhaps he harbored a zesty secret anger toward her, too, but if so it kept itself in disguise. If Liir lashed out at Dorothy—well, what would he have left in the world? Who? Pretty nearly nothing. Just about nothing at all.

“Well, we can’t wait while you dither,” said Dorothy. “You’d be a fool to pass up this chance. The Wizard can give you your heart’s desire, after all. He’s good at that.”

He remembered a conversation with Elphaba, suddenly.

What do you want, Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?

A father.

“He’s like Santa Claus.” Dorothy’s eyes were button bright with apostolic zeal.

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“Santa Claus? Jolly old elf! Magic as anything. At Christmas every year he comes to your home and leaves you treats, if you’re good. Or if you’re not, coal in your stocking. We don’t always have extra coal in Kansas so once he filled my stocking full of manure. I cried like the dickens but Uncle Henry said it was punishment for me singing too brightly in the hog pen. I was scaring the pigs shitless, he said, and here was the proof.”

“The Wizard of Oz puts manure in your socks?”

“No! Listen and stop being an idiot. I just mean the Wizard is like Santa Claus: he’s a charitable sort. Come and get what you need. What’s to stop you? What do you have better to do?”

He wobbled. If the Wizard was handing out rewards, why shouldn’t Liir deserve one? He was an orphan now. He didn’t need to say who he was, did he?—or where he came from?

“He owes you lots.” Dorothy was solemn with assurance. “Without your help, we wouldn’t have gotten back alive. The creepy Yunamuffins hiding on the trail, that repulsive Elephant monster, queen of the Scrow-folk. I had jeebies crawling all over my heebies.”

“Maybe I will,” said Liir.

What do you want, Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?

A father.

The Wizard couldn’t give him a father or a mother, but maybe he could give him some news of Nor. Now that the Princess Nastoya had awakened a hope that Nor might still be alive. Or maybe the Wizard had gotten hold of the missing Grimmerie, somehow. With it, Liir might figure out how to help the Princess shuck off her disguise. In any event, even to approach someone as mighty as the wonderful Wizard of Oz would be, for Liir, both a novelty and an accomplishment: he was hardly more than spinster spawn, and had seen little of the world of men.

“Well, come if you’re coming; we’re off,” said Dorothy, so Liir hid the Witch’s cape beneath an ornamental flowerpot in a corner of the deserted café where they had been sitting, and went with them.

Dorothy’s strategy for getting the attention of the proper officials at the Palace doors was simple. “I’m Dorothy,” she said, “you know. The Dorothy.”

The guards gawked. Ministers were summoned, and arrangements made for an interview almost at once. “You’re not allowed,” said the Secretary of Audiences to Liir. “You aren’t part of the original contract.”

“But I’m here to ask the Wizard for help,” said Liir.

“Piss off.”

Dorothy shrugged, grinned too broadly, and straightened her apron. “Don’t fret, Liir. We shouldn’t be more than an hour. All we have to do is show up, and I’m sure the Wizard will grant our requests. We’ll meet back at that café tonight and decide what to do to celebrate before I leave.”

“Are you sure you want to leave?” asked Liir.

“Of course I’m leaving,” she snapped. “This is my exit interview. Why do you think I put myself through this indignity? I didn’t ask to kill the Witch, but having done it, I’m going to collect my reward if I can possibly manage it.”

He bit his lip. “Then may I come with you?”

“You wouldn’t feel at home in Kansas. Few do. Besides, you’re supposed to be un-bewitching that old freak elephant noggin. Are my pigtails even?”

She kissed him in a bruisingly incidental manner. Full of stupid trust, she turned and hurried after her friends. The ceremonial doors banged behind them.

Liir went back to the café. Using up almost all the coin he had, he waited with mounting horror and then failing hopes. She never returned. He never saw her again.

She hadn’t been much, that Dorothy. Priggish, in a way, proud of her wide-eyed charity. Her kindness, at first magnificent, had come to seem a bit—well, cheap. After all, she’d also oiled the Tin Woodman, and soothed the timorous Lion, and discussed differences between the gold and silver standards of foreign currency with the Scarecrow, who seemed for all his brainlessness to be following the whole discussion. She’d cuddled that rank little dog of hers. In light of all that, her solicitousness to Liir seemed nothing more than the Next Good Deed.

Nonetheless, she had been brave, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the Vinkus, all the way back. When the bells began to toll throughout the City, and Liir finally worked up the nerve to ask someone why, Dorothy wasn’t mentioned at all. “The Wizard is deposed,” they said. “The Wicked Witch is dead, but the Wizard is deposed anyway. Some other good witch has been hired to oversee Oz in the interim.”

“Dorothy?” he asked. “What about Dorothy?”

“Dorothy who?” they replied. The cult of Dorothy had yet to take hold.

ONCE, YEARS BACK, in one of the barns at Kiamo Ko, Liir had been horsing about with Nor and her brothers. The children of Fiyero and his wife, Sarima, were high-tempered, and they had persuaded Liir to sit on one end of a timber that they intended to pivot out over a pile of hay below. He could jump to his safety! It would be fun, they said. And so it would have been, had not one of them—Manek, probably—leaped off the balanced end before Liir was fully positioned. Afraid of smashing himself on the stone floor of the barn, Liir had lurched to safety across the edge of a cart. The falling beam failed to kill him.

However, he knocked the wind out of his chest, and for a minute or two he was unable to breathe. He could feel his lungs kicking, and his heart kicking back, but he thought he was dying. The faces of Irji and Nor peered down over the edge of the loft at him. Lying on his back, stretching in vain to open his windpipe, he looked up at their faces contorting with laughter and mild concern.

What Liir remembered, in as near to extremis as he had experienced in his short life, was how embroidered these last few impressions of the world seemed. How the light breaking over the crowns of Irji’s and Nor’s heads seemed shaped like segments of overlapping fins, tying the bright expressions of his friends to the rafters, the cobwebs, the knotholes, the looped ropes, the stray feathers. All of a piece, all of a piece, he thought: why did I never see it before, and now I will die and never see it again.

Then he didn’t die, but lived. His breath punched itself back into place, and he wailed and his torso hurt and everything splintered into disjointed elements. As angry as he felt at Manek for making him the butt of a well-planned prank, he was distressed at the loss of his fine moment of apprehension: The world belonged together like this. The pieces related to each other. There was no contradiction, deepest down. Complexity, yes, but not contradiction. Only connection.

Now, hunched beneath the doorway of a shuttered butchery in the Emerald City, with Dorothy so newly met, and just as quickly vanished, he remembered the incident in the barn at Kiamo Ko. There is no resolving a good mess, he thought. Every breath one takes is a waking up into disjointedness, over and over.

He rocked hard enough to build plum-colored bruises on his shoulders. They hurt when he prodded them, and he prodded them to make them hurt.

He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. By day and night he meandered like the other bits of human trash that drifted up and down the boulevards. Filching from merchants, begging for pennies, relieving themselves in public without concern for decency or hygiene.

Nightly he returned to the café, in case his sense of dread had been for naught, and Dorothy might still make good on her promise and come back for him, at least to say good-bye. A lucky thing, too, for on the fifth day Liir was turning over newspapers looking for scrag-ends of butter pastry when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned, half expecting that the café owner had summoned the police as he’d been threatening. Instead, Liir found the Scarecrow.

“You’re still here,” said the Scarecrow. “Somehow, I thought you would be.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone, you know that.” The Scarecrow sighed. “You knew she would go. She was a Visitor, not of our kind; that kind can’t stay, you know.”

“How do you know? Maybe you just need to invite them.”

The Scarecrow affected a superior attitude, and that was his only answer. “A lot is going to change in a very short time,” he said. “I hope it’s for the best, but it could get ugly in the interim. I thought it smartest to let you know. If I were you I would get out of town.”

“No one wants me,” said Liir, scoffing. “No one cares to come looking for me! No one knows who I am, not even myself. Do you mean that because someone tittered that the Witch was my mother, I’m in danger?”

“I don’t mean that,” said the Scarecrow. “I don’t know if anyone here knows or cares whether the Witch had children, or who they might be. I just mean there’s talk of a cleanup of this neighborhood.” He straightened up—he’d been limping, an odd thing for a Scarecrow—and cast his clumsy gloved hand down Dirt Boulevard, where the denizens of the evening were in their cups. A small crowd had gathered around a couple of half-naked teens making dirty right there on the ground. The tatterdemalions were pelting them with bits of food and egging them on. Elsewhere, bottles emptied of their beer smashed on paving stones. A baby cried piteously.

“What is happening?” said Liir.

“The Wizard has left, and Dorothy is gone, and Lady Glinda Chuffrey, née Arduenna of the Uplands, has been importuned to supervise a government until something more permanent can be arranged.”

“Glinda! I heard of her. The Witch used to talk about her sometimes. Well, she’ll do some good, won’t she?”

“Doing good, cleaning house, takes a mighty strong broom,” said the Scarecrow. “Speaking of which…”

The Scarecrow looked this way and that. The kids on the ground, wheezing and humping in their throes of lust, had secured the crowd’s full attention. The Scarecrow reached into his waistband and, hand over hand, drew out a stake. No, a pole—the handle of the broom. The Witch’s broom. Aha. Hence the limp.

He gave it to Liir. “No one wanted it,” he said. “No one needed it for anything. It served its purpose and was going to be thrown out.”

Liir accepted it with resignation; one more thing to carry back to the home he no longer had. “What do you mean, things are going to get ugly? Seems to me they’re pretty ugly around here already.”

“Well, I mean, for the ceremony of Glinda’s elevation, they’ll have to relocate the urban poor. For one thing. Glinda’s quite tidy and likes things just so.”

“You seem to know a lot all of a sudden. The brains are working?”

“There’s talk that Lady Glinda will eventually yield, and put a wise Scarecrow on the throne,” the Scarecrow said, pride—or derision—making his voice sound odd. “After she cleans up the Wizard’s affairs. And there are those who think that the charmed child Ozma will be located in some cave almost at once, now that the Wizard’s gone. Sounds cynical and desperate to me, but what do I know of government? I’ve had more access to information the last few days than the rest of my life put together.”

“A wise Scarecrow on the throne? You?” said Liir, incredulous. “Sorry, I don’t mean to imply—”

“I,” said the Scarecrow, “or someone like me. Frankly, to human beings, all Scarecrows look the same, which is odd, since we seem to be much more individual than humans. But we’re made in their image and likeness, so all they see in us is themselves, and one mirror is as good as another, I guess.”

“Do you want to be king? Now that you’re so smart?”

“Now that I’m so smart, I know enough not to let on what I want,” said the Scarecrow. “We should move away from here, you know.”

Liir roped the heavy cape around his arms and took the scorched broom. “Any ideas?”

“Just—away. This is all so unseemly.” The Scarecrow indicated the throng. “You’re very young for all this.”

“You’re younger than I,” said Liir.

“I was born old,” said the Scarecrow. “That’s how I was made.”

“I don’t know how I was made,” said the boy. “That’s part of my problem.”

They crossed a small canal into a quieter street and came to rest on a fundament to which ranks of small private barges and blunt-boats were tied up for the night. The smoke of cooking fires, the smell of boiled beans and potato stew hung in the air.

“I miss Dorothy,” he said.

The Scarecrow replied, “It’s the Witch you miss, isn’t it?”

“I hated her too much to miss her.”

“That’s what you think.”

“You think your own thoughts, and leave me mine.” He was outraged at the presumption. “What did you know of the Witch? Auntie Witch? Elphaba Thropp? She was my…she was my witch!”

The Scarecrow paid no attention. “It’s starting, listen,” he said. He held up his hand. The sounds from Dirt Boulevard had altered; a percussion of horses’ hoofs, hundreds of them, came thrumming forward, a scatter of shouts turning into screams. “I waited too long,” the Scarecrow said. He bundled Liir onto the nearest canal boat. A bearded old coot with a sawed-off hand turned and raised a hot skillet at the Scarecrow, but the Scarecrow deflected it with his gloved fist, and the man tumbled into the filthy water. “Loosen the mooring, push away,” said the Scarecrow, “the neighborhood will be in flames by dessert time.”

2

CANDLE PUT DOWN the domingon to rest. Her fingers were swollen with long red welts. She’d been working hard. The young man—they called him Liir, was it?—breathed shallowly, but regularly. And he hadn’t twitched a muscle in the hours since Candle had started playing to him.

At the sound in the doorway, she turned. She expected the Superior Maunt, but it was her grouchy kitchen boss, Sister Cook.

“Someone landed a cushy job where she can sit all day,” said Sister Cook, without real resentment, but she had eyes only for the victim. Hardly nightfall the first day, and the maunts in the cloister of Saint Glinda couldn’t curb their curiosity. “He’s not much to look at, is he?”

Candle made a soft sound in her throat, a kind of purr. A demur? Sister Cook wasn’t sure. She knew Candle to be capable of following instructions, so whatever the girl’s limitations were, they didn’t include deafness or lack of language understanding. She just didn’t speak up; with her it was mostly glottal molasses.

Sister Cook wrinkled her nose, as if considering the merits of a joint selected for the holiday roast. A gauze sheet, nearly transparent, casting lavender shadows on the lad’s near naked form. The coverlet was woven tightly, affording warmth, and was light enough to be whisked away when medical attention was required. As the evening came in, the blood blisters under the skin on this face looked like medallions of honor—or maybe the sites of subcutaneous leech colonies.

“I came to make sure you were all right,” said Sister Cook at last, having taken her fill. She turned back to Candle. “Here. We all must do our part.”

She pulled from her apron pocket a long red frond, fringed with airy, asparagus-fern stamens. Candle started, and the sound in her throat was clearly revulsion.

“Not to worry, it was a willing sacrifice,” said Sister Cook. “I was alone in the yard mincing the cord onions when that Red Pfenix appeared again. He was distraught. He’d been attacked and wounded by something; he was bleeding from the throat and couldn’t speak.”

Candle shrugged and hit her chest with her hand, turning it outward.

“Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire hate to administer to Animals, you know that,” said Sister Cook. “But it doesn’t matter. They couldn’t even if directed to. The Superior Maunt sent them away after lunch. Off on some investigative mission about those Emerald City novices who had their faces scraped. So what was I to do?”

Candle reached out and touched the Pfenix feather.

Sister Cook said, “Nearly shorn of life, he came back here. He pulled out his axial feather himself and walked up to me with it in his beak. Swans sing when they die; Pfenix do, too, but he couldn’t. So you make music for him, please. Out of respect; we’re having Pfenix breast tonight.”

Sister Cook shoved both her hands in her apron pockets. “Pfenix breast, though I’ve diced them small and disguised them as chicken fingerlings so our dear old Mother Rush-to-Judgment doesn’t have a conniption stroke. Don’t forget to come down when you hear the dinner bell; we don’t get Pfenix around here very often, Animal or otherwise.”

She lingered a moment longer and watched Candle hold the red feather. It was almost two feet long and still retained some of its vital elasticity. “Well?” said Sister Cook. “I can’t stand here forever. Play a dirge for the Pfenix, who never made it to his Convention or his class reunion or wherever he was going. He was interested in your playing, I saw. Honor him by accepting his gift.”

Candle tried to remember what she had seen of the domingon when it was played by its maker. She had swooned, for music or love or both, and in her exhilaration, maybe she’d overlooked an aspect of the instrument’s construction. Maybe it had had a pfenix feather, and the master had removed it—pfenix feathers weren’t easy to come by. And a Pfenix feather, freely given besides! What she might learn to play now.

She leaned down and laid the quill end of the feather against the empty notch at one end of the domingon’s lower soundboard. It settled in perfectly, as if the domingon had been built to accommodate this exact feather. Then Candle gently coaxed the feather flat. There was a hasp at the soundboard’s far edge, a leather tooth on a sprung hinge that clamped down hard to hold the pinion end of the tailfeather in place.

Candle turned the pegs, listening to calibrations of tuning too precise for Sister Cook to appreciate. Then Candle flung out both her hands at Sister Cook: Go! Go!

“Ungrateful, the both of you,” said Sister Cook. As she descended the stairs, she heard the first few notes of an exquisite instrument being played by an expert. So suddenly it took her back to school days—when she was a nervous slip of a thing at Madame Teastane’s Female Academy, not the cow she’d become—that she had to steady herself against the wall. She was thirteen, and suffering her first menses. Coming back from a dawn visit to the cold lavatories on the third floor, she’d spotted a red pfenix on the roof of the Master’s lodge. The trees had been airy, just budding, struck with first light, and the bird had looked like red cloisonné set in warm stone. A stab of loveliness unmerited, unexpected. It had cheered her then. She continued down the stairs back to the mauntery’s kitchens, cheered again at the long-forgotten thought, though perhaps she was also happy to anticipate a fine, fine meal that night.

Southstairs

1

THE SUPERIOR MAUNT made it her business to get to the infirmary on a daily basis. She didn’t like what she saw. The young fellow made no discernible progress; indeed, a yellowish sweat rolled off him, hinting of turps. His skin was cold to the touch. He was still breathing, however.

“You may wipe him down when he becomes too clammy,” she said to Candle, and showed her how. The girl seemed reluctant to touch her charge, but did as she was bade.

Holy intuition, the Superior Maunt felt, did not figure among her own administrative talents. She was a common-sensist. She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil. She had tried to lift herself up by clear thinking, and others, too, when she could.

Nonetheless, it was intuition as much as charity that had inspired her to call for a musician. This Candle seemed perfect: demure, even of temper, and increasingly proficient at her instrument.

The Superior Maunt wasn’t overly worried that whatever had befallen Liir—whatever it was, those bruises, those broken bones!—would afflict her pair of investigators. The young missionaries from the motherchapel in the Emerald City, whose faces had been scraped—the boy himself—were possessed of the loveliness of youth, youth’s fine ignorance of its own fleeting grace. The same couldn’t be said of Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. Through long years of dedication and hard work, they had grown wizened and doughy, respectively. They would be safe from the attention of those who wanted to despoil the innocently beautiful. And their training in medicine had fostered keen observational skills; they could protect themselves, if anyone could.

The Maunt Superior noted that though her hearing wasn’t good anymore, the music of the repaired domingon had a way of traveling. The entire mauntery was filled with its soft phrases. Sister Linenflaxen said it was elegiac, damn it, Candle was wooing the lad to his final sleep. She should play something peppier. Everyone else said shhhh. The whole place had fallen under a sort of spell. They were waiting to see what would happen, but the music made them patient.

Sister Graveside ironed a fresh winding cloth and refilled the corked jug with anointing oil, to be ready.

CANDLE WAS MORE OBSERVANT than the Superior Maunt credited, though. She could see that Liir’s respiration responded to her choice of music. He went through periods of rhythmic breathing, like someone sleeping peacefully enough, followed by patterns of shallow flutterbreath.

Restored to glory by the feather of the Pfenix, the domingon had become responsive: the harmonic overtones hung in the air and complemented one another. When the invalid seemed too agitated, she would bring him back with long furling phrases. But too many of those and she was afraid he would deliver his last, deep outgo and breathe in no more: and then he would be dead. So she would agitate him with pizzicato comments and thumb-struck flat-tone responses, to alert his lungs and stimulate his heart.

She was guiding him. She knew it. She just didn’t know where he was.

LIIR WAS IN THE STOLEN BLUNT-BOAT with the Scarecrow, heading along one of the waterways of the Emerald City. It was a week or two after the Witch had died. There was trouble behind, and darkness ahead, but the windows of the town mansions that lined the canal—one flight above street level, above the barricaded stables and stout front gates—threw trapezoids of gold light onto the stinking canal water. Liir and the Scarecrow passed in and out of one another’s view.

“What will you do?” asked the Scarecrow. “Where will you go?”

“I have no place to go,” said Liir. “I’m not going back to Kiamo Ko. Why should I? Only old Nanny there.”

“Have you no obligation to her?”

“Now you ask me? In a word, no. Chistery will mind her well enough.”

“The Snow Monkey? Yes, I suppose he will. Well, the story of Dorothy is done. We won’t see her like again.”

“And a good thing, too,” said Liir. “Off and away with the fairies, just like that, and not so much as a decent good-bye!”

“Her departure was precipitous,” agreed the Scarecrow. “Glinda made the arrangements in something of a hurry.”

The light from a party, candles laid out on a balustrade. The music wafting out open doors: agitated phrases, comments and responses, from some instrument with multiple voices, or many instruments playing very close together. Haunting!

The Scarecrow said, “Don’t fasten on Dorothy. Only unanswerable longing lies down that road. Gone is gone.”

“How wise you are, now that you’re packed with brains. Everyone got some party favor from the Wizard except me. Everyone’s got somewhere to go.”

“Don’t look to me for a map, Liir. Figure it out for yourself. What about your friend, Nor? That Princess Nastoya seemed to think she might still be alive. Maybe you could find her.”

“First I better learn a trade and find a way to support myself. Or watch how the pickpockets practice their trade. Sure, I would like to find Nor, but I’d like to fly, too. Not bloody likely without some help.”

“I can’t be much help.”

“Too highly connected now, I’m sure. Too chummy with the chief cheeses.”

“I have my own plans. Appointments to keep. I’m out of here as soon as I can.”

“I thought that Glinda person had singled you out for a lead position in the government. That’s what they’re saying on the streets, where I pick up my news and other garbage.”

“Lady Glinda doesn’t confide in me. I’ve heard she intends to rule for six months or so, and then abdicate in favor of a straw man. Who?—well, as I’ve admitted, one scarecrow is as good as another. Do you think anyone would notice the difference? When a scarecrow blows apart in a gale wind, the farmer just props up another one. It’s the job to be done that’s important, not who does it.”

“That’s what they used to say at the mauntery,” said Liir. “If a maunt dies and goes to the Afterlife, another maunt comes to take her place. Like replacing a pane of glass. It’s the work that’s important, not the individual who does it.”

“Well, I’m keeping my own counsel about my plans,” said the Scarecrow, “and I’m not long for the Emerald City, I’ll tell you that much. One day you’re a celebrity, the next day you’re hauled off to jail.”

They contemplated this as they came upon a weir. From here, a system of locks stepped the water level down steeply until it disappeared into a fortified grate. Above, armed members of the Emerald City Guard were having a smoke around a brazier. “Better not get their attention,” said the Scarecrow.

“What’s over there, that the canal is guarded?” whispered Liir as they regarded their situation.

“Not sure. Couldn’t say. But it might be Southstairs.”

“Southstairs? What’s that?”

The Scarecrow made a face in the gloom. “The high-security prison for the heartland. Don’t you know anything? I’ve only been here a week and I know that.”

“Why would they be guarding the canal grate?”

“Who knows? Maybe they’re afraid there’ll be a move to liberate Southstairs. I’m told a lot of professional Animals ended up there over the decades, cheek by jowl with murderers, pedophiles. Rapists. Political pamphleteers.”

“The Wizard’s gone. Why aren’t they just throwing the gates open?”

“You want the murderers and rapists back in the neighborhood?”

“Well—no. No, but for the dissenters.”

The Scarecrow frowned. “Dream on. Who’s going to take it upon themselves to decide which is which at this point? The job of personal fiscal betterment is far more urgent.”

“Hard to argue with that. And I bet the suppressed Animals agree with you. Are they on the move, do you know? Or hanging low until they see what develops?”

“Look, I got you safely away from Dirt Boulevard before you were swept up in a purge. I’m not going to deliver you to Southstairs so you can check on the Animals there. Let’s turn about.”

The Scarecrow piloted the blunt-boat backward until there was room enough to swing it around. Their route took them back under the balustrades where the fancy-dress ball was in progress. The laughter was more unguarded, even strident, the music brassier. “Lots to celebrate these days, for those of the right station,” said the Scarecrow. “Good news indeed. Could be another Victory Gala.”

“Celebrating the Wizard’s departure?”

“Celebrating the Witch’s death,” said the Scarecrow. His face was impassive. “Oh, sweet Oz, it’s Glinda’s house!” He tucked his head down. “Liir!”

“She doesn’t know me,” said Liir. He scrambled backward along the boat to its squared-off stern, a small elevated platform for the loading of goods. Craning, he could see a woman leaning her hips against the carved stone balustrades of the balcony. The light from the ballroom fell on her golden hair, which was swept up on her head in a bubbly mass of curls hooped by a diamond tiara. He couldn’t see how old she was, nor her expression, for her face was turned away. She was trim and fit, though her shoulders were slumped—grief, or despair? Or boredom? She dabbed a handkerchief at her nose.

Liir didn’t speak, he didn’t call out—what did he care for Lady Glinda Chuffrey? Auntie Witch had mentioned her only in passing. Sometimes with grudging respect, more often with disapproval. As he watched her, something echoed along the waters of the canal, a sound—as if a private, smoky slide of music accompanied their blunt-boat, counterpoint to the party pandemonium.

Lady Glinda turned, and gripped the rail with both hands, and leaned over as their vessel was slipping beneath a pedestrian bridge. “Shit!” hissed the Scarecrow, and stayed the boat in the shadows by throwing his weight against the pole. “She’s seen us!”

“Who is it?” called Glinda. “Who’s there?—I almost thought—”

Liir wanted to speak up. The Scarecrow clapped a gloved hand against his mouth tightly. Liir struggled, elbowed the Scarecrow, but he wasn’t strong enough to break free before Glinda shook her head as if in disbelief, straightened the epaulets on her ball gown, and returned to her affair.

“What’s the matter with you?” railed Liir, when the Scarecrow had let him go.

“What’s the matter with you?” said the Scarecrow. “I’m trying to keep a low profile in order to help you, and you have to go and signal the heads of state and alert them about it?”

“I didn’t signal her!”

“Well, she must have a sixth sense then, for she turned, and she saw you.”

“She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know I exist!”

“And let’s keep it that way.”

2

THE ANIMOSITY THAT OBTAINED between Sisters Doctor and Apothecaire subsided once dusk fell on their first evening away from the Mauntery of Saint Glinda. The women erected the frame of thin skark ribs and fixed the waterproof awning to it. Then they huddled together under a blanket. When the wolves of the oakhair forest howled their midnight requiem, the Sisters mangled their devotions into such a gabble of syllables and sobs that, had the Unnamed God been condescending to listen, it could only have concluded that its two emissaries were afflicted with sudden-onset glossolalia.

“The Superior Maunt thought it safe to send us out on an exploratory mission even though the faces of those three young missionaries had so recently been scraped,” said Sister Apothecaire the following morning, which dawned damp and windless. “I trust her in every particular,” she added fiercely, unconvincingly.

“Our charge is clear,” said Sister Doctor, “safety or no. We are to make an effort to address the tribal Scrow, if we can locate them, and certainly the Yunamata. We must enquire about the disaster that struck those missionaries. With the conviction of our faith in the Unnamed God, no harm will befall us.”

“Do you propose the missionaries were in greater danger because their faith was weak?” asked Sister Apothecaire.

Sister Doctor’s lips became thinner as she folded the awning away. “Cowardice, said the Superior Maunt, will not serve us in this task.”

Sister Apothecaire relented. “Cowardice is a dubious attribute. Yet I possess it in spades, so I hope on this venture to learn how to use it to my advantage if I must. All gifts come from the Unnamed God, including cowardice, and self-repugnance.”

The mules dropped their heavy hoofs on the path, picking a way between ranks of thin trees with branches nearly empty of leaves. Little cover.

“Perhaps,” said Sister Doctor, “the Superior Maunt sent us out because we would be better able to tend to each other, medically, were we attacked.”

“If we survived. Well, I’ve no doubt that our skills here in the wilderness will prove useful. After all, I do speak a dialect of West Yumish.”

“When you’ve had a bit too much seasonal sherry.”

They laughed at that and proceeded in companionable silence until Sister Apothecaire couldn’t stand it. “Now Liir is Candle’s responsibility. Funny little thing. What can she bring to Liir that we can’t?”

“Don’t be stupid. She can bring youth and charm, if she can get his attention. She can give him a reason to survive. This is something neither you nor I could do. If he opened up his eyes after a long coma and saw either of us right off, he’d probably kick the bucket in a nonce.”

Sister Apothecaire did not murmur assent. She was rather proud of her looks. Well, her face, anyway; her figure was regrettably lumpy. “Perhaps,” she said distractingly, “Candle has a natural talent that the Superior Maunt can sense.”

“What sort of talent?” Sister Doctor shifted in her saddle and turned to peer at her colleague. “You don’t mean a talent for magic? That’s distinctly forbidden in the order.”

“Come come. You know perfectly well we resort to it when we must. Not that we’re very good at it. I need hardly remind you that these are dangerous times. Perhaps the Superior Maunt thinks that in the rehabilitation of the boy, such a talent is called for.”

By the straightening of her spine Sister Doctor signaled that she did not intend to second-guess the Superior Maunt’s motives. Sister Apothecaire regretted having brought it up. “Well,” she continued, falsely jolly, “I don’t have much of a sense of Candle one way or the other. If she’s got common magic or common sense, it’s news to me either way.”

“She certainly has no talent for music.” Sister Doctor sniffed. “I do remember the day she arrived, though. I happened to be suturing one of the novices in the kitchen. I turned to ask kindly for water, and there was that Candle, her rickety domingon slung over one shoulder like a crossbow. Mad old Mother Yackle had her by the hand, as if she’d just created her out of calves’ foot jelly. ‘The gypsy Quadling, her uncle leaves her to us,’ said Mother Yackle.”

“Mother Yackle doesn’t speak and hasn’t in years.”

“That’s why I remember the event so distinctly.”

“Did you see the Quadling uncle?”

“I went to the window, and he was making his way rather hurriedly through the kitchen garden. I called out to him, for there are procedures for the introduction of a novice, and this wasn’t one of them. But he wouldn’t be stopped, merely called over his shoulder that he would be back in a year if he was still alive. It’s rare to see Quadlings this far north these days. I imagine the poor girl is quite lonely.”

“Well, yes. No one speaks Quaddle.”

“I believe the term is Qua’ati. So is Candle mute or is it that she just hasn’t anyone to speak her native tongue with?”

“I don’t know.”

Perhaps it was Candle’s silence and self-control that had inspired the Superior Maunt to choose her for keeping vigil over Liir. The maunts began to regret their tendencies to bark and spark at each other. Thinking on their noisy failings, they fell into a silence now.

IN THE FOLLOWING FEW DAYS, they came across their share of blue squirrels, bald egrets, and disagreeable emmets. The egrets kept to the ground cover, rarely taking wing; the emmets preferred the bedding. It wasn’t until near dusk on the fourth day that the maunts came across an Animal, a lone and pagan Water Buffalo in the shallows of a cove of Restwater, Oz’s biggest lake.

“Oh, oh,” moaned the Water Buffalo at their approach, “not the missionary voice traveling in twos! Not again! I bury my own waste, I only speak when spoken to, I lick my knees fifty times a night before I sleep—what more am I to do to appease the fates? I don’t want to be converted! Don’t you understand? Oh, all right, get it over with. I’ll lapse before nightfall, I promise you. I can’t help myself. Perhaps I’m too far gone for you to bother with me?” He peered, both gloomily and hopefully, at them.

“We’re not converters,” said Sister Apothecaire. “We haven’t the time.”

“And who cares about you? You can go to hell,” said Sister Doctor, meaning to be cheerful. This was the right note, as it happened; the Water Buffalo began to smile.

“Scarcely see a soul coming from your direction who doesn’t have designs on my immortal soul,” said the Water Buffalo. “It used to be I was worried about my hide. I always thought a soul was private, but it appears it can be colonized against your will if you don’t watch out.”

“Well, we are maunts,” admitted Sister Apothecaire.

The Water Buffalo winced. “No. Say it ain’t so. You’re plates of glamour and glasses of fashion, as anyone who rests a sore eye upon you would have to agree.”

“Don’t be mincing,” snapped Sister Doctor. “These are perfectly respectable clothes for traveling in.”

“Depends on where you want to get to,” intoned the Water Buffalo.

“Look, we can evangelize like the best of them, if that’s what it’s going to take—”

“Sorry, sorry!” said the Water Buffalo. “I’ll be good. What’s your game?”

They told him. He knew nothing of the attacks on the young maunts and their scrapings, nor had he ever heard of Liir or his misadventure. But he had seen airborne battalions of trained creatures flying so high that he couldn’t make them out. “Something’s amiss,” he said. “I know there’s been an attempt to call a Congress of Birds out in the west, but lately I’ve seen few Birds brave enough to fly at anything like a decent height.”

“We can’t patrol the skies right now,” said Sister Doctor. “It’s the Scrow or the Yunamata we need to find.”

“The Scrow rarely venture this far east. However, you may come across a small band of Yunamata, if they haven’t moved off yet. They’re down from Kumbricia’s Pass. I came across them bathing this morning. We all minded our own business. They don’t have anything to do with the Unnamed God, so they don’t bother me, and I don’t bother them. They rinsed their totems and washed their hair, and one of them gave birth to a baby underwater. They’re rather froggy folk when it comes to birthing. They circulated a birth pipe around, passed out in the sun for an hour or so, and then gathered their things and left. They seemed to be heading southwest. Several dozen of them, no more.”

“If you see them, tell them we’re coming,” said Sister Doctor.

“Jubilation, they’ll be over the moon,” drawled the Water Buffalo. “If you want to meet up with them, better not tell them you’re coming, honeys.”

The sisters moved on, but before they had lost sight of the Water Buffalo, Sister Apothecaire thought to turn and call, “We forgot to ask your name!”

“Only the chattering classes of Animal have names!” the Water Buffalo replied cheerily. “And there hasn’t been a professional Animal the length and breadth of Oz for thirty years. If I don’t have a name, I can’t be targeted as a potential convert, can I?”

A moment later, when he was out of sight, his voice rang toward them thinly: “Though if you had to locate me, I suppose I’d answer to Buff…”

“Weird creature,” said Sister Apothecaire a while later.

“He’d survived, a talking Animal in the wild,” Sister Doctor reminded her. “It can’t have been easy. After the Wizard’s banishment, the Animals didn’t rush for reassimilation. Who could blame them, with all they’d been through.”

“Sounds as if the creature’s been dogged by zealots, though.”

“Indeed. Well, the Emperor is a devout man, and wants all his subjects to enjoy the benefits of faith, I suppose.”

ANOTHER NIGHT, and the wolves howled more fiercely than ever. The dawn seemed full of its own arcane purpose, a pale light leaching through grey cloud-hemp. The maunts ventured out across the Disappointments. Then, easy as playing at knackers, they came upon a group of Yunamata doing winter rush-work.

“Hail,” said Sister Apothecaire in Yumish, “or have I said hell by mistake? Hello? Yoo hoo Yunamata? We come in peace.”

“What are you saying?” said Sister Doctor. “They look mystified.”

“I’m addressing their tribal gods,” said Sister Apothecaire, and in Yumish, “I. Good. Good one. Good human person woman being. I. Good thing. Where is the library?” In her anxiety it was all she could remember.

“They look amused,” said Sister Doctor.

“That’s respect,” said Sister Apothecaire. But amusement was better than hostility, so she began to relax, and more of the plain tongue began to return to her.

The Yunamata were known for keeping to themselves. Nomadic, but not a horse culture like the Scrow, this Vinkus tribe was fleet of foot and economical of domestic impedimenta, needing only a few pack animals to carry their belongings. Generally they sheltered in Kumbricia’s Pass or the forested slopes of the Kells south of there. What were they doing out in open country?

Sister Doctor, who never liked to go slumming as a veterinarian, felt she could sniff out an Animal tendency: the Yunamata looked as if they might all have one giant, docile Frog among their ancestors. Way, way back. Nothing like webbing between their digits, no long flickering tongues, no, no; they were human through and through. But an amphibian sort of human, with leathery skin, narrow ridiculous limbs, and thin lips that seemed partly withdrawn into their mouths.

One could laugh at the silliness of them. Laugh—and then be carved to shreds, for when aroused they could be a formidable enemy. The Yunamata had skill with knives. Mostly they used their serrated tools—lethal curved blades set in handles of the hardest mahogany—for aid in the construction of their tree nests, where they harbored at night. Those same knives could carve a pig or eviscerate a minor canon with equal efficiency.

Sister Apothecaire set out to convince the Yunamata that the maunts were abroad neither to betray the clan nor to convert them. Just in case, like the Water Buffalo, they’d previously been targeted as a population ripe for conversion. As a group, they listened, promoting no spokesperson among them. By turns they mouthed small neat phrases. Sister Apothecaire took pains to translate these remarks to her colleague carefully, and to question her own understanding if she had any doubt. She didn’t want to assent to human martyrdom merely because she’d forgotten some nicety of Yumish grammar. Was there a retractional pluperfect subjunctive in Yumish?

“You are going on quite a while,” said Sister Doctor after an hour or so.

“I am doing my job and trying to see if we’re going to be invited to stay for supper,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Leave me be.”

“I hope they aren’t teetotalers. I think I’m getting a sniffle.”

When the conversation had concluded at last, and the Yunamata retreated to prepare a meal, Sister Doctor said, “Well? Well? I deduce from your smug expression that they’re not about to sharpen their blades to scrape our faces from us. Though I’d like to hear it put directly, to ease my mind.”

“They speak by indirection. They know about the scrapings. They have seen evidence of it. They say it must be the Scrow. The Scrow have a tradition of royalty, and their queen is an old woman named Nastoya who has been in declining health for a decade. Were we to fulfill the mission assigned us, we would next have to hunt for this Princess Nastoya and reprove her about these infractions. The Yunamata insist that the Scrow must be in allegiance with the Emperor.”

“Ridiculous. If the Scrow were in allegiance with the Emperor, would they be scraping his emissaries? Or are the Yunamata lying?”

“Look at them. Could they lie?”

“Don’t be soft. Of course they could. The most purring of cats can still kill a bird within half a purr.”

“I suppose I believe them,” said Sister Apothecaire, “because they admit to their capacity for vengeance. But they also have told me that this is the season of the jackal, and out of wariness of the moon’s opinion, they take a vow of gentility. Babies born under the jackal moon are considered lucky. Babies born in Restwater are luckier still.”

“Are you sure you’ve understood correctly? Throughout Oz the season of the jackal is considered dangerous.”

“Perhaps it’s a kind of propitiation,” said Sister Apothecaire. “They mentioned the Old Dowager, a kind of deity who harvests souls. She sounded a bit like Kumbricia. Do you remember Kumbricia, from your schoolgirl lessons in antique lore? Kumbricia, the oldest witch from the time of creation? Source of all venom and malice?”

“I turned my back on such things when I entered a unionist mauntery,” said Sister Doctor. “I’m surprised you remember such poppydegook.”

“I don’t know if we’re getting a meal,” said Sister Apothecaire, gesturing, “but look, it appears we’re getting a pipe of some sort.” A delegation of Yunamata was approaching with a communal smoke.

“A vile habit,” snarled Sister Doctor, but she determined to do her best at being sociable, and stomach such barbaric customs as courtesy required.

3

NO ONE AT THE MAUNTERY, Candle included, knew enough about musical instruments to appreciate the domingon she arrived with. It was made of seasoned wrenwood by a master from the Quadling Kells, and Candle had first heard it played at a summer festival. The master himself performed, using his fingers as well as a fiddle bow and a glass emulant that he kept tucked under his bearded chin when not required. Now Candle recalled that the domingon had been fitted out with a feather, though at the time Candle had thought it merely ornamentation—and a sexy fillip at that.

She had thought she was in love with him, and had slept with him before dusk, but a few days later she realized it was the music she had loved. What she heard in its music: a coaxing, an invitation to remember, to disclose. Perhaps because her voice was small and high, she couldn’t project, and she imagined it would be more gratifying to play music than to speak. Mercilessly she pestered her uncle to circle back and buy her the domingon; she’d been surprised when he obliged.

Candle was not simple, not in the least, but her debility had made her a still person. She listened to church bells, when they pealed, trying to translate; she watched the way the paper husks of an onion fell on a table, and examined the rings of dirt that onion mites had left in parallel rows on the glossy wet inside. Everything said something, and it wasn’t her job to consider the merit or even the meaning of the message: just to witness the fact of the message.

She was therefore a calmer person than most, for there seemed no dearth of messages from the world to itself. She merely listened in.

For a week now she’d been playing the domingon until her fingers ached, watching and listening for the language of Liir’s recovery. It wasn’t unusual that she had had experience with men; Quadlings were a casual sort in matters of sexual prudence. The carnal experience had neither scarred her nor much interested her. Through it, at best, she had learned something of the human body, its hesitations and reservations as well as the surge of its desires.

In the infirmary, as her eyes moved from the instrument to the invalid, she felt she was picking up some news. Was it some minor language of olfactory signals, an arcane pattern of eye twitches, a hieroglyph etched in the beads of his sweat? She didn’t know. She was sure of this, though: Liir’s body seemed the same in temperature, comportment, and color. But he was going through a phase of crisis, and would either awaken for sure or die at once: no middle ground.

She didn’t know if she should go get the Superior Maunt or if she should stay at her post. She was afraid if she left, if she dropped the domingon on the floor even for the twenty minutes it might take to find the Superior Maunt and get counsel, she would lose Liir for good. Wherever he was, he was lost, and the music of her instrument was his only hope back.

So Candle stayed seated and played till her own fingers bled, in ripples of waltz, as if nothing were wrong. The blue of the sky thinned till it was pierced with star prickers, and then the jackal moon rose and slowly lumbered over till it could look in the window and watch for itself. Watch, and listen, as Candle played Liir through his memories.

“SHE’LL BE THERE,” said Liir.

“Who? Where? Are you talking about Elphaba?” said the Scarecrow.

“Of course not. I’m talking about Nor. The girl I knew. Maybe my half-sister, if the Witch really was my mother and Fiyero my father, as some have guessed.”

“In Southstairs? A girl?”

“Can you tell me why not?”

The Scarecrow didn’t answer. Liir thought: Maybe he imagines that someone as insignificant to the mighty Wizard of Oz—a mere girl, no less—hardly merited imprisonment. Maybe he thinks she might as easily have been murdered, or tossed onto the streets to drift and starve. How long had it been anyway since she had been taken from Kiamo Ko? Two years? Three? But then Princess Nastoya had implied that Nor might have survived…

They had circled the canals a bit longer and found a place to berth underneath some rotting trees by the side of a pub. “I can’t stay with you for much longer, you know,” said the Scarecrow. “I only came to give you the Witch’s broom, and to wish you well, and to protect you from the clearing of Dirt Boulevard. I have my own path to follow. I would see you safely to the other side of the gates of this troubled city if I could. If you would let me.”

“I’m not going,” said Liir. “Not without Nor. Or not without finding out what has happened to her.”

At a crossroads, unwilling to move, they sat disconsolate.

“Look,” said Liir, at graffiti dashed sharply and sloppily on the pub’s side wall. It said HAPPY ENDINGS ARE STILL ENDINGS. “You’ve done your work, you’ve kept your word to Dorothy. I have the broom. But I won’t be ushered out of harm’s way. What’s the point? I have no happy ending—cripes, I’ve had no happy beginning, either. The Witch is dead, and Dorothy is gone, and that old Princess Nastoya has asked us for help. As if I could! Just because Elphaba would have!”

“You needn’t fulfill some promise Elphaba made. If you’re not her son, you have no obligation there.”

“Well, there’s Nor, too. Call it a promise to myself.”

The Scarecrow held his head in his hands. “The Tin Woodman has left to cultivate the art of caring. He has his work cut out for him, poor sod. The Lion is suffering severe depression; his cowardice was his sole identifying trait, and now he’s pitiably normal. Neither of them can help you much, I’m afraid. You should get yourself out of here while you can. Start over.”

“Start over? I never started the first time. Besides, it’s not getting out that I need to do. It’s getting in.”

The Scarecrow pushed a hand against his heart and shook his head.

“Into Southstairs,” said Liir.

“I know what you meant,” said the Scarecrow. “I’m not stupid. Now.”

“You’re the one I need to keep on my side—”

The Scarecrow interrupted with a brusqueness that might have been meant kindly. “Don’t bother to look for me. You won’t find me. Save yourself for someone you might recognize. I’m not in your story, Liir. Not after this.”

So they took their leave, with little fanfare or fuss. The friendship between them was no larger or more hopeful than the shape of a scorched broom, which Liir waved halfheartedly as the Scarecrow loped out of sight, once and for all.

The boy sat in the bobbing blunt-boat and listened to the sound of laughter spilling out the open windows of the pub. The smell was of beer and vomit, and old urine splashed against the wall. The moon was invisible behind the clouds. The sound of a tentative waltz, beguiling and minor, hung over the stinking waters of the canal and the desolate boy there.

THE NEXT MORNING, Liir presented himself at the servants’ entrance of the town house he’d passed the night before.

“We don’t give handouts and we don’t need another coal shoveler, so get yourself out of here before I assist you with a boot in your behind,” said the houseboy.

“If you please, I’m not looking for food or work. Sir.”

The houseboy smirked. “Toadying bastard. Call me sir again, and I’ll beat the crap out of you.”

Liir couldn’t follow. “I meant no disrespect. I just want to know how I can get an audience with Lady Glinda.”

The houseboy’s sneer needed rearranging with a good swift kick, Liir decided, but when the houseboy guffawed, his voice was less hostile. “Oh, a simpleton. Pardon me, I didn’t realize. Listen, the very Margreave of Tenmeadows, Lord Avaric himself, hasn’t been able to get her ladyship’s attention. She’s got her hands full, what with the goings-on in the Wizard’s Palace. The people’s Palace now. Or should be. Or will be. What, you want to fling yourself in her lap and call her mother? More urchins have tried that already than you could fit on a barge and drown in Kellswater. Now get off with you.”

“Whatever mother I don’t have, it certainly isn’t her.” He held up the broom and shook it in the houseboy’s face.

“What’s that then?”

Liir said, “You tell Lady Glinda that a boy at the back gate has the Witch’s broom. Tell her Dorothy gave it me. I don’t care how long you take, I’ll wait.”

“That thing? That’s a corpse of a broom. Not fit for kindling.”

“It’s been through a lot. That’s how you know it’s the real thing.”

“You’re a stubborn bugger. I can’t be standing here chewing the fat all day. Tell you what. Do me some magic with that broom and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

“I can’t do magic. And the broom isn’t a magic wand. It’s a broom. It sweeps.”

“Sweep a floor with that thing, you’ll leave char marks, and I’ll be the one cleaning up after you. Get out of here, now. Go on.”

Liir raised the broom again and tilted it forward. The houseboy shrank back, as if afraid flecks of scorch would fall on his livery. Noticing this, Liir decided it would be worth his while to wait around and see what happened.

His instincts proved sound. The houseboy wasn’t able to resist gossiping about his conversation with Liir. Just before noon, a housekeeper came out, tucking her apron strings in and wiping crumbs from her lips. “Love a grouse, you’re still here, and that’s a good thing!” she gabbled. “The houseboy’s been docked a month’s pay for being silly-headed! Get over here, Her Haughtiness wants to see you at once! You reek, haven’t you washed? The pump, there, boy, scrub your grubby armpits and wipe that smirk off your face. This is Lady Glinda that lives here, not some cow-mistress. And hop smart, you. She’s waiting.”

HE WAS BROUGHT TO a lady’s parlor and told to behave and touch nothing.

He could look, though, and he did. He had never seen an upholstered chair before. He’d never seen one chair face another chair that looked identical. Cushions everywhere, fresh flowers, and gleaming crystal bubbles set on little stands. A collection of commemorative baubles, he guessed. To what end?

A fire of aromatic woods burned in the dainty hearth. Why a daytime fire in such a well-built mansion, when the citizens outside couldn’t get close enough to a brazier to warm their hands, let alone soften their supper bricks of congealed molasses?

He wandered to the window to open it, let in some air. It looked out over the canal where he and the Scarecrow had drifted the night before. From this height, he could see the rooflines of the fancy houses. Palaces, almost, or palaces-in-training. Beyond the chimney pots, beyond the roof gardens, the cupolas and spires and domes, two more massive buildings rose: the domed Palace of the Wizard, in the dead center of the City, and off to the right, the steep bluestone ramparts of the prison known as Southstairs.

It was like looking at a picture in a book—not that he’d seen all that many books. Only the Grimmerie, and that only from a distance. Here, the etched rooflines seemed like a hundred man-made hills. Set here and there to delight the eye with infinite variety in depth and perspective.

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history.

He hardly believed he had summoned the nerve to come here. But it was all he could think of to do. The Princess Nastoya had promised, in exchange for his helping her, to listen for news of Nor. But why work backward? The Princess would have to be scrubbing the news of the Emerald City to learn about Nor. Whereas now—he was here already—so let Princess Nastoya work out her troubles for herself. Liir had all the City before him. He would be forthright and claim what he wanted for himself. On his own terms.

“The Lady Glinda,” announced a man’s voice. When Liir turned, the door was already being drawn closed behind her, and Lady Glinda came near.

It was like being approached by a decorated holiday tree tiptoeing in jeweled slippers. Lady Glinda was the most exceedingly dressed person Liir had ever seen. He almost flinched, but knowing that Lady Glinda had been a friend of Elphaba’s stiffened his nerve. “How do you do,” she was saying, in a voice like a piccolo blowing soapsuds. She tilted her head. Was it an upperclass gesture, like a genuflection? Ought he pivot his head in reply? He remained upright. “Liir, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He had never called anyone “ma’am” in his life. Where had that come from?

“They said it was Liir. I thought I might have misheard. Please, won’t you sit—” She took a better look at the state of his clothes and changed her mind. “Would you permit me to take a seat? I’m not resting well these days, and it’s a strain.”

“Of course.” He realized he was to remain standing, though he drew a little nearer. Settling gingerly on a chaise longue upholstered in peppermint stripes, she arranged a bolster at the small of her back, and then reclined, lifting one ankle up from time to time. Maybe she had a twitch.

“I’m told you have something to show me, a talisman of some sort. You’ve got it wrapped in that shroud. A broom, a witch’s broom. The broom? The broom of the Wicked Witch of the West?”

“I didn’t call her that,” he said.

“How did you come by it? Last I heard of it, that Dorothy Gale was humping it around the Palace like some sort of a trophy, brandishing it for all to see.”

“I’m told she’s gone,” said Liir.

“She is.” The tone of authority was convincing. Tired, regretful, convincing.

“Gone the way old Ozma is gone? Disappeared? Done in?”

“Gone is gone,” said Glinda. “Who knows, maybe Ozma herself will be back someday. I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“And maybe Dorothy, too? Or is she gone too far to come back?”

“You ask bold questions of a lady you’ve just met,” said Glinda, and she looked at him sharply. “And you haven’t answered mine. How did you come by Elpha—I mean the Witch’s broom?”

“You can say Elphaba to me.” Liir unwrapped the broom and held it up for Glinda to see.

Glinda didn’t look at the broom. She was staring at the Witch’s cape. She hoisted herself to her feet and reached to touch its hem. “I’d know this anywhere. This is Elphaba’s cape. How did you come by it? Answer me, thug—thief—or I’ll have you thrown in Southstairs.”

“Fair enough, I’m headed there anyway. Yes, it’s her cape. Why wouldn’t it be? I took it when I left her castle. I’m her—”

He couldn’t say son. He didn’t know. “I’m her helper. I came from the castle with Dorothy. When the Witch melted, all that was left was the broom. The Scarecrow brought it back to me after Dorothy vanished. No one else wanted it.”

“It’s a burned stick. Throw it on the fire.”

“No.”

Glinda reached out a hand, and Liir took it. She wanted help getting up. “Let me look you in the eye, young man. Who are you? How did you come to be at Kiamo Ko?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. But I served the Witch and saw Dorothy safely to the Emerald City, and I need your help.”

“You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a false identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I’ll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her.” Her head tilted again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. “You knew my Elphie!”

He would not indulge in cheap grief. “I want to find out what happened to a girl kidnapped by the Wizard’s men a few years back. She lived at Kiamo Ko when we got there.”

“We?”

“The Witch and I…”

“The Witch and you.” Her hands reached out hungrily for the cape and rubbed its hem, as if it were leaves of thyme or hyssop. “What girl might that be?”

“Her name is Nor. She is the daughter of Fiyero, one-time prince of the Arjikis, and his wife, Sarima, also kidnapped that very day. You knew Fiyero.”

“I knew Fiyero.” It was clear Glinda did not want to speak about him. “Why should I bother with you?”

“Nor was his daughter. She was my—” Again, he couldn’t say half-sister. He didn’t know. “My friend.”

Glinda reached out and took the charred broomstick and cradled it. “I know about friends.”

“Friends have children,” Liir said carefully. “If you can’t help your friends, you can help their children. Do you have children?”

“I do not. Lord Chuffrey was not so inclined.” She reconsidered. “I mean to say, he is so very old. Old and wealthy. His interests lie elsewhere.”

She drifted among the occasional tables. “I don’t know why this girl you mention was taken away, or, if she proved that much of a worry, why she should still be alive.”

“Everyone knows the Wizard is gone. Surely his enemies don’t need to stay imprisoned? If she’s alive, why shouldn’t she be released?”

A rustling of stiffened tulle sounded in her underskirts. “How do I know you are telling the truth?” she said at last. “These are such treacherous days. I’ve spent my adult life up till now in salons and theater boxes, not in closed assembly with grasping, pinching…ministers.” She spat out the word. “Insects. And I thought girls at school were devious. Here, every impassive expression hides a bloated ambition for—for dominance, I suppose. And any one of my so-called loyal cabinet could be sending you in here with a tale designed to catch at my throat. I must have more proof you are who you profess to be. This may not be Elphie’s cape you’re sporting. Maybe my sorrow tempts me into seeing what I would love to see. This may not be her broom. Tell me more, you Liir. How did her broom come to be so burnt?”

“I’m not sure. In truth, I didn’t see her die, I only heard what Nanny and Dorothy and the others said. I was locked downstairs. But the broom burnt, that’s all I know.”

“Anyone could tell a lie!” cried Glinda. “Anyone could burn a broom and make up a story about it!” She beat herself on the breastplate with a clenched fist, and suddenly rushed across the room, overturning a small table and shattering some china dolls. She flung the broom in the fire. “Look, I could do it, too. There’s nothing to it.”

“Take the broom, burn it,” he replied. “Take the cape and burn it, too, or sew it into a hairshirt and wear it under your fancy ball gowns. It doesn’t matter. Give me a way to get to Nor, and to get her out; you can have whatever you want. I will come back and serve you as I served the Witch. I have no other plan for my days alive once I answer the question about Nor.”

Glinda collapsed on the nearest stool and wept. She needed a man to come and take her in his arms, to give her a shoulder. Liir wasn’t a man, nor was his shoulder made for a highborn lady to weep upon. He stood foolishly by, twisting his hands, averting his eyes here, there.

“Look. Glinda, look.” In his excitement he forgot to use her title.

She raised her eyes and turned to where he was pointing.

The fire still danced and hissed. Some trick of physics caused the flue to hum faintly like an old folk melody, as if someone were on the rooftop playing an instrument. The music was not merely consoling—and it was that—but commanding: look, it said, look. The broom lay on the back of a log that seethed with flames of pumpkin and pale white. The broom was untouched.

“Sweet Oz…,” said Glinda. “Liir, take it. Take it back.”

“I’ll burn my hands!”

“You won’t.” Glinda chortled a few syllables in a language Liir couldn’t understand. “This is one of the few spells I could ever really master; it came in handy when my husband required me to hand him the burnt toast on the mornings I thought it my wifely duty to prepare his breakfast. Go on. Grasp it and bring it back.”

He did, and Glinda was right: the broom had not only neglected to ignite further—but it also wasn’t even warm to the touch.

“A burnt broom that has had enough, and refuses to burn further…Keep that with you,” said Glinda. “I was wrong to doubt you. Whoever you are, however you came by it, this is the Witch’s broom. And so I must trust you to be telling me the truth.”

She shrugged and tried to smile, and almost began to blubber. “Elphie would know what to do!”

“Tell me what you know,” he said, as softly as he could.

“I don’t have access to the register of prisoners in Southstairs Academy, which is the place your—Nor—is most likely to be if she wasn’t murdered long ago. I’m not even sure a register is kept. But I know someone could get you in, at least. Whether you could find Nor or get her out, or yourself either, I can’t guess. But I can make introductions for you; in memory of Elphaba, I will do that much.”

“Who would help me? A friend of yours?”

“No friend of mine, but a bereaved member of her family. Next of kin to the dearly departed Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West…”

“But I thought Elphaba’s sister was dead!” said Liir. “Wasn’t Nessarose—killed by Dorothy’s clumsy house?”

“Yes, she was. But didn’t you know? Didn’t Elphaba tell you? She had a brother, too. A younger brother named Shell.”

4

IN COMING TO THEIR SENSES, Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire were gratified to find they still possessed their faces. The pack mules were nowhere to be seen though, nor their food supplies, nor their hosts.

“What is that engine in my brain?” said Sister Doctor, after she’d vomited into some ferns.

“I feel as if the jackal moon had been down here snouting around in an unseemly manner.” Sister Apothecaire adjusted her garments. “It must be the effects of the ceremonial pipe.”

“And that’s why the Yunamata never built a city nor invented algebrarish nor bowed to the Wizard.”

“With a smoke that kicks like that, who needs a city or an Emperor?”

They ambled in oppressive daylight. “I suppose we should think about what we’re doing,” said Sister Doctor.

“Yes. If the Yunamata are right, then the Scrow must be responsible for the scrapings. So we’re liable to wander into hotter water if we are able to find them.”

“I think that’s our calling, isn’t it?”

“Hmmm.” They had a choice: to venture farther into the foothills of the Kells, and make their presence known to the Scrow—or to go back and claim they’d failed. Without discussing it further, they pressed on. Duty weighed more heavily than dread.

THE MAUNTS KNEW that their professional skills—to be loving, to be devout, to be local in their attentions and spiritual in their desires—had not prepared them to be government envoys. Still, since their mauntery served as a way station for those who acted upon the stage of the world, the good sisters considered themselves at least as broad-minded as any other cloistered soul.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire, nonetheless, were unprepared for the breadth of the Scrow camp when they came upon it. More than a thousand clanfolk, they estimated, maybe fifteen hundred, and a virtual zoography of physical types. The nomads tented in patterns that followed their occupations.

Some castes managed the animals, primarily a huge herd of sheep collected from fell-swards to be penned for a late winter lambing. Other castes specialized in creating sumptuous hangings and carpets from the wool of those same sheep. A contingent of fierce-browed young men with slender, tapering dark beards seemed to be a kind of clerks’ collective, running here and there with instructions, corrections, assessments, revisions. Older men and women—some much older—managed the care of children with surprising mildness and efficacy.

At the center of the hubbub rose a tented pagoda. Around it, a good many brass urns issued an aroma of raspberry and heart-of-musk. It didn’t take the maunts long to realize that the incense wasn’t devotional, but hospitable: the smell from the Princess’s pagoda was, well, a stench.

First fed on a peppery broth that seemed to clear both their sinuses and their brains, the maunts were then allowed a chance to pray and compose themselves. It was almost dusk when they were brought into a tent to meet an ambassador of some sort.

“Please, sit,” he told them, and sat as well. He was a portly man on the threshold of old age. One eye wandered as if bedeviled by an interior vision it didn’t appreciate. His skin was the color of fine whisky. “We hope you have been made comfortable. Or comfortable enough.”

The maunts nodded. Their approach had been greeted without apparent alarm, and they’d been welcomed respectfully.

“Very good, very good,” he said. “Even in these uncongenial times, with the Emperor cudgeling us heathen into conversion through the force of his holy mace, we pride ourselves on clinging to our customs. Charity to visitors ranks high among our traditions. My name is Shem Ottokos.”

“Lord Ottokos, you speak very well,” ventured Sister Doctor.

“For a Scrow, you mean,” he said, taking no offense. “I had a university degree at Shiz, back in the days when there was more collegiality at college. I studied the languages, ancient and modern.”

“You had a notion to be a translator?”

“My notions are insignificant. I am the chief interpreter for her Highness now. I assume you have ventured into our tribal lands to gain an audience with the Princess?”

Though the maunts believed the native land of the Scrow to be significantly farther west, on the other side of the Great Kells, theirs wasn’t to quibble. “Yes,” said Sister Doctor. “We have work to complete. We are investigating the cause and agency of the recent spate of scrapings. If it would suit the Princess to grant us an audience, we should be able to clear up our concerns and be on our way almost at once. Is the Princess up to seeing us?”

Without answering, he stood and flicked both his hands, which the maunts took to mean: Come. They followed him from his tent and toward the royal pavilion in the center of the camp.

“She has not been well for more years than anyone can remember,” said Lord Ottokos as they walked. “She has little energy for idle chat and I will not bother to translate anything that would upset her. I would suggest you contain your remarks to ten minutes, no more. When I get up to leave, so shall you.”

“We might have brought tribute…,” murmured Sister Apothecaire.

“Sister!” said Sister Doctor sharply. “We are maunts of the House of Saint Glinda! We do not bring tribute to a foreign princess!”

“I meant a cake, or a witty novel,” she explained unhappily.

“She has no need of cakes or novels,” said Lord Ottokos. “Meaning no disrespect to our Princess, I would recommend that you breathe through your mouths. It is not considered impertinent to hold your sleeve in front of your nose. Try not to gag, though; it upsets her Highness.”

The maunts exchanged glances.

The interior of the pavilion was dark and dank. Even chilly, come to that. Eight or ten heavy stone caskets with perforated lids slowly exhaled sheets of moisture that hung, nearly visible, in the air. Ice, thought Sister Doctor. They’ve carried ice down from the higher Kells, where it lasts all year long. And the cold serves to tamp down the smell of rot. Now that’s a labor, for ice is heavy, and the higher Kells are not convenient…Perhaps that’s why they’re so far from their normal territory at this time of year, for easier access to the ice pack up the eastern, more gradual slope of the Kells…

Sister Apothecaire, whose eyes had adjusted more quickly to the gloom, pinched Sister Doctor’s elbow and indicated a massive mound of reeking laundry on a low table. It was rolling on its side and opening its eyes.

“Your Highness, may I present Sisters Lowly and Lower-even-than-that,” said Lord Ottokos, before he remembered to speak in his own tongue. “Ladies, the Princess Nastoya acknowledges your presence.”

She had done nothing of the sort. She had not spoken nor even so much as blinked.

Lord Ottokos continued. “The Princess enquires after your health, assumes it is sufficiently robust or you wouldn’t be here, and compliments you on your courage. Have you news of Liir?”

The maunts turned to each other, but in the darkness of the pavilion they could scarcely read each other’s expressions. “Liir?” said Sister Apothecaire faintly. She was beginning to need her sleeve, as had been proposed.

“The boy who denied he was Elphaba’s son. Is that not why you came to us? To tell us of him? Where is Liir?”

Sister Apothecaire began, “Why, that’s uncanny, I never—”

But Sister Doctor cut her off, saying “We came to discover why the Scrow are scraping the faces of unarmed travelers.”

Lord Ottokos made his mouth into a pucker—amused, distressed, it was hard to tell. “I repeat, have you news of Liir?” he said.

“If you’re not interpreting our comments to your senior, need we have this conversation here?” said Sister Doctor.

“My good Sister,” said Lord Ottokos, closing his eyes briefly, as if experiencing a spasm, “the Princess Nastoya entertains visitors only once every several weeks. Do not waste her time. She is waiting to learn what you have to say.”

“We have seen Liir, we have!” said Sister Apothecaire, unable to govern herself any longer. “He was found not all that far from here some days ago, and brought to our mauntery for recovery, if he can be recovered.”

“Sister!” barked Sister Doctor.

Sister Apothecaire shot her colleague a look that seemed, vaguely, to imply: Give it a rest.

Lord Ottokos turned and spoke to Princess Nastoya. For the first time, she stirred; that is, her face stirred. Beneath its greasy robes her body had kept up a constant slow stretching, twitching, creaking. Her eyes widened, and globes of ink-colored tears collected in the folds beside her nose. She was a woman in mighty distress. When she spoke, the voice was deep and plain, a laundry mistress’s voice, no sonority to it. She said only a few syllables, but the language of the Scrow must have allowed for much meaning in enunciation and pronunciation.

“Forgive my not getting up,” began Lord Ottokos’s translation. “I am stricken, a creature severed unnaturally in two by decisions made long ago, when the Wizard of Oz set public policy against thinking Animals. Now, one part of my nature is nearly dead and the other clings to life waiting help.”

“I have training in surgery, and my colleague in applications—”

Lord Ottokos spoke over Sister Doctor. “I have entrusted the boy Liir with a task, and I have been waiting his return these ten years. Ten years is a decade to a woman, marking the difference between maiden and matron, matron and crone, crone and harpy—but to an Elephant it is only a breath. A long, foul breath, but only a breath. I know the loyalty of Animals, I know the fickle allegiances of men. Because Liir was possibly a flitch of Elphaba, I had placed my trust in him all these years. I have hoped he might discover or invent a solution for my dilemma. And I have been patient—an Elephant is patient. And you come to tell me you have found him. Bless you, my daughters. Is he coming back to me at last?”

“He is not well,” said Sister Doctor.

“He was not well,” corrected Sister Apothecaire. “Perhaps he’s improving. We’ve been traveling, so we can’t report developments in his state.”

“Why does he not arrive?”

“Something happened to him,” said Sister Doctor. “We don’t know what. Perhaps what attacked our sister maunts attacked him, too. He is sunk in a strange sleep from which he may not awake. If we knew what had attacked him, we might better invent how to treat him. Lord Ottokos, ask her my question!” she said suddenly. “It is pertinent!”

Lord Ottokos obliged this time, and muttered something to Princess Nastoya.

The reply. “We do not scrape the faces of maunts, nor of mice, nor sheep. We do not treat others as we have been treated. You must hunt the barbaric Yunamata and find out from them why they have taken against travelers.”

“It isn’t the Yunamata,” said Sister Doctor, and in making the remark out loud she suddenly felt certain about this for the first time; she had been dubious up until now. “They wouldn’t do such a thing. Can you be sure your people are not forgetting their traditions under the burden of sorrow they feel at your condition?”

“My people, as you call them, are not even my people,” said Princess Nastoya. “They honored me years ago and made me their princess, and even in my decay they will not allow me to abdicate. They are a nation that has elevated charity beyond what is possible even in the precincts of your religious order. If out of fealty to me they would rather be governed by a Princess who is partly a corpse, how could they raise a hand against defenseless travelers?”

“The young maunts who ventured this way were intent on conversion,” admitted Sister Doctor. “They were sent by the Emperor himself, we hear.”

“None of us admires the Emperor’s zealotry. But intention to convert is hardly a reason to kill people and defile their bodies. The murderers you seek aren’t among the Scrow. Don’t waste your time considering the matter. It is the Yunamata or it is someone else. Or something else. Perhaps they had a disease.”

“No disease makes one’s face fall off,” said Sister Apothecaire firmly.

“If you know so much, what is my disease?” said Princess Nastoya.

“We should have to examine Your Highness,” said Sister Doctor.

“Enough,” interrupted Lord Ottokos. “I won’t translate such a barbaric notion. The Princess has dismissed you. You may leave.”

But the Princess spoke over her interpreter, and he was bound to listen. He bowed his head and continued, “She says again—and she has too few words left to spend in life to say it a third time—where is the boy Liir?”

“But he is not a boy any longer. We have told you what we know.” Sister Doctor put her sleeve to her nose; in her line of work she knew the smell of putrescence all too well. “He is in a comatose state not six or eight days’ journey from here, though perhaps nearer to the Emerald City than you would like to venture.”

Lord Ottokos snapped, “We are not imbeciles. We know where his body is. You have told us. That is not the question.”

The maunts blinked at him.

“Where is he?” Lord Ottokos repeated. “Where is he?”

“We don’t know where he is,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Our talents are not that fine.”

Princess Nastoya shivered. Handmaidens came forward to withdraw shawls drenched with sweat and other seepage. “Let me help,” said Sister Apothecaire suddenly.

“Don’t you dare,” said Lord Ottokos.

“I do dare. What are you going to do, have me scraped? Sister Doctor, a vessel of water and some essence of citron—lemons, limoncelli, parsleyfruit, anything. And some vinegar reduced to the usual.”

Princess Nastoya began to weep then, full tears of a nasty vintage. They fell on Sister Apothecaire’s bare hands and burned them; she was not halted in her work. “What has she said just then, in that low murmur?” she asked Lord Ottokos, who stood sputtering and clutching his beard in rage and disbelief.

Finally he submitted to this dotty, disobedient woman. “She said she wishes she could be scraped,” he finally allowed.

“We can’t do that,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Vows of gentility and all that. But she can be made more comfortable. Sister Doctor, that pillow. The head. Watch the neck. What a weight upon this spine! Where is the dratted vinegar reduction?”

5

FOR A MOMENT, TO REST HER HANDS, Candle set the domingon down. The sound box thunked with a hollow expression. Its cavity was a kind of womb, she thought; how ineffable the secrets born there.

She wasn’t given to reflection herself, but she was tired. For a moment she allowed herself to remember her arrival here a month or so before. The one called Mother Yackle had been dozing on a bench in the sunlight; she’d looked up with a start at Candle’s approach. She had stretched out a wilted hand, peering with an expression canny, severe, and resigned. Resigned: that was much the way Candle had felt at that moment. Her uncle had tricked her here; he hadn’t wanted to keep her any longer. “The way you’re going, you’ll be pregnant soon enough, if you’re not already—and I can’t take a child and a child’s newborn with me on the road.” It seemed he’d bought the domingon from its maker as a way to bargain with her. Go into the mauntery for a year, and the instrument is yours. Do with it what you will, and I’ll be back to get you in good time. There’s not much left for us in our home marshes, but you’d be ruined in the north. They’d spit at you, your easy ways; they’d laugh, your little voice. Stay here, and remember me wherever I am.

That kind of remembering was another skill, but now she was attending someone else, and her uncle meant little to her.

Candle took Liir’s hand in her own. A clamminess. Was his color fading? Or was it just that the sun was setting, and the jackal moon was rising later than it had? The shadows lengthened and browned. By comparison his skin was bleached like an old, sun-whitened bone.

She took up her instrument again and leaned the edge of the minor bridge right on the edge of his bed. Her fingers running into the treble range, they danced in contrapuntal jiggery at the top register, not six inches from his right ear.

Where was he?

LADY GLINDA SAID TO LIIR, “I can tell you have no intention of leaving that charred broomstick behind, but if you try to walk into a public space carrying it over your shoulder like a blunderbuss you’ll be taken for a fool, or at any rate noticed. I think what you are after is something a little more like camouflage.”

She paused to regard herself in a convenient looking glass in the stairwell. Adjusting her everyday tiara, she conceded, “It must be said that camouflage is not an effect I have ever strived to master. Still, we’ll do what we can.”

Liir followed her down the marble steps of the central staircase. The place had gone quiet. “Goodness, everyone takes off for a smoke the minute my back is turned,” she said. “Where are the kitchens, anyway? Through here?”

She stumbled into a cloakroom, and then opened the door to a closet where two of the belowstairs staff were involved in recreational exercises. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and shut the door, and then locked it. “Eventually they’ll have to thump to be released, and one of them is bound to be cheating. Heaps of fun. But where’s the kitchen?”

“Have you just moved here?” asked Liir.

“Don’t be silly. Lord Chuffrey had this place long before we married. But I don’t cook for myself, if that’s what you mean. Nothing other than the toast that I mentioned earlier, and that’s done in the breakfast hall. Ah, here we are.”

A half-flight of stone steps descended into a cavernous whitewashed kitchen. A dozen members of the staff were sitting about the table so deep in conversation that they didn’t hear her coming. “Lady Glinda,” said a bootblack, and they all leaped up with guilty looks.

“Glad to be recognized in my own home,” said Glinda. “I hate to interrupt what are probably well-intentioned plans to kill us all in our beds, but if you don’t mind? A minor request for whichever of you has just a moment to spare?”

They melted away, all but the housekeeper and the houseboy.

“He’s about the same size as the bootblack,” said Glinda, pointing to Liir. “Suit him up in House of Chuffrey colors and find some decent shoes, and get him a leather satchel on a sling. You know, that long cylindrical thingy that Lord Chuffrey’s guests use to carry their arrows when they go hunting in the country. That ought to accommodate the filthy old broom, I think.”

“Asking your pardon, Lady Glinda,” said the houseboy. “We’ve no such satchels on the town premises. They’re all down to Mockbeggar Hall.”

“Do I have to think of everything? Haven’t we friends? Haven’t we neighbors to borrow from? Aren’t there shops still serving the public? Need I go tramping to the marketplace myself with a sack of coins between my teeth?”

The houseboy fled. The housekeeper pursed her lips editorially.

“Don’t speak. Don’t. It’s only a temporary appointment,” said Lady Glinda. “Just for the day, in fact. Now feed up this boy; he hasn’t had a square meal for weeks, I can tell. And when he’s equipped as I require, return him to the Yellow Parlor.”

Lady Glinda climbed the stairs, muttering “Kitchens!” in disbelief, leaving Liir behind.

“Well, peel off those beggar’s weeds and wash in the cauldron room, just there; I won’t have you staining her fancyfart’s good livery with your dirty limbs,” said the housekeeper. “I’ll put out some food, and you be grateful for it, for it’s out of our own downstairs supply, and we don’t take kindly to ravenous upstarts here in Lord Chuffrey’s establishment.”

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” He peered out the window of the carriage.

“Put your head back. Servants don’t gawp out of carriage windows.”

How odd to be five feet higher than the street. It was not an experience to which he was accustomed. The carriage lurched under arched spans of stone, stopped for a squadron of uniformed cavalry on display, sidelined along a merchants’ parade, and picked up speed along Dirt Boulevard. Cleared of its village of indigents, the roadway showed signs of its original elegance, though its parallel rows of trees were in bad shape. It looked as if the grounds were being used for military drills.

Where had all the itinerants gone? “Where are we going?”

“To the Palace,” Glinda said. “Where you’ll keep your head down and your mouth closed. Are you scared?”

It seemed too personal a question for a woman to ask a boy. Perhaps she realized this. She continued, “I was, the first time I came here. It was with Elphaba. We were older than you are now, but only by a few years. And in many ways we were more naive. Well, I was, anyway. And I was terrified. The wonderful Wizard of Oz! My stomach just about dissolved in its own acids.”

“What happened?”

“What happened?” She turned the question to herself, examining it. “History happened, I suppose. We saw the Wizard, and we parted ways—Elphaba went underground, as it were, and…in time, I hugged the limelight.” She sighed. “With the best of intentions, and with limited success.”

“And now?” he said, not because he was interested, but because he didn’t want any more attention on himself.

“Now, I hold the key,” she said. “Now, for the time being, I am intended to stand in for the mighty on their thrones. It’s all I’m good for.”

“Are the mighty deserving of thrones?”

“That’s an Elphaba question, and out of your youthful pouting mouth it sounds preposterous. Like most of her superior cavils, it has no easy answer. How could I know?”

She sighed. “Sit back, I said. Yes, I’m nervous. You’ll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they’re wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good. Perhaps being jittery helps me pay closer attention. You know, I didn’t want the hard work of government. They all say I need to clean house. Clean house! That presumes I’ve cleaned a house before. I say, hey, what are the servants for? Decoration?”

She was speaking to herself, in a way, but she was also trying to cheer him up. He turned his head, confused by her kindness, and busied himself from watching, at an acceptable angle, as the buildings nearer the Palace hove into view. One mammoth ministry was strapped with bas-relief marble panels depicting various historic Ozmas in characteristic poses. They looked at once venerable and ludicrous, and the pigeons of the Emerald City paid them no high compliment.

“But why are we going to the Wizard’s Palace?”

“The people’s Palace, now,” said Glinda derisively. “Though what the people are going to do with their own palace I have no earthly idea.” She chewed on a nail. “There’s a clandestine entrance to Southstairs from the Palace. Of course there had to be, a means of instantly spiriting away any treasonous Palace upstart sniffed out in the court. Though the common criminal condemned to serve time is more publicly lowered in a cage into the pit that drops down inside those bulwarky ramparts. You see, it’s mostly underground, Southstairs. It’s the most impregnable prison in Oz. Nobody who goes in via the cage comes out that way.”

“How do they come out?”

“In pine coffins.”

SHE DABBED A SACHET doused with oil of clove and root-of-persimmon behind her ears. By the time the door to her carriage was opened by a staff member of the Palace, Lady Glinda had become more regal. Her chin went up, a jeweled scepter was provided for her right hand. Her eye flashed with a steeliness Liir had not noted earlier.

“Lady Glinda,” they murmured. She deigned to supply the briefest of nods, as an indication that she was not deaf, and walked by.

Liir followed in something closer to terror than he had ever experienced before. He expected to be rushed away and beaten before he could even begin to protest. But Lady Glinda’s penumbra of influence extended eight feet behind her, it seemed, for his progress was unquestioned, and he gained the threshold of the Palace without anyone’s objecting.

The place was a maze, and he lost his bearings almost at once. Accompanied by a Palace flunky, Glinda and Liir swept up grand staircases, along arched corridors, past ceremonial chambers and receiving parlors. Another staircase or two, another corridor or three, and at length they traversed a long dingy room, where dozens of staff members were perched on high stools above ledgers. They splashed ink in their nervous abjection, though not on Glinda in her celestial blue gown.

Behind a wall with an interior window, the better for supervising workers, stood an office with a desk and some chairs. An elegant man absorbed in a newssheet was tipped back on the hind legs of his chair, his ceremonial boots propped on the desk and his saber stuck in the soil of a potted fern. “Commander,” said Lady Glinda, “we’re here. Show some respect, or pretend to anyway.”

He leaped to his feet with ostentatious speed. Liir blinked and gaped. “Commander Cherrystone!” he said.

“You’ve met?” said Glinda. “How droll.”

“I’m drawing a blank,” said the Commander, wrinkling a brow.

“At Kiamo Ko,” said Liir. “You were head of the Gale Forcers at Red Windmill. It was your men that kidnapped Fiyero’s widow, Sarima, and her sisters and her children.”

Commander Cherrystone smiled deferentially and offered Liir a hand. “Kidnapped? We took them into protective custody for their own good. How were they to know the depravity of the Witch they were harboring?”

“And how well did you protect them?” said Liir.

“Ooh, the boy has spit, has he,” said Commander Cherrystone, wiping his sleeve. “I like that, son, but please. This is my best dress uniform.” He was equable and seemed to take no offense.

Liir glared at Glinda. “You’ve taken me here, to him—betrayed me to the very man responsible for Nor’s abduction?”

“Recriminations, they get us nowhere,” said Lady Glinda. “And how was I to know? Consider it poetic justice: Now he must help you. Because I say so.” She turned to Cherrystone. “Look, Commander, I’ve laid it all out. You got my note? The boy wants to see Fiyero’s daughter, if she’s still alive. As an officer and a governor of the prison, you can make the arrangements, can’t you?”

“It’s an institution with its own appetite, is a prison,” said Commander Cherrystone. Rather approvingly, thought Liir. “I can’t say I remember you, lad, but my work involves many postings. And in none of them have I ever before met a soul who wanted to enter Southstairs voluntarily. You understand: No promises that you will leave it. Either dead or alive. It might be your tomb.”

“My name is Liir,” he said. He tried to lift his chin as he had seen Glinda do. “We have met. I liked you. You seemed decent.”

“I tried to be decent, within reason,” he replied. “Anyway, I had little choice if I wanted to gain the trust of that knotty little clan in Kiamo Ko.”

“What happened to Sarima?” asked Liir. “Fiyero’s widow.”

“Everyone dies. It’s a question of where and how, that’s all.”

“Oh, bandying, bandying, please, my head,” said Glinda. “I feel I’m back at Shiz. The Debating Tourneys: what a migraine. I need a tonic. Are you going to do this for me, Commander?”

“I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t require it,” he answered. “Ready, lad?”

“I’m ready,” Liir answered. He turned to Glinda. “Ought I take off these silly clothes?”

“What, and go naked into Southstairs? I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Commander Cherrystone. Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to know if her pretty ways were studied or innate.

“Oh, oh,” she managed, “I don’t know that I’ll see you again…and you remind me so of her.”

“I haven’t Elphaba’s talent,” said Liir simply. “I’m not worth mourning, believe me.”

“Her power was only part of it,” said Glinda. “She was brave, and so are you.”

“Bravery can be learned,” he said, trying to be consoling.

“Bravery can be stupid,” said Commander Cherrystone. “Believe me.”

The boy didn’t move forward to touch her or kiss her. In Kiamo Ko, only Nanny had been the kissing type, and Liir hadn’t figured much in her affections. So he merely said, “Well, good-bye, then. And don’t worry. I’ll take care.”

They looked at one another. In a moment Liir would lose heart; he would do the shaming thing that the houseboy had predicted. He would let Nor’s life reach its destiny without intervening—in exchange for having someone stand in as a mother. Lord knows Elphaba hardly had!—and here was Glinda, blinking back tears or something.

She looked at him almost as if thinking the same thing. The moment passed, though. “You do your work,” Lady Glinda told him. “Ozspeed. And don’t forget your broom.”

“Her broom,” said Liir.

“Your broom,” she corrected him.

6

THE ROOM GREW SUDDENLY COLDER. Night was drawing in, and the rump flank of the wind hinted at the winter to come. Candle rose to draw the shutters closed. The jackal moon was at its most self-satisfied; soon the constellation would wane and its elements return to their ordinary, lonelier orbits.

She shuttered most of the windows for the first time, but she couldn’t fix one shutter securely; a rope of ivy with a stem stout as a forearm had grown across a corner. Candle took an extra sheet and hung it as best she could against the chill.

When she came back to Liir, she became alarmed. She felt his brow. His skin was colder still, and his blood pressure seemed to be dropping.

She wasn’t suited for work of this seriousness. She laid down her instrument on the floor, determined to run and get Sister Cook or the Superior Maunt. She found her way blocked.

The figure stood in the doorway, veil drawn to cloak the features. Candle reared back, startled.

The veil dropped. It was only the addled elderly maunt, the senior biddy in the place, the one known as Mother Yackle. What was she doing here?

“You can’t leave,” said Mother Yackle. “There’s no one else here to do what needs to be done.”

Candle picked up her domingon and raised it threateningly. Quicker than could have been imagined, Mother Yackle slid back into the shadows, and closed the door behind her, and locked it.

Candle thumped against the door, and threw her shoulder against it, but the heavy thing was quarter-sawn oakhair wood, and cross-built. She couldn’t waste her time clawing at it with her fingernails. Liir was failing.

She turned her attentions to the rest of the room. Not raised in the arts of medicine, she didn’t recognize much of what she found in the cupboard. A large mortar and pestle for the grinding of herbs. Several fresh-nibbed pens, with sheets of paper and a stoppered jug of ink, for the making of notes. Unguents of disagreeable viscosities. The body of a mouse on the bottom shelf. A few old keys—none of which fit the room’s only keyhole.

She sat down and played a few rapid runnels, in mischief mode, to concentrate her apprehensions. She felt for his pulse again, and brushed his hair away from his forehead. Even his scalp was cold.

She took off her tunic and tried to wave it from the window. Though she couldn’t attract attention by yelling, maybe someone in the kitchen garden would see her signal. But a wind came up and took the tunic away, and that was that.

At length she relied on what fate had provided her. She took the cleanest of the pen nibs and sharpened it further by training it along the stone windowsill. Releasing Liir’s left arm from its splint, she propped it up against a transept of the domingon, so his hand was raised in the air, a salute. To the extent that she prayed—which wasn’t much, even in these environs, even at this drastic juncture—she begged for her hands to be steady. Then she tried to play Liir’s bicep as she might her domingon, running her hands in light, feathery scales along the skin. She settled on a place near the inside of the elbow, and using the nib as a lancet, made a neat incision.

She caught his blood in the mortar, and when she’d filled it she rushed to the window and dumped it out. There, jackal moon, you want your blood offering, there it is. She collected a second portion, then a third, and she took off her habit to bind Liir’s arm and stop the flow.

In only her broadcloth shift she shivered, and her fingers trembled. Nonetheless she returned to her instrument. Her musical figures went wobbly, but she kept on.

AFTER GLINDA HAD GONE, Commander Cherrystone took no more notice of Liir than he might a napping dog. He disappeared behind his newspapers, humming to himself. Liir sat on a stool, waiting; something had to happen sooner or later. He watched the Commander’s well-trimmed nails hold the page, listened to various admonitory hums and clicks and editorial humphs breathed nasally. The career soldier was a fit man, a calm one, and his lack of attention to Liir seemed suitable. What was hard to fathom was the Commander’s composure. It was under his command that Nor and her family had been abducted, yet he seemed so oblivious to Liir’s contempt that Liir began to doubt himself. Maybe there was more to the ruling family of Kiamo Ko than he had known.

Not until the business day in the Palace came to an end, and the dozens of civil servants left their desks for home, did the Commander sit up. “Your guide will be along presently—ah, there he is.”

A handsome younger man with a keen, guarded expression blustered into the room. “Can’t have kept you waiting more than a tockety-tick, have I? Witches’ britches, the Palace staff gives you the once-over! Thought things would loosen up once the Wizard abdicated.” He shucked a jacket from his shoulders and slung it across the desk. “You notice. Nice, eh? A clothier in Brickle Lane. Yes, it’s black-market Munchkinsheep wool, I’d have nothing else. Feel that weight.”

“You’ve a prettier penny to spend than a military man does,” observed the Commander dryly.

“She is not that young and I am not that choosy: conditions for a bargain. Bartered it mostly. Fuck, I’m hungry. This is the boy, then. Got a crumpet or a butter roll anywhere, Cherryvery?”

“This is Liir. You’re to take him below and help him as best you can. I know you’ve your mind on other matters, so I don’t pretend to expect you will be thorough in your assistance. But do try. He seems a good sort.”

The young man shot Liir a glance. “He looks too wet to be after what I’m after down there.”

“I suspect he is,” said Commander Cherrystone, “but all good things come to those who wait, and he may grow into a sexual nature before he emerges, if he ever does. Liir, this is Shell.”

“The Witch’s brother?” Liir felt he had to check.

“The same,” said Shell, flexing his fingers. Liir wasn’t sure that he could see a resemblance, but Shell looked capable and cunning both. “Are you ready?”

Does he know who I am, wondered Liir. Has Shell ever heard of a Liir? A boy who might be his nephew?

“I’m ready.”

Commander Cherrystone flicked a speck of dust off his dress weskit. “The usual arrangements about your return, Shell. Liir—I wish you luck.”

He left, locking them into the office. Shell looked at Liir more closely, and his nose twitched as if on the scent of something. Then he shrugged and said, “I’m ready for an ale. You ready for Southstairs?” Liir nodded.

Shell went to an installation of cubbies for the sorting of interoffice mail. Liir couldn’t see how his fingers fussed, nor at what, but in a moment the whole wooden unit slid aside on a secret track. Behind, a plain door, and Shell had the key for it.

“Is this where Southstairs got its name?” asked Liir, pointing to the flight of timber steps that descended treacherously, without benefit of railings, into the gloom.

“Dunno. Never thought about it. Let’s go. I hope your thighs are good. Watch your step.”

“Was your sister a martyr?” asked Liir, innocently as he could.

“Which sister?” he answered, but before Liir could reply, he continued. “Martyrdom implies a religious faith, and Nessarose had so much faith that no one else in the family could breathe. Elphaba affected a salty agnosticism; I never knew whether it was genuine or not. For me to consider them martyrs, I’d have to have faith, and I don’t—not in unionism, the faith of my father; nor in the other varieties that clot the calendar with their hobbledehoy feast days. It took all the fancy dancing I could do not to be tarred as a traitor-by-family-association. Luckily, I have little interest in government, and I’m rather good at dancing, as it happens. Look…Liir, is it…I prefer to save my breath. Shall we not chatter like choirgirls on an outing? That okay with you?”

Liir didn’t answer. The wind siphoning through the slitted windows above made a sound almost like a spiral of music. He wanted to ask Shell if he could hear the strange effect, but he kept his own counsel.

They grew colder and colder as they descended. Soon Liir had to put out a hand, not just to feel his way in the gloom, but also because his legs threatened to buckle beneath him. The wall was damp, here and there soft with wet clinging growth.

Eventually the sound of their steps began to echo, and then it was clear a light was burning below. At last they reached a stone floor from which several dark corridors led.

“Here I usually stretch,” said Shell, and showed Liir how. Liir rubbed his muscles as directed. When they were ready, Shell took a club from a pile on the floor and lit it from the torch affixed to the wall. “Do the same; we won’t spend the rest of eternity together, you know,” he said. “Light is helpful. These are limbs of irongrowth stock, so they burn a good long time.”

“If we’re not going to stick together, how will I find my way out?”

“I don’t know. I assume you’re clever, though.” Shell’s nonchalance was cruel. “Very few emerge from here. Only the guards.”

Liir tried to memorize all of everything, just in case—but he intended to stick with his guide no matter what Shell might think about it.

The way was dank and sour, sometimes cut with a sulfurous gust. The torchlight made a tidal rush against flattened arches of milk grey stone. Parts of the walls were bricked, though the work was ancient and the brick face crumbling.

As they walked along the crushed cement and scattered rubble, and Liir got his breath back, he tried to think of how to speak to Shell. The man was in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, and a certain class of fop; even Liir, knowing himself a rube and a naïf, could see that. But Shell’s eye was keen and his manner, variously courtly or casual, always suave. He was taller than Elphaba had been, sleek where she had been spiky.

As it happened, Liir had no time to ask questions. The path ended in a flight of shallow steps leading farther down. They were reaching the outskirts of Southstairs—not so much a prison as an underground city. The sounds of carts, and a murmur of voices. Somewhere, someone was playing a stringed instrument, far away; somewhere, someone must be cooking, for there was a grievous smell of rendered bacon fat on a hot griddle.

“The cowhand of mercy prepares his rounds.” Shell swept off his hat and left it on a ledge; a curl of yellow plume bobbed in the gloom.

“Will you lead me to Nor?”

“I’ve promised to take you to the central registrar, but I’ve a few stops to make first.” Shell patted the satchel on his shoulder. “Some folks need my attention, and it would be unthinkable to postpone their medications to rush you by first. You don’t mind?”

Liir did. “No, of course not.”

Around another corner, down a few more steps, and they came to a greasy waterway, not unlike the canals above in the Emerald City. “Come on then, if you’re coming,” said Shell, leaping aboard an abandoned canal dory. He seemed to be growing cheerier by the moment.

At length, the narrow waterway ran into a wider channel that curved beneath a high ceiling of rock face supported here and there with beams and buttresses. On either side of the channel, padlocked doors were set flush into the stone walls. Sometimes the doors gave out onto ledges or a path between cells; more often, just onto the water.

The stench and the noise grew. Before long Liir and Shell passed grey-clothed laborers hauling buckets of supper one way, buckets of feces back.

“Didn’t think a country kid would wrinkle his nose at a rural perfume,” observed Shell, berthing the canal dory. “You’ll stay and guard this; more than once I’ve had my vessel nabbed while I was at my errand of mercy.” He opened the flap of his satchel and removed a small glass syringe filled with a urine-colored solution. He wiped the needle with a clean cloth and then tapped the plunger once to make sure it worked. “Ripe and ready, she is,” he murmured. He looked sideways at Liir. “It’s humbling to be able to help those who suffer.”

With a practiced hand, he quickly undid the lock on a door and slid through, closing it behind him.

Despite his intentions to cling to Shell like a burr, Liir didn’t have the nerve to follow, nor was he tall enough to peer through the small window high in the door. But there was a gap at the bottom between the door and its sill. By sinking to the floor of the dory, Liir could make out the movement of figures inside. Apparently Shell had set his torch in a wall stanchion. His voice sounded soothing, even hypnotic, but the prisoner crouching against a back wall scooched her bare feet underneath her skirts. Shell’s boots drew near until he was standing flush against her. She moaned or whimpered, and her feet curled the farther under her skirts. Mercy was hard to accept, Liir guessed. Shell’s feet rocked from toe to heel, with a comforting rhythm, and his heels began to lift from the floor.

At the sound of someone approaching, Liir turned.

“You, what’re you lying there for?” A portly Ape with a ring of keys, dragging his knuckles on the ground. He was wreathed in his own weather of cheap cologne, protection against the smells, and he wore a collar made of mangy ocelot fur.

“I’m visiting,” said Liir. “With permission of Lady Glinda. I’m accompanying a man named Shell, who is inside tending to the needs of the sick.”

“I’ll say he is, and he’s sicker than most,” said the Ape. “But what Lady Glinda dictates means nothing down here; we’re our own society. Have you a writ of passage from the Under-mayor?”

“We’re on our way to get one. But Shell needed to stop first.”

“He sees to his needs. I’ll see to yours. Come with me.”

“I don’t think I’d better.”

The Ape insisted, and Liir called out repeatedly for Shell, who emerged, cross and agitated. “What’re you bothering my boy for?”

“Oh, he’s your boy?” asked the Ape. “Ever the surprise, Shell.”

“He’s under my care for the moment. Leave him be, Tunkle.”

“You give our Miss Serenity her weekly jab?” asked Tunkle, jingling the keys.

Shell replaced the syringe. “You interrupted me. I’ll go on to the next.”

“He’s a one-man festival of fun,” said Tunkle. “I wouldn’t get too close if I were you. He gets fairly hot and bothered over all these errands of mercy.”

Shell showed no sign of taking offense. “Clear off, Tunkle. We know the ropes. We’re on our way to the Under-mayor. We’ll just take our time, that’s all. You want a lift?”

“Not on your life. I go upside once a month and I can find my own fun, Master Shell; I don’t need your fancy imported sort.” The Ape spit in the waterway and let them go by. “Watch your back, lad.”

Making no effort to lower his tone, Shell remarked to Liir, “Tunkle. A collaborationist. Saved his own hide, during the Wizard’s campaigns, by signing on to bully his own.” Still, his tone was neutral, as if this seemed a reasonable enough strategy.

Liir asked softly, “How far are we from the Under-mayor’s office?”

“A stop or two, or three,” said Shell. “There’s more than one would like my attentions, but I pick and choose, trying to be fair. I can’t be all things to all people, now, can I?” He brushed his lapel and made ready to continue his missionary work.

LIIR DIDN’T KNOW how much time had passed before they finally reached the Under-mayor’s quarters, but Southstairs grew progressively warmer, stinkier, noisier, brighter the farther in they floated. Shell made two or three more stops, always, it seemed, to tend to young women—Liir could hear their voices, supplicating, sometimes weeping, once cursing Shell. But Liir couldn’t see them, nor did he want to.

Shell became more distracted as the hour passed, his bespoke clothes more disheveled. At length, however, they reached their destination. A foreman’s cabin stood freely beneath the lofty ceiling from which, in the stronger light, Liir could make out rock structures, strange candelabras of dripped stone frozen in place.

The prison Under-mayor was a sallow man, skin soft and pale as bleached linen. He looked as if he hadn’t seen the sun in many years. Multiple rings on every finger, even his thumbs: like a fence for stolen jewels. His name was Chyde. “You’re raising someone up in the paths of righteousness, I see,” he said, cheerily enough, to Shell. “I’m not used to thinking of you as concerned about the morals of the young.”

“One does what one can,” said Shell.

“I thought your motto was one does whom one can. But never mind that. You bring news of the starlight goddess?”

“Glinda’s all right. She’s coping. The City’s a mess up there, but you’ll have heard all about it.”

“You always have a special slant, though.” Chyde located some beer and a few stale rings of fried castipod. Liir declined, but Shell tucked in.

“Well, after all these years, it’s a right rich stew up there, that’s for sure,” Shell conceded through a mouthful of flaky breading. “The Wizard’s departure was weirdly unexpected, given he’s been in power for so long. Still, with so many having schemed behind the scenes to oust him, you’d think they’d have gotten their signals straight about what ought to happen next. Lady Glinda is looking in, a glamorous figurehead, and no one knows if she’s got a scrap of brain in her noggin. The trade unions should be rising any day, but the municipal militia wasn’t quite prepared to recognize a socialite for a queen. Hence, in loyal support of course, the guard has been on the offensive, clearing out the neighborhoods where the rabble is more likely to rouse. Glinda thinks it’s urban revitalization. So it’s an interesting time, a sweep of forces with everyone assessing the power of the other. Heads will roll, of course. It’s merely a question of in what sequence: who gets to laugh first, and who next, and whose laugh is cut off by the guillotine blade.”

“And you’ll be stealing in and out of the bedchambers of the wenches and the wives and the widows…”

“The wives laugh neither first nor last, but they do laugh best!”

“I live a quiet life down here,” said Under-mayor Chyde to Liir. “It’s part of your dad’s program of good works to fill me in on the local gossip. I could go northstairs if I could trust a soul, but I don’t trust a soul. And the minute the selfish bastards up there remember their relatives down here, if they ever do, I’ll be hamstrung before morning and bled by noontime. I’ve never felt I could leave my post, but especially not now. Not if I want to survive through these interesting times.”

“He’s not my father,” said Liir coldly.

“Oh? I thought I caught a resemblance,” said Under-mayor Chyde. “Well, more’s the pity. You’re training an apprentice, are you, Shell?”

Shell yawned and drained his beer. “No. I promised Lady Glinda I’d deliver this spawnling to you. He’s searching for a prisoner.”

“We’re all searching for someone,” said Under-mayor Chyde in a drawl. “People pay me well to begin searches I can’t somehow ever manage to complete.” He flashed his jeweled hands. “Care to make a contribution to the exhibit, lad?”

“He’s not buying your silence or your service,” snapped Shell. “Get on with it, Chyde-ey, or I’ll report your side business to the authorities. Lady Glinda has an interest in jewels herself, as it happens. A more seemly interest. She might not like to hear—”

“Name?” interrupted Chyde.

“Her name was Nor,” said Liir. “Is Nor. About, oh, sixteen? She was abducted by the Gale Forcers at the castle of Kiamo Ko, out west. In the Vinkus.”

“I can’t say the name sounds familiar, but we house an exclusive clientele, some of whom like to keep a low profile. We respect their wishes, of course.”

“Her father was the prince of the Arjikis.”

“A crowned head? Well, if she’s here, she must have one of the private suites. You haven’t been to offer her your particular brand of solace, Shell?” Under-mayor Chyde snapped his fingers with a clink and said, “Jibbidee, bring me the two green ledgers. No, sorry, the ocher ones, if she’s a Winkie.”

“She’d be young still,” said Shell. “Or young-ish. I do have some standards, Chyde.”

An elf with ears in an advanced state of decomposition appeared from a cupboard and scrambled about a rickety bookshelf. “Thank you, Jibbidee,” said Chyde, without inflection, and the elf returned to his cupboard and shut the door behind him when his job was done.

“You might remember the circumstances of her registering,” said Shell. “It was the same castle where my sister lived until recently.”

“Oh, that Kiamo Ko. How could I be so slow?” Chyde slid a pair of spectacles off his pate and down to his nose, and squinted. “My former wife, save her blessed hide, always said that I’m such a big-hearted guy, you know, everyone’s story gets to me, and so I can’t keep them straight. My heart bleeds for all. One and all.” Harumph. “Part of our marital problems, but so be it.”

He glanced up over the top of his lenses and fastened on Shell for the first time. “I am sorry about your sisters, though, Shell. Both of them meeting their ends within such a short time. It can’t be easy.”

“We weren’t close,” said Shell, studying his nails.

“Munchkinland’s in revolt, now that Nessarose is dead. It has to be said she ruled with an iron fist, for all her piety.”

“Spare us the civics class. I’m in a hurry, Chyde,” said Shell. “Can I leave the boy here for you to finish with?”

“Some poor widowling just aching for your attention, I know, I know…”

Liir put it together at last. What a dolt am I! “Are you sleeping with your patients?” he blurted out. “I mean—you know—”

“Patients,” mused Chyde. “Nice touch.”

“I am seeing to their needs,” said Shell, without apology or shame. He patted the satchel. “The comfort I supply is greatly appreciated. And of course they want to show their gratitude. What else does a lady in chains have to offer? She couldn’t accept charity. It isn’t done in polite circles. So she pays as she can. I’m not so cold as to deny them the chance to show their appreciation. It seems a fair exchange to me.”

I’m not sticking with him even if he is my maybe-uncle. Forget it. New plan needed. I’ll improvise. “You’re disgusting,” said Liir. “I mean, really. That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. I can’t believe it. It’s—it’s monstrous.”

“Oh, I’d need to be a good sight more ambitious to make it to monstrous.” Shell laughed. “Chyde? Sometime this week would be nice.”

“Might as well leave him.” Chyde turned to another volume. “Nothing is coming to light. Are you sure she’s here?”

“I’m not sure of anything, but this is the natural first place to start, I suppose,” said Shell. He stood and smoothed down his clothes, and offered his hand to Liir. “So we take our parting now, comrade. I hope the rest of your day is as amusing.”

Liir thought about biting the hand, but Shell would only make another joke. So the boy tucked his own hands high up in his armpits. “We’ll meet again,” said Shell. “Likely it’ll be down here, since it isn’t easy to obtain an exit visa. Sweet dreams, Liir-boy.”

He spun on his heel and disappeared almost at a run.

“Oh, the energy of the young,” said Chyde, sighing and continuing to flip pages. “You know, I’m not coming up with anything so far. What did you say her name was again?”

7

IN THE WESTERN DISAPPOINTMENTS, on the last evening of this jackal moon, the Scrow herders sent their dogs out to round up the sheep earlier than usual. Other workers erected a double row of pliant, bindweed fencing around the far edge of the fold’s perimeter. Unless cloud cover prevented it, the celestial beast would brighten the night more brilliantly than at any other time in a generation. It would make a good night for scavengers.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire had done what they could. They had provided comfort to the old Princess that her own staff could not. She was happier, though the mood in her tent, when she was asleep, was ugly. The Scrow were a proud people—well, what people weren’t?—and they were suspicious of foreign clinical practices.

The interpreter put it to the women as gently as he could.

“You should move on,” said Lord Shem Ottokos. “We have told you what you came to learn—that we know nothing of the scrapings of those colleagues of yours. If your profession is the extension of charity, you have performed your mission. You’ve benefited Princess Nastoya mightily. There is no reason to linger, and danger to you if you do.”

“We’re told you are hospitable to strangers,” Sister Doctor reminded him.

“Strangers, yes; that is the way of the Scrow,” said Ottokos. “After several days, you are less strange than you once were. You become familiar, and therefore, like family, less agreeable. I’ll be happy to provide you with a supply of food, but I recommend that you start home this very evening and take advantage of this unusually bright night.”

Sister Doctor said, “In the question of scrapings, we haven’t convinced you that the Yunamata are blameless. So why would you send us into danger?”

“You’ve been so good; we’ll provide what we can manage by way of an escort,” said Lord Ottokos, and left.

“The nerve!” said Sister Apothecaire. “We’re being disinvited. I believe I’m offended.”

“Are you going native?” Sister Doctor asked her Munchkin colleague. The tone verged on the cruel.

“They’re adorable heathen,” said Sister Apothecaire, somewhat wildly.

“Yes. Well, they’ll seem less adorable if they conquer their aversion to scraping the faces of their visitors. After all, when you were a child you were an adorable heathen, too, but you got over it.”

“I don’t appreciate your wit, Sister Doctor.”

It began to seem for a short while as if the maunts might disobey the instructions of their superior and split up. However, the Princess Nastoya requested a final interview with them, and she felt well enough to sit up on her pallet.

“Have you taken the full measure of my ailment?” she said, through Shem Ottokos. “To avoid the pogroms of the Wizard against the Animals, I went deeply underground many years ago, accepting a witch’s charm as a way to hide myself. I am an Elephant, and want to go to my death as an Elephant, but I am cursed to remain in this human body. I used to be able to change for a brief time, but infirmity and age have eroded those talents, and now I am trapped. I fear the Elephant within me has been dying for some time, and may be in part dead already; but I would join it, if I could only have help. Ten years ago I asked the Witch’s boy for help, but he disappeared. Now through your exotic skills you have helped me rally, and so I must press this request. Please return to your hive and collect the boy, the man, Liir. Bring him here or send him here; get him here safely. He may not be able to help me, but even the most blessed of witchcraft has gone underground in these trying times, and he is the only one I know who might be able to help.”

“Do you really think he is Elphaba’s son?” asked Sister Doctor.

“He had her cape, he had her broom,” said Princess Nastoya. “Maybe he wasn’t her son, but he cared about her life, and he may have learned something anyway. What other course can I take?”

“We’ve never even seen him awake,” admitted Sister Apothecaire. “It would be hard to promise we could persuade him when we don’t know what he’s really like. Yet.”

“In return for his help, I’d promised him something in exchange.” She began to wheeze a bit, and Ottokos collected her phrases haltingly. “I want—to tell him what I’ve heard—about—the word on the street in the Emerald City.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fascinated,” said Sister Doctor. “If he ever wakes up.”

“The threat to Animals during the Wizard’s reign crowded me—humanward—and I have been safer than many. Now, as our violently holy Emperor demands all our souls, I want to go to my death as an Animal: proud, isolate, unconsecrated. Find him for me. Hurry. I will give you—two rare male skarks to ride—and a panther to travel by your side as far as the forest. You will travel faster on the backs of those beasts than you did on foot or on mules. If you aren’t ambushed by soldiers or wolves or any other enemy, you may make it by sunrise. At the edge of the forest the panther will turn back, but the skark will keep on, and by then the worst of the jackal moonlight will be spent.”

The maunts nodded their heads and rose to take their leave. They didn’t expect to see Princess Nastoya again, dead or alive, an Elephant or a human. They didn’t want to tire her with further discussion. But it was she who raised the last point, when they were almost beyond addressing.

“My friends,” she said. They turned. “You have been kind to me, and good to each other. I am not so far dead that I haven’t seen this. How can you perform such works in the name of the Unnamed God, whose agents belittle us so?”

“The Unnamed God does not descend from the Emperor,” explained Sister Doctor. She was afraid that an obscure point of contemporary unionist theology might be lost on a pagan, but she was reluctant to treat the Princess like a fool. “The Unnamed God, whatever they may say in the Emerald City these days, is still in its essence unnamed. We have as much a right to work in its name as anyone else.”

“Hardly seems worth the bother to believe,” murmured Princess Nastoya. “Still, life itself seems more than patently fantastic, and we believe in life, so I’ll let the matter drop.”

THE RIDE WOULD BE SWIFT but rollicking. These skarks were large of pelvis, supported by longer back legs than other skark varieties. Around their legs circled the panther like an eddy of black oil, constantly swishing by.

Lord Shem Ottokos escorted them safely out of the camp. Sister Apothecaire was disappointed that there were so few Scrow to wave good-bye to them. “You’ll have noticed the creatures circling,” said Ottokos. The maunts looked uneasily at each other. “In the sky, I mean.”

“Vultures?” said Sister Apothecaire. “Sensing the carrion of Princess Nastoya? She would supply a healthy portion of carrion to a bevy of vultures.”

“They are higher up than vultures, I think,” said Ottokos. “So, according to the laws of perception, they must be larger than vultures. Besides, vultures wait for the body to die before approaching. I fear they are a squadron of attack creatures who don’t wait until the meat is dead. Perhaps—well, I hardly dare say it. Dragons.”

“Dragons are rare in the first place, and in any case docile,” snapped Sister Doctor. “Menacing dragons are only mythology.”

“Myth has a way of coming true,” said Ottokos. “I’m merely saying Be careful.”

“How kind to set our minds at ease, just as we depart from your protection.” Sister Doctor looked livid.

“You have the panther. Nothing will get by her.”

“Good-bye, then,” said Sister Doctor. “I hope you have learned something from us.”

Sister Apothecaire sniffled into a souvenir shawl that she’d bought at an inflated price from a Scrow weaver.

Shem Ottokos watched them leave. He did wish them well, at least as far as the mauntery, and the completion of their task for his Princess. Beyond that, he wished them nothing at all: Let their Unnamed God go on unnaming their lives for them.

THE SNOUT OF THE JACKAL moon poked over the line of the trees.

Liir was nearly grey. The bleeding was staunched, but his heart was lurching. Candle worked at her throat, trying to scream for help, but she could not make that strong a sound.

No, she thought, the poor cold boy, no. Not this.

She put her domingon down and rubbed his shoulders. Then she removed his splints and braces and massaged his arms and legs. The air was turning from chilly to icy, and the extra blankets were in the hallway, beyond the locked door. She felt something lurch in him—he, who had been absent for so long—something kicked and resisted the death that seemed to be settling upon him. His breath was halting. A long moment without a breath; another.

She leaned over his brow from above, and held his newly bearding cheeks in both hands, and laid her nose next to his, and breathed into him, and kissed him besides.

“WELL, THERE’S SOMETHING FOR YOU, NOW,” said Chyde. “It never hurts to read the small print, my lad. Jibbidee, my walking stick? And it’s not even that far, though in a quarter I rarely get to visit myself. Let’s go.”

The elf came forward with a walking stick, and Chyde stood erect, or as erect as he could. Long years of desk work had crushed his hips cruelly, and his posture was poor. Still, at a new angle, he was able to look Liir over a bit more thoroughly than he’d yet managed.

“You hadn’t ought to have arrived with a firearm,” he said with sudden harshness. “You’ll leave that with Jibbidee at once, my lad-ee-oh.”

“It’s no firearm. It’s a broom.”

“Show it me.”

Liir opened the satchel and displayed the top end of the charred broom-pole.

“Let me see the length of it, to be sure it’s not a blunder-bulleter in disguise.”

The broom was withdrawn and Liir handed it over. “A right wreck of a thing, but for the new growth,” said Chyde, handing it back.

“What?”

Liir didn’t ask again, but felt it. The broom handle was notched with young nubs, and two of them had split, revealing modest embellishments of pale green leaf, like tiny rare broaches pinned to an old bit of scrap wood.

“It can’t grow!” said Liir in amazement. “It can’t do that.”

“Put it away,” said Chyde. “Some folks haven’t seen a green leaf growing in twenty years. You don’t want to get them all weepy now, do you? Mercy is the name of the game in this trade.” He kissed a vulgar emerald on the knuckle of his own middle finger, paying obeisance.

They set off, not in the direction of the waterway, but along a broad passage that served as a commercial parade for the underground settlement. More humans in evidence now, part of the vast employment network that kept Southstairs running, though the shops and stalls were largely staffed by elves who seemed to have raised obsequiousness to an art form. Here and there, the nice contrast of a grumpy dwarf. The noise was ordinary chatter and gossip, and it was some time before Liir realized what made it seem strange. For once, there was no little strain of music playing off to one side. Well, who would play music in a prison, after all?

The roofs of the cavern rose higher overhead, passing out of view into darkness. More of the structures were freestanding, supplied with their own tiled roofs, like buildings on any aboveground street. It felt like a city of the dead. Eventually Liir could see why: this must be the oldest district in Southstairs. It certainly seemed the most decrepit, so far. Above it, all at once, the claustrophobic blackness of cave-dark gave way to the blackness of a different sort: a moonless night, with scratchy scarves of cloud being drawn by the wind across ancient, disaffected stars. It was the middle of Southstairs, the original geologic bucket that must have suggested itself as a natural prison to the first settlers of the Emerald City.

“Stars, they give me the creeps,” said Chyde. “I hate to come this way.”

They found a set of steps leading farther down. Chyde asked for directions once or twice, and sent Jibbidee scampering to check the marks on buildings. “This’ll be it, I guess,” he said. “It’s an Animal district, so you’ll forgive the stench. Hygiene isn’t their strong suit, as you know.”

The air was so cold, though, with a wind whipping in from above, that the smell seemed negligible. At any rate, Liir was too excited to care. He found himself bobbing up and down, and once he nearly grabbed Chyde’s hand to squeeze it. So what that Shell was a bounder, that Lady Glinda was a glamorous airhead! They’d done something good; he’d gotten here. He’d find her, his only peer and friendmate, his half-sister if that version of history was true—the girl who befriended mice, and shared her gingerbread, and who had giggled at bedtime, even when threatened by a spanking. He would liberate Nor, and then—and then—

He couldn’t think beyond that. Just to see her, someone he had known once, back when the world had been something other than tragic, back when Elphaba had been stalking about the castle out west in her robes and rages! Back when home was still home!

Jibbidee skittered forward, back, anxious and irritable. “What, what’s the matter, thingy?” asked Chyde. “Cat got your tongue? Ha-ha.” He turned to Liir. “It did, you know. That’s why he can’t talk. It’ll grow back in time, but at the moment it’s a bloody little stump.”

They pressed into a building, more a pen than a set of salons. A Sow was lying in straw trying to warm some Piglets, most of whom looked to be dead. Improbably, the runt had survived, but it was not long for this world.

Chyde voiced what Liir was himself wondering. “An odd place to put a girl child. What was I thinking of? You. Sow. We’re looking for a girl, a human girl child. Name of Nor. The register puts her in this unlikely spot.”

“She had some developmental problems,” explained the Sow without opening her eyes. “Some lodgings coordinator decided that, among the likes of me and mine, she wouldn’t seem as offensive.”

“Where is she?”

“I would construct a good story if I had the strength,” said the Sow, “but I’m conserving what energy I have left for my litter. In fact, the girl’s own story is good enough. Do you remember when the butchers came through a week or ten days ago to cull the crop because a roast of loin was required? Some celebration Upside. It was the Wizard’s deposal, wasn’t it?”

Chyde looked slantwise at Liir. “We don’t sacrifice Animals for ceremonial meals, don’t be silly,” he said hastily. “You’re talking through your postdelivery deliriums, Sow.” He twisted rings on his fingers, turning some jewels palmward, other jewels out.

“Whatever,” she said. “My deliriums remind me about a couple of Horned Hogs, long in the tooth if they’d still had teeth, who were going to make better rump roasts this year than next, I’ll tell you. They knew their days were numbered. One of them had broken off a horn trying to escape, and the bone spur was sharp and useful. Didn’t you read the report on this?”

“I’ve fallen behind. Terrible workload, and no one to pick up the slack. Jibbidee’s next to useless. Where is the girl, that’s what I want to know.”

“I’m telling you. The Hogs entered a kind of suicide pact, and the bull killed the bitch and then himself. They arranged it to be done on the same slab of old door on which they’d have been carried out for slaughtering anyway. A kind of final comment on the quality of life at Southstairs.”

“Only the best is good enough,” said Chyde.

“So they let themselves putrefy, and we neighbors left them to it for as long as we could stand it. It bought us all some time. But you know as well as I that the entrails of Horned Hogs breed a kind of maggot that likes to burrow into human orifices, especially the airless ones—”

“Stop…”

“And there’s little less airless than Southstairs—”

“I don’t want to hear about it—”

“So your colleagues had to cart the carcasses Upside. They had no choice.”

Chyde said softly, “You’ll get a huge extra bucket of slops for this. Keep on.”

“I had no way of suspecting that the poor suckling Nor had a functioning brain left in her skull,” said the Sow. “But apparently she did. She climbed onto the door-slab and pulled the Hog carcasses over her. I certainly hope for her sake she plugged all her valves. I saw her chewing candlewax once, so maybe she was softening it for just such a purpose. Anyway, hidden by corpses, she was carried away a few days ago, though what happened to her once she left our happy home I can’t say.”

“The very least of my concerns,” said Chyde. He glanced at Liir, who was tremblingly pale and gulping for air. “You take it so hard, lad? Why is that? Sounds like she got out—something you’d never have persuaded me into allowing. Don’t weep, silly boy.” Then he said, “Jibbidee. The runt.”

“Oh no you don’t,” said the Sow, struggling to her feet. The elf was defter, though, and he had scrabbled over the boards and across the straw, and snatched the Piglet before the Sow could position herself in full defense. “You bastard!” she cried.

“I’ve been remiss; I haven’t noticed. Poor Sow: You’ve far too much on your mind. This should relieve you of distractions.” Chyde grabbed the squealing Piglet from the elf and hurled it against a beam. His aim was true; the blood spattered and the body fell with a thud into the slop trough.

In shock Liir fell against the fence, and the maddened Sow went for him, but Chyde, laughing, pulled the boy away in time. “You should’ve let someone know these shenanigans were going on,” he said to the Sow. “Being a squealer isn’t such a bad thing in a Pig. And we all have to do our duty—you, me, and the least little daisy in the field. Eh? Eh?”

8

THE PANTHER HAD GONE as far as she would go, and turned back. Now the canopy of oakhair limbs formed over their heads. In the short time that they’d been away from the mauntery, however, the wind had scoured the trees of their last leaves. The jackal moon, though sinking toward the horizon, still watched Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire as their high-rumped skarks fleet-footed it through the forest. The unnamed creatures still circled overhead, following their progress.

“I could use a moment to pee,” called Sister Apothecaire at one point. “A Munchkin woman doesn’t have as large a bladder as some others.”

“Winter wolves come out at dawn,” Sister Doctor replied, “so shut up and hold your bladder if you can, or pee in your saddle.”

9

CANDLE HAD SEEN ENOUGH OF DEATH to know that Liir was about to die. She was breathing him and kissing him as best she could, rubbing his limbs to encourage what warmth remained. His scalp was like ice. She took off her underskirts and tried to wrap them like a turban around his head, to keep his brain alive. From time to time she went and kicked against the door, hoping to arouse some maunt doing midnight devotions, but she couldn’t keep up the effort. She couldn’t stay away from him. As he grew more distant and colder, she grew warmer in her panic, and climbed atop him and tried to rescue him with her own warmth. She kissed him and licked his eyelids as a cat might, trying to open them. She didn’t know what his eyes looked like, even, and she was stretched naked upon him like a wife.

LIIR BROKE AWAY FROM CHYDE, stumbling, his eyes shut against the tears and the memory of the blameless Piglet. Just like that, without cause! What then, thinking they had some cause, might they have done to Nor?

“Be it on your own head if you get lost down here,” called Chyde, not much alarmed. “You won’t get far, and there’s none to help. Come back to headquarters when you’ve had enough wheeling about and I’ll get you a hot meal. There’s no reason for me to be inhospitable, you being a guest of Lady Glinda and all. I’m not unreasonable. I live to serve, as my dear former wife always knew me to say.”

Liir lurched, first running, then sinking almost to his knees and catching himself, then running again. He didn’t know how to find the waterway on which he and Shell had arrived. He threw down his torch, hoping it would catch something on fire and turn the place into the hell it seemed, but the torch only rolled once or twice and then dropped into a canal. There it sizzled out, and the stick bobbed like a hard new turd.

The dark was less intense, though, than he’d reckoned on, and in a moment he thought to look around. He was in a small square of faceless buildings, just a few bolted doors, possibly a warehouse district. It was empty of pedestrians and fairly quiet, too, as this place went, and above him was a scatter of starry deep.

His only thought was that there was nothing left, nothing to live for, nothing to wait for, nothing to remember. The stars were cold and he couldn’t leap to grasp them, to pass fist over fist along their lofty network of knobs, arrive someplace new, and, if not safe, at least less heinous. They merely mocked, as stars were created to do.

He hugged himself, for here the wind swept in without interference. He pulled the cape like a blanket about him, and clutched the broom as if it were the Piglet, and he could will it back to life. His tears came hot and desperate, the only warmth in the universe.

The broom twitched once or twice, and he took it out of the satchel. It shook itself slightly, and seemed firmer in his grasp. The old dusty straws at the back end, bound in a bristly fagot for sweeping so long ago, were freshened with green—even in this starry half-light he could see the color. Cattails, or grass tips in seed, something like that. He didn’t know the plant.

He threw his leg over the broom without thinking and he held on tight, and he rode it up the draft from hell, and into the night.

10

WHEN SHE HEARD THE KEY IN THE DOOR OPEN, she came to her senses, and collected her hair from where it had spilled across his face, and climbed down.

Mother Yackle was smiling almost as if she had a sensible thought in her head, though according to the other novices Mother Yackle had been senile for as long as anyone could remember. The old crippled creature pulled the door aside and dropped her head, as if affording Candle some privacy as she composed herself.

Liir stirred, and sighed. Though his eyes remained closed, the lids both twitched, just faintly. One hand clenched, then released.

By the time the jackal moon was gone for another generation, and the Superior Maunt and her returning agents, Sisters Doctor and Apothecaire, had made it up the steps to the infirmary, Liir and Candle were gone, too.

The Service

A NOTION OF CHARACTER, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line offkey, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness—in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.

That was what was once believed. Now, it seems hardly to matter when and how we become ourselves—or even what we become. Theory chases theory about how we are composed. The only constant: the abjuration of personal responsibility.

We are the next thing the Time Dragon is dreaming, and nothing to be done about it.

We are the fanciful sketch of wry Lurline, we are droll and ornamental, and no more culpable than a sprig of lavender or a sprig of lightning, and nothing to be done about it.

We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the Unnamed God, which in keeping its identity secret also cloaks the scope of the experiment and our chances of success or failure at it—and nothing to be done about it.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

IN SOME MORE HUMBLE QUARTERS of Oz, gossip had long held that Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West, had been born a wise soul, already formed, somehow conscious. Why else the mouthful of sharp choppers, not so much baby pearls as python’s teeth, which some folk insisted she’d sported at birth? She came into the world with advance knowledge of its corruption, and in the womb she had prepared for it as best she could, by growing those teeth.

That was what was said, anyway.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.

The governesses of the monied classes often held that a child ought to be kept from witnessing cruelty and ugliness, the better to preserve some ounce of innocence. Rural grannies and spinster aunts—like the Nanny who had helped raise Elphaba—neither mollied nor coddled. They believed it was better for a child to know what befalls a chicken when the feast of Lurlinemas rolls around. Better to learn—from a distance—the tricks perpetrated on the weak, the distractible, the unlucky.

Both pedagogical stances, however, relied on a common assumption. Growth and change were viewed as a reaction to conditions met. One might as easily argue, however, that it is the world’s obligation to respond to children. By force of personality, by dint of their vicious beauty and untamed ways, children tromp into the world ready to disfigure it. Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself—that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring. Elphaba, with her sympathies far more substantial than her luck, had at least wrestled with the questions. She’d shoved, and barked, and made herself a right nuisance.

By contrast, the Quadling girl, Candle, was an interpreter savant, translating the text of a world whose fundamental nature she hadn’t yet grasped, and maybe never would. Did the difference between an Elphaba and a Candle come down merely to a question of focal depth: the big picture versus the little picture?

For his part, Liir had not been a bright child. Even on the edge of puberty he had given little thought to the paradoxes of his existence. He had imagined himself to be more like Chistery, the chief Snow Monkey, than like Nor and her brothers, Irji and Manek. Chistery had a slipsy-doodle sense of language, but he tended toward steadiness. He did his chores without complaining or forgetting, and asked for nothing beyond his basic needs. Even at fourteen, Liir hadn’t been much more demanding than Chistery.

But Liir remembered that Nor had addressed the stars, had sung harmony with mountain streams, had loved all creatures whether their initial letters were written Great or small—Animal or animal. She was nuts as a nut tree in a nut forest, of course: that was what he had thought without realizing he was thinking anything at all. That silly Nor was a creature apart. Not just as a girl—though that, too, of course—but as a fragment of human possibility. She had had a sympathetic imagination, and Liir?—he could barely count.

Children often define themselves in relation to their parents: emulating them or working hard as possible to avoid resembling them in any way. Since the identity of both his parents was in doubt, Liir couldn’t see himself as taking after anyone for sure. Certainly not Elphaba. In her final months, stooped, crabbed, scrabbling from desk to podium to window ledge, she was more like a quivering scorpion than a woman. At rest her fingers tended to curl up like a claw, or like the petals of a flower gone a bit blowsy: her hand was always out, always open, ready to take what found its way there and seize it. Not at all like Liir, who cowered.

Among the human kind, thought even the most jaded and bitter of Animals, there are many ways to be wrong, but there are only a relatively few ways to be young. In their generous apprehension of the world, for their insatiable appetite for the world, the young are to be forgiven.

SOMEWHERE IN THE SULFUROUS UPDRAFT above the great maw of Southstairs, Liir was born out of a dark vile womb and thrown into the night. He came into himself perched on a broomstick dozens of yards above the highest watchtower. Here was a cushion of wind, billowing him almost onto his side, causing his shins to tighten automatically against each other, his arms instinctively to wrap the broomstick harder. It was Liir and wind and height and stars, it was alone and alone and alone; the understandings were distinct and differentiated, and then suddenly annealed by a process he couldn’t name. Maybe fear of heights! His Liirness applied, suddenly, applied to himself and no one else.

He didn’t know what Liirness might mean, and he was sorry Elphaba wasn’t around to raise a mocking eyebrow and sling a caustic remark. He might have been hurt by her sly digs, but he could have relished that hurt, too—he saw now. Survived it? Transformed it.

A hurting Liir was a real Liir.

However he’d come to be here—settling on an unstable bolster of thermal, learning to slide up the banister of the night—there was no else doing it but Liir.

The Emerald City gaped at him, but it didn’t understand what it saw. He was just a touch of ash from a hearty fire, a scrap of tinder tossed in the winds. Winds that were damned strong; they snatched at the hem of his cape and unrolled it off his shoulders until it trailed behind him, a stain.

For his part, he saw the City the way few others had. Well, Elphaba must have! And anyone lucky enough to harness a Pfenix, that rare creature. The view was like a model of a city made with an impossibly deft hand—hundreds and hundreds of buildings, grand and humble, glazed with tile and black with soot. A city built on a gentle rise, he could now see: long slicing boulevards and curving promenades, a honeycomb of streets and canals, parks and squares, a thousand mews, ten thousand alleys, a hundred thousand windows blinking bronzely. A glowing organ, like the illuminated heart of Oz itself pushed through the flesh of the land, pulsing with its own life, tricked out with monuments, defaced with the graffiti of broken trees, the Palace of the Wizard a cancer upon the landscape, the dead center of it all.

In his grief at having missed a chance to save Nor, and his shock of the unanticipated flight, and the confusion about what to do next, he was more successively Liir with every breath.

He circled the Emerald City, afraid if he landed he would return to being slightly dead. How could anyone live without flying?

SO THE BOYHOOD of Liir began—began in a new way, as if all that had gone before had happened to someone else.

But it seemed amazing to him that he’d had the courage to set out cross-country with that Dorothy. Was it courage? Perhaps it had only been sheer ignorance of the breadth and treachery of the world.

The broom brought him to ground on the cobblestoned quay near one of the smaller canals. The wind was strong, so itinerants were huddled face-front around brazier fires made of scrap wood and boards ripped from fences. No one saw him land.

Bravado was not what he felt; but he felt something, and that was rare enough. A cold sense of thrill: absorbing the news of Nor’s escape, her being alive. Wounded, cursed, embattled—alive nonetheless.

He walked for a while along the quay but realized it was colder there, and ducked into an alley. The broom on his shoulder bounced as he walked and looked for a place to doss down. It bounced harder, as if thwacking him with congratulations, but this was silly: he was walking with a spring in his step.

After a while he just jumped, six, eight times in a row, in glee, like a kid playing Hoptoad Hoptoad Call My Hoptoad. He’d look a right idiot to anyone peering out a window, but he didn’t care.

A GOOD NIGHT’S sleep under a rubble of marketplace hay neither dampened his spirits nor inspired him with a plan. Eventually he made it back to Lady Glinda’s town house in Mennipin Square. Perhaps she could arrange another meeting with Commander Cherrystone, who might be able to find out what had happened when Nor had had herself secreted upstairs. Or maybe Lady Glinda had an opening for a bootblack or a son.

The houseboy who had first talked to Liir reported that Lady Glinda had repaired to Mockbeggar Hall, the Chuffrey country pile near Restwater, there to do good works among the rural poor. It pleased her to dispense largesse from time to time. It calmed her nerves and made her happier with her marriage. She’d brought her cabinet with her, hoping that some grouse hunting of a sunny afternoon would breed camaraderie and unity of purpose, or if not, that one or two of the more difficult ministers might be shot accidentally in a convenient hunting accident. More than one kind of grouse needs bringing down!

That was how the houseboy put it, anyway—with high knowingness. No, there was no way to say when Her Ladyship might return. In her absence, the household was investing in a pack of howling Bratweilers, which as a breed was not known for its docile disposition. And take off that suit of livery, by the by, lest the house of Chuffrey be besmirched by whatever smut you’re about to get up to.

Liir was happy to oblige. His old garments, which had been placed in a bin for disposal, were dug out and tossed at him. Wriggling into them, Liir noticed an unfamiliar snugness. As if his limbs were lengthening after just one flight.

The rest of his life, and all its possibilities, were spread like a landscape before him, and he couldn’t help taking in three or four breaths, keenly and quickly, to sample the day. The air was bracing and his blood quickened. He felt as lithe and full of ginger as that cunning Shell had seemed. Liir could commit a crime, or…or banter with fellows on the street…or wink at a girl and cadge a kiss. That’s what people did. He could do that.

Soon. First he answered the summons of a carillon and presented himself on the broad steps of a church. He had a dim memory of mauntish prayers, but not of services, and this morning he felt worthy enough to feel humble. He would prostrate himself before whatever-it-was-in-there, and thank the Unnamed God for having brought him that close to Nor. And ask what next.

The doors were flung open and the service just starting. Was it a holiday, and he hadn’t known? Or were churches in the Emerald City always this thronged? Peering between the unstooped shoulders of gentlemen standing in the vestibule, Liir caught sight of the wide, bright room, a preacher of some sort declaiming from a plinth to a sea of faces varnished with rapture or, at any rate, close attention.

“I’m sure our Unnamed God requires of us conviction and perseverance. I’m sure our Unnamed God grants us the privilege of obedience. In the face of uncertainty, the one thing we can be sure of is the value of certainty. And the Unnamed God bestows upon us the balm of certainty.”

He’s sure of a lot, thought Liir; how consoling to stand within the sound of such confidence. And the way he rolls “our Unnamed God” off his tongue—the our might as well be my, he’s that well placed. People say “my God!” all the time, but usually they mean “oh shit.” He means something better.

Liir stood on his toes. The homilist was an affable older man, neither handsome nor plain—rather forgettable, but radiant with the effort of explaining the Unnamed God to all these devout, and devoutly interested, people. He looked a bit like an animated puppet, tufts of hair behind his ears taking a red tint from the colored windows behind him. “Let us continue this celebration of Thanksgiving for our deliverance from the Witch. Our independence from the Wizard and our relief from the Witch bring all of Oz to a new chance for greatness. Miss Grayling will lead us in Anthem Eleven: ‘One Truth, One Truth Alone.’”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. The room was so very crowded, and now skirts rustled and scratched, boots scuffled, as people rose to sing. He didn’t know the anthem but the refrain was simple enough.

“One truth alone we hear:

Your secret holy plan.

With so much yet to fear,

We trust what truth we can.”

The choir sang an unintelligible verse and the chorus began again, and this time Liir tried to join in, but an usher grabbed him by the collar and sidled him backward over the threshold.

“I know what you’re after,” said the usher. “Any cash in these pockets goes into the collection plate.”

“I’m not a pickpocket,” said Liir.

“Oh? You didn’t exactly dress for the service.” The usher had a point. Compared to the pious at noisy prayer, Liir looked like a peasant. “Catch you inside again, I’ll alert the constable, who’s sitting in the back row on the ready.”

“Sorry,” said Liir. But he found he could listen from the top step almost as well, and the air was nicer outside anyway—not so clotted with perfume and incense.

At the base of the wide stairs loitered a group of urchins, the oldest at least four or five years younger than Liir. They looked up at him as if he were one of them. “You don’t go in either?” he asked them.

“Never had a chance,” said one; “Never wanted a chance,” added another.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Charity pennies when the service lets out, stupid.”

“Oh. Right. Don’t you get cold?”

“No,” said a small girl missing some front teeth. “We fights a lot to keep warm.”

“It’s a good song,” said Liir. “Can you hear it from down there?”

“Don’t know hymny-singing.”

He began to hum the melody and came down a few steps. “One truth alone we hear,” he said with bright enunciation, “your secret holy plan.”

They liked the sound of a secret holy plan. “What is it?” said the gap-toothed girl.

“It’s secret, stupid,” said the older boy.

“Shut up,” said Liir, happy to be bringing joy and religion to the masses. “Your secret holy plan…get it? Da da da something, we trust what truth we can. Now there’ll be another verse and they’ll start over. Everyone ready?”

“You’re a ragamuffin cleric,” said an older girl, but she sang when the chorus came around again, and the others chimed in with more gusto than grace until the usher came out with the constable, and they all had to scatter.

“Thanks,” said the urchin leader, “now we got a song, but we got no breakfasts. Come on, looters; we’ll go steal bread from the pigeons near the Ozma Fountains.”

“Surely there’ll be more food to go around,” said Liir. “I mean now the Wizard is deposed.”

The kids ran and laughed, as all kids can, even malnourished urchins. “What, because he’s not around to eat his own portion? We’ll see about that!”

Undaunted, Liir wandered about until he came to a small hostelry. A sign read SURGERY FOR THE SENSELESS, and beneath that hung a wooden image of scissors in the act of snipping off the heads of a bunch of daisies.

This time he knew enough not to go in the front door but to wander the alley behind till he found another entrance. A graceful young woman in a dotted purple cloak came to the door when he knocked. “I’m looking for an Arjiki girl, about sixteen, newly sprung from prison, and possibly in poor health. Would she have come here?”

“We tend the wrinklies here.”

“Well, then,” he ventured, “I’m here to offer my services.”

“We have no budget for a houseboy.”

“I don’t need funds. Just a place to sleep and something to eat from time to time. I can help take care of the senseless. I had an old Nanny who needed all kinds of assistance, and I know how. I don’t mind.”

“When we’re through with them, they don’t need much help,” said the woman. “They don’t care so much what goes right or wrong for them anymore, and that’s a blessing, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so. I’m merely looking to be of service,” he explained. My life started today, he wanted to add, but she looked too cross to take it all in.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the solicitor sent you to spy on us,” she replied. “We doctor the patients, not their last wills and testaments. We’ve been cleared of suspicion any number of times. Why are you tormenting us? Isn’t there supposed to be some relief of oppression now that the Wizardic administration has left the Palace?”

“I’m not from the Palace,” he said, affronted partly, but also impressed: could he seem that old and competent already?

“If you don’t go away I’ll set the cat on you.” She pulled down her sleeve; her left arm was raw with swellings and scabs. “Unlike some, he’s not very nice since he’s been neutered,” she said ominously. Liir had the feeling that if there was a cat in the house, it was really a Cat. He backed off.

“I couldn’t just come in and get warm?” he began, but she had shut the door.

DAYS WENT BY, and he was glad to have learned about the stale bread fed to the pigeons at the Ozma Fountains. He kept body and soul together there. Scrambling for food, he wasn’t as nimble as some of the street dodgers, but his legs were longer, so he made out all right. At night he had the benefit of the cape as a blanket, so he was warmer than some.

He asked about Nor, but the City was filled with itinerant children, and to the good burghers of Oz, tinker children were anonymous when they weren’t invisible. No one had noticed an Arjiki girl on her own, and push off, you, before we call the authorities.

He thought about Princess Nastoya, but what could he do? The famous Wizard of Oz, granter of wishes, wasn’t going to stage a comeback just so Liir could beg for help for that old She-Elephant. And there was no one else to ask.

Determined not to be cowed, Liir took to hanging around the army barracks just inside the south gate, known as Munchkin Mousehole, a reference to the diminutive stature of Munchkinlanders. The Emerald City Home Guard was better fed than the poor under the bridges, that much was obvious. After a while Liir decided that membership in the Home Guard would relieve his hunger while he tried to decide what to do next. And maybe he’d find that devoting his life to service paid dividends.

Stuffing the old cape in a sack, pressing it as compacted as he could manage, Liir joined the throng of roughhouse boys on the parade grounds—the boys who played gooseball with soldiers at free exercise. The lads hoped to merit the gift of a cracker or a coin or a plug of tobacco, but Liir wanted more. He bade his time and steeled his nerve.

One afternoon a sudden hailstorm blew in from the Kells. Everyone scattered for cover. Liir ducked into a narrow archway hardly large enough to protect one. The soldier already there couldn’t be more than a year or two older than Liir, and so they fell into conversation as they waited out the storm.

The soldier, proud of his stature as Petty Fife in the Guard’s musical corps, told Liir where and how to apply, and what to say that would amuse the conscripting officers. “Don’t tell them you don’t know who your parents are,” he advised. “The officers are a high-strung bunch. They think that all the orphans who apply are really sent there by their parents, infiltrating the Guard for an eventual insurrection. If you’re really an orphan, lie. Tell them your folks can’t keep from screwing and they just had their twelfth baby, and you were kicked out of the family sty. That they’d understand; they’re screw-starved here, a lot of them.”

In time, Liir followed the advice, and learned it was sound. Though eight other gaunt-cheeked boys presented themselves in the same audience, only Liir answered smartly enough to be signed up. He was given a number, a cot, a cabin, a chit for meals, a key, a position title—Second Scrub—and a job, doing just that: potatoes in the commissary kitchen, morning, noon, and evening. The Home Guard ate little but potatoes, it seemed.

Still, there he was! Here he was! It seemed too good to be true. A smart uniform—someone else’s before it was his, for a few old stains hadn’t entirely washed out, and one sleeve had been replaced with a new one cut from a cheaper weight of broadcloth—but smart just the same. It came with a cap sporting a stiff silly brim in front, and a cocky periwinkle-colored tuft up top. The outfiteer also located a pair of boots, down at the heel and splayed at the toe, but serviceable enough, for they were conveniently overlarge and could take an extra pair of socks in the toe, which kept out the cold.

Once in a while Liir caught sight of the chatty fellow who had befriended him in the archway, but that soldier was assigned to a different division. In any case, Liir was determined to maintain a comfortable anonymity, so he didn’t go chasing for friends, neither in his own division nor beyond it.

One morning in the yard, when Liir was hauling sacks of potatoes from a delivery cart, he spotted Commander Cherrystone arriving in a brougham. The man appeared weary. Liir hung back and kept silent, but he invented reasons to linger in the area. He watched as the Commander spoke with a sergeant at arms. The Commander took a cup of coffee in a china cup and reviewed a construction site marked out for a new latrine or barracks or something. He then disappeared into a foreman’s shed with a roll of schemes under his arm.

An hour or so later he emerged, a cigarette between his gloved fingers. Liir approached Commander Cherrystone and reintroduced himself, a new politeness and reserve hiding what remained of his disapproval. Cherrystone might still be helpful.

“Yes, yes,” said the Commander, distracted. Liir wasn’t even sure Cherrystone remembered him, but the commander listened politely and said he would try to find out what he could about the details of carcass removal at Southstairs. “You mustn’t hold your breath though,” he said. “I’ve a lot on my plate. There is much to be done for the defense of our city.”

“There is? But we’re not at war? I thought peace was at hand.”

“Your highborn champion, Lady Glinda, thinks all is peaches and cream. She’d like it to be. But given the uncertainty of the political situation, the economy needs stimulus, and the threat of war is a great incentive to spend. Fiscal frottage.”

Liir didn’t know what this meant. But things did seem to be happening. For weeks, and then for months, he fed potatoes to the burly soldiers who dug and hauled the earth away from the building site, and eventually began the even harder work of setting colossal foundation stones in place. Liir was glad he was a slender thing, for he was better suited to kitchen work than transporting boulders. But slowly he deduced that, despite his nothing childhood in the nowhere mountains, he wasn’t quite as obtuse as he’d imagined.

He had no reason for smugness about it, to be sure. He was a bumpkin when it came to national affairs. He’d had little schooling and less practice at rhetoric. He didn’t venture an opinion about current affairs, for he hardly knew what they were. No one bothered to circulate news broadsides in the barracks, and the banter at mealtime boasted about whores and sores. Period.

What Liir discovered, rather, was that merely by hanging around in the company of Elphaba he had picked up—something. Not power, not intuition, which she seemed to have down to her very eyelash. Not understanding. But something else—a good ear, anyway. Would he could find a way to perform a spell! That was the ultimate competence with language, a skill Elphaba had had in spades, and that she used rarely and reluctantly. What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled…some imprecision clarified, some name Named…and some change managed.

Despite his flight on the broom, Liir was sure he had no instinct for magic. It was the broom that had managed that feat: he’d gone for the ride, nothing more. If he’d ever felt the slightest tremor of intuition or capacity, he’d have pounced on it like a cat on a rat. No, he was duller than the other kitchen lads even about basic things. He couldn’t even predict when he was going to need to use the latrine.

But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, though, that he wasn’t stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable.

COMMANDER CHERRYSTONE DIDN’T COME seeking out Liir to answer his question about Nor. When several more weeks had passed and there was no sign of the Commander again, and no message passed on by his aide-de-camp, Liir began to press the issue to others in the Home Guard. Cautiously he started to circulate a scrap of gossip he had invented. A pair of Horned Hogs was slain in Southstairs—because the Hogs were magic. Their carcasses were removed before they could contaminate the other inmates with sorceric powers. Could it be? The kitchen boys, hungry for tales of enchantment, took up the story as if it were gospel. Liir hoped his invention would trip a rebuttal, turning up some useful information about the actual disposition of the Hogs—and by extension, suggest Nor’s next whereabouts. But revelation was slow in coming.

The winter crashed in with icy spite. His hands turned red and chilblained from the water into which the potatoes dropped. At least he wasn’t freezing or starving to death outside; snow was felling dozens. He bade his time. He was glad he got to feed the fellows who worked at the construction. They had finished shunting boulders onto the site, but even in this cold they were required to lift and set, plumb and point. They got little relief from the cold.

The Home Guard guessed they were building yet larger barracks, as if the numbers of the force might swell sometime soon. Or perhaps warehouses for the defensive artillery supposedly under development. During a thaw, a steep roof was framed and shingled; when the snows returned, the interior was roughed in at a rapid rate. Before long a unionist cleric, his ceremonial garments hidden beneath heavy fur robes, appeared on its steps. With smoking urns and hallowed gestures he signaled the Unnamed God, and the unfinished place was consecrated as a basilica.

The basilica was more or less functional by Lurlinemas. True, the pagan cult of Lurline, the sprite said by some to have founded Oz, was out of favor; few but illiterate country folk paid obeisance to Lurline anymore. But the celebration of that old holiday was still popular. Lurlinism had been quietly absorbed into the common culture, not least because the cash tills splashed with money during the festive season.

Lurlinemas made a welcome distraction from the anxiety about leadership that seemed still to grip Oz, even though the Wizard was now gone half a year. Holiday presents came in on all sides for everyone but Liir. He had prepared a story about his parents’ fierce devotion to unionism and their rejection of the heathen custom, but he didn’t need to lie: no one asked him about the absence of gifts by his bunk. His mates received parcels in gilt paper, silly trinkets, useful clothes, small wallets of cash scented with cloves. He remembered the time Nor had given him the tail of her gingerbread mouse, and his mouth watered, but he swallowed it down.

The basilica was large enough to hold nearly a thousand at a time, so everyone got to attend the strictly unionist service on Lurlinemas. Liir saw Commander Cherrystone in the front.

A visiting chaplain with an ungainly flapping lip pulled himself into the pulpit and intoned the beginning of a homily. The sung petition petered out into a tirade against the loose morals of the day. Most of the soldiers went instantly to sleep, propping one another up on the benches, but Liir still had had so little exposure to homiletics that he sat straight up and listened. The preacher, perhaps sensing that someone midway down the room on the left was actually paying attention, began to improve.

The minister gripped the edges of the lectern and swayed sideways. “At every stage, even in the decorous and seemly home that the army provides you here, weird rumors of magical uprisings spring up! Like weevils in the wheat, like maggots in the rump roast!” Either his raised voice or the mention of magic stirred the morning crowd awake.

In order to challenge the blasphemous apocrypha, the minister repeated some stories being told and retold about town. “Magic’s appeal is sheer pfaithism: the pleasure faith that attracts by the glitter of its surface,” he railed. “Change a fish into a farthingale? Or a feather duster? All distraction! All sleight of skin! But change a fish into a fish fillet and feed your hungry mother: now, that’s a magic we can applaud: the magic of human charity!”

Liir was ready to applaud. Who wouldn’t? But no one else stirred, so he settled his hands back in his lap.

“Urban legends; they spring up when times are grim,” continued the homilist. “That Ozma will return to govern the humble! That little toast roundlets spread with herbed goat cheese will fall in the desert and feed the starving! That Horned Hogs, in sacrificing themselves, will confer a magical immunity to residents of Southstairs and help them to survive their confinement!!”

Liir nearly jumped out of his seat.

“No, no,” continued the minister. “The Ozma kidnapped years ago is dead in an unmarked grave, and her bones are halfway to dust. Toast roundlets don’t fall in the desert unless you’re in the final delirium of starvation, and they don’t taste of much even then. Horned Hogs, when they die in Southstairs, are carted to Paupers’ Field, and their corpses burned. Nothing of them remains, not a jot of magical comfort for any of the denizens of Southstairs. Better that prisoners should turn their wretched hearts to the Unnamed God, and beg forgiveness for even imagining such a farrago of faith!”

Paupers’ Field, then. Liir committed it to memory. But he listened to the minister’s address to the end, in case there was more to learn. The words rolled on, sonorously and as buoying, in their way, as the winds had been, the one night that Liir had ventured on the broomstick.

At the close of the service, Liir bravely pushed forward and touched the minister on the sleeve. The man—older than he’d appeared from below—turned wearily to look at Liir.

They exchanged a few words. Liir asked for instruction in unionism. He’d been moved by the remarks. He wondered aloud if escaping Kiamo Ko the way he did, even at the cost of Elphaba’s death, had been the Unnamed God’s way of getting Liir’s attention. But the minister said, a bit too sharply, “Why? Have you seen or do you know of magic being done? Here? On the premises perhaps? Are you being tempted by the wrong forces? Explain, boy!” Liir was alarmed and shrank back. Foolish to have identified himself so! Shaking his head, he excused himself from the conversation and left.

It was too cold to venture out of the Guard yard. But the weeks would pass, the sun would wheel. When the worst of the season had slunk by, he would think up an excuse to skulk out to Paupers’ Field. Learn what he could.

THE DAY DID COME, though not soon enough, and Liir made the trip swiftly, and only a little illegally. (Initially he had invented an ailing mother and a crippled father, and after he’d been in the Home Guard six months, he was given leave to carry them a few coins and a loaf of bread.) Apparently, though, his invention of the story of magic Horned Hogs had worked too well. The legend had spread through the urban population like news of a scandal, and pilgrims had begun to mass at the pyre of the Horned Hogs. The crematorium at Paupers’ Field had had to be abandoned and demolished. The squatters whose tents had sprung up on the dreadful spot knew little of what had recently gone on there, and nothing of Horned Hogs, or if an escaped convict from Southstairs had been discovered.

Still, returning to base, Liir found himself less than distraught. If Nor had really had the invention and courage, even after those years, to secret herself out of Southstairs sandwiched between two slaughtered Hogs, she’d have managed somehow to find a warm place for the winter. Their reunion was ahead somewhere, waiting for them.

He would have faith in the Unnamed God, who even now was probably ordaining the right time and place in some secret holy plan. All Liir had to do was bide his time, do his work, peel his potatoes, keep his nose clean and his eyes open, and the UG, as Liir’s barracks mates termed it, would tell him what to do next, and when to do it.

As to his hopes for helping Princess Nastoya—it wasn’t going to happen. You didn’t learn magic in the army. He had nothing to say to her, no way to give comfort. Probably she was dead already, anyway.

THERE WERE NEW HABITS to examine in the privacy of his bunk. Self amusement was the least of it: operating solo beneath the rough sheets was risky business in a dormitory setting, and his mates were always alert to the cues that one of their number was finding himself hot and bothered, and doing something about it.

No, his secret distractions were acts of memory, flights of doubt, even at times a feeble attempt at prayer. (He wondered why the chaplain spent so much time discoursing on the value of prayer to the enlisted man, yet never gave instruction in how prayer ought to be conducted.)

Deep in the funk given off by a dozen young men dozing in nearby bunks, Liir itemized his attributes, and considered how they were being heightened and strengthened by life in the barracks.

Rectitude, for one. Propriety. Custody of the senses!—that was how he (mostly) resisted masturbation.

Also, Liir found he was developing a capacity for respect. The mark of a soldier, of course. Back at Kiamo Ko, he hadn’t been respectful—he’d been ignorant and scared. There was a difference.

The army thrived on its regulae. Precision, obedience, and rightness of thinking. Had Elphaba possessed any of those virtues? When she’d been sloppy with emotion, vivid with rage or grief—which was most of the time—she hadn’t kept to a schedule. Coffee at midnight, waking up the others by slamming the larder door looking for cream! Lunch at sunset, bread crumbs on the harpsiclavier keys. Pelting through the gates of the castle, in any weather, at any hour, no matter if Liir had just laid out a couple of coddled eggs for her. Studying the night through, getting excited, reading things from that—that book of hers—out loud, to hear how they went, to hear how they sounded. Waking Chistery on his perch at the top of the wardrobe. Impetuous and selfish, totally selfish. How had he not seen it?

She was obedient—yes—to herself. Though what good had that done her—or anyone else? So far as he could remember—and he spent some wakeful nights examining his recollections carefully—she had rarely asked anything of Liir except that he keep himself safe.

And certainly she’d never asked him to be obedient. How was one to learn obedience unless one was thwacked into line? He’d been left alone, to roam the dusty corridors with Nor and her brothers. He’d picked up reading almost by accident. He’d been clothed by Sarima’s sisters, that clot of spinsters who had nothing better to do but brood and bitch. Now, there was a group of responsible adults, he thought, though he found he couldn’t actually remember their faces.

Still, he reminded himself, stiffly, to be kind. What did Elphaba know of child rearing? When he listened to his companions gossiping about their mothers—those cozy, pincushiony mamas, who never cuffed a child without a follow-up cuddle—he knew that nothing about Elphaba smacked of the maternal. Maybe this was all the proof he needed that she wasn’t his mother, couldn’t have been. She had had lots of power, in her own way, but she had no more motherly instinct than a berserk rhino.

Even a berserk rhino can bear a child, his deeper voice reminded him, till he told it to shut up.

MONTH AFTER MONTH, his days were spent in drilling. In learning to shoot. How to run holding a rifle without tripping on it and spearing himself. How to march in formation. (He didn’t learn horsemanship, as the only soldiers permitted to ride were those who had brought their own mounts with them when they enlisted.)

How to wear his hair saucily, to thrill the maidens on the pavement.

How and when to salute, though not, precisely, why.

How to peel potatoes faster.

What was curiously obscure, Liir thought, was the nature of the menace that the Home Guard was formed to protect against. The commanding officers didn’t reveal much about possible threats. When at ease in their dormitories or in the canteen, the enlisted men discussed the question.

Some felt the Home Guard existed to provide mortal comfort to the citizens of the Emerald City. Should the rabble ever rise up, should the denizens of Southstairs break free—hell, should a mighty comet thud into the Palace and burn it to blazes—the Home Guard would be right there, ready to restore order.

Others argued that the Home Guard wasn’t a municipal police force but a defensive army. Before the Wizard’s departure from the Palace, the province of Munchkinland had declared its autonomy as a Free State. Since the Emerald City’s main water supply, Restwater, fell wholly within Munchkinland’s borders—to say nothing of the great arable reaches that fed the capital of Oz—hostilities were conducted primarily on the diplomatic level. It was inconceivable that the EC would retaliate against the upstart government in Center Munch; a full-scale civil war in Oz would imperil both the water and food supplies of the capital.

But what if Munchkinland raised an army? If such an army invaded the Emerald City, the Home Guard had to be ready to toss them out on their asses. So the drills were constant, the defenses shored up, and it was said that spies were kept busy trying to find out just what Munchkinlanders were up to.

“Spies,” said Liir. It sounded lovely and sexy and dangerous.

Still, he supposed that it was good policy for the enlisted men not to know the precise reasons for their constant drilling. The information belonged to those wise enough to interpret it, and Liir knew this didn’t include him.

HE LEARNED A LITTLE MORE when he and five others were singled out of a lineup one morning and told to wash and clothe themselves in their dress uniforms. “Palace detail,” said the commanding officer.

Palace detail! How smart! He was moving up. Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the prize: it worked.

When Liir and his mates reported for duty, he realized why he’d been chosen. The detail involved six trim young men of identical height and build: two blond heads, two chestnut, two charcoal. Liir was one of the charcoals.

They were to accompany Lady Glinda and Lord Chuffrey into the House of Protocol, said the commander. There, the well-placed couple was being inducted in the ceremonial Order of the Right. The Lady Glinda was being thanked for her period of service to the country, and her husband for his own contributions. It was a high honor for the soldiers of the Home Guard to attend this ancient privilege of the just getting their just deserts, said the commander. So smarten up, top form, eyes front, chin high, buttocks in, shoulders back. The usual.

With his riding crop he smacked one of the blond heads. “You think this is the stables, you dolt? Get rid of that chewy pulp or I’ll knock your teeth out your behind.”

It is something to be charcoal-haired, anyway, thought Liir. Isn’t it?

He’d see Lady Glinda again. That much was for sure. If he had no further campaign with her, at least he had a little history. And who knew? As the throne minister of Oz, perhaps she followed all things; maybe she’d remembered his quest for Nor, and had information for him that Cherrystone had never heard.

At the Palace, Commander Cherrystone caught his eye and winked. Liir and his five mates made a sort of human wallpaper, dazzling in their white sartorials and whitened boots, gold plumes splashing from their half-helmets, standing at the head of the aisle.

Lady Glinda walked a step or two ahead of her husband, greeting the cheering crowds with a rolling movement of her scepter. Her skin was firm and her chin up, and her eyes dazzled as they had done the first time Liir had seen her. She wore antique mettanite struts, and a tiara of cobalts and diamonds, and she advanced in her own warm front of orange blossom fog. Her face was trained on the crowd, giving them love, and when her eyes passed over Liir and he gulped and willed her to recognize him, she didn’t.

Commander Cherrystone followed, pushing Lord Chuffrey in a wheeled chair. The nobleman’s head was fastened peculiarly on his neck, as if it had come unfastened and been reattached by someone inadequate to the task. Chuffrey drooled on his epaulets. Attending like a nursemaid with impeccable references, Commander Cherrystone discreetly wiped away the spittle.

The ceremony was abbreviated due to Lord Chuffrey’s obvious ill health. Perhaps he was dying and they were rushing through this convention as a thanks for all the good he and his bride had done the government. Which in Lord Chuffrey’s case, if Liir understood the testimonial talks correctly, seemed to be a canny invention in the field of fiscal accounting that had helped the government avoid bankruptcy some years back. In Lady Glinda’s case, it was her dazzling throne minister-ship, over all too soon, but the rewards to be reaped for years to come, and so on, and so on.

Glinda seemed to have learned how to control her blushing in public, or perhaps she just wasn’t listening to the speeches.

Toward the end, when Liir’s green eyes had begun to glaze over a bit, a rustle and hush in the peplums and fozzicles of the gentry caused Liir to turn ever so slightly to a side door. Supported on both sides by a pretty maiden, in came the Scarecrow himself. He looked greatly inebriated, or troubled by muscular atrophy; his limbs were akimbo and his eyes rolled like hard-boiled eggs on the spin.

At first Liir thought it was a joke, like a Fool at a sacred pageant. But the cornets trilled, and the great and good deigned to applaud. The Scarecrow gave a genuflection of such profound clumsiness that several of the Home Guard snorted. The Scarecrow said nothing, just waved, and Lady Glinda curtseyed, a cataract of tulle bunching in front and frothing around to the back.

The Scarecrow retreated. Liir felt cold and mean. The Scarecrow had been an obvious imposter—nothing like the Scarecrow Liir himself had walked with along the roads from Kiamo Ko. Couldn’t they see it? Or were they complicit? Or maybe, in their eyes, one Scarecrow did look like every other Scarecrow.

The whereabouts of the real Scarecrow hardly bore imagining, now that Liir had seen the depths of Southstairs. Or perhaps, just perhaps, cannier than he’d ever let on, the real Scarecrow had managed to disappear himself somewhere. Good luck to him, in prison or in hiding.

Liir didn’t pay attention to current affairs, generally, or not those beyond the intrigues within the barracks; he thought it beneath him to follow the details of how the civilian world amused itself. Was Lady Glinda stepping down willingly or had she been crowded out by some coalition of antagonists? The question occurred to him, but in dismissing it as meaningless, finally, Liir felt the first flush of adult apathy. It was welcome. About time.

At any rate, to be invisible to Lady Glinda and unrecognized by the next hollow head of Oz—it brought back to Liir the truth of his isolation. He wouldn’t approach Glinda for news of Nor; he wouldn’t stand the insult of having to reintroduce himself.

At length, the soldiers were shown a side room where they could nibble at dry crackers while Lord Chuffrey and Lady Glinda were received at a luncheon. To avoid possible stains on their dress sartorials, the soldiers were forbidden to drink anything but water. Liir was pissed at serving as a pretty accessory for Lady Glinda. He refused even the water.

When they saw the couple back to its carriage, Liir didn’t even bother to let his eyes sweep over them. Should her eyes pick him out, now that the job was done, let her address him. But she didn’t.

A YEAR PASSED, another. Nothing was the same, year by year, but little was different, either.

He found himself watching how the men consorted together, realizing long after it had begun that this was effectively his first experience of male behavior. Kiamo Ko had been unrelievedly female, at least in the adult generation; the shadowy presence of Fiyero, long lost husband and lover and father, was real but indistinct. Liir had learned nothing of how men speak, or joke, or trust, or fail to trust one another.

In the service, there were games, and Liir played hard and well. Formal clubs and socials, and he attended—stiffly. His work assignments gave order to his days and brought some satisfaction. He became known as a good listener, though this was mostly because he was unwilling to spill the beans about his quirky upbringing, and listening was easier than chatting.

Liir grew accustomed to his privacy. When furloughs were granted, he chose not to take advantage of them. Once he was invited to join a fellow cadet on a trip home to the family farm somewhere north of Shiz, in Gillikin. Liir had been tempted to accept. But the night before they were to leave, the cadet had a few too many. He began to carol about his doddery old daddums and the good little woman who’d married him and on and on and so forth.

“They’re so proud of me. It’s the best thing anyone in the family has ever done—to be selected a member of the Home Guard!”

Peculiarly undistinguished lot, Liir supposed.

Oh, said the cadet, but his mother’s apple trickle could bring tears to the eye! Indeed, it brought tears to his, but Liir’s eyes were stones. The next morning he told the headachy cad to go on without him; he’d changed his mind.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” said the cadet.

“I’d like to keep it that way.”

The fellow returned with a sizable chunk of apple trickle wrapped in a checked cloth, and it was good. Too good, in a way; Liir had never tasted anything so wonderful. He resented every tasty crumb.

A few weeks later, when a commander’s rifle had gone missing from the rack, Liir made an appointment to see the commander privately. He said he knew that the code of honor required him to speak. Deftly Liir laid suspicion on the shoulders of the Gillikinese cadet. The lad was hauled off into solitary for a few days. When he had not confessed in a week, he was stripped of his uniform and excused from service, dishonorably.

He never made it home, someone said later; he killed himself on the way. Hung himself in someone’s back field, strung up on a black-trunk elm.

Nonsense, thought Liir; that’s just army gossip. Who would bother to learn such specific details of a suicide of someone so patently soft and regrettable?

He sat in chapel. “Nothing convinces like conviction,” thundered the minister, warning against softness, which when you came to think about it seemed like the UG’s way of approving of Liir’s maneuver. His own lack of remorse about it seemed authoritative in and of itself. When the rifle was found elsewhere, merely misplaced in the wrong locker, the entire company simply avoided the subject. No one came after Liir to ask him to justify his previous statements. It seemed no one wanted to be caught in the wrong.

A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask. An Elephant in her disguise as a human princess, a Scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch’s hat, a Wizard’s showbiz display, a cleric’s stole, a scholar’s gown, a soldier’s dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?

The next time Lurlinemas rolled around, Liir volunteered for solitary guard duty in the watchtower that capped the great chapel. He wouldn’t agree to being spelled so he could spend an hour at the holiday dinner. “I determine my own duty and I perform it,” he said to the cadet assigned to replace him. The cadet was only too happy to sidle back to the festivities. Liir took pleasure in dumping out, untasted, the tankard of ale snuck in to thank him.

ANOTHER YEAR, or was it two? At length the day came when Liir’s company learned it was shipping out. But to where?

“You don’t need to know,” said the sergeant from Detail Desk, looking over his notes. “Your mail will be forwarded.”

“Is this a…military moment?” asked someone, trying to speak stoutly.

“You get a night on the town before you go, six chits each. A court-martial for you and a fine for your family if you don’t come back by the morning call of the roll,” they were told.

Liir had no family to be fined, and no one to shame with a court-martial, but he was beginning to have enough of a sense of propriety not to want to be ashamed of himself. And since the months had become years, and the Home Guard was an institution that honored tradition and resisted innovation, he had lost sight of how much he had grown up. He was old enough to have a couple of beers, goddamn it. Because who the hell knew what was coming next?

He had to borrow civilian clothes from mates—a pair of leggings, a tunic, a waistcoat—for he’d long outgrown the rags he’d arrived in. He’d outgrown everything but the old cape, in which he had no intention of swanning about, not in front of his mates, nor anyone else.

He kept the broom and cape in a locker, away from prying eyes. He no longer put his face in the musky pleats of the cape’s broadcloth, to harvest piercing memories. He didn’t want to think of the past. Memories of Nor were pressed flat as envelopes, juiceless, between the folds of the cape, interleaved with memories of Dorothy, Chistery, Nanny—and oldest, Elphaba. They were of no use to him now. Indeed, they were a hindrance. Neither did he dream of his old associates—he could scarcely call them family, or friends—nor of anyone else.

The fellows who made it a habit of jolly-follying knew where to head for a good time. A tavern, they said, in Scrumpet Square: known for cheese-and-bacon temptos and even cheesier women. The floor was sawdusted, the beer was watered, the elf who served the drinks was neutered, and the tone agreeably disreputable. The place proved to be as advertised, and packed to the rafters, as the news of a Mission had spread. Common knowledge held that departing soldiers were good at loosening their wallets, their trousers, and sometimes their tongues, so an assortment of bamboozlers, shady ladies, and spies were fighting the buckos for the attention of the barkeep.

After so long in something like solitary confinement—solitary because he was solitary now, by choice and by nature—Liir found the exercise unsettling but not appalling. He tried to relax. He prayed to the UG that the spirit of relaxation should break the yoke of tension that rode across his shoulders here and now and, come to think of it, always.

Everyone wanted to know where they were going, and why. In all the theories that were shouted from table to table, one of them had to be right, but which one? An uprising among what remained of the Quadlings down there in Qhoyre? No—a final decision, and about time too, to invade Munchkinland and reannex it? No, no, nothing so exciting—only a boring public works project, building a dam across one of the vales of the Scalps, to create a reservoir deep enough to supply the Emerald City and decrease its dependence on foreign water. Or yet again no: no: no: no: something more wonderful than that. The cave of Ozma has been discovered, and she is to come back and rule our Oz, and the idiotic Scarecrow can go stuff himself. Hah! Good one: a Scarecrow stuffing himself.

Liir hunched into his borrowed jacket and tried to look as if he was expecting someone. His mates weren’t avoiding him, exactly; they knew they’d be stuck with him for some time to come. They were spilling over with chat and banter on all sides, from all comers. Liir watched pockets being picked, groins being stroked, apron strings unraveling, beer spilling, candles guttering, mice cowering in the shadows, and the elf scampering almost weightlessly about with trays of beer glasses.

When he came to whisk away Liir’s glass for a refill, he said, “Three Ozpence, guv; and how’ve you been keeping since Southstairs?”

Liir’s head whipped. When Glinda hadn’t recognized him for anything but his function, he had hated her for it. Now he hadn’t recognized this elf—and he’d only ever seen one before! Or was that a good enough excuse?

He found the name on his tongue. “Jibbidee?”

“The same. Can’t stay to chew the fat. Money’s sloshing in the till.”

“How’d you get out? I thought no one got out—”

“No one? Hah. You did, didn’t you? You weren’t meant to, I think. And so did that girl you were looking for, if the stories they told were true. Folks gets out, boy-britches. Many different ways. Sneaks out, flies out, folks their way out. Myself, it was bribery. Once upon a time I recognized a ring too unique to have found its way to the Under-mayor legally. Chyde would’ve slaughtered me, but elves are hard to pin down.” He leaped up in the air like a figure filled with helium; it was true. Elves had little weight. It’s what made them so easy to kill, if you could catch them. “So now I’m Upside, enslaved here to the shackles of righteous employment, too tired to think straight, and Chyde is free as a bee down Southstairs, out of mortal company, light, and beauty. Which of us wins the liberty sweepstakes?”

He skirled away without waiting for an answer, but when he came back to drop the next beer on the table, he added, “You’re not one I’d have spotted for the military, you.”

“Hidden depths.”

“Hidden shallows, I think.” But Jibbidee wasn’t being mean. He grinned. Elves were like house cats that knew how to smile; the effect was unnerving. “That beer’s on me.”

“I inshist—”

“Don’t bother. You’ve got the welfare of the land on your shoulders. All I have to do is keep awake till last call, and then mop up the vomit.” He twitched his ears—which looked in considerably better shape than they once had. “I heard about how the girl you were hunting for was said to have escaped, but not how you did. They’re still talking about it down there. Confounded ’em all.”

Liir scowled; he didn’t like to remember flying. The experience had been grand, and a sense of airsickness had obtained only after the fact.

“Did you ever find the girl?”

“I found out how to mind my own business.”

The elf didn’t take the offense Liir had intended him to. Cheerily enough, he riposted, “You’re the rare one, then, who knows so well the line between your business and anyone else’s.” He bounded off.

Liir drank up and felt the beer rise in him—an agreeable and uncustomary heaviness. He imagined he could sit there all night, shoulders hunched, watching the circus of human life at a high pitch. After a half an hour, though, he had to go piss it out.

On his way back to the table he lurched against a soldier, who turned at the thump. Liir recognized him. It was the guy who had told him how to apply to the Home Guard all that time ago—the fellow on the gooseball pitch who’d sheltered with him during a hailstorm. Imagining Liir had approached him intentionally, the soldier said, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Well, it is,” said Liir. “All these years, and never thanked you for the skinny on how to get in.”

“If you’re looking for advice on how to get out, I’m afraid it’s too late now,” said the fellow. He was sleek and rangy both, with hair the color of clarified butter, swept long across the brow and clipped at the nape. Even in this welter and swelter he was wearing officer’s code stripes on the shoulders of his smart civilian tightcoat. A Minor Menacier, by the look of it.

“Liir,” said Liir.

“Some do. They can’t help themselves,” said the petty officer. “Leer,” he explained. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Not too much enough of.”

“You ought to sit down. You don’t want to throw up on my threads.”

The Menacier commandeered a small table from a couple of floozies. “Trism,” he said, by way of introduction. “Trism bon Cavalish.”

“Liir.” He never said “Liir Thropp,” though that was his closest approximation to a real name. Formally he’d enrolled as Liir Ko—taking the second part of Kiamo Ko as his surname. Now, though, he didn’t offer even that. The Minor Menacier seemed not to notice, however.

“Do you know where’s we’re going?”

“I’m staying put. But if I knew where you were going and I told you, that’d be treason.” He took a long pull on his beer. “No, I don’t know.”

They studied the crowd in a complacent silence as if they’d been friends for years. Liir didn’t want to ask questions of Trism’s origins, lest Trism ask him the same. So he asked Trism what a Minor Menacier’s duties consisted of. Maybe he’d one day get to be one. Day. A Minor Menacier. Someday. Pluck a duck, the beer was telling.

“Development of Defense,” said Trism. “That I can tell you.”

“Which means what? New sword technique?”

“No, no. I’m in husbandry.”

Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.

“Animal husbandry,” Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature. “Training for military uses,” said Trism at last. “Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?”

“It’s the beer,” said Jibbidee, swooping down again. “I’m not sure I’d fill him up with any more, begging your pardon, unless you want to husband him home.”

“Sorry; it is the beer,” said Liir, suddenly queasy. “I think I need some air.”

“Can you manage on your own?” By the tone of Trism’s voice he certainly hoped so but courteously he helped Liir up and loaned a strong arm. “Make way, make way; hail hail, the prince of ale,” he cried. Liir felt like that old weevily Scarecrow he’d seen at the Palace. His legs had contradictory intentions.

More or less tumbling out a side door, they were almost plowed into by a carriage careering down the alley from Scrumpet Square. It pulled up to let out more custom. “Whoa, your country needs you, don’t go slipping under the wheels of this fancy rig,” said Trism, hauling Liir back and holding him up.

The door flew open and a man in a fashionable dark brocaded vest jacket descended. “All my small life that stays small and separate comes out now’s time to see me drunkish,” said Liir, “not fair play, that.” The smart figure was Shell.

“Oh ho,” said Shell, in a merry mood. “I knew you’d turn up one day! So, laddio, you’re doing the town? Out soliciting officers, by the look of it? That’s my boy.”

“I’m a Guardsman,” said Liir, straightening up more or less successfully. “Ow.”

“Watch your head. You may need it one day. I wondered where you’d gone! Wicked old Chyde was absolutely flummoxed. He’d no idea what happened to you. Assumed you’d slipped and drowned in one of the canals, but then suicides and other such big shit usually silts up against the grates at one end of the line or the other, and you never did. Somebody said you’d melted, and sifted right through the sieve! Ha! That was a good one.”

“I was looking for Nor,” said Liir, trying to hang on to any small knot of reality he could pinch.

“Sure, and I remember that well. She’d snaked her way out somehow, hadn’t she? And then word of her turned up, now where was it—?”

“I shall leave you to your reunion,” said Trism, starting to detach himself.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of parting chums,” said Shell. “We’re only young once, lads; make the most of it. And tomorrow you go toodle-oo, I hear. No, I can’t stay and chatter; I’ve work to achieve in the next hour, now that lips are oiled enough to speak what I want to hear. But I’m talking strategy to the armed forces: I’ll save my breath for kissing, or kissing up. Off you go, boys. If you want to borrow my trap and get home in a hurry, just see it’s sent right back. I was young once, I remember. Go ahead.”

“Sir!” snapped Trism. “I am an officer of the Home Guard!”

“And I’m the wicked snitch of the west,” said Shell. “Oh well, I was trying to be useful. Not my strong suit. Driver, an hour, and don’t have too much yourself; I don’t want to end up in hospital. I’m to be back at the Palace by midnight for fun and frolic if I can pay with the coin they require.”

“Nor!” said Liir. Saying the very word, after all this time, had made him come round. “Where is she?”

“Am I your personal secretary? I don’t know. Was it Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland?”

“Couldn’t have been; that’s a hostile state,” intervened Trism, bulking up.

“You’re in a hostile state, by the look of it. Don’t sneer at me, Minor Menacier. I get around; that’s my job. But no, it wasn’t there. Maybe it was Shiz. Was it Shiz? I can’t remember exactly where. Don’t pester me, Liir: I can see you’re going to pester me. I have to go.”

“Shell!” said Liir, but the man was gone in a snap of cloak and a slam of the door.

“Well,” said Trism. “I’m not seeing you home, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I am thinking no such thing. Though that coach would have been useful right now.”

“I wouldn’t take the loan of a boot from the likes of him. Bounder. I’ll hail a cab or a street chair for you.”

They walked to the front of the pub. Scrumpet Square was bright with torchlight. While Trism hailed a driver, and the cab was being brought round, Liir trained his eyes on some scraps of graffiti written with drippy paint on a public wall. He tried to bring them into focus as a way to sober up. In four different hands, applied at four different opportunities, to judge by the aging of the text, the wall read

ELPHIE LIVES!

OZMA LIVES!

THE WIZARD LIVES!

And then

EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.

Trism dumped him in the cab and paid for it, and gave the driver directions. Then Trism disappeared back into the pub before Liir could even thank him. So Liir settled back against the moldy cushions.

Everyone lives but us.

Nor was somewhere in Shiz. Shiz. Where was that?

He would find her. He should find her. He should leap from the cab right now and go find her. He tried to sit up, but the world beyond the isinglass windows was unsettled and rolled about as if on the backs of a school of earthquakes. When he was deposited at the barracks, his feet found their way to his bunk while his head tried not to hurt, and also tried to remember what was so important.

HE WAS HALFWAY PACKED next morning when he recalled Shell’s comment about Nor. Through the sawteeth of his headache he grappled with the question. What to do? Packing, he paused over the cape—leave it behind, leave all the past filed in its pleats? He didn’t want to deal with that decision now, while his head hurt. Easier to pack the old thing. Easier to bind the broom’s head in a cloth so it would look less womanly, and tie the thing to the satchel laces. Postpone chucking these things out for good. Any minute now inspiration would strike. An idea would form, and as if by magic the courage to follow that idea would flare up. If only his head wouldn’t pound so!

Now’s a good time for an idea, he said, as he joined his mates in formation to receive orders.

Commander Cherrystone had not been informed about his own new assignment, it appeared, until that very dawn; he arrived at the head of the transport column with an unpinned collar and crumbs in his trim, silvering beard. His expression was thunder. He delivered his instructions in a throttled tone. No one dared ask a question. When the chaplain arrived, Commander Cherrystone didn’t join in the public atonements delivered under open skies to the Unnamed God, in exchange for the success of their mission. Whatever it might turn out to be.

“We leave in an hour,” said the Commander.

So, oh, what next? If only he had more oomph this morning! Or if he had a place to rest his head till the screech of today calmed down.

He finished clearing his trunk. Unlike all the other men, he had no private books, no mezzotints of family grandees, no clutches of letters from admonitory father or teary mother or whispery girl back home. He was bereft of the more traditional impedimenta, and determined to be proud of it.

He waited in the yard beside the basilica. What did he take of his mock parents? If Fiyero had been his dad, really, Liir had got nothing from him but a possible half-sister. No model of comportment, no word of wisdom, no wallet fattened with funds, no blessing.

If Elphaba had been his mother, he got something more—that much was sure. But what? She had acted to pervert fate, to interrupt and bludgeon history into shape—to topple the wonderful Wizard of Oz, no less—and what good had it gotten her? She was fierce and futile at everything she attempted. What kind of a lesson was that?

She hadn’t talked to him much. Only in a cast-off manner. One lunchtime she’d seethed, more to herself than to him; “It isn’t whether you do it well or ill, it’s that you do it all,” she’d said, dumping her attempt at poached eggs on the floor and hurrying back to the books and charms in her tower. That was her legacy, and it didn’t add up to much.

So perhaps he should consider the absence of good advice a kind of direction from the universe: Follow where you are led, and take it from there. Maybe fate intends to lead you to Nor. It’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it?

It was easier to be passive, easier on his brain anyway. His cohorts gathered for departure while he congratulated himself for sorting this out.

And it was indisputably thrilling to fall into formation to the punch of snare drums. The men squared their shoulders and became Men. The wind obliged by whipping the banners and emblems: it was all so glorious and immediate.

The four departing companies of the Home Guard were now colloquially named the Seventh Spear, after some magic weapon in a children’s fable that Liir had never heard told. The convoy marched in formation through the smell of sweet morning loaves, as Emerald City shopkeepers were unshuttering their windows and washing down the paving stones.

What a joy there was in movement! Liir hadn’t realized how petty he’d become, worrying daily about the gloss on his boots, the snap in his retort. The Guard’s culture had trained him into thinking that a well-brushed smile and a groomed chin were somehow vital to the preservation of the nation.

He saw the Emerald City—perhaps for the last time?—as if for the first. And how fitting it seemed that the Seventh Spear was shafting its way through the capital toward Westgate, the portal through which Liir had first made his approach. They marched past the polished half-domes and buttresses of the Wizard’s Palace—still called that, even now. The sun came out and glazed the marble; one could hardly look at it. A giant broody hen. From this angle, a distance north: the grimmer spectacle of Southstairs, lurking behind the hunched shoulders of its walls.

Everywhere else—on this boulevard, anyway—the allure of healthy commerce. Cafés catering, at this hour, to merchants on their way to their warehouses. Stalls of books, pottery, feathery remnants to adorn hats and hems. A display, arrayed under a bentlebranch arbor, of several dozen tribal carpets imported from the Vinkus, suggesting that the West was trading with the capital these days. And floral silks from Gillikinese artisans, sprays of lavender and lime, to upholster furniture in better parlors. One merchant had hung an entire chandelier, chase-worked mettanite with crystal pendants, from the bicep of a healthy oak, and he had arranged below it a dining area for eighteen—table, chairs, Dixxi House porcelain settings and silver service, with linen napkins folded to look like swans, one at each place setting.

That those who headed the nation could enjoy their meals in such luxury!—the men marched with firmer step. The vitality of the capital gave life to their cause.

The Seventh Spear turned a corner, continuing toward Westgate. Liir recognized the warehouse district through which he’d passed with Dorothy and her friends. The convoy paused while Commander Cherrystone negotiated some last-minute business with a wine merchant, and the soldiers were allowed to fall out of formation. Bleary from last night’s mistakes, Liir wandered to the brighter side of the street. He propped himself against the wall of an abandoned granary of some sort. Putting one heel against the wall, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to get some sun.

The warmth of the walls behind him, the pleasure of being between moments of his own history…his skittery mind indulged in a waking dream. His thoughts wandered up the cracked plaster walls of the corn-house. It was as if he were looking down at himself from the window on the second level. That’s me down there, that young soldier, anthracite-haired, trim, smart enough, having his moment of rest…How handsome a figure he managed to seem, from this vantage point: shoulders acceptably broad, the windblown hair on his scalp, the knee thrust forward. A soldier doing the work of the empire: a good guy.

Then the focus of his attentions backed up—for that fragment of an instant in which a revery implies eternity—and Liir had the sense that the young soldier at street level was out of sight again, and out of mind; and the two people who might have been looking out at him from some private aerie above had turned their attention back to each other, lovingly.

Must be the sun! Must be the beer! Filthy slutty mind he had, after all.

“Straighten out!” barked Cherrystone, and they did, and he did.

THROUGH WESTGATE, they turned to the south. The lads knew the habits of the sun enough to be able to tell that much. They marched as suited the Commander’s whim—more relaxed when in the rural outback, in parade formation when passing through villages. The companies tented at night, found the dried lentils and local celery exotic and filling, alternated hymns of patriotism to Oz with anthems of devotion to the Unnamed God, and didn’t bring out the bawdier ditties until Commander Cherrystone had retired for the night.

Fording the Gillikin River, they came to a broad sweep of pebbly waste, marked here and there by stands of scrub maple and pencilnut. Once they stopped for water at a kind of oasis, a mauntery of some sort, hoping that some novices would come scupper for them—lean down to reach the bucket, and show evidence of some lovely curve beneath their voluminous habits. But the maunts who supplied some succor were desiccated old biddies who had no curves to flaunt.

Liir waited to feel some frisson of recognition—could this have been the place where he and Elphaba originated? He couldn’t decide. Maybe one mauntery looked just like another. Certainly one maunt and the next seemed identical twins.

“If we’re going south or east again, wouldn’t the Yellow Brick Road give us better speed?” some wondered. But perhaps the Free State of Munchkinland hadn’t granted the necessary license.

Another opinion held that since most of the Yellow Brick Road leading south and east fell within the boundaries of Munchkinland, perhaps the final destination of the Seventh Spear was the mysterious west—Kumbricia’s Pass, or the Thousand Year Grasslands, or Kvon Altar—romantic locales, full of intrigue, exoticism, magic, sex. Everything over the horizon beckoned more temptingly than anything near.

Crossing into the eastern Vinkus, they continued through the oakhair forest between Kellswater and Restwater. Fording the Vinkus River, too, they paused on the escarpment of its southern bank. A dozen miles or more to the southwest, the Great Kells gave off a faint but redolent breath of balsam and fir. Nearer, scatterbirches in the lowland meadows shimmered in their new leaf, like chain mail on skeletons. Several hundred small grey birds flew by, brazenly low, singing their throats sore.

It felt as if the world itself were blessing the endeavor when Commander Cherrystone gave the signal not to head west toward Kumbricia’s Pass, the main route to the vastness of the Vinkus, but instead to the southeast. They would skirt the mountains and, rounding them, head south into Quadling Country.

The where, then, but not the why.

Why Quadling Country? When the Seventh Spear paused to make camp, the soldiers shared what they remembered about the southernmost province of Oz. Quadling Country was your basic muckland. An undifferentiated waste of bogs and badlands, once widely populated by the Squelchfolk, a marsh people known for their ruddy complexion and fishy odor. Hadn’t they mostly been eradicated when the Wizard had drained the wetlands in the hunt for swamp rubies? In the Emerald City you could see Quadling families from time to time. They were clanny, silent in public, making little effort to integrate. In the Emerald City they’d cornered the market on trash removal—all the funnier: trash hauling trash.

But the two larger cities of Qhoyre and Ovvels: surely something of them remained? The southern arm of the Yellow Brick Road ended in Qhoyre, and Ovvels was a nearly impassible distance beyond. A town built on stilts, Qhoyre. A town whose streets were silted with mud, Ovvels. No wonder the Seventh Spear’s administration had obliged them to include gum-rubber boots in their packs.

WONDERFUL WEATHER, bracing light, cheery companionship. Now and then a free-held farm or some nobleman’s country estate would welcome the convoy. A whole stable of milk cows at one, and they had milk to drink, to pour in their coffee, to splash on their faces; they had milk puddings, cheese temptos, creamed curd, lake lobster bisque. Who needed that fancy dining ensemble for sale under the trees in the Emerald City? The soldiers ate like kings and nodded off under the willow fronds, sassy and satisfied.

One day Liir and a couple of pettys were sent to collect fresh water at the foot of a wooded dale. They paused to rest before starting back with the filled jugs yoked to their shoulders. Other topics of conversation having been exhausted, Liir asked his mates, Burny and Ansonby, about the place of husbandry in the development of new defensive systems for the Emerald City.

As it happened, Ansonby and Burny had both flirted briefly with defensive husbandry. Ansonby had worked in the veterinary arts, and Burny had helped copy some legal contracts with farmers outside the Emerald City.

“It’s supposed to be hush-hush, but everyone talks about it,” said Ansonby.

“Not to me,” Liir said pointedly.

“Well, then, I’m not sure it’s my place—”

“Dragons,” Burny interrupted. “Smallish flying dragons.”

“Dragons!” said Liir. “Nonsense. Aren’t dragons mythological? The great Time Dragon and all that?”

“Don’t know where the stock came from,” said Ansonby, “but let me tell you: I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes. They’re about yea big, wingspan the length of a bedspread. Vicious things, and hard to control. There’s a team been breeding them for a few years now.”

In the course of their military careers, Ansonby and Burny had both come across Minor Menacier Trism bon Cavalish. They had no opinion one way or the other, except that he was remote and a bit uppity. Good at his job, though.

“Which job is that?”

Ansonby said, “He’s a kind of—what would you call it? An animal mesmerist, I guess. He’s got a silky voice and is real calm. He can woo an agitated dragon into a sort of trance. Then he takes the dragon’s head in his palms. This is seriously risky, you know. The notched beak of a dragon can puncture the skin of your forearm, hook your vein, and unspool it out of your arm with a single jerk. I’ve seen it happen. No, I have. Really. Not to bon Cavalish though; he’s smooth. When the dragon’s purring, the dragoneer does something suggestible to the beast. I guess it’s about overriding the creature’s internal gyroscope, or navigational mechanism. Or just being persuasive and chummy with an attack beast. When he’s done, the dragon is directable by voice, at least for a while. Like a falcon with its falconer, a sheepdog with its shepherd. Go, come, round, back, stay, up, dive, lift, attack.”

“Retreat?”

“Dunno about retreat. They’re attack dragons.”

Liir closed his eyes. “I can’t picture a dragon, try as I might, except for something fanciful in an illustrated magazine, or a stage prop. And a flying dragon!—sounds effective. Also a little scary.”

Ansonby remarked, “Trism bon Cavalish thinks that someone came up with the idea after hearing about those flying monkeys organized by old what’s-’er-face out west. The witchy witch. What was her name anyway?”

Nobody spoke. The wind soughed and the leaves scratched against one another. “Come on then, better get on,” said Liir nonchalantly. “The water’s heavy, and it’ll be a bitch to haul. We’re rested enough.”

“Who made you boss?” said the other fellows, without offense. They dusted themselves off and began to press back to camp.

THERE’D BEEN NO SIGHT of settlement nor even of a solitary hermit for days. No border marking, either, but they knew they’d reached Quadling Country by the change in landscape. Little by little the land was sinking, a series of overgrown meadows stretching for days, every few miles another half inch lower. The grasses went from emerald to the yellow of pears, and then to a ghastly sort of white, as if the fields were being tinged with hoarfrost in the height of summer.

At night they slung hammocks in stunted sedge trees, and tried to sleep, though a zillion mosquitoes emerged, and there was little protection against that. Also a soft, thumpy sort of airborne snail would constantly blunder into their faces at night, perhaps drawn by the steamy exhalation of human breath. The camp echoed with a night-long chorus of stifled girlish screeches or curses as the worm-clods landed wetly across noses, cheeks, mouths.

“No wonder this place is uninhabited,” said Burny once.

“It didn’t used to be. The Quadlings lived here,” Liir pointed out.

“It’s one huge stinkhouse. Any locals still preferring this to the rest of Oz must be cretinous. Or subhuman. En’t our old Wizard done them a favor to clear them out?”

BUT WORM-CLODS AND MOSQUITOES were hardly enemy combatants, and the Seventh Spear knew things could get worse. It had to get worse, or why were they being asked to suffer the indignity of this climate?

They gained an uncharacteristic hummock of land, a half mile across, from which the ground water had drained, more or less. Commander Cherrystone gave them permission to peel off their boots and air their feet. Eighty men scratched between their toes, where the itch was most maddening; flakes of wettish skin billowed before being borne away. It almost looked like snow.

Commander Cherrystone spoke about their mission.

“By my reckoning, we aren’t far from the outskirts of Qhoyre,” he said. “Common talk in the City treats Qhoyre as a provincial backwater, and compared to Oz’s capital, it is, of course. But it has a distinguished history of its own, predating annexation by northerners. In the modern times, there’s usually been a Viceroy stationed here to oversee. Not now. Were things calmer, we would have expected someone dispatched from Government House to serve as a translator of the native tongue, Qua’ati. We’ll do without, I’m afraid. Unless I have a secret linguist among my fine young men?”

No one volunteered.

“As I thought. It’s an ugly tongue but not hard to pick up, I’m told, if you work at it. I’m sure some of you will find yourselves fluent in a matter of weeks, and that will come in handy in due course.”

The matter of weeks stumped them. Also, in due course. Was this some sort of permanent billeting? To what end?

Commander Cherrystone explained. It seemed that the Viceroy had been abducted, and his wife had disappeared, too. No one in Qhoyre admitted to knowing who was responsible, but the indifference of the natives to the situation was unsettling to the Scarecrow’s cabinet back in the Emerald City. Quite offensively the Quadlings behaved as if life ought to go on much as normal, whether with a Viceroy or without one.

The job of the Seventh Spear was to befriend the locals, keep the public order, and—best-case scenario—identify and punish the perpetrators. If the Viceroy and his wife could be found and rescued, all the better, though he wasn’t an indispensable civil servant, apparently—otherwise he’d not have been saddled with such a hardship assignment. In any case, the brief of the Seventh Spear didn’t extend to recovery of the Viceroy; showing some muscle, however, was paramount.

“We’ll move into the city, reclaim Government House, and restore order,” he said. “There may be some bloodshed, men.”

They nodded and clutched their weapons.

“Let us bow our heads and put our holy mission of right governance in the sight of the Unnamed God.”

This, so far as it could be said for a fact, they did.

DISAPPOINTINGLY, THEIR RECLAIMING of Government House involved no bloodshed at all. The toothless old woman who had set up a loom in the eastern verandah merely handed over a rusty key that had been dangling on a string around her neck. For one so plump and wrinkled, she took off at a jaunty trot. Before nightfall a cohort of youngish teenagers, possibly grandchildren, appeared in the street to haul her loom away. They left a large tray of aromatic rice, still steaming, and they tossed red blossoms on the verandah floor that, in the moonlight, looked like splashed blood.

Thus a military skirmish fizzled into a social call. The establishment of dominance proved all the more elusive because the native culture was one of deference, hospitality, and bonhomie. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” said Commander Cherrystone.

Being built large enough to be pretentious and commanding, Government House could just about domicile the entire company of the Seventh Spear. There was a lot of work to be done in terms of general upkeep, however. Cracks in the plaster, mildewing whitewash. The garden had run to seed and was a total embarrassment. How long had the Viceroy been gone? Or had he simply been a hapless steward of government property?

For a good price, the locals supplied acres of mosquito netting, which the men slung from hooks in the ceilings in the local fashion, cocooning each small grouping of cots. For extra protection, lengths of netting were nailed up at the windows, and a webbed arcade was erected from the kitchen door to the latrines at the back of the garden. In their smalls the men could walk to relieve themselves at night without fear of being bitten alive.

Some of the soldiers picked up Qua’ati, as Commander Cherrystone had predicted they would.

IT NEVER SNOWED in Quadling Country. The swamp forests held in the heat. Time seemed languorous and unchanging. How many years had they been there? Three? Four? They’d reopened a school and built a kind of surgery to augment the work of the local doctors. Some of the men had moved out of Government House, informally, and were consorting with Quadling women. This was forbidden during a campaign of occupation, but Commander Cherrystone looked the other way, for he had a common-law wife of his own by now and he hardly cared to enforce an inconvenient standard.

Liir worked mornings in Commander Cherrystone’s outer office. He copied documents, he filed, he recommended which of his peers needed punishment for various minor infractions. As often as not Commander Cherrystone was absent from the inner office. Liir could go in and smooth down the crinkled months-old newspapers in which the shipments of Gillikinese wine came wrapped. He read about the Scarecrow’s unfortunate accident involving that beaker of lighter fluid—what a horrible twist of fate, that it was right there!—and the subsequent elevation of the Emperor. “Would’ve liked to be invited to that investiture,” said Commander Cherrystone, coming in on Liir as he jerked upright from his perusings.

“Old news is better than no news,” Cherrystone remarked ruefully, about once a week. “Still, maybe it’s better to be marginalized. You don’t get noticed, and there’s a liberty in that, eh, son?”

“You’ll want a bottle of the Highmeadow blanc in the water well, sir, if you’re having guests at table tonight.”

“You remember everything. I’d be lost without you. Can you see to it?”

“I will.” He already had.

Once a small crate of perguenay cigarettes arrived. “Bless my sweet bankers, I must’ve made another killing,” said the Commander, reading a note. “Those Shizian accountants are wizards; they can make money out of a massacre of mice. Try one, Liir, you won’t find better.”

“I’ve no skill at that, sir.”

“It’s not much fun to smoke alone. Put down those charts till later and join me on the verandah.” It sounded like an order, so Liir obeyed, willingly enough.

The smoke of dried perguenay was nutty and gamy both, hardly disagreeable, though taking perfumed heat into his lungs made Liir cough. “Ain’t it grand, the life,” said Cherrystone, propping his boots on the seat of another chair.

“You could get used to this if you were an ironsmith. Bit roasty for me, though.”

“You learn to love it. So. Liir. What do you hear from home?”

Liir was unused to personal conversations with his peers, and this blunt question from his boss unnerved him. He was glad to have smoke in his lungs; he held it there while he thought what to answer. “Precious little.”

“Sometimes the less you hear, the more precious it becomes.”

Sentimental math problems were beyond Liir. “I follow my work day to day, breakfast to bedtime, sir. That’s my life, and it’s enough.”

“You’re a good lad. You’re shaping up. Don’t think I don’t notice.” Commander Cherrystone closed his eyes. “I would’ve been happy for a son like you, but my fond Wendina only gave me girls.”

“You must miss them, sir.”

“They’re girls,” he said neutrally, and his point was beyond Liir. They’re girls, so why bother? Or They’re girls, so of course I miss them, don’t be daft.

“Since we’re chatting, I wonder if it’s bold to ask a question of you, sir.”

“Ask away.”

“If you had children, how could you stomach storming the castle of Kiamo Ko and carting off the widow and children of Fiyero?”

“Oh, back to that! Fair enough; you’ve earned the right. It was another time, another country—perhaps another me, Liir. When you’re off on a posting and your family is left behind, they loom in your daily reflections with a…a size, a significance…and the thought of them gives you courage in times of doubt. I didn’t like the maneuvers at Kiamo Ko, I’ll have you know that right now. But I like being a man of my word. I like doing my duty. As I see you do, too.

“Besides,” he added, “I did my best to delegate.”

“Do you remember seeing Nor? The little girl?”

“She wasn’t a tyke, she was growing up. I saw her. She was brave, if that’s what you’re asking. Quite possibly she didn’t understand what was going on.”

“Quite possibly.” What a phrase. Of course she didn’t understand it: how could she? She’d been raised on a mountaintop by a widowed mother and a half dozen spinster aunts. What could she know of military maneuvers?

“I see it still gives you pause.”

Perhaps less pause than it once had. Waiting for fate to intervene was hardly taxing, Liir realized. “I think of her from time to time.”

“You probably harbor a youthful resentment against me. It’s all very normal, my lad. You were young at the time, and what could you know of duty and honor?”

“I am not sure, even now, I know what honor is.”

The Commander was silent for so long Liir felt perhaps he’d been rude, or that the Commander thought his remark was rhetorical. But finally he opened his eyes and said, “How would it seem to you to be promoted to the rank of a Minor Menacier?”

Liir felt himself blushing. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You deserve it, son. You deserve the honor of it. I’m not a wordsmith, I can’t define the concept of honor. But I know it when I meet it, and I see by the look on your face you do, too.” He grinned almost sheepishly at Liir. His teeth were yellowing in this climate.

WORD ARRIVED THAT THE new leadership in the Palace was displeased with laxness at Government House, and requested the prompt execution of the Seventh Spear’s original mission.

Commander Cherrystone turned to Liir. Although chilly politeness often still marked their exchanges, there had come to be some measure of regard on both sides. Liir was often disdainful of Commander Cherrystone for his complicated moods—now a front for the Palace, now a critic of the system—but Liir practiced loyalty and obedience, virtues the Seventh Spear espoused and he shared. And he was grateful for the promotion, and the smarter braid on his dress habillard.

Some of the fellows resented the promotion, but they saw the point. Liir was unusually circumspect for a young man. Not in any obvious way a dangerous loner, Liir kept to the margins, befriended other soldiers only so far as was fitting, and he didn’t consort with the Quadlings beyond what the work required. He was the model of a military man at the start of his career, so far as anyone could tell. And since he had no social links with Quadling circles, he was a natural to enjoy what confidences might arise working in the Commander’s office.

“Sit down and let me rehearse an idea with you,” said Cherrystone one afternoon. Liir remained standing.

Bengda was a small community twenty minutes southwest of Qhoyre on the broad flat river known as Waterslip. In the days before the Wizard had mucked up the water table and wreaked havoc with a centuries-old way of life, the Bengda district had thrived in one of the few dry areas, humps of sandy hill on either side of Waterslip. A bridge between the cliffs had spanned the river. Over the years, with the harvesting of trees, the soil eroded, though. The hills lost height and subsided into the muck. Little by little the Bengdani villagers either left or took to the bridge. Now the hamlet of Bengda supported itself by exacting a toll from the ferries and commercial fishing vessels that used Waterslip as a highway between Qhoyre and points south.

“Entirely improper, of course,” said Commander Cherrystone.

“Surely they’ll stop if you threaten them with a fine?” asked Liir.

“They might and they might not. I hate to give them a chance to knuckle under, for it’s worth more to us if they resist. Can you sniff around and find out if they would?”

“I’m not the man for that job,” said Liir stiffly. “Begging your pardon, sir, you have more pull in that department than I do.”

“If I start talking, I’ll plant ideas in their heads.” The Commander spoke wearily. “It’ll work much better if it happens below ranks. Your expertise is needed, Liir. Can you put it about among the men that this information is of interest to me?”

Liir did, and came back a week later. The residents of Bengda were stroppy, at least by Quadling standards, but they would probably cave if presented with an order of prohibition or a bill of tax.

“That’s no good, then.” The Commander rubbed his elbows. “What they’re effecting is a kind of extortion of river merchants, really. Perhaps I could charge them triple all that they’ve collected since we’ve been here. That would beggar them and they’d have to resist. Find out, will you?”

Liir returned and said that, begging the Commander’s pardon, he couldn’t really learn the answer to so specific a question without tipping the Commander’s hand. “Tip, tip, that’s the point!” roared the Commander, so Liir tipped.

The reply came back that the extended families of the Bengdanis would manage to come up with the triple penalty and that the bridge dwellers would stop levying the toll.

“Damn,” said Commander Cherrystone, and he had Liir send out a formal censure of the Bengda bridge dwellers with a public declamation and a request for a penalty twice what had already been posted as the triple penalty.

Bloody hell no, said the Bengdanis, in Qua’ati, of course. At least not yet.

They paid up what they’d collected and made no promise as to when the exorbitant balance could be expected.

“That’s that, then,” said the Commander. “Make sure the whole district knows about their resistance, Liir. This has to get back to the City or my reputation is, like everything else in this Quadling quagmire, mud.”

Liir did what he could, talking against the Bengdanis at the mess hall, the local gin pavilions, in the latrines even. It was uphill work now, for the Seventh Spear had become lax, and many men tended to think their Commander was getting high and mighty, not to say unreasonable. “He could just fork over a third of his own salary to his concubine, and she could find a way to get it to the Bengdanis,” they said. “Why scapegoat those poor buggers? Why make life so miserable?”

“It’s not ours to make life miserable nor to avoid misery when it’s required of us,” said Liir. “Have you whole lot gone to ground here? That says little about the military discipline we learned.”

“Lighten up,” they answered.

COMMANDER CHERRYSTONE TOOK LIIR under his arm and gave him the assignment to burn the village right into the river. “Tonight,” he said.

Liir’s face was stony. “Sir,” he said, “you know as well as I that it’s almost impossible to set anything alight in this climate. The moisture seeps into everything.”

“I’ve sent to the Emerald City for provisions to help,” said the Commander. “I’ve got six buckets of the tar of pulped Gillikinese maya flower, which would burn in a monsoon. Once night falls, you can paint the struts and supports of the bridge with it. Begin with the beams nearest the ends of the bridge, and paint high. Toward the center, paint low, closer to water level. Light the ends first—simultaneously—to create walls of fire on each approach, so the Bengdanis can’t escape that way. They’ll be crowded toward the center, and there’ll be time for them to consider what to do, to call for help, before the lower-lit struts burn up enough to imperil them.”

“Who will come to their aid?” said Liir. “They’re twenty minutes from Qhoyre.”

“In twenty minutes someone will hear them and, just as important, someone will arrive in time to witness their distress. That’s the important bit. I’ll see to that if we synchronize our timepieces.”

“Arrive in time to witness? Not to help?”

“Liir, it’s a bridge. They can jump into the water.”

“Commander. Begging your pardon. No one swims in Waterslip at night, and rarely during the day, either. There are deadly water eels in the depths, and alligators that feed nocturnally.”

“I didn’t settle them there,” said the Commander. “Do I detect a note of insurrection in your voice, soldier?”

“I don’t believe so, sir,” said Liir. He was troubled, though, as he turned away.

So that there could be no possibility of a warning leaked to the Bengdanis, the campaign would have to commence at once. Liir conscripted Ansonby, Burny, and several others. Learning a trick or two from the high command in the Emerald City, Liir didn’t tell them the nature of their mission. They were to dress in dark clothes and to wear mosquito-netted caps, to smudge their faces with mud, and to tell no one what they were doing.

“It’s about the kidnapped Viceroy, I think,” Liir invented, when someone pressed him. “There’s been a lead. We’re going to smoke out the kidnappers. But we can’t give them a lick of warning or they’ll scarper.”

Sunset, with its usual caramel-orangey smear, was quick. The night creaked in on the wings of countless wakeful insects churring. An audience of billions.

“DETAILS TO FOLLOW, fellows, but first things first: This is a secret mission.” Liir and his companions huddled by the flatboats he’d commandeered for the exercise. “You’ve been chosen because you have girlfriends here. You’ll want to get back to them quickly as possible and hop into the sack with them. My advice is to try something new tonight. Make it memorable for you both, so if there’s a call for alibis, you’ll be prepared.”

“But fraternizing is frowned up,” said Ansonby.

“I mean if the Quadlings cry for scapegoats, you’ll be covered. Anyone needs advice in the sex department, ask Ansonby. Tell them about position six, Ansonby.” Liir winked. “It’s known as Choking the Mermaid in some quarters.”

He wasn’t fooling anyone. Liir was suspected of sexual ignorance, and he had a reputation for an old-fashioned reticence about such matters. The fellows looked unhappy.

“If we’re supplied with alibis,” said Burny after a while,“what about the fellows who en’t?”

“Tough luck hits us all,” said Liir. “Sooner or later. Maybe they’ll duck it this time. Maybe we will, too. Come on, we’re moving out.”

Once it grew dark, the mosquito problem drove most Quadlings into their stilted huts, though the odd canoe or flatboat sidled along. No one paid much attention. With the sky moonless at this time of the month—no doubt the Commander had already figured on this—visibility was reduced, helpfully.

A half mile north of Bengda, Liir signaled the boats in. He gestured at the rickety community cantilevered over both edges of the bridge, a hive of windowed light and the noise of supper and chatter. Then he explained the mission.

Burny was the first to speak. “Folks might die,” he said.

“Not sure on that score, but I believe that’s taken into account. Regrettable, but there you are.”

“But women and—and children,” said Burny. “I mean, what’s children got to do with tolls or paying taxes, or refusing to pay them? En’t they blameless an’ all that?”

“Are children still blameless if they’re going to grow up to be the enemy? I’m not going to discuss this. We’re not taking a class in moral philosophy. We’re soldiers and these are our orders. Ansonby, Somes, Kipper, you do the far end; we rest will start on this side. Here’s the supplies—tar, brushes, a flint when you’re ready. Knives.”

“What’re the knives for?” asked Burny.

“Carving your initials in the supports. You moron, what do you think the knives are for? Use them if you need to. Are we ready?”

“I can’t do this.”

“We’ll ask the Unnamed God for the successful completion of our mission.” Four seconds of silence. “Let’s go.”

They poled the flatboats forward and then nudged their way among the villagers’ fishing boats, which as usual were tied in a long barricade beneath the bridge to prevent night traffic from sneaking through toll-free. The soldiers got a shock when they roused an old Quadling grandfather from the bottom of his boat, probably avoiding his scold of a wife. They clapped their hands around his head and bound his mouth tightly. Then they tied him in a burlap sack and dumped him into Waterslip.

Commander Cherrystone had chosen the hour perfectly, for the children of the settlement were fed but not bedded down, and as the soldiers set to smearing the tar pitch, they could hear the shrill laughter, the tired crying, the occasional lullaby filtering down through the rush-matted floors above their heads. The noise made a suitable cover, were any needed, for the quiet work of arson.

Their retreat would have to be swift, Liir knew, not only so that they would go unnoticed by fleeing Bengda villagers, but also so that his men would be spared the witnessing of what was bound to be ugly. All tyrants were harsh, but fire was more ungovernable than most.

He mouthed, “Set. Right. Light.” With trembling hands both teams reached for the oil-soaked rags, which were balled by net wire. The men impaled the rags on the end of their swords, and struck their quickflints. The length of the sword allowed each soldier to reach high enough to light the tar his mate had already smeared into place.

One team finished faster than the others, since Ansonby in his haste whipped his sword too swiftly around. Perilously, the clot of burning rag dislodged early, but Ansonby ducked, and the rag hissed into the river.

It was neat, a job well done, and both flatboats were eighty feet back before the timbers truly caught and the night became annealed with the light of hell. The river reflected the crackling timbers, the shuddering bridge, which almost at once seemed to be gateposted with pillars of fire thirty feet tall. Good strong stuff, that maya flower tar! Then the screams, the dropping timbers, the burning water.

They were to have been fully away by now, and some other contingent was to come upon the sight, to report it objectively. But the flatboats got snared bankside in the knotted roots formed by ancient, shadowy sedge trees. Besides, the men couldn’t stop looking. They could see Bengdanis running from window to window, house to house, and climbing up the mildewy thatch of their roofs. Some threw furniture in the water and tried to leap upon it; a few were successful, though Quadling furniture, mostly woven rush, was known neither for its strength nor its buoyancy.

One clump of thatch fell lazily through the blackness, like a falling star extinguishing itself, or a burning alphabetic vowel swallowed by watery silence, or a firebird plunging into a suicidal dive in a dark nameless lake.

Drunk on metaphor, thought Liir: that means it’s time to scamper. “Guess we better go. We mess up this part of the job, guys, we’ve messed up the whole thing.”

“What was the point of this?” asked the one called Kipper.

“Campaigns are devious; that’s why they’re called campaigns and not ballroom dancing lessons,” said Liir, but his voice sounded odd. He leaned his whole weight against the barge pole and began to move out. “The beds of your lady friends are cold tonight without you, lads, and if you’re not back in time there’ll be someone else to take your place before dawn. You know it better than I. Look sharp—”

He himself looked sharp, casting an eye around to make sure nothing was coming upriver from the Bengda bridge. How could it, unless it was a river monster disturbed by the conflagration and rising in rage? No boat would ever leave from that bridge again, nor be prevented from passing under it, either; it was falling, timber by burning timber, and its population with it, as he watched.

A man and a woman on the near side, which was collapsing haltingly into the burning water, had grabbed a child between them. Her clothes were aflame and the parents or neighbors tore them off. All their mouths were open, though Liir couldn’t distinguish one human scream from all the others. Then the parents braced themselves as upright as they could against the sloping structure and began to swing the girl, arms and legs, to fling her free of the burning.

Liir was reminded of a game he’d played when he was what, seven, eight?—when Irji and Manek had swung little Nor like that, and then swung him, too. But it was into a bank of snow in the wintery heights of the Great Kells, at Kiamo Ko; it wasn’t to save his life, or hers. It was for fun.

The girl twisted as they let go, and her arms reached back, as if she could will herself to swim through the night air and return to the arms of her parents. The fire behind them caught up with their legs and ran up their backs as she hovered like a naked girl bird, gilded red-bronze in the light. Then she crashed into the water. The efforts of her parents had worked this much: she landed beyond the pools of burning oil in which everyone else had fallen.

Liir leaped from the boat, hissing over his shoulder “Back to base! That’s an order!” He didn’t turn to see if he was obeyed. In vain he looked for the girl. He didn’t see her. He didn’t see if she had swum ashore, or if she had sunk, or if she had swum back into the fiery liquid to join her parents in their immolation.

GOVERNMENT HOUSE WAS LOCKED down with tighter security than he’d ever seen it, but Liir had no trouble signaling to the night watch and getting in. Despite instructions to the contrary, Ansonby and Burny and the others weren’t out canoodling with their local girls; they’d taken refuge in the barracks. The company of their mates must seem more consoling. And Liir observed that no one was off the premises that night. The other soldiers must have been alerted not to stray. For defense of the post? For their own safety? That meant the guys assigned to the mission would have been the only ones outside of military protection. Liir saw it now. They’d have been sitting ducks, isolated from each other, naked in bed with native women when and if the news spread and a retaliation was launched.

“The hero of the hour! Where’ve you been?” asked Somes.

Liir started to say something about the girl. He hadn’t been able to find her, partly because it had been hard to train his eyes on the scene. It seared too brightly to be able to read.

“We’ve been fortifying ourselves with whiskey and patting ourselves on the back. The bridge is history! Come in for a rousing welcome.”

“History. History. In a flash,” said Liir. “Need to get something first.”

He ducked along the upper verandah that looked onto the central courtyard, keeping back in the shadows and out of sight of men lounging by the fountain below. It only took him a moment to grab his satchel, the few things he’d stored in his trunk at the foot of his bed. He put his dress boots on the windowsill: a kind of symbol, he supposed, that he’d jumped. Everyday boots would serve well enough. Then, the old, mildewing cape and the broom on his back, a corked flagon of fresh water slung over his shoulder, he made his way lightly down a back staircase and through the dry goods pantry. Then over the wall, literally and figuratively.

WITH THE WITCH’S BROOM, he had the means to travel swiftly, but his heart was so heavy that he couldn’t imagine lifting off the ground—or if he did, only to reach a height suitable for throwing himself from his perch.

He walked, and took no pains to conceal his tracks or silence his footfall. North, as far as he could tell. He corrected his trajectory by checking it against the movement of the sun, and if one day he wobbled too much to the west, the next he would likely wobble easterly.

It was early spring when he left Qhoyre—spring by the calendar, not by the growing season, for in the marshlands, rot and flower and fruit and seed and rot happened simultaneously all year. Long ago the climate had become a second skin from which he couldn’t extract himself until, weeks on, his path began to climb, and now and then his foot landed on a hillock of dry grass.

He’d expected some crocodile to snap off a limb while he slept, a marsh cat to take a swipe at him, but the only creatures that seemed aware of his presence were the mosquitoes, and he yielded himself to them without complaint. He imagined them bleeding him dead, a thousand bites a day for a thousand days, until from the inside out he would have dried up entirely. Then—another way of flying!—a strong gust might come along and begin to worry a fleck of skin, and his whole being might toss itself like a scatter of midges in the air and disappear.

Weeks of walking, resting, walking. He didn’t look for food, but the amoral landscape threw succor in his path. Thrashes of greenberry bush, ground nuts, the occasional swamp apple, porcupine root. He grew leaner than ever, though his diet seemed sufficient, for he suffered neither from dreams nor dysentery.

His sense of the geography of Oz was limited, but its most salient feature was the scimitar-shaped spine of high mountains that curved up from south central Oz to the northwest. He needed to get through the Quadling Kells—either by the Yellow Brick Road or not. Once he was northside of the mountains, he’d turn west and keep them on his left. Sooner or later he’d come to the gorge known as Kumbricia’s Pass, the best route to the vast grasslands of the Vinkus. But he’d move on, until the Great Kells raised their ice-sheathed peaks on the west. He’d have to hit the Vinkus River, and he’d follow it north to where it emerged in a dazzling waterfall from a hung valley in the central Kells. Up the side of that waterfall, tracing the banks of the rightmost branch of the higher Vinkus, and still higher up the middle ridge of Knobblehead Pike, and he’d be back.

Not home. There was no place like home. Just back. Back at Kiamo Ko.

As he walked, he thought of nothing, when he could manage that. The world in its variety had no appeal, and seemed mocking and vain. Clearing the Quadling Kells with relative ease, he’d come out into an easy summer on the northern slopes, wherein fruit trees sported flocked yardage of blossom, and bees sawed the sunny afternoon with their industry. It was not music, but noise. He stole some maple sap from a hermit’s storehouse in the woods, not to savor, just to feed the gut.

In time there was evidence of human habitation again—a homestead here or there, a shrine on the road—to Lurline or to the Unnamed God, he couldn’t tell and didn’t care, and didn’t stop to pay homage. He avoided people when he could, and when he could not, he was stone-tongued enough to be alarming. The kinder of the farm folk might offer a scupper of milk or a blanket in the hay loft, but they wouldn’t welcome him in to their table. Nor would he have accepted.

Once he came upon an old woman driving a four-horned cow before her with a switch. She was accompanied by a kid, a boy by the looks of it, who seemed frightened of his granny, and shot Liir a desperate, pleading look. The woman turned her switch on the child and hissed, “There’s nothing to look at in him, Tip, so mind your eyes or the road’ll trip you up, and you’re not riding the cow so stop thinking about it. We didn’t come all this way for a prize specimen so you could mope and roll your eyes.”

“How far is all this way?” asked Liir—not that he cared, but he thought if the woman would talk to him, she’d have less breath for smacking the boy.

“Gillikin, and we aim to get there before the snow flies, but I have my doubts,” snapped the woman. “As if it’s any of your concern.”

“That’s a long way to come for a cow,” said Liir.

“A four-horned cow gives quality milk, useful for certain recipes,” said the woman.

The boy said, “You could sell me to this soldier, and then you could ride the cow home yourself.”

“I wouldn’t dream of selling a boy as useless as you,” she answered, “the good burghers of Gillikin would have my license for passing on damaged goods. Keep your mouth shut, Tip, or you’ll regret it.”

“I don’t buy children,” said Liir. He looked the boy in the eye. “I can’t save anyone. You have to save yourself.”

Tip bit his lower lip, keeping his mouth shut, but his eyes stayed trained on Liir’s. The rebuke seemed to Liir to say: You have to save yourself? And what proof of that are you, soldier?

“Although if you were to offer that besom of yours,” said the woman, “I suppose I might risk my professional reputation. It’s a handsome item.”

Liir passed on without replying. A mile or two later, he stopped to tighten his bootlace, and in looking back he saw that the woman, the cow, and the child had veered a bit northward across some meadows. The best route to the Emerald City, and Gillikin beyond, led between Kellswater and Restwater, through the oakhair forest, so now he could guess he wasn’t far from Kumbricia’s Pass. This proved to be true.

High summer, then, on the banks of the Vinkus River. He bathed in it. The mosquito plague was behind him now, kept away by a steady breeze sweeping down off the flanks of the Great Kells, which like transparent slices of melon were beginning to hover insubstantially to his left. The Vinkus River ran broad and shallow here, and icy cold even in the hottest sun, for it was fed by a thousand rills cascading down the piney slopes of the mountains.

Still, no animals. No herds of dancing mountain ponies, no turtles spending a decade or two in the middle of the path, very few birds even, and those too far away to identify. It was as if he gave off such a stink that the animal world was retracting from him as he moved north and west.

One evening he tried to cut his own hair, for it was falling in his eyes. His army-issue knife had become blunt from peeling porcupine root, and his efforts to sharpen it on a stone had come to nothing. He made a pig’s breakfast of the haircut, finally dropping the knife and pulling at his hair, yanking it out by the roots till his scalp bled into his eyes. He thought the blood might refresh his broken tear ducts, and for an instant he imagined something like relief—relief—but it did not come. He dried his face and tied his hair back, and endured the sweat and damp of a heavy burden of hair.

The mountains, nearer now, loomed as a kind of oppressive company, their aroma of granite and balsam unmistakable, unlike anything else, and as unconsoling as anything else. Their million years of lifting their own heads was just a million years, nothing more than that. The summer was going, the sun was sinking earlier, he caught the tang of a fox one day on the wind, and felt the bite of an appetite—to see a fox. A simple fox darting past, out on its own business. He saw no fox.

The world seemed punitive in its beauty and reserve. Sometimes, thought Liir—his first thought in weeks and weeks—sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It’s so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

THEN HE CAME to a place where the Vinkus ran by a series of small lakes—none more than a mile or two long, and all of them narrow. Clearly they’d been formed by the same compulsion of landscape, for there was a family feel to them. The water was fresh and moving, and though he could see no fish, Liir imagined there were schools out of sight. Larches and birches and the thin growth known as pillwood made a pinkish fringe on the far shores. For the first time since leaving Qhoyre, Liir aborted his slow tromp north. He took a day to look around, for the landscape seemed obscurely pleasing, and he wasn’t used to being pleased anymore.

The middle of five lakes was more fan-shaped than the others, and from the pinched point to the south it opened up to a wide vista of low hills—basket-of-eggs country—that caught the light and made patterns of shadow, one hill to the next. He explored the lake’s southern shore and found there a smoothly rounded hill not much larger than a pasture or two, overgrown with pillwood trees, and slashed through with horizontal outcroppings of granite or trusset, he couldn’t tell which.

The grass beneath the trees was evenly cropped, and pelleted with droppings, so some ruminant herd loitered nearby, keeping the sward neat. This gave the place a domestic look.

Liir sat down with his back to a tree and looked out over the water, which was lipped by the wind coming south, and striped with light catching on the wave tips.

It could make a home, he thought; pretty enough to tolerate, and no one around. The beyond of beyond. Nether How, he named it, how being a useful old word for hill. And how pompous that is, to name a place just because you rested your own nether how there for a while!

But he closed his eyes and drifted into a sort of waking dream, as he’d done once or twice before. He saw himself sitting there, almost nodding off, more of a man than when he had started out, but still lost, like most young men, and more lost than most. With no sense of a trade, no native skill except to make mistakes, no one to learn from, no one to trust, and no innate virtue upon which to rely…and no way to see the future.

He rose to the height of the leaves of the pillwood trees, which were beginning to turn amber, a first hint of autumn. He saw himself below, the ill-cut hair—what a botched job!—and the knees, and the feet turned out as if planted there. If he could just stop breathing, he’d become part of Nether How; sink capably into the grass. When his offensive spirit had left his body, the mountain sheep or the lakeland skark or whatever animal fed here would eventually overcome its fear, and nibble the grass right up to his limbs, keeping it shorn around him.

Then his attention turned to another figure, distantly apprehended though near enough. It was a man in a cloak of purple-rose velveteen, holding a staff and a book of some sort. He was emerging in the air as one seen coming through a fog. He seemed to be off balance at first, and tested the ground with his staff until he found his feet. Setting his funny hat straight on his brow, he pulled at his eyebrows as if they bothered him, and he began to look around himself. Liir imagined he was speaking, but there was no sound, just the apparition of a funny old man, sober and crazed at once, making his way along the brow of Nether How.

The old man passed close by the body of dozing Liir, down below—the Liir-shade in the tree branches saw it. The old man, maybe a scholar of some sort, paused as if curious, and looked at the tree against which Liir was leaning. Then he looked up into its branches. But his eyes could not focus on Liir at rest, nor Liir aloft, and he shrugged and began to make his way down the hill.

A good way to avoid company, if I want to avoid it, thought Liir, as his spirit began once again to settle down into his body, or—put another way—as his little dreamlet ended and the sorrier sense of the world, even this pretty corner of it, flooded back in.

He had left Nether How and was well along the lake’s rightmost flank, continuing north, when he remembered the revery and saw something in it he hadn’t noticed at the time. He had recognized the book that the old fellow was hauling about with him. It was the Grimmerie, the book that the Witch—that Elphaba—had used as her book of spells.

HE HAD LOOKED for the Grimmerie once, hadn’t he? But that was before he’d set out from Kiamo Ko with Dorothy. And met up with that old she-Elephant, Princess Noserag or something. Who had promised to try to help find Nor, or to share what she could learn.

Proud and confident as only the truly stupid can be, he’d set out to find Nor on his own. Smart move, Liir, he said to himself. Good one, that. Just look at where you got to by keeping your own counsel.

Well, that was something, though. At least he was talking to himself—instead of giving himself the cold shoulder.

IT TOOK TWO MORE months to finish the journey. He was in no hurry.

Once, as he rejoined the Vinkus River, he spotted a single stag. It stood alert in the middle of a long line of mature beech trees that ran the crest of a ridge, half-lit by an effect of late afternoon sun and cloud. Knee-deep in dried grass, the stag watched him as he passed. It did not flinch or flee. Nor did it attack him.

AT LAST, something familiar: the small settlements that clung to the slopes of the Kells. Arjiki villages, some with names, some not. Fanarra, and Upper Fanarra, and Pumpernickel Rock, and Red Windmill. It was late fall, early winter; the flocks were down from the heights, noisy in their fold; the summer cording was done, and skeins of dyed skark yarn were knotted and hung out to dry on pegs. The smell of vinegar used to set the dye tightened the skin in his nostrils.

The Arjikis regarded his progress along Knobblehead Pike without comment. If some of them recognized him, they didn’t let on. It had been almost a decade since he’d left with Dorothy. Everything had changed within him—he’d broken out of his shell to find himself wanting—but the Arjikis looked stolid and eternal.

He recognized none of them, either.

As he walked the last mile, looking up, the old waterworks towered high from the strong thighs of the mountain. It loomed overhead with impossible perspective, and the clouds above it whipped by so quickly that, as he stood with his head thrown back, he became dizzy. To see it again!—the old pile, once the family home of the prince of the Arjikis, then the castle refuge of the Wicked Witch of the West. Kiamo Ko.

Its stones were streaked with the water from snow melting off the battlements. (Harsh weather sometimes hit the higher mountains as early as Summersend.) Its roofs looked to be in a serious state of disrepair. Crows shot from the eaves, and an oriel window seemed to have collapsed, leaving a gaping maw, but smoke was issuing from a chimney, so someone was in residence.

He hadn’t spoken a word since meeting the woman on the road, the crone with the four-horned cow and the child. He wasn’t sure he could still talk.

The bartizans were deserted, the ceremonial drawbridge of the central gate was up, but the gatehouse door was wide open, and snow drifted within. Security wasn’t the top concern of whoever lived here now.

He gripped the broom in his hand, and tightened the Witch’s cape around him—he’d worn it several weeks now, glad to have carted it all these seasons, as it was helpful against the chill. Mercy, mercy, he thought, I’m home from the wars, whatever that means. He climbed the steep steps to the gatehouse and went in to the primary courtyard.

At first he saw no change at all; but he was looking through the eyes of memory, and those eyes were blurred with tears. She might have come back here, he thought at last. Have I been hoping this all along, step by step—is this hope what has kept me from dying? If Nor really had survived her abduction, she might have made her way back here as I have. She might even now be slapping a meat pasty into a hot oven and turning at the sound of my foot on the cobbles.

Then he wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. The place had gone from rack to ruin, and some of the hard edges of its utilitarian design had become softened by neglect. The cobbles were covered in dried leaves, and a dozen or more saplings like party guests stood here and there, human size or even a little taller, twitching their thin limbs in excitement at a new arrival. A shutter banged overhead. Ivy clawed up the side of the chapel. Several windows were broken and more young trees leaned out.

It was silent but not still; everything rustled almost without sound. He could have heard a baby cry in its sleep down in a cradle in Red Windmill, had some baby needed to cry just then.

He turned about slowly, his arms open, pivoting on one heel. Allowed a torrent of emotion to batter him from within.

When he finished his revolution, the monkeys were there under the trees, on the outside steps, peering out through the yellowing foliage in the windows. They had come from nowhere while his eyes were misted. Some of them trembled and held their wingtips; a couple shat themselves. This breed had never taken to personal hygiene with any conviction.

“Liir?” said the nearest one. He had to walk with his knuckles on the ground; had the years of living with heavy wings curved his spine? Or was it merely age?

“Chistery,” said Liir, cautiously; he wasn’t sure. But Chistery’s face had broken into a grin at being recognized.

He came up and took Liir’s hand and kissed it with gummy affection.

“Don’t do that, don’t,” said Liir. He and Chistery then walked hand in hand through the warped door into the ominous, plain, high-ceilinged staircase hall, just as they had done fifteen, eighteen years ago, when for the first time they’d arrived together at the castle with Elphaba Thropp.

IT DIDN’T TAKE HIM LONG to figure out that Nor wasn’t there. The sudden lurch of thought about her, though, crackled almost aurally through his apprehensions of Kiamo Ko. It was as if he could just about hear her childish squeals and pattering feet.

Still, he couldn’t indulge in moodiness even if he wanted. For one thing, the skanky stench of monkey ordure cut through the complicated memories of childhood. He had to watch where he stepped. Public health hazard.

He was hardly surprised to find Nanny still alive. She’d be in her ninetieth year now, or more? Surely. Her olfactory senses had long fled her, so she seemed unbothered by the fumes, and her own bedding and day gown were in a less-than-pristine condition. Sitting bolt upright in bed with a bonnet on her head and a beaded purse clutched between her hands, she greeted him without much surprise, as if he’d only been down in the kitchen this past decade, getting himself a cup of milk.

“It’s hizzie, it’s whosie, yourself in all your glory, if you can call it that,” she said, and offered her cheek, which had sunk dramatically into a hollow of greying crinkles.

“Hello, Nanny. I’ve come to visit you,” said Liir.

“Some does and some doesn’t.”

“It’s Liir.”

“Of course it is, dear. Of course.” She sat up a little straighter and looked at him. Then she picked up an ear trumpet from her bedside table and shook it. A ham sandwich fell out, the worse for wear. She regarded it with disapproval and took a healthy bite. She put the trumpet back against her head. “Who is the whosie?”

“Liir,” he said, “do you remember? The boy with Elphaba?”

“Now that’s one as never visits. Up in her tower. Too much studying and you’ll chase the boys away, I always said. But she had a mind of her own. Are you going up there? Tell her to show some respect to her elders and bitters.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I thought you might be Grim Death, but it’s only the haircut.”

“Liir, it is. Liir.”

“Yes, and whatever happened to the boy? He was a funny noodley one. It took him forever to get trained, as I recall. Still, he’d fit right in now.” She rolled her eyes at Chistery, who stood fondly by with his hands folded. “He never writes, you know. That’s all right, though, as I can’t read anymore.”

Liir sat down on a stool and held Nanny’s hand for a while. “Chistery, is there anything like sherry around?” he asked suddenly.

“Whatever hasn’t evaporated in its bottles. We don’t touch the fumey stuff,” said Chistery. That’s a bit righteous, thought Liir, and realized, too, that Chistery’s language had improved hugely. Now that everyone had stopped trying to teach him.

Chistery returned in time with a dusty bottle. It was ancient cooking brandy, and a B grade at that, but Nanny’s palate had clearly deteriorated like some of her other talents, and she sipped it happily, goofily.

After a nap that lasted only a few moments, she was awake, and more alert. Her eyes looked as they once had: less swift to track, perhaps, but no less canny.

“You’re the boy, grown up some,” she said. “Not enough, I see, but there’s time.”

“Liir,” he reminded her. He wanted to work fast while she was attending. “Nanny. Do you remember when we came here? Elphaba and I?”

She screwed up her face and settled on an answer almost at once. “I do not, Liir. Because I came later. You were already here when I got here.”

Of course. He had forgotten this. “Elphaba was your charge, wasn’t she? You were her nanny. She told you everything.”

“She hadn’t much to tell,” said Nanny. “For an interesting life, you wanted to listen to her mother. Melena. Saucy little thing, got around the parish, if you know what I mean. A trial to her husband, Frex. Now he was a good man, and like most good men, a crashing bore about it. The hours he spent trying to convert me to unionism! As if the Unnamed God wanted to take an interest in Nanny! Preposterous.”

He didn’t want to talk about religion. “I want to ask you something directly. If you know the answer, you can tell me. I’m grown up now. Was Elphaba my mother?”

“She didn’t know,” said Nanny. Her mouth took the shape of an O—O!—as if startled all over again by the ridiculous conceit. “She suffered some terrible blow, and lapsed into a dreamless sleep for months on end. Or so she said. When she came to, and was suitably convalesced, she stayed on to work for some maunts. Then she left them to come here, and they gave her you to take along. That’s all she ever knew. She supposed she could have given birth to you in a coma. It is possible. These things do happen.” She rolled her eyes.

“Why didn’t she ask about me—and her?”

“I suppose she thought the answer didn’t matter. There you were, one way or the other. It hardly signified.”

“It matters to me.”

“She was a good woman, our Elphie, but she wasn’t a saint,” said Nanny, both tartly and protectively. “Leave her her failings. Not everyone is cut out to be a warm motherly type.”

“If she thought I might be her child, wouldn’t she have mentioned the possible father?”

“She never did what another person might. You remember that. Now, I did know that fellow named Fiyero, once upon a time, and you don’t look much like him, if that’s your game. Frankly, you could more easily pass for a child of Nessarose. Elphaba’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the East as they called her behind her back. If you were Elphie’s there’d be the green skin, wouldn’t there? It’s a puzzle. Is there any more of that juice?”

He poured a small sip more. “Did you raise Nessarose, too? And their baby brother? Shell?”

“Their father, Frex, thought I was too pagan to be over involved with Nessarose. Me with my devotions to dear Lurline, our fairy mother. Frex wanted a godly child, and it was clear, with her alarming hue, that Elphaba wasn’t it. Nessarose was born a martyr—that unfortunate disability! Revolting, really—and she lived and died as a martyr. If she had even a second or two to understand that a house was about to come and sit on her head, I’m sure she died happy.”

“I never met her.”

“In the Afterlife, my boy, count on it. She’ll be waiting there to improve you some more.”

“And Shell? I’ve met Shell once or twice.”

“Oh, that lad! The high jinks of that one! He was in and out of trouble like tomorrow’s stitches in yesterday’s britches. He led poor Frex a merry chase! Shell was hopeless at school, a good-joke johnnycake, in trouble with the masters and in the skirts of the misses. And he grew to have a smart mouth for wine, they say. He used to lie to his father so well that you’d’ve sworn he was born for the stage. Of course in his line of work, later on, all that came very much in handy.”

“What work was that? Medicine?”

“Never heard it called that. I think the term is espionage. Snooping, settling scores out of the public eye, selling information, and if the tales have any truth to them, sexing up the ladies from Illswater to Ugabu.”

That made some sense, then, of Shell’s activities in Southstairs. He was ferreting out information from political prisoners and getting laid in the bargain.

“I know she’s dead,” said Nanny flatly, looking out the window. “Dead and gone. At least once a day I remember that much. You could be her son. Why don’t you just decide you are?”

“I had nothing from Elphaba but misery,” he replied. “It was a happy sort of misery, since children know no better. But she left me nothing—nothing but a broom and a cape. She left me no clues. I have no talents. I haven’t her capacity for outrage. I haven’t her capacity for magic. I haven’t her concentration.”

“You’re young yet, these things take time. I myself couldn’t cast off until I was well into my sixties, but then I could do it so enthusiastically I once fell right out of my chair.”

“I think you know if you’re different,” he ventured. “I think you know if you’re gifted. How could you not?”

“You know if you feel set apart,” said Nanny, “but who doesn’t feel that? Maybe we’re all gifted. We just don’t know it.”

“Does no good to have a useless gift.”

“Have you tried? Have you even tried to read from her book of spells? From what I remember, Elphaba had to learn. She did go to school, you know. She was a scholarship girl at Shiz.”

“Chistery’s learned to talk well,” he said, after a while.

“My point exactly,” she said, draining her glass. “He had to try for years, and it suddenly clicked.”

He walked around the room. The windows were shuttered against the early autumn gale—how well he remembered the way it blew up the valleys, sometimes forcing the snow back up into the clouds that had dropped it. “You have a good life?”

“I have had a good life,” she corrected him. “Chistery comes from time to time, and the filthy peasants bring their filthy food, which I’m expected to eat as my part in community relations. I do as I’m bade.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not in a dog’s age. Not since that Dorothy. And you and the others. Did Dorothy ever stop whimpering so? She’ll grow up to require the convent, mark my words. Or a husband with a good strong backhand. Her fanny wants spanking badly.”

“Dorothy came back?”

“She did?” Nanny’s clarity was ebbing.

“If I go up to Elphaba’s room,” said Liir carefully, “and if I find something of hers, may I take it?”

“What, you’re looking for precisely what?”

“A book, maybe.”

“Not that big thick thing she was always poring through?”

“Yes.”

“Much good it would do you even if she would let it out of her sight. She could hardly ever get those recipes to work. I remember once she was trying to work a spell on a pigeon she’d caught. She was trying to teach it to be a homing pigeon. She let it loose from her window. It zipped away from her as fast as it could, but when she called ‘Come back now,’ the thing turned and dived like a suicidal lover, and impaled itself on the weather vane.” The old woman sighed. “Actually it was kind of funny.”

“I’ll leave you for a while, Nanny, and I’ll come back. I promise.”

“I never cared for pigeons except in pies. Poor little Nor, though, was heartbroken.”

“Nor,” said Liir cautiously.

“The little girl who used to live here. You remember. With the others.” But Nanny grew vague now and she could be made to say no more about Fiyero’s three children.

“What if I find that book?” asked Liir. “If no one has taken it away, may I have it?”

“You’ll have to ask Elphaba.”

“If she’s not there to ask?”

“Where would she be?” said Nanny. “Where would she be? Where is she? Elphie!” she suddenly bellowed. “Why don’t you come when I call you? After all I did for you all my life, and your slut of a mother before you! Elphie!”

Chistery came flying from the corner of the room where he had been folding a basket of laundry. He made shooing hands to Liir, who backed out of the room, shaken.

LIIR SPENT THE FIRST few weeks helping put Kiamo Ko to rights. He reminded the monkeys about sanitation, first and foremost. Under his help, the monkeys set to work closing up windows that had blown open, and repairing the roof when the wind didn’t imperil them. Liir began to weed the forecourt of its convocation of trees, sad as he did so, for even in their autumnal twiggery they provided some semblance of company. But then he decided to prune and thin rather than remove the trees entirely. Under its ivy and moss and tiny domesticated forest, the place might as well succumb to green. It seemed a suitable memorial for Elphaba Thropp.

He couldn’t bring himself to go up to her tower rooms, though. He was afraid he might throw himself from the highest window if the grief took him unawares, like a demon lover.

He visited Nanny and made her conditions comfortable and more sanitary. In a sideboard in the dining room he found a magnifying glass and some dusty old novels written decades ago. The Curse of the Admirable Frock was one; A Lady among Heathen, another. “Trash,” decided Nanny at once and set to reading them with gusto. It turned out she had not forgotten the skill; it was merely her eyes giving her trouble, and the lens helped.

He watched the autumn go golden, then spare. He took care not to get too friendly with Chistery and the others. Isolation was one thing, but forming an unseemly attachment to a Flying Monkey might be quite another. The monkeys kept to their quarters—the old stables, the hayloft and granary—and he slept in the room that Nor had used as a little girl. The days darkened earlier, and when he went to bed in the gloom, he hardly knew if he was twelve or twenty-ish.

A few days after the autumn rains began, a Swan was driven into the forecourt, and huddled for four days under a set of steps. He brought her milk and meal, and helped her wash her bloody breast, for she’d been attacked. She couldn’t give a name to the predator; she didn’t know what it might be called. She lived long enough to say that she had summoned a Conference of Birds to convene in Kumbricia’s Pass, but she’d gotten blown off course in some nasty weather.

“What’s the Conference about?” asked Liir.

She wasn’t accustomed to talking to a human, and resisted saying more. As her death drew nearer, though, she relented. “The rising threat. Can’t you see it? Being creatures of the wing, we have largely escaped the harshness that has befallen the creatures of the soil, but now we are paying for our isolation and pride.”

Before she died she said more to Chistery, perhaps feeling that as a winged creature he was more deserving of her confidences. Despite a blinding rain, they buried her beautiful downy carcass deep in the orchard. Out of respect Chistery and Liir didn’t rake her plumage for feathers to improve the household bedding, though Liir guessed that they both considered it.

SHE HAD BEEN A PRINCESS among the Swans, said Chistery. Her last wish was that, as a Flying Monkey, he should take her place at the Conference and deliver her opening remarks to those assembled.

Chistery said them carefully, trying to remember.

“She said that the danger imperiling members of the Yunamata and the Arjiki clans, the Scrow and Ugabusezi, and the other tribes of the Vinkus, is related to what threatens Munchkinlanders in their fields and Scalp dwellers in their caves—it is a related sorrow, or the same trouble under different names. Trouble, sorrow, danger, peril: the Animals suffer no less than the Quadlings; the Birds are merely the latest, and neither the least nor the last—but only the Birds see everything, and they are coming together to share their information, to tell what they see, and to sound an alarm.”

“I can’t make out what you mean, Chistery.”

He moaned. “I’m trying to say what that Swan Princess said. Don’t ask me what it means! My head! She said, ‘It isn’t a matter of each generation taking care of its own, each species protecting its own young, each tribe its own kind. It is not a matter of that.’” Chistery’s head looked as if it were going to explode. These were not matters he was used to discussing. “The parvenu Emperor is the First Spear of God—that’s what he calls himself. He aims it against the whole world; no discrimination left. We have no choice but to resist.’”

“Are you going to go to the Conference? Where is it?”

“The eastern mouth of Kumbricia’s Pass. No, I’m not going.” Chistery spat. “I’m not a Bird, and I’m hardly a Monkey—more a monkey, really. Besides, my wings wouldn’t manage that distance anymore. I need a nice perch and a hot cup of cocoa before sleep, and a good private scratch in the morning, or I can’t answer for myself. It isn’t pretty.”

Liir couldn’t force Chistery to put himself in danger. He was the chief of his tribe, after all; the others had never advanced in language or understanding quite as he had. Well, he’d had Elphaba’s tutelage.

What would the Witch have done? Liir didn’t know. He pestered Chistery until the Monkey cried, “Leave me be! How would I know what she’d do?”

“She always liked you better than me,” Liir snapped at him.

“Frankly, Liir, I’d rather be cleaning the chamber pots than having this chat.” Chistery left. Liir noticed he hadn’t contradicted the assertion about the Witch’s affections. Weasely beast.

Liir started up the stairs to see if Nanny was in one of her sharper moments. But she was asleep with the port bottle nestled between her fingers, so he kept going, up and up, at last, to the rooms in the southeast tower, the suite that had been the Witch’s study, her home and her hermitage.

The place was much as he had left it a decade earlier, though furred with a cold and clammy sort of dust. The one broad bank of windows looking east was shuttered, enshrouding the chamber with shadows. Mouse droppings littered everything, but that was expected in a castle without a cat.

He had to put his weight against the bar that kept the shutters closed, but at length the thing trembled and gave way. He only opened a segment of the window, so that enough light could come in and save him from barking his shins. As it was, he stumbled over a low chest of drawers, shattering a range of baby roc wing bones that the Witch had been drawing shortly before the end.

The room was a wheel, and he imagined it spun around him, but then that was him turning, wasn’t it, turning so his eye could fall on everything at once. He had looked unsuccessfully for the Grimmerie once before. Now he was taller, and his eye better trained: perhaps he would make it out lying slumped on some shelf, or stashed on top of a cupboard.

He didn’t see it. Maybe he just didn’t want to see it, for it would only reinforce the murkiness of his origins. Elphaba had been able to read that book, to decipher its skittering language somehow, but few else had—maybe no one else. He didn’t know. He had been good at Qua’ati, but to master a foreign language of magic was another business entirely. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to tie his own shoes until he was ten.

Expecting little, he pushed aside furniture, looked under the mildewed cushions of the window seat. The wardrobe was locked, but he found a skeleton key in a chipped teacup and worried the latch open.

Inside hung a few dresses, mostly in the black that the Witch favored. There were no shelves, and no Grimmerie hidden beneath a secret floor. Just a pair of boots. He pulled them out and looked at them.

They were expensively cut and pieced, made of some supple leather that had been well treated. Where the boots had folded a bit, there were only eyelash cracks. A gentleman’s boots, Liir realized. Elphaba kept a pair of men’s boots under lock and key?

He felt inside them. One was empty. The other yielded a piece of curling paper about eight inches square. He took it to the window and flattened it on his knee so he could make it out.

A sketch of Nor. No mistake about it. The chin was all wrong, and the eyes too close together, but the joyful tilt of the head, the way the hair whipped off the brow—it could be no other. Liir could see the artist’s tentative first lines corrected by definitive cross-hatching in a kind of drypoint, with highlights of coffee-colored wash. Maybe the artist had spilled some coffee on purpose and rubbed definitions in with a finger. Elphaba?

He turned the paper over. On the back, in a crude, distinctive hand, was scrawled

Nor by Fiyero.

This is me Nor
by my father F

before he left

So Elphaba had kept it—as another token of Fiyero, maybe, something from his hand. And perhaps also because she had admired Nor a little, in her own way—to the extent Elphaba could admire any child. Nor had had spunk.

He turned his head to avoid any more of that kind of thinking. The light from the window worked a glint upon a kind of bowl of glass. A ball, really. He rubbed the dust from it; it played like a bright spatter of sunlit rain as he cleaned it.

He found a low stool with five legs, each carved with its own representative foot: a dwarf, an elf, a human, a bird, and an elephant. He drew the stool close and sat down with his chin in his hands.

Lifting his chin this way and that, looking at himself slantwise. Did his chin have a sharp line to it, was his nose sloping and stabbing as Elphaba’s had been? Was his skin the color of her brother Shell’s? Whatever efforts or accidents had brought him into the world—was he worth it? And if so—worth it to whom? He was poised as a girl preparing for her first party, trying to see her own loveliness. He didn’t care for loveliness, one way or the other: but he looked for something that might stand in its stead. Something like merit. Capability.

If only she were still alive to tell him something, anything.

A cloud passed before the sun. The room shook a little, adjusting its outlines. The ball darkened and brightened again. He took it in his hands, the old thing, scratched and crazed, and cracked along several seams. It looked as if it had once been a flat bit of glass, and someone had heated it, thinned and curled and patched it into this makeshift gazing ball. A miracle it hadn’t fallen apart. The shapes within shifted as he tilted it this way and that, to try to surprise himself by a new aspect. Catch a new angle, learn a new regret. Anything.

He leaned down and breathed against it, and quickly wrote his name with his finger in the condensation. It dissolved into shapes, his reflection no longer sharp-lined, but foggy. Colored blobs like tossing petals. Then they resolved. The lines he saw were not the carved cornices of the wardrobe or the line where the ceiling met the walls. Instead he saw a skylight, and walls of old cracking plaster, and a white cat observing from the top of a crate. A man moved out of the margin of the mirror, turning his tunic inside out in his haste to remove it. He was dark and beautiful; Liir knew enough about the beauty of men to tell this. He circled an arm about a woman and drew her toward the wall, where he leaned down to kiss her. Then the man turned to open a wide double-doored window, and a flood of light that was never seen in the tower at Kiamo Ko burned into the room in the mirror. (Liir the young soldier was outside, heading for Quadling Country, daydreaming in the sun.) Their forms were indistinct in the sun flooding around them into the room. The woman pulled back, away from the window frame, and raised her arms around the man. Her face was hidden. Her arms were green.

Liir set the mirror gently down. He turned as if to say to the white cat, Hush, that’s private—but the white cat was in the mirror, of course.

Elphaba. Elphaba and Fiyero. Elphaba once upon a time, maybe not much older than Liir was now. And Fiyero, Fiyero for sure. In the light of that distant memory, captured somehow in a looking glass, one couldn’t mistake the pattern of blue diamonds that had been incised into Fiyero’s skin. Liir had envied how Nor had spoken so affectionately of her father’s blue-diamonded skin.

Liir didn’t want to see more. He was too constricted for prurience of any sort, much less this kind. But he was young and normal—too normal—so of course he had to look again. He was relieved to find that the circumference of the ball was misting up, and in any case the picture was different. It was the Witch now, the woman he had known so well—fiercer, less forgiving, more impatient, more focused. She was slapping the pages of the Grimmerie, looking for something she couldn’t find. Then she closed the book with a whomp so hard the globe almost rocked on its stand, even now, at the memory of it.

She turned and raised a crooked arm in the air above her, and her mouth was open, but he could hear no sound; and the broom came rushing forward, dragging its hems across the floor. The Witch wrenched it with one strong hand and settled her rump firmly against the tied top of the brush. They rose as a single instrument and left the room through the broad window. The Great Kells—as they were a dozen or so years ago, as they were today—seemed like fans of lavender and ice in the distance, and he could make out her path for a few more seconds, trading on the currents of the wind, after an impossible prize.

HE SAID HIS good-byes to Nanny, though she seemed mercifully vacant this afternoon. “Tell ’em all to go to hell,” she advised. “And save me a good seat by the racetrack when they get there.”

Chistery saw him out. “You’ve no need to take this on yourself,” he repeated.

“She would,” he said.

“You aren’t her; you can’t be, and shouldn’t try.”

“Try to be her, or try to be me? There is a difference. Of course there is. But I’ve got the broom now, haven’t I? So who else should do it?”

Chistery shrugged.

“If the Princess of the Swans was presiding over a Conference of the Birds, so that the flying creatures of the world could share what they knew about the trouble ahead, you know who would be there. She would. She flew on a broom. She qualified. So I’ll go in her stead. I may not have her blood, but I have her broom. I’m all there is.”

“Go with the winds,” said Chistery. “Shall I save supper?”

Liir put on Fiyero’s boots. Hadn’t he earned them?

Or perhaps not. He took them off again and replaced them in the wardrobe. But he did take the drawing of Nor, and fold it up, and tuck it in an inside pocket of the cape, from where it could not blow away.

He climbed to the windowsill in her old study and threw himself out, trusting that the broom would remember its mission. His eyes closed against the fall, and the crows sheltering under the eaves screeched in shock and terror. The broom stumbled and pitched, rolled and yawed, but Liir kept his boots kicked firmly in the straw and his hands iron-tight around the pole. When after the first few seconds he had not yet whumped into the side of Knobblehead Pike, he opened one eye.

The landscape was a broken thing from this high up. The mountains looked like mud, swept into ridges and painted white and brown and grey and green. Thin flat lines of polished silver: rivers threading along the valley floors. Almost as far as the eye could see, the Kells curved north. The horizon beyond them was white as sugar crystal where the sun made some fun of its own.

To the south, Kumbricia’s Pass was out of sight, hidden by the shoulders of mountains between, but it wouldn’t be hard to find from this height.

He wheeled about, vaguely southward, leaving Kiamo Ko for the second time in his life. He didn’t look back, for the whipping black cape would interfere with his view anyway. To the east, invisible still, the Emerald City, and all that went on there. To the south, a flat plate of greenish brown. Maybe Kellswater in the distance already? That would put Nether How beneath him, and the five lakes west of the Vinkus River. He hadn’t the nerve to look down, however; looking out and across was just barely tolerable.

He saw the first sign of the moon, and the weird hump of a snout it had. The jackal moon, Nanny had told him; she’d hoped to get another jackal moon in her long life. There it was, his first, or the first he could remember anyway. It lay on the horizon to the southeast like a dog with its nose on the threshold, barely obeying the instruction to stay outside. It had a cold and a personal look to it.

The wind played tricks in his ears: now a soughing like the breath of a man in distress, now an indistinct glissando almost as of fingers on purely tuned strings. From here one could see nothing of the works of man in the world, and it was the more beautiful for it: how odd, then, that the wind should still sound like human music. Or was it that human music sounded more like the wind than people could possibly know?

On his right, coming over the Kells from the west, three or four clots of dark matter, indistinct because of the light and the wispy streakiness of the skies. He paid the flotsam no mind until a skein of cloud parted and they were nearer. Larger than he’d guessed; now he could see they were still rather far off. But gaining in speed; and gaining on him, slicing toward him in a wide curvet like hounds let loose on the side of a meadow, and he the fox already moving broadly down its middle.

He used the force of his thumbs to press the wood of the broom pole down, and as if possessed of a mind, or as if it had become part of his own body, the broom obliged, and he lost altitude in a hurry. The larger creatures would have a hard time adjusting their speed and height, he thought, and he was right; they were less nimble. But the air below was thicker with the water vapor and breath of forest. What they’d lost in maneuverability, the hunting birds made up in greater weight; they plunged toward him.

Farther, and he dropped farther still, each time catching some small advantage, to lose it within a few minutes. The four birds now penned him in the air: two keeping slightly forward and below, one coming on his left. Above—he could feel it with his peripheral judgment rather than see it—the final one. And closing in fast, to judge by the pair of shadows that he could see racing along the flatlands below: his shadow and his pursuer’s.

There was nothing to lose by an attempt to buck sideways and zigzag; with luck two of the dedicated missiles might collide, and each one knock the other unconscious. But the broom didn’t seem responsive enough. A small amount of jerking up and kicking back made little difference. The farther the drop, the slower the broom’s response: the more resistance put up by the moods of the climate.

Now above the horizon the jackal moon was staring. It had risen as Liir had descended, and their relative positions were reversed. It was the head of a predator on the crouch, and he was the prey trying lucklessly to make it to a mouse hole of one sort or another.

The first attack was of talons, so Liir thought, eagles? Massive eagles—and the second attack was by a tooth or a beak, which might have meant anything. It ripped off the cape as if calmly unknotting it. Then Liir turned to beat at the creature with his arms, since encounter was inevitable, and he came face-to-face with a flying dragon. Roughly the size of a horse, with wings of black and gold, and a venomous eye of gold shot through with black where red should be.

The other dragon neared, and the two of them made their nab neatly, tossing Liir between them as his clothes shredded and his voice raveled. Then, having worried him at last from the broom, they let him fall, and retired with their spoils.

The Emperor Apostle

One Plus One Equals Both

1

HE HAD HAD EVERY INTENTION TO DIE, and music had forbidden it. He’d been netted by melody not so much beguiling as nagging. That’s what he thought, when he could think about it. Though it was another few hours or days (he couldn’t count either) before even this much came clear to him.

What he remembered from before his fall from the sky was imprecise at best, and its emotional character muted. Panic over the sight of a girl being slung from a burning bridge…disgust at realizing what Shell had been up to in those cells at Southstairs. Consolation at seeing a stag at the far side of a field in early autumn. Panic, disgust, consolation—cheap souvenirs from a holiday. Emotions were portable and obvious: small savories of a life, suitable for kicking his mood upswing or down as the moment required. False, somehow.

But he and his memories alike had awakened into a new capacity of pain and grief. He had awakened to find himself alive again, damn it. Couldn’t he even fall from a great height and expect the comfort of a quick death? Need Feckless Liir march on yet again?

Though marching was hardly what he was doing, in literal terms, as he tossed, and kicked the sour blankets in this abandoned mill building or industrial outpost, wherever it was she had taken him.

The girl was named Candle, she said. She spoke to him colloquially in Qua’ati.

She brought him water from a well outside. He could hear the squeak of the pulley as the bucket went down, came back. She brought him nuts and moss apples, which gave him a stentorian diarrhea at first, but cleaned him out and started him up again, and before long he was able to sit up. Then get up and piss in a pail. Then walk to the window and rub a shaky hand against the dirt on the glass, and circle a clean space with his palm, and look out.

His resting room was off the kitchen of a small compound: a few stone domestic buildings connected to dependences built at right angles to one another. In the yard he saw the laundry cart to which Candle and that ferociously old maunt had dragged him. Now the donkey was unhitched and was grazing nearby in an overgrown orchard, braying opinions about nothing in particular. Within a couple of days, out on her scouting adventures, Candle had come up with a hen, too, and once the hen grew familiar with her new home, there were eggs in the morning.

“Is it a farmhold?” he asked her.

“It was once,” she said in her half-a-voice. “Old apple trees in the woods, and dozens of barrels in a shed. I think it had been a cidery. But it seems to have been fitted out for industry of some sort since. I’ve found a…a heap of machinery standing in the high main barn. It’s been hacked with sledgehammers and I can’t guess what job it was meant to perform. When you can get around better, you can tell me what you think.”

Beyond the orchards and a few overgrown pastures, as far as he could tell, they were surrounded by a forest. By day it was the color of a hundred fawns, every afternoon brighter as more leaves fell and the light sank nearer to the ground. By night, owls hooted, and in the ceaseless wind the branches made sounds like coughing.

He dozed much of the day and lay awake next to her much of the night, when she fell into a sound sleep. She showed no sign of restlessness. But then, he couldn’t play an instrument to trouble her dreams. The domingon, if that’s what it was called, hung on the wall like an icon.

“Why did you rescue me?” he asked her. She couldn’t answer the question; she seemed not to understand the concept of rescue, though the word in Qua’ati could mean nothing else. “Who are you?” he tried, another way of posing the earlier question. The reply, “Candle,” nothing else, gave him something close to comfort, but it was not comfort, quite.

Another time he asked, “Why did we flee that place?”

“The old maunt told us to go. She said they would hunt for you sooner or later.”

“They? Who?”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. Anyway, she said you were in danger. She had heard tell of this abandoned place and gambled that the donkey would find the way. Indeed, it did.”

“I am still in danger? Then I’d have been safer if you’d let me die.”

“I didn’t cause you to live or die,” she said. “Don’t give me credit for skills beyond me. I played music; you remembered. Music will do that. What you remembered—that was within you, and nothing to do with me.”

But he wondered, as he grew stronger. So many of his memories included an offstage trickle of melody, like marginalia embroidering a page of manuscript. He hardly recognized himself in the glass of the window, when at night he took a candle to the black pane to see who he was now. Gaunt, and stubbled, almost palsied with the weakness of the infirm. Had her playing helped him to remember his life as it had been lived, or had she enchanted him with music and given him a false past?

He could be anyone, this could be anywhere. He might be mad, and not even know it. There might be no Emperor, no dragons, no broom—no castle of Kiamo Ko before that, no Nor abducted from it a half a lifetime ago. No occupying force in the provincial capital of Qhoyre. No parents slinging their daughter clear of the burning bridge. Candle might have riveted his comatose mind with a battery of pretend memories so as to distract him from something more important.

Though she spoke Qua’ati, and so did he. She wasn’t likely to be that skilled a player that she could have taught him a whole new language in his coma.

2

THE FIRST NIGHT HE COULD MANAGE IT, they pulled two chairs into the open doorway to watch the stars come out. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

She lit a candle, charmingly. Even more wonderfully, she pulled a bottle of wine from out of nowhere. “Mother Yackle gave it me, along with a few other things filched from the mauntery’s pantry,” she admitted. It took some ingenuity to remove the cork, but when they’d succeeded, they sat with their legs entwined, and sipped from old clay mugs with broken handles.

She told of her past. He tried to listen. After a while he realized that he was waiting for clues to prove that he had been comatose for several years, not merely weeks. He wanted her to be the Quadling girl tossed from the bridge at Bengda, grown up and magically restored not just to life but into his life. How he wanted to provide for her—to begin the impossible task of reparation.

It was hard to shake off this hope, but in order to hear of Candle’s real life, he had to try to still his own rackety guilt.

Candle was raised in Ovvels, in all of Oz the southernmost town of any size. Well, hardly a town, as she described it: a network of cabanas built in the rubbery limbs of suppletrees above the salty damp of flooded groves. As a child she hunted charfish with her spear. Like most of Quadling Country, her settlement had become economically blighted in the decades of the Wizard’s ascendancy. She thought prosperity must once have been possible here: great tiers of granite blocks, eighteen feet at their highest, were set together in long broad curves. One could have driven a horse along the top for nearly a mile. Nobody alive could imagine what such massive structures had been used for, nor how they had been erected; there was no granite anywhere nearby. The locals used the place for fixing their marsh nets and for drying fish.

Beyond that, Candle had little else to say. Her father had lit out long ago, her mother being rather wiftier than was useful in a wife. Food had grown scarce, and some of her relatives had set out to try their luck as itinerants. She’d learned to play the domingon while traveling with her uncle.

“But how did you come to stay in a mauntery?” asked Liir. “The Quadlings aren’t unionists.”

“In general, Quadlings are inexpressive about holy matters,” said Candle, “which means they’re not easily offended by other traditions. However, you’re wrong about southern Quadlings. A whole passel of Quadlings from Ovvels converted to a kind of unionism several generations ago when a missionary and his entourage came through. I heard my great-grandmother speak of it once. A sickly group of do-gooders, prone to being afflicted with mold in our climate. Frankly, it’s a wonder they had any effect. But they did. I was raised on a cushiony variety of unionist thought, so I don’t mind the chapel and the devotions that the maunts engaged in. Nor the custom of caring for the sick, either. It seems a decent way to spend one’s hours.”

“You played for me on that—domingon. Where is it from?”

“It was a gift of my uncle,” said Candle tersely, and would answer no further questions on the subject of the instrument or her uncle, either.

“You cared beautifully for me.” Liir noted the rue in his voice. “I remember what it was like to fall through the air and see the ground rush up with a speed you can’t imagine. It was all a brown blur of wind and earth.”

“I couldn’t have saved you if you had fallen very far,” said Candle. “Likely you imagine it worse than it was.”

“But my bones are healed. I can move,” he said. “I didn’t bleed to death.”

“The maunts who tended you first were more capable than they let on. In any case, I am still not clear on why you came to be airborne,” said Candle.

He ripped the skin off a wild winter orange she had found in the woods somewhere. The pungency stung his nose with eclipsing sweetness. “With all I seemed to relive in my dead sleep, there’s a lot I can’t remember,” he said at last.

“Do you remember what happened to your broom?”

“I suspect it fell to the ground. I’m not sure. Or maybe the dragons took it, though why they’d bother I can’t imagine.”

She didn’t press him further. It was Liir who did the asking. “Why did you take me away from there? Why did that one you called Mother Yackle lock us in the tower together, and release us when she did? What did she say to you about it?”

“Mother Yackle is well known to be wandering in her mind. In the short time since I arrived at the mauntery, I never knew her to cause trouble nor even, often, to speak. Somehow your arrival engaged her, though whether it was into a further madness or a mysterious clarity, I can’t say. Perhaps we were locked in so…”

“Finish your thought.”

She couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She merely smiled at Liir. “It’s nice to speak Qua’ati again. They thought I was simple at the mauntery. I didn’t mind that, really; I suppose I am simple. And my small voice doesn’t lend itself to public utterance. But I find it is nice to speak with words again, as well as with music.”

“How did you learn your skill with music?”

“We all have skills,” she said. “I mean the Quadlings from Ovvels do. They emerge in different ways. We can—see things—is that how to put it?”

“Can you see the future?” said Liir. He gripped her hand. “What is our future?”

She blushed a little; he hadn’t known a Quadling who could blush. “It isn’t like that,” she answered. “I can tell you—I suppose—a little bit about the present. It’s not the future.”

“Tell me about the present,” he said.

“I did already.” She pouted, a jest only. “I sat by your side for days and days and played the domingon to you. It gave you your present.”

“You gave me memory. That’s the past.”

She corrected him. “Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces like”—she looked around—“like this peel of orange, and that clutch of pips.”

“Play for me again.”

“I’m tired of playing,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

Before they went back inside, they explored the high-ceilinged barn. “I’ll look again in better light tomorrow,” said Liir after poking around a bit. “But I think this was a printing press.”

“Out here in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?” said Candle.

“Maybe it printed seditious tracts,” said Liir. “Someone didn’t like what it was being used for, and expressed that opinion with an ax and a hammer.”

“From pressing cider to publishing broadsides.”

“Both are presses. This is Apple Press Farm. I’m naming it.”

They retired. Candle fell asleep quickly. Liir rolled up against her for warmth. I am not a soldier any longer, he said to himself; this is not my Qua’ati girlfriend. He stiffened, as a man will, but took pains to govern the appetite. She was his rescuer and not his concubine. He might be infected with something contagious, and he wouldn’t endanger her that way.

When it seemed that the sweet lettucey smell of her breathing, the roll of her breast in the moonlight was too much to bear—that he would sink his mouth upon it—he turned onto his side. A minute or two of envisioning the burning bridge at Qhoyre was all it took to restore him to the sadder state in which he’d spent most of his life.

3

IN NOON LIGHT, the mess in the main barn proved more severe. Dozens of trays of letters used by compositors in a back room—once a milking stall maybe—were overturned on the floor. The wheels and weights and great drum of the press proper, cabineted in well-oiled oak and well-blackened brackets and footings of iron, had been gashed, and fairly recently, by swords or axes. The metal cuts gleamed with as yet untarnished brilliance.

They saw no sign of blood. Perhaps the obscure printers had gotten wind of an assault and cleared out in time.

Liir poked about in the charred rubble of the barn hearth. He managed to dislodge a few scraps of a broadsheet. He pointed to the words, but Candle said that she couldn’t read the script.

“‘Pieties of the Apostle,’” Liir told her. “That’s the heading. Here, beneath, it says ‘The Virtue of the UGLY.’”

“I didn’t know the ugly had special virtue,” said Candle, “just a sort of misfortune.”

The print was small and Liir had to carry it to the open door in order to make it out. “It seems a blameless sort of religious tract, near as I can tell.”

“Perhaps the press was used for more incendiary publications, too.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed away char and declaimed from the parchment: “‘The Apostle boasts no special skill. For his humility the Unnamed God has blessed him with the reward of untroubled conviction.’”

“I told you,” said Candle, “we’re already converted. I don’t need a further catechism.”

She left to gather firewood, and when she returned a few hours later leading a goat, Liir said, “You are systematically raiding some nearby farm, aren’t you? Is that why you have been carrying your domingon with you?”

“There are a few holdings in these hills, farther up,” she admitted. “Mostly they’re abandoned at that time of the morning, but it’s true: the instrument helps lull any resident grandfather into his morning nap.”

“I hope you’re not beggaring them.”

“Should I bring it back?”

Milk. Cheese, in time? “No.”

But what were they doing here? Resting up—for what?

“I’ve been scrutinizing such flecks of pages as I could salvage,” he told her. “I’ve come to think this circular was not a missionary tract. I think it’s oppositional. You just don’t see it at first—you read some ways down and begin to find resistance to the notions of the Apostle. It’s a clever rhetorical device, in its way; it may have fooled some readers, or convinced others to join a resistance to—this Apostle, whoever he is. It’s seditious, this paper, that’s what it is. And whoever didn’t like it traced its origins here, and made their sentiments known.”

“I hope they don’t come back.”

“What’re they going to come back for? The goat?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you know anything about milking goats?”

“I learned to fly on a broom,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “I can learn to milk a goat, I bet.” Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

4

CANDLE SAID EVENTUALLY, “The weather is steadily chilling. If we’re going to be here all winter we’re going to need to get in some firewood. Are you feeling well enough to begin to collect some?”

He was, and he did. In finding his way around the browning dales and hollows, he realized that the press had been set up in a farm that most likely had been abandoned a generation ago. Rangy teenager trees were colonizing some of the pastures, and deeper in the woods, the crisscrossing of stone walls suggested that these had been working meadows not all that long ago.

At suppertime he told Candle what he’d seen. “I don’t know much about how land is used anywhere but Ovvels,” she admitted. “I have seen those walls among the trees, and I thought perhaps they grew there like lichen.”

“The influence of pebbles! To grow stone walls. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plant a farm that way! Drop the seeds of a barn here, drip a tincture of millpond in an eyedropper over there. Plant an egg and get a whole henhouse, complete with cockcrow and breakfast omelet.”

“What would make a sheepfold?”

“All you need is a lamb’s tail.”

“How horrible!”

“Not really. To avoid fly strike, shepherds often dock the tails of lambs.”

She didn’t like this line of play. She got her domingon—Liir guessed as much to change the subject as anything else. He needled her anyway. “To grow a mauntery you’d have to plant a…a what?”

She struck up a tonic depressive and then played it backward. “Plant a prayer,” she said, despite herself. “To grow an army…?”

“Touché. Well, the story of the Seven Spears says you plant dragons’ teeth.” He’d heard the folk story eventually, the one that had given the company of the Seventh Spear its name. A bit close for comfort, that. “To grow a melody?”

“You can’t grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.” This seemed a musical reference, and it went over his head. “To grow a memory. Tell me that one, mister magic farmer.”

“To grow a memory. To grow a memory, one must plant…I’m not sure. Who wants to grow memories, anyway?”

“I’ll make it easier. To grow a good memory. A happy memory.”

He shrugged, indicating, Go on.

“It doesn’t matter what you plant,” she concluded, “but you must plant it with love.”

Then she whipped up a scale and finished with some splay-handed chord clusters. The sounds hung in the air like prisms suspended from the trees on invisible strings. The donkey brayed in an altogether more accomplished voice than usual, looking astonished at himself. The goat cocked her head.

Candle added a few grace notes in a complementary modality.

The hen stepped closer as if surprised, at her age and station, to receive an invitation to dance. She let out a squawk that turned into a nightingale’s sonnet, line after line after line, though Liir couldn’t imagine what it meant.

Candle added a hedge of bass notes, tense as the girders of a bridge. The goat opened her mouth and provided an alto obbligato line—rather huskier than would work for a paying audience, but entirely serviceable in a barnyard.

Then the Quadling girl sang something in Qua’ati—some rural advice; Liir had to struggle both to hear her and to translate. He guessed she was singing, “No one can sing unless they can remember.” The trio of animals attempted a big harmonic finish, but it was beyond them, and the moment passed.

“You can make the animals sing,” he said. “You are a wonder.”

“I can play a wonderful instrument,” she corrected him. “To grow a song, you must plant a note.”

THE NEXT DAY he went for more kindling. His strength returning little by little, he scaled another rise, a higher one than before. He saw in the distance a blurred line of tree heads a different shade of brown. The oakhair forest, in that direction, and, when he turned to see, the suggestion of the Kells in the other.

He collected what he could comfortably carry, not yet having regained full strength, and put off what needed to be said another day or two. Before he could bring the matter up, though, Candle got there first.

She said, “It’s a month now since we left the mauntery, and you dropped out of the sky perhaps two weeks before that. I’ve been nursing you as best I could, and I’ve assumed we’d winter here together. But is that a false premise? You ought to let me know. I must decide if I want to try to stay here alone through the winter, or return to the mauntery.”

“Why would I leave?” he asked, looking for a reason.

She tried to lighten the mood. “To grow a man, you must not only plant a child, but harvest it,” she said. “You’re not done yet. Are you?” When he didn’t answer her, she added, “You ask why you would leave. But I ask, why would you stay?”

“I owe you that much.”

“You owe me nothing.” She looked as if she meant it, seeming neither combative nor proprietary. “I did the job that was set me by the Superior Maunt, that’s all. Though maybe in evacuating you from that keep and bringing you here I exceeded my charge, and endangered you the further.”

“I can’t be in danger here. Look, what? Are the very elm leaves going to wreathe up by magic and smother me?”

“Something attacked you six weeks ago, and for a reason,” she reminded him.

“I had a flying broom. Of all things. No reason more than that.”

“You had the power to fly on it, too.”

“Any ant has the power to wander aboard an eagle.”

She demurred, but didn’t want to argue. “You were going somewhere. Surely you remember by now?”

“A Conference. A Conference of Birds in the eastern entrance to Kumbricia’s Pass. Though I have no way of knowing exactly when it was formally opening, nor how long it would last. It could be over already.”

She sat down. “If I understood what I picked up in the mauntery, we aren’t that far from the eastern edge of the Kells.”

“No. A few hours by broomstick, I guess. A few days, maybe, on foot.”

“There’s the donkey.”

“Two weeks on the singing donkey. He seems very lazy.”

“You’re still weak. You ought to ride.”

“You’re pushing me out of the nest?” He was relieved, in a way: someone was making a decision for him. Or perhaps she wanted to hear from his lips that he wouldn’t abandon her, he wouldn’t consider it.

Her thinking was further along than that. “I don’t know if you want to stay with me for a day, or for longer, or at all,” she admitted. “But you should choose what you want and not just fall into it. I abducted you, after a fashion. I will not keep you.”

“I’ll give myself permission to stay here.”

“You’ll settle your curiosity first,” she told him. “You don’t know why you were attacked, really. You don’t know what the Conference was for, nor what it might mean to the Birds that you didn’t arrive. You should find out that before you make any other decisions.”

“I’m not that selfless anymore. Anytime I try, I fail. I learned failure early, and mastered it.”

“Be selfish then. Ask those Birds if they have seen your friend. That Nor.”

He could hardly believe her generosity. He loved Candle already but didn’t have the perspective to know if it was as a savior, a woman, a friend, an alternative to loneliness. Or all of those together. Or if any of those were the right reason to love someone. Well, what personal experience of love had he ever had? And what testimony of love had ever been paraded before him? Precious little.

He knew in many ways Candle was right and that, also, she was giving him a way out.

“I need firewood. If you help me with firewood,” she said, “I’ll stay here the winter and not leave till spring. Between the fruits and mushrooms I’ve been drying, the potatoes growing wild in the sunny patch yonder, and what the goat and the hen can provide, I won’t starve. If I’m turned out by some landlord, or if trouble chases me away, I’ll return to the mauntery. I can be found there, by my uncle if he comes to claim me, or by you. Or there I’ll stay, maybe; it’s as good a life as most, and they’re kind women.”

He helped with the firewood, redoubling his efforts to build up the stockpile, and in so doing restoring mass to his muscles and strength to his step. By the time the first hard frost came, and the chimney was issuing its thin braid of smoke all hours of the day and night, he was ready to leave.

He wouldn’t take the donkey. She might need it.

“For what?” she asked.

“He’s better company than the goat,” said Liir at last. He took Candle in his arms on the final morning, and kissed her fondly for the first time. “I do not need to hear about goodness from any Apostle,” he told her. “You have given me more to admire than almost anyone I have ever met.”

“It’s very clear you haven’t traveled the world,” she chided him, almost lovingly. “Be safe, as safe as you can, dear Liir: and be brave.”

“Are we a couple?” he asked, bravely enough.

“We are one and one,” she said. “In Quadling thinking, one plus one doesn’t equal a single unit of two. One plus one equals both.”

For a long time, turning back, he could see the soft curl of smoke hovering over where Apple Press Farm must stand in its encroaching forest. The fire’s breath hung like a question mark above the place that she had planted herself, already, to wait for his return.

The Conference of the Birds

1

WHILE THE TREK FROM the farmstead in the woods to the start of Kumbricia’s Pass was short, comparatively speaking, every step he took bit at his bones and taxed his joints in a way that none of the long forays across country had seemed to do before.

Well, he was older. Hardly old yet—twenty-three, was he, or twenty-four? Something like that. Not old enough to feel like an adult, really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless.

So he took care. Any little scatter of stones might shift beneath his weight, any patch of grass might prove more slippery than it ought. He latched his eyes to the ground. Confidence and stamina returned all too slowly.

But return they did. Eventually he was walking two hours at a stretch before pausing to rest. He fixed his gaze to the horizon and willed himself forward by setting himself serial destinations. That tallest blue pine, that nubble of grasses in the upland meadow, that outcrop of granite. Before long, the prospect grew grander, as the Kells swam into clearer focus, and the steep cut between them said KUMBRICIA’S PASS: enter if you dare.

He remembered his childhood journey with Oatsie Manglehand and the Grasstrail Train, and how the travelers had traded tales. Fierce Kumbricia, the witch from the oldest tales of Oz! Kumbricia was so ancient a figure of lore that she seemed freed from the limitations of any particular moral position. She was not exactly the demon crone from hell, intent on the destruction of mortal souls, nor was she the nodding grand-tit of the world, providing succor in times of trial. Or perhaps, more truly said, she was both. One plus one equals both. Like the most insouciant and playful of earthquakes, collapsing villages and crushing populations, Kumbricia’s actions followed her own secret intentions. To a human, what might look like luck one minute was disaster the next, but what meant luck to Kumbricia, or disaster either? In the stories she was fierce, amoral, wholly herself. Unvanquishable and incorrigible.

And unknowable, really.

Like the Unnamed God, when you came right down to it.

Occasionally, Nanny had singsonged, as a nursery ditty, something probably derived from the Oziad or some other baroque history-legend.

Kumbricia stirs the pot, and licks the ladle,

Sets the table, pours a glass of tears.

Waits beside the ominous vacant cradle.

Waiting still. She can wait for years.

Yes, just like the Unnamed God.

2

THE CLIFFS OPENED BEFORE him and then closed behind him, for the track into Kumbricia’s Pass took several quick turns along the valley floor before it began to rise. The ground breathed different vapors here, and the season was delayed: the browning leaves of the trees hadn’t fallen yet. Not enough wind could wend through to tear them away.

The brightness of the sky was shattered into glazed mosaic bits by the fretwork of branches and foliage. This high-slung canyon went on for days, didn’t it?—wasn’t that his recollection? Until it opened on the western slope of the Kells, and the Thousand Year Grasslands spread out as broad as the imaginary sea from children’s stories? How would he ever find traces of a convocation of Birds in this secret haven?

But a good place to gather, he had to concede. The mountains served as ramparts, and the ravine was helpfully overgrown. Here the Yunamata made their home most of the year. And here Elphaba and Liir had picked out their way all those ages ago, pressing on toward Kiamo Ko and the hope for sanctuary.

He had all the time for rumination he needed—and then some. What had he understood, then, of Elphaba’s drive? Her need? The force that pushed her around? Precious little. But he remembered the day she had saved the infant Snow Monkey, who would become Chistery. Her native—talent? power? skill at concentration?—or maybe, merely, compassion?—had caused a small lake to ice over so she half walked, half slid across it to collect the abandoned, fretting monkey baby.

That’s what his memory said. The very ice formed under her heels. The world conformed itself to suit her needs. But how could this possibly be true? Perhaps it was the unreliability of memory, the romanticking tendencies of childhood, that made Liir remember it this way. The lake went ice. The baby monkey was saved. Maybe, really, she’d waded. Or maybe the lake was already iced over.

Maybe all that really mattered, as to her power, was that she saved the baby monkey.

At the shores of a small tarn, he paused, and became aware of a new variety of silence. It was the sound of everything holding its breath.

At the farther side of the tarn was a small island. A spinney of knot-branch trees grew in the center of the island, their five or six tree trunks so close as to resemble the uprights of a series of doors, all leading to the same interior space among the trunks, some dozen feet in diameter. The trees held what was left of the Conference of the Birds, and the Birds were holding their breath.

He stood, not ready to call out, for he didn’t want them to scatter. But they were aware of him, he was sure. How many hundred pairs of eyes blinked or unblinked at him from those ring-coiled leaves? They neither approached him in sortie nor twittered in fright. Perhaps, he guessed, they were stupid with fear.

Finally he thrashed about along the bracken and located a fallen tree trunk substantial enough to bear his weight. He hauled it to the water’s edge and pushed it in. No conjuring up an ice-walk for him. With the help of a staff, he balanced himself and began to draw his way across the water. He could have swum, he knew, but that would require his undressing either before or after the swim, and it seemed an undignified way to approach a Convention.

The Birds seemed patient, and as he got closer he thought: It’s as if they have been waiting for me.

This was so, according to the hunch-hooded Cliff Eagle who bade him welcome.

“You’re the boy-broomist,” he said. “The fledgling. We knew you’d been downed. A Red Pfenix got far enough through enemy lines to cry out that much information before being wounded and having to turn back. We trusted you would come. You’ve come.”

The Cliff Eagle paused smartly, puffing out his breast feathers.

“I almost didn’t,” said Liir. “It wasn’t even my idea, really.”

The Eagle made a mouth gesture as close to a sneer as he could manage. “Humans are fickle. We know. But you’re here. The boy-broomist.”

“I’m without the broom.” Liir put his staff down on the ground so the Birds could see. “I walked. Have you a name, by the way?”

The other Birds hopped a branch or two closer to see if the Cliff Eagle would answer. They were the larger creatures, mostly—a few random Finches and Fitches, some Robins, and a busy preening department of Wrens—but mostly Eagles, Night Rocs, a youngish Pfenix in its glowing halo. Nine Swans still waiting for their Princess. A blind old Heron with a twisted left leg. Others.

“I know what happened to the Princess of the Swans,” said Liir, and told them how he had buried her—and, in a dim sense, come in her stead.

The Cliff Eagle took the news unflinchingly, though the Swans bowed their heads until their necks were white hoops, and their wings shuddered with an airy sound, as of an industrial baffle.

“I am the President of the Assembly,” said the Cliff Eagle. “Thank you for coming.”

Liir had no use for honorifics. “Am I to call you Mister President? Or just Birdy?”

The Cliff Eagle bristled, and then said, “General Kynot is my name, though my name isn’t important. And yours isn’t either. We’re soldiers at strategy, not a military tea.”

“Well, I’ve been a soldier and I’m not going back to it. I’m Liir, for what that’s worth, and I use my name. I’m not Broom-boy.”

Kynot ducked his head and bit at a nit under his wing. “Sorry, the place is crawling with nits,” he said. “Liir.” It was a concession, and Liir relaxed. He was about to ask permission to sit down, and then remembered he didn’t need it. So he sat, and the Birds came farther down from the branches, and most of them settled on the hardscuffle with the sound of small loaves of bread falling to a floor.

Kynot made quick work of their concerns. The Conference seemed to be comprised of seventy or eighty Birds who were now afraid to leave. They had met to convene about the threat in the skies, but that very threat had cornered them and grounded them. It would take a talent and a cunning greater than any of their skills to make the skies safe for travel.

“You’ve come to the wrong beak if you want talent or cunning,” said Liir.

“Don’t be absurd,” snapped Kynot, and continued.

He beat out every point of his argument with a hard flap of his wings. Whereas conditions of life under the Emperor had become intolerable, whereas his airborne army of dragons had systematically disrupted air travel, unsettled populations of Birds and birds, and interfered with the natural rights of flight and migration and convocation, now therefore a Congress of the Birds had been summoned, if sadly beleaguered by aforementioned hostile army, and such delegates as had managed to sneak in had concluded thereby that they were singly and in unity incapable of combating the enemy fleet. Therefore they needed help. Fast.

“I came to tell you of the death of the Princess of the Swans,” said Liir, “because it is what Elphaba would have done. Beyond that, I can’t be of much use. If I’m the only hope around, you’re in a heap of trouble.”

“Unlike Animals, we Birds haven’t often lived wing by jowl with humans,” replied the general. “The human prohibition against eating Animal flesh being subject to abuse, think how much less strict is any taboo against eating the Bird of the air. We must be shot at and brought down before we can be interviewed to learn if we are talking creatures. Few hungry farmers are willing to extend Birds that courtesy, so those of us who talk tend to congregate in areas less frequented by human scum. My apologies, that was crude of me.”

“Don’t apologize too fast, you don’t know me very well,” said Liir. “But still, why ask me for help?”

“You have flown, as most humans have not,” said Kynot simply. “You have powers unique among the humans we’ve met…”

“I can keep my balance. So what. It’s the broom that has powers. Elphaba’s broom.”

“The wing doesn’t work separately from the feather, Liir. They work in tandem.”

“Well, I haven’t the broom any longer, or haven’t you heard? So I can’t fly—which means this hardly concerns me.”

“You were attacked by the dragons yourself. Weren’t you? Or have I been fed misinformation?”

“Well, I was. But that’s between me and the dragons. It has nothing to do with you.”

“And they call us birdbrains.” Kynot was livid. “There is a common cause among our kind and a flying boy, you dodo.”

“I object,” said a Dodo, just waking up from a nap.

“Sorry, that was uncalled for. Listen. Liir. You must have been intending to help us, or why did you come here at all?”

He thought of Candle. “It was the suggestion of a third party.”

“A suggestion of what? That you deliver your tragic news, and then stay to laugh at us in our plight? That you see your fellow creatures chased, tortured, kept from associating freely, just as you were chased, robbed, and nearly killed, and then you—what? Walk home and retail the event for amusing dinnertime conversation?”

“Don’t paint me so bleakly. I’m capable of doing that for myself. Look, it’s occurring to me that I might ask something of you. On and off over the years, I’ve been looking for someone. A girl-child. Perhaps you could help. On your various migrations and such.”

“We can’t fly freely, or haven’t I put that clearly enough, you cretin?” Kynot was apoplectic. “How can we serve your private needs when our numbers are being diminished by the day?”

“Well, then.” Liir shrugged. “It’s a no-go. I guess I didn’t really understand much about this skirmish involving the Birds. It’s sad, but it hasn’t anything to do with me. And even if it did, I’m powerless…I’m not Elphaba.”

A small Wren hopped forward and said to Kynot, “If you please, begging your pardon, General…”

“Do not beg my pardon! Do not beg at all! How many times have I to drill this lesson into your brain, Dosey?”

“Sorry, Gen’ral. Begging your pardon for that one, too. It’s just that the young man might want to think on this bit somewhat.” Dosey turned to Liir and cheeped. “It ain’t just us Birdys, mister. Those dragonfings are bad cess for human beings, too. Scraping the faces of defenseless women in the wilderness! Have they no shame? Have you? If you cain’t help us out of the kindness of your liver, surely you could work to keep such things from happenin’ to your own kind?”

“Well said, Dosey.” Kynot sounded less apologetic than surprised.

“Those were unionist missionaries, I’m told,” said Liir, his shoulders slumping. “It was horrible to hear about. But I’m not a maunt, and I don’t even know if I’m a unionist.”

“So what next? They’ll kill your brother in his stockings, and you’ll say, ‘He had grey eyes and I have green, so it weren’t really about me a’tall’?” asked the Wren. “They already attacked you, duckie, so’s I heard. Ain’t you rememberin’?”

“Maybe I deserved to be attacked.”

“Oh, save us,” muttered Kynot. “Somebody save us. But it’s not going to be this nutter.”

Dosey wasn’t ready to give up. “Mebbe you did deserve it,” she snapped. “But that’s giving those dragons an awful lot of credit for knowing the insides and the sinsides of your soul! So what if they fly out of the stables of the Emperor! They’re not Talking Dragons! They’re in the pay of the Emperor of the Ugly! And you cain’t be sartain those young maunts deserved what they got, can you? Their faces so scraped! It’s hideous is what it is!”

“It’s not for me to decide whose faces get scraped or not…”

“No,” said Kynot. He reared up and looked as if he wanted to peck Liir’s eyes out. “No. Leave it in the beak of the Unnamed God, or his mortal avatar, the Emperor. Leave it to the agents of the Emperor, who run the Home Guard for the security of the Emerald City at the expense of all others who live in Oz. Or leave it to the underlings who follow the orders of their superiors. Leave it in the beaks of the dragons themselves. Dragons don’t kill people, people kill people. They kill themselves by walking unprotected in a world where there are dragons. You make me sick.”

“I don’t have any idea why the dragons attacked those maunts—”

“It is increasingly obvious that you don’t have any ideas at all. The dragons attacked the maunts to stir up trouble between the Yunamata and the Scrow. Those human populations had finally positioned themselves to be ripe for treaty making, after ten hundred generations…They had been learning to trust each other. With random attacks on isolated humans, the dragons could keep the tribes suspicious of each other. Tribes are easier to intimidate when they are not united. You said you were in the military: didn’t you learn anything about military strategy?”

Liir thought about the burning bridge. He could see again the letter of burning straw, changing shape as it fell, spelling something fiery and illegible into the vanquishing water.

He thought about Candle, waiting for him to return—having done something. Having completed some action. If Liir assumed he wanted Candle, and how could he know that yet?—he couldn’t have her. Not until he had an alternative against which to make a choice.

“Look,” he said. “Flattering, all this. But I can’t fly anymore. My broom is gone. I risked having my face scraped by coming solo across the Disappointments as far as Kumbricia’s Pass. I came for the wrong reasons—as usual. There’s nothing I can do for you, even if I am a human. I have no talent. My broom had great talent!—if it even was my broom. But it’s gone. Either the dragons took it, or it’s lost.

“Listen. Keep listening. Wipe that squawky look off your faces. Please. Why don’t you band together to fly out of here? A huge clot of you? The dragons couldn’t take you all out—some of you would be bound to get through.”

“Nice,” said a small Barn Owl. “Very nice. I have an irregular left wing and I tend to fly in loops, which slows me down. I’ll be one of the first to go. Gladly shall I sacrifice myself for the great Conference of Birds!” He didn’t sound as if he meant it.

“While there are grubs to eat here in Kumbricia’s Pass, and the dragons can’t see into our hideout, we are imprisoned here,” said Kynot. “But to leave would be to risk even one of us—and that is a risk we don’t take. We won’t. The least little Sparrow that falls diminishes us all. I thought you knew all about that.”

“Yeah, well, my religious instruction was pretty feeble.”

“I wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but of military strategy. You could get to the dragons, couldn’t you? A witch-boy passing as a soldier? You could see if they had your broom, for one. You could get it back. You could be our voice—our ambassador. Our human representative, our agent, our proxy—”

Liir interrupted. “If I could get my broom—what good could I do? They would just attack me again. Last time they were satisfied with my broom and my cape. Maybe this time they’d scrape my face.”

“You just said it’s not up to you to decide whose face gets scraped or not,” said the Cliff Eagle. “If you believe that, put your face out there and deal with what happens.”

“This isn’t going to work,” said Liir. “I can’t do anything for you. I’m not a Bird. I’m not a witch-boy. I don’t even have a broom anymore. And even if I had it, maybe I wasn’t meant to fly. Maybe I shouldn’t even have that liberty.”

“Maybe none of us should have the liberties we have. We keep going as we are, we’ll find out soon enough. But if you help us squelch the dragon threat, we’ll do what you ask. We’ll hunt for that human female you’re seeking.”

The Wren hopped forward again. “You’re going to do it,” she said to Liir. “You’re going to try, ain’t you. I kin tell.”

“You read the future, Dosey?” said Liir.

“Begging your pardon, sir—”

“Dosey!” interrupted Kynot. “No begging!”

“Ooh, sorry I’m sure,” Dosey continued. “No, Mister Broom-boy. You’re going to do it for a perfectly selfish reason—our looking for your lost girl-fing—and that’s okay. Why not? Long as the job gets done.”

The Birds were silent.

“You’ve had a taste of it,” she said in a softer voice. “Not many has, but you has. You’ve tried flying, ain’t you. Now try giving it up.”

She came nearer. “Try giving it up,” she said. “Begging your pardon, sir, you cain’t.”

The Birds began to flap their wings and, one by one, to lift up, making their final argument. They swept counterclockwise around the dead little lake, perhaps in deference to the Owl whose wing anomaly made him list in a particular direction. There were more Birds than Liir had first perceived. Several hundred. The more timid ones must have been hiding higher in the branches, but listening intently: all listening. Now they flew, and as they flew, there could be no leader, no follower: they traced the same track in the air, faster and faster. The very force of their rhythmic pumping made the surface of the lake stand up in waves of its own, higher and higher, till wingtips of white froth were beaten up, and then the clots of pale spume lifted and circled beneath the vortex of birds like a second population, like ghost Birds, like the relatives of the Conference who had been slain. But what were ghosts without voices?

The birds were silent—none of them, even the Geese and Ducks, who liked to honk in flight, dared risk attracting attention to their stronghold.

“Stop,” cried Liir and held up his hands—not out of pity, nor fear, nor a new moral conviction: simply out of the lack of any further reason to resist.

The blind, gimpy Heron hobbled forward and pecked at Liir’s leg to locate him. “I can’t fly either, now my sight’s gone,” the Heron said. “Makes me no less a Bird, though, do it?”

Kumbricia’s Cradle

1

THE WALK BACK WAS FASTER. Now that his bones were knitted, all this trekking was building up muscle again. He hurt, but solidly, recuperatively.

The Disappointments afforded little by way of a blind, so he traveled by night as much as he could, hoping that dragons wouldn’t be abroad then. He tried to keep to clearly marked tracks, goat paths, stream sides, where the going was smoother, though the cover less useful.

Arriving back at Apple Press Farm an hour shy of dawn, he was unwilling to frighten Candle by approaching in the dark. He found an old tree on the edge of the orchard still forcing out small, deformed fruit, and he made a breakfast for himself, shivering with his hands in his armpits. He tried to feel the day warm instant by instant as the sun rose over the horizon, but his apparatus for appreciating such subtlety was too crude.

Then the donkey brayed, and a cock cried out his serrated Confiteor through the rising mist. Where had Candle got a cock from? She must still be roaming the province, releasing creatures from homesteads with impunity. She was lucky she wasn’t caught, as the donkey and the cock weren’t exactly keeping their whereabouts secret. The cock sounded like a tenor.

With all that noise, she’d be stirring by now. Still, he waited till he saw the smoke from the kitchen chimney roll up, and he heard a window shutter bark against the stone. He came toward the house ready to call out, but she was standing in the doorway on one foot, the other foot rubbing against the back of her calf. “What have you been waiting for?” she asked, her head tilted forward. “Isn’t it cold out there in the orchard?”

“You’ve been clearing the undergrowth.”

“The donkey has. Makes my life easier; he’s done enough for a kitchen garden. If we remove a few more trees, we’ll have a good open space, and fertile, by the look of it. But we’ll need fencing against the donkey and other comers. Why do you loiter, come in, you must be ice.”

He was about to say I was afraid I’d frighten you, and then he remembered: She possessed some sort of a talent for reading the present. She’d probably known he was there; and indeed, she admitted as much when asked.

His fists clenched and opened at the notion of touching her sleep-warm body, of wrapping his arms around her, diving his cold fingers into the folds of her simple broadcloth sleeping tunic. But she ducked into the shadowy doorway before he could embrace her, as if his time away had made them strangers again.

The place was that much straighter, simpler, more pleasant. She’d been busy. Dried flowers set round in cracked terra-cotta pots. Tassels of herbs drying from strings, spooling their fragrance across the kitchen. In the fire nook, the andirons had been polished, and from the trammel hung a fine bulbous kettle with scented water roiling in it. “How did you know I’d be back today?”

“The cock crowed more self-consciously, so I guessed he must have an audience. Anyway, I sensed it would be you. Or maybe that was just hope, who can tell the difference? You must be weary. Rest your bones, Liir, and I’ll fetch some rennety milk pudding from the cold room belowstairs.”

“Don’t move about so. Just sit—here.” He patted a stool near him and smiled. Her hands flexed and met his at the fingertips, and their fingertips bounced gently against one another. Then she took herself off to get the pudding.

“You’ll eat first, and then you’ll sleep,” she said, like a mother, “for I don’t need the skills of divination to know you’ve been walking most of the night.”

She would hear of nothing else. He had to content himself with watching her flit across the kitchen, into the sunlight and out of it again. How is it that she is like a bird, too, he thought, and felt he was on to something, but then the food settled him, and Candle had proven right, for his head was nodding on his spine. She helped him to the room where they had so chastely slept, and after she had taken his shirt off and lightly run a damp cloth under his arms and behind the lengthening mane of hair at his nape, she dropped the cloth on the floor and pressed her hands against his bare chest, as if trying to interpret the arcane language of his heartbeat.

“Later,” she mouthed at him, and kissed the space where his lips would have been if he hadn’t just then begun to keel backward against the pillow.

The sleep was devoid of character. A good sleep.

He awoke well into the heat of the day, such as it was at this time of year. She had set out a tunic and fresh leggings. What a capable scavenger she was. The trousers, cut for a slenderer man, cinched too tightly at his thighs, but they were clean, and the tunic scented of pomander. In new garb he felt a new man, and looked out of the window to find her.

She was hard at work in the patch she’d mentioned. Using a sharp segment of the printing press’s broken iron wheel, she was levering aloft a resistant root of apple tree. Smudged now, where he was pristine, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and in vain tried to scatter a late population of midges who found the smell of her sweat enticing. He called to her, and she waved and fell heavily to her knees as the root chose that moment to yield.

“Let me do that,” he said.

“Done now. But I’ll rest a spell. Come down.”

They walked to the edge of the orchard, by turns sipping sweet well water from a single pipkin. “You’ve done good work here,” he told her gravely.

“I’ve had good reason.” With her little finger she picked at a bit of wax in one ear. “You’re back, now, and there’s one on its way.”

He arched an eyebrow, feeling very Commander Cherrystone-ish. “Company’s coming?”

“You could put it suchly.”

What was she reading out of this sunny hour that he couldn’t see—oh, he couldn’t, but then he could. “It’s not so. You’re not old enough.”

She said, “Though like you I can’t exactly say how old I am, apparently I am old enough, Liir.” Her tone was easy and a bit bored, but he thought he knew her well enough by now to suppose that she was at least a little frightened.

Many of the fellows in the unit had talked about this. They’d shared their observations. Women always knew, and a preternatural calm swept all other earthly considerations aside when it happened. But Candle was hardly a woman!—and not inaugurated into those mysteries. Or not by him.

“I’ve been gone only a few weeks,” he said, trying not to sound cold. “Or had you already charmed a local farmer with your domingon even when I was still recuperating inside? Is that how you got the goat, the cock, the hen—a bartering for your farmyard needs with your farmyard skills? Is that why you encouraged me to leave on a wild Bird chase?”

“You needn’t fuss so.” She bit her lip and looked at him levelly. “It was no other man, Liir.”

“It is not by me. Candle!” He slipped out of Qua’ati for a moment, to spew expletives in the orchard air. “I am a fool and a naïf and a monster, all at once, but I am not stupid about how a girl becomes pregnant. It is not by me. Don’t embarrass me with a hopeless ruse. Do you think I would abandon you over it?”

“I don’t think—”

“Or maybe you want me to? Well, I won’t. I haven’t that crooked a soul. Just don’t lie to me, for that’s intolerable. Candle! The whole thing is beyond belief.”

“Liir. I ask nothing of you. You’re not married to me. You didn’t choose me. I didn’t choose you.”

“You chose to save me,” said Liir despondently, “when I might have slipped away, and a good thing, too.”

“I chose to try to save someone. Someone sick in an infirmary, that is all. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know you yet. I don’t know you yet.”

“I am not the father,” he said. “Am I required to remind you how it works? I kept my distance, Candle. I never slept with you; I never buried myself in your trove. I thought about it, yes, but thinking’s not doing, and no child is begat by the midnight thoughts of an adult sleeping alone.”

“But you did,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “It would be easier to pretend you hadn’t, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The infant grows. I won’t turn it out of its nest now.”

“I didn’t!” he insisted, and then she told him how he had, and when, and why.

A small rain came up over the orchard, and in an eddy of chill, the drops turned to snow. The season turned several more notches in an instant, as can happen.

They made their way inside without further remark, and Candle put herself to kitchen tasks. She measured two handfuls of coarse flour and shook it through a boulter of cloth. The light greyed, and faded, and he pulled the shutters tight, and built up the fire. There were the cock and the hen to bring in, and the donkey to stable, and whatever else he could think of to do, he did: shifting firewood, scattering clean straw for the floor, arranging things on shelves. Things with handles and spouts, items with purposes he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine anything.

They ate, and after eating she said softly, “This is a good thing, Liir.”

“Then it couldn’t have come from me.”

As she prodded, and because it made a distraction if nothing else, he told her about the Conference of the Birds and the charge under which he was laboring—or had so labored, up until this morning upon his return—to find his broom.

She had always seemed unshaken by the notion of flying dragons. When he asked why, she told him that she’d heard rumors of such creatures a few years back. They were involved in an action in the provincial capital.

“Qhoyre,” he filled in. “It figures.”

“If there were going to be troubles, you’d expect them in Qhoyre,” she concurred. “It began as a tax revolt or something. The garrison of the Emerald City military was stormed by Quadlings, and more or less annihilated.”

“I don’t believe you can be more or less annihilated. You either are or you aren’t.” He thought of the suave, genteel Commander Cherrystone, and hoped that he had been one of the ones who had been killed.

“Don’t look to me for accuracy. I’m a simple soul. I’m merely telling you what I heard my uncle say. Some of the reasons we left.” Candle continued. It was calming for both of them to avoid the matter of her pregnancy. “He said that the Emerald City flared up in reprisal. Overreacted. A small fleet of flying dragons was unleashed against the Quadlings at Qhoyre. It was pretty terrible. There were only a few survivors, and who could trust what those poor traumatized loons said? Flying dragons? Quadlings are so superstitious. No one knew what to believe—so let’s get out of here, said my uncle.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “So I’m not surprised that it has turned out to have been true.”

He put his head in his hands. The other fellows in his squadron. Had any of them survived? Ansonby, Kipper, Somes? Burny, Mibble? The one they called Fathead? Or what about their girlfriends—were they tarred as collaborators?

It wasn’t just the girl slung from the burning bridge—it was all of them. Her parents, their neighbors, the countryfolk. The occupying forces, the officers and the infantry, the support teams, the ambassadors. The repercussions seemed endless and only to grow in force and significance, never to recede.

Candle saw his expression. She took his hand, and he had to work hard not to snatch it away.

“Remember why you went to the Conference,” she said. “Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself, Liir. Otherwise you’re just a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by chance and the insensible wind.”

“I will stay here, whether you’ve been sleeping round the countryside or not. We are called to be as limbs of God,” he said.

“That piety curdles on your tongue, and you know it. If you don’t rescue yourself, Liir, you might just as easily be a limb of evil.”

“One has to admit one’s destiny.”

“Naming your destiny the will of the Unnamed God doesn’t make it so. And self-glorifying, besides.”

They lay down in the same bed that they had shared before. Neither of them slept, though not this time from being racked with desire.

2

THEY AROSE WHEN IT was still dark, besting the cock at his own business.

Tea in a cup with a crack in the glaze; small beads of tea lined up vertically. He stared at it, wishing to learn a new language.

“Whom will you choose to save?” said Candle, when the sun made an effort to lighten the room. “I am not that girl, you know. That Quadling girl you saw pitched into the burning river. You cannot make me her by beggaring yourself for my needs. You can’t choose me in that girl’s place.”

“Maybe I can’t save anyone,” he said. “Since Elphaba died, how many times have I set out to try? There was Nor, who was in prison. There was Princess Nastoya, in medical extremis. I make no headway in either direction. Even some miserable boy I saw on a road, whose granny was willing to sell him in exchange for my broom—I just walked on by. Why should I be beholden to those Birds? Find the old broom! Speak out danger to the world! I’m not a spokesperson for myself; how could I be for them?”

“You can do what you choose to do. You’re hardly on death’s door,” she reminded him. “I mean, not anymore.”

“And you’d have me believe that I have lost my virginity, and I don’t even remember it. Life in a coma. Well, it figures. It’s consistent, isn’t it? I’ll give you credit for that: you’ve read me correctly.”

“You owe me nothing.” Candle stood up and put her hands on the small of her back. “There is enough food and firewood here to see me through my months. It’ll be spring before the baby comes. The goat will provide backup milk if I run dry. Or I’ll take myself back to the mauntery for the final lying-in. The maunts will know what to do. It’s not the first time the maunts have seen such.”

“If I owe you nothing,” he said, “no one owes anyone a thing.”

“Maybe no one does.”

“Except the Unnamed God.”

“Maybe we don’t owe the Unnamed God anything,” she said. “Maybe not allegiance, maybe not gratitude, maybe not praise, maybe not attention. Maybe the Unnamed God owes us.”

He sputtered at her impiety, but she looked queasy: a touch of morning sickness upon her, no doubt. She hurried away to take care of it in private. The yard outside the house was rimy with hoarfrost, and the new sun shone upon it harshly. He had to squint to watch her cast herself away from him.

She was shivering. As the winter came in, she’d have to go more slowly to the outhouse, what with ice on the ground, and a weight in her belly. He would try to tie some straw to a pole, leave her a makeshift broom to sweep away the snow, if nothing else.

He gathered the straw and threw it on the floor while he hunted for cord with which to bind it. In the splayed angles in which it fell, it spelled the burning letter again, a letter he couldn’t read.

Dragonfings

1

WAS IT THAT he was better traveled now—or just that he was older? Had the Emerald City actually changed, or just his ability to apprehend it?

The Big Itself had never seemed shy of self-regard—Liir remembered that much. Now he became aware of how everything flourished on a hefty scale. Architectural metastasis. The chapels were like churches, the churches like basilicas. The government houses out-bloated the basilicas, with bigger columns, more imposing flights of steps, higher spires. Private homes were nothing shy of palaces-in-training.

In his absence, the Emerald City had undergone a makeover. Oceans of whitewash had been splashed to obliterate the grattifi. Along the canals, trees had been pollarded to force full head, and ringed with liquid lime to prevent disease. The strip he’d called Dirt Boulevard had been replanted and it served again as a promenade, with well-raked tracks for military drill, and meandering paths among bushes and fountains where the plutocrats might see and be seen.

He supposed it came down to this: The Emerald City was no longer the capital of Oz. It was Oz. It survived for the sole purpose of insuring its own survival.

Maybe it always had done so, but now there was no pretending otherwise. Were there always so many ministries, or were they simply better marked? The Ministry of Comfort—that was aid for the indigent. The Ministry of the Home Guard. The Ministry of Sincerity (the sign beneath read FORMERLY THE PRESS BUREAU).

The Ministry of Artistic License. Apparently now you had to apply to be an artist.

Obelisks, cenotaphs, marble statues, fluttering banners and pennants. Souvenirs in kiosks: Everything OZ. I love OZ! A keychain, a whistle, a reticule, a letter opener, a lorgnette case: OZ, OZ. A military band every half mile, performing gratis for the residents of the emerald hive. The City seemed to have its own theme song.

But for what, wondered Liir. For background? For show? Everyone seemed in a hurry, more so than he’d remembered. The cafés were thriving, the public trams dripping with riders, the piazzas clotted with tourists, the museums thronged. “Apostle Muscle,” an exhibit showing at the Lord Chuffrey Exposition Hall, was advertised in broadsheets plastered on all the public notice boards. The graphic was brilliant, Liir thought: a male foot in an open, leather-strapped sandal stepping out of a cloud. The painted landscape receding to the horizon showed that wherever the Apostle had already set his foot, communities like miniature Emerald Cities sprung up within the precise outline of his footly influence, from the heel to the sprawl of toes.

Liir turned his back on Southstairs, but it wasn’t all that hard to do. The Emerald City had grown taller, more prosperous. Southstairs was more hidden now, though some edict or other must be keeping the land around the Palace relatively low built, so its stately domes and minarets could still dominate the City center.

2

AS FOR THE citizens of the Emerald City, business seemed to be profiting them very well. Skirts were thicker, hems were longer, fur trimmed everything, from ladies’ hats to brougham bedeckings. Men’s waistcoats were cut fuller to accommodate bigger bellies. The dry goods used by clothiers looked overdyed: the colors richly saturated, as if intended to be seen from a distance, as on a stage. The effects would have been comic but for a costive sobriety that seemed to have swept the City like an infection.

It’d be comfortable to be here, Liir decided. Everywhere else, ordinary folks laugh so much because they’re nervous. Being stationed in Qhoyre, we laughed like morons: it helped us deal. It also made us friends. But perhaps you don’t need to laugh if all your deprivations have been alleviated, your anxieties relieved. You can afford to be judicious, keep a civil tongue in your head, and speak in a lower tone of voice.

There were riffraff, as before—and a good thing, too, or he’d have stuck out even more than he did. Not so many Animals, still. A few in the service industry. An aproned old Warthog Governess, pushing a pram, some Rhino security guards.

And kids. Kids looking terribly old. Probably alley-cat thieves among the younger of them. Older kids, sloe-eyed teenagers, who cast him sly looks, trying to make out if he was an easy mark, competition for trade, or a possible ally.

Ruddy Quadlings in their huddles of family, clam-colored Yunamata indigents surviving on handouts and ale. Dwarves looking uppity, and why not?—dwarves looking shifty, and so what. Munchkins, in sizes small, medium, or grande, who’d emigrated from their own Free State. Or maybe they were turfed out for passing secrets or engaging in black trade. Dirty-looking polybloods in tatters of blanket, stepping on hardened bare feet across raked gravel forecourts, holding out their hands until some welcoming committee came out with a cudgel.

Elphaba had come to the Emerald City once, as a young woman. Maybe even his age—he didn’t know. She’d never said much about it. “Pimps and Prime Ministers, and you can’t tell the difference,” she’d growled once. Had she stuck out like a green thumb? Or were people more accepting back then? For better or worse, he was able to pass.

He guessed by the end of the day he might be imprisoned in Southstairs himself. He thought he was ready for it, and perhaps he deserved nothing better. Still, if that were so, why was he taking care not to stand out? Skulking where he needed to skulk, striding confidently when the streetscape required it? A deeper intention at work, he guessed: that old beast-in-the-bear-trap thing that humans did so well? Even the reprobate who knows he’s a moral coward wants to keep drawing breath.

Despite the building boom that the new prosperity allowed, the Emerald City remained familiar. Liir found his way more or less correctly to the Arch of the Wizard and along the Ozma Embankment, through the tony district of Goldhaven right to Mennipin Square, at the far end of which the house of Lord Chuffrey presided.

He wasn’t exactly sure what he could accomplish, but he had to start somewhere. The Lady Glinda, née Upland, now Chuffrey, was his only contact in the Emerald City. Even retired from public life, surely a former throne minister would have access to the army, yes? To its barracks, its dragon stables, the lot. Could she be convinced to come to his aid again, after a whole decade?

Mennipin Square hadn’t suffered any loss of prestige in the years since he’d been here. The house fronts were decorated with swags of green and gold. Lurlinemas was coming, of course. Ceremonial greens and garlands of winter golds were woven through the uprights of the iron fence that surrounded the square’s private gardens.

In order to get to the kitchen yard where he had once presented himself, he had to pass the mansion’s front entrance and turn a corner. When he reached the approach to the front door, he paused. Beyond the gravel of the carriage drive rose a flight of granite steps. At the landing, in front of the carved double doors, stretched a huge tiger in the act of licking its balls. A chain around its neck locked the tiger to one of the marble pillars supporting the portico, but there appeared enough length in the chain to allow the beast room to stretch and lunge. Sensibly Liir kept his distance. He looked, though. He’d never seen a wild animal chained in such an upper-purse locale.

The creature paused an instant and shifted its eyes without lifting its head, looking out from beneath tiger brows. “What are you looking at?” he growled softly.

A Tiger. A talking Animal, tied up like a farm dog, to scare off intruders.

Liir wanted to rush on, but to ignore the Tiger’s belligerent question was to suggest a condescension he didn’t feel. And Elphaba would have taken it all in stride. “I’m looking at a whole lot of Tiger,” he said at last.

“That’s the right answer,” purred the Tiger. “You’re either smart or lucky.”

“I’m just brave,” said Liir. “Have to be. I’m coming to see Lady Glinda.”

“Well, you’re not lucky, then,” the Animal answered, “because she’s not at home.”

Liir’s shoulders fell.

“She’s off at Mockbeggar Hall. The Chuffrey country estate, down Kellswater way. A month in mourning.”

“Mourning?”

“You just rolled off the cabbage cart? Looks like it. Her husband died. Didn’t you know? Lord Chuffrey. He made a big donation to the Emperor and the banker’s cheque had hardly cleared the First Accountant’s office when Lord Chuffrey breathed his rummy last. Perhaps he thought he’d never be in as expensive a state of grace again, and might as well take advantage of it. Lady Glinda’s bereaved.”

“I’m sorry for her,” said Liir.

“Don’t be. She’s not exactly a pauper widow. And she wasn’t much more than a paper wife to him, anyway, so I hardly think she’s fussed. She’ll miss him, no doubt—we all will. He was a good sort in his way. Supports my family upcountry. Or he did.”

Liir slumped against the stone gatepost. “Great. So what next?”

“I wouldn’t come too close if I were you,” said the Tiger. “I may be chatty when I’m bored, but if I chat too much I might work up an appetite.” He winked at Liir, who moved back a few feet.

“Why do you stay?”

“Well, it certainly isn’t the chains, is it? I sport these for effect,” said the Tiger. He tossed his head and his eyes flashed in anger. “I mean, it’s a statement of style, isn’t it? Or are you really only a cabbagehead?” He was on his feet, and he roared. The gate shook on its pins, and Liir was halfway through Mennipin Square before he realized he was running.

So much for his first idea. Well, he’d have to work without the help and blessing of Lady Glinda, Society Goddess. And he’d hoped for a square meal to set himself up for harder campaigns. He had only the small scraps of dried fruit and bread that Candle had forced into his hands before he left.

The last time Liir had been so destitute in the Emerald City, he had gone to work in the Home Guard. Ready to improvise, he headed again to the main barracks campus near Munchkin Mousehole, in the lee of the low hill on which the Palace in its opulence squatted.

Boys, and a few girls, too, were running about the same sward on which he had once played gooseball with the bored soldiers. The grass was brown and flattened, weary of winter even before Lurlinemas Day, but the cries that rang out among the children seemed green enough to him. Unless he should run forward and capture the ball, and impress himself onto a team by dint of his swift responses, he would remain invisible to the children. Why not? He was a tallish, slightly ravaged young man, thinner, more ribby than the sleek soldiers who toyed with the kids.

He saw himself through their eyes: his cord-held hair, his green eyes, his new habit of ducking his head, scratching his elbows. A handsome enough beggar, maybe, but a beggar nonetheless, and too grown up to be thrown a bread roll for charity’s sake. If the notion of charity still obtained here. He wasn’t yet able to tell if it did.

Still, children at their games! It pleased him to watch. He remembered the children he had sung to, briefly, on the steps of a church when he first came to the Emerald City. He had smiled at them, had felt for them in a general sense, but he hadn’t stood solid with them. Each time of life is such a prison, a portable prison. The children here on this fairway, the soldiers messing about with them, were no more like Liir than a Tiger was, or an elf or a—

“Cutting an old chum with impunity, and not blinking an eye. You’ve considerable nerve, you have.”

Liir shook his head to register. A soldier at his left shoulder, breathing hard; he must have been among the fellows playing at gooseball, and come running up behind him. Hah. So much for the more sublime perception of the isolate.

“You don’t remember my name any more than I yours.” The fellow swept his damp blond hair off his sweaty brow. “What’d you do to deserve early retirement? Our tenures have been indefinitely extended with no right to petition otherwise.”

Liir shook his head, wondering if he should play dumb, play it as a case of mistaken identity. Play wounded in battle? Play for time anyway. He hadn’t worked out any particulars of strategy, just intentions.

“It’s bon Cavalish, if you please. Trism, actually. You came into the service from this very field, and I was the one told you how.”

Liir wrinkled a smile at him and shrugged. Work with what you have. Trism. Yes. A Minor Menacier…and in dragon husbandry, if he remembered correctly.

Coolly, Liir said, “That’s a good eye you have for a distant acquaintance. I was standing there thinking how blind we all are to each other, and I didn’t even recognize you.”

“And I got you, but not your name.”

“Ko, that’s what I go by. Liir, commonly.”

“Liir Ko. Right. You went off somewhere a few years back.”

“I did indeed,” said Liir, “but I don’t want to talk about it, certainly not here.”

“O ho,” said Trism, and then, “O ho. A deserter? No.”

“You’ll get in trouble being seen with me.”

“Trouble. That’d be fun.” Trism looked this way and that. “Well, unless you’re reenlisting voluntarily, you’re making a big mistake showing yourself here. Or do you want to be caught? Are you spying for one of our enemies?”

“I don’t even know who our enemies are,” said Liir. “I never have.”

“Well, if you’ve really gone and scampered, you count as one of them, so you better make yourself scarce. However, don’t drift too far. The service is a bit more lenient in some matters than it used to be. They had to relax a few rules if they were going to keep us enlisted forever. We get a little city freedom, if you know what I mean. I’m sprung tonight till midnight. Hang about somewhere and we’ll have a drink. Don’t forget. Don’t forget me.” He gripped Liir’s collar suddenly. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

3

TRISM WAS AS GOOD AS HIS WORD and was waiting at a sidewalk place in Burntpork, the low-rent district. “Welcome to the Cherry and Cucumber,” he said, handing up a full pint of lager before Liir’d had a chance to take a stool. “They keep their license to serve real beer because they sponsor the annual Holy Action Day festivities.”

“The what?”

“You’re way out of touch. We can change that. Cheers.”

The place was too empty at this hour for Liir to bring up the matter most pressing to him. Voices would carry. Scrawled in chalk on a slate above the bartender’s station, though, was a message announcing: “Tonight, Fourth Comeback Tour, Sillipede Herself. 9:30. No tomatoes.” The notice didn’t actually promise a crowd, but Liir could hope. Or they could wander elsewhere.

Liir wasn’t inclined to talk about himself much, and found that easy enough to manage. Trism didn’t ask. He relaxed almost at once, and chattered at length about the military as if he and Liir had been best of friends back then. This one, that one, regulations by the book, funny pranks on supercilious superiors. “And what’s become of Commander Cherrystone?” asked Liir as lightly as he could. He didn’t want to be recognized as a deserter by someone with the power to slap him in chains for it.

“Dunno.” Trism turned to survey the room, which, as hoped, was filling up with a noisier clientele, some of whom had been drinking before they arrived.

“We’re not likely to meet a commanding officer here,” said Liir, “I suppose.”

“Anything’s possible. Tastes vary. Doubt it, though.”

On their third round, Liir began. “You were special forces, weren’t you? Back then?”

“To the Unnamed God, we’re all special,” said Trism. Liir was unsure if he heard sarcasm in the rejoinder. “Minor Menacier back then.”

“Husbandry, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, the lad’s sharper than he looks. Yeah, husbandry, for a time.”

“Not now?”

“I don’t like to talk about my work when I’m out larking.”

“But I’m curious. Sounded very important. We dug the foundations for that new building—the stables.”

“Basilica.”

“That’s right. I remember now. No stables below?”

“Look, it’s Sillipede. The very one. A living legend. She must be ninety.” An extremely odd, angular creature was being hoisted onto a small stage. Behind her, whisking spittle from the mouthpiece of her willow flute, stood a young woman dressed in little more than golden epaulets slapped strategically about her body. A couple of Bears opened their music cases and began to turn pegs to tune up: an Ugabumish guitar, a violinsolo. “So few Animals with real jobs, but if you drummed Animals entirely out of the music business, nobody’d hear a note.”

Sillipede began to warble. She was so old that it was impossible to tell if she was a man or a woman, nor if she was trying to make an attempt to imitate either her own or the opposite gender. In the cracked and breathy voice, though, the singer still had considerable power, and the room quietened down somewhat. Liir had to wait for the first number to end before continuing his remarks.

“I mean, specifically, dragons,” he said through the applause.

“Hush, you’re not being polite,” said Trism. “Isn’t she something?”

“Something or something else or something else again. Maybe not to my taste. Do we have to stay?”

“And give up our good seats? Have one more beer and let’s see the first set through, anyway.”

Sillipede bumbled her way through some difficult patches, talking more than she sang. She lit a cigarette halfway through one number and burnt her fingers, and told her backup to can it. “I’m hardly myself tonight,” she told the crowd, “what with this dreadful heathen holiday approaching. Lurlinemas. Can you believe the Emperor in his goodness allows any reminder of those archaic superstitions? Can you believe that he in his goodness? Can you believe his goodness? I mean, can you? I’m asking you a question here.”

The room was silent. Was she spinning out a comic story or was she losing her marbles? She took a drag on her smoke.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I can see on the faces of those of you who still have faces that you’re afraid you’ve wandered into a conventicle of traitors instead of a comeback concert. Please. Relax. If we get raided and we all end up in Southstairs, I’ll lead singalongs on the weekends. I will. That’s a promise.”

The flautist relieved an itch beneath one of the epaulets.

“I’m not proselytizing. Neither for the Unnamed God nor against its holy un-name. That would be plain old sedition, and frankly at my age, I’m just not up to it.” She made a face. “Sedition is unthinkable. Although to say something is ‘unthinkable’ is, of course, to have been able to think of it. And I’m at the age where I’m losing language faster than I’m gaining it. I don’t know what sedition means anymore. I never said it. I never never said the word screwy, did I? Did I say the word complicity?”

Someone in the back muttered something a little ugly. Sillipede said, “I can see you back there squirming. You and your sour puss. Don’t get out much, do we? You remind me of someone. You remind me of someone that I would find really annoying. What’re you getting so feisty about? I’m just taking a cigarette break. Shooting the breeze. If you think I’m being unscrupulous, give me a break: I’m too old to have scruples anymore. Where would I put them?”

“What is she on about?” muttered Liir.

“She’s going to end up either in prison or the ward for the incurably old,” said Trism. He was red in the face. “Maybe you’re right; we better go.”

But they couldn’t get up while she was in her monologue: that would single them out for her catcalling, draw attention their way. She’d be all over them.

She wandered a bit in the crowd. Now she looked more like an old man in makeup, now like an old woman trying to look young. She looked more human than anything else, though that didn’t necessarily mean handsome. Liir prayed she wouldn’t come over and start talking to him. He had a strong feeling she would.

Under the table, Trism reached for his hand and squeezed it. He was more nervous than Liir. This place wasn’t sanctioned by the Home Guard, Liir guessed, and Trism would be in serious jeopardy if things got any hotter. Liir detached his hand.

“I’m a ditsy old relic, don’t mind me,” said Sillipede. “You young things take everything so seriously. But you don’t remember the bad old days of the Wizard. The drought. How we lived back then. How we laughed! Hah. A lark. And hardly anyone stood up to him. Only some fool witch from the hinterlands. And we all know what happens to witches.”

Someone hissed.

“These days are so much better,” the creature said. “Ask Sillipede. Sillipede knows. I’m old enough to remember when the Ozma Regent was still the crowned head of the nation, and baby Ozma a little bundle of coos and poos. I’m so old I was already retired when the Wizard arrived and set things to rights. Hard times then! Things are better now, ain’t they? Well, depends on your outlook, I guess. If things ain’t actually better, they sure are gooder.

“These times,” she continued, “so righteous! Everyone so much more moral! Put some clothes on your nakedness, girl, or the vice squad’ll be down our throats. Or down your throat, anyway, if you look at ’em like that.”

The flutist looked as nonplussed as the audience.

“You got to hold on to your values, if you can still reach them,” said the chanteuse. “Buy some values, rent ’em, steal ’em if you have to. Sell ’em for a profit when tastes change. Whatever works. Is this a crock, or what?”

She regained the small stage and put her hand to her eyes, shading the flare of the lights. “I can see you. I know you’re there,” she said. “I know you’re in there somewhere. I can wait.” She signaled the Bear on bass and said, “A torch song about lost hopes, Skoochums, how ’bout. For old time’s sakes. In the key of E, Harrikin. No, not B. I said E—E for Elphaba. One. Two. Three. Whatever.”

The Bear lazily thwacked out a bass run, and Sillipede drew a breath, but then spoke again, interrupting the intro. “And that other problem, all that graffiti! I saw it again on my way here, scrawled on some library wall. ‘Elphaba lives!’ What’s that supposed to mean? I ask you. Isn’t it just too much? Why don’t they keep their sloppy old slogans to themselves? Elphaba lives! As if.”

She flicked her cigarette butt into someone’s lager. “Now I just feel all riled up and alive. This ain’t happened since I left double digits. So I am going to sing a beautiful old hymn to prove it to you. Anyone who’s with the Emperor can stand and sing it with me, to show we’re not just scratching our balls here, are we, folks?”

The band patched together an intro and Sillipede sauntered into a familiar melody. The patrons of the place were irritated, a bit unnerved by the theatrics, and unsure who was being made fools of: the Emperor, the Unnamed God, Sillipede herself, or them—or anyone idiotic enough to take a position against the Palace. But the song was balm itself—devotional, a bit flowery, familiar. Complexities gave way to the simpler sentiments. People stood and sang in defiance of Sillipede’s posturing. In the shadows and shuffling, Liir and Trism escaped. Trism grabbed Liir’s hand as if he might try to duck away; Liir couldn’t help squeezing back. He was wound up. E for Elphaba. It was as if, these years later, he’d finally attended her wake.

4

THEY WALKED ALONG a quay in the Lower Quarter. Elsewhere in Oz it was probably snowing, but with the warm smoke of ten thousand coal fires, Liir and Trism felt only a particulate moisture in the air, part rain, part mist. Flames burning in lampposts gave off a pulsing, melon-colored glow.

“Mustn’t be late, I assume,” said Liir.

“One can hear the bells of the basilica all over the City. These days of the New Piety, they ring on the half hour. We’ve some time yet.”

“That place made you tense. Where’re we going?”

“I’ve been there before, but not on Treason Night.”

“You think that was treasonous?” Liir was aghast. “I thought it”—he governed his language—“only stupid.”

“She’d do better to keep her opinions to herself. Or organize them first, anyway. I wasn’t even sure what she was on about, but it takes something like whiskey courage to pretend that much skepticism about the Apostle Emperor. He’s a good fellow. The people love him. I myself feel flattered to have met him personally.”

“You have? Really? What’s he like?”

Trism shot him a look. “Of course I have. I was with you the first time it happened. The night before you lot shipped out? Remember? He offered us his carriage. He was cynical and louche then, as I remember. A lost soul. His Awakening hadn’t happened.”

“The Emperor of Oz…no. Shell? Shell Go-to-hell Thropp?”

“The First Spear himself. Can you really not have known? Where have you been? The moon?”

The very paving stones on the quay seemed more slippery. “I don’t get it. Everyone talks about the Emperor’s…his virtue. Shell was the last person to have any virtue. He was a spy, wasn’t he—didn’t someone say? Anyway, he used extract of poppyflower to opiate the young women in Southstairs and fuck them silly. I know that for a fact.”

“Well, who better to speak for the Unnamed God, then, than one who has sinned so egregiously? Talk about your recoveries…the Awakening happened, and he heard the voice of the Unnamed God, telling him to lead. You know his sisters were the two witches? Nessarose and Elphaba Thropp?”

Liir felt ill. “It’s just too…uncanny. Too unlikely.”

“Not as unlikely as all that. Who is exempt from the claw of salvation? The more sinful you are, the more likely salvation can take root. His father was a unionist minister, after all. A missionary, I think.”

“He’s a charlatan, Shell is.”

“May have been once. Don’t think so now. He believes he was Awakened in order to lead Oz through this desperate time.”

“Are we so desperate that we need the likes of him—”

“Well, you tell me,” said Trism. His voice had gone lower, intimate. He leaned in and almost put his chin on Liir’s shoulder. “How desperate are any of us at any given moment? Hmmm? Are any of us so desperate that we might, say, attack an unarmed rural settlement at night and burn it into the river?”

Liir pivoted to glare at Trism, who reached out and pinned Liir’s right arm behind his back, whispering, “You shitty little creep.”

“Let me go. What is this? A one-person tribunal? A vendetta? Let me go. Where are we?” In the mist Liir had lost his bearings. “How do you know anything about me? And what’s it to you? I was doing the Emperor’s work, Trism. Your precious leader. His bidding. Let me go.”

“I’m going to beat your head in and then shove your sorry carcass into the water.” By now Trism had both of Liir’s hands behind his back, and Trism was kicking at cobbles randomly, to find one that was loose and use it for braining.

Liir struggled. Trism, in military trim, was fitter and had had the advantage of surprise. To yell wouldn’t help: a police force would side with Trism at once. “Look,” Liir said, trying not to sound terrified. “I’m bone tired. What do you care about what happened south of Qhoyre? Aren’t you a company man? Head office mastered that situation in a flash, I’ve heard.”

“I heard what you did. How could I not? Soldiers gossip worse than housewives. Because of that attack, the Quadlings around Qhoyre struck out at Cherrystone’s garrison. You lost some of your buddies, buddy. And then the Emperor called up his brand-new defensive system and deployed it against the natives.”

Liir began to get it. “Oh ho. But that was your specialty. Those were your dragons.”

“I was one of the team. Prime Menacier of the division. Right. And I’d been told the dragons were to be held in abeyance, paraded for show on Holy Action Day. The annual display of military might and moral purpose. Scare the rabble and comfort the nervous. Nothing like good defenses to allow citizens to sleep well at night.”

“And you believed every word of what was told you, and never meant to hurt a fly. I know that story. Let me go, Trism. Come on. You’re hurting me.”

“I’ve only started to hurt you. Get used to it. Because of your fucking about, the dragons were called up from their catacombs. And you haven’t seen merciless until you’ve seen those beasts at work.”

Liir was near to spitting. “I have seen merciless, Trism. As it happens. I was attacked by your little trained pets.”

It was Trism’s turn to start, and with the advantage, Liir tried to pull away. He half managed, but they ended up in a tumble on the pavement, fighting. They rolled in puddles and a plod of horse dung, and Trism ended up on top, his knees on Liir’s chest.

“I’m going to kill you. I saw you standing there on the playground, and I thought: there is an Unnamed God, and it has delivered you to me to kill. Your cruel actions have sentenced me to a life more wretched than anything you have known. Once the military strategists saw what the dragons could do, nothing for it but that they should be used again. Trained more precisely. My life is chained to the job of perfecting the killing capacity of those creatures.” He was as close to wailing as yelling, and Liir saw now what he hadn’t noticed so far: Trism bon Cavalish was a shattered person.

“Kill me then,” Liir said. “It’ll make you feel a whole lot better, I can just tell. And maybe me, too, the way things are going. But hear me out first. It was the Emperor’s word that started this whole thing. He required Cherrystone to invent an incident. Maybe he wanted a reason to launch a dragony attack all along, I don’t know. I was doing the bidding of my company commander.”

“And that’s all I’m doing, and between us there’s hundreds and hundreds dead, and more hundreds living in terror, and even more hundreds ready to kill us back, if they could only find a way.”

Liir let Trism sob. Well, he didn’t have much choice. Trism’s nose dripped on Liir’s face, but Liir couldn’t lift his arms to wipe it off. “We’re more or less in the same boat, you know,” Liir said in as even a voice as the sentiment allowed, when Trism had regained some composure. “We’ve both done some serious damage.”

Trism took a huge breath, nodded, and then removed his knees from Liir’s chest. Liir sat up and, as discreetly as he could, shook the snot off his forehead.

5

THEY WALKED ACROSS the Law Courts Bridge and disappeared into the alleys and courtyards of the Lower Quarter. The place teemed with charlatans, addicts, and runaways; it stunk of sizzling night sausage and sewage, and rang with the laughter of the mad. We belong nowhere else, thought Liir; better get accustomed to it.

They could talk, though, without fear of being overheard; and in not looking at each other they could say more.

Trism bon Cavalish was the chief dragon master. He wasn’t governor of the dragon stables, but he trained the creatures with a sure hand and a regulating eye. He had the longest tenure on the staff. His work required him to follow the exploits of the dragons and fine-tune their training.

He knew that a pack of dragons from the west had returned with a broom and a cape, though he didn’t know where this bounty had come from. Liir, of all places! Trism knew about the scrapings of the missionary maunts, among, it turned out, several dozen others.

“Scrapings,” said Liir with a shudder. Candle had mentioned such a thing. “I hardly know what it means…”

The claws are sharp as razors, oppositional pinchers like a human thumb and forefinger, Trism explained. A human can build a miniature ship in an empty jeroboam, and a dragon can remove a face with as few as nine incisions.

Trism was curt. “Don’t ask me for the rationale. I know one thing: the dragons only go after the young. They’re trained that way.” He squared his shoulders. “I trained them that way. The theory is that when the young are brought down in their prime, it is more—alarming—useful—than if some old codger or crone is bumped off.”

Why hadn’t the dragons scraped Liir’s face? He was young enough. Maybe they thought the broom and cape were all the trove they needed. Or maybe they saw something in Liir that stopped them.

“But maunts!” Liir said. “Young women devoting their lives to the service of the Unnamed God? It doesn’t figure.”

Trism explained that the old maunteries, with their traditions of independence, didn’t suit the leadership style of the Emperor. The Apostle of the Unnamed God—

“What’s all this about the Apostle?”

“That’s what the Emperor calls himself. The humblest of the humble has been exalted by the Unnamed God. So the Apostle feels obliged to exercise the authority granted him.” It seemed that some of the maunteries about Oz were led by older women raised in an archaic scholastic tradition. Some superiors were becoming dangerously out of touch with the needs of the common folk, and fell to asking bothersome questions about the spiritual authority of the Emperor. Such foment could only erode the confidence of the nation.

“Is that it?” asked Liir. “Is this a moment of foment?”

“I’m not privy to the thinking. Information’s meted out on a need-to-know basis. But I’ve heard the western tribes were close to uniting by treaty, to defend against City interests in their land. The dragon attacks could confound the tribes, cause them to mistrust one another, if they didn’t know who was behind the attacks.

“The faces of those young missionaries you mention,” Trism concluded, working to maintain his composure. “They’ve been cured and stored. They’re going to be taken out at the next Holy Affairs Day and exhibited. A point is going to be made.”

There was worse still. The dragons—there were several dozen of them—were fed on the corpses of freshly killed humans. That bloody diet helped stoke the dragons with the strength needed to fly the hundreds of miles to the west. The cadavers were imported directly from a killing chamber in Southstairs, where a fresh supply was always available, thanks to the culling campaigns of the Under-mayor.

“Chyde,” intoned Liir. “The guy with the rings.”

Trism was nonplussed. “Is Shell the spy, or is it you?”

“I get around. Find the company I deserve. Go on.”

“Well, with all that folderdoodle, human corpses freshly bled and rendered into cutlets, do you wonder I am a wreck? The dragons weren’t my idea, but I was elevated to the position, and now they’re under my supervision.”

“Whose idea were they? Shell’s not that clever.”

Trism cast Liir a dark look. “Who can believe anyone anymore? But I met Shell again—as Emperor I mean, of course—a while ago. I had a private audience, not long after his Elevation to the Imperialcy.”

Liir folded his arms and leaned against a parapet. They’d walked on, climbing out of the Lower Quarter as the streets climbed. The lights of the alleys of the Burntpork district burned below the escarpment. “Do tell.”

“He was humility personified, Liir. Make that face if you like. You distrust everything. He’s a little thicker about the waist, very quick of wit and…almost tender, I guess. His Awakening has given him a largesse and a zeal. He talked about it. Why shouldn’t he lead? ‘Choosing the lowliest among us,’ he said, indicating himself. ‘A fornicator and a sot.’ He seemed pretty shocked. ‘What am I but a shell—waiting to be filled with the spirit of the Unnamed God?’”

“What form did his Awakening take, I wonder? I thought people who heard voices were generally considered lunatics.”

“Who knows. He grew up in the thick of it, though, didn’t he? He’d had those two powerful sisters; next to them he must always have felt like shredded cabbage.”

“Are we talking about the same Shell? Come on!”

“Come on yourself. Suppose everyone in your family was thought to be wicked. Even were called Wicked, almost as a title—”

But they were, thought Liir; it was my family, too, or as good as.

“—what would you have done in Shell’s place—as…alleviation? Compensation? Damage control? Shoot, he may have believed the next flying house or flying bucket of water was meant for him. You’d sign on with a Higher Authority if you were he, wouldn’t you?”

“Shell was about the last one I’d have fingered for a low self-image. Surprise, surprise. Now he works out his inferiority at the helm of the nation…”

“He sees it as destiny. He showed me a page torn out of a book of magic. The Scarecrow found it in the Wizardic apartments after the abdication. It was in an indecipherable script, but it had been laboriously translated. I suppose by the Wizard. ‘On the Administration of Dragons’ it said.”

Liir felt creepy. He knew that the Wizard had wanted Elphaba’s Grimmerie. She had sworn it would never happen. This sounded like a bit of it. How had it gotten here?

“He convinced me it was the right thing to do,” continued Trism. “I believed him, mostly because he believes himself. He’s not lying; he’s not the sham that the Wizard was, or misguided like Glinda the Glamorous, establishing libraries wherever she planted her jeweled scepter. Neither was he the ineffectual front man of a cabal of bankers, like the Scarecrow. He’s the genuine article.”

“The genuine article of what?” It was Liir’s turn to scorn. “He convinced you to take part in something so heinous?”

“He asked me. What could I say? It was like the Unnamed God came down—”

“Isn’t the Unnamed God actually unnamed so that you can’t confuse it with someone named Shell Thropp?”

“I’m just telling you, since you asked. We’ve all heard that the bankers in Shiz have been withdrawing investments from the Free State of Munchkinland. Lord Chuffrey was the chief architect of that strategy. Sanctions against the Munchkins. They’re not small enough already, bring them to their little knees. The exercise of dragon power was billed as a necessary lead-up to an annexation of Restwater in western Munchkinland. Well, the Emerald City needs the water, you know.”

“All that bores me. You still knew what you were training dragons to do.”

“I did,” said Trism. “The dragons were the Second Spear.”

If the Seventh Spear could immolate Bengda, what might the Second Spear be capable of? And the Emperor, the First Spear? “Can’t you ask for a reassignment?”

“Dragonmaster bon Cavalish? Reassigned? Don’t be absurd. They couldn’t replace me. I’m too valuable. My assistants are assigned to the stables on a quick rotation so they can’t learn too much. There’s no replacement trained to take my place. Not yet anyway, it’s all too new. In the development and testing stages.”

“You could just leave. Scamper, as you put it. The way I did.”

“That would make me feel better for about an hour. It would do no good beyond that. The dragons would still be there. Someone else would figure out how to hum them through their assignments. I’m talented, but I’m not a freak; I’m not indispensable. Besides, I have a family. They’d be fatally mortified if I disappeared in disgrace—and singled out for reprisals, like as not.”

“A family.” Liir whispered the word as if it meant gelignite. He felt cold, as if he was offended that his potential murderer no longer thought him worth the effort to kill. Falling from a great height again, and no warning. A family.

“What’s that look for? I mean parents. Citizens of some standing. From good lines. Also a lunk of an older brother, simple in the head. Not such a good iteration of the bloodlines.”

And Liir didn’t crash-land but was rescued by that answer.

They were walking, circling, in the mist. It was a clammy night to be out on the street, but neither of them wanted to stop in another establishment. The mist thickened to a fog, and bells rang out. Ten-thirty. Someone emptied a chamber pot out an upper window, and the soldiers ducked together into a doorway just in time to escape being wasted. It put Liir in mind of the time they met, huddled in an archway, sheltered from a hailstorm.

For the first time since Quadling Country, Liir felt the appetite for a perguenay cigarette.

They kept on. Dragons. Where had they come from, these creatures of myth and mystery? Had a cluster of eggs been uncovered in some landslide in the Scalps, or in a mud-pocket in the badlands of Quadling Country? Trism wasn’t certain.

Liir didn’t have to ask about the more basic why. Not if the Emperor’s aim was to make rural people cower. If a dragon was really a flying lizard, the original lizard of Oz was the Time Dragon. The foundation myth of the nation. In a subterranean cavern, deeper even than Southstairs, sealed over by earthquakes and landslides, the Time Dragon slept. He was dreaming the history of the whole world, instant by instant.

Trism was thinking along the same road. “I can tell you the inspiration,” he said, and—a little pompously—recited the words of the anonymous Oziad bard.

“Behold the floor of rhymeless rock, where time

Lies sleeping in a cave, a seamless deep

And dreamless sleep, unpatterned dark

Within, without. Time is a reddened dragon.

The claws refuse to clench, though they are made,

Are always made in readiness to strike

The rock, and spark the flint. Then to ignite

The mouth of time that, burning hot

And cold in turn, consumes our tattered days…”

“You have it down cold.”

“And it goes on

“…then the burst

Of whitened sulfur spark. The fuse is lit.

The dragon’s furnace starts to roar and ride

And time, being dreamt within, begins outside.”

Liir was awed. “You’ve had some schooling before the service.”

“We had to memorize great quaffs of The Oziad in primary lessons at St. Prowd’s,” said Trism. “I was a day student on a bursary. Got top honors though.”

“Well, it’s awfully, uh, grand,” said Liir. “The Time Dragon dreams up when we’re born, when we’re to die, and whether for lunch we’ll get the roast pfenix stuffed with creamed oysters at the head table at St. Prowd’s, or the day-old ploughman’s, the roadsweeper’s budget lunch?”

“If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don’t need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.”

“You too,” said Liir. “You were brought through primary school to the services, and the Time Dragon dreamed you there at the head of this horrible stable. But you don’t know what he’s going to dream you to do next. Maybe it’s scamper and leave those dragons to their fate.”

“I said already. The family.”

They came to a newsstand shuttered up for the night. ELPHABA LIVES was scratched in char on the boards. The family! Hah. “They think they own her,” Liir said, suddenly disgusted. “The Witch would be foaming at the mouth. She was a flaming recluse and a crank.” Even the handwriting had an intimate, proprietary look to it somehow.

“What do you care?”

Liir changed the subject. “Maybe it’s your job to kill the dragons. Maybe that’s why you’re there. Maybe that’s why our paths crossed again today.”

“Are you insane? I couldn’t do that.”

“You could kill me, or at least you told me that you would. And I’m the least little lick of flame in your past. If it wasn’t Qhoyre, if that hadn’t worked, your superiors would have set up some other straw threat. I was being used no less than you are now. But I left, Trism. I did. You could, too.”

“I told you. The parents,” he said. “I’m trapped.”

“How would it work?” said Liir. “Quick and permanent? Burn the stables down? Slice their heads off?”

Eleven-thirty bell. Time to start back for the barracks.

“Poison?”

“Didn’t you hear me?” said Trism. “They’ll kill my next of kin.”

“Not if you didn’t do it,” said Liir. “I’ll do it. I’ll leave a note saying I did so, and that I kidnapped you as a hostage. You’ll be exonerated. They can’t kill my next of kin—I don’t have any.”

He didn’t add: Anyway, by some rumors, Shell is my next of kin, our holy Emperor. Let them go after the First Spear, if they must.

6

“TELL ME,” said Liir as they stood outside the sentry gate, screwing up their courage, “how do you mesmerize a dragon?”

“It’s not mesmerism, quite. I focus and I—hum—”

Liir raised an eyebrow. “Sweet nothings?”

“Nothing sweet.”

“Come on.”

Trism balked, but Liir pushed. They were both avoiding the risky moment of trying to get into the base. “Oh, all right,” snapped Trism. “Truth is, my family’s not all that exalted, despite the fancy ‘bon’ in my surname. Gentlemen farmers in Gillikin a couple of generations ago, but the gentlemanly part couldn’t be afforded during the drought, and they farmed to eat after a while. I won a few hog-calling contests, which brought more shame than glory to the family, and then I did some sheepdog trials, too. I guess I have a knack. Proved there was dirt under the fingernails; it made my folks crazy. They were trying to breed up.

“Goes something like this,” he said. “But I’m not telling you the whole whack: I’ve picked up the benefits of need-to-know. So this is the general stuff. I get up close to a dragon, which is hard work by itself. They’re skittish and inbred, given the stocks we have to work with. Takes time. You have to be totally still and selfless as possible, become like a rag doll in their pen, till they relax. When they do, their breathing changes; it slows. I come in close and mount them. No, you can’t ride a dragon, I mean I just climb up the pinions of their wings and settle my chest on their long strong neck, and straddle them. I crook my knees around the forward phalange of their wing. I circle the neck with my arms, the way I’d choke a man if I had to, only gently of course. This makes their ears fill with blood and stand up. It’s arousal, basically. They’re suggestible but also hugely intelligent, and I hum into their ears. Usually the left one, don’t know why; it tends to cock backward a little more, I think.”

“It is sweet nothings!”

“Shut up. I hum, line by line, the shape of the task at hand. If I hum a dragon to sleep, he sleeps—and I could jump up and down on his sensitive wings without waking him. If I hum him to fly, to hide, to hunt, to act alone, to be a team, to unlatch his dangerous claws, to cut, to scrape, to preserve, to return…”

“But you didn’t hum four dragons to bully a boy-broomist out of the air and confiscate his broom…”

“No. And that’s the worrying thing. I didn’t. How would I know he’d be there? How could I?”

“Well,” said Liir, “we’re not a moment too soon, are we. But listen: why don’t you just hum the dragons into docility? Or make them fly themselves into dead and deadening Kellswater?” Burning letters of thatch drowning in Waterslip.

“I don’t think I could. I’ve always guessed that dragons are, essentially, antagonists. They take to attack more easily than to, say, flying in military formation.”

“You could try.”

“Not now. Not tonight.” Trism cast a sideways glance at Liir. “I wouldn’t trust myself to be able to concentrate so intently. One lapse of focus and I’m the midnight snack.”

“No, don’t try tonight,” agreed Liir hurriedly.

Trism threw his military cloak around Liir’s shoulders to finish what camouflage they could manage. “On we go, then, and see what happens.”

THE SENTRY WAS yawning and ready for his relief to arrive. He was nodding over a pamphlet that looked suspiciously like “The Pieties of the Apostle,” the tract printed at Apple Press Farm. Anyway, its arguments must have proven leaden and soporific; he waved Liir and Trism through the guardhouse without a second glance.

At this hour, the yard was largely deserted. Without opposition Liir and Trism circled about to the basilica with the stables beneath.

Since the dragons needed to be stabled, and yet their claws kept honed for precise military use, the stalls wanted constant cleaning. Dragon fewmets tended to corrode dragon claws. But some months before, Trism explained, sloppy stablehands had left behind a bucket of cleansing solvent helpful in disinfecting the floors of their stone stalls. A dragon had lapped up a quart and died in its sleep an hour later.

Several kegs of the germicide, already tapped and ready for dispersal, stood in the cleaning shed. Trism had keys.

Liir didn’t want to look at the dragons. The coma he’d been in had blunted the memory of their attack, and that was fine with him. Still, out of his peripheral vision he allowed himself to take in the golden blur, the furnace heat, the sharp ammonia pong of breath and semen-sweet skin, the sound of deep-throated dragon purring.

But the first dragon turned its nose up at the bucket of risk.

“Not thirsty?” whispered Liir, when hearing Trism’s report.

“Dragons are smart,” said Trism. “That’s why they’re so trainable. They learn fast and they remember. This dragon may have seen the other die, or smelled his death and associated it with the smell of the cleanser. Maybe if we disguise it somehow.”

The first bell after midnight. They had to work fast in order to have time to get away.

“If they won’t drink, maybe they’ll eat,” said Trism at last. “Come on, the provisions cellar is down this way.”

Into a chilly storeroom they tumbled. Bricks of ice laid out on slate stones kept the meat cold. At least it was bundled in old newsfolds and tied with string, so they didn’t have to look at it closely. The parcels were sloppy, more mounded than squared off, about the size of saddlebags.

“Stop, don’t retch,” said Trism roughly. “The dragons will smell your stink and be put off their supper. Don’t think of this as human flesh. It’s the delivery of a necessary medicine, that’s all. And may the Unnamed God have mercy on these poor quartered souls, and on ours.”

“And the dragons’,” added Liir, but now he wanted to see them, wanted to remember that attack, their canny strength. He needed to block out the thought of what they were carrying, armload by armload, up the stairs, but when he could no longer do that—peppery tears an inch thick in his eyes, all of an instant—he steadied himself:

You poor corpse, you thought you had died in vain, selected for slaughter by Chyde. You didn’t. You’re bringing down the House of Shell. In the most ungodly way, you’re doing good. Bless you.

They doused the parcels with the poisonous decoction. As if they were tossing lighted coals into pools of flammable fluid, Liir and Trism dashed up and down the central corridor of the dragon stables, and along the several transepts, and lobbed the midnight snacks over the stout stone-ribbed doors. Those dragons who dozed woke up and ripped the packets open with their teeth. They ate so vigorously that small glistening gobbets of flesh spun in the air.

Only when the last one was done did Liir allow himself to climb up on a bench and look down into a stall.

The dragon faintly gave off its own coppery light. It was working at its meal without hesitation, snuffling with greed. The forearms twisted with a terrifying capacity for grace. The claws retracted, clicked, leaned against one another in efficient opposition, and gleamed a horny blue-silver. Then the creature turned and looked at Liir. Slobber fell from the back of its jaw as it slowed its eating. The intelligent eye—he could only see one—was gold and black, and its iris, shaped more like a peapod than a marble, rotated from a horizontal to a vertical slit, and widened.

He’d been recognized. This was one of the very beasts that had attacked him.

The creature reared up and slapped its heavy wings forward so that its body arced backward, slamming against the rear wall of the chamber. The snout raised and the mouth opened, and bloody teeth moved into position, and a sound issued that was not a bellow nor a snort, but the beginning of a dragon trumpet volley.

“Shit, that’s not good,” said Trism, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

“They’re raising an alarm,” said Liir.

“They’re dying, and they know it, and at least one of them knows why.”

7

TRISM AND LIIR STOPPED at the top of the landing. In one direction, the stairs continued farther up, to the vaulted basilica proper. The door to the outside, through which they’d come, stood ajar. There was no sound of anyone dashing about to see what, if anything, was wrong. Maybe dragons snorted and bellowed in their sleep all night long, and this was nothing new.

Liir waited. “What?” said Trism.

“I’m not leaving without the broom. I’ve promised myself that.”

“No reason you shouldn’t have it back. But we’ll have to hurry.” Trism fitted a key into the only other door opening off the landing.

“Wait here,” he said. “Inside is the stuff of nightmares.”

Liir followed him in regardless. In their treason the two men were bound together, at least for the night, and Liir didn’t want to lose sight of his accomplice.

The sloped ceiling suggested the long narrow room was a shed appended to the basilica. Probably built low so as not to interfere with the colored windows giving into the sacred space above, Liir thought. Unheated at this hour, the room reeked with the juices of pickling agents and tanning acids.

Trism used a quickflint to light a portable oil lamp. “Keep your eyes down, if you’re going to follow me in here,” he muttered, shielding the light from the glass chimney with one hand. “The broom is in the far cupboard, and I’ll have to fiddle with the lock.” He hurried between tall slanted tables on which some sort of piecework was in progress.

“How much danger are we in?” asked Liir.

“You mean in the next five minutes, or for the rest of our short, sorry lives? The answer’s the same: lots.”

The small light went with Trism toward the cupboard. In the returning shadows, Liir moved nervously and disturbed a pile of wooden hoops about a foot across. They clattered to the floor. “Shhh, if you possibly can,” called Trism in a hoarse whisper.

Picking up the materials, Liir listened to the sounds. The dragons below, snorting and nickering, and their wings like vast bellows pumping. The jangle of Trism’s key ring, heavy old iron skeletons throttling against the glassy tinkle of smaller jewel case keys. The snap and thrust of a lock being pulled back, and then the rustle of dried sedge and straw. The broom. Elphie’s broom. Again.

He had to see it, as Trism turned; he looked up in something like love. Trism had the Witch’s cape looped ungainly over one arm, and the broom under his elbow, as he fiddled to close the closet again and lock its door. Then he turned, and held the light up so he could see his way back to Liir. He was smiling. So, too, in a sense, were the semblance of faces that sprung out of the shadows on the inside wall of the chamber. Ten or twelve or so, plates of face: creepy voodoo stuff, Liir thought at first. The scraped faces, repaired with catgut twine where needed, were strung with rawhide cord inside beech-wood hoops like the ones Liir had upset.

“Shhh, will you shush?” said Trism. “I told you not to look.”

8

SOME MOMENTS LATER, when at Liir’s insistence they had finished removing the dozen remnants of human countenance, and had stored them in two satchels, Trism said, “If you’re really serious about leaving a note claiming responsibility, now’s the time to do it. Can you manage ink and a pen?”

“I know how to write,” said Liir. “I didn’t go to St. Prowd’s, but I can write.”

“Shut up. I mean, are your muscles shaking too much to control the nib?”

He had to work at it. The third parchment was good enough to serve.

I abducted your craven dragonmaster and aborted his evil work. He will pay for his offenses against lonely travelers.

Signed, Liir son of Elphaba

“Son of Elphaba?” said Trism. “Not the Elphaba?” He looked at Liir with a new respect, or maybe it was outright disbelief. Or dawning horror?

“Probably not,” said Liir, “but if no one can prove it so, it’s equally hard to disprove, isn’t it?”

Trism looked at the note again. “Is craven overdoing it a bit?”

“Let’s go.”

“I hope this is only rhetoric, that I’ll pay for my offenses.”

“You will pay, Trism. You will. We all do. You’ll pay, but you won’t pay me.” He clutched the broom. “You’ve already paid me.”

As they hurried away, the noise rose. The poisoned dragons were falling into fits, roaring, throwing themselves against the walls of their stables. The basilica above shook with it.

9

THEY DIDN’T DARE present themselves at an inn or a hotel at that hour of the night, and all of the gates of the City were closed. After skulking about in the fog, they eventually hopped a fence in one of the City’s small private cemeteries, and found a lean-to used for wheelbarrows and digging supplies. The mist turned to a thunderous rain, sheeted with weird winter lightning. There, under the cape, they huddled for warmth, and shuddered. Just before they fell asleep, Liir murmured, “No humming, now.”

They rose before dawn. Trism had enough coin in his pocket to buy them milky tea and a few cream biscuits from the first street vendor. They argued about the best way to leave the City without detection, but their bravery had subsided. They chose Shiz Gate because the welfare of the Emerald City and the northern province of Gillikin were the most tightly entwined, and the traffic there the heaviest.

Providence provides: that’s why it’s called providence. They shambled through Shiz Gate by helping an old merchant whose wagon had suffered a split wheel on the cobbles. The sentries at Shiz Gate paid them little mind, deep in gossip of their own about the attack on the basilica the night before. Word of it was abroad already.

Once through, they abandoned the hapless old man in his search for a wheelwright, and ambled north until they came to a high road looping back. Hatless, in civilian clothes, they meandered westward, the gleaming profile of the Emerald City always at their left shoulders. The sun rose, shone for a while, and then became cloaked in cloud. By nightfall they’d reached the outskirts of Westgate. Liir wanted to keep on toward the Shale Shallows, until he could recognize one of the tracks that led southeast through the oakhair forest, between the great lakes, and back toward Apple Press Farm.

But their limbs, by now, would go no farther, so they counted up their coin. As night fell, colder than the one before, they presented themselves at the door of a ramshackle tavern and inn on the main Kellswater Road. A sign reading WELCOME ARMS dangled on a broken hinge from the lamppost. The Gillikin River ran close by, gurglingly, and bare willows hung over it like ghostly harps.

“Oh, there’s not much by way of rooms tonight, only two,” said the matron, a tall spindly older woman whose unkempt grey hair spilled from her bonnet. “The locals shivareed a new married couple last night, don’t you know, so the best room is a mess. I wouldn’t put my own disgusting mother in there. They’ll pay, that lot, but meanwhile I’m shy of chambers. I don’t want to give you the big room, as I often have a party arriving from the City an hour after the close of gates, don’t you know, and they pay government rates. Very nice little sinecure for a widow on her own. But up top a’that there’s a space not much used. No fireplace, mind, but I’ll gift you with extra blankets. You’re young and hot and you won’t notice.”

She rustled them a supper, buckled mutton with a side of tadmuck, stringy and dried out but warm enough to satisfy. Perhaps a bit lonely, she poured them drinks of yellow wine, and kept them company through the first bottle and the second. But then there were horses in the yard, and she stirred herself to her feet, yawning. “It’s the trade I was hoping for, so if it’s all the same to you, gentlemen, I’ll leave you to a good slumber if you please.”

They found their way. The flight of steps led only to their chamber. The small room was an architectural afterthought, the result of a failed attempt at dignity, a mansarded cap on the larger guest dormitory below. Cold, indeed. More a storage space with a feather bed in it than a chamber for guests. A tall round-topped, gabled window was set in the middle of each slanting wall.

Liir sat down, weighted with fatigue and a little tipsy, on the edge of a trunk. The thing was felted with dust. They shouldn’t have to pay a penny for this attic.

Trism left to wash in the sink on the landing. Liir stared at shadows, seeing nothing. The smell, the sight, the notion of killing dragons—and what would Elphaba have thought of that?

But he wasn’t Elphaba; most days he was barely Liir.

He’d gone to get the broom, only, so he could fly for the Birds, ambassador for them. Then they would pay him by looking for Nor—or so they said. How could he identify her? He didn’t even know what she looked like after all this time.

Then, he’d done more. He’d murdered the herd of dragons. The Birds would be able to fly free now. He wouldn’t need to fly with them or for them: he’d removed the deterrence.

Trism came back. “Asleep sitting up?” Water slicked down the blond hairs on his thighs. He didn’t smell sweet and soapy, just less sour. His green tunic, unbuttoned at the neck and released from the belted leggings, was long enough to preserve modesty and serve as a nightshirt. “I think our dame has got the custom she hoped for, by the sound of it. More bottles opening downstairs. Hope they don’t keep us awake; they’ll be sleeping right under us.”

Ratty brocaded drapes, dating from no later than the days of the Ozma Regent, hung thickly on either side of the windows. Liir regarded the four separate glimpses of night: night north, south, east, and west.

“Come to bed,” said Trism. “It’s freezing.”

Liir didn’t answer.

“Come on. Why not?”

“The moonlight,” he said at last. “It’s so—seeing.”

“Well, I’m not going to go to sleep until you lie down. Do you think I’m going to turn my back so you can stick a knife in me? I remember that line: he will pay for his offenses.”

“That was theatrical.” Liir shuddered. “It’s the moon, I guess,” he said.

Trism got up and moved across the floor, huffing in irritation. “Paranoia. Very attractive. No one can see in windows this high, Liir. But we’ll block the moon for you, then.” The sills of the windows were three feet from the floor, and the columnar bulk of the heavy drapes rose six feet higher than that. Trism said, “Move, you,” and nudged Liir off the trunk, which he dragged to the first window. From there Trism climbed to the windowsill, his clean bare feet pawing in the grit and dust for purchase.

He reached up. The curtains hadn’t been shifted in decades, and they resisted. He grunted. The light of the moon fell on his ear tips, his lifting shoulders as his fingers just grazed the center of the curtain rod and walked their way east and west toward the edges of the drapes.

“Oh, company,” he said. “Those horses in the yard—five of them. They’ve got the Emperor’s caparisons. This is a soldiers’ sleepery.”

“Welcome Arms. I suppose it figures.” Liir came up behind to look. As Trism stretched, the shirttail lifted above his shapely rear. Liir reached out and settled his hands there, to support Trism should he fall, for the ledge was shallow and Trism’s balance precarious. Trism made a sound in his throat.

He managed to dislodge the first volute of brocade an inch or two, and a colony of blue moths, the size of penny blossoms just going by, issued forth and settled upon them both. A thousand pinches without fingers.

The brocade shifted some more. The drapes were cut from an old tapestry design. Once pink and yellow and rose, it was now the color of dirt and ash, but the ravaged faces of society charmers still peered out through threaded expressions. Moths are the death of brocade potentates and hostesses, pavilions and rose arbors and islands in some impossible sea. Moths eat such faces alive. The faces of living humans they merely explore, and the peninsulas of their forearms, and the promontories of their breastbones, and the shallows of their tympanic chests, which when heard close up thunder too loudly for moths to notice.

“Right,” whispered Trism hoarsely.

“Come on,” Liir answered. “We have to be quiet. Maybe these soldiers aren’t looking for us. Maybe she’s too drunk to remember we’re here. There’s no way out, anyway. Not till they’re asleep, at least.”

“We could jump out the window into the river.”

“Too late for that; we’ve already jumped. Anyway, I’m going to jump you now. Come on, to bed. It’s just the next part of history, right? If we’re going to be found, we might as well be found out.”

10

DESPITE THEIR EXHAUSTION, they hardly slept. They clung to each other, making the least possible noise, and when it got too much to bear they buried their faces in pillows. Spent, at least briefly, they dozed, and Liir’s last thought was: sleeping with the talent. A dragon mesmerist, of all things—what magic a body is—all that you couldn’t know about the world packed up tightly in the flesh lying on your breast.

All the things Ansonby and Burny had known about—not about girls, but about people—how they felt when they were closer than clothes could ever be. How secret, still: how still, and secret. But a connection nonetheless, dared and decided: a new way of knowing, new burning letters falling through the air—and the words that could be spelled weren’t all disastrous.

At last, in the deadest part of the night, they crept back into their clothes and braved the staircase. From the larder they nicked a hock of ham, and from the pasture by the river’s edge they nicked two horses. Trism’s way with dragons, it seemed, had suggested to him a language for comforting horses, too.

They led the horses away by the river’s edge, where the noise of the water would afford the best cover. A mile out, Trism showed Liir how to climb into the saddle. Liir had never ridden before. “I’m not sure tonight’s the best night for this lesson,” he said. “Ow.”

“It’s the next part of history. Now, where are we going?”

“Are we going together?”

“We seem to be. For now, anyway.”

Liir shrugged. “We’ve got to cross the Gillikin River and keep Kellswater on our right. South through the oakhair forest.” As far as Apple Press Farm, he thought, but he didn’t want to say that yet.

“I don’t know these parts, but if we’re crossing the river, let’s not wait for a bridge. We’ll ford it here where we can, and confound the soldiers if they come looking for their rides.”

The moon was nearly down, but there was enough light for the horses to pick their way safely across the water. They gained the far bank, which rose to a prominence. Looking back, the fellows could see the Welcome Arms they’d abandoned. From here, with its smaller second story, it looked like a lopsided old boot.

“The Boot of the Apostle,” said Liir.

“The Apostle only wears sandals, to judge by the graphics advertising that exhibit. That Apostle Muscle exhibit.”

They rode till dawn, though at a safely slow pace, keeping to well-worn tracks. Gradually the sky lightened, cheerless and without bold character, the look of molasses dissolving in milk. They hoped a wind would arise to shift the scratchy snow and cloak their tracks, but it didn’t.

By the time they could see their own breath in the cold dawn, they had reached the edge of the Shale Shallows. They could begin to move faster. They were now apparent to each other again, though in the daylight it was harder to meet one another’s eyes. They didn’t talk much.

Siege

1

SISTER APOTHECAIRE WAS drying her hair with a towel when Sister Doctor rushed into the ablutory. “He’s back,” she said.

Sister Apothecaire did not need to ask who he was. “With the girl?”

“No. With a boy. Well, a young man, I mean.”

“Do up my veil snap, will you, Sister? I’m hurrying.”

Along the stairs, they met Sister Cook. “Famished the both, malnourished the one, perhaps, though I’m not a doctor, being only the cook,” she reported. “They’re both deeply into their third helping of sausage and beans. The Superior Maunt is waiting in her chamber.”

Indeed she was. Her hands were composed upon her lap, and her eyes closed in prayer. “Forgive me, sisters,” she said when they came forward. “Obligation before devotion, I know. Won’t you sit down?”

“We hear that Liir is back,” said Sister Doctor. “We should like the chance to see him.”

“To inspect him. To meet with him.”

The Superior Maunt raised her eyebrows. Sister Apothecaire blushed. “I merely meant that it would be useful in our professional practice to know what the cause of his peculiar ailments actually was. Likewise we are quite in the dark as to the treatment Candle applied that helped him to recover so.”

“Of course,” said the Superior Maunt. “And I’m eager to know as well. But I have other responsibilities this morning. The unexpected arrivals are breaking their fast in the refectory, I believe, but I have made an appointment to counsel our other guest in the small chapel. I don’t believe I should break my appointment with her. So you will conduct the interview jointly and report to me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She dismissed them, but then called after, “Sisters.”

They turned.

“In women of your age and station, it is unseemly to pelt so. The young men will not have left.”

“Pardon us,” said Sister Doctor. “But of course the last time we hoped to find him, he had left.”

“He hasn’t asked as much yet, but I believe he’s requesting sanctuary,” said the Superior Maunt. “I’m afraid he won’t be leaving very soon. You have time. Practice continence in your expression of enthusiasm.”

“Yes. Indeed. Quite.”

“You may go.”

They stood there. “Go!” repeated the Superior Maunt wearily.

She closed her eyes again, but this time not in prayer. The new winter was approaching. Another winter in the mauntery of Saint Glinda. Fires that would not warm her papery skin. Fruit that would grow mealy in the larder. Increased agitation among the maunts, for when there was less work in the gardens there was more gossip and bitchery in the sewing compound. There would be new leaks to repair, and ague would knock a few of the old ones into the grave. She wondered if it would be her turn.

She couldn’t hope for this. She didn’t hope for it. But the rewards of the winter season seemed richer in her childhood memories, back before she had these tiresome women to govern—the silly affectations of Lurlinemas, which even professed maunts in their strictness remembered with pleasure—the spectacle of sunlight staining birch shadows into the snow like laundry blueing—the way snow fell up as well as down, if the wind had its way—of course, the way birds returned, stitching the spring back into place by virtue of melody.

It was the gardens of her girlhood she remembered most, the earliest blossoms. Jonquils and fillarettes and snowdrops, perfect as the Dixxi House porcelain bibelots that had adorned her mother’s dressing table. She had not seen a fillarette in years, except in her mind. How sweet it was to regard!

She prayed for strength to last the winter out. These days, though, she rarely got into the fourth line of a beloved old epiphody before her mind skipped back through some pasture or garden walk of her youth.

Attend, she barked at herself, and stood with difficulty. The cold was already at work in her joints. She creaked as she readied herself for the morning conversation. Noting the raggedness of the face flannel with which she wiped her brow, she hoped that the mauntery’s guest might have come to propose a sizeable donation. Or even a little one. But this was beyond what the Superior Maunt thought it was proper to pray for, so she didn’t spend her prayer in that direction.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery, she said to herself, not for the first time. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That’s what makes it mystery.

THE FELLOWS WERE NEARLY KEELING OVER into their coffee cups. “You’ve had no sleep, you’ve been riding all night,” said Sister Doctor, disapprovingly. “It’s a dangerous track at best, and foolhardy to venture upon if you don’t know your way. Have you come from the Emerald City?”

“We’ve been round and about,” said Liir.

Sister Doctor explained that she and Sister Apothecaire had briefly tended to Liir when he’d been brought in by Oatsie Manglehand, the captain of the Grasstrail Train. “Have you any recollection of that?” she pressed.

“I know very little about anything,” he said. “I’m useless, pretty much.”

“Any more cheese, d’you think?” asked Trism, draining his noggin of ale.

“You were here for weeks, I’m afraid,” Sister Doctor remarked to Liir. “Without the ministrations of our community you should certainly have died.”

“Perish the thought. I’m alive, for what it’s worth.”

“What Sister Doctor is trying to ascertain, in her skittery way, is how Candle did it,” interrupted Sister Apothecaire. “She was mute as a lilac, and seemed not overly canny. Yet she managed a miracle with you.”

“Professional curiosity requires us to ask how,” inserted Sister Doctor.

“Professional jealousy requires it, too,” admitted Sister Apothecaire.

“I don’t know.” The boy had a private look. “In any event, I wasn’t consulted.”

“Oh, she leached him, she took a lancet and bled him, she sucked his poison out, and a good thing, too,” said a biddy on a bench nearby. They hadn’t noticed her there.

“Why, Mother Yackle!” bellowed Sister Doctor in a matronizing manner. “Aren’t you the chatty one today!” She shared a wrinkled expression with Sister Apothecaire. The dotty old thing. Ought to be in the solarium with the other silly dears.

“She’s got a good instinct, that Candle,” said Yackle. “The oafs are pleasant enough to bed, in their way, but it takes a daughter of Lurlina to draw out the milk only boys can make…”

“Shame and scandal on the house,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Gentleboys, forgive her. You know, their minds wander at that age, and the sense of propriety wobbles ferociously.”

Liir turned to look at the woman. Her veil was pulled forward, but the splayed nostrils of her long rude nose showed. “Are you the one who directed us to the farm in the overgrown orchard?” he said.

“She never!” said Sister Apothecaire. “Liir, she’s yesterday’s potatoes, and mashed at that. Don’t pay her any mind.”

In a low voice, almost masculine in gruffness, Mother Yackle replied slowly, “I mind my own business.”

“Of course you do,” said Sister Doctor.

“But if I were you, I’d send those soldiers’ horses packing,” continued Mother Yackle. “You don’t want them found on the premises, I’d warrant.”

Liir shrugged, then nodded.

“Look,” said Sister Doctor, “this isn’t the place to talk. Finish up, lads; we need to have a heart-to-heart.”

But Trism had fallen asleep against the back of his chair, and Liir’s eyelids were lowering as they watched. There was nothing for the maunts to do but show them to the cots in the guest quarters, and find blankets, and retreat.

2

LIIR, NEARLY ASLEEP, tossed his body back and forth on the lumpy straw of the bedding. It was as if he had been here before.

Well, he had, but in a feeble enough way. In childhood he’d been more aware of the hems of Elphaba’s skirts, of the food in the wooden bowls. An awful lot of oatmeal mush. And more recently, he’d been broken and mindless, wandering his past in a feverish state. Even the night he and Candle had left the mauntery, and she had helped him move, as good as carried him on her back down the stairs, nearly, the halls had been dark. He’d collapsed into the donkey cart and slipped almost immediately into a real sleep, a sleep of fatigue and not one of voyage.

That was his first apprehension of Candle, he remembered. A slip of a thing with the strength and willpower of a pack horse. She’d been mostly naked, and Mother Yackle had thrown a cloak over her shoulders. Here in the mauntery again, Liir tried to lean into that recent memory, the way he had learned to steep himself in other memories. Maybe there was something yet to be understood about whether he’d actually slept with her, impregnated her…even more, whether and in what ways he might love her.

Now—a thousand difficult lonely miles away from Trism, who snored a yard to the east—Liir turned over, facing the wall. Candle was a cipher to him, sweet and elusive, and the memory was frail. There was nothing more he could unpack from it, nothing useful. To distract himself, in his heart and memory he walked about and examined the hull of the mauntery, doing a kind of spectral surveillance.

The place betrayed its origins as a gardkeep. It was a fortified house, here on a slight wooded rise, an oasis of trees in the Shale Shallows. The ground floor had no windows, and the front door was reinforced with iron bracing. Behind, the kitchen looked out on a greasy moat crossed by a simple drawbridge. The vegetable plots and cow barn were beyond.

The mauntery would afford little protection in a siege. The place was tall and, at this stage in its history, unsecurable for very long. In any effort to gain unlawful access, a modern police force might be slowed, but it wouldn’t be stayed.

Still, at least a few cows could be swept into the parlor, and hay stacked up under the stairs. The fruits of the harvest crowded the shelves and larders, and the garde-manger was bulbous with blood sausage, dried muttock, and nine varieties of salami, to say nothing of cheeses. There was a mushroom cellar and a bin of desiccated fish fragments. And plenty of wine, and that wonderful rarity in a rural establishment, an indoor well.

In his dreams he checked the cupboards for rifles, he blew through each room to look for wardrobes that could be pushed against windows. He did not see the Superior Maunt asking questions of her esteemed guest about the payout schedule of a proposed beneficial annuity. He didn’t see Mother Yackle nodding in her own morning nap in the sunlight. He didn’t see nor overhear Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire squabbling gently in their shared cubicle about how they ought to proceed. The rooms were empty of novices, maunts, guests, spiders, mice, bedbugs, and any presence of the Unnamed God that he could determine.

What he saw, in the topmost room where he had lain, was a figure on a rush-bottomed chair, sitting away from the light, twisting her hands. Her dark hair was looped up on her head with no regard for neatness or propriety, just to get it out of the way. Her eyes were closed, but he didn’t think she could be praying. He didn’t know what she was doing. At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn’t look into it; he couldn’t. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a little push, and because of its rounded bottom, the basket rocked for a time. Then the green foot would appear again, and start the rocking over.

HE WOKE WITH A START. It was sharp noon, and the house smelled of warm leek-and-cabbage eggery for lunch. Trism was still asleep, his hair rucked back against the pillow. The sound of cantering horse hoofs grew louder. Liir wanted to kiss Trism awake, but had the notion that the time for that was already over.

He did it anyway. Trism groaned, and made room, and after a while said, “We don’t do this sort of thing in our circle.”

Did he mean his class at St. Prowd’s? His family? The Home Guard? Didn’t matter. Liir replied, “Well, your circle seems to have widened, hasn’t it.”

“Or shrunk,” said Trism, reaching for his boots.

3

“THEY’RE LOOKING FOR TWO men,” said Sister Doctor.

“Indeed,” said the Superior Maunt.

“One is said to have kidnapped the other.”

“Our guests appear to be on a more familiar footing than hostage and abductor, don’t you think?”

“Well—yes.”

“So tell the soldiers we haven’t seen the men they’re seeking, and bid them good day.”

“The thing is,” said Sister Doctor, “they’re said to be quite dangerous, these fellows. In an act of desecration, they imploded the Emerald City basilica of the Emperor by causing combustible dragons to—combust.”

“How dreadful. I don’t think our two look very dangerous, though. Underfed, if you ask me, and perhaps undecided in their emotions, but not dangerous.”

Sister Doctor came back. “I’ve been told that one of the two they’re seeking is named Liir.”

“I see. Well, tell them he’s not here.”

“Mother Maunt. I question your—propriety. Is that not a lie?”

“Well, if one of the two that they seek is named Liir, one is not named Liir. So answer in reference to that one, and say he’s not here.”

“That is devious, Mother Maunt.”

“I’m old and muddled. Put it down to that, if you must comfort yourself,” she replied sharply. “But I’m still in charge, Sister, so do as I say.”

Sister Doctor came back a third time. “They are more explicit. The Commander says that they are seeking Liir Thropp, the son of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“As I live and breathe, Sister Doctor! You extend more respect for my authority than is useful. Need I come up with every rejoinder? Are you never to think for yourself? To the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been conclusively determined that Liir is the son of the witch. So, again, since we cannot answer for certain that the person they seek is here, they must conduct their searches elsewhere. Give them my blessing and tell them to hurry, or do I have to come and do it myself?”

Sister Doctor yelled the message out the windows of the scriptorium. The Commander called back, “If you’re not harboring felons, why are your doors blocked?”

“Spring cleaning.”

“It’s early winter, Sister Thudhead.”

“We’re behind schedule. We’ve been dreadfully busy.”

“Busy harboring criminals?”

“I hate to be rude, but I’ve work to do. Good-bye.”

By late afternoon the thud of stones against the door had become intolerable, and the Superior Maunt herself came to the window. The armed contingent had to interrupt the attack in order to hear her quavery voice.

“It’s an inconvenient time to come calling,” she said. “For one thing, ladies in community tending to have their menses together, you find an entire household of terribly cross and uncompromising people. We’re not up to housing a garrison of soldiers, however rudely they pound on our doors. Please go away at once.”

“Mother Maunt,” said the Commander. “This household received its original charter from the Palace, and it is with the authority of the Palace that I come and demand access. Your studied resistance proves you are harboring criminals. We know they stayed at an inn last night, and they cannot have come much farther than here today.”

“Matters of authority are perplexing, I agree,” replied the old woman, “and I would love to stand here in the icy wind and discuss them fully, but my ancient lungs won’t stand it. Our original charter, by way of our motherchapel in the Emerald City, does comes from the Palace, I’ll concede. But I’ll remind you that the Palace in question was the Palace of the crown of Ozma, many generations back, and in any instance we have earned the right to self-governance.”

“The Palace of Ozma is long over, and it’s the Palace of the Emperor that comes calling now. He is favored by unionist acclaim, and by dint of his apostleship you are under his bidding.”

“He is a parvenu Emperor, and he does not speak for the Unnamed God to me,” she cried. “And unless he asked for it, no more would I speak of the Unnamed God to him. I reject his expedient and proprietary faith. We stand here on our own chilblained feet, without apology and without genuflection.”

“Is this an indication that the Mauntery of Saint Glinda has endorsed and even overseen the publication of recent treasonous broadsheets attacking the spiritual legitimacy of the Emperor?”

The Superior Maunt made a most uncharacteristic gesture.

“That’s hardly an answer the courts would recognize. Good Mother Maunt,” came the reply, “let us not distract ourselves with the luxury of theology—”

“For me it is no luxury, believe me—”

“I know the boy you are harboring. I met him when he was only a boy, at the castle of Kiamo Ko in the Kells. When fate brought him in my path again, not once but twice, I suspected he had the makings of a firebrand in him. I made it my business to convince him of the rightness of the Emerald City cause. He might have knowledge of Elphaba, or of her missing Grimmerie. I named him my secretary in Qhoyre. I promoted him. I fathered him as best I could. Now listen: he was not Elphaba’s match. He could not be her son—too docile and biddable. But he should give himself up regardless. He has kidnapped a soldier of the Emperor and destroyed the basilica of the army.”

“Commander,” replied the Superior Maunt, “you can save your breath. And you can put down those archaic crossbows or whatever you’re readying. We’ve got company that it would be unseemly for you to disturb.”

She turned and beckoned. A figure appeared at the window and lowered a shawl off her forehead. The glitter in the eyebrows stood out in the falling light. Commander Cherrystone made a gesture and the men dropped their weapons as the Superior Maunt intoned, “The widow of Lord Chuffrey, Oz’s former throne minister, making a religious retreat to the mauntery that bears the same name that she does. Lady Glinda.”

4

A NOVICE OPENED THE DOOR for Liir and pointed him into the simple paneled parlor, and closed the door behind him without a sound.

“I was told you were in the country,” said Liir.

“But I was,” answered Glinda. “I am. I had intended to travel from Mockbeggar Hall, our—well, my—country house to come make a bequest to this mauntery. Lord Chuffrey has left me quite wealthy, you know, and I thought it time to help the women in their good works.

“But when my under-butler arrived last night on horseback with news of the attack on the basilica, I decided to change my schedule and come here straightaway. I have a commitment to this house, and I wanted my new bequest registered before there was any move toward disestablishment.”

Her glamour was all the more ridiculous and appealing in this setting. “It’s good to see a familiar face,” said Liir.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find you here. After all, Elphaba was here for a while, you know. It’s one of the reasons I like to support it.”

“I know she was.”

“She tended the dying.”

“And the living,” he said, remembering his dream of the basket. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

“Oh, well.” She waved her hand dismissively but then dabbed at her nostril with a scrap of lacy roundel. “We largely went our own ways; it was that kind of a marriage. Now he’s gone his own way for good. I miss him more than I would ever have let on while he was alive. I suppose I’ll get over it.”

She cheered up almost instantly. “Now tell me about you. Last I remember, you were marching off to Southstairs to find some little friend or other. I lost track of what happened. Well, there was the court to manage, and various putsches to suppress.” She regarded him. “No, I suppose it was ruthless of me to forget about you as soon as you left. I’ve never been good at keeping up with people. I’m sorry.”

Liir remembered that he had momentarily hoped for Glinda as a mother. He pushed the thought aside. “You know the Emperor,” he said. “None other than Shell. Elphaba’s younger brother.”

“Wouldn’t she be surprised to know her brother had succeeded the Wizard!” She looked rueful.

“Surprised,” said Liir. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Well, yes. She’d be outraged. Piety as the new political aphrodisiac. I suppose that’s what you mean.”

He shrugged. “What someone would feel after she’s dead—that notion means little to me. She doesn’t feel. All that’s left of her—shades and echoes, and fading by the hour.”

Glinda closed her breviary with a little slap. She hadn’t been attending closely to her devotions anyway. “That pesky slogan you see scrawled everywhere is right. She does live, you know. She does.”

Liir snapped at her. “I have no truck with that kind of sentiment. All butchers and simpletons ‘live’ in that sense.”

Glinda raised her chin. “No, Liir. She lives. People sing of her. You wouldn’t guess it, being you—but they do. There’s a musical noise around her name; there are things people remember, and pass on.”

“People can pass on lies and hopes as well as shards of memory.”

“You refuse to be consoled, don’t you? Well, that’s as much proof as I could ever need that you’re kin to her. She was the same way. The very same way.”

5

THE SITUATION, the Superior Maunt concluded that evening, was decidedly unsettled. Scouting from the highest windows in all directions, the novices reported that several dozen armed horsemen showed signs of making camp in the Shale Shallows. They’d broken into the kitchen gardens and rooted about in the shed for squashes and such. “It seems unfeeling not to provide them with a meal,” said the Superior Maunt, “but I suppose that might give the wrong impression.”

Liir and Trism asked for an audience, and she sat with them on a bench at the base of a flight of steps. “We can’t have the house put in danger on our behalf,” said Liir. “Between Trism and me, while working in the Home Guard, we’ve been responsible for enough loss of life. We didn’t know the dragons would explode. We didn’t intend to bring down the basilica. We don’t know if there was human death in that catastrophe. We want to do no further damage, if we can help it. We shall give ourselves up to them.”

“Since it may ease your minds on that score, I will tell you that I heard of no loss of human life in the collapse of the basilica,” said the Superior Maunt. “It was midnight, after all. The place was deserted, even the side sheds and storerooms that escaped being crushed by falling debris. I suspect, however, your foes imagine the basilica was your real target, and the death of the dragons—how do they term it these days?—collateral damage. As to your suggestion that you should turn yourselves in, let me take it up in council before you make your decisions.”

“What is council?” asked Trism.

“I don’t know. I’m going to find out,” she replied.

THEY GATHERED IN THE CHAPEL, the only room in the mauntery large enough to hold all inhabitants and guests. Evening devotions usually occurred on a basis of rotations, some maunts handling kitchen washup or geriatric babysitting while the rest sank into quiet prayer or early nap. Tonight the Superior Maunt requested the attendance of all, even those retired maunts like Mother Yackle who were on the edge of gaga.

Lady Glinda, though a benefactress, refused a seat on the dais up front, and she had removed her trademark diamond strutted collar for a quieter linen ruff. Liir and Trism, unfamiliar with these traditions, stayed standing. The older maunts were escorted in, in wheeled chairs when necessary; the novices took their places on their knees until the Superior Maunt indicated they should sit. “This is not prayer,” she said. “Something like it, but not prayer, precisely.”

She sat herself down, with difficulty. After a short silence, Sister Hymnody offered a provocatory in plaintone, though her sweet bell-like voice quavered. They were all on edge.

“Sisters, mothers, friends, and family. I shall be brief. Our tradition of charity, reinforced by our vows, brings us this evening into a conflict none of us has anticipated or experienced before. However generous the tithe of Lady Glinda, I doubt it will rebuild this house should the army of the Emperor sack it.

“We are a small house, a mission post on the road halfway between our motherchapel in the Emerald City and the rest of the world. Our isolation has been the cause of loneliness, at times, but also promoted peace and protection. Perhaps even provocation—but I pass over that. Tonight we are neither isolated nor peaceful. It is a truth we must accept.

“I am an old woman. I was raised as a novice in the venerable practice of obedience. Under the rubric of our order I followed instruction, including the one that required me, years ago, to take charge of this mauntery and govern it until death.

“I still believe in obedience. Even while soldiers camp outside our walls, and quite likely call for reinforcements, I must be obedient to the wishes of the powers that placed me here.

“As I speak these words, my dear friends, I hear in them an echo of the Emperor’s remarks. He professes subservience to the highest aims and intentions of the Unnamed God. God is the mouthpiece and the Emperor is his striking arm. The First Spear.

“I have not met the Emperor, and I will not. I should decline an invitation were one offered. The Emperor has hijacked the great force of faith and diverted it to further the prosperity and dominance of the City. Who can argue with a man who has the voice of the Unnamed God speaking exclusively in his ear? Not I. I have never heard such a voice. I have only heard the echo that still reverberates, once the Unnamed God stopped speaking and the world took up with itself.

“In our house, we profess to believe that the Unnamed God has made us in its likeness and its image, and this should have enlarged us to be like the Unnamed God. I fear in the Emerald City, they have remade the Unnamed God in their image, and that has belittled and betrayed the deity. Can the Unnamed God be belittled, you ask. No, of course not. But the deity can go unrecognized, and return to mystery.”

The sisters shifted. Many of the novices were ignorant of the Emperor’s apostasy, and the shoals of theocracy were beyond their ability to navigate. The Superior Maunt noticed.

She stood. “Bring me two other chairs, one at my right and one at my left,” she said. This was done.

“The Unnamed God retreats into mystery, and is not especially localized in my heart, my dears. Nor in the Emperor’s. The mystery is as equally in your heart as in mine, and in…the spirit of the trees and the…the music of water. That sort of thing. In the memory of our elders. In the hope for the newborn.

“I break with the tradition of our house tonight, as the decisions now to be made involve your lives as well as mine. I am old; happily I would go to my sweet reward this evening were it provided me by a literal spear of the Emperor. I cannot ask the same of you. Therefore it is my wish that henceforth the mauntery—even if our residency here lasts only till dawn—shall be governed not by a single voice, but by a troika of voices. Were the disagreeables not outside our walls, I should invite your opinions and call for a ballot. Time prevents me from allowing that. In extremis, our family of maunts shall accept the leadership of three. Sister Doctor, will you rise to the chair?”

Sister Doctor gaped. She grasped Sister Apothecaire’s hand briefly, and moved forward. Sister Apothecaire trembled and moved to the edge of her seat, perching for approach.

“I shall take the second seat,” said the Superior Maunt. “I may be old, but I’m not dead.”

The room was so still that the sounds of horses whinnying and stamping outside carried through the cold.

“The third chair I am reserving for the novice known as Candle,” declared the Superior Maunt. “I have a notion we shall see her again. For how long, I don’t know. But we need the wisdom of age, the strength of the fit, and the initiative of the young. From this moment forward, my absolute command over this establishment is dissolved. I shall enter it so in the Log of the House before I retire. Now, let us see how we get on.”

Sister Apothecaire bit her lip and tried to feel more humble than humiliated.

Skirts rustled as the women shifted. Faint whispering, unprecedented in the chapel, sounded, like faraway wind. The Superior Maunt dropped her forehead into her fingers and breathed deeply, feeling that the world had changed utterly, and wondering how quickly she would regret this action.

In the stillness, Lady Glinda stood. Reticence not being her usual thing, she’d had about enough: and anyway, hadn’t the Superior Maunt called for a collaborative spirit? “If I may speak,” she began, in a tone that implied she knew she could not be denied, “even if the army breaks through the defenses of this mauntery, they cannot do you good women much harm. There will be no bloodshed or rape here. Not while I am in house. Make of it what you will, even though I am retired from what passed for public service, I am still seen as a friend of the government. I have the ear of every society power monger in the country. The army knows well enough they cannot abuse you while I am a witness—and they will not touch me. They daren’t.”

She added, “I am Lady Glinda,” in case some of the younger novices hadn’t cottoned on yet.

“It isn’t the girls that are wanted,” said Sister Doctor. “It is the boys.”

“Don’t underestimate what people in the throes of passion may do,” said the Superior Maunt. “Our rectitude means little to the world beyond our walls, and the commitment of our lives is as cheap as throwaway grain on unuseful margins of field. Still, Sister Doctor, you are right. The army seeks two young men, but they do not know for sure that they are here.”

Liir said, “I do not think the broom would carry two, but Trism could climb to the ramparts late at night, and fly to safety. That would leave only me, and whatever fate I have earned, I should face it by myself.”

The room grew decidedly chilly. “So the rumors of the broom are true?” said Sister Doctor. The Superior Maunt took in some breath wetly at the corners of her mouth.

Liir shrugged but couldn’t deny it. From the side, mad Mother Yackle called, “Of course the rumors are true. The broom came from this very house. I myself gave it to Sister Saint Aelphaba years ago. Am I the only one concentrating enough to know this?”

She might, an hour earlier, have been hushed, and the Superior Maunt began to speak. But Sister Doctor raised her hand and stayed the Mother Maunt’s comment, and remarked, “You’ve been quiet for a decade, Mother Yackle, but of late you’ve come back to yourself somewhat. Have you anything to add we should know?”

“I don’t talk when there’s nothing to say,” said Mother Yackle. “All I have to add is this: Elphaba should be here to see this hour.”

“You have an uncommon association with—the Witch of the West.”

“Yes, I do,” said Mother Yackle. “I seem to have been placed on the sidelines of her life, as you might say, as a witness. I’m mad as a bedbug, so no one needs to attend, but I’ve taken some measure of her power. Oh!—but she should be here to see this hour.”

“Mother Yackle? A guardian angel?” called Sister Apothecaire.

“Well—a guardian twitch, anyway,” replied the old woman.

Liir trembled and thought of his lack of power, once again, and of his revery within these walls. Now he remembered what he hadn’t seen before: that in the corner of the room where the green-skinned novice had sat rocking the cradle, a broom leaned against a chest of drawers.

“Are there other remarks?” asked Sister Doctor.

Shocked somewhat by the developments, the maunts muttered quietly, but no one else spoke until Sister Apothecaire stood and said, “Mother Maunt, I would like to applaud you for your courage and your wisdom.”

Tears ran suddenly from the old maunt’s eyes as her house, to a person, stood and paid their respects. Outside, the horses shied and the men started at the sudden rain of noise from the chapel windows.

THE BROOM, THOUGH, wouldn’t carry Trism. In his hands it was no more than a broom. “I lack the proper spunk, it seems,” he said.

“Maybe it has lost its power,” said Liir, but in his own hand the thing leaped to life again, bucking like a colt.

“We might be able to manage a sleight of hand with only one man to hide,” said Lady Glinda. “After all, as you pointed out, they are looking for a pair of you. Perhaps Trism could be passed off as my bodyguard. It was unlike me to have ventured here without a bodyguard, after all, though I did. Sometimes I like to confound even myself,” she explained. “It isn’t difficult.”

“If the men who hold us under siege recognize Trism from the barracks at the Emerald City, he will be put under arrest,” said Sister Doctor.

“Well, I used to be good at makeovers,” said Glinda. “And I could do magic with a blush brush. He’s got big shoulders for a maunt, but he’s pretty enough, and a little peroxide on the facial hair, which is so conveniently blond—” She tossed her own curls. “Well, I never travel without it.”

“I think not,” said Trism in a steely voice.

“Then we’ll have to take the chance we can pass you off as my servant,” said Lady Glinda. “Liir will leave tonight, on the broom, and tomorrow morning I shall ride out with Trism at my side, and make no explanation. If you choose then to open your doors to the soldiers, they will find nothing untoward here. I shall wait outside your gate as an obvious witness until their search is completed. If they are that hungry for blood, they will not dally here but rush on elsewhere.”

“But where will you go?” the Superior Maunt asked Trism. By now they had retired to her office, and she was sagging against the worn leather of her chair.

Liir looked at Trism. As much as could pass between them in a look, without words, passed: and another moment of possibility crashed and burned.

“If Trism can get through, he should try to find Apple Press Farm,” said Liir. “He might smuggle Candle to safety elsewhere. The Emperor’s soldiers are headed vaguely in that direction, and the site has been discovered and ripped up by thugs and vandals at least once already. It seems to have been used as a clandestine press for the printing of antigovernment propaganda.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt modestly, “so I’ve been told.”

“For you, I would try to find that farm,” said Trism. “And I will take the scraped faces, that they not be found here when the army does its ransack.”

“As for me,” continued Liir, “I’ve learned something from you.” He looked at the Superior Maunt, who was tending to nod. “I promised to try to complete an exercise, and I did this much: I helped rid the skies of the dragons that were attacking travelers and causing fear and suspicion among the outlying tribes. I will finish my work before anything else happens. I should let the Conference of the Birds know that, for now, they are free to gather, to fly, to conduct their lives without that undue threat. With the help of the Witch’s broom, and unimpeded by dragon-fings, I can manage that shortly.

“Beyond that,” he said, “I have other scores to settle. I set out years ago to find Nor, a girl with whom I spent some childhood years.”

“But, Liir,” said Sister Doctor, “the Princess Nastoya is expecting your return.”

Liir started. “I had assumed she’d have died long ago.”

“She’s been trying to die, and trying not to die, a complicated set of intentions,” said Sister Doctor. “She mentioned you, Liir.”

“I don’t know what I can do for her. I do not have Elphaba’s skills, neither by inheritance nor by training.”

They sat silently as he worried it out. “In the choice of what to do next, I’m troubled. On the one hand, you say the Princess Nastoya is old and suffering and wants to die.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt wearily. “I know the feeling.”

“On the other hand, Nor is young and has a life ahead of her, and perhaps it is a greater good to help her first, if I can.”

They waited; the wind soughed a little in the chimney.

“I will return to Princess Nastoya,” he told them. “I know I won’t be able to help her to sever her human disguise from her Elephant nature. I’m not a person of talents. But if I can give her the loyalty of friendship, I’ll do that.”

“You would help an ancient crone over a disappeared girl?” said Sister Doctor. Her sense of medical ethics flared.

“Young Nor found her own way out of Southstairs,” said Liir. “Whatever else has been done to her body or her mind, she clearly has spirit and cunning. I shall have to trust that her youth will continue to protect her. And maybe she doesn’t need my help now—though I won’t rest until I know it for sure. Meanwhile, Sister Doctor, you say that the Princess Nastoya has asked for me. Ten years ago I made a promise to try to help; I owe her my apologies if nothing else. And if I can report conclusively to the Scrow that it was not the Yunamata who were scraping the faces of solitary travelers, I may be able to help effect a treaty of faith between the two peoples.”

“Is it hubris to aim for such a large reward?” asked Sister Doctor.

“No,” said the Superior Maunt, her eyes now closed.

“No,” said Liir. “The Superior Maunt has shown me that tonight. If we share what we know, we may have a fighting chance. This house, as a sanctuary, may survive. The country, and its peoples, may survive.”

“The country,” said the Superior Maunt. Her mind was sliding sleepward. “Oh, indeed yes, the country of the Unnamed God…”

“The country of Oz, be what it may,” said Liir.

In a semblance of a toast to hope, they raised imaginary glasses of champagne, as the Superior Maunt began to snore.

SOMETIME LATER THAN MIDNIGHT, Sister Apothecaire showed Liir and Trism to an attic. A window gave out conveniently to a place where two matching peaks of roof on either side sloped together to form a valley between them. Corbelling protected this section of roof from the view of people on the ground.

Sister Apothecaire said, “Sister Doctor mentioned your intentions to me, Liir. I’m glad to have the chance to add what Sister Doctor forgot about. The Princess gave us a message to give you—but of course you had disappeared by the time we got back. She said something about Nor and the word on the street about her. I don’t recall precisely, but she has something to say to you.”

Liir reached inside the Witch’s cape. In the interior pocket, he felt for the folded-up drawing of Nor by her father. He winced at the memory of the childish writing—the chunky downstrokes, the blocky uncials. Nor by Fiyero.

Sister Apothecaire wrapped Liir’s cape the more tightly around his chest to make sure it wouldn’t flap and draw undue attention as he tried to make his escape. She tucked extra loaves of bread and a parcel of nuts into his lapels, and bade him Ozspeed. Then she retreated to give them privacy for their good-byes.

“Neither of us may make it, you know,” said Trism. “Before noon tomorrow we may both be dead.”

“It’s been good to be alive, then,” said Liir. “I mean, after a fashion.”

“I’m afraid I got you into this,” said Trism. “I saw you on the ball pitch and thought I would take my revenge on you. I didn’t mean this much revenge—either that you should die, or that we should part like this.”

“I was looking for you, too, sort of—you just saw me first,” Liir answered. “It might have been the other way round. Anyway, what does it matter? Here we are. Together a moment longer, anyway.”

After a while, Trism managed to say, “Are you sure you can fly in this condition?”

“What condition is that? I’ve been in this condition my whole life,” Liir answered. “It’s the only condition I know. Bitter love, loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”

They kissed each other a final time, and Liir mounted the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, and felt it rise beneath him. He did not look back at where Trism stood. He had few talents, did Liir, and while flying a broom was one of them, he wasn’t practiced enough to risk breaking his neck.

His other talent, though, was a distillation of memory into something rich and urgent. He guessed, in the hours or years remaining to him, he would remember the effect of Trism clearly, without corruption, as a secret pulse held in a pocket somewhere behind the heart.

The exact look of Trism, though, the scent and heft of him, the feel of him, would probably decay into imprecision, a shadowy form, unseen but imagined. Hardly distinguishable from an extra chimney in a valley formed by pantiled roofs of a mauntery.

The Eye of the Witch

1

FLYING AT NIGHT.

He kept low at first, scarcely twice the height of the highest trees. The winds tunneling beneath the cloud cover were ill-tempered, as if out to tumble him. Below, the oakhair forest twitched in the winter gale, looking like the pelt of a great beast lumbering along for midnight rendezvous with sex or supper.

Then the clouds thinned, and the air grew colder still. He remembered more of the attack by dragons than he wanted to—it kicked up a sick feeling. He couldn’t manage much more height than he’d achieved so far. Still, with a quick flip of his head left, right, he could make out the southernmost cove of Kellswater and the bay where the Vinkus River debouched into Restwater. From this vantage both lakes looked hard and dead as slate.

He crossed the dark line drawn by the Vinkus River. Now he was halfway to Kumbricia’s Pass, which meant that Apple Press Farm was somewhere below. How was Candle faring? He thought of pulling down and seeing.

You could, he said to himself. Now you needn’t worry about scaring her, for if you show up in the middle of the night, she’ll be ready: she’ll have divined the present and sensed your approach, and prepared the tea for your arrival. And the blankets, and the fire, and the bed, though you’re not ready yet to go to her bed again, even chastely.

But no, no, he continued—no. What if she was with someone else? Or what if she’d left? Or what if Commander Cherrystone recognized Trism and arrested him, and tortured him into revealing Liir’s hiding place—and thence discovered Candle? And kidnapped her—as he had done Nor all those years ago!—as a kind of reprisal against the slaughter of the dragon contingent, the ruin of the basilica?

Liir was learning to think in terms of consequence. He gave due credit to the strategies and devices of the Emperor. In any case, though, concern for Candle would distract Liir from completing his mission, as he had promised her to do. Let Trism get there safely and see to her needs, if he could, if he would. Time enough for me to show my sorry face and find out what’s going to happen next.

For now, he would finish what he’d started: at least this much.

He might have caught sight of the farmhouse roof winking, or he might be miles and miles off. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He kept his eyes trained on the foothills of the Great Kells, which from this height were already beginning to swell, less an actual shape than a shift in the grade of shadow.

The wind strengthened as it rushed down the eastern slopes of Oz’s mountainy spine. He lost speed, and it took more effort to keep the broom on course. Like riding a horse in a raging river, he imagined, now that he had some experience of horseback riding under his belt, as it were. Finally he had to come down to earth entirely, from exhaustion. He found a shepherd’s summer lean-to, abandoned for the season, and stretched out underneath the cape and fell promptly asleep, the broom between his arms and along his chin like the boniest of lovers.

2

AT DAWN, THE WINDS RELENTED, and the mountains burned in pinkish light. He finished the small meal provided by Sister Apothecaire and pressed on.

Kumbricia’s Pass was defined by a color of evergreen specific to the suspended gorge that widened apronlike as it dropped toward the Vinkus River plain. How foreboding the uprights of the cliffs on either side—how much more fortress the landscape provided than Liir had been aware. No wonder the Yunamata, the Scrow, and the Arjiki had never knuckled under to the industrial strength of Gillikin or the military might of the Emerald City. And no wonder the dragons had been an important development—they would have had to work to flap their way along this wind-chased passage, but they would have managed. If the dragon population had expanded, and a whole fleet of them had become available for maneuvers, they could have rained destruction even upon the distant populations of the widespread Vinkus.

And might yet, Liir knew. The strategic knowledge that had developed those dragons into weapons wouldn’t have been lost because Trism defected or the basilica collapsed. If nothing else happened, it was only a matter of time before another Trism came along to do the bidding of his superiors and raise up perhaps an even mightier army.

Yet today had dawned, and tomorrow could not be foreseen. No magician in the world had yet mastered the art of prophecy, so far as Liir knew. Not a single venerable bishop with his channels to the divine, nor any tiktok mechanism of subtle apprehension, nor even the best-taught sorcerer with the keenest of inner eyes, had ever accurately foretold so much as whether the rain would hold off for the picnic. It was Time Yet to Come that possessed the strongest force of all, a magic mightier than the Kells themselves, a magic greener than all of green Oz. Inscrutable, terrifying, and exhilarating at once.

HE FOUND HE COULD NOT FLY above Kumbricia’s Pass. His broom bucked to one side or another, as he’d heard a horse instructed to cross a risky bridge might do. He didn’t know whether this was mere exhaustion, a flagging of his will, or some sort of wizardic or magnetic obstruction he didn’t understand. He allowed himself to drop, by a series of long, scalloped declines, till at last he found landfall in a clearing, and continued his voyage by foot.

It took time to locate the spot where he had been interviewed by General Kynot, the crusty old Cliff Eagle—the island in the hanging tarn. The place seemed deserted. He could see nothing but random feathers and the inevitable mess of droppings. Maybe they’d moved on to a cleaner lobby somewhere.

On foot he continued west, losing track of time. One of the drawbacks of flying on the broom was that his nose became frozen, and the air at a certain height, while clean of grit, was also curiously scentless. Kumbricia’s Pass, by contrast, was a festival of odors.

In the nest of the cape, he settled for an afternoon nap and didn’t wake up until dawn…and he wasn’t even sure it was dawn of the next day, or some day further on.

Nonetheless, he was rested at last, rested in a deep way, and better able to spy winter berries in the thickets, and chichonga pods, and the occasional scatter of walnuts on the ground. Dozens of streams leapt from either side of the great gorge and crisscrossed, occasionally islanding the floor of the pass into hillocks. He didn’t go thirsty. He felt that the longer he pressed on, the stronger he became.

At last Kumbricia’s Pass made its final abrupt turn before opening out above the beautiful bleak expanse, as far as the eye could see, of the rolling prairie known as the Thousand Year Grasslands. In the shallow caves and along the ledges of the westward face of the Kells, nearly deafened by the constant wind, Liir met up with what remained of the Conference of the Birds.

Their numbers had dwindled in the short time since Liir had left Kumbricia’s Pass. When General Kynot spied Liir standing there—so much for the vigilance of their sentries!—he lop-winged over and indicated, with a strict jerk of his head, that they should retreat into the gorge for a bit of a chin-wag.

A few Birds saw the General’s intentions, and braved the buffeting winds to join the colloquy. Several dozen gathered, including the Wren named Dosey, who cued in the blind, hobbledy Heron.

“We see you’ve reclaimed your broom,” began the General without formality. “I’m to understand it is not functioning as a vehicle for flight anymore, or you wouldn’t have come on foot. And you would have come sooner.”

“I came as quickly as I could,” said Liir. “What’s happened?”

“We’ve lost half our number,” said the General, “or near to it. The Yunamata rushed us, and since we were scared to take high wing, we were caught in a series of nets and traps they’d erected across a narrow part of the Pass. Scarcely a one of us hasn’t lost companion or kin.”

“That’s not like them,” said Liir. “Or not like their reputation. They’re a peaceable people.”

The General glared at Liir. “We’ve had to leave the Pass, lest it happen again. We’re cornered against the sky up here, on display to preying dragons, and without adequate supply of grubs and worms.”

Liir said, “I’m sorry about the Yunamata attack. That’s the Emperor’s strategy—to keep his foes busy nipping at one another. That has to stop. There’s no way to survive without our making peace among ourselves.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” shrilled the Wren to Liir, and the General was too dispirited to bother correcting her terminology. “One population can’t make peace with another by force.”

“There are possibilities,” said Liir. “The time of the dragons is done, at least for now. You can fly again. We can fly again. And before the next threat might come, we have to maneuver ourselves into…a coalition. No, not that: a nation.”

“Which nation is that?” snapped the General.

“Witch nation!” tittered a Dodo. “I likes that, I do.”

“You called a Conference about the raiding skirmishes of dragons,” Liir reminded them. “The dragon fleet has been destroyed. But those dragons were a tribe, too: ill-used, malevolent, raised up to strike out, imprisoned by their training. It gave me no joy to poison a dragon, even one that has attacked and killed your kind and mine. Yet the moment is here to fly again. Not just home, not just yet: but fly into the storm. The Emperor has already sent out a guard to hunt me down, and he and his ilk will hardknuckle anyone who gets in his way. No one in the Emerald City can stand up to him, for he claims the divine right of the elect—not elected by people, but by the Unnamed God. Who can dispute that? We are all elect, for here we are, and we must fly for our lives. We must show ourselves to be a company. He sent dragons to scare the skies: we will fly ourselves as a flag right back at him.”

General Kynot pretended to peck at his chest for vermin. When he raised his head, his eyes were dry again. “It is not easy to trust the wisdom of a human person,” he admitted. “Like so many humans, you could be lying. Leading us into a trap. Promising us freedom, and tricking us into an ambush of yet more dragons. Yet we have so few choices but to trust. After all, you are the son of the Witch.”

“Don’t base your decision on a false premise,” said Liir. “I will never know for sure who my parents were. And even if I did, the son of a witch can be as wrong as anyone else. Let us fly because you are persuaded we should, not because I say so.”

“I vote yes,” said Dosey.

“So do I,” said the Heron, “though I can’t fly anymore, of course.”

“I didn’t call for a vote,” said Kynot.

“That’s why I voted,” Dosey replied.

“Witch nation! Witch nation!” said the Dodo.

THEY LAUNCHED AT NOON, maybe ninety Birds, swooping westward into the buffeting winds that ran the span of the prairie to build up enough strength to crash against the Kells.

The venture almost scattered them at once. The Wrens tumbled like husks of dried pinlobble; the Ducks shat themselves silly; the Night Rocs couldn’t see in the widest daylight Oz had to offer, and nearly brained themselves by wheeling backward into the peaks.

Liir was giddy and vertiginous. The broom shot out over a rocky sward, so low that he could make out the surprised expressions of wild highland goats. Another instant and he was fifteen times higher than the highest tower of Kiamo Ko, and a silver river winked in the sunlight below him, narrow as a bootlace.

Just fighting to stay together took the better part of an afternoon. When they finally reached air space beyond the forested foothills, above the nearest start of the endless grassland, where the power of the wind diminished, they settled to rest and feed and count their number. Four of their ninety had been lost in the first descent out of Kumbricia’s Pass.

But there were grassland grubs and beetles, and the backwash of mountain rills to splash in, so they made their first encampment.

IT TOOK A FEW DAYS of rehearsal for the Night Rocs to learn how to maneuver by daylight, but the Grasslands were forgiving. After hours of uninhibited flight, with no dragons approaching, the Birds grew braver and flew in a looser formation.

For the time being they avoided other populations, though far below them they delighted in the spectacle of wild tsebra wheeling and cantering in their winter migration toward the south, a flurry of black and white markings against the brown ground, an alphabet in the act of writing the story of tsebra migration. Or notes, singing a mythic history.

Draffes, their long tawny necks swaying, saluted them in their high-pitched voices. Liir couldn’t hear them, but Kynot said that evening that sentient Draffes were living among draffes, in apparent harmony.

A small band of Vleckmarshes flew up to greet the flying Conference (Kynot would not allow the Birds to call themselves Witch Nation, despite the Dodo’s pleading). At the sight of Liir on the broomstick, the Vleckmarshes made common cause with the travelers, and flew alongside.

Then a bounty of Angel Swans, who usually kept to themselves out of pride for the whiteness of their mien, gave wing. So too a noisy clot of Grey Geese, who were wintering together on the banks of a nameless broad winter lake that appeared and disappeared in different places every year, they said.

The Conference flew in waves, the bigger birds working harder, providing a breakfront against the wind, the smaller birds in the slipstream, and lower, in case of attack by air. It was Dosey who spotted the tents of the Scrow, arrayed in the usual geometric precision against the trackless blanket of earth.

Liir did not want to approach the camp, not yet. But General Kynot, agreeing to serve as an emissary, dove out of formation and whipped around the camp until he could decide which tent belonged to the Princess Nastoya.

That night, the Conference having settled under a shelter of windthorn hedge, Kynot reported to Liir.

“I found one who could speak to me, an old scholar named Shem Ottokos,” said the General. “I told him you were abroad, but he said he didn’t need me to tell him that. He had been able to make you out with his naked eye, because the cape unfurls so blackly against the scrim of the evening. He had the tent lifted for his queen to see, and though she is mostly blind now, she said she could make you out against the sky. He thinks it was the clot of the Conference she was seeing, its whole mass. She wants to see you, said Ottokos. She has something to tell you. Whether you can help her or not.”

“If she agreed to meet me later, she can tell me then,” said Liir. “Did she?”

“The Scrow rarely travel during this time of year, and they haven’t settled any peace with the Yunamata. Ottokos does not know if he can convince the tribal elders to pull up camp and brave Kumbricia’s Pass. He doesn’t know how to talk to his people about this. But I explained about the extermination of the dragons. Perhaps Ottokos will be persuasive.”

“If Princess Nastoya still has time, we have time,” said Liir. “It is her time that we need to read, not ours.”

NORTHWARD, BEATING AGAINST THE ICY WINTER gusts known in some circles as the Farts of Kumbricia; northward and northward, and the Thousand Year Grasslands went white under drifts of frost. The snow was lipped and patterned by the wind into shapes like the imbricated scales on a fish. Now out of sight of the Kells, now back; now joined by a throng of Snow Geese, five hundred strong, now by a mystic Pale Crane, her partner, and her senile though quite energetic mother.

At last, because the smaller Birds feared freezing to death, and the food stock grew scarce, the Conference wheeled eastward. Kynot had a notion that they could most safely cross the Kells again at the point where the Arjikis had built their mountain villages. If nothing else, there would be the chance of a barn in which to roost, or a bonfire around which to warm themselves. It was rough work, though. Once more suffering the churning of wind against the hard breast of the Kells, the Conference sought a lower altitude, which took more time but afforded quicker shelter should a storm come up.

The weather was with them, at least. Day after day the sky was peerless blue, if pinion-quaking cold. Under snow squalls or rain clouds the Conference would have fumbled. But they always had the chance to move on: this kept the smaller birds brave.

They came at last to the highland valleys and white wastes of the Arjiki stronghold of Kiamo Ko. Liir did not care to alight there, but the nights were drawing in earlier and earlier, and he had no choice but to see it as a blessing.

His rump sore, and almost unable to uncurl his spine from the arched position in which he flew, he landed on the cobbles of the courtyard with 220 of the smaller Birds, while the larger ones waited formally outside for an invitation. The monkeys shrieked, though whether it was out of terror or welcome, Liir couldn’t tell. Chistery met him at the top of the steps to the main hall.

“I suppose you’ve asked me, for old time’s sake, to join you,” he said. “I’d come if I could. But I don’t think my wings are up to it.”

“You can’t have had news of our intentions,” said Liir.

“You’re a message, that’s all,” said Chistery. “No one can watch you raveling and unraveling up the columns of mountain air without knowing you intend to be seen. I’ll tell you, my heart was in my throat though, as you came nearer. I thought to myself, It’s Elphaba herself.”

“No, it’s only me,” said Liir. “How’s Nanny?”

“Past her prime. For the fourth decade in a row, I’d say. She’s having a sandwich of egg and dried garmot. Do you want to go up?”

“I suppose I’d better. May we stay here?”

“You needn’t ask,” said Chistery, slightly hurt. “Until someone else comes to claim it, the house is yours.”

Nanny sat up in bed, looking gently at her bread crusts. When she saw Liir, she smiled and patted the bedclothes. “Don’t worry, I won’t wet,” she said. “I’ve already gone.”

“Do you know who I am?” asked Liir.

“Ought I?” She didn’t sound worried about it. “Is it Shell?”

“Decidedly not.”

“Good. I didn’t like Shell very much.” She held out the pieces of bread. “I saw the Birds coming, and I saved them something from my lunch.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Actually, the bread was a bit stale. But maybe they won’t notice. It’s nice to see you again, whoever you are. Just like old times.” She patted his hand. “I never could tell what was going on then, either, but now I don’t mind so much.”

“Nanny?”

“Hmmmm?” She was beginning to drift off to sleep.

“Did you ever hear of someone named Yackle?”

One eyelid of Nanny’s cocked open. “Might have done,” she said warily. “Who wants to know?”

“Only me.”

“Days a lifetime ago are clearer to me than today. I don’t even know what sex I am anymore, and I can remember what I got in my Lurlinemas basket when I was ten. A tin cannikin full of colored beads—”

“Nanny. Yackle.”

“I met someone named Yackle once,” said Nanny. “I always remembered it because her name reminded me of jackal. Like the jackal moon, you know.”

“Where?”

“She had a little commercial enterprise, if you call it that, in the Emerald City. The Lower Quarter, downslope of Southstairs, if you know where that is.”

“I do.”

“I went in to have my tea leaves read and to ask a question about Melena. Your grandmother.”

Liir didn’t bother to correct her.

“Yackle was an old crone without much time left, I’d guess. But she still had talent. She gave me a few words of advice, read me the riot act about my petty filching, and told me Elphaba would have a history. Can you believe it!”

“How did she know about Elphaba?”

“Silly. I told her, of course. I told her Melena had given birth to a green daughter. I bought whatever Yackle could provide as a corrective agent to ensure the second child didn’t come out green. And she didn’t, did Nessarose. Neither did Shell. Only our Elphie. A history! Can you believe that?”

“Must be a common name.”

“Yackle, you mean? Don’t know about that. Never heard it again. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think Elphaba will have a history?”

“She does already, ninnykins! I just saw her flying up the valley as large as a cloud. Her cape went out behind her, a thousand bits in flight. Nearly touched the peaks to the left and the right. If that’s not a history, what is?”

CHISTERY SAW HIM OUT. “You’re welcome here anytime,” he said. “This is your house.”

“She always loved you best, you know,” said Liir, grinning as he laced the braces at the clasp of the Witch’s cape.

“Considering what she was like, is that a compliment or an insult?” replied the Snow Monkey. “Fly well.”

BY THE TIME THEY NEARED the Emerald City, half a month later, the Conference of the Birds was six thousand strong. They’d had to slow down as they grew larger, for fear of midair accidents, but east of the Kells the winds were less harsh. As the Conference crossed the Gillikin River, coming into sight of the smart little villages and spruce knolls and brick factories and millhouses of the rolling Gillikin tableland, its shadow grew more definite by the day.

Liir had no intention of attacking the Emerald City. The Birds were not warriors, and the Conference, or Witch Nation, wasn’t military in makeup. Liir didn’t want to see Shell, nor the Lady Glinda, assuming she had returned to take up residence in her Mennipin Square town house for the winter season.

He only wanted that they should be seen.

It was nearing evening when they approached the walls of the City from the north. The sun was sagging against a few distant scraggly clouds, heading pinkly for its rest, and then it disappeared behind the horizon. The western sky would remain glassy bright for a half hour yet.

As workers clocked off at the Palace, as the boulevards were thronged with people heading for supper, and as the indigent went to their own work of begging for coin against starvation, the Conference wheeled into place. Anyone looking north at the display of Birds, from the inn called Welcome Arms on the banks of the Gillikin, say, would read only cloud: an invasion, a plague, a disaster. The same impression struck those looking, from the northwest of the city, at the Birds swimming like an ocean away from them.

From the Emerald City, though, from every west-facing window of the Palace, the intention was unmistakable. The Conference of Birds had rehearsed to perfection. They flew in formation for viewing from the east. They were the Witch, hat and cape, skirt and broom, shadowy face tucked down against the wind, but beady-eyed bright. Liir, on his broom, followed General Kynot, whose superior navigational system gave him his location. Liir on his broom played the keen black eye of the Witch.

Was Shell there, wondered Liir, knuckles on some marble windowsill, Lord High Apostle Muscle himself, Shell Go-to-hell Thropp, First Spear, Emperor of Oz, Personal Shell of the Unnamed God? Did he lean forward and squint at the holy ghost of his remonstrating sister, and rub his eyes?

Six thousand strong, they cried in unison, hoping that the echo of their message would be heard in the darkest, most cloistered cell in Southstairs as well as the highest office in the Palace of the Emperor. “Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!”

Raising Voices

1

THE CONFERENCE HAD GROWN too large for a single speaker to address it. On the morning it disbanded, therefore, two delegates from each species met with General Kynot and his loose affiliation of ministers, which included the Wren, the Dodo, and the most aggrandizing of the Grey Geese, a gander who had appointed himself.

Liir was invited, too. He asked the birds to keep an eye out for Nor. “You go everywhere, you see everything,” he said.

“We stay clear of humans when we can,” replied the Grey Goose, “present company accepted. Pro tem.”

“It’s probably futile,” Liir agreed. “Still.” He walked about with the drawing of Nor by Fiyero. “She used to look like this. She’s older by now, of course.”

“All people look alike to me,” murmured a Vleckmarsh.

“She’s simply beautiful,” said the blind Heron.

“Well, thanks just the same,” said Liir, tucking the paper away.

The General gave a rambling address that confused everyone, including himself. “To conclude,” he conceded, “we go on to new work. The Birds run a risk of reverting to behaviors less than helpful. Now, I don’t mean to besmirch the fine Ostriches from the Sour Sands, who because they don’t fly were not part of our Conference. But we all know what Ostriches are rumored to do when faced with a crisis. We must not retreat into our claques and clans. Wary of human settlements—yes, who wouldn’t be? Let’s not be stupid about humans. But wary of one another? A little less so, if we can manage.”

“And a little more chatter amongst us,” added Dosey the Wren. “In ways we are only beginning to understand, we are the eyes of Oz.”

“When can Witch Nation have a reunion?” asked the Dodo. “This was fun.”

“The boy-broomist must go and make his own nest. And I?—off and away to my family,” said the General. “The wife, you know, and there was a new clutch of eggs last spring. But there are the families of those Birds who were heinously trapped and slain by the Yunamata. Those families should be contacted, if we can figure out how.”

“I’ll take care of that, sir,” said Dosey.

“You take care of yourself, missie.”

“Should this be an annual event?” asked the Dodo. “Ought I be taking notes? I mean mental notes, at least?” But the General had lifted himself onto the hump of a sudden, warmer breeze, and whatever he answered over his shoulder could not be heard in the cheer that went up to bid him good-bye.

2

LIIR DIDN’T ASK THE GREY GOOSE for company, but the Goose followed along behind. It was a problem. The Goose was too regal to be servile, and too beautiful; he made Liir feel like a chimney sweep who hadn’t seen a bath in a month. The Goose called himself Iskinaary.

They flew from the southern edge of the Emerald City and headed straight out across Restwater, keeping east of the isthmus between the lakes. If the mauntery of Saint Glinda had been torched, Liir didn’t want to know about it yet.

Where the Vinkus River seeped along flat-bouldered steps into Restwater, they stopped to get their breath, and they surprised a fox out of a clump of wrestlebush. The fox dove at Iskinaary and wrenched his wing, but Liir clobbered the fox with the broom, and the fox let go. His wing drenched in blood, Iskinaary shed unashamed tears at his disfigurement. Closer examination proved that the damage was, indeed, slight. Nonetheless, if they were to proceed together, they’d need to go on foot.

“I don’t mind a chance to give my legs some exercise,” said Liir.

“That’s the most disingenuous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Iskinaary. “And it’s not as if you have particularly handsome legs.”

“They walk faster than yours do, I’ve noticed.”

“If you want to walk faster, you’ll have to carry me.”

Iskinaary was heavy to carry, and for all his beauty he still smelled very much like a Goose. Still, Liir didn’t mind that the trip would take a little longer. So much had happened. A chance for reflection was welcome.

He was returning now, having accomplished something at last—a set of dragon murders, regrettable, but there you go. He was eager to know how his accomplishment would fit in the house. What he and Candle would be like together now. He had no experience of a happy return, ever. He would hardly know what to say, where to smile. He hoped that not knowing might seem wonderful.

He knew more about human warmth, too, from Trism. How that knowledge would translate in the presence of Candle was a puzzle to anticipate with excitement.

When they reached the Disappointments south of the Vinkus River, it was sunset, and the cold dusk made them shiver. But there was evidence of the tiny flower known as Shatter Ice—four little bluets in a nest of the tiniest emerald leaves—which meant the hump of the winter had been passed, and spring, however long it took to arrive, had started on its way.

ISKINAARY’S WING HAD MENDED a bit—not much—by the time they approached the series of wooded knolls in which Apple Press Farm was hidden.

“You’re not planning on staying and becoming domesticated, I assume,” said Liir. “I mean, it’d be fine to see you, umm, swanning about our meadows, but I can’t expect that would give you anything approaching professional satisfaction.”

“I have my own ambitions,” said Iskinaary. “I’m intelligent as well as gorgeous, you know. Leave it to me.”

“To be more specific,” said Liir gingerly, “I’m not necessarily inviting you to take up residence with us permanently. No hard feelings.”

Iskinaary shrugged, as much as a Grey Goose could shrug. “Makes no difference to me what you say,” he replied. “I wasn’t waiting for an engraved invitation. I’ll follow my own instincts. We Animals still have instincts, you know.”

“Touché. And your instinct is?”

“To keep my own counsel.”

They entered the woods, slopping through mushy hillocks of drifted snow. “And, being instinct rich, Iskinaary, have you any opinion what my instincts are?”

“You’re not untalented,” said Iskinaary, overlooking the slight sarcasm in Liir’s tone. “You’re even rather smart. For a human. You keep excellent company.”

“Yourself.”

“Exactly. Furthermore, from what I’ve observed, you have a talent for reading the past.”

“What does that mean?”

Iskinaary honked. “What it sounds. There are very few who can read the future. And you’ve mentioned this Candle of yours can read the present. But reading the past is a skill in and of itself. It’s not just knowing the past. It’s feeling it. It’s deriving new strength and knowledge from it—learning from it all the time. It’s my own guess that this was intended to be the great strength of human beings, when the Unnamed God came up with the notion of you. Sadly, like so many good ideas, it hasn’t quite worked out in practice.”

“Thank you very much.”

“No insult intended.”

“I didn’t know you believed in the Unnamed God.”

“I was speaking metaphorically. I assumed you’d get that. Is this the place you’re looking for?”

It was. The low roofs of the dependences, and the main structure of the house itself, and the big barn room in which the broken press presumably still stood. Perhaps it could be made to work again.

They came the long way around, to approach from the open meadow by the front door. There they found that Liir’s invitation had been accepted. Nine tents were erected in the meadow, as perfectly aligned as the casual ramble of the fences would allow. Eight subordinate tents made a square, and the Princess Nastoya’s tent stood centrally.

With her canny ways, and for all the advance warning of this contingent of Scrow, Candle ought to have known he was coming. Nonetheless, she seemed surprised. Surprised, and flustered, large and slow, even redder of face than her natural coloring suggested was possible. Perhaps blood pressure problems? Or had she been experimenting with native rouges?

He approached her cautiously—as if she were a young novice, not a farm bride. He took her hands and held them, and found out that even now he didn’t know how he felt. “I’ve flown the world,” he said.

“Welcome home from the world.” Her face was tucked down, as if she were shy. A new shyness.

“Candle,” he said, “has the fellow called Trism come here?”

She looked up at him from under a wrinkled brow. “He said you’d ask for him. I couldn’t be sure of him; he seemed a soldier of some sort. Well, now you’ve asked, and right off. Though I’d have thought you’d enquire if I was all right first! All these guests, and me in this state!”

“Of course—of course. But I can see you’re all right. And I don’t know if Trism survived.”

“Well, he did,” she said, summarily. “Oh, Liir,” she continued, her voice now sounding as if he’d only been gone an hour, and she’d missed him for sixty full minutes, “look what’s happened, and I wanted to greet you on our own.” She spread her hands at the meadow.

“I know,” he said. “I invited them.”

“I’m glad you finally arrived to greet them, then. They’ve been here a week, and my careful larder is just about bare. The one older fellow speaks a rude sort of Qua’ati, but I can’t make out a thing from the others.”

The Scrow were trying to brew a kind of tea out of the bark of apple trees and such sap as was running in the maples. They wrinkled their noses at it and hardly seemed to notice Liir’s arrival.

“In the family way, I note,” said Iskinaary pointedly, slipping into Qua’ati effortlessly, “or are you just big-boned, my dear?”

Indicating the Goose, Liir said to Candle, “This is my…” He paused; the word friend seemed inappropriate.

“Familiar,” supplied the Goose.

“Oh, please!” said Liir. “Is that what you’re on about?”

“Don’t mind me, I’ll just settle here with the stupid hens,” snapped Iskinaary.

“I’m not a witch, nothing near!” said Liir. “You’re going on the grossest sort of hearsay.”

“Get on with your task, and I’ll be the judge,” said the Goose. He shifted about three inches to one side and turned elegantly still, which gave him the effect of being statuesque while allowing him to eavesdrop with impunity.

Liir picked up Candle’s hands again. He wanted more from her, he willed it so. She let him thumb her palms for a moment, then she pulled her own hands away.

“So Trism got here unharmed?” he said.

“The dragon master? He did,” she said, her face turned away again.

“Where is he?”

“He couldn’t stay.”

Cautious. Gentle step, here. “Why not? Candle?”

She began to lift a huge urn of water from the table in the yard; he took it from her.

“Candle. What happened? Was he all right?” Suddenly Liir had no trust: not in his own apprehensions of Trism, nor of Trism…nor even of Candle. Trism, after all, had once wanted to kill him. “Did he treat you poorly?”

“This water needs taking out to the Princess,” she answered. “She’s being laved round the clock. I’ve been preparing it with essence of vinegar, as that priestly prince instructed me to do.”

“What happened? What passed between you and Trism? Candle!”

“Liir. What could pass between us? He didn’t speak Qua’ati. And I could understand what he chose to tell me, but not answer him—I don’t speak that bossy a tongue. I have a small voice, a half-voice. As you know.”

In succession, Liir thought a half dozen crises. She knows I loved him. That I love him. That he loves me? That he loves her?

That she loves him?

What was this verb love anyway, that could work in any direction?

Did he hurt her?

“Candle. I beg of you.”

“Don’t beg,” intoned Iskinaary, standing on one foot. “Remember General Kynot. Don’t beg. Never beg.”

“We’ll talk later,” she said. “Now, if you’d take that water to your guest? And then you’d better do what you came here to do.”

“I came here to be here! With you.”

“And this band of ragamuffins who preceded you? They are, what? The relatives?”

Tears pricked his eyes. “Don’t be preposterous, and don’t be mean! I’ve been away, Candle. Doing what you asked. Getting something done. Anything. Learning where I wanted to be.”

“I have my bad moments,” she admitted, wiping her own face. “It hasn’t been easy. Let’s not talk. Go straight to work, and help that old sow if you can.”

“She’s an Elephant.”

“Whatever the beast she is.”

“Candle!”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Liir, you startled me. Carrying this child is hard work. I haven’t been myself.”

He could see that.

“Did Trism leave parcels for me?”

“Two packets in the press, hanging on strings from the ceiling, to keep the mice from them. The mice are very interested. Are you going to haul this water to the invalid, or shall I? I have other work to do now. Washing. The old woman runs through a dozen towels a day.”

She picked up a basket of wet laundry and wobbled outside to an old apple tree, where she began to sling the clothes on drooping branches to dry. She’s hurting, he thought: even I, dull as I am, can see that. But from what? My long absence? My affection for Trism? Or is the child inside her making her sick, draining her blood, eating her liver from within, kicking her pelvis sore with its ready heels?

3

HE WASN’T UP TO DEALING with Princess Nastoya yet, and the Scrow seemed to have settled in nicely. Hell, she’d been dying for a decade, she could die some more for another ten minutes before he finally had his reunion with her.

Stung by Candle’s reticence, he wandered into the barn to retrieve the parcels. If Trism had gotten them here safely, then he must have managed to elude Commander Cherrystone. Glinda’s glamour had worked once again, and riding at her side as her factotum, Trism had played the shadowy manservant, a known quantity. He’d been smuggled out of the mauntery safely.

But what had happened here? Had he followed Liir’s directions and found Candle in residence, beautiful and reticent and large with child? Had Trism resented the notion of a Candle? Had he been stung by the fact that Liir had never mentioned her pregnancy? Had he assumed Liir was the father?

Had Trism been cruel to her?

Liir took down the parcels, struck by the thought that the workings of the human heart could be as various and imperturbable as the workings of human communities. He didn’t know enough of love in all its forms to compare, to choose, to sacrifice, to regret. Held in Trism’s soldier arms, he’d been strengthened; held in Candle’s loving regard, he’d been strengthened, too. Now the only thing holding him was Elphaba’s cape. Was her mantle of penitential solitude to be his, too?

He wiped his eyes and opened the parcels. In the slanting light through the barn door, he wheeled out the hoops of face. Now that he knew what they were, they seemed less grotesque—no less terrible than a drawing or a dream of someone. A flat disc not unlike a mirror. They’d had lives, these people, as puzzling as his. No one would ever know what those lives were like, though.

“Well,” said Iskinaary, who’d followed him in, “as I live and breathe. Is this what they mean by a human shield?”

“They’re the faces of the dead.”

“You’re in here studying them, when you have a dying woman out there in a tent, waiting for your attention?” Iskinaary was incensed.

Liir looked at them, shaking his head. From the distance he heard the first few notes of a melody. Candle had taken down the domingon again. Whom was she calling with it? The baby within her? Come out, come out? Or Liir himself, stuck in his indecision, his confusion?

“I’m quite an expert at music, as I have perfect pitch. Unusual in a Goose,” said Iskinaary. “She’s got a way with that instrument. She could play the eggs right out of a mama Goose.”

“I heard her encourage the yard animals to sing,” said Liir. “I mean really sing, not just bray and cackle.”

“Singing lightens the load,” said Iskinaary, who looked about ready to deliver an aria himself. He cleared his throat. But Liir suddenly snatched up the hoops from the ground and turned on his heel.

“If she can be persuaded,” he said, “maybe she can help the load lighten. She’s so weighed down herself—but she’s a kind person. What a good idea!”

“Thank you,” said Iskinaary, his feathers ruffled. Denied an audience, he hummed to himself in a desultory fashion, but shortly thereafter he followed Liir to find out what his good idea had been.

LIIR INTRODUCED HIMSELF to the man called Lord Ottokos.

“We’ve met before,” said Shem Ottokos, “though since then, you’ve grown up and I’ve grown old.”

Liir explained what he hoped Candle might do. If she would.

Shem Ottokos seemed to find nothing peculiar in the proposal. “Your wife is very kind, even in her heavy condition, and your husband seemed equally kind.”

“She is not my wife, and I have no husband,” said Liir. “Indeed, I have no talent except the idea for this. And I do not know if it will work.”

“I will tell the Princess Nastoya that you have arrived,” said Ottokos. “She is in grave distress, and it is hard for her to talk anymore. But I believe she is still able to hear and understand. I must believe this: it is my job.”

Liir took the scraped and treated faces of the dragons’ victims into the orchard, faintly budding already, though the ground was still wet with old snow. He hooked the thirteen hoops upon notches of apple tree branch, as near to body height as he could guess each one had required when attached to a living body. The damp sheets and toweling fluttered like liquidy limbs beneath.

4

SHE PUT ASIDE her domingon when he approached and asked her for her help. “Don’t do it for me,” said Liir. “Do it for her.”

“I’m already doing laundry for her,” said Candle. “I have no more strength.”

“You know people and you know kindness. Your music sang me back to life. You have that skill. It’s called knowing the present. You could make the barnyard sing. I only ask that you know the present of Princess Nastoya, and play her constituent parts to their own places.”

“You think like a witch. I am not a witch, Liir.”

“I am not a witch and I am not thinking like one. I am trying to learn from history. I am trying to figure out what happened in the past, and work to use that knowledge again. You played in my past, and brought me my life. Perhaps you can play her death to her.”

“I don’t feel well.” She rubbed her eyes with her forefingers. “Frankly, I haven’t been sleeping. I don’t know that this pregnancy is going as it should, but there’s no one to ask.”

“You don’t feel as badly as Princess Nastoya does.”

“Liir!”

He caught her at the elbow. “Tell me what happened!” he said roughly. “Tell me what happened with Trism!”

“Leave me be, Liir,” she said, crying, but when he gripped her arm harder, she said, “He told me to come away with him. He said whoever had followed the two of you so far would not give up that easily. He said the mauntery would be burned, and its members tortured until they disclosed the whereabouts of this satellite operation. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Of course the maunts know about this place! Why else would Mother Yackle have sent us here? Or the donkey know the way? Think, Liir!”

“He told you to leave with him?”

“He said I should go with him, for protection: that it is what you would want me to do.”

Liir was stunned. “Why didn’t you do it, then?”

“I trusted you,” she said, a little abrasively, “how do I know whether to trust another soldier? He could have been abducting me to kill me and my child. He could have been lying. He could have been doing it to hurt you. Though now I see he meant more to you than I reckoned.”

What he heard mostly was her possessive pronoun: my child. Not ours.

“And he didn’t stay,” said Liir, in a voice nearly as small as hers.

“No, he didn’t,” she answered. “Generally, people don’t. They come, they go. He left. The Scrow came. For all I know your Commander Cherrystone will be here in time for tea, and Mother Yackle for the washing up.”

5

THE SCROW RETINUE carried the Princess into the orchard and set her down on a blanket. She was grey; her legs had swollen like bolsters, her scalp was nearly bald. She’d lost her eyebrows and her eyelashes, which gave her sightless eyes a horrible eggy look. Her chin bristled with enough hair to wipe farm boots clean.

Liir could hardly put this collaboration of bones and muscles and foul odors together with his childhood memories of meeting Nastoya the day or two after Elphaba had died. He didn’t try. The Princess was beyond language, groaning and leaning into a screw of physical pain that seemed to implicate the entire orchard. He could never apologize for having abandoned his promise to her for so long. Neither could she speak whatever message she’d had for him. It was too late now.

Lord Ottokos retained his composure. He spoke to her about every shift of limb and placement of pillow. Unsuccessfully he tried to dribble some water into her mouth, but even at this late moment he was afraid he might drown her before she could be divided from her disguise. She would have to go to her death, if this worked, thirsty.

She was prostrate on the ground, her head rolled back, giving her chin some prominence for perhaps the first time in a decade.

“We’re ready,” said Ottokos. He stood with a gnarled old staff, a bit of sourwood into which iron thorns had been pounded. It looked like a mace of some sort, a scepter, and Lord Ottokos was ready to assume the leadership of the tribe.

Liir nodded at Candle, who had come equipped with an old milking stool. She sat down clumsily. Her legs went wide, but there wasn’t enough lap on which to hold her instrument. She had to balance it on an overturned washtub. Still, she looked at Princess Nastoya with a complicated expression, and presently she began to play.

The others in the company had not been invited, but they lined the edge of the orchard, knuckles locked, a Scrow position of reverence. The Goose stood near Liir, a foot or two back, both deferential and significant. It wasn’t clear if he was Liir’s familiar, or if Liir was his interpreter.

Candle began by dissecting chords and distending them into arpeggios. She chose the lighter modalities at first, but quickly shifted into more subtle variations. The Princess was uncomfortable on the ground, and her blankets were already getting soaked in the snow.

“To grow a death,” murmured Liir, holding Candle’s shoulders, “you must plant a life.”

She shook him off. He began to walk the perimeter of the orchard, trying to see from different angles. Was there something more he could do? He should be doing? Candle was hard at work, and no doubt Princess Nastoya was doing her own, but was more help needed, in this mission of nothing but mercy?

One stretch of the orchard. Another.

“Liir,” whispered Candle as he neared her. “I am very uncomfortable here. It is not like six months ago. I can’t keep this up for long.”

She rotated the instrument a quarter turn and splayed her fingers, cocking them laterally, and she flat-struck the alto quarter, trying a sprigged quadrille, a dance of spring.

The third side of the orchard. Iskinaary wandered over as if at an evening reception honoring the recent work of a well-regarded painter. “You might try concentrating on the past,” he said.

“I don’t know her past,” said Liir. “I don’t know a thing about it, except that she knew Elphaba.”

“I don’t mean her past,” said Iskinaary. “She knows her own past well enough, somewhere in there. I mean the others. Even in death, we are a society, after all.”

Liir turned and looked at the Scrow, standing a distance away, but then he saw what Iskinaary meant. It wasn’t anything the living could do—it was the human dead who were best equipped to call the human disguise off Nastoya. They could beckon it forward, if Candle could play the scraped faces to sing.

But the playing was her talent, and the singing was theirs—it was his job to listen. To witness their histories, and cherish them in memory, his only talent. He had looked into the Witch’s crystal ball, after all, and had seen her past, even if it had nothing to do with him. He had stumbled upon his own reveries without benefit of any gazing globe. Maybe his only job was to listen. That much he could do.

6

I WAS THE FOURTH OF FIVE CHILDREN, and I loved the way sun warmed stone. Just before lunch, on the flagstones of the terrace, I used to dance barefoot with my mother for she loved it too.

I was happy enough in my marriage, and happier still when I was widowed, though happiness seems incidental to a good life.

I never wanted to take the cane my father gave me, and I picked it up and broke his nose with it, and he laughed so hard he fell into the well.

I made things with colored threads, little birds and such.

I always wanted to go to university at Shiz, as some of my friends would do, but boys like me weren’t allowed.

I believed in the Unnamed God and accepted the mission set me because God would take care of everything: the Emperor said so.

I once took off all my clothes and rolled in a field of ferns, and had an experience I never told anyone about.

I was at the ceremony in Center Munch when the cyclone dropped the house on Nessarose, and I saw it with my own eyes, but I lost my ribbon on the way home.

I loved how milk tastes, and the way hills go blue with cloud markings, and my baby sister, her hair black as a beetle brush.

I loved it when I was alive.

I loved it when I was alive, too.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget that we loved it when we were alive.

LIIR HEARD SOMETHING from each hoop. Every face sang as Candle provided accompaniment. The bud-notched trees shook with the force of their voices, though there were no tongues, and little enough left of lips, and no wind to pass through the aperture and turn their mouths into flutes.

Reminded of human life, the corporeal part of Princess Nastoya melted into the snow. All that was left of her human disguise shook off—a spin of charcoal smoke, smudged in the air like incense. It stood, finding its feet, before it dispersed, and the voices fell silent.

There was nothing left on the blanket but a massive She-Elephant. The Scrow all closed their eyes and began to weep. Her eyes opened and her head rolled back. Her eyes met Liir’s for an instant. Her neck snapped.

No Place Like It

AFTER AN HOUR, Lord Ottokos indicated that a surgeon should come forward with a saw. The small bowl-stomached woman went to work at the Elephant’s right tusk and removed it in just a few minutes. Then she sawed an inch of disc off the wider end. The tusk being hollow at the wide end, the disc formed a ring with an aperture several fingers wide. The surgeon fitted this on the point of the other end of the tusk, and handed the relic to Ottokos.

He bowed and accepted it. In turn he fastened it to the staff he had prepared. When finished, the staff was a six-foot stake crowned by an arched prong of Elephant tusk, an ivory smile without a face around it.

“I will lead under the influence of Nastoya,” he said in a quiet voice, and this calmed the Scrow from their weeping.

What influence is that, thought Liir; a shard of bone, a makeshift totem?

That, and memory. Maybe all the influence needed.

THE SCROW HAD lived so long under the leadership of Princess Nastoya that they hardly knew what to do when she was gone. With effort, everyone tugging at once, they managed to get her body onto the cart that had brought Candle and Liir to Apple Press Farm. Then they began the long trudge back to their tribal homeland. They would burn her on a pyre when they arrived, and the scraped faces besides, and not a moment too soon. Nastoya had never smelled very fine while alive, and now she was a health hazard as well.

Lord Ottokos insisted Liir should accompany them through Kumbricia’s Pass in case the Scrow delegation met up with the Yunamata, and trouble flared. “It’s the last thing you can do for Princess Nastoya, finishing the task she asked of you back when the Witch first died,” he said. “See her bones to safety, anyway.”

Liir decided to leave the broom and the cape behind. He wouldn’t fly while in the company of the Scrow, and after departing from them, he mightn’t be able to fly back, anyway. Kumbricia’s Pass had been resistant to his flying above it.

After packing the hooped faces alongside Nastoya’s carcass, Liir bade Candle and Iskinaary a quick good-bye. “Mind each other,” he said. “Iskinaary, keep watch.”

“I can watch over myself,” said Candle. “You forget I can read the present.”

“Can you read what is in my heart?” he asked. If so, tell me what it is, he continued to himself. Tell me, so I can tell you back.

Candle held his hands but wouldn’t meet his eyes. Perhaps, the nearer the baby was to birth, the more she despaired of ever having said it was his. Would he ever be able to map any part of her mystery?

He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.

THERE PROVED LITTLE DRAMA on the high ground. One evening the Yunamata materialized out of nothing, naked as Birds, painted in tribal markings. They approached the corpse of Princess Nastoya, carrying the lighted roots of hagtooth bush that they used in their own funeral rites. They sang, and melted away again in rather unseemly haste.

At the final gorge, where the Conference of the Birds had departed for its circuit around western Oz, Liir said a quick and perfunctory good-bye to Lord Shem, Prince Ottokos, and turned home with a heavy heart.

The accomplishments of the last six months had been irrelevant, he decided, for all but Nastoya. Was that the only accomplishment that mattered?—that somehow you not bungle your own death? Everything else that had happened in his short adult life had been frothy and meaningless, ultimately. Passionate, yes—yes, that, indeed. Passionately felt, but without shapeliness or worthy outcome.

The dragons were dead: some people were still walking about, ignorant of how their tired lives might otherwise have ended up with a scraping. That much was good. Stack that up against the cursed lives of those Quadlings who daily had to remember their own dead, lost at the burning of the bridge at Bengda. The bit of thatch falling, a letter in the air, flaming and drowning.

And doubtless there were still disconsolate prisoners in Southstairs, and misguided soldiers in barracks, and those abject poor who had survived the cleaning out of Dirt Boulevard. And that kid named Tip, whose granny had probably sold him already for a better brand of cow, a broom, a new pot for the hearth.

To be sure, the airborne Conference of the Birds—a great show, if nothing else. But what did it mean? Where did it get anyone? For all Liir knew, that juvenile spectacle would give the Emperor better leverage to draft additional soldiers, to tax for newer weapons, to dictate for more control over the crown city of Oz. A flying witch made out of birds! In another generation that would have been called pleasure faithism: as if spectacle itself could convince one of anything.

Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?

The great force of evil? Shell, Emperor Quake-in-your-Boots, naming himself the Spear of the Unnamed God? Or the next despot, or the one after that?

The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Remembering Princess Nastoya, he thought: Sever us from our disguises. Then he flinched, almost in disgust: was that a prayer?

How he wished the Elephant Princess had been able to deliver whatever message that Sister Apothecaire had advertised she had for him. Another slim hope dashed, so many slim hopes waiting to rise in its wake.

A message about Nor, and the word on the street. Could Princess Nastoya, with her massive ears, actually have learned Nor’s whereabouts? Surely she’d have found a way to tell him?

Nor, lovely Nor, wherever she was. He didn’t know where, he might never know, except she was in his memory—like everyone else. There, and drawn on the piece of paper secreted into the inner pocket of the Witch’s cape. He saw it in his mind’s eye, clear as day, the drawing, the coffee-colored wash suggesting the gleaming highlights of preadolescent, perfect skin, the letters written in Nor’s peculiar, crabbed printing.

It was as if the burning letter had spelled something, suddenly, just before it was quenched in black water. The thought came like a spasm, and he harvested it before it disappeared. He unpacked the Princess Nastoya’s promised gift.

The word on the street. Elphaba Lives!

Nor’s handwriting.

WHEN HE GOT BACK to the farm a little after dusk, perhaps a week later, he knew at once that it was deserted. One knows those things about an old farmstead. Iskinaary was gone, and the donkey, and the hens had scattered. For a minute he wondered if Trism had come back for Candle, and now—angry at Liir for his quizzical ways, or herself taken with handsome Trism—she’d changed her mind, and cast her lot with him.

Or perhaps Trism’s warning had been accurate, and Commander Cherrystone and his band had found Apple Press Farm at last. Found a way to avenge the slaughter of the dragons.

It mattered, and would matter more tomorrow. For now, he was alone, as before. As usual. It was a condition he’d need to get used to, or to tolerate never getting used to—not exactly the same thing, more’s the pity.

He walked through the house. Her domingon was gone, which suggested deliberation, but the dishes were unwiped, still crusty with porridge, which suggested haste. Had she taken the broom? No, there it was, put up on the mantelpiece out of harm’s way.

He built up a small fire in the kitchen to take the edge off the chill. There was precious little with which to make a meal. As he stood trying to think, though, he heard a barracking in the boggy land some way south of the farm. Thrashing through underbrush, he found the goat hidden in thickets, tied to a tree, sorely in need of milking, and cross as blazes.

He led it back to the barn, and milked it in the shadows of the broken press, glad he had learned one skill at least.

Then, in the dark corner of the stair hall where they left the trash for tipping into the dump beyond the orchard, he nearly tripped over the Witch’s cape. He picked it up to shake it out and hang it on a hook, and the lump of dead matter rolled off the hem into the corner.

Oh, oh oh oh. So this was it. The baby had come, come early, he guessed; he didn’t know all that much about the calendar as it pertained to babies. It must have come too soon, and it had been dead on arrival, or it had died at once. And Candle had been alone, poor thing—alone but for that vainglorious Goose. How misguided that Liir should have felt the need to honor the corpse of Nastoya and leave Candle to face a possible childbirth or a stillbirth alone, with only a silly Goose to hiss for help.

He had hauled the dead carcass of an Elephant across the mountains on a cart; he had tried to hear the testimonies of people who had had their faces scraped. He had murdered dragons and people. He could bear to touch the small corpse of a human child.

So he picked it up. He held it at a distance. Tears started, though why? He hadn’t believed this was his child, and there was no new reason to believe it now. It was just another child, just another inevitable fatality, the next crude accident of the world, and not the last.

He maneuvered its cold form closer. Cold, though not icy; this death had to have just happened. Had the scraped faces sung the fetus to a death, as they’d sung Princess Nastoya?

Maybe the child had been born dead this very morning, as he was making his approach. And a rosy morning it had been, the sun strengthening, and the inane involuntary return of a green blush to the skin of the world. He had even sung a bit of his own. Not his usual way!—he’d yodeled some nonsense syllables, thinking: Maybe it will be all right. Maybe Candle. Maybe Trism. Maybe something will work.

The form was cold. Was it a normal infant size, or smaller? He didn’t know human infants. He nestled it against his neck, and thought he felt its mouth move.

Gingerly he stepped from the stair hall into the kitchen. Was it warming up? Or was it just his own heat he felt, reflecting back at him?

In the feeble light of the new fire, he moved it again, shifted it to rest along his forearm. It was a pretty corpse, and now he could see it had been a girl. Its umbilical cord was an unholy mess. Maybe Iskinaary had helped to sever it. It didn’t bear thinking about.

The corpse twitched and cried, and stretched a little. He wrapped it from stem to stern, forehead to toes, making sure its dab of a nose had access to air. Then he carried it closer to the fire, in case corpses liked to be a little warm before they were fed milk.

Elphaba had kept a basket rocking at her feet, once: a basket was just the thing. Was there an old onion basket somewhere in the keeping-room belowstairs? He’d find a basket.

He found a basket.

He fed her by dripping goat’s milk through a cheesecloth into her pursing mouth. She took the false sucket well enough. She had Candle’s Quadling face, already: those beautiful rhomboids that made such splendid cheekbones.

Of course Candle would flee, if she’d given birth to a child and thought it had died. Imagine the panic. Of course she would. Maybe she’d go back to the mauntery, as the Superior Maunt had suspected she would. At least for a time: to recover herself. What an ordeal she’d had. The lonely pregnancy, the lonely delivery, and then—whatever it was that had happened with Trism. And all of Liir’s absences. Of course she would flee.

She might come back. She might.

He sat with the infant most of the night. For a while he spread out the cape and even managed to sleep a little—he kept her in the basket, though, so he wouldn’t roll over onto her by accident and crush her.

In the first black wash of dawn, he woke up comforted with a different thought. Candle could see the present. Perhaps she’d known he was almost home. What if she had fled—what if a guard of Commander Cherrystone’s battalion had indeed found the farm, and she’d led them away, diverted their attention? Drawn them off scent? The mother bird pretends to have a broken wing, to lead predators away from her nestlings in the grass. Candle had as much instinct as a mother bird.

So she knew that Liir would be back in time to rescue the girl, give it a burial if needed, feed it if not. She’d hid the goat for him to find.

She wasn’t leading danger away from him, but from the baby. She could take care of herself; they didn’t want her, after all. But she was relying on Liir to save her baby, whether he believed it was his or not.

Imagining that, anyway, helped him open his eyes.

There was heavy rain in the morning. The light was greyish and mossy with the low clouds. He had to concede that the baby wasn’t a corpse, really. She was alive. Maybe she’d been born stone cold. But she was alive now.

Still smeared with her birth blood, and the watery beginning of her little feces. He took her to the doorway and held her up in the warm rain. She cleaned up green.

A LITTLE PATIENCE, and we shall see the reign of
witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people,
recovering their true spirit, restore their government
to its true principles.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1798

From Wicked

THEY CONDUCTED THEIR LOVE AFFAIR in the room above the abandoned corn echange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

ONE EVENING THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fraglity of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

MY MOTHER was a westerne woman
And learned in gramarye

—K. Estmere, 1470,
collected in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS ARE DUE to the team at ReganBooks, starting with Judith Regan and including Cassie Jones, Paul Olsewski, and Jennifer Suitor.

Thank you to David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss for commenting on early drafts of Son of a Witch.

Thank you to Haven Kimmel and to Eve Ensler, for encouraging words sent at precisely the right moment.

Thank you to Harriet Barlow, Ben Strader, and the company of Blue Mountain Center, New York.

Thank you, again, to Andy Newman, for defending the ramparts as usual, and to Lori Shelly, for able assistance at every wicked little thing.

A Lion Among Men

Volume Three in the Wicked Years

Gregory Maguire

Illustrations by Douglas Smith

Map

Dedication

FOR MAURICE SENDAK
King of all wild things

Epigraph

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could have dreamed would come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

—Goethe, by attribution

A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world…. We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.

To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral.

—Eric Kraft, “I Consider My Luck,” from Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Significant Families of Oz

A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz

Deposition of an Oracle

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

The Nursery in the Forest

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

No Good Old Days to Speak Of

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

A Coward for His Country

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

A Question of Influence

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Past Approaches

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Acknowledgments

Credits

SIGNIFICANT FAMILIES OF OZ

The House of Ozma

The Thropps of Munchkinland

The Uplands of Gillikin

The Tigelaars, Arjiki chieftains of the Vinkus

A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE THRONE MINISTERS OF OZ

Augmented with notes about selected incidents of interest to students of modern history

THE OZMA YEARS

- The matrilineal House of Ozma established.

The Ozma line descends from a Gillikinese clan. It originally claimed legitimacy through a purported divine relationship with Lurlina, fabled creatrix of Oz. Depending on the claim, history records between forty to fifty Ozmas and their regents.

- The last Ozma, Ozma Tippetarius, is born of Ozma the Bilious.

Ozma the Bilious expires through an accident involving rat poisoning in the risotto. Her consort, Pastorius, becomes Ozma Regent during the minority of Ozma Tippetarius.

- Pastorius rules over central Oz.

He renames the hamlet known as Nubbly Meadows, near the ancient burial ground of Open Tombs, as the Emerald City (EC). Declares the EC as the capital of united Oz.

- The Great Drought begins.

- By air balloon, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs arrives in the Emerald City.

Diggs successfully mounts a palace coup d’état. Pastorius is murdered, and the infant Ozma Tippetarius disappears. She is presumed slain, perhaps in Southstairs Prison (built over the Open Tombs), though an evergreen rumor claims she lies enchanted in a cave, to return only in Oz’s darkest hour. Diggs becomes known as the Wizard of Oz.

THE WIZARDIC YEARS

- The Emerald City renovation is completed.

- The Wizard of Oz orders expansion of the Yellow Brick Road.

This serves as a highway for the armies of the EC and aids in the collection of local taxes from previously independent populations, especially in Quadling Country and on the eastern flanks of the Great Kells of the Vinkus.

- Animal Courtesy legislation enacted (known also as the Animal Adverse laws).

- Munchkinland secedes from Loyal Oz.

Under the rule of Nessarose Thropp, Eminence of Munchkinland, the secession is conducted with a minimum of bloodshed. The “breadbasket of Oz” maintains an uneasy commercial relationship with Loyal Oz.

- Nessarose Thropp dies.

The arrival in Oz of a visitor, a Dorothy Gale of Canzizz (sometimes transcribed as “Canzuss” or “Kanziz”), results in the death of the Eminence. Speculation suggests her sister, Elphaba Thropp, will return to Munchkinland to mount a more aggressive campaign against the EC than Nessarose ever did.

- Elphaba Thropp is vanquished.

The so-called Wicked Witch of the West, onetime agitator, now recluse, is subdued by the powerful Dorothy Gale.

- The Wizard of Oz abdicates the throne.

The Wizard had held power for almost forty years. The reasons for his departure remain a matter of speculation.

THE TWIN INTERREGNUMS

- Lady Glinda Chuffrey, née Upland, is briefly installed as Throne Minister.

The Animal Adverse laws are revoked, to little effect; Animals remain skeptical of their chances of being reintegrated into human society in Oz.

- The Scarecrow replaces Glinda as Throne Minister.

The Scarecrow, a figure of uncertain provenance, is often assumed to have been installed as Throne Minister by palace apparatchiks sympathetic to Shell Thropp, an ambitious upstart engaged in mercenary espionage. The Scarecrow proves to be a weak figurehead—a straw man, figuratively as well as literally—but his tenure allows Shell Thropp to avoid having had to challenge the popular Lady Glinda for the leadership. The Scarecrow’s whereabouts following the end of his abbreviated realm are never revealed.

Some historians hold that the Scarecrow serving as Throne Minister was not the same Scarecrow who befriended Dorothy, though this assertion is unverifiable.

THE EMPEROR APOSTLE

- Shell Thropp installs himself as Emperor of Oz.

The youngest of the three Thropp siblings, Shell claims rights of ascendancy through an adroit manipulation of Palace power brokers.

from Wicked

IN CAME A BOY from Three Queens rolling a table like a tea tray. On it, crouched as if to make itself as small as possible, was a lion cub. Even from the balcony they could sense the terror of the beast. Its tail, a little whip the color of mashed peanuts, lashed back and forth, and its shoulders hunched. It had no mane to speak of yet, it was too tiny. But the tawny head twisted this way and that, as if counting the threats. It opened its mouth in a little terrified yawp, the infant form of an adult roar. All over the room hearts melted and people said, “Awwwwww.”

“Hardly more than a kitten,” said Doctor Nikidik. “I had thought to call it Prrr, but it shivers more often than it purrs, so I call it Brrr instead.”

The creature looked at Doctor Nikidik, and removed itself to the far edge of the trolley.

“Now the question of the morning is this,” said Doctor Nikidik. “Picking up from the somewhat skewed interests of Doctor Dillamond…who can tell me if this is an Animal or an animal?”

Elphaba didn’t wait to be called on. She stood up in the balcony and launched her answer out in a clear, strong voice. “Doctor Nikidik…. It seems to me the answer is that its mother can. Where is its mother?…Why is it taken from its mother at such an early age? How can it even feed?”

“Those are impertinent questions to the academic issue at hand,” said the Doctor. “Still, the youthful heart bleeds easily. The mother, shall we say, died in a sadly timed explosion…”

Deposition of an Oracle

• 1 •

THE TIME came for her to die, and she would not die; so perhaps she might waste away, they thought, and she did waste, but not away; and the time came for her to receive final absolution, so they set candles upon her clavicle, but this she would not allow. She blasphemed with gusto and she knocked the scented oils across the shroud they’d readied on a trestle nearby.

“God love her,” they said, in bitter, unconvincing voices—or perhaps they meant May the Unnamed God love her, our unrepentant sister Yackle, for we certainly can’t.

“Sink me in the crypt,” she said, speaking directly to them for the first time in years. “You’re too young to know; that’s how they used to do it. When the time came for an elder to go and she wouldn’t, they settled her down in the ossuary so she could chummy up to the bones. Supplied her with a couple of candles and a bottle of wine. Let her get used to the notion. They came back a year later to sweep up the leavings.”

“Mercy,” said whoever was nearby to hear.

“I insist,” she replied. “Check with Sister Scholastica and she’ll bear me out.”

“She’s raving mad,” said someone else, chocolately. Yackle approved of chocolate, and indeed, everything edible. Since Yackle’s eyesight had gone out for good a decade earlier, she identified individuals by the degree and idiosyncracy of their halitosis.

“She’s always been raving mad,” said a third observer, Vinegarish Almonds. “Isn’t that rather sweet?”

Yackle reached for something to throw, and all she could find was her other hand, which wouldn’t detach.

“She’s doing sign language.” “The poor, deluded dovelette.” “Clinging to life so—whatever for?” “Perhaps it isn’t her time.”

“It is,” said Yackle, “it is, I keep telling you. Won’t you fiends let me die? I want to go to hell in a handbasket. Put me out of my misery and into the Afterlife where I can do some real damage, damn it.”

“She’s not herself,” said someone.

“She was never reliably herself, to hear tell,” said another.

The bedsheets caught fire spontaneously. Yackle found she was rather enjoying this, but it helped neither her reputation nor her rescue that the only liquid nearby with which to douse the flames was cognac.

Still, Yackle was not to be dissuaded. “Isn’t there a Superior in the House?” she asked. “Someone who can lay down the law?”

“The Superior Maunt died a decade ago,” they replied. “We work by consensus now. We’ve noted your request to be interred alive. We’ll put it on the agenda and take it up next week at Council.”

“She’ll burn the House down, and us with it,” muttered a novice, sometime later. Yackle could tell that the innocent speaker was talking to herself, to stoke her courage.

“Come here, my duckie,” said Yackle, grasping. “I smell a little peppermint girl nearby, and no garlicky matron hovering. Are you the sentry? On our own, are we? Come, sit nearer. Surely there is still a Sister Apothecaire in residence? With her cabinets of nostrums and beckums, tonics and tablets? She must possess a sealed jar, it would be dark blue glass, about yea-high, pasted over with a label picturing three sets of crossed tibias. Couldn’t you find this and pour me out a fatal little decoction?”

“Not a spoonful of it, I en’t the grace to do it,” said Peppermint Girl. “Let go a me, you harpy. Let go or—or I’ll bite you!”

Out of charity to the young, Yackle let go. It would do the poor girl no good to take a bite of old Yackle. The antidote en’t been invented yet, and so on.

Hours and days pass at elastic rhythms for the blind. Whether the pattern of her naps and wakings followed the ordinary interruptions of daylight by nighttime, Yackle couldn’t tell. But someone she recognized as Broccoli Breath eventually informed her that the sorority had decided to bow to Yackle’s final wish. They would install her in the crypt among the remains of women long dead. She could approach bodily corruption at whatever speed appealed to her. Three candles, and as to nourishment, red or white?

“A beaker of gasoline and a match as a chaser,” said Yackle, but she was indulging in a joke; she was that pleased. She nominated a saucy persimmon flaucande and a beeswax candle scented with limeberries—for the aroma, not for the light. She was beyond light now.

“Good voyage, Eldest Soul,” they sang to her as they carried her down the stairs. Though she weighed no more than sugarbrittle she was awkward to move; she couldn’t govern her own arms or legs. As if motivated by a spite independent of her own, her limbs would keep ratcheting out to jab into doorjambs. The procession lacked a fitting dignity.

“Don’t come down for at least a year,” she sang out, giddy as a lambkin. “Make that two. I might be old as sin itself, but once I start rotting it won’t be pretty. If I hammer at the cellar door don’t open it; I’m probably just collecting for some public charity in hell.”

“Can we serenade you with an epithalamium, as you go to marry Death?” asked one of the bearers, tucking in the shroud to make it cozy.

“Save your doggy breath. Go, go, on to the rest of your lives, you lot. It’s been a swell, mysterious mess of a life. Don’t mind me. I’ll blow the candles out before I lower my own lights.”

A year later when a sister ventured into the crypt to prepare for another burial, she came across the hem of Yackle’s shroud. She wept at the notion of death until Yackle sat up and said, “What, morning already? And I having those naughty dreams!” The maunt’s tears turned to screams, and she fled upstairs to start immediately upon a long and lively career as an alcoholic.

• 2 •

THE OTHER maunts gave no credit to the drunken gibberish of their cowardly novice. They assumed she had succumbed to panic at the threat of war. Immediate war, local war. You could smell it in the air, like laundry soap, or an ailment in the sewers.

From the occasional evacuee who stopped to water his horses, Sister Hospitality gleaned what news she could. She broke her vows of circumspection to share with her fellow maunts what she learned.

By late spring, the four divisions of Emerald City foot soldiers massed on the north bank of the Gillikin River had been joined by a fifth and a sixth. Conscription having thinned the countryside of its farmhands, General Cherrystone released teams of men to assist in harvesting first-growth olives and early kindle-oat. The army then requisitioned most of what it had gathered as its fee for helping out.

“Indeed,” whispered Sister Hospitality, “tavern owners are said to be bricking up the better ale behind false walls. Their wives eavesdrop on tipsy officers and gossip over conflicting rumors. No one is sure of anything. Is the army constructing an underground canal into Munchkinland, to leach the great lake of its water? Is a new weapon being perfected upriver that will make an invading army invincible? Or are these maneuvers merely war games to intimidate the Munchkinlanders into making concessions?”

Her confidantes shook their heads, dizzy with the intrigue of it, which seemed oddly like life in a mauntery except more so.

“The mood of the season,” hissed Sister Hospitality. “Pray for peace but hide your wallets and your wives, and send your children away if you can.”

The maunts were infected with this impulse even though they had no wallets, wives, or offspring to bother about.

Sister Hospitality, peering with relish through the peekhole in the porter’s lodge, allowed her mind to roam beyond what she could actually see, elaborating on the square of visible landscape with fond remembered notions of the wider world.

Despite armed conflict, fields of wheat will grow taller, she thought, the color of bleached linen. They will pull this way and that in the breezes. Sparrows will wheel at the sound of gunfire, horses rear and dig at the air, pigs dive under their troughs.

In households? Pots go without blacking, sheets without blueing, and water drops on goblets dry into the housemaid’s nightmare: poxy glass. Aprons go unironed. Upstairs grannies go unvisited. Shiny knives and spoons cloud with a mat of tarnish, as if hoping to hide in the coming gloom.

The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can’t remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.

Sister Hospitality paused in her reveries, not knowing if she was thinking her own thoughts or imagining some unknown crone’s. She slammed shut the small panel and returned to her chores.

In the garden, no one approached with a rake to pull away last year’s matted leaves. The tulips came up crippled. The bas-relief pagan goddess, sculpted into the western wall before unionism had commandeered this ancient temple site for a cloister, had grown a beard of winter moss: no one pulled it away. A useful disguise in time of war, maybe. Who could fuss over that?

Maybe the Unnamed God would grace them yet. Maybe the coming war would prove to be rumor, fear, nothing more.

The apple blossoms trembled and fell. No one gathered them.

The cats lost their chance to practice hunting, as even the mice had fled.

In the herb garden, a spiderweb grew on the sundial. No one swept it away. On bright days, laddered shadows crept across the oxidizing numerals, giving the numbered hours new accents, one by one, until the sun went down or the clouds came in. Any variety of darkness can silence a sundial.

Maybe there would be no armed conflict, the maunts commented encouragingly. But each maunt in her own way felt the curse of war’s inevitability.

Sister Laundry would no longer dry the sheets in the sun, for they looked like white flags of surrender and no one wanted soldiers garrisoned in the mauntery. Sister Hospitality began refusing shelter to wanderers through these isolated reaches, lest they turn out to be secret agents. Behind closed doors, Sister Apothecaire availed herself of a calming beverage usually reserved for those in medical distress. Sister Petty Cash had bad dreams. “The cost of war,” she murmured, her voice trailing off.

“We’ve no reason to fear either army,” insisted Sister Doctor, when the subject came due for an update at Council. “Three weeks ago, when the Munchkinland marauders swept by, making their inept preemptive strike into Loyal Oz, they didn’t stop to rape and plunder us as they passed. They hoped to wreak havoc on the Emperor’s forces massing to the west, but it appears the upstarts have managed only to wreak a spot of bother. Sisters, be sensible. Now the Munchkinlanders are in—what’s it called?—hot retreat. Fleeing for their lives. They’ll be too distracted to drop in for a refreshment while they’re being pushed back to their own borders. Lighten up.”

The maunts, pledged to obedience, tried to lighten up, though Sister Doctor’s customary brusqueness of diagnosis seemed, perhaps, inadequate to riddles of military strategy.

Still, the House of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, meant to be remote from worldly concerns, stood this month like a Gillikinese sycamore trying to camouflage itself in a Quadling rice paddy. An exceedingly prominent target. There was no other establishment in the district so capacious, so securable, so fitted with supplies. Most of the maunts felt it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, which army would knock at the doors? The home team or the rebel rabble? The well-trained Emerald City army forces or the Munchkinlander militia, that ad hoc volunteer swarm? Though the mauntery stood in Loyal Oz, the maunts, by dint of their spiritual allegiances, considered displays of patriotism inappropriate, if not gauche. Though they did wonder: Would either adversary show mercy to the self-quarantined isolates of a religious order?

“Of course they will,” argued Sister Doctor from the lectern. “We are the exemplars of mercy. We set the standard, and an army has no choice but to respect our standards.”

The maunts nodded, respectful but unconvinced. Men were beasts. Everyone knew that. It’s why most of the women had entered the mauntery in the first place.

Dinner conversation revolved around nothing but military operations. These days the women had to raise their voices to be heard above the sound of military skirmishes. Practice charges, they hoped. Trees were being felled for the construction of catapults: Who could think properly with all that racket? Who could pray—or, put another way, who could stop praying?

To add injury to insult, a projectile of flaming pitch and straw went astray and landed on the leads of the chapel, so the Council was burdened with the added annoyance of home repair. It was impossible to persuade skilled trade to venture behind the battle lines. Sister Hammer did what she could, but even so.

Nightly, from the bluestone bartizans, Sister Doctor reviewed the campfires of opposing forces as they shifted back and forth, west and east. A sally, a retreat: one could read the campaign from this height. Mutton for supper; one could smell the menu.

Blinking with encouragement, she reported that the Emerald City brigades looked set to push the Munchkinlander upstarts back to their borders and perhaps beyond, farther east, right into Munchkinland proper. Sister Apothecaire, a displaced Munchkin of the shorter sort, wasn’t able to suppress a bark of affront at this naked sympathy for the Throne. So Sister Doctor shut up about the rumor that the Emperor was going to use the Munchkinlanders’ misadventure as an excuse to invade and to capture the lake of Restwater, finally to sever dissident Munchkinland, the breadbasket of Oz, from its own water supply. Political pundits had long predicted this action: The Munchkinlander militias had cooked their own goose, but good. Done Loyal Oz a great service, they had, by ceding the moral high ground, handing their enemy a legitimate reason to retaliate. Very smart of them. The little morons.

“Remember to breathe,” advised Sister Doctor to her companions. “It is, after all, the secret of life.”

Obediently, the maunts breathed, if not much easier, and they sang songs of gratitude for having been spared—for those who had been spared, they took pains to remember.

They paid for their neutrality in baskets of apples, in buckets of water pulled from their well. They fed the professional Emerald City Messiars as fully as, three weeks earlier, they had fed the stumpy little Munchkinlander farmer-soldiers. They never stinted at feeding the hungry, as long as the portions could be lowered over the wall in a basket, as long as the hungry didn’t need spoon-feeding. There was a limit to everything: eggs, bandages, breath, even mercy. If the maunts beggared themselves, who would be left to offer even half a mercy?

When Sister Doctor and her lowly and disgruntled colleague, Sister Apothecaire, went forth to tend to the wounded, they left by a back door, and under cover of darkness.

• 3 •

SOME MILES south—away from the nickering of cavalry horses, the cloudy antiphons of the maunts—the nighttime sounds of Oz took on a more arbitrary rhythm. A breeze in the higher branches of trees. The percussive thunk of a frog objecting to his neighbors. Silky passage of water snake, chirr of midnight mosquito. Woodland Oz going about its nocturnal business. Adequate peace.

Safely buried in deep forest, the infallible Clock counted out the seconds of its life in waltzing ticks like hazelnuts dropping into a wooden bucket. Tik tik tok, tik tik tok.

The dwarf and his company of superstitious boys snored on. The Clock’s only female attendant, a woman of uncertain age, kept the night watch against reconnaissance scouts or beasts or light-fingered mendicants. She was still new to this troupe—and she owed them her life—so she did what she was told, picking up what information she could as it fell her way.

She’d learned that now and then, sometimes for years at a stretch, the Clock of the Time Dragon dropped out of sight. The acolytes of the Clock would shutter up the preposterous thing. They trusted in its own infernal charms to protect it. And maybe the boys were sensible enough to do so. Whenever the sergeant-at-hand called back the company—a few starry-eyed converts compensating for any no-shows—they apparently always found their treasure in working trim. Sometimes it would be overgrown with forest ivy or moss. Dead leaves, tendrils of cobweb. Perhaps a kind of natural camouflage the Clock called to itself. It didn’t matter. The handmade masterpiece snapped right back to business. The play of its gears remained deft, the tension in its belts and chains keen. Its mechanical advantage was said to have been augmented by a stubbornly adhesive magic.

The night watchwoman, a novice in service of the Clock, had asked the sergeant-at-hand their destination.

“We meander as whimsy dictates unless the Clock gives explicit advice,” he’d answered. “Whimsy is fate, too: just less knowable.”

“Did whimsy bring you to rescue me, Mr. Boss,” she asked, “or were you bound by advice?”

“That’s what they all want to know.” The sergeant-at-hand, a dwarf with regrettably sloppy habits of dental hygiene, leered his mustardy smile. “But it’s confidential, my darling, my dimple. Trade secrets indeedy.”

For five weeks the self-appointed acolytes had been pushing and dragging the towering Clock, which was mounted on a wheeled flatbed. They kept away from farmhouses, going overland through pastures and paddocks. If they had to pass through a small village, they waited till midnight.

The equipage rocked and lurched like a small ornate ship on stony seas. Above, the clockwork dragon supervised. How much of Oz those dull eyes had taken in. Oz rehearsing itself, rearranging itself decade after decade. Whimsy and fate, destiny and accident. The fall of the house of Ozma, the dirty years of the Wizard, the rise of impeccable Shell, holy Emperor of Oz. Fortunes, in any case: changeable fortunes converted into the changeless facts of biography by every passing tick of its mechanisms.

After the Clock had rescued her, its sergeant-at-hand had briefed the newest convert. “We pick our way with superior caution,” the dwarf told her. “Everything’s tinder-hot now and ready to conflagrate. We have our task. The Clock tells us so. Quietly, quickly, like mice stealing between the toes of battling manticores and basilisks, we inch forward as we’re told.”

“Imagine what it’s seen since we last brung it along to an audience,” one beardless boy said. “Imagine the stupefied Squirrel or idiot Monkey coming across this in the greenwood! Sitting all ’lone and full of itself, like a pagan temple! Without us to service it, you think our smoky friend here would rouse itself and deliver a pronouncement?”

“For a chattering Monkey? Get real. That ever happen, I’d like to see so! Fun for the Monkey who goes shrieking mad and he drop right out of his tree!”

The dwarf knew, but did not say, that in those quiescent periods in the forsaken outlands, creatures did creep up to sniff, to examine, even to climb over the peculiar heap of marvels. A dense woods is not off-limits to its own residents. And woodland creatures take notice of everything invading their territory, including fate.

Monkeys, venerable and caustic, lost no opportunity to chitter. Parrots, much given to expressing their opinions, gossiped in serrated squawks. Younger, more timid habitants approached in their own time. A garter snake and his sister. A raccoon with a tendency to morbid depression. The odd lion cub among them.

The newest vigil keeper didn’t worry so much about animals. Let them come up and sniff. It was men she avoided as best she could. So she liked this task of midnight watch. In company but still alone. The lads in a loose jumble of limbs, their wizened old sergeant-at-hand shifting in his creaking hammock. She could move around as she liked. It wasn’t that, if awake, this lot would plague her much. They knew better. But she enjoyed the privacy. To the veteran of prison, solitude can offer few unsavory surprises.

She removed her shawl and hung it on a branch, and with steps that whispered in the pine needles, she approached the water. A small cove of Restwater, Oz’s inland sea, made an intimate bathing chamber. Once out of sight of her sleeping companions—out of sight should they awaken, that is—she unfastened the clasps of her tunic and lifted it over her shoulders. Beneath, she wore a binding sheath, which she loosened and began to remove, folding it back upon itself as she exposed her stomach and then her breasts.

She wasn’t thinking of her breasts, still full and high, though the hormone-whipped lads often did. She was thinking of white paper and dark ink, and the difficulty and danger of scoring a page with lines of ink, to make it sing, if it could. If she could make it.

But if it sang, perhaps it would say something other than she intended. Perhaps it couldn’t help but say who she was, where she was, though she kept all things hidden that she could manage.

Books could seem to unleash all the hallelujahs of hell—she had known one that could, in her past; it was a volume of enchantments known as the Grimmerie—but even books that did not detonate into history, as the Grimmerie had, could still whisper their private secrets. And her appetite to write was countermanded by a dread of being read and recognized.

Her breasts, loosened from their cotton corset, itched; they rolled outward, toward her biceps. Absentmindedly she caressed first one and then the other with the back of her hand. Then she untucked the sash that secured her skirts. She hung the skirts on nearby branches, further curtaining herself from mortal eyes, should any be open.

Before she stepped into the still water, she ran the fingers of her right hand along the scar between her legs. This was not for pleasure—there was no pleasure left—but as a test of assurance that the seal had not been broken.

Solitude, continence, silence: custody of her own history; custody of any future that might have descended from her, squawking and looking to suck.

Satisfied. More than satisfied, relieved, she arched a foot to enter the water. But before she did, she saw in the flat green of the pond’s surface a reflection of a moon. At first she thought: Now there’s a surface safer to write upon than paper. The circular page of the moon in the water—words written in water are sure to wash away, and the moon itself no wiser.

Lowering herself to her haunches, preparing to bathe, she realized she was not entirely unobserved. She could see upon the water a curlicued sort of growth like a backward question mark. She knew it for the reflection of the head of the dragon to whose service she and the others were committed.

The dragon’s eye was red, red in the green water. Red, unblinking, unblinkered.

You, you can look all you want, she thought, but even so she slipped into the water hastily.

What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.

• 4 •

AT DAWN Sister Hospitality was summoned to the back door of the mauntery when the medical team returned, accompanied by a tall, stooped figure.

“We are not housing soldiers,” hissed Sister Hospitality. “You know I made that perfectly clear at Council, Sister Doctor.”

“Whatever this fellow is,” said Sister Doctor, “he is not a soldier.”

The chap was wearing a traveling cloak with a hood finished with bristles of greasy fur—or that is how Sister Hospitality saw it at first. When the visitor dropped the hood, she realized the fringe of fur was an unkempt mane, and the man in need of sanctuary was in fact a Lion.

Sister Hospitality snapped, “Who is this, then? What class and category of aberration? A deserter? A conscientious objector? A visitor from the press?”

“An emissary on a neutral mission,” replied Sister Doctor, removing galoshes caked with gore better left unidentified. “He is taking advantage of the safe passage here allowed by the forward front of the EC Messiars. And we welcome him, Sister Hospitality.” She spat out the name.

The Lion studied the floor as if expecting to be turfed out. An unlit cigar dangled in his mouth, a pad of paper projected from his vest pocket, and a pair of spectacles fitted with green-glass bifocal lenses hung on a chain from his velvet lapel. Sister Hospitality noticed some greying mane hairs stuck to the front of his cloak. His posture…well, it made Sister Hospitality square her own shoulders in a superior way.

“Brrr,” said the visitor.

“Let me fetch you a warming cocoa,” said Sister Hospitality, without much enthusiasm.

“No,” he replied, “cocoa disagrees with me. Brrr, I was introducing myself. Brrr, the name.” He handed over a card on which was scribbled an illegible note to himself. “Sorry, other side.” There it was: BRRR, three rs. COURT REPORTER TO THE EMERALD CITY MAGISTRATES.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire hung up their own robes—Sister Apothecaire using a lower hook. Sister Doctor stumped off in her stocking feet without further comment. Her diminutive associate blushed by way of apology. “Sister Doctor and I must enter our activities in the Log of the House,” said Sister Apothecaire to their guest. “Please excuse me, too. Sister Hospitality will see to your needs.” She left the Lion standing among the cleaning buckets, the barrels of cornmeal, the bins of dried beans.

Sister Hospitality went to hang the Lion’s traveling cloak in a clothes press. When a pocket twitched, Sister Hospitality recoiled with a shudder and she tried unsuccessfully to disguise her curse as a cough.

“Oh, my guard cat has scared you good,” said the Lion—almost approvingly, thought Sister Hospitality. “Nearly forgot about my little kitty-thingy. It’s been following me since Shiz. I must be the first Lion it ever saw, and it’s become smitten. Look at it, the little dollop.”

The cat may have been white once, but it was old enough for its fur to have thinned. “I never saw such a thing,” said Sister Hospitality. “It’s distinctly offensive. Creepy. Almost transparent. Male or female?”

“That much isn’t transparent, I’m afraid. Everything else is.”

“What ailment does it suffer from?”

“Cats don’t usually last as long as this one clearly has,” said Brrr. “That’s my guess. A cat gets old, its fur goes white, it dies. This one’s got some years on it, looks like, and if cat fur is white to start out with, how much paler can it go? Look.” He rubbed the cat’s arthritic spine, and a net of hairs came off on the pad of his paw. He held them out. Each hair looked like nothing so much as a thread of glass.

“Revolting,” said Sister Hospitality, charitably enough.

“Look, it hardly has a shadow,” said Brrr, and this was almost true; the morning light of the vestibule slanted through where the cat stood, stretching arthritically on the flagstones.

“What name does it answer to?”

“Have you ever known a cat to answer to anything?” said the Lion. “But I call it Shadowpuppet, for old as it is, it still enjoys the game of stalking prey.”

“If it’s as fragile as glass, it will be pleased to learn that our own mousers have recently fled,” said Sister Hospitality. “Cats can be so territorial. Present company excepted,” she continued, leading him up the stairs toward a receiving parlor.

“Oh, I’m territorial enough,” said the Lion. “Still, Shadowpuppet never leaves me, and I think I can scare off your convent cats if they come back.” He lifted Shadowpuppet, because the stairs were too steep, and Sister Hospitality would not pause even for a cat of advancing years.

“May I ask, what is a court reporter, Mr. Brrr?” Sister Hospitality pushed the drapes back to let in sunlight the color of old bandages.

“Sir Brrr, when I’m at home,” he corrected apologetically. “Title awarded by Lady Glinda herself, at the conclusion of that little Matter of Dorothy.”

“Beg pardon,” said Sister Hospitality, no tone of regret to stain her inflection.

“Not that I use it,” he hurried on. “The house has fallen on hard times. I do pickup secretarial work to make ends meet. Now, to business. I am dispatched by the Lord High Magistrate of the Emerald City to make enquiries of a member of your—tribe? Flock? Whatever it is a body of maunts calls itself. You know, like a swarm of bees, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls.”

“I’ve heard that lions consort together in a pride,” said Sister Hospitality.

“Those that let others join,” interjected Brrr. “Let’s not go there.”

“Call us a deference of maunts, if you must. And deferential, then, within reason, we’ll try to help. Do you know the name of the maunt you have come to ask about? Though we take new names as our obligations require, most of us remember what our original names were.”

The Lion steadied the spectacles on his nose. Dander flecked the lenses; no wonder he peered and blinked at the small notebook in his paw. “I can’t read my own writing. Jackal?”

“We have no Sister Jackal.”

“Sister Quackle? No, perhaps a C. Cackle?”

Sister Hospitality said carefully, “Oh, dear. I wonder if you could mean Yackle. She was laid to rest over a year ago.”

“Was she an oracle?”

“Sir Brrr. We are a convent of holy women. We don’t trade in prophecies. What would a seer be doing in a mauntery?”

“You haven’t answered my question. Was she an oracle?”

“I can’t possibly answer that question. I was not her confessor.”

“Who was?”

Sister Hospitality thought. “Actually, she didn’t have one. She wasn’t professed, I think.”

“Would someone here know if Yackle was an oracle?”

“The old Superior Maunt might have, but she’s gone too.”

“Holiday?”

“The Final Holiday.”

“Sheesh. Occupational hazard in this place?”

“Growing old? Yes.”

Brrr explained. A knotty little concern in the courts had prompted a senior magistrate to call for a finding. Brrr had been dispatched by order of the Stamp of the Emperor to pursue the matter in any direction. From a side pocket he produced a notarized writ of entry flecked with bits of bread crust. He flattened it with a paw. The legal penmanship crosshatched the vellum into illegibility. “This authorizes any enquiry I want to make, as it happens.”

“Are you bullying me, sir?”

“I don’t need to bully the likes of you,” he replied, tapping the paper. “This is the bully.”

“I haven’t the mind for this, nor the time,” said Sister Hospitality. “Nor am I the authority in the House; we are governed by a Council. But I can and must report to them what you say. Why don’t you tell me precisely what brings you here?”

“Highly secret and hush-hush.”

“I respect that. I’m Sister Hospitality, after all, not Sister Rumormonger. If hospitality requires confidentiality, I’m qualified.” She made a shushing gesture, tapping her forefinger against her pursed lips, then whispered, “I’m all ears.”

The Lion muttered to himself a little, weighing his options. Finally he allowed this much: He had recently spent a week in the Gillikinese city of Shiz, going through the deposit library of Shiz University. He had required to see the papers of a onetime governor of Crage Hall, long since departed into the Afterlife, rest her soul. A Madame Morrible. The frumpy little scholaresses at the desk had put up an argument, but he’d prevailed.

“And what did you find, pray tell?”

The Lion appeared to be governing a small temper, as if he thought Sister Hospitality’s curiosity unseemly. When he spoke, though, his tone was even enough. “Since you ask so nicely: Cryptic notes in what looked like the deceased headmistress’s hand identified a questionable personage known only as Yackle. An entity of some sort, but what sort? An agent of whom? If an oracle, was she a charlatan or a savant? And the way these investigations go, don’t you know, one thing has led to another. The Motherhouse of the order of Saint Glinda, in Saint Glinda’s Square in the Emerald City, had known a Mother Yackle but had sent her away for retirement. To a mission chapel, a benighted outpost in the Shale Shallows. And so, as they say in the pantomimes, ta-da!”

The white cat settled in a patch of sunlight and began to clean itself. It all but disappeared.

“I do so wish you’d come sooner,” said the maunt. “There’s a little thing called armed conflict going on locally.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You ought not to have bothered. There’s nothing I can do for you now. Whoever Yackle was—an ancient madwoman older than sin itself—she’s passed away, and to the best of my knowledge she was never an oracle anyway.”

“Think again!” said a voice at the door.

They turned.

“I knew you’d be here sooner or later,” said Yackle, “but it took me the better part of the season to get up the stairs. Glad I’m in time.”

The Lion, not knowing precisely what he was seeing, merely gaped. Sister Hospitality sloped to the floor with the clop of a collapsing ironing board. “You seem to have killed her,” said the Lion to the newcomer, affably enough.

“All those months that I couldn’t manage to kill myself, and I slay the righteous with my first remark?” said Yackle. “There’s gratitude for you.”

The Lion cocked out a sleeved elbow. She gripped it. He guided her to a chair. Her voluminous winding sheets were unstained by ordure or blood; they were merely dusty from having been trailed through the basements. He could detect no stink of corruption. “The odor of sanctity,” said Yackle peremptorily.

“You are an oracle,” said Brrr. “You’re the one I hoped to find.”

Shadowpuppet sniffed around the edges of Sister Hospitality, who came around and sat up. “You’re blind, not to mention dead, Mother Yackle,” sputtered the maunt. “How could you make your way upstairs?”

“My inner eyesight seems to have been improved with my little reprieve from the distractions of dailiness,” Yackle admitted. “I could remember every step taken to cart me downstairs, and how high the door handle was, and so on.”

“No time like the present,” said the Lion, extracting from another pocket a pen and a small pot of ink with a cork stopper. “The tides of war go backward as well as forward, and some army might wash up here by teatime. I’d never be able to concentrate if there were men ballyhooing about. Distractible that way, but there you are.”

“You have no business leaving your bier and barging in here as if this is some sort of a—a saloon,” insisted Sister Hospitality in a honking voice, but they banished her and set to the task.

• 5 •

HE DIDN’T like the look of Mother Yackle. Who could? She was a walking cadaver. Her eyes rolled, ungovernable but to the spectacle of her inner sight. Her lips were thin as string. Her nails had kept growing while she was interred, and they made a clacking sound like a set of bamboo blinds being lowered against the noonday sun. When she went to scratch a place on her scalp, she misjudged the angle of approach and nearly punctured her own eardrum.

It’s been a long time since I have seen Death this close up, he thought. This is Death refusing to die. She’s a centerfold for a mortuary quarterly.

“I was quite a looker in my time,” she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know that she must be hideous?

“Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”

“A comedian,” she observed. “I come back from the very gates of death to be interviewed by a vaudeville wannabe.”

“Let’s get started.” He flipped open his notebook. At the top of the page he wrote a note to himself: Interview One. Don’t vomit.

She paused so long that Brrr thought perhaps she’d expired. My timing, he thought. Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

But then she exhaled again. “What do you want from me, kind sir?” Her vowels were lengthy, as if she intended to wring out of her words every drop of nuance they might supply.

“I’m conducting an investigation,” he said. “Official business. Consider the codes quoted and the documents flashed at you. You’re blind, you can’t read them anyway, so take it on faith. We don’t have a lot of time. I’m chatting up anyone who had anything to do with a Madame Morrible. Your name has come up.”

“That’s no answer,” she said. “My name comes up everywhere if you dig deep enough. I want to know why Madame Morrible’s archives are being combed. Why are you bothering?”

“The Courts are building some kind of case, and I’m preparing a background paper.”

“A court case with Madame Morrible as a lead witness? I knew she was talented, but if she can give sworn testimony from beyond the grave, she has better connections than I thought.”

He snorted at this, and while his guard was let down, she jabbed at him, “Or are you sniffing around here for the young fellow named Liir? Last I heard, he’d disappeared into the lawless lands.”

The Lion started but hoped she hadn’t picked up on it. Once in his regrettable past he personally had known someone named Liir, a ragamuffin boy who had lived out west with the famous Witch. But Brrr would keep his own counsel. He sang softly in a lullabye voice, “I need to take your deposition, good granny. Don’t you worry your tired noggin over poor little me.”

“I needn’t answer you merely because you ask,” she said. “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’ Isn’t that what the old bastard, our dearly departed Wizard, used to say?”

He hadn’t figured on her sass. “Perhaps you’ve been comatose through the current troubles. Oz has an Emperor now. One with an iron will, as it happens.”

“Threats don’t work on the chronically dead,” she replied, “which is close enough to what I am to make no difference. So try again, mister. You tell me something about yourself first. I want to know who I’m talking to before I decide. And what you’re really after. And for whom you’re working. And what immunity from prosecution I might be afforded. My testimonial privileges. Then we’ll see if I feel like rewarding you by answering your questions.”

He took a breath in. “And don’t lie to me,” she continued. “I can be vexed when I find I have been lied to.”

Where to start? Always the question. “Well, for one thing, I am a gentleman sporting a very fabulous weskit,” he said, partly mocking, and to see just how blind she was. But he regretted the gambit at once. If she leaned forward to feel his vest, she’d rip it to shreds with her nails, and it wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, actually. Secondhand, if not fourth-hand.

“Not a spot of mange?” she asked. Did she know he was a Lion, not a man?

“I’m not talking about my own hide. I mean I’m decked out in a gentleman’s item. A bespoke article. It swims on me a bit, since I’m leaner than I once was, but it’s a Rampini original. Teck-fur detailing, with a kind of red highlight. Can you see color?”

“No, but I can smell it,” she said. “Yellow, yellow, yellow.”

The cozy old invalid was sneering at him. He unsheathed his claws, just for a moment. Let her droopy ears catch the release of each horny talon from its velvet socket.

“A shame to start off on the wrong foot, don’t you agree?” he said. Plaintively, almost a miaow, to the castanet shuffle of his claws sliding against one another.

She heard his feline assertion. “You are a Lion,” she said, and whispered theatrically: “the king of the forest, no less!”

She used just the perfect phrase designed to poke the embers of his childhood into flamed memory despite his resistance. The King of the Forest. He shuddered involuntarily, hoping she couldn’t hear his jowls jiggle.

She pressed her advantage. “I’m neither a judge nor a jury. I’m a witness. Tell me who you are, Sir Brrr, and how you got here. And tell me the truth. Then maybe I’ll comply. You weren’t already weaselly when you were young, were you? Even weasels aren’t very weaselly at first.”

With elegant steps, looking sore of paw, Shadowpuppet paced to the legs of Brrr’s chair and purred to be picked up. Brrr obliged. The cat calmed him down.

Taking this deposition would be one campaign he wouldn’t screw up. For the love of Ozma, wasn’t he the equal of this crazy old coot draped in a tablecloth? And he had his writ in hand, permission to take her into custody if need be. He would get the goods if they were to be gotten.

If it was to be cat and mouse here, he had the genetic qualifications to play the cat. He had the motivation. He had the might of the bloody Court to back him up, too, if need be. He would redeem his reputation among the great and the good of Oz, and he’d wipe the smirks off their goddamn faces with his own beribboned tail.

“You’re an oracle, I’m told,” he said. “You ought to be able to see my youth, if you want to.”

“I like to hear it told,” she replied. “I have an appetite for childhoods. Insatiable, as it happens.”

The Nursery in the Forest

• 1 •

THE PARTICULARITY of other folks’ youthful memories always mocked Brrr. The first visit to Grandmama’s! When the coconut fell on the teacher’s head! The time that baby Albern almost choked! How we laughed, how we cried. How we remember. Together.

His first and oldest past was undifferentiated. Unending forest. Unremarkable seasons. Loneliness without hope of relief. How could Brrr imagine relief from loneliness when he hadn’t found companionship yet? What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Brrr didn’t know if his mother had died in childbirth, or been stricken with amnesia. Or maybe she just lit out because she was an unnatural mother. A loner or a schizo. Or maybe she was drummed out of the pride for low behavior. He used to care which it was.

Though of course he didn’t take it in at the time, he also grew up without the benefit of a tribe of his own. No aunties to fill in the blanks about what his mother had been like, and where she had gone, and why. No growly father hiding a whiskered grin of affection even as he set to cuff his darling cub, raising him up right in the ways of the family.

His earliest memories—gluey hazes—involved skulking about the Great Gillikin Forest north of Shiz like—like a skunk, like a grite, like one of those creatures who can become repellent even to their own kind. Like a human.

In later years as an arriviste in the Emerald City—having sat through a number of poetry readings—he found a way to characterize the Great Gillikin Forest. After a second sherry he could wax most convincingly about shrouds of spiderwebs. The dank naves suggested by rows of diseased potterpine, slatted with bars of cold yellow light. The forest floor carpeted with thornberry prickle. The stupid fecundity of the spring, the swift and unrewarding summer, the gloomy autumn, and—oh hell—the bone-taxing winter. What damned Lioness would bother to deliver a cub just to abandon him there, of all benighted places?

People nodded politely as they inched away.

The trees creaked as if the whole world were constantly flexing its muscles, about to pounce. A fern could unfurl with a snap that knocked you six steps toward a sanitorium. Owls, bats, forest harpies, badgers. A wild turkey in the undergrowth, startled into flight, making a noise of small explosives. To say nothing of fog. He hated fog. And poison ivy. And don’t even mention snakes.

Or elves. Or any beast larger than a runtling pig.

The first humans he could remember coming upon were the mad Lurlinists. Brrr spied on them from behind screens of bracken. They dabbled in heathen rituals. Smoke and incense, singing in minor thirds. That sort of thing. He’d deduced language from them, language of a sort: an orotund pitch derived from religious prosody. Somewhat off-putting, as it turned out. It hadn’t helped him to act the part of an alley cat later on, when he’d wanted to flee into the demimonde.

But he had loved the contrapuntality of discussion even before he quite understood that words possessed dedicated meanings. Eavesdropping on two travelers arguing over which way to go: savory plum nectar to him, blanket and kisses and mother’s milk to him. The lilt of human voices in conversation, the nasal sonority, the fermata silences—he learned to hold himself very still in dappled shadows for the reward of it. Rhythm and tempo came first, vocabulary followed—but he never practiced, except to himself in secret bowers. As a young Cat he was still larger than a human, and if he spoke stupidly he might identify himself as nothing but a big lummox.

How had he survived his early years? He’d eaten nothing but forest turnips, shallots, the pinker of the edible fungus. He’d stalked human travelers and eavesdropped on their campfire chats to try to pick up anything that approximated street smarts, though he didn’t even know what streets were yet. Watching occasional romantic exercises in the firelight, he’d learned more. Not that he’d been able to put theory into practice very often. More’s the pity.

“Your childhood,” said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn’t chosen to retail at drinks parties.

Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

• 2 •

HE DIDN’T exchange a word with a mortal soul until he was nearly full grown, which for a Lion takes about three years. Therefore, he was slow to pick up on the concept of hunting, even though he’d heard it mentioned.

The memory stung still. He crossed his legs, as if the old witness sitting there in her death-linens could hear the vascular effort of his veins trying to retract his testicles. He smoothed the Rampini coat over the little loaf of his stomach.

Hunting…well, it was what he was doing now, too, wasn’t it? No handgun in his vest pocket, true. Just the privileges of the law, notarized by EC heavies.

He remembered the first time he’d heard the noise of rifle-shot. From far enough away, it had sounded like a distinct filament of thunder, a single flayed nerve of it. Brrr knew tree rodents to be smart; if they were careering away from the retort, there was good cause.

He lay low, in a kind of declivity—not a Lion’s usual response to aggression, but how was he to know? Before long a quartet of uniformed men came near. They pitched their tent, and lit their campfire, within a few yards of where he had dropped like a felled potterpine. It took the Lion a few moments to realize they were responsible for the portable thunder. The rifles leaned against one another, reeking still of burnt gunpowder.

He was afraid his body odor would give him away, or the rumbling of his stomach. The hunters were noisy from drink, though, and he had nothing much to fear from them except what he learned about hunting. They traded tales of knocking off deer, skinning and mounting ocelot, tanning the hide of elk, beheading lions and having their skulls stuffed with sawdust and their teeth waxed. And spheres of polished onyx inserted in the emptied eye sockets.

Brrr’s blood went slow, as if turning to gelatin. Even when the last hunter had nodded off, and the campfire collapsed into bright char and hiss, his whiskers never twitched. Were the hunters to sniff him out, stand over him and give him a head start at the count of ten, he wouldn’t have been able to move. The bombast of hunterly boasting had hexed his limbs into basalt.

The hunters woke before dawn. One of them all but pissed on Brrr, but the guy was sufficiently hungover not to notice. They kicked sand over their campfire and hoisted their rifles and packs, and crashed like rhinos away from Brrr’s sanctuary.

He resigned himself to living in hiding for the rest of his life: to remain a rogue, unattached and unnoticed. And safe. Though what kind of a life would that be? He remembered with the instant nostalgia of youth the Lurlinists singing their anthems, the rare hikers chatting over landmarks, the lovers twisting by firelight against each other, as if trying to relieve a fatal itch. The choice of renunciation he was making was gloriously disappointing and refreshingly sad.

It was his first adult decision and therefore almost immediately revoked. A few days later he stumbled—literally—across the inaugural test of his mettle.

Evening. Brrr had been on the lookout for a growth of sweet forest pumpkin, which he especially favored. He hadn’t seen the fellow on the ground, and he’d stepped right on him. The pressure of his paw had awakened the hunter out of a torpor of pain. “Help,” said the man. Brrr leaped back, as terrified as he was surprised.

It was the youngest of the four hunters, the least offensive, though no saint either, by the stench. The fellow’s leg had been all but snapped off in a trap of some kind. Flies were making a banquet of the pus.

“Open the trap,” begged the poor sod. “Let me free, or else eat me at once. I’ve been here days beyond telling.”

Surely it can’t be more than three days, thought Brrr, but he didn’t contradict.

“I can’t bear another night,” claimed the fellow.

“The very dark,” said the Lion. This didn’t seem enough, so he added, “Isn’t it very very fright-ful?” It was his first remark to anyone other than himself, so it was the first time he heard himself sound like a pantywaist. What was that all about?

“I beg you. Mercy, for the love of the Unnamed God.”

The Lion backed up, his rump high in the air, his whiskers a-twitter.

“Release me or do me in—one or the other,” said the man, and fell to moaning. “Kill me and you can chew this wretched leg off my torso at last.”

“Actually, I’m very vegetarian,” said the Lion, proud of the actually. Is this how conversation was supposed to go? Your turn.

The young man reached again, for what must have been the ten thousandth time, to try to open the trap by force, but the thing was built to hold. He hadn’t the strength by himself, and the trap wouldn’t yield.

“You pull that side and I’ll pull the other,” said the fellow. “Together we can open it. Then, maybe you could cart me to a settlement, or at least to a stream. I’ve been rotting here with nothing to drink but the dew I could lick off the vegetation.”

But the Lion found the teeth of the trap alarming. “That’s a very iron mouth,” he observed. “Far too very dangerous. Look what it’s done to you.”

“It’s sprung, it can’t spring again. Hunter’s traps don’t work like that.”

Brrr shook his head.

“You imbecile. You flathead. I’m begging you—”

“I can’t risk it. There are those who rely on me for support,” said the Lion, thinking: Myself, for one, and one is enough. “Besides, I haven’t those curving shrimplike fingers you have. I can’t just purr the thing off you, you know.” He was trying for a jocular tone, but it seemed to lack smack, and the hunter’s distress was, well, distressing. Brrr pawed about, keeping a fair enough berth, sniffing and tossing his mane. “So this is a hunter’s trap, and you’re a hunter. And I’ve just put the two concepts together. Aren’t you a little bit very ashamed of yourself?”

“I’ll give you anything. Every nickel florin I own. My father’s cottage—it’s freehold, no mortgage, running water, two fireplaces, stunning views.”

“A cottage among very human cottages?”

“Nicely done up. You wouldn’t even have to redecorate.”

“Cottages filled with the fathers of hunters? I don’t think so.”

The man fell back, stunned into silence, and then began to weep. Quietly, noxiously. The Lion was appalled and faintly offended. This wasn’t quite as much fun as he’d imagined. The human raised himself on an elbow and managed quaveringly to say, “You have a pride nearby—someone old enough to know how to show mercy to a stranger in your kingdom…”

“I’d go for help,” said the Lion, “but I’m afraid no one is very near.”

“Help is near enough. If not from your clan, then from mine. I just got separated from my pals. Not long ago, really. They probably only made it back to the base camp by now. And look, in case the base camp has pulled up stakes, there’s a small cadre of the Wizard’s forces stationed at Tenniken. I’m one of their number—hunting with my mates on behalf of the regiment. They’re loyal to the Wizard of Oz! They will come for me if you tell them where I am. Soldiers don’t abandon their own.”

“A soldier-hunter.” A new concept. “A lesson for us all,” said the Lion cautiously. “Wish I’d had a soldier for a mother, then. Loyalty to the pack: what a thought.” But that was rumination, not conversation. He tried again. “Have you enjoyed visiting this very neck of the woods?”

“Are you tormenting me?” The lad—he was hardly more than that—sat up as far as he could. “Am I hallucinating all this? Kill me or save me, as you wish, but for the love of the Unnamed God, do it soon. I’m all alone.”

It was this last remark that moved the Lion to pity, or pity of a sort. He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.

He padded forward and put his big head down on the man’s chest. The man swooned in fear or disbelief, whereupon the scattershot snare in his chest slowed to a more stately thud.

The Lion considered creeping off. The whole thing was so embarrassing. Yet he remembered conversations usually concluding with “Good night” or “So long” or at least “Piss off.” He didn’t want to be rude and leave without the correct valediction.

He wrinkled his nostrils and sorted out the ribbons of odor. The pheromones of panic and anxiety (the young soldier’s and the young Lion’s, both). The salty sting of male sweat, and the cinnamony reek of human feces. Dried urine (faintly aphrodisiacal), dried blood (an astringent to the curled outer segments of Brrr’s olfactory fissures). And mold, but not common leaf mold. This was mold on parchment that had been sized with bleaching.

Brrr had few words for those apprehensions, which were nonetheless tantalizingly distinct. He followed his nose and discovered a satchel of four books. They were dropped a few yards beyond the trap. He picked them up in his mouth and brought them forward to the soldier. He smelled the ferrous note of the belt buckle and then its complement, the tooth-sting of processed tin. The soldier wore a medal on his chest. Even in forest gloom the shine on it was enthralling.

The Lion fell in love. He sat down with front paws laid out together, like a sphinx, until the felled hero began to stir.

“I brought you your books,” said Brrr.

“Oh. I hoped you were a dream,” murmured the soldier, which Brrr first took to be a compliment.

“I thought you’d want them.” He walked the parcel over to the soldier and he didn’t mean to drop it on his head. “Whoops. Sorry.”

“They’re not mine, you monster,” complained the young man. “They’re for you.”

“I have no learning,” said the Lion, “or I’d be happy to read aloud to you to pass the time.”

“You mock me for someone else’s crimes. Lion, I throw myself on your mercy.”

“What can I do for you?”

“What do you think? I don’t want you to return these books to the library!” yelled the soldier. “I want help! Go for help, you cretinous beast!” He was quite pretty, weeping.

“Wait here. I’ll bring you some water to drink.”

“I’m not going anywhere, ’cept to the breast of Lurlina if you don’t hurry.” The soldier ran his fingers over his shaven scalp. “I wish the bugs would wait until I was fully dead.”

The Lion returned. It was hard to balance water in a scooped-out gourd, and most of it had spilled, but a few drops moistened the soldier’s parched lips.

“Since you can’t wrench this iron mouth off my leg, please go get my comrades,” said the soldier. “If they’ve given up on finding me, they’ll reconnoiter at the barracks in Tenniken. Tell them that Jemmsy sent you. They won’t forget their Jemmsy. I’m their favorite. I’m like their little brother.”

“Jemmsy, is it? Jemmsy, I can’t have anything to do with soldiers! Soldiers and their campaigns, Jemmsy. Really.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” said Jemmsy. “Everyone sleeps with the soldiers, in the long run.”

“If I’m not mistaken, Jemmsy, you were among that troop a few nights ago, Jemmsy, boasting about bagging pussy and all that? Weren’t you, Jemmsy?”

“You totally don’t get it. But this is my punishment? To be lectured to death by a talking Lion?”

It was at this remark that Brrr first surmised that not all Lions could speak.

“You’re raving, perhaps from starvation,” said Brrr. “Jemmsy, let me find you some food at least.” He lit out in the direction of Tenniken, in the direction that the fallen man suggested, and when he came across a slope of ripe strawberries he picked several quarts with his mouth and brought them back, delivering them one by one with a roll of his tongue.

The water had revived the soldier enough to be more aware of his pain. “Don’t stop to feed me,” he groaned, cramming the fruit in his mouth. “Don’t come back with a salad course. Just get my mates. Get me some fucking help. Don’t I merit that much mercy?”

“I can’t actually tell. What’s your medal for, Jemmsy?”

“Courage in the line of fire.” Jemmsy began to bite his nails.

“And why do you wear it, Jemmsy?”

“To give myself courage.”

The circularity of this was beyond Brrr.

“You want it? The medal? Take it. I don’t deserve it anymore, anyway. Going to pieces like this.” He unpinned it from his jacket. “You can fix it to the belt lashing those books together, and wear it around your mighty thigh.”

Brrr had to keep from stealing a look to see if his thigh was all that mighty. “I haven’t earned it,” he said. “Jemmsy.”

“It will be your passport in Tenniken. No one will harm you if you come in aid of a soldier of the Wizard’s army. If you deliver the news of my incapacity to my brothers-at-arms, they won’t forsake me. Soldiers take care of their own. Low ranking though I am.”

Brrr came forward and accepted the token by opening his mouth and gumming Jemmsy’s hand almost up to the elbow. It tasted lettucy, watery, unwashed. The hand was limp on Brrr’s tongue, and for a moment neither of them moved.

Then, extruding the hand through closed lips, and ejecting the badge onto the pile of books, Brrr said softly, “Pin it there on the belt, as you suggested. When I go, I’ll take the books with me, too.”

“Bless you,” replied Jemmsy. “If I were not to survive, would you tell my fellows to remind my father I loved him until the end? And forgive me my crimes against you and your kind.”

“I have no kind,” said Lion. “But okay, sure. If it’ll make you happy. What crimes might those be, Jemmsy?”

But Jemmsy had rolled over on his side, and he put the saliva-wet hand into his groin and drew his knees up, as far as the trap would allow. He didn’t speak again.

Gratitude, thought the Lion. He gripped the satchel belt in his mouth and left. He found, though, that the farther away he got, the less he could be confident of the small association that had sprouted between him and Jemmsy. Did a conversation constitute a friendship? If so, this was his first friendship, and he wasn’t sure how fragile it might prove to be. How could he abandon the fellow, just like that? What if Jemmsy fell asleep and had a bad dream, and cried out, as the Lion had so often done?

He circled back, then, but by old habit he settled out of sight in a shadowy clot of fallen and rotting tree limbs. He watched his friend sleep, and struggle against the trap, and grow still. Brrr reviewed the matter as best he could, inventing rhetorical forensics from the ground up.

On the one hand, Jemmsy and his companions had set that very trap. Or things like it. They were hunting him, or his kind. His kind. Right? Right? So now the soldier had him. Jemmsy had caught himself a Lion, just perhaps not in the way he had intended.

On the other hand, maybe experience—of any sort—was only valid if it caused you to redefine your terms. Courage, for instance. The courage to go versus the courage to stay? Which was more very couragey?

Any decision he made, Brrr realized, would affect his friend’s future one way or the other.

His heart burned with affection when, in a fever, the man called out, “Lion. Friend Lion! Have you forsaken me?”

It’s good that I am in your heart to give you hope, thought the Lion, hope unto death. He lay as close to the soldier as he dared, to keep the man warm at night until there was nothing left of him to warm. Even when Jemmsy died, and the smell grew worse, the Lion hated to leave the body.

“Now I’ll go for help,” he said to the carcass. “You’ve been very patient.”

Jemmsy didn’t reply.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” said Brrr, but his tone sounded off and he closed his mouth.

My first conversation, he thought, and his bound had a new spring to it. He was nearly giddy. Of course, the finish had been awkward—death is a real stifler of repartee—but on the whole he thought it had gone rather well.

A conversation and a friend. Jemmsy had called out “Friend Lion!” So the friendship had been short-lived but real; now that it was dead, it couldn’t be revoked. It was preserved inviolable in his heart. And the medal shone like a portable compliment. The medal advertised Brrr’s own courage as he headed to Tenniken to keep his promise. He would deliver the news of the fallen Jemmsy to those grieving companions-at-arms. And through them the news could go on to Jemmsy’s father, that puzzle of a creature, for being capable of abandoning his son to the care of the army.

“THE HEART OF a Lion,” murmured Yackle, almost purring herself. Brrr resisted the temptation to imagine she was being snide, but he couldn’t resist the domino-patter of memories, one after another, that had concluded his childhood. The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

• 3 •

SO THE next memory toppled forward, a tremor following upon a tremor. Jemmsy. His body seeping into the ground like a pudding at room temperature. How long had it been since Brrr had thought of Jemmsy? The scab torn off, after all this time; a smell of earth leaching from that opened wound. The smell of those childhood woods from as far back as his mind could pick its way.

When was his unspoken pledge to Jemmsy hijacked by ambition? How soon was his hope to deliver the news of Jemmsy’s death superseded by his hunger for the reward of gratitude? Or had it not happened as baldly as all that?

He couldn’t now remember. Only the terror and giddy release at having a destination at all. Tenniken. Tenniken, a garrison town, and nearby, a soldier’s grieving father. A brick hearthside where Brrr might curl up like a house cat, like a surrogate son, purring, domesticated, basking in the warmth of approval.

He felt perverse and new, flayed by raw luck. For the first time, he felt naked. He felt he could outrun his timidity just by doing the job right.

Getting to Tenniken. Returning Jemmsy’s medal of honor. Exchanging the tin ikon for the real thing: a sensation of righteous bravery he could own for himself.

It was going to take a while, though. He had to venture beyond the paced edges of his territory. Like all creatures who mark their boundaries, he could tell when he passed into the treacherous unknown. The musk of the undergrowth seemed foreboding.

The pictures in his mind grew more lovely, perhaps to distract him from the fear of being afraid. The cozy garrison settlement, and a place to eat. With any luck it would be a beer garden. Flowers, stripped of their nettles and thorns, madly fomented in pots set on window ledges and stoops. Candy-colored birds in silver cages, birds who didn’t threaten like forest vultures with those nerve-jangling cries, but who actually sang. On pitch. And trilling maidens at the town well, picking up the melody and embellishing it. That sort of thing.

It would have been hard to say just how this picture came into his head. It must have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of things he had heard in the woods, long before he could understand them. Though what a pretty picture! The maidens with their scuttles and pails, and every cobblestone glistening, and every windowsill laden with fresh fruit pies cooling, and every housewife generous with her pies, and every schoolchild blithe and gay. And every father appreciative, especially Jemmsy’s father. Brrr could hardly wait to get there.

He rehearsed these visions to put himself to sleep at night, troubled upon a bed of foreign moss.

He’d gone six days or more, practicing conversational gambits aloud—“Hello, I’m very new in town”—“Hello, are you very in need of a new friend, one with prior experience?”—when he crossed through a thicket to the edge of a blueberry patch. The fruit hung heavy, cobalt and black and pink, and a small creature, perhaps the size of a human cub, was driving its snout through the offerings.

Brrr couldn’t help himself. “You must be very brave out here all alone in the woods,” he began. The cub froze and turned an eye like a blueberry upon the Lion. Brrr straightened his shoulders and tossed his head to aerate his mane into magnificence, whereupon the cub fell to the ground on its back, its small stained paws cupped below its furry chin.

“Sweet Lurlina,” said Brrr, “I’m slaying them right and left with my conversational wit.” He went up to look closely. The cub wasn’t dead, but shamming: Brrr could see it shaking like a butterfly in a draft. “What are you doing? I won’t hurt you.”

“Just my luck,” said the Bear cub, for that’s what he had turned out to be. “I break the rules and go off on my own, and the King of the Forest arrives to devour me.”

Brrr almost turned around to see the King approaching. “You don’t mean me? How very droll. Get up, I won’t hurt you. Rise. Why are you lying there as if you’ve had a very cardiac episode? It’s unsettling.”

The Bear cub sat up. “If you insist. You promise you won’t hurt me?”

“I’m very promising. Why did you collapse like that? Do I look like a hunter to you?” Brrr was more curious than offended.

“It’s what you do if you’re facing long odds,” said the Bear. “You play meek and helpless in front of a sterner foe, and that kick-starts a sense of noble mercy in them. That’s the theory anyway. I never had need to practice it before, but it seems to have worked. My name is Cubbins.”

His placid delivery sounded mature, though his voice strayed trebleward. Brrr replied hopefully, “Lost and alone and very abandoned by your clan?”

“Just taking a break from the endless hilarity of it all. They’re downslope a ways at the stream’s edge. You’re not here to scatter us to kingdom come?”

“Hardly. I need some directions.”

“The King of Beasts needs directions?”

“Will you stop with that?” said Brrr. “I’m not even a very local celebrity. Just passing through and minding my own very business.”

“Well, with that medal and all,” said Cubbins. “You look official. Is that why you say very so very often?”

Young as he was, he was ribbing the Lion. “Take me to your leader,” said Brrr, exerting very control. “Please.”

“Such as she is,” said Cubbins obligingly. “Actually, I’m the boy-sheriff of our group, but since you stumbled upon me and showed me mercy, I’ll oblige. Follow me.” The Bear cub led Brrr along a ridge and down a trail to the edge of a broad, shallow stream. “Look who found me when I was lost in the woods,” called out Cubbins.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” said the others. There were five or six of them, full grown: some burly companions at play and an aging old thing resting in kind of a shabby bath chair, half-in, half-out of a pool.

“Don’t mind them. They’ve spent the afternoon with a comb of fermented honey,” said Cubbins.

Brrr picked his passage on stones across the stream, taking care not to let the pads of his paws get damp.

“Oooh, a toady right from the git-go,” said one of the older Bears. “I oughta known it, a sissy missy, the way she goes mincing across those stones like she’s afraid of ruining her mother’s silk stockings.”

“Enough, Bruner O’Bruin,” said Cubbins. “This creature was kind to me.”

“What’s your name, Lord Lion?” asked Bruner O’Bruin.

“Brrr,” replied the Lion, shaking his mane, trying to make a theatrical shimmer out of word and name alike. “Who are you lot?”

“The last, best hope for Oz. Movers and shakers,” said Bruner O’Bruin mockingly. He got up and shimmied, his rump poking out. The others guffawed. Cubbins rolled his eyes and offered the Lion a sip of water from a battered iron ladle.

“We’re what remains of the court of Ursaless, the Queen of the North,” said Cubbins. “Fallen on hard times, but good at heart, I hope. That’s Ursaless over there.” He indicated the oldest one, who was getting up from her chair to stretch. She was immensely tall. Even at her apparent age, white whiskers and all, she towered over her companions. “Ursaless, say hello to our guest.”

The Queen had a ratty sort of coat, and no clothes to speak of but a tiara three sizes too small. A sash that read QUALITY LIQUORS AT INSANELY LOW PRICES rode from one shoulder to the opposite hip. She grimaced. Perhaps she was troubled by arthritis.

“Queen of the North?” asked Brrr.

“Queen of the Northern Bears,” Cubbins amended. “Not that there are many of us left in the wild. Our kin and cousins are easily seduced by the lure of human comforts—beds, running hot water, whist championships, you name it. Still, some of us hold on to the old folkways, and Ursaless is our leader.”

The Queen lumbered over on all fours. “The Lion comes to pay his respects,” she observed, looking him over through mild eyes. “It’s been some years since I’ve seen Lions in these parts.”

“You’ve seen a Lion around here before?” Brrr found a new reason for conversation: the examination of history. “How very marvelous! I’ve never met another Lion. Who was it? Where did they go? Did they happen to misplace a Lion cub, do you know? Did they look like me?”

“Don’t be tedious; I have no head for details,” said Ursaless. She examined her nails and frowned.

“Oh, but if you could remember a scrap!” he insisted. “A very scrap!”

She turned her head so only one eye rested on him. It looked cold. “Your Highness,” he added.

This relaxed her. “Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, what brings you to our encampment?”

“I’m headed for Tenniken,” he replied. “The human settlement, where I understand soldiers are stationed. Soldiers loyal to the Wizard of Oz.”

“Tenniken,” she repeated, hummingly. “Do we know Tenniken?”

“Tenniken’s not to be worth knowing,” said Bruner O’Bruin, “if we’re not there making it worth the while to know.” His voice was confident but he turned his head away as he spoke, as if not wanting to meet the Queen’s glance.

The Queen continued. “Caraway Coyle? Bungler MiGrory? Shaveen Brioyne? Anyone remember Tenniken?”

“There’s so much past,” said the one called Shaveen, a female who sat picking nits from her armpits. “I don’t think Tenniken was worth remembering, if we ever knew of it. Otherwise we’d remember it.”

“She’s right as usual, our Shaveen,” said the males. The concert of their agreement seemed to satisfy the Queen.

Ursaless turned back to the Lion. “We can’t help you in this, either, I’m afraid. Tenniken means nothing to us.”

“Didn’t we go on a scavengey romp there?” asked Cubbins. “I was only a mite of a thing last spring, but isn’t Tenniken where the train engine scared us, racing by?”

“Don’t listen to yourself,” said Ursaless fondly. “You’re too young to have learned to forget what isn’t needed. If we can’t corroborate your assertions, there can be no useful truth to them.” She cocked an eyebrow at Brrr. “Would you care for some honey?”

The Lion shook his head. Their lopsided version of conversation was unnerving, and he was losing the confidence he’d been struggling to maintain. “I’ll just help myself to another sip of water and be on my way, then.”

“What way is that?” asked Ursaless.

“I’m going to Tenniken.”

“Never heard of the place,” she stated firmly. “Any of you bruisers heard of Tenniken?”

“Not I,” said Caraway Coyle. Bungler MiGrory put his head in his paws and began to snore. Shaveen Brioyne said, “I think we talked about this once before, but maybe I’m thinking of someplace else. Or that we talked about something else.” She absentmindedly ate a nit. “I like to talk,” she said, almost to herself.

Ursaless turned back to the Lion and asked, “What’s your name?”

“I thought I’d mentioned it,” said the Lion. “It is Brrr.”

“That’s a nice name,” said Ursaless. “Brrr sounds like a Bear. Do you have Bears in your background?”

“I very much doubt it,” said Brrr. “I may be mocked by some for the way that I walk, but I believe I am very much Lion.”

“Why did your parents give you a name so like a Bear, then?”

“I had no parents,” he replied. “Unless you’ve remembered seeing any around here? A pride of Lions on a march of some sort?”

“Someone gave you a name, or did you name yourself?”

This question hadn’t occurred to him before. He hadn’t named himself—so where had his name come from? “I don’t remember that I had parents,” he replied.

“All Bears have parents,” said Ursaless. “Caraway, you have a father and a mother, don’t you?”

“You’re my mother. No?” Caraway sounded dubious. It was Ursaless’s turn to cough and change the subject; she couldn’t answer authoritatively.

“Were I you, I would find my parents and ask them why they named me something like a Bear.” Ursaless hurried on. “Then you can come back and tell us.”

“Though chances are we won’t recognize you,” said Shaveen.

“Except Cubbins,” said Ursaless fondly. “You will, won’t you, fondness?”

Cubbins turned his head so she couldn’t see him rolling his eyes at her.

“I can’t find my parents, I don’t even know who they are,” said Brrr. “For all I know, they’re dead. Besides, I am on my way to Tenniken. A human town to the south.”

“Oh. Humans. Hmmm. I’ve never been convinced they exist, humans.”

“Of course they do,” inserted Bruner O’Bruin. “That’s where all our cousins go when they can’t stand their cousins anymore.”

“They go to be humans?”

“No. They go to human places.”

“Like Tenniken,” said the Lion, pushing it now, but unable to resist. “You know, Tenniken. The human settlement, where I understand soldiers are stationed. Soldiers loyal to the Wizard of Oz.”

“Oh,” offered Ursaless, attentive, “the great WOO.”

Cubbins intercepted that one for Brrr. “WOO. That’s what we call the Wizard of Oz. The Great and Wonderful WOO.”

“And if there is such a creature,” said Ursuless, “may he stay where he is and we stay where we are. Anyway, we’re not subjects of any Wizard. He doesn’t rule the Great Gillikin Forest.”

“Far from it,” said Caraway Coyle, belching.

“He’s never even been here,” said Shaveen.

“We’d tear him limb from limb, if he existed,” said Caraway Coyle. “Watch me do a three-quarter snarl. It’s so cool.” He obliged, looking suddenly like a hydro-encephalitic dog with a mosquito in its nose.

“I thought he was the Wizard of all Oz,” said Brrr, trying to bring them back to it.

“Anyone can name himself whatever he wants,” said Cubbins. “Wizard of Oz or WOO or the King of Beasts.”

“I know this much,” said Brrr. “He sends human soldiers into our forest.”

“A good reason to stay out of his way,” replied Cubbins. “Deep down, we wild Bears are unrepentant followers of Ozma, though she has been long disappeared from the public eye and is presumed dead. Still, we carry a torch for her. In her time, she was less hostile to beasts in the wild than the current administration is. May she come again. They say she will return to rescue Oz in its time of tribulation.”

“Who says?” asked Brrr.

“General prophecy. Common sense. I don’t know.”

“People who say it, say it,” barked Ursaless.

Cubbins continued. “Well, all I want to know is, what’s keeping her? It’s tribulating enough these days. Threat and panic everywhere you turn. We have to wait until it gets worse?”

“Listen to smartypants there. We never believed in Ozma,” said Ursaless. “I never did, so you never did either. I’m the Queen.”

“I don’t believe in you, so there,” said Shaveen, though when the Queen glared at her she pointed at Brrr.

“You have your hands full, governing this crew,” murmured Brrr.

“Well,” said Ursaless, “some say the brighter among us left for the human world. More possibilities for advancement, et cetera. Maybe they had more get-up-and-go. Personally, I think it takes character to stay here and hold down a court. Maintain a presence in the ancestral wild. The forest bucolic.” She made it sound like a paradise, the pestering flies, the drunken circularities repeated by an inbred family. “Anyway, when we bother to believe in her, we wait for the return of Ozma. No good comes of commerce with humans. Mark my words, you Lion.”

“But do they come back? Your cousins in the human world?”

“Cubbins, can you help our guest? I’m growing weary of giving an audience.” She let loose a flagrantly stagy yawn, and returned to the dollop of honey dripping off a wedge of comb the size of a small boulder.

Cubbins nodded to the others and jerked his head to the Lion: this way, friend. The Lion followed him, trying hard not to waggle his rump. As he passed, though, the Bears made remarks under their breath.

“Captivating family you have here,” said Brrr, when they were far enough away to avoid being overheard.

“Go easy on them,” said Cubbins. “They can’t really help it. It’s what happens to us Bears.”

“You go loopy on honey?”

“I don’t think the honey has much to do with it,” said Cubbins, “though I can’t really be sure. I don’t care for fortified honey yet, so I don’t partake. Still, I’ve observed that a taste for the stuff develops as Bears mature. In any case, I suspect it’s just that we don’t have much of a race memory, that’s all. Bears are creatures in the present. Any Bear who finds that the present just isn’t enough, well, that Bear strikes out for the human world—the Tenniken of which you speak, or other parts. Maybe they want to see if they can acclimate themselves to a weight of memory under which humans live and are pinned. I have no idea if they manage, for they never come back. Maybe the WOO gets them. Who knows?”

Perhaps that was what happened to Brrr’s parents. Maybe they entered the world of humans. But he didn’t want to talk about it to Cubbins: all this curiosity was a new thing. Likely born of hearing how lovingly his friend Jemmsy had remembered his own father as he lay dying. For the first time Brrr tried the gambit of changing the subject. “How did you come to be sheriff?”

“I’m just the youngest. The youngest is always everything important, except the Queen, of course. I’m the sheriff, and the bursar, and the accounts receivable department, and the chaplain and the social affairs committee and the historian. As soon as someone accidentally has another cub, I will yield my place to him or her. The youngest is in charge around here. We forget as we grow. Or did I already say that? It worries me when I repeat myself accidentally.”

“You’re fine,” said Brrr.

“You haven’t said why you’re leaving the wild for a human settlement.”

Brrr didn’t want to speak yet about Jemmsy. It was his secret. His mistake, maybe, or maybe the key to his own rare and beautiful future. In any case, he wasn’t sure if he wanted Cubbins coming along. Cubbins was a lot more adorable than Brrr. Cubbins might move into the cottage of Jemmsy’s father while Brrr was kept on a leash in the yard.

“I have some books to return to a library. For a friend,” he said, becking his head at the leather-bound stack of them.

“Books!” said Cubbins. “What are you doing with books in the Great Gillikin Forest, for crying out loud?”

“Returning them. As I said.”

“But where’d you get them?” Cubbins was riven with book-lust. “Let me see, may I? Three Treatises on the Liberty of Speaking Beasts. What’s that one with the faded gilt—Ozma Incognita. Oh, my. A trove. And chosen to appeal to the likes of us.”

“Well, don’t get your grubby paws all over them. They’re not mine to loan.”

“What’s this silvery emblem?”

“A medal,” said Brrr. In a softer voice, with a tone of hesitation, as if nearly too modest to continue: “A commendation for bravery, as it happens.”

“I’d never have guessed it,” said Cubbins, piercingly earnest, though his eyes were still on the books.

“If you don’t mind, I have a schedule to keep,” said the Lion. “It’s a busy life, mine. As I’m learning. Now, can you set me on any sort of a path that would be useful, do you think?”

“The Tenniken that we Bears have never visited and don’t believe in lies south by southwest,” Cubbins said without sarcasm. “The only way I can tell you for sure brings you uncomfortably close to Cloud Swamp. Though maybe you wouldn’t mind that the way we Bears do.”

“I never heard of the place.”

“Cloud Swamp? Oh, it’s a soupy section of the woods. A wetlands, I suppose you’d call it. Not all that far from here, most of the time, though it has a weird tendency to be migratory. Imagine not knowing about Cloud Swamp.”

“I had no parents to tell me about it,” said Brrr dryly.

“Well, it’s the haunt of the Ozmists.”

“Ozmists. Who are they? Secret defenders of the deposed line of Ozma that I’m learning about?”

“Good guess. But no. Ozmists are—well, for lack of a better term, I guess you’d call them ghosts. Or particles of ghosts.”

“Migratory ghosts.” Brrr tried to keep his voice level. “Ghosts ancient or modern?”

“I don’t know. We Bears avoid Cloud Swamp most of the time. Perhaps we give up our pasts, as you have seen, whether we like it or not. But ghosts—wow. Ghosts are nothing but pasts. Look, if your parents are dead, you might find one or both of their Ozmists in Cloud Swamp, and at least learn why they called you Brrr. And maybe why they went and died on you, and so forth.”

“I never said my parents were dead.”

“No, you didn’t, but where are they, then? Living the high life among other talking Animals and humans in the wonderful welter of Oz?”

“If they are ghosts—well—can ghosts hurt?”

“You mean, can they hurt you? I doubt it,” replied Cubbins. “They’re just notions, aren’t they? Dissolving shrouds of an individual? Still, to be fair, don’t take my word on it: For all I know, it’s ghosts who have spooked us Bears into being so forgetful. We can never remember if we ever accidentally ventured into Cloud Swamp. I only know we haven’t been there since I’ve been in charge. That’s all I’m sure of.”

Brrr wasn’t sure he relished the idea of meeting the nub of an idea without its mortal husk, though he couldn’t think how to say this.

Cubbins shrugged. “Just a thought. Maybe you don’t want to know if your parents are dead or not. If it doesn’t appeal to you, head on past. You’ll find your Tenniken. To the south, more or less. But I don’t know where it is exactly. Someone else will have to tell you.”

“Too bad,” said the Lion. “If you’d had better information, I might have paid you with one of these books.”

Cubbins looked disappointed, but he spoke with characteristic brio. “It’s okay. Anything I might read I would only forget sooner or later.”

“It must be hard to be the only Bear with a brain,” said Brrr.

“I’d love to come with you. But someone has to keep this passel of friends on the straight and narrow. If I didn’t remind them, they’d forget the answer to the tired rhetorical gibe, Does a Bear shit in the woods?”

Brrr didn’t want to share with Cubbins any final glory he might achieve in Tenniken, but on the other hand, if Brrr were accidentally to meet up with the Ozmists he intended to avoid, company in the form of a little Bear sheriff would be welcome. “If you walked away from here, your family would forget you in a minute,” said the Lion. “What kind of a loss is that? Don’t sacrifice yourself to them. They won’t even notice.”

“I get something out of this,” said Cubbins. “It doesn’t hurt to have a family, you know, even a troubled one. At least I know where I am. What are you looking for in Tenniken, anyway? You think your parents went there?”

Brrr snapped his mane. “It’s my own business,” he said.

“You really should start at Cloud Swamp and find out what you can, you know. It might help you narrow your search. Why spend time hunting for forebears if they’re dead?”

“Thanks,” said Brrr, “but no thanks.” Then he gave up his airy attitude. “Truth to tell, without a companion, I don’t dare venture into anyplace called Cloud Swamp.”

“Cloud Swamp? What’s that?” asked Cubbins, but when the Lion shot him a look, the cub’s eyes were twinkling in mischief. “You better get along now. My family party here is agreeable, but they can be disagreeable, too, and the mood can shift in an instant. Better make your way before they get suspicious that you’re going to kidnap me or something. One thing they do know is that they’d be lost without their baby cub to give their lives what little meaning and history it still has.”

“And you went out hunting for blueberries on your own.”

“One misdemeanor a day is enough, I suppose.”

“It’s been a mighty pleasure,” said the Lion, and he meant it. He was sorry to leave Cubbins. “Good luck to you. If I ever make it into the human world, I will hope to run into you there someday, too. You deserve better than this.”

“Life is unpredictable,” said Cubbins. “I don’t imagine we’ll meet again, but who knows. I’ll look for a Lion with a sway in his swagger. Just kidding.”

“If I wanted to avoid Cloud Swamp, now,” said the Lion, “which way would I go?”

“From this point on the streambed, you may choose left or right. If you can just keep to the uplands, you’ll skirt it entirely,” said Cubbins. “Good luck to you, very Brrr.”

• 4 •

URSALESS, THE Queen of the Bears, had said it straight: Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying. Who knows when memory, unbidden, will burst out and take hostages? Clearly the question of Yackle’s had snapped some ancient chains Brrr had used against all this.

And this wash of recollections had become a slick along which Brrr careered, like it or not. Brrr’s recall of what had happened before seemed limited to apparent causes of what had happened next. The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

But his intention, starting out, had been to avoid Cloud Swamp. Hadn’t it? His curiosity about possibly meeting his spirit-ancestors was more than mitigated by the fear of coming across the ghost of Jemmsy. Wasn’t ready for that. Not until he had delivered the medal to Jemmsy’s father. Not until Brrr deserved his own personal medal for courage that a grateful pride of grieving soldiers might press upon him. Not till he could show his missing clan that he had survived on his own. Survived and triumphed. Cloud Swamp could wait until then.

Though wherever Tenniken might turn out to be, Brrr couldn’t seem to get there without tending downslope. Every path that he found leading upland reversed its grade, perversely, around the next stand of houndstooth hedge or outcropping of granite. Leaving the path also proved futile: he’d met an interlocked network of chalky cliffs, too sheer to climb. The chasms that he came across proved too wide to leap. And again with the houndstooth hedge.

Eventually, despite his hopes to avoid any lowlands, hunger drove him downhill, as in the moist gloom he could see knuckles of cobbleberry vine displaying their sweet green fruit like so much vulgar jewelry. Brrr fell on the treat avidly. The aftertaste of the cobbleberries was tart, reminding him that the berries were in second growth. The spring was moving on.

He became possessed by the notion that time might harbor a hunger of its own, a hunger it fed by gobbling up long strings of minutes, courses of hours, harvests of seasons one after the other. This notion, too, was probably born of watching those Bears in their eternal present, unaware of time passing, unaware of cobbleberry vines forcing out a last, tangy collation of the season.

A few moments later, Brrr wondered if perhaps the berries he’d gobbled down had begun to ferment. His usual gingerish footing became a bit heavier, even clumsy. His head grew dense, and a miasma of undecipherable impressions closed in on him like marsh gas. Not long thereafter he fell to his chin and rolled over onto his back, dozing with open eyes. The stars lifted their myriad eyes to watch him wince over the clenching of his intestines.

If the stars showed, it must be nighttime. No cloud of ancestors on the horizon to obliterate the constellations.

Very few forest creatures were out and about tonight at their nocturnal chores and hobbies. In fact, he could detect no motion but the papery rustling of wind in sedge-grass. No frog dove into the stagnant ditchwater. No mockingbird traced her alibis into the gloaming.

There weren’t even any mosquitoes, which was not only pleasant but impossible, especially in a swamp.

A swamp it certainly was; perhaps a rising one. The small hillock on which Brrr had settled seemed ringed by a steely salver of water—so calm that the constellations were reflected in it perfectly. You couldn’t make out the seam where the water ended and the sky began. It was more like being aloft among the heavenly bodies than adrift below them. The air was uncolored, characterless, neither sweet nor cold, neither clear nor moving.

Poison cobbleberries? Maybe, he thought, I have died, and so all life around me has died, too, for what proof have I that life should go on when I do not? After all, what kind of a life is it that is not pestered by insects? A perfect one, and since life is not perfect, this cannot be life.

With a sense of calm, or was it a paralysis, he realized the stars were moving toward him, very slowly, growing infinitesimally larger but no more distinct. At first he thought: Maybe these are the ghosts of trees that have rotted in Cloud Swamp, for that’s where I must be, like it or not.

Then it seemed like a host of shimmering midges in a corps de guerre. (Was this where all the insects had gone? Magnetically drawn to the hollow-in-life that a ghost colony might be, filling in the vacuum with the smallest fleck of indivisible yet visible living matter?)

Now they were airily shaping themselves into bouquets, like giant heads on tapering necks, like volutes of blossom on slowly spiraling stems. Nearing and nearing, possessed of both presence and distance.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Brrr, to himself or to them, or both. Hoping they might be offended and leave.

They began to circle about him. The nearer they drew, the more of a family feeling they took on. Was it because, once a creature became a ghost, it shirked off the differentiations of biological diversity and, uniqueness annihilated, became just shades of life? Footfalls of the past?

“I have the distinct feeling I’m not in Oz anymore,” said Brrr. Now he was speaking aloud to keep up his courage—such as it was.

The specters wreathed themselves around him. As they tightened the circle, their separate margins began to merge. Before he was swallowed up in a blancmange of foggy apparition, he gave out a thunderclap of a roar. It appeared to make no impression on the creatures, but he was glad he could still roar. It meant he wasn’t dead. Presumably.

“Excuse my volume; I have no self-control,” he said. Well, why not talk to the phantoms? He had meant to avoid Cloud Swamp at all costs, but opportunity was presenting itself. And conversation was his only skill.

“Begging pardon for the intrusion. Frightfully thoughtless of me,” he went on. “Is there a spokesperson among you who can answer a question or two? If you’ve time to spare?”

There was a sort of drumming in the air, as if a billion miniature throats were clearing themselves. Languidly the sound resolved, its pitch rising and consolidating toward a common note. But it died out, bearing no word for Brrr upon its pressured breath.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said more forcefully. “I am, in actual fact, the King of the Forest.”

No reply. The apparent lack of interest on the part of a congress of ghosts shamed Brrr. It also frightened him. Of course they would realize he was no kind of king at all. He organized his thoughts with more honesty.

“I didn’t come here to disturb your rest,” he stated. “Indeed, I hoped to pass without pestering you. Shall we just nod courteously and say ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Piss off’ or whatever’s appropriate and then breeze on our separate ways?”

The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.

“Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.

Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.

“I forgot to tell you that you need to offer a tribute if you want to speak with the ghosts,” said Cubbins.

Another little secret about conversation. How did folks learn to get on in this tricky verbal negotiation called chat? How much had it cost him to grow up without the banter of family life?

Still, Brrr was glad to see the boy sheriff. (Out on his own again, the little dickens!) Almost as glad as if Jemmsy himself had coalesced out of a matrix of midges, free of an iron snare, smiling a soft-cheeked hello at his final friend, allowing Brrr to grin back at his first. But Cubbins was decent company, and Brrr felt both enriched and a little traitorous to the memory of Jemmsy to like Cubbins, too, and so quickly.

He said, hiding his gratitude, “How do you know you need to offer the ghosts a gift if no one in your tribe believes in ghosts?”

“I asked Ursaless. She claims never to have seen the Ozmists, but she insists this is the way it’s done by long-standing custom.”

The Lion raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ask,” said Cubbins, sighing. “I don’t expect to follow her line of reasoning. I just listen and obey.”

“But you’re not allowed to go running off alone,” said Brrr. “Isn’t one disobedience a day enough?”

“You are brave enough to strike out on your own,” replied the cub. “And ten minutes after you left, no one could remember you had been there. So I realized you were right. What is there for me in the court of Ursaless?”

“They’re your family!”

“They’re not the whole world. I can always come back if I want.”

Brrr spoke cautiously. “What if you can’t find them? What if they have moved on?”

Cubbins laughed. “Move? That’s the whole point of the Northern Bears. They never move on. So I’m taking a cue from you…”

He put the comb of honey on a rock in the clearing. The midges swarmed nearer it. In the act of crowding together their apparition took on a more coherent aspect. Not a human face, perhaps not even a face at all, but something with an enriched identity.

“Are ghosts bugs?” whispered Brrr.

“Who knows? Next time you squash a roach, you might be doing in old Auntie Groyleen again. Or maybe bugs are the largest part of life without individual character, so they’re useful vessels for ghosts. I have a theory—”

All at once, words were spoken in the clearing. It was like the echo of a sound divorced from its original imprint. The Ozmists spoke in one voice.

Barter, said the chorus ominously.

“‘Barter’?” whispered Brrr. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Another word for chat, I think,” Cubbins replied. “I’m guessing they will tell you what you want if you tell them what they want.”

“Is this more advice from Ursaless?”

“Common sense. Which as you know doesn’t come from Ursaless. Shhh, let’s find out what they want.”

Brrr cleared his throat. “All right, then,” he started. “As long as you have granted me an audience, I would like to ask about the possible ghost of a Lion or Lioness who might have joined your, um, ranks. Or even a whole pride of Lions. Not just any spare Lions, but mine. My kin.”

When a certain velocity had been reached, the Ozmists trained their vibrations nearer to a common key, if not a single note. They managed to communicate a message in some fashion that was neither words nor music, quite. Still, the Lion and the Bear cub listened closely.

We note your query, they managed to communicate. By way of payment: You tell us first—Is the dreadful Wizard still on the throne of Oz?

“You should know more than I do,” said Brrr, playing for time. How embarrassing to be asked a question he couldn’t answer. “You’re ghosts, after all: you’re spirit and transcendence. I’m just plodding along with my nose to the ground here, wet behind the ears and a long way to go.”

We have no more experience of the future than the living do, they said, but their voices went out of keen registration, and it sounded like hundreds of voices intoning the same thought at once. W-w-w-e-e-e ha-v-v-ve n-n-n-o-o-o mor-r-r-r experienshchshe…

“And you hunger for future history,” said Brrr.

This day you live in today is the impossible future to us, said the Ozmists. Is the Wizard still squatting upon the throne? We crave to know the future.

“All well and good,” said Brrr, “and what I know, I will share gladly. I recently met some soldiers in the forest—one special soldier particularly—serving in the forces of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. So I can answer that much, if not more: The Wizard of Oz is on the throne of Oz. Do I get an answer in reply? Are fragments of my ancestors figured among your midst?”

The Ozmists glowed, small cyclings in place. We stir, we steep, we sift, we shift among ourselves for clues to your question, they said.

Brrr waited. They said no more.

“Are they taking inventory?” whispered Cubbins.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, tell me this, then,” went on Cubbins excitedly. “While you’re figuring out whether his parents are among you Ozmists, perhaps you can tell us about who is not there. Is the missing queen of Oz, Ozma, among your kind? Was she murdered in her infant cradle, as some have said? Or is her spirit still abroad in its human form?”

The Ozmists reared—twenty, thirty feet in the steamy air.

“Scratch that last question,” Brrr called in a loud voice. “Never mind. We’ll soldier on as we are. You are dismissed.” Hoping that he and Cubbins could be dismissed, too.

But the Ozmists replied, There is little time left—the act of our compressing into community unsettles the vapors. You ask the impertinent question all Bears ask, and you will pay the price. Ozma is not dead. But you bring us no news of our lost Oz—you break the contract. You will pay.

Cubbins’s small jaw dropped. “News!” he remembered. “News of the Northern Bears.” But he was young: nothing in the life of the Bears had changed since he could remember.

Brrr wanted to say, Lie to them, tell them anything! But he didn’t dare. The Ozmists were everywhere and could apprehend the faintest whisper.

“News,” said the Lion, trying by his tone to communicate an instruction to fabricate—another first—“Cubbins, give them, you know, the news. The newest news!”

Cubbins looked wildly about as if trying to see modern history in the making among the jeweled rash of phantoms. His eye fell on the stack of books that Brrr carried, and he grabbed the top one. “I have—to hand—the latest news—here!” He read the title: “Ozma Initiata: The Birth of the Throne Line.”

But even Brrr could tell this was history, not current events.

“Or…or…” Cubbins tore through a second book. “Animal Magic, or, The Secret Spell of Language.” He whipped pages filled with charts. “A grammar textbook. You know, language is always changing, they say: ever new. Refreshing itself—”

As if a compression of thunderclap had been unpacked, a low sound began from the center of the wheel. The Ozmists swayed their rotating mass laterally across the marshy ground, passing over and (it seemed) through the Lion and Cubbins until the Animals were in the center of the swarm and the noise became deafening.

Bear, if you don’t believe in keeping your bargain, we thrust you out before we make you one of us!

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said the Lion, trying to stand before the small cub—but the Ozmists were everywhere, and there was not enough Lion to encircle Cubbins. The sound of the Ozmists raked through them both, but Cubbins held his paws over his ears. Then the Ozmists disappeared into the rising vapors from a visible marshland. In their place rose curtains of brainless flies and midges, deterred for a moment by the honey but ready, Brrr guessed, to turn and attack them.

Cubbins was already scrabbling up the slope, which now seemed to permit it. With flummoxing of limb and tail, the Lion followed. Soon he’d overtaken the young Bear.

This is what it feels like to be a piece of shit, thought Brrr; being pummeled on all sides by the world, forced forward, outward, into naked stink and light. But he and Cubbins danced as they ran, a sense of relief and escape energizing them. They avoided the steam of salt geysers that were sprouting up through invisible fissures, but they couldn’t avoid the hot rain that pelted down.

His eyes closed against the sting, Brrr smacked into boulders and tree trunks and clawed his way through brambly growth. By the time they emerged from Cloud Swamp, day was dawning in the teeth of an ordinary rainstorm.

“What did we get from that exercise?” he asked Cubbins, once he felt able to speak without his voice breaking.

“Wet,” said Cubbins.

“Well, yes. But from the Ozmists?”

Cubbins looked at Brrr. “I don’t believe in Ozmists,” he said. “Bears don’t, you know.”

The Lion snarled, as if to say: No time for your funning, Cubbins! The Bear’s eyes looked back at him, flat, less glossy than before. Perhaps it was the overcast sky.

“They said Ozma is still alive somewhere,” ventured the Lion.

“People can say all sorts of things,” said Cubbins. “Where did you get those books?”

“From…” But he couldn’t finish. Didn’t Cubbins remember?

Cubbins was pawing them and looking at the spines. “Ozma Incognita. That sounds interesting. What are you doing with these books?”

“I don’t know,” said the Lion after a while. “I don’t have much use for them.”

“I’ll take them off you. I like the idea of books,” said Cubbins. “Here’s another one with color plates—look! Lurline and Preenella: A Fairy Tale of the Poor. How stupendous! We don’t see books around the Great Gillikin Forest often, you know.”

“You don’t say.” He tried to keep a wobble out of his voice.

“If books show up anywhere in the woods, they’re usually not far from a trap of some sort. Bait, you know. Humans plant books in the woods, hoping to attract the urban talking Animals who have gone to ground here, escaping the Wizard’s laws against them. I suppose you’re aware of this?”

“I suppose.” He sighed.

“And hunters, perhaps with guns, waiting nearby.” Cubbins was turning the pages. “If you picked these up from the woods, you’re lucky you didn’t get snared in some beastly iron-jaw thing with rusty teeth.”

“Guess luck is my middle name.” But it was too dreadful. “Will you know how to get back to your clan?”

“My clan?” said Cubbins.

“Don’t forget that part! Ursaless and the others. Bruner O’Bruin, Caraway Coyle. You know.”

At the sound of the Queen’s name, Cubbins grinned. “Oh yes! Of course! My mind had wandered for a moment. Well, I’ll take these books off you if you like, and be getting back to my kind. We admire books, you know, we Bears. We read them over and over.”

“Good.”

“We never get tired of them,” said Cubbins in a voice gone soft, as if the fact of his dimness was trying to dawn on him. “Because we forget them as soon as we finish them. We can start reading them over right away.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Brrr gently, “I will take the medal, though. I need to bring it to someone.”

“Suit yourself,” said Cubbins. “In fact, I’ll loop it around your neck on this leather belt. I can carry the books in my arm. There, how’s that?” His small brown arms reached up. In the effort to put the strap over Brrr’s head, he gave the Lion a bear hug around the cranium. The coarse Bear fur was slicked into tapering points and it rubbed agreeably against the Lion’s mane. “What is the medal for, anyway?”

The Lion couldn’t answer, Courage. He couldn’t speak for a while; he just turned and walked away. He glanced back only once. Cubbins was staring at a page of the book, and shaking his head, and wiping his eye with the back of his paw. Growing up, growing dead.

As he padded south, Brrr considered the all-but-fatal interview with the Ozmists. Maybe Bears who had genuine news they could barter were released unharmed. Maybe these were the Bears competent enough to take their chances in human society. If so, Cubbins had sacrificed his own ambitions in order to help Brrr summon the phantoms.

Still—on further reflection—had any of it actually happened? And why should Brrr presume that Ozmists, being ghosts, were telling the truth about anything? If they could be legalistic and harsh to a Bear cub as guileless as Cubbins, perhaps they could also lie—about whether or not Ozma was still alive, even about whether or not Brrr’s pride was among their particulated number.

The alluring stars in an apparently endless sky had, after all, been a disguise for the cloud of spirits. Ghosts perhaps could lie in death as well as creatures could lie in life.

Under a green bay tree he stretched out, thinking: If even the ghost of the past can harbor a motivation to dissemble, where can any ignorant Lion sensibly place his trust?

Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps lying down and playing dead, as Cubbins should have done with the Ozmists, was the only legitimate response to the villainy of life, the aggrandizement of very matter.

In any event, the Ozmists hadn’t spoken in the voice of Jemmsy, a new arrival in their midst. Neither to hector Brrr for his mistakes nor to hurry him toward his goals. So the Lion would continue to Tenniken to deliver to Jemmsy’s father this precious medal, and to deserve his own. On his own, unpartnered, but by the ghost of a chance, maybe, wiser than a day ago.

• 5 •

SOME WEEKS later, when the Lion emerged for the first time from the Great Gillikin Forest into the world of human affairs, he paused to wash his mouth out with well water and straighten his mane as best he could. It wasn’t vanity so much as nerves. He’d never seen an entire hive of humans before.

The first people he saw gave him a bit of a berth, to be sure, but at least they didn’t run shrieking behind slammed doors. They kept their little toy noses in the air. Their little toy ankles, tucked in those little booties, kicked ahead in the best, most dismissive manner. He couldn’t fault the town citizens for self-possession.

He finally managed to startle an old woman who was nearsighted enough not to see him coming. He’d been practicing his inaugural remark for weeks and was pleased with his delivery.

“Beg pardon, madame. I’m enquiring after the garrison of soldiers I’m told is stationed at Tenniken,” he said.

The woman’s crabapple chin bobbed up and she fished for a pincenez in her reticule. “Goodness, a Lion,” she observed, when she could. “Why ever would you imagine you could find soldiers stationed at Tenniken here, of all unlikely places?”

By which he learned he had emerged too far to the east. Not in Tenniken at all, but on the high street of the Gillikinese settlement called Traum.

“You charming idiot, get out of my way,” she concluded. “I’ve a daughter-in-law to annoy, and I must be to it. If you can’t tell the difference between a military garrison and a market town, you’ve got a screw loose, I fear.”

How was he to know? He blushed, though he was not sure if a blush would show in a Lion of his naturally high coloring.

Still, a handsome place, this Traum. The town was prosperous, old enough to boast some architectural character and even charm. Half-timbered almshouses and taverns. Stone guild halls clawed over with ivy and roofed with mossy slates laid in patterns of chevron. Escutcheons of painted wood advertising the trades.

“Do you know the way to Tenniken?” said the old woman. “Someone will tell you, but not I. I must get going. It doesn’t do to be stopped in the street today, not with those ruffians and ragamunchkins about.” She snapped her spectacles into their case and pushed away.

Brrr continued on, curious, feeling braver every moment. Traum must have seen Lions before, to judge by the way its denizens affected a worldly disregard to the visitor in their midst. At least this was how he read it at first. In truth, like the first old woman he interviewed, the citizens of Traum had other matters on their minds.

The Lion paced the merchant arcade, stopping to sniff at a rope of garlic hanging from a peg, or to watch through an archway as a glassblower plied her gassy art. He would ask for directions to Tenniken in a moment, as soon as he could catch someone’s eye again. But Traumanians were deeply skilled at averting their gazes.

In any case, the need to ask for directions seemed less urgent the more he saw of Traum. This was an old establishment, and he was a very young Lion, after all. So much to command his attention! A steam engine on a rail track. Gutters that ran with clear water. A unionist minister in dark leggings and an accusatory beard, pointing its hairy finger at every passing sinner.

“Are there any soldiers in town?” he asked a schoolchild, the only human who didn’t intimidate him. The girl pouted and began to suck her thumb in reply.

“No soldiers when you need them,” remarked the child’s chaperone, a teenage sitter. “The town is crawling with angry trolls, so are we supplied with a military presence this week? No. Of course not. Naturally.” She dragged her charge off into a side street. “Come, Gritzolga. The nasty trolls will eat you if you don’t behave. They like bad children like you.”

The Lion asked a question or two of some jittery shopkeepers who were folding up their shutters early. They didn’t stop to reply. At one emporium, however, where a shipment of porcelain was being unloaded from a wagon, the doors remained open so the workers could haul in the wares. A few of the more chattery of the townspeople were converging there. The Lion stooped to enter.

“Traum: the crossroads to nowhere,” said a young clerk with a voice that broke in midvowel. “Or everywhere: it’s the same thing, en’t it?”

“I don’t know Traum from Tenniken, or a troll from a trolley car,” said Brrr, admiring his own cleverness.

The clerk rolled his eyes. “Looking to buy a good map?” He pulled out a colored chart of the district.

Brrr had never seen a map before. He struggled to make sense of the scraped lines and shaded patches. A wispy gentleman, in looking for some snuff, leaned over the counter to see. “I taught geographics and natural civics to unteachable boys for thirty years,” he said. “Allow me to explain.”

The Lion learned that Traum had sprung up in a gentle valley between folds of forested hills. The valley allowed for a train line originating in distant Shiz, to the southwest, and running to Traum and beyond. To the northeast, the line was built on steep and inhospitable ground. Trellised and buttressed in precipitous style, the tracks climbed upslope until they reached the quays of the famous Glikkus Canals.

“Famous to some but not to all,” said Brrr.

The old fellow took a pinch of snuff. He was warming to his subject.

“The Glikkus channels are carved by some natural event of such mind-numbing antiquity that their origin can be explained only by myth. They serve as a merchant’s route to the emerald mines in the western Scalps of the Glikkus. The mountain natives—called Glikkuns, though none can deny they are anything but trolls, really—take advantage of those natural waterways and our industrial rail line to bring their emeralds to market.”

“Yes, but which way is Tenniken from here?”

“Traum is the trading post for the whole emerald industry. Why do you want Tennikin?” asked the clerk. “We have quite a line of emerald souvenirs, including a kind of fudge peppered with emerald dust.” The lone box of fudge wore a mantle of ordinary dust upon it, suggesting that the delicacy was more a novelty than a necessity.

“Is Tenniken on the rail line?” asked Brrr.

“Look, there’s some stumpyfolk now,” said a burgher’s wife, clutching her shawl about her, as if to preserve her respectability, even at this distance. “Stars and stitches, but they give me the goosey shivers!”

Brrr regarded the Glikkuns through the open door of the establishment. They were stout and stubby. Like many creatures who spend a good part of their lives underground, they were bleached out.

“If we Gillikinese are pale, at least compared to the darker tribes of the Vinkus and the ruddy bloody Quadlings, Glikkuns are downright albinoid,” murmured the doddery gentleman, who apparently couldn’t resist a spontaneous lecture. “Am I right? Am I right about this?”

“They look like walking farmcheeses to me,” agreed the goodwife.

A Glikkun family group loitered outside, deciding whether or not to venture into the shop. A blond moss capped the scalps of them all, from the papoosed newborn to the elders. The eyes of trolls, what Brrr could make out through their perpetual squint, glinted like steel, the pale white irises appearing to rise in blue albumen. Both males and females sported hunches pronounced enough to need wrapping in dedicated hunch-coats, each secured by buttons and straps and elasticized hems.

They carried short, stout dirks in skarkskin sheaths.

“That’s their chief,” whispered the schoolmaster. “A woman named Sakkali Oafish.”

A troll woman in leather leggings and a grey scarf rubbed the belly of her pregnant companion and scowled around her.

“She’s just got wind of the scam—I mean the scheme,” said the clerk. “Oooh, dark night, alley, that carving knife: not for me.”

“When their babies want to suck, the Glikkuns offer the knife instead of the tit,” said the goodwife. “Puts ’em off milk at once and stunts their growth, making ’em more Glikkuny than ever.”

“The Wizard of Oz wants emeralds, he gets emeralds,” said the schoolteacher. “The Wizard of Oz makes the laws. In this case, the law of supply and demand. He demands it, they supply it. End of discussion.”

“The Wizard of Oz,” said the Lion, remembering the question of the Ozmists. He wished he had the nerve to say “The WOO” in a superior, derogatory tone, but he didn’t trust himself to be able to carry it off.

“The Wizard of Oz, yes. You just crawl out from under some rock?—the chief potentate, if self-proclaimed, of the whole beloved country, thank you very much. He has recently kicked off a schedule of public works in the Emerald City that requires a goblin-hoard of emeralds. A fourfold increase from the usual amount requisitioned. The Glikkuns have stepped up production in their mines and arranged for transport of the emeralds to Traum. Here they collect their fees in cash and grain and medicine.”

“And vermouth,” intoned the clerk, knowingly.

“You serve trolls in here, don’t you,” said the goodwife.

“Their coin weighs the same as yours,” said the clerk. “Madame.”

“The economy of Traum relies on the trolls,” said the schoolmaster. “And I don’t know why they should be complaining. Business has never been so brisk for them. Ever. But, my dear boy,” he continued to the clerk, “I do think you could make a legitimate argument for barring the door against an angry mob.”

If the seven-person family group outside constituted a mob, it wasn’t entirely angry. The Glikkun baby chortled as it sucked on a sugar stick.

“What’s their gripe?” asked Brrr, going toward the back of the shop, pretending to inspect the wares displayed there—a line of women’s foundation garments. Camisoles, bustiers, smocks, and pantaloons.

“Close the door up, mercy on us,” hissed the goodwife to the clerk.

The schoolmaster rooted through his purse to pay for his snuff. “Sakkali Oafish has just gotten wind of an…an irregularity, shall we say, in the arrangements. The Traum merchants are paying the Glikkuns the going rate for emeralds, fair and square and in conformance with trade agreements—but our merchants are transporting the crop of jewels by rail down to Shiz, and they have begun to mark up the wares fourfold. For the simple job of loading emeralds onto the trains and unloading them several hundred miles south, the merchants are getting fat on the labor and product of the Glikkun miners.”

“The Glikkuns get their due,” said the clerk, “as I hear it told. The guild of traders has never stiffed the trolls a penny farthing.”

“Contracts hold, but contracts can be unfair, too,” asserted the gentleman.

“We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the goodwife. “I’d have been a smarter woman to have gone visiting my sister in Tenniken like she asked me to instead of finding myself here on this day of all days.”

“Tenniken! The home of the soldiers,” said Brrr. “Can you get there by train, do you know?”

“I can. Not certain trains are serving the likes of you.”

“I don’t understand why we’re seeing trouble today,” said the young clerk, whose pink-ham face was going pale and his voice cracking in higher registers than before.

“Aren’t you paying attention?” snapped the schoolteacher. “Sakkali Oafish has just learned about the trade inequities. The merchants taking twenty florins for every five the trolls get. She’s spitting nails. She’s declared she’ll call a strike unless the agents of the Shiz merchants pay double the negotiated rate for the emeralds they take, starting with the current shipment. Today. Before the Glikkuns leave. But the agents for the Shiz merchants are balking, saying that they aren’t authorized to enter into a new agreement, nor do they have the funds on hand to pay an unanticipated surcharge. Of course the Glikkuns are mad as hornets. And like all trolls, stubborn to boot. The whole town is waiting to see if they start to riot.”

“Our husbands are getting their guns,” said the goodwife. “They’ll take care of the matter. The Traum civic militia drills once a week.”

“Drills for ten minutes, drinks beer the rest of the evening,” replied the schoolteacher.

“My Aimil is in the service and he can shoot to kill at fifty yards even when he’s dead drunk.” She sniffed in pride. “Good lad.”

“I hope your Aimil is stopping for an ale then, because there will be shooting here before the moon is up.”

“Mark my words. They’ll show those Glikkuns the business end of a blunderbuss. Do some good, to boss the clammy little pasty-blobs about,” said the goodwife.

“Severity rarely helps in instances like this,” replied the gentleman.

“You setting yourself up as a court of justice all by yourself?” The goodwife raised her chins and rounded her lips as if tasting something unsavory. “Why en’t you going to live underground with the mole folk, if you endorse them so pitifully?”

“I’m not a court of justice—merely a commentator for our ignorant visitor,” said the schoolmaster mildly. In the spark of their little exchange, the Lion had retreated farther into the shadows.

“That petticoat will never fit you. It’s a petite,” said the clerk, either nastily or trying to make a joke and diffuse the situation. “A lady is petite.”

“I’m shopping for a friend,” replied Brrr, as frostily as he could, dropping the garment. He had thought it was some sort of headdress, with its lacy eyelets and scalloped hem.

“I suppose you’re friends with them?” asked the burgher’s wife. “You arrived with them, and all?”

“I never did.” Brrr tried harder for a tone of offense. “I have nothing to do with them.”

“If you’re not their weird bodyguard, then why en’t you chasing them away for us? They’d run from you soon enough.”

“I have nothing against trolls,” said Brrr.

“That’s a medal you got on your chest, en’t it?” She glowered at him. “A medal for what? Valor in the line of shopping?”

“I was hoping to find the soldiers’ garrison at Tenniken. This is all a mistake.”

“What the soldiers wouldn’t do with the likes of you!” She pursed her raspy lips at him and lowered her chin to look out under her brow, like a lizard from under a rock.

He stopped trying to explain. He only wished he could fade into the shadows in the shop the way, so conveniently, he’d been able to camouflage himself in the shadows of woodlands.

Before the Glikkuns outside could move on, the lane was filled with the stutter of drumming. The Traum Defense Brigade, no doubt. The goodwife looked hopeful at the thought of an encounter.

Not yet ready for a face-off—not with the baby troll drooling into its bibbing—Sakkali Oafish turned her group toward the doors of the shop.

“My virtue,” said the goodwife to the clerk. “Shut the door, can’t you?”

The clerk strode forward and said, streetward, “We’re closed to all but residents with town accounts.”

Sakkali put her foot in the door jamb. Her glance betrayed little fear. When she spoke, her voice was low and full of rasp. “Is that so? Then the Lion lives in Traum?” One hand settled on the infant’s scalp, the other one on the hilt of her dirk.

A silence ensued. “She has a point,” said the clerk to Brrr. “You’ll have to leave.”

“This is unseemly,” said the schoolmaster. “There’s no need—”

“I insist, or I’ll summon the merchant defense,” said the clerk. “I can’t tell the boss that his shipment of deluxe Dixxi House dinner services got shattered in a brawl.”

“I don’t have the stomach for shopping today,” said Brrr at last.

The door closed behind Brrr. He could hear the angry click of the bolt against the strike. Apparently that honorable schoolmaster had elected solidarity with his fellow citizens.

“You choose to stand with the aggrieved,” said Sakkali Oafish admiringly.

“I choose no such thing,” snapped Brrr. He looked up the way, and down. He wanted to get out of Traum before things became more unpleasant. “I don’t suppose you know the way to Tennikin? Where the soldiers are?”

“The Wizard’s soldiers?” Sakkali Oafish spat at their name.

“I knew a soldier who was—” But Brrr couldn’t think of how to describe Jemmsy.

She was quick, that Sakkali. “You knew a soldier who betrayed his orders by befriending you?”

The local militia turned into the high street. A motley mob of overweight merchants, nervous teenagers, that same miserable minister with his beard. Some pitchforks, a rolling pin, several guns looking all too dangerous.

“I have a job to do,” said Brrr. “I’m sorry for your trouble with soldiers, but I can’t stick around and sort it out. I have an errand of mercy for the father of a dead friend.”

“You’re not going to leave us to face this human mob unarmed,” said Sakkali. “What kind of Lion are you, anyway?”

At which question the Lion discovered the rhetoric of silence.

In any case, the trolls were hardly unarmed, he thought to say (but didn’t); fellow Glikkuns were showing up from an alley here, a chapel gate there, supplied with pickaxes.

The local militia raised their muskets. The Glikkuns stooped to loosen cobbles from the roadbed. From the stove of some upper-story kitchen, out of sight, a teakettle hissed like a small storm of rain beyond the hills.

Once again, thought Brrr, my chief talent: wrong place, wrong time, wrong key. “Not my fight,” he tried to explain. “I have a promise to keep…”

Backing up, twitching his tail in consternation, he heard a holy sound of bells splashing from the steeple. Like the Lurlinists’ music, only pretty. Brrr had not heard such melodic resonance before, and it sounded notionally of resolution, somehow.

Yet all around the town square of Traum, the hands of worried citizens were clanging gates closed, making an iron music. Wooden garden shutters slapped into place and were barred from the inside: You could hear the oaken music of the slats dropping. The free passage of the high street and the market square, within moments, became a pen. A closed run for an enemy trapped within.

This is how a market town defends itself when it lacks an army garrison, thought Brrr, and only then did he realize he had been pad-docked, too.

Sakkali Oafish hadn’t bargained on this reception. Perhaps this was a new maneuver, invented recently. “You, Lion!” she bellowed. “You smash a wall before they slaughter us, every one!”

“But—but—I have business in Tenniken—” He wasn’t refusing, he wasn’t—so what was he doing?

A barred iron gate right before him in his face, and all the pitching against it, to no avail—for it was strong, and he only a cub—

Before he could shake the thought free, return to language, a shot rang out, or two. Brrr was lately familiar with gunshots in the woods, but here in the open, in a town built of stone and slate, the echo was terrible. Stupefied, he recoiled sideways, involuntarily, and he pitched into the stone arch of a covered well. Dizzied, dazed, he stood long enough to see Sakkali take a stone at her skull. She was brought solidly to the ground, like a sack of rice tilting over onto its side. He staggered and fell, and was sick on the cobbles.

“Here, here,” cried the other Glikkuns, a small citizenry of them in their gravelly tones. Sakkali—dead or alive?—no one could tell. Two small fierce trolls lifted her body with hoarse grunts like chortles. “Lion, to gate, to wall, for one, for all.” Two or three of them leaped upon him. They hauled Sakkali’s barrel-like form with them.

“No,” he murmured, hoping only they could hear, “play dead, play dead! It’s your only chance.”

He shook them off and rolled onto his back, showing them how, letting his forepaws fall limp upon his chest like the unbuckled ends of a belt.

The trolls battered down beside him, as if he were a rampart, but only for an instant. Rifles were being aimed from all directions, and a supine Lion was a useless Lion to the Glikkuns. They abandoned him, making a rush for the lowest and weakest-looking of the gates, where a single sharpshooter was able to pick out one, two, three of them, and then the others took Brrr’s advice too late, and played dead, and were taken into captivity.

Initially—that day, the next—the Traumanians went through a show of celebrating Brrr. His refusal to evacuate the Glikkun trolls was called brave; his collapse in the high street was deemed an act of public sacrifice. A masterstroke of mob-control strategy. Pacifism in the course of strike busting. Brilliant.

For a while Brrr believed the public relations campaign, until it dawned on him that the constant advertisement of his refusal to defend the Glikkuns diverted attention from those who had actually carried out the assault. Then he began to suspect that within any cry of applause may lie coiled a hidden sneer. Perhaps a well-deserved sneer.

He made plans to leave Traum as soon as it felt safe to do so, which was some weeks. He traveled by train toward Tenniken, afraid all the while that vengeful Glikkuns might dynamite the tracks. Run the carriages off the rails. Reclaim any cargo of emeralds in transport. Then hunt through the passenger cars to locate the Lion’s cowardly carcass and do to it what he had allowed to be done to the members of their tribe.

He found that his reputation preceded him. “Just my luck. The Champion Lion himself,” said a portly journalist in the dining car, scribbling notes on a stenographer’s pad. He looked fondly over the tops of his reading spectacles and lifted a glass of sherry to the Lion, who had been assigned the second dinner sitting and directed to the journalist’s table. “Have I heard that the grateful citizens of Traum pressed upon you a small purse, in gratitude for services rendered?”

“Yes,” said Brrr, with some reservation.

“Whatever funds they came up with would have been less than what they’d have had to pay the Glikkuns.”

“Indeed,” said Brrr. Some of which he had spent in the dry goods store, buying a vest in which to keep his cash. And a cane, to give him gravitas. “It was just a token honorarium.”

“As befits a token hero. And look at that simply glorious medal for courage, to celebrate your achievement.”

The twinkle in his eye was deadly. Brrr feigned an attack of indigestion and excused himself. Alone in a stinking loo, he found that his alibi of intestinal ailment had come true.

When he emerged, he didn’t return to the dining car but wandered in the opposite direction. Upon reaching the last car on the train, he opened the rear door and stood on the juddering platform. Out of sight of anyone else, he allowed himself an unseemly spasm of shame. Then, when the train rattled onto a trestle bridge, crossing some dark unpleasant lake, Brrr let the medal on its leather belt fly out to hit the water with a final gleam.

Now it is over before it has really begun, he thought, my quest for approval. Only for Brrr it was never over, not really. An accidental half hour in the wrong village. His curse.

The train stopped at Tenniken later that evening, but Brrr didn’t alight.

An onward pitch to his life now, a few arts and skills—rolling over, playing dead, making mistakes, making conversation—but no destination.

Trusting in the amnesia of Bears, in the incapacity of Ozmists to identify their constituent citizens, Brrr hoped that his mortification at Traum would be as quickly forgotten. He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

• 6 •

THE AIR in the mauntery parlor seemed to have settled, as if nothing were alive but the past. “Not too much to say about the first years,” he concluded. The room had a funny buzz to it, though. Old granny vigor mortis was listening so cannily that the Lion began to wonder if he had shared more about his origins than the sentence or two he remembered speaking aloud. She’s a tricky one, he thought.

“Talented, rather than tricky,” she cut in. “But how did you come upon the name Brrr?”

“If you can read my mind,” he said, “—which frankly I find an abuse of my fucking privacy—then you know already.”

“I don’t read minds, and you haven’t got enough of a mind to browse through anyway.”

“What’s being an oracle, then, if you can’t read minds?”

She replied, “I can only guess at what you are thinking, and truth to tell, I’m not quite up to room temperature yet. Playing dead myself has caused me to lose a little of my usual concentration.”

“I don’t know who named me Brrr,” he told her, “and it doesn’t matter. Now you tell me of your own origins. For the record. For when I file my findings.”

“None of us knows our own origins. We only know what we’re told by our parents and the mythography of our national anthems.”

“Don’t hold out on me. Look, I gave you what you wanted. I offend you by being honest? Get used to it. Story of my life, which you can stay the hell out of.”

“I’m the last one to be offended at human behavior,” she replied calmly, “so a Lion’s petty moral conundrums mean even less to me. Besides, I’m no blushing spiritual nosegay myself.”

“Well, then, get on with it, will you? Why are you implicated in Madame Morrible’s journal? I haven’t got all day. I can’t read your mind, I can’t even read your expression, since your eyes are so screwed up. The Court doesn’t want minor philosophies. It wants the facts.”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

He mused. “A barter system. Like the Ozmists proposed, once upon a time. You want something of me, too. Don’t you? You must, since you’ve taken pains not to die till I got here. Well, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” He grunted. “You look like you got a mighty arthritic hunch on your back.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. Whatever could you do for me?”

“You tell me.”

She sat silent. He’d got her thinking. He was sure she was bargaining, too, though he didn’t yet know over what. He’d promise her the world to get this job over with. She wouldn’t live long enough to collect.

He slapped his notebook against his forehead as if to attract the attention of a simpleton. “I’m ready when you are.” He flipped the book open again. “It’s your relationship with the Thropp family that the Court is tracking down,” he said. If she called him on his dissembling—his peddling not a lie so much as a disguised truth—he’d have proof that she was the real deal, not a charlatan.

He was gratified at her response. In her chair she reared back a little, her dry, flaking nostrils flaring like those of a panicky horse.

“For what use does the Court want my deposition?” she demanded to know.

“When did you come to be involved with the Thropps of Colwen Grounds, Munchkinland?”

“Has she come back?” said Yackle. “Is she here?”

“Who?” said Brrr. He stifled a wince of triumph. It had worked. Even a seer could be startled, it seemed. “Which one do you mean?”

“Elphaba, of course,” said Yackle.

And, dullard that he was, Brrr could sense it: The mention of Elphaba, of her sorry history, had hurried a flush into Yackle’s old veins. Whoever she was herself, old Mother Yackle, death-defying crone, she was still human enough to be corrupted by feeling. After all these years, an ounce of regret or something else very urgent still tainted the bucketful of blood that seeped beneath her bunched, crepelike skin.

He saw this. He had her. He wasn’t as stupid as he thought.

“Has Candle been found?” she said. “And Liir?”

She had mentioned Liir before. Well, some folks just knew the wrong things to say. Liir was another thorn in the Lion’s own sore past, and he didn’t want to think about how casually he’d sauntered away from the homeless boy without a second thought.

Brrr flipped open his notebook again. “It’s your turn to talk, Yackle. And I got evidence from other sources to check your statement against, so don’t try slinging some phony hash at me, fair enough?”

She chewed on the nail of her little finger. It looked as if she were dining on the fin of a lake narwhal. Beyond the room, a gust of autumn wind rattled the drying ivy clinging to the shutters. “I hear a noise of marching,” she said at last.

“The Emerald City divisions are tramping their muddy boots into Munchkinland,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? On the grounds of retaliation. Self-defense by way of colonization, probably.”

“I never attended to human politics.”

“That’s sound practice. Stay far away. Very far away. Listen, you want the background? So far as I can pick up, our glorious Emperor asserts that he is the de facto Eminent Thropp, the satrap of Munchkinland. Because his great-grandfather was the Eminent Thropp those three, four generations back. Shell, the Apostle Emperor, claims a right to the manor house of Colwen Grounds, to the demesne, and even more so, to the governorship of the province. So he’s about to re-annex the Free State of Munchkinland.”

“But the Eminent Thropp had daughters, and the rights of inheritance pass down through the female line. Even I remember that much.”

“Ah, but Shell is the last of the line, and both his sisters, Elphaba and Nessarose, died without issue.”

“But did they?” cried Yackle.

“What do you know about it,” he asked, “and furthermore, to the point, why do you care?”

His voice was brutal, even in his own ear. He must be anxious, more than he wants to show, she thought. But she had no room for him right now, when her own tinderbox of memories was flaring to the strike. Her eyes, which had not yielded up moisture for a decade, went gummy, and her heart went hard and soft by turns.

“Tell me when you first became aware of them all,” he said. “Why not? It might help. You may be an oracle, but no oracle can know everything.”

At that remark of his, her sloppy tears did fall. When they dropped on her immaculate winding sheet, small tear-shaped holes burned through, showing shadowy flesh, rucked like flaky pastry.

“I will hold you to your promise,” she said, when she could speak, “or I will kill you.” Standing, she gripped the back of the chair as if she were at a Testimonial Pulpit. What was left of her irises rolled up into her head, slowly. It turned his stomach so far around he felt he could taste his own shit.

She didn’t begin to speak until there was nothing left but the whites of her eyes, like bloodshot stones embedded in her skull.

WHEN DID I first become aware of them? Of the witches of Oz?

No Good Old Days to Speak Of

• 1 •

YOU CAN start with your own origins.” He kept his voice soft, almost a purr. “Name, place, and date of birth. The usual jolly rigamarole.”

“Well, I don’t know my origins.” Her voice sounded faraway. Maybe she was speaking slowly because she was manufacturing lies, or maybe it took her a while to reclaim a notion of the past. “Lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid.”

“You mock me, you mock the Court.”

“I mock nothing and no one. First thing I can remember, I woke from a stupor and I sat up. Like a newborn I was naked, stupid, and without control of my bowels and bladder. But I was resplendently wrinkled and I wasn’t blind the way babies are. My breasts pointed at my toes. I wriggled my toes and I tried to wriggle my breasts. I smelled of ginger and pearlfruit jelly and I was devilishly hungry, so I got up and began to explore. I found a mirror on a wall and noticed that I had eyes, and I saw the flaccid skin barely managing to hold these eyes in their sockets. I had moles on my earlobes, and my hair was lank and grey, and my back hurt. I could talk, so I knew how to curse. I was already well on my way to bodily corruption, you see.”

“But where were you—in a room, on a bed? What district?”

“Some room, some bed. Some hostel for indigents, I suppose. I didn’t linger to find out. I stole a robe and some slippers from a cubby in the washroom and I tottered out the door. I found myself in the city of Shiz in northern Oz. I appeared older than most of the sentient life that waddled or cycled or ambled by.”

“Did you remember your name?”

“Those who don’t have a name can’t remember it, can they? Sir Brrr? If I’d had a name before, I didn’t know it anymore. So I had to name myself. In a marketplace stall I found a portfolio of rotogravure prints and I examined the pages. The collection advertised itself as artistic interpretations of characters of folklore. I saw gnarled old Kumbricia, I saw the fairy queen, Lurline, and her sidekick, Preenella. I saw the dragon who dreams the world and the tiny pixie-mites who afflict the undeserving with plague. Then I came across a page showing an elderly dame with a walking stick and a jackal on a leash. She carried the moon in a basket on her back. It was pretty. The script said ‘Yackle Snarling,’ and though I didn’t know the story she features in, nor any story, I liked her name. Yackle. I didn’t know if ‘Snarling’ was her second name or her occupation, so I left it off.”

“Didn’t you see a doctor? Anyone propose it might have been a stroke?” He wasn’t being tender, just comprehensive. “Probably your mental gears just slipped. It happens to the feeble.”

“Those who don’t know the concept of medicine don’t think to consult physicians.”

He tried a more soothing voice. It came out snide. “A little therapy, or a stiff drink, and maybe the memory of your past life would return.”

“Maybe,” she replied. “But I don’t believe in past lives.”

“Any twinges about your lost childhood? Snatches of déjà vu, that sort of thing? Did you ever pick up something silly and common like, oh, bootlaces or, or…butter rolls…and stare at them in case they jogged your mind about your past?”

“I didn’t imagine the past, yet, so I didn’t miss it. It was as if I was freshly minted as a senior. Some are born blind, some cranky, some superior. Some”—and she waggled a finger at him—“are born green. I was born old. Old I came into the world, and older still will I leave it, if I can ever figure out how.”

He wrote in his notebook: Claims to have amnesia about her youth. Dotty? Honest? Clever? Canny strategy to avoid her legal liabilities?

“We’re here to do some discovery about your relationship with the Thropps,” he said. “Can we continue?”

“I thought you said it was Madame Morrible’s connections you were tracking down.”

“Madame Morrible. The Thropp sisters. There is some overlap, as you bloody well know. Now just start where you can, and I’ll cut you off if you ramble.”

“I don’t think I like you,” she said, “but since this is nearly a posthumous tea party to which I’ve been invited, maybe it doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”

“You came from your coffin to talk to me,” he reminded her. “You must have had something to tell me now, right? Got some beef you’re eager to turn into hash. I’m your willing audience. I’m all ears, I am.”

She cocked her head sharply. She wasn’t befuddled in the slightest. She just didn’t like him. It showed loud and clear. Not that he cared. He was only doing his job. “Get on with it, before those army boots start tramping back this way,” he said.

Was she ready to talk? She thought it over. Would she inadvertently give something away before she had finished vetting the Lion for a possible ally? So far he didn’t look promising. Sitting before her, waxing his mane with spittle, twirling it into points. She could hear the motion, her ears were that keen. He was behaving like a pantomime villain training his mustachios.

Maybe he was only a ruse, a warm-up. Maybe she’d emerged from her clammy bier for the one who would follow this oily character.

Oracle though she was, she couldn’t see in front of her own nose.

• 2 •

BRRR TAPPED his pencil. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Still, he was trying to listen to her with the severity of attention she had paid to him.

WITH A plain demeanor, I could sidle by unnoticed. I had no charm to speak of. The older woman talking to herself in some gutter isn’t an uncommon sight, and passersby rarely bother to interrupt her.

I found it useful staying a bit unwashed. No one wants to look too closely at someone wrapped in strong body odors. That made it easier to sidle along in the background, to watch slit-eyed and sideways at the goings-on of a crowd. To size up a mark. To pick up what I could about this mystery of my existence.

So I stumped about Shiz. I kept my eyes down and my ears open and, for the time being, my big mouth shut.

These were the days before the Wizard arrived—yes, get your pen, I’m going to be as specific as I can, though the patterns of politics always eluded me. But now I know enough to realize that I emerged from my first sleep into the halcyon last days of the line of Ozma. Though halcyon is never so sweet as memory makes it.

Vain Pastorius was squatting upon the throne as the Ozma Regent. He ruled in the Emerald City in the stead of his infant daughter, the Ozma Tippetarius. He was a piece of work. Dim, bullnose-chinned Pastorius. What is this in human time? Fifty, fifty-five years ago? Being born without any childhood to speak of—my “olden days” have a different meaning than yours!—I never could master time. It seems a long while ago, anyway. Pastorius, that old fool. Both sybaritic and syphilitic. Cocooned in silk, drunk on compliments warbled by his ass-licking courtiers. Those were days of expensive balls in the court proper, and of bawdy carnivals of patriotic sentiment outside the palace walls. To distract the urban poor from the deprivations of the Great Drought, about which no one could do a thing.

THOSE DAYS,” she asserted. “You wouldn’t remember. You weren’t whelped yet.”

“Tell me. I’m all ears.” He listened like a doe just noticing a leopard on a limb.

“You want the three historic segments of my earthly life? I’ve lived through a good deal of these modern times, if you can call it living. I’d arrived, preaged and preshrunk, a crone at birth, just at the end of the Ozma regency, before Pastorius was deposed by the Wizard and the infant Ozma was secreted away, probably murdered.

“Then came the Wizardic reign. Nearly four decades of the Great Head, as power consolidated in the Emerald City. Animals were disenfranchised of their rights; and the green shrike of a witch, Elphaba Thropp, flew the skies in agitation. Her sister, Nessarose, presided over the breakaway state of Munchkinland.

“Following the Wizard’s abdication of the Throne, the brief and blameless twin interregnums—first of Lady Glinda, that bottle blonde, and then of the so-called Scarecrow, who came to power and left it again faster than a pile of autumn kindling responds to a winter torch.

“The torch of piety, that is, as wielded by Shell, the Apostle Emperor. Younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. He swore he was divinely positioned by the Unnamed God. For all I know he is his, he is his—” She nearly gagged at the thought, and rotated her hand in the air, a forward roll. “He is history.”

Brrr didn’t want to lead her on, to give her anything to work with, if she was indeed an oracle. Let her show facility with those unholy talents. Yet he was curious, too; he couldn’t help saying, “The Emperor Shell is still on the Throne in the Emerald City. No opposition to his royal prerogatives allowed.”

“But of course. Who can gainsay a prince personally chosen by the Unnamed God?”

He nodded: go on.

I HEARD ABOUT current events, naturally. Shiz is a university town from way back, and undergraduates reading history do blather so.

I minded my own business on the pavement—well, begging a little, picking pockets, too, for I saw that was how common folk fed themselves. I figured out that inventing little prophecies—doling out appealing lies—brought in some cash.

I bought my bread and beer from the small change I could earn by pretending to be a seer. I was persuasive enough, a competent liar, and I looked the part, so I developed a clientele. I wore a shawl, like Yackle Snarling. I had fun worrying my hair into a nest of scowls. When I had put a small purse aside I took a room above a tonsorial parlor and I invested in a line of herbal comforts. Limited-liability curses, bogus love charms and the like. I traded only in minor hexes, for I wanted no trouble with the constabulary.

It was fun for a while. I examined tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I studied the crow’s feet on either side of a spinster’s face and I made up some nonsense about strangers and romance. I never could figure out why romance is so desirable, having felt nothing of the sort myself. Maybe because I was desiccated in that department. With no eggs to hatch, I had no reason to kiss and canoodle, and no appetite for it, either. But those with an experience of canoodling seem reluctant to leave the possibility behind, even when their romantic prospects are limited due to the insults of aging. Onset of severe personal ugliness.

Then I got in a spot of trouble. A local brouhaha, nothing you need worry yourself about. I made a bad investment prediction and a couple of Shiz financiers who were trembling on the edge of ruin fell into it. When their goons came after me with a vengeance, I developed a sudden yen to see the other sights of Oz. So I considered lighting out for the Emerald City, which, while still being built, was already the biggest conurbation in Oz. Finding me there would take some doing, and I hoped they wouldn’t manage it. Still, you have found me. A goon on whose payroll?

BRRR THOUGHT: Is she just making this up because of my own admission of being morally obtuse as a cub? Trying to soften me up by saying, see, we’re equally untethered to conventions of right and wrong?

A court reporter’s first job, though, is to report what is said. Let someone else authenticate it. Someone with more to lose. Hah—as if there were such a creature.

“Very interesting,” he said, and made some notes. Then he regarded them dubiously. He had invented a shorthand all his own to compensate for his inability to hold a pen in the human style—wrong muscle groups for that. But sometimes he couldn’t read his own scrawl. He hoped he wouldn’t come a cropper when it was time to dictate to his transcriber back in the Emerald City court stenographers’ bullpen. She’d slap his face, and her colleagues would snort and titter. The flatheads.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “I had asked about when and how you first came in touch with the Thropp family. When you became aware of them. And I’m trying to find out why your name was scribbled in the notes left in the archives of a clandestine Wizardic operative named Madame Morrible.”

“One has to start somewhere,” she replied. “Because I developed a reputation for clairvoyance in the demimonde of Oz, I attracted the attention of a family retainer of the Thropp contingent. It all goes back to that.”

“Still, can we get to the point? I haven’t been tracking the progress of the military units around here, but if the skirmishes around us heat up, the Emerald City Messiars or the Munchkinlanders may need to fall back to regroup. I wouldn’t be surprised if this House is commandeered for a garrison by nightfall. I plan to be finished up and on my way before that happens. I have no interest in hobnobbing with soldiers. Not my type.”

“Don’t bully me,” she snapped.

He straightened up. This was one of the nicest things that had been said to him since his release from custody. “The Thropp family,” he insisted.

“You next,” she said. “This is a bargain, remember? What happened when you debuted in property society? Civilization and its malcontents?”

The Lion’s voice was testy. “You are under order of the Emerald City Court of Magistrates to comply with my request for information. I don’t have to answer your nosy questions. I’m done auditioning for you. I’ve said all I have to say.”

“You didn’t tell me if you ever found the soldier’s father. As you promised. Do you keep your promises? I’m merely asking.”

“You think you can shame me? You’ll have to work harder than that.”

“Shame you? Hardly. I have no capacity for that,” she said. “No capacity and no interest. I’m not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn’t have any such holiday called childhood. I’m merely curious.”

• 3 •

THEY SAT in silence, both of them unwilling to yield, and after a while a maunt came in. She carried a plate piled with rye brisks smeared with a paste made of ground tadmuck and onions. Neither Yackle nor Brrr thanked her—neither was willing to be the first to show the weakness inherent in courtesy.

While the maunt fussed about with napkins and condiments, Brrr listened to the world.

The Mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows sat only a little distance from a forest of oakhair trees. Brrr knew that the higher branches of the mature oakhair tree developed long tendrils. In early autumn, the tendrils produced dense little acorns that swung until, finally, they were heavy enough to snap off and drop to the ground for seeding. Before they fell, though, the weight they exerted pulled their long threadlike stems tighter and tighter. When the wind arose from the south, if it ran close enough to the earth, it could produce a sound as of thrummed harp strings. A kind of foresty moan. Lurlina, or whatever damn goddess was responsible for the development of flora in Oz, hadn’t bothered to tune the oakhair’s reproductive system. The sound was less like an orchestra agreeing on a common pitch and more like a bevy of banshees considering what creature to feast upon for their supper.

The sostenuto lingered. The transparent cat began to vibrate slightly, as if in sympathy, like the ringing of a wineglass struck with the blade of a knife. The noise an ornamental paperweight might make if it could purr.

The maunt left, closing the door soundlessly behind her, no doubt vexed that she’d been able to overhear nothing of the interview. The wind pulled longer, half-strangled moans out of the forest, until, to drown out the noise if nothing else, Brrr caved at last, and spoke first.

“I hate that sound.”

“What sound is that?” asked Yackle, pawing on the floor for a biscuit she had dropped.

“The oakhair chorus. Can’t you hear it? I thought the blind developed keener hearing as compensation.”

“I can’t hear it. I have other compensations,” she said. “Like a sense of taste. I don’t suppose that helpmeet supplied us with any gin? I found this little snack offensive.”

“Only water, I’m afraid. I could do with some ale.”

“You say,” said Yackle, “that your emergence into Traum was your first experience outside of the Forest. Are you sure of that?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s even been suggested to me that I could have wandered out when I was too young to perceive it. So what? That’s as good as if it hadn’t happened, right?”

“Perhaps,” she answered. “Or not.”

“You might well have had a childhood yourself,” he said. “Suppose you lived eighty years of some life choked with drama and feeling, and then you had a stroke or some other illness. When you came around, in that basement in Shiz, you were like a child again. The slate wiped clean. It’s been known to happen to the elderly, Animals as well as people.”

“No, no,” she replied. “Even those whose memories are corrupted by illness still have their pasts pocketed somewhere. But I have nothing to remember—no childhood to flee from. Don’t you understand? I think that’s why I can see the future—to the extent that I can. I suppose it’s your principle of compensation. I can’t remember the past, so I can remember the future.”

“All right, then. Prove it to me. Remember for me what is going to happen to me when I get back to the Emerald City with the information they want. Which you’re about to give me.”

He was playing with fire, but what was there left to lose? Not dignity—he couldn’t lose face with this harridan, who couldn’t see his face to begin with—or could see it all too clearly. One or the other.

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Or are you the scam artist that most oracles are? Look, I gave you my shame, which you asked for. Tell me about the Thropps, then. The Thropps.” He tapped his pencil on the notepad. “Or are you losing memory capacity so fast? The bucket leaking while we sit here? Your past draining away?”

“If I only had a past. I have no past.”

He grinned at her, wondering if she could intuit an expression. “And if I don’t get what I’m looking for, I have no future. So begging your pardon, can we hurry it up?”

• 4 •

HE WATCHED as she descended into what memories she had. The poor old macaroon. What possible good could come of her in the end? Of any of us, he amended.

Did her memories sting and surprise, as that sudden recollection of a cage had done, coming over him in Traum at the height of the troll massacre? And returning to him now. Always a cage, no?

I REMEMBER MORE than you think.

I can’t always tell what it means, though. Every oracle is a scam artist, even those with talent.

My departure from Shiz. Under cover of night I packed up what little I owned and I spent my last coin on a midnight carriage to the Emerald City.

The journey—it means nothing to your investigation. But I do remember sucking on the edge of my lace shawl, to savor a taste of potato stew I had trailed the garment through. I was at wit’s end. I was spooked by the challenge of the Emerald City, but I desired it, too. I hoped I could glean something from some other old crone at a bingo parlor or a chapel testimonial. Maybe I could hear that someone else had been born old. Then I might learn why I was so blighted.

I can feel you sneering in sympathy. You think effeminate beasts are the only ones who don’t know their places?

So I came to the Emerald City to find my fortune, a toddler in the body of an octogenarian. I was astounded at the capital city’s noise and breadth and stink and lights and attitude.

The Emerald City, so called, wasn’t hugely emerald yet. It was more like a work in progress. Its name was a developer’s advertisement looking for investors. The green jewels being dug up in the Glikkus mines adorned only the Palace. The urban squalor around the Throne house looked like a heap of pigsties. Nonetheless, the Emerald City was beginning to practice the art of self-squawk.

Eventually, I saved up enough of my little pilferings and filchments to launch a new practice. I’d learned my lesson, though. No more financial advice. And I wouldn’t take on a client unless she—it is nearly always a she who cares about the future, isn’t it?—unless she promised not to call in the authorities if my reading provoked some catastrophe or other. In such an event, I declared, I’d consider myself released from our contract and I’d have to lower a chastening spell upon her.

I hadn’t any such talent at spells, mind you—I was never a witch of any stripe—but my talent for lying proved useful. Clients always acceded to my conditions. They were so greedy to know things.

And as I peered at them, and as I struggled to see the ways that they could lie to me as well as to themselves, I found out new things about them. And about myself.

Without a childhood, you see, I had to lightfinger an education from someone.

Don’t glare so. I can hear you glaring. Yes, the Thropps. I’m getting there.

In my third year at work in the EC—old Pastorius was still in power, parading his baby Ozma up and down the Ozma Embankment—I had a visit one cold autumn afternoon from a middle-aged domestic. Her name, she said, was Cattery Spunge, but she was known around the estate as Nanny. Well-upholstered in the rump and cushiony of bosom—professional attributes as a governess, I guess.

She liked saying estate, she adored saying she was known. She wore her affectations of gentility like so many foxfur castoffs of her lady employer.

It came out soon enough that this Cattery Spunge had served as overseer to several generations of a prominent family. The clan was headed by the Eminence of Munchkinland known at home as Peerless Thropp or, when in government circles, the Eminent Thropp.

Yes, we’ve reached the Thropp family at last.

Cattery Spunge brought with her a small pot of common ferns. She pushed it across the table toward me as I was clearing away lunch. Scraps of congealed tar-root and mash, I’m afraid. Proof of my humble station. “I don’t barter,” I said at the sight of the fern. “I take cash only.”

“It’s not a present,” said Cattery Spunge. “Nor a bribe. Nanny wouldn’t stoop to bribery.”

I left it where it was. Green things tended to wither in my company. Milk sours, children cry, cats develop hairballs. I’d have made one hell of a mother, believe me.

“Go on,” I said to her, refusing to touch the plant.

She fussed at the clasp of a garish carpetbag, making sure I saw the handsome obsidian rings on her chafed hands.

Not too old for romance, I guessed, though beyond child-bearing years. Not twitchy enough to be in legal trouble. Too stout to be vexed by a wasting illness. “An eminence named Peerless Thropp,” I said, to get a hold of anything. “I’m not quite sure about eminences. I have never been to Munchkinland.”

“An eminence is the senior member of the local governing family. Munchkinland has maybe a dozen or so established families, don’t you know, and the Thropps are the most prominent. The Eminent Thropp is superior in station to all other Munchkinlander gentry. I believe the term Eminence is specific to Munchkinland, though I can’t be certain. I have never traveled much. Happy at home, you see.” She grimaced. “Quite happy indeed.”

So we were getting somewhere. “Peerless Thropp is still alive—?”

“Yes. A widower. So he’s the Eminent Thropp. More or less the governor of Munchkinland. One daughter, Lady Partra, who married and bore two daughters of her own, Sophelia Thropp and Melena Thropp. I helped raise them both. The former went mad, in the most respectable way, and is housed offstage. The latter, Melena, I did with what I could. High spirits, that one.”

A decayed gentlewoman of loose morals, I inferred. “Go on.”

“Melena could have had anyone, but she suffered chronically from spite. To vex her family was her chiefest aim. She refused an alliance with another eminence’s son, as Lady Partra had proposed. Instead, Melena eloped with a minister of the unionist faith. The husband is far beneath her. Frexspar, his name. As if it matters. As if he matters. Stationed in the hardscrabble outback of Wend Hardings.”

Yes, I remember this all. As if it were yesterday. But you must consider that my mind wasn’t stuffed with eighty years of my own memories. There was little to displace.

The Nanny enjoyed reciting genealogies. “Melena is the Thropp Second Descending, you see—she will become Eminence when her grandfather and her mother are both dead. The honor passes through the female line, just as with the Ozmas. This is assuming, of course, that her mad Aunt Sophelia doesn’t rap out a claim to the title and the family seat, et cetera. Few think she’s capable,” observed Nanny, “but in any instance she has no issue, so sooner or later the title will revert to Melena Thropp.”

All this palaver. “Why have you come, Miss Spunge?”

“Call me Nanny.”

I resisted the invitation. She continued. “My sweet Melena, the Thropp Second Descending, is still young and fertile. I want some salve, some charm, some hedge to ensure that any second child would be born—without blemish.”

“The first child?” I said.

“Elphaba,” said Nanny.

A chill ran through me. I who hadn’t known chills before. I didn’t ordinarily deal in medical charms. “A serious blemish, I’m guessing, or you wouldn’t be here.”

She nodded. A tear fell, and I knew it to be genuine.

I continued. “They put the unhappy infant out of its misery, I assume.”

“Hardly. As if they could. That child has a will stronger than springtime.”

“Her infirmity, then? You must be blunt if I am to be of help.”

Nanny pushed the potted fern closer. “Green. Skin as rich as that. I brought this so you could see. The child is a year old now, poor dreadful thing. I don’t ask you for a corrective for her condition—only for a prophylactic to save Melena Thropp, her mother, against a repeat disaster. To benefit a second child, not Elphaba. Elphaba is condemned to sorrow.”

“Elphaba is condemned to nothing,” I found myself saying. “Nothing is written for her, which means everything is possible.”

I looked at the fern, which did not wither back at me.

“That’s a fancy opinion,” said the family retainer, but I could see she was a bit shaken. “Nanny expected something more in the line of an herbal remedy. Not a prophecy.”

“This is not a restaurant. You take what’s on offer,” I said, but I was surprised at my vehemence, too.

“As long as you’re feeling prophetic, why not push it a little bit further?” she asked. “I mean, a Nanny’s job is to prepare for all eventualities, so it would be useful to know what to look out for. Plagues, boyfriends, the rotten tread in the tower stairs, that sort of thing.”

I was torn at the audacious request. Who was I? A scioness of nothing—without an evident mother, I wasn’t even a bastard. Having anything to do with a prominent family seemed risky from the start. Still, I was intrigued. I wasn’t given to vaulty sorts of sentiments, but the report of a green girl had captured my attention. I felt a little bit of a one-off myself—perhaps there was a kinship effect.

“I will need to have something to hold,” I said, playing for time while my mind raced.

Nanny put her hands in her satchel. At first I thought she meant merely to remove them from the tabletop so I wouldn’t get any ideas. Then I saw she was fussing about. “I suspected as much,” she said. “I came prepared. This isn’t my first visit to an oracle, you know.”

“Why didn’t you go back to the oracle you’d seen before?”

“She died, alas, when a marble bust of Pastorius fell off its pillar and brained her.” The Nanny got to the punch line first. “Yes, yes, if she didn’t see it coming, one questions her professional skills. So she probably deserved to die.”

I snorted to be polite, yet not so loudly as to impugn my colleague, may she rest in peace. Whatever that might be like.

“Still,” said the Nanny, continuing to rummage about, “who of us really can see our own deaths coming?”

I didn’t know back then that this would be a problem of mine decades hence: that I couldn’t find my own death. “Have you got anything in there?” I asked.

The Nanny withdrew some prettily carved beads, ivory or the like, and a golden garter worked with repoussé trim. “The beads were made by Melena’s husband, the minister,” she said. “They’re inscribed with symbols of the Unnamed God, I’m told. To me they look like denomination emblems from foreign monetary systems, but what do I know. Like I said, I haven’t traveled much.”

I took the beads. They felt cool and aloof in my hands, and spoke nothing to me. If I’d hoped for a jolt of spiritual connection, I was disappointed. “Let’s see the garter,” I said. “And this belongs to your Ladyship?”

“Did. Does. That is…” And here the Nanny began to blush, remembering I was supposed to be a truth-teller. “I came away with it in my belongings, somehow, last time I visited,” she admitted. Meaning she stole it. I nodded without disapproval; I wasn’t above theft myself, though it was the edible thing rather than the beautiful that I usually lifted.

I felt it, to little benefit. The woman who wore such a decorated legging expected her legs to be explored by admirers. That was all, and I’d already figured out as much. I handed it back. “Is there nothing else?”

“Oh, you are good,” said the client. “Here you go.” Next she fished out a small bottle made of green glass with a cork stopper in it. It stood so-high, about, and a paper label was affixed to the front. Yes, I remember what it said; give me a moment. It read MIRACLE ELIXIR.

“You have miracle elixirs, so what are you coming to me for?” I asked.

“I need all the help I can get,” she replied.

I picked at the label with my finger and some of it came off. A scrap of paper at the end of the word, showing part of the ornately inscribed X and IR—XIR, it looked like, or—LIR. I examined the dried glue on the back, as if it might be a pale word in a secret language. It was a glob of dried glue, no more, no less.

Still, the client wanted theatrics, and I think I was more alert than I’d ever been. I found a porcelain mortar and I burned the scrap of paper, and looked to see if I could read words forming in the arabesques of smoke. I couldn’t. I mashed up herbs and crystals and added some oil of gomba, and heated the whole mess in an alembic. I counted backward by seventeens. All the usual party tricks.

Then I popped off the cork and took a swig of the miracle potion.

I’m not a poet, and despite my profession I’m not particularly good at description. The taste burned and stank, and I felt the liquor in my eyes stew. Waves rose and fell in half formation, like apathetic ghosts, like anemic fogs. I could almost see—I reached, mentally—I could almost read what it meant. But it was shapeless as most dreams really are; we put onto our dreams the shapes we think with during the day, depriving our dreams of the message they are trying to deliver. Such it was with me. There was so much life, it was so vivid: but I could only think of it with the experience of life I had already had. And despite my evident age, that wasn’t much experience at all. It was like a five-year-old, upon learning the alphabet, being presented with a copy of the annotated Great Morphologies of the ancient tutorix Gorpha vin Tesserine. A child might be able to count the numbers marking off the footnotes, but not much more than that.

Nonetheless, I put my hands flat on the table and felt the surface of the wood grain, and tried to release my mind. The wood meant “usefulness in death” to me; the wood meant “you may be dead and you may still serve.” I had never tried to read the lifelines of a piece of timber before.

“Are you quite all right?” asked the Nanny, beginning to gather up her things, including the bottle. Apparently I looked as if I were about to expire, or explode.

“You have to leave the way you came,” I said to her.

“I only saw the one staircase,” she asserted.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what I did mean, or if it had anything to do with her at all. “History waits to be written, and this family has a part to play in it.”

• 5 •

HAH,” SAID the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”

Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”

She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.

“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”

He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.

“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”

She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”

“You can see now? Or are you ‘seeing’ it?”

“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all—a keep.”

“Apparently whoever lives out yonder isn’t scared, though.”

“Not scared of war? Hmmm.”

“Or maybe more scared of starvation. It’s harvest season, and the troops have been tromping their bloody jackboots all across the country. Flattening whatever modest crop of autumn wheat the locals can manage to eke out of this unforgiving soil.” He walked to the window and stood next to her. “I’m right. Their house stands amid three small fields of grain ready for harvest. If they leave that harvest too long, the armies will trample the fields for a camp, or bloody it with an encounter.”

“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”

“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”

“Who has had enough of life?” she said.

“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”

“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.

Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”

“You’re going to pray?” he asked.

“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”

He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.

“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba—the Wicked Witch—before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.

Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp—the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”

“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”

She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”

“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”

“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.

Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.

It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.

NOT MANY MILES to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.

• 6 •

THE CLOCK was moving rather slowly; the lads who pushed and pulled it were struggling across the terrain. It felt as if they were hauling the wagon over a series of railway ties without the benefit of steel runner rails, since the ground was fretted with half-submerged roots of oakhair trees.

The dwarf and his new recruit walked ahead, picking out the best route. They would need to stop before long, as the sky was paling.

“We shall want to take special care, Lady Lucky,” said Mr. Boss. “Usually we like to sidestep troublesome neighborhoods, but our advice this time is to thread our way among contentious populations of nasty, armed men. Reach a safe haven just between them—a tall stone house where custom requires we be granted sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary comes at a cost, however hidden,” she replied.

“Oh, our private Missy Prissy condescends to comment!” The dwarf skipped in place. His mockery was affectionate, but it knew no restraints. “Do tell, darling.”

“I mean nothing by it. Just—just that no rescue comes free.”

“You’re sulky, you’re surly, because we impressed you into service after we saved you from that dolorous tower. That’s the thanks we get. My feelings are hurt.”

She shrugged. Perhaps she did mean that. Some weeks ago, in her life before now, her aging employer had locked her in the top floor of a stone turret. She’d been retained as a nurse, but he wanted more than medical care, and she had refused to yield to his advances. (Well, she couldn’t even if she’d wanted.)

He had gloated at her from below, by turns cajoling and threatening, until one morning, when a grape had become lodged in his windpipe. She couldn’t throw herself out the high window to revive him; the drop was too steep. She couldn’t beat the door down (she had tried that). She watched him stagger to his knees and clutch his throat, and look up at her. He couldn’t speak. She had all she could do not to sing down to him, “Did you take your tablets before your meal?” When he fell, his body made a shadow and then a stain on the terrace.

She feared starvation, but scarcely a day later the dwarf and his crew came along with their awesome Clock. The Dragon had stretched its armored swanlike neck nearly as high as her windowsill, and she had been able to escape, exchanging one affectionate fiend for another. But at least the dwarf and his toothsome boys had sworn against sex with a woman, so they were a better company to keep for the time being.

Mr. Boss deduced that his reticent recruit was in a perplexed mood. He asked, “What were you doing in the service of that Grandpa Ogre, anyway?”

She looked hither and yon. Though the boys were far enough ahead not to hear, she didn’t want to talk about most of it. She said, “My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom. I had three years to go when he became cross with me and locked me in that tower. It was too high to escape from, unless one wanted to jump to one’s death. Once in my childhood I had thought I could fly—but I had no wings of my own. It took your dragon with its own wings to reach its neck up so I could crawl on top of it, and scramble to safety. Did the dragon tell you I would be there, or was it just my luck?”

“Please! I don’t dabble in contingency theory. Too rich for my numbish skull.”

“How long am I beholden to you for your kindness?”

“Ah, that I can’t say. The Clock spells out its designs of fate only as far as it wants me to know them.”

They were silent. More companionable than usual. The dwarf in his way was as indentured as she was in hers. She had seen him set up the Clock only once, to put on an exhibition for a petty brigand who’d come across them on a stretch of paved road and threatened them with a pistol. She’d watched the sergeant-at-hand ratchet the gears until the whole tall instrument was quivering with tension. They all stood back as the Clock invented a little entertainment. She didn’t yet know if the Clock was merely distracting, a tiktok cleverness, or enchanted.

A puppet arrived under the arch of a little proscenium up top. He looked uncannily like the brigand, right down to the gusseted Lincoln-green tunic and the pistol. The puppet looked this way and that, as if to make sure he was alone. Then he sat down and clasped the pistol, barrel upright, between his legs and began to stroke the shaft of it.

No children’s puppet play, this. She’d closed her eyes.

“That’s filthy,” murmured the bandit, somewhat approvingly.

She heard the puppet rocking back and forth. Though there was no sound, she could tell by the quickening of the rhythm that the big pop was near. “Stop,” she’d tried to say, but her voice had fled: She knew no one was listening to her.

“Whoa,” said the bandit, “you’ve got some nerve—”

She had peered between lashes, she admitted it: The mouth of the pistol had fountained a surge of foamy blood all over the trousers of the puppet, who fell back, sated and, it seemed, dead.

Worried that the Clock was not just illustrative of morals but perhaps a hand of fate, she’d whirled to see the brigand. He was slack jawed at the performance (though that was the only part of him slack), and he hadn’t yet noticed that the boys had liberated him of his considerable wallet and his pistol both.

They kept the cash and the bullets and returned the pistol before releasing him. They had nothing to fear: He tore off crashing through the underbrush like a fox from hounds.

The blood was good, no? asked the dwarf. Juice of blood oranges and pomegranates thickened with cream of tartar. The Clock is talented but needs some fuel from time to time.

She hadn’t asked how it came to be that the Clock was supplied with a puppet resembling a chance highway robber. Such a turn put paid to the notion of chance at all. Still, in some ways that was consoling: She could stay where she was, clandestine and still, and freely believe that this must be her fate. The need to decide further was removed from her, which made something of a rest.

“I won’t keep you longer than I’m directed to,” said the dwarf now, as they headed toward the sanctuary he had divined might take them in.

“You did me a service by rescuing me. I’m not looking to leave you. I have no plans but to keep out of sight. I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us.”

“Armies are only hunters in formation. Upright teams of precision hunters.”

“Once I hunted for information, but one of my informants was killed. I have retired from hunting, Mr. Boss. I am no fan of the spoils of the game.”

He reached out to pat her wrist but she tucked her hands in her shawl. Such reticence she showed! Hoping to further this unexpected moment of confidences, the dwarf asked her, “How would you feel about a Lion hunt?”

A Coward for His Country

• 1 •

A LION AT rest.

How old was he now? Thirty-eight? Forty? How long had he been waiting to see some shade of the world other than grim yellow?

That oracle, who was blind with age, could see more than he could. Damn her.

Was she holding out on him? Running for the chapel just when they were closing in on the questions he most needed to ask? Where is the Grimmerie? Where was Elphaba’s rumored son, Liir—where had he disappeared to? If anyone in Oz might know, it had to be Yackle. Yackle wasn’t the only person who had cared about Elphaba—there was Lady Glinda, among others—but Yackle was the one who had been able to see into the darkness of Elphaba’s life.

A vision like that—what he wouldn’t give to have some…some sense of scope. Some perspicacity. But he could never see forward. Even the act of looking back—at how he had gotten himself hip-deep in muck, again and again—even that was hard for him to fathom.

Well, he wasn’t giving up this time. He’d proved useless at his earliest tasks, like finding Jemmsy’s father. A total loser and no mistake. He’d always run off at the first sign of trouble. But now there was nowhere left to run. It was this or prison.

So he let her see of him what she would, with her oracle’s inner eye; she didn’t need to hear him voice his reservations about himself out loud. There were things he would never say to any female, whether she was a Lioness or a human, a judge or an oracle, a petty whore or a pettier maunt.

A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him—so why bother?—but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible. Yackle would prove no exception, he was sure.

How different his life might have been if he had emerged from the Great Gillikin Forest right at the outskirts of the town of Tenniken instead of at Traum. Sure, now he knew: A talking Lion would have had a rough go of it anywhere under the Wizard’s jurisdiction. Yet if Brrr had been able to deliver the medal of honor back to Jemmsy’s father, he’d have had an early experience of reaching a goal. Of not being diverted.

But remembering what had happened in Traum—even thinking about it today—had been a mistake. Living with amnesia, the way those cretinous Bears in the Great Gillikin Forest did, was the only sensible strategy.

The word lionized had more than one meaning.

His youth, his stupidity, had been no more than that. Stupidity was forgivable in the young. But when he’d lain down and played dead in Traum—it had been no more and no less than a collapse of his enfeebled sense of himself—he’d made himself into an emblem of complicity. “Remember the cowardly Lion,” the humans had said in Traum. “He laid down his life for us.”

Sunk in a fug of self-loathing, he’d bypassed Tenniken entirely. Paid the conductor extra to stay on to Shiz. (No other Animals rode the train that day, though, sealed into his own mortification, he hadn’t noticed. Later, he wondered if some good burgher of Traum had bribed the conductor to allow Brrr to board at all, just to get him out of the vicinity.)

Still, the sight of the outskirts of the ancient university town caught Brrr’s attention, drawing him out of his funk. He peered through the grimy train windows. First, the great manufacturing plants. Brick factories with glass transoms, spewing noxious plumes out of zigzaggy smokestacks. Closer to the city-centre, terraced housing for millworkers. Their laundry yards swarmed with small human cubs, at play with their skipping ropes and stones.

And then into the close, gnarled, ancient university center of Shiz. Its separate colleges in promiscuous adjacency. Each boasted an ivy-clawed gatehouse through which passersby could glimpse serene quadrangles…brilliant chapels, lecture halls…science labs chasing the latest developments in two dozen separate branches of enquiry.

The Lion had taken stock of the smart little city, the jewel of the province of Gillikin. He’d explored its nests of colleges and its clubs and its manicured parks and canals, and then he’d set himself up in a better class of residence. Not far from Ticknor Circus, with its array of bistros and bathhouses. A sunny, top-floor den in a purpose-built brick mansion block called Ampleton Quarters. Suite 1904. Fully furnished and featuring the most up-to-the-tiktok in water closets.

Was he aware that he might be trading on a reputation as the very Lion who had inadvertently advanced the Wizard’s plans in the emerald trade, helping to squelch the spontaneous labor revolt? Innocent as he was, it would have been hard for him to discern the ways in which he was receiving undue advantage. His first time in a city—or the first time that he could remember. No other Lions seemed to live in Ampleton Quarters; but then, he tended to hurry to his flat, and avoided the biweekly tenants’ meetings because he didn’t want to be bullied into serving on any committees.

He kept his mouth closed as much as possible. And comparatively speaking, a Lion cuts a fine figure; the world admires a glossy mane, a sultry-surly growl. One can make an impression without saying much, and Brrr learned that he was not bad-looking, as Lions go.

But being good-looking has its own penalties. The public will not let a comely face walk by anonymously; it must find out who owns it. By the end of his first social season in Shiz, Brrr had made the grade. He enjoyed the occasional off-night, back-alley shenanigans but he built a more formal life on the strength of his reputation as a hero.

He didn’t consider marriage. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in a portfolio of diversified stocks managed by a Shiz bank called the Gold Standard. In the first few years it swelled agreeably. While the rest of Oz was still suffering the effects of the long drought, and farmsteads in Munchkinland were being repossessed for back taxes, the industrial base of Gillikin allowed waistlines to amplify and chins to double. Brrr grew prosperous, and lived like it. He kept to himself. Cultivating the reputation of a mystery presence about town, he avoided close contact of a genuinely intimate nature, and therefore—he hoped—he might be excused for failing to see the social coercion, the repression on which the Shiz haut monde was built.

He took in shows. He meandered through galleries. Without much attention to the topic at hand, he attended the occasional public lecture at Three Queens College or Briscoe Hall; it seemed to be something the well-heeled did in a university town like Shiz. He never took notes, although sometimes he tried mentally to assess his compounded interest for the quarter while the lecturer was nattering on.

Brrr especially enjoyed those presentations on the subject of art history, not least because the lights would go down when the gloriously colored illuminatums were to be cast upon a white plaster wall. In the darkened hall, no one could notice if Brrr was paying attention or not. Thus, freed of anxiety, he found he did appreciate the lectures. And he stayed awake, unlike some.

His earliest love was for manuscript pages. “A singularly fine example of the monk known to us now only as the Ur-Scribe. This from Shiz’s most antique bound codex,” droned the master. “Notice the three-ply wreathing adorning the left margin. Green foil made from the crushed talons of dragons, very rare; and observe the flecks of gold as well: a hint that the artist still possessed Lurlinist tendencies, though the early unionist text posits the Unnamed God’s superior station.”

“And the blue on the third strand?” asked a woman of a certain age, decked out in blue furs herself, fluffing a storm cloud around her chin.

“Perhaps a kind of alibi color, to throw those sniffing for heresy off the scent,” replied the master. “We can only speculate.”

“Perhaps he liked blue,” said the aging dilettante. Her eye was bright and, yes, blue. “I certainly do. I find it…stimulating.”

“If we might proceed,” said the master wearily.

Brrr talked to the woman at the reception hour. “He’s so distinguished, our guest scholar,” she gushed, “but he thinks me crass. He won’t find time in his research schedule to visit my newly decorated salon—oh, it’s divine, eighteen panels of bleached pearlwood—and help me decide on what to hang. And where. I’m so cross with him.”

“Have you a fine collection?” asked Brrr.

“I’ve no eye to decide if it’s fine or not,” she replied. “Why don’t you come have a look, tell me what you think?”

When he said he would, she introduced herself as Miss Piarsody Scallop. She was rather long in the tooth to be a Miss, and he wondered if he might have been invited to her home for reasons other than art appreciation. Nonetheless, he took a risk, and discovered Miss Scallop to be genuinely rich, and genuinely interested in—if paralyzed by—the ambiguities and obscurities of art.

Thus he finally found out that he did possess a native skill, that mysterious commodity known as a good eye. Cousin, perhaps, to perfect pitch, or a sixth sense. He became adroit at buying and selling small prints and sketches and advising ladies of leisure about the works gracing the walls of their salons. He could turn a tidy profit in the bargain, and he did. He lived off his interest and never touched his capital.

One evening, in the magnificent diamond-paned lectorium nestled next to the Deckens College chapel, he heard a titter in the room and sensed faces turning his way. He blushed without knowing why and waved a little, as if to show he had been paying quite close attention, thank you very much. He did try to concentrate for the next few minutes, to deduce what had happened. The lecturer, a Madame Morrible from Crage Hall, was treating the audience to the benefit of her impressions of—what was it?—the Animal Adverse laws (or the Animal Courtesy acts if you used the jargon of punditry)—as they pertained to higher education at Shiz.

“Exceptions are always possible,” insisted this Madame Morrible, fluttering one hand to simulate the sparkle-dust of mercy while waving the other hand in the Lion’s general direction. “The Animal who serves our beloved Wizard is accorded all the privileges he so richly deserves. The creature called cowardly by some has had the courage to accept the epithet. Another name for cowardice is the courage of no convictions. A true hero can tolerate being called a coward for one’s country. No?”

He wasn’t quite able to follow the gist of this. He wasn’t ashamed. He’d had no education, after all; it was a miracle he could walk into a place like this and hold his head up! He applauded with the rest of them, but he couldn’t think of a single remark to make during the Q-and-A period.

He got up to stretch, collect his greatcoat and huge bespoke dove-grey evening gloves. He turned to mumble appreciatively to the lady on his left and he saw that she was moving away quickly as if to avoid having to chat. He turned again, and the gentleman on his right was doing the same.

He looked the room over, in that way one does, pretending to expect to find one’s best beloved, or at least a crony, and readying to sigh loudly, a public display of regret, dash-it-all!—and at last it dawned on him that he was the only Animal in the room.

On reflection, walking home, he concluded that this had been the case, in the circles in which he traveled, for some time. He had never noticed.

Still, he didn’t yet have the wherewithal to know if he had become a laughingstock. He began to pay attention. Was including Brrr on a guest list a sleight-of-mockery to amuse the disdainful? An Animal in Society—in these days, in these hard times, with the Animal Courtesy acts!—had he become a joke? A beloved old joke? Was treating him like a hero a part of the joke? It might be just so. His allowing it to happen—showing up at dinner parties as the outré guest, dandified and powdered and beribboned—that was his part of the joke, people assumed. He had no shame. Good for him. He was a token of the Wizard’s clemency and understanding.

Perhaps they weren’t as cruel as they seemed. He pondered it. The Cowardly Lion? Sure, it sounded like a slur of sorts, but he’d looked on it as almost a kind of stage name, a title. He’d assumed they meant it affectionately. He had been very young when he’d made his name, after all.

Then, at last, and who knows how, the word began to get out that he’d been paid for playing dead all those years ago.

The Traum massacre. The journalist in the train’s dining car, all those years back, had coined a phrase, the Cowardly Lion. The tag was an insult in remission, ready to metastasize in the public consciousness now that Brrr had established himself as a public figure.

The Lion who wouldn’t fight. The pesky Glikkuns who were mowed down. The big old peaceable pussycat. The dead trolls. The wussums with his wittle Wion’s tears.

Ah, but Brrr would have survived the shame of it a little better had he not taken the purse.

He’d been too wet, too inexperienced, too damn hungry to think twice about accepting it. In the end, as the stink of a questionable past began to bloom around him, it wasn’t as much the cowardice people commented upon, but that Brrr had been paid handsomely.

We all make mistakes. But we’re not supposed to profit from them.

What could he do next? The rumors kept doubling the amount of the sum he’d been awarded. If he’d had anything like such an initial investment, he’d be the wealthiest Animal in Oz by now. In gossip, presumed wealth is always overestimated by garish exponentials. That in itself was a burden to him.

He couldn’t give the money back to the hard-up burghers of Traum; that would be to acknowledge some sort of wrongdoing, and he’d done nothing wrong except to be young and ignorant.

Besides, he could never afford to give back the amount of money folks now said he’d earned on his first day in human society.

In any case, giving publicly to charity was thought unseemly. He’d only be able to contribute anonymously. And while this might help his soul, it wouldn’t salvage his reputation.

He tore his mane out at nights, sleepless and distraught. But he kept accepting invitations, for suddenly to drop out of society might also signal a sense of failure, of guilt. The soirées became ugly but he kept showing up, in part to prove he wasn’t scared to show up.

Then one evening, as he stood under the stone portico of the Sir Chuffrey Opera Palace, waiting in a queue of the great and the good for the next available landau, Brrr was approached by a young blueblood. “The Cowardly Lion! You’re the Lion from the labs at Shiz University,” he said. “Aren’t you? The little orphaned cubling! Doctor Nikidik tried to sever your language stem. I was there. I remember.”

“I was never in Shiz as an infant,” he replied, affronted, though as he spoke he realized he couldn’t be sure of this. Who remembers their own infancy?

It was a Margreave’s son, deep in his cups, slurring his words and making a scene. “Brrr. Is that right? I remember—the doctor named you Brrr because you shivered like a kitten with the flu.” Only it came out “shivered like a shitten.”

“Nonsense,” said Brrr. “This is my first episode in Shiz. I should remember an earlier visit.”

“The cage,” prompted the inebriate, “a cunning little cage! I remember because your name was pronounced like the first syllable of berserk.”

Avaric Tenmeadows, the Margreave’s son, it turned out, had attended some classes with Elphaba. The dreaded Wicked Witch of the West, as she’d come to be known. On the day in question, she’d witnessed the dustup, swore the Margreave’s son. She had!

Heads turned. The Witch was big news just then, because her sister, Nessarose, recently had orchestrated the secession of Munchkinland from Oz. The Thropp family was in dudgeon, both sisters alike. No one yet had taken any measure of their baby brother.

Overnight—as the rickshaws and buckboards and broughams pulled sloppily into the rain—the Lion’s reputation was tarnished in another way. Suspicious through association. Complicit. A familiar…

The Witch had rescued the poor little cub from the experiment, said a letter to the editor, signed Anonymous (a pensioner).

No, it was a pair of fey boysies called Crope and Tibbett, said someone in a gossip column. The Witch actually wanted the cub killed so she could drink its baby Animal blood.

No, the Witch had hexed him, that poor little Brrr.

Are you kidding? He’d been hexed at Brrrth. Ha-ha.

I wish I’d been hexed with a trust fund like his.

Within a few weeks, vaudeville comics on the variety stages of Ticknor Circus were mocking Brrr’s precision in speech. When he made an attempt to talk street-thuggy, they mocked that even more.

What astonished him—when he had achieved the distance from the events to interpret them without rages—was the extent to which a comic accusation could, by dint of repetition, begin to be taken as received wisdom. The Witch, after all, was on her way to becoming feared and despised, but she was still only a distant threat. Whereas if the Lion was her familiar—hah! It made the threat of the Witch seem more like a joke.

When the joke faded, the sentiment remained. The bemused tolerance that had attended his myopic insistence on being a civilized Animal in Shiz began to evaporate. His silvered tray was empty of calling cards; the morning post brought fewer and fewer requests to call, to dine, to take a promenade through the Scholars’ Arbor, to attend a charity function at considerable cost. He was stuck with a stock of expensive old mettanite engravings he couldn’t shift, and he owed a bundle on them.

Miss Scallop began to be not at home to him, when, on her receiving afternoons, Brrr came to call.

In the week that no such invitations arrived, and the columnists grew snarkier in their insinuations, Brrr finally saw what others had seen many months, even years, before. Things were not going well for talking Animals in general, and for a talking Animal with a tainted reputation, for having been defended by the Witch, a known enemy of the state—well, if he didn’t get out soon, it would be his own fault.

One morning over coffee, a political cartoon showed a dandified Lion mincing along with banknotes stuffed in his beribboned mane. The caption read:

Quivery Brrrr.

What’s up with her?

What’s she prefer?

What makes her purr?

No loyal Cat

Should act like that.

The heart of a cur

In expensive fur.

The offending newspapers slapped to the floor, the Lion made his plans quietly—there were no friends to share them, after all—and then he disappeared from Shiz, leaving three months’ rent owed on Suite 1904.

He needed to avoid the Emerald City to the south, so he couldn’t go there. If anything the Animal Adverse laws were stricter in the capital. Yet, though some free Animals were said to be migrating westward into the Great Kells, the Lion could summon no enthusiasm for the wilderness outback of the Vinkus. He’d become too accustomed to his creature comforts. And he had no interest ever in revisiting the Ozmists or the Bears, or any other denizens of the Great Gillikin Forest. Shame? Been there, done that, as the wags said.

Instead, therefore, he made his way cross-country to the southeast. He wandered about, doing odd jobs and stealing from barns when hunger required it. In the best of times, a Lion can’t cause trouble in rural neighborhoods and get away with it for long. And these were not the best of times by a long stretch. So he lived in an unsettled way. He roamed the lower slopes of the Madeleines, hunger in his guts, burrs from hack-thistle in his pelt.

These were years of loping along, fits and starts. He would take a job on a farm—he wasn’t above hauling a wagon if it meant dinner—but the farmer was inevitably brutal, or stupid beyond tolerance, or offensive, or a sorry joke of a human being. Brrr didn’t think of himself as losing his jobs, but leaving them when the moment was ripe. (That moment so often came the moment he was fired.)

Once he discovered a pride of Lions trying to make a small conclave for themselves in some caves on the eastern slopes of the Madeleines. They had never been to Shiz, nor to anyplace more thrilling than the nearest market town. Nor had they any memory of abandoning a cub in the Great Gillikin Forest as Brrr had been abandoned. They were not his family, they attested. Far from it. None of their number could commit such a heinous act. Furthermore, they didn’t keep up with Lion tribes in other free-range zones.

At least, that was what they said at first. One evening on watch, a distinguished old auntie Lioness allowed that communiqués among the outlying prides had once been common. “There were human campaigns to separate prides of Talking Beasts from the rest,” she insisted. “The great WOO has never trusted Animals. I heard from a relative in the Great Gillikin Forest that the usual single poachers were being joined by a more systematic cohort of army hunters. They were intent on eliminating the larger Animals who might get wind of the Animal Adverse laws and mount an attack in defense of their citified kin. The Forest is not all that far from Shiz, as you must know.”

“As far as I understood, Animals in the wild have little to do with their domesticated cousins.”

“Every pride is different, dear,” she answered softly, “as every Animal is.”

“Have you ever known a pride that abandons its young?”

“Not willingly. I did hear once of an attempt to cull Lion cubs from their mothers,” she continued, more blithely than he could have thought possible. “For use in laboratory experiments, whatever those are. One queries if said mothers relinquished their cubs in exchange for their own liberty. I never would of course.”

By now Brrr was cynical enough to look at her sharply. Was she revealing a hidden secret of this pride? Might they all have been lying to him? Could she herself…?

But this pride, to the last one of them, was marked by a dark tuft of fur at every chin, and he had no such marking.

So all she was revealing was the capacity of a Lion even to entertain the thought of such a betrayal, even if by someone else.

He didn’t bid the auntie good night, for he didn’t think it would be one; and it wasn’t.

Still, he learned from this pride of tuft-chinned Lions a certain coherence of attitude. A Lion pride could be a kindly casual crowd. They didn’t indulge in aimless ancestor worship, but unlike the court of Queen Ursaless, they didn’t forget each day as it happened, either. They were wary of others and tended to avoid large groups of nomadic Animals, even those they might easily disperse by a show of claw. Not precisely pacifists, but not the fierce Lion of human legend, either.

For quite a while they admired Brrr and treated him like a respected cousin visiting from the glamorous, dangerous city. He amused them with tales of goings-on, quite a few of them true. He settled with them, a raconteur-at-large, a personality that brought their humble forest lives some distinction. He made an effort to court a few young Lionesses (one at a time, of course), but his overtures were rebuffed. He was too foreign, too silver of tongue, for them to take seriously. He thought he could wear them down—wear them all down—by his amused tolerance, his capacity for sticking around. He could make himself indispensable.

But eventually the Lions began to mock his drawing-room parlance, and not in an affectionate manner. He was too gilded a lily for their rustic clan. If he could not mate because none would mate with him, he would be bound sooner or later to fight for tribal dominance, and—oh, the idea of it—they could never allow a dandy such as Brrr to lead their pack. He should think of moving on. Soon.

So once again he would have to get up and leave, before things got ugly.

By the time this thought occurred to him he had been with the pride of Lions some few years, and the departure was more painful to contemplate than he’d imagined.

Evacuating a sordid situation was beginning to become a habit.

During a night plagued by insomnia, he steeled himself to go. The sad dawn came, a soft-yolk sun blearing through vermilion clouds. Like an effect of the later period of the great la Chivarra. And there was a watery softness to the weather. Maybe it would be all right.

How old was he now? He pondered as he stretched the sleep-kinks out. Haven’t I earned the right to a decent life? Or could that ever be a right?

He had nothing to pack, no satchel, no clothes. He’d abandoned all his fine rags in Ampleton Quarters, Suite 1904. Naked as a brave Animal, he looked left and right across the clearing one final time. No one was awake but for a shy cub who was nuzzling a makeshift dolly in her mouth.

“I’m off, then,” he said to the little thing. She turned her head and closed her eyes as if she hadn’t heard.

“Don’t be such a little coward,” she purred to her fake baby.

• 2 •

WHAT A piece of work he’d become! He acknowledged that. A ludicrous figure padding his way overland, with no particular destination, nor much of a yen to settle on one.

Indeed, the farther he got from the pale of the Lions, the more desolate the landscape became, and he in it. The rises known in Gillikin as the Madeleines—for their gentle ridged shapes, like the spongy cake so beloved of schoolboys—were less appealing on the Munchkinland side of the border. Their name changed, too. The Wend Fallows. Wind-reddened, turnipy hills that, lower down, broke up into a network of arroyos, most running south by southeast. Beautiful to no one but the stray hermit or mendicant. What streams there were flushed into the mighty Munchkin River, which fed Oz’s largest lake, Restwater.

But—martyrs roasting on an open fire!—Wend Fallows was ugly as sin. A furzy sort of brown nap coated the hillsides, like a mold that has died but refuses to stop clinging. On south-facing slopes, caterpillars had ravaged the spindly trees. Their leaves looked less lacy than skeletal. The water was brackish; the salt lick, licked out.

An arid good-for-nothing sort of landscape in which Brrr might as well make himself at home.

It was neither the place nor the time of his life in which he thought to find romance. Indeed, any expectation of intimacy initially sparked by his early friendships with Jemmsy or Cubbins seemed to have petered out, leaving nothing. He therefore hove into the sight of a tribe of—what were they—Ocelots?—without paying much attention. Almost devoid of the instinct for self-preservation now, he loped upon them and moved to pass through, looking neither left nor right at them as they lay, sprawled and unafraid, in the thin junk-woods that pestered the terraces and leveling slopes of the Wend Fallows.

He wasn’t so much displaying a proud profile as daring the Cats to be affronted, and to fall upon him with claws.

They did neither. A leader of some variety stood up and blocked his way. “It is poor manners in these parts to traipse through a party without stopping for a meal,” said the creature, a male.

“Didn’t presume to be invited,” said Brrr.

“You’re in such a hurry?” The tone was guarded, perhaps hostile.

“No hurry,” said Brrr, and then—a little hostile himself—“and no appetite to speak of, either.” He neither raised his brow to be superior nor lowered it.

“Stay a spell, then. Join your neighbor Cats in fellowship.” He flicked his eyes left and right, circling the pack in. “We are a family tribe called Ghullim, and I am the chief, known as Uyodor H’aekeem. We have not met you before, I think.”

Brrr decided to withhold his name for the time being. “I’m not from these parts.”

“Advance guard for your pack?” Uyodor sniffed the wind for further company.

“Traveling alone,” said Brrr. “By choice,” he added, which was mostly true.

“A rare creature, to brave the landscape on your own.”

“Not much of a landscape.” He couldn’t keep from adding, “And so not much bravery required.”

“Still, you’ve met a peaceable sort, we Ghullim. We don’t like strangers to pass through without getting to know them, for strangers can become enemies, but friends?—friends can never return to being strangers again. Don’t you agree?” He whipped his tail, aerating his punctuation. The wind hissed in Brrr’s eyes.

“Oh, quite,” said Brrr, “though a conscripted friendship is a conceit I’ve never encountered before.”

“No conscription,” said Uyodor H’aekeem, “no coercion: only conversion, and by affable means! Piyanta, Zibria, come escort our new friend to table.” He enunciated the word friend with a crispness and decorum that suggested something like a legislated honor.

Piyanta and Zibria rolled up on delicately articulated paws. They were maidens of a piquant variety, and in a human affectation their eyes were smeared with kohl.

“Follow us,” they purred, and led Brrr away—he was not protesting—to a shaded clearing up a small rise, where a pair of tree elves was busy stirring a pot over a fire. The smell of a savory stew enhanced the sense of welcome.

“You will be our guest,” said Uyodor from a distance. “Ghullim custom insists on it. Treat him well, young ladies.”

“Guest, schmest,” muttered one of the tree elves. “I call it indentured service, myself.”

“Me, I live to cook,” replied the other elf staunchly while looking around himself this way and that. Sotto voce: “Shut up, Twigg.”

“Shut up yourself, Stemm.”

Brrr paid them no attention. He had never seen tree elves before, but having heard of them, he considered them beneath regard. “Are you allowed to talk with me?” he asked his female consorts.

“To talk, to befriend, to enrapture,” said Zibria. Piyanta giggled and looked in one of Zibria’s ears, as if studying to see if she had any brains at all.

“Then I ask a question, if I might.”

“You might.”

“I don’t recognize your species. Your profile confuses me. You resemble Tigers in your musculature, but you are smaller. And your coats—like dried mint leaves, the markings, rather than stripes…”

“We’re a rare kind, we are,” said Zibria. “Perhaps a one-of-a-kind species. We have Spice Leopard in our Tiger makeup.”

Brrr raised his eyebrow. He hadn’t known interspecies generation ever to work. True, in the wide scope of society, it was inevitable that shady romances between members of separate species would occur from time to time, but they were frowned upon at best and rarely produced offspring in any event. Now, he thought, an aberration that had yielded a most sumptuous type of cat—look at Piyanta lying there, amusing herself by batting at a butterfly—a dollop of femininity curled upon itself, in a coat of golden-brown scallops. An exquisite she, a remarkable she.

“Does the Ghullim clan have a name?” he found himself asking. “As a species, I mean? I can’t quite place you.”

“We don’t need to name ourselves. Let others try,” replied Zibria.

“Merchants of Oppression?” offered Twigg. “Slaves to Your Glorious Past?”

“Soup’s nearly on!” sang out the one who’d been addressed as Stemm. “And yummers, is it a winner today, folks!” He brandished a ladle like a mace. “Who wants firsties?”

“The guest,” said Zibria. “Of course.”

“Not hungry,” said Brrr, thinking poison or the like.

“Still, it’s only polite to accept our humble fare,” said Zibria.

“Not as humble as all that,” said Stemm. “We been working on this batch since sunup. No rest for the weary, that’s what I say.”

“No rest for the idiotic,” said Twigg. “Dish up a portion, brother-at-arms, before I bash your brains in. Not that you have many.”

The tree elves conspired between them to carry a shallow bowl of the viscous liquid over to Brrr and set it down on the ground without spilling too much of it. Potatoes like soft stones gleamed in the broth.

“Garnished with elf spit!” cried Stemm, and made as if to prove it.

“That’s an elf joke,” said Twigg, cuffing him. “Go on, eat up. It’s good.”

“Please,” said Zibria.

“I couldn’t,” said Brrr.

“You should, please,” inserted Piyanta, “for Ghullim custom requires us to hold off our own meal until the guest has partaken, and I am particularly hungry this morning.” She loosed a sour-pink tongue between pearly dirks of tooth. Brrr nearly swooned. Whatever they called themselves, or resisted calling themselves, they were a perfect beauty of a tribe.

He obliged, in the name of courtesy. If he were poisoned and died today, what difference might it make? He’d have perished in golden company, and little complaint at that, among all else to fret over.

And the soup wasn’t bad, actually.

He finished his portion, and the elves then served Zibria and Piyanta—from the same pot, Brrr was pleased to note. He rolled over on his side and stretched his aching legs. He didn’t think Lions had been meant for hillside meandering, not the way his limbs felt today. But to lie here in a wash of faintly pulsing pain and watch those pretty tongues lap and lap…well, he could bear it just now.

Before the elegant pair of damsel Cats could return to conversation, though, a third creature walked through. At first Brrr thought it was Uyodor H’aekeem again, for the stance was regal and the attitude curt and guarded. Then he saw that the newcomer was a female.

He was on his feet at once.

“Scatter,” said the newcomer, and Zibria and Piyanta left, drops of soup raining to either side.

The ladycat sat herself down. The tree elves didn’t offer her a meal (perhaps there was none left). They clung to each other and hid behind the pot.

“First things first. I see you’ve been fed,” she said. “I am Muhlama H’aekeem. The daughter and only child of Uyodor.”

He waited to be urged to sit again, but she didn’t mention it, and after a while he didn’t dare.

As if continuing a postprandial colloquy, she commented, “You are a brave Lion, to waltz in among the inestimable Ghullim without introduction or apology.”

“I don’t know your Ghullim ways,” he replied. “I don’t fathom the ways of communities in general, come to think of it. I have lived a while among Lions, but I am not essentially one of them. You must forgive me the brutality of my manners. Ignorance, I promise you, not superiority.”

“Well, of course, not superiority,” replied Muhlama. Her eyes were anthracite—hard, fixed, aqueous—but her tone had the faintest uplift of irony. “Where are you headed?”

Brrr had no destination. In a sense, his life of motion and restlessness, in successive waves of unsuccessful campaigns, had washed him up, cast him ashore on the lip of this very morning, with no further horizon to crave or even imagine. “Where am I headed? I suppose I was headed here, although I didn’t know it.”

Muhlama turned her head. It dawned on Brrr that they were perched on a blunted promontory above the encampment. While he was more or less on display, an ornament on a ledge, so were the splendid cats arrayed below. It was a larger tribe than others he’d encountered in the wild. He could examine their social organization as if it were drawn out in a textbook diagram.

“Has the Ghullim clan a name?” he asked. “A species name, I mean?”

“We are the Ghullim family. We need no other designation among ourselves. But I have known others to call us Ivory Tigers, which seems to be a nod to the apparent Tiger among our ancestors as well as to the Spice Leopard markings, which to some look like angle-cut slices of vanilla pod laid in imbrications.”

Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tigress. And below, her father en couchant, his forearms set decidedly as andirons. Marmoreal, he rested upon an ornate carpet knotted in golds and green silks. Back and forth among the cool stand of ferns behind him, his Ivory Tiger tail moved, like the head of a Water Cobra.

Around Uyodor H’aekeem’s carpet churned the workings of a government more regularized than any that Brrr had witnessed in the Animal provinces. Several elder Ivory Tigers, ambassadors or senators of some sort, conferred among themselves in tones soft and serious. Other male Tigers, disarmingly casual, patrolled the perimeter of the camp. The Tigers weren’t dissolute like Bears or paralyzed by endless arbitration like humans, but regimented and alert. Brrr realized he must have been given clearance to stroll into this group.

Nearer, he could see Piyanta and Zibria and their cousins in a kind of open cloister, reclining behind a netting of pale golden gauze suspended from the branches of larch trees. The young females tended to one another’s needs with a simple affection that seemed both kittenish and provocative.

A few rapscallion youngsters were being taught the algebraics of pouncing by a seriously trim grandmother warrior. She was not afraid to draw blood with the cuff of her paw, though Brrr could hear no mew of complaint from the erring student.

“Is there a queen?” he found himself asking, thinking of Ursaless, that dowdy collapsing pillar of Bear.

“Are you referring to Ozma?” Muhlama nearly spit the word.

“I was not. I meant was your father blessed with a consort.”

“Uyodor H’aekeem does not take a mate for life,” said Muhlama. “Like so many tribes in Oz, we are a matriarchy. But if a Chieftess bears no female offspring, her oldest male cub becomes leader until he dies or is challenged successfully by an upstart. Uyodor, the son of our last Chieftess, has held sway since before my birth.”

“And you are in line, then, to lead the Ghullim when he dies.”

“I stand in no line,” she snapped, but that was a revelation she regretted at once. (She had a temper, he saw.) The rate of her breathing had changed; she was holding her breath—holding herself together, holding herself back. “You are correct. If tradition is followed, I am the next to rule.”

He decided to change the subject. “Since you mentioned her, I wonder if your clan believes that Ozma will return to rule Oz again?”

She snorted. “Ozma? Can you credit anything about the heap of gossip surrounding her? The washerwoman myths of a holy saint Ozma, our savior and our guide—hah! Those baby bones are halfway to dust now. The Wizard in the Emerald City is far too smart an operator to have sequestered that child somewhere off-site, where she could grow and thrive and command an army to return and reclaim her throne. We wait for no deliverers here, and we need none. We are in readiness when our terrain is threatened, and no Wizard of Oz nor any other agitator will co-opt our independence or receive our tribute.”

The vigor of her testimony seemed disproportionate, since his remark had been casual. This was a tribe that reveled in its iconoclastic identity with lethal earnestness.

“I only wondered,” he said. “It does seem to be an enduring story, that the baby Ozma was hidden somewhere when the Wizard accomplished his coup d’état.”

“Inane. What reason could that mad potentate possibly have for allowing a potential rival to survive?”

“I don’t know.” The Lion felt out of his depth when talking political strategy, especially if the discussion became heated. “I heard someone posit that if the Wizard were ever brought on charges for her murder, he’d be able to pull her out of hiding and prove his innocence. Other than that, I have no earthly idea.”

“I can see that.” She rolled over on her side and looked at him without blinking. He felt he had never been scrutinized up close so intimately, and it took every scrap of willpower not to flinch at her velvety appraisal. “You are a naïf who has traveled widely. I can tell by how you speak. It takes a certain kind of independent spirit to remain aloof when one has gotten around.”

“Independent spirit is a polite way to put it. I prefer to think of it as a character flaw.”

She laughed a little and her tail lashed against the stone beneath her.

He asked her, “Why did the Ghullim allow me to approach, when you clearly approve of your own independence?”

“You showed no sign of being a threat to our security.”

He had to acknowledge they had read him correctly, but still that seemed an incomplete answer. “Are you looking for something from me? News about the Emerald City, say? It is some years since I was in Shiz, where EC goings-on were always the hot topic.” He did not add, And I left in disgrace, but he imagined Muhlama H’aekeem was smart enough to guess his shortcomings.

“We have a network of informers, should we need a key piece of classified information. Anyway, it was I who gave the signal to let you in.” She rolled onto her back so he could see the bits of torn autumn leaf, red maple and lavender pearlfruit, caught in the hot white-gold of her under-trunk fur, spangling it like jewels, from her neck to her loins.

“But why?” He found he had to lower his volume or he was afraid his voice might break.

“Diversion,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“How could I mind?” he replied. “I was going nowhere special, so I could hardly be diverted.”

“I mean diversion for us. For me. A distraction from the daily efforts of our military readiness. A distraction from the threat of becoming the Chieftess, which is an obligation I have no wish to accept.”

“Can’t you simply refuse?”

“Refuse your duty to your father? To the tribe he governs?” She let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth, playing corpse. “Only in death. Have you no concept of fathers?”

“No,” he admitted. “Mine never remembered to come round.”

“Lucky beast.”

“Him or me?”

She turned her head toward him; her chest was still exposed in the sunlight. It was all he could do to keep his eyes trained on her eyes. “If you have never enjoyed the paternal correction as administered by your own father and master, how will you qualify to be a father when it’s your turn?”

“I didn’t know I would need to supply qualifications to become a father.”

Again, she laughed. “I suppose there is really only one application procedure,” she admitted. “Touché. But in actual fact—what is your name?—I signaled you should be brought into the circle so that the subject might be changed. I was arguing with Uyodor H’aekeem about matters of state. Our words were sharp, and I didn’t want to lose my temper. In general it isn’t considered seemly among the Ghullim, and for a chieftain’s daughter to discredit her father’s position by second-guessing him—well, it isn’t done.”

“You could just walk away, couldn’t you?”

“I can be rude to you, but not to Uyodor H’aekeem.” Her tone remaining precisely neutral, she neither mocked her father’s name nor celebrated it. “Or did you mean I might strike out on my own?”

“Some do. I did, of necessity.”

“I knew I liked the look of you, at least a little. You have a silly swagger about you that is entirely unconvincing. Anyone brave enough to sashay through our territory like that is either a one-off nutter or an ally worth cultivating.”

“I may be neither,” he said, and wanted to add, or I may be something else again. He tried to focus on her without blinking, though his tear ducts tended to empty at inopportune moments.

She leaped to her feet as if she had caught wind of salacious thoughts. “I’m too full of energy, I can’t sit still for long,” she said to him. “I don’t want you to leave yet, for I have a lot to accomplish while you’re here, but I have to run, run my limbs to exhaustion, or I will claw myself to death.”

“Highly strung, are we.”

She bared her teeth at him. He went on more neutrally, “Are you permitting me to stay or prohibiting me from leaving?”

She didn’t answer but went leaping down off the ledge, a wave of golden coins pulsing through the scatter of falling leaves.

He did not feel he wanted to push his luck.

The tree elves came out from behind their pot. He had forgotten about them.

“She’s in a lather,” said Twigg.

“Never seen her quite like that,” said Stemm.

“Have we heard something we ought not hear?” said Twigg.

“She’s too smart for that; she will have known we were quivering back here like mice,” replied Stemm. “But nobody trusts what we say anyway, so who cares?”

“Is it like that?” asked Brrr. “Is Uyodor H’aekeem so driven? So unyielding? Would he care that much if his oldest daughter renounced her obligations?”

“And do what?” asked Twigg. “Run a nursery school for malformed forest creatures? It’s inconceivable. Ivory Tigers live to thrive, and they thrive through keen military readiness. She can have no other notion for herself. It’s not allowed.”

“She’s touched in the head,” said Stemm. “Of course, don’t listen to me, I’m a dolt-bolt, what do I know?”

“Well, I know what they think,” said Twigg. “It’s all honor and tradition and how things are done. And how they’ve been done for the past twenty chieftainships. Their elegant history of independence weighs on them, their own style of yoke. Slaves to themselves. Do as well as we have always done! Don’t be the weak link in the chain of our ongoing history. What a lump of cold congealed pottage it all is, at least to me.”

“Shall I leave or shall I stay?” It seemed demeaning to ask advice of tree elves, but Brrr was caught in indecision.

“Makes no difference to us. Stay, enjoy our cooking. Leave without permission, and we have Lion stew on the menu for the evening. Your choice. It’s a free woods.”

So Brrr allowed himself to stay and be courted by Piyanta and Zibria again, though they seemed less appealing now that he’d met Muhlama. In time he asked to take a nap, and he sent them off giggling and blushing back to their enclave.

• 3 •

WAS HE a guest of the Ghullim or a prisoner? He couldn’t answer the question for himself assuredly. If a guest, eventually he’d have to leave. If a prisoner, he supposed he ought to protest his incarceration. Still, what kind of incarceration was this? Exercise, the morning run, and rock-scramble with Muhlama and her companions. Hardly a punishment.

Brrr relaxed; what else could he do? He enjoyed the meals, sometimes cooked by the tree elves, sometimes caught and served bloody raw by the Ivory Tiger hunters. (He’d abandoned vegetarianism when he’d arrived in Shiz, though he preferred the human custom of cooking the meat.) He took part in games of hide-and-seek at which he was always it, because he, alone among the Cats, couldn’t scale the bark of a tree nor hide in the foliage of its canopy. Even emaciated with hunger, he weighed twice what an adult male Ivory Tiger weighed.

Afternoons—a Lion’s laziest time—he dozed a short distance away from where Uyodor H’aekeem held court. Muhlama disappeared. He wondered whether she was conducting her ablutions, or napping in a private boudoir, or—he tried not to visualize this—pursuing a dalliance with some other creature. It was none of his business. And he would never know: in her regal demeanor, she shone, and deflected close scrutiny, too, like a shellac.

Still, the idea burned him and teased him a little.

He had never expected to appeal to anyone. He didn’t much appeal to himself. He conceded the obvious: Perhaps he was being kept around as a spot of comic interest, like the dotty maiden aunt trotted out into the family parlor to amuse the neighbors and ensure that the conversation remained innocent and droll. But so what? He was growing used to Muhlama’s manner. Her high style and her higher disdain, which sometimes flowered into impatience.

Brrr and Muhlama disagreed from time to time, and she even lashed out at him, but he took no offense. Disapproval was better than invisibility.

He’d been with the Ghullim a month, or even two, when the equilibrium was shattered. One night, after a feast of braised loin of warthog served with mushrooms, Uyodor H’aekeem awoke with a start. He claimed he had been snared in a bad dream. (It seemed that Ivory Tigers rarely dreamed, but when they did, it was a bad sign.) The truth was, though, that the raw terrain was being washed with high winds and cracking branches. The chief had probably been startled by the fall of a tree nearby.

Dreams were always warnings. But what did it mean? Unfamiliar with the conventions of dream, Uyodor called Brrr to his side.

“The dream had human men in it,” said the Ivory Tiger, pacing back and forth in the teeth of the dry gale. “You’ve lived in the world of men, you say. Tell me how I should interpret the dream. Tell me why I have had it now.”

“The storm unsettled you,” said Brrr. “With your sharp ear, you heard a cry of alarm from some pitiless creature hurled through the high winds. Give it no mind.”

“It was a dream,” Uyodor insisted. “Where did it come from?”

“Perhaps the mushrooms were off?” But this was too glib. Uyodor glared and repeated what he could of his murky midnight vision. It was less clear than ever; it had dangerous men in it. Cats, Brrr thought, could have no more revealing dreams than socks or mustard could.

But he didn’t care to make things up. “Have you considered perhaps dismissing your chefs?”

“Are you proposing poison?”

“Heavens! No.” Brrr wanted no more blood on his paws, not even the thin silly blood of tree elves. “Perhaps your palate needs a change—your indigestion a result of a kind of curiosity for something new…”

The wind snatched at one of the golden veils and flew it away.

“Perhaps you need to move camp,” said Brrr. “Maybe the dream was calling a warning to pack up and leave here before a disaster stronger than a storm should strike.”

This was more like it. The chief retired to spend the rest of the night sleepless, and Brrr crawled back into the nook he’d been designated, a cleft under a protruding slab of pinkish granite. A moon was up and the skies were clear, and Brrr could see that the tree elves had climbed into their iron pots to keep from being blown away.

At dawn Uyodor H’aekeem convened a council of elders. He gave out his orders on the legitimacy of the Lion’s advice. They would retreat to a new campsite at once, cull food from fresher sources, avoid some disaster that must be coming their way at the place they were about to abandon.

His tribe reacted with the usual politesse and immediacy. Everyone except Muhlama, who without comment disappeared into the forest.

Brrr went to the cooking station to find out what to think about all this.

“Uyodor H’aekeem, the brave Chief of the Ghullim! This is a rare instance of superstition, for him,” Twigg observed. “He prides himself on being above that kind of thing.”

“This lot stays put until there’s a reason to move,” agreed Stemm. “But, Twigg, it’s not your job to judge how Uyodor H’aekeem makes his decisions. Some leaders do it with entrails, some with tea leaves, some with the knucklebones of pigs. He does it with dreams of storms, or storms of dreams. Same difference.”

“Do the Ghullim move often?” asked Brrr.

“We lose track,” said the tree elves simultaneously. “One forest glade is the same as any other to us,” continued Stemm. “We’re doomed to servitude our lives long, so we take no interest in our surroundings.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” asked Brrr. “You aren’t shackled in any way that I can see, and half the time no one is paying any attention to you.”

They seemed offended at that. “Really!” said Twigg. “You don’t know much, do you, Brrr? They’d be lost without us, lost. None of them have opposable thumbs. How could they possibly do a roasted leg of forest goat with a side of ivory ferns and a saltberry pudding? I mean, really!”

“Besides,” said Stemm, “where would we go? It’s not as if there are dozens of tree-elf colonies sprouting up all over the place like, like…some sort of problem in forest population control.”

“We go where we’re told,” concluded Twigg, “and really I imagine, Brrr, so will you. Haven’t you learned anything about the sacred performance of your duties? You’ll come along with us. Unless our employers decide that your presence drew the storm from the sky and the dream upon the Chief. In that case you will need to be sacrificed, bled, roasted, sliced, and served on a leaf of buttercup lettuce.”

“With marinated shallots,” said Stemm, rubbing his hands.

“No, that’s so high summer. Let’s go autumnal. Grocer’s gourd stuffed with minced hazelnut in a chanterelle reduction and a wild rice pasticcio.”

“Will you stop?” said Brrr. “I’m not going anywhere. I mean into any cooking pans, thank you very much. And you’re lucky I was around to save you from the same fate.”

“We should have let ourselves be blown to kingdom come when we still had a chance.”

While the Ghullim began to break camp, Muhlama seemed stalled in a state of high dudgeon, huffing and hissing at anyone who came near. Brrr kept his distance, too. He saw that the tree elves were the ones who scampered aloft and untied the gauzy curtains from their boughs, and stacked the cooking utensils in wooden crates, and rolled up Uyodor’s patterned carpet, and collected scraps and bits and souvenirs. What the Ivory Tigers provided the elves, he guessed, was some sort of security, but the elves did all the work.

Most of it, that is. A ramshackle old cart came out of storage from somewhere, and Brrr was asked to push. Twigg and Stemm would sit up top and steer.

So Brrr set his shoulder against the sloping rear panel of a human cart. This required his head to cock at an angle, and he hoped to find Muhlama looking at him with a measure of gratitude. He was earning his way, see, just like the tree elves. She didn’t favor him with the pleasure of a glance, though. He worked without reward or even much assistance.

Muhlama’s tone was saturated with rancor. “Where are we going? The moon? Uyodor, do you intend to march us all the way up the slopes of the Scalps? Just how big was that dream anyway? I’m not going another step!” She seemed to have forgotten her requirement of obeisance toward her father. “Or was this so-called dream just a ruse? Had you been planning on relocating us to the highlands anyway, and forgot to tell us? Are you mincelings just going to tramp along without saying a word?”

She had to spit in disgust, which was an elegant thing and, Brrr thought, had a certain sort of sweet sexiness to it. Though his neck and shoulders were aching.

Perhaps she wore her father down, for he selected a new campground before dusk. Brrr found it impossible to estimate how far they had gone, but it couldn’t have been five or six miles, not with the cart bumping and scraping over every inch. The downed limbs, the mess of storm. In one place an entire pool had been emptied of its water; turtles were emerging from the mud and blinking at the novelty of air.

“That’s a pretty talented storm system,” observed Brrr, as conversationally as he could. Trying to lighten the mood. Muhlama paid him no mind and addressed her father, who remained confirmed about his premonitions because they had been illustrated with wind damage.

“Is this our final lodging?” she said. “Or is this just nighty-night? You get spooked by another hurricane, and tomorrow will we continue on toward the Glikkus or the over-harrowed Corn Basket? Make our home in domesticated fields like so many cowering field mice?”

His eyes flashed, but she was his daughter and he wouldn’t upbraid her in public. She would rule the Ghullim sooner or later. He couldn’t be seen to erode her authority even as she questioned his.

Brrr watched. The strange flexing arrangement that fathers exert over their children. It awed him.

He also saw that the tree elves were being directed to unpack the cart, so perhaps this really was the chosen camp for the next indefinite period. If they were marching again tomorrow, the elves wouldn’t be bothering to decorate the clearing with such swags and scrims as Ivory Tigers admire.

While the hunters skulked off to hunt down a supper, which Brrr supposed drearily would be served without anything by way of sauces or savories, he managed to straighten out the kinks in his shoulders enough to hobble up to Muhlama and look her up and down.

“What are you giving me the once-over for?” she snarled.

“You’ve spent an awful lot of time being furious today.”

“So what.”

“So”—(here it came)—“I can’t help noticing fury becomes you.”

She backed up several steps; her tail snapped. “You—you pack Lion! You menial…beast! How dare you! You have some nerve!”

“I have little nerve,” he replied. “But after my work on behalf of your tribe, I’m too tired to lie. Why shouldn’t I tell you that you are more provocative than ever when you’re so vexed?”

“You—you and your deciphering some dream of the chief’s—making us move camp by your auguries.”

“Oh, stow it,” he said, flumping down in some leaves. “I’m the only one who talks to you. I might as well talk to you honestly.”

He knew there was a sting of truth in his words. She became frozen with reserve, though her tail couldn’t stop itself from switching back and forth.

He pressed his advantage. “Why didn’t you want to leave? Are you just angry at your father for his unilateral dictates? If what everyone says is true, those powers will be yours one day.”

“I don’t want to rule. Haven’t you sussed that out yet?”

“Why not? Everyone will look up to you, take you seriously.”

“Are you an aberration to your species?” she cried. “Cats don’t look for approval!”

He didn’t reply. Her words were cutting, but she hadn’t convinced him of anything yet, except that he could be cut by words. And he already knew that.

“I have no use for this guarded life, this wreath of security around us all the time, this…myopic servitude to ourselves,” she said more slowly. “I have other ambitions than to be the indentured princess of an autocratic father.”

“Then why don’t you just leave?” he asked. “You are sleek enough. You could outrun any number of hunters.”

“And I’d end up like you, wandering aimlessly through the woods?”

“Things could be worse. As it seems you know. Why don’t you leave?”

“Because it would break his heart,” she replied, voice lower still. “It’s all he lives for. Not me, not them, but for the inebriation of being ruler, and passing it on. Fathers want one single thing: that their power will outlive them. It’s his only gift to me, after all.”

He wasn’t sure if he believed her rationale. Nonetheless, he believed her distress. She wasn’t just playing at being fussed.

“What is it you want?” he said again, more privately, hoping that she would surprise him with intimacy. “Are the tree elves right? Did you have some lover-Cat in the near vicinity, and is that why you balked so at leaving?”

“Did they say that?” Her head whipped around so fast he could only see the circumference of the circle described by the tips of her erect ears. He was afraid she would lunge off and slaughter the elves.

“No,” he quickly replied, rising. “I was fooling. It was my own thought, actually. Though I hope I was wrong.”

“You are so wrong at everything that if you ever started being right…” But she couldn’t finish her thought. She glared at him with perhaps the coldest look ever, but he imagined he saw a fringe of possibility flaring.

“You hope you are wrong,” she repeated. She took a step back, still looking at him. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He wished he’d had time to comb his mane. But in all his disarray, he preened for her anyway, tossed his head with a jerk at the neck. That usually got the human crowd, but good. She didn’t flinch. She moved an inch closer.

“Brrr,” she said. “Oh, Brrr. I’ve been rather a selfish thing today. You doing all this work, and just to get my attention. Now I see it. Now I see.”

“I like to work,” he lied.

“And they took advantage of you. That’s like them, you know. My kin. They make servants of guests. You realize of course that three Ivory Tigers could have pulled that cart easily enough from the front, if the elves had harnessed them into the leathers. But no, they all took advantage of your brute strength.”

He liked the way she said brute strength, even though his muscles were so tired that his back haunches were trembling. He hoped he was standing at such an angle that she couldn’t see. From some perspectives he actually didn’t look all that ineffectual, he guessed. He hoped.

“It was an honor to help,” he said again.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You look ill.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “It would be good to lie down and rest a bit. It has been a long day.”

“We’ll go for a walk,” she said. She turned and snarled at the nearby sentries, “We are going for a walk. Got it?”

He couldn’t tell why they stood back and let her pass unrestrained. Perhaps they realized she was still spitting mad. Perhaps they saw that Brrr was calming her.

Muhlama led the way. She had a seriously keen sense of smell and followed a track through sweeping clusters of vine until, after a few minutes, she had reached the edge of a pool. Here she laid herself down, reclining her hindquarters fully, her chest torquing into an elegant curve, so her head reared back upon her neck. Nacreous shadow behind her, blue and lavender and mauve. Her eyes lowered. Her ears lowered. “There is no one trailing us,” she said. “I would hear them if they were.”

He sat down close. Not too close. Close enough that he could feel the heat from her pelt. Musk of a rare sort; he’d never apprehended such a naked barb of invitation. A scorched-pecan, apricoty, humid sort of appeal.

“You are so royal, you can bring on estrus at will?” A bold thing to say and would have been crude said to anyone but a princess; and indeed he meant it as a compliment.

“I am talented,” she replied, lifting her tail another parabolic sweep higher, “but you give me too much credit.”

They didn’t speak for a while, as the evening birds exchanged their bulletins, as the bullfrogs dove into the water out of a surfeit of modesty. A hummingbird, a whipping blossom, came along and perched on Muhlama’s ear, until it realized its mistake and fled.

“You can’t be so kind to me,” said Brrr after a while. “It isn’t possible. No one ever has. I don’t fit in.”

“It’s I who don’t fit,” she said, “I with my strong-minded ways, my temper, my appetite to leave the very home that I am tethered to. I look a princess, I know; but I am a slave here, no less than the tree elves, no less than you are. I don’t belong.”

She angled her rump, and the movement of her tail changed. It became the pendulum on a metronome, counting the slow moments until she pushed her pelvis higher and threw her head back, nipping at Brrr’s throat as he covered her beautiful coat with his own.

When he could think in words—was it then, was it later, he didn’t know—it was simply this: Now I fit in.

His reverie was delicious. Eyes closed. He was partly conscious of the floating strings of the world, its selvages restitching themselves into a prettier apprehension. Some might call it afterglow. For Brrr it was as if a new appetite was just beginning to stir out of his dreamy slumber. But it was interrupted by hissing alarums. He hardly knew what was closing in on him until it was over and done with.

The discovery in flagrante by Ivory Tiger scouts. The forced return to the camp. The accusation of Uyodor, his recitation of Brrr’s offenses against the noble line of the Ghullim camp. Was this an attempt to thwart Uyodor’s regime? Was Brrr a stooge of the Wizard of Oz, working his way in here, seducing the daughter of the chieftain of the Ghullim?

“There was no seduction, sir!” Brrr was aghast. He glared at Muhlama, looking for testimony. Muhlama neither concurred with her father nor protested his accusations. She couldn’t speak. For anger, for regret? Then he saw what they had seen already. She had begun to bleed. The iron stench of it, a wound too large to hide. A rivulet of orangish blood that wouldn’t stop.

It seemed he hadn’t quite fit in, but she’d let him try anyway.

With a cold resolve, she hectored him, too. “Go. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Go, before they have your head on a trophy backboard. You’ve done quite enough.”

Perhaps because she was still Uyodor’s daughter, they let him go. Though Uyodor declared, as Brrr backed away, “You are no creature of the wilderness, Lion; you do not belong here. Should we come across you again, or should our allies, you are fair game for the predator. A marked beast. You have ten minutes before we enact our promise to seek vengeance.”

So he pelted away, but ever after he wondered why. Was it just to preserve his own life? His life had a tinny cast to it, an artificial quality, hardly worth preserving. Or had he left not so much to save his own skin as to avoid having to see Muhlama’s life bleed out of hers?

In any case, he was gone. Not for the first time, nor the last: an ignoble retreat from a fray that had grown too hot for him.

Back into the wild, back into woods, back into exile. And this time he would endure a loneliness made more cutting by the recent experience of consanguinity. Or call it love, if you must.

Exiled, even unto himself, until and unless something came along to redeem him.

What came along some time later—days, or was it weeks?—near where the Wend Fallows petered out into the Corn Basket, was that toothsome morsel known as Dorothy. Another rare and delicate human, a girl this time, improbably making her way along the stretch of Yellow Brick Road that originated in central Munchkinland.

• 4 •

IT WAS an accident of the light, nothing more, that caused the little girl and her pair of noodnik companions to leap in terror at the sight of him. Or had it been too long since his most recent wash-and-set? In any case, he steeled himself for the inevitable interview, and wondered how much of his sorry history he could gloss over. Maybe they had some provisions to share.

Dorothy, though, was not riven with wild curiosity. She seemed to take his bowdlerized biography at face value. She asked no probing questions. She just smoothed the edges of her apron and consoled her quivering little pup. “Oh, Toto, have you ever imagined a Cat so big in your wildest nightmares? I hope you don’t lose your lunch.” She nuzzled her face against her dog’s in a way that might cause some citizens of Oz to question her sanity.

Still, he found to his surprise that he felt some small measure of sympathy for Dorothy. He was no longer inclined to consider human beings warmly, but maybe he was able to make an exception because she was so clearly a foreigner. Brrr imagined she was an orphan like himself, as humans didn’t usually leave their young to wander the high road alone. And no half-decent parent of any species would hire a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman as chaperones and aides-de-guerre.

“Come with us,” said the girl. “We’re headed for the Emerald City.”

Propitious words.

One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. A lost girl in a blue gingham skirt and a white pinafore hardly seemed a likely ambassador to a rosier future: still, stranger things had happened.

He considered joining them. What else did he have scheduled? He couldn’t risk running into the Ghullim again. Neither the nabobs of Shiz, nor the Bears nor the Ozmists, nor the Glikkuns with their dirks, nor any affectionate soldier boys astray in the Great Gillikin Forest.

It seemed there was nothing in the wild for him; it was civilization itself that must be tamed. Perhaps this was his lucky break. It sure was about time.

And who better to serve as his escort back into society but this Dorothy? She possessed a writ of safe passage from Lady Glinda, who had met the foreign girl when investigating the sudden death of Nessarose, the most recent Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland. It took Brrr several weeks to pry the whole story out of Dorothy, about the tornado, the plummeting house, the glittering shoes. By then he deduced that Glinda was moving the girl out of harm’s way, because Munchkinland was up for grabs now that its governor was dead. Would Nessarose’s sister, Elphaba, come back to Colwen Grounds and rule the seceded nation?

Every step away from Munchkinland would be a step away from the Wicked Witch of the West, Brrr figured. Accurately or not, his name had been linked to her before; he wanted no reunion, thank you very much.

And once in the Emerald City—well, there was the famously reclusive Wizard of Oz to meet! The WOO! If Lady Glinda’s offices were as well connected as she had attested to Dorothy.

“Oh, do join us. Lady Glinda is so good,” said Dorothy. “I’m sure the Wizard will honor her request and see us. After I’ve come all this way—and through that dreadful storm, no less. A thousand miles from any outhouse. I won’t tell you what I had to do while aloft; it was revolting.”

Laboriously Brrr figured the dates backward and concluded that the great twister carrying Dorothy to Oz was the same storm that had given Uyodor H’aekeem nightmares and begun the sequence of events leading to Brrr’s expulsion from the Ghullim. He spent a few moments over a dark fantasy of revenge against Dorothy. But she hadn’t orchestrated that storm into being; she was a victim of fate as much as he was. So he let it go.

“I’ll come with you,” he told Dorothy and the others.

At this point—the moment when Brrr stepped into the limelight of history—he was perhaps twenty, though of course as a Lion that meant he was middle-aged. Twenty, and he’d conducted his sordid affairs and peccadilloes only in Gillikin and Munchkinland. But he’d spent his life within earshot of Oz’s great capital city, which pulsed with so much power it was almost a nation unto itself—a state on its own. Perhaps what was scandalous elsewhere, in hidebound provincial centers like Shiz, would seem penny-candy stuff in a capital city. Perhaps the EC was large enough, urbane enough, to consider Brrr’s trials and shames not only incidental but unremarkable.

He had little to lose now. If Dorothy’s stamp of approval from Lady Glinda proved genuine, he might be traveling with diplomatic immunity. After all, Dorothy had shown him a writ on a scroll, though he couldn’t read it well enough to parse its curlicued grandiosity.

The Kiss of Lady Glinda, it was called: a passport requiring its bearer safe passage to the Emerald City under penalty of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

It was signed with a flourish and a little scribble of a heart with a smile inside it, which looked to Brrr like a picture of an extracted tooth delighted to be liberated from some foul mouth.

A good deal of what happened next—the Matter of Dorothy—was a story he didn’t choose to dwell upon. How déclassé, to arrive with a crippled human decked out with tin prophylactics and with a Scarecrow, sweet enough but clueless as to his own origins—though who wasn’t? Brrr liked Dorothy, though. One evening he found himself imagining her as Jemmsy in a dress and pigtails, which seemed too weird, if fun, so he steered his attentions elsewhere.

The Emerald City lifted itself onto the horizon, more pomp and glory than Brrr had imagined possible. Emerald overdrive. Even the loo paper was green, which Brrr considered a sort of design error. But The Kiss of Glinda worked its magic, as it were. The magnificent and dreadful Wizard of Oz agreed to meet them, though in separate interviews. Brrr’s was last, and he was expecting a great Head, like the one that had shown itself to Dorothy, but perhaps the wine had been more toxic than he’d realized, for all he could see was light shining from the throne.

Steeling himself, Brrr remembered the Ozmists, and thought: Barter! He would negotiate for some government sinecure in exchange for having escorted this foreign dignitary to the palace. “I have a request of you,” he began, “O great-and-powerful-and-all-knowing Oz.”

“Courage,” said the Wizard.

“No, not courage,” said the Lion. “I mean, well, courage would be nice. But I was thinking of something more in the line of a job.”

“I will give you what you most need,” said the Wizard, “if you bring down the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Bring her down? I had hoped she wouldn’t even come up,” murmured Brrr. The Wizard was better at bartering than he was.

Later, Brrr said to his new companions, “I’m all for engaging in a little cut-and-run action here. Why should we do the Wizard’s dirty work? He has his own military presence. The EC is crawling with soldiers.”

Some of those middle-aged military personnel might once have known Jemmsy. But Brrr let that thought pass.

“Yes,” said Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman. “And any one of those soldiers could take you into custody for refusing the request of the Wizard.”

“He didn’t order us out to the West,” said Brrr. “We’re volunteering. Aren’t we? Aren’t we?”

They looked at him.

“We’re not drafted against our will, surely.”

“De facto, we are,” said the Scarecrow. “It’s only our having a commission from the Throne of Oz that keeps those soldiers from picking you up, anyway. The Animal Adverse laws haven’t been lifted, Pussycat. You don’t see many Animals in the streets of this fair city, do you?”

“Besides,” said Dorothy, “I want to go home. I’m sick of this place. Not of you, dear friends, never of you. But all this rigamarole, all this kowtowing. It’s exhausting. Let’s just consider this little military action something we have to go through. In any event, I’m going, on my own if I have to.”

“You’d kill a witch, just like that, at someone’s suggestion?” asked the Tin Woodman. “How unfeeling. You’re a monster.”

“I didn’t say I was going to kill her,” said Dorothy. “Perhaps we can make a private arrangement with her. Broker a peace deal, a compromise of some sort. Who knows. In any event, my house did sort of smush her sister, and I haven’t had a chance to deal with the trauma of that, what with all the festivities and so on. I mean, I need some closure here.”

The Wizard of Oz, it seemed, had them all by the short hairs. So against his better judgment, Brrr signed on to the mission. Maybe Dorothy’s preternatural innocence would call good luck upon them, and he could be a partial beneficiary. And the Wizard had promised Brrr a suitable reward should the mission succeed.

Now, was it forward to victory? Or was it out of the frying pan into the fire? The stakes were never higher. Whatever happened, it would be impossible to retire anonymously after all this. Perhaps Brrr should have roared that tiny little Toto into an early grave and gotten out while he could.

The trip to the West was taxing in every sense. Eventually the Witch’s Winged Monkeys showed up to give them a lift up the steepest of the slopes of Knobblehead Pike to the Witch’s castle, known as Kiamo Ko. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow were left below, but the Lion and Dorothy and Toto were deposited in the courtyard to meet the Witch and her little entourage: the other monkeys, that lad named Liir, and the old Nanny whom Yackle, it seemed, had met all those years earlier.

Liir was the least of creatures on the scene, a scrambling aide-desorcière as the Lion remembered. Fumbling, earnest: a knockabout kid who looked as if he could fall out a tower window without much surprise. The Lion had paid little attention to him: Who knew that Liir’s whereabouts would come to intrigue the high and mighty in the Emerald City one day?

And of the so-called Witch, what could Brrr now recall? His whole life had seemed to lead up to this fatal event: the instruction to murder the Wicked Witch of the West. So you would think he’d have a better grasp of that Elphaba Thropp.

Yet he had only seen her the once, really, and there she remained, stamped in his mind’s eye in a kind of bas-relief, like a figure on a commemorative medal. If she really was a Witch, beneath all that witchy drag, she was an erratic one. Her body made a zigzaggy shape at the top of those castle steps, like a W fallen on its side. She was all angles, contorted like a cripple, twisted with rage and fear, but not with paralysis. She was anything but paralyzed.

“You!” she’d cried at him. Had she recognized him as the Lion cub in the laboratory back at Shiz? He didn’t know. He hadn’t the temerity to ask for clarification. “You!” she’d cried again, and this time he quailed more deeply, thinking she meant You traitor! How can you, a Lion, come against me, when I have fought for your weal since before you were born!

He wanted to reply, Show me some respect. Some of your detractors have tarred me as your familiar. And he would have said that, and more. If he only had the nerve.

But her gaze had turned to Dorothy, and Elphaba had whipped down those steps like an oversize, bewitched eggbeater whirling on its own. What happened next, the famous dissolution of the Witch, had happened offstage, as the flying monkeys had crowded Brrr and the Witch’s help-boy, Liir, into a larder and locked the door. By the time Brrr had broken the door off its hinges, the damage was done. The Witch was gone. And Brrr’s reputation would be tarnished forever by dint of his presence at the castle.

Guilt by association—or a hero by popular clamor, depending on which political hack was retailing the events.

One way or the other, the Witch was gone.

After a couple of skirmishes with barbaric tribes of the Vinkus, the Lion and Dorothy—together with young Liir, and soon reunited with Nick Chopper and the Scarecrow—made their way overland back to the Emerald City. Their hopes were high but soon daunted. By an accident of the sort one might see on the stage, Dorothy’s little yapper, Toto, took a grip on a closet curtain and gave a tug. Only useful thing the fool animal ever did. The Wizard was revealed as a mere mortal, and a bit of a charlatan at that. As clever with his hands—all those tiktok inventions, those terrifying images he projected—as he was with his diktats and fiats and fatwahs. Oh my.

In the confusion that followed, the Emerald City Irregulars were showered with junk. Tchotchkes you could pick up at a five-and-farthing store.

As the Wizard rummaged through a drawer, he spoke over his shoulder. “My research associates are thorough when they need to prepare the case for honorifics. You, my friend, are known as the Cowardly Lion—oh, don’t be bashful! Your history precedes you! I shall give you just what you deserve: a token of esteem suitable for wearing at Court.” He came up with a tin medal on a sash of green and gold. It wasn’t suitable for wearing to the church rummage sale, unless you intended to dump it in the hand-me-down box. The sash was stained with creepy beige spots (don’t want to know what that was) and the medal said COURAGE! It had been so clumsily produced that the first three letters were afflicted with bloat. The only legible part read RAGE!

“Thank you, your Ozness,” said Brrr, hoping it was a joke, hoping if he played along he’d end up happy. The WOO placed the medal around his neck. Had Jemmsy’s medal for courage been as cheaply manufactured, as odious? Brrr lifted the medal to sniff it, to bring back Jemmsy. A pin mounted on the back cut the softer part of the pad of his paw.

“I can’t accept this—” he began to say, but the Wizard had moved on to address Dorothy, and the little girl was beaming in such high hopes of an exit visa from Oz that the Lion didn’t have the nerve to interrupt.

Still, as they were dismissed and ushered away, Brrr continued to imagine that he might somehow parry the dubious honor into a rehabilitation, perhaps even a position in the Wizard’s court. He was mistaken, though. His timing couldn’t have been worse. The Wizard’s long reign had come to an end at last. Oscar Zoroaster Diggs, the great and powerful WOO, abdicated the throne and departed the Emerald City by a hot-air balloon, said to be the way he had arrived four decades earlier. Why, why leave now, when his adversary, the Wicked Witch, was finally done for? No one was certain. Perhaps the crafty old geezer could hear that palace knives were being sharpened for a use more sinister than the carving of rump roast.

“Cowardly Lion,” said Dorothy to him, snapping her fingers in his face to get his attention. “With any luck my visit is drawing to a close, and I need to talk to you before I go.”

He roused himself from the lethargy of resentment. Dorothy shut the door to the chamber of the shabby guesthouse in which he was lodged. There was no direct light, given that to the north a government bureau loomed six stories above them. “Sadly in need of redecoration,” said Dorothy, smoothing her skirt over her behind and sitting down on the chenille bedspread, “but nothing compared to what Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are faced with, given that I set out from home bringing the whole house with me.”

“Are you making the rounds, dispensing last little bromides? You can save your breath.”

“Don’t be like that. When the time comes for me to leave, I know you won’t want to make a public fuss over me. So I’ve come to say something in private.”

Brrr hadn’t actually planned to attend Dorothy’s valedictory session. He just nodded at her: Go on.

“I love your pals, you know; the Scarecrow and the Woodman. But I love them for their quaintness, while I love you for the animal in you.”

In most Animal circles referring to one’s animal instinct would be considered a ferocious insult. But Brrr thought it best not to challenge Dorothy to a duel at this stage. He’d probably lose.

“You see, I grew up on a farm. I had a little pet hen once. She followed me around, in and out of the kitchen, into the farmyard. She couldn’t speak, of course. We’re talking Kansas, where free speech in general is not highly prized.”

“Is there a moral to this story?”

“One day she crossed the road. Do you know why the chicken crossed the road?”

“Is this a joke?”

Nothing was a joke to Dorothy. “Because I was on the other side,” she finished. “I was standing on one foot and singing a little song about, oh, I don’t know what. And that brave little hen crossed the dangerous road to be with me.”

“What happened to her?”

“One Saturday night Uncle Henry wrung her neck and Auntie Em made chicken stew. I cried and cried but actually she tasted pretty good.”

Brrr shook his head. “I’m not getting the point of this, Dorothy. I think you’ve been away from your own kind too long.”

“That is exactly my point!” she exclaimed. “You see, I lost my parents, too. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry aren’t even relatives. They wrote away to an orphanage in Independence, Missouri, requesting someone because Auntie Em needed some help around the house, what with her sciatica. I’m who they got.” She chewed her pigtail. “Perhaps they regret it now, or maybe not. Hard to say.”

“Dorothy,” said Brrr, “I was about to take a nap.”

“Sorry. The point is: You and I are more alike than you think. And ornery as Auntie Em could be, and pigheaded as Uncle Henry is, they are my own family now, and I miss them and love them. I would cross the road for them, like my pet hen did for me. You must feel no different about your own family.”

“With all due respect, I have no family, Dorothy.”

She put her arms around him, which was an odd comfort.

“Take care of Liir,” she whispered. “Okay? He has no family either. And he’s a little…well, dim.”

“I don’t have any obligations to that boy.” Brrr was all too aware how he had failed Jemmsy and Cubbins. Better that Liir should get on in his life without being shackled with a big burly Lion for a sidekick.

“For me?” she said. “If the Witch was his mother, my word: it’s my fault he’s an orphan now, too. Like me and you both. I can’t bring him home with me, and I daren’t leave him alone. He needs someone, Brrr, and so do you.”

He pulled away from her, uncomfortable with this consultation. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, gravely. She was waiting for a promise. There was something eerie about her gentle manner and her steely patience. Winds would wear a cliff down to a stony strand before she would change her mind about the goodness of the world.

He had to love her for it. He kissed her furrily. He knew she was taking this as a promise to regard Liir as his own family, but he was just getting rid of her. He wasn’t in a position to take care of a minor, not when he was so minor himself.

“Good-bye, Dorothy,” he said. “I hope they learn to love you at home as much as we love you here.”

“Well,” said Dorothy, standing up, “I’ll tell them they just better.”

• 5 •

WITHIN A few weeks of Dorothy’s departure, Glinda formally took the Throne. Brrr was able to get an audience with her, and, after a little fawning and purring, he wheedled a title. Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary to the market environs of Traum. It was, as he thought and others joked, a cruel blow: about as undistinguished a peerage as it was possible to acquire. One could pick up higher honors going through the garbage. Lord Low Plenipotentiary was a title without an estate, a job without a salary, an honorific without a voting voice in the Council of Agreement, which Lady Glinda had promised to reconvene after a lengthy hiatus.

And Traum? Traum, of all places? Lady Glinda was depositing him at the site of his public humiliation. Had she meant to rub his nose in it? Or in her giddy innocence did she hope to give him a chance to return as a conquering hero? He didn’t know and he didn’t bother to visit his district and find out. Let them get on without him.

He drank too much during the day, and he lost track of that agitated kid, Liir. When the Lion learned that the Scarecrow had been nominated to succeed Lady Glinda to the Throne—the Scarecrow elevated to be the Head of Oz, while the Lion groveled, a Lord Low Plenipotentiary!—well, he lost more acreage of guts to stomach acids.

Anhedonia, a doctor said. Fear of pleasure.

He almost bit the doctor, for the pleasure of it.

He might have survived the indignity if he’d had a circle of companions. Anything like a confessor, a crony.

But Dorothy was gone, disappeared perhaps the way Ozma Tippetarius had disappeared, too. The Scarecrow was busy with regal affairs and rarely met his public. (Some said he wasn’t even the same Scarecrow, but an imposter. Brrr never got close enough again to venture an opinion on the matter.) And Nick Chopper was filled with the romance of labor rebellion, getting in bed with dubious sorts to hatch out schemes to organize the tiktok workers, the mechanized servants of Oz. Change was in the air, everyone said—change of every sort except spare change: not that kind. Times weren’t better, they were just—different. Times were hard in a new way. You could be grateful for the novelty of it, but only up until teatime, when dried rye brisks and plowfoot jelly made their baleful appearance on the table. Unless you were Palace, of course.

He might have survived it if he had never learned to read. But what else was there to do but hang out in cafés frequented by the demimonde, sip stale tea or watered-down plonk in the Burntpork district, and scrutinize the cast-off newsfolds?

THE WORTHY SCARECROW HOLDS A PALACE RECEPTION
Dateline: Emerald City

Peers of the realm, from the level of Minor Establisher and up, gathered in the glittering Ozma Arcade last night in one of the season’s most exclusive soirées—

See and Be Seen! Tizzy Splendthrift, society spy, reports on a very naughty party held last night in an undisclosed private residence in the tony district of Goldhaven, to which Oz’s glittera-muses, the great and the good from as far up the social pyramid as can be mounted, got up to no good—and we do mean up…

Whipping the pages so hard they tore. The financial columns and the editorial pages arguing about whether Nick Chopper was well connected enough to bring the Throne’s attention to a proposed scheme of merit-credits for the tiktok workforce…. Whether it would be any good for Oz…. The social obligations, if any, of rewarding clockwork for ticking on time…. The suffering of laborers and their families if a general strike was called…. NICK CHOPPER: BLEEDING HEART OR BLOODY HEARTLESS?

Brrr didn’t care. It was the parties he wasn’t invited to, the salons, the committee meetings dedicated to raising funds to repaper the libraries in imperial Ozma style, now that it was no longer forbidden to speak her name…. The drunken lunches of the newsmongers who laughed at the excesses of the high and mighty! He’d have been glad enough to rag on his former friends, had he been invited to do so.

Then some journalist, writing under a nom d’espionnage, published a column questioning the correctness of the Palace’s having awarded even so much as a Low Plenipotentiaryship to a Lion who had been, after all, a collaborationist. He’d worked at the Wizard’s bidding, hadn’t he—when more respectable Animals were imprisoned, or had fled into the outback?

A collaborationist. Working for the Wizard, who had done so much to oppress the Animals of Oz. When once Brrr had been tarred as the Witch’s familiar, now he was a lackey of her enemy. He was a turncoat for all seasons. You couldn’t win.

Perhaps, the argument went, if the Cowardly Lion were stripped of his honors, hardworking Animals would feel justified, at last, in returning to the cities and towns of Oz and entering the workforce again. Hadn’t Brrr been known as a Cowardly Lion? If he were all that brave, he’d surrender his honors himself, voluntarily, for the symbolism of it. His apology to the nation.

Let him be rehabilitated as a common citizen and join the Animal workforce that Loyal Oz hoped would soon be returning from exile—those who hadn’t been exterminated, that is. Bring back the Animals as a backup labor resource. Show the agitated millworkers they could be let go if they made trouble.

So off then, outa there, but good. Brrr tried not to think of the injustice of it, but of course the injustice greeted him daily. Was there any reason he should be so embattled other than the maliciousness of fate?

He didn’t avoid the thought of Dorothy; he didn’t need to. She evaporated out of Oz as successfully as the Witch herself had. One would have thought Dorothy had been brought from abroad for no other reason than to have her wet way with the Witch. But that was paranoia, wasn’t it? Fuck Dorothy. In a manner of speaking.

And as for his promise to keep an eye on Liir—well, Liir had his own history to follow. He had disappeared into the crowds of the Emerald City. Just another urchin on the make, a feckless little whippet cast aside by the powerful. Let him dodge his own fate as best he might; he was not the Lion’s cub, after all. Brrr had his own hide to protect.

Back to the wilds, once again, where the knowledge of his demotion by way of low promotion could prove less bitter, less public. He’d have to avoid the Ghullim, of course. If Muhlama H’aekeem had lived, she might be the Chieftainess now. And if the networking of the Ghullim was as keen as they boasted, they’d have heard that their runaway Lion had been marginalized by the indignity of petty honors. And tarred with the worst taunt of all. Collaborationist.

No, he’d avoid the Ghullim. Avoid them all. Avoid the whole damned mess of his whole damned life up to now.

• 6 •

AFTER DOROTHY.

Brrr entertained the notion that he might go back and take up again with that pride of tuft-chinned Lions in the western Madeleines. As far as he knew, he was the first Lion with a title. Maybe the pride lived far enough from the EC to have missed the curse of “Collaborationist!” Maybe it would decide to be impressed. Reconsidering their early dismissal of him, they might conclude that they had been too provincial to recognize his merits first time around. Why not?

But these years on, the Lions had scattered. The outback of Gillikin hadn’t proved hospitable to Animals, even to those who had never forsaken their natural habitats in the wild. From smaller Animals who still lingered, reluctant to give up the old neighborhood, Brrr learned that the tuft-chinned Lions had migrated east into Munchkinland. “Though I’m told,” continued an opinionated Squirrel with a cleft palate, which made his words hard to grasp, “that times have been no easier for the Animals in the Free State of Munchkinland than they are in Loyal Oz. The Great Drought is blind to national borders. Larger Animals have had to withdraw into less salubrious quarters.”

“Like?”

“The more hardscrabble reaches south of the Yellow Brick Road. Nest Hardings, Wend Hardings, and the ghost hamlets on the banks of Illswater.”

“Ghost hamlets.” Not Ozmists, for sure; they maintained their haunts in the Great Gillikin Forest. Or had the Cloud Swamp been affected by the drought, and had the ghosts migrated, too?

“I mean the old farming villages in southeast Munchkinland—the last sorry bit before Munchkinland peters out into the uncrossable desert. Those desolate places that even humans have no more use for. Or that humans abandoned once the Animals began to move in.”

“I’ll head that way.”

“I’ll come with,” said the Squirrel succulently.

“Not if you value your nuts. Forget about it.” Brrr was done with finding mates on the road.

He headed east, learning to nurse his grievances like so many fond memories. To take them out in his drowsy hours, in his dreams. To fasten upon them in the doldrums of insomnia. He remembered how the frowzy Miss Piarsody Scallop had tended to her mysterious ailments with all the devotion of a postulant. He dedicated the same zeal to his rash of insults, kept them raw by constant attention.

The death of Jemmsy. The taunts of the Bears. The dismissal by the Ozmists. The Traum Massacre. The lovely but brutal sex with Muhlama, and his subsequent exile from the Ghullim.

And then the taunts. Coward. Witch’s familiar. “Little Miss Sissy” in one popular musical parody that was all the rage the season he fled from Ampleton Quarters. Lord Low Plenipotentiary, for the love of Lurlina. Collaborationist.

A Lion, even a lily-livered one, can roam about an unfriendly landscape more easily than, say, a Badger or a slow-moving Cow. The Lion was shunned but not otherwise abused. He kept to himself. He could get little work in Munchkinland; farmers husbanded their farm chores zealously.

One night he fell asleep on the edge of a cornfield, and dreamed of a happier past. When he woke up to take a leak, he heard his own voice muttering in his ears. He had been talking to the rangy scarecrow set up to frighten predators. It was an odd thing, nothing like his erstwhile pal. Neither male nor female, Animal nor human, the creature had a woman’s apron, a farmer’s soft felt hat-for-chapel, an Ox’s collar, and a cunningly arranged strap of sleigh bells. Its head was a gourd of some sort, softening in the back, and the seeds falling out of an abrasion in the vegetable skull were being nibbled by field mice. “Get away from my man Jack!” roared the Lion, but when the mice scattered in terror, he had to weep. He’d come to this: lording it over dumb mice in drought-slackened fields. And talking to a dummy, the best he could claim as a friend.

He crossed the border from Gillikin into Munchkinland near the southern edge of the Madeleines. He wanted to steer wide of the Ghullim, so he headed southwest toward the spot where the Yellow Brick Road breached the Munchkin River across a span of nine murth-stone arches. On the far side, the terrain lay down and refused to move, not even a wrinkle in the dustland. Suitable for little but subsistence farming. None of the great Munchkinland bounty you’d find in the Corn Basket farther north. Just scrappy farms worn grey with wind and regret.

One job he could take, and he did without mortification, was the carting of manure from farm stables. In this wasteland, farmers couldn’t manage a decent yield of crops without manure. So the stables were shit factories. Whether the Animals were glad enough for their oats to shit on demand, Brrr didn’t know, and he took pains not to ask. Coming face-to-face with a Stallion in tethers, Brrr behaved as if he were a mute Lion, or perhaps ignorant of basic Ozish. He had no doubt the Stallion could see right through the ruse, but it still seemed correct to feign being dumb.

He got the job done, was paid in innards and offal.

He slept apart, alone, and stayed until his insomnia flared up again, at which point he moved on to the next farm. A constantly changing horizon seemed the only prophylactic against his obsessive review of his grievances.

The next horizon, sometimes just the next farm, was always more promising, until it proved not to be so, after all.

This way, Brrr made his slow progress southeast through Munchkinland until he’d reached the hardscrabble district known as the Hardings.

The Squirrel had been accurate in his description. In the towns of Three Dead Trees, Rush Margins, and the inappropriately named Center Bounty (Center Spite was more like it) the hounded creatures had hunkered down and made the best of a bad situation.

By now he was finally beginning to understand what had happened to the Animals in Oz. The professionals—the chattering classes, also the twittering, clucking, nickering, and braying classes—had gone underground. Some of them literally (Moles, Rabbits, Badgers), some symbolically. As a rule, many of them were so long removed from any kind of manual labor that they hadn’t fared at all well when trying to take up again the practices of their ancestors.

They made their living, such as it was, in the townships of southeastern Munchkinland—the stony dales and blackened, brackish rills, the treeless hills supporting only gorse and broom and the occasional weary flock of sheep, for their weary wool, or peppermilk colts, for equally wearying cheese. The Animals crowded, cheek by bristly jowl, or wither by wen, in stone crofts and stone hovels and stone lean-tos and stone corncribs built in a more hopeful time.

Brrr continued his career in down-market picaresquerie. A month in Three Dead Trees, two weeks in Broad Slope Town, then a longish stint, almost a year, in Rush Margins, the surface of Illswater glinting with a hard beauty in the occasional shock of sunlight. More often the skies were streaked with grey. It never grew very warm here, even in spring, what with the winds constant as tidal wash. They endlessly speckled the windowpanes with sand carried in from the eastern deserts.

But eventually even Rush Margins grew unbearable, too, and Brrr forged his way against the wind, ever farther south. He wondered if he harbored a secret compulsion to leave Oz entirely, to enter the trackless desert from which, it was said, there was no return. To dig himself a grave in the largest sweep of cat litter nature could provide, bury himself like a turd there. Outside the legal reach of Oz itself, outside its memory if he could only arrange that, too.

One evening on the south slope of Illswater, not far from Stonespar End, Brrr came upon a neglected parsonage. It had been dedicated to the use of a unionist minister—Brrr recognized the symbols carved over the lintel. He nearly passed it by, having no more use for the blandishments of piety than he did for political capital. A voice called from an open window, though, offering a firkin of water, and one didn’t turn down a drink even if it came at the cost of a spiritual seduction.

It was an ancient Ape in a quilted velvet smoking jacket so old and frayed that it betrayed no clue as to its original color. He beckoned with palsied knuckles. He called himself Mister Mikko. He shared digs with a Boar named Professor Lenx who, due to deteriorating hips, was confined to a wheeled cart that the Ape could only barely manage to maneuver in and out the garden door.

Both of them were too elderly to do much but remember the good old days when they were tenured lecturers at Shiz.

“Tenured,” insisted Mister Mikko, “until we were untenured.”

“Sacked,” said Professor Lenx. “Pass the saffron cream, will you, old darling?”

A joke of sorts. Saffron cream was a thing of the past for these two.

They housed the Lion equably enough, making certain he understood it was only temporary. Brrr tried to resist the urge to scoff at their fusty mannerisms. The way they insisted on offering him two-thirds of whatever they had in the larder was unctuous and superior. He ate it anyway.

“You’re looking for a home, but we have only the two sleeping chambers here,” observed Mister Mikko. “We’re gentlefolk of a certain generation, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t bed down in shared quarters like cattle.”

“Certainly not,” said Professor Lenx. “Never think of it. The very idea.”

“Too cozy. Not our style.”

“You assume I care.” Brrr managed to sound offended, obscurely.

“Well, a Lion on his own…” The way their voices trailed off. Suspicious, they meant. “At loose ends.”

“My end is anything but loose.”

They didn’t like that style of badinage. “And food is in short supply, of course. Had we gardens like the ones in College now, it might be another matter. The vegetables! Do you remember the vegetables, Mister Mikko? The sweet summer scallions, the tomatoes, the blue runner beans! And when the corn was ripe! Hallelujah season.”

“Indeed I do remember it well, my dear Professor. Though also I was partial to the formal walking gardens, the parterres, the flowering cherries, the borders of myccasandra and iris…”

“Shiz could do gardens well. Here, alas, if we get eight potatoes a season, we’re lucky.”

“The gardens of Crage Hall! I do remember. The year that the transplanted termite ivy from the Lesser Kells went wild! It took the staff five years to root it all up. They even needed to demolish an ancient Lurlinist shrine because the migrating root ball had lodged itself there.”

“Would that we had a problem with invasives now.”

“We do. We’re being invaded by dirt.”

They laughed. It was as if Brrr were no longer there. Their memories were stronger than the present moment. Brrr felt as if he were the new invasive.

“I have been to Shiz myself,” he ventured.

“Oh well, dear boy, many go to Shiz,” said Mister Mikko.

“And many leave it,” said Professor Lenx.

They looked at each other as if they were discussing the deepest philosophical principles. Then they laughed at the same instant. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Their simultaneity was cloying but kind of sweet.

Over dinner—a noxious potato porridge and sandwiches on stale bread—the subject returned to Shiz. Naturally. Brrr learned a good deal more about the Animal Adverse laws enacted during the Wizardic reign. Early on, when professional Animals could still quit their positions and freely cross the borders, Professor Lenx had fled too quickly to liquidate a sizable portfolio held by a Shiz fiduciary house. He assumed the funds had since been co-opted by the Wizard’s financial ministers, but he had no way of knowing.

“I daren’t write to enquire. I don’t care to give my location away, you see. Old-fashioned reticence about money matters, and cautious that way,” said the Boar.

“No one would call you cowardly, old darling,” said Mister Mikko, which sounded like a riposte in a disagreement between them that stretched back years. “A little mustard on your cheese butty? I think so. Let me spread it for you.”

Perhaps it was a thrill of sympathy for Professor Lenx having to endure that particular slur—cowardly!—or maybe Brrr was simply relieved not to be the target of the criticism himself. He found himself saying, “I actually had a profile in Shiz once—of a sort—and of course I am now formally a Namory, by order of Lady Glinda.”

“A Namory! And you didn’t mention it till now. You are too humble, Sir Brrr,” said Professor Lenx. “May I humble you further with another spoonful of pottage?”

“There’s a shortage of certain kinds of labor in the Emerald City these days,” said Brrr. “Domestic work isn’t yet open to Animals again, it seems, but there are other opportunities. The WOO is history, gentlemen. Your old stomping ground, Shiz, has become ringed with factories. I understand Dixxi House to the north of Shiz is begging for a workforce. The Animal Adverse laws are greatly relaxed, and the EC is making all sorts of overtures to exiled Animals.”

“Well, we’re far too old to enter the workforce,” said Mister Mikko.

“And I’m crippled,” said Professor Lenx. “Not to mention that my field was mathematics. I specialized in diluted equations.”

“Did you say deluded equations?” Mister Mikko posed this piously.

“Ha-ha, exceedingly ha. What a robust sense of humor you have. Too bad it isn’t equaled by your sense of history. Or perhaps you taught histrionics, I quite forget, as of course one would tend to.”

As much to smooth over the comedy of professional sniping as for any other reason, Brrr said, “If the EC’s ministers of labor are really interested in wooing back the Animal workforce, they would be smart to free up any funds appropriated from Animals who had to leave under the Wizard’s ‘courtesies.’”

“We didn’t have to leave,” said Mister Mikko. “I did teach history, young Sir Brrr, and I know that much. We could quite as freely have chosen to go to prison, you know. That option was never denied us. So we are considered to have departed of our own volition.”

“You know what I mean,” said the Lion. “The banks could institute an amnesty of sorts. If Animals were permitted again to invest and profit, they might be more likely to lend their shoulders to the wheel of industrial progress. The powers that be should consider this.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trust the current administration any more than I trusted the Wizard of Oz, may he rot in hell and all babies sleep well, thank you very much.” Professor Lenx worked at a bit of rind with his tongue and then spat the mess out of the side of his bristly mouth.

“Tut-tut. And I just swept that dung heap,” said Mister Mikko, and spat in concert.

“Oh, the Scarecrow’s not smart enough to be devious,” said the Lion.

“Stupidity is as dangerous as cleverness,” retorted the Ape.

“More so,” said the Boar.

Brrr looked at the two of them, noting their infirmities, their indignities, their brave courtesies to him. He didn’t like the old codgers, nothing so drastic as that. But if he had been of a certain class of urban Animal, he might have gone to Shiz University himself, once upon a time. He felt a tenderness at the idea. They might have been his very professors. For a moment he pretended they were, and he was a devoted student who had made good in the world, and was looking after their interests, the old dears, now that they couldn’t manage much for themselves.

“I attended a few lectures now and then,” he told them, playing at the fantasy. Well, attending lectures open to the public, that was true enough. “I once had a private practice trading in small original etchings under glass, the occasional watercolor. I grew to know quite a bit about old paper, and the fugitive qualities of certain pigments…”

“Oh, you don’t say! But how bizarre,” said Mister Mikko. “I don’t suppose you ever came across a Miss Quasimoda? She was a White Ape who taught drawing from life. Quite scandalous.”

“With you involved, I shouldn’t wonder,” intoned Professor Lenx.

“I mean the drawing from life,” huffed Mister Mikko. “The very idea!”

“No, no, I never did,” said Brrr hurriedly. “I don’t remember anyone’s name from that time, except for a headmistress of one of the women’s halls. Someone named…Madame…Madame Morrible.”

The silence could have been scraped with a putty knife.

“She was in cahoots with the Wizard,” said Professor Lenx shortly. “That’s what was said in the SCR, anyway.”

“Of course she was, she and that little tiktok agent of hers. Gramitic.”

“Grommetik.”

“All due respect. I am certain it was Gramatic. Gramitic.”

“Your certainty has more bare spots than your scalp does.”

Mister Mikko bared his old teeth at his colleague and turned back to Brrr. “Don’t mind Professor Lenx; his mind is going. I don’t suppose you ever came across a Doctor Dillamond? A Goat with expertise in several fields, history and science among them.”

“The history of science,” murmured Professor Lenx. “The science of history.”

“I never did. And I’m sorry for mentioning Madame Morrible. I didn’t meet her personally. She presided over teas for the visitors—community relations, that sort of thing, a town-and-gown tension-mitigation scheme. She lectured once or twice. I don’t remember the topic.”

He did, though. The Animal Adverse laws, and the Wizard’s mercy.

“Doctor Dillamond,” said Professor Lenx. “A fine scholar.”

“And an early admirer of Elphaba Thropp’s, as I recall,” added Mister Mikko.

Brrr took the chance that was presenting itself. “I don’t suppose you remember an occasion in which an infant Lion cub was brought into a laboratory in Shiz? For some kind of treatment?”

Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko exchanged glances.

“Much was done that is best not to remember,” said Mister Mikko softly.

“I think I might have been that Lion cub.”

A grave silence as, in the next room, a few coals fell from their little heap.

“We might all have been that Lion cub,” said the Boar.

The Ape got up to clear. The cups trembled in his hands. When he left the room, the Boar leaned forward. “We did not approve,” he whispered. “Please don’t speak of this again. He gets very upset, the old fool.”

“It was my life,” said Brrr.

“And this is ours, what’s left of it. Spare us, and save yourself. You’re young enough. Look: You have survived. Bless you, dear sir. Bless you, and shut up.”

As Mister Mikko cleared away, Brrr pushed Professor Lenx’s cart into the front parlor, where it took up half the room. The Lion stirred up the fire while the Boar sunk into a reverie about Madame Morrible and the last golden years of an integrated university life. When Brrr settled in a ratty old upholstered chair ( just covered with silvery Ape hairs), he didn’t speak but thought about Animals in exile and the need for a modern workforce in the factories.

There was an opportunity here. Staring him in the face. Rehabilitation of a sort, if he worked it right. If he had the mettle to do it.

During afters, Brrr made his proposal over a bitterroot sherry. He offered his services as a go-between. He would return to Shiz and present himself to the appropriate authorities as Professor Lenx’s agent. He would ask 15 percent of any funds he was able to locate and arrange to have released. Everything notarized and formalized.

“I know you’re young,” said Mister Mikko. “Well, youngish. But have you really the nerve to return to Loyal Oz?”

“I am a Namory,” he reminded them. “I once got a medal from the Wizard of Oz himself. And for a time I counted the Scarecrow, who sits upon the Throne, a personal friend.”

“We move in lofty circles, yet we wear such a nobly frayed jacket,” said the Boar, as gentle as he was wry.

Brrr pressed his case. “I ought at least to be able to get an audience with him, if the banks give me a hard time.”

Professor Lenx couldn’t control his trembling as Mister Mikko, with a more capable hand, labored over a contract engaging Brrr as a financial agent.

“Assuming on the Loyal Oz side of the border that the Shiz bank honors its terms, will the Eminent Thropp here in Munchkinland allow the funds transfer?” asked Brrr. “I don’t know much about monetary policy. And who is the current Eminent Thropp now, anyway?”

“With the deaths of both Elphaba and Nessarose, the title of Eminent Thropp ought to have reverted to Shell,” said Mister Mikko. “I mean, given the absence of the issue of the women of the line. For, like the descent of Ozmas, the Eminenceships descend with a matrilineal bias. But Shell is said to be a playboy in Emerald City gambling parlors. Also a regular visitor to girlie arcades. He’s shown no inclination to give up the high life and waltz back here to govern a rogue state. One suspects his political sympathies, if he’s ever developed any, would have conformed with the Wizard’s, anyway.”

“Who else has emerged?” said Brrr. “I mean, to pick up the county where Nessarose left it when she died?”

“Bit of a local scrabble,” said Mister Mikko, “but if we had the money you might bring us, we’d put it on the Eminent Pastor in Old Pastoria. Her name is Mumbly.”

“Her name is Mammly.”

“Her name is immaterial. Mumbly, Mommy, will you let me finish, old darling? She keeps to herself. She’s distantly related to Pastorius, who was the last Ozma Regent before the Wizard’s takeover. She probably has the most legitimacy to stand up to the Emerald City in case of an attempt at reannexation, though I don’t know if she would. I don’t think she has the conviction of exceptionalism that Nessarose possessed.”

“We use the same currency, in any event,” added the Boar, “so how could there be a prohibition against our reclaiming our retirement funds?”

Brrr left them to their nattering and sunk into a haze of anticipation. Could this work? A legitimate job serving two populations at once? If he helped to resolve the labor crisis, surely that would confer upon him a legitimacy that had hitherto eluded him in human society?

It had been several years since he’d left the Emerald City. He could return in triumph, circling north to Shiz first, of course, to begin the negotiations.

He fell asleep in front of the fire and dreamed of gratitude.

IN THE MORNING, Brrr managed to cadge from the two old bachelors an advance on future earnings—a sack of fifteen mettanite florins. With mounting hopes he made his way back overland to Shiz. Back from the farthest habitable corner of Munchkinland, back to life. Scheming all the while. He’d spend a third of the money on a new wardrobe, first; then secure a pied-à-terre in a respectable neighborhood. Someplace better than Ampleton Quarters: that was important. People would notice.

For a week, no more, he would bring himself out to cafés and concerts. He’d condescend to recognize none of his former associates. It would be enough to be seen. Brrr’s back. Brrr’s back in town. Delicious. He’d returned: a Lion unafraid of human society. Let it be said of him that he was the first of the Animals to emerge from hiding. He’s the first, you know. Who’d have thought it of him?

Let it be said that he held his head high.

His mane is a ruff of bronze. Adversity has strengthened him! Let that be said, too.

His knees were shaking, though, behind the panels of his red velvet greatcoat—cut intentionally long to hide just such a syndrome—when he got up the nerve, at last, to present himself to the governor general of the banking house identified by Professor Lenx.

He gave his name as Sir Brrr, Namory of the Palace of the Throne of Oz. He didn’t specify his rank nor identify his district, which proved a smart move. The governor general apparently thought it impolite to enquire. (An Animal Namory was an aberration in and of itself, so far, and perhaps, Brrr speculated, the GG of the bank didn’t care to be seen ignorant of the conventions, however newly established.)

Somewhat shocked by Sir Brrr’s request, the banking officials couldn’t quickly enough find out a reason to reject his petition. In the end it was a matter of deciding what fee to apply against the withdrawal sum for the backbreaking work of having kept Professor Lenx’s deposit secure all these long years, while said absentminded Professor had gone lollygagging about without so much as a postcard over the holidays.

When they announced the amount that they would take—30 percent—Brrr was shocked. He understood at once that he had undersold himself as to the percentage of his own fee. But how easy to exaggerate by 5 percent what the bank had charged, and pocket the difference. He was worth it. Without his skill at negotiation and his nerve, the Animals back in Stonespar End would be getting nothing.

Carrying a letter of assurance, Brrr traveled back to Munchkinland. He avoided the high road, fearful of bandits—he was carrying cold cash—so it took a while to arrive. In the time he’d been gone, Mister Mikko had suffered a viral infection of some sort and lost all his teeth, and he refused to come out of his room.

For his part, Professor Lenx was irate to learn that his investment, far from growing, had lost 50 percent of its original value. But to have some cash was better than having none. He thanked Brrr profusely with tears and scratchy embraces, and introduced him to a neighbor from Three Dead Trees, a crippled old Tsebra, whose family also had a sizeable trust fund in a Shiz cash emporium…

Thus did Brrr’s career as a professional adjustor of personal finance—his own—root and thrive. He took new digs in Shiz at the top of a converted palace. He had a private lift and he hired a personal valet—a human, what a delicious touch—and from his salon at night he could see the glittering lights of the banks reflected in the black waters of the Suicide Canal. The pelt of a tiger was draped across the piano.

• 7 •

A LION COULD move in circles that others could not. Once he established himself as a professional arbiter, Sir Brrr began to demand—and get—the more useful sort of testimonials. Letters from the proper officials that permitted his passage across the Oz-Munchkinland border at the checkpoint called Munchkin Mousehole. A good thing, too. Much safer than the off-road scurry that black-market enterprise favored. Still, the fear of highway robbery remained strong, since the wheels of the rented phaeton had bronze rims that rang out an alarm—the progress of money over here!—as they struck the yellow brick paving.

Brrr’s valet doubled as a chauffeur. He carried a cosh and a pistol and looked like a bandit himself, which was perhaps useful. His nose ran constantly and he seemed to enjoy his toddy at all hours of the day and evening, which Brrr overlooked since everything else seemed in order. He was called Flyswatter.

The need for Brrr to approach his old chum the Scarecrow in the Emerald City had never arisen. A good thing, too, as the Scarecrow had stepped down or been stepped over. Indeed, Flyswatter—speaking for the demimonde—insisted that the Scarecrow had disappeared. The power in the EC now devolved upon the improbable person of Shell Thropp, who had boasted publicly of his estrangement from his famous and powerful sisters, Nessarose and Elphaba. And then he had ordained himself Emperor.

On what authority? He’d had a conversion. The Unnamed God had chosen him to lead Oz. The Unnamed God had selected in Shell a servant and a steward of this great people, this deserving nation, this heap of goodness, this blessed verdant pasture ringed by stinging deserts…well, the rhetoric was almost as bountiful as the moral surcease with which Oz credited itself.

Brrr took little notice, except to be glad he hadn’t needed to approach the Palace of the Emperor of Oz. Instead, he involved himself in more traditional credits of the double-entry bookkeeping sort.

The banks didn’t like seeing their deposits dwindle, but those in the know were always muttering about the cost of an impending military strike. Who could say when deposits might be impounded by the Throne for the purpose of funding the army? If the banks could charge 30 percent for every withdrawal by an Animal and then use magical accounting to disappear their earnings as thoroughly as Ozma herself had been disappeared, they were in some ways ahead.

Any in-house scruples were easily suppressed. A certain Loyalist strain had never accepted that Shiz banks should be holding Animal funds in the first place. Tainted!

So the banks prospered in the short term, and hid their gains; the Animals received some capital after a long period of penury; and Brrr thrived. His own account accumulated like—well, like magic. He paid off old debts involving Ampleton Quarters, and he invested shrewdly in the less gaudy of Hiiri Furkenstael’s gilded engravings. Not for trade, but for his own pleasure.

The Lion ran into Piarsody Scallop one afternoon at the Fine Engraving Exchange this side of Ticknor Circus. She had not aged well, growing purple in the face and kitted out in an unsuitably girlish gown, all white ruches and pink furbelows. Her boot was undone because she suffered from elephant ankle. The malady forced one shoulder lower to the floor than the other, but Miss Scallop bolted upright with surprise to see him. She came stumping across the sawdusty floor with both hands flung in the air as if she were about to hurl a watermelon. He cut her.

He lived it up, he put on weight, becoming almost portly as befitted a gentleman in middle age. He ate well. It showed.

He called it gravitas, but it was mostly gravy. He was swimming in gravy.

Until the gravy boat spilled him.

It happened so slowly this time, so genteelly, that he didn’t even see it coming. He paid little attention to conversations in the club about the need of an Animal workforce to shore up the Gillikinese manufacturing sector. No significant improvement noted in that area yet, worried the captains of industry. But Sir Brrr—he used the title now—didn’t feel implicated. For one thing, he wasn’t a laborer himself, as was patently clear. For the second, though he had initially proposed to the Shiz banks that a loosening of monetary policy would result in a rise of Animal workers hunting for jobs, the bankers seemed to be exercising due patience. The banks were still culling huge fees from the withdrawals. “What do they have to complain about?” he muttered to his valet, expecting no answer. Flyswatter gave him none.

Whatever else was barked and bellowed, Loyal Oz saw no return to the Animal Adverse laws. In fact, those hoary old containment strategies were retired in ceremonies dripping with public symbolism. COME HOME TO OZ read the full-page government advertisements.

“Ha,” said Brrr to Flyswatter. “Come home to Oz. That’ll be the day.”

“What day would that be, sir?”

Brrr explained. The Animals who had emigrated to Munchkinland or to the outback of the Vinkus remained cautious about emerging from their obscurity. Hardly better integrated into the Free State of Munchkinland, where the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws had landed a weaker blow, many Animals nonetheless lived in relative tranquility. “Exiled for a generation now, some of them, they go largely unmolested about the rural reaches of the Hardings and the Fallows. They keep to themselves. They’ve found their safe haven and they’ll stick to it. Smart of them, too, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

Brrr thought it over. Few Animals tried to reinvent themselves in Shiz or the Emerald City as he had done. Abroad—in Fliaan, in Ix—it was another matter, but the sands that surrounded Oz made it likely that anyone who managed to survive an oversand trek to a foreign country stayed there.

Oz—Loyal and not—remained, in all its own breadth and vitality and distance, isolated from anything like a comity of nations. The vessel had yet to be built that could sail the desert sands on sledge runners, though inventors and madmen had imagined such a thing for generations.

“Troops amassing on the Munchkinland border, they say,” he murmured to Flyswatter once. The valet was giving him a whisker trim. “That long-anticipated strike against Munchkinland’s life support?”

“What life support would that be, sir?”

“The lake called Restwater. Huge thing. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I keep to myself, sir.”

Brrr turned to the financials. It looked as if Shell, the human Emperor of Oz, had run his treasury bankrupt by building up the military for the possible invasion.

“That’s enough for now, Flyswatter.” Brrr decided to get to the bank. He’d seen that the Emperor’s chancellor had ordered an audit of the banks, hoping to find pennies of taxable profit.

The bank manager was too busy to see him. He came home and watched the matter unfold in the papers, listened to the gossip in the clubs.

Hold on, cried the auditors. What’s this? Shiz deposits draining into the breakaway state of Munchkinland?

Possibly funding the military of that upstart nation?

And in a time of social unrest, what with the labor shortage, the drought still upon them, the tax base eroding as incomes fell?

Fie, cried the chancellor, and the bankers shrugged, and the fie! rolled off their shoulders. It lay like a judgment upon the shoulders of Brrrr.

Or perhaps Flyswatter turned him in. In any event, the constabulary showed up one morning and the valet had bolted, so Brrr answered the door himself. He was wearing a regrettably adorable robe, beige satin woven with stripes of darker beige, and pink piping, very cuddly, very oh-what-a-night—and his mane went every which way. Bumblebee advocates of the new journalism—on-the-spot flash-lit photogravures—were waiting behind the shoulder of the constable to ambush the Lion.

“Aiding and abetting the enemy,” said the constable, as if pronouncing a sartorial crime. “Is that a Rampini knockoff?”

“It’s an original,” said Brrr, letting it drop to the floor. The nakedness of Animals always made humans profoundly uncomfortable. It was the best he could do as a protest, given such short notice. “Am I allowed to dress myself?”

“We’re gentlemen here. Make it snappy, though.” CLAP HIM IN CHAINS said the caption that evening, and IF SIR BRRR LIKES STRIPES SO MUCH, WE CAN SHOW HER SOME STRIPES IN A PRISON GARMENT.

Clap some more as he is led to prison, was the point, and we go free for the virtue of our fingering him.

“I am only a delivery service,” Brrr declared to the court registrar. “You want the bankers, not me.”

The registrar raised her eyebrow. Brrr knew she was saying: Bankers are always pure. Bankers are purer than priests. Something about money insulates them in virtue.

“I charge you with fraud, to start with,” said the first magistrate he saw in Shiz, known as the doorbell magistrate for his job of cobbling together the initial court definition of an indictment. “You’re a villain.”

“I charge you with exaggeration,” shot back the Lion. “I’m a fall guy.”

The accusation of fraud was entered into the register—fraud perpetrated not against the victims, for some reason (who regards victims?), but against the banks themselves. Fraud in the service of treason. (Had he been turned in by one of his pool-hall cronies?) The complaints were written in such convoluted language that Brrr couldn’t follow them. Nonetheless, his gizzard seemed cooked, but good.

His offer to pay back to the banks any funds deemed to have been illegally skimmed off the released Animal accounts was met with “no comment.” The court wasn’t in a mood for bargaining. Brrr spent a few weeks in a holding pen, no worse a lodging than that old ministerial croft in which Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko were entering their dotage. One night the Lion was bundled into a special convicts’ train that traveled at midnight from Shiz to the capital. Within a mile or two of the Emperor’s Palace, Brrr knew, hunched Southstairs, the underground prison carved on the site of a megalithic tomb. He imagined the place as a massive mouth of Oz. It ground its stony gullet, waiting for Brrr’s carcass.

But there were a few steps to endure first, the joke of applying for an appeal in the Emerald City, the punishment of having to wait for a hearing until the meanest magistrate was free of social obligations. The usual foul skirmishes.

By dint of the judgment against him his assets were frozen pending appropriation. (Someone had to pay for his incarceration in Southstairs, and better the accused than the state.) He wasn’t a lamb thrown to the lions—he knew that—he was a Lion thrown to the lethal but dominant Lambs of the Unnamed God.

Then, if you could call it that, a stroke of luck at last. Someone serving as a Friend of the Court had recognized him in chambers; it was the Margreave of Tenmeadows, a Gillikinese noble named Avaric. For his own amusement if nothing else, Avaric worked in Secret Affairs, an arm of the Palace defense team. Before Brrr’s final appeal review could be canceled due to insufficient cause, and before he could be led off to prison, Avaric arranged a meeting between the criminal and the sentencing judge, a professional scold named Miss Eldersdotter. At the Court’s discretion the Margreave was allowed to attend.

“You are a Namory, as I understand it,” said Miss Eldersdotter. Her shiny jaw bristled with so many ugly hairs she could have knitted herself a chin wipe out of them.

“Sir Brrr, Low Plenipotentiary of Traum,” he replied.

“The first Animal so honored,” interjected Lord Avaric.

“All the more reason to set an example,” snapped Miss Eldersdotter. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Brrr.” Her refusal to use the honorific was nothing less than a taunt. He governed his temper.

“I am mightily ashamed of what has happened,” he said coolly.

“And well you might be.” Her eye was trained on documents. He expected if he kept replying she would keep answering his assertions so as to have the last word. I remain deeply ashamed, Your Honor. As it should be, Brrr. And as it is, Your Honor. I would expect it to be so, Brrr. And on. And on.

Then she looked up and said, “Not the Cowardly Lion of the incident out West? That little contretemps with the dainty Dorothy? You do get around.”

“The same, Your Honor, though I don’t include the sobriquet on my letterhead.”

Lord Avaric snorted. Even Miss Eldersdotter had to twitch a smile into submission.

“So you had doings with the Wicked Witch of the West and her witch-boy.”

“Doings would be putting a mighty fine gloss upon it. I accompanied Dorothy to the West and spent the evening in question mostly locked in a kitchen storeroom.”

“You know the lad called Liir. Her son, some say.”

“He won’t be a lad anymore if he is still alive. I knew him for a few weeks, and that was the end of it.”

“Have you an opinion as to whether he really was her son? Did he ever show signs of any particular talent at spells?”

“He showed little initiative in the time I knew him, and no promise of any sort.”

“Still,” she said noncommittally. “Still. And even so.”

“We may have an opportunity here,” said the Margreave.

“I begin to see what you are on about, Lord Avaric. Would you like to present your proposal to the Court? Since we are about to be off-record, Miss Saucerly, you may break for an early tea.”

Miss Saucerly fled. Miss Eldersdotter took off her magistrate’s wig to reveal a flattened little steel-blond hairdo, spare and dispirited. She fluffed her hair with Miss Saucerly’s pencil as Lord Avaric spoke.

Brrr looked out the window, his future in the hands of others. He listened, but not too closely at first, afraid to become hopeful about whatever Lord Avaric was proposing. Miss Eldersdotter asked a few questions and made a few notes. At one point she dispatched a pigeon to the Palace, requesting information from someone, and the pigeon returned twenty minutes later, the reply scribbled on the back of the same scroll.

Thus was the plot hatched to transpose Brrr’s punishment from incarceration in the highest security prison in Oz to a civic alternative: government service. By virtue of his experience with the Wicked Witch of the West and her putative son, Liir, Brrr would be engaged to do some research for the Courts and for Secret Affairs.

He would find out what happened to Liir after he was last seen some eight years ago, suspected of having holed up for sanctuary in this very mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He would poke around for this and that among the Witch’s effects. Interview a few witnesses.

To what end? Brrr insisted on following the point. Not because he would take it into account—just—because. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but he was a big Cat and had a higher tolerance for curiosity than some.

“Lord Avaric will explain. Case retired.” Miss Eldersdotter closed the file and rubbed her temples. “Before you take up your new assignment, Brrr, I wonder if you could illuminate me about that aspect of your career involving the assessment of antique prints. I inherited a set of moldy old things from my widowed aunt in Tenniken, and I suspect they are worth a pretty bundle.”

All kinds of possibilities emerged. He held his tongue until his thoughts settled in his mind. Then he said evenly, “I am afraid the market has changed so much since I was professionally involved, Your Honor, that I would no longer be qualified to offer a judgment.”

“Well,” she said, “so few of us are.” And she all but leaned back in her chair and kicked up her heels, laughing at her own little self-coronation.

Suppose Miss Eldersdotter’s widowed aunt had been the mother of Jemmsy the foot soldier. That would make the magistrate and Jemmsy first cousins. But if she were so related, Brrr didn’t want to know. Poetic justice could be just that ironic, but why allow it to trounce upon his frailest feelings?

Once the plea bargain had been struck and approved and signed in triplicate, and the copies filed and their receipts stamped in triplicate and themselves filed, he was free to leave his cell. In a brougham, Lord Avaric arrived to collect Brrr at the door of Saint Satalin’s Nook for Petty Criminals. The Margreave proposed luncheon at a respectable establishment, but Brrr said he had no appetite. This was only partly a lie, as he certainly had no appetite to be seen dining in public.

So Avaric took Brrr on a walk along the Ozma Embankment, where they couldn’t be overheard by pedestrians. Avaric had a little device called an air pistol that, when fired, made a sudden bang, and the nearby avian population involuntarily launched themselves into a frenzy. The swans on the canal hammered the water with their powerful wings, thwacking the lilies, splashing themselves airborne. No small winged spies remained near enough to overhear Avaric’s revelations.

“You’re right to ask about your obligations to the Court,” he confided to Brrr. “Secrecy is all very good, but an agent can best do his job if he knows the parameters.”

Brrr pulled the collar up around his ruff. He was furious, but he was free. The Ozma Embankment was in spring bloom. Butterflies, untroubled by the salute of the gun, pasted themselves on the limbs of miniature ornamental quoxwoods. Bees reprised their hymns to the goddess nectar. A street sweeper in leg irons sang, too, some pagan paean to Lurlina. The roses were a week from cresting. His eyes watered at the notion of how swiftly this could have been swept away. The beauty. The bastards.

“I don’t know why you took my part,” he said to Lord Avaric.

“Don’t be craven,” said the Margreave. “It wasn’t high sentiment, believe me. As I hear it told, you were once labeled a Witch’s familiar, back when she was public enemy number one. And—how talented you are, really—you’ve also been tarred as a collaborationist, taking the part of the Wizard against your own nativist Animal population. Both the left and the right have called you seditious. You’re despised by all. That’s a good profile in our line of work. If you’ve had some actual practice in betrayal, you’re better able to carry off the scheme again.”

Brrr did not reply. He had never considered himself either a defender of the Witch or a collaborationist with the Wizard; that had been an interpretation of the press and general public feeling. As if guessing his thoughts, Avaric continued, “Don’t mind me. A traitor can skew his moral compunctions around any new endeavor and make it seem the correct and even laudable course of action. That’s also part of the makeup of a spy: the ability to convince himself of the rightness of his aims.”

Brrr found the courage to say, “Sir, I am no spy.”

“Well, that’s just fine,” said Avaric, unflappable. “You’re just a Namory who has narrowly escaped imprisonment for treason. How lucky that you have such patriotic impulses. All ready to help the nation in a little fact-finding mission! And since you’re no traitor either, as I see you are about to claim, you’ll have no qualms in working on behalf of Secret Affairs.”

They had reached the place on the Ozma Embankment where one could turn around and look back along the Grand Canal to see the Throne Palace. It stood shining on its little blunted peninsula above the reflecting basin. The emeralds in its facade winked like reflections on a lake: at this hour, from this point, the palace looked as if it were built of the purest water.

This prospect was the subject of dozens of mettanite etchings and coldstone engravings. He knew it as he knew the back of his own paw. But seeing the view for real, in stone and jewel and waterway rather than in watercolor washed over ink on paper—well, it thrilled one to the bone, even as the power the Palace represented gave one a cramp.

“From what I hear tell,” Avaric was saying, “Old Elphaba, that crankina on a broom, once gave the Wizard of Oz a page from a book she called the Grimmerie. She was tempting him with it, using the book as a bargaining chip to arrange for the release of a political prisoner named Nor. The good Wizard refused to negotiate with a terrorist like her, but, frankly, he was tempted. He’d had knowledge of that magic book for some time, and he wanted it. The single page he managed to get from Elphaba that day was responsible for the knowledge of how to train dragons for use in military maneuvers.”

“Some book,” said Brrr cautiously.

“How much more the Wizard might have achieved had he gotten the whole book! But the Wizard abdicated—some say he was deposed, as he deposed the Ozma Regent before him—and notions of those magic gospels were forgotten for a while during the short, giddy reigns of Glinda the Good and the Scarecrow after her.”

“Yes,” said Brrr, unable to resist boasting about his connections. “I was once quite au fait with the Scarecrow, as it happens.”

“Indeed you were. Of course you were. Then you will remember how Shell, Elphaba’s brother, ascended to the throne in that smooth, unresisted way. The Scarecrow as good as a butler, the way he melted away without a murmur.”

“I was traveling at the time, but I learned of it later.”

“It was Shell’s ministers, combing the Treasury for negotiable commodities to fund his army, who came across the page on dragons.”

Avaric explained further. Since the writing on the reverse side of the page had seemed to be the second half of a spell, not otherwise identified, no one had paid it much mind at first. But then the Emperor had engaged a scholar of magic at Shiz—a Miss Greyling, spelled g-r-e-y, or maybe it is spelled g-r-a-y—something like that—to decipher what she could of the spell’s conclusion and to infer, if possible, the spell’s name and intention.

“That would take some talent,” Brrr ventured.

“She spent several years over it,” continued Avaric. “Eventually she made her report to the Emperor. As near as she could tell, the verso of the manuscript page was the second part of a spell to reveal hidden inscriptions. Codes, watermarks, the like. A universal spell for the deciphering of runes. Perhaps even the location of individuals in hiding; could it be? Either that or, perhaps, a recipe for oatmeal fritters. It was hard to be sure.

“‘What we need,’ our Emperor Shell replied, ‘is the rest of this text so we could use it to reveal the location of the Grimmerie to us. A circular ambition, but once we had the Grimmerie, what else we might be able to do!’”

“What does the Grimmerie look like?” asked Brrr. “Not that I was ever one for books or that sort of thing. My expertise was limited to flat pieces done on private presses.”

“Few could ever have seen it,” said Avaric. “So there’s no reliable description. By the size of the page that Shell has in his treasury, it is a big codex, a tome—a foot square, perhaps.” He looked narrowly at Brrr. “You were one of the few to go to the Witch’s castle while she was thought to have it in her possession. I mean, the others—dead or disappeared. The entire Tigelaar family, who held the castle called Kiamo Ko before the Witch took up residence, was captured and imprisoned. One of them, that child named Nor, escaped from Southstairs a few years ago—she might know the whereabouts of the Grimmerie.”

“Well, ask her.”

“You find her and ask her. Also, the boy named Liir, who some say is Elphaba’s son, had gone to Southstairs hunting for her. Perhaps he had seen the book, too, and was looking for his half sister to work with. But he also has gone into hiding. Oz is just riddled with hidey-holes, to judge by the number of useful folk that we can’t seem to locate. Can you imagine what a boon it would be, if the government could get its paws on the rest of the spell—to say nothing of the rest of that book?”

“Surely the Witch’s castle has been searched?” asked Brrr. He didn’t want to go back there again; he’d almost rather sign up for a season in prison. Those flying monkeys—it made his flesh creep to remember them.

“The place was turned inside out,” said Avaric. “Or so I understood. Nothing left there but an old family retainer and the monkeys. No, the guess is that someone took the Grimmerie from Kiamo Ko. But who—and why—is a mystery—and where it is now is an ever bigger mystery.”

“To whom does it actually belong?” asked Brrr. “I mean, if Liir actually is the Witch’s son, I suppose it is his book, really.”

“It belongs to the government,” said Avaric. “I hope I haven’t misplaced my trust in you, Brrr.”

“Not at all. I was merely making conversation. Wondering if perhaps Liir had found it after all, somehow.”

“I don’t think he has,” said Avaric. “Because the betting parlors have it nine to one that when or if the Grimmerie falls into Liir’s hands, he would find a way to use it against the Emperor.”

“Is our national security policy governed by the odds in betting parlors?”

“You’re funny,” said the Margreave in a voice that betrayed little evidence of amusement. “Liir led a sort of protest of sorts against the Emperor seven or eight years ago. He commandeered a huge armada of Birds and they flew over the Emerald City. He had the Witch’s broom and her cape. If he gets his hands on her book, too, there’s no telling which corner the trouble will start in. The fact that things have been so quiet this past decade suggests he is looking for it as hard as we are.”

“Maybe he isn’t,” said Brrr. “Maybe he’s melted away like his so-called mother. He’s done his conscientious objection—”

Avaric started.

“I mean his rabble-rousing,” continued Brrr. “And if the rabble refuses to rouse itself further, why bother? Maybe he’s retired to the country to take up croquet.”

“He’s certainly gone to ground,” agreed the Margreave. “But it isn’t Liir we want, specifically. It’s the Grimmerie. Keep your eyes on the matter at hand. My advice is to start with Madame Morrible. She was, apparently, engaged by the Wizard to keep Elphaba under some sort of surveillance. She died two decades ago, but her effects are archived in the college of Shiz University, where she was headmistress. Crage Hall, it’s called. Start there.”

When they were about to take their leave of each other, Brrr asked, “How will you have me report?”

“I trust you,” said Avaric. He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. Despite the spring efflorescence, a cold wind had sprung up, smelling of old ice. “You are the Cowardly Lion, dear fellow. You will fulfill your commitment to the Throne or find your pardon revoked. One can always trust a coward to behave in a certain manner; they are predictable as rust. That’s why you’re so useful.”

“You are too kind,” said Brrr.

Avaric laughed. “You can’t even do obsequy with any conviction. The perfect spy. Here’s hoping for your sake, and for ours, you can carry it off.”

Freed to wander about again, though without his glad clothes. Brrr was reduced to seconds bought off the rack at the Poor Fair Boutique in the Burntpork district. A Lion snatching for a Rampini knockoff and fighting over it with a toothless gentleman who wanted it, he said, to make purses out of. Brrr won the tussle but lost his dignity. Well, as if he had any left to lose.

Supplied with a sheaf of writs and a small purse for expenses, Brrr headed back to Shiz. It was eerie to be middle-aged, tramping about the quadrangles as a functionary of Secret Affairs, where once as a dandy he had sprung along the graveled walks in an opera cape and a daringly rose-scented cologne. Everything now looked as seedy as he felt. He didn’t know if this was the aging process—the retreat from insouciance—or if the university was falling on hard times.

He’d met the archivist, Miss Greyling, a stoic in sensible shoes, and he decided that she was nuts. She couldn’t work the latch on the casement window, or remember with which hand to shake Brrr’s paw—nor whether touching the felted pad of an Animal was gauche or daring or illicit or morally profound. How could she deduce what the half-a-spell was saying? It would be a half-magic not worth the coin, he guessed. Her credentials, in addition, seemed dubious. But she was devoted, and flustery, and her cheeks grew pink if he let his language get coarse, which he did now and then, to remind her that he was, after all, an Animal.

“Oh, sir,” she’d say, “muffins at Lurlinemas, I shall scream!”

He was amused, and also chagrined. So it comes to this. I say naughty things to aging spinsters, to get a rise out of them. What a wolf I am. What a loser.

She found him the name of Yackle, though, and in time, with worryingly few other leads scrawled in his notepad, Brrr made to leave that hothouse atmosphere.

A glass cat had been sitting, grooming itself at the porter’s lodge. Perhaps unused to seeing a Lion in the streets of Shiz, the cat had gone all devotional and even romantic, purring up a storm in its aging larynx. So this is what it’s like to have a pet, thought Brrr, and while he didn’t encourage the creature, he didn’t kick it away, either. It had been too long a time since anyone, creature or human or Animal, had purred in his presence.

Why did the cat cross the Yellow Brick Road? To reach the Lion waiting on the other side.

Brrr had accepted the companionship. It was a novelty. He named it Shadowpuppet for its bright transparency, for its tendency to skulk in the shadows as if to keep from being overheated by the sun.

Going overland again—into the part of Oz most likely to see military activity—was no picnic. Until the first sign of battle, though, he preferred imminent danger to the froufrou of cottage guest rooms for hire. The lavender sachets, the geranium-mint teas, the caged songbirds embellishing the air with the pretty sound of their distress. Spinsters can decorate their own hearthsides with handiwork and camouflage, but to the Lion it seemed another sort of prison.

However, he was striking out in a new direction, and that had some merit. He had always relished the look of a virgin horizon. He headed due south, bypassing the EC, southwest toward the place where the dead lake called Kellswater most nearly approached the great reservoir of Restwater. The provinces of the Vinkus and Gillikin met here, and the Free State of Munchkinland to the east nudged up against them both. It was, quite possibly, the hottest spot on the map just now, due to the need for fresh water.

The various biddies from their porches agreed: Just north of the oakhair forest he would find the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He nodded and kept on. With luck the old bitch, Yackle, would still be clinging to life. If she’d survived to this unholy age, she’d be a pushover. He wasn’t worried about it.

He would pursue any lead he could to learn from Liir, or from any source, the whereabouts of the fatal book of magic known as the Grimmerie. Even daring to dart about a landscape gone noisy with the movement of infantry divisions. Where, in a slightly horrifying night, he had come across Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire tending the wounded, and persuaded them to let him and Shadowpuppet accompany them back to the mauntery.

HE SAT IN the darkening room. Early evening was always the hardest to negotiate. He tried to concentrate on the immediate. The wind had died down a little; the oakhair forest moaned less strenuously. A moon was rising; it would be ducking in and out of clouds tonight. The world first in shadows and secrets, then in naked prominence.

Nothing in his own life was worth remembering, really. Every turn had promised reward, and delivered something less. So in truth, searching out the twists of someone else’s life—be it Madame Morrible’s, or the wretched Liir’s, or even old Yackle’s—was a downright comfort. A welcome distraction. It was diverting to consider lives that had been as hobbled as his own troubled existence.

From a witch’s familiar to a collaborationist of the Wizard to this: a civil servant yoked to the information agencies. Abhorred by the right and the left alike, as Avaric had said. In some ways, rounded upon by everyone, Brrr had nothing left to be, to become, but himself.

How limited, even sour a prospect, though.

One may, oh, cook poorly, or be socially graceless, or invest unwisely, or fail to achieve the best of personal hygiene. But one doesn’t want to live wrong—from breath to breath, from start to finish, to get it wrong, so wrong, so fully wrong, that one has never had the glimmer of an idea that it might be better. Or does one? Maybe if you’re going to get it that wrong, it’s better to get it all wrong. The proverbial stupid ant crawling on the hat brim of the prophet, eager only for the shade behind the prophet’s left ear, and ignorant of the civilization-altering sermon it is witnessing.

• 8 •

THE ACOLYTES of the Clock of the Time Dragon banged cooking utensils into dirty kettles, tying up their sleeping rolls. Their anxiety at the sound of distant cannon was obvious through their overeager laughter. Boys in the neighborhood of war.

“We’re pulling up stakes here, Missy Morosey,” called the sergeant-at-hand, but when she didn’t arise to hurry to them, he just cursed under his breath and continued knotting ropes to secure the carriage. There was too much to be done to waste his breath trumpeting at her when she decided to go deaf.

Her back was turned to them, her head bent as if listening to an interior argument. She was alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, are alone. Had she a mirror to study her own features, she’d have noted with approval the early silvering of her hair, the spatter of liver spots on the edge of her temple. These would have helped her overlook that her skin still glowed, almost as if backlit, with the enviable sheen of youth.

But she wouldn’t have a mirror. She cared to see in her own face neither shades of the hopeful child she’d been nor glimpses of the schemingly wanton maiden she’d become. In recent years, she had bridled at compliments—“How like a sylph you are! How maidenly!”—as if the efforts to survive her calamities and do useful work had proven incapable of maturing her.

The clearing was striped with oakhair strands. They’d been vibrating earlier, but as night drew near, the winds lapsed, the music stilled. It was almost time for a candle, but she didn’t want to go back to her cohorts at the wagon. Bellow though they might, they wouldn’t leave without her.

She balanced a pen in her hands, musing.

She had been trying for years to write, but even when she managed a line or two, she couldn’t or wouldn’t use the personal pronoun. The habit of alibi prevented her. Anyway, she was no longer convinced that she possessed a character so resolved it could boast about itself: I, I, I! When she did write it, it was followed by a period. I. It might as well be her initial, as in “I. sat alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, sit alone.”

Her reservations weren’t rooted in aesthetics. She knew little about that branch of opinion, and cared less. Beauty and its refinements. Hah! If she had to consider her aversion to the unslakable I in terms of theory, she supposed she would speak about the elegance of justice: Your I and my I are of equal weight. Or about the central paradox of equality: The I, the singular first-person pronoun, had to be eradicated in order to sustain the argument about justice’s brash lack of interest in individual history—even as justice existed to champion the rights of such histories to exist. I and I and I and I, all the land over.

The dwarf barked at her. “Dizzy Lady Lollipalazy! We may have to break camp before our scout returns with news of those pesky troop movements! Skedaddle before we know whether we’re making ourselves targets or skirting the skirmish! Put away your notepaper unless you prefer to be swallowed up in cannon smoke. Though whether it’s the cannon of the EC professionals or the stumpy little guerrillas, we can’t yet tell. Are you listening, Twit-Twit-of-the-Mountaintops?”

After a while she uncorked a bottle of dark red ink and wrote a few words.

The madder the battle, the saner the peace.

She didn’t know if this was true. She wrote to ask herself questions. Was there any reason that peace should ever be sane? Perhaps war was too mad an endeavor for the world to survive intact; perhaps its aftermath was always corrupted. The I. who considered this was not without corruption, she knew.

She thought, but didn’t write: The louder the cannon, the deafer the peacemakers.

This was nearer to what she wanted, but it was not right.

She sighed. Given how the writing impulse had first emerged, no wonder it was so hard to get the correct words.

Some years before signing on as a nurse to a dirty old coot, she had taken up a position as a gentleman’s comfort in the squat industrial Gillikinese town of Red Sand. She learned her trade, mastered it, to useful effect. One evening she maneuvered herself from a shadowy nook in the Hall of Salt Fountains right onto the lap of a northern Gillikinese supplier of iron ore. He gave his name as Serbio, which she knew to be false. No matter; she used alibis in her line of work, too.

After a brief and teasing carriage ride, she ended up in his bed in a lodging house in one of Red Sand’s seedier streets. The smell of hot refuse, brimstone, and tarnish entwined, issued from the drapes; the factories were working overtime.

Her client was drunk and handsome though tending to portliness, and he had a wife at home who wouldn’t let him have his way with a riding crop. While I. could pretend abandon with a finesse verging on the uncanny.

Her client had left her there naked in the brownish lamplight while he answered the lodge keeper’s knock at their door (the interruption seemed to stoke rather than quench his ardor). The lodge keeper complained. Would Master Serbio please see to the inconvenient visitor at the street door as the lodge keeper was retiring—again, and this time for good?

She had expected the interruption—it was why she was here—though she hadn’t figured on the beating. But if she could deliver the goods, the unexpected welts on her naked skin might be seen as badges of honor.

As soon as Serbio left the room and trotted down the hall of the rented chambers, she rose flinching from the bed to accomplish her task.

Her backup team having worked out the scheme properly, she was ready. They’d had word that while Serbio was visiting from the western edge of the Glikkus, a munitions manufacturer in Red Sand was hoping to make a secret negotiation with him. The deal would need to be sealed before Serbio headed home to the slopes of the Scalps, site of the iron-ore mines. She needed to find out: How much blue iron ore was Serbio selling to the arsenal in Red Sand? And how often? Only certain kinds of firearms were prized in infantry maneuvers—the Pollinger redoubler, especially—and the iron ore used in the casting of Pollinger gun barrels was derived primarily from Glikkun sources. So figuring out which factory was producing the bulk of Pollinger artillery, and how frequently, would give a clue as to how the Emerald City generals planned to prosecute an invasion of Munchkinland.

If the bulk of the munitions were being manufactured here in Red Sand, then the invasion would likely start in the south, as (with a carefully planned overland water carry) artillery could be shipped from Red Sand to the Shale Shallows by way of the Gillikin River. The goals of the invasion most likely would be limited to wresting the great lake and its water supply from Munchkinland.

If, on the other hand, the iron ore was being reserved for the new munitions factory in Traum, the EC invasion strategy probably involved cutting across the Glikkus Canals—braving those trolls—and dropping into Munchkinland from the undefended north. A march through the Nest Fallows—a summer holiday for foot soldiers!—then on into Center Munch and Colwen Grounds. Capture the capital first rather than its plum asset, Restwater.

I. had planned the seduction; she had worn the red picandella with the lace reveal; she had done her hair in pearl rosettes. Into the recess scooped out of her abalone-clad toiletry kit she had fitted a slim notebook with curved pages (each cut to fit with a nail scissors) and a pencil shaved to an inch.

The birds in the cage on the landing, though, she hadn’t planned on. At the sound of the knock on the street door at midnight, they had gone mad with song. (They hadn’t uttered a word at the noise of the cudgel or at her bitten-off cries. Perhaps, like so many, they had tendencies of voyeurism.) Now they were shrieking alarums.

On tender and bruised soles she had hurried back to the chamber, praying that all other fly-by-night tenants, even if they’d awakened, would be cowering with their illicit bedmates, hoping to escape notice. Once past the age of twenty, few like a surprise midnight visitor. She had grabbed her skirt and returned with it, its wings wuffling, and she’d flung it over the cage. The birds fell silent at the unexpectedly immediate sunset.

She’d crouched at the top of the stairs, shivering in the cold. She’d listened and heard one, two vital words; and then a bonus, something about an increase in orders next spring. And a second bonus—another supplier was being brought on to help the Pollinger manufacturer—might Serbio consider a reduction in his bulk prices, and meet his competitor’s prices? A lower figure per unit ton…

Her client began to haggle. She had to admire a businessman able to defend his turf while standing in a freezing hall in nothing but button-bottomed pantlettes.

It was enough. Reclaiming her skirt, she stole back to the chamber and made three notes in pencil while the birds began to clamor again.

They covered the noise of Serbio’s tiptoed return. He had wanted to find her cowering with her head under the pillow, her rump exposed; she was busy writing instead.

“A letter to Mama about what a naughty girl you’ve been?” he said, though his arched eyebrow defined his attention as keenly suspicious.

She gasped and managed not to fling the book away from her. She said the first thing that came into her head.

“Notes for a story.” A long pause. “I write fancies; they only come to me when I am in distress.”

She pulled her skirt over her lap, making a game of it, but Serbio grabbed her paper, saying “Whaddya fancy then, so I can provide it times three, heh-heh?”

Blessings on the team member who had insisted she learn code. “This looks like dragon drool,” he said. “Words en’t involved here.”

“I was just starting,” she said.

“Tell me what your big idea is, that you got to get up from your sweet bed of pain to write it down.”

Maybe it was his mention of Mama. Just in time, she remembered a story from her childhood. She had no way of knowing whether it was a famous legend or an invention of her own mother. “It’s about a Witch,” she said, “a Witch who has a sudden yen for a dinner made out of fox babies. But the fox mother howls down the moon, which rolls like a grave door in front of the Witch’s cave. And there the wicked old Witch stays, for ever so long.”

He wasn’t so drunk as not to be dubious; the unexpected business negotiation at midnight had corrected his thinking. “All that in this little sketch, these scratchy lines?”

“I was just beginning,” she said.

“I’ll sit and watch you write,” said Serbio. “You can read it out loud as it occurs to you.” He dropped on his knees by the side of the bed and pulled the skirt away from her lap. He dug his hand. “I don’t know whether we should beat that old Witch out of her cave,” he said, twisting. “What do you think? What do you think we ought to do?”

“Once there was a fox mother,” she said, but where she had avoided weeping earlier, the memory of the story retold in this situation gave a greater grief.

The diversion had worked. She had escaped with the information required, which she supplied to the go-between the next morning over a market stall. “Did you get hurt?” asked the intermediary, pretending to examine potatoes as he slipped the written information into his vest.

“I’m not sure,” she replied, “it wasn’t covered in the story I told.”

For a while after that, she’d survived the worst of the injuries brought on by her espionage by escaping into stories. They served as a kind of supple armor when she was naked, a place to which her mind could retreat. Over and over again she told herself the story of the Witch and the fox babies, like singing a song in her head to give herself bravery—the same thing those filthy noisy birds had done that evening. Later, sometimes both bruised and confused, she collected herself by trying to scribble things down. Not the notes in code—that system, amazingly, had remained undiscovered. But shreds of tales.

She became involved in the work. For a short time it became her salvation. She remembered how her aunts had read the same novel over and over again, for it was the only one they had, and how in their bleak spinsterhoods they had thrilled over false adventures in an invented world.

Then she gained some distance, and lost some momentum. She began to see that her stories were an argument through incident. What had seemed arbitrary, even magical—events unfolding out of her pencil as if it were her pencil doing the thinking—she now deduced as a reductive patterning, a false simplification of the world. Narrative shapeliness was a fiction in and of itself, a lie. The pencil was lying about how much meaning the world was capable of.

Any conclusion she could ever reach was false, because the validity of any conclusion could not be proved by any creature still imprisoned in the throes of life, and therefore still ill educated about myriad cause and final effect.

So after some years, she gave up the experiment of fiction. For a while or for good, she didn’t know. When she was engaged as a helpmeet and a nurse by the elderly widower—the Ogre, she called him—only to be locked in a tower to watch from above as he died, words failed her yet again.

Now sitting just outside of the company of the Clock, her saviors, she watched her pencil trail the paper and, avoiding language, make a long arcing line, a tree trunk of sorts. She added odd hooping branches bent like geometrically accurate arches. A stylized willow, a perfect fountain of green.

Sometimes, when words began to raise welts in her skin and panic in her breast, a drawing would suffice. It came from nowhere, this pure tree on the page. Perhaps it was code of another sort, and she could not yet read it.

The sergeant-at-arms said, “Ilianora!” At the sound of her name, she had to stir; she had no choice. “The runners are back,” he continued, “we’ve worked out our route. We’re right in the crosshairs of the EC militia approaching from the west; we’ve got fifteen minutes to get out of their way. If you don’t come now, we’ll leave you here! And bye-bye, Baby Beauty!”

The dwarf turned to the others. “North we go, boys, north to the edge of the woods but not out into the open, for we don’t know precisely where the Munchkinlanders are, and in the evening light we don’t want them to mistake us as their foe. We don’t want to draw their fire. Haste, or we’ll be collateral cost before midnight! If I haven’t lost my touch, sanctuary should lie just ahead of us.”

The boys to their harness, the dwarf to the seat up front. She tucked her pencil and her notebook into her apron pocket and pulled her veil back over her brow. Then she turned to join her family.

“I’m coming,” she announced, for it was her history to do so, and she could no more avoid her future than she could escape her past. However often she sat quietly apart, fretting over it. “I’m coming,” she called louder, so they could hear her over the sound of cannon.

A Question of Influence

• 1 •

THE GLASS cat made a sound of complaint; Brrr returned to the present.

“Oooh, Shadowpuppet, supper will be coming soon. These poor servants of the Unnamed God won’t let you go hungry. Their brief doesn’t allow it.”

The cat came to his lap and licked at some old crumbs caught in the pilling of Brrr’s weskit. Brrr petted it, trying to provoke a purr. This was the only warmth Shadowpuppet could show, a tonal warmth: Its body was immune to changes of heat and cold, so far as Brrr could tell.

What an advantage. Maybe it came from old age. Something to anticipate, a reprieve.

Even ancient Yackle seemed somewhat inert, emotionally: She was enduring her apparent immortality with stoicism. He’d be driven mad if he thought the blandishments of death were to be denied him forever.

He tried to escape those memories that had crowded upon him this past hour: his disastrous incompatibility with clans either Animal or human, like the Ghullim, like the Shiz banking circle; his mistakes with rogues like Dorothy or Elphaba. His humiliation at the bar of Miss Eldersdotter.

Collaborator. But to collaborate implied a betrayal of one’s natural tribe, and if one didn’t have a natural tribe…

Perhaps Yackle possessed a shred of mercy; perhaps she had taken herself away not to pray, but to get out of the room while the more heinous memories surged upon him. Perhaps she’d been able to guess that, between Traum and this off-center cloister, he had endured a lifetime of collapsing hopes and misadventures.

If so—if he could credit the old bitch with that much feeling—he had a little to thank her for. Though given his record, he was probably wrong. He was another pawn in another campaign, and hadn’t sussed out yet what her angle was.

In any case, Yackle would be coming back from chapel soon, unless she’d died a death holier than the life she’d led. Meanwhile, the small stars showed up one by one, picking their way slowly, reluctantly, through the gloaming. (He’d preferred overcast nights ever since the creepy atmospherics of the Cloud Swamp.) The stars made a rash in a sky that glowed the color of those mythical seas painted by Dobbius and his followers. A serpent green wash overlaid with a smudge of blue-coal Conté crayon applied with forefinger. In another ten minutes the green of the heavens would drown under the black, and night would be fully and legally arrived. For now, the day played its last hand, the sky reveling in its fullest dimensionality, flaring up into all directions: height, breadth, depth, lastingness.

The noise of cannon, distant but not comfortably distant enough, corresponded with the sound of Yackle approaching down the hall, a sloughing and sighing presence.

She came into the room, hitting backward at the helpful hand of the novice who had been guiding her. “Enough, you crow; go pester some other poor wren. I’ll break my hip if I’ve a mind to, and nothing you can do about it.”

“Begging pardon, Mother Yackle, but Sister Doctor asks me to show the Lion to his evening chamber, and you to yours. I bring you here just to say your good evenings, and then I’ll bring you on.”

“I’ll sit here in the dark. I don’t need a bed.”

“I’m not wasting time at sleep,” said Brrr. “Can’t you hear that gunfire? Whatever is happening is coming closer. Let’s finish up here and I’ll be on my way under cover of darkness, the way I came. I have no intention of spending a night here.”

“I’ll wait outside,” said the novice. “I’ll give you ten minutes. I am not at liberty to countermand Sister Doctor’s orders.”

The young woman retreated, and the door closed. Yackle bumped her way to her chair; Brrr didn’t offer to help her. She seemed more tired, though hardly an ounce more dead than before.

“Restored, I trust?” said Brrr bitterly.

“They haven’t changed, those women,” said Yackle. “For what seems like decades I sat among them, wondering how they did it, all that continence of emotion, all that rigor and fervor. I still wonder. I wasn’t really made for this world.” By her tone he knew she meant the world at large, not just the mauntery.

“Sentimental religiosity?” he asked. “It claws at one, doesn’t it.”

“I haven’t the goods to define it. Not to defend it nor belittle it. It just gets the better of me, that’s all. How can they sing those hymns to an Unnamed God? What is the point?”

Not for him to answer, not that one. “Why are you so sour? You are a maunt, after all. Or masqueraded as one all these years.”

“I make as few claims for my spirituality as you make for your courage,” she snapped. “The truth is, I wish I were deaf as well as blind. Relieved from listening to the biddies going at one another. Sister Doctor is in charge, more or less, but her aide-in-the-surgery, Sister Apothecaire, has never forgotten that Sister Doctor was elevated while she was passed over. The rub of it hasn’t mattered much for years, I imagine, but with an invasion of Munchkinland by the Emperor’s forces about to happen, well, that stout little Munchkinlander Sister Bulldog-Apothecaire thinks Sister Doctor is proving too neutral a leader.”

“Very psychologic of you.”

“Don’t mock me. The scorn on both sides is deafening. Toadying appeaser, thinks Sister Apothecaire of Sister Doctor. Bloody hotblooded peasant, thinks Sister Doctor of Sister Apothecaire. You suppose I can’t hear all this in how they intone their prayers?”

“You do have good ears,” said Brrr. “Quite a liability to your peace of mind, I can see that.”

“Go to your rest,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you tonight, so you might as well sleep. Should you have to run mighty fast in the morning, a good night’s sleep will benefit you.”

“I haven’t got what I need yet,” he said.

“You’re not going to get it now,” she answered. “I’m going to sit here a while, in the dark. I am thinking about whether to say any more to you at all. It’s possible I might. But I would like to grumble to myself a bit, and I don’t want to be overheard.”

“It’s time, Sir Brrr,” said the novice timidly.

She led him to the staircase, which dropped down a wide high stairwell. Above the polished wainscoting on the walls opened a large window with clear panes set in the center, colored borders on the sides. Brrr stood on the top step, waiting for Shadowpuppet to catch up. Brrr lengthened his spine, his neck, to look over the edge of the windowsill, over the curtain wall of the mauntery, to see if he could locate any sign of army divisions or sharpshooters. The sky came down almost to the ground—a flat geography in these parts. Nothing to see but a house or two with some lights on against the dark.

A house right in the way. Poor fools.

“Sir Brrr,” said the novice, using an aggrieved tone to chivy the Lion. He picked up the glass cat, resisting an urge to heave it at the novice’s skull, and followed her without speaking again.

The room to which the novice led the Lion was fitted with three clerestory windows. They were too high for him to leap through, should the place be attacked at night—the worries he carried with him!—and in any instance they were probably too small, too, since he’d put on something of a paunch despite the hard times.

Supper came, and it didn’t sit well, so it went the way it came. Shadowpuppet kept a distance, wrinkling its glassine nose at the stench.

He found he couldn’t sleep on the hard straw mattress, so he curled up on his coat. The stone floor was cold, and Brrr shivered enough to drive Shadowpuppet to the other side of the room, as if the small moony cat was afraid of shattering.

He tossed and twitched, avoiding the last yoke, the worst of it, but as he grew more tired his resistance thinned; and then it was upon him.

The men with their prods and harpoon guns, the net, the ignominious net. The surrender to capture, the terror in the cage, the shame. The accusations, the sentencing. The surgeon with his sedative, a needle and a plunger. Then the scissors of four or five barbers snipping around him, all at once. “Mortification is good for the maturing beast,” said a voice, the surgeon’s, someone’s. “Strip him of his honors, shave his mane, prune him down to nothing, and if he survives he will grow up stronger.”

A shorn head, the sign of a collaborationist.

He couldn’t and wouldn’t place the memory; he wouldn’t give it credit for being true, even. He couldn’t see himself either as a Lion cub or as a gentlebeast financier. The truth remained: He was a hollow in the midst of his own life. He’d never achieved a personal stature, a standard by which to guess the stature of others.

Perhaps it was a dread he had only imagined. If it really had happened, he didn’t want to remember the details. Better that day should stay dead.

Relieved of that darkest recollection, Brrr slipped into sleep at last. He dreamt, and he knew he was dreaming as it happened, which was curious in and of itself, the more so because on the whole Cats rarely dream.

The long lean form of Muhlama H’aekeem extended in his dream-thoughts, stretching elegantly, as if she’d just awakened from a nap by a jungle pool. He licked her spine as she arched it, each vertebra articulating in a sensuous fold one at a time. The goodly form of an Ivory Tigress—

In his dreams she was in estrus, and the smell was like a firecracker in his chest, creaking and ticking to detonate; the firecracker, as if it were something he’d swallowed, moved down, to burn his loins and swell his Lion’s scepter. (King of the Gillikin Forest. In his dreams.) She lashed at him with her tail lovingly, tauntingly: Mount me, mount me now. Her head turned slightly back toward him, the smile like a snarl, the snarl like a smile, and her eyes half-closed, and the rhythm of her rocking causing the obsidian opacity of her eyes to seem splashed as with sea spume, were there such a thing as a sea.

He growled and moaned in his dream, and woke himself up before the accident of release, so he was left pitiably alone. For an instant, a kind of ghost-image of the dream lingered on the inside of his eyelids: The sight of Muhlama H’aekeem prancing away across an outcrop of limestone. She was too far for him to fall asleep and catch her again, and finish his conquest. Too far for him to tell if she was hurt and bleeding—if it was that time—or if she was still the young tempestuous Cat, the runaway from her royal family.

He rolled over on his side, unwilling to look and see if Shadowpuppet had witnessed his midnight indiscretions.

Sleep did not come back. All that unintended testimony he delivered to himself, at Yackle’s canny questions, had brought Muhlama back into his catalog of defeats. He had buried so much. Like a kitten hiding his little birch-twig feces, he had dug in the sand and buried the memories of so many calamities.

Where would she be now, if she had lived?

It wasn’t that I loved her, he told himself. She never let me know enough about her to know if I could love her or not.

Neither, he whimpered to himself, neither did I let her know myself.

Old, old Brrr, crouching in a cold room. Thinking about a saucy Cat from his salad days. What a sad picture of a creature he was! Poorer in every way, except broader of imagination about the treacheries we practice upon one another.

For instance—he nearly smiled at the cleverness of it—he had grown quite capable of thinking opportunist of others. After all, perhaps Muhlama had never loved him. Perhaps she had sized him up (quite literally) and invented a strategy designed to make her ineligible to rule after her father, old what’s-his-name. Yuyodoh. Uyodor, that was it.

If her birth canal was ripped, bled out, scarred, inoperative, she could not bear young to carry on the practice of leadership of the Ghullim. She could abdicate without the tribe’s objection. She could name herself ineligible. Theirs, after all, was a matriarchy, he remembered.

Across the room, the ancient cat spit as if it could imagine what Brrr was stewing over. He had to suppress an urge to fist up his paw and smash it to shards.

He looked at the squares of blackened-turquoise sky punching into the chamber, and the paler turquoise stars twirling on their invisible stems. A moon was rising, bleaching out the stars: Thank Lurlina! He was sure he heard a clock tick, though he had seen no clock on any wall or table. He counted the steps into time that the ticks made, one at a time, until he fell asleep again and could count no longer.

This time he did not dream.

One of the few mercies afforded us.

• 2 •

ROOMS, MOODS, tenses away, Yackle sat on the floor, her legs stretched out at right angles to each other and to her spine. She was spry from ankles to the bottom of her rib cage; above that, her torso was boled and contorted. Much like the beleaguered Glikkuns with their humps, she guessed. As she imagined them, anyway.

She didn’t sleep, though. Sleep was no blessing to her, not until it was the final sleep. Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

She didn’t sleep because she didn’t need sleep. She didn’t, it seemed, need to see, or really to eat. She hadn’t required to move her bowels nor relieve her bladder in over a year. Everything seemed to come and go through her lungs.

So she sat and clasped her knees, stretching her backbone. She listened to the sound of ticking. She hadn’t remembered the maunts being much for clocks; after all, they lived as much as they could manage in holy time, which was an anomaly, a contradiction, a tautology: the time in which time has no meaning. A paradox. What was the word?

She wasn’t losing language, was she?

She couldn’t be losing touch.

An oxymoron, that was it. Holy time. Hah.

Though how she longed to slip into it, even though she didn’t—couldn’t—believe in such a notion. This must be, she guessed, how the young felt about the nonsense stories of fantasy that their grandmothers told them—the youngest of three daughters to lose her way in the forest. The little copper fish in the mythical blue sea. The funny one about the quill pen that made wishes come true—verbatim. Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls….

And anyway, here she was doing the same: imagining herself inside a clock, the sprock-sprock of the mechanism inching along the circumference of an hour. The play of the gears, the lunge of the pendulum, the creep of the hands, the aperture of now simultaneously opening and closing at precisely the same ratio forever. But there were no clocks in the mauntery except for the sundial, which spoke its moon-hours as silently as its sun-hours. Of this, the more she thought about it, the more sure she became.

Is it the heart, my old heart, she thought—or whoever’s old heart lives in my old chest? Can I now hear it ticking like a timepiece?

Or has the mauntery itself become a clock, a tall, rooted old stone clock, and the maunts, in their nervous twitchy sleep, the little mice that ran up and down its shifting weights, hickory-dickory mice?

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn’t done before. How novel. She’d start seeing ghosts next, if she was lucky. Always a treat, always a hoot, this burden of living beyond the range of one’s life expectancy!

She turned her head toward the window. From this point on the compass, her room faced a mounting bank of clouds, and what to the Lion looked like turquoise would have seemed, to someone in Yackle’s room, a swollen sludge of violet. Yackle, though seeing nothing, imagined a sky with an octopus-ink tide rolling in, snuffing out young stars. Her instincts were still sharp, sharper than she knew.

Had she learned enough of Brrr to trust him?

She didn’t need to know every tittle and jot of his mortification. What she had deduced was that, despite his many abrasions, his lop-cut life, he was still not beyond shame. And that excoriating lash that whips us all has some little benefit: It motors our aspirations to avoid its next hissing strike.

She had listened to his memories, as much as she could—some of them spoken aloud, though he may not have realized he was speaking; others of them rehearsed in silence—but her ears were good. She had found after a day that he seemed to have an endless capacity for mucking things up. Perhaps his history of fecklessness provided him the perfect alibi to be the treasurer of what she knew, and was hiding within her still.

Could she trust him with what she knew? And then, perhaps, die?

Or was this a temptation that she should avoid at all costs—even at the price of giving up the mortal death promised us all?

Then, a nervous spasm caught in her throat for an instant, and she found herself thinking on what the Lion had asked her. That old Brrr. His raw manner didn’t fool her for an instant. He was no more a hardboiled truncheon than she was. What had he asked? If she perhaps possessed an other life, one too deep down in her memory to experience it, so all her protestations were only that: the crazed defense of a crazy woman.

No, she thought; no, it can’t be. I have entertained that possibility eight hundred times before, and I’ve always turned away from it: no. Brrr had been right to suppose that something small would have given her former life away: a spoon, a string of celery caught in the teeth, the way clouds can look like octopus ink. Something would have caught in an earlier memory, if there had been one. But no random spark of dailiness had ever connected with any life predating the time that she woke up, born an old woman naked in a daybed.

Brrr was there before her in her mind. She couldn’t picture him exactly, but whatever she could envision was rolling his eyes and fiddling with a pen he could scarcely govern. “Why did you take such an interest in Elphaba?” he wondered aloud. “Why would the story of Elphaba and Nessarose have caught at you so?”

“You tell me,” she rattled back, in her mind, giving testimony at midnight. Or was she withholding it?

“The mentally deranged have no capacity for memory,” he said. “You’re the mad Aunt Sophelia, maybe. Lady Partra’s other daughter; Melena’s older sister; the aunt of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Shell, who is now Emperor of Oz. The real Thropp Descending.”

“Were I to believe that, I’d be guilty of delusions of grandeur,” she said, “then I would truly be mad, and if anyone could find a way to put me away even further than a crypt, they’d be correct to do so at once.”

“I’ve never heard proof that Sophelia died,” said Brrr, “and your age would just about conform, I guess, with how old she would be if she still lived.”

“That’s nuts,” she replied. “You’re insane.”

“Not I.” He smiled as he began to fade from her mind. “You, after all, are having this conversation with yourself. I’m off asleep somewhere else.”

“Damn,” she said aloud, in the cold bedchamber.

She traced it out some more—just the highlights. How she had moved about Oz, in thrall to the idea of the two Thropp sisters. She’d begun to feel anointed, if that was the word—or condemned—to the task of living on the sidelines. To the extent that she had developed genuine powers of prophecy, she had tried to read what was happening, what might happen, and to place herself in Elphaba’s way, where she could do some good.

She got a great deal wrong, of course. Infallible she was not. There she’d been at a grotty den of sexual escapades, collecting cash at the window, having read the signs that Elphaba would come by that night. She thought she could protect Elphaba from some dreadful experience. The Philosophy Club! She could remember that. The dwarf at the door, a rotten little bounder: That was where their paths had crossed for the first time. He had been dogging Elphaba’s steps, too, it seemed, though she had not been able to determine why.

He was as wrong as she was, that night. Elphaba had proved elusive, often swifter than Yackle’s powers of prediction could track. True, Elphaba’s college chums had shown up: Avaric, Boq, Fiyero. A few others. But not Elphaba or Glinda. Instead, those two best friends had ducked away that night, and gotten out from under Yackle’s distant and watchful eye—it worked back then, the eye, both eyes—and they had hightailed it to the Emerald City for their famous interview with the wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And Yackle had taken years to pick up the trail again. Elphaba had gone underground, a kind of freedom fighter with questionable ethics. She had been damned slippery—who would have thought a green-skinned girl could make herself so invisible? It had taken the best of Yackle’s talents to track her down again. But find her she did, after several years, and this time her reading had been more accurate. She could see that Elphaba would turn to the mauntery (though not why, not that she would arrive with the blood of Fiyero on her wrists); and Yackle had presented herself at the door of the establishment earlier, to be there, to be ready when Elphaba arrived: and so she had been.

Yackle had kept her own counsel, nodding in her blankets like a gaga grandmother, but she’d watched. She’d slipped a hand to Elphaba, a set of gnarled fingers in the green palm, as if she were looking for help up some stairs: She had tried to squeeze strength and courage through that wordless communiqué. Who is to say it didn’t help somewhat?

Had Yackle known what she was doing when she gave Elphaba the broom?

She could no longer remember.

Then, when the time was right, Sister Elphie had left for the West, to the mountaintop seat of the Tigelaars, the ruling Arjiki family. For all her life an upstart, the grit in the eye that makes it water, Elphaba had hoped to become a hermit. Hoped for forgiveness from Fiyero’s widow, hoped for solace from the mountain loneliness.

But the dwarf had come back into the picture, and had delivered to Elphaba an old looking glass she had had in childhood. Elphaba had reheated the glass and modeled it into a globe—turning a mirror into an eye—and who knows what she had been able to see in its depths. The girl was talented.

Talented enough to sidestep everything except, in the end, her own death.

Though perhaps, like Yackle, death was what she had wanted the most.

Yackle groaned. The notion of being Aunt Sophelia, loopy Aunt Sophelia: curse that the idea had roosted in her! Now she’d have to disprove it to her own satisfaction. Still, it made some mad kind of sense: Why else had she spent these weird extended decades of old age stepping around the skirts of someone else’s life? She had never known where the compulsion had come from. Perhaps something as simple as blood.

The house ticked, neither in sympathy nor in accusation.

When you can’t die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Yackle couldn’t see the dawn, but she could hear in the brush of movement, the wind against roofing tiles, and in the swell of birdsong that light was rising. She was tired without exhaustion, or exhausted without weariness—it was hard to put into words.

Still, she asked herself: If I am not mad Aunt Sophelia Thropp, and never was, then who put me here? Who had enough influence to knock me into a somewhat human figure in a world of more fully human creatures as well as Animal figures—and bystanding dwarves? And prophetic clocks?

If I were appointed to generate change in Elphaba’s life, who had generated the change in mine? The legendary source of evil amongst us, that old she-demon, the Kumbric Witch? Or the grand, dim, fusty, decayed deity, goddess of creation, Lurlina Herself? Or the Unnamed God, more sober because more secretive? (And did unnamed mean un-nameable or “once named but name revoked”? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was that proof of, besides obduracy?)

Who gave Lurlina or any other deity her power?

The very children, maybe, who were now hearing the story of Elphaba only as the cautionary fable of the Wicked Witch of the West—her rise and fall—and believing it? Cutting their schoolyard morals to conform to the cheap lessons of a propagandized biography?

She couldn’t know. Her head hurt to try to imagine. The closest she came to sleep these days was a kind of slipping sideways into a vision, and this is what she saw: The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.

Everything was not merely relative, it was—how to put it?—relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.

• 3 •

A MILE OR two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. “The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way,” decided the sergeant-at-hand. “Lads, look sharp; they’ve stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we’re not careful we’ll rub noses with them.”

“We’ll blow them to kingdom come!” cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn’t bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.

“Heave now, heave,” called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.

The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.

But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn’t want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

They couldn’t continue without light now; the night had truly arrived. The dwarf lit torches and gave her one to carry. “Go front, if you’ve the heart for it,” he mumbled to her. She knew the lads would be emboldened by her prominence, and that they couldn’t risk affixing lanterns to the cart lest a stray bullet smash a glass chimney and the whole kindle box explode in flames.

Though what a sight that would be! Another kind of release, she supposed.

She did as she was bidden. She had a decent instinct for finding a way. The floor of the forest was fairly level, here between the lakes, and for that they all were grateful—though who could know for sure they weren’t driving themselves directly into the line of fire of the Munchkinland resistance coming from the east?

Riding up top, the sergeant-at-hand had no need of a whip. Four of his beauty boys, as he called them, in a kind of jerry-rigged harness, dragged the clockwork oracle along. The other three put their shoulders to the back of it, helping it through ruts and over the roots of oakhair trees. The wind had died down, which was unfortunate: As the company made its way through the strung verticals of the oakhair nuts, they set weird shimmering chords to vibrate around them. It sounded like piano strings long out of tune being scampered upon by mice.

Surely if the EC forces were to come upon their left flank, the soldiers would be playing their own entrance theme?

If the acolytes of the Clock stopped, and let all the oakhair strands fall silent, they might hear where else in the forest a cacophony was being struck. But the boys were now zealous and slightly mad with fear, and wouldn’t respond to the sergeant-at-hand’s proposal that they pause for a moment to listen.

The wagon met a gentle but longer slope than usual, and the boys grunted at their work. Though he weighed little, the sergeant-at-hand leaped from his perch to lighten the load. He came forward to walk beside Ilianora. He stood only half as tall as she did, when he was standing upright. She thought, not for the first time, This little man, these seven boys: It sounds like a story I might have made up, back when I was writing down such fancies.

“I’ve been through this way before,” he said. “We’ll level off for a bit, and unless the undergrowth is fuller than usual, we ought to be able to see Kellswater down to our left.”

“You’ve been everywhere in Oz,” she replied.

“Sure seems like it, after all this time.” He knew enough not to ask her about her own travels. She wouldn’t answer. Waste of breath.

“How far to the northeast was the Munchkinlander encampme—”

“Shhh—”

They were reaching the flattening crest of the long slope, and the first missile flew by—not a rifle shot, as they’d expected, but an arrow. It buried its head in a tree trunk, and a second followed, and a third.

“We’re in it,” he hissed. “Boys, drop!” Ilianora clamped the cap on the lamp to extinguish it, to buy them a minute or two. But four more arrows, and the shouts of a force thrashing up the left flank of the rise: It would be only a moment before they were captured.

The moon cruelly opened her eye from behind the mounded cutouts of cloud, and they could see the silhouettes of soldiers against the steel-white water of the lake below.

“We’ll plead neutrality, see where it gets us,” said the dwarf, dragging at Ilianora’s hand to pull her to her knees. “Boys, you imbeciles, get down!”

Being lower down, the soldiers were at a disadvantage, but they were trained. Ilianora could see the crossbow aiming, could see the glint of bayonet. They swarmed—thirty, forty, fifty—a half mile out. The sound of crushing underbrush, the strum of advancing men. “Hie, on the narrow,” cried one; the voice was businesslike as it carried, like a professional herder of cattle. “Hist, second volley,” called another. “Grade and scale,” said someone nearish; “Bloody unlikely,” came the reply. A shot rang out.

“We fly no emblem!” cried the sergeant-at-hand, but another shot muddied the sound of his words. “Fucking hell, we offer no resistance!” he yelled, irritated enough that his voice rattled into a falsetto shriek.

The Clock had other ideas about this. The great dragon head lifted from its mechanical sleep and rotated like a swan, and eyes with a dull carmine spark shifted in the dark. The leather nostrils dilated and the tin scales scraped upon one another as the armature of the wings stretched like two sails in the woods. It was, perhaps, just enough to cause the closest EC Messiars to halt, as they tried to work out what huge creature waited, glowering and creaking in the dark. The light shifted.

“Keep going!” cried the sergeant-at-hand to his pony-boys. “Mischief is having her own say!”

The nostrils flared. Coils of steam-grey smoke fell out in slow hanks, unrolling as they dropped, thickening like gelatin beads in water. Within a moment, the Clock was shrouded in a fog that smelled of yeast and mud.

“Grade and lower!” cried a commander. “Pox on my eyes,” cried an advance scout, quite close; they could hear him breathing and swearing, and he fell to the ground.

“I mean to keep on,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Walk the way forward, Miss Trip-Through-the-Trees, and pluck our way out of here, strand by strand if you must.”

The hilltop was smeared with fog, no less troublesome to Ilianora than to the Emerald City division, but she’d had the advantage of reaching the summit before their attackers, and she had seen a bit of how the land went. Along a ridge, and then down a scalloped recess; she could get them that far. She reached out and plucked a wry song out of the struts of the forest. A pizzicato progress. The company kept close behind her, and the dragon trawled a breathy cloak that did not quickly thin.

They were well away, perhaps as much as a mile, before the oakhair trees gave out, and a grove of taller stag-head oaks crowned the next gentle hump. There the company paused to rest and judge by the moon whether they had strayed too far east. The dwarf’s destination was due north. Clearest route out of the danger was due north. The dragon’s eyes had gone dim and the bellows of its nostrils now trailed only faint, acrid wisps. Its wings settled back in their customary place, folded across their mount with reticulated wrist-claws pointing straight up like spear heads.

“It’s a bad night to be wandering in the woods,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Unlucky for some, though not for us. Hide your eyes lest the glint give us away.”

The company froze, looking through fingers where he pointed. Eighty feet to the northeast, a group of Munchkinlanders in tabards and boots were preparing some sort of a catapult. They were whispering—they must have heard something of the commotion downslope. But they seemed oblivious of the company of the Clock hunched on its separate hilltop. They were too involved in their own efforts at stirring something in a large spherical iron pot at least as tall as they were.

It was nothing short of a miracle that their attention was so riveted by their preparations. Yet through the dragon’s breath, which continued to lay close to the ground, the muffled complaints of the EC men clearly identified their location: a mile or so along the ridge and below it, to the west. The twang of snapped oakhair strands; the cursing of the soldiers and the hollering insults of their officers.

The smoke didn’t clear for another quarter hour, by which time the Munchkinlander guerrillas had slid their heavy artillery overland on something like a forest sledge, sleek birch runners that used the slick of pine needles to advantage. When the smoke thinned enough that the moonlight again struck the surface of Kellswater, the company of the Clock could see well enough. Not the attack of the Munchkinlanders, not the lobbing of the fiery pitch they’d prepared in their dreadful cup. Not the EC soldiers cowering or falling back—all that remained concealed by the great dark and undifferentiated folds of the hills, the screen of oakhair limbs. What the company could see was the metallic rings of bright moonlit water that grew out from the shore, circles interrupting slow circles, chevrons divided into shards, as one after another the EC Messiars were driven backward into the lake.

The Past Approaches

• 1 •

THE DAWN was a masked one, clouds making modest the exhibitionist sun.

Brrr, whose sleep had been erratic, sat up. In the corner, as yet un-struck by light, Shadowpuppet looked like watery milk. A small heap of shit, its tapering point like the head of a worm, lay coiled nearby. Brrr couldn’t imagine how a transparent creature could produce opaque offal, but if this was a philosophical question in disguise, he wasn’t up to considering it before breakfast.

He stood and tried to press the wrinkles out of his coat. Not that the humble maunts nor the blind oracle would care.

He couldn’t see out the window; what an appetite a window awoke. He wanted to look down on the terrain, to observe the nearer wheat fields and the oakhair forests farther off. To plot, if he could, the movement of opposing militias. To note if the chimney of that small farmhouse in the wheat was issuing the smoke of kitchen fires, or had the crusty residents finally abandoned their homestead during the night?

Lacking the window, though, his eye veered inward for a last, involuntary lurch toward his most private possession, the memory of Muhlama.

She’d gone, bounding with energy away from him, up an escarpment of rocks the color of pearlfruit rinds. Now that his whiskers were starting to whiten, he could imagine all too well some male Ocelot lurking beyond the rocks. Or maybe even a Fell Tiger—someone who fit Muhlama better, both in character and in the congress of sexual organs, than the stout and Cowardly Lion.

One thing was certain; she hadn’t been unpracticed at the art of receiving sexual advances. She worked herself to her satisfaction with a talent that Brrr had first mistaken for his own glorious technique. Later—again with the laters—he’d mused on her expertise. Lover in the underbrush somewhere?

Felinity. You never knew, as he was the first to admit.

“Come on, Shadowpuppet,” said Brrr, nudging the old cat with a sheathed paw. “Time to finish our interviews. Unriddle the riddles at hand, not the ones out of reach.”

The cat purred, and Brrr purred back. The best part of these late days was in their purring wordlessly together. The closest to companionship he got.

Then, hitting the society of crabby, tired, black-clad maunts on their way toward morning devotions, the best part of the day was behind them.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire were hotly arguing on a landing. They turned at his approach.

“Ladies,” he said, “I thought charity ruled in a house like this one.”

“Mind your own business,” said Sister Doctor.

“That’s your answer to everything,” snapped Sister Apothecaire. She held her hand to her side, as if she had a case of stitches; perhaps she’d been running. In any case, she was a stout little thing, and the staircase had not been built with Munchkinlander legs in mind.

“Anything I can help with?” His tone sounded grand this morning; maybe just remembering Muhlama once in a while had a tonic effect.

“You can finish your work and be on your way,” said Sister Apothecaire.

“You can join us in chapel to pray for those who died last night,” said Sister Doctor.

His ruff went up. “Not Yackle?”

“No, but if she keeps refusing to die, we can put her coffin on wheels and slide her into Kellswater like—like—” Here Sister Doctor, who was one hard cookie, lost a startled little tear from the outside of each of her eyes. The drops rolled slowly down, like glue, as if astonished at their liberation.

“Don’t be wet,” snapped Sister Apothecaire, and then gave a nervous snuffle. Inadvertently she’d made a joke of some sort. Sister Doctor glared with hatred at her.

Brrr had no use for either of them. “But what? A new military maneuver? A rash broken out among the novices? What are you talking about?”

“We have had news of last night’s engagement,” said Sister Doctor. “An itinerant dwarf came to our door early this morning for food, and told us what he knew. In the middle of the night, the Munchkinlander militia surrounded a contingent of Emerald City Messiars and drove them down the slope of a bluff. The dwarf saw it all, he said. The Munchkinlanders herded the hapless soldiers right off the strand of sour pebbles and into the dead reaches of Kellswater.”

“It is impossible,” said the Lion.

“They kept shooting, a volley of arrows and scattershot alike—I don’t know the terms of the military trade—and the soldiers were driven deeper, waist-deep deeper; and eventually dove down to escape the onslaught.”

“But Kellswater is poison water,” said Brrr. “That’s what is said. Nothing grows there; no animal drinks at its shores.”

“That’s what is said, and that’s what is meant,” said Sister Doctor. “And there is a good reason. The soldiers came up dead—their bodies began to rot once they were immersed. They bobbed like so many carcasses. Not a single soul taken hostage, no mercy shown to any man jack among them.”

“Well,” said the Lion. “A military operation that worked, then.”

“The Munchkinlanders were unnecessarily cruel,” said Sister Doctor. “With their penchant for thoroughness, they did in an entire regiment that might have surrendered.”

“You take a lofty point of view.” Sister Apothecaire, being a Munchkinlander herself, was denied loftiness of any sort. “The Emerald City forces have invaded Munchkinland to annex the other lake—the big lake, the good lake. An illegitimate exercise from every angle. Why shouldn’t the Munchkinlanders defend their territory any way they see fit?”

“Good water and bad,” said the Lion, wanting to avoid taking sides here. “One lake is dead—a depthless basin of venom as far as anyone knows—and the other lake, only miles away, is the fount of life for the greatest green basket of arable land that Oz has. How can water display such variety in character?”

“You can be of help, Sir Brrr,” said Sister Apothecaire. “If you will. The dwarf tells us that the Munchkinlanders suffered heavy casualties on the ground before they conceived of this maneuver. We have had all our cart horses and donkeys requisitioned by one militia or another over the past several weeks. We have no way of pulling a cart for the collection of suffering bodies. Would you oblige us?”

He looked at Sister Doctor, imagining she would disapprove of offering succor to wounded Munchkinlanders, since she disapproved of their tactics. But she disappointed him; her cold dispersal of mercy, such a mercy as it was, was unequivocal.

“I think we have a cart in whose harness you would fit,” she said. “An embarrassment, I know—an indignity—but this is war, Sir Brrr.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “For one thing, there is the matter of an old injury to my spine. I try not to complain of it, but it makes some sorts of labor quite out of the question.”

“I have many liniments useful at reviving sore muscles,” said Sister Apothecaire. “I keep a full stock of balms and lotions.”

“Then there is the deeper matter of my obligation to the Crown,” continued Brrr over her remarks. “I need to finish up my enquiries and be on my way to file my report.”

“You will be lucky to get out,” said Sister Doctor. “If what the dwarf tells us is true, then the Emerald City Messiars will launch an even more virulent campaign against the Munchkinlanders, and this quiet hermitage sits right in the path from one camp to another.”

“I will do what I must,” said the Lion.

“I will pray for the souls of my countrymen,” said Sister Apothecaire.

“I will hold grudges,” said Sister Doctor to them both, and she swept down the stairs. The glass cat, which had been silent throughout, hissed.

• 2 •

BRRR RETURNED to the interrogation parlor, but Yackle wasn’t there. She was in chapel, listening to liturgical music about flights of angels escorting the lucky dead to their rewards, a good rest among them.

The well of dark in which Yackle lived was something unlike what her companions assumed. Her blindness sometimes seemed to have little to do with vision. It seemed instead a kind of lack of desire, or of the desire that she imagined others felt. She experienced anticipation without the expectation of release—rather like what she assumed the libido of a eunuch might feel like. Or the spiritual ambitions of, say, a bedbug.

So in the chapel, as the maunts prayed for the drowned EC Messiars, Yackle didn’t listen to the devotional longing of the spinsters around her. She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith—the only article of faith, and out of her reach!—though the notion of an Afterlife filled her with revulsion. Imagine the boredom of an Afterlife! All that undifferentiated yowling of praise. Yet the maunts, who had feared rape and murder or at any rate inconvenience by an occupying army, seemed ready to warble their hopes that forgiveness and everlastingness be granted to their predators. They were good women. They were nuts.

Rather than pray, Yackle trained her memory to recall the faded frescoes of angels that had adorned the higher reaches of the chapel walls and the vaulted ceiling. For all she knew, the images had been whitewashed over by now, angels having gone out of fashion somewhat—but beyond the hedge of her blindness Yackle could picture the paintings well. Gamine female angels in trailing robes, arching their ankles and pouting their mouths as if in perpetual erotic bliss. Wings like mattresses—imagine being an angel prettily taken against the soft resistance of her own feathery appendages. The male angels hardly less vulnerable.

How tedious to be an angel: So much holy vigor, and all directed to the Unnamed God who, without form or name or provable substance, could hardly be expected to enjoy the attentions that angels seemed eager to supply.

Probably those images had been whitewashed over. While the mission settlement of this outpost was conveniently distant from the spiritual governance of the EC, the self-appointed Holy Emperor of Oz had wielded his influence upon the varied religious and agnostic traditions of the nation. Probably the bosomy nymphs and rosy-bottomed angel boys above had been banished beyond the cloud of unknowing, a lime wash swirled with a brush. Oh, the happy memories that the soft-bristled brush must cherish!

She was working herself into a state of agitation.

She tried to concentrate for a moment on the music.

But sacred music—another anomaly. If in the Afterlife every good thing coexists eternally, then music cannot exist. Music is the stuttering of adjacent noises in sequence—stress, discord, complaint, resolve: then release—and sequence means timing. If the sound of music is simultaneous, all notes sounding at once, forever, then it is just sound. A mothy blur of noise. A sea of aural fuzz.

“Yield up, yield up,” sang the maunts, in a dirge written, surprisingly, in waltz time. Yackle remembered it and tapped her toes.

“Yield up your souls

To singe the air.

Yield up, and mount the heavenly stair.

Yield up, yield up,

You’re almost there.

You’ve dropped your bones in the sod.

Yield up, yield up, yield up your souls

To the darksome, nameless disappearance:

The heart of the Unnamed God.”

When Sister Doctor approached the podium to offer a eulogy for the dead soldiers, Yackle stood up and rambled away.

• 3 •

SHE WAS almost back to the chamber where Brrr was conducting his interviews when she was interrupted by an unfamiliar smell. In the corridor’s chill stony breath, a mild, milky reek of tubers. At about the level of her thighs.

“Who is it?” she said, thinking: A dog? A raccoon? A Munchkinlander she hadn’t met yet? (Sister Apothecaire was the only Munchkinlander in residence, and her musk was redolent of rotting tea leaves, no matter how much lavender she doused herself with.) Then Yackle thought: I’m a bit potty—I imagine this to be old what’s-’er-name, the Glikkun from the Lion’s past. Sakkali Oafish. A Glikkun would smell of root vegetables; they all live underground.

But it was a male voice that replied. “Sticky trickle, who’d have guessed this? You old thing? Still? What’s propping you up?”

She knew the voice, from years and years back. “Making trouble again?” she snapped at the dwarf.

“I never make trouble,” he protested, chuckling. “I make way for trouble.”

“What are you doing here? In a cloister of religious women, of all unseemly places?”

“Not my first choice,” he admitted. “But small and incidental as I am, no more than a straw in the floods of history, I am pushed ahead of the approaching Messiars. The Emerald City will be catching news of the attack this morning. Retaliation time. Of course it’s all in the cards, don’t you know? The armies are already here, prepared for the next provocation. What an obvious game, what a tedious one. But I agree: I don’t like being washed up on the banks of a religious establishment any more than you do, I suspect.”

“Well, get out of here, then,” she said. “I want nothing to do with your meddling.”

“But I don’t meddle,” he repeated. “I don’t even comment. I simply perch and watch. Keep my own counsel. Lips sealed, eyes open. How have you managed to stay alive, you old heathen?”

“One gasp at a time. And I have no time to grant you an audience just now. Get out of my way, you imp. You hobgoblin.”

“My feelings are hurt.” His voice wheedled, almost affectionately. “And we go so far back.”

“So far back, and no further forward,” she said. “Get out of my way.”

“You haven’t run into a Lion slouching along these corridors, have you?”

She rounded on him. “What is your game, you miscreant?”

“Oh, you know me, Missus Madame Maenad. You think you’re the only one with an eye to the future, but I take my marching orders from a pretty terrific instrument on wheels. I was led to believe I’d find a Lion about here. Times being what they are, I suppose I need another conscript, maybe one with claws.”

“You—you stay away from him. If you find him. He’s on a mission.”

“You defending some craven beast? Say it ain’t so. I thought you were never out for any but yourself.”

Yackle didn’t answer. She just saw in her indeterminate way a kind of shadow of the Lion, slump-spined, bejowled, bewhiskered. A hat rotating in his hands, a stain on his vest. Afflicted with the twitch of always looking over his own shoulder. “The Lion’s not in play here,” she said.

She left the dwarf. As far as Yackle knew, the dwarf was as nameless as the Unnamed God—but not as blameless. Assuming that the Unnamed God was blameless in the matter of human suffering—and if you assumed that, you could have no use for such an ineffectual deity.

She ground her teeth as she moved on by. And then she thought: Maybe that sore old stump of a dwarf is my salvation, after all. Maybe the Lion is just a decoy, a distraction. Maybe it was the dwarf’s impending arrival that called me from my unquiet tomb, and Brrr just happened to be in the way. Surely being in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed to be that unlucky scalawag’s single occupation in life.

• 4 •

WHEN SHE came into the chamber she was agitated, but Brrr hardly noticed. His own fur was ruffled at the news of the military debacle. “We will finish our work this morning,” he said to Yackle, before she’d even had the chance to settle into her chair. “The reprisal for last night’s disaster at Kellswater is aiming right this way. I can feel it. I intend to have cleared out before it strikes. Let’s get this interview wrapped up.”

“Nothing can be wrapped up,” she snapped.

“Save your irritation for the lunch menu,” he replied, as brusquely. He flipped open his notebook. The glass cat looked a little alarmed at the sharpness between them, and regarded the window ledge. But the sash was swung open this morning, letting in light and air, and perhaps the cat was just smart enough to know that it was too old to rely on being able to jump and perch without tipping out the window and plunging—to shatter into shards?—into the gravel far below.

“This is our second meeting,” said Brrr, writing it down on a new page, “and our last one. We spent too much time dancing each other’s histories yesterday. Down to business, and at once, before the army arrives.”

“And arrive it will,” she said. “I have it on the highest authority.”

“Your deepest sixth sense?” he asked, cuttingly.

“No,” she admitted. “Higher than that. My trust in human cruelty. But ask your question; I’m as sick of this as you are. I’d like to see your big furry behind waddling away. Or imagine it, anyway. And plant an old boot in it as you leave, for that matter.”

“You wouldn’t be the first. Now listen. About the rumors circulating for a decade or so that Elphaba Thropp had a son. That boy named Liir.”

“What about him?”

“If he is her son, and if he is still alive, and if he has no sisters from Elphaba, then he is next in line to inherit the position of Eminent Thropp. He would be the de facto governor of Munchkinland. His claim would trump that of the Holy Emperor of Oz, Shell Thropp. Elphaba’s brother.”

“I know who Shell is, and I know about Liir, too.”

“Can you confirm he is Elphaba’s son? Or if he is alive? He was here, it seems—some years ago.”

She had no interest in giving the Lion any scrap of information that might help the EC thugs locate Liir. She spoke cautiously and shared only what she thought was redundant or immaterial. “Yes. He has been here three times in his life. Once as a young child—perhaps even an infant—when Elphaba wasn’t yet the Wicked Witch of the West. She set out from here to the castle in the west—”

“Kiamo Ko.”

“Yes, yes, whatever it’s called. She repaired there for reasons of her own. She took the child with her, though where he came from originally—if he was really her issue—I don’t know.”

“Don’t you know through your inner vision? Can’t you figure it out?”

“Even if I did know, what proof would you have? Only my word. I might as well say he was the result of a broomstick handle poking itself hot and jolly in the vortex of a tall black hat. What difference would it make? Just because I have had visions doesn’t mean they’re true.”

Though she had never said that to herself before.

He grunted. “Didn’t sleep well, did we.”

She glared at him as well as a blind person can manage. He continued in a more neutral tone. “Whatever you say goes on record. Let someone else decide if it is true or not. When was the other time you saw Liir?”

“It was after he’d been attacked in the air by the Emperor’s dragons, as I understand it. He was left for dead in the Disappointments a little to the south. Some do-gooder hauled his carcass here for the maunts to tend. Then a young Quadling woman named Candle, a novice, brought him back to health and life, through devices and schemes of her own.”

“You had nothing to do with it?”

She paused.

“Don’t lie to me, don’t lie to me,” he roared. “Why bother? The whole world lies! Don’t you do it, too!”

“I helped her a little,” said Yackle. How odd to feel capable of being shaken. Maybe she was dying! Her spirits lifted at once. “Yes, I helped her, why not? I didn’t know if Liir was Elphaba’s son, but he might have been; I could see that. I remembered him from childhood. So I introduced a little romance into the therapeutic situation. Oh, Candle, that weird duck: She was a honey, but a mystery, too.”

“As who isn’t,” he said.

“As who isn’t,” she agreed. “So I took it upon myself to stand guard upon the tower room where she was helping him cling to life, in all the ways that a young woman can and will.”

“Ways?” The Lion was all ears. His whiskers trembled.

“Don’t be prurient, you old goat.”

“You said it. You mean it, too; I can tell.”

She had said it; it had slipped out. Time for damage control. “Yes,” she continued. “I had never enjoyed the benefit of a good leg-over. I thought she might. I thought he might. He looked rather scathingly virginal to me. Call it, what term do they use—call it transference. Call it divine sublimation. Call it a metaphor. I locked them in together and let their natures run their course.”

“And what happened?”

“I am a cupid of sorts,” she said, “but I’m not a peeping lecher. History will decide what happened, not you or I.”

“But what did happen? I mean, whether they screwed around or not—what happened next?”

“What happened is they left the mauntery under cover of dark. As you would have been wise to do yourself last night.”

“Where did they go?”

She paused a while and then said, “This is all old business. I suppose it can’t hurt anyone to say.”

“Who are you protecting,” he rushed in, “and why?”

Ah, but that was it, wasn’t it? She admired him for catching her drift. She answered his earlier question, though. “The maunts had once kept a little printing press off the grounds. A sideline to the religious life: producing pamphlets that opposed the warmongering of the Emperor. Rather by accident, the press had been discovered by the Emperor’s men, who more or less destroyed it. But they never traced the sedition to here. The press was housed some little distance, a day’s journey or so from here. I loaded the couple up on a donkey—poor Liir was just barely alive—and I sent them on their way without confiding in my sisters. I thought that was the end of them.”

“You did.” He said it flatly, intending to be as neutral as plaster. Keep going, old lady.

“Yes, but then some short time later—weeks, I think, a few months at the most—Liir returned to the mauntery a final time. He and a soldier of the EC, a minor Menacier named Trism bon Cavalish, had torched the stables of the flying dragons and fled from the Emerald City. It was a case of political action—espionage—I don’t know what you’d call it. But a force of the Emerald City under a Commander Cherrystone gave hot pursuit, and arrived at these walls just shortly after the lads did. This was before I went blind—oh, nine years ago, perhaps? And Liir therefore was perhaps twenty, his companion several years older.”

“Was Liir caught?”

“You know he wasn’t.” Of this she was sure. “Don’t waste your time, Sir Brrr; there isn’t that much of it left. If he had been caught, it would be in the records. And you wouldn’t be here asking about him.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “But what happened to them?”

“Liir took the Witch’s broom and he left the mauntery from the rooftops. It happened that Lady Glinda was in residence—she was a kind of patroness of the order, don’t you know; years ago she changed her own name from Galinda to the more stylish Glinda. To honor the popular saint, to bury her rural origins, some other reason. Who knows. Anyway, she made an effort to get Trism out as one of her retinue, and it seemed to work at first. The team that was hunting the lads didn’t dare accuse Lady Glinda of treason—not without some kind of proof. She had after all been on the Throne of Oz for a time. She still enjoyed a cherished position in the hearts of her people, though the political climate had changed so much, and for the worse.”

“Naturally. Some of us get accused of treason for no reason. Others who deserve it waft free as a bubble on the breeze. Go figure.”

“Shhh. Listen. When Glinda thought they were safely free of scrutiny, she dismissed bon Cavalish to his own campaigns. She didn’t know that she was being trailed, and that the EC thugs would continue after Trism. They set upon him and beat him up. Brutalized him pretty badly, I heard, before letting him escape. They were sure that he would lead them to the place where he and Liir would meet. There was a romance between them, see.”

“I thought you had arranged for Liir a romance with Candle.”

“Oh, la, romance will find its own outlets, don’t you think?”

He wasn’t about to comment. “So they tracked Trism to the farm.”

“See,” she said, “you know about this already.”

He purred a dangerous sound. The glass cat looked around, alarmed, as if it had discovered a thorn in its own throat.

“I never called it a farm,” she pointed out.

“I have done my research,” he admitted. “Aren’t I allowed that?”

“We choose our own bosses,” she agreed. “Except those who work as slaves. Now in fact, Trism somehow gave those soldiers the slip for a couple of days. Not for long—they had bloodhounds on the job, can you believe it—but for a precious couple of days. Trism introduced himself to Candle, it seems, and what happened between those two—well, that I can’t say.”

“You can’t or you won’t?”

“As good as the same thing, my dear.”

“But we’re at the nub of it now. Was Trism jealous of Candle? Or vice versa? They shared a lover, after all. Did they go at each other like wildcats?”

“Is this germane to your investigation, or do I detect a particular interest in sexual jealousy? An uptick in your circulation? Some shallow breathing?”

“Fuck you.”

“If I’d only been so lucky.”

Shadowpuppet seemed to catch the tension. It paused in its morning ablutions and studied a spot on the wall as if embarrassed at the decline of civility.

Brrr governed himself. Don’t lose it now. You’re closing in on things.

“Candle and Trism. Did their mutual attraction to Liir translate somehow into an attraction to each other? With Liir off rambling on some obligation or other—out of the farm—away from prying eyes—what happened?”

Or were Candle and Trism just using each other, somehow? As he and old Yackle were doing just now?

“There are some things even oracles can’t determine,” admitted Yackle. “What I do know is that by the time Liir returned, Trism had already left. Maybe he wanted to avoid Liir. Maybe he had persuaded Candle to join him later in some safe harbor, far from the attentions of a novice magician.”

“Magician!”

“Well, if Liir were Elphaba’s son, he’d be a witch of sorts, wouldn’t he? Or have the potential, anyway? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Now don’t you lie to me,” she snapped. “Have I ferreted out from you what your real aim is? Are you looking for Liir? You want to get at him through any avenue possible—through either of his lovers, Candle or Trism, or…”

Still, she paused; she couldn’t say it.

“Or what?” Brrr hoped that she would tell him what he wanted to know—the Grimmerie, the Grimmerie!—instead of what she needed to share. She kept on.

“So Commander Cherrystone circles Apple Press Farm, but Trism has already left. Cherrystone lies in wait for Liir to return. Then, just before dawn one morning, Candle leaves with a bundle under her arm. Hoping it might be the Grimmerie, Cherrystone throws all his efforts into following her. It turns out though that she has swifted away a bundle of rags, nothing more. She is deemed to have no importance—perhaps she acted the simpleton—and she is released.”

“What happened to them all?”

“Up in smoke,” she said. “They all went up in smoke, each in a separate puff.”

They both contemplated the convenience of a private exit.

“How do you know so much?” he pressed.

“Cherrystone returned here when all his other trails went cold. He conducted an interview with the old Superior Maunt. I’m sorry to say she died a few hours later. Either from shock or due to a stronger talent at self-preservation than I have been able to manage.”

“And he interviewed you,” said Brrr.

“You know it,” she replied.

“You have told me more than you told him,” he said, “and I didn’t go the length to put out your eyes the way he did.”

“The blind see history in a different way than the sighted. Besides”—she sighed as she spoke—“back then I had no idea I was going to prove so hopeless at dying a natural death. All that blood, all that mess—”

“Please,” he said. “Please. I did have some breakfast.”

“It’s ancient history,” she said. “This was nine years ago. Where are they all now? How did they disappear so thoroughly? If they are still alive, Liir would be twenty-eight or-nine—Candle likewise—Trism thirty-two—and…And…”

And, she thought, the child, the child; the child whom Candle had borne? But still she could not speak.

Brrr sat very still.

She sat up straight. “I have given you as much as I know. The truth is, once I went blind, I began to doubt my own oracular capacity. Perhaps Commander Cherrystone’s terrible attack on me was exactly the thing. I can smell a person,” she said, “I can smell a lie, but I can no longer see the truth right in front of my face.”

“You’ve corroborated a lot,” he agreed. “Still, how did you know so much about the movements of Trism and Candle?”

“Candle came back, for one night,” said Yackle. “She came back to thank me for…for everything. Sensibly, she wouldn’t tell me where she was going; this meant I could not have it forced out of me. She was a week or so ahead of Cherrystone.”

She appeared to look out the window. “I think of her often,” she said. “I liked the young girl. She was braver than most.

“Braver than you,” she continued.

“That’s not saying much,” said Brrr.

“I can smell a lie,” she said, “and I believe that you still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“I have,” he said. “We’re looking for Liir, don’t you know? To make sure the Munchkinlanders don’t rally behind him as the proper Eminence. To make sure that Shell’s claim to the breadbasket of Oz isn’t challenged—”

“There is no more time to lie,” she told him, rather peacefully. If she could have found his huge paw and patted it for comfort, she would have. “You haven’t really come here to find out about Liir and Trism and Candle and all. You knew most of that already. You knew about Liir and how he would suffer, thinking that Trism and Candle had fallen in love. Fine for him to love two—not so fine for him to watch two others loving in turn.”

“I take a lot of notes,” said Brrr, “but I don’t pay attention to that aspect of people’s lives.”

“You don’t want to,” she noted, “because it is too close to home, I suspect.”

“None of your business,” he growled. “If you are so ornery and right all the time, then how am I lying? What have I come for that you haven’t yet told me? Tell it to me now and we’ll have done with this interview. I can smell death frying up in the skillet alongside the lunchtime bacon. Let’s finish up.”

She stood and with unerring accuracy she pointed a bony finger right along the seam of his nose. “You want to find out the location of the Grimmerie,” she said. “You want the great book of magic. Sure you’d be glad enough to learn where Liir is, and his little circle of oddities. But Liir isn’t the firebrand that Elphaba was; he’s nothing without that encyclopedia of spells. The Emperor has dispatched you here to see if I can tell you where the book is. Elphaba’s magic book, and someone else’s magic book before it was hers. You’ve been lying all along. Liir is only part of it. You want the book.”

He sat very still for a long long time. The glass cat watched with an unblinking eye.

“If you’ve known that all along,” he said softly, “then you must also know where it is.”

“Ah, no, not that,” she said. “Your comrade-at-war, then a mere commander, blinded me, and I have lost what powers I had. Tell General Cherrystone to come back and rip out my heart and fry it alongside your lunchtime bacon, and then we’ll see if I can lose the rest of my powers—like breathing, and thinking, and remembering, and hating. I should be glad to let go of some of these functions.”

“Let go of the drama, why don’t we. Tell me why you can’t just have a vision and find out where the Grimmerie is. That’s all I want. To get out of here with some hard information. We’re counting in hours now, not days, before this place becomes a militarized zone. Madame Morrible’s notes suggested you were Elphaba’s sentry angel. No one has a better chance of knowing where the book went but you.”

“An angel!” She began to laugh. It was a hideous sight, her eyes rolling about in her skull. She clutched her ribs and bent over. “Oh, that’s rich! An atheistic angel.”

He had to wait for her wheezing to peter out. “Please,” he said. “What must I promise you in exchange for the location of the Grimmerie?”

“It’s hopeless,” she said, her voice giddy now, as if having abandoned all hope. “One doesn’t have visions on demand. And even if I knew, dear Brrr, how could I tell you? We’re at cross-purposes. The EC would use it against—”

But she went from breezy hopelessness to a sudden frenzy; her face contorted.

“Are you all right?” he said. She shook her head. It wasn’t a pang of death—nothing as useful to her as that—but a grief mortal enough to carry away anyone less immortal than she continued to be.

“Stop,” he said. “It’s not that bad. It can’t be.”

“What will you do if you can’t locate the Grimmerie?” she asked at last. “Who is your next witness?”

“I have none.” He slapped his notebook closed. “Madame Morrible’s papers turned up precious little, actually. She was a bit of a sorceress herself—you must have figured that out—and she was sharp enough to have known exactly what to discard. Even her references to you were cryptic—more in the line of deducing your existence by a kind of magical algebraics. And learning your name through the agency of a mechanical spy named Grommetik.”

“All that lead-up, and I’ve given you precious little. What will you do next?”

“Assuming I can get overland without being molested, I will have to return to the Emerald City with what I’ve been able to gather. The Court won’t be pleased with me, but I’ve done my best.”

“They won’t drop you into Southstairs?”

“They won’t. My plea bargain has sorted that out, at least.”

“You trust the Court not to revoke its understanding?”

After this review of how his life had run so far? Only one answer. “No. I don’t trust the Court at all.”

“Then that’s the first evidence of good sense I’ve witnessed in you.” She twisted her fingers ghoulishly. “I will trust you, and hope that when you leave here you might come to your senses. The Emerald City will never take you in. You’re too raw and obvious for them. Look, I have no other option. I’m not going to trust any dwarf with this matter; his allegiance is already pledged. You will have to do. You are a creature bedeviled with foolishness and bad luck, but if you’re finally smart enough to be skeptical about the honchos in the EC, well, I suppose there is some hope.”

“Let me save you from making a mistake,” he said. “You are too smart to trust in me.”

“I need your help,” she replied. “There’s no one else. It’s come down to that. I have to trust you whether I should or not.”

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? For her, for him, for anyone? Being needed? The sorry old approval game? Either it would work or it wouldn’t: She had no choice.

“All right, then, tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you have to tell me. Maybe if I become rehabilitated in the EC, I’ll be in a position to help sometime.”

“You haven’t given up, have you?”

“Look, if you’re going to trust me, you’ll have to trust me. I’ll do with your information as I see fit. And you know I don’t see very fit.”

“You see better than I do at this point.”

“A matter of opinion.” He closed his notebook. “I’m putting my pencil away. Just tell me.”

“It isn’t Liir,” she said. “It’s Liir and Candle together—it’s—their child. I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for. As no one ever stood for you.”

“Their child,” he said.

“Born in Apple Press Farm, while Liir was absent. Nine years ago. When Candle left with that bundle, it was to draw the watching eyes away from the newborn. She left the baby for Liir to find; she swifted away to draw the hounds off scent.”

“So that is why you locked Candle in the tower with Liir? So she would have sex with Liir and perhaps conceive a child? Why would you care? Was it because you were never nine? No, not that. It was because you would never conceive a child yourself. You were too old when you were born. You were all dried up before you even got going.”

“Very sharp of you. I suppose I deserve this. I can tell you have had many dinner parties with cognoscenti who amuse themselves at guessing the motivations of others. But my motivation doesn’t matter. The thing happened, and now there is a child, a girl. And I have realized that this is why I can’t die. I was present at her conception: I was her godmother, in a sense. But I haven’t arranged for a guardian for her in my absence, as I tried to be one for Elphaba.”

“Why should she need a guardian?” The Lion’s voice was cold. “Some of us didn’t get any guardians at all.”

“And you would recommend that, based on your own experience?”

“I suppose she is special,” he said venomously. “History belongs to her, right? The next Munchkinlander Eminence in her minority? Prophecies tremble on her little shoulders? What did you say of Elphaba, that time you took a swig of the joy juice and had your first vision? Something like This child belongs to history, was it? Good and ill hangs in the balance, right? So she must be protected at all costs, right? She’ll save us all, just like little dead Ozma? The little darling? Right?”

Yackle could not take umbrage at his tone. She understood the rage masked as sarcasm. She rubbed her shoulder blades as if they were too heavy for her own spine. When she answered, her old lips quivered.

“It’s not that she is special,” said Yackle. “It’s not that she is chosen. It’s that she is ours. That’s all.”

He knew what the possessive pronoun meant. She is the one who is here, special or no. Whether to be glorified by history or abandoned by fate—to be accident’s victim or to be prophecy’s chosen child: It makes no difference. She’s the innocent on board. That was all. It came down to no more than that.

“They go to war, back and forth,” said Yackle. “The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is not a field, a lake, a city, an industry, but a child.

“The child would be nine,” said Yackle in a softer voice, almost to herself. “A nice age for a child.

“That is,” she continued, “I have always assumed it might be. I myself was never nine. As you know. Still, it sounds a pleasant age.”

Brrr thought that none of his ages had been particularly pleasant. Still, at this remove, he wouldn’t have relinquished a moment of any of them.

“There, there,” he said. “Don’t get soppy on us. I’ve said I would listen, and I have listened. I’ve heard what you said. I didn’t write it down. I’ve put it”—he tapped his chest—“right here.”

The glass cat turned its head so quickly that the light winked from its ear tips. Brrr was rising from his chair and then dropping to his knees, awful creaking in his joints. He was curling up on the floor at the feet of the trembling old harridan. She was weeping into the edge of her shroud. He was purring, and rubbing his head against her ankles.

• 5 •

A KNOCK AT the door. Brrr sprang to a more dignified position at the arrival of Sister Apothecaire. “You must forgive me,” she said in tones that brooked no dispute in the matter. “Sister Hermit, walled up in the cenobitic tower, has broken her silence to drop down a message in a basket. An army vaster than she knows how to describe is fording the Gillikin River west of here.”

“I don’t follow,” said Brrr. “Which army, which direction?”

“West to east, so it must be the EC Messiars,” said Sister Apothecaire. As she was professed to neutrality, her tone was curt, but her sympathies lay with her own countrymen, so her eyes snapped like coal fire. “But there’s also a blaze happening to the south. Perhaps a band of the Messiars is burning the forest so as to destroy the blinds that can conceal snipers and guerrillas. They’ll force a Munchkinlander retreat to the south. In any case, the Messiars are meeting no resistance so far and will be here by sunset.”

“I am on their side,” said the Lion, to no one in particular—to himself, then.

“Bully for you. You can make the tea and crumpets for eight hundred.” Fear was turning her waspish. She continued in a rush. “The administrative troika of the mauntery has called an emergency Council—I mean, Sister Doctor of course, and her two assistants—of which I am not one, not in the business of governance. They will propose how we shall meet the ruthless invaders.”

“Hardly invaders,” Brrr corrected her. “This mauntery is not in Munchkinland.”

“In my book, an army intent on invading is an invading army no matter which side of the border you view it from. Sister Doctor may view things differently; that’s her prerogative. I’m simply staff.” Her head turned to the hall, and she called out, “Aren’t you attending? Please. You can come in here, if you will.”

“We have company?” said Yackle.

“We have no time for company,” said Brrr.

“You have no say in the matter,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Do you forget you’re a guest here? A Council is called, and Sisters Hospitality and Cook are required to attend. So I have arranged a cold luncheon for all strangers who have sought sanctuary here. You can eat together. We will dismiss you when and if the Council decides that would be a prudent course of action.”

“I can’t work under these conditions,” said Brrr.

“Courage,” said Yackle. “Who knows what you can or cannot do?”

Sister Apothecaire made no move to help the novices, who came in with flasks of water, slit husks of pearlfruit, ham sandwiches, and a bowl of blue olives. The young women set the repast down on a sideboard and fled.

Into the room traipsed a dwarf, a woman in a plain veil, and a few muscle boys sporting tangerine tunics and leggings as well as shaved heads, which looked tangerine-ish by association.

“I’ll let you make your own introductions,” said Sister Apothecaire. She elevated her chin till her nose was nearly as high as her forehead. The gesture proved she could be taller than a dwarf—which was lost on no one.

“We don’t trust louts loose among the novices,” she continued briskly, “and as I mentioned, we have an emergency Council to convene. So forgive me the indignity of this key—it is a necessity in these wartimes, and signifies no disrespect.” She departed, closing the door with a decisive slam. They all listened to hear the key turn in the lock.

“We’re being held hostage by sisters in a mauntery?” asked Brrr.

“Hey, I got weak kidneys,” said one of the skinheads.

“Piss out the window,” called Sister Apothecaire through the door. “Don’t think me rude. We just can’t have beefsteak lads wandering about the cloisters and hiding in the novices’ wardrobes, waiting to provide them a midnight surprise. I’m sure you understand.”

“You again,” said Yackle, dilating her nostrils as a horse might.

“Me again,” agreed the dwarf. “We seem destined to spend a holiday together.”

“Well, one of us should know about destiny,” said Yackle, “though I confess that I didn’t see this coming.”

“There’s a lot more to seeing things coming than meets the eye,” said the dwarf. “The proverbial eye, I mean, not your wonky pair. But what do I know? It always takes some—”

“I’m on a government exercise here,” interrupted Brrr. Well, he sure was, compared to a dwarf, anyway. He waved with his notebook. “I suppose for the record I should jot down your names, and so on. Material witnesses in case this next section of my deposition is questioned by the Courts.”

“Don’t have a name,” said the dwarf affably.

“Everyone’s got a name,” said Brrr.

“Ask a garden moth what its name is,” said the dwarf.

“Dwarf,” said Brrr, writing. “Ugly and hostile. Refuses to name himself.”

“Who gets to name himself?” said the dwarf. “Come on.”

“I did,” said Yackle.

“Oh you, you’re a honey, you,” said the dwarf. “Give me a break. Old Mama Senility gets creative.”

“I’m Ilianora,” said the woman. She dropped her veil off her forehead, revealing a sharp profile. Her white hair was lustrous and thick, no sign of yellowing. Indeed, noted Brrr, Ilianora had good skin tone, only a few wrinkles around the eyes. Her chin hadn’t sunk and her color was high. Ruby plum. “Put me down as apprentice to the dwarf. And he’s not being obstinate: He has no name, or none that I’ve heard him admit to during my time lurking nearby. When I need to address him, I call him Mr. Boss.”

“Home?” asked Brrr. Her accent was curious; he couldn’t place it. Might she be a Winkie?

“None,” she said. “We’re itinerants. We’re the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon. You may have heard of us.”

“Yo ho,” said Brrr, recoiling. “I’ve heard of that. Yes. Didn’t know it was still a going concern.”

“Going nowhere fast, at the moment,” said the dwarf, amiably enough. He scratched himself at the base of his spine where, Brrr thought, a tail would have emerged had he one.

“You young stalwarts?” asked Brrr. The lads refused to name themselves. They settled down to deal a few hands of shamerika, a game that appeared to involve two sets of playing cards, a wodge of ersatz paper notes, a set of weighted dice, and a trapunto cloth map in which small brass flags could be stuck, moved, or removed. Brrr guessed that they had little to offer, and he scribbled “seven apprentices.” He could scare their names out of them later.

“So the Emerald City Messiars are approaching by the legions,” said Brrr. “A fine fix you’ve gotten yourself into, little man.”

“Truth or consequences,” said the dwarf. “My favorite game.” He sunk his teeth into a ham sandwich and smiled around the mouthful.

“Don’t eat so fast,” said Ilianora. “You’ll choke.”

“I wish,” said the dwarf.

“You sound like me,” said Yackle, surprised. “Life gone on a bit too long for you, too?”

“Don’t get me started,” said the dwarf.

“Mr. Boss is none of your concern,” said Ilianora to Yackle and Brrr both. To the dwarf, she continued, “Let’s use this time to rest.”

“Fair enough,” said the dwarf. “When we are ready to move again, we may need to move quickly.”

Ilianora sat on the floor and arranged the folds of her skirt to cover her ankles. “Take no notice of us, friends. We’ll sit silently and catch a midday nap, like your crystal cat.”

The cat opened one eye as if on cue. Never predict a cat, thought Brrr, somewhat proudly.

“Brrr, how delightful,” said Yackle. “We have just about reached the end of what we could say to each other, and look: Look. Fate, or the Unnamed God, or brute coincidence, whatever you will call it, has supplied us a coda. What is the Clock of the Time Dragon if not a device for telling the truth? And it has foundered up here on the shoals of our interview just when we were getting nowhere. A blessing, a curse, who knows? But the next thing, for sure.”

“I’m hardly here on official business,” hummed the dwarf through his nose, around his mouthful. “I’m on sabbatical this year.”

“What is your business, precisely?” the Lion asked him.

“I owe you no answers, you nosey parker.”

“I am supplied with the writ of the Emperor,” said Brrr.

“I have a master who is an independent agent, thank you very much. I don’t answer to the Emperor of Oz.” The dwarf was withering. “True, I was looking for a Lion, I thought. But I have no use for a minion of the state. Don’t suppose there are any other Lions on the premises?”

“Mr. Boss,” said Ilianora, in an affectionate but weary tone. “Oh, Mr. Boss.” She took an ivory comb out of her pocket and began to address the knots in her hair.

“You do have your fanciful equipment with you, no?” asked Yackle. “The fabulous theatrical clock with the Time Dragon coiled atop it?”

“He don’t park it for storage this season,” intoned one of the boys, rubbing an aching shoulder.

“I’ll park something in your nether nether land,” barked the dwarf. “If something is to be said, I’ll say it, or you’re history. Got that?”

“Got it once too often,” murmured the lad, pretending to protect sore hindquarters, but then he fell silent.

“I don’t want to talk to timepieces,” said the Lion.

“But just think!” Yackle was filled with energy. “I’ve run out of capacity to see beyond the end of my own imagined nose. And who walks in but yon Mr. Boss, let’s call him. Accompanying a tiktok legend: a device that can sniff out the hidden. Brrr, I’ll ask it about my death. I can stand to learn something new. I’m sick of being stuck here. What do you say?” She turned to where she knew the dwarf must be lolling. “Can you do an old friend a favor?”

“In what context might you be said to be friends?” asked Brrr.

“Yeah, what context would that be?” asked the dwarf drily.

“We’ve been circling around each other for years,” said Yackle. “Why don’t you take his deposition, Sir Brrr? He’s been on the outskirts of Elphaba’s life, too.”

“Pure coincidence, if it happened at all, which I’m not saying it did or it didn’t,” said the dwarf. “I had a different mission, lady. Don’t involve me in your hurly-burly.”

“You are involved,” said Yackle. “You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have business in the neighborhood. Don’t waste my time!”

“Why not? You’ve got plenty to waste,” he answered. “You may not be getting any younger, but you’re not getting any deader, either. No, I had reason to think I was looking for a Lion who might join us—but not this liverish lump. I must be off my game.”

“Your weird equipment knows where it wants to go, and when it wants to rest,” said Yackle. “So it wanted to come here, eh? It can look like a tiktok extravaganza, all gears and sequins and powdery flashes of light. Traveling theater. But what it knows, and what it shows! How do you account for that? Do you send your accomplices ahead of you as advance scouts, to sniff out the local gossip, to read the local tea leaves, so when you pull into the village you know what is on everyone’s mind?”

“Them? Hah,” said the dwarf. He plugged one nostril and mimed shooting a plug of mucus out of the other one. “Haven’t the brains among them to come in out of the rain.”

“Then it’s a charm—I’ve always guessed it. Some sledgehammer of a charm, that can read the world’s secrets correctly decade after decade.”

“Ninety-nine point ninety-seven percent accuracy,” said Ilianora. “That’s what the advertising panel says, anyway.”

“Hush, daughter,” said the dwarf, in a more kindly tone than before. “Pour me some water, will you?”

“Whose spell is as strong as that?” asked the Lion, becoming interested despite himself. “Whose spell could teach a puppet machine to spill secrets like that?”

“One whose name I don’t give out, as I don’t give out my own,” said the dwarf. “Ooh, this water is good. I’ve always wondered why the grand viziers of magic in the Emerald City—that is, if there are any—didn’t just get to work devising a spell to purify the whole of Kellswater. Reduce Loyal Oz’s dependence on foreign water. That lake is nearly as large as Restwater and if made potable could irrigate all of Loyal Oz. That would liberate the EC from its obsession with truculent Munchkinlanders, who, as I hear it told, never never shall be slaves.”

“One of the folktales I heard in my youth,” said Ilianora, “held that the ancient old demon-witch, Kumbricia herself, lives in the depths of Kellswater, or died there, perhaps, despoiling the supply for all time.”

“You and your tales,” said the dwarf. “One of the folktales I heard in my youth is that folktales are idiotic. Anyway, the cause is beside the point.”

“Sniff out the cause, and you conceive the solution,” said Yackle. “But who knows. Mr. Boss, Mr. Boss, if you won’t show Sir Brrr where in Oz the Grimmerie might be hidden—for that’s really what he is here to learn—then do some good for me, your old partner and nemesis on the hems of Elphaba’s life. Show me how I might die. I’ve told to this Lion all that I know. Let me reap some small benefit in return.”

“The Lion works for the Emerald City,” said the dwarf. “I should reward you for dealing him information that the EC might find useful? I’ve no opposition to the Emperor of Oz per se, but I’ve no affection either. Live and let seethe, that’s my motto.”

“The Clock is off-limits, anyway; we’re locked in,” remarked Ilianora, arranging a trio of white ribbons in her white hair. “This is probably the safest site in central Oz right now.”

“A sanctuary or a trap,” said the Lion. “I’ll bark the door down if I want to. As I said. But Mister Boss-man, why are you on the ‘hems’ of Elphaba’s life, as Mother Yackle puts it?”

“You’re here to interrogate the old brickbat, not me,” said the dwarf. “En’t that right? Give me that chair, you, so that I can look out the window and see if the armies are in sight.” He scrabbled up on the seat and raised himself on his toes.

The Lion could have told the dwarf what was visible: a low bolster of smoke to the southwest. The smoke must be heavy. Tendrils of it lifted up, like the heads of dark swans, then ducked down again. There was no acridity in the air, though. The wind must still be from the north or northeast.

“They’re burning the oakhair forest,” said the dwarf. “Pushing the Munchkinlanders farther south, away from the lake, I guess.”

“Unless the wind swings around,” said Ilianora, standing beside him. “Then it might smoke the Munchkinlanders out into the open. They’d be mowed down like wheat by a scythe.”

“We don’t take sides,” the dwarf reminded her. “Not in our brief.”

“We can take the side of mercy without being compromised,” she replied. “Surely?”

“If it don’t compromise our mission, why not?” He munched his sandwich with gusto. “Knock yourself out with mercy, honey.”

“Mr. Boss,” she said. “The Messiars may have gotten their idea of a smoke-out from the dragon. Their fellow infantrymen were blinded by smoke from our Clock—and driven into the obsolete lake.”

“It appears Fate may have caught up with those who advertise as Fate’s voice,” said Yackle, not, Brrr thought, without a touch of satisfaction. Even smugness. Professional jealousy among oracles!

“Ha,” replied the dwarf, grousing. “Fate. Some call it fate. Some call it lunch.”

“You fault your own profession?” Yackle seemed to be enjoying this. “Shame on you.”

“Fate brought you here,” said the Lion. “You must admit that.”

“Listen,” said the dwarf, “consider a pack of nursery children on a church picnic. They are about to mount a grassy hilltop. Clouds gather while one of them stops below to tie the laces of a lisping junior. Then lightning strikes at the crown of the hill. Say it strikes the meanest child, the one who wouldn’t pause to help and so has forged on ahead. Or say the cruel child has already passed to safety, so lightning kills the kindly laggard child, who is second up the slope. Or say, even, that both who act, either in churlishness or charity, cross the upland meadow safely, so it is the innocent toddler who is killed. Any of those three deaths are possible without a moral being drawn. Do you think that lightning has chosen its victim on the strength of character?”

“Then where does fate come in?” asked the Lion. “Wouldn’t this Clock of yours have been able to name what was to happen? Or any blind old oracle worth her salt?”

“Fate is only fate once it has happened. Even our own deaths are only theoretical until we croak.”

Ilianora pursed her lips as if trying to decide whether to join the conversation. She did. “There is a fourth child at the base of the hill who can read the weather enough to know that lightning is likely. The child can rush forward to chase all the others off the mound, and she risks being killed in the process. If that brave child is slain by lightning, it is sullen fate at work. But the other children’s lives have been altered. History has been vexed by the intercession of a bit player. It is what we hope for, and what we dread, too. Isn’t it?”

The dwarf replied, “I dread nothing but garlic muffins. Listen, the child who can read the portents of weather may well have hurried the others back down the slope into the jaws of a manticore, itself sensible about lightning and waiting out the storm in the down-slope shrubs.”

“Not to act is to act, too,” insisted Ilianora.

The dwarf seemed to agree with this, or perhaps he was tired of the discussion. “Couldn’t be truer, sweet-cakes, but we haven’t time to keep nattering like this. I haven’t been stepping sideways for half a century just to be caught, by fate or accident, in some WC in a mauntery, of all godforsaken places. Break down that door, Lion, and we can all get out, and leave these holy women to their immolation. Might be lively entertainment for a maunt, to be violated and then martyred, but I can’t subject my Ilianora to the danger. Lion, the door.”

Brrr had little inclination to snap to the dwarf’s commands, but he had no inclination at all to stay put. “Always with the doors,” he said. “When I broke through at the Witch’s castle, I was in better nick.” He took off his weskit and folded it neatly as the boys surrendered their cards and collected their ivory quad-ribbed pieces. The little glass cat blinked, obedient and even docile, but it seemed ready to quit the company of oracles and acolytes.

Ilianora, with a placidity that under the circumstances suggested a mild mental incompetence, straightened the margins of her veil and stood up. “After you,” she said to the Lion, indicating the door.

For the Lion, staying in fighting trim had never been a daily ambition. He did several deep-knee bends and sprang back and forth across the room to get his blood going. Turning to Yackle, he asked, “Are you coming with us? Or is this what you’ve been waiting for? Death by an army sharpshooter? I shouldn’t hang around any longer than necessary—”

Yackle appeared to have passed out.

“The sight of me taking any exercise, I know: a taxation to credulity,” said Brrr.

“She’s ill,” said Ilianora. She moved without apparent urgency to the old woman’s side, but her voice betrayed some fretfulness at last. The ancient oracle had sloped sideways to the floor and—oh, not a pretty thing to witness—her eyes had actually rolled back in her skull, just as oracles were said to be able to do, so the blind eyes looked inward. Only a glaucous white showed between the remaining shreds of ancient eyelashes.

Ilianora took Yackle onto her lap, like a mother to a child, but reversed.

“She’s shamming,” said the Lion without conviction.

“Oooh, that’s revolting,” said one of the boys. “Those eyes.”

“She’s trying to hold us here,” said the dwarf as Yackle began to shake. “She is in cahoots with the powers that be. Pay her no mind. Lion, bust down that door before I bust your chops.” He stumped across the floor and showed the Lion a laughable little fist, so close that the pig-bristle hairs growing out of the knuckles went all blurry, and the Lion had to pull back to get them in focus.

“Can we do something to help?” asked Ilianora. Yackle had torn her robes open, and Ilianora tried to close them again. Her attempts were rebuffed by the ancient maunt’s thrashing limbs. The sound unreeling from her mouth was a taper of protest; it hummed against—he could hear it now himself, Brrr could—the groan of the oakhair trees as their harp strings swung in the smoke, and shimmered atonally, and then snapped. All this he could hear, and more besides: The room had fallen so very still as everyone watched Yackle in the throes of some condition, as if in the maw of some invisible beast.

“Water for her,” murmured Ilianora, and one of the boys brought forward a tumbler of water. But Yackle’s mouth wouldn’t stay still enough to cup the liquid, and it drained off her face to stain her robe.

Brrr watched as old Shadowpuppet, who had kept its tail tightly wound about its furled legs, now stretched with effort and scrabbled, you’d have to say, across the floor. It put out a paw tentatively against the heavy cross-laid door, and walked its front legs stiffly up the panels till it was leaning against the door like a fragile glass buttress. The cat meowed. Brrr had heard purrs from Shadowpuppet before, but in all these weeks, nothing more expressive than a glottal hum. This complaint was vicious, like the voice of a tomcat being crossed, and reminded him, just for a second, of Muhlama’s high-flown irritability.

“Let’s go. We’re all agreed,” said the dwarf. “Even your shattery cat can tell that it’s time.”

Brrr flipped his notebook closed. Was Yackle shamming? He wouldn’t put it past her. But why would she want to hold them there? Not to do him harm—the EC Messiars wouldn’t lay a finger on Brrr, not with his letter of introduction from the EC on his person. Did Yackle know something more about the dwarf than she was letting on?

But who cared? He’d gotten a good deal of what he had come for. The old bag of bones could suffer and crumple if she wanted. That was what she had wanted. And anyway, wasn’t bolting from a crisis his special skill and trademark?

He turned back to stalking up and down a few more times. It moved the blood, loosened the joints, bulked up the muscles. It had been a long time since he had had to throw his weight around. Humiliating if he couldn’t actually defeat a door in a mauntery, but he tried not to think about that yet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dwarf rooting through the pocket of the Lion’s own weskit.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing—”

Too late. The dwarf had folded the piece of official vellum into a chevron, and was aiming—

“You don’t dare!”

The paper soared out the window before the Lion could snatch at it. “Now we’re all in the same boat,” said the dwarf affably. “No one is supplied with special defenses against being aggrieved by the Messiars, or whichever army gets here first. So stop stalling, Lion. Get us out of here before the soldiers arrive.”

Brrr could have sprung on the dwarf, swiped him sideways out the window. Mashed him to an ugly organic patty, internal organs extruded like sausage meat through a grinder. Good-bye to Mr. Boss’s unblinking unretreating stance, his outthrust bearded chin and agate eyes. His belligerence. His confidence. In one so small: so concentrated. Like Sakkala Oafish. Where did it come from?

Was the dwarf a Glikkun—avenging the Traum Massacre, after all this time?

No: That was his own nerves attacking him, a case of the humors. Or, as some called it, paranoia. As much to shake himself up as anything else, Brrr roared. The boys started. The dwarf did not.

The Lion tensed and sprung, rolling his spine forward and sideways, to take the brunt of the impact on his shoulder rather than his skull.

There was a gratifying thud, a shriek of splitting wood, and an echo, but the door did not split. The old oaken planks ran in two depths on the bias, they were laid tongue-and-groove and reinforced by iron braces. And the doorjamb was stone.

“Good one,” said the dwarf. “Very nice, that. Expected no less.”

“In words of one syllable or less,” said the Lion, “first: ow. Next: shut up. You want to take a turn, be my guest.”

Ilianora came up to Brrr to press her hands on his shoulder muscles. “Your old auntie needs help,” she said. “Wasn’t that Munchkinlander maunt who locked us in here a healer? An apothecaire? We must find her.”

“You don’t understand. If Yackle is failing at last, the last thing she wants is help,” said the Lion, shaking Ilianora off. “But I’ll try again.”

Three, four times at the door.

“Who’s in a hurry?” said the dwarf. “Not me. I can’t see the army approaching through that high window. I’m too short. So I’m totally unconcerned. I think I’ll sit here and teach myself to count in a foreign language. One, two, three, fuck, fuck, six, seven, eight, nine, fuck.”

“Mr. Boss,” said Ilianora.

“Hey, look at the see-through pussy,” said one of the boys. “She having the genuine hissy fit?”

“Hair ball, more likely,” said another.

“Glass hair ball? Ouch.”

Brrr thought: It’s as if Shadowpuppet is as alarmed by the loss of the writ as I am. Attuned to my jitters. Some sweet, small consolation.

In protection of Shadowpuppet, if no one else, the Lion made another half-dozen lunges at the door. Eventually the wood split along the grain, and the iron doorknob and lock hung at a drunken angle. It appeared that Sister Apothecaire had left the key in the keyhole. They had some job reorienting the lock to line up, but eventually they managed, and opened the remains of the door.

“Are you coming?” said the dwarf.

“She’s not in a condition to be moved,” said Ilianora. “You go, get things in order. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”

They pelted away. Their footsteps retreating down the stone stairs made an isolating sound. The mauntery echoed like a mausoleum.

Still Yackle twitched, like a blind fish unable to see the string coming out of its mouth or the fisherman overhead, but responsive to every tug. Ilianora kept one hand on Yackle’s shoulder or at her wrist.

“You have a talent for comforting the sick?” said Brrr.

“None,” she replied. “Why don’t you go with them? Nothing is holding you here.”

He had no answer so he offered none. “What’s your answer to that same question?” he said.

“By long habit,” she replied, “I don’t answer questions.”

“Could we get her on my back?” said Brrr. “Maybe I could carry her down the stairs?”

“She’s too brittle, and she’s still being bothered by a spell of something.”

“Maybe she’ll wake up and find herself an infant this time,” said Brrr, almost to himself. “With a cowardly Lion and a whatever-you-are for parents. What are you?”

“I’m the handmaiden of the Clock, I suppose,” said Ilianora.

“That tells me less than I want to know.”

“Are you taking notes?”

“No,” he said, “and that’s a promise.”

She drew her knees up to her chin. She looked like a small Ice Monkey, almost, in her white veil. With Yackle in her white, too, they might be Granny Ice Monkey with Granddaughter. Two weird characters in their matching shrouds.

“Are you Mr. Boss’s daughter, or are you married to him?” asked Brrr. “I can’t see why anyone would commit herself to a clockwork oracle, unless it was the family business.”

“I am not married, and will not be so,” said Ilianora. “I’m no longer fit for bearing children.”

“You have white hair, but you aren’t that old…”

“I had myself closed,” she said, “after having heard enough of human iniquity to despair of the species. Closed. So I tread the world lightly, lightly as possible, and I bring no infants forward to suffer as I have done. I worked with the underground vigilantes who struggle against the tyrant on the throne of the Emerald City—our Emperor Apostle—until I learned that in the service of their honorable goal they are capable of actions as dishonorable as the Emperor’s—then I gave myself up for lost. I wandered without aim or ambition, a sad folly of a way to spend one’s life.”

“I wouldn’t know, being drenched in accomplishment each time I open a new door—”

She laughed at him; a bell-like sound so devoid of malice that it made his ears ring. Brrr pressed her to continue, not just for the story but because he was blushing. “And the Clock found you and took you hostage?”

“You could say that,” she said, “if you believe in oracles. Since I don’t believe in fate, it can’t hurt me. Its capacity to predict my days is nil. I have apprenticed myself to the Clock’s company, and I serve as a kind of watchdog of its prophecies. The dwarf is unscrupulous, just doing his job; he doesn’t care what mayhem is rucked up by the Clock. The boys who cycle through the company for months or even years at a time join because they are young and scared of the possibilities of life. A belief in preordained history is consoling to those with few prospects, and the boys generally come from the families of blue-coal miners or serfs. They see a little of Oz, watch the Clock tell its predictions and stir up trouble, and do the dwarf’s bidding. I suppose they think it is a way to secure a brighter future.”

“Perhaps the boys know more than you do,” said Brrr. “Maybe believing in the Clock is its own reward. You’ve never seen it tell your future for you?”

“I have no future. It wouldn’t dare.”

“You sound very cynical.”

“You’ve seen enough of life to suggest I should be otherwise?” she asked.

“As I said, a bed of roses and a walk in the park, that’s my life story. But look, here comes Yackle blinking back to life. She is an oracle without a bevy of spies or a clockwork instrument. She’s the real goods. What might she say to you, if you asked her?”

“I wouldn’t listen to it, and anyway I wouldn’t ask her,” said Ilianora. “Regularly I ask blank paper, and in all my life I’ve never known magic writing to appear on its blank surface.”

• 6 •

YACKLE GROANED and made to sit up; Ilianora on one side and Brrr on the other helped her. She murmured unintelligibly. Then she spit on the floor, something thin and bubbly—liquid lace.

“I thought you were dead,” said the Lion.

“More’s the pity,” she replied, “not yet, but I may have seen my way out at last. I’ve had a Sighting, and maybe the truest one I ever had. But you have to help me. Get us out of this hell-nook.”

Brrr glanced at Ilianora and raised an eyebrow. “Lucky you,” he said to Yackle. “I’ve already cleared the doorway.”

“It’s very quiet here,” observed Yackle. She turned to Ilianora. “Where are your friends? They haven’t left without you, have they?” She became alarmed and turned back to Brrr. “It depends on them—on the Clock—I have seen it.”

“Don’t worry; they won’t have left without me,” Ilianora replied. “Give me your arm, old auntie.”

Yackle was irritable with fretfulness. “Are the sisters still in Council, or have they fled in advance of the approaching army? Help me on these steps, will you? I seem to have caught a tremble in my knees.”

“We’re here, on either side,” said Brrr. Yackle reached out her dry twiglike hand and squeezed the muscle of his right forward limb.

“Well, go ahead, you, and stop them if they are trying to flee without me,” said Yackle. “I’m not going to miss this omnibus!”

Brrr and Ilianora glanced at each other. Brrr nodded, and shifted his arms so he could support Yackle, supplying both a handhold and a backrest. Ilianora hurried down the steps ahead of them.

Shadowpuppet stuck close to Brrr’s side.

“I must rest a moment—a stitch in my side,” said Yackle. She leaned her forehead upon the stone wall and closed her sightless eyes.

“Was it upsetting? Your Sighting?”

Yackle said, “You gave it me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You told me. You cued me to that line—‘You have to leave the way you came in.’ You told me that was for me. And I saw that it was true—it is true for me, and it is true for you as well.”

“None of this will hold up in a court of law.” But he knew that she would hear the sweet mockery in his voice as encouragement.

“I’ll tell you what I saw as it pertains to you. If you want.”

“For a lark, for a joke, to pass the time while armies are converging upon us…sure, what the hell.”

She reached her hand out, searching for his paw. He took it.

“The hunt for a Lion cub in the Great Gillikin Forest,” she told him. “Several decades ago, I’m guessing; I was never good at counting years. Male humans wanted a cub for experimental use in a lab of some sort. I saw a day of floating leaves. You know, the forest in the fall, all red and gold. I saw a circle of men closing in upon a pride of Lions. Most of them scatter, but there is a nursing mother, too tired to run, and her mate stays by her side. A family group. Around them come the men. Beating the bushes, using nets and snares, carrying for defense those hot charred stakes pulled from a portable furnace. Closing in, closing in. That Lion king, that paterfamilias, he is alert, leaping back and forth. The noose is tightening. The Lion family breaks up, hoping to cause confusion, diversion, hoping some might survive. The father and the cub escape before the explosion.”

Brrr is calmer than he’s ever been in his life. “And the mother?”

“The gelignite is lit. The rocks split and tumble skyward. The mother is crushed when they rain back to earth. She protects the other cub with the arch of her rib cage, though her spine is broken. The men take him away from her breast.”

Brrr says, “Umm—the other cub?”

“Yes,” says Yackle. “There are two in the litter. The escaped one is already looking like both the parents, with that tuft of dark fur at its chin. Did yours ever come in?”

“No.”

“I suspect it was scared out of you.”

“I suspect so.” His voice was exceedingly calm, almost as if he were still practicing to learn how to talk, with very very concentration.

“You have to leave the way you came in,” she finished. “That’s not just for me, Brrr. It’s for you, too. You arrived in a family, unlike me who arrived on a wing and a prayer. You are not supposed to be so alone.”

“I have no family.” No Cubbins, no Muhlama, no Piarsody Scallop, no Jemmsy, no allegiance to the yoke of his probation officer. Certainly no family feeling with a pride of tuft-chinned Lions who, it seemed, removed themselves to the Madeleines and saw fit to deny any relationship.

“You have time,” she told him. “It’s yours to do with what you choose.”

“They turned me out,” he said. “Again and again. They all did.”

“I have to wait for magic,” she said. “You don’t have to. Don’t wait for anyone else. Do it yourself.”

The light had moved on over the mauntery. Daylight, with its shifting dusty tremulous clarity, fell lengthwise down the shaft of the broad, foursquare stairwell. Yackle and the Lion and the glass cat. Elsewhere in the mauntery, a cold silence, patiently waiting for—for what was to come. Whatever it was.

“Come on,” she told him.

The stairs finished at a broad terrace that itself debouched through arches into a cloistered courtyard open to the sky. Favoring his shoulder, Brrr’s body leaned left, and his eyes trailed heavenward, noting the battalions of clouds that surged east. They were thick and grey enough to make the few blue patches look like water features—lakes, inlets, impossible seas—picked out in landmasses painted the grey of wet papier-mâché.

“It is a map of Oz,” he said, for a moment forgetting about the blindness of Yackle. But then he turned his attention to the structure in the center of the courtyard. “Sweet Ozma,” he growled, “that’s a stick of furniture and a half, en’t it?”

The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion

• 1 •

BRRR DELIVERED Yackle safely onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. He could feel the quickening of her pulse; it matched his own. He was aware of Ilianora standing to one side, neither demure nor deferential, just a handmaiden to her own life. The sun struck the silvery stitching in her veil. If she was a eunuchess, she was a striking one, coming forward to offer Yackle her arm.

“Well, there you are,” said the dwarf, poking his head out of a window halfway up. “Never known the gears to stick, ever. But I think I just fixed it. Maybe it was balking until you arrived. What took you?”

“A vision took me,” said Yackle in a theatrical voice.

“Visions, schmisions,” said the dwarf. “We got the corner on that market, darlin’.”

“This is quite an operation you got here,” said Brrr.

“The Clock of the Time Dragon, at your service. Well, not at your service,” said the dwarf. He pulled himself out of the window and scrambled down the side. “All this time we’ve been pulling history out of a hat, and we never crossed your path before?”

The thing was massive—mounted on a flatbed cart, three times as high as Brrr standing upright. From a distance, he guessed it would resemble a stupa of some sort, an ornately carved portable omphalos, but close up one could see the ticky-tack aspect.

“It’s due for a once-over-lightly,” admitted the dwarf, as if he could guess the Lion’s opinions. “Every little while we replace the fabric, do some touch-up work. But we’ve been on the road lately.”

“Can’t tell by me,” said Yackle, urging Ilianora forward with little twitchings on her sleeve. The elderly maunt reached out and stroked the folded leather wing of the dragon, whose head and forearms finished the steeple-top scare of it all.

“Don’t fondle the merchandise,” growled the dwarf.

“You are going to start it up,” said Yackle.

“I don’t take orders,” he replied.

“Do what the lady says,” growled Brrr.

“I’m not giving you an order, Mr. Boss,” Yackle told the dwarf. “It’s a prophecy. You’re going to start it up for me before you leave here. If you’re anxious to be on your way, and who isn’t, I might add, you’ll get it up to speed pretty damn zippy.”

“You may as well,” said Ilianora to the dwarf. “She might be right.”

“You’re the one don’t believe in prophecies. What’s got a hold of you, Missy Malarkey?” said the dwarf, but affectionately enough. He petted Ilianora’s hand a little.

“Come on, Mr. Boss,” said one of the boys, “armies on the way and all that. We’re getting wanderlust.”

“Oh, is that what you call it, boy genius? Well, the gear’s unstuck, so we’ll push off then.”

“Wind it up,” says Yackle. “I know more than you do, today at least, and it knows more than I do.”

The dwarf made a rude gesture he knew blind Yackle couldn’t see.

Brrr swelled his chest. “Mr. Boss, I didn’t throw out my shoulder and crash down the door so we could linger here exchanging pleasantries. I want to get out before the armies arrive, too. Now, I notice there is a well in the corner of the courtyard that is far too large for me to hide in but would accommodate you nicely, if you’re scared of soldiers.” Then he did something he’d never done before and, sweet Ozma, hoped he’d never have to do again. He opened his mouth and picked up the dwarf by the largest, densest part of his body—his considerably broad shoulders—and he began to carry him, as a mama cat would her kitten, across the courtyard.

“Oh, all right,” growled the dwarf. “Everyone’s going nasty on me.”

“We’re on edge,” said Ilianora. As if to authenticate the worry, the boom of cannon was heard in the distance.

A moment later the cannon sounded again, four, five times in sequence, and a hail of roof tiles rained into the courtyard. “Sister Hammer is going to be none too happy,” said Yackle, ducking her head. “But have the maunts all fled?”

“Fled, and left us locked up like that? The nerve,” said the Lion.

The dwarf climbed a small rack of stairs to the base of the Clock and disappeared inside a low painted door. Above the bartizans of the mauntery, above the Clock, new clouds of gunpowder smoke smudged a darker aspect across the celestial map of Oz. Brrr could smell the stink of saltpeter.

“Oh, for the eyes I once had,” said Yackle. “You’ll have to tell me what’s happening, Sir Brrr.”

“I don’t read omens,” he said, “en’t that your job?”

They fell silent. The dwarf could be heard moving about, setting pendulums free from their catches, winding trip-gears, muttering to himself. Stumbling. “Ow. Damn it.” Then he reappeared, breathing a little heavily and brushing some sawdust off his elbows. “Well, that’s that; she’s cooking. Let’s see what the old gal comes up with this time. I hope it en’t a nice little tragic-comedy about the beheading of several boys and the skewering of a Lion by any advancing army or such.”

“You don’t know?” said Brrr. “You didn’t set it up?”

“Of course I don’t know,” he snapped. “I’m the servant here. When did you ever know a dwarf to be in charge?”

They watched. Slowly the interior clockwork built up its reserves of power. Sounds of ticking and switching emanated from the depths of the cabinetry. There was a moaning, almost as of an orchestra tuning up, adjusting the parameters of its harmonies so as to accord.

Then the dragon began to lift its head. Notch by notch: in the costive silence you could hear the mechanism at work. Underneath the sequined scales a cleverness of hinges and loops was corralling the spine tighter, so the head of the dragon lifted, and the eyes began to burn red; the nostrils of the dragon dilated with a pornographic labial movement, issuing some hiccups of pale purple smoke.

“The dragon is smoking, too,” said Brrr to Yackle.

“I can smell that much,” she replied.

• 2 •

BRRR THOUGHT the dragon seemed uncertain what revelation to publish, if any. In a balcony to one side, made from half a porcelain teacup, a small puppet with a red mane emerged and mewed.

“Is that supposed to be me?” said the Lion. As if disappointed in its reception, the puppet disappeared.

“You don’t criticize the clock,” said the dwarf. “What, you think it responds to notices in the evening papers? To notes from some splenetic director? Let it be.” But he sounded confused himself.

“What’s it doing?” asked Yackle.

“A marionette in an alcove now,” said Brrr. He peered, squinted, to make sure he was getting it right. “With diamonds painted on his face.”

“Steady,” said Yackle, though whom she was addressing was unclear: maybe the marionette.

“Gone,” said Brrr. “This is awfully patchy.”

“You’re asking a lot of the Clock,” said the dwarf. “To make sense to both of you at once—not sure if it can handle the task—”

“Over here,” said Brrr, “get this. Another arcade.”

A red velvet curtain lifted, and a stage like a rounded dock slid forward on invisible rollers. The marionette with the blue diamonds on his face reappeared. The light strengthened enough so that one could see his fine rural tunic half slipped off his shoulder. His chest, though only a piece of polished poplar, managed to look sexy, the blue diamond tattoos circling around one nipple and then dropping in single file toward his abdomen. “It’s a man from the West, a Winkie I believe, in a costume suggesting money…”

But even Brrr’s voice caught in his throat, to see the door of a cupboard open and a figure painted green, dressed in the black skirts of a novice maunt, step through.

“It’s Elphaba, with the Winkie prince,” said Brrr. “Couldn’t be anyone else.”

“No,” said Ilianora. “The Clock wouldn’t dare. I don’t buy it.”

Yackle kept her chin trained straight at the little stage as if she could tell exactly where it was, and what it must be showing. She gripped Ilianora’s hand hard. “Steady, steady, steady,” said the older woman to the younger.

“He’s her lover,” said Brrr. “The Witch’s lover. Did she have a lover? Or is this propaganda?”

The dwarf didn’t answer. He seemed just as captivated as they.

The embrace was brief and, if you could credit such a thing between figures of painted wood and cloth, passionate. Then Elphaba whipped away offstage, and the lights went half down. They were beginning to come up elsewhere, on a lower section, a grid of iron behind which something was beginning to happen: a huge golden fish, a carp or something, floating…. But Brrr’s eye was caught by a flash of movement on the darkened deck, and he whistled. “Something else up there—look!”

The puppet of the Winkie prince had gone into a slump, perhaps a kind of postcoital doze, when a figure up on top of the wardrobe appeared. It was a funny little white pincushion sewn over with small mirrors that caught the limited light.

Brrr said, “A little star up there? A small overweight star spying from the wardrobe?” But the bright lumpy thing leaped down with an undeniably feline agility, and stalked on stiff little furry legs to the sleeping lover. The creature sniffed the man up and down, from his soft breathing nostrils to his groin.

Brrr found himself holding his breath.

As if to protect Shadowpuppet, he reached down and snatched up the glass cat, turning its head from the entertainment. But no cat, glass or otherwise, yields to this sort of command, and it squirmed its neck about so its glassy eyes could follow the movements on the stage.

“Powerful entertainment. My little critter’s rapt,” he said, as much to himself as to the others.

The white cat in the tableau ran to a doorway at the rear of the stage, and mewed—three harsh mews, cut off, more like words. Not so much “meow” as “now—now—now!”

Several bits of shadow, with masks and cudgels, shaped themselves into more or less human form, and they surged forward, four, five of them—the sleeping man woke, and cried out twice—and then the cudgels were upon him. The toy blood realistically sprayed the stage. The puppet cat watched, and then licked the blood off its mirrors.

The glass cat in Brrr’s arms began to squirm. Brrr held it more tightly. It protested with meows like insults.

“Now, settle down, you,” said Brrr. “Don’t want you running away and hiding just when we’re getting ready to fold up shop here and skedaddle. Can’t imagine either army would treat you as well as I do.”

“You oaf,” cried Shadowpuppet. “I can’t breathe.”

“What in tarnation’s corner!” Brrr thrust Shadowpuppet away, as if it were possessed, but caught himself from dashing it to the ground. He barked at the dwarf, “My only comfort, my pet, and you paint it a small villain? Is this how you catch your audiences, sowing discord and suspicion among them?”

“Don’t look at me,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “I’m staff, not management.”

“And you—” Brrr winced at the wriggling thing. “You suddenly borrow enough language to lodge a complaint mightier than a meow? Have you been enchanted by this, this puppet play—or are you smoked out by it?”

“You!” said Ilianora. “You were an informer on Elphaba and—and—” She nearly couldn’t say his name. “And Fiyero? You?” She grabbed Shadowpuppet from Brrr and squeezed it so hard its tail broke off, and splintered upon the cobbles.

The glass cat—was it a Cat?—reared and shot its claws. Ilianora, weeping, flinched away and flung the Cat on the ground. It didn’t shatter, but a front leg bent laterally in an unnatural way, as if the Cat had taught its forearm how to cast a shuttle across a loom. It sat there and just managed to crane around enough to lick the blood from the stump of the severed tail. The blood was thin and brown, like shit water.

“Shadowpuppet! Were you spying on the Witch? Were you in the Wizard’s employ? How could you—how you could—a traitor—a turncoat—”

“The word you want,” said the dwarf, “is fink. Or, if you’re being fancy, collaborationist.”

Brrr felt he suddenly understood what it might mean if he said I am beside myself! The world contorting again, long after he had thought it possible to learn anything new. It was like being back in the Great Gillikin Forest, suddenly recognizing that the musical repertoire of humans that he was overhearing was in fact language, implying meaning, implying a secret world he might uncover. The bone-icing creepiness of realizing that an Animal can masquerade as an animal! He hadn’t known it possible.

“Oh, we all have our disguises,” said Shadowpuppet irritably. “You think only a big Cat can practice sedition?”

The Cat hissed at them all. The dwarf continued, “No need to get so worked up over it, Mister Lion. The episode depicted by the Clock didn’t involve you, far as I could see.”

“No, it didn’t,” said Brrr. “But I took on Shadowpuppet as my pet—”

“Hah,” said the Cat. “No, sir, I took on you as an assignment. To end my long career in a last bout of usefulness, and look—I’ve all but been thrown out on my ass.”

“Assignment for whom?” asked Brrr.

“The regimes change, the posts are filled and vacated and refilled. I can hardly remember the current personnel. Think you’ll take my deposition? Think again. Anyway, as if I owe you an explanation?”

“You do,” said Ilianora. “If you informed against the Witch, you were an agent in the death of Fiyero Tigelaar. And he was my father.”

“Was he now,” said the Cat. “Pity, that.”

“Nor?” said Yackle, turning her head toward Ilianora. “Nor Tigelaar? Fiyero’s daughter?”

“Nor was a girl, and that girl is dead,” said Ilianora. “That girl died in Southstairs Prison…I go by the name of Ilianora now.” She dropped her veil back from her forehead. “If a Cat can skulk around disguised as a cat, a girl can certainly disguise herself as a woman.” Her tone was cool and not particularly flummoxed.

Brrr had never known Fiyero, but long ago he had traveled to the Emerald City with the boy sometimes thought to be Fiyero’s illegitimate son. “Ilianora, listen: The Witch’s boy—Elphaba’s charge—was looking for you some years back. Did he ever find you?”

“Liir?” said Ilianora. “Liir, you mean? Is he still alive?”

“Twenty years ago he was,” said Brrr.

“Ten years ago he was still alive,” said Yackle. “He’d be, oh, twenty-nine or thirty by now. Excuse me for hurrying this along, but why don’t you ask the Clock?”

“It does no good to ask the Clock,” said the dwarf curtly. “The clock only reveals what it will.”

They all turned to look at it again.

“You’d be thirty-five then,” said Brrr. “Or so. You were older than Liir, right?”

She didn’t answer. Her face was in her hands. The news that someone had once hunted for her seemed to be seeping in.

“You have someone who cares for you,” said Brrr. “Somewhere. You don’t need to languish in thrall to a dwarf. You don’t owe him anything.”

“Don’t mind me,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “I didn’t snitch on any Winkie prince. I don’t take sides. I mind my own business. Little me and my own ten toes, each more blameless than the one next door.”

• 3 •

YACKLE WAVED her hands loosely in the air, as if casting spells or shooing chickens. She began to get excited. “Open your trove, Mister Boss, and let me at it.”

“You’re off your rocker,” began the dwarf.

“Don’t deny me my last moment.” Yackle rubbed her eyes with her fists, impatiently. Brrr thought: She’d force her eyes to focus one last time, if she could.

“Show’s over,” growled the dwarf. “You’ve agitated my virgin missus. En’t that enough trouble for one day?” He began to slap up the hinged stages and secure the shutters. “We gave it a chance, and it’s paid us with a scrap of useless history. Who cares if that friable Cat once worked for ye olde Wizard of Oz? He’s long gone, and it’s Emperor Shell on the throne now. All that bunk of espionage and assault is ancient history and does no one any good, least of all the Cat, with its fragmented tail.”

The Clock disobeyed the dwarf and clattered its central stage open again.

“Huffy, are we?” said the dwarf. “Feeling our oats, eh? This is a strange turn of affairs.” But he backed off a little, nonplussed.

“Look,” said Brrr.

“Easy for you to say,” replied Yackle, tapping one dead eyelid with her fingernail.

The Clock’s machinery chirred with a sound like the tumbling of oaken dice. The hands of the dwarf fell at his side, but remained fisted, as if Mr. Boss would strike the equipment if it dared an impertinent display. Brrr shifted to get a better view. Ilianora and the boys watched, too.

Through a mist that suffused the stage from vents in the flooring, a tall figure emerged. It stood about ten inches high. It sported a long white beard and a tall velvet hat—like a witch’s hat but without the brim. The face was indistinct but furrowed with character; it looked like the business end of a pair of socks folded into each other. The face seemed pinched between the downward cone of the white beard and the upward cone of the black velvet cap. Stars and moons were picked out on the old gentleman’s robe.

“What’s happening?” asked Yackle. “This is no time to fall silent, you lot.”

“Sorry,” said Brrr, and he began to describe what he saw.

In his arms the figure hugged an oversize volume, a folio of russet leather clasping vellum pages of irregular cut. Oversize, proportionally speaking, of course: in actuality, the prop was about the heft of a roast-wren sandwich.

The figure set the book down on the ground. He looked to the left and to the right, as if checking to make sure he was alone. Then, alarmingly, he looked at the small audience and winked at them. It was almost salacious. Brrr felt in the presence of rough magic.

“It’s a book,” said Brrr. “A magic book, I bet.”

“The Grimmerie,” added Ilianora. “I knew it in my youth, back at Kiamo Ko.”

“The Grimmerie,” replied Yackle. “As I suspected. What about it?”

Brrr and Ilianora took turns describing the scene. The figure opened the cover of the book. It was only a simulacrum of a book, not a real book: its pages were not more than five inches square, if that. When the book was opened flat, at a central section of pages so the versos and rectos spread evenly in each direction, the bearded puppet made some arcane gestures above the gutter of the volume. He let his beard trail along the stitchery, which seemed a nearly obscene gesture, certainly an odd one. Then he curled his fingers up and lifted his gnarled hands—Brrr could tell his hands were gnarled even though they were papier-mâché puppet hands. He knitted a spell with his fingers. It was as if, Brrr thought, he were writing in the air above the book. “He’s…he’s conjuring something out of the book.”

“Of course he is. It’s the Grimmerie. Aren’t you getting any of this?”

“Don’t be so snarky,” said Brrr, but mildly; he couldn’t really fault Yackle. The air seemed to crackle and dry; his mane was going mad with static.

Yackle gripped each of her elbows and hugged herself. “What’s he calling up?”

Something began to lift off the page. It looked like origami being done by invisible fingers: a complicated fold of ivory paper twisted itself, unbent a limb, twisted again, uncorked a shoulder. Slowly the creature balanced on four limbs, then stood erect on two—the rear two limbs. A third pair of limbs scraped the air behind the creature, unfolding and unfolding until they were twice the height of the biped.

“Wings,” said Ilianora, in a gasp.

“A winged human,” said Brrr, “made out of paper, I mean.”

The creature stood to full height only once, and some trick in the folds of the face made a little gleam of light come out—as if a torch had picked up a glint of reflection made by a drop or two of dried glue. The figure was naked and magnificent, a hobbledy old winged woman with a mane of paper hair wild enough to make Brrr jealous.

Then the creature’s wings folded back, to pack into the woman’s shoulders like a broad deformity, a pair of humps. The weight of them curved her spine a little; she stooped, looking older. This caused her hair to drop over her forehead, giving her a shifty look beneath its unkempt locks. The light dimmed somehow; only now could Brrr see that the paper had been crumpled before being folded, so the dozens of wrinkles approximated the veined sheen of old flesh.

“It is an old woman,” said Brrr. His voice went quiet. “An old woman has just lifted out from the pages of the Grimmerie, and been deprived of the wings that helped her stand erect. The wings have folded heavily on her back, buckling her spine with the weight. And she is on her knees, now, and lying down, naked and old.”

“I know,” said Yackle tiredly. “Naked and old and newborn. And never knew a mother’s kiss. Tragic. But you’ve learned of your origins, Brrr, and I’ve learned of mine, too. Happy birthday.” Her voice sounded as proud as it did tired. “Now what?”

The crumpled woman who had sprung from the open folds of a magic book slid offstage, never waking, never stirring. The bearded puppet was left alone. He picked up the book. He looked here and there—hunting for something. A puppet can do anything. He turned at last, and a scroll of paper at the back of the stage wound a new backdrop behind him. An approach to a towering house, almost a castle—

“Kiamo Ko!” said Brrr.

Ilianora gripped his paw. “Wasn’t Kiamo Ko bigger than that?”

“Everything seems bigger when you’re young,” explained Brrr. “Anyway, this is a stage set, so how big can it be?”

“Give me my eyes,” said Yackle. She sounded like a crazy old lady, nothing more, but Brrr knew what she meant, and answered her. Brrr described what he saw.

The castle was painted gloomy and quaint, bats in the window and crossbones on the door: a bit over the top, if Brrr could rely on his own memory. But up came the magician, if that’s who he was, in his tall hat and his unrespectable beard; he delivered air-knocks on the castle wall, and then he laid the book down on the floor before the doors, which anyway were painted shut. Once he’d accomplished this, the magician puppet was yanked into the fly space by the Clock’s impatient gearwork.

“That’s how the Grimmerie came to be at Kiamo Ko,” said Ilianora, almost in a whisper. “I remember my mother telling us about it once. An old peddler or a mystic of some sort left it there, and years later Elphaba found it in the attic.”

The book sat on the floorboards. The rest of the stage set was bare. Nothing happened.

Shadowpuppet chose this moment to comment. “A tiktok entertainment leaves something to be desired in the way of dramaturgy. The plot has gone slow here. Are we to wait here and watch the cobwebs grow, while armies are approaching? If you call this a reliable witness, Sir Brrr, why don’t you just haul the Clock of the Time Dragon back to the Emerald City magistrates? Get it to deliver your deposition for you? If you trust it so much?”

“I’m not sure I’d take advice from you, Shadowpuppet,” snarled Brrr. “Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn’t it?”

“As long as we’re chatting,” said the Cat, “the name is Grimalkin. Malky for short. Shadowpuppet is just so…so you.”

Yackle threw her fists in the air and uncurled her palsied fingers as far as she could. “Enough! Will nobody do as I ask? Dragon, dwarf, lady, Lion, someone: Ask the Clock for the book!”

Brrr was stunned. “Ask where it is now?” he said.

“Don’t you understand? I have seen how my story ends. It’s here. It’s here. In the clock. Bring it out.”

“It was a play-action, it was a fake book,” Brrr reminded Yackle. Was she losing it at last?

“Shhh, old mother,” said Ilianora, stroking the skin pleating on Yackle’s trembling forearms.

Even the dwarf showed some remorse at getting Yackle all wound up for nothing. “I’m afraid they’re right, Mrs. Mysteriousness. We’re out of tricks. Show’s over. Nothing to see here. Move along. Keep to the left. Tell your friends. Blessing of Lurlina on you, and all that rot.”

But the Time Dragon had other ideas. It flexed a forearm and draped an accordion-pleated leather wing across the central display chamber. It lowered its head with a clanking sinuousness both sinister and noble. Its ruby-glass eyes bulged in their leathern sockets. Its gooseneck armature struck forward, pinning Mr. Boss to his ground. From its nostrils issued a smell of scorch that wrinkled their noses. Calamitously thick smoke spilled from the dragon sinuses, clouding the courtyard, watering every eye.

Brrr wanted to rub his eyes, but in his arms Shadowpuppet…Malky…was squirming to escape in the sudden fog. “Stop, or I’ll snap every limb off of you, one at a time,” Brrr rasped, coughing. He had to do with trying to rub his face into his forearm. When his eyes stopped streaming, the smoke was lifting. Everyone was suffering from the stinging soot. Ilianora was wiping her face with her silvery veil, the dwarf with his beard. The boys were clutching one another and whimpering: They had all of a sudden seen one revelation too many, and they wanted to go home. Yackle rubbed her eyes, too.

“Look,” she said, pointing. The dragon wing was lifting at an angle. Brrr stared: The Clock was taking orders from no dwarf. It had its own agenda. The second dragon wing had started to lift in the opposite direction, an effect like curtains parting at a window, before it dawned on Brrr that it had been Yackle who had told them to look. But he couldn’t even turn to see what her face was like now that—could it be possible?—her eyesight had been restored by the dragon smoke. He just obeyed her instruction, and looked.

• 4 •

A SLIDING PANEL of stage flooring moved out, a wooden tongue on oiled bearings. In a drawer, on a carpet of green and gold silk, the Grimmerie waited for them.

Brrr didn’t need to describe it for Yackle anymore. He didn’t need Ilianora to identify it. It wasn’t a tiny stage prop. It was the real Grimmerie.

The volume sat half unwrapped in a traditional Vinkus hunting shawl, a fringed cloth with roses on a black background. There was something almost lascivious about the arrangement to Brrr, who had never admired books particularly. He didn’t remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

“Nobody has the clearance to touch the Grimmerie,” said Mr. Boss, but his voice had gone faint; he was immaterial now, incidental, and they all knew it.

Yackle took hold of Brrr’s paw. She regarded him up and down with real eyes, which were, Brrr saw, adamantine blue and cloudless. “You’re not quite as I’d pictured,” she admitted. “A little baggy here and there. Still. Are you ready?”

Brrr was fairly certain Yackle wasn’t the angel of death come to take him to the breast of Lurlina. Still, he raised an eyebrow enquiringly, his underarms dampening. “I don’t think I’m quite that ready,” he replied. “I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and all, but hey. There’s always next time.”

Yackle laughed. “You idiot. Pay attention. Are you ready to choose, I mean. You came hoping to find information about the Grimmerie, and instead you stumbled upon the actual article. If you take this dangerous volume into custody, you might have redeemed yourself. There’s rehabilitation in this for you—or so you’ll be tempted to hope.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “a different choice. A lot less fruitful for you, perhaps. Nothing certain about the outcome.”

But that was the whole point. There is never anything certain about the outcome of a child’s life. She was reminding him about the child of Liir and Candle. Elphaba’s granddaughter, just possibly.

“You think you came up from the crypt to tell me about—” But in the presence of either the dwarf or the tiktok oracle, Brrr kept himself from saying the child. Yackle saw that he wasn’t going to give their secret away, at least not yet, and she grinned at him like a saucy schoolgirl. “But,” he continued, “you didn’t come to tell me anything. You were sensing the approach of the Grimmerie, that’s all. That’s what you were doing.”

“Never mind about why I jumped out of my sarcophagus. That’s ancient history now!” she said gaily. “Anyway, whoever insisted that two things can’t be true at once?” She put her old pale hand on the kinky hair of his chest where a medal for courage might have hung, did he still own one. “Make the right choice, Sir Brrr, when your time to choose arrives,” she said. “Oh, liberty at last!” Hiking her white sheets to her shoulder, she tottered forward with the tentative steps of the truly elderly. It was as if the return of her eyesight had reminded her how very infirm she must be. Ilianora moved beside her, ready to catch her by the elbow should she fall, but Yackle managed to keep her balance for the five steps left to her, from the crowd of Ozians to the threshold of the Grimmerie.

“Don’t you dare touch that book,” said Mr. Boss, the buzz of a fly, no more.

Brrr watched as Yackle reached out for the cover. It was made of a material he couldn’t identify, something that had properties of leather and cloth both—the slick coolness of leather, the cross-grain of cloth. The color of the binding suggested light on water, as if the warm color was emanating from a depth inside the book.

The spine was set with jewels arranged in an arabesque—every color but emerald—and an iron lock to clasp the secrets tight. But the pin was freed from the staple, and the hasp lay back upon its hinges.

Yackle lifted the cover and turned it over. The book didn’t allow any page to slide open; it turned itself to one page, a third of the way from the front, as if, for right now, the book consisted only of that page, and the other pages were glued shut.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” asked Brrr.

“No one knows quite the shape of their death,” said Yackle, “but I daresay I will recognize it when I see it.”

The paper had a purple aspect at first, and the writing thereupon was silver. As they looked—they were all looking by now, even Shadowpuppet leaning forward, even Mr. Boss, craning from where he lay pinned on the ground—the color subsided to a taciturn peach, not unlike the tanned hide of a pig. The ink seemed less silver and more black. Almost as if the book were trying to resemble other books, as much as it could.

“Ah,” said Brrr. “Look, can you see that? A watermark.”

“What is a watermark?” asked Ilianora.

“Something I learned about in my years as a trader of etchings and drawings. A watermark is a kind of a ghost coin imprinted when the page is made by the artisan. A trademark. The emblem is an embossing done when the paper hasn’t fully set; it presses the fiber tighter there, so when the page is held up to light, the image emerges. I never knew a watermark you could see without a light behind it, though.”

“This book has its own light,” said Yackle.

Brrr rested his chin on her old shoulder; she was strong enough to take it. Absentmindedly with one hand, while trying to read, she reached up and scratched just below his lips, exactly where he would have liked it best had anyone ever done this before.

Most of the text on the page shrank and moved off to one side, like dancers in the wings awaiting their next entrance. The watermark grew a little larger, as if to be seen all the better. Brrr could make out a form, though not the foreign alphabet that spelled a single foreign word beneath the watermark.

“Is that a symbol we’re likely to recognize?” asked Ilianora.

“Is it lightning?” suggested one of the boys looking on.

“A crow with the legs of a stork,” offered Brrr.

“That’s a pretty good description of Elphaba,” said Yackle.

“Is this her story?” asked Brrr. “Or is it her book?”

“It was her book for a time,” said Mr. Boss. The dragon claw had let him sit up, at least. “Or in her keep, I should say; the Grimmerie was no more hers than it is mine. The book belongs to a magician from some distant land, the one who brought it to Oz for safekeeping.”

“Who do you mean?” asked Brrr. “Do you mean the Wizard of Oz?”

“Please,” replied Mr. Boss. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

“The Wizard of Oz had no power,” snapped Shadowpuppet. “That’s common knowledge by now. No, Our Glorious Wizard came to Oz looking for this book, don’t you know? And ever since Elphaba died and the book disappeared, everyone else has been looking for it.”

“You, too,” said Brrr, surmising. “Your directive was to keep an eye on me in case I actually found out something and decided not to report it.”

“Oh, you’d never do that,” said Shadowpuppet mockingly. “Not Sir Brrr, the most reliable agent we have in the field. Sir Brrr of such famously lofty principles. Heaven forfend. Besides, I’d never betray you. You’ve been such entertainment. Such a lark.”

Yackle laid her hands on the paper, palms down, as if reading the heat on the page.

“How long have you been here, guarding the book?” asked Brrr.

“You still taking notes?” replied Mr. Boss. “Oh, on and off, oh, eighty years maybe? You lose track when it’s such a gas.”

“Even before the Wizard of Oz first arrived in the Emerald City? But why?”

The dwarf replied, “That’s a tale for another time, my comings and goings. I thought you were curious about the history of Our Miss Yackle. Which is all in the Grimmerie. Haven’t you seen it now?”

“Put it together for me.”

“The Clock told it to you. You saw the story of the birth of Yackle—from the pages of this magic book. She was drawn out of here to do a job: to be vigilant over Elphaba’s life. Not to interfere, not to intervene: to be a witness. That was enough.”

“That’s all I did,” said Yackle, talking as much to herself as to them. They had to strain to make it out. “All I ever did. I was a handmaiden. Rather long in the tooth to be a maiden, but it takes all kinds to make a world. I did give Elphaba the broom; I’ll accept that much credit. But I didn’t know what she could do with it. Nor did I know why she was the watermark in my life: the deep hidden thing around which my weird existence revolved. I only knew what I was compelled to do. And I know what I’m compelled to do now.”

“You take a lot upon yourself to guard this book,” said Brrr to the sergeant-at-hand. “If the Emerald City gets hold of you, you’re history.”

The dwarf shrugged. “I have a job and I do it: I protect the book. The Clock of the Time Dragon was magicked up as a kind of reliquary for the Grimmerie when it’s needed. I don’t ask questions. Elphaba seemed to be the one most capable of reading it correctly. Given her bloodlines, maybe, her natural talents. And she found the book where the magician left it, and used it, and showed the Wizard of Oz a page of it. He hunted for it ever after, but when Elphaba disappeared and the Wizard abdicated, the book ended up with her erstwhile friend Galinda. Sorry: Glinda, onetime Throne Minister of Oz. Our Miss Glinda returned the Grimmerie to me when I was passing by her country estate, Mockbeggar Hall, some years ago. It’s been safe here ever since, until today, when the Clock determined it was time to reveal its treasure to you bozos.”

“Yackle,” said Ilianora. “Yackle, what are you doing?” and Brrr realized he had been watching the dwarf, and clutching the Cat, keeping the troublesome elements under control, his back turned from Yackle and the Grimmerie.

She had slipped her winding robe off her shoulders like a shawl.

While she had been speaking, the watermark had returned to fill both pages of the open volume, and the page had gone from ivory to pale spring green. It looked more like Elphaba than ever, with her sharp nose and slightly crooked hat, and her zigzaggy bony form at the ready for flight, for battle against some treachery they couldn’t see just off the margins of the page.

The lines of the watermark glowed a yellower, fiery green, and the shape of the Witch contorted, as if working out a kink in her lower back.

Then the watermark rose off the page. It did not flesh out, like a suddenly luminous puppet or like a radioactive green parrot, but retained its drawn outline, its crude symbolic origin. It reared, it rose in a sweep of cape, it lifted like a green flower from a bed of words and red roses on a black fringed background. It was not Elphaba; she was not here; her time was over and done. It was the mark of Elphaba, though, vivid as ever. Their eyes stung, to see her again, or for the first time.

“Of course,” said Yackle, turning for a moment and glowing at Ilianora. “You have a brother. Of course you must go on! Because history can’t be vexed by small players; don’t you know?” She looked at Ilianora, at the dwarf, at Brrr, with an expression too complex, too pungent to understand. “Don’t you understand? She’s coming back—”

Brrr thought, for an instant—but what does she mean? In her weird seeingness, can Yackle picture Muhlama H’aekeem? Or does she mean the lost Ozma, or Elphaba, who melted away, or the fairy goddess Lurline, or the Kumbric Witch, or even Dorothy the interloper?

In any case, Yackle let her shroud slip to the floor, and from her naked, poxy back unfurled two capacious sails of feather and strut and papery light. Unused these dozens of years, they had lost none of their power to elevate. Yackle rose in the air in the courtyard of the House of Saint Glinda, her calloused heels showing the dirt and detritus of the cobbles, the skin around her shanks and buttocks sagging, bruised, vivid with ancient life. She said nothing more, but as the watermark of Elphaba began to sink back again to flatness on its page, Yackle followed it. She disappeared into the Grimmerie like a diver entering the deepest parts of a magic pool: slow-motion, full of grace, the toes in the gleam; casting off wretchedness, casting off the shroud. She folded magically into the Grimmerie, her third and fourth dimensions laddering accordion-like into the secret unnamed dimensions of a page. They all leaned over the great book to watch.

But she wasn’t fully done. Just before her arms and wing tips and head lost their material shapeliness, her hands twisted in the air. Brrr, who had met Yackle only twenty-four hours earlier, knew her well enough to guess what she intended. He reached over the book as one will lean over a precipice. Shadowpuppet-Malky began to squirm and yowl, but Ilianora grabbed its rear paws. Together she and Brrr delivered the glass Cat to Yackle’s hands. Only a vowel-less snarl was left behind as Yackle’s wing tips and wrists and tendrils of hair and the glimmer of hostage Cat disappeared into the pages of the Grimmerie.

“I’ve sworn off taking sides,” said Ilianora fiercely, “but good riddance to bad rubbish. I hope it finds itself in some sort of a pit of hounds in there.”

“That hissy little piece of work won’t do any more damage while penned in that book,” said Brrr. “Just hope it doesn’t try to claw its way out from the inside.”

They peered to see if Shadowpuppet was pictured on the page, or even if Yackle was, but the letters had come crowding back. They’d enlarged, and begun to superimpose themselves yeastily, one upon the other, so that only the spaces between the loops of printed letters showed like dwindling dots of light. Then the words darkened entirely and screened the paper with darkness. In the sea of black remained the watermark, faintly, vernally. No other image, no Yackle, no Shadowpuppet. No prophecies about Liir and Candle and their daughter.

The Grimmerie shut itself; the Clock withdrew the book into a hidden chamber, the dragon up top sighed and clanked rather noisily to a finish—Show’s over, folks—and they were out of the realm of mystery, and back in the realm of war.

• 5 •

THOUGH THEY all stood for a minute, in between moments, as a light wind pushed into the courtyard, and a smell of smoke and greenery strengthened. It whisked their spirits in silence; they felt upbraided by possibility; they felt taunted by the aesthetic appeal of justice. They felt hungry, and several of them felt horny, and the light flickered as a flock of birds coursed against the sun—too high to be identified, too high to be heard, but not too high to be influential.

• 6 •

WHILE BRRR was halted among this latest grab bag of companions, he was alone in the anointment of a quickly stinging grief. A hollow feeling, before forgetfulness rushed in to blanket and anaesthetise. Yackle had not been his antagonist after all. He’d learned this just well enough to feel the ache of her departure. Even the thorn in the paw makes sense while it stabs, and she was both thorn and balm.

His reverie was broken by the sound of footsteps. The Lion looked up to see Sister Apothecaire stumping along a rampart. She brandished a ring of keys and was blathering nearly incoherently.

“Slow down,” called Brrr. “Take a breath. You’ll pop a button or burst a spleen.”

“They’re advancing, oh sweet Lurline,” said Sister Apothecaire, in her panic reverting to pagan sensibilities, for Lurline had come from history and gone into myth long before faith in the Unnamed God had called maunts to live in community and service. So long ago that no one could ascertain the chronology of it.

“While we were in Council, and we left you locked up—oh—you’re out”—she noticed—“the Munchkinlanders have come up with a startling crew of backup patriots! Lord bless ’em! But they’re converging from the east, and it looks as if a battle will indeed be joined right here, on the very skirts of our precincts. And the good sisters at last have fled, that toady Sister Doctor leading the gallop! I said I would hurry back to release you, once we had remembered about you, and no one protested. Who wants a blot like that in our copybooks? So here I am. Consider yourself released. Shoo.” She waved her hands. “Where’s Mother Yackle?”

“Safe,” said Brrr.

“You’re a brave woman, good Sister,” said Ilianora, starting to help the dwarf strap up doors, slotting the stages like drawers back into the bureau of clockwork.

“Brave or good, coward or bad, I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said. “Get out while you can. I have the keys and there is no governing Council or Superior Maunt to stop me. I’m going to open the doors to the Munchkinlanders and give them a fighting chance. Unless you want to be caught in here with them, take to your heels, at once!”

“Which way should we go?” asked the dwarf. “We have precious cargo.”

Do we? wondered Brrr. He supposed that Mr. Boss was referring to the Clock of the Time Dragon and the Grimmerie. All the rest of them—Ilianora among them, even the dwarf himself—were more or less dispensable.

Sister Apothecaire replied, “I don’t know which army would trouble you least. It’s your choice. Munchkinlanders are sweeping up in a shallow curve from the eastern edges of the oakhair forest. It’s a counterattack in advance of the arrival of the Emperor’s armies. We maunts evacuated to the northwest—deeper into Gillikin, whether I like it or not. The pincers are closing exactly upon this troubled house: It stands precisely where the East and the West will meet and have their bloodshed, and in a matter of quarter hours, not days. I have sung my alarum to you, now fly if you will; be it on your own heads if you won’t. I must be at the ready. I will offer flame and pitch from the ramparts to any EC soldiers, or sanctuary should the Munchkinlanders get here first.”

“You can’t rely on virtue and vice being so evenly distributed,” said Ilianora.

“I am not talking about vice. I’m talking about clan.”

A pride of maunts, thought Brrr, is rather a self-made thing, isn’t it? And temporary, if it could dissolve under pressure of war into the clans from which its members originated. Still, there is no law that says all decent things must be permanent. Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Having delivered her ultimatum, Sister Apothecaire turned, but she was moving so fast that she couldn’t stop herself. Her foot twisted on a crack between the stones of the staircase, and she tumbled nine or ten feet to the ground, and there she lay still.

“She won’t be dead,” said Ilianora, but Brrr thought her statement more hope than prognosis.

The dwarf wouldn’t wait for a report. “Leave the little old fussbody for her countrymen to tend. We’ll be off and away with the fairies, as advised.” He barked orders to the acolytes to withdraw the bars from the main gate, and then to position themselves for flight.

Four boys put themselves between the shafts of the cart, and the others went behind to push. But Ilianora said, “Mr. Boss, we can’t be sure the Munchkinlanders will arrive first. If the Emerald City Messiars beat them to it, this maunt may be in danger. Lay her on the coachman’s seat, and we’ll study her situation when we can pause for a moment to breathe. Brrr, help me.”

“Oh, my Lady Lovely, are you planning to leave us? Are you nominating a successor? Or are we abducting a goodwife for me in my ripe old age? Such a cranky one! And won’t she be surprised when she wakes up. Sure, take her along.”

Brrr and Ilianora lifted Sister Apothecaire, who was heavy for one so small, and they settled her in a supine position. Her eyes were closed but, as far as Brrr could tell, she appeared to be breathing.

“Well?” said the dwarf, scrambling onto the buckboard, “you’re coming with us, Cowardly Lion?”

“Is that an invitation or a prophecy?”

“I came to get you, didn’t I? That’s what the Clock told me to do.”

“You came and found me, true, but maybe my use to you was only as bait. To draw the Grimmerie to Yackle so she could take her leave. And where are you going anyway? Are you converted to Elphaba’s old cause, to see her rise like that before us?”

“Elphaba’s dead and gone,” said the dwarf equably enough. “We stay neutral, we keep our nosey noses clean, we take no sides, and we watch our backs. So linger here and stew about it as long as you like. Send us a postcard from whichever military prison you end up in. Whee-up, gee-up, knees-up, boys.”

Brrr was stuck with the conundrum. His job was done. He had been ordered to find out what had happened to the Grimmerie, and he had done far more than that: He had located the very book itself. Why let it escape? He might as well go with them, keep them in range. When the time was right he could choose to turn them over to the Emperor’s army. Once he felt ready to make that decision. The proper number of the dwarf’s slurs and indignities having mounted up to legitimize it.

Think of the glories that might accrue to Sir Brrr if he arrived back at the Emerald City with the Clock of the Time Dragon, and the Grimmerie safely interred within.

Think of the possibilities if he did not. He could fall in with the company of the Clock now, and perhaps—if they escaped to the West, along the banks of foul Kellswater—he could trip the brakes on the dreadful apparatus and drown the tiktok dragon and its bullying prophecies in the deadening water. Then no one could ever again use the Grimmerie to learn how to attack another soul.

“Make up your mind, and on your own head,” said the dwarf as the Clock of the Time Dragon began its slow creaky exodus into its future.

Ilianora turned to him and held out her hand. “Don’t be bashful. You would make a good companion for the company of the Clock. You know as much as anyone does, now, about where it came from and why we tend it.”

“I don’t know why you tend it,” said Brrr, but he flipped his notepad closed and pocketed it. “That’s beyond my brief to care about, Ilianora, so don’t spend your breath. Let’s get out of here.”

They passed under the portcullis. The broad stretch of the Shale Shallows lay to the west and south, wheat fields to the northwest. On the horizon they could see emerald green pennants of the advancing army, though from this distance the wind masked the sound of their snapping. Had the EC battalions paused to reconnoiter? Load their cannons? Was some general busily braying a rallying oration?

“Why did that otherworldly magician bring forth Yackle to oversee Elphaba?” Brrr asked Ilianora. “If his goal was merely to hide the Grimmerie, he didn’t need to use it to meddle in the affairs of this world. Look at the harm it’s done.”

“All my thoughts about history are sifted through my own warped fate. I have no conclusions,” she replied. “I can’t imagine why Elphaba deserved an angel to hover on her sidelines, even a paper angel, when the rest of us have to deal on our own with what prison and torture befalls us.”

“Prison and torture?”

“I’ll tell you one day. But not while you’re on the payroll of the Emerald City, no thank you. Not when the EC has supervised the extermination of my kin.”

“They’re not all dead,” said the Lion. “Liir may not be dead. And he went looking for you, all the way into Southstairs, I’m told.”

“There is that,” she said.

“We could leave the dwarf to his misadventures,” said the Lion. “We could try to find Liir.” So was he signing on to Yackle’s hopes? Was he being seduced by her wily trust in him? Or perhaps he was remembering Dorothy’s long-ago request of him, that he remain a companion to Liir. “I’m not looking for much,” he continued, shrugging. “Not for romance, believe me. You and I are well matched in our hesitations. But romance isn’t the only thing that draws two individuals together.”

They walked more quickly, almost trotting, to catch up to the Clock of the Time Dragon, but still they hung back far enough to speak privately for another moment or two. The steep walls of the Cloister of Saint Glinda fell behind them, a stone cloak they were escaping. As the armies drew within earshot of each other, the doors of this holy keep would be opened to all.

“I don’t want your company while you are in the employ of the Emerald City,” she said at last. “Not when they were behind the stationing of your Cat as a spy. Not when they were behind the deaths of my father and my mother and all my siblings. Everyone.”

“Everyone but Liir,” he said again, trying to convince her of something. “Liir waits for you somewhere. We can find him.”

“Have you other work you must finish?”

There were so many campaigns he had left midway, out of shame and confusion. One couldn’t fix much in one’s messy past, of course. Perhaps none of it at all. He couldn’t stitch up history so that Muhlama returned to him. He couldn’t go back and pull the trap off Jemmsy’s leg. He couldn’t apologize to Dorothy for his failing to warn her against the wickedness of the Wizard of Oz.

“It’s hard to know what to do,” he admitted. “I look at that great book of magic, and all the mechanisms set up to guard it from eyes that would steal its secrets. So much fate seems wound up around it, including whole lives—yours, Yackle’s, maybe Elphaba’s, maybe mine. With so much written in magic, how can we hope to become agents culpable for our own lives?”

Ilianora laughed. It was the first time she had laughed in years, guessed Brrr, for even she looked surprised to hear the sound coming out of her mouth.

“You and I think alike,” she said. “How improbable. But I don’t put much faith in a magic book. For everything that is revealed, more is concealed. What good is that Grimmerie going to do us? A magic book can ingest a troublesome old crone: so what? An army can’t disappear into a book of magic.”

“Fair enough,” he admitted. “Can it bring a single dead soldier back to life?”

Ilianora was busy unlatching a satchel slung over her shoulder. She reached inside and withdrew a small notebook. “Look,” she said, opening it up, fanning its blank pages in his direction. “This is a book, too, and precious little is written in it. It’s just as accurate as the Grimmerie, and maybe more so. Don’t be chagrined by its blankness. Be liberated instead. Go on, it’s yours. I have never written a word in it worth saving, so what I give you isn’t magic or the benefit of my thinking, but my belief in the blankness of our futures. Charms only go so far. Here, take it. Whether you write your own story in it or not, that’s your affair.”

He took it from her, mostly because she seemed eager to release it to him.

“A blank book for a court reporter to take depositions in?” Was he teasing her, just a little? He was.

“Take your own deposition,” she said.

He looked sideways at her. Her veil came down farther over her forehead, hiding even the tendrils of hair that had been blowing across her forehead, but her chin was up. Her eyes were dry and true.

“You go on ahead, then,” said the Lion. “We’ll find a future uncharted by any tiktok charm. We’ll make our luck as we go along. When I get back.”

“Why?” asked Ilianora. “What are you doing now? Where are you going?”

He wasn’t sure even what his answer would be; he waited to hear the words from his own mouth.

“The cottage there.” They were passing a small stone hut with a roof of oakhair thatch. A kitchen fire was still burning in the chimney, and beyond, in the light, a field of wheat rustled like gold on water. “One of the maunts mentioned that an elderly couple lives there, and their sons have gone off to war. The rain will come soon, and the wind, and an army will trample this field by tomorrow. I have learned enough about prophecy to say that for sure: Its future is drenched in blood. Let me harvest wheat before the catastrophe. I’ve done some agricultural work in my time. I can bring in that crop for them. Better they should have something to sell to the mill when the battle is history and their sons are dead. Better that wheat should go for bread. No? No?”

“Go, then,” said Ilianora. “If you must. Someone might as well chase the schoolchildren away from the lightning-wreathed hill.” She didn’t look at him, but drew her veil tighter, and covered her mouth with it. Was she covering a smile—did she believe he was lying, out to betray the company of the Clock?—or did she think him a hero, for having so far-fetched a notion of charity?

Brrr bounded forward and pulled from the back of the Clock of the Time Dragon the shroud that Yackle had left behind. She wouldn’t need it now. He dressed himself in it. Not a white flag of surrender but an advertisement of his neutrality. A plea to let him pass.

“Go,” she repeated. “Bread for the aged and the desolate. It’s as good a job as tending the book. Maybe a better one.”

“We’ll look for Liir,” he said. “When I come back.”

“We’ll look for Liir.” She was trying the idea on for size: the idea that someone might be left to her, after all her losses. Her color was high, making her own veils look like the glazed white paper in which Shiz merchants wrapped freshly cut flowers. Which made her a kind of bouquet. “You and I together? You’ll catch up to me?”

“I’ll catch up to you.”

“Is that a promise?” But she wouldn’t have heard an answer even if he had given one. The dwarf was braying out that the boys should push, push, put their backs into it. The dragon’s sallowwood limbs were creaking and its leather wings fell to flapping in the commotion, like a bellows swung about in a circle. A mile or two off, the music of war went tintinnabulary. Clarion horns of the hunt sounding, thunder of horse hoofs on stony ground, shatter of artillery, the clamorous ringing of swords.

Louder than any of that: men roaring like beasts.

The Lion turned into the wind, on the run once more. Neither an envoy of the EC, just now, nor a foot soldier of the underground opposition. Not even a neutral protector of oracular justice and magic hopes. He was a free agent, a rogue Lion, just as he’d started out in the Forest. A rogue Lion with the beginning of an education.

He headed for the sag-roofed, slipshod cottage. He had so little time. He would frighten the old couple there with an offer of help. It was neither the least nor the best he could ever do. It was simply an action that didn’t follow obviously from all his earlier campaigns. It was an exercise in refusing to barter. It was an exercise in refusing to play dead. And that was the only way he could imagine how to vex history.

A plodder, he watched his feet on the ground. Had he turned to look up, to review the map of Oz in the clouds, he’d have seen the first stain of battle smoke rising against the white. Lightning was waiting in the heavens, of course. Sooner or later, the lightning comes to us all. In the meantime, for a moment, the clouds had rearranged themselves, and he might have said that they looked like a flying creature, a shadow angel, all light and impermanence. But the clouds suggested this only to themselves, while he kept his head down, bent to his task.

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?

—George Herbert, “The Collar”

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank a coterie of early readers for giving such useful comments. Mistakes that remain are mine. The readers include David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates; and at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, Cassie Jones and Johnathan Wilber.

Douglas Smith’s devotion to the exercise of illustrating the Wicked Years is an inspiration to me to continue writing the books just to see what he’ll come up with.

FOUR YEARS AGO, to prepare for writing Son of a Witch, I reread Wicked for the first time in quite a while. I was startled to see something I’d never noticed before: a little plot device I had worked up to explain the mysterious presence in Elphaba’s life of the dwarf (in A Lion Among Men called Mr. Boss). I saw that his employment and employer bore similarity to aspects of Susan Cooper’s novel for children called The Dark Is Rising, which I’d read some fifteen years before writing Wicked. While I have had fun in the Wicked Years slipping sidelong references to books by L. Frank Baum and other inspiring fantasists, and to the famous MGM film of 1939, I didn’t intend my homages to descend into appropriation.

At once I wrote to Susan Cooper—a long-standing friend and colleague—and I apologized for the accidental theft. She answered with her usual clarity and courtesy, citing a remark by J. R. R. Tolkien (who had once been her teacher at Oxford) that reminds us of the differences, in ancient storytelling, between invention, diffusion, and inheritance: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.” Had she been possessed by a litigious mood, she might have gone on to quote: “There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.”

Credits

Illustrations by Douglas Smith

Map by Douglas Smith after the original by Gregory Maguire

Jacket and case illustrations by Douglas Smith

Dedication
for Cassie Jones

Epigraph

[He] … had a magical view of the work of words, that “it is hard to conceive of a nobler magic” than the prospect of a salvation which is not just for us.

—Michael Wood, in The London Review of Books, on Frank Kermode’s appraisal of I. A. Richards from Bury Place Papers

We believe the explanation we hear last. It’s one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, an end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storytelling ruse. The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn’t you say? Time never simplifies—it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken.

—Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Wicked Years: A Note to Readers

Charting the Wicked Years Chronologically

Maps: The City of Shiz, Gillikin; The Emerald City

Significant Families of Oz

A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz

Prologue: Out of Oz

I. To Call Winter upon Water

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

II. The Patchwork Conscience of Oz

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

III. The Chancel of the Ladyfish

1

2

3

4

5

6

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IV. The Judgment of Dorothy

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V. At St. Prowd’s

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VI. God’s Great-Niece

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VII. To Call the Lost Forward

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VIII. Somewhere

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Acknowledgments

Coda

Credits

THE WICKED YEARS

A Note to Readers

Our story so far:

Wicked begins with the birth of a green-skinned child, Elphaba Thropp—later known as the Wicked Witch of the West—and portrays her unlikely college friendship with Galinda Upland and her romance with Fiyero Tigelaar. The arriviste Wizard of Oz consolidates his power in the Emerald City and throughout Oz. Under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the East, Nessarose Thropp, Munchkinland secedes from Loyal Oz. The novel closes with the Matter of Dorothy, when Elphaba is thirty-eight and her son, Liir Thropp, is fourteen.

Son of a Witch tells the story of Liir’s life, revealed in flashbacks, while Elphaba’s brother Shell strengthens his position in the Emerald City, particularly against Munchkinland. Orphaned at fourteen, without guidance or patronage, Liir stumbles into the military, leads a raid against Quadlings, and goes AWOL, eventually heading a protest against his uncle Shell, now the Emperor of Oz. Son of a Witch concludes with the arrival of a child—a green-skinned daughter—born to Liir and Candle, a Quadling. Liir is about twenty-four.

A Lion Among Men refers to the Cowardly Lion, known as Brrr. His story is told alternately with that of the ancient oracle, Yackle. Brrr muses on his part in the Matter of Dorothy, his rise and fall in society, and his plea-bargaining with Emerald City magistrates to avoid a prison sentence. Hunting for the mysterious oracle Yackle, he locates the lost Grimmerie in the bargain. At novel’s end, a skirmish between rabble-rousing Munchkinlanders and the Emerald City military threatens to ignite into full-scale civil war. Caught in the crosshairs, Brrr escapes with the troupe that accompanies the Clock of the Time Dragon.

Out of Oz begins a few months after the close of A Lion Among Men.

Charting the Wicked Years Chronologically

“Oh, as to time, well, no one in Oz ticks off tocks very systematically.” Each dot or upstroke represents a year … more or less.

WICKED

OUT OF OZ

The story begins six months after the end of A LION AMONG MEN.

Liir is about 30; Rain is 7 or 8, give or take.

Maps

THE CITY OF SHIZ, GILLIKIN

THE EMERALD CITY

Significant Families of Oz

Key

= marriage    (~) romance sans wedlock

THE HOUSE OF OZMA

—The Emerald City—

THE THROPPS OF MUNCHKINLAND

—Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland—

THE UPLANDS OF GILLIKIN

—Frottica in northwest Gillikin—

THE TIGELAARS, ARJIKI CHIEFTAINS OF THE VINKUS

—Kiamo Ko on the slopes of Knobblehead Pike, the Great Kells of the Vinkus—

A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz

Augmented with notes about selected incidents of interest to students of modern history.

THE OZMA YEARS

•   The matrilineal House of Ozma established.

The Ozma line descends from a Gillikinese clan. The Ozma line claims legitimacy through a purported divine relationship with Lurlina, fabled creatrix of Oz. Depending on the argument, historians recognize between forty and fifty legitimate Ozmas and their regents.

•   The last Ozma, Ozma Tippetarius, is born of Ozma the Bilious.

Ozma the Bilious expires through an accident involving rat poisoning in the risotto. Her consort, Pastorius, becomes Ozma Regent during the minority of Ozma Tippetarius.

•   Pastorius rules over central Oz.

The Ozma Regent renames the hamlet known as Nubbly Meadows, near the ancient burial ground of Open Tombs, as the Emerald City (EC). Declares the EC as the capital of united Oz.

•   The Great Drought begins.

•   By balloon, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs arrives in the Emerald City.

Diggs successfully mounts a Palace coup d’état. Pastorius is murdered, and the infant Ozma Tippetarius disappears. She is presumed slain, perhaps in Southstairs Prison (built over the Open Tombs), though an evergreen rumor claims she lies enchanted in a cave awaiting her return at Oz’s darkest hour. Diggs becomes known as the Wizard of Oz.

THE WIZARDIC YEARS

•   The Emerald City renovation is completed.

•   The Wizard of Oz orders construction of the Yellow Brick Road.

This serves as a highway for the armies of the EC and aids in the collection of local taxes from previously independent populations, especially in Quadling Country and on the eastern flanks of the Great Kells of the Vinkus.

•   Animal Adverse laws enacted. (The “Animal Courtesy” acts.)

Social unrest deriving from the Great Drought promotes an atmosphere of scapegoating and hysterical patriotism.

•   Munchkinland secedes from Loyal Oz.

Under the rule of Nessarose Thropp, Eminence of Munchkinland, the secession of the Free State of Munchkinland is conducted with a minimum of bloodshed. The “breadbasket of Oz” maintains an uneasy trade relationship with Loyal Oz.

•   Nessarose Thropp dies.

The arrival in Oz of a visitor, a Dorothy Gale of Canzizz (sometimes transcribed as “Canzuss” or “Kanziz”), results in the death of the Eminence. Though rumor suggests her sister, Elphaba Thropp, will return to Munchkinland to mount a more aggressive campaign against the EC than Nessarose ever did, such predictions prove baseless.

•   Elphaba Thropp is vanquished.

The so-called Wicked Witch of the West, one-time agitator, now recluse, is subdued by the powerful Dorothy Gale.

•   The Wizard of Oz abdicates the throne.

The Wizard has held power for almost forty years. The causes of his departure remain a matter of speculation.

THE TWIN INTERREGNUMS

•   Lady Glinda Chuffrey, neé Upland, is briefly installed as Throne Minister.

The Animal Adverse laws are revoked, to little effect; Animals remain skeptical of their chances of being reintegrated into human society in Oz. Many refuse to return to Loyal Oz from Munchkinland, where they have taken refuge.

•   The Scarecrow replaces Glinda as Throne Minister.

The Scarecrow, a figure of uncertain provenance, is often assumed to have been installed as Throne Minister by Palace apparatchiks sympathetic to Shell Thropp, the youngest of the three Thropp siblings. The Scarecrow proves a weak figurehead—a straw man, figuratively as well as literally—though his elevation allows Shell Thropp to avoid having to challenge the popular Lady Glinda for the leadership. The Scarecrow’s whereabouts following the end of his abbreviated realm are never revealed.

Some historians hold that the Scarecrow serving as Throne Minister is not the same Scarecrow who befriended Dorothy, though this assertion is based on circumstantial evidence.

THE EMPEROR APOSTLE

•   Shell Thropp installs himself as Throne Minister of Oz.

Shell claims rights of ascendancy through an adroit manipulation of Palace power brokers. He styles himself an “Emperor Apostle” by dint of formidable piety and sacred election.

In retaliation for a sortie into Loyal Oz by a band of Munchkinlander guerrillas, Shell authorizes the invasion of Munchkinland for the purpose of appropriating Restwater, Oz’s biggest lake.

PROLOGUE

Out of Oz

It would take Dorothy Gale and her relatives three days to reach the mountains by train from Kansas, the conductor told them.

No matter what the schoolteacher had said about Galileo, Copernicus, and those other spoilsports, any cockamamie theory that the world was round remained refuted by the geometrical instrument of a rattling train applied to the spare facts of a prairie. Dorothy watched eagles and hawks careering too high to cast shadows, she watched the returning larks and bluebirds, and she wondered what they knew about the shape of the world, and if they would ever tell her.

Then the Rockies began to ice up along the spring horizon beyond the shoot-’em-up town of Denver. Uncle Henry had never seen such a sight. He declared himself bewilligered at their height. “They surely do remind me of the Great Kells of Oz,” agreed Dorothy, “though the Kells looked less bossy, somehow.” She tried to ignore the glance Uncle Henry shared with Aunt Em.

Some of the passes being snowed over, even in early April, the train made slower progress than the timetable had promised. Aunt Em fretted that their hotel room would be given away. Uncle Henry replied with an attempt at savoir faire. “I’ll wire ahead at the next opportunity, Em. Hush yourself and enjoy the nation.”

What a charade, that they were accustomed to taking fancified holidays. They had little extra money for emergencies, Dorothy knew. They were spending their savings.

The train chuffed along valleys noisy with rushing waters, inched across trestles as if testing them for purchase. It lollygagged up slopes. One cloudy afternoon it maneuvered through so many switchbacks that the travelers lost all notion of east and west. In her seat, Dorothy hummed a little. Once she thought she saw a castle on a ridge, but it was only a tricky rock formation.

“But I never before saw a rock that looked like a castle,” said Aunt Em brightly.

You never saw a castle, thought Dorothy, and tried not to be disappointed.

They worried their way through Nevada and its brownish springtime and at last came down into Californ-eye-ay through a napland of orchards and vineyards. When the train paused outside Sacramento to take on tinder, Dorothy saw a white peacock strutting along next to the tracks like a general surveying his troops. It paused at her window and fanned out its impossible stitchery. She could have sworn it was a White Peacock and that it would speak. But Toto began to yap out the open window, and the Bird kept its own counsel.

Finally the train shrugged and chuffed into San Francisco, a city so big and filthy and confounding that Uncle Henry dared to murmur, “This beats your old Emerald City, I’ll warrant.”

“Henry,” said his wife. “Pursed lips are kind lips.”

They found their hotel. The clerk was nice enough, a clean young man whose lips weren’t so much pursed as rubied. He forgave their delay but could no longer supply them with a room only one flight up, as they’d been promised. Aunt Em refused to try Mr. Otis’s hydraulic elevator so they had to climb five flights. They carried their own bags to avoid having to tip.

That night they ate Kaiser rolls they’d bought at the train station. All the next day they stayed in the hotel’s penitentially severe room, as Aunt Em recovered from the taxation to her nerves caused by the swaying of railway cars. She could not tolerate being left alone in a hotel chamber on their first day, not when it felt as if the whole building was rocking and bucking as the train had done.

Dorothy was eager to go and see what she could see, but they wouldn’t let her walk out alone. “A city is not a prairie,” Aunt Em proclaimed through the damp washcloth laid from forehead to chin. “No place for a compromised girl without a scrap of city wits.”

The spring air wafting through the open window next morning revived Aunt Em. All these flights up, it smelled of lilacs and hair oil and horse manure and hot sourdough loaves. Encouraged, the flatlanders ventured outdoors. Dorothy carried Toto in a wicker basket, for old times’ sake. They strolled up to the carriage entrance of the famous Palace Hotel and pretended they were waiting for a friend so they could catch a glimpse of sinful excess. What an accomplished offhand manner they showed, sneaking sideways glances through the open doors at the potted ferns, the swags of rust-red velvet drapery, the polished doorknobs. Also the glinting necklaces and earrings and cuff links, and gentlemen’s shirts starched so clean it hurt the eye to look. “Smart enough,” said Aunt Em, “for suchlike who feel the need to preen in public.” She was agog and dismissive at once, thought Dorothy, a considerable achievement for a plain-minded woman.

“The Palace Hotel is all very well,” said Dorothy at lunch—a frankfurter and a sumptuous orange from a stall near Union Square—“but the Palace of the Emperor in the Emerald City is just as grand—”

“I shall be ill.” Aunt Em, going pale. “I shall be ill, Dorothy, if after all we have mortgaged on this expedition you insist on seeing San Francisco by comparing it to some imagined otherworld. I shall be quite, quite ill.”

“I mean nothing by it,” said Dorothy. “Please, I’ll be still. It’s true I’ve never seen anything like most of this.”

“The world is wonderful enough without your having to invent an alternative,” said Uncle Henry. A tired man by now, not a well man either, and stretched to put things baldly while there was time. “Who is going to take you in marriage, Dorothy, if you’ve already given yourself over to delusions and visions?”

“Snares of the wicked one.” Aunt Em, spitting an orange seed into the street. “We have been kind, Dorothy, and we have been patient. We have sat silent and we have spoken out. You must put the corrupting nightmare of Oz behind you. Close it behind a door and never speak of it again. Or you will find yourself locked within it. Alone. We aren’t going to live forever, and you must learn to manage in the real world.”

“I should imagine I’m too young to be thinking of marriage.”

“You are already sixteen,” snapped her aunt. “I was married at seventeen.”

Uncle Henry’s eyes glinted merrily and he mouthed across his wife’s head at Dorothy: Too young.

Dorothy knew they had her best interests at heart. And it was true that since her delivery from Oz six years ago, she had proved a rare creature, a freak of nature. Her uncle and aunt didn’t know what to make of her. When she had appeared on the horizon, crossing the prairie by foot—shoeless but clutching Toto—long enough after Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s home had been carried away that they’d built themselves a replacement—her return was reckoned a statistical impossibility. Who rides the winds in a twister and lives to tell about it? Though Kansans set store on the notion of revelation, they are skeptical when asked to accept any whole-cloth gospel not measurable by brass tacks they’ve walloped into the dry goods counter themselves. So upon her return, Dorothy had been greeted not as a ghost or an angel, neither blessed by the Lord nor saved by a secret pact she must have made with the Evil One. Just tetched, concluded the good folks of the district. Tetched in the big fat head.

The local schoolchildren who had often before given Dorothy a wide berth now made irrevocable their policy of shunning her. They were unanimous but wordless about it. They were after all Christians.

She’d learned to keep Oz to herself, more or less; of course things slipped out. But she didn’t want to be figured as peculiar. She’d taken up singing on the way home from the schoolhouse as a way to disguise the fact that no one would walk with her. And now that she was done with school, it seemed there were no neighbors who might tolerate her company long enough to find her marriageable. So Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were making this last-ditch effort to prove that the workaday world of the Lord God Almighty was plenty rich and wonderful enough to satisfy Dorothy’s curiosity for marvels. She didn’t need to keep inventing impossible nonsense. She keeps on yammering about that fever dream of Oz and she’ll be an old spinster with no one to warble to but the bones of Toto.

They rode cable cars. “Nothing like these in all of Oz!” said Dorothy as the cars bit their way upslope, tooth by tooth, and then plunged down.

They went to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Dorothy had never seen the ocean before; nor had Uncle Henry or Aunt Em. The man who sold them hanks of fried fish wrapped in twists of newspaper remarked that this wasn’t the ocean, just the bay. To see the ocean they’d need to go farther west, to the Presidio, or to Golden Gate Park.

For its prettier name, they headed to Golden Gate Park. A policeman told them that when the long swell of greenery was being laid out, the city hadn’t yet expanded west past Divisadero Street, and anything beyond had been known by squatters and locals as the Outside Lands. “Oh?” said Dorothy, with brightening interest.

“That’s where you’ll find the ocean.”

They made their way to the edge of the continent first by carriage and then on foot, but the world’s edge proved disappointingly muffled in fog. The ocean was a sham. They could see no farther out into the supposed Pacific Ocean than they’d been able to look across the San Francisco Bay. And it was colder, a stiff wind tossing up briny air. The gulls keened, biblical prophets practicing jeremiad, knowing more than they would let on. Aunt Em caught a sniffle, so they couldn’t stay and wait to see if the fog would lift. The clammy saltiness disagreed with her—and she with it, she did declare.

That night, as Aunt Em was repairing to her bed, Uncle Henry wheedled from his wife a permission to take Dorothy out on the town. He hired a trap to bring Dorothy into a district called Chinatown. Dorothy wanted so badly to tell Uncle Henry that this is what it felt like to be in Oz—this otherness, this weird but convincing reality—that she bit a bruise in the side of her mouth, trying not to speak. Toto looked wary, as if the residents on doorsills were sizing him up to see how many Chinese relatives he might feed.

After a number of false starts, Uncle Henry located a restaurant where other God-fearing white people seemed comfortable entering, and a few were even safely leaving, which was a good sign. So they went inside.

A staid woman at a counter nodded at them. Her unmoving features looked carved in beef aspic. When she slipped off her stool to show Henry to a table, Dorothy saw that she was tiny. Tiny and stout and wrapped round with shiny red silk. She only came up to Dorothy’s lowest rib. To prevent her from saying A Munchkin! Uncle Henry said to Dorothy, with his eyes, No.

They ate a spicy, peculiar meal, very wet, full of moist grit. They wouldn’t know how to describe any of it to Aunt Em when they went back, and they were glad she wasn’t there. She would have swooned with the mystery of it. They liked it, though Uncle Henry chewed with the front of his lips clenched and the sides puckered open for air in case he changed his mind midbite.

“Where are these people from? Why are they here?” asked Dorothy in a whisper, pushing a chopstick into her basket so Toto could have something to gnaw.

“They’re furriners from China, which is across the world,” said Uncle Henry. “They came to build the railroad that we traveled on, and they stayed to open laundries and restaurants.”

“Why didn’t they ever come to Kansas?”

“They must be too smart.”

They both laughed at this, turning red. Dorothy could see that Uncle Henry loved her. It wasn’t his fault she seemed out of her mind.

“Uncle Henry,” said Dorothy before they had finished the grassy tea, “I know you’ve nearly poorhoused yourself to bring me here. I know why you and Aunt Em have done it. You want to show me the world and distract me with reality. It’s a good strategy and a mighty sound ambition. I shall try to repay you for your kindness to me by keeping my mouth shut about Oz.”

“Your sainted Aunt Em chooses to keep mum about it, Dorothy, but she knows you’ve had an experience few can match. However you managed to survive from the time the twister snatched our house away until the time you returned from the wilderness—whatever you scrabbled to find and eat that might have caused this weakness in your head—you nonetheless did manage. No one back home expected we’d ever find your corpse, let alone meet up again with your cheery optimistic self. You’re some pioneer, Dorothy. Every minute of your life is its own real miracle. Don’t deny it by fastening upon the temptation of some tomfoolery.”

She chose her words carefully. “It’s just that it’s all so clear in my mind.”

“A mind is something a young lady from Kansas learns to keep private.”

As they began to pile up their plates, the Munchkin Chinee—that is, the little bowing woman in her silks and satins—scurried to interrupt them, and she brought them each a pastry like a crumpled seedpod. When Uncle Henry and Dorothy looked dubious, she showed them how to crack one open. The fragments tasted like Aunt Em’s biscuits, dry and without savor. Inside, how droll: a scrap of paper in each one.

Marks in a funny squarish language on one side, letters in English on the other.

By the red light of the Chinese lantern leering over their table, Uncle Henry worked to decipher his secret message. His book learning had been scant. “Mid pleasure and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” he read. “John Howard Payne.”

“Pain is right,” said Dorothy. “Meaning no disrespect, Uncle Henry.”

“He has a point, though, Dorothy. Be it ever so humble, and we have the humble part covered good enough, there’s no place like home. Now you read yours.”

“My mind to me a kingdom is, Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That Earth affords or grows by kind. Sir Edward Dyer.”

“Dire is right,” said Uncle Henry.

The hobbled, squinch-eyed woman in red saw them through the beaded curtains toward the street, but at the lacquered door she grabbed Dorothy’s sleeve. “For you,” she said and handed Dorothy a tiny bamboo cage. Inside was a cricket. “For ruck. Cricket for ruck.”

Why do I need luck? Dorothy thought she’d spoken to herself but the woman answered as if she’d spoken aloud. (Maybe she had. Maybe she was dotty, a dodo, like the children had called her. Dotty Dorothy. Dorothy Dodo.)

“You on journey going,” said the old woman, though whether this was an observation, a prophecy, or a swift good-bye, Dorothy couldn’t tell.

Distastefully Dorothy fingered the little cage. The locusts of Kansas had made her dubious about crickets. Still, the little twiglet was alive, for it bounced against its straw-colored bars. It didn’t sing. “I don’t believe animals should be in cages,” she said to Uncle Henry.

“People neither,” he answered, almost by rote. His one-note message. “Don’t cage yourself in your fantasticals, girl. Before it’s too late, get your mind out of Oz, or you’ll be sorry.”

“I take your point, Uncle Henry. I’ve taken it for some time now.”

“You’re welcome.” He put his hand on his rib and breathed through the pain for a moment.

They walked down the street in silence, under a magnificently carved and painted gateway that spanned the street. Electrification had come to San Francisco and the granite of the buildings glittered as if crystals of snow were salted into the stone. It seemed a nonsense-day and a half-night at the same time.

Maybe Uncle Henry was right. Maybe there was enough in this world to make her forget Oz. But was that the right motivation for marrying a Kansas farmer, assuming she could land one?

Only, she supposed, if he was the right farmer.

At the hotel she begged Uncle Henry that they ride the lift up to their floor. “Your Auntie Em wouldn’t approve, fretting for our safety,” he replied. “Whether she’s around to notice or not, I never behave as she’d disagree with, in honor of her.”

What a set of stairs to walk up, she thought.

But when they reached the fifth floor, he winked at her and kept going. Three, four more flights. She followed wordlessly. At the top level they found a door. It opened easily enough to reveal to them a glowing cityscape. The canyons between buildings were running with light and sound. On the electric blue darkness, all around Dorothy and Uncle Henry, hung the illuminated windows of people in rooms. A museum of their living lives. Golden squares and rectangles. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “no fibbing—it’s better than the Emerald City! But where is the ocean? We’re so high. Can we see it?”

They worked out which direction to look. This late at night there was nothing except for darkness. “That empty place without lights,” said Uncle Henry. “It must be there, though you can’t see it.”

“Some say that about … other places,” she replied, but not harshly. “Beyond the ocean, what’s there?”

“The land of the Japanee and the Chinee. A whole society of them, all talking in that singy-song way they got.”

“And the ocean.” She could hardly bear it. “What’s it like?”

“I never seen it yet, but tomorrow we can come back up here.”

She was lost that night, when she finally managed to sleep, in the raspy claws of dreams that wouldn’t declare themselves fully. The cricket chirped on one side of her and Uncle Henry wheezed in concert. As the first light weakened the blackness of sky, but long before dawn, Toto began to whine. “Hush, Auntie Em is feeling poorly after our long trip,” whispered Dorothy, but Toto needed to go outside. Dorothy hunched herself into her clothes and grabbed the cricket cage, and let herself out of the room, leaving the door open a crack so she could return without disturbing her worthy relatives.

It didn’t take long to find Toto a scrap of junk ground in which to do his business. Dorothy turned her head. Many of the lights were lowered now but there was a strange apprehensiveness to the street, like the setting of a stage in which a play was about to begin. The charcoal of the night decayed into a smokier shade, still dark but somehow more transparent. “Come on, we’ll be in six kinds of trouble if they find us out on the street alone,” said Dorothy. “Let’s go up.”

In the lobby she saw the elevator man asleep in a lounge chair, his head to one side and his little cap askew. In that funny high-waisted jacket he looked like a flying monkey she’d once known. How were they ever affording this, poor dear Henry and Em, late of the Kansas prairie? So frightened of her. So eager for an acceptable future. She would make it worth their while.

She stepped into the cage and pulled the door shut. The door was fretted, like sets of linked scissors, like the threads of an old apron if you scrub it too hard with lye. Connected to itself, but airy. There was a single control, as far as she could see. She gripped the brass handle and revolved it a full half turn, and the floor began to lift, with Dorothy and Toto and the cricket inside. She almost squealed, but she knew the merest sound might wake the elevator attendant, and she probably risked being put in jail for ambushing a lift and taking it on a joy ride.

The perforated room sailed up past the fifth floor, all the way to the ninth, which led to the roof. She remembered. She tiptoed from the elevator cabin and shouldered her way through the door, into the chill of dawn above the ocean.

In the few moments she’d been rising in the lift, the sky had lightened that much more. The effect was not so smoky, more pearlescent. The buildings at this hour seemed less defined by light. They looked like stone formations left behind after some unimaginable geologic event.

She could make out a tongue of sea beyond the buildings to the west. But no sound from this far away. No apparent motion. Only a lapidary expanse dimming and shading into the sky. No horizon line: just endlessness. Sea and sky inseparable.

Toto began to whimper and to jump around as if he wanted to leap from the ninth floor. “It’s not frightening, it isn’t,” she said, though she didn’t know whether she was trying to convince herself or the dog. “It’s just the ocean, and another world on the other side. You know all about that. You’re the best-traveled mutt in history, Toto. Stop your fussing! What are you fussing about?” The dog appeared to be going mad, running in circles around her and yipping in some sort of distress.

Dorothy set the cricket cage upon the stone barrier that kept people from falling off the flat roof. “You can come out,” she said to the cricket. “I make my own luck, you make yours. Nobody should live in a cage. Never surrender to that.”

The cricket emerged and rubbed some scratchy parts of itself together. Whether it leaped or whether the wind took it, Dorothy couldn’t say. The cricket guest was there one moment and gone the next.

“Safe landing,” she called lightly after it. “Oh, all right, Toto, stop that infernal fussing. The wind isn’t going to take you, too. Once in your life was enough.” She picked up the dog and went back into the building. The elevator was where she had left it, quivering at this height. She would ride it down to the fifth floor, and go in and rest next to her uncle and aunt. She had spied something of the ocean, some little hem of it. The globe was round. She could see there was another world beyond this one. That would have to do. Meanwhile, some corn-blind farmer, walled on four sides of his life by Superior Alfalfa, was waiting for her.

She began her descent. She passed the eighth floor and the seventh. About quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, the buildings of San Francisco started to shake.

To Call Winter upon Water

1.

One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tell, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green.

Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part.

The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn’t see over horizons of any sort. At a small clearing where (she later realized) a farmer’s cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass.

The mouse pelt was still soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and all, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk.

She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away.

It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret.

She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.

2.

Please,” said Miss Murth. “He won’t take no for an answer. It’s been an hour and a half.” She laid her palm on her bosom as if, thought Glinda, it were in danger of being noticed. Her fingers fluttered. Murth’s fingers were notched and rickety, like her teeth.

“There is no need to be afraid of men, Miss Murth.”

“It’s an imposition for you to be expected to receive visitors when you are not ‘at home,’ but these are trying times, Lady Glinda. You must hurry. And I can tell by the bars and braids upon his dress uniform that he is a commanding officer.”

“How commanding? Don’t answer that. At least he carries dress uniform into the field.” She worked with a brush and then plunged an ivory comb into her hair, buttressing a heap of it at the nape of her neck. Ah, hair. “This whole thing is vexing. When I was young and at school, Miss Murth—”

“You’re still young, Lady Glinda—”

“Compared to some. Don’t interrupt. How times have changed!—that a woman of position can be importuned almost at the doors of her boudoir. And without so much as a letter of introduction.”

“I know. Can I help you in any way…?”

Glinda picked up a small looking glass with a handle of rather fine design. She peeked at her face, her eyes, her lips—oh, the start of vertical pleats below the join of chin to neck; before long she would look like a concertina. But what could she do? Under the circumstances. A little more powder above the eyebrows, perhaps. At least she was younger than Miss Murth, who was hugging senility. “You may give me your appraisal, Miss Murth.”

“Quite acceptable, Lady Glinda. There aren’t many who could wear a sprigged foxille with such confidence … under these circumstances.”

“Considering we’re wallowing in a civil war, you mean? Don’t answer that. Show the unwelcome visitor to the pergola. I shall be down presently.”

“In any weather, you do us proud, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda said nothing more for the moment, just waved her hand. Miss Murth disappeared. Glinda continued to dally at her dressing table in order to buy time to think. Strategy had never been her strong suit. So far the time spent over her toilet had bought her precious little except for a manicure. Well, she could admire her cuticles after the chains were slapped on, if that was where this was heading.

She was affixing an earring when the door burst open and Miss Murth entered the room backward. “Sir, I protest, I do protest—Madame, I have protested—Sir, I insist!” He pushed her into a chair so hard that three top buttons of her respectable blouse popped and spun onto the floor. Several inches of Miss Murth’s private neck were exposed. She grabbed a pillow to conceal herself.

Poor little me, surrounded by the retinue I deserve, thought Glinda. She nodded at Cherrystone and waved to a tufted stool. He remained standing.

“I was told you were ready to see me,” said General Cherrystone.

“Well, I was almost ready to see you in the pergola, where thanks to the grapevines the light is less accusatory.” She finished putting on the second earring. “Still, we must move with the times. Miss Murth, if you have finished composing yourself? A little air, the window, such stifling… Excuse the atmosphere, sir. Ladies in their chambers and all that.”

“I was afraid I’d hear that you’d been spotted leaving through the servants’ entrance and taken into custody by my men. I wanted to spare you the indignity. I assumed that ninety minutes was enough for you to compose yourself, and I see I was right. You remain a captivating woman, Lady Glinda.”

“When I was the Throne Minister of Oz, that would have been a most impertinent remark. Still, I’m retired now, so thanks a lot. To what boysy sort of escapade do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“Don’t play the naïf; it doesn’t suit you any longer. I’m here to requisition Mockbeggar Hall.”

“But of course you’ll do nothing of the sort. You have no grounds and I am certain you have no authority. You will stay for elevenses though? Do.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that your name has come up for questioning in the Emerald City. For your refusal to evacuate the premises. Some call it seditious.”

She studied him before he spoke. It had been some years since their paths had crossed, and she had once been his boss. Had she treated him well? But what did that matter? Here he was. With a good head of hair; she admired that in any man past fifty. Though the gloss in his locks was gone, and the color was of dirty coins. He’d shaved. A missed stand of stubble under one ear betrayed the grey. Shaved—for her? Should she feel flattered? Curious: his eyes were no more guarded than they’d once been. That was how he had gotten ahead, she thought—oh, mercy, a moment of clarity, how unusual and piercing, but concentrate, what was that thought again?—Cherrystone had always seemed … approachable. Sanguine. Ordinary, cheery. Those peppery, bitten smiles, the self-deprecation. The shrugs. A pose like any other. Beware, Galinda, she said to herself, not realizing she was addressing herself with her childhood name.

“Sedition?” she ventured. “Bizarre, but you’re joking.”

He spoke in even tones, as if briefing a dull-witted client. “Lady Glinda. Loyal Oz has mounted an invasion of Munchkinland. We are at war. Under the circumstances, the Emerald City magistrates have found your refusal to leave Mockbeggar Hall and Munchkinland all but treasonous. You hardly need me to explain; the Emperor’s counsel has sent you petitions by diplomatic pouch, to which you have refused to respond.”

“I’m not much for correspondence. I could never choose the right stationery, rainbows or butterflies.”

“You make it impossible for anyone to mount a case in your favor. Even your supporters in the EC are flummoxed at your obstinacy. What’s your rationale? Lord Chuffrey, rest his soul, was from the capital, while you originate in Gillikin Country. You can claim no family roots here. Ergo, your insistence at residing in a state with which we are at war is tantamount to a betrayal of Loyal Oz.”

“Is that what determines one as a traitor these days? One’s address?”

“It makes no difference now. It’s my sad duty to inform you that you are under arrest. Still”—the good guy at work, she saw it—“you’re free to make a statement on record, as we have a witness in your lady-in-waiting. What do you call yourself? A rebel? Or a loyalist?”

“I call myself well bred, which means not talking politics in society.”

He gave a half-nod, though she couldn’t guess if it was acknowledgment of protocol or proof that he considered her borderline berserk. Still, he continued in a dogged manner. “You understand the thinking of the EC magistrates. You must. Mockbeggar Hall is in Munchkinland. And you haven’t been seen in the city in five years. You haven’t hosted a soirée in your house in Mennipin Square in too many seasons to count.”

“When one has become famous, one finds it harder to go out to the shops without being pestered by well-wishers and rabble. And really: Where would I go? The Emerald City? Please. I couldn’t step foot outside the front door in Mennipin Square without people flocking to me. It’s tiresome to have to … beam so. My face hurts.”

He looked as if he thought her quite the incapable liar.

Doggedly she went on. “I prefer the quiet life now. I look after my garden… I train the climbing roses, deadhead the pansies.” This was sounding feeble. “I like to arrange flowers.”

Their eyes both drifted to a milk jug on the table between them where a fistful of listing tulips, papery and translucent with age, had dropped a few browned petals. Sad, really. Condemning. She tried again. “In truth, I’ve been composing my memoirs, and the country is conducive to reflection, don’t you see.”

“But why have you parked yourself in a country home abroad instead of in Loyal Oz, from where the Arduennas and the Uplands hail?”

“Darling Cherrystone. Lord Chuffrey’s family had this house long before Munchkinland seceded—what, is it thirty years ago by now? And when I became Throne Minister, and this place remained accessible via the east-leading branch of the Yellow Brick Road, why shouldn’t I repair here? I could get back and forth to the capital with ease and safety.”

“You could have relocated. There are other great houses within a few days’ ride of the Palace.”

“But this house. It’s the real thing. Pallantine Revival, don’t you know. Without any of those tacky so-called improvements affixed with sticky tape and safety pins … no, it’s simply the best of its kind. You must have noticed the twice-etched pillars inlaid with strabbous onyx on either side of the south porch? In ranks of three? Genuine Parrith’s, I tell you, verified by the Parrith Society. He didn’t work in onyx anywhere else, not even in the Emerald City.”

“In fidelity to the nation, a patriot would pick up and move house…” His tone was ominous, as if he had forgotten to notice the south porch. The oaf.

“This house doesn’t move. Most don’t. Or are you referring to Dorothy?” she said coldly. “She moved house rather capably, as we all remember. Mercy, could she move house.”

“Always clever. But, Lady Glinda, you align yourself with the wrong sort if you do not step in line.”

“I didn’t draw this line, or any others. And if by ‘the wrong sort’ you are referring to the departed Thropp sisters, Nessarose and Elphaba, well, that’s tired business. They’ve been dead and gone, what, fifteen, sixteen years now.”

“I have little time for this; I’ve heard what I need. You have not declared yourself unequivocally patriotic. That’s now a matter of public record. But I warn you, Lady Glinda. There are borders one should not cross.”

“If Elphaba observed any border, she’d go out of her way to trespass against it. Or are we talking, obliquely, about social class? Have a brandy, it’s nearly noonday. Miss Murth, are you composed enough to decant something for us?”

Cherrystone said, “I must decline. There is much to arrange. You have been served notice of detention at home. I am taking over Mockbeggar Hall as my headquarters.”

Glinda sat forward and gripped the arms of her chair, though her voice remained casual. “I would do the same were I you, I suppose. It isn’t often that a boy of your humble beginnings gets to lodge in a jewel box like this. Will you be a honey, though, and do mind your bloody boots when it comes to the sofas?”

His boots shone like ice, of course.

“And where will you expect me to lodge?” she continued in a stiffer voice. “Do you intend to plunge me and my staff into some oubliette?”

“You may maintain your private apartments and you won’t be disturbed. I am afraid we shall have to dismiss your staff.”

She gave a laugh. “I don’t do without staff. Sir.” Her refusing to use his military title was intended as an insult, and she watched it land.

“A skeletal company then. Two, three.”

“A dozen. And the departing staff will need guarantee of safe passage through the armies that seem”—she indicated the window—“to be wreaking havoc in the hydrangeas.”

“Please submit a list of those who will remain so we can have them vetted.”

He crossed his long legs, as if making bivouac in some forest glade. The nerve.

“I mean now,” he added.

“Oh, my goodness, military life is so brusque. I had quite forgotten. Have you forgotten, Commander Cherrystone, that in my station—”

“General. General Cherrystone, not Commander.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon.” Could he tell she was having him on? “Nonetheless, though I wish I’d maintained a private army to turf you out, I shall do as you request in return for your promise not to molest those staff who must be made redundant. I shall require, let’s see. A chef, a sommelier, a butler. That’s three. An ostler and a driver. That’s five. And a lady-in-waiting as chaperone at home…” She gestured toward the woman nearby. “Not you, Miss Murth, you are too dour.”

Miss Murth wailed.

“Only kidding, Miss Murth! Though I turn serious if you shriek again.”

“That’s six,” said Cherrystone. “More than enough. Though in actual fact you won’t need an ostler or a driver.”

“Surely you don’t plan to confine me? To keep me from making my rounds among the poor of the parish?”

He snorted. “You’re doing charity?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s bundles of fun.”

“When you wish to dispense largesse, you can rely on me to supply you a driver and a chaperone. We’ll subtract two from your list of six. No ostler, no driver. That leaves you four. That sounds quite enough.”

“Oh, and yes, I shall need a girl to help me bathe.”

“You’ve forgotten how to bathe?”

“The powders, dear Sir. The unguents. The gentle persuasion of peroxide. You need study me more closely, or do you think such beauty as I pretend to is wholly of the natural order?”

He colored slightly. She had him, and carried on. “Unless you want to dispatch a young foot soldier to do the work? In the interest of military economies? Very well, if I must. Provided I get to interview the nominees and make the choice myself. I pride myself on being able to tell a healthy—”

“Five retainers, then. Submit to me their names and their points of origin. You will not be allowed to maintain Munchkinlanders, I am afraid.”

“Well, we stand in agreement on that matter, for I always found old-stock Munchkins too petite to reach the sideboard. In any event one is wise to keep the sherry on an upper shelf, don’t you know.”

He ticked on the fingers of one hand. “A companion, a butler, a chef, a sommelier, a private maid. You may take the afternoon to write out their references. But we’ll drop the sommelier, I think. I know a bit about wine. I’ll take pleasure in making recommendations myself.”

“I don’t supply supporting documents, General Cherrystone. I am Lady Glinda.” She stood up so suddenly she felt light-headed. “Your horses are eating my roses. Miss Murth, would you see the General out?”

When he’d gone, she remained at the window. Restwater, the largest of Oz’s lakes, glowed keenly white in the high sun. A few storks waded in the rushes of the nearer cove. She could glimpse little sign of the fishing fleet out on the water. The fishermen had tucked their vessels up tightly somewhere, and were hoping to sit out the invasion without starving.

There was no safe place in Oz for Glinda. She knew this. The government administrators in the Emerald City—the Emperor’s men—were just waiting for her to emerge. She was too popular a figurehead to be allowed to swan about freely in the EC. Her longtime sponsorship of an institute of maunts latterly accused of printing seditious broadsides was enough reason to lock her away. Risky business, offering patronage. No, her bread was buttered good and hard on the wrong side. Better to tough it out here and manage her private obligations as best she might, for as long as she could.

3.

By noontime the next day the soldiers’ horses had drunk the fountain dry. The forecourt of crushed lake abalone reeked with horse manure. “Do bring a message to the General,” said Glinda, “and inform him that there’s a whole lake forty feet beyond the lawns. Since this invasion is all about the appropriation of water, perhaps he’d be so kind as to lead his cavalry down to the water’s edge?”

“I do not think, Lady Glinda, that he listens to me overmuch,” said Miss Murth unhappily. “I would not command his attention.”

“Try. We are all under pressure, Miss Murth. We must do our best. And we may be confined for some time, so I suppose I should convene a colloquy among the help. Propose a common attitude toward this intrusion, and so on. What do you think?”

“I was never good at current affairs. I preferred the arts of needlework and correspondence.”

“Correspondence? To whomever would you write?”

“Well. The papers.”

“So you took the papers. You never read the papers, surely?”

“I found news somewhat sullying.” Miss Murth fluffed the feathers on Lady Glinda’s afternoon hat; they remained droopy. But Lady Glinda wasn’t going anywhere. “It wasn’t a wise choice, I now see,” said Miss Murth. “I might have followed politics, but I preferred the society columns. When you were in them.”

“Surely I’m in them still.”

Miss Murth sighed. “It’s a shame about the horse droppings.”

“Miss Murth. Are you listening?”

Miss Murth straightened her shoulders to indicate that she was indeed listening, damn it.

“You ought to follow events, Miss Murth. You remember that skirmish by Munchkinlanders into Loyal Oz last fall? Oh, don’t look at me like that, it was west of here, near that strip of land that divides Kellswater and Restwater. You remember. Near the mauntery of Saint Glinda, where I sometimes like to go and consider my soul, my debts, my diet, and so on? Yes?”

“Yes. With those cloistered ladies who think they’re so holy.”

“Miss Murth. Do try to attend. Out of the goodness of my heart I’m sharing what I have picked up.”

“The skirmish. Yes. Everyone was so vexed,” recalled Miss Murth, aiming at drollery and achieving condescension. “It completely upended the social season.”

Damn the attitude of help; Glinda was talking this out to get it straight in her own head. “When by winter’s end our Munchkinlander tenants and neighbors had retreated under the superior fire of the EC forces, they scurried back east. I hear they’ve been beavering about, renovating some antique fortress at the easternmost end of the lake. Where the Munchkin River debouches. So I believe General Cherrystone is stopping here to wait for reinforcements before pressing farther east. If he takes the fort at the head of the lake, he’ll have access to the river, which is a virtual high road of water straight into the breadbasket of Oz, straight to Bright Lettins and to the seat of the Munchkinland government at Colwen Grounds.”

“Where the Thropp family used to live, back in the day.” Miss Murth sniffed.

“Indeed. Well, not Elphaba, nor her brother Shell. Oh excuse me: Emperor. But their great-grandfather the Eminent Thropp ruled from that house. A pretentious heap compared to Mockbeggar’s understated charm! But never mind all that. It’s on the strength of his bloodlines that Shell Thropp claims Colwen Grounds and, by extension, the right to rule all of Munchkinland. So he starts with Restwater, which until the secession of Munchkinland twenty-umpty years ago, or something like that, had always provided water for the Emerald City.”

“If we’re through reviewing current events,” said Miss Murth, “the General is waiting for the list of staff. He threatens to imprison the whole lot of us if he doesn’t receive it by teatime.”

“Very well. Find a quill and take down this list. You can remind me of the names, if you will. Put yourself first, Miss Murth. Have you a first name?”

“Yes, in fact.”

“How alarming. Next, Chef. What’s he called?”

“Ig Baernaeraenaesis.”

“Write Chef. Write Puggles the Butler.”

“His real name is Po Understar.”

“Oh, this is so tedious! Am I expected to remember these names? Is that the lot? Are we missing anyone? I think that’s it.”

“You requested a chambermaid.”

“That’s right, I did. Now whom should I pick? There’s Mirrtle. She’s a little cross-eyed but she plays a mean hand of graboge. There’s the broomgirl who does the steps. I don’t recall her name. And then silly Floxiaza. No, she steals my cologne. Not Floxiaza. What do you think? Mirrtle, shall we?”

“I like Mirrtle,” said Miss Murth. “One can rely on Mirrtle to keep a civil tongue to her superiors.”

“Then I’ll choose the broomgirl. Write down the broomgirl. What is her name?”

“I’ll ask her,” said Miss Murth. “Nobody ever uses it so I doubt she’ll remember, but maybe she’ll surprise us all. May I deliver this now? I don’t want to appear cowering but the General seems insistent.”

“I suppose I should sign it.”

“I have signed it for you.”

“You’re a blessing in disguise.” Glinda looked her over. “A very capable disguise. You may consider yourself dismissed.”

4.

She was standing at a weir. Though later she realized someone must have built it, at the time it seemed just another caprice of nature. An S-shaped curve of broad flat stones, to channel the water, slow it, creating a deep pool on the upstream edge. Along that side a fretwork of bentlebranch fronds had been twisted and laced together laterally, further helping to slow the water that coursed through—when water coursed, that is. Today it was frozen.

Probably she’d been wearing boots, but she didn’t remember boots, or mittens, or even a coat. What the mind chooses to collect, and what it throws away!

She leaned from the walkway over the top of the artificial thicket. She could see that the whole affair guided the stream through a channel. Good for fishing.

The surface of the stream was glassy, here and there dusted with snow. Beneath the surface of the ice some hardy reed still waved underwater with the slowed-down motion of a dream. She could almost see her face there beneath all this cold, among the hints of green, of spring.

Never one for studying herself, though, her eye had caught a flick of movement a few feet on. In a pocket in the ice of the stream, a little coppery fish was turning round and round, as if trapped. How had it gotten separated from the members of its school, who were probably all buried in the mud, lost in cold dreams till spring? Though she couldn’t have known about hibernation yet.

One hand on the unstable balustrade, she ventured onto the ice. The trapped fish needed to be released. It would die in its little natural bowl. Die of loneliness if nothing else. She knew about loneliness.

A stick came to her unmittened hand somehow. She must have dropped her mittens, the better to grasp the stick. Or she’d been out without protection. It didn’t matter. She bashed at the ice for some time, never thinking that the floor could capsize and she might go in the drink. Drown, or freeze, or become mighty uncomfortable some other way.

Little by little she hacked away a channel. The fish heard the vibrations and circled more vigorously, but there was no place for it to go. Finally she had opened a hole big enough for her finger.

The fish came up and nestled against her, as if her forefinger were a mother fish. The scrap of brilliance leaned there, at a slight tilt.

That’s what she remembered, anyway.

She had gone on to release the fish. What had she done with it? With the stream frozen over? The rest was lost, lost to time. Like so much.

But she remembered the way the fish bellied against her finger.

This must be another very early memory. Was no one looking after her? Why was she always out alone?

And where had this taken place? Where in the world did childhood happen, anyway?

5.

Glinda finished her morning tisane and waited, but no one came to take away the tray. Oh, right, she remembered. But where was Murth when you needed her? The woman was useless. Useless and pathetic.

A light rain pattered, just strong enough to make the idea of Glinda’s giving an audience in the forecourt something of a mistake. She’d rather send remarks through a factotum, but that was the problem: the factotums were getting the boot. The least she could do was give her good-byes in person.

There was nothing for it but that Glinda must poke about the wardrobe herself and locate some sort of bumbershoot.

Puggles saw her struggling with the front door and rescued her. “Let me help, Mum,” he said, relieving her of the umbrella. It had a handle carved to look like a flying monkey; she hadn’t noticed that. Probably Cherrystone would decide that the umbrella was grounds for her execution. Well, stuff him with a rippled rutabaga.

“Everyone’s assembled, Mum,” said Puggles. “As you requested. Too bad about the weather, but there you are.”

She’d written some notes all by herself, but raindrops smeared the ink when she took them out of her purse. “Goodness, Puggles,” she said in a low voice. “Do so many work here?”

“Until today.”

“I never quite realized. Well, one rarely assembles the staff all at once.”

“Once a year. The below-stairs staff party at Lurlinemas. But you don’t attend.”

“I send the ale and those funny little baskets from the Fairy Preenella, one for everybody.”

“Yes, Mum. I know. I order them and arrange for their delivery myself.”

Was he being uppity? She couldn’t blame him. She should have realized the household staff was this large. There must be seventy people gathered here. “If this is the number on which we normally rely, how are we to get along with only a skeletal crew, Puggles?”

But he’d stepped back to join the paltry retinue that would not be dismissed, which had lined up behind her.

Awkward. In what degree of affection or distance ought she to address them? The situation was grave; many of them were in tears. She was glad she had worn the watered-silk moss luncheon gown with the peek-a-boo calf flare and the carmine collar; she’d be stunning against Mockbeggar’s rose-colored stucco and ivory entablatures. A comfort to the staff, she hoped, her ability to maintain her style. An example.

She plunged ahead. “Dear friends. Dear laborers in the field, dear dusters of the furniture, and whoever uses the loppers to keep the topiary in check. Dear all of you. What a dreary day this is.”

She was reaching for a hankie already. How revolting, how mawkish. She didn’t know most of their names. But they looked so respectable and kind, in their common clothes. Men with hats in their hands, women in mobcaps and aprons. Surely they were going to leave their aprons behind? Aprons marked with House of Chuffrey crests? Well, better not to make a fuss over it.

“I know some of you have lodged here, lovingly tending Mockbeggar Hall, since long before I met Lord Chuffrey, rest his soul. For many of you—perhaps all of you, I’m a bit wobbly on the details—this has been your only home. Where you go to now, and what life awaits you there, is beyond my comprehension.”

One or two of the young women straightened up and put their hankies away. Perhaps, thought Glinda, this hasn’t started well.

“I have arranged for your safe passage off the estate. The General has promised you will not be accosted, nor will your allegiance to my welfare all these years be held against you. Indeed, I have not supplied him a list of your names or your destinations.” This much was true. Cherrystone hadn’t asked for that. He was irritatingly fair from time to time, which made resenting him a tricky business.

“Nothing should have pleased me more than to provide you with lodging and work here until the end of my days,” she said. “In the absence of that, I have had the seamstresses work overtime, hand stitching on some cotton geppling serviettes the lovely old-fashioned blessing OZSPEED. By the way, thank you, seamstresses; you must have had to stay up past midnight to manage supplying all this lot.”

“Actually, we’re a few short,” muttered Puggles.

She paid him no mind. Having been Throne Minister for that brief period had taught her several useful skills.

“Mum,” called someone; Glinda couldn’t tell who it was. “Will you have us back, in time?”

“Oh, if I have my say,” she replied cheerily. “Though I doubt you’ll recognize me when that day comes! I’ll be sun-bronzed and wizened and my elbows will be raw from the dishwater! You’ll think I’m the bootblack’s grandmother!”

They liked this. They laughed with unseemly vigor. Though perhaps commoners have a different sense of humor, she thought.

“Dear friends,” she continued. “I cherish the dedication to your tasks, your love of Mockbeggar, your sunny good natures at least whenever I came in the room. And next? None of us knows what waits down the lane for us.” She was about to refer to her own power as compromised, what with the house arrest, but caught herself. Surely they knew about it, and they wanted to remember her as being strong. She threw her shoulders back and pinched a nerve in her scapula. Ow. “As to whomever was in the habit of filching the leftover pearlfruit jelly from the sideboard in the morning room, you are forgiven. You are all forgiven any such lapses. I shall miss you. I shall miss every one of you. I hardly knew there were so many … so many”—but that sounded lame—“so many brave and dedicated friends. Bless you. Ozspeed indeed. And on your way out, don’t hesitate to snub the new sentries at the gatehouse. Don’t give them the benefit of a single word. This is your home, still. Not theirs. Never theirs.”

“Burn the place down!” cried someone in the crowd, but he was hushed, as the emotion seemed misguided at best.

“Don’t forget to write,” she said, before she remembered that quite likely some of them couldn’t write. She’d better get off the top step before she did more harm than good. “Farewell, and may we meet again when Ozma returns!”

The bawling began. She had ended as poorly as she’d begun. Of course, the common people believed that Ozma was a deity, and they must have concluded that Lady Glinda was referring to the Afterlife. Well, so be it, she thought grimly, hoisting her skirts to clear the puddle by the front door. The Afterlife will have to do for a rendezvous destination. Though I suspect I shall be lodged in separate quarters, a private suite, probably. “Puggles,” she murmured, “get the yard boy to pick up the mobcaps some of that lot were trampling into the mud as they left.”

“There’s no yard boy, Ma’am,” said Puggles gently. “He’s off with the others.”

“It’s a new era, then. You do it. It looks a sight. And then join the rest of us in the grand foyer.”

The others who were to remain had retreated inside and stood in a line with their hands clasped. Their uniforms dripped on the checkerboard marble. Glinda would fix each one with a dedicated personal beck. She could do this, she could. She’d been practicing all morning. This was important. “Miss Murth,” she began. “Ig Baernae…”

“Chef’ll do, Mum. Even I can’t say it unless I’m soused.”

“Ig Baernaeraenaesis.” She was glad to see his jaw drop. Puggles slid into place in the line; Glinda nodded at him. “Mister Understar. And—” She came to the chambermaid. “And you. Rain, I think it is? Very lovely name. Scrub your nails, child. Civil unrest is no excuse for lapses in personal hygiene. Dear friends…” But perhaps this was too familiar a note to strike now she was inside her own home. She had to live with these people.

“I’m grateful for your loyalty,” she continued in a brisker tone. “As far as I know my funds have not been impounded, and you shall stay on salary as usual.”

“We don’t gets salary, if you please, Mum,” said Chef. “We gets our home and our food.”

“Yes. Well. Home and food are yours as long as I can manage it. I cannot pretend this is a pretty time for Mockbeggar Hall or for any of us. Murth, don’t scowl; it’s not too late to exchange you for someone out in the forecourt lingering over farewells.”

Miss Murth slapped on an inauthentic expression of merriment.

“A few remarks. I am still the lady of the house. You are my staff, and according to your stations you shall maintain your customary retiring ways in my presence.”

“Yes, Mum,” they chorused.

“And yet, and yet.” She wanted a conspiratorial chumminess without a breakdown in authority. She must step softly. “We are now bound together in some unprecedented manner, and we must come to rely on one another. So. I shall ask you all to refrain from fraternizing with the military who will be bunking in the servants’ quarters, in tents in the meadows, in the barns and stables. I shall ask you to be no more than minimally polite and responsive to the officers who have taken up lodging in the guest quarters. If they ask for food, you must procure it. You must cook it, Chef. You need not season it and you must not poison it. Do you understand?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Mum.”

“I daresay. If they request their shirts and stockings done…” She looked about. She had forgotten about laundry. “Well, they will have to do it themselves, or hire a laundress. No doubt they will try to cozy up to some of you.” She took a dim view of cozying these days, though soldiers probably got lonely. She didn’t think Miss Murth was in danger of being meddled with, and as for the girl… “You, Rain,” she said, “how old are you?”

Rain shrugged. “I believe she is eight, Lady Glinda,” said Miss Murth.

“That should be safe enough, but even so, Rain, I’d like you to stick near to Miss Murth or to one of the rest of us. Chef, Puggles. No running about and getting into mischief. I’ve kept you here because you have work to do. Sweeping up. You’re the broomgirl. Remember that.”

“Yes, Mum.” The girl’s gaze lowered to the polished floor. She wasn’t overly bright, to judge by appearances, thought Glinda, but then some had said that about her, in her day. And look where she’d ended up.

In virtual prison, she concluded, sorry she’d begun the train of thought. “That’ll do. To your work, then. Hands to your task, eyes ever open, but keep custody of the lips. If you should hear anything useful, do tell me. Are there any questions?”

“Are we under house arrest too?” asked Puggles.

“Open up a bottle of something bubbly,” she replied. “When I figure out the answer to your question, I’ll let you know. You are dismissed.”

She stood for a moment as the foyer emptied. Then, mounting the first flight of the broad fleckstone staircase to her apartments, her eye drifted through the doors of the banquet hall. Before she knew what she was doing she had turned and pitter-patted down the steps and marched into the room. “Officer!” she shouted. She had never raised her voice in her own home before. Ever.

A soldier snapped to and saluted her. “Where is Cherrystone?” she barked.

“Not here, Mum.”

“You’re not in my staff. I’m not Mum to you. I am Lady Glinda. I can see he is not here. Where is he, I asked you.”

“That’s privileged information, Mum.”

She might have to throttle him. “Officer. I see charts and maps all over my banquet table. I am sure occupying armies need charts and maps. I am also sure they do not need to be held down flat by early Dixxi House spindle-thread vases. Do you know how rare these are? No more than thirty exist in all of Oz, I’ll wager.”

“Do not approach the table, Mum.”

She approached the table and she snatched up first one porcelain vase and then the second. They were almost four hundred years old. Handworked by artisans whose skill had been lost when Dixxi House went factory. “I will not have magnificent art used as … as paperweights. You put your boots on all the other furniture. Use your boots.”

The maps had rolled up.

“Begging your pardon, Mum, you’re striding in where you’ve no—”

“I don’t stride, young man. I never stride. I glide. Now you heard what I told you to do. Take off your boots and put them on the stupid maps.”

He did as he was told. She was impressed. She still had some little authority, then. She turned and left without addressing him again.

She cradled the vases against her breast as if they were puppies, but she wasn’t thinking of the vases. She had seen that one map featured a detailed drawing of Restwater, all its coves and villages, its islands, the locations of its submerged rocks. She had seen a dotted line drawn from Mockbeggar Hall to Haugaard’s Keep, the garrison fortress at the east end. The marking didn’t run along the north shore of Restwater, but right through the middle of it. But what army could march through a lake?

6.

Of an afternoon, Glinda had been accustomed to the occasional carriage ride. She would set out for nearby villages and take a full cream tea in someone’s front parlor. She would drag along Miss Murth and a novel, and ignore one or the other, sometimes both. From favorite overlooks she sometimes watched the sun subside toward the horizon. Spring in Munchkinland usually lent a certain cheer to her days. Summer the same. She didn’t suffer pangs of longing for the house in Mennipin Square until after the first frost of the autumn. And by now she had learned to endure those pangs. For the time being, those lovely fall social seasons in the Emerald City were a thing of the past.

Like, it seemed, her excursions by carriage. It only took a few days after Cherrystone’s appropriation of Mockbeggar for a new pattern to set in: the carriages were always spoken for when she requested one.

Unsettling, that the activities of the house were being determined by someone else’s needs instead of her own.

And what a commotion! The army had set up a sizeable village of tents and built a pair of rude temporary structures—latrines, she expected. One for officers, one for enlisted men. The farm animals were turned out of the barns—no hardship, since the weather was good—and the barns became ad hoc mess halls and, perhaps, a wood shop of some sort, as the sound of hammering went on all day and half the night.

Glinda had Puggles show her how to find the stairs to the parapet so they could peek from behind an ornamental urn and grasp something of the size of the operation.

“I should think there are a full three hundred men on the demesne, Lady Glinda,” said Puggles. “Given the amount of food I hear is being conscripted from local granges and farms.”

“Can that be enough force with which to prosecute an invasion?” she wondered.

“You’d have a better sense of that than I. You managed the armies of Loyal Oz for a time,” he reminded her. “And word has it you yourself once hoped for reunification.”

“Of course I did,” she snapped. “But not through military action. Too messy by half. I hoped if we put on a ball and went lavish with the refreshment budget, the Munchkinlanders would come back into the fold. I’m speaking figuratively, Puggles, don’t look at me like that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. How could we humble Munchkinlanders refuse an invitation to dance with the overlords of the Emerald City? But when that rogue missile of a Dorothy-house came down on Nessarose’s holy head? The Munchkinlanders discovered that liberation from sniffy Nessarose didn’t provoke them into wanting a return to domination by the EC. Can you blame them? What population signs on willingly for slavery?”

“You mean other than wives?”

“I’ve never married, Mum. Don’t accuse me by association.”

“Oh, never mind. I just think Cherrystone is going to need a vaster force if he expects to drive a division right into the heart of Munchkinland, to Bright Lettins or Colwen Grounds. Unless the Emerald City is simultaneously mounting an invasion from the north, through the Scalps. Though I can’t imagine the Glikkun trolls in the mountains would let them get very far with that. Or is Cherrystone going to be content with snatching Restwater and leaving us the rest of the province?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mum.”

“Well, what do you know, Puggles? How would we find out what’s going on in those barns, for instance? I can’t go waltzing around as if I’m used to milking the cows of a spring evening.”

“No, Mum. But I’m not allowed to wander about, either. Guards are posted, you see, beyond kitchen gardens on the barn side, beyond the forecourt on the carriage frontage, and beyond the reflecting pond and the parterre to the west.”

“Is that so.” She wasn’t surprised.

“I do hope you’re not going to contemplate some campaign, Mum.”

“You flatter me with that remark.”

“I have a hunch that General Cherrystone wouldn’t hesitate to restrict your liberties even further than he has already done.”

She began to cross the roof and head for the stairs. “I’m sure you don’t believe me capable of laying gelignite sandwiches on the party platter. Anyway, I can’t cook.”

When she was back in her salon she wandered along all the windows to see what she could see. She had never considered herself an inquisitive woman, but being confined to a suite of only eight rooms made her restless. She was also gripped with curiosity. Why hadn’t she thought to retain someone nubile? Someone who could smolder, sloe-eyed, near a vulnerable soldier? Someone who could pick up some useful information? She herself was too high, Murth was too dead, Rain hardly more than a babe in arms … and Glinda doubted that Chef or Puggles would attract much attention among itchy-triggered soldiers.

Was it too late to exchange Miss Murth for someone a bit younger—younger by, say, a half century? Glinda could pretend to do it out of concern for Miss Murth’s health.

But then Miss Murth came tramping in, hauling six logs of oak she had split and quartered herself, and she knelt down at the hearth to arrange the fire for when the evening chill took hold. Glinda knew that unless she herself brained Miss Murth with one of these spindle-thread vases, the old fiend would probably never die. She’d collapse over Glinda’s grave with dry, red eyes, and then take up a new position somewhere else.

The tedious never die; that’s what makes them tedious.

Glinda remembered the death of Ama Clutch, her governess. Almost forty years ago. Glinda never wakened from any sleep, even the luscious damp sleep that follows rousting sex, without sensing a pang of obscure guilt over her governess’s demise. Glinda didn’t feel she wanted to take on another such debt, especially over someone as irksome as Miss Murth.

“Miss Murth,” she found herself saying, “Puggles was telling me about how limited a range he is allowed to traverse these days. Does the same apply to you?”

“I suspect it does, Lady Glinda,” said Murth, “but I haven’t pressed myself to try. I have no place else to go, and for years I haven’t had reason to leave the premises unless you require my company.”

“What had you been used to doing when I would go to the Emerald City for six or eight months?”

“Oh … tidying up some. Dusting.”

“I see. Have you no family?”

“I’ve been in your employ for twenty years, Lady Glinda. Don’t you think I would have mentioned my family if I had any?”

“You may have nattered on about your kin for yonks. I never know if I’m listening.”

“Well, since you’re asking, no. I am the last of our line.”

And I the last of mine, thought Glinda, who had had no siblings. And she and Chuffrey had never managed to conceive. How quirky, to share this common a loneliness with a member of her staff. Whereas if Glinda had had children—even now, some child or children dashing in every direction, carrying on irresponsibly as the young do—well, what a different place Mockbeggar would seem.

“There are all sorts of maps and missives in the dining hall, Miss Murth, but I draw attention to myself when I enter. There’s no chance you could sneak a peak at them and report to me anything you read?”

“Out of the question. We’re all under supervision, not just you.”

“Do you think that our Rain has the run of the grounds?” She picked at a thread on her shawl as she spoke and didn’t look up. She could hear Murth settle on her heels in front of the fire and let out a worried hiss between those old well-chewed lips. “And does she have any family, do you think?”

“To the best of my awareness, she has no more family than you and I,” replied Miss Murth, vaguely.

7.

The first time a dinner invitation arrived from General Cherrystone, Glinda folded up the paper and said, “Thank you, Puggles. There will be no reply.” The second time she had Murth write a note to decline. “How shall I sign it?” asked Miss Murth. “Lady Glinda, or just Glinda?”

“The scandal of you. Sign it Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hall. And none of those twee little hearts and daisies and such.”

But the next night Glinda sent him an invitation. “Dinner at ten, on the roof of the south porch.” She had Puggles and Chef take apart the sallowwood table from the card salon, put it through the windows leg by leg, and reassemble it on the graveled flat of the porch roof. Then she arranged herself upon the balustraded area ahead of time so she wouldn’t have to be seen clambering through a window like a day laborer. The stars were out and the moon was wafery. She wore her midnight blue scallopier with eyelet fenestrae and a ruched bodice the color of wet sand. Chef would serve lake garmot stuffed with snails. “Is it a mistake about the candles?” called Murth through the lace swags. “They’ll drip wax all over the food.”

“Don’t hector me,” said Glinda. “I know what I’m doing.” The two precious spindle-thread vases held a bounty of prettibells and delphiniums selected for their vigor. They better not so much as drop a single petal if they knew what was good for them.

Cherrystone came up the grand staircase just at ten. She could hear the clongs of the grandmother clock strike and the clicking of his heels as he turned at the landing. The windows were wide but the sills two feet high, so he had to sit and swivel to get his long legs across. “A novel place to host a dinner guest. Perhaps you intend to push me over the rail as a divertissement,” he said. “Good evening, Lady Glinda.”

“General. You understand that a person of my position doesn’t entertain in her private apartment, and in any case I notice that the banquet hall has been requisitioned as a strategy center. So I’ve improvised. We dine at my invitation, as this is my home, but we dine neither in my own apartments nor in the spaces you have appropriated. Instead, a neutral territory. Above it all, as it were. Won’t you have a seat?”

He offered a bottle of wine. “Not from Mockbeggar cellars, so I apologize if it doesn’t suit. It’s Highmeadow blanc, a good year. I don’t travel without it. I hope you approve.”

“My butler is a bit stout to be climbing through windows. So this is something of an evening picnic, I’m afraid. Will you do the honors? There’s a cork-pull just here.”

The candles were guttering madly for the first ten minutes. Glinda took care to sip sparingly. “While I understand the intent toward courtesy in your recent notes to me, General, I can’t bring myself to accept an invitation to dine in my own home. My study of etiquette provides no precedent. So I thought I should be cordial and explain this to you in person.”

“Damned awkward I’m sure, but you’re being a brick, as I knew you would be.”

“The meal will grow cold, so please, shall we sit?” She waited for him to pull out her chair. From over his shoulder she could see the campfires of soldiers beyond the ha-ha. The distant sound of singing, more rowdy than tuneful. “How will you keep all these men occupied and out of trouble, General? You’ve clearly settled in for a while, and no matter what construction you’re overseeing in the barns, you can’t be employing more than a smattering of this large number.”

“I trust they’re being no bother. You let me know if they are.”

“I’ll let them know if they are.” She leaned forward, taking care not to seem coquettish, which, she recognized, seemed to be her default position. “Allow me to remove the covers, will you? Since it’s just the two of us?” She lifted the lids off the plated dinner of garmot, braised stalks of celery, and mashed spinach forced to look like a green rose. Oh, Chef could make magic out of whatever lingered in the larder. “I hope this meets with your approval, General.”

“Please; as we’re dining, I should be happy if you called me by my first name. Traper.”

She shook her head as if she were being pestered by mosquitoes. “You make it all very confusing. Traper. A most irregular season! I am detained in my own home, I am forbidden anything but emergency staff, I am asked to house a garrison or a committee or a division or whatever you call this lot—”

“We are roughly three hundred men, which in this instance means a command made up of three brigades. One of our brigades is a cavalry unit, and the other two are foot soldiers. Messiars, as we call them.”

“And Menaciers are officers in training. I know the nomenclature. I did govern the Home Guard once, as you recall. But if what you are overseeing is a command, what makes you a General instead of a Commander?”

“Long years of service, for one. I am allowed to direct as many commands as the Emperor in the Emerald City sees fit to supply me.”

“Then you’re waiting on more commands. I see. Traper. Please, eat; it’ll go cold. There’s slightly more breeze at this height than I’d anticipated.”

He tucked in. “You didn’t ask me here to discuss military strategy, and anyway, it would be boorish of me to bring my work to the dinner table. Tell me about yourself.”

“Oh, General—”

“Traper.”

“Yes. Traper. You know a woman loves nothing more than to talk about herself. But you have incarcerated me here and Lady Glinda is bored to migraines with Lady Glinda. Unable to get around as she did, or to invite old friends to spend weekends hunting or playing plunge-ball or Three-Hand Snuckett. No, I asked you here to learn about you. So I insist. I’ve given you your supper, and you must sing for it. Tell me about your long years in the service, as you put it, even if you must keep as confidential your present aims and designs.”

Obediently the General ventured into a loose and nonspecific accounting of various assignments through the years. However, he underestimated the degree to which Glinda had paid attention while she was Throne Minister. She had read everything she could get her hands on, and various details had stuck because of references to old friends and cronies. She knew Cherrystone was from Mistlemoor, a small Gillikinese hamlet a few hours north of the Shiz Gate at the Emerald City. She knew the Wizard had sent Cherrystone out to Kiamo Ko when her old friend, Elphaba, had taken up residence there, and that Cherrystone had had something to do with the death or disappearance of Fiyero’s wife, Sarima, and their children, Irji and Nor. She knew he had had a hand in some nasty business in Quadling Country, where he’d been stationed for nearly a decade, and when things went hot there he was recalled to the Emerald City. A desk job for a few years, under the Emperor. But called into field service again. His final triumph? Before retirement with a pension? She wondered. And all the time she kept smiling like a barkeep, unassuming and unflappable.

“You have a family,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. His fork poked back and forth as if checking for poison darts hidden in the fish. “A wife and three daughters. Now mostly grown; indeed, a granddaughter at home too, who I rarely see.”

“I can’t imagine. It must be dreadful for you.”

“I’m sure it would be.” He smiled under his lowered brow. “I mean, the noise of a gabbling child and four women under one roof.”

“You don’t fool me. You miss them dreadfully. What are their names?”

“I choose not to talk about them. It helps me not miss them as much.”

“Is that breeze causing the candle to spit wax on your plate? Thoughtless of me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Miss Murth?”

Murth was sitting in an upright chair just inside the window, her hands folded in her lap. “Yes, Lady Glinda.”

“I know you aren’t spry enough to clamber out the window ledge with an oil lamp in a glass chimney. One that won’t gutter so in this updraft. Would you call the broomgirl to do it? She is agile enough, unlike the rest of us.”

“I’m happy to oblige, Lady Glinda,” said Cherrystone. “Allow me.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it. Miss Murth?”

“I think the girl is asleep, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda waited.

“But I’ll wake her.”

“How wonderful. The lamps on the escritoire. Both of them. Thank you.”

She tried without success to bring up the subject of the construction going on in the barns, but Cherrystone affably declared that too dull to discuss over such a fine meal. What next? He complimented the local landscape. She concurred: the lake before them in the moonlight, sheer silk spangled with diamond chunks, wasn’t it divine? Less cloyingly, they discussed the social makeup of the nearest villages. “I do trust you’re paying the local farmers for all the food you’re demanding from them,” she ventured.

“We’re at war, Lady Glinda. I try to make it look as much like a picnic as I can, but you can’t have forgotten that Munchkinlanders provoked the Ozian army to invade.”

“Well, nor have I forgotten that Oz was massing an army of invasion on the border for weeks and weeks before the Munchkinlanders made a raid against it.”

“Defensive positioning, Lady Glinda.”

“Spoiling for a fight, and the fools bit. Though had they not bit in time, you’d have come up with some other reason to invade. The Emerald City has had its eye on Restwater even since my own time in office, Traper, though I did my best to change the subject.”

“Don’t let’s talk military strategy. Do you play an instrument, Lady Glinda?”

“I have a set of musical toothpicks I must show you someday. Ah, here she is.”

Rain slung one leg over the windowsill. She was dressed in a man’s cast-off nightshirt. It made her look like an urchin. Her calves were smooth and pale, the color of new cream in the moonlight. Her dark hair hadn’t seen the benefit of a comb recently. Once through the window, she turned back and took the lamps Miss Murth handed her. The light on either side of her face made her look like a visitation from some chapel story of youthful piety. She was nearly pretty, but for the dirt on her face and her cross, sleepy expression.

“Where does you want ’em,” she said, forgetting to make it sound like a question.

“Oh, how about one on the table and then one on that stone ledge between the windows,” said Glinda. “Then if Miss Murth comes at the General with a crossbow we shall spy her before any damage is done. Miss Murth has many hidden talents.”

“Lady Glinda!” hissed Murth from inside. But Cherrystone was laughing.

“Stay, little Rain,” said Glinda. “We might need something else, and you’re better at getting over window ledges than we are. You can rest with your head against the wall there.” In the lamplight, squatting with her back against the stone, the girl looked like a beggar outside a train station in the Pertha Hills, back in the day. Frottica, Wittica, Settica, Wiccasand Turning…

The light of the oil lamps glazed Cherrystone; he became a more fixed target. Glinda had reached the end of that part of the strategy she’d been able to plan ahead, and she was improvising now. But how formidable he looked. Patient, wary, courteous, buckled up inside himself. He did have utterly lovely eyes for a marauder. A sort of faded cobalt. “I sense that these are early days, Traper. Still, I would be irresponsible to the memory of Sir Chuffrey if I didn’t ask what your ultimate intentions are toward Mockbeggar. I do hope you have no plans to raze it.”

“That wouldn’t be a decision of mine, though I think no one in the Emerald City would bother this place much. I see that it is a jewel. In these few days I’ve come to appreciate why you love it so.”

“Were I at the helm of strategy, I should think that securing Restwater as a permanent source of potable water for the Emerald City would be enough. I’m wondering, should that happen, if you intend Mockbeggar to serve as a satellite capital of the EC, and might decide to leave the rest of the Free State of Munchkinland alone? Munchkinland covers a vast territory, and though decidedly rural, it’s more evenly populated than the rest of Oz, which by comparison is either urban or hardscrabble and too remote to be habitable. The attempt to subdue all of Munchkinland would be punishing.”

“You have a good head for strategy, Lady Glinda, as befits a former Throne Minister. But you retired to seek other pleasures. Like gentlewoman farming, and flower arranging. So I shouldn’t fret about the future. What will happen will happen.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m too selfish to care primarily about Munchkinland. What happens to the stucco walls of Mockbeggar and to its staff also happens to me. What happens to Mockbeggar’s irises and prettibells happens to me. You think me shallow, but I have been breeding prettibells for eighteen summers now. It is my passion. I have a new variety that was even written about in our local newssheet, Restwater Dew Tell.” This was partly true. The gardener had been doing something with that ugly little orange flower. “Rain, can you slip into my library and find a copy of the newsfold with the article on prettibells?”

The girl said, “I don’t know how to find it.”

“It is a printed journal. It will say ‘Prettibells Galore’ in the headline, or something like that. Get up when I speak to you.”

She stood, but shrugged. “I don’t know how to read, Mum.”

“I can find it,” called Miss Murth.

“She’ll do it,” said Glinda tartly. “Child, there is an engraving on the page just under the masthead. You do know what a prettibell looks like, don’t you? A blossom like a kind of grubby little chewed sock?”

Cherrystone was laughing. “They are your passion. You speak with the sour affection of the convert.”

“Do as I say, Rain.” Glinda felt herself flushing and hoped it didn’t show in the lamplight. “I tell you, Traper, you abuse my ability to entertain when you reduce me to such a staff.”

“Your prettibells will likely suffer this year,” he admitted. “Sorry about that. Where are they in the garden, so we can avoid them?”

He almost had her there. “I can’t discuss it any longer. It’s too vexing to think of them in extremis. There’s a dormant polder of them out beyond the little village of Zimmerstorm. Won’t you allow Puggles to escort me to check on them?” There was no such polder. But if she could get out for a day on a false pretense, she might gain a better sense of what was going on.

“It may be possible. Depending.”

Rain clambered back over the sill with several papers. “Not sure which one you want, so here is the lot.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore. I’ve become distressed by the thought of them. You may return these.”

“No, wait,” said Cherrystone. He took several papers from Rain and studied the headlines. Then he turned the front page so the girl could see it and said, “Do you know your letters?”

“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Never had none to teach me, sir.”

“Your mother doesn’t know how to read?”

“If you remember, Cherrystone,” said Glinda, “you required me to dismiss almost everyone.”

“You kept a girl from leaving with her mother?”

“Well. Actually, the child is an orphan. I look after her out of charity. Don’t pick your fingernails, Rain.”

“But you don’t teach her the alphabet.” Cherrystone sounded incredulous.

“I can’t do everything. I have prettibells to propagate. Until recently I didn’t know this girl by name, so how could I know if she could read or not? Perhaps it’s time for the cheese board. Rain, clear the plates.”

“I’ll take them through,” called Miss Murth, stifling a shadowed yawn.

“My granddaughter is learning her letters,” said the General. “Letters are a kind of magic, Rain. Coming together, they spell words, and words then are a kind of spell, too.”

“She doesn’t want to learn to read. She wants to carry those plates to the window. Leave her be, Traper.” But Glinda was now on this. Could she play the hand? She’d never been good at bluffing when the local gentry came by for a couple of rubbers of Three-Hand Snuckett.

She picked up one of the papers and pretended to look at it for the article on prettibells, and then she moved the paper up close until it almost touched her lips. A little blind, to buy her some time, while Cherrystone asked the girl, “What does this letter look like? This thing?”

Rain said, “It looks like a stick for finding water with.”

“Doesn’t it just. It is called Y.”

“Why?”

“Indeed.”

“Too too touching,” said Glinda, “but I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. Our broomgirl is thicker than mud on the moor. Now, Rain, unless you want to annoy me, leave the General alone. He is a busy man and he needs his cheese.”

“I have the board,” called Miss Murth through the lace, which was now swaying in a stiffer wind off the lake. “A nice Arjiki goat-cheese and a Munchkinlander corriale, and an aged Zimmersweet made with the ash layer. Though one corner may be the wrong color of mold; it’s hard to tell in this light.”

“Would you like to learn to read, Rain?” asked Cherrystone.

“Do you specialize in impossible tasks?” interrupted Glinda. “You might as well ask a rural Munchkin-wife if she would like to brush the teeth of a mature draffe. The little scold can’t reach and she won’t reach no matter how many lessons in growing taller you squander upon her.”

“My granddaughter is seven and she can read,” said Cherrystone. “How old are you, Rain?”

“Now you’re impertinent. Rain, go with Miss Murth.” The girl shrugged and slung one leg over the windowsill. Straddling it, her hair fallen back about her neck, she reviewed the diners on the roof of the porch. Looking at the girl’s curious expression, with a certain thrill Glinda thought: she’s learning to read already. Letters are only the half of it.

She kept the paper over her face to hide her tiny twitch of triumph. What if Rain could be taught to read? She might sidle places in the house no one else could visit. Peer at maps. Directives to the field officers. Might be risky, but still…

When the girl had gone, and they had demolished a good deal of the cheese and two glasses of port each, Glinda returned to the subject to clinch the deal. “Do you want to help me survive the boredom of this incarceration, Traper? Shall we enter into a little wager? I’ll wager you can’t teach our broomgirl to read by the end of the summer. That is, assuming your tasks will keep you here all summer.”

“About our tenure here, I can make no comment. But I’ve had a grand time helping my daughters learn to read, when I was home on leave, and my granddaughter too. I can make of your stupid little maid a capable reader of simple texts in a month or two. By Summersend, anyway, if we’re here that long. It’s a deal.”

She raised her glass; the edges chinked to seal the wager.

“But you must have a challenge of your own,” he said. “I shall dare you to … oh, what is it you can’t do? Is there anything?”

She hoped he wouldn’t say generate a new strain of prettibell. “I’ve always had Chef, of one name or another,” she said. “I suppose I could enter into the fun of it and learn to prepare a meal on my own.”

“It’s a deal,” he said, and the glasses chinked again. “But really?” he added, as he stood to go. “Even in childhood you had a chef?”

“Mumsy was an Upland,” she said, as if that explained it.

“But didn’t you linger in kitchens and pick things up, as all small children do? Even I did that.”

“I don’t recall much of my childhood,” she told him. “It’s been such a full rich life ever since, I haven’t felt the need to dwell on that simpler time. Life, with whatever it has brought—university one decade, the Throne Ministry of Oz the next. The cultivation of roses and prettibells one year, house arrest another—well, daily life has always seemed distracting enough. Childhood? It’s a myth.”

“Good night, Lady Glinda. And thank you for a very pleasant evening. I shall send for your chambergirl in the next day or two.”

It was late. She dismissed Miss Murth and the girl, but not before thanking Rain for her help. Then Glinda prepared herself for bed. She didn’t need to check with the little mirror to see herself smiling. She believed she had won the hand.

Though as she settled herself upon the pillows, she found herself thinking about childhood. Had she meant what she had said? Had her own childhood really evaporated as thoroughly as all that? Or had she merely forgotten to pay it any attention once she’d left it behind and headed off to school in Shiz?

8.

The third, and as far as she could figure, the last of her early memories. Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentially?

Probably they are not.

Still, this was a memory of autumn. Either it was actual autumn or she was dressing her few memories in contrasting colors, the better to render them distinctive.

Apple trees? Yes, apples. An orchard hugging a slope. Hesitating in its ascent, the incline leveled off several times—built up manually, to accommodate carts, or maybe the hill just preferred itself like that. This was her only memory to begin with the setting first, and with her entering the place, rather than with herself central as a maypole and the situation emanating from her.

She was wandering about the contorted trunks, trees twisted in their growth by a constant upsweep of wind from the valley. (So there must have been a valley. What lay below? A house? A village? A river? Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail?)

Windfalls jeweled the grass, the colors of russet, burgundy, limeberry, freckled yellow. Fruit hung in the boughs like Lurlinemas ornaments. Leaves twitched as if signaling to one another: she approaches.

Around a certain tree she came upon a wounded bird humped in the grass like an overturned spindle. At first she thought it had bruised its head in an accident, twisted its neck. She had never seen a side-beak merin before.

The eye above the treacherous beak stared at her. She felt herself being pulled into the bird’s gaze, sacrificing her own centrality for a moment. She felt she was being seen and understood by the merin.

The merin is a waterbird, distant cousin to the duck and the swan, though devoid of both the duck’s work ethic and the swan’s narcissism. The unusual bill swivels sideways to filch morsels from other birds. When not in use the beak, on a double-hinged jaw, can swing and tuck backward into creamy neck feathers so that in flight the merin resembles a coat-knob with wings. This merin, the color of a stag-head beetle, didn’t store its beak in its ruff. It merely looked at her and opened its mouth as if to speak.

She hadn’t yet known that some creatures can speak. She did not learn it now—at least not through evidence. But she could tell by the serrated stroke of remark, by the waterfowl’s stuttery smoker’s vowels, that the merin had something specific to say.

She tried to lift the bird but it wouldn’t let her. The subsequent scratches on her forearms, chalk marks at first, slowly beaded up. Crimson stitches on an ivory bolster.

She said, “You’re hurt, but hurting me back won’t help you any.”

It humped itself a few inches away, as much by willpower as by mortal strength, and regarded her with need and fury.

“If I can’t pick you up and take you—”

But where would she have taken it? To some house, some village, some river?

She rolled an apple at it in case it liked apples. The merin knocked it away savagely.

Then—so why did she remember any of this?—she took care of it. She didn’t remember how, just that she did. She found a way to feed it for a while until it had gathered its strength.

Say what you know.

I remember pulling a golden minnow or smelt from my pocket, still flapping, as if I had just rescued it from the weir, and feeding it to the merin. I remember how the fishlette flopped in the beak, dropped in the grass, and with what acumen and zip the merin retrieved it, and swallowed it whole.

But what a patently false memory this was. The rescue of an ice-bound fish happened in winter. The merin’s recuperation from some unknown attack or disease clearly happened in the autumn—all those apples decorating the memory.

So—if the oldest memories could contaminate one another, could prove impossible—what good was memory at all?

Was that why she remembered nothing more?

Except that when the merin had recovered its nerve and its composure, it staggered to its bandy legs and rushed at her, clacking its beak like scissors. Until it pivoted. Like a one-legged man picking up his false leg and tucking it under his arm before hopping to bed, the merin swung its beak into place. Then the bird raised its weird puppet-head and opened its wings. She could see that one wing had been wrenched at; its feathers thinned. An ugly viscous patch glistened on the leading edge like wet shellac.

And still it somehow managed to launch itself. It battered through branches as it learned how to fly all over again, with new strength in its left wing correcting what it had lost in its right. Lopsidedly it lifted along the slopes of air that mimicked the steps of terraced orchard below. It wheeled against silver blue, heading for something beyond the scope of memory to imagine.

To climb up the invisible staircases of the sky—!

Without benefit of a mouth, which was in storage, it said to her, one way or the other, “Remember.”

9.

Cherrystone was true to his word. The next morning he sent an underling to collect Rain for her first lesson in reading. It would take place in the Opaline Salon. Safe enough. Miss Murth reported that the door had been left ajar, as if for Lady Glinda or her minions to be able to check for impropriety.

“Is that so. Well, then, be a dear, Murthy, and nip down there to investigate, just in case,” said Glinda.

“Lady Glinda. I do many things and I do them well, but I do not nip.”

Rain returned an hour later not visibly glorified with learning. She trotted off to water the potted prettibells in the south porch, since Glinda now felt obliged to keep the damn things alive.

Chef sent word that his supplies of potatoes had been appropriated. Also three whole smoked haunches of skark and a pair of hams. Would Lady Glinda settle for a lunch of coddled eggs and new carrots?

Miss Murth had a headache and retired for the afternoon.

Glinda walked the length of her apartments. Since Mockbeggar Hall crowned a headland, it enjoyed water views from three directions. Westward Glinda could see a flock of geese. Out the front windows she spied a lone tugboat plying the waves. Easterly, several stacks of smudgy smoke unfurled from an indeterminate source.

She rang for Puggles. “They’re not burning Zimmerstorm, surely?” she asked.

“I can’t say for certain, Mum,” he replied. “All our kitchen deliveries are now handled through an EC lout who acts mute. Perhaps he is. He is called Private Private, and he doesn’t speak to us or anyone else, near as I can tell. So I can get no word out of him.”

“This is intolerable.” She tried to summon Cherrystone, but the guard who seemed permanently stationed in the banquet hall replied, “He’s not at home, Mum.”

“Of course he’s not at home,” she snapped. “His home is someplace else. This is my home. Where is he?”

“Privileged information, I’m afraid, Mum.”

“I’m not Mum to you, laddie. Address me as Lady Glinda or Lady Chuffrey. Who are you?”

“Privileged information, Mum.”

She almost hit him. But Cherrystone came swooping in, pretty as you please, through the kitchens. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said, like a husband returning from an afternoon shooting grouse. She almost felt he was going to swing across the room and plant a kiss on her cheek.

“Traper. I need a word. Privately.”

He shrugged. “As you know, privacy doesn’t do either of our reputations any good.”

“This is war, Traper. Reputations be damned.”

“As you wish.” He made a gesture and the Menacier skated away.

She told him she wanted to know what was burning to the east. “Oh, that? It’s the cotton harvest, I’m afraid. The holdings between here and Zimmerstorm.”

She gasped. “You must be mad. What has cotton ever done to you?”

“Oh, very little. Cotton is blameless, I admit.”

“What is the point? Just to deprive the farmers of their cash crop? They sell to mills in Gillikin, you must know that. You’ll force up the price of cotton in Loyal Oz. That’s madness pure and simple.”

“Maybe there was a population of boll weevils doing the nasty on that farm.”

“I’ll say. Are you trying to foment the farmers into attacking you here? The Battle of Mockbeggar Hall? Seriously. Traper. I want an explanation.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you’d become the Good Witch of Munchkinland, Lady Glinda. They already have a pretender to the position of Eminence squatting up there in Colwen Grounds, I’m told.”

“And I have friends in the neighborhood.”

“Among cotton farmers? Please.”

It was a stretch; she saw that. She tried again. “Those farmers supply you and me both with dairy and grain and who knows what else. You’re playing with fire, General. Rather literally, I’m afraid.”

“Well.” He poured himself a small portion of her brandy. Before lunch! He offered her a glass. She didn’t acknowledge his offer. “The truth is, the boys are antsy. Soldiers like to be on the move, and they’re going slightly stir-crazy. They need to be kept busy. A little burning of fields is a useful exercise. Gets them out and working.”

She stared at him as if he were mad.

He added, “You haven’t had sons, you wouldn’t get it. Soldiers like to destroy as well as to build.”

She was flummoxed. “If you’re going to be here for months, what will you do—scorch the entire district?”

“Maybe we’ll take up lowland sports. Like hip-sprung dancing, the way the old ones do in the pub in Zimmerstorm. Or darts.” He was being amused by her consternation. “Or I could teach my men to speak Qua’ati, perhaps. By the way, your Rain made a creditable start at learning her letters this morning.”

“I need a carriage.”

“There’s nothing available today.”

“You’ll have to locate me one. I have an appointment. I’m leaving directly after luncheon.”

“I can’t spare a driver.”

“I’ll have Puggles or Chef. They’ll know how to manage a team.”

She turned to leave as he was speaking. “Where is your appointment?”

“East of the cotton fields,” she replied. “I haven’t decided the exact destination.”

Somewhat to her surprise, when she descended the stairs in her wine-colored summer cloak with the musset panels, the front doors were open and the Menacier from the banquet hall was waiting. “The name is Zackers, Lady Glinda,” he said with crystalline politeness. “I have orders to accommodate you within reason, and to turn back if you cannot be reasoned with.”

“I have nearly no sense of reason,” she told him, “so be forewarned.”

It wasn’t her best carriage but it was better than nothing. Miss Murth had brought a fan, but the breeze off the lake was strong this afternoon and the horseflies mercifully few. What a treat to hear the trap clicketing along on the abalone drive, and then the softer sound it made in summer dust when they passed through the front gates of Mockbeggar and turned east along the lake road. Lady Glinda hadn’t really felt imprisoned yet, but her release was more welcome than she’d anticipated.

The road rose and fell as the low hills of the Pine Barrens to the north approached the lake. This part of Oz had been farmed for hundreds of years. Some tedious old geezer at a dinner party once had told Glinda that the Munchkins of antiquity had settled here first before colonizing the breadbasket of Oz to the northeast. How anyone could deduce such a thing seemed dubious to her, though in time her eye for architecture began to assemble clues that supported his thesis. And, she had to acknowledge, the fecundity of this district would have appealed to any wandering troll or trollop.

How she’d come to love Restwater. As if she didn’t see it every day from her chambers, she marveled once again. Every bend in the road, every dip after every rise, bringing new vistas of blue shattered by sunlight. Blue between the pines, one shade; blue between the birches, another. Blue in chips and fragments; blue opening up. If there were such a place as heaven, she thought, it could do worse than modeling itself on the road from Mockbeggar to Zimmerstorm.

All too soon, however, she began to smell the stench of char, and most of those blues went brown with heavy hovering smoke, a kind of industrial fog. She coughed, and Murth coughed, and their eyes stung and then ran. “Shall I turn back, for your health, Mum?” asked Private Zackers.

“Press on.”

The fields were destroyed. At least—she peered through the streams in her eyes—at least the outbuildings and farmsteads seemed standing. Those visible from the road, anyway.

What had those farmers done? Where had they gone while their livelihoods were being torched?

The carriage passed a vegetable garden that for the fun of it, she guessed, had also been ravaged. A scarecrow shrugged its shoulders at the sky, presiding over ruin, as if asking the Unnamed God the reason for such wantonness.

Murth’s tears were real tears. She was a fool, after all, if a dear one. For herself, Glinda felt ready to take some training with a halberd.

Before long—not soon enough—they had cleared the worst of the damage and were beginning the descent into Zimmerstorm. Its town hall steeple, its pitched roofs clad in the blue-grey tiles of the region—it all looked more or less correct. A mercy.

Glinda directed Zackers to halt the trap in the village square. “We shall take our tea, my companion and I,” she told Zackers. “Your company is not required.”

He stood on guard at the street door of the local tearoom anyway.

Then Lady Glinda had the most unfortunate experience of realizing—very slowly, picking up cues as if they were bug bites—that the residents of Zimmerstorm didn’t fully believe the testimony of those who’d been dismissed from Mockbeggar. They harbored a suspicion that Lady Glinda was in collusion with the occupiers.

She could hardly blame them. She was Gillikinese herself, of course, and she had had high-ranking association with the Emerald City. And she couldn’t mount an explanation in public—former Throne Ministers didn’t do that. Besides, who would believe her? She just had to sit in stony silence as the cabbage-faced Munchkinlander hostess grunted and scowled and made as if to dump the tea in her lap. “A biscuit,” Glinda begged.

“No biscuits,” snapped the proprietress. “Your military friendsies scarfed ’em all up. For ’emselves.”

“Perhaps a roundlet of toast?” wondered Miss Murth.

The toast came about twenty minutes later. It had been burnt inedible. As burnt as the cotton fields.

“Perhaps a constitutional,” suggested Lady Glinda.

“That’s five farthings, Mum,” said Sour Peasant Woman.

Lady Glinda wasn’t in the habit of carrying coin. Miss Murth had none to carry. How embarrassing to have to petition Private Zackers to pay the establishment. I won’t make that mistake again, Glinda thought.

Still, while Zackers was settling up, Glinda and Murth got ahead of him, across the village square. A miniature escape! Oh, hilarity.

“Into the lending library, Murthy,” said Glinda. “Quickly now. Move your arthritic hips or I’ll run you down.”

The librarian was a retired Munchkin on a stool. She recognized him though she didn’t know his name. “I’m looking to borrow a book that can teach one the essentials of preparing a meal,” she said. “For dining, I mean. For human dining.”

“Books en’t going to teach that, Lady Glinda,” he said. “Mothers teach that. Closest I can help you with is a volume on animal husbandry, which has an illustrated index on slaughtering your own livestock.”

“I think not,” she murmured. Turning, she saw a notice board behind his desk. A scroll was posted with nails. She peered at it. A crude drawing with a handwritten announcement. She hadn’t brought her reading glasses. “Miss Murth, can you decipher that message?” she asked.

Miss Murth could not. “You want something read, you should’ve brought Rain,” she said, somewhat cruelly.

“I can read that for you, Lady Glinda,” said the librarian. “It says that the Clock of the Time Dragon is coming through in the next week or so, weather and the military situation permitting.”

“It looks like a chapel on wheels of some sort.”

“It’s an entertainment, Mum. Sort of a puppet show for adults. You en’t never seen it?”

“Nor heard of it.” She intended frost in her tone, but thought better of it. “My dear man, would you tell the managers of this traveling enterprise to make their way to Mockbeggar Hall? I do believe that if the soldiers had something to look forward to, we might keep them from doing any more damage than they have already done, for instance, today.”

Luckily, this Munchkinlander wasn’t as suspicious as the tea-wife in the shop. “Can’t say them traveling clocksters will listen to me,” he replied. “But I can pass on the word and see what they’ll do. They operate with cheeky diplomatic immunity, far as I’ve heard. Cross these parts every few years, don’t matter if it’s Wicked Witch of the East or the old Eminent Thropp or that mean old Zombie Mombey in charge. They seem pretty fearless. I’ll give ’em your message.”

“You’re too kind,” she told him. Here came Private Zackers, looking red under the collar.

“You were nice to my sister, that time she lay in childbirth a month too long,” said the librarian softly. “You put a cloth to her brow. Don’t pretend you forget.”

She turned away, confused by an accusation of charity. “How impertinent!” hissed Murth on her behalf.

10.

Day after day as different plantings came to flower, blossoms patterned the gardens and the meadows with a shifting palette. Now the eggy frill of late forsythia, now the fringe of fern. Now the periwinkle mycassandrum on the hillsides, until pale daisies overtook the lavender, and then wild dusteria the daisies. The leaves on the trees flexed their palms wider. Let me in, said the sun. Let me out, said the tree.

Beyond the reflecting pool, the topiary hedges thickened into rooms again, chambers of green set round with statues, plinths, benches of marble carved to look like rural twigwork. Once the daily cloudburst had passed, Glinda often grabbed a parasol and picked her way through the maze. Miss Murth had an allergy to the mites that came out of the ivy after a downpour so she stayed inside, and Glinda got herself a little privacy. The Green Parlor, as they called it, was considered an extension of her private chambers, so she had no cause to worry about some wayward soldier interrupting her meditations.

She was surprised, therefore, one afternoon about a week later, to come upon a dwarf with a hoary beard sitting upon the drum of an aesthetically collapsed column.

“I beg your pardon.” Her tone was High Frost.

“No offense taken,” he told her, lighting a pipe with a long stem.

“This is a private garden.”

“You’d better take yourself off, then.” He winked at her. The nerve. “Or should I say, All the better for a private conversation.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Glinda, or else I made a wrong turn,” he answered. “Easy enough to do in a hedge maze. Especially for a dwarf.”

“I’ll set the dogs on you unless you leave.”

He looked up over the tops of his spectacles. “That’s a sour welcome considering you called for me. You don’t remember we’ve met before? Or is it, Seen one dwarf, seen ’em all? They all look alike to me?”

“Forgive me. I’m not myself. I no longer have the staff to hand me notes of reference.” She peered at him sideways. “Oh. I see. You’re with that circus. That pantomime troupe. No?”

“We prefer to think of ourselves as social critics. The conscience of Oz. But we take any cash comes our way, so you can call us dancing bears or moral vivisectionists, whatever you like. Makes no difference to me.”

He gave his name as Mr. Boss, which rang no bells with her.

“How did you know how to find me in the maze?” she asked.

He laughed. “Oh, knowing things; that’s my line of work, missy.”

“Well … thank you for coming, I suppose. I had thought maybe you could put on a performance or rally or sing-along, whatever, to entertain the men garrisoned here. Is that the sort of thing you do?”

“I do anything that suits me. But it can be made my while, I think.”

“Well, what do you charge?”

“I’ll let you know. Can you show me the setup?”

“First remind me how we came to meet the first time. For the life of me I can’t recall.”

He didn’t comply with her request. “You must meet so many dwarfs in your line of work. Let’s go.”

She didn’t like to be seen taking the air with a dwarf, but she supposed she had no choice. And really, she thought, what do I care what soldiers think? Bloody hell. They’ve spent the week burning cotton fields.

But she did care, which was annoying.

Still, she ushered Mr. Boss out of the Green Parlor. The dwarf breathed noisily and spat his tobacco into the prettibells.

In the widest open space among the farm buildings, where two stables and three barns and some carriage sheds fronted a sort of ellipse, Private Zackers showed up to refuse her further access. “I have no interest in the barns right now, Zackers,” she told him. “I’m engaging a troupe of traveling players and I’m examining the barnyard as a possible venue.”

“Has the General approved this?” asked Zackers.

She made a disagreeable face. “I’m not submitting to him for reimbursement, Zackers; there’s nothing to approve. I’m supplying my uninvited guests with a little weekend entertainment. I am the lady of Mockbeggar Hall, after all.” She turned to the dwarf. “What do you think?”

“Some can sit in the upper windows and get a balcony view,” he said. “Shall we say sunset tomorrow?”

“How will I reach you in case plans need to be changed?”

“You won’t need to reach me.”

He was confident. As well he might be: Cherrystone had no objection. “I saw posters mounted on various kiosks in Zimmerstorm and Haventhur,” he said. “I’d been wondering what it was all about. Bring it on.”

So, ten days after the burning of the first cotton field, Glinda left Miss Murth and Chef and Rain behind. They could keep an eye on the silver if nothing else. She accepted the arm Puggles extended to her because the cobbles were uneven. Cherrystone had arranged a chair for her—one of the precious bon Scavella chairs from the Hall of Painted Arches!—but she pretended not to be outraged.

Men surrounded her in jostling, good-natured mumble. The ones nearer the appointed arena had brought cloaks upon which to sit, but most of the fellows stood, arms about one another’s shoulders, or leaned against the various walls. Several hay carts provided mezzanine seating, while other fellows appeared in the hay doors under the peaks of the barn roofs. From a height sometimes known as the gods they swung their heels and hooted at their buddies.

General Cherrystone hauled out a camp chair for himself. He sat some distance away from her, as was correct. She nodded, acknowledging him briefly before turning her attention to nothing of interest in her purse.

Just as the sun was slotting between two hills to the east, raging the lake with ruddy copper, she heard the sound of wheels on stone from around the edge of the farthest barn. This was the signal, apparently, for soldiers to light some torches. Within a few moments the last of day became the first of night, a magic as peculiar and welcome as any other.

A wheeled monstrosity of some sort emerged. Nothing less than a small building erected on a dray. Between the shafts, where one might expect a team of horses or donkeys, a lion strained, head down, mane over his eyes. The temple of entertainment was accompanied by a number of young men in tangerine tunics, black scarfs covering their noses and mouths. A slim white-haired woman in a golden veil struck a set of chimes with a mallet. She looked spiky and consumptive. The dwarf drew up the rear, banging a drum almost as big as he was.

Glinda hoped she wasn’t going to ask to be converted. She didn’t have much to be converted from. She began to wish she’d sat farther back. Now where had she met that dwarf before? She’d been racking her brains for a day and had turned up no clue. She supposed, not for the first time, that she didn’t have a whole lot of brains to rack. Or was she at the age already when memory begins to fail? She couldn’t remember.

The lion muttered something to the veiled woman. So it was a Lion, then. Curious. Most respectable Animals wouldn’t be seen doing menial labor like pulling a cart, but perhaps this was a sort of penance. Glinda knew that Animals in Munchkinland fared no better than Animals in Loyal Oz; you rarely saw a professional Animal on the shores of Restwater. But then her social circuit was circumscribed by her position; who knew what Animals might be getting up to in the back of beyond? All kinds of unsavory mischief. She preferred not to contemplate it; life at Mockbeggar these days was vexing enough.

She turned her attention to the performance. Things were starting up.

The jittery-totteriness of it. A sort of omphalos made of wood, capped by the semblance of a dragon. Its countenance was lurid, its eyes glowed red, like embers. Clever and banal. Long struts carved of sallowwood flexed to suggest the limbs of a bat. When the dragon shifted its wings to reveal a clock-face, the sound of leathery creases shifting was like wet laundry on the line, flumping in a stiff wind.

So this was the Clock of the Time Dragon. Ready for all manner of foldiddy-doodle.

Then the facade of the great structure along the length of the cart, the long side, began to separate into segments. It folded back cunningly, the best of tiktok play. Small stagelets receded or nested against each other. Protrusions locked into recesses. The whole thing was a set of shutters collapsing against one another like a sentient puzzle.

All this clockwork commotion revealed a central arena, cloaked from view by a curtain as broad as two bed linens hemmed together. The drape must be stiffened with wooden braces. The surface of the cloth was painted with a fanciful map of Oz. More iconography than geography. The Emerald City glowed in the middle through some apparatus of backlighting; a loose approximation of the four main counties fanned out to the margins. Gillikin to the north, Quadling Country to the south, the Vinkus to the west, and Munchkinland—the Free State of Munchkinland, for her pains!—to the east.

She was sitting close enough to peer at the margins of the map. The outlying colonies and satrapies of Ugabu and the Glikkus. A few arrows pointing, variously, away, off margin, to countries across the band of deserts that isolated the giant Oz as competently as a ring of seas might, were seas anything other than a mystical notion of everlastingness.

Some sort of music began. She was dimly aware that the boys in their sunset robes had picked up nose whistles and cymberines, tympani and strikes. Someone drew a bow across a squash-bellied violastrum. Someone lit a muskwax-taper that smelled of rose blossoms. To a man, the soldiers squatted, relaxing on their haunches; this was well done enough to be convincing before it had even begun.

Cherrystone, she saw, was lighting a cigarette.

The dwarf gave a bow at the close of the prelude. The curtain rose on a lighted stage as the yard appreciably darkened by three or four degrees of violet.

A couple of figures strutted lazily onstage. What were they called again? Homunculards. Puppets on strings. Marionettes, that was it. They were meant to resemble the Messiars and Menaciers squatting in the barnyard of Mockbeggar Hall, no doubt. They were hale and fit, and their ash limbs had been carved to exaggerate military physique. Waists tapered to pencil points, while biceps and buttocks and pectorals were all globular as oranges. Faces were blank but rosy-cheeked, and one chin had a sticking plaster across it, suggesting a soldier so young he was still learning how to shave.

The two soldiers sauntered across the stage, looking hither and yon. Lights came up further to reveal the painted backdrop, which seemed to be a field of corn or wheat or cotton. A rough fence, a scarecrow, a few squiggles of bird painted in the sky across fat clouds in summersweet blue.

What craft the handlers showed! The puppet soldiers were bored. They whistled (how did they do that?). They kicked an imaginary stone back and forth. Funny how in the telling of it, thought Glinda, in the arc of the leading foot and the posture of the defense, the presence of the implied stone seemed as real, or even realer, than the puppet fellows themselves.

The puppets soon tired of kick-the-pebble. They approached the front of the stage and looked out at the audience, but it was clear they weren’t peering at real soldiers in the gloaming. One of the carved Menaciers put a palm to his eyebrows as if shielding it from sun while he scanned the horizon. The other knelt down and dipped his hand a little below stage level, and the audience heard the sound of water swishing about. The puppet guard was meant to be on the shores of Restwater.

From offstage a melody started up, a saucy two-step in the key of squeezebox. The soldiers looked at each other and then off to one side. On came a line of dancing girls with high-stepping legs, bare to the knee and venturing quite a bit of thigh. In the porphyrous barnyard, General Cherrystone’s soldiers roared and applauded the arrival of this squadron of hoofers. Well, they were cheery, Glinda had to agree. And so smart! Eight or nine dancers. Their dresses, sequinned and glittery, were made of silvery blue tulle netting stitched from the hip of the first dancer on the left all along to the last dancer on the right. Their kicks were so uniform they were no doubt managed by a single lever or pulley of some sort. Offstage, some of the musicians were hooting out in falsetto as if the dancers were catcalling the men, “Heee!” and “What ho!” and “Oooh la la!” and “Oz you like it!”

Then, through some sleight of theater that Glinda couldn’t work out, they’d turned back-to-front somehow. The vixens put their hands to the floor and their legs in the air, and their skirts fell down over their bosoms and heads, revealing pink panties that looked, from here, like real silk. Their costumed behinds faced the audience. Each one of the girls had a bull’s-eye painted on her smalls.

The soldiers in the barnyard roared their approval. Glinda noticed that the two puppet Menaciers had disappeared. Well, who needed male puppets when females were available?

You could no longer make out the heads of the dancers, nor even their legs. The blue netting seemed to be rising and thickening; there was more and more of it, until all that was left were nine pink behinds bobbing in a sea of blue.

Thank mercy she had left Miss Murth at home, she thought, as—oh sweet Ozma—the dancers somehow dropped their drawers. The pink sleeves slid under the waves, and on each of the nine bobbing unclefted arses a different letter was painted.

R-E-S-T-W-A-T-E-R.

The articulate rumps quickly disappeared beneath the blue waves of the lake. The audience booed good-naturedly. But Glinda noticed that the smell of roses had given over to a smell of smoke.

From wing to wing, across the back of the stage, some long slit in the floor must have opened, for the dancing girl puppets and then their drowning lengths of blue skirt drained within the aperture. Their disappearance revealed one of the soldiers from earlier. His face had been smudged with coal dust, his clothes as well. He carried in his hand a torch. The fire was made of orange flannel lit from within; a spring-wound fan made the flames dance to the same melody that the girls had jigged to.

Oh, thought Glinda suddenly, as the smell of smoke intensified. Oh dear.

The aperture opened again and up from beneath the stage rose a stiffened flat. It was in the shape of a hill, the same shape as the hill on the backdrop, and very soon it stood in front of the backdrop, blocking the view of Highsummer crops. The hill was denuded of crop, and blackened. The scarecrow was a scorched skeleton with hollows for eyes.

The second soldier came on, and the two companions returned to the shore of Restwater. Somehow while the audience had been distracted by the rising dead hill, a segment of the stage had slid forward, like the broad bowed front of a shallow drawer. From the recesses flashed scraps and humps of the costumes of the dancing girls, now clearly signifying the waves of Restwater. Then—oh, horrid to see!—from the surface of the tulle-water emerged the head of the Time Dragon itself. Its eyes glowed red; its scissoring jaws seethed with smoke.

The two soldiers waded in the water, one on either side of the puppet Dragon, and they clasped their arms around its neck. They fell to kissing the creature as if it were one of the dancing girls, and as its smile turned into a leer, it sank beneath the waves, dragging the two soldiers with them. They couldn’t pull away. They courted the dragon with affection until they drowned.

“Enough!” barked Cherrystone in the dark, but he hadn’t needed to say this. The lights were going down and the music fading upon a weird, unresolved chord.

The barnyard fell silent. The dwarf came around from the back of the Clock and gave a little skip and a bow and a flick of his teck-fur cap.

Glinda stood and applauded. She was the only one until she turned and made a motion with her hands. Then the men joined in, grumblingly and none too effusive.

Improvising, she walked over to Cherrystone and pretended she couldn’t read his ire. “Would you care to join the troupe of entertainers back at the house for a light refreshment before they go on their way?”

He didn’t answer. He began barking orders to his men.

She couldn’t resist fluting after him, “I’ll take that as regrets, but do feel free to change your mind if you’re so inclined.” Then she cocked her head at Mr. Boss and indicated Mockbeggar Hall’s forecourt.

11.

My, but Cherrystone needed to sort out his men. They seemed bothered by the turn toward tragedy that the episode had taken. Clever little dramaturg, thought Glinda, sneaking a glance at Mr. Boss and his associates as they dragged the Clock of the Time Dragon across the forecourt of Mockbeggar.

Puggles had rushed ahead to light a few lanterns and arrange for a beverage. But Mr. Boss said, “There’s no time. We have to get out quickly before your General Mayhem arrives to put us under lock and key.”

“But you’re my guests,” said Glinda.

“Fat distance that’ll get us, when you’re in durance vile yourself.” He turned to the Lion. “Brrr, guard the gateway, will you? If you can manage to look menacing, you might hold off the law for a valuable few moments.”

“Menacing isn’t my strong suit,” said the Lion. “How about vexed? Or inconvenienced.”

Glinda recognized the voice, dimly. Not the famous Cowardly Lion? Doing menial labor for a bunch of—shudder—theater people? She had made him a Namory once, hadn’t she? “Sir Brrr?” she ventured.

“The same,” he replied, “though I drop the honorific when I’m touring.” He seemed pleased to be recognized. “Lady Glinda. A pleasure.”

“To your station, ’fraidycat,” snapped the dwarf. Brrr padded away. The brittle woman in the veils went with him, one hand upon his rolling spine. In the lamplight he looked quite the golden statue of a Lion, regal and paralyzed, and his consort like some sort of penitent. The lads in orange were still strapping up the Clock and securing it.

“I have been trying to think of where we met,” said Glinda. “I ought to have kept better notes.”

“You ever intend to write your memoirs,” the dwarf said, “you’re going to have to make up an awful lot. Maybe this will remind you.”

He motioned to the young men to stand back. They looked singularly strong, stupid, and driven. Ah, for a stupid young man, she thought, losing the thread for a moment. Lord Chuffrey had been many wonderful things, but stupid he was not, which made him a little less fun than she’d have liked.

The dwarf approached the Clock. She couldn’t tell if he pressed some hidden mechanism or if the Clock somehow registered his intentions. Or maybe he was merely responding to its intentions; it seemed weirdly spirited. “The next moment,” he murmured, “always the next moment unpacks itself with a degree of surprise. Come on, now.”

The section of front paneling—from which the lake of blue tulle had swelled—slid open once more. There was no sign of the dragon head, the drowned Menaciers, the rustling waves. The dwarf reached in and put his thwarty hands on something and pulled it out. She recognized it at once, and her memory snapped into place.

Elphaba’s book of spells. Glinda had had it once, after Elphaba had died; and then the dwarf had come along, and Glinda had given it to him for safekeeping.

“How did you persuade me to give it to you?” Her voice was nearly at a whisper. “I can’t remember. You must have put a spell on me.”

“Nonsense. I don’t do magic, except the obvious kind. Fanfares and mistaken identities, chorus lines and alto soliloquies. A little painting on black velvet. I merely told you that I knew you had the book of spells, that I knew what was in it, and that I knew your fears about it. I’m the keeper of the Grimmerie. That’s my job. If not to hoard it under my own protection, then to lodge it where it will do the least harm.”

He held it out to her. “That’s why I’ve come. It’s your turn. This is your payment for our service tonight. You will take it again. It’s time.”

She drew back, looked to make sure that Cherrystone wasn’t approaching from the barns or the house itself. “You’re a mad little huskin of a man, Mr. Boss. This is the least safe place for the Grimmerie. I am incarcerated here.”

“You will use it,” he said, “and you must use it.”

“I don’t respond to threats or prophecies.”

“Prophecy is dying, Lady Glinda. So I’m going on a hunch. Our best thinking is all we have left.”

“My best thinking wouldn’t boil an egg,” she told him.

“Look it up. This thing is as good a cookbook as any you’re likely to find. Come on, sister. Didn’t Elphaba trust you once to try? It’s your turn.”

“I don’t mention her name,” said Glinda. Not coldly, but in deference.

“Shall I leave you the Lion to help you protect the book?”

“I am not allowed pets.”

Brrr, circling the court and sniffing for trouble, gave a low growl.

“Sorry. I’m flustered. I meant to say staff. I have a skeletal crew on hand to look after me, but I think you need the Lion’s services more than I do.”

“His services aren’t much to speak of,” said the dwarf. The boys laughed a little nastily. They were Menaciers themselves, she saw, just in a different uniform, serving a different commander. She wanted nothing to do with any of them.

“When I saw you once before,” she told Mr. Boss, “you were on your own. You didn’t have this extravagance of tiktok mechanics at your heels.”

“Once in a while I park the Clock in secrecy when the times require it. That instance, as I recall, I was making a little pilgrimage on foot. I told you that I knew you had the Grimmerie, and what was in it. I told you things about Elphaba that no one could know. That’s how I convinced you to relieve yourself of the Grimmerie then, before Shell Thropp had acceded to the Throne and approached you, intending to impound the book. I trust he did make that effort?”

She nodded. The dwarf had predicted events quite cannily. Thanks to him, she’d had nothing to show Shell, not in the palace treasury nor in her private library, not in Mennipin Square nor in Mockbeggar Hall. She’d been clean of this dangerous volume.

And now, Cherrystone breathing down her throat every day, she was expected to take it back again? To hide it in plain sight?

“Are you working to set me up for execution?” she hissed.

“I never talk about the end game.” He winked at her. “I’ve lived so long without death that I’ve stopped believing in it.”

From the shadows of the great Parrith onyx pillars with strabbous inlay, the Lion spoke. “Things are settling down now. Campfires being lit, men sorted out. We don’t have much time.”

“Please,” said Mr. Boss to her. “And I don’t say please often.”

Glinda kept her hands tucked under her arms. She looked up at the dark windows of Mockbeggar. If she took this book, she wanted to make certain that Miss Murth and Puggles and Chef were ignorant of it. She didn’t want to put them under any more danger than necessary.

There was no sign of a shape at the windows. Or was there? Perhaps a little thumbnail of darkness at a lower pane. Surely Rain was off and asleep?

The spooky woman in the veil hesitated, but then left the Lion’s side to approach Glinda. The lamplight etched shadows from her veil along the sides of her face, but Glinda could make out her strong thin nose and full lips and a shock of white hair, odd in one who seemed otherwise so young. A wasting ailment, perhaps. Her skin was dark, like a woman from the Vinkus. “We do not play at intrigue,” she said to Glinda. “We work to avoid it wherever we can. But I ask you. Do this for Elphaba. Do this for Fiyero.”

Glinda reared back. “What license have you to take their names to me!”

She replied, “The right of the wounded, for whom propriety is a luxury. I beg you. In their names. Take the book.”

“Listen to Missy Flitter-foot of the Prairies,” said Mr. Boss to Glinda. “Before they tear us limb from limb.”

The Lion shook his mane. “Ilianora. Gentlemen. Mr. Boss. They’re beginning to marshal their forces. I can hear them coming.”

She didn’t know why she took the Grimmerie from the dwarf, but Brrr was already settling himself between the shafts of the Clock, and the lads in tunics were putting shoulders to the carriage. The one they called Ilianora drew her veil down upon her forehead. “If they catch us up, and tear the Clock apart with their fingers, they won’t find its heart,” she said to Glinda, and put two dusky fingers upon Glinda’s pale hand. “Much depends on you now.” Then she turned, a corkscrew twist of white sleeves and ripples, and hurried after the Clock as it passed through the gates of the forecourt and into the dark, heading not toward Zimmerstorm and the Munchkin strongholds, but west along the road leading toward Loyal Oz.

The dwarf was walking away backward, hissing at Glinda. “We won’t go far. Into a tuck between low hills in the Pine Barrens. Just until we’re sure everything is copacetic.”

“You have no reason to look after me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. We want to make sure the book doesn’t come to harm.” Then on his bandy legs he stumped to catch up with his companions.

She was alone for a moment, alone with the Grimmerie in the guttering light of lanterns. It weighed against her breast and clavicle like the child she had never had. It was nearly warm to touch. It was warm to touch. The tooled binding seemed to relax in her hold.

Nonsense.

She flung herself inside and up the grand staircase. She was huffing by the time she reached the top, and she could hear soldiers returning to their posts in the banquet hall and the reception rooms. She heard the crystal chink of stopper against bottleneck; brandy was being decanted. Disagreements about the Clock’s presentation were being aired. She achieved her private suite, however, without molestation.

A single candle glowed in a sconce. Miss Murth sat ramrod straight, looking directly ahead. The girl was on the floor, her head in Miss Murth’s lap. Murth was stroking her hair.

“You fool. You should be abed. I can manage my own nightgown,” snapped Glinda.

“The girl couldn’t sleep and I didn’t dare let her wander about alone.”

“So where did the two of you wander to? The ramparts?”

Miss Murth pursed her lip. “The girl was curious. But I did not care for the entertainment. It did not seem suitable.”

“Suitable for whom? I’m disappointed in you both. Take yourselves off somewhere else to sulk. I didn’t write the script. Go on, I’m in no mood to talk.”

Miss Murth arose. She didn’t glance at the Grimmerie, which Glinda felt was glowing against her bosom like a red-hot breastplate. “You will bring us to ruin, Lady Glinda,” she said in a low voice. “Come along, girl.”

The sleepy child stood and yawned. As much to herself as to Glinda or Murth, she murmured, “My favorite was the Lion.”

12.

Whatever happened, Glinda was pretty sure she wouldn’t be subject to a midnight inquisition, so she just stuffed the Grimmerie under her pillow. Then she humped herself into bed and blew her own candle out, and failed to sleep till nearly dawn.

What to do about the book? Cherrystone had already scoured her apartments, but he was no fool. He might work out that the performance of such a seditious little one-act was a diversionary tactic. That some transaction had occurred in the forecourt. He could come storming in here at dawn and tear the place apart. What to do? Where to turn?

And why was she the point person? Was it simply too obvious for words—that she was known to be more capricious than clever? That no one would think to look for an instrument of parlous magic in her presence? That she was a silly, dispensable figure whose moment had passed? She couldn’t dispute any of this. And she still couldn’t sleep.

Her thoughts returned to Elphaba Thropp. It was more than fifteen years since they had parted ways. What an uncommon friendship they had had—not quite fulfilling. Yet nothing had ever taken its place. Years later, when that boy Liir had shown up at Glinda’s house in the Emerald City, she had known him at once for Elphaba’s son, though he seemed in some doubt on that matter. (Children.) He had had Elphaba’s broom, after all, and her cape. More to the point, he had had her look: that look both haunted and thereby abstract, but at the same time focused. A look like a spark on a dry winter’s day, that staticky crackle and flash that leaps across the air from finger to the iron housing of the servant’s bell.

What would Liir do, were he handed the Grimmerie? What would Elphaba?

She drifted to sleep at last as the summer dawn began. Birds insisted on their dim pointless melodies. She didn’t believe she dreamed of Elphaba; she didn’t have the kind of aggravated imagination that loitered in dreams. Maybe she dreamed of a door opening, and Elphaba coming back from the Afterlife. To settle Glinda’s consternation; to save her. Or maybe this wasn’t a dream, just a foundational longing. Still, when she rose to a clamor of soldiers practicing in formation outside, she found that she had an inkling about what to do. Like a bit of advice from Elphaba, in her dream! But that was fanciful.

Miss Murth was drawing the bath. “I fear a slight headache,” called Glinda. “I will do without tea until later. Leave me alone.”

“Very good, Mum,” said Miss Murth in a voice of superiority and disdain. She slammed the door on the way out.

Glinda approached the wardrobe and removed the Grimmerie. She sat it on a towel on her dressing table. The volume was as long as her forearm and almost as wide, covered in green morocco and gussied up with semiprecious stones and silvergilt. No title upon its spine. The pages were rough cut, she could see, and when she ran her finger across the deckle edges she believed she felt a curious charge. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t fully awake yet.

She opened the book. This is to say, she prised up the cover and a certain portion of pages. The book wouldn’t allow her to select any old page. It seemed to know what she was looking for, and sure enough, she found it. The facing page was blank, but the inscribed page read, in majuscule so ornate as to look like lace, On Concealment.

A knock on the door. Without thinking Glinda murmured, “Come in.” Murth approached with tea on a tray. “I said I would wait,” said Glinda.

“But it’s noon, Mum,” said Miss Murth. “And you haven’t taken your bath yet? It’ll be glacial cold by now.”

“Leave the tea,” said Glinda, frightened. She hadn’t felt more than a minute go by as she was trying to scrutinize the spell. Apparently she had lost a morning.

“I have news, Lady Glinda,” said Miss Murth.

“Later,” said Glinda, flustered. “I mean it, Murth. I’ll ring for you presently. Good-bye.”

Miss Murth departed. Glinda was almost there. She had to concentrate.

She stood. Her back was sore from hunching over. She had been studying this one page for several hours! Mercy. Had she learned to concentrate at last? Perhaps she was ready to take some correspondence classes in, oh, table gooseball. Or poem writing. Or the foreign service.

She put the fingers of both hands spread out upon the tabletop—that seemed to be part of it, to stabilize herself. It was almost as if the book wanted her to succeed, wanted to be concealed; there was a sort of sharpening of focus upon each word as she spoke it, though she scarcely knew what the words meant. “Debooey geekum, eska skadilly sloggi,” she recited. “Gungula vexus, vexanda talib en prochinka chorr.” She didn’t think herself at all convincing, but the book didn’t seem to notice.

She reached the last syllables—and the book shuddered and jumped, as if someone had kicked the table from beneath. She put one knuckle between her teeth to keep herself from shrieking in surprise. Success! Or sabotage. Anyway, something. Something was happening.

The Grimmerie began to change shape. She couldn’t have said how. It was shrinking and growing at the same time, and the balsam-needle color of its spine seemed to be burning off. The book flexed and retracted. It took several moments before it returned to seeming lifeless, like most books. It was thick and square and yellow—the size, shape, and color of a bad cake. A kind of papery cover, a shiny scarf cut to order, was folded into the front and back boards and jacketed around the spine of the volume.

Glinda picked up the Grimmerie and shook it. It made no sound except the riffling of pages, which fluttered in a respectably bookish way. There was no warmth or life in it. She studied the cover as if she were Cherrystone looking for the Grimmerie. The author’s name was unintelligible gibberish. Big squarish letters above it, though, which must indicate the book’s title, said Gone with the Wind.

She humped it into a shelf next to her favorite books, A Girl’s First Guide to Coquettery and The Little Mercenary: A Novel of Manners. It looked quite at home. It certainly didn’t look like the Grimmerie.

She rang for tea. She was famished.

Tea arrived with bad news. Miss Murth looked at her balefully. Chef had been dismissed. Forcibly. “No,” said Glinda.

“While you were busy reading your book,” replied Miss Murth with spite.

“Where are the others? Rain? Puggles?”

“Rain is off at her reading lesson with the General. Puggles is trying to stake tomatoes upon the roof. Chef left him with several pages of instructions before he was carted away.”

Glinda dressed in haste and hurried downstairs, but she cast a last look at the bookshelf before she did. Gone with the Wind sat smugly in its place. What a good title for a hidden book, she thought. The Grimmerie has a sense of humor.

Any sense of accomplishment she felt at the successful completion of a spell soon evaporated in the granite presence of General Cherrystone. She paused at the door to the library, where Rain was sitting at a table, her bare legs swinging and her finger tracing letters in the pollen that had sifted through the windows and settled yellowly on the tabletop. Where the hell is that maid, thought Glinda madly, before remembering, of course, that the maid had gone wherever Chef had been sent.

Cherrystone lifted a finger to his lips. She fell silent but quivering at the doorway.

“That was decent work today, my little scholar,” he told the girl. “You’re becoming very good at your standing-up letters. Next time we’ll begin on the letters shaped like circles, or parts of circles. Don’t forget to practice.”

The child fled so fast that her dirty little soles flicked themselves at Glinda. Oh, standards, she thought. Then she pulled herself together.

“I have a bone to pick with you,” she said.

“Lady Glinda.” He didn’t rise as she came into the room. The absolute nerve of him! Leaving her standing as if she were a … a servant.

She pulled out a chair so hard it scraped the parquetry. “Miss Murth tells me you’ve dismissed Chef. You have no right to meddle with my people.”

“You’ve brought this upon yourself, Lady Glinda, by your endorsement of that provocative display last night.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not an impresario. This was no command performance. I didn’t know what entertainment that troupe was going to provide. I merely invited them. You welcomed the notion, yourself. Furthermore I have no idea what you mean by provocative. I thought the repertoire slight, coarse, and pointless.”

“I’m afraid there have had to be repercussions.”

“Are you setting me up as a collaborationist of some sort? That’s nonsense. I have retired to the country to write my memoirs.”

“And to learn to cook. I know. How is it going?”

“How am I to learn without Chef?”

“I’m sure, like your chambermaid learning to read, you’ve picked up some basics. It’s merely a matter of putting them together.”

“Cherrystone. This is intolerable. I want Chef reinstated at once.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. For one thing…” He paused, putting his hands flat on the tabletop, spreading them apart, as if smoothing a bedsheet, then bringing them together so their thumbs touched. “For one thing, he’s in no condition to take up cooking at the moment.”

Glinda gaped. “You—you—”

“He met with an accident.”

“I thought you dismissed him.”

“I did. I dismissed him. And then somehow he walked into Restwater without removing his heavy clothes, and he seemed to drown. Not unlike the set piece that concluded the little performance you so enjoyed last night, though without the involvement of any tiktok dragon.”

She stood. “I don’t believe it. A man who teaches a child to read doesn’t turn around and condemn an innocent man to death. You’re lying. I want him back.”

“The subject is closed. But in any instance, I’m afraid I am moving more men into the house. I’m going to require the use of the chambers on the piano level and in the servants’ quarters, both backstairs and up top. You’ll have to ask your people to clear out.”

“Impossible. Where will they sleep?”

“You have room in your private apartment. I will have my men move bedding and cots into one of your salons.”

“Are you insane? Traper? I can’t have Puggles in my apartments. He is my butler. A man!”

“You were married for some time, Lady Glinda. Surely you know how to close the door against ill-timed attentions. That’s a skill every wife learns.”

She was badly frightened. She needed to find out if Chef was really drowned. Ig, his name. Ig Baernaeraenaesis. “The time has come for me to ask how long you intend to loiter in my home, General.”

“That, my dear, is privileged information. Private Zackers!” he called suddenly. Zackers came through the swinging pantry door. “Some sparkling cider-tea for Lady Glinda, and one for me.”

“I will tell you this,” she said. “You may not release another member of my staff. You may have nothing to do with any of them beyond your lessons with the girl. If anyone is to be dismissed from now on, I’ll make the decision and I’ll alert you by note. Is that clear?”

“Surely you’ll stay for a glass of refreshment? Zackers isn’t Chef, of course, but he’s learning his way around the larder, much as you are.”

She didn’t reply, but swept away. In her rooms, she wept momentarily, feeling foolish. She rang for Murth and asked her to find out more about Chef, but neither Murth nor Puggles was allowed outside of the house anymore. “I didn’t hear ‘drowned,’ ” insisted Miss Murth. “I only heard ‘let go.’ But he couldn’t swim.”

After lunch the Menaciers began moving soldiers’ trunks and sleeping rolls into the gilt-ceilinged guest chambers. Zackers oversaw the setting up of cots in Glinda’s retiring parlor. Three of them, one for Puggles, one for Murth, one for Rain. “I can’t sleep in the same room as Puggles,” begged Miss Murth. “I am an unmarried woman.”

Glinda didn’t answer. She told Puggles to find Rain. Glinda would see her at once, in the privacy of her boudoir.

13.

I need something of you, Rain,” said Glinda.

The girl didn’t answer. She doesn’t speak often, noted Glinda, not for the first time. Maybe learning to read will change that.

“We are being asked to keep from walking about in the gardens for a while,” she said. “But you’re young and can run and dash about, and no one much notices. Can you find out something for me?”

Rain looked up sideways at her mistress. Despite years of Glinda’s watching her own diet and performing knee-bends in the privacy of her chambers, she suddenly felt fat. Fat and squat and old. And she feared she smelled of caramelized carrots. But enough about me, she said to herself, and shook her curls, which were due for a bleaching in a solution of lemon juice and extract of milkflower. Later. Concentrate.

“Are you up for this, Rain?”

The girl shrugged. Her hair was dirty and her calves were dirty, but prettying the child up wouldn’t do her any good, Glinda thought. She was safer looking a little revolting. That snarled cloud of unbrushed brown hair! “What do you want me to lookit?” Rain finally said.

“I want you to find out what they are building in the barns. Can you do that?”

Rain shrugged again. “They’re always hammering inside there, and the doors are shut.”

“You’re small. You can stick to the shadows.” Glinda fixed the girl with as fierce a glare as she could manage. “Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better try, or I might have to cancel your reading lessons.”

The girl looked up sharply, more keenly than before. “Not that, Mum.”

“I trust the General is treating you well?”

“He teaches me good enough,” said the girl. “I knows a passel of letters now.”

Glinda pursed her lips. She didn’t believe in putting children in danger, nor of frightening them overmuch. “He’s permitted to teach you no more than letters,” she finally said. “If he tries to teach you anything else, you come let me know. Is that understood?”

The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaller, but more honest.

“That’ll do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

“He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

14.

While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squall of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spell that would send Cherrystone and his men packing. After all, if she could use a spell to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spells. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spells therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t really make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

She replaced the book on the shelf. What had she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so well through that concealing spell that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventually Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubiousness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

15.

Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shell kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift scullery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

“Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg rolled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shell quite efficiently.

“I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?”

Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

“I’m sure you found a way.”

“I waited till the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

Glinda waited.

Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”

“It’s hard to say what I saw. It was upsy-wrongedy houses, sort of like.”

“I see,” said Glinda, though she did not.

“Like the houses in Zimmerstorm, but on their heads.”

“Were the upsy-wrongedy roofs made of blue tile, as in Zimmerstorm?”

“No. Strokes of wood all hammered close together, going like this.” Rain pushed her hands away from her belly as if describing a long melon in the air.

“Wouldn’t the upsy-wrongedy houses fall over if they were trying to balance on their narrow roofbeams?”

“They all had leggses. Like spiders, sort of. Wooden leggses.”

“How many of these houses?”

“You din’t tell me to counts ’em.”

“A lot?”

“They were too big to be a lot. They took up the whole space nearly, between the lofts for straw up high and the stalls below.”

Glinda went to a table and looked at the implements. She selected a knife and a loaf of bread. She cut off the heels and a good deal of the crusts and made the loaf into a statue of a house, as well as she could. “So. It was like this?”

“Yes but turned over.” Rain reached out and upended it. “And the spider leggses all up and down here and here. But this end was more pointy.”

“Oh. Oh yes, of course. I see now.” Glinda plucked a paring knife and quickly made of the upside-down house a sort of tugboat. “Like this. And if the spider legs were knocked away, it would look like a boat.”

“Boats don’t have such pointy bottoms.”

“Some do. You’ve probably never seen a boat out of the lake, that’s all.” She put the knife down softly. “They’re building boats. They’re going to take a flotilla up the lake and attack Haugaard’s Keep by water. Of course. It makes sense.” She thought of the map she had seen, and the dotted line up the middle of Restwater. In the center of the lake the invaders would be beyond the reach of any local ambush brigade mounted by Zimmerstorm or Haventhur to the north, or Bigelow or Sedney to the south. Though the progress of such vessels, if they were indeed as large as Rain suggested, would be clearly visible, and allow impromptu navies up and down the lake to row out to attack them. What was Cherrystone playing at?

“You’ve done very well, Rain,” said Glinda. She hesitated a moment, and then—something she had resisted doing for years—she put her hand on Rain’s shoulder. “You deserve a reward. What would you like?”

“Do you got anything I can read?”

“Nothing suitable, I’m afraid. Besides, I hear from the General that you’re at early stages yet. But perhaps you’ll learn.”

“I’ll learn,” said Rain. “Meanwhile, if you en’t got no bookses, give me two slices of boat and some butter spread on ’em.” She twisted her hands and grinned at Glinda. It was the first time in, what, seven years.

16.

For what was Glinda waiting? To be rescued? To have a tantrum? To be inspired to act? To warble an anthem of protest to an incredulous shoreline? She did a little crochet work, a sunny pillow with a motto. OZMA BEFORE US. She watched the thunderheads of Highsummer massing to the west, and she fled if they threatened to let loose. She studied the long lake, which curved between the foothills of the Great Kells on the far southern side and the lower slopes of the Pine Barrens on the northern. The placement of Mockbeggar on its little promontory gave her limited advantage; as the lake curved subtly to the southeast, it narrowed and disappeared between opposing banks. Same to the northwest. Due to the angle, she couldn’t glimpse Haugaard’s Keep even had she the eyes of a hawk. Unless she had the wings of a hawk too, of course.

Her household wobbled on. Systems seemed maintained not so much through stamina as through an inertia borne of fear. Nothing more came to light about Chef. Puggles did what he could with the odd breast of fallowhen, with parsleyfruit and wristwrencher beans, with eggs and cheese and a militant sort of pastry pot pie that refused to yield to a knife. Miss Murth lived on tea and she smelled of tea and she began to resemble a tall stalk of ambulatory celery, and she trembled when she talked, which was less often than usual. What Rain ate was a mystery to Glinda, mostly.

One day when the cloudburst began earlier than usual, the girl showed up fresh from her lesson. She hunted for Os and Zs all over Glinda’s parlor, in the gnarly filigrees of preposterously carved furniture. She all but capered with the fun of it. “I know Oz, now,” she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. “Usually letters don’t hide inside each other,” she told Glinda firmly.

“No, that’s true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding, though.”

The girl turned and as if by magnetism walked directly over to the little bookshelf beside the window. She tugged the yellow book out. It might as well have been her primer. “What’s this book? I can’t read these words yet.”

“It’s called, um, The Wind Blew Away. Or something.”

“Is it about the big wind that blew Dorothy here?”

“Where did you hear about Dorothy?”

“Miss Murth told me the story.”

“Never listen to Miss Murth. She’s too old to be valid. Now put that book back.”

I must seem too old to be valid, too, thought Glinda, as Rain ignored her. The girl opened the cover and ran her hand along the page. “What’s hidden here?”

Glinda felt a chill. “What nonsense you speak. What do you mean?”

“This book. It’s like a creature. It’s alive.” She turned to Glinda. “Can you feel it? It gots a heart, almost. It’s warm. It’s purring.”

“Do you come in here and touch this book when I’m not looking?”

“No. I never seen it before. But it was sort of shimmery.”

Glinda snatched it away. She had never noticed a shimmer to the book and she didn’t see one now. But Rain was on to something. The Grimmerie had a kind of urgent low heat to it. A kind of soundless hum.

She found herself saying, nearly whispering, “What page would you like to look at?”

Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

The thunder made a menacing comment, but it was comfortably distant. Rain turned to a page about two-thirds through.

“You can’t read this. Can you?”

Rain peered. “Everything’s hitched up and kicking.”

“Yes yes, but can you read it?”

Rain shook her head. “Can you?”

How mortifying. Glinda looked. A heading of some sort was squeezing like a bellows; at full extension it seemed to suggest To Call Winter upon Water.

“It’s about dressing warmly enough. Sort of,” she said. She slapped the book closed. “Why did you open to that page?”

Rain murmured, “I was remembering something once. About a goldfish.”

Suddenly Glinda was tired of Rain. Tired, and a little scared of her. “Would you run tell Miss Murth it’s time for my tea? And no touching this book unless I ask you to. Do you understand?”

Rain was out the door, on to the next thing in her stunted little life. “Sure,” she called, disingenuously no doubt.

Glinda carried the volume to her escritoire. She opened it again, but now she couldn’t even fan the pages. The book fell open to the page it preferred. To Call Winter upon Water. How had Rain called this spell up out of the book?

I chose to be the patron of arts festivals over dabbling in the science of charms, she thought. But there’s no help for it now. I am stuck here with a book of magic that won’t let me go.

She read a little bit of the charm, as best she could, and then sat back, exhausted. Thought about the Grimmerie, and its wily ways. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into Rain’s capacity to hone in on the tome. She was learning to read, after all. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page—but then the world is the same way, isn’t it? The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

How does anyone learn to read? she thought. How did I?

By the time Miss Murth arrived with tea, Glinda had worked through a good deal of the spell, though she didn’t understand its possible uses. She closed the volume gently, drawing no attention to it, in case Miss Murth was in one of her beaky prowly moods. But Murth had other things on her mind. “The storm has moved on toward Sedney,” she said, “and the General has called for the barn doors to be open. They are breaking down the front of two of the barns, Mum. They are bringing out the boats.”

“You know they’re boats?” Glinda felt a little cheapened.

“You think you’re the only one pays attention to Rain,” said Murth.

17.

The vessels rolled out on an ancient technology: clean-hewn logs set parallel. At once Glinda saw the serviceability of Mockbeggar in a new light. The appeal to Cherrystone of her country house wasn’t the formal aspect of the great house. A Pallantine masterpiece meant nothing to the armed forces. It was the barns. They were tall enough to have served as incubators for these four massive ships. Sequestered, men had worked through the daily downpours and on through the night.

Even more important, the grade from the barnyard to lake would accommodate a launch. A clear access presented itself across the drive, through the wildflower meadow and down the pastures, neatly avoiding the ha-ha and (mercifully) Virus Skepticle’s bentlebranch folly in honor of freshwater mermaids.

Glinda considered herself in the mirror, then drew a lace shoulderette from the wardrobe and freshened her lashes. A parasol to suggest idle ambling. She wished she had lap dogs so she could seem to be taking them for a walk, but ever since that monstrous Toto had nipped her heel and torn the hem of her favorite pink reception gown she had gone off the cussed creatures.

Puggles was making an effort to concoct some sort of soup. “I weren’t raised to this grade of domestic work, Mum,” he said, wiping his brow and nearly clocking himself through the clumsy application of a meat mallet.

“You’re doing admirably. I shall take notes one day. But Puggles, did Miss Murth tell you? The builders have unveiled their constructions.”

“She did.”

“How will they avoid being attacked? The ships, I mean?”

“Lower your voice, Mum, there’s soldiers everywhere now.” He pounded harder as he spoke, to drown out his whisper. “It’s hard to get word through the cordon of guards, but I have it on pretty solid authority that the farmers and fishermen of the area already have worked out for themselves what was going on here. I think some of the Munchkinlander beached fleet might be readying to venture out again after their nice long rest.” He winked at her. “Suicidal, I know…”

“There’ll be cannon on board Cherrystone’s warships, no doubt.”

“Cannons are good for hammering at the stone walls of fortresses, Mum, but they’re less good for swiping at your little lake heron or your quick minnow. If you take my meaning.”

“Well.” She chose her words carefully. “If you hear more about the wildlife on the lake this season, do let me know.”

“I’m no longer permitted outside the house, Mum,” he told her. “I’m not likely to hear more.”

She moved on, worried for the local Munchkins. Cherrystone was too smart to display these lummoxy floating wooden castles without being prepared to deal with any attack on them. Still, Glinda was infected with a sense of excitement as she descended the great stairs. She admired the well-made thing, whatever it was: a slipcover, a compliment, a man-o’-war.

She ignored the muddy boots lined up on the floor, just plowed through the banquet hall and the kitchens as if she’d been used to taking charge there for years. “Zackers. Hat off in the presence of a lady,” she barked at him, who whirled around from where he was rooting through a bin of biscuits. Feeling a warm breeze from an open door, she continued on through a larder and a maze of pantries, and found an exit into an herb garden. How useful, now that she knew what herbs were for. But she had no time to pause and take notes.

From the ground the four ships were even larger than they’d looked from her windows. Bowl-bellied wooden narwhals. Men with their shirts off were swarming up ladders on all sides, caulking and scraping and wielding brushes to apply some sort of gleaming oil. It made the fresh wood glow like skin.

She located Cherrystone near a commissaire or clerk who was taking notes. She bearded the General. “Traper, you are to be congratulated. This is an installation of most magnificent hue and heft. I can’t think where you got all the lumber.”

“There’s a mill or two in the Pine Barrens. You pay enough, you can find the help you need.”

“Pay with cash, or with threat of violence?” But she smiled as she said it, and he grinned back, replying, “Oh, the coin of the realm appears to be good cheer, as I understand it. We imported white oak for the ribbing, but the local fir stock is suitable for cladding and masts. Amazing how generous the locals are, if you put it to them persuasively enough.”

“I don’t know sail-lacing, so this is deepest arcana to me. However, Restwater being Oz’s largest lake, I believe I’d have noticed vessels of such magnificent profile if they’d ever sailed by me before. They don’t look like riverboats, yet the masts are lower than I would imagine useful to help propel such a capacious hold.”

“Oh, it’s a manly art, is shipbuilding,” said the General. “I can’t pretend to follow a word of it. I have a hard time lacing my own boots.”

Glinda caught herself from making a remark about not lacing her own stays. “We all know the EC wants to divert the lake for its private use, in the capital and in the mill towns and factory hamlets springing up between the Emerald City and Shiz. And so I realize these ships are intended to attack Haugaard’s Keep. But I can’t understand why you’d take four weeks and some to build them, giving the local farmers a chance to plan their resistance and fortify the lake, when you could’ve marched your army along through the villages and circled Restwater six times over by now.”

“Straight through a gauntlet of pint-size guerrillas? No, thanks. But too terribly dry, this business of strategy,” he said, as if in agreement. “I’d love to chat more. Shall we dine again? I can wax hysterical about the cost of labor in wartime, and you can catch me up on your successes in the field of cuisine.”

“Are you inviting me to a reception upon the virgin decks of your commanding vessel?”

He blushed. She hadn’t known she could make him blush. “I’m afraid it’ll be some time before the accoutrements are fitted, the paint applied and dried, and so on. It’s why I had the ships brought out into the sunlight, so this work could proceed apace.”

“But the daily thunderstorms?”

“Spittle and eyewash. Won’t slow us down.”

She almost asked permission to take a promenade around the boats, but remembering herself, she started out at a pace. He caught up with her and took her by the arm, but gently, as a husband might, and escorted her about the graveled yard. She commented, “I trust you’ll be putting my barn fronts back together. One bad storm and the places would collapse like houses of cards.”

He didn’t answer, just pointed out admirable bits of carving on the figureheads. “You have some very talented, very bored soldiers,” she said. “Surely that’s not a portrait of me?”

“No, it’s meant to be Ozma.”

“Dreadfully royalist of you. Positively seditious. I’d expect it to be the Emperor.”

“Some of the men are simple. But if you want to get good work out of them, you have to allow them their prejudices.”

“Tell that to the Munchkins.” But she was trying to be slick as boiled sweeties. “What will you call these fine dames of the lake?”

“We’ll slap their names upon them when they’re waterworthy.”

“I can’t wait that long. I might die in my sleep tonight, of impatience.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Glinda.”

He had used her name without the honorific. She smiled a little less winningly, more inscrutably, reeling him in. “No, do tell. Traper.”

“Can’t you guess what the Emperor’s four lake ambassadors would be called?”

She blinked at him, grateful she’d taken time to darken her lashes.

He said, “The Vinkus, Gillikin, and Quadling Country.”

“I see,” she said. “And the lead vessel … the Emerald City.”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “Munchkinland. In anticipation of the reannexation, whenever we achieve that happy marriage, and make Oz whole again.”

18.

In truth, she’d begun looking over Chef’s shoulder—before he disappeared. A bit sullenly, she now peered in at the efforts of Puggles. She was starting to know just enough to be dangerous in the kitchen. She watched things being ladled out of cast-iron gorgeholds and dumped into porcelain kettles or copper skillets. She understood how a single squeeze of lemon could salvage a crime against cuisine, and how a misplaced spray of orange balsam could sabotage a masterpiece. About things like salt and sugar and blanched pepper she became more confused, as they all looked more or less snowy.

She had no time to waste, though.

“Grab a sheet of paper, Miss Murth. The pen is on the blotter. Date: 18th Highsummer comma, 11 of the clock. Dear Traper comma, Unable to wait for a kind offer to dine on the deck of the Emperor’s good ship Munchkinland comma, I propose instead—”

“Dear Traper?” Miss Murth’s outrage was controlled and magnificent.

“—that you join me for a meal in the knot garden. Stop. The prettibells are perfection and the roses aren’t too shabby either. Stop. I’ll cook. Underline the I’ll twice. Tomorrow night at eight question mark? Are you keeping up, Murthy?”

“Shall I sign it, Love and kissies, your little Glinda?”

“Don’t be absurd. I’ll sign it myself.”

“I’ve already signed it.”

Glinda snatched the paper and read Cordially, Lady Glinda, Arduenna of the Uplands.

“Exactly how I would have signed it. You have perfected my signature after all this time.”

“I aim to serve,” said Murth, aiming herself out the door.

“Miss Murth,” said Glinda.

Murth turned.

“Would you kindly try not to be so cheerless. It’s unsociable and it taxes the nerves. I do know what I’m about. I’m not the idiot you take me for.”

Miss Murth attempted a kind of curtsey that had gone out of fashion four decades earlier. Her knees clacked like ivory dominoes dropped on a plate.

Glinda in the kitchen. “Zackers.”

“Mum.”

She gave up on insisting on Lady Glinda. “In the absence of Ig Baernaeraenaesis, otherwise known as Chef, I’m attempting to put together a little meal. Do you know where the cookery books are kept?”

Zackers found a shelf under a window seat. Some parish committee’s collection: Munchkinlander Aunties Share Secrets of the Sauce. And Glinda liked this one, printed in large type with droll and useful drawings: Avoid Prosecution for Poisoning: Cooking by the Book. Particularly well thumbed was Widow Chumish’s famous volume, Food You Can Actually Stomach. She grabbed all three and told Zackers she would send down a list of ingredients.

She was almost excited. The dishes, the pans, the wooden spoons! The heat of the stove would rosy up her cheeks and curl her hair. She hoped it wouldn’t also steam off the highlights. She had found more than one frizzle of grey nestled among the gold and wrenched it out, but now it was either dye the traitorous locks or resign herself to mid-age baldness.

Glinda with Rain. The Grimmerie lay on the games table, sweetly dull in its disguise. Glinda sat before it, and Rain stood at her side.

“Your interest in reading seems to inspire this book’s playfulness,” said Glinda. “I wonder if you could open this book to any page?”

The girl didn’t understand. Lurline, but she was a slow train to Traum!

“Now watch me.” Glinda banged open the cover. The merciless slabs of dense print on every page looked like torture. No pictures, no diagrams, very little white space on which to rest the eye and let the mind wander. Glinda riffled the pages to make the book’s point, whatever it was. “Now you do it.” She closed the book and pushed it toward Rain.

The girl paused, then opened the volume. It transformed under her hands, becoming the Grimmerie, proffering the page with the spell: To Call Winter upon Water.

“But you see, I don’t want to call winter upon water,” said Glinda, as if she were talking to a simpleton. She wasn’t sure if she was addressing Rain or the Grimmerie. “I’m looking for a recipe for starched muttock, maybe, or grip of lamb with a crawberry chutney to lend a sort of alto chromatic to the gaminess of the enterprise. A genteelly quibbling complement.” Or did she mean compliment? She had no idea what she was talking about. She couldn’t speak gourmandese. She just wanted to see Rain handle the Grimmerie.

The book, however, had its own notions. While Rain could slip the pages a little from the gentle steppe of parallel deckled edges, she couldn’t move them to reveal more than an inch or two. The pages husband their secrets; the book was only interested in suggesting how To Call Winter upon Water.

“Well, it prefers its opinions, I see.” The mistress of Mockbeggar sighed. “Personally I hate uppity books. Don’t you?”

“I never got to no book yet. Books is still all secrets.” Disgruntled, the girl slumped in her seat and, forgetting her place, leaned against Glinda. “The mister says that letters are the key, but even when you know the whole family, there’s so many combinations you can make. And they break their word.”

“Yes. Well. You’ll get there.” Against her better judgment she couldn’t help putting her hand on the girl’s hip. “I don’t remember learning to read, but clearly I did, because I can.”

“What does that bit say?” Rain pointed.

“Well, this is hard, even for me.” She couldn’t serve winter on a bed of water to Cherrystone, however often the Grimmerie recommended it. She closed the book, and it slid back into the casing of its casual disguise.

“Secrets. Pfaaah.” The girl was vexed. “Look at that Oz, what I showed you previous.” She traced her finger against the inlay of the table, along the Z whose termini and angles met the encircling O at four points of the oval: . “It looks like a person trapped in an egg. Bent back, on her knees. Can’t stand up straight. Can’t get out. Why don’t the O let her out?”

“That’s Oz for you,” said Glinda. “All about crimping. And I don’t mean piecrust.” Perhaps a lambkin pie with a summer salad of peas and potatoes?

Glinda with Miss Murth, later in the day. “Please take down this message. Eighteenth Highsummer four hours beyond noon. Zackers colon: I need the following colon: four little thingies of lamb eight potatoes the yellow jacket kind blue peppercorn four ripe pears peeled two cloves a dish of clover mayonnaise about sixty peas all the same size and a sharp small knife stop. Oh, and some bickory root. Read that back to me.”

Murth did. “How shall I sign it for you?”

“I really need these things. Sign it Mum.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Murth took so long writing out the signature that Glinda knew she was adding a paragraph of specifics she’d cribbed from Cranston’s Encyclopedium of Gentry. The honorary degrees, the citations of merit in the cause of charities from Madame Teastane’s Female Academy to Crage Hall at Shiz. The whole nine yards of it. “Oh, Miss Murth. Are you so jealous as all that?”

“My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda, even if you are losing your mind.”

The kitchen, next day. Zackers served as sous chef and personal bodyguard. Twice he saved Glinda from immolation. His pimples hadn’t improved, but he wasn’t a bad sort. His grandparents had been Munchkinlanders from Far Applerue, he told her, but they’d migrated to Tenniken in Gillikin after the Wicked Witch of the East had risen to be the de facto governor. They had smelt secession in the winds, he told Glinda, and they didn’t like it.

“Oh, who would,” agreed Glinda absently. “Especially if it smells like this poaching liqueur.”

“You might try removing the trotters. Here’s a pincers. Or shall I?”

That seemed to help. “But aren’t you conflicted, Zackers? A soldier of Loyal Oz, going to war against Munchkinlanders who might have been friends and neighbors of your grandparents?”

“If they were friends and neighbors of the wrinklies, they won’t be up to throwing pitchforks at me. They’ll be belted into their rockers like my old kin.”

“The principle of it, I mean.”

“Munchkinland belongs to Oz.” Adamant. “A lot of Munchkins remain Loyal Ozians despite that Mombey, arriviste Eminence in Colwen Grounds. A fair lot of Munchkins quietly think Oz isn’t Oz when it’s severed like this.”

“What is it then? If it’s not really Oz without Munchkinland?”

He replied, “It’s spoiled. Like this reduction. I think we better start over.” He would say no more about himself, and became curt. But the second batch turned out less disagreeable.

In the late afternoon, she directed Puggles to set up a table for two in the rose garden.

“I’m not allowed in the rose garden, Mum.”

“But who will serve? I can’t be expected to cook a meal and then haul it to the table like a milkmaid.”

“Were I you, I should take it up with that buttery-boy Zackers. You seem to be chummy enough with him. Lady Glinda.”

Puggles didn’t know she had a strategy, but she didn’t dare whisper about it. She only said, “This is intolerable. You can’t be tethered like a cow, Puggles. I shall protest. Meantime, give Zackers instruction in the correct layout of a summer table.” But she didn’t protest; she had to whip up the cream and egg yolk for the crawberry fool. And she had to study the Grimmerie.

At seven, as a half-moon appeared opposite the sunset and the lake went hazy and golden with midges, she dressed. Miss Murth saw to Glinda’s hair and perked into compliance the bows that ran from her peplum to the end of her diaphanous train. “The pearl pendants, I think, will do. A jaunty little tiara would be putting on airs. This is alfresco, after all. If I’m in the mood I shall adorn my hair with a rose or two.”

“The thorns will scrape your scalp and you’ll bleed into the dessert.”

“It could only help. I’m ready to descend. Will you carry my parasol?”

“You’ve not been paying attention, Mum. We’re not allowed out of the house anymore.”

“No? I’ll take it up with Traper if the moment arrives. Don’t wait up, Miss Murth. I can see myself to bed.”

“I’m sure you can.” Miss Murth pursed her lips so hard they looked broken.

The General arrived on time in a suit of ivory sartorials Glinda hadn’t seen before. Crimson braid. He was as vain as she; he’d checked the colors of the prettibells, or he’d had Zackers check. She felt eclipsed in her ash satin with the double-backed sparstitch in chrome and salmon.

Zackers had done the job as Puggles had directed. The table was laid correctly enough, and an occasional table had been arranged to one side for the parking of domed serving dishes and beakers of wine. Next to it, eyes trained forward, stood Zackers. He was all in black like a maître d’ in a midrange lunchery in Bankers’ Court in Shiz. His pimples matched the roses nicely too.

He pulled out the chairs and poured the wine. He offered Lady Glinda a fan, as the humidity had risen during the day and there was no breeze off the water. She felt more gluey than dewy after her afternoon imprisoned in the furnace of ovens and hobs. But Cherrystone looked sticky, too, which was some comfort.

Betraying their convention, she plunged into a discussion of government policy. “Traper. With my staff ever more circumscribed—we’ll get to that—I feel the need of understanding the larger picture. I’ve been thinking about this campaign of the Emperor to annex Restwater for Loyal Oz. It was being bruited about even during the Wizard’s time, don’t deny it, and my own ministers used to try to get me to consider military action. But in the years since I left off being Throne Minister—”

“—and took up cooking. Delicious,” he muttered, through a mouthful of penance. She knew it. The gum-rubber little cutlets lay drowned in puddles of grainy sauce that tasted, somehow, violent.

“—I have rather lost the thread of the rationale of this conquest. The western Vinkus isn’t arable due to the aridity of the plains, I know, and the slope of the Great Kells in the Eastern Vinkus makes plowing impossible. Quadling Country is a stew of mud and marshgrass. My own dear Gillikin Country—though forested, lightly hilled, with such a soft climate—features soil more conducive to manufacturing than to farming. So much iron in it. But three-quarters of the grain we all require annually grows in Munchkinland. Why would Loyal Oz want to annex Restwater? Doesn’t it threaten the agricultural base of the source of Oz’s food supply? What if Munchkinland embargoes its sale of wheat and other crops? The EC would starve. And the rich farmers of Munchkinland might see their bank balances dip, but they wouldn’t go hungry. They have what they need. They can hold out.”

“Glinda, you’re the sweetest peach in the fruit bowl, but I don’t believe you understand the aquifers in Oz and their effect on riparian systems.” Cherrystone took several lettuce leaves with his fingers and dumped them on the tablecloth. He mounded up one leaf higher than the other. “Look. The Great Kells of the Vinkus over here, right? And the lower Madeleines over here. Emerald City between them.” (He put a radish, with its single-fringe dome, in the middle.) “And the three great rivers? Let’s see.” Several of the longer green beans. “The Vinkus, like so. The Gillikin River. Munchkin River. More or less. Do you see?”

“Yes, and that little woggle-bug on the radish is the emperor of all it can survey. Traper, I did attend primary school.” Did his knee touch hers under the table? In the act of leaning forward as if captivated, she grazed his knee glancingly and then shifted her leg away, just in case. “Go on.”

“The Gillikin River, though long, is shallow. The river water leaches easily into the landscape. Gillikin is the Oz of which the poet speaks—‘land of green abandon, land of endless leaf.’ The river makes Gillikin into the kind of pretty picture of Oz that I expect to think of on my deathbed.”

“How absurd. I shall be thinking of my portfolio, and if I’ve adequately kept dividends from grasping hands. Go on.”

“The Munchkin River is the longest, but the Munchkins have hundreds of years of experience in irrigation by canal and aqueduct. You’ve seen them?”

“Of course I have. Don’t patronize me. Cross-ditching, they call it.”

He raised an eyebrow. Score for her. “The point is, Munchkinlanders use their water wisely—upstream. They bleed it all along its length. So the Munchkin River, like the Gillikin, gives little more than lip service to Restwater as it debouches therein. And the EC to the north long ago overwhelmed the United Gillikin Canal Company’s capacity to supply it. Here’s my main point, Glinda. Your lovely lake called Restwater is replenished daily by the water that courses down from the snowy peaks and wintry ice packs of the Great Kells. Every single peak of which looms solidly in Loyal Oz. The shortest but the healthiest, the fiercest, the wettest of the rivers of Oz is the Vinkus. And as it runs between banks of hard fleckstone ten thousand years old, it doesn’t leach into and make fertile the parched land. Indeed, the flat through which it passes is known as the Disappointments. The land is poor and affords farmers little more than a sullen, resentful crop of whatever is planted.”

“I always thought the Disappointments was the name of some sort of old-age hostelry.”

He wasn’t amused. “No, the mighty Vinkus River, all that runoff of the Great Kells, pours without subtraction into Restwater. I’m sure you’ve circumnavigated this broad lake and seen the Vinkus tumbling over those rounded stones—the Giant’s Toes, they call it—delivering Oz’s best water to the Free State of Munchkinland. Our enemy.”

He picked up the Vinkus River and took a chomp. “We have every reason to claim Restwater. For one thing, the Munchkins don’t use it for their farming. For another, the water in it is ours. Damn, this is a good meal, Glinda. You’re going to qualify as a chef before I get your parlor maid to crack the code of the written language, I fear.”

“I meant to ask. How is she doing?”

“She’s a spiky little thing, she is. I don’t know how much she has upstairs, frankly. She’s too quiet for me to guess. But she does attend. Maybe it’s just lack of other diversion.”

“Well, she used to be allowed to run in the meadows leading up to the Pine Barrens when she was released from duties. You’ve cut down the range of all of us, Traper.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to be cutting it some more.”

“Have another cutlet. How do you like the wine?”

“I’m going to have to move a few men into part of your suite.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. I’m afraid they’re up there shifting furniture as we speak.”

“Traper. Really. We can’t tolerate this abuse. Will you have me snuggling in the same bed with Puggles and Miss Murth?”

“You could release one of them. You may have to.”

“You haven’t tried the mashed bickory root.”

He took a long sip of his wine. “I wish we didn’t have to fuss over this, Glinda. It isn’t to my liking, you know. The mission has other ambitions that take priority over mine and yours. But I had accepted the assignment hoping that our paths might cross, and in an agreeable way.”

“You have a wife and children.”

“Grown children,” he said.

As if that made a difference. But then how would she know? “By crowding me into tenement conditions in my own home, you expect to win my affection? I fear the bickory root is overmashed, by the way; I’d avoid it. Or oversomething.”

“Oversalted,” he proposed. “Well, winning hearts comes second. My commission from the Emperor comes first, and I’m required to carry out his instructions completely.”

“How is Shell, anyway? And who is he, these days. Do you know, I’ve rarely met him? Elphaba didn’t mention him much when we were together at Shiz—he’s four or five years her junior, I believe, and who remembers their families when they go up to college? As a former Throne Minister I did attend his installation, as was only fitting. But Chuffrey had a spoiled spleen or something, and I had to rush off, so in fact we didn’t speak. Shell hasn’t been one to come seeking advice of former Throne Ministers. Doesn’t so much as send me a greeting card at Lurlinemas.”

“Oh, he’s a deeply devout unionist. Lurlinism and paganism are as one to him. Do you know there’s almost no public celebration of Lurlinemas in the Emerald City anymore?”

“Another reason to keep to my country villa. Is the wine too warm?”

“Ah, it’s nice.” He drained his glass. “But yes, it’s a little warm.”

“Would you like some ice in your refill?”

“If you don’t mind.”

She got up. “Zackers, allow me. And if you don’t mind, I have some private business with the General. If you would repair to the portico, I’ll signal when we need you.”

Zackers stood his ground. “I don’t think I can see you from there, Lady Glinda. The rosebushes are too high.”

“I know, aren’t they wonderful? A banner year for roses.”

She raised an eyebrow at Cherrystone, who dismissed Zackers with a flutter of fingers. “And how are your prettibells faring in this lush warm weather?” the General continued.

Glinda almost replied, My what? but she caught herself. “Goodness, what with entertaining myself through cookery education, I have hardly a moment to check on them. There are some over there in the weeds. Aren’t they special.”

“You cook as if by magic,” he said.

“Don’t I wish.” She reached for the wine, a rather smoothly turned-over mountain antimerguese imported from the Ugubezi. “I picked up all my best recipes through my sisters in séance.”

“You’re joking.”

She smiled over her shoulder. A roll of evening thunder unsettled itself some distance away. She made slow work of pouring the wine, and her whisper was so low she could hardly hear herself. “Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” she muttered.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Reciting ingredients in my head, that’s how I train myself. How do you manage to teach my girl anything? She’s too silent to rattle off her alphabet.” Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta. She circled her palm over the pale wine in the goblet. Had she ever learned anything from Miss Grayling back in Shiz?

Cherrystone mused aloud. “I wonder why the girl wants to learn to read. A domestic won’t have any prospects. Particularly as she has no family. Is that what I understand?”

She squared her shoulders. Traversa psammyad…

A little ice forming a coin on the surface of the wine. She swirled faster. The ice packed itself into a white lump, split in two. Two white lumps a little larger than lumps of sugar.

“Your wine, sir.” She handed it to him as if she were the domestic. She was so proud of herself she was glowing. Cherrystone misread the expression.

“Either you’ve slipped a love potion in here, or you’ve poisoned it.”

“Neither. And to show you, I’ll sip myself. To your health.” Scandalously she took a sip of the newly chilled wine. Heavenly. She returned him the glass and she lowered her gaze to her plate. The food was heinous, mushy and parched by turns. But the ice was perfect. She had learned to cook.

At the end of the meal, most of the crawberry fool having been abandonded in its dishes, Cherrystone escorted her through the rose garden and around the corner of the south porch. There they discovered Puggles in a broken heap on the gravel. He seemed to be dead.

19.

But he wasn’t dead. After Zackers and a few others had carried him into the reception room, where men on cots had leapt up to provide him a bed, Glinda saw that he was still breathing. “You have a physician among your men,” she said to Cherrystone. “If not, there’s a doctor in Haventhur who will come to Mockbeggar, assuming you promise her safe passage here and back again. Though I hardly know if I can rely on your word.”

“I assure you, Lady Glinda, whatever happened will prove to have been an accident.” In front of his men he returned to formality in addressing her. But she hardly cared about that now. She put her hand on Puggles’s forehead as if feeling a servant were part of her routine. She had no idea what to think about how his forehead felt, though. It felt like a parsnip, which until this week she had never felt, either.

She refused an escort upstairs and took her leave of Cherrystone without ceremony. The evening had ended badly—horribly, for poor Puggles—but not without some small reward. She had used a spell to draw winter upon the water. A baby step, to be sure. But that wine had been nicely chilled by her work.

Her step hastened as she realized that if men had been in her private chambers rearranging her furniture, someone might have removed the books from her shelves. Luckily, soldiers seemed uninterested in books. The little library had been lifted intact and installed in her bedroom.

Miss Murth and Rain were huddled together on a settee. Miss Murth’s face had been wet but was now dry as if permanently. Her grim strength had an aspect of fleckstone about it.

“This is a furniture warehouse,” said Glinda. One could get about the room by climbing on top of the wardrobe, dressers, chairs. A cat would love this room, leap up and never descend again. But there was hardly enough floor space to do her daily kick-ups to keep her bottom pert. “We can’t live like this. Murthy, what happened?”

“You weren’t gone half an hour, Lady Glinda, before they beefed their way through the door. General’s orders, they said. They locked us in this room till they’d cleared out. Puggles tried to stop them, but they’d have none of it. There were almost a dozen of them, and all young men, showing no respect for a man of his age. They took him up the stairs to the parapet to get him out of the way. I don’t know what happened next. They told me he broke away and fell over the balustrade. Dreadful liars, the lot of them. What will become of us?”

“You will have to sleep on the settee. Rain, can you settle down?”

But Rain had become a cat. She had climbed up a chest of drawers and crossed on top of the escritoire and scrabbled aboard the wardrobe. “I can sleep up here!” she crowed. For her, this was fun. Well, Glinda thought, perhaps it felt to her like having a family. Which is less fun than is generally acknowledged in the popular press.

“You’ll do no such thing. Get down from there. You’ll be the next one to bash your skull.”

Murth fussed. “Oh, Mum, is that what happened to Puggles?”

“He’s alive, at least he was when I left him. I don’t know his condition. I think they’re sending for Dame Doctor Vutters.”

Rain said, “Did your supper get all et up?”

“How kind of you to remember.” Under the circumstances, Glinda was touched. “It was as well received as I might have hoped for.”

Murth set her straight. “She means, is there any left. We didn’t get a meal, what with the invasion of the furniture snatchers.”

“I’ll see to it at once.” The queen of the kitchen now, she sallied forth from her room. But in her large salon she was stopped by four soldiers in dress habillard. They carried rapiers, ceremonial but sharp. None of them was Zackers.

“Curfew, Lady Glinda,” said one. “Apologies from the General.”

“But I’m peckish. I’m off to collect myself a little pick-me-up.”

“We’re here to be of service.”

“Nonsense. What, are you going to remove the night soil as well? Sing us to sleep if we have a bad dream? Boys. Out of my way.”

“Orders, Lady Glinda. We’ll dispatch to the commissary for what you need. Will bread and cheese do?”

“Rye brisks. And milk. I have a child, don’t you know.” And how odd to make that statement. “I have a lady companion as well. So a bottle of savorsuckle brandy while you’re at it.”

Returning to her room, she felt defeated. When the door closed behind her, Rain and Miss Murth glanced up with eyes like sunken puddings. (For the rest of Glinda’s life, would everything look like spoiled food? A sad commentary.) She had nothing to say. But thunder outside the house, nearer this time, said it for her. “Let’s open the curtains and raise a window. The air is stuffy in here with the three of us. At least two of us ought to have bathed more recently, had we known we’d be lodging together.”

She directed Miss Murth to the sash, and in doing so realized that they’d been crowded into a room with windows that looked only in one direction—east. Glinda had always preferred sleeping in a room served by the sunrise, but now that she was exiled from other chambers, she had no view of the front gardens, and none of Restwater except the distances toward Haugaard’s Keep. A flotilla sailing in from the Gillikin River and western Restwater could be approaching the boathouses and she’d never see them till they passed—or arrived.

“Thunder, but no sign of rain,” said Miss Murth. “The night is cloudless.”

“This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.

“Get in your nightdress,” snapped Glinda.

“It’s in my trunk. Up in the attics, where I sleeps.”

“You’ll have to borrow something of mine. Miss Murth, find her a camisole. Something.”

After a light supper that was rather like a picnic—they all sat on Glinda’s bed and got crumbs everywhere—they made their good nights and Miss Murth blew out the candle.

“Miss Murth. Are there evening prayers for a child?”

“Lady Glinda,” said Murthy through the dark, “you never assigned me the task of raising this child. Give her whatever childhood prayers you remember. My own prayers are private ones.”

“I know, you’re praying for my immediate death, by my own hand, food poisoning myself. Very well. Rain, here is what we said in the Pertha Hills, when my mother would tuck me in.”

The memory, like ice forming, was slow to arrive. In the end, Glinda said,

Sweet and sure the lilacs bloom,

And the heather, and the broom.

Every mouse and mole rejoices

When the sparrows raise their voices.

“That’s not a prayer, that’s a nursery rhyme, and you’ve got it all wrong,” snapped Murthy.

“God bless us, every one. Except you,” said Glinda.

20.

The weather remained clear but stifling. Glinda and Miss Murth were allowed to sit in the parlor daily and play cards in the presence of four armed men. Rain was called once or twice for her lessons.

“Can you read enough to find out what’s happening?” Glinda whispered before Rain left. “Snoop a bit?”

Rain rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

On the third night of the intolerable situation, Rain waited until lights were out. Then she interrupted Glinda’s continuing attempt at devotional doggerel by saying, “The teaching man was called away while we was doing our letter writing and no one else was in the room. Somefin was happening so I creeped to the door and then snucked out. I went round by the barns. No one saw me.”

“Entirely too dangerous. Don’t do that again or I’ll slap you. What did you see?”

“That weren’t no thunder we hear at nights. It’s dragons in the dairy barns up the slope.”

Glinda sat straight up in the dark.

“It’s true. They got dragons for them boats I think. I heard Cherrystone yelling at someone for treating one of ’em beasties wrong. The lad got his foot crushed and they had to cut it off. Dame Doctor Vutters is living there now, like us. In the shed with the mattocks and grub hoes and stuff. It’s her surgery.”

“Dragons!” Miss Murth sounded as if she would have wept had she been less desiccated. “Lurline preserve us!”

“They’re big as houses,” said the girl, “and they glint gold even in the shadows. But they stink and they spit and strike out like catses.” She pounced a forearm and made the cry of a shrike.

Glinda plumped her pillows up in the dark. “It’s beginning to make sense. Why we’ve been crowded into a room that faces only east. And why they burned down the fields around here. They don’t want news of the dragons getting out to the Munchkinlanders.”

“And why Cherrystone was so angry after that puppet show, with the dragon in the lake!” said Murth excitedly.

“I thought you weren’t watching. You were supposed to be minding the girl.”

“We peeked. So put us in prison.”

“We’re already there.” Glinda bit her lip. “I assume they’re flying dragons—I’ve never seen a dragon, so I don’t know if there are other varieties. Do they have wings, Rain?”

“Like great sloppy tents. When they stretches ’em, they goes to the ceilings of the barns! They disturb the pigeons, who poop on ’em. Then they eats the pigeons.”

“Perhaps this makes sense of the vessel designs as well,” added Murth. “Those stumpy masts, and the odd twin prows. They may not be entirely sailboats, but boats to be pulled by dragons in harness. The dragon may slot between the double-breasted prow.”

“How ingenious.”

Glinda knew she had to get to the Grimmerie again, but she didn’t dare do it with Miss Murth hovering about. Rain was taciturn to the world, but Miss Murth might gabble if cornered. “Rain,” said Glinda, “I think we’d better cancel your reading lessons now. The point has been made. You are not incapable of learning your letters.”

Rain’s mouth made an O. “But I’m nearly reading, real reading! Cherrystone keeps bringing me old papers and training me up on them, and I’m getting the hang of it.”

It was as if the ice Glinda could form in a glass of wine had begun to cloud the blood in her veins. “What pages are those?”

“I can’t say. Old magicks, I think, but I can’t get ’em yet.”

So he knew who she was. Pure peril now and no mistake.

“Not another word,” said Glinda, “it’s sleepytime. If you blather any more I shall subject you to more nursery verses.”

The room fell silent, and soon Murth was snoring, and Rain’s breath had silenced to below the level of hearing. But Glinda did not sleep.

The next day she requested an audience with Cherrystone. He didn’t reply until late in the day, and said he’d be up to see her at sunset. Through the intermediary, she asked for permission to allow Rain and Miss Murth to take the air in the herb garden—which she knew was sufficiently hidden from both barns and lakeside not to alarm the Menaciers—so that she and Cherrystone could have some privacy in her room. This he allowed, said his emissary.

He arrived on time, looking more worn than before.

“You’ve finally beaten my resistance,” she told him. “Here I am, General, entertaining you in all but the very bed in which I sleep.”

“I apologize for the inconvenience.” He had grown more courtly and more distant. “How may I be of service?”

“I need to know about Puggles.”

He looked confused.

“Po Understar. Puggles. My butler.”

“Oh, yes. Well, he is hanging on. He’s recovered consciousness, somewhat, but not his language.”

“What does Dame Doctor Vutters say?”

“A broken spine.”

And to think he might have left with the others had she not required a butler.

“General, I would like to talk with the doctor, and to see the patient.”

“I’ve dismissed the doctor. She’s done all that can be done, she says.”

“Where is Puggles?”

“He’s been made a chamber in a closet under one of the staircases.”

Glinda stood and began to walk toward the door. Cherrystone stood and said, “I can’t allow this.”

“Then stop me forcibly. You ought to enjoy that.” She brushed past him, angry, alert, sensitized to her earlobes and toes. He didn’t touch her.

She swept past the Menaciers in the next room with their rapiers raised. “Gentlemen,” she said. Behind her, Cherrystone must be signaling that she be allowed to pass.

She hadn’t known there was a cupboard under the west staircase. It reeked of rising damp. Mouse droppings dotted the unpainted floor. Puggles was swathed in a crude overshirt and his knees were exposed. He didn’t move to cover them when he saw her. He did see her—she was sure of that, by the tracking of his eyes—but he couldn’t move his hands. Or he no longer cared about whether he was exposing his knees to his superior.

“Oh, Puggles,” she whispered. She sat right on his bed and took his fingers in hers. Clammy and lifeless, but not cold. “Can you tell me anything about what happened? Can you talk?”

He blinked. The skin at his lower eyelids pouched, shadowy grey.

“I know you were behaving in proper service. I shall see you are tended to as you deserve, to the best of my ability. I want you to know that.” She swallowed. “Po. Po Understar. Do you understand?”

There was no way of knowing if he did. She sat there, stroking the top of his hand, and then left him. Her escort returned her to her room. At least she was alone for a moment, for Murth and Rain were still enjoying the herb garden. She should have gone to join them, but ten minutes of solitude was bliss itself.

She took up the Grimmerie and hoped, with the success of her little exercise in ice generation, that it might relent and allow her access to other pages, other spells, but as usual it kept its own counsel. She wanted to throw it out the window, but knew better.

After lunch, when Glinda was having a little lie-down with the shades drawn, Rain flapping a palmetto fan to keep the flies away and provide some breeze, a knock came at the door. One of the Menaciers handed Miss Murth a letter from Cherrystone to Lady Glinda. “I’ll look at it later, Murth,” said Glinda, and she drifted off into a troubled rest. For a moment, or ten, she was back in Shiz, darting up some alley of flowering quinces, racing Elphaba to the fountain at the back of the quad. Elphaba was glowing with the effort—glowing emerald!—and Glinda, in her dream, was almost absent to herself, caught up in admiring her friend. It happened so seldom, vacating the prison of one’s limited apprehensions. Even dreams seemed ego-heavy, she thought as she was waking. But oh, to see Elphaba, even in dreams, is both reward and punishment, for it reminds me of my loss.

“Where’s Murth? I mean Miss Murth?” she asked Rain.

“Dunno.”

Thunder came up—real thunder, not dragon cry—and the long delayed cloudburst pummeled the house. Rain leaped to help Glinda slam the windows closed. She hoped someone downstairs would remember to shutter the windows to protect the parquetry, but with Murth called away and Puggles incapacitated, the floor would probably be drenched and need refitting in the fall. Damn damn damn.

They played cards. The rain continued.

As long as Miss Murth was taking her time, they checked the Grimmerie. Again Rain could open it while Glinda could not, but as usual they could turn to no other page than the one that the Grimmerie seemed inclined to let them see.

By teatime Glinda suffered the throes of a snit gunning to become a rage. “I am expected to do everything around here?” she said to Rain.

“I’m a parrot,” said Rain from the top of the wardrobe. “Tweetle twee.”

When the fellow arrived with afternoon tea, Glinda accosted him. “Where is Miss Murth? Find her and tell her to stop gallivanting. She can’t be outside; she’s not allowed. Furthermore, it’s bucketing barrels out there.” She paused. Perhaps Miss Murth was tending to Puggles. Was there a tenderness between them?

No. Impossible. Not Murth. She wasn’t capable of that fine a feeling, and she wouldn’t inspire it in anyone else, either.

“Is Miss Murth with Puggles?” she snapped.

“I’m just doing your tea, Mum,” he said.

“Are you all imbecilic? Is that a requirement of enlisted men? It’s Lady Glinda!” She was losing it, big time. “Get me Murth!”

At sundown, when the rain had finally passed over and the heat returned as if the drenching had never happened, Zackers appeared. He had his cap twisted in his hands as if he was paying a social call.

“What is it, Zackers?”

“You asked about Murth, Mum, and the General doesn’t understand.”

“What are you chattering about?”

“The note that the General sent you just after lunch, Mum.”

“There was a note,” said Rain helpfully, leaping from wardrobe to the bed like a demented bandit monkey. The bedclothes flew up. “Isn’t it still over there, under the what-chit?”

A paper folded beneath the decanter of sherry. Glinda hurried to look.

Lady Glinda,

I regret the further inconvenience. In pursuance of your request to be allowed to name what member in your service might be released due to mounting pressures upon the household, I would like your recommendation. I would suggest the girl, as she must be of less service to you than your lady-in-waiting. I could use her somehow.

Cordially,

General Traper L. Cherrystone,

Hx. Red., Advanced

“This makes no sense to me. I did not receive it. I was napping.”

Zackers looked distinctly uncomfortable. “The General acted upon your suggestion.”

“I made no suggestion. I was napping, I tell you.”

He handed her a folded page of her own stationery.

General:

Under the circumstances, I shall release Miss Murth.

Lady Glinda of Mockbeggar Hall

Arduenna of the Uplands,

Dame Chuffrey,

Throne Minister Emerita,

Honorary Chair of Charities,

Patron of Saint Glinda’s in the Shale Shallows, etc., etc.

Murth had brought Glinda’s signature to too fine a facsimile.

21.

She went to shove past Zackers as she had done past Cherrystone, but he blocked her way. “En’t allowed, Mum,” he said. “Quarantine.”

“Quarantine? What are you on about?”

“That’s what I’m told. You’re confined to your room. Meals will be supplied.”

“What’s been done with Miss Murth?”

“I’ve got my orders.” Suddenly his pimples seemed a disguise; he was a man holding on to the scabby shield of youth to use it to his advantage. “You’d be wise to return to your room, Lady Glinda.”

She fixed as spirited and venomous a look upon him as she could, but even within a moment she softened it. “Zackers. I don’t want to make trouble for you. Send for your commanding officer and we’ll sort this out.”

“The General has given orders not to be disturbed.”

So she went into the room and closed the door. Rain had been jumping on the bed, and sat down flump with her legs outstretched. “Where’s Miss Murth gone off to?”

“Never you mind about that.” She went to the window and threw up the sash. Was there any way to escape? Her own windowsill extended to join a sort of stone rim or lintel, some three inches wide, that ran around the building, connecting all the windows on this level. She could not hope to get a purchase on a ledge that narrow.

She looked down. A nine-foot drop onto the flat roof of the ballroom below. Even if one could leap or lower one’s self down under cover of darkness, the ballroom was twenty-two feet high, she knew—she’d had the room redone last year. The ballroom stretched out in its own wing, and its windows on three sides opened onto terraces, so fevered dancers could cool themselves by taking the evening air. This meant there were no useful trees growing up near the building, no climbing cypress or espaliered ivy to serve as an escape route.

“I were a bird, I could just wing the air down,” said Rain, as if reading her thoughts.

“You won’t move an inch from my side unless I say so. Not one inch. Do you hear me?”

Rain fell asleep almost at once. Perhaps, thought Glinda somewhat guiltily, perhaps she never slept in anyone’s encircling arms before. They spent the night holding each other.

By morning it was clear that evacuation orders had been given. Breakfast was nothing but tea and slightly stale bread. If they sat very still at the open window, they could hear the sound of the ships being rolled to the launching point. How could they have been kitted out so quickly? Glinda supposed that, under a firm enough manager, three hundred men with time on their hands could achieve quite a lot.

At noon on this day of lancing summer light, Glinda began to hear the sound of the dragons. Their cry was at once serrated and tuneful. Glissandi of violoncello interrupted by the yowls of cats in heat. Now that Glinda was really and truly imprisoned, her aggressors clearly felt no more need for secrecy. The dragon trainers led the fearsome creatures around the east edge of the house, below the ballroom. A military parade of sorts. Six of them. Perhaps one each to haul the four warships, and an extra dragon at the front and another to the rear, as sentries.

Fearsome? She thought she might never dream of anything else again. Each one of the foul creatures was ridden by a soldier in leather chaps. Each soldier, equipped with a whip and dirk, looked terrified. Each leaned forward, wrapped obscenely around the neck of his mount, whispering to it. Dragonmasters. She had heard tell of such.

But the creatures themselves. Rain had told only the glamour part of it. Yes, there were scales that burned in the sun, imbrications of bronze and bruise-purple gold. But a lizardy dankness obtained as well, the stench of the bog. Their skulls were shaped less like horses than like some strange elongated insect. And eyes! She remembered the glowing eyes of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Like genuine eyes, those had gleamed with life, but these actual dragon eyes looked polished, blank, black, deadly. They reflected all, they gave nothing away. “Pull back, lest one of them see you,” said Glinda, but Rain behaved as if she were at the parade of a traveling zoo. Glinda had to hold Rain’s hands to keep her from clapping.

“Let’s try the book one more time, shall we?” she said when the dragons had passed. Before they could pull it out, Zackers opened the door without knocking and Cherrystone strode in.

“I’m taking my leave,” he told her. “Zackers will stay behind to see to your needs. I apologize for the inconveniences, but you can see why we couldn’t allow you the run of your house and the service of your aides.”

“Why do you not kill me, and save yourself the trouble of abusing my staff?” she said, putting Rain behind her and holding her in place with clamped hands. Nonetheless, she felt Rain peering around her hip.

“Depending on how the matter unfolds, you may yet come in use. Not to me—to your country. Your liberated staff will have spread the word that you are detained against your wishes. All of western Munchkinland knows that you are locked up here. Should we decide to sue for peace, you are advantageously placed as a loyal Ozian with strong affections for Munchkinland. A former Throne Minister with personal ties to the rebel province. Munchkinlanders would accept you as an emissary of the Emperor. We have arranged it for you to be ready to serve.”

“What have you done with Murth?”

He inched forward. In the heat of the impending battle was he going to kiss her at last? But he had in mind something more of a sneer. “Why should you care?” he said. “You don’t even know her first name.”

She sputtered and thought of slapping him, but that would be too drawing-room farce. He said, “I want to take the girl with me.”

“I think the phrase is, over my dead body. And since you intend to keep me alive, you may as well go off on your capers. Your days of being a tutor are through, anyway; you’ve got your army to manage. Though I suppose now they’ve become a navy.”

“I’ll take up the matter when I have completed the mission of the hour. Good afternoon, Lady Glinda.”

“May you freeze in hell.”

He gave the briefest of bows, not so much from the waist as from the chin, and turned to leave.

And the Grimmerie proved as recalcitrant as ever.

They watched the first of the ships roll into view on the water. Glinda had to admit there was something terrific about the sight. The ships were painted red and gold, from this distance looking like wooden cousins of the dragons. Their sails puffed out; the wind was strong and apparently from the right quarter. Behind the stubby masts Glinda and Rain tracked the movement of those stubby masts against the hills, which helped them mark the acceleration of two, then three ships. The fourth would be coming along.

From this distance the dragons resembled immense overheated ducks.

There would be no stopping a fleet with six dragons. Haugaard’s Keep was lost. But Rain didn’t need to be lost. There was still time.

“Quick,” said Glinda. “How is your head for heights?”

“I’m gooder than a bird in any tree, Mum.”

It was too late to insist on Auntie or anything like that. “Can you balance yourself here without falling?”

Rain looked out the window at the three-inch ledge. “If there’s no big wind to scrape me down.”

“Blessings on you. There, that’s a prayer, best I can do. I’ll give you a leg up.” She helped Rain out the lower sash. Thank Ozma the windows were tall; Rain could almost stand up straight before she’d scrambled out. She fit her naked feet (still dirty, Glinda saw) this way and that, a dancer’s pose, until she was erect and balanced.

“Anyone’s walking in the rose garden’ll see up my frock.”

“Never mind about that. Do you think you can safely inch beyond the edge of this window? Not far—only a bit at a time to see how it feels.”

“Oh, I’m a spider on a wall. It’s easy florins, this one.”

“Now listen to me, Rain. I want you to inch—if you feel you can—until you’re about halfway between this window and the next one. No farther. Have you anything on which to cling?”

“My fingernails.”

“That’ll have to do.”

“What does I do when I gets there?”

“Just wait for further instructions. I am going to scream a little bit, but I don’t want you to be startled. I am only acting.”

“Acting?”

“Like the puppets in that play. I’m not really screaming. It’s like—it’s like singing.”

“I didn’t know you sung, Mum. Songs, like?”

“Oh, I have lots of little talents. Cooking is the least of them.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Don’t be snarky. Are you ready? You won’t be startled and lose your grip?”

“Spiders don’t fall off the wall when they hear a singer.”

“I may have to double the octave to get some attention.”

“I’m watching the fleet. Sing away.”

“Here I go.” Please, Lurlina, please. Or the Unnamed God. Anyone who might be paying attention. Elphaba.

She reeled her voice out. It wasn’t very convincing. “That was it?” called Rain.

“That was my warm-up. Here comes the real thing.”

She was gratified that when she let loose, two of the dragons turned their heads. But she couldn’t watch them. Zackers was unlocking the door. “Glory and gumption, Lady Glinda? Are you all right?”

She wheezed, holding her side. “The girl! She’s trying to escape! Out the window! Oh, Cherrystone will have my head!

“Also yours,” she added, in a more normal voice, as Zackers rushed to the open window.

“Holy Saint Florix,” said Zackers. “Get in here, girl, before I whup you. You’ll break every little riblet in your skinny little frame. Take my hand.”

“Oh, oh,” screamed Glinda, beginning to enjoy the role.

“Don’t worry, Mum; I’ve almost got her. She’s quite the little scorpion, en’t she?”

Glinda walked backward, screeching, the way she’d seen opera singers do onstage—only of course their sound was musical, while she was working to deliver something convincingly atonal. In midscreech, she stopped dead. Zackers, his head and torso leaning out the window, turned at the sudden silence. She lifted her skirts and rushed him like a bull, kicked his damn boots off her good carpet, and tumbled him out the window. For Puggles, she thought.

“Nicely managed, Rain,” she said. “You can come in now.”

“I like it out here,” said Rain.

“You heard me.” She didn’t want to look down. She had appreciated Zackers, for a few days anyway, and she hoped he wasn’t dead. But he was moaning and cursing. It was only nine feet after all.

But too high to climb up, even if his ankle wasn’t broken, which it looked to be, the way his foot was improperly hinged. And he could never leap to the ground.

“How clumsy of me,” she called down to the roof. “I must take a refresher course in deportment to restore my glide.” Zackers’s reply wasn’t suitable for Rain’s hearing, and Glinda hustled her away. But not before picking up the Grimmerie.

The house was empty of soldiers, as far as she could tell; they had all evacuated onto the ships except, she supposed, a skeleton crew holding Mockbeggar hostage. Knowing an unencumbered view would be essential, she hurried Rain up the dusty steps to the parapet. Ah!—free from this summer bondage for a few moments at least.

“You need to help me with this one, Rain,” she told the girl.

“I’m ready, Mum.”

Glinda taught her the words. They stood facing the fleet—The Vinkus, the Quadling Country, the Gillikin, the Munchkinland—its four powerhouse dragons yoked between prows, as Murth—Murth!—had imagined, and the two extra dragons paddling along in the rear like a pair of proud snarling parents.

“Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” said Glinda. “That’s the start of it. Can you memorize this quickly? We have so little time.”

Rain nodded. Her eyes were like iron, hard and true.

They held hands and leaned across the parapet. The wind was blowing from behind them; maybe it would carry their words far enough. “Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” they chanted in unison. Glinda taught her the rest, line by line. Rain drank it in like fizzy wine and remembered it faultlessly.

“A wand would help, but I haven’t had a wand in years,” said Glinda. “Wands go wandering. We’ll have to do without.”

She stretched out her left arm, Rain her right. They delivered the spell to bring winter upon the water.

It was unclear whether it was working at first, for the strong wind continued to blow, the sails to billow and flap, audible even at this distance. Glinda held her breath and trained her gaze on the foothills of the Great Kells. It seemed as if the masts were making slower progress against them. Slower, slower still. Then the masts shivered and creaked, and one of them split because the soldiers-turned-sailors didn’t yet know their progress had stopped, that the sails had needed to be brought about or cut.

The four boats and the six dragons were pinned in an island of ice that had come up from the water below and congealed around webbed feet and submerged hulls. The dragons were enraged and crashing their wings. Shrieking.

“They sound like you, Mum,” said Rain.

“We haven’t time to watch them drown, or burn their way loose, or turn around to catch us. We’re cooked any way you look at it. Let’s go.”

22.

Safe enough to set one of the barns on fire, one that stood away from the house. And anyway, it had been more or less eviscerated; she saw that the soldiers had appropriated a good many of the posts and beams from the hayloft. A security measure, bringing the structure down, she could say. The clouds of black smoke would alarm residents of Haventhur and Bigelow and the rest, and ready them for whatever punishment Cherrystone and the forces of the Emerald City might still manage to loose against them.

Glinda had never saddled up a carriage, but Rain had spent her childhood in the barns. While the girl wasn’t big enough to handle the tackle, she knew what was needed, and she could demonstrate how it hooked and snaggled together. In the time it would have taken them to walk to Zimmerstorm on their hands and knees, Glinda had readied the lightest of carriages. So they set out along the coast road, heading west—away from the wreckage on the water.

As it happened, they didn’t need to go very far. Four miles out—away from the burning barn, the ships frozen in the summer lake, the panicked and furious dragons, and General Cherrystone—waited the Lion and that high-strung veiled woman with the pretty white hair. She was pacing and he was lolling, but when the Lion saw the carriage he drew himself to his hind legs and smoothed his mane.

“How did you know I would come here?” asked Glinda.

“You forget for whom we work,” said the woman. “The Clock tells us things that may happen. Not what should happen, mind, or what will happen. But what might.”

“Anything might happen,” said Glinda.

“The secret of why prophecy is so popular,” agreed the woman. “Good for business.”

“I brought you back the book,” said Glinda. “It’s too fussy for me to have. I thought so the first time I had it, and I think so again.”

The Lion said, “We’ll take it. You’re safer without it now, in case there are reprisals. But from the hill where the Clock is hidden—we have a good view of the lake. We saw what you were able to do with the Grimmerie. You used it well.” He grinned at her. “Nice piece of work, sister.”

Glinda remembered the play. “Have the sailing Menaciers all drowned?”

“It’s not over yet,” said the woman. “But they saw the Clock’s performance, and the fear of their own drowning will undo them usefully. You’ve pinched exactly the right nerve. The alarm has been given, and the dragons have been slowed or made ill.”

“A dragon with a head cold. Nasty thought.”

“You never knew a dragon to live in an icy realm, did you? Cold is perishing pain to them, one hears tell.”

Glinda took the Grimmerie from where it had lain like an old farmer’s manual on the floor of the carriage. It had shed its disguise while they clattered on the road, and it looked like itself. Perhaps a bit more tattered. Could a book that old continue to age?

“You’ve done a great service,” said the Lion, taking it from her. “Some wouldn’t have thought you capable.”

“Well, I learned to cook. At my age,” she told him. “What’s next? Arts therapy? Anyway, I’ve had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases on down any road. Come, Rain. A quick good-bye, and off you go.”

“Good-bye,” said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman.

“Not to them,” said Glinda. “To me.”

She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. “Mum?”

“He was too interested in you,” she said in as bland a voice as she could manage. “It’s become too dangerous. You are better off with them.”

“We don’t have those instructions from Mr. Boss,” said the Lion. He growled low in the back of his throat.

“Mr. Boss is not the only one who gives instructions,” she told him. “I am a Throne Minister Emerita. As I remember it, Sir Brrr, I am the one who conferred a Namory upon you. Many years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, pussying about with his lapel. “Very nice and all that, but Lady Glinda.”

“I gets to go with the Lion?” Rain was unskilled at the control of elation. It cut Glinda like onion juice in a fingertip newly slit with a paring knife. Or worse.

“You do,” said Glinda. “Off with you then.”

Rain clambered down and ran to the Lion. He backed away with his paws out. The veiled woman with him just laughed. “You’ve faced worse, Brrr. Come. Let’s see what the dwarf has to say about this.”

“You do know who she is—her name is Rain—” said Glinda, but her voice was failing her, and she didn’t know if they heard. They were moving away, turning, cutting up through the scrappy barrens of pine.

Just when it was too much, when Glinda thought she might sob, Rain suddenly twisted about. “But en’t you coming?” she called.

“Can’t possibly.”

“Why not?” The girl sounded petulant, as if suddenly she decided the whole world ought to go her way, all the time.

“Zackers is stuck on the roof. I have to fling some sandwiches down at him so he won’t starve. And there’s Puggles. He can’t move, Rain. Now that I know how to make soup, I have to make some soup and spoon it into his mouth until I can find somebody to care for him, to make him better if it can happen.”

“And there’s Murth,” said the girl ruminatively.

Glinda didn’t believe there was Murth any longer. “You take care of one another. Come and see me sometime if you are passing through.”

Rain had already turned back around and was chattering to the Lion. The woman lifted the girl up on the Lion’s back—he was down on all fours again—and Rain squealed with glee. She grabbed his mane by two fistfuls and her little naked feet came up as her knees went down. Her head went back in joy. Blinding joy. She looked like a girl in the best of times. She looked like a girl broken out of the prison egg. But she didn’t look back.

The Patchwork Conscience of Oz

1.

The Lion backed up as the dwarf turned a red no beet would ever manage. “I sent you to collect a library book, and you come back with a child?”

Uh-oh, thought Brrr. Bad move. He arched his backbone—a bit of alley cat attitude that no one could be fooled by, but it made him feel better. He hadn’t seen the dwarf this seriously off his nut before.

To Ilianora, the dwarf added, “Look, Little Nanny Ninnykins, I always thought you were simple, but I see I was wrong. You’re demented. Take her back where you got her.”

To Brrr’s surprise, Ilianora gave Mr. Boss no quarter. “You’re interested in the future,” she said to him. “Any child is a head start on the future, no matter who they are.”

“So we should maybe kidnap a whole orphanage? Listen, I won’t stand for this. Send her packing.”

“Don’t get your little knickers in a twist,” the Lion said mildly. “We can take care of her. Principles of child governance—how hard could it be?”

“You couldn’t govern a coffee grinder. You’re too big a sissy to run a nursery school.”

“On the contrary. Cowardice is a virtue when it comes to protecting the young and frail. If I can be as scared as a child is of, oh, bumblebees or something, I can better remember to keep us both safely away from them.”

“I en’t scared of no bumblebees,” inserted Rain.

The dwarf ignored her, and snapped at the Lion, “You sure put the pussy in pussycat. You couldn’t even stand up to Lady Glinda when she foisted this hoyden on you.”

Well, there is truth in that, thought Brrr.

Ilianora said to the child, “When did you last have something to eat?”

“I am hungerful,” admitted the girl. “Lady Glinda en’t all that good a cook.”

Brrr let the child slip off his back. The dwarf fumed and spat but the Lion stood his ground. “We’ve got bigger problems than kindercare,” he said. “Have you forgotten that the fleet that the Clock showed us has been attacked? Someone will be wondering who did it, and putting it all together.”

“It gots stuck in the middle of the water,” said Rain.

Ilianora, rooting about in a satchel, located some shreds of ham and bread. A pot of mustard and a spoon. The dwarf took the Grimmerie off into the underbrush of the pine barren, probably to return it to the Clock. In a clearing upslope, the assistants pitched quoits, ponying about and paying no mind.

“Why should he be so aggravated about a kid tagging along?” Brrr asked his wife. “He’s already saddled with us. What’s one more, and a little one at that?”

“Let me first see to some supper for the child, Brrr.”

When she had finished her meal, Rain looked about her with brightening interest. “Here’s where you live?” she asked.

“Until Mr. Boss gives us the word to press on.” Ilianora removed her veil and shook it out. Her white braid was coiled upon her head in a henge of black pins.

The Lion said, “I do hope we’ll get going soon. There’ll be a marksman or even a posse on our trail by dawn, I bet. Anyway, this place gives me gooseflesh.” He had never liked the forest, any forest. That sense of lostness. How a horizon so quickly gets knotted up in the fractal digression of branches. Though this stand of junk trees was thinner than some.

Sotto voce, Brrr to his all-too-human wife: “I don’t want to be the only timid one at the table, but don’t you agree we should light out before that General sends hit men to find the Grimmerie? And to mow us down while they’re at it? We could move faster on our own, you and me. With the girl, of course. Since her welcome to our own little tribe has been, shall we say, a little thin.”

Ilianora bit her upper lip, considering. “I’ve felt we should all keep together, but now that we’ve obeyed the Clock, delivering the Grimmerie to Lady Glinda and collecting it from her again, you might be right. Though where would we go?”

“You need to find your brother.”

“I don’t need to do that.” She lived and breathed, Brrr knew, with a high tolerance for detachment—like a lake jellyfish floating in a glass casket, oblivious of japing crowds.

He’d been with her for six months now. In that time she’d learned—or remembered—how to laugh. Gulpily. Bitten-off retorts, like poorly suppressed hiccups. She’d seemed to grow younger through the winter. He didn’t want to see her lose any ground. “Shall we skive off?” asked the Lion again, in a lower voice.

She shrugged. She’d know what was to come next when she knew it, thought Brrr. And though no magistrate had recorded their union—any cross-species romance revolted Mice and Munchkinlanders alike—he and Ilianora enjoyed a marriage just the same, and he’d stick by her side either in or out of the shadow of the Clock.

The dwarf was waddling back. Not for nothing was he called Mr. Boss. “You lot of layabouts, this is no picnic. We’ve got problems to see to. Up, up, off your furry rump, Sir Brrr. Miss Fiddlefuck of the Fairies. Hey, you noisy boysters, shape up—we’re hotfooting it back to the lookout bluff, where we can see down the lake, and catch the news on the wind.”

Brrr raised his eyebrows to the child, and she understood; she galloped toward him and sprang onto the Lion’s back. “Don’t get used to me,” he found himself saying over his shoulder. “I’m no one’s defender. I’m not reliable.” Her finger dug into the rolls of skin at the nape of his neck and she nuzzled her face in his mane. This made her cough. He wished he’d given himself a shampoo more recently, but conveniences were in short supply in the Pine Barrens. Another reason to detest the place.

They’d stashed the Clock at the dead end of an old logging road; above this, the hills mounded to a lookout. Brrr didn’t wait for Ilianora, the dwarf, his boys. He vaulted ahead, passing the Clock, breasting the hill.

The sun was just beginning to set. The stripe of glare down the lake, too bright to see at first, pinned the flotilla within it. Then the Lion’s sight steadied, and Rain’s must have too. The girl murmured, “Holy Ozma.”

They saw four ships and six impossible dragons encased in a floating belt of ice, a flat island of white. Ice had run up the ratlines and shrouds and stiffened the sails into glass. Men had shucked their uniforms in the summer heat and jumped onto the floe. In little but braies and singlets they were hacking with axes. Here and there campfires had been set, as if to puncture the ice with melt-holes. The dragons bellowed!—you could hear it even at this distance. One or two had worked a wing loose. The military were staying clear of the twisting, snakelike heads, which snarled and snapped in rage at everything and nothing.

“They din’t do nothin’,” said Rain. “T’ent their fault, them beasties.”

“Fell in with the wrong crowd,” said Brrr, “and they’ll pay. Mind who you choose for friends, Rain.”

“Friends,” snorted the girl, skeptical of the concept, maybe.

Out from Sedney and Bigelow to the south, from Haventhur and Zimmerstorm to the north, Munchkin boats were emerging. Shabby little barks such as had been snugged into port or tucked under screens of pine branches proved trim and ready for this opportunity for sabotage. Twelve, fifteen, twenty vessels. Compared to the mighty ships Cherrystone’s men had built, these were laughable toyfloats. Powered by forearm and sail and cheery, puffing steampipes. Here came a bark shaped like a gilded swan—that must be from one of the ancestral piles farther up the lake.

“High holy hysteria,” said Mr. Boss, arriving with the others in time to see the Munchkinlanders take revenge for the burning of their crops.

The dragons were making so much noise, down below, that the soldiers seemed slow to comprehend the net of lake midges drawing around them.

“Brrr, turn around, take the girl away from this,” said Ilianora suddenly.

“This is the world in which she has been born,” barked the dwarf. “Better to know early. Take a good look, girlie.”

Ilianora came up beside Brrr and reached for one of Rain’s hands; Rain shrugged her away. She didn’t take her eyes off the lake.

“The local riffraff is ready with muskets of some sort,” said Brrr, as punches of thready smoke also bloomed out around the raggle-taggle peasant fleet. It wasn’t long before columns of cloud smeared the air from the gunnels of The Vinkus, the Munchkinland, the Gillikin, the Quadling Country. A hearty response from professional artillery.

Perhaps the kickback of Cherrystone’s cannon began to shatter the ice. The rocking worked some play into the frozen girdle, and the navy Menaciers seemed encouraged. But soon it became clear that the Munchkinlanders were united in a simple strategy. Spare the ships; attack the creatures. The slaughter of one dragon, then a second and third simultaneously, made all the onlookers, even Mr. Boss, catch his breath. The great dragon-heads fell to one side, old sunflowers listing. The dragon-wings burst into thin flame, translucent first, then oranged, rouged; they fell to ash within minutes.

“Ow,” said Brrr. “You’re hurting me, Rain.”

The fourth dragon died. The fifth broke loose in the commotion, at last, and rose above the fray so high that the company on the bluff drew back, ready to scatter should its eye fall upon them. But it dove upon one of Cherrystone’s ships to snap the stubbed mast. Then it whirled about and attacked the gilt-tipped swan boat. It caught the silly hooped neck of the prow and rose in the air with it, dashing it upon one of the frozen ships. Brrr couldn’t see if the swan’s navigator or skipper had dived to safety.

The liberated dragon dropped from the air again. At first they thought it was attacking another ship, but the dragon was heaving in a death throe. In the muck of ice floes and floundering vessels, it overfreighted one of Cherrystone’s vessels to the starboard side, and the ship upended with a sound of suction and shattering, stove through.

The sixth and final dragon managed to rip free, now that the spell was losing its grip. Into the sky it racked its way. Taking no notice of floating armies or vengeful ambushers, it staggered in the sunset light. Crazed perhaps. It turned to the south, heaving over Bigelow and the foothills of the Great Kells. Heading for the Disappointments, maybe, or the murk of the badlands. None of its band would follow it into Quadling Country. It had no living mates left.

2.

After soaking a puck of congealed tadmuck and mashing it up, the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon disported itself about a small fire of coals to cook their penance and eat it. They were silent at first. The smoke kept the jiggering mosquitoes off, but the light drew the moths. Cross-legged on the ground, Rain cupped her chin in her hands. Her eyes followed the mauve wings. As if she’d never seen moths before, Brrr thought. Or perhaps she was contemplating the kinship possibilities between moth and dragon.

“Not to ruin anyone’s digestion,” said Brrr at last, “but we’re probably marked enemies of the administration lording it up in the Emerald City. Ilianora and I were talking and—well, don’t you think we should scram while we can?”

“I don’t work by committee, never did,” snapped Mr. Boss. “I want your sympathy, you faggoty cat, I’ll ask for it. You can go foul your knickers for all I care.”

“What’s the matter? Some mountain goat nibble at your testicles?”

Ilianora shot Brrr a look and indicated the child. But Rain continued oblivious to anything but the flutter of moth and flame, and Brrr kept at the dwarf. “What is it? You don’t like anyone else making a decision? Such as our taking on the girl when Lady Glinda suggested it?”

Mr. Boss had been kind to Ilianora for the past year. She had always before been able to cozen the dwarf from his tempers. Now, when she sat down near him and put a hand on his knee, he swatted it away. “You want somebody more functional than Sissyboy Lion, help yourself to one of the lads. I’m not interested in you.”

Behind the dwarf’s back, Brrr mouthed singsongingly to his wife, You’re i-in trou-ble.

“We’ll only keep the girl till we can find somewhere safe for her to stay,” she said to the dwarf. “We more or less promised Lady Glinda. In exchange for releasing the book back to us.”

Mr. Boss flicked a piece of ratty bark into the fire, taking out one of the moths. Rain gasped, quietly.

“We got your precious book,” said Brrr, trying not to sound panicky. “The girl is a bonus. What’re we waiting around for?”

“I don’t know. How the hell should I know?” Mr. Boss’s tone was darker than usual.

“Ask the Clock?” suggested Ilianora, as if that thought might not have occurred to him.

“I can’t.”

Brrr had only been with the company of the Clock for the past six months. Still, he’d heard that the Clock decided for itself when it needed a rest. When this happened, the company would sometimes disband for a while. Maybe it was time. The Lion asked, “What, is the thing on strike again? Holding out on us?”

Mr. Boss shifted this way and that without answering. Off to one side, to the plinks from a silver guitar and a set of jingle-tongs, the bawd came through clearly. The seven lads were improvising more lewd verses to their nightly lay of the endless lay. Some evenings the boys sang of themselves taking their pleasures in a whorehouse, sometimes in a female seminary, sometimes in front of an audience of kings and bishops. The boys were equally godlike in endurance and readiness, the girls indistinguishably gorgeous except for variations in hair color. Hardly lullabye material, but soon enough Rain slumped in the Lion’s forearms and noodled herself toward sleep.

“Now,” said the Lion, “I don’t mean to rush you, but assassins are no doubt starting out to find us, the Clock, and the book. They’ll have put it all together, given we showed them an excerpt of what to expect. Do you want to tell us what’s going on?”

Mr. Boss sighed, and a single golden tear slid out of his eye and lost itself in his bottlebrush mustache. Brrr didn’t trust the tear of a dwarf any more than he trusted the Unnamed God to appear in the clearing and settle the universal contest of good versus evil. Or even good versus bad taste.

Ilianora extended their chieftain the benefit of the doubt. “What’s upset you? It surely can’t be the child?”

The dwarf sunk his chin farther into his chest, as if he’d rather speak to his lap. “I hoped getting the book back from Lady Glinda would refresh the Clock’s executive function, but I don’t believe it has done so.”

Ilianora and Brrr exchanged glances, and waited.

“You always see the entertainment message of the Clock,” explained Mr. Boss. “That’s all anyone ever sees. The audience side with the stages, the apertures and balconies and suchlike. But there’s a difference between public demonstration and private revelation. Around the corner? Not the side with the storage cabinets, but the back end of the cart? Where the placard says HE DREAMS YOU UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN? That advertisement hides from everyone’s view a private stage you never saw because I never mentioned it. To anyone. When I’m alone I go sneak a look there. I watch for direction every few days. Even if the Clock prefers to show no opinion about what might happen, always before this it has quivered with secrecy. It’s been like a child trying to keep perfectly still. Can’t be done. No one can play dead dead enough, not even a Clock. Until now. It gave me one more tirade while you were gone, today. Then—it died. It’s mastered the art of being dead. Or comatose.”

“What did the Clock say?” asked Ilianora.

“It said keep away from any grubby underage girlykins who have no business mucking with history.” He tossed his brow toward Rain but couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “And then it collapsed.”

The lads were settling down into their usual mound. They always slept apart from management. Rain was lost into a dream of her own.

“Perhaps the Clock needs the Grimmerie to function properly?” suggested Brrr. “Like a kind of yeast, or a key? Maybe now that we have it back…?”

“More often than not, the book has been clear of the Clock, and still the Clock told me whatever it needed me to know. The Clock and the book are separate systems, though sharing a cousinly interest in influence.”

“Then maybe the Clock doesn’t like having the Grimmerie back,” said Brrr. “Maybe you should hot-potato it back to Lady Glinda’s lap.” He wouldn’t relish being delegated for that mission, not in the current climate.

“Right. And maybe the stars are really the toenail cuttings of the Unnamed God. Don’t talk about that which you don’t bloody get, Sir Pussykit.”

So even history can get tired too, thought Brrr. How many futures has the Clock told in its time? It’s been humping around Oz for what, thirty, forty, fifty years now? And the dwarf slaving in attendance to it except during the periods when the Clock was hidden in some crevice of Oz, and the dwarf could go out and live something of a life? “Well, if you can’t start it up with a hand crank, maybe it wants to be dead,” said Brrr. “Ever think of that?”

The dwarf only groaned. “The Clock isn’t just a font of prophecy. It’s—a kind of conscience, I think.”

“It won’t be the first conscience ever nodded off. I’m joining it. Good night.”

But the Lion’s rest was pestered by the calls of hootch-owls and the slither of pelican beetles under dried pine needles. He was worried that the dwarf seemed immobilized by the Clock’s paralysis. He was worried they shouldn’t be sleeping here, but should be on the road already, getting away. He could hear marksmen in every scrape and shudder of forest.

Always some itch that worrying couldn’t scratch. Brrr slipped sideways in and out of the kind of sleep that masquerades neatly as the actual moment—is he a Lion aware of being almost asleep in a summery pine forest, or is he dreaming of that same reality?

Apparitions of his past detached from the fretwork of chronology and drifted into consciousness, out again. The Lion swam in that underwater wonderland where action and consequence lose their grip on each other.

Look who’s here on conscience’s catwalk: striking poses between wakefulness and dream.

The nobleman who’d thought up for the Lion an agent’s assignment. The man who had smelled of licorice and tobacco. Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows. His thin pumpkin-colored mustache and goatee, that bearing few Animals could imitate. Damn the confidence of the titled!

Avaric gave way to Jemmsy, the first human Brrr could remember meeting—a humble soldier of the Wizard of Oz. The Lion’s first friend, so his first betrayal. What made Brrr think he could care for a little girl, even for a while? Doing damage—that was the Lion’s métier.

Jemmsy flew apart into ashes. In the Lion’s hypnogogic paralysis, Jemmsy resembled the swarm of Ozmists, said to be fragments of ghost who haunted the Great Gillikin Forest. What had they asked? “Tell us if the Wizard is still ruling Oz.” And Cubbins, the boy-sheriff of the Northern Bears, had asked them a return question: “Tell us if Ozma is alive.”

Why didn’t hooded phantasms in their sepulchral moan ever ask, “Tell us if salted butter is better than unsalted in a recipe for a Shiz mincemeat pasty?” Prophetic questions and answers only cared about rules—powers, thrones, pushiness.

Cubbins faded away into a pattern of sedges and paisleys. Brrr was nearly asleep, and then a thought of the ancient oracle known as Yackle intruded upon the artsiness of the mind yielding to dream.

She was so robust in his thoughts that he sat bolt upright. That cunning fiend! In his mind she was more demanding than ever. “Take care of the girl,” she’d hectored him not six months ago. “I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for.” She’d been talking about the child of Liir and Candle. None other than Elphaba’s granddaughter. But was this girl who showed up—Rain—the right one? The Clock seemed leery of her, according to the dwarf. And Brrr couldn’t be sure. He lay down again. Behind his closed eyelids, as the girl stretched and rubbed against his spine and rolled over, he tried to imagine her as green, though in daylight she seemed the same filmy milkweed color of so many Munchkinlanders and Gillikinese.

Clocks are color-blind, thought Brrr. Let the Clock recover its spring and go back to being the conscience of Oz. It can sort out Rain’s reality. I’m too tired.

All his previous disasters danced attendance upon him now, a big lousy finish. That nightly inquisition, as character relievedly dissolves into oblivion: Who are you really? The Lion had a wife with whom he didn’t sleep, not only for the problem of incompatible proportions but because Ilianora was stitched into a finalizing virginity. The Lion had fixated on many humans and Animals alike, and loved only one, Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tiger. That had gone nowhere in a hurry. Had he sired litters? No. His part in the Matter of Dorothy and the death of the Wicked Witch of the West was puzzling to all, himself included—was he an enemy of the state? Or a hero of the nation? Or just an empty space in the world wearing an acceptably impressive mane—that was how he accounted for himself, up and down and be done with it.

So maybe he wasn’t capable, he concluded, of fulfilling Yackle’s request of him. “Take care of the girl.” Why should he? Elphaba had done him no favors, unless you believed those who said he’d been a Lion cub in Shiz, and she and her friends had rescued him from some unsavory experiment in a lab. No way to prove it, of course.

But here was Rain, in her sleep, rudely scratching herself between her buttocks. The Lion could feel the girl’s spindly arm. His spine and hers, back to back.

But why wasn’t he capable? Come on. Lady Glinda had looked after Rain without drawing attention to the matter. And face it, Lady Glinda was hardly Old Mother Glee from the operettas. If Glinda could manage, couldn’t Brrr? With Ilianora’s help? With or without the dwarf’s help, the Clock’s advice?

But the Clock had gone somnolent, Brrr remembered. A conscience in a coma.

But but but. The endless clockwork spin of self-doubt.

He had come to no conclusion in his roundabout reflections. Sleep rescued him temporarily from the obligation to fret about it any longer.

3.

The new others were still asleep. Rain picked her way around them: the white-haired woman with the hard-soft face, the goldeny Lion, the little mean man. Also the seven acolytes of the Clock, who were tickling one another in their sleep, she thought.

She didn’t miss Glinda. She didn’t miss Puggles. She half expected Miss Murth to be lurking under the pines with a face flannel at the ready, but when Murthy didn’t show up Rain pushed on. She was intent on climbing back up to the lookout to see what could still be seen of the dragons in the water.

Her mind for a path was clever enough. The light rowed like slanted oars along the way, showing her how to go. It felt good to be out in the world. Not dangerous at all, no matter what Miss Murth had kept saying, especially lately.

Ah, the lake. At this hour its surface steamed black-silver. Green glowed on the hills. Green painted the southern coves like a skin of algae. She noticed smoke above Zimmerstorm, though she was too young to wonder if it signified the remains of a town burned in reprisal. She couldn’t see the mansard roofs of Mockbeggar Hall, and she didn’t think to look for them.

The dragons were gone. The ice was gone. The ruins of one ship drifted like a broken island. Two of the ships were yoked and listing. The fourth ship was gone, maybe sunk entirely, or paddled to port somewhere out of sight.

She was sorry for the ships but sorrier for the dragons. She bet no one had asked them if they was interested in swimming boats around. She had helped to ice them in—somehow she knew that. She didn’t know the word ashamed, or even the notion, but she felt punky and wished it hadn’t happened. Lady Glinda was in trouble and there weren’t no other way; but still.

The bits of timber on water looked like broken letters.

This reminded her of the word man. Cherrystone. Once he had found a book with big letters—whether it was for children or for blindish adults she didn’t know—and he had sat it on his knee facing her. She hunched on the floor. He’d taken out his littlish silvery dagger and had used it as a pointer. What’s that? The E. What’s that? The I? No, the other one. The L. Right? Right. And this? The, um, the one like an E. The F! E-L-F? Can you spell it so far?

She could, but for some reason she’d shaken her head. She hadn’t wanted this to go too fast.

Now she saw a big stick and went to pick it up so she could scrape letters into the pine needles. How to spell sorry? The stick wiggled off and she chased it. She knew it had become a snake, but maybe it would hold still and be a stick for her. Maybe it could spell better than she could. “Wait.”

It hustled away, but slower, she thought; it was considering her plea. Then it paused and turned its needle head. It was allover green except where it wanted to be brown. Its eye—she could only see one—was a tight shiny opaque black lentil.

She said, “Did you wriggle up from the water this morning? Do you know what happened down there? Is those dragons friends of yours? Is any of them okay?”

The snake lowered its head, perhaps in mourning.

“One of ’em flied away. Did you see that part?”

The snake didn’t move, but Rain thought it maybe looked a little interested.

“Oh, it did. I en’t got any notion where it flied itself off to. Out beyond the shores over that way.”

The snake seemed to be trying to turn a different color, to blend in with the bit of lichen on one side and a scrap of stone on the other, but it was slow work. She squatted down to watch it go. “Whoa-ey. I din’t know snakes could shift to green and back agin.”

The creature’s lidless eyes were baleful and patient. “A lot could go green if they tried harder,” it said. “Keep it in mind.” Rain reared back, never having met a talking Snake before, nor heard of one even. She thought they were only storylike. The Snake finished its conversion to camouflage, and she couldn’t see it anymore.

She missed the Snake but she appreciated the advice. “Right-o,” she said to where it had been. “Oh and—sorry.”

4.

Rain told them about the ships all ruined, and the dragons, dead or fled. The companions looked at Mr. Boss. He just shrugged.

“Assuming most of the soldiers survived and regrouped on shore, Cherrystone’s first order of business will be to find us,” said Brrr. Patient as a marmoreal Lion. Though he was finding it hard not to scream. “The Clock predicted a watery rout, remember? And Cherrystone might guess we had a mighty charm for making it come true. We really can’t hang around waiting for the Clock to stamp our hall slip.”

“Hey, the Lion’s right. We’ve been romping back and forth across hostile ground for the better part of a year now.” This from a boy with a chestnut mop. Brrr had never heard him speak before. “With that watery zoo in flames last night, we’re going to be everyone’s first target of revenge.”

The towhead said, “And how. Thankth to the bloody Clock’th little prophethy to the military. That wath a collathal fucking mithtake, that wath.”

Yet another virgin opinion: “It’s time we decided which way—”

The dwarf interrupted the boy. “When you start to think about deciding, it’s time for you to decide to leave.”

“Maybe we will,” groused a fourth fellow. “Being wanted in military sabotage is different from being a hand servant to Fate.”

“And you can’t risk bossing Fate around,” spat the dwarf. “You’re going to second-guess me, get out. I mean it.”

The speaker, a kid shaggy with corkscrews of cobalt black, lost a measure of his resolve. He backed up a step, as if to give the dwarf room to back down too.

“I’m not stopping you,” said Mr. Boss, “nor you other fellows. We’ve managed for years either to negotiate a kind of diplomatic immunity or to squelch out of any cowpie we happen to step into. Our stretch of luck might be over, though. Get used to it or get another hobby.”

“But luck, what is luck, up next to Fate—” The boys couldn’t wriggle out of the propaganda snarled around their hearts.

“Save yourselves. Last one to leave, put out the moon. You too, daughter.” The dwarf pointed a gnarled forefinger at Ilianora. “Nothing’s holding you here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she responded. “Yet.”

The lads were packed up and ready to leave within the hour. Abandoning their orange camisoles, they hoisted rucksacks on their backs and tied civilian kerchiefs at their necks. They figured to strike out north across the Pine Barrens, avoiding militias of either stripe.

Brrr thought it best. These boys hadn’t signed on to become agents provocateurs in some accidental war. Most of the lads had wanted merely to see the world and to claim their importance as acolytes of history. Or to postpone indenture in some family grocery or gravel-and-sand concern.

“You’re next,” said the dwarf. “Out. Vamoose. Scrammylegs.”

“Not without you,” said Ilianora. “Mr. Boss, you’re not yourself.”

“I’m not going anywhere with that ruinous child,” said Mr. Boss.

“If we leave, you’re not going anywhere, period,” observed Brrr. “You just dismissed your backup labor force, and I’m the only one left who can drag that Clock. Unless you’re ready to walk away from it.”

“Curses,” bellowed the dwarf, and demonstrated some.

“Hush,” said Ilianora. “If they’ve really decided to hunt us down, you’ll only pinpoint our location for them.”

The dwarf went and sat under the wagon.

“I’m all packed,” said the Lion to his spouse. “Nothing holding us, I think. Since we seem to be dismissed.”

“He rescued me,” said Ilianora. “I can’t just leave him over this slight difference of opinion.”

“Why en’t you ask the Clock?” suggested Rain. “If you talked nice to it? What’s its name, anyway?”

Ilianora gave the wrinkled wince that, in her, passed for a grin. “Oswald. But I think of it as Oswalda.”

Rain went to look at it. “It en’t very breathy,” she admitted, but she walked about it, giving it the benefit of the doubt. From beneath, the dwarf pitched stones at her scraped ankles.

Brrr saw the dragon as a cutthroat charm, a vulgar but effective contrivance of tiktok ingenuity designed to remind gullible audiences of the archaic folk belief known as the Time Dragon. Though himself reared without such nonsense—because self-reared—the Lion had learned of Oz’s origin legends well enough. The snot-fired underground creature, asleep in some unreachable cavern, dreaming the universe from its beginning. A fiery fatalism.

And not the only type of fatalism to grip Oz. Other more phlegmatic theories proposed existence as the result of some unholy combustion of oils and embers. Even today, some peasants credited their filthy lot to the dilettantism of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, trying her hand at creating a world. And eggheads smart enough to suffer gout or glaucoma argued that life was a benighted experiment in ethics or cruelty invented by the Unnamed God. But the dragon story was older—so old in folk knowledge that the dragon had no name. Oswald was a nom de théâtre: deep fate is always run from behind the curtain, from which we are asked to divert our attention.

Today the dragon of the Clock was inert. A clapped-out heap of oxidizing technology. Could it be a disguise? Oswald had so often seemed a half-creature, sinister in its apparent sense of impulse, decided in its attitude toward wrong and right. The dragon’s head had rotated like the headlamp of some pedicycle rollicking down the college lanes of Shiz. The jaws snapped in four different positions. None of them smiling. When did conscience smile?

“It looks deaded out,” concluded Rain, cheerfully enough.

“Rain, a little less noise,” suggested the Lion. No sense in salting the dwarf’s wounds.

“Why en’t we hunting in the Grimmerie for words to wake ’m up?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” said Brrr. “I vote yes.”

“Suddenly we’re a democratic synod? That’s what having children does for you? Remind me to neuter myself with a grapefruit spoon.” But with what Ilianora had been through, that remark was thoughtless, and despite his distress the dwarf caught himself. “Oh, all right. But I’m not promising to play by any suggestion a stupid book makes, magic or not.”

He got the Grimmerie out of a drawer that opened with a pop, as if it had been eager to deliver the book to Rain. “Reading never did much for me, in my line of work,” he grumphed.

Ilianora spread her shawl on the needled ground, and Mr. Boss dumped the book upon it. “I don’t like to touch the Grimmerie,” said the woman, but Rain knelt down before the tome. She put her hands on the cover as if she’d like to hug the thing, and opened the great lid of it.

“It feels hummy. Like moss with sugarbees in it,” she said.

“And you look like clot without the cream.” The dwarf snorted. “Find what you need to find and close the damn thing up again. It makes me nervous. This book isn’t for the likes of us to examine. We’re just the keepers.”

“Maybe the world is changing,” said the Lion, “and it’s up to us now.”

The dwarf stifled himself as Rain turned the versos. Today each page seemed made of a different sort of paper. Different colors and weights, sieved and pressed with a variety of trash: rag content and straw, string and fuse. To Brrr’s eye the hand-lettered words seemed overly hooked and pronged, a foreign language if not, indeed, a foreign alphabet. Though his spectacles needed updating. Sometimes the marginalia designs appeared engaged and in motion, flat little theater pieces performing for themselves. On other pages a single portrait without caption stared out, its eyes moving as the page lifted, wavered, settled, was covered by the next. “How do we even know what we’re looking for?” asked the Lion.

“When we find it,” said Rain. Simple enough.

Brrr saw it before she did. They had come upon a page that seemed sheathed in ice or glass, across which embossed patterns of frost and snowflake were wheeling, interleaving the way, presumably, the cogs of the Clock did when the Clock was in fettle. The paper glinted with sparkles as of light on snow. Rain said, “Is this calling winter upon water?”

“Who knows?” said Brrr. “No text I can recognize, unless the snowflakes are their own prose. The book has stopped riffling itself, though. Seems to be the destination page, anyway.”

The girl agreed; she clasped her hands over the page eagerly as if to warm herself on a winter’s afternoon. “Where is my mittens?” she murmured, almost to herself.

The snowflake patterns pulled apart like theater curtains, revealing a dark blue background that filled the whole page, like a night sky during Lurlinemas. Stars shone in midnight ink. “If this is an advertisement for classes in faith formation, honeyclams, I’m taking a match to the whole damn thing,” whispered Mr. Boss.

“Shut up,” said Brrr politely.

A single dot of white began to grow larger, as if nearing from a great distance across the heavens. It looked like a sort of snow globe, of the type Brrr had seen in the shops at holidays. An ice bubble, maybe? A perfect crystal drop. Hovering. It swelled almost to the margins of the page. When it stopped, they could see that the globe was clear, and a hunched figure imprisoned within.

“The Z in the O,” said Rain.

They couldn’t quite tell who it was.

“It’s meant to be Lady Glinda,” said Mr. Boss, despite himself. “People said she used to come and go by bubble. Though it was really a White Pfenix.”

“No, it’s meant to be Elphaba, only you can’t see she’s green,” said Ilianora, “not behind that icy white window. It reminds me of her crystal globe at Kiamo Ko.”

“It’s neither.” The Lion didn’t know why he felt so decisive about it. “It’s Yackle. Old Mother Yackle, the senile sage of the mauntery. She’s the one who took up lodging within these very pages, if you recall. And the glass ball—maybe that’s what’s become of Shadowpuppet—Malky, the glass cat. It has swallowed her up as if she were a bird. Well, she had those wings, remember.”

The figure—it was surely a she—pointed out at them as if she could see them from the book. One finger at Brrr, one at Ilianora, one at the dwarf, and one at Rain. With her other hand she collected four upright fingers and bunched them together like asparagus spears tied with string. She gripped them, indicating—quite cleary—together. Together.

Then she raised her right hand and pointed over their shoulders. South. She made a shooing motion with her hand, a farmwife annoyed by chickens. Go! Go. Together. South.

Flee.

Hurry!

“She could get a job at Ticknor Circus doing charades,” admitted the dwarf. “She’s pretty good, though who’s to say she’s not some dybbuk tempting us to our doom?”

The snowflakes began to close in, obscuring the figure. The Grimmerie became stiff, the pages blocked. Nothing to do but close the damn book before the ground around it began to ice up and the Grimmerie froze to the earth.

“I’m going south,” said Brrr. “With Ilianora and with Rain. I’ll haul the Clock if you choose to come along, Mr. Boss. If you can’t bring yourself to join us, well, it’s been jolly when it hasn’t been a total nightmare.”

The dwarf pulled at his hands, all but whimpering, “The Clock said no girl.”

“Haven’t you ever known a Clock to tell the wrong time?” Though Brrr stopped there.

“All right. I’m beat.” The dwarf walked up to Rain; their faces were almost the same height. He waggled a finger. “But hey? Little funny kid? You’re not to touch this book again. I don’t like that look of entitlement on your smug face.”

“It’s called reading,” she retorted.

Whatever else they griped about—whoever the image had meant to remind them of, and they argued over it—they’d come to agreement about this much, at least: better to be caught on the road headed for other mischief than to be found squatting in a cul-de-sac like mice in a tin bucket. Since the battle for Restwater might be joined again at Haugaard’s Keep, to the east, then they’d head around the western tip of the lake, until they could follow the book’s advice and turn south.

Now the Lion discovered that the boys had been letting him do all the work since the day he arrived a half a year ago, back when the autumn came upon them to the sound of gunpowder explosions and the odd bugle bravocatory. The harness strained against his shoulders no less than it had last week.

The dwarf walked on one side of the wagon, Rain on the other.

Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success.

Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination.

Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. Not for nothing does the assignment of hauling the Clock of the Time Dragon between the shafts of a wooden cart seem a sort of vacation. A Lion in Oz glows in the gloom: hustlers and harlots, here’s your mark! But adjacent to the Time Dragon, however slackened it might be, a Lion could enjoy being overshadowed.

5.

Deciding on a destination always makes the weather improve, or seem to improve. Though the sun remained brutal and the winds weak, and the humidity felt heaped on like a sodden coat, the uncompanionable companions stepped sprightly. The farther they got from Mockbeggar Hall, the better off they’d be. The pines gave way to long gravelly stretches, like dried-up streambeds, perhaps evidence of a flow that had once moved from Kellswater into Restwater. The companions camped by day if they could find shade; by night they trod, wordless and lost but not, Brrr thought, in despair. Or not yet, anyway. As soon as the moon sank they stopped and rested too. No matter how hot it was, Rain slept against Brrr as if she were his kit.

Some days later, on the horizon, the first of the great oakhair trees began to lift their frondish heads. Brrr remembered this terrain from last fall. At noontime, they came within sight of the mauntery where Brrr had interviewed Yackle, and she him.

It sat and sulked by itself on its flat, like an armoire set out on a lawn. It looked deserted, but Brrr didn’t propose going nearer to satisfy his curiosity. Neither did anyone else. They kept to one side of the establishment, pushing south, deeper into the oakhair forest.

Ilianora carried the scythe the boys had sometimes wielded and she knocked down what bracken she could. If shadier, the woods were stiller, too. More spiders. Brrr hated spiders, but Rain scurried sideways to peer through each fretted oculus.

“What are you looking for?” he heard Ilianora ask her once.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The spider world. The world the spider sees. The other world.”

“Little goose.” Ilianora takes such a fond tone when trashing the dreams of the young, Brrr observed. “Little monkey. Little moron. There is no other world. This world is enough.”

“Of course no one asks me my opinion about other worlds,” growled Mr. Boss. “I who actually have traveled a good deal wider than some.”

“Well?” Rain rarely addressed the dwarf. “What would you say?”

He glowered at the girl, as if she were responsible for the Clock having suffered its rigor mortis. “Ah, what I could say, were I free to spill the beans.”

“Don’t fill her head with nonsense,” snapped Ilianora. “It’s unkind.”

“What about that Dorothy?” asked Rain. “En’t she from the other world?”

“Who told you anything about her?” asked the dwarf.

“Murthy did. When Lady Glinda was busy twisting her hair with that hot fork.”

“I knew it,” said Brrr, shaking his natural curls.

“Wherever she was from, Dorothy was a stooge of the Wizard,” said Ilianora. “She did his bidding, from what I heard. She killed Auntie Witch—”

She paused. Brrr rarely heard her mention Elphaba Thropp. He knew his wife well enough to guess that the phrase Auntie Witch, rising to her own lips, had startled her. He swished his tail in his wife’s face to amuse her. She blinked at him in a noncommittal way.

“Dorothy could have come from anywhere,” he drawled. “There’s a lot of Oz untraveled by the likes of Ozians. More outback than city centre in Oz, no? And beyond the sands, Fliaan and Ix, and other murky badlands too impossible to imagine.”

“That’s not what Murth says,” protested Rain. “She says Dorothy was from the Other Land. You can’t get there by a cart. Just by magic.”

“It’s a one-way ticket, honey,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me on this one.” He turned his pocket out as if looking for a chit for the return voyage: nothing.

“Dorothy went back, though.”

“Hah. They probably topped her and tumbled her in some hole. And made up another story. Just like they did to Ozma. People will believe anything if it’s impossible enough.”

“Don’t,” said Brrr. “Let Rain learn the world the same way we all did.”

“The scientific method of child rearing? Analysis by trial and terror?” The dwarf cracked his knuckles. “Move aside, Lion. I’m going for a walk. I can’t sit here and listen to you corrupt a child with the limits of logic. You’re all boobs and bobbycats.”

He humped himself straight through the big spiderweb that Rain had been examining. Then he turned around and said, “Look, little wastrel girl. I’m on the other side. And what’s the news? It stinks over here, too.”

The Lion whispered to his spouse, “Is he going to hold against Rain until she’s old enough to jab him one between the eyes?”

“Who likes being cut out of the future?” she replied. “The Clock is giving no opinions—so how does he learn his way?”

“The same as the rest of us. Dread, shame, and luck.”

When he came back, forty minutes later, Mr. Boss had a wife in tow. His own wife. An unregenerate Munchkinlander whom Brrr believed he’d met before. The woman, like many of her kind, was compact, half as wide as she was tall, slightly bowed of leg, a face like a dented saucepan. Some sort of weed in her hands—she’d been collecting herbs, maybe. She stumped forward into the clearing with the confidence of a woodcutter.

It took him a moment to place her. “Sister Apothecaire. As I live and breathe. I thought you’d taken a vow of chastity?”

“I accidentally left it behind in the mauntery when you carried me off in that cart six months ago. Oh well. Whoever finds it can keep it; I’m through with it. Anyway, mind your own beeswax.”

Ilianora turned to look. “It’s good to see you so recovered.”

“From my fall down the stairs? Or from my life as a maunt? Never mind. Now I appreciate that you were kind to carry me and my cracked noggin away from the mauntery before the EC forces arrived. Being a Munchkinlander, I might’ve been taken hostage. As I remember, I was rather cranky at the time, though. With some relief you passed me over to a team of women wheelers on their way to the EC for a championship tournament. I stayed with them for a few weeks, as they rehearsed their moves in a farmer’s meadow northwest of here,” explained Sister Apothecaire. “After a while, I realized even sports competitions are essentially political in nature. Who needs it. Besides, as a Munchkinlander I was too short to keep up with the team. So I found an abandoned woodman’s lean-to and made do.”

“Did you give no thought to returning to your roots in Munchkinland?” asked Ilianora. “Or repairing to the motherchapel in the Emerald City?”

“The motherhouse? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve been co-opted by the Emperor’s religious diktats for years. I’m not bowing to fix the sandal of the Emperor Apostle, no sirree. I may be short but I’m not that short. As to Munchkinland, I don’t have many relatives left in Center Munch. They were all ruined by the effects of that twister that passed through when I was a child. The one that carried that little fiend of the winds, Dorothy. So I’m an orphan spinster apostate, and this morning I woke up all alone, until I met Mr. Boss, who has improved my prospects.”

“I have no intention of improving anyone’s prospects,” said the dwarf, “my own included. That’s why I married you. Someone to share a similarly sour outlook, or even degrade it some. This lot is entirely too rosy now. They’re going to break into song any moment. They’ve even taken on a child to raise.”

“Ha,” said Ilianora. “No one raises that girl. We’re escorting her to safety. That’s all.”

At this Rain looked neither right nor left. She just kept studying the bole of a tree in which a squirrel might live, or an owl, or a chipmunk. Something secret, animal, magical. Unrelated.

“The curse of parenthood. As if the world can be safe.” The dwarf almost smiled at his traveling companions. “Anyway, you all can come back to our little hovel-in-the-hellebore and we’ll serve you an omelet. Her specialty is plover’s eggs and scallions.”

“It was all I was ever able to find,” confessed Sister Apothecaire. “I’m neither a hunter nor a gatherer, it seems. I’m more of a pantry parasite. Though I can bake a captivating muffin, given the right ingredients.”

They accepted the invitation. “Congratulations,” said Brrr to the dwarf as they walked along. “If I had a cigar, I’d give it to you to smoke in honor of your impending nuptial experience.”

“Oh, we’ve already consummated our union,” he replied.

Brrr raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a dwarf on a lonely road and I’ve been giving my life to this fool contraption as if there was something in it for me. She’s a Munchkinlander maunt who has been celibate since before her first milk tooth came in. Put it this way: we were ready.”

Well, thought the Lion. Bested at that game, too. By a dwarf, no less.

They approached the cottage in the woods, a ragged-roofed thing covered in old oakhair leaves. “Are you going to stay here?” asked Brrr. “Taking up the life of a retired husband? Collecting scallions instead of being bishop of the book, dragoman of the dragon?”

“Of course not. After a hundred years of service, or whatever it’s been—it’s felt that long anyway—I want to see this escapade to its natural end. Wifey can wait for me or come along, makes no difference to me. Ours is not a very strong marriage. Still, I love her, in my way.”

Mr. Boss grinned at his four-square bride. “What’s your name before you became Sister Apothecaire?”

She squinted, and put a finger to her lips. “I forget. In faith classes, they called me Little Daffodil.”

“Little Daffy. I like it. Well, come on, Little Daffy; let’s break out the best linen and tap a keg of springwater for our guests. It’s a wedding party, after all.”

Rain was skeptical about the newcomer. Her hard little face was like an old rye loaf left out in the sun. But in general the girl didn’t care for people, so her specific apprehensions of Little Daffy came and went, uncataloged, evanescent.

Brrr murmured to Ilianora, “Maybe this is our opportunity to peel off. Who would have guessed it? After all this time, our confirmed bachelor takes a wife.”

“Perhaps, the Clock being somnolent, he needed something else to nag him, and a wife serves that function handily,” said Ilianora, coming as close as she ever did to joking. Still, there was something to it.

After a slap-up supper Mr. Boss readied himself to get back on the road. Little Daffy went inside to tie on a fresh apron. Brrr admitted to being dubious about taking on another liability.

“You saddled us with a child, and you’re second-guessing me about picking up a wife?” The dwarf raised his fists at the Lion. “I’ve had it with you. Come on. Last one standing. It’s time to settle this.”

“I merely mean that your ladyfriend should be told about the danger we’re in,” said Brrr. He wasn’t going to fight a dwarf. He had no chance against that pipsqueak barbarian.

Ilianora said, “Listen, you louts, I’ll just lay out the details and let Little Daffy decide for herself.” She called Little Daffy from the cottage and made short work of it. “One. We’re probably wanted for aiding in the sabotage of the Emperor’s fleet of ships on Restwater. Two. They’ll guess we have the Grimmerie with us, since the damage done was substantial. Three. The Clock is broken, and we can’t rely on its advice. Four, the Grimmerie won’t open for us anymore, once it gave us its advice to go south. So we’re on our own.”

“South?” That was the only part that made Little Daffy blink. “The mud people? Munchkinlanders don’t venture into the clammy zone. Offends our sense of rectitude, both moral and hygienic. Why not west? I know some decent Scrowfolk who would hide us a while.”

“The advice was south,” said Brrr, “and that’s where we’re headed.”

“The advice was also to keep miles away from wretched girl-children,” interrupted Mr. Boss, “so this enterprise already starts off on a bad footing.”

“I’m going south, with the Clock or without it,” said Brrr, “so if you want to stay with the Clock and you want me to pull it for you, the matter’s settled. Little Daffy, join us or not, but make up your mind now.”

6.

The Munchkin woman decided in favor of adventure, to see if her marriage would hold. Before she left the woodcutter’s shed, she buried a spoon in the soil beside the doorsill. She explained: an old Munchkinlander custom before travel was undertaken. If you ever make it home, there’ll be something to eat with, even if the only thing left to eat is dirt.

“Lady Glinda could cook dirt,” said Rain.

Highsummer turned into Goldmonth, though Brrr insisted that up north the season was known as Tattersummer, for the fringing of the leaves by insects. Little Daffy countered that in Munchkinland these late summer days were called Harvest Helltime, as farmers struggled to get crops in before thunderstorms or the occasional dustbillow. “Munchkinland is losing acres of good soil to the desert every year,” she clucked. “If the EC really intends to polka on down and set up housekeeping, they’ll need a good broom.”

Rain listened to pictures more than people. Spoons in the ground, thunderstorms, dustbillows. The use of a good broom. The complexity of the world’s menace was daunting, but perhaps she’d learn to read it as she had learned her letters. First step of reading, after all, is looking.

Eight-foot spiderwebs toward the southern edge of the oakhair forest. The Lion squealed whenever he stumbled into them, but Rain loved them. If she found them before they were battered by her companions, she looked through them, to see what she could see.

It was, indeed, like peering through a window. From one side, she was a human-ish enough girl looking in to the spider world. She saw spiders with short eyelashy legs and spiders with thoraxes like lozenges. Spider-mites with bodies so small you couldn’t even make them out, but who sported legs that could span a skillet.

Hello, little capery-leg. And how do you do today?

What Rain didn’t see, and she kept looking, was groups of spiders. Did spiders have attachments? Other than to their webs? She watched each silvery gumdrop sink on its strings, but when the spider climbed back up, nobody else was ever home. Any guests who blundered into their threaded nets became supper, which seemed unsociable.

Spiders had nerve, and speed, and art of a sort, but they had no friends. They didn’t go get married just like that.

From the other side of the web, being a spider, Rain peered back at the humans, to see in pictures what she could see.

For instance. The dwarf had called Ilianora “daughter” one time too many, so Little Daffy wondered if the veiled woman actually was his child. Ilianora was miffed. “Mr. Boss? Are you joking? My father was a prince, for all the good it did him.”

Everything looked like something. So what did this look like now? Mr. Boss looked like he’d been stung by a flying scorpion. His lips were blown out and bitten back.

Little Daffy looked suddenly ravished with interest by her fingernails.

As a spider, Rain thought Mr. Boss and Little Daffy looked like tiny little matching grandparents, sour as mutual crab apples. They looked like they were playing at living. Or was this living? Rain wasn’t sure. She stayed out of the dwarf’s way as much as she could.

She heard Brrr and Ilianora talk quietly, out of range of the dwarf and the Munchkin, but not out of the range of a spider’s attention. Ilianora proposed that, given the Clock’s new reticence, being married was a legitimate diversion for a dwarf at loose ends. Surely?

“That attitude toward marriage makes of our union a slight mockery, don’t you think?” Brrr purred Ilianora up the side of her neck. “Anyway, they’re at it like a tomcat and the parish whore. Every night. It’s embarrassing.”

“He’s got to do something. He’s not the type to take up knitting by a fireside, is he?”

Rain turned her head. The dwarf was pitching a penknife into a tree trunk at forty feet. His face was sweaty, his raveling beard in need of a shampoo. He didn’t look as if he would favor doing piecework.

“At least he’s stopped fussing so much over Rain,” continued Ilianora. “The book’s told us what to do—stick together, head south—but not why. You and I aren’t captives, though. If you have any other ambitions once we ditch the Grimmerie somewhere safe, spell them out.”

Do I care what they do? wondered Rain, and couldn’t think of an answer.

“I can’t go back to the Emerald City unless I’m willing to hand over the Grimmerie to them,” said Brrr. “Otherwise I’ll be thrown in Southstairs, and it won’t be pretty. You’ve told me how unpretty it would be, in no uncertain terms.”

“I don’t want to talk about Southstairs.” Ilianora’s face turned a shade of stubbornness no spider had ever seen before. “I was asking you about your ambitions. No interest in your companions on the Yellow Brick Road? That Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman?”

“The Scarecrow has all but disappeared. I suppose straw succumbs to mold and weevils. And last I heard, the Tin Woodman is still a labor agitator in Shiz. Wish he could organize our mechanical conscience here. Fat chance of that. Really, that Matter of Dorothy was a sorry passage, let me tell you. In a generally sorry life.”

“Mine hardly prettier. After prison, to slip from doing resistance work into writing fanciful stories for a while. The dilettante’s gavotte, I think one would call it.”

Rain saw their faces screw up more complicated, pancakes trying to become soufflés. Faces bloated, contorted, deflated, endlessly in disguise. Tiresome but curious.

“That General Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall?” Brrr spoke in a softer voice; he didn’t know spiders have good hearing. “Cherrystone was the one who kidnapped you when you weren’t that much older than Rain is now. He didn’t recognize you all grown up, I know. But do you feel—in that vault of your heart—the yearning for vengeance?”

Ilianora held her tongue for what seemed to Rain like a couple of years, but finally she spoke. “We took a risk walking into Mockbeggar Hall carrying the Grimmerie right under Cherrystone’s nose. I believed Mr. Boss when he said the book was only on temporary loan to Lady Glinda. Getting it safely out of there, away from Cherrystone’s hands, seemed the more crucial objective. If the day arrives when I’m ready to take vengeance on him for slaughter—of my family—well, I suspect I’ll know it. It’ll come clear to me, privately, all in good time.”

Secret knowledge, thought Rain. My head hurts.

“As for now,” continued Ilianora, “let history have its way: I’m only a bystander. A dandelion, a spider, nothing more.”

“We aren’t aimless. We have a goal,” the Lion reminded her. “We’re keeping the Grimmerie out of the hands of the Emperor of Oz. We’re heading south, as the book advised. And, incidentally, whether Mr. Boss likes it or not, we’re rescuing the girl.”

At this they both looked up at her, and Rain found the spiderweb too thin between them. It had become a gunsight that focused her in its crosshairs. Their look of affection was brazen. To break the spell of their myopia, to divert them, she brayed, “I want to keep reading but we got no books. You write stories? Write me some words I can practice on.”

“I don’t write anymore,” said Ilianora in one of those voices. “Ask someone else.”

“Who’s to ask?” Rain felt fussed and hot. “The world en’t gonna write nothing for me. No words in the clouds. No printed page among these dead leaves. Can a spider write letters in a web?”

“What nonsense,” said the dwarf from his distance, pitching his knife through the web a few feet above her head, severing a prominent girder so it collapsed like shucked stockings. “That would be some spider.”

7.

They didn’t dawdle but they moved without haste. The Lion had concluded that attention must still be centered upon the battle for Restwater, since goons with guns hadn’t shown up yet. A few days on, as they entered the hardscrabble terrain known as the Disappointments, they spotted the next oddkin, the latest of Oz’s free-range lunatiktoks. “It was ever thus,” the dwarf averred.

“No, war is driving the entire country nuts,” replied the Lion.

The creature seemed to be a woman, sitting in the only tree on this wide stony plain. She held an umbrella for shade and protection from the rains. Evidence of a cookfire in one direction, a latrine in the other. The place was open enough to appear attractive to lightning. Perhaps she wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.

She scrambled down when they approached and stood her ground. She wore what had once been a rather fine dress of white duck with cerulean blue piping, though the skirt had gone grey and brown. That’s a useful camouflage, thought Brrr. A starched blue bib rode against her bosom. Her shoes were torn open at the toe. “Hail,” she said, and stuck her arm out in a salute, and chopped it once or twice. Her eyes wobbled like puddings not fully set.

The hair piled up on her head reminded Rain of a bird’s nest; the girl half expected a beaky face to peer out from above. She all but clapped with joy.

“Let me guess. You are the Queen of the Disappointments,” said the dwarf. “Well, given our recent history, we must be your loyal subjects.” He spat, but not too rudely.

She looked left and right as if someone might be listening. She appeared familiar to Brrr, but he imagined that most loopy individuals seem recognizable. They mirror the less resolved aspects of ourselves back at us, and the shock of recognition—of ourselves in their eyes—is a cruel dig.

“Are you all right?” asked Ilianora. Ever the tender hand, especially for a female in trouble, Brrr knew.

The woman cawed and flapped her arms. They saw she had stitched some sort of a blanket of feathers to her white serge sleeves.

“Wingses!” said Rain happily.

“She’s so far round the bend, she’s back home already,” muttered Mr. Boss.

“Hush, husband,” said Little Daffy. “Hold your snickering; she’s dehydrated. In need of salts, powder of cinnabar, a tiny dose. Also a brew of yellowroot and garlic to take care of the conjunctivitis.” She dove her hands into her waistband, inspecting the contents of pockets sewn on the inside of her skirt. She had, after all, been a professional apothecaire. “Heat up some water in the pot, Ilianora, and I’ll shave up a few herbs and hairy tubers for the poor Bird Woman.”

The woman wasn’t much frightened by them. After several sips of something red and cloudy that Mr. Boss offered from his private flask, she blinked and rubbed dust out of her eyes as if she were just coming up to room temperature. When she opened her mouth, it was not to twitter but to speak more or less like a fellow citizen. “God damn fuckheads,” she said. “Give me some more of that juice.”

“That’s the ticket,” said Mr. Boss, obliging.

She lifted her chin at the Clock. “What’s that thing, then? A portable guillotine?”

“That’s as good a word for it as any,” said the dwarf. “A cabinet of marvels, once upon a better time.”

The Bird Woman looked it up and down and walked around it on her toes. That accounts for the condition of the boots, Brrr thought.

“No. I know what this is. I’ve heard tell of it. Never thought it would feature in my path. It’s the Clock of the Time Dragon, isn’t it? What are you doing dragging it out here in Forsaken Acres?” She ruffled her wings as she stepped about, like a marabou stork.

“Brought it here to die,” he said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Oh, more or less the same thing,” she replied. “Isn’t that the general ambition of living things?”

“Hush, there’s a child,” said Ilianora.

The Bird Woman peered at her. “So there is. How grotesque.” She put out a hand and rubbed the side of the Clock. “I figured this sort of entertainment went out once they started doing girlie shows in Ticknor Circus.”

Mr. Boss made a point of humphing. “This isn’t a sort of anything. It’s sui generis.”

She took on the expression of a crazed docent. “You’re small and barky but you don’t know everything. This Clock is the latest and maybe the most famous of a long line of tiktok extravaganzas. They used to circulate several hundred years ago in the hamlets of Gillikin, telling stories of the Unnamed God. Such contrivances specialized in the conversion stories of the Saints. Saint Mettorix of Mount Runcible, who was martyred when a coven of witches flew overhead and dropped frozen cantaloupes onto his scalp. Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall, you probably have heard of her. Hidden from sight for decades, emergent at last, in some versions. Also Saint Glinda.”

“I know the tale of Saint Glinda, thank you for nothing,” said Little Daffy. “I spent my professional life in the mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows.”

“A sordid little tale of grace through glamour,” said the Bird Woman dismissively. “Then, little by little, as unionism rooted more deeply in the provinces, the tiktok trade became secular, pretending toward prophecy and secret-spilling.”

“We specialized in history and prophecy in conjunction with civic conscience.” Mr. Boss sounds like a traveling salesman, thought Brrr.

“Charlatanism,” insisted the Bird Woman. “And sometimes dangerous. The masters of traveling companies used to send their acolytes ahead to sniff out local gossip, so the puppets could be seen to imitate the bellyaches of real life.”

“I never needed to do that,” said Mr. Boss. “Different organizing principle entirely. Real magic, if you don’t mind. The rough stuff.”

“You only carried on all these years because there was a tradition to hide behind,” said the harridan. “You’re the last one and you stick out like a sore behind. People have got to be asking why. Especially in times like this.”

“Doesn’t matter what people say. Anyway, you’re right about one thing: this famous Clock has had it. The tok is divorced from the tik.”

“It’s not dead yet,” she said.

“I didn’t come for a second opinion,” said the dwarf. “What are you, a witch doctor?”

“I know a thing or two about spells, as it happens.”

“Who are you?”

“I used to have a name, and it used to be Grayce Graeling. But without a social circle, a name quickly becomes moot, I realized. So never mind about me.”

“How do you know about spells?” asked Ilianora. “Seems to be a dying art in Oz.”

“What do you expect, with the Emperor wanting to husband all the magic in his own treasury?” chirped the Bird Woman. “It’s not going to work, of course. Magic doesn’t follow those rules. It carves its own channels. But why don’t you fire this thing up and show me what you’ve got?”

“I told you, it’s paralyzed. Maybe dead,” said Mr. Boss.

“Can you fly?” asked Rain.

“It isn’t dead. I should know. I could tell you a thing or two about spells. I taught magic once, I was on the faculty at Shiz several yonks ago. I was never very skilled, mind you, but I was a devoted teacher to my girls, and I picked up more than anyone credited.”

“The entire former faculty of Shiz seems to retire to the suburbs,” observed Brrr. “Did you know a Professor Lenx? And Mister Mikko?”

“I knew how to lace up a boot from across a room,” she said. “I knew how to produce crumpets and tea in fifteen seconds, for when a trustee arrived unexpectedly in one’s chambers. I knew that Elphaba Thropp, once upon a while.”

“Oh, sure you did,” said Mr. Boss. “Seems like everyone in Oz knew her. Can’t walk across the street without running into someone from the alumnae association. By the math of it, there were seventy thousand people who entered Shiz that year with her.”

“How high can you fly?” asked Rain.

“She wasn’t so special,” said the Bird Woman, picking a nit from her feathers and looking at it with something like avarice. She didn’t eat it, just flicked it off her thumb. “She was an ordinary girl with a talent for mischief and more serious complexion issues than sick bay knew what to do with. What happened to her in the end was a crime.”

“What happens to all of us in the end is a crime,” said Mr. Boss. “Take it up with the authorities.”

“I tell you, this instrument isn’t quite done,” she insisted. “Or maybe it’s just responding to me and my long dormant talents. Open it up. I haven’t had an entertainment in months.”

“What are you doing here? Did you fly here?” asked Rain.

The dwarf shrugged his shoulders and turned to Ilianora. “Well, Miss Mistress of the Mysteries, unstrap the belts, like the good old times. I’ll wind up some cranks and see if she responds.”

“Do you live in a nest?” Rain asked.

“Hush, child, don’t ask personal questions,” said the Lion.

“That’s the only kind I have,” said Rain.

“I know you,” said the Bird Woman to Brrr.

“I had a feeling you would,” he replied.

“You worked for the Emperor. You scab.”

“I was in a bit of a legal squeeze. That’s all over now.”

Hunching down before the stage, she paid Brrr no further attention. Rain went and squatted next to her, and tried to angle her elbows out to mimic the Bird Woman. “Can you lay an egg?”

“Any eggs get laid around here, let the dragon do it,” said Mr. Boss, huffing. “Well, what do you know. Some phantom juice left in the gears, after all. You aren’t as flighty as you seem, Queen Birdbrain.”

“I could paint stationery with butterflies and lilac sprays and shit like that,” said the Bird Woman, “without picking up a paintbrush. I wasn’t good at controlling the flow of watercolors, though. They tended to puddle.”

“Don’t we all. Grab your privates and say your prayers, folks. Here she goes.” The dwarf went round to release some final clasps and rebalance the counterweights. “What do you say,” he called, “if it comes to life and tells us to give the girl to the hermit lady as a present? We’ll call it magic, eh?”

Rain looked around. Her expression was intense and occluded. “He doesn’t mean it,” said the Lion, without conviction.

A wobble, a spasm, the sound of a pendulum wide of its arc and striking the casing. The shutters folded back, courtesy of magnets on tracks. Brrr and Ilianora exchanged glances. This should cheer up the dwarf.

“If today’s matinee has anything about the Emperor in it, I’m walking out, and I want a full refund,” declared the woman who had been Grayce Graeling.

“Shhh,” said Rain.

The dragon at the top of the cabinet moved one of his wings in a stiff way, as if arthritis had set in. His head rolled. One eye had become loose in its socket, for the look was cross-eyed and almost comical. Little Daffy began to giggle, but Ilianora put her hand on the woman’s wrist. The dwarf wouldn’t like to hear laughter. The Clock wasn’t a device for comedy.

The main stage whitened with a camphorous fog. A backdrop unrolled but got stuck halfway down. Hanging in midair against another scrim, one of rushes and cattails, the scene was of a tiled floor in some loggia. Brrr muttered to Ilianora, “Should someone go forward and give it a tug?” but she shook her head.

On an invisible track a cradle came forward, rocking. An ornate was carved on its headboard. Over it stood a puppet of a roundish man with a pair of oily mustaches ornamentally twirled in bygone fashion. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, possibly signaling grief. The sound that came was less nasal than industrial, like a train whistle. He didn’t notice. He was just a puppet on rusty wires.

He was moving, he was turning this way and that, but he was just a puppet. He had no life. Brrr could tell that Rain was disappointed.

Down from the fly space dropped a cutout of a hot-air balloon with a smooth-cheeked charlatan grinning and waving a cigar. “It’s the arrival of the Wizard,” said Brrr. “I’d know any cartoon of him, for in real life he was hardly more than a cartoon.”

Ilianora turned her back.

“The mustached marionette below must be Pastorius, the Ozma Regent,” decided Brrr.

“Who’s that?” asked Rain.

“The father of Ozma, the infant queen of Oz when the Wizard arrived. She was just a baby, see, and her father was to rule in her place until she grew old enough to take the throne. Shhh, and watch.”

The Ozma Regent picked up his motherless infant. He carried the bundle of swaddle to stage right.

Out from the wings hobbled a creature dressed in a cloak all of sticks, small sticks bound together with thread. Her head was carved from a rutabaga and the stain had darkened, so she looked like a creature made entirely of wood. She wore a pale red scarf pulled over her head and tied at the nape of her twiggy hair. She lurched and grinned—her teeth were made of old piano keys, four times too large for her face, and yellowed, foxed with age—but the grip with which she yanked the baby from the father was fierce. She backed up off the stage in a crude motion. A duck walking backward: impossible.

“Some local wet nurse to lend a helping—” began Brrr, not liking the menace of this twig witch. Everyone who tries to help a child is a kidnapper in the last analysis, he thought.

Pastorius turned and made as if to mop his brow in relief, but the Wizard pointed his cigar at the Ozma Regent and cocked his thumb. A little tiny noise of firecracker went off, no louder than an urchin lad’s Celebration Day bombcrack candy. The Regent fell over dead. The cords that had moved the puppet ruler were severed, so he rolled with more than just theatrical gravity. The Wizard put his cigar in his mouth and puffed genuine smoke, but it smelled like bacon. A spark caught on a curtain.

The Lion didn’t care to preserve any theater of the dramatic arts. Still, the Clock was the hidey-home of the Grimmerie, and he couldn’t stand by and watch that go up in flames. He leaped up and put out the fire by sucking his own tail for a few seconds and applying the wet mass against the nascent flame. The smell was filthy.

“Show’s over folks,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s nothing to see here. Exit to the left, through the gift shop, and please, not a word to the late afternoon crowd. Don’t spoil it for them.”

Ilianora turned back. “Did that end as unpersuasively as it began?”

“Pretty much,” said the Lion.

“What did it say about the Bird Woman?”

“That was the funny part,” said Brrr. “It didn’t seem to know she was here.”

“Like any old spouse,” said Mr. Boss, coming around from behind. “It’s unresponsive. It’s just going through the motions. I bet it showed some tired revelation from decades ago. I hate revivals. What was it about?”

“The fall of the House of Ozma,” insisted the Bird Woman. “Our sorry history. The Wizard arrived just as Pastorius was packing the infant Ozma away for safekeeping to some old hag. The Wizard did the Ozma Regent in with some sort of firearm. That part is history, the murder of the Regent, I mean. The rest is apocrypha. My guess is that the Wizard probably slaughtered the baby too. Fie, fie on the myth that she’s hidden, sleeping in some cave to return in our darkest hour. How dark does the hour have to get? Bunk. Bunk and hokum and sweet opiate for suffering fools. The Wizard was too canny to let a baby get away under the tinderwood fingertips of some rural wet nurse.”

“Did you ever meet the Wizard?” asked the dwarf. “That brigand?”

“I never had the pleasure.” The Bird Woman spat out the word as if it were an insect found swimming in her iced lemon-fresher.

“He came to Oz looking for the Grimmerie,” said the dwarf. “This book has a mighty broad reputation, to attract miscreants like that from beyond the margins of the known world.”

“And we lost our royal family in the bargain,” cawed the hermit. “That book has a lot to answer for, and so does whoever stowed it in Oz. To get it safely removed from some other paradise. Not in my backyard, is that the saying? But it got dumped here. And you’re its minder. You should be ashamed.”

Mr. Boss didn’t like this line of contempt. “But the Clock said nothing about you?” He stroked his beard with both hands. “The Clock is charmed to respond to the stimuli of the audience of the moment. It makes no sense for it to present a repeat performance. It’s never done that before.”

“It was fun,” said Rain, “but not as good as the dragon in the lake last time.”

“How long have you been out of touch?” asked the woman. “Do you know what’s going on in the Emerald City?”

“We’re clueless,” said Brrr. “Surprise us with the truth.”

“The Emperor of Oz—you know about him? No?”

“Of course. Shell Thropp. The younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. What about him?”

“He’s issued a proclamation. Your magic dragon couldn’t reveal that to you? Ha. Oh yes, the Emperor has called in to the palace all implements of magic the length and breadth of Oz. Every magic whittling knife, every charmed teapot that never runs dry. Every codex of ancient spells, every gazing ball, every enchanted pickle-fork. He has forbidden magic in Oz.”

“He can’t do that,” said Brrr, thinking about what he knew of the law—which wasn’t much.

“He can’t do that,” said Mr. Boss, whose tone implied he meant that the ambition was beyond any emperor, of Oz or other-Oz. “He might as well ask people to part with their ancestors, or the glint in their eyes. Or their skepticism. It’s not gonna happen.”

“Nonetheless, he has done it.” The Bird Woman began to look twitchy, her eyes went more hooded. “No doubt he’ll send out agents to round up those who taught in college, long ago. For debriefing. And though I spent a stint as an organist at chapel, I’m as much at risk as you are.” She began to shriek like a demented mongoose.

“Stop that,” said Ilianora. “What difference does it make if you taught magic once, or if you accompanied a choir? You’re here, among friends. We wouldn’t report you even if we were headed north into his receiving parlors. But we’re going south. We have our own reason to stay out of the way of the Emperor and his forces.”

“He’ll find you, wherever you go.”

“Oh, we can get pretty damn lost,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me.”

“He has no governance over me,” said Little Daffy. “I’m a Munchkinlander.”

“I’m not anything,” said Rain. “Yet. I’ll be a crow. Can I climb up in your tree with you? Can you teach me to fly?”

The deranged woman finally looked at the girl. “What are you flailing at me for?”

“No one gits me anything to read, and I got to practice my letters,” said Rain.

Something of the teacher she had once been made the Bird Woman glare at them all, as if they’d confessed to abusing the child with castor oil. “I have a pen and a pot of ink. I shall write you your name so you know it when you see it on a writ of arrest. Get away from this lot, child. They’re headed for a cliff edge at quite the gallop.”

“Oh, look who’s telling the future now,” scoffed the dwarf. “You going to take her off our hands?”

“Nothing doing,” said Brrr, “if you want to keep having hands, Mr. Boss.”

The Bird Woman was as good as her word. She wrote a number of words for Rain: the names of Brrr, and Ilianora; of Little Daffy and Mr. Boss; of Rain, too.

“Anyone else important in your life?”

Rain shook her head.

“What about Lady Glinda?” asked Ilianora, but Rain showed no sign of hearing.

The Bird Woman wrote, finally, Grayce Graeling.

“That was me before I was a bird,” she told them. “So if they ask you if you ever met me, you can say no.”

“Is that g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y?” said Brrr, whose spectacles were in his other weskit.

“The orthographics have it several ways,” she said. “I vary it for reasons of disguise. Now I prefer Graeling, using both vowels, because it sounds more like a bird.”

“They all sound the same,” said Rain. Grayce Graeling regarded Rain as if she were a conveniently placed spittoon, but she wrote out some extra words on a piece of paper so that Rain could practice reading. “Is this a magic spell?” the girl asked her.

“Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

“I know that,” Rain declared, sourly, grabbing the paper. “I seen some books before.”

“Even if it’s broken, I’d keep that Clock out of sight, were I you,” warned Grayce Graeling. “The Emperor doesn’t want anyone else to have any toys. You’re courting trouble.”

“Nosy crow. None of your business,” said Mr. Boss.

The Bird Woman began to scale her tree. “Mind what I say. I have a friend or two in high places.” She pointed to some birds flailing against the blue, way up there.

“Are you coming with us too?” asked Rain, who thought she’d discovered the Company’s new everyday trick, collecting lunatics. Behind Grayce Graeling, the other travelers made X-ing gestures at Rain with their hands.

8.

Why din’t she come along? She coulda taught us to fly,” groused Rain. “The book said us four,” said Brrr. “Remember? Four fingers, to the south?”

“Then what about her?” Rain pointed over her shoulder at Little Daffy.

“The book meant me too,” said Little Daffy. “I was hidden there in that spook-lady’s gesture, probably. The figure you described in the O. I was small, the thumb. You couldn’t see me in the prophecy, but I was there.”

“The blind, the lame, the halt, the criminally berserk,” said Mr. Boss. “You have to stop somewhere or you don’t have friends, you have a nation.”

The next day, meandering across the Disappointments, they kept looking back to make sure the Bird Woman wasn’t pacing after them. “Is them her friends?” Rain asked, over and over, of any local wren or raven, until the others stopped answering and the girl fell silent.

They paused for supper when the heat of the day finally began to lift a little. As the adult females organized a meal, the Lion rested his sore muscles and slept quickly, deftly, for a few minutes. Then he told them, “I emerge from my snooze remembering who the Bird Woman is. Or was.”

“Ozma herself, that’s it,” said Little Daffy. “A hundred years old but holding the line nicely. Am I right? Ya think?”

“She was the archivist in Shiz who helped me look at Madame Morrible’s papers,” said Brrr. “A gibbertyflibbet if ever I saw one, the kind of person who enters a café with such fluster and alarm one would think she’d never been out in a public space before. Frankly, I doubt she possesses enough talent at spells to have had to bother going dotty at the Emperor’s prohibition of magic.”

The dwarf lit his pipe and drew on it, releasing an odor of cherry tobacco cut with heart-of-waxroot. “Never underestimate the capacity of a magician to go dotty. Occupational hazard.”

“Maybe news has gotten out somehow. News that the Grimmerie has emerged from hiding. Makes me nervous, this impounding of sorcerers’ tools. If the Emperor has lowered a moratorium on items of magic, on the practicing of spells—if Shell has called for a surrender of instruments and such—perhaps he’s trying to coax the Grimmerie in by default.”

“Or make its presence in a barren landscape glow and shriek, so he can find it more easily,” said Mr. Boss. “I take your point. Our instruction to move south may prove to have been sound. We’ll keep going.

“But not tonight,” he said to Rain, who hopped up and was ready to run ahead. She was happy with her scrap of paper. Ilianora had shown her how to fold it into a paper missile, and Rain had spent the afternoon launching it and chasing it, finding it and trying to read it, launching it and chasing it again. “Settle down, you ragamunchkin. There’s no moon this time of month, so no night travel. We’ll take our rest in the cool and move again in the morning.”

“Read me what’s on the back,” Rain asked of Ilianora.

Brrr watched his common-trust wife unfold the chevron of paper. The Bird Woman’s handwriting was on one side, but the other side had print upon it. It was a page ripped from a book. A normal book. Without its own shifting editorial policy toward each specific audience.

“What do you know,” said Ilianora. “A scrap of an old tale. One of the fabliaux, one of the long-ago tales. They tell them at harvest festivals and bedtimes. This is one of the stories of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, and her bosom companion, Preenella.”

“One of them?”

“Oh, there are dozens. I think.” She squinted; the light from the fire wasn’t strong. “I think this is the one where they meet what’s-his-name.”

Brrr felt uncomfortable when confronted with the lore of childhood. It always made him want to sass someone, or fart like a pricklehog. He knew why: as a cub, he’d never had someone to tell him stories of Lurline, Preenella, and Skellybones Fur-Cloak, or whatever his name was. Not, Brrr supposed, that he’d missed much. While Ilianora tried to remember the full tale—the page apparently only gave some segment of the narrative—Brrr watched Rain attend, with yawns and solemn fierce eyes. She probably hasn’t had much of a childhood either, he thought. But there was still time. She was a fledgling.

By the time Ilianora was done, the fire had died down, and the dwarf and his Munchkin wife had cozied off for privacy. Rain took herself a few feet into the dark, to have a last pee. Ilianora murmured to Brrr, “What did you think of my storytelling?”

The Lion whispered, “Did you make that up?”

She nodded, shyly. “Most of it. Not the characters—not the famous ones, Lurline and Preenella and old Skellybones. But the rest.”

He looked in Rain’s direction, out of caution. “You have a knack.”

She laughed. “You weren’t listening, were you?”

“It took me back,” he said, and that was true enough.

Rain returned and settled down, pulling the hemp-wool blanket to her chin. This beastly hot summer wouldn’t last forever, said the night; perhaps the stars will turn into snowflakes and fall before dawn. It happens one night or another, eclipsing another summer night of youth. Snow on the blooms.

A few bugs beezled along, chirring their wings and sounding their sirens. An owl made a remark from miles off, but no one replied, except Rain, who murmured, “Lion?”

For some reason he loved, loved when she called him Lion. Loved it. When she avoided reminding him he was Brrr, the creature with the sad history of being known as Cowardly—Cowardly his professional name, just about—but chose to say simply: Lion. His head reared back a few inches (these days his eyes didn’t always like the distance they had to take to focus on someone speaking). “What do you want, girl?”

“Is Lurline real in the world? And those others?”

It was almost a question about the sleep-world, he thought; she’d drifted far enough along. Still, he loved her too much to lie to her. What did one say? He tried to catch Ilianora’s eye for help, but she had put on her veil and was in her own distance.

He would lower his voice in case, as he paused, she’d already slipped off to sleep. But when he said, “Well? What do you think?” she murmured something he couldn’t quite hear. He thought she might have said, “I can wait to find out.” Then again, she may have said something else.

In time, she would probably know the answer more richly than he ever would. The thought afforded him comfort, and on that he rested all night.

9.

The Kells began to loom up before them. The Lion said, “I’m not going to drag this caboose up the sides of those bluffs. Get yourself another workhorse, Mr. Boss. The book’s advice seemed to suggest we go south.”

“To get around them, we’ll have to head a little east, then,” said the dwarf. “It’ll take us into the southeast margins of Munchkinland, but we’ll meet up with the lower branch of the Yellow Brick Road eventually and then we can plunge to the south.”

“When precisely will we have gone south enough?” asked Ilianora. “Or are we now wandering to take in the views?”

“We’re putting as much distance as we can between us and the menace of the Emperor,” said the dwarf. “The EC never cared for Quadling Country except for the swamp rubies. And the taxes, when they could be collected. But given a war with Munchkinland, they’ll be letting the Quadling muckfolk lie fallow. A brief holiday from imperial oppression. We’ll be safer there. Can hide like pinworms in a sow’s bowels, like the book told us.”

Rain said, “The book didn’t suggest anything.”

They looked at her.

“It was the person in the book,” she explained. “And en’t it possible she weren’t saying ‘go south’ but only ‘get back’? Like, um, ‘get back from this book, it’s too dangerous?’ ”

“Oh, the Clock already told us who’s dangerous,” said Mr. Boss. “Keep your mouth shut. What makes you think you can read better than we can?”

They settled into a better pace, but a certain germ of doubt attended their progress.

As the weather finally cooled off, Rain was working on her letters. Little by little she figured out how to form them into words. She wrote comments by placing broken twigs on the ground. RAIN HERE. And TODAY. And WHO. And SORRY. She made words with pebbles on the beds of streams, big words that someone with an eye for stony language might see one day. WATER RISE she wrote, and WATER FALL. Rather expressing the obvious, thought Brrr, but he was as proud of her as if she’d been translating Ugabumish or inventing river charms.

The occasional farmstead gave way to the occasional hamlet, with its own chapel and grange, its antiquated shrines to Lurlina, its stables and inns and the unexpected tearoom. They passed farmers and tinkers on the rutted tracks. By stature they were Munchkins (“Munchkinoid,” suggested the dwarf, who was one to talk), but they seemed equable and not especially xenophobic. Little Daffy splinted someone’s shabby forearm, dosed someone with rickets, and pulled a tooth from the wobbly head of an old crone. Everyone nearly gagged, but the grandmammy smiled with a bloody gap the size of an orange when the job was done, and she invited them home for tooth soup. An offer they declined.

News of the troubles to the north was thin. One farmer asserted that the whole lake of Restwater had fallen to the invaders. “Any word of Lady Glinda?” asked Brrr.

The man was startled. “Haven’t heard of her since the turtles’ anniversary swim meet. Is she still alive?”

“Well, that’s what I was wondering.”

“Scratch my behind with a bear claw. I got no possible idea if it’s so or no. Why would she be dead? Other than, you know, death?”

On they trudged. The month being Yellowtime, their hours rounded golden, when the sun was out. But hours can’t dawdle—they only seem to. The leaves began to fall and the branches to show their arteries against the clouds.

Finally they reached the Yellow Brick Road. It was ill tended, here; the occasional blown tree or stream overrunning its banks made passage slow. The stretch was clearly untraveled. That night they camped in a copse of white birches whose peeling bark revealed eyes that seemed to be trying to memorize them.

“Can trees see?” asked Rain.

“Some say the trees are houses of spirits,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, stupid people say it, but even so.”

“I don’t mean tree-spirits,” said Rain. “I mean the trees. Can they see us?”

“They weep leaves upon the world every autumn,” said Little Daffy. “Proof enough they know damn well what’s going on around here.”

After Rain’s eyes had closed and her breathing softened, Brrr intoned to Ilianora, “Do you think everything is right with our Rain?”

She raised an eyebrow, meaning, In what context do you ask?

“I’ve known few human children. That Dorothy Gale just about completes the list. So I have no premise on which to worry. But doesn’t Rain seem—well—odd? Perhaps she is a girl severed from too much.”

Ilianora shut her eyes. “She’s young even for her age, that’s all. She still lives in the magical universe. She’ll outgrow it, to the tune of pain and suffering. We all do. Don’t worry so much. Look at how she touches the trees tonight, as if they had spirits she knew about and we didn’t. That’s not weird; that’s what being a child is. I was such a girl, when I was alive.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Oh, I’m alive enough now.” Her eyes opened, and they were filled with whatever passed for love in that woman. “I am alive. But I’m not that girl. I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago. I see her life like an illustrated weekly story I read long ago, and it is pictures of that that I carry in my head. Her life in Kiamo Ko. Her life with her father, long ago—that famous Fiyero Tigelaar, prince of the Arjikis. Her life with her mother, Sarima, and her father’s erstwhile lover, Elphaba Thropp. It’s a child’s story in my head, no more real than Preenella and the skeleton hermit in the everlasting cloak of pine boughs. I’m not sad; don’t shift; leave me be. We were talking about Rain.”

For her sake, he returned to the earlier subject. “I don’t fault her interest in the natural world. What I notice is her … her distance from us.”

“She’s here curled up against your haunches. To get her any closer you’d have to swallow her whole.”

“You know what I mean. She seems to float in a life next to ours, but with limited contact.”

Ilianora sighed. “We agreed to take her to safety, not to perfect her. What would you have us do? Sing rounds? Practice our sums as we march?”

“I don’t know stories. Maybe you could tell her more? I wish we could get through a little more. She loves us, perhaps, but from too great a distance.”

“She’ll have to cross the distance herself. Trust me on that, Brrr. I know about it. Either she’ll choose to visit us when there is enough of her present to visit, or day by day she’ll learn to survive without needing what you need and I need.”

“I think it’s called a knot in the psyche.”

“It’s called grief so deep that she can’t see it as such. Maybe she never will. Maybe that would be a blessing for her in the long run. If she can’t learn to love us, would that keep us from loving her? Brrr?”

Never, he thought. Never. He didn’t have to mouth the word to his wife; she knew what he meant by the way he tucked his chin over the crown of Rain’s head.

10.

A day of mixed clouds and sudden fiercenesses of light. Breezy but warm, and aromatic, both spicy-rank and spicy-balm. The road passed through open meadows interspersed with dense patches of black starsnaps and spruces, where clusters of wild pearlfruit glistened in caves of foliage. Rain paid no attention to the clacking of nonsense rhyme that Ilianora had taken up. Rain heard it but didn’t hear it.

Little Ferny Shuttlefoot

Made a mutton pasty.

Sliced it quick and gulped it quick

And perished rather hasty.

and

Reginald Mouch sat on a couch.

A ladybug bit him and he said ouch.

It smiled at him. He started to laugh

And bit that ladybug back. In half.

“What’s up with you today, all this mayhem?” said Mr. Boss to Ilianora. “Awful passel of nastiness in children’s rhymes. Toughens up the little simpletons, I guess.”

“A lot of biting too,” said the Lion, showing his teeth. He was proud that Ilianora was taking up the challenge to force-feed childhood lore to Rain.

“I remember a counting-out rhyme,” said Little Daffy, and proved it.

One Munchkinlander went out for a stroll,

Two girls from Gillikin danced with a troll.

Three little Glikkun girls chewed on their pinkies.

Four little Winkie boys showed us their winkies.

Five Ugabumish girls started their blood.

Six little Quadlings went home to eat mud.

Now who wins the prize for being most pretty?

The girl from the Emerald, Emerald City.

One Ozma, two Ozma, three Ozma.

“And on until you miss a step,” said Little Daffy.

“Which you rarely do,” said the dwarf.

“There’s a skipping game to that,” said Little Daffy. “We used to play it in Center Munch.” She found a stick of last night’s kindling saved for tonight, and with the charred end she drew squares and circles on the yellow pavement. She labeled them with numbers.

“No one learned me numbers yet,” said Rain.

“It’s easy.” The Munchkinlander skipped and huffed to the ninth circle. Whinging, Rain tried to follow, but she was stopped at the seventh circle by the explosion into the eighth of a small whirlwind of feathers and beaks. A Wren with a grandmotherly frown had landed onto the bricks in front of them. She was flustered and out of breath.

“No time for nursery games,” panted the Wren. “Unless you fly, me duckies, you’ll have enough time to skip stones in the Afterlife.”

“Sassy thing,” said the dwarf. “Are you available to stay for supper? We’ll serve roast Wren.”

“I cain’t spend precious moments in foolflummery. I been hunting a while.” She was having a hard time talking while catching her breath; her voice came out whistley. “The crazy bird lady asked me to find you. I followed the words I saw on the ground. You’re in danger, the blessed lot of you. A thumping great crew of the Emperor’s nasty-men is on your tail and no mistake. Oh, all is lost! Unless it ain’t.”

It took them a while to piece together the silly creature’s message. The soldiers were armed and mounted. They’d interviewed the Bird Woman of the Disappointments, and wrung from her the information that the company of the Clock had passed that way, all jollylike and worms for brekkie.

“I wonder what wardrobe I should plan for prison?” drawled Brrr.

“Begging your pardon, sir, you’ll not get the privilege of prison, I bet,” said the Wren. “Not to judge by them fiercish faces. Why do you loiter so? Fly, I tell you!”

“I have short legs. I never move fast,” said Little Daffy. “Maybe we should split up?”

“It was a nice marriage while it lasted,” said Mr. Boss. “I never thought it would come to this, but life is full of pleasant shocks.”

“I didn’t mean you and I split up, oaf.”

Ilianora roused to alarm earliest. “Perhaps it’s a sign we should ditch the Clock and take the book; we can move faster on our own.” The Lion flashed her a warning look; however dizzy this Wren, they oughtn’t reveal to her that they had any books. But it was too late now.

“If you got the singular volume they’re after, pity upon you,” said the Wren. “Grayce Graeling thought you might. But the longer you sit here and mull it over, the easier a job to round you up. Those horsemen on their way are all done up in silver plate, bright as icicles, armed with saw-ribbed swords and quivers of skilligant arrows.”

The dwarf had heard enough. “On we go, then. When you return to that Bird Woman, tell her we thanked her for the warning.”

“There ain’t a whole lot of her left to thank,” said the Wren. “Ozspeed, you little egglings. Wind under your wings and all that. I’ll sing out to alert what remains of the Conference of the Birds that I saw you safe, once upon a time, and I left you safe. What happens next belongs to your decisions, and to luck. Is that girl who I guesses she is?”

“Don’t go,” said Rain. Brrr and Ilianora looked at each other. Even in the face of mortal danger parents are attentive to the smallest improvements in the capacities of their children.

“I’ll sing you cover best I can,” said the Wren kindly. “If you’re looking for Liir, he’s well hid. But what a sight for sore eyes you’d provide him, on some happy day! Meanwhile, I’ve done me best, and now you do yours.”

11.

Having finally been roused to worry, they made up for lost time. “We’re history,” said Little Daffy. “Even without the Clock, we can’t move faster than soldiers on horseback. Not with a child.”

“I can run faster than you can,” said Rain.

“I know. We’re both three feet tall but I’m two feet stout.”

“We’re not ditching the Clock,” said Mr. Boss. “That’s a nonstarter.”

They were hurrying along; their chatter was nervous chatter. “Why armor, at this time of year?” asked the Lion.

Little Daffy spoke up. “Against some sort of spell, hammered metal can afford a minimal protection. Or it can at least slow down a spell’s effectiveness.”

“You’re not a witch, except in the boudoir. Are you? You witch,” huffed her husband, almost admiringly.

“It’s no secret that some professional people can manage a bit of magic in their own line of work. Sister Doctor and I used to sew sheets of hammered tin into our clothes when we worked among the Yunamata, for instance. The mineral prophylactic. Only common sense.”

“Can you do us something useful? A pair of seven-league boots for each of us, to settle us more deeply into the safer mess of Quadling jungle?”

“I’ll need two pair,” said Brrr. “Though I’d also accept a seven-league settee.”

“Bring me an ingrown toenail and I’ll trim it without my sewing scissors,” huffed Little Daffy. “That’s about the size of what I can do, people. Anyway, even the most powerful enchanter doesn’t have the power to do anything he or she might want. Only certain things. No one can point a finger at a dozen horsemen and turn them, poof, into a dozen doughnuts. No one can, as a single campaign, magically remove the Emperor from his throne, nor bring Elphaba back from the dead. Magic powers are limited to start with, and more limited by the history and aptitudes of the person attempting a spell.”

“Look,” cried Rain. Brrr turned, aware that for once she was paying more attention than the rest of them.

Across the open meadows through which they were hurrying, they saw a clot of horsemen emerge from around a stand of larches, miles back. With a zealotry of spear and sawtooth sword. If the companions could see the horsemen, they could be seen too. It could be mere moments before the kettledrumming of horses at gallop.

“We’re lost,” cried the dwarf. “Brrr, take the girl onto your back; you can cover the ground faster.”

“Anything to get rid of her, eh?” roared the Lion. He turned once, three times, five in desperate circles. The cart turned with him. He was tempted by the moral acceptability of a personal escape for himself in the service of guarding a human girl—but then he set his pace forward again. “I’m not leaving the book to the Emperor,” he growled, “nor the rest of you to the Emperor’s spears.”

“We should fly,” cried Rain, “din’t the Wren say we should fly?”

“Now isn’t the time to discuss figurative language,” ventured Little Daffy, “not when our livers are about to be diced in situ.” She pulled herself up onto the Clock, where Rain and the dwarf were already riding.

Rain gave out as much of a curse as she could, given that her fund of vocabulary remained on the spare side. She crab-walked up the side of the Clock and put her foot upon one of the long wrought-iron hands on the time face. “I seen a real dragon that could fly. This one knows about it as good as I do,” she cried. Using the leathery flaps of the wings to scurry higher, she eventually thumped the dragon on its reticulated proboscis. “Fly, you stupid worm, and do the work you was made to do!”

Maybe she’d hit a secret lever or a magic nerve still potentially alert while the rest of the Clock remained paralyzed. The great wings shook. Browned leaves and the husks of forest insects dusted out upon them. The creak, when the sallowwood ribs attained their fullest extension, was like the snap of an umbrella when it catches. The batlike wingspan reached twenty-eight or thirty feet from tip to tip.

“Pretty, en’t it,” said the dwarf. “If they didn’t see us before, they’ll see us now. We’re a whole dragon-cloud on their horizon, soon as they look to their left.”

A cry of discovery. The avalanching sound of horses’ hooves. As Brrr strained to pull even harder, he noticed that the wind had swung round. It had been blowing from the north, bringing with it the cool of Gillikin summer farmland, but now from the west the wind picked up with a sudden, drier emphasis. As if it meant business.

The wings of the dragon caught the wind and billowed, to the extent that aging leather, softened by time, can billow. The wagon moved faster as if loaned spirit by the weather. “Whoa!” cried Ilianora. She scooped herself onto a running board.

Rain perched forward like a gargoyle on a chapel parapet. She hopped up and down on the shoulders of the dragon, looking forward, not scared at all, as the Clock accelerated.

If it starts to fly, thought Brrr, I’ll be hanging from the hasps of this cart like a kitten sagging out of the mouth of its mother. He couldn’t stop to disengage from the harness, though. There was no time. The Clock hurried on.

Brrr didn’t think the dragon could outpace military steeds, but maybe the horses had been ridden hard. By the time the Lion had either to pause or else risk a coronary, the assemblage had mounted a slight slope of the Yellow Brick Road and descended the other side. The gravity hurried them all the faster, into a copse that promised, just beyond, a deeper forest. Affording a small window of time to strategize before their predators were upon them.

The dragon’s wings folded so suddenly that Rain tumbled forward to the pavement. She didn’t complain about the scratches on her dirty limbs, the little blood. She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn’t smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It’s something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.

As if Rain’s enthusiasm had called it into being, they soon came to an opportunity. A fork in Yellow Brick Road. A high section running along a ridge, a lower road, perhaps an older line that had been superseded by later engineers. Mr. Boss selected the descending road, as it looked more brambly. Sure enough, the scrub trees and snarled hedges snapped back into place after the Clock pushed through, providing the companions deeper cover, hiding evidence of the choice they’d made. At least for the time being.

That night the dwarf said to Rain, “You made the dragon fly. Could’ve tickled me in the tickle zone with a tickle wheel. A good job, that. I guess you can stay.”

“I already stayed,” said Rain.

12.

They couldn’t imagine giving their pursuers the slip so easily, but it seemed so. A good thing too: another day or two, and the forest had petered out entirely. Pale meadows rounded beside them like billowing sheets being flapped dry by two laundresses. Here and there a rill wandered past them, and the company could pause to rinse a cup or soak a sore heel. They didn’t pause for long.

The little girl, thought Brrr, seems more thrilled than frightened by the urgency. Though he offered to carry Rain on his back, she preferred to walk and she didn’t tire. She often sprang ahead as he imagined his own cub might have done, had he been sprightly enough to father a cub. He had to resist the urge to cuff her, not out of annoyance but love. She seemed not to appreciate the stress beneath which her companions lumbered.

And then he thought, Oh, sweet Ozma. She doesn’t understand it. Deep down, she doesn’t get it. She is younger than her years. Is she simple? She doesn’t know that the world is made up of accidents jackknifed into every moment, waiting to spring out. Of poison saturating one mushroom and not another. Of pox and pestilence accordion-pleated in the drawing room drapes, ready to spread when the drapes are drawn of a chilly evening. Of disaster stitched in the seam of every delight. The fire ant in the sugar bowl. The serpent in the raspberries, as the old stories had it. She doesn’t know enough to worry. She hasn’t been educated enough to fret.

The General had been teaching her how to read her letters, but she hadn’t learned how to read the world.

The old branch line of the Yellow Brick Road began to peter out. Local scavengers with building projects of their own had dug up the looser bricks in such a patchwork fashion that traveling the road became difficult. Around here, the meadowgrass to either side grew more serrated. It scratched against them, as if each frond were rimmed with salt crystals. Then, at last, the white meadows dipped into the first stand of something more like jungle than forest.

They didn’t expect to find the going easy, as the Clock was tall and the growth was dense, but nor did they expect that the swift change in climate would surprise them with a huge increase in native population. Not forty feet under the canopy of marsh-jungle they were deafened by the jaw-jaw of life. Cawing birds and scolding monkeys. Ten thousand industrious insects chewing, sawing, fighting, digging, dragging, battling, zizzing by. The vines pulled away like spun-sugar candy. The Clock drove in deeper. The noise itself was a kind of camouflage, and welcome.

The first afternoon in the badlands, Little Daffy identified a plant whose small quilted leaves, when snapped open, oozed with an unguent that repelled mosquitoes. The need was urgent enough that the adult companions ventured out to harvest a goodly supply. For her safety, though, Rain was shoveled into the body of the Clock. Protected from mosquitoes there, and also from getting lost. She could tend to wander, thoughtlessly, and a jungle was no place for that.

Rain hadn’t often been in such an enclosed space. The great gears made of carved wood rose like clock faces, while those of hammered iron lay horizontal. The wooden ones smiled, but some of their teeth were splintered or missing. The iron gears looked more treacherous, as if they would stop for no mouse or magician, but chew up history any way they liked.

The dust-silted interior of the Clock was all-business—a different world from the gilded scrollwork of the outside. The air was drier in here, less punitive. Greenish banyan light seeped in where a board had warped or a shutter failed to hang true. She felt like a new seed in the green light of undergrowth, or a fish in scummy shallows.

Almost lackadaisically a twiglet of moss, sort of brown and green both, began poking through a crack at the bottom of one of the shutters. Thinner than a pencil, more like a pipette. It was joined by another, and then a third and a fourth. The sensate tentacles stiffly carved out half circles in the dust, reaching in, probing. Rain didn’t know what they were, but they were animated and curious.

There was room for them; they could come in. But try as she might, she couldn’t budge the shutter door. She was trapped in here until her companions opened the door from the outside.

If anything happens to the Clock’s minders, she finally thought (and this was perhaps the first time Rain had ever thought conditionally), I’ll be locked up here tight as Lady Glinda in her housey house.

She couldn’t hear any noise from outside. No chittering of mob monkeys. No appreciations of one’s own remarkable plumage by the teenage birds. Instead she sensed a kind of hush, a seasoned thickness of sound.

Oh, but those little crab-fingered fingerlings really wanted to get in! Now some were trying to claw up through an old knothole whose bole had aged and didn’t sit true in the plank. Six or eight of those strands poked up. If she could only knock the bole out, they could swarm in, maybe. She hit it tentatively with her hand but she couldn’t focus her force enough to make a difference. She saw that the back side of the wagon, through the screen of meshing gears and flywheels and pendulums, was also being explored for entrance by a host of twitching finger-limbs. But here came the dwarf opening her door, and the spiderlets melted away.

“Free and clear,” he said, “we’ve done ravaging the forest for medicinal help.”

“Did you see them twiggy spider folks? Where’s they get to?”

“What’re you on about? All we saw were buzz-bugs the size of luncheon plates.” The dwarf and Little Daffy and Ilianora insisted that the Clock hadn’t been besieged by anything. The Lion, who had kept an eye on the Clock even while scavenging, told Rain she was inventing things. “It sounds nasty,” he told her. “Like giant bedbugs. You’re trying to terrorize me. It isn’t hard to do, I realize, but just stop it. You know how I despise spiders.”

“I didn’t make ’em up.” Rain described their legs or fingers as best she could, but none of the party had seen a single creature like that, let along a posse of them. Little Daffy gave Rain a tonic to calm her nerves, but the girl threw up. She didn’t want her nerves either calmed or inflamed. She wanted the spiders to come back and tell her what the spider world was like.

Near sunset a human creature came slinking through the jungley-woods. He was neither a northern soldier, tall and armored, nor a Munchkinlander outcast. He looked more like a local drunk. His coloring was dark and his clothing brief. Knitting needles pinned the lanky hair piled on his head. On his back he carried a basket filled with mushrooms of a certain heft and texture and stink.

At first he spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand, but he made an effort to remember another tongue, and tried again. He was a scavenger plying his trade, and he could offer the more potent of wild mushrooms rooms for sale. Very very good specimens very very rare. Little Daffy looked interested, as she knew the medicinal properties of his stock, but Mr. Boss cut her off and said they had no use for recreational fungi.

The native never told them his name, but he recognized at once that the company must be the prey of the Emperor’s soldiers, of whom he had heard the gossip. Rain wondered from whom: Parrots? Monkeys? Spiders?

Haltingly, Heart-of-Mushroom told them, “Your soldiers? They looking for you still. But emergency make them to divert from their task. They are not to give up too quick-like. They to return. Risky if you to go on, but more deeper riskiness if you to stay put.”

“Well, that’s a nice menu to choose from,” said Mr. Boss. “And you look as if you wouldn’t hesitate to turn us in.”

“I to sell mushrooms, not people,” he replied, taking no offense. He flicked open his loincloth and urinated on the ground between them. Was this a gesture of disdain, or a proof of nonaggression, or merely sign of a full bladder? Brrr thought, Well, if I ever get back to high society, there’s a new trick to try out in a crowd.

The man said, “Emperor’s men not welcome in Quadling Country. Heart-of-Mushroom not to sell information to bad men.” He took a mushroom from his basket, scrubbed it against the hair in his armpit, and took a bite. When he offered it around, everyone professed to be full.

The Lion said, “Would it be better for us to leave the Yellow Brick Road and cut across country?”

The Quadling shook his head. “You are safer on the road of yellow brick. The trees and vines and clinging growth only thicken as you go south. Also jungle leopard to make short meal of you.”

“I can take on a jungle leopard,” said Brrr.

The mushroom vendor snorted and took another nibble. “Also forest harpie and small vicious deadly jungle dormouse.”

“Well, then,” said Brrr. “I take your point.”

“But even if you not to believe me, you to think of your baggage,” he concluded. “Quadling Country is wet to the shin.” He looked at the dwarf and then at the Munchkinlander. “Or to the waist. You to be bogged down in mud. Easy for soldiers to catch and kill. But yellow road is built dry and high. You to move deeper from your enemies that way. Faster away from the north.”

“But they’ll follow the Yellow Brick Road toward Qhoyre, surely,” said Brrr. “They’ll move faster than we can. I’m surprised they haven’t caught up with us yet. What was the emergency that diverted them?”

“They stumble upon rogue dragon,” said Heart-of-Mushroom. “Not ticky-toy thing like yours. Real one. They stop to try to capture it but cannot to manage it. It fly away. So now they to take up hunt for you again.”

“They saw a dragon close up, and I en’t seen nothing but spiders?” Rain was incensed.

“But if we stay on this road—they’ll be following us,” persisted Brrr.

“No road goes only one way. When engineers to build the only dry access into Quadling homeland, they also build only dry access out of Quadling homeland. So when EC soldiers betray Quadling hosts and kill and steal and burn their bridges? EC soldiers walking away on Yellow Brick Road make easy target for Quadling dart and Quadling arrow.” He spat out a mushroom bug and cursed in Qua’ati. “Quadlings not to kissy kiss EC soldiers any more.”

“What’s to stop your countrymen from shooting at us?” said the Lion. “I’m from Gillikin originally, and my wife is from the Vinkus. Little Daffy is a Munchkinlander, and Mr. Boss—”

“I’m undeclared,” said Mr. Boss.

“We’re a walking gallery of the enemies of the Quadlings. And you’d send us down Slaughter Alley? Hardly sociable,” finished Brrr.

“Not so,” said the Quadling. “You have your rafiqi, and Quadlings to give you safe passage.” He bowed just a little to Rain. “She is Quadling, no?”

Brrr looked at the girl. He hadn’t thought of her as positioned anywhere in Oz, ethnically speaking. But Brrr could see what the mushroom peddler meant. Rain’s face was somewhat heart shaped, a little flatter than those of her companions. Her lips fuller. You couldn’t say that her skin was as ruddy as Heart-of-Mushroom’s, but now, in this light, maybe…

Brrr caught the eye of Mr. Boss. “So the Clock told you to beware of a little girl. Did it. I think the Clock was just jealous. We got ourselves an ambassador.”

The itinerant vendor spoke to Rain in Qua’ati. She didn’t notice he was addressing her.

“Not to mind,” he told them. “My people to see what I can see. She is to promise you safe passage on the Road.” He nibbled another portion of his wares and smiled balefully. “Qhoyre is big city where you can to lose yourself. Such a small band of soldiers will not dare to follow you into Qhoyre. You to be safe there.”

“Safe from soldiers,” said Mister Boss. “How about invisible spiders?”

They tried to explain what Rain claimed to have seen. “Maybe the Emperor has trained bloodhound spiders through the magic he denies everyone else?” asked Ilianora.

“Invisible spiders,” said the Lion. “Did I mention that even visible spiders cause me angina of the psyche?”

They never learned what Heart-of-Mushroom thought about invisible spiders, for at their very mention he paled. In a moment he’d melted away back into the forest, for all practical purposes having gone invisible himself.

“Another one who didn’t come along,” said Rain. “We isn’t too friendified, is we.”

13.

The Quadling’s terror at spiders that only Rain had seen made the adults more squeamish than ever. Rain, however, experienced a sort of gingery buckling sensation inside. People couldn’t see the spiders and they couldn’t see inside of her—they hadn’t been able to figure out that she’d been telling the truth.

An apprenhension of isolation—that sudden realization of the privacy of one’s most crucial experiences—usually happens first when a child is much younger than Rain was now. The sensation is often alarming. Alone as a goose in a gale, as the saying has it. Rain felt anything but alarmed, though. The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

They heard her singing that night, a rhyme of her own devising.

Spidery spiders in the wood

No one knows you very good.

No one can and no one should.

14.

The deeper they penetrated into Quadling homelands, the more signs they saw of Quadling activity. Rushes laid out on the margins of the Yellow Brick Road to dry in the sun. Donkey dung and human feces. A broken harness for a water buffalo. Meanwhile, no alarums of horse hooves sounded behind them. The Yellow Brick Road south of Gillikin and Munchkinland might be Slaughter Alley, but not for a band of irregulars accompanied by a child with evident Quadling blood.

They made sure to keep Rain front and center, on the Clock’s most prominent seat. No one much believed in the spidery figments, but neither did they believe in taking chances with Quadling poison-tipped arrows.

“I’d like to know what our intention is, when we arrive in Qhoyre,” Ilianora said as they made an evening meal of poached garmot and swamp tomato. They sat right in the middle of the road, their cooking fire banked up upon the brick. “We’re about to have obeyed the advice mimed out of the Grimmerie. We’ll have stuck together and gotten south. But what next? And why? We’re going to take a flat there? Start a plantantion to harvest mildew? Set up a circus? Learn Qua’ati?”

“Tut tut, my little Minxy-Mouth of the Marshgrass.” The dwarf fingered out a fishbone. Marriage had eased his nerves somewhat. “No one knows where home is until it’s too late to escape it. We’ll know what to do when we know what to do.”

“Qhoyre can’t be anyone’s home,” argued Ilianora. “Otherwise so many Quadlings wouldn’t have migrated into the northern cities.”

“What is the world after Qhoyre?” asked Rain, who seldom listened to their discussions.

Mr. Boss shrugged. “The Road peters out, as I understand it, but Quadling Country squelches on.”

“Oh, even Quadling Country ends, eventually,” said Little Daffy. “At least according to the lessons in map reading we got in petty nursery. The province meets up with the ring of desert that surrounds all of Oz.”

“But what’s after the desert?” asked Rain.

“More desert,” said the Munchkinlander. “Oz is it, sweetheart.”

“To hear Ozians speak, other places don’t exist,” said Mr. Boss. “There’s no place to the north, like Quox, for instance, except as a supply of fine brandy and the source of a certain plummy accent. Ev, to the south over the sands, doesn’t really exist—it wouldn’t dare. But oh, we do like our Ev tobacco if a shipment gets through.”

Rain scowled. She didn’t understand irony. The dwarf, more respectful of Rain now that she was their de facto rafiqi, took pity and explained. “Oz isn’t surrounded by sands. It’s enislanded in its own self-importance.”

“Hey, Oz is bigger than Ev or Quox or Fliaan,” said Brrr in mock effrontery. “Those dinky sinkholes are hickabilly city-states founded by desert tribespeople.”

“Who cares what’s outside of Oz?” agreed the dwarf. “No one goes there. Oz loves itself enough not to care about provincial outposts.”

“But after the deserts?” said Rain.

“Ah, the innocent stupidity of kids,” said the dwarf. “You might as well ask what is behind the stars, for all we’ll ever know. The sands aren’t deadly, that’s just the public relations put out by edge communities. Not that I’m proposing we keep dropping south to become nomads in bed linens. The deserts aren’t hospitable. It’s where dragons come from, for one thing.”

“She wants to know where we’re headed, that’s all,” said Ilianora. “I’m with her on this.”

“Headed to tomorrow. Equally impossible to tell what’s on the other side of that, but we’ll find out when we get there,” said the dwarf. “Everyone, stop your beefing. You’re giving me cramps.”

The tomorrows began to blur. In a climate that seemed to know nothing but one season of growth, maturity, decay, all happening simultaneously, perpetually, even time seemed to lose its coherence. The company grew quieter but their unhappinesses didn’t subside. The cost of wandering without a named destination was proving steep.

Eventually the Yellow Brick Road petered out—brick by brick, almost—but the tramped track remained wide enough to accommodate the Clock of the Time Dragon. The signs of human enterprise grew more numerous. The companions began to spot Quadlings in trees, in flatboats, even on the mud-rutted road. The natives gave the company of the Clock a wide berth but a respectful one. Brrr observed that Quadlings, the butt of ethnic smears all over Oz, seemed in their own homeland to be more capable of courtesy to strangers than Munchkinlanders or Gillikinese.

Ilianora put her veil back upon her brow despite the steamy everlastingness of jungle summer.

There was no good way to avoid Qhoyre. The provincial capital had colonized all the dry land making up the isthmus-among-the-reeds upon which it squatted. And squatted was the word. Brrr, who had lived in the Emerald City and in Shiz, knew capital cities to be places of pomp and self-approval. Qhoyre looked mostly like a collection of hangars for the drying of rice. Indeed, Brrr reasoned, that was probably how the city began.

At ground level, the stuccoed administration buildings showcased an extravagance of softstone carvings both profane and devotional. Above them, ornament was abandoned for louvers, weathered out of plumb, and perforated screens of raffia or stone. Shabby, genteel. The hulks of Rice House and Ruby House and the Bureau of Tariffs and Marsh Law—titles carved not in Qua’ati but in Ozish even Rain could now read—loomed beside soapbone shops that wobbled on stilts above household pork-pen and pissery. But government house and grocery alike featured spavinned roofbeams. To swale away monsoon-burst, Brrr later figured out. Sensible in that climate, though the first impression was of a dignified old city in its dotage.

The Quadlings swarmed about the companions without evident panic. “They never heard of the Clock,” said Mr. Boss under his breath. “How bizarre. They don’t want a glimpse of the future from us. We could retire here, no?”

“No,” said Ilianora, spooked by the crowds.

To Brrr’s eye the Quadlings seemed louche and convivial. They’d survived all attempts by unionist ministers to convert them, preferring their own obscure dalliance with fetishes, radishes, and the odd augury by kittlestones. Stalls on the edge of market squares might be shrines or chapels, or then again they might be the tipping place for one’s household refuse. Little Daffy, with her Munchkinlander’s lust for a good scrub, was appalled. “It’s not even the nakedness behind those loincloths,” she said. “It’s that you can see they haven’t even washed well back there.” With aggressive cleanliness she took to pumicing her own face on the hour.

When the company paused for the night in a blameless nook, natives emerged from alleys and mews-ways to bring rattan trays of steaming red rice and fresh fruit and stinking vegetables. They set their offerings before Rain as if she were their local girl made good, and skittered away. “Monkey people,” said Little Daffy.

Rain showed no particular interest in this population to whom, Brrr conceded, she did bear some resemblance. She tried to make friends with the myriad hairless white dogs who cowered everywhere, under open staircases of cedar and rope. Rain put out rice and then fruit, and they would venture forth to sniff at the offering, but scurry back. She tried with some of the brown vegetables, the ones like voluted woody asparagus, and they also turned up their snouts at that. Then she arranged some of the asparagus into a few words—FOR YOU. EAT. So they did.

“How does she do that?” asked the dwarf of Brrr. “Have you any idea?”

“I’m the muscle in this outfit, you’re the brains,” replied the Lion. “As long as they don’t come and eat us, I don’t care how she does it. Are they dogs?”

“Or rats. Or weasels.”

The torpor of the climate induced a lethargy that the companions didn’t mind indulging; they’d been moving about for some time now. Easier to have your meals delivered than to press on with no assurance of decent foraging ahead. “We’ll know when it’s time to go,” said Mr. Boss, from the hammock he had strung between the post of a bat house and a nearby wrinkleroot tree. “Climb up here and get cozy with me, wife.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon and that’s a see-through hammock,” protested Little Daffy.

“They don’t mind.” And it was true; the Quadlings acted on their impulses when so inclined, without shame or secrecy. Interestingly, Rain seemed not to notice, either. The innocence of that child, thought Brrr, was troubling when it wasn’t refreshing.

The dwarf and Little Daffy didn’t budge from the vicinity where they’d stodged the Clock. “We have to guard the book,” they reminded Ilianora languidly. “You’re feeling antsy about our prospects, you go find someone to talk to.”

Brrr’s wife held out as long as she could, but finally she wrapped her shawl so tightly around herself that only her eyes showed, and she began to explore the town on her own. She was looking for someone who could translate Qua’ati for them. She found an old woman in a tobacco shop whose feet had been chewed off by an alligator but who could hobble about on sticks. Ilianora persuaded her to come back to the Clock. The nearly deaf old woman agreed to answer what of their questions she could in exchange for a salve that Little Daffy swore would regenerate her feet—but not for a year, which would give them plenty of time to get far away from her. “Anyway, she’s not going to run after us protesting, is she,” murmured Little Daffy to the others, sotto voce.

Her name, as near as they could make it out, was Chalotin. A bitter orange rind of a woman passing herself off as a seer. Brrr, who not long ago had spent some intense hours with old Yackle, could tell the difference between chalk and chocolate. Chalotin was rather thin chalk.

Still, for an old broad she pivoted about on impressively flexible haunches. She ran pinkish fingertips over her perfect ancient teeth as she told them what she knew.

Yes, she said, though the Emperor’s forces got no love no more, no more, they still made a preemptory show of authority every now and then. The only way they ever arrived was the High Parade, the route the company of the Clock had taken—what was left of the Yellow Brick Road. Quadlings let them pass as long as they marched in dress uniform rather than field garb. They never came in the rainy season, though. Or never yet.

“So they could tromp in any day,” confirmed Brrr in a soft roar, that she could hear him.

Yes, her shrugging expression implied. Wouldn’t put it past ’em.

“Where do they set up?”

“One of the government houses.” Warming to her subject, she told them that the EC had once kept a firmer grip on Quadling Country, dating all the way back to the days of the Wizard, when the extension of the Yellow Brick Road first allowed swamp engineers to come in and cull the mud flats of their rubies.

“Emeralds from the northeast, rubies from the south,” said Mr. Boss. “No wonder the Emerald City got so powerful, filching from all over. I suppose there are diamonds in hidden caves in the Vinkus?” He looked at Ilianora hopefully. “We could all maybe get filthy stinking rich back at your place?”

Chalotin didn’t care about rubies except to say that in the act of diving for them, the swamp miners from the EC had upset the crops of vegetable pearls harvested out near Ovvels. It had taken three decades for the agrarian economy to begin to recover, she said, and she predicted it would take three decades more before the natives of Quadling Country could rise to the level of poverty they’d once enjoyed.

“We are no longer friendly to our overlords,” she finished, spitting, but smiling nicely too. “We are polite but we don’t let them to stay. Not after the burning of the bridge at Bengda. That massacre. Not after attack by flying dragons.”

“Dragons,” said Rain, looking up. “Have you seen a flying dragon?”

Chalotin made a gesture to ward off the notion. “When the EC to set flying dragons upon us, oh, years ago, a full five miles of swamp burn south of Ovvels. That much Chalotin know for herself, back when Chalotin could both to walk and to swim. But no dragons since then, no no.”

“So why aren’t your patriotic fellow citizens tossing us out on our arses?” asked Mr. Boss.

She replied that the presence of such a young rafiqi required of the Quadlings basic hospitality and even assistance. She indicated Rain when she spoke, but Rain had lost interest and was crawling around in the dirt, pretending to be one of those white hairless dogs.

“How do we get out of here then?” said Ilianora. “We don’t want to be cornered in Qhoyre if the Emperor is about to send a brigade in after us.”

Chalotin explained that the Yellow Brick Road only went as far south as here because beyond Qhoyre, arcing first to the southwest and then toward the north, a fairly dry and passable berm already existed. Whether it was a natural feature of the land or the remains of ancient earthworks, no one knew, but if the companions left Qhoyre by the road near the Mango Altar they’d be safe and dry.

“Though if the rains to start, to be careful not to step off the high road,” said Chalotin. “Chalotin not to believe that your dragony cart is also boat.”

“Where will that take us, though? An endless circle around Quadling Country?” asked Ilianora. “I’m done with circling!”

Chalotin had had enough. She insisted that Little Daffy supply the salve that would regenerate her missing feet, and when the Munchkinlander came out with a small pot of something rather like cold cream, Chalotin took a portion on her finger and swallowed it. She grimaced but pronounced it useful, if not as a medicinal unguent then as a dip for fennel.

From off her shoulder she pulled a belted sack. Rain wriggled closer to look at it. A lake shell of some sort, larger than anything Rain had ever seen on the shores of Restwater. “What’s that, with all its points?” asked Rain, indicating the reticulated spine of it.

“Deep magic, you buy?” asked Chalotin. “Cheapy cheap for you.”

“What kind of magic?” asked the girl.

“You can’t buy magic,” protested the dwarf, and then, in a softer voice, added, “Of course, you can’t buy feet, either.”

“The Emperor is calling in all magic tools and torques,” said Brrr, thinking he might wheedle the shell out of the old biddy without having to fling coin at her. Nice to supply Rain with her first toy. “That contingent arrives from the EC and finds you with something powerful, you’ll need more than new feet to get away safely.”

“How magic could it be, anyway, if you can’t summon up your own feet?” said Little Daffy, playing along.

“It makes noise,” Chalotin told them, and showed them how to blow it like a horn. “The tip has to be broken first. But Chalotin say: this shell not to sing its voice. This shell to listen to. Conch to talk to you. Conch to tell you what it know.”

“No magic. No buy,” said Mr. Boss. “No good. No deal.”

“Well, we have no coin of the traditional sort,” said Brrr, hoping to force a negotiation of some sort.

“What does the shell say?” asked Rain, nearly breathless with hope. But the old woman scurried backward and shook her head. Without another word she headed down the lane, galumphing along as well as she could on her stumps.

“Wait,” called Mr. Boss. “One more thing.”

Chalotin turned but didn’t stop moving away.

“What are these white critters? Are they puppies?”

“They to be albinoid otters,” she replied. “Smart to avoid them. They to overrun Qhoyre for long long time. When the rice terraces burn, the otters they to lose their protective coloring. Before that no one realize they color from their diet. Now they safer among pale stone buildings than in green-purple swamp. So they to overrun Qhoyre and to mess in the silk farms and to eat the worms. Bad fall of letter-sticks. Bad tumble of dominoes.”

“What color are they usually?”

“Rice otters? Green of course. To swim in paddies and marsh.” Chalotin crab-walked away then, and Brrr joined the others in discussing how quickly they might get out of Qhoyre, while they still had their own feet attached. Teasing and tempting the nearer rice otters, Rain wandered about, disappearing for a time and appearing again, a child with her own shadowy concerns among the green shadows of a busy neighborhood.

“But what are you doing with that?” asked Little Daffy at dinner, when Rain showed up with the shell. She checked her purse to make sure Rain hadn’t stolen any farthings. “Did you steal any of my cash?”

She shook her head. “Stole the shell,” she replied.

Little Daffy and Ilianora lit into Rain, but good. Had she learned nothing about honor, about moral competence? What was she thinking?

“You told her you could grow her some new feet,” said Rain. The equivalency of the crimes was debatable, but the girl effectively shut up her elders anyway.

The company left the capital of Quadling Country the next day, doing a favor for their hosts without meaning to. In the early morning, before everyone was awake, Rain had tried to blow a sound from the conch. She couldn’t hear what noise it might have made, but some several hundred white otters congregated around the Clock. The pack followed the companions past the Mango Altar and out along the high dusty road into deepening jungle. The stink was horrific, but at least the pack lagged about a half mile behind them. It was like being dogged by a murky white afghan whose segments came apart and rejoined at will. Neither Rain nor the adults were sure whether to be pleased or alarmed, but they could hear the sound of humans cheering from the squat cityscape behind them.

“Is that why the book sent us south?” muttered Ilianora. “So we could liberate a foreign capital of its pests?”

“We could look at the book agin,” said Rain, slyly enough. “If you en’t sure it was telling us to go south, let’s see. Mebbe now it’ll say go north, or go to the desert.”

But the Grimmerie wouldn’t open for them this time. Perhaps, thought Brrr, it had heard Rain’s suggestion that Yackle was warning them to get away from it. It was sulking. Anyway, keeping its own counsel, much as any unread book does.

Maybe we would be better off without it?

Then Brrr thought, maybe Chalotin set Rain up to steal that shell. If all magic totems are forbidden, Chalotin herself might be safer to be shy of a powerful item.

Oooh, but what a narcotic, paranoia.

15.

Rain had never taken into account creatures en masse. To her, the companions of the Clock retained a stubborn and incomprehensible separateness. But the otters conjoined like individual autumn leaves into a single pile.

She remembered the original lonely fish against her finger, the mouse in the field that was her oldest memory—maybe these were instances of aberration. Single creatures in their single lives.

One rice otter, maybe a little bit smaller than its mates, had a slightly rosier cast. (She couldn’t tell genders even when they were fucking; they seemed entirely too limber to be limited to a single gender. She found herself thinking of the rosier one as it.) Since she could identify it in the horde, she cared for it more than the others.

Miles beyond Qhoyre, miles beyond the ruins of Bengda on Waterslip, the rains began. A throng of pilgrims huddling under palmetto leaves, on their way back to Qhoyre from some ceremony in the swamplands, said in kitchen Ozish that the high city of Ovvels was only a day or two away. The companions would find succor there for the rest of the rainy season if they pressed on, said the pilgrims. Though the pilgrims might have softened their promise of a welcome if they’d known about the white river of otters following like a scourge behind.

High city? In this lowland swamp? What could that mean?

They found out. The track on which the companions had traipsed from Qhoyre slowly raised itself on gravel-banked shoulders. The ramp proved so slight an incline that Brrr hardly felt the strain, even though the wheels sucked into the mud. On either side of the highway—a literal highway—grew a town much smaller than Qhoyre, and more real, in a way. Ancient suppletrees, knitting their elbows together, supported small huts from which walkways were slung. A village of treehouses. Every roof was palmettoed, every window netted with gauzlin. Even in the drenching, some people were fishing from their front doors with strings let down into the swamp.

“Bird people!” cried Rain, though in many ways they proved to be more like fish people.

The main track on which the companions had arrived leveled out on top of a thick wall built of granite blocks. Twenty, twenty-four feet high, and just as wide. “Quadling know-how isn’t up to this job. The flatboat to haul such heavy stone has never been built. This wall was here long before the town,” said Mr. Boss.

“But the stones must have been cut by masons, and laid by engineers, time out of mind,” said the Lion. “If the Quadlings didn’t build this, some earlier population did.” Rain ran her hand over marks left in the surface by ancient adzes and chisels.

The characteristic hospitality of Quadlings asserted itself. Some kind of mayoral commission dragged itself together to negotiate lodging for the itinerants. The side of the wall that slanted northeast had been fitted with ledges and steps leading to cells and stalls. Maybe dug out by later generations. The company could take their choice of rooms. The floors might be muddy, but there were shelves on which the companions could dryly sleep.

It was a simple enough matter to drag the Clock into a barnlike warehouse in which it just fit, to cover the thing with banyan leaves until the rain moved over. The natives were fascinated by it, but Mr. Boss said, “Go away. No looky look.”

Rain was beginning to call the rosy-chinned otter Tay, after a Qua’ati word te, meaning “friend.” Rain and Tay slept in a cell with the Lion and Ilianora. Mr. Boss and Little Daffy took a chamber beyond that. Rain would rather have been in a tree.

She instructed the other otters to sleep outside. They didn’t mind. She couldn’t tell Brrr how she had done this. She didn’t know. The otters weren’t talking Animals.

On the outer wall of the defensive rampart, if that’s what it was, the Quadlings had painted illustrations of huge glowing fish. Gold and blue, ingesting each other, smiling at each other in passing, eliminating one another cloacally. “Is these fish as big as life?” Rain asked Ilianora. “Any fish so big en’t fitting in any rice paddy.”

“These fish look like giant ancestors dating back to the dawn of the gods. It’s art. Pay it no mind. It’s all fabrications and lies. I have no patience for lies of any kind, especially the lies of art.”

“What about the Clock?” asked Rain. “And what it says, or won’t say?”

Ilianora wouldn’t answer.

Rain loved the great staring ovoids. She was living in a wall of fish that were swimming toward her from the past. She hadn’t thought about the past much—not even her own past—but now her memory of the fish in the ice pocket accrued some meaning. It had wanted to get back to its gods or its grandparents. It had had someplace to swim to.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to be a fish. And have someplace to swim to.

16.

It took a while for the companions to realize that the monsoons weren’t necessarily annual events. A monsoon began when it began, and it lasted as long as it wanted. Until this one was over there was no hope to move on. Endless, endless rain. The company of the Clock of the Time Dragon spent almost a year in Ovvels waiting for a spell clear enough for the high road to dry.

A whole year in which no battalion of pursuers from the Emerald City swam up to the long island of the high road.

A year in which no foot-free seer from Qhoyre managed to stump up the ramp to demand her money back or to reclaim her purloined shell.

A year in which no news of the battle between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland seeped into the backwashes of soggy Quadling Country.

It was, therefore, a year of quiet. Mercy to some—including Rain—and hard luck on others. She learned to watch her companions more closely, even if she kept her distance.

Mr. Boss declared he’d had decades learning how to kick back when the opportunity presented itself. He could busy himself, thank you very much. Out of balsa bark he whittled figurines handicapped by oversize genitalia. To Rain they seemed more dead than mud, and when he wasn’t looking she stole them and sent them flying through the air, to swim a while and eventually drown.

She liked stealing things, though most of what she stole she threw away. To rescue it, to liberate it. The glossy pink shell, with its spiraled belt of spikes and its silky silvered mouth, was an exception. She kept waiting for it to talk to her.

When Mr. Boss protested that his little people were disappearing, Little Daffy replied, “I think they’re disgusting, but don’t look at me.” The Munchkinlander whiled away the hours trying to teach such advanced medicine as she could to the local fish doctors, though with limited resources her efforts were lacking in smack. The Quadlings took to the Munchkinlander as if she were a kind of toy grandmother. Rain heard Brrr mutter that Little Daffy was having too much fun and wouldn’t want to move on when and if the sun ever returned.

“You think I’m just a rural squash,” the Munchkinlander snapped at the Lion. “You think I’m drunk on exotica. You think I’m going native. Maybe you’ve heard that when I helped my old colleague and nemesis, Sister Doctor, tend to that ailing Scrow potentate, Princess Nastoya, I fell in love with the Scrow. Well, it’s true. I could’ve stayed there. But I had my calling.”

“I’m your calling now, honeybag,” said Mr. Boss. “Don’t you forget it.”

“You kidnapped me,” she told him. “But bygones be gone, as they say.”

Little Daffy gave up running a rural clinic and took to playing a kind of strip canasta with a bordello of Quadling maidens possessed both of loose clothing and morals. When Mr. Boss tried to peer in the shutters at them, she called him a perv and slammed them shut. Then the giggles! The dwarf sulked for a week, fouler than usual.

“Get away from that window or you’ll go blind,” he growled at Rain, who was just passing, minding her own business.

She didn’t answer him, just slid on by. Watching. Adults were more broken than animals, she thought. She missed the birds of the sky, the big birds: in the jungle, only sodden little feather-fluffs hopped from branch to dripping branch under the jungle canopy.

Every now and then she went to look at the Clock, to see if it had wakened up. She was the only one to visit it as far as she knew, but the thing stayed frozen, dead as one of the dwarf’s ugly carvings.

For Brrr’s part, the months of inaction made him consider that the one thing that had characterized his life since infancy was his constant motion. No matter how much he’d enjoyed life among the great and the good in Shiz or the Emerald City, he wasn’t a house Lion at heart. He was a roving beast. Maybe his lifelong tendency to take umbrage at minor slights was a symptom of his chronic eagerness to get going somewhere else. He only ever needed a good reason.

He wouldn’t leave Ilianora, though. He could tell this waiting was hard on her too. Waiting for what? The book—they had kept trying to open it—offered no further advice. Meanwhile, Ilianora’s veil, which for so long had stayed down, was raised again, in more ways than one. She lived in a new silence, and slept with her back to him. They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

So Brrr was cross, too. Everyone was more or less cross except for Rain.

The Quadling children tried to make friends with Rain, but she felt unsure of their intentions. Anyway, they didn’t like the otters, who bit children when provoked. Though Tay never so much as nibbled at Rain. Except a little. And it hardly hurt.

Alone most of the day, Rain was turning into a little monkey on the vines and trestle-passes of the supplewood trees. Tay scurried along behind her like a kind of white trailing sock. Brrr watched her with cautious eyes. She was growing, their Rain. Her limbs liked this damp climate. Ilianora had had to sacrifice another veil to make a longer tunic for the girl, lest she flash her private parts by accident and invite a disaster.

Just in time, before a couple of marriages broke irreparably, the sun returned. Steamy yellow and obscure white. It hurt their eyes. With it arrived new generations of biting bug who were impervious to the few remaining sachets of unguent the companions had harvested more than a year earlier. It would be time to get moving before long. “What’re we waiting for?” asked Ilianora.

“For a sign of some sort,” said Mr. Boss.

“You’re not over that yet? The Clock is broken. There are no signs.” Her tone was aggrieved in a cosmic way. The dwarf rolled his eyes.

The painted fish looked now as if they were swimming in light instead of streaked green air. Early one morning Rain caught sight of an etiolated matron touching up one of the fishes with some blue paint ground up in a gourd. She was dabbing with her fingers and singing to herself. This old flamingo had never seen a big fish like that, but still she had the temerity to instruct it to swim for another year?

Strange. Another lie, thought Rain.

“We don’t have a prophecy from the Time Dragon, we get no reading from the Grimmerie,” said Mr. Boss one day. “The sun is our alarmus. We’re off and away with the piskies. Let’s unshroud the Clock and oil the axles and it’s hey, hey, for the open road. The book don’t like it, let it give us some better advice.” He got no argument, except from Little Daffy, who had to be encouraged to swaddle her breasts again. “I’m going to miss the old damp hole in the wall,” she said, sweeping it out with that Munchkinlander frenzy for housecleaning. “If we ever retire, darling Mr. Boss, perhaps we can come back here for our sunset years?”

He didn’t answer. He was cheery for once, swarming as high up the Clock as he could, though he was no match for Rain.

All of Ovvels gathered to see them drag the Clock out of its tomb. However feeble the Qua’ati that the companions had managed to learn in a year, it served well enough for good-byes. A berdache of some sort, a smeary-eyed young man with pinkened lips, made a speech hearkening back to some time when another troupe of northerners had come through and lived with them for a while. Before his day, but it was local lore. “They to try convince us to believe in something they say is not there,” he said, “the god who is unnamed.”

“Missionaries,” said Little Daffy, who had put her own past behind her with dizzying alacrity. But “Couldn’t you just puke?” had to do for social comment, and after that she kept her mouth shut.

“We did not to kill them,” said the berdache. “Minister come to educate and steal our souls for his god who won’t to name itself. Rude man. Man of moldy thought. But he has girl with him we do not forget.” He smiled at Rain as if she were that girl, and he wasn’t discussing something that happened a hundred thousand years ago in folk memory but this very week. “He has little green girl with him. His oldest girl. She to sing for him, when we to harvest vegetable pearl. She sing the pearl off the vine. I am not there but she is like you.” He nodded to Rain.

The others bowed to Rain. She put her shell up to her head and turned away, as if she preferred its windy noise over their attention.

Brrr said, “How can you know our Rain is like that girl if none of you were alive back then?”

The man shrugged. He indicated to Ilianora that he would accept the gift of her scarf. She didn’t hand it over. Sighing, he answered Brrr as best he could anyway. “Some Quadlings to have sense to see the present, to know the present,” he finished. “We to see your young rafiqi girl and we to know she is the one they talk about.”

“I to see myself into a loony bin in about one minute,” said Mr. Boss. “Let’s go.”

Brrr wondered what they saw when they looked at Rain, and why they waved at her so affectionately when for a year she hadn’t given them the time of day. Of any day.

“Aren’t you going to show us the Clock?” asked the berdache. “Before you go?”

“It doesn’t show truth to pagans,” said Mr. Boss. “Why would you believe it when you can’t believe in a god you can’t see?”

“We housed you and fed you through months of rains. You won’t deny us a look at the future. Quadlings, when they’re able, can sometimes see the present, but this Clock tells the truth of all things.”

“I never said that,” swore the dwarf, stamping.

“You never did,” agreed the berdache, batting his eyelids. “But I can see the present, and I know that is what you think.”

The companions were in a bind. They couldn’t leave without paying the Quadlings of Qhoyre something for a year’s lodging and board. Cursing up a head of steam, the dwarf made valiant effort to rev the old girl up. Put on a little demonstration. All things being equal and buyer beware, and so on.

“Come on,” said Rain on her haunches, bouncing up and down like the monkeys she played with. “Come on!”

The Clock obeyed nobody’s deepest wishes. Mr. Boss couldn’t get a shutter to open, a crank to turn, a single puppet to appear and blow a kiss at the assembled crowd. “It’s done for,” he declared. His furrowed expression showed him to be sincere. The Quadlings had no choice but to offer him their condolences on the death of the future.

“It died just like that god who slid off the world and lost his name,” said the berdache. “Never to mind. Is pretty dragon anyway.”

“The Unnamed God isn’t a person,” said Little Daffy, out of some final spasm of feeling for her religious past.

“And fate isn’t limited to a tiktok dragon’s sense of theatrics,” added the Lion.

“Nor the spell of any magic book,” offered Ilianora.

The Quadlings began to bow and wave the companions off. They didn’t want philosophics. They’d wanted a bite at the future, and were willing to live without it the way their ancestors had done. The berdache walked them a little way out of town, on the northern ramp off the elevated road. “Perhaps the world is to heal,” he said. “The vegetable pearls healthier this spring than I ever to see them. Perhaps the rice otters to learn their old way and go green as before, now there are pearls to help harvest.”

“Too much mystery for an old fraying hairdo like mine,” muttered the dwarf, disconsolate. “So long, chumpo.”

“Lord Chumpo,” said the berdache, rushing to give out embraces. Ilianora turned her head and beckoned Rain to walk with her. But Rain was getting too big to order around. Her head was higher than Ilianora’s elbow now—almost as high as her breast.

17.

Their spirits lifted as they left Ovvels behind. Such was the power of the sun that even under the jungle canopy a year’s worth of monsoon drippage burned off in a matter of days. The companions didn’t find the passage tough, only slow, as they had to clear undergrowth every quarter mile.

Brrr had hoped, once they began to move again, that Ilianora’s mood would improve, but she continued to seem vexed. It took him a few days of watching her watch the girl before he was able to frame his thought.

The girl was growing up. Their Rain. That’s what was agitating Ilianora.

Growing up, and growing beyond them.

Rain had not been theirs, not for a moment. Brrr could still read with a parental eye how the world could present itself to a young girl like Rain. And how Rain might respond, this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.

“She’s all right,” said Brrr, splashing through the lily pads, the floating beehives. And Rain was all right. But Ilianora—he had to face it—was not.

That night, he thought another, more common thought. Maybe it’s that time of Ilianora’s life. Maybe it hurts Ilianora to admit that Rain isn’t her daughter. That there will be no daughter now. Not even if Ilianora could unstitch the seam and find a human male as another husband. The vegetable pearls were not growing for Ilianora.

18.

They’d been told they’d leave the mucklands behind soon enough, and the road would climb some sandy slopes, and eventually debouche into the Sleeve of Ghastille. This broad and fertile valley led northeast, marking the border between the Vinkus and Quadling Country. The berdache of Ovvels had insisted that the companions would find few inhabitants in the valley, but they must beware nonetheless.

“If it’s so fertile, why is it uninhabited?” Mr. Boss had demanded. The answers had been incoherent. The natural landscape between the Great Kells to the west and the Quadling Kells to the east proved low and dry and well drained. Surely it seemed an ideal route for the Yellow Brick Road? Back in the day when it was being laid out? And why had any human travelers to the Thousand Year Grasslands to the west chosen to brave the inhospitable track over Kumbricia’s Pass rather than this lower and more welcoming approach?

It didn’t take long for the companions to see why. The pass was a set of gentle crescents around foothills that abutted the horizon from east and west. From slope to slope, at this time of year anyway, an ocean of carmine red flowers took their breath away. Poppies.

“I know about poppies,” said Mr. Boss. “Grim business, even for me, who likes a tidy profit if I can turn one.”

“I know about poppies,” agreed his wife. “All kinds of useful applications that you can rarely take advantage of because of side effects. We were forbidden to use them in the surgery when we could even get them, which was seldom.”

Brrr felt their effect at once. The odor was of scorched cinnamon, savagely beguiling. In the freshening light and the wind that swept west from the swamplands and the grasslands, the air pushed the pollen heavily ahead of them. It inflected the day no less than fog or rain or brutal heat might have done. The travelers struggled through the endless carpet. Were anyone to try to follow them after all this time, too bad: the tracks of the cart were swallowed up as the blossoms closed ranks.

Rain hunted daily for high-flying birds. Remembering the Wren? But even eagles and rocs seemed to give this valley a pass.

At night Brrr slept fitfully, with dreams of things he would rather not remember. Appetites long suppressed, for one—and healthily so, he remonstrated himself upon awakening. Chief among them an appetite for shame.

They were all affected. They pushed to get through the sweep of bloody blossom at as swift a clip as they could manage. But the Sleeve ran vaguely uphill, and the labor of hauling the Clock seemed harder than before. Or had Brrr grown soft again during nearly a full year of downpour?

The new anxiety came to a head on the third afternoon of wading through thigh-high blossoms. Rain had been caught stealing some sugar brittle from the Clock’s supplies, and the dwarf went overboard railing at her. Brrr lunged to the girl’s defense. “You’re so noble? Tricking people for decades about fate with this diabolical dragon routine? Give her a break. When’s she ever learned about right and wrong?”

“Not from you,” replied the dwarf. “You great big shameless Cowardly Lion.”

“Nor from your wife,” replied Brrr, “tricking that old seer in Qhoyre into thinking her feet would grow back.”

“You’re hardly one to talk about conscience,” began the Munchkinlander.

“Stop,” said Ilianora in a low, deadened sort of voice. They did, but only because she hadn’t spoken for a while. “Prophecy is dead, and conscience is dead too.”

They kept walking, making whiskery sounds of passage in the verdure.

She continued, dry as a sphinx in the Sour Sands. “That berdache believed that any Unnamed God must be a dead god. But it’s conscience that’s dead. Maybe the dragon really w-was … was the conscience of Oz. But it’s dead. Oz is broken in parts—Loyal Oz divided from Munchkinland, and who knows what polders and provinces might splinter off next? There isn’t any full Oz anymore, and no conscience, either. That’s why the dragon died. Just about the time those other real dragons threatened to attack Munchkinland. We’re broke. We’re broke and we can’t be fixed.”

“Nonsense,” said Brrr, trying to hurry a little to her side, but he was so tired, and the heavy cart of dead conscience dragged at him.

“And what’s left then?” The Lion’s wife tried to stifle a gasp of remorse. “We’re all schemers and liars, thieves and scoundrels. To our own private good cause. There’s no primary conscience to call us up.”

It was Little Daffy who replied—she who had toed the line of unionism the most faithfully all those years in the mauntery.

“If there’s no good conscience to trust,” she declared, “no Lurline, no Ozma, no Unnamed God, no standard of goodness, then we have to manage for ourselves. Maybe there’s no central girl in some hall in the Emerald City, all bronzed and verdigrised, all windswept hair and upthrust naked breast, lots of bright honor carved in her blind and focused eyes. No conscience like that, no reliable regula of goodness. So it’s up to us, each of us a part. A patchwork conscience. If we all make our own mistakes, from Rain stealing stuff to the rest of us lying to ourselves and each other—well, we can all make amends, too. No one of us the final arbiter, but each of us capable of adding our little bit. We’re the patchwork conscience of Oz, us lot. As long as the Unnamed God refuses to take off the mask and come for a visit. As long as the dragon has croaked on us.”

No one seconded the notion. No one objected. They staggered on. Wilting, aggrieved, conscience-stricken, dulled.

19.

They read the solar compass, the play of shadows on staggered sets of slope. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty hours to cross the Sleeve of Ghastille, they guessed. Still, every day they could manage no more than a few miles before exhaustion set in. Brrr was aware that sunlight was good for the eradication of mange, but he needed to rest under the cart. In the shadows. Outside, in the bright light, the red of poppies burned against his retinas through his closed eyelids. A siege of coral light, a siege of fire.

Even Little Daffy, with her familiarity with amelioratives and strikems, purges and preventicks, seemed dazed with the effect. “Consolidated airborne precipitate. How do these blossoms manage?” she moaned, and rolled down on the ground next to her husband, exposing her bosom to the glow. The liberty of Quadling mores had rooted in her in a big way.

Ilianora, however, became ever more shrouded in her veils. Only her eyes showed.

The Sleeve was ahead of them and behind them, a river of mocking full-lipped smiles lapping a third of the way up the foothills on either side of them. Had anyone been able to look overhead, they would have thought the sky was red, too, probably; red, or by that trick of compensation that human eyes manage briefly, perhaps green.

The companions had decided to try traveling under the red stars at night, when the effect of the vegetation was less oppressive. During the day they napped or lay down with handkerchiefs over their eyes, stoned. Ilianora, perhaps because she kept her veils over her nose and mouth, became the de facto lookout, and even she found her attention hard to marshal. “You should take some water,” she would murmur, to no one in particular, and then get some for herself when no one replied. On one such occasion she rounded the corner of the Clock and walked into a loosened shutter.

The main doors of the Clock had swung open. Rain was lying on the stage, a hand draped over the edge as if she were dabbling her fingers in a brook.

Then Rain sat up, and her eyes were wide and staring, but not at Ilianora. The child’s expression was equal parts horror and fascination. Rain seemed in a spell of delusion, beginning to reach out to invisible creatures on the ground, to pet something, to lift them up, then to recoil her fingertips as if they’d been bitten or burned.

The poppies near the wagon stirred, roiled, as of a wind along the ground, though there was no sign of any creature among their hairy twists of stem.

Ilianora’s voice issued, more steam than volume, the way that one attempts to scream in a dream but can’t get louder.

She tried to stagger forward herself, to help the girl in whatever new disaster this was. Her own limbs seemed locked, frozen, her mind slowed. Her carapaced form was hindered by the winding sheets of her veils.

Her utterance sounded hollow, and Brrr only snored on. The girl began to thrash. “Oh,” said Ilianora. It was the sound someone makes finding a common word in a surprising context. “Oh, hmmm.”

Before Rain could fall from the stage, though, or suffer a mental collapse right before Ilianora’s eyes, the poppies around the Clock of the Time Dragon whipped into frenzy. This time Ilianora could see the cause. As if swimming underneath the toxic tide, a school of rice otters approached through the greeny algae of poppy stem and leaves. The warm light silting through red petals turned their short fur greenish. Something happened that only Ilianora among the companions witnessed, unless Rain was watching too, behind her blanked-out eyes. A battle between the otters and an invisible foe. Ilianora couldn’t see the event, only its effects, as otters thrashed something silly, or the field of poppies thrashed itself. A blood that was not the stain of poppy dye ran from the mouths of otters.

Something was massacred in fifteen minutes, while Brrr hummed in his sleep and Little Daffy waved an inebriated fly from the canyon of her cleavage. Ilianora trembled as if in a gale. The petals ripped and shredded and blew about them. Eventually Rain began to soften, her paralysis to collapse, and she fell weeping on the stage floor.

But Ilianora couldn’t make herself move to comfort the girl. It was too horrible. She was frozen too.

By the time night fell, Ilianora was huddled against Brrr as he pulled himself up to a crouch. Little Daffy made some gloppy soup with a garnish of poppy pollen sprinkled on top. Mr. Boss was energized by the fact that the doors of the Clock had swung open, though once he refastened them they went right back into their old paralysis. Still, the fact they could still open seemed to be a useful kick in the butt. As he set to doing something of a tune-up, he whistled as he worked. Tunelessly.

“What happened?” asked Ilianora when the meal was done, and Brrr was cleaning the bowls with his tongue.

“Something was following us,” said Rain. “I don’t know what it was.”

“What did it look like? Soldiers?” asked Little Daffy.

“No. More like, um, spiders,” said Rain. “But more up-and-down than spread out. Their legs not so wide and curved like umbrella ribs, but more straight. Like what Murthy used to call a side table.”

Brrr said, “You had a dream of being attacked by a matched set of occasional tables? That reminds me of my setting up my first digs in Ampleton Quarters, back in the Shiz days. Green in judgment and all that. A case of nerves about being unpracticed at both sex and society was nothing compared to fretting that the wall hangings and the upholstery didn’t see eye to eye.” He knew he sounded berserk. He was trying to make light of Rain’s experience, whatever it had been.

“They wasn’t tables. They was beasties of some sort.”

“I suppose you took their names down, Rain, and all became quite cozy,” said Little Daffy. “You and your little party animals.”

“What did they want?” asked Mr. Boss. “You? Or the book?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t call ’em to me, but they came. They been following for a while I guess but I forgot to tell you.”

“Call me superior, but frankly I don’t think it’s likely you can see things we can’t,” said Little Daffy. “What were we saying earlier about conscience? In my day a girl who told tales would get a right smart spanking on her fanny.”

“You wasn’t looking. You was sunning.”

Ilianora roused herself. “Rain’s not pulling a fast one. I saw it happen. I saw something happen. Something came at the Clock, though whether it was for her or for the Grimmerie I don’t know.”

“They was the things that came to scrabble into the Clock the day I got locked in for safety,” said Rain. “The spiderish things from the jungle’s edge.”

The group fell silent. Brrr twitched his tail around exploratively, to see if it landed on something. No doubt he would scream like a schoolgirl if he touched … it. “Are they still here?” As baritone a voice as he could manage.

“They is all gone.” Rain began to cry a little. “I don’t know if they was good or bad or just hungry for something, but they is all gone. The rice otters got ’em.”

It was only then that they realized the rice otters had disappeared too. Hurried back to their swamp at last. All except for the one Rain had called Tay. It curled up on her lap and made itself at home, like a kitten. But its albino period was done. It looked like a mossy kitten entirely incapable of ripping a predator to shreds.

Brrr was consoled at the sight. He turned his attention to Ilianora, who continued to seem shattered at having witnessed an attack by an invisible foe. Anyone would be spooked by such a thing, he knew, but Ilianora—who shielded herself from notice by her veils—had been the one unlucky witness. She had withstood the opiate of the blossoms better than any of them. Why?

Well, she was sealed up, for one thing—actually and symbolically. That must be it. But having been protected by the suture, she was still vulnerable. The variety of despair brought on by panic and dread. She’d seen too much torture in her childhood. How well would she survive a genuine attack, one that had to be seen, that couldn’t be denied or filed away as delusion or fancy?

20.

The clouds skirted the bright moon in a well-behaved manner, so the companions pressed on through the Sleeve of Ghastille all night. They were eager to escape whatever the lure of poppies called up. Brrr, if he had put a name to it, would have said impatience with Ilianora.

Ilianora would have said panic, though panic had been dogging her footsteps since long before they entered the valley of the poppies.

Little Daffy regretted leaving such abundance of raw poppy material behind, but she went along grudgingly, making allowances for future needs.

Mr. Boss wanted his Clock to start working again.

Hugging Tay like a rag doll, Rain fell more silent than usual. She stayed closer to Brrr than to the others. He was the biggest even if the most squeamish.

Another day or two, another week, it was hard to tell, but things were improving. Maybe they were all just drying out after the wet year. Eventually other growth began to appear among the poppies—a stand of ferns here by the streamside, a clot of sunflowers. Then a few trees, the sort that can find a scrabblehold in sandy soil. The sound of birds up in the greeny shadows. Real birds at their private lessons, then flying high and free against outrageous blue.

The sandy road began to lead along a series of ridges. Brrr had to step carefully lest the ground begin to slide. Though not quite dunes, the slopes were certainly unstable.

Worrying about the apparent conspiracy of the world against the girl, whether Rain knew it or not, Ilianora was a mess of nerves. So Brrr wasn’t surprised when she lost it big-time one afternoon nearing sunset. Mr. Boss was just loosening the Lion from his tethers as the Clock perched on a sedge-grass knoll. Little Daffy was snipping some wild runner beans into a salad. Suddenly Tay set up a careering lollop as if bit by a stag-head beetle. The rice otter went plunging over the edge of the rise. Ilianora followed it with her eyes—more spiders?—to see Rain walking through grass forty, fifty feet down the steepening slope, toward a fell tiger of some sort who was emerging from the shadows of a copse of birches and terrikins.

“Brrr!” cried Ilianora, for she couldn’t sprint that fast, and the Lion could. Brrr was slow to twig, though. “Brrr! She has no fear!”

The Lion slewed about. He let out a roar more iconic than anything else, and he powered his haunches to cover the ground between Rain and the interloper. The dwarf fell back as leathern straps snapped. Probably half-rotted from a year in Quadling Country. The cart inched as if to see for itself, and a curvet of sandhill gave under the rim of the forward wheel. The Clock went plunging down the slope after the Lion; after Rain.

Into this bowl of poppies, the last gasp of their color and prominence, Brrr pounded to the rescue, endangering the Clock. It was a false alarm—or false enough. The stalking creature was a Tiger with Spice Leopard markings. He knew her by the affectionate disregard that rose in her eyes as she turned at the sound of his approach; he knew her for his first love, Muhlama H’aekeem.

21.

You always were rash. I wasn’t going to snack on her,” said Muhlama. She neither flinched nor flushed at seeing him again. As if he hadn’t been chased from her tribe by her chieftain father bent on vengeance—oh, all those years ago, twenty was it? As if Brrr had merely stepped out for an evening constitutional.

She was a matron Ivory Tiger now. Not given over to fat as some might have done, but sleek still. Markings about her cheeks had gone a silver that verged on purple. “I never took you for a pack Lion,” she added as Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, like stout grasshoppers, came hopping down the hill toward the Clock, which lay on its side, the dragon snout collapsed into its own poppy cushions, laid to rest.

“Get back, Rain,” growled Brrr. “Go to Ilianora. She’s having a fit up there.”

“I just wanted to…” Rain put out her hand, palm down, indicating something to Muhlama, but Brrr had no patience. He roared at Rain and she backed up, not so much horrified as, perhaps, embarrassed for him.

“I never thought I’d see you do that,” said Muhlama as the girl retreated. “Roar, I mean. Didn’t quite seem in your makeup. She’s only a human cub, of course. But that was relatively convincing. Have you gone on the stage?”

He couldn’t chitchat. “Were you going to harm her?”

“Why would I want to do that? Of course not. I’ve been looking for her. For you all. The aerial reconnaissance team finally located you after what, a year? I’ve been sent here to swim in the Field of Lost Dreams and drag you out by the scruff of your necks, if I needed to. You’ve been a long time making your way.”

“It’s quite a passage, this Sleeve of Ghastille.”

“You’re almost through. Two miles on there’s real grass. Let’s decamp there.”

“I have to see to the Clock.”

“Not much left of that, it looks like.”

They both soft-footed it over to the heap of split canvas and detritus. One wheel was spinning slowly like a roulette. Mr. Boss was pale, and Little Daffy was trying to fling her arms around him, but he was having none of it. “We’re over, we’re history,” he was saying. “Conscience dead, history buried.”

Rain sat down in the shadow of the wreck and draped one of the leather wings over her head, a tent of sorts. Ilianora stared at Brrr with fierce eyes as if something were all his fault. Well, he was used to that, but not in a while, and not from her.

“How bad is it?” he asked the dwarf. Mr. Boss was blubbering. So the Lion looked for himself.

The wheels on the right side had buckled so that the left side, the most prominent of the stage areas, was exposed to view like a corpse. The Clock’s last revelation? Brrr felt prurient to peer at it, but peer he did. They all did.

The shutters were flung wide. The proscenium had split at the top and its segments overlapped like misaligned front teeth. The red velvet curtain, fallen from its rings, draped off the front of the stage, a lolling tongue.

In the mouth of the Clock, its main stage, lay some composite material, papier-mâché perhaps, made up to look like stones. On one side of the stage they resembled boulders having avalanched down a cliffside, but on the other side they seemed more carved, as if to imitate the rusticated facades of great stone buildings.

The place didn’t look much like the Emerald City, nor like Shiz. Nothing like Qhoyre.

No, this looked like a foreign city-state. Maybe someplace in Ix or Fliaan, if those places even existed. Brrr had his doubts.

Or an imagined place. As if such places existed, either.

Bits and pieces of puppets lay strewn about, spilled into an effectively ropey sort of red, almost like poppy juice. No figure resembled anyone even marginally familiar. No stripe-stockinged witch crushed under a farmhouse. No corpse of baby Ozma bundled upside down into an open sewer. No costume, even, that anyone could identify—no Messiars or Menaciers from the military of Loyal Oz’s Home Guard, no cunning Munchkinlander folk getup for delighting tourists, no glamour gowns from palace balls. In their rictus, the puppets looked only like carved bits of wood and painted plasticine. The strings that held them in place lay snapped atop them. Dead, they convinced nothing about Death, except via the corollary that Life, perhaps, had always been made from scrap materials, and always would be.

“It’s an earthquake,” said Mr. Boss at last. He turned to Brrr. “You did this to it. You killed it.”

“She called out,” said the Lion. His use of the pronoun for his wife was the cruelest remark he had ever made, but he couldn’t help himself. “The girl comes before the Clock. As you should have known this last year, and some.”

“I told you we shouldn’t take her on!” The dwarf staggered about in a circle, beating his forehead with his fists. “The Clock saw the danger, and warned me against her!”

“I don’t cause earthquakes,” said Rain.

“Looks a heap of damaged goods to me,” said Muhlama.

Little Daffy found the Grimmerie a few feet away, lying where it had been pitched. Hidden in the shadow of the dragon’s ripped wing, as if the last act of the failing tiktokery had been to protect the magic book.

The Clock might be sprung at last, its mechanism despoiled after a century of charm, but the book remained closed to prying fingers.

“Let’s right the old lady, anyway, and see if we can cobble together a repair,” said Brrr. He wept a little, as if the dragon had been a companion too, and dissected one of its wings to remove a sallowwood humerus. With his little knife the dwarf fashioned enough of a substitute axle to manage.

They dragged the dead Clock through the last few miles of the Sleeve of Ghastille. In a shadowy meadow where the brook widened out, they paused to breathe the air less thick with poppy dust.

Brrr noticed it was autumn again. More than a year had passed since they had taken Rain from Lady Glinda. The twisted bows of pretzel puzzle trees were raging with hornets doing their anxious final dance. The leaves were falling, red and gold. They fell into the open mouth of the theater. When the sun began to set over the Great Kells and its light struck the stage, the earthquake event glowed as if it had been further plagued by a conflagration.

After a pick-me-up supper had been prepared and mostly ignored, and they were sitting around a small fire of their own, the company of the Clock without, it seemed, the Clock to cohere them, Brrr asked of Muhlama, “On whose agency have you been trying to rope us in? You weren’t a team player when last we met, as I recall.”

“Still not,” she said, yawning. “I’ve turned my back on my tribe, as you did on yours, Sir Brrr. But I never took up with humans. Yes, I’ve heard all about your later … accomplishments.” She had lost none of her power of condescension, he saw, almost affectionately. She continued. “I have no money on the matter of governments either way. I owe no loyalty to the grandees of the Emerald City or to the pipsqueaks of Munchkinland.” Little Daffy glowered at her in defense of her people, but Muhlama was impervious to a Munchkin glower.

“Someone sent you,” prompted Brrr.

“Someone asked me to come,” she agreed. “Someone said you might be in danger. I thought it might be amusing to watch. I had owed you something, after all.”

She had. Brrr’s dalliance with her had given her the alibi to leave the line of succession of the Spice Tiger camp. To escape the destiny of leadership her father, Uyodor H’aekeem, had required of her. Brrr saw that much more clearly now, since he too hadn’t been above using others as pawns for his own ambitions. “I was happy to help,” he said. “Way back then.”

“I made you happy to help,” she admitted. She flicked her tail in a way that reminded him of her seduction, the sordor of it, the ardor of it. But her tail was a commentary on Animal relations, not a come-on. “You freed me from my own prison. These years later, the moment arrived for me to try to do the same for you.” She looked sideways at Ilianora, who appeared as if carved out of ivory, staring at the flames, and added drily, “If that’s your wife, perhaps I didn’t come soon enough.”

“Tell us what you know,” he said. “Has the invasion by Loyal Oz been successful? Has Haugaard’s Keep fallen? Is the Emperor still blathering on his throne? It’s been a year since we’ve lost touch with the news.”

She limned it in quickly. “The Munchkinlanders defended their positions for as long as they could, but eventually they had to abandon the lake. All but the eastern fort. For a while it’s looked as if Loyal Oz will keep Restwater, requiring a retrocession of that edge of Munchkinland. Perhaps, folks said, to avoid further incursions, the Munchkinland Eminence would settle the matter, accepting the loss of the lake in exchange for political integrity of the rest of Munchkinland.”

“The EC only ever wanted water,” said the Lion.

“Not true. They also need the grain supplied by the breadbasket of Oz, in central Munchkinland,” Muhlama argued. “They need enough of a détente that commerce can begin again. There’s been a certain amount of unrest and deprivation in the Emerald City while Oz is engaged in this civil war.”

“So what’s the problem?” asked Brrr. “They sue for peace.”

“The Emperor,” said Muhlama, and yawned. “Shell Thropp. You remember him? I see you do. The younger brother of those sister witches, Elphaba and Nessarose. He has declared himself divine. He has promoted himself god.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” said Mr. Boss, his first comment in hours.

“The Munchkinlanders had enough of godliness after their years under the yoke of Nessarose,” replied the Ivory Tiger. “They’re commonsense when it comes to commerce, but they get their backs up when it comes to dogma. They won’t negotiate with a god. Who could? So just as it seemed a peace might be brokered, the Emperor had to go do a pious makeover and provoke the humble Munchkinlanders, who never ever shall be slaves. It’s not money. It’s some dim little ember of self-respect that won’t die out in the stout breasts of Munchkinlanders.”

“I’m not that stout,” said Little Daffy. “I’d say pleasingly plump.”

“The plumper, the pleasinglier,” said Mr. Boss, laying his head thereupon.

“Who is leading this Munchkinlander resistance to a brokered settlement?” asked Brrr. “When Nessarose was killed by that house of Dorothy…”

“I remember that,” said Little Daffy. “I was there that day.”

Brrr continued. “… the first response upon liberation was to revoke the rights of the Eminences of Munchkinland and centralize control. No? I remember someone named Hipp, or Nipp, who named himself Prime Minister.”

“I didn’t read history, ancient or modern,” said Muhlama. “I’m a creature of the hills and shadows. As you ever knew. But the Eminenceship is not entirely dead. Titles never die, they just go somnolent. Some crone or crony of the old Wizard of Oz has emerged to claim authority, if I have it right. Someone named Mombey. A kind of witch.”

“Hasn’t the Emperor called in all magic utensils, hasn’t he forebade the casting of spells? I thought the time of witches was done,” said Brrr.

“It’s never done,” said the Tigress. “Besides, you’re forgetting the Emperor doesn’t have the rights to legislate about magic in Munchkinland. That’s part of what they’re fighting against.”

“I’m going to bed,” said Ilianora, and she crept into the shadows of the useless Clock, pulling the ratty leather wing over her head like a blanket. “Come, Rain, settle with me. There’s no need to hear gossip about government. It’ll only give you gas.”

“It’s my belief that Munchkinlanders will launch a counterinvasion,” said Muhlama. “Won’t that be fun? Overrunning the EC with pudgy little ferret people? They have a dynamic military commander who has managed to hold on to Haugaard’s Keep, after all. A steeltrap farmgirl now goes by the name of General Jinjuria. She calls herself the Foill of Munchkinland.”

“A stage name for a commanding officer,” said the Lion. “It’s all stage stuff now, isn’t it?”

“Get me my wrap, I don’t need the second act,” she replied.

The dwarf and the Munchkinlander retired on the other side of the Clock. Rain and Tay crept in among the earthquake ruins, and no one stopped them. Muhlama and Brrr stayed awake, side by side, looking not at each other but at the horizon to the east, where creatures with names like Mombey and Jinjuria were providing some background static to the story of the Cats’ rendezvous.

22.

Under stars at first, then under a waterstain of vaporous cloud, high up. They didn’t talk anymore, not till morning.

Ilianora gave the Tiger ample distance, and offered her no coffee.

“I’m no threat to you, Brrr. I’m joining no mission,” said Muhlama. “I’m bringing you out to your counterparts where they wait, and then going my own way. Ever was a rogue Tigress. But I confess to a little curiosity about that Matter of Dorothy. When I heard you were involved, I admit I was surprised. You didn’t seem to have it in you to get so deep into a mess like that.”

“Yes, well, life, it does broaden you. It was just after I left you.”

“I left you,” she reminded him. “But let’s not monkey with nuance. Tell me about that creature. The things that are said about her! A holy fool, say some. A saint. A termagant. A pawn of someone’s larger campaign. She brought down the Wicked Witch of the West, for all her clumsiness—maybe through her clumsiness, for all I know. You were there. What happened?”

“I was nearby,” said the Lion. “I wasn’t present, no matter what the papers said. No one was there but Dorothy and the Witch. No one saw what happened. Liir and I were locked in the scullery, and I had managed to break through the door…”

“My hero,” she purred, meanly.

“But I didn’t get up to the parapet on time. The Witch was gone, and Dorothy descended, blasted and incoherent about what had happened. She was never coherent about very much, come to think of it.”

“Spoken like someone trying to distance himself from the inconvenience of a prior sympathy. But I never understood about the shoes. Magic shoes. Shoes, of all things? Why not magic braces? Or underwear?”

“I didn’t write the script. Don’t ask me.”

“The Witch’s reputation is ripe for a comeback,” said Muhlama. “At least in Munchkinland it is. That peculiar creature, Elphaba Thropp, had positioned herself in opposition to the stony faith that ran in her family. Her minister father, her totalitarian sister—and now her brother is god himself! Never underestimate the mood swings of the crowd. Dorothy’s gone from being thought a heroine to being tagged as an assassin, and Elphaba from Wicked Witch to martyred champion. At least in some circles.”

“The pendulum will swing.”

“Ah, but is there such a thing as a pendulum anymore?” They looked at the collapsed Clock, which Mr. Boss continued to try to clean and organize as if by dint of polish and spit he could persuade it to revive. But it was the preparing of a corpse, no more than that. Everyone could see it.

“You haven’t said to whom we’re headed,” said Brrr. “Is it Lady Glinda? Is she released from house arrest?”

“I don’t follow the columns,” said Muhlama. “Anyway, I’m not talking.” She glanced over at Tay, the rice otter, who lay unrepentantly greenly in Rain’s arms. “You never know who is a squealer.”

Brrr had to agree. “So enough is enough,” said Muhlama. “I’ve done my work, I need to get on.”

“But get on where?” he asked her, as they righted the husk of the Clock. The broken dragon head cantilevered forward, eyeless and insensate.

“Where are you going? And alone? Or is there a companion?”

“You’re so coy.”

“Stay with me, now,” said Ilianora to Rain. “Keep close.” But the girl paid her no more attention than she ever had.

“I’m causing trouble,” said Muhlama to Brrr, tossing her head toward Ilianora. “Pity.”

“Only so much I can do,” replied the Lion, equivocating.

That night Brrr asked of the companions, “Are we going our separate ways?” Muhlama, having said she would deliver them to their party in the morning, had taken herself off for a hike, to give the companions privacy to confer. “I mean, there can be no company of the Clock of the Time Dragon anymore, can there, if there is no Clock?”

“It’s resting. It’s called Time Out,” said the dwarf, back to his old belligerence.

“The Lion has a point. Your primary charge was security for the Grimmerie, wasn’t it?” said Little Daffy to her husband. “To hear you tell it, the Clock was invented as a wheeled cabinet for safekeeping. Distraction to the masses on the one hand, a magic vault on the other. No one would fault us if we ditched the scabby thing now. We sure could move ahead faster without it. The book is still intact.”

“You don’t need me to carry a book,” continued Brrr. “I was a helpful donkey in the shafts of the cart, sure, but I’m not a house pet.”

“Brrr, you do what you like,” said Ilianora to her husband. “It makes no difference to me. You are no house pet. Go with Muhlama, or not.”

“I’m not going with her,” said Brrr, though he didn’t know if it was go with in the adolescent sense, or go with as in the future intentional. And he also didn’t know if he was telling the truth. Ilianora’s suffering charged the conversation with horseradish. If he couldn’t know what his wife felt or meant anymore, how could he understand his own changing aspirations?

“I’ll see the girl to the next juncture,” decided Ilianora, “and I’ll carry the book that far too. I can’t care for her anymore.” Because caring for Rain would hurt—that much was evident. Too much of the young wounded Nor was still, after all this time, alive in the elegant veiled adult. Alive and dead at once. Like the dragon, whose wings flopped in the grass as if with spirit, but nothing like the spirit it had once, magically, possessed.

Midmorning came, a series of brief squalls. Cool, without monsoon steam—glorious. Acorns thrown from trees; the last of some wild plums. Native woodland, nothing magnificent—but at least northern. On the lip of a promontory ahead of them, Muhlama pointed out the arches of some ancient helm that had probably guarded the environs of Restwater from any predation ascending through the Sleeve of Ghastille. “That’s where you’re headed,” the Ivory Tiger told them. “There’s something of a roof left still. You can shelter from the rain there, should it come down stronger, and meet your maties. Then my job is done, and I’m off.”

Brrr didn’t comment. He just pulled the hobbledy-hoy cart, maybe for the last time. Up a road packed with ancient grey cobbles, a road fringed with drying nettles and slipweed knot. He thought of the toddler’s game, building a church with the fingers of two hands. The guardhouse raised its ribs like the fingers of one of those hands, cupped against the air. Built like that? Or had the fingers of an opposite hand collapsed down the slope years earlier? Yes, he could see ancient slates cladding a shed dependence. He could smell a kitchen fire, a roasting haunch of venison, or maybe loin chops of mountain grite. For a moment when the wind died down he heard the sound of a stringed instrument.

The approach to the ruined keep rose to a point slightly higher than the fingertips of the broken arches. Then the path descended in a gentle S-shaped curve. Muhlama led the way, pacing elegantly, her whiskers twitching to sniff out trouble. But the stiffness in her shoulders relaxed. No danger here apparently except the danger that new circumstance presents to old allegiance. “I’ve done what I said,” she called. “Oley oley in-free. Wherever you are, come out, come out. They’re here.”

Brrr was released from his shafts, slipped from buckles and leathers, by the time a low wooden door opened and their hosts emerged. He didn’t recognize the Quadling woman with a domingon in her hands, though he guessed her to be the one called Candle. He knew Liir, though. Coming behind her, his palms on her shoulders. Liir at thirty or thirty-two, maybe. Fuller in the shoulders, higher in the brow, a great mane of dark hair even a Lion could admire. A habit of youthful quiet and temerity aged into something almost like courage. But what would the Lion know about courage?

“The book,” announced Muhlama, “and the girl who comes with it, as a kind of bonus.”

The humans looked at one another. Curiosity and wariness shaded into something not yet like recognition, not yet like wonder. A mathematically perfect pivot, equal amounts of hope on one side and, on the other, alarm that the hope might be unfounded, that this revelation might yet be a mocking lie.

Brrr let them have their human moment. He kissed his good-bye to Muhlama—a final one, a temporary one? He didn’t know. He realized that Ilianora would soon be relieved of responsibility for Rain. Perhaps her distress would lift, once Rain’s parents took in the fact of their daughter. He wouldn’t abandon Ilianora in any pain, whether he could help that pain or not. If, in time, he couldn’t help it—if, in time, he realized that his not being able to help was making it worse—well, he would reconsider.

But not yet. For now, he’d stay by her side, through the next round, whatever it might be. Together he and Ilianora, the dwarf and the Munchkinlander, had delivered Rain to her home, or such home as she might hope to have. Rain was safe, or safe enough.

Now Brrr was left to shield the other bruised girl, the stillborn one huddled inside the veiled woman, for as long as he could. If he could. There wasn’t now, nor would there ever be, any shortage of girl children whose safety he would need to worry about, either in or out of Oz.

The Chancel of the Ladyfish

1.

The outlaws had been told by a Swift that Muhlama would be heading a delegation of exiles, but not who would be among them.

Liir gripped his wife by the hand. Hold back this instant longer, Candle. We’ve been waiting for all these years. Don’t scatter her into the clouds, like the little wren she resembles.

She was here. She had come back. (She’d been brought back. She’d been brought in.) There would be time enough to study her. Time had begun again.

He could feel his wife strain to break free, to surround the child with scary, pent-up love. His forearm would be bulging as he staked Candle immobile. Don’t rush the girl.

Our girl.

He tried to advise Candle by the theatrical turn of his own head. Look at Brrr instead. That old Cowardly Lion, as he’d come to be known. There he stands, dropped to all fours like an animal, naked but for a kind of painter’s blue serge smock with a bow at the back. And rolling his boulderlike head from the girl to her parents, back and forth. The Lion could look at her. He’d earned the privilege. Liir and Candle would have to wait another moment. Now that there were extra moments.

Brrr had gone silvery about the whiskers. He must be nearing forty, surely? So was it age, exhaustion, or nerves that made the Lion’s left rear leg quiver? His mane was full and nicely aerated though even his jowls were bejowled. He’d developed not only a paunch but also a bit of an overbite. However, both tokens of age disappeared when the Lion reared to his hind legs. As if he’d suddenly remembered he was a Namory of Royal Oz. He looked ready to curtsey, but he extended his front paw to Liir.

The Cowardly Lion said, “A lifetime or two ago, somebody you may remember as Dorothy Gale once browbeat me to look after you. I paid little attention. Later, a ripe old fiend named Yackle asked me to protect this child if I could. I tolerated her request without imagining I could oblige her. Yet here I am—surprise, surprise. Presenting my consort, Ilianora, and my young friend who goes by the name of Rain. I’ve unwittingly obeyed both bossy females and done you two services on the same day.” Dropping the sarcasm, he said more huskily, “Would that I could have been of greater service, Liir son of Elphaba.”

Liir hooted. “Don’t take that tone to me. It sounds like you’ve wandered out of some pantomime about Great Moments of Chivalric Oz. ‘Liir son of Elphaba’? I call myself Liir Ko now.” Nonetheless, he fell into the Lion’s embrace. The musk of the Lion’s mane was rank; it smelled like young foxes and incontinent humans. “You old pussy,” he murmured. “I never liked you much, and damn it, now I’ll be in your debt the rest of my life.”

“A rare thing, for me to have any advantage,” replied Brrr. “I’m sure I’ll squander it.” The dwarf nodded in agreement, character assassination at work.

Liir pulled back to say, “This is Candle Osqa’ami.” He beckoned his wife forward. She nodded from the waist; but her eyes never left the girl, who was twisting her ragged tresses around her forearm as if in an agony to tear off her own head. A small greeny-white creature, a ferret or a rotten mink maybe, writhed at the girl’s ankles as a hungry cat might do.

Finally Liir turned to the woman the Lion had introduced as his consort. Only now was she folding the veil back off her foreheard, pulling its drapes away from her cheekbones. The cry Liir gave made everyone start except for Rain, who seemed oblivious.

Nor held up her hand, holding Liir back. “Food first, and water,” said Nor, in a voice that was and wasn’t the voice Liir remembered from childhood. “Our histories have waited this long; they can wait till the washing up. Candle Osqa’ami, show me a chore, and I’ll help you with what needs doing. I’m south any appetite for overwrought reunions.” As she passed Liir, she trained her eyes forward, but the fingers of her left hand reached out to graze his elbow and his hip.

Candle didn’t budge, just flapped a hand toward the crumbling narthex as if to let the busybody find whatever she would in there. “We’ll follow right along,” said Liir. Nor drifted into the building alone.

Candle dropped to her knees, so Liir dropped too. Candle clapped three times. The girl looked at Candle with mild curiosity, maybe aversion. Candle clapped again, twice, and this time their daughter clapped back. Once. Feebly. It was a start.

“Oziandra Osqa’ami,” said Candle.

“Commonly called Rain,” remarked the dwarf, to whom no one had been paying attention. “And as we old ones remember from those decades of the Great Drought, Rain rarely comes when she’s called. Even when she’s called by the name she knows. Rain.”

“Oziandra Rain,” said Candle.

“Child,” said Liir. He didn’t know the significance of that Quadling clapping. He just lifted his hands, palms out, as he might to a sniffing hound or a hurt wolf-cub. Safe, open. No stone, no knife.

The dwarf cuffed Rain on the crown of her head. “Go to them, bratling, or we’ll never get a bite to eat. After all that poppy-dust in the nostrils I’m stranded on the famished side of peckish.” So Rain stepped forward, out of everyone’s shadows—out of the shadows of the last eight years. And Liir looked at her.

In the sloping light of evening Liir couldn’t tell if he was noting a condition of facial structure or an expression. Or was it a lack of expression? The girl’s eyes seemed cloaked. She had Candle’s high cheekbones and hazelnut jaw, but she was urchin-thin and dusty as a rebel. She held a translucent porcelain something tucked into an elbow. A shell, he saw. Far the largest shell he’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re nice but that’s nicer,” he said, pointing at it. “May I see it?”

“You’re taking liberties before you have a license,” observed the dwarf, but the Munchkinlander dame cuffed him good and proper. Then the small square couple followed Nor into the keep. Even Brrr started to pad away, but the girl whimpered, so the Lion sat down halfway. He set to grooming himself with a desultory air.

“It’s awfully pretty,” Liir said of the shell. His heart was beating as if he were in a court of law—a court of recriminations and, maybe, pardons. “Can you hear anything in it?” He inched forward on his knees, only a scosh.

The girl put the thing up to her ear and listened. Then she turned away to ramble after her companions through the shattered archway of the porch and into the open-roofed ruin of the building. The verdant creature—perhaps an otter?—scampered after her. Candle’s face had fallen but her weeping remained silent, at least for now.

“I think that went pretty well,” said the Lion.

“Is the child all right?” asked Liir. His eyes followed her as she crossed a patch of gloaming light, the sort that gilds every feature at the last minute. She looked normal as a copper farthing. Not a sign of green in her skin, not at this hour, not in this sunset attention. “Is she all right, do you think?”

“Begging pardon, it’s been a long day. It’s been a long year,” said Brrr, “and believe me, I’m no expert. But I’d say she’s right as rain.”

2.

Liir caught Candle’s hand as they hurried up the sandy steps to their sanctuary. “She’ll need to adjust,” he said. “We have to give her time.”

“We’ve given her all those years. I have no more moments to spare.”

Their daughter had gone ahead wispily, surlily perhaps. Liir tried to see this hideout anew, as if through Rain’s eyes, realizing that he had no notion of what she’d ever seen before. Stowed away in Lady Glinda’s entourage as she’d been. And who knows what else she’d witnessed on the road.

The place where he and Candle had washed up—how improbable it seemed. Perched high over the pass that led from the Sleeve of Ghastille toward central Oz. A nameless hill, so far as they knew—in sillier moods Liir sometimes referred to it as Mountain Objection. Travelers watching their footing below would have no reason to lift their eyes; in any case, the spot was camouflaged by overgrowth.

The place may have been established as a guard keep or a pilgrim’s destination. But when Liir and Candle had found it—they were hunting for a cave in which to hunker down, out of sight—it’d been abandoned for decades. Longer, maybe. For some community of cliff dwellers time out of mind, this outpost had been home. Home, or maybe an inn for passersby, for the underground warren was supplied with small cells and the remains of bedsteads and mattresses.

The ruin aboveground, through which Liir and Candle now walked, looked designed for some public function. At this stage in its collapse, the wall facing southwest was gone. The pavers of the great formal floor lay open to the sky. All that was left of the outside wall were the stumps of a line of columns. Like a lower jaw full of bad teeth. Ivory, grey, eroded. The opposite wall, hugging the hill that rose behind it, featured columns leading to the ribs of a missing roof and a dais of some sort.

In the few unionist chapels Liir had ever bothered to visit, the lectern had always stood at the far end of a rectangle, opposite the vestibule and porch. Here totemic sculptures and a sort of throne were inset against the hill wall, in the long side of the box, rather than tucked into the far apse. The carvings between the intact columns faced the broken columns and the sky and valley beyond, as if visitors on giant birds might swoop in for an audience.

Now he and Candle caught up with Rain. She’d paused at the altarpiece or whatever it was, and there she stood, tracing her hands over the surface.

At first Liir was puzzled. After an initial glance at the graven images, years ago, he’d ignored them except as hooks for bleeding a wild lamb or muttock, ledges for drying berries and onions. But Rain had set her pink shell in a niche, just so. The supports of the ledge were carved like shells too. He’d never noticed.

The shelf capped a panel of carved marble. Like a blind person, Rain was feeling the sculpture with a curiosity and openness she hadn’t shown to her mother or father.

A type of fish-woman, perhaps a lake mermaid of some sort. Her lower half tapered into a scaley tale and fins. From each of her hips flared a pair of spinnerets. Her arms and breasts were naked. Her face, set in profile against a dial or plate of some sort, gave the effect of a head on a coin. Liir didn’t know who she was—maybe some fishy variant of Lurline, maybe the invention of a bored unionist monk with a chisel and an appetite for breasts. But the creature looked in equal measure both beneficent and ferocious.

Rain’s hands touching the stern blank eye, the weatherworn stone breasts, the imbrications of those stony scales—his daughter made Liir see that the carving had character. He hadn’t noticed.

Still so much to see, so much to take in, and he was thirty or thereabouts—halfway through his life, assuming the Emperor’s assassins didn’t find him out at last and cut his life short.

Candle couldn’t hold back any longer. She wrenched away from Liir and moved forward to kneel beside Rain. He could see the similar shapes of their skulls, but the girl’s shoulders were tight, as if wound onto her spinal column like a wing nut, whereas Candle had tended toward a sexy fullness of form the past few years.

“I like this one,” said Candle in her soft, bruised voice. Her hand reached out to touch a star-shaped protrusion humping along with others in a welter of runes. For all Liir knew, this row of roughs was only the pattern-block of an anonymous instructor of ancient carving. He didn’t care. He had an aversion to magic, implied or actual.

“Me too,” said Rain, “but this better.” She chose from a protected cubby a small freestanding stone Liir had never noticed. He neared to look over her shoulder. About the size of a breviary, the display side was polished smooth as milk pudding. In it was carved something impossibly small and delicate. Liir couldn’t imagine the human hand that might manage such particularity, nor the instrument that such a hand might use. A relief of a vaguely animal-shaped creature. A sort of snouted feather, a legless head of a pony erect on a curved spine or tail. An inch high, no more. “What is it?” asked Rain.

“I don’t know,” said Candle.

“Pure fancy, I suspect,” said Liir, trying out the pedagogical function of fatherliness. “Nothing living can stand upright without at least two legs.”

“A tree can. What’s this?” The girl pointed to another shape carved into the lintel, a protrusion too peculiar for Liir to compare to anything else.

“An accident of the artist’s adze? Or maybe it was once something remarkable, but wind and rain took away its character over time. So now it’s just a mystery.”

“Wind and rain?”

“They blow from the west, clear cross the hall, or from the south. Sometimes—once a year—a storm with tiny teeth of salty sand, which rub at these carvings.”

“I never knowed of storms that could change off the face of a creature.” Rain looked surprised at the idea of the ravage of the world. “How many storms was it?”

“Hundreds of years of storms,” Candle answered her. “More years than I could count. We’ve only been here a handful of years, and the damage was done when we arrived. Nothing’s changed since we got here, but the sand comes and settles. I brush it off with feathers when the great wind subsides.”

Rain made her fingers like feathers, brushing, brushing. “What is this place?”

“It’s your home,” said Candle, and extended her hand to touch Rain’s hand—to cover it as Rain had covered the star shape.

This was a venture too bold. “I got no home,” said Rain, and pulled away and walked into the dark doorway that led to the stairs and the catacomb apartments in which Candle and Liir had hid, and lived, through the time it had taken seven rainstorms to deposit seven skins of sand upon the evaporating stone.

3.

Just before they’d met Muhlama yesterday, Ilianora had cried out to the Lion that Rain had no fear. Rain had heard this, and she knew it was wrong. She had plenty of fear, all right. For instance, she didn’t trust these two new people in their hilltop hideaway. The man was possessed by something aggravated, something with the intensity of hornets. He tried to disguise it, but she could see. The woman was no calmer, even though she looked like a Quadling, and Rain’s exposure to Quadlings in Ovvels had led her to consider them kindly and placid. Up till now.

I’ll have no part of this, she thought, though she knew she had little choice.

She found Brrr downstairs, pacing in and out of stone doorways, checking out the lodgings. “Time was I might have expected the sheets turned down and a chocolate bourbonette placed upon the pillow,” he said. “But since there are no sheets or pillows, I suppose hoping for a chocolate bourbonette is a waste of energy. Rain, where should we sleep?”

“Far away from here.”

“Tiss toss, somebody’s cross. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“En’t nothing under my skin but my underskin.” She threw herself down on the floor, purposefully hard so she could bang her coccyx and try out a cuss. Tay twisted its head at her, confused.

Brrr had learned enough not to take the bait. He said nothing.

“How long are we here? When are we going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t yet really understand where we’ve arrived. Shall we go help with food, and see what we can learn?”

“I can’t learn anything.”

Brrr decided to consider morbid self-loathing something of an advance in the consolidation of Rain’s character. “Well, if you’re enjoying a little hissy-mood, why don’t you come along and find more to disapprove of upstairs?”

“You can leave me here to die.” She stretched out on her back and put an arm over her head. She made an unconvincing corpse, though Brrr knew that with enough practice—sixty, seventy years on—she’d get it right.

“Well, I’m going to sleep here. I think this room is kind of cozy. I like how a little natural light comes in through that slit. I bet you can see stars on a cloudless night, inching by.” She didn’t look. “But while there’s work to be done for supper, it’s cowardly to shirk down here. So now I’m going above. You can do as you like.”

“I know that.”

He had to suppress a smile. A vexed Rain was slightly more coherent: there was more of her on display. He knew she’d follow eventually.

Back outside, in a summer kitchen beyond the nave of the sacred fishy lady, Liir and Candle were scrubbing some turnips. A rusty kettle hanging on a hook bubbled, a rich onion broth. Ilianora—Brrr couldn’t yet think of her as Nor, which was how Liir addressed her—was mashing carrots with a pestle. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were collecting from the compartments of the Clock anything that might be of use. Scissors, forks, banged-up pewter plates. Dried herbs. Candle’s eyes went wide and delighted at the sight of oregano and pumperfleck.

Brrr was no better at dicing cubes of salted grite than he was at the preparation of radish roses. His arthritic paws were devoid of opposable anythings. Settling to take some of the evening wind onto his jowls, he closed his eyes to listen to the murmur of human malcontent. It was comfortingly so like his own.

When Rain cried out, because splashed by moiling soup—so she’d emerged, no surprise there—Brrr opened his eyes. They focused to pick out a statue of an iron goose framed in a collapsing archway of unpruned peony hedge.

The bush was past its prime. Like the rest of us, he guessed. Then the statue kinked a leg and spoke.

“None of my business, of course, but have you paid any attention to the question of whether or not your dinner guests are being followed?” He appeared to be addressing the peonies, since one could not tell on whom his glazed eye was fixing.

“We’ll get to that,” said Liir to the Goose. “We’ll talk after we eat. If you’re so concerned, launch yourself and take a loop around once or twice. Settle your mind about it.”

“Couldn’t be bothered to exercise myself. The moment your incarceration arrives, I take to wing with a song in my breast and the old heave-ho.”

“Ever the optimist,” Candle said to the newcomers, shrugging. “This is Iskinaary. Liir’s familiar.”

“Not as familiar as all that,” protested the Goose.

“I never knew a Bird to shelter with humans,” said Brrr.

“I never knew a Lion to mind his own business,” snapped the Goose.

“Don’t let the Goose vex you,” said Liir. “We haven’t had company for so long, he’s forgotten how to be cordial.”

“You’ve forgotten how to be suspicious,” complained the Goose. “These vagabonds come creaking like the Walking Dust of St. Satalin’s Graveyard and you don’t worry it’s the opening salvo of an ambush attempt?”

“Muhlama has promised to stalk the perimeter tonight before she slinks away in the morning,” soothed Liir. “No need to ginger up the atmosphere, Iskinaary. This feast has been postponed for too long. You were there when the little girl was born. You can manage to be glad she’s back. No?”

“This is all my fault. I saw the Clock from the air, we sent Muhlama to investigate since she was passing through. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. But the girl is trouble, Liir, and dragging trouble in her wake. Mark my words. And I’m not crazy about the otter.” At Liir’s lowered brow, the Goose hurried on, “Not that I mind, of course. I love trouble. The spice of life and proud progenetrix of all progress, yes yes. Don’t mind me.”

“I think someone’s being sentimental,” suggested Liir. “We’ve never had reason to see how a Goose gets sentimental before. High emotion is nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”

“We have a Cowardly Lion and a Sentimental Goose, is that it? No thank you,” said Iskinaary. “I’m not interested in the position.” He curled his neck like the hoop of an iron rail marking out the edge of an ornamental border and he nipped viciously at his breast. “I’ll dine alone on my own nits, thank you.”

The humans sat cross-legged on a blanket. Under the circumstances Little Daffy offered a brief grace in a general sense, addressed to Sender. The slop was good as well as plentiful. Brrr ate with his tongue rather than a spoon. He was getting too old to fuss with a spoon at every meal. Rain sulked and wouldn’t touch a bite.

When they were done, Candle suggested that she and Rain might take a knife to the peonies and cut some to arrange on the shell altar. Tay slunk after, docile as an old family collie. After they’d wandered away, Liir ventured softly, “Before they come back, in case it’s upsetting to Candle, can anyone tell me about Rain?”

“She’s a bothersome girl, more trouble than she’s worth,” said Mr. Boss. He’d hardly spoken since they arrived. Well, observed Brrr, ever since the Clock took its tumble, Mr. Boss has gone very silent indeed.

Liir’s fixation on the girl seemed to annoy the dwarf, who continued, “What you see when you look at Rain is all there is. You can’t get milk from a salamander. I want to know what’s going on down there.” He swept his hand skyward to the north and east. “We’ve spent a year with Quadlings who wouldn’t know a current event if it rolled over and squashed their granny. I can see you’ve removed yourself from the cocktail party circuit, but you must hear something in your aerie up here, if you have an assortment of winged foreign correspondents. What’s the news out of Oz?”

“Since when?” asked Liir.

“When we left Munchkinland more than a year ago,” replied Mr. Boss, “Lady Glinda was confined to Mockbeggar Hall. Her country estate on Restwater, as you may know. An army of Loyal Oz had gotten halfway up the lake, heading inland, but its armada was destroyed by a spot of magic. A dragon escaped and flew south, we think, and that’s the last we heard for certain.”

Some bad memory there, thought Brrr, seeing Liir pale at the mention of the beast. Evenly enough, though, Liir replied, “We’ve seen or heard no sign of any dragon.”

The dwarf snorted. “Yes, Lord Limp in the Lap, but what about the armies bucking about Restwater?”

“We came here to get out of the path of armies.”

The Goose suddenly snapped to life again and hissed at Liir. “You’ve invited them to stay the night and you’re suddenly above gossip? Has the arrival of that child mischiefed your mind? Listen, little man,” he told the dwarf, “the last we heard, General Cherrystone had taken the lake, even storming Haugaard’s Keep. The Munchkinlanders cleverly vacated their stronghold so they could isolate and contain Cherrystone once he took it. They have him holed up there. He retains lake access but he can’t move farther inland toward Bright Lettins, the new capital. Some fortresses are harder to quit than they are to breach.”

The dwarf said, “Smart. And…?”

The Goose went on. “Tit for tat, the Munchkinlanders have formed an alliance with the Glikkuns to their north, and appropriated the emerald mines in the Scalps. Easy enough to defend those mountain passes. And the Glikkuns have cut the rail line into Loyal Oz. You can hardly be surprised. They’ve been taken advantage of by the Emerald City for decades. It’s all stupefyingly predictable. The Glikkuns, those trolls, are natural allies to the stumpy Munchkinlander folk.”

“You should talk,” said Little Daffy. “You’re not any taller than I am.”

“Who’s leading the Munchkinland government?” asked Brrr, to keep the conversation civil, and also to find out.

The Goose gargled and hootled. “Liir himself would be eligible for Eminence in Munchkinland, should he ever claim the seat. His aunt, the so-called Wicked Witch of the East, having been the last Eminent Thropp.”

Liir shrugged. “Not interested in the job. Anyway, I’ve changed my name to Liir Ko, so maybe I’m not eligible.”

“Since the Emperor of Oz, Shell Thropp, was Nessarose’s younger brother,” said the Goose, “it’s on the basis of a blood claim to the position of Eminence of Munchkinland that the Emperor validates his invasion. You’d pass muster too, Liir.”

“But names,” said Brrr. “Who’s holding Munchkinland together?”

“To the north, the Glikkun alliance is managed by a mangy old troll-woman named Sakkali Oafish,” replied Iskinaary.

Brrr closed his eyes. He remembered Sakkali Oafish. The Massacre at Traum, for which he’d earned his sobriquet as the Cowardly Lion. The one thing about a social indignity was that, like several of the nastier rashes, it was never completely cured, and could flare up at a moment’s notice.

“In Munchkinland proper,” the Goose continued, “the mastermind is an old witch named Mombey.”

“That’s not a Munchkinlander name,” scoffed Little Daffy.

“She’s Gillikinese originally. But as you may have noticed, the Munchkinlander that might serve, won’t.” Again Iskinaary indicated Liir. “And the one that would serve, namely the Emperor, isn’t welcome. So Mombey’s holding things together somehow. Her chief military strategist, who’s kept Cherrystone boxed up in Haugaard’s Keep all year, is a saucy young warrior princess named Jinjuria. General Jinjuria, she calls herself.”

“Yes, Muhlama told us about her. Well, Munchkinland was ever a stomping ground for strong women,” said Little Daffy. “Nessarose Thropp, this Mombey, this General Jinjuria. You got to hand it to them.”

“Yes, they’re just as bitter and conniving as men,” said Iskinaary. “They might’ve offered a position to one of the many Animals who took refuge inside their borders all those years ago, back during the Wizard’s pogroms. But noooooo. When women share power, they share power with women.”

“And you have a problem with that?” Little Daffy picked up a small sharp stone and tossed it up and down.

The dwarf intervened. “Come on, Husky Honey, remember we’re guests. Not nice to stone our hosts.”

“This is hardly news,” said Iskinaary, “but Nessarose was no fainting sweetheart, once she took the chair. The way I hear tell it, Elphaba Thropp had her own permanent case of broom rage too. Don’t murder the messenger. I’m just answering the question you posed.”

Once again Brrr broke in. “Is Lady Glinda free?”

“The latest gossip,” said the Goose, “is that she was charged with treason against Loyal Oz. For somehow arranging the assault on the armada. As if she could manage that!—she who can’t manage to thread a needle. But if she’s been taken from Mockbeggar I couldn’t say. My circle of informants doesn’t stoop to information of such particularity.”

“It en’t all her fault.” They hadn’t seen Rain and Candle come back, arms full of satiny white peonies glowing in the fading light. The girl said, “Me and Lady Glinda—we did it together.”

“Keep marching in the direction you’re going, little girl,” said Iskinaary, “and you’ll hit the banks of Restwater again. If you apologize to General Cherrystone nicely, maybe he’ll only slap you in prison for the rest of your life instead of killing you outright.”

Ilianora gasped, and Liir bellowed, “Iskinaary! Mind yourself.”

“Somebody’s got to tell that girl the truth,” snapped the Goose. “Or eventually she’ll put herself in the same kind of danger she’s putting you.” He craned his neck and looked, just for an instant, regal—at least regal for a Goose. He kick-stepped his way across the stones to where Candle and Rain had paused and he stood before them. From Brrr’s vantage point, his graphite feathers made a sort of silhouette against the white blossoms drooping from Rain’s arms. The Goose all but honked at the girl. “I have no reason to like you, Miss Oziandra Rain, but neither will I let a damaged child waltz into peril because her companions are congenitally foolish.”

“Well, I don’t like you either,” said Rain, pelting the Goose with her heap of blooms. Unfazed, he poked his bill among them to enjoy the ants crawling in the sweetness. Brrr had to admire his composure.

Candle hid a small smile of her own by raising her armful of blooms up to her nose.

4.

Under their common blanket Liir comforted Candle that evening. “You hover too close, you’ll scare her away,” he murmured. “She feels safe with the Lion. There, there. Hush, don’t let them hear you.”

“You always said I could see the present,” said Candle, when she could speak. “But I can see nothing about her—my own daughter.”

Liir smoothed his hand over her silky flank. “Maybe that’s not so surprising. Maybe all parents are blindest to their own offspring.”

“It isn’t right. It isn’t natural.”

“Hush. They’ll hear you. Remember—the morning is always brightest after the moonless night.”

Eventually she fell asleep, if only, he guessed, to escape his platitudes. But it was the best he could do.

Even at this slight elevation, Highsummer was passing more quickly than in the valley. The dawn revealed a new ruddiness to the greenery. “I want to have a better look at that Clock,” Liir told the dwarf after breakfast. “You’re the chargé d’affaires about that, right?”

“You could call me the timekeeper,” said Mr. Boss, “only I seem to have lost track of the time. Sure, come along. There’s little to be lost or gained in the Clock’s prophecies anymore.”

They stumped down the stone path to where they’d left the Clock the night before. The assemblage look weather-beaten with age. Which it had every right to look, after all these years.

“I always thought this Clock was apocryphal,” said Liir.

“It is apocryphal. That’s the point.” The dwarf seemed to be tilting into a sour mood.

“I never expected to see it,” said Liir. “Somehow it’s smaller than I imagined.”

“Most of us are. You too, bub.”

Liir had more than his share of personal flaws, but rushing to take offense wasn’t one of them. “How’s this thing work, anyway?”

“It doesn’t. That’s the crisis.”

The stage curtains yawned open like a fresh wound. “Is this supposed to simulate something?”

“Ruin,” said the dwarf. “Of the Clock, or of my life. Makes little difference. Perhaps its time has come. Even a thing can die, I guess. Though I never thought about that before this year.”

“Maybe someone could fix it up?”

“Some magician, you mean?” The dwarf glanced up at Liir. “I know your mother is said to have been Elphaba. The Wicked Witch of the West. Great stage name, that. But I doubt you inherited the talent.”

“I have no capacity. I wasn’t volunteering for the job. I was just wondering.”

“The magic of the Clock doesn’t originate in Oz, so it can’t be amended here.” The dwarf kicked at the hub of a wheel. The drawer with the Grimmerie in it sprung open. “I suspect you were looking for this little number, once upon a time.”

“The Grimmerie?” guessed Liir.

“The same.”

“Yes, I was. Once, anyway. Maybe twice… I hunted through Kiamo Ko for it, but it’d either been hidden or taken away.”

“It’s made the rounds, this great book. It was given to Sarima, your father’s wife; then to Elphaba; then to Glinda, more than once. When it’s not being used it’s come back to me. But the Clock can’t keep it safe anymore, and I can’t determine through the Clock who should have it. So it’s yours now. Happy birthday and no happy returns. I don’t want it. You’re as deserving a candidate as any. Besides, I hear your daughter can read it some.”

“But—whoever brought it to Oz—whoever magicked the Clock—might want it back.”

“Whoever.” The dwarf snarled.

“I mean, your boss.”

“My liege and master?” Mr. Boss made a rude gesture. “He cast me away in this land with a job to do and a Clock by which to count the hours of my service. He hasn’t come back. If the Clock is done counting my shift, so am I. The book is yours, bub.”

“What if I don’t want it either?”

“Try to get rid of it and see what happens.” Mr. Boss grinned, nastily. “I wouldn’t like to be an enemy of that thing. I’ve managed to stay neutral, but even so.”

“Yeah. I’ve tried to stay neutral too. It isn’t always possible.”

They paused, in a stalemate about something neither could name.

“Well. Are you going to pick it up?” asked the dwarf.

“And what if I don’t? I came here with Candle to protect her, to protect myself. I’m not Elphaba. Never could be. I know my limitations. I don’t deserve anything this powerful. I can’t use it and I can’t protect it.”

“If you don’t take it, sir,” said the dwarf, “I shall give it to your daughter.”

So Liir had no choice. A moment that comes, sooner or later, to all parents.

5.

Rain saw Liir carry the Grimmerie into the chancel. She was uneasy about the great book now she knew that Lady Glinda had gotten into trouble by reading it. Yet Rain still felt the book’s subtle allure. Her mouth watered. She was eager not to do magic but to read. She’d had too little reading. What few things that General Cherrystone had taught her were languishing in her head, pollywogs that could never grow up into frogs.

“What you going to do with that?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“I don’t think this is a good thing for you to look at. It’s powerful stuff, from all I’ve heard.”

“I’m powerful stuff.”

He grinned and shook his head. Without having words to express it, Rain knew that a smile tends to avert or disguise the natural tension that pools around people trying to be in the same place at once. But Liir’s smile would have no effect on her. She would see to that. “Where you going to stow it?”

“I don’t know. No place seems safe enough.”

“I’ll hold it for you.”

“That would be like giving you a boa constrictor for a pet. No father would do that.”

“You’re not my father.” The words just slipped out—they weren’t antagonistic, just commentary.

“Actually, I am. Though I surely can see how you might doubt it.” As if he was afraid the book would open up of its own accord, he set it on the ground and sat on it. She hoped it would bite him on his behind. “If you could look in this book, what would you be looking for?”

“Words,” she said, cannily, honestly.

“Which ones? Magic ones?”

She didn’t feel like saying that all words were magic, though she thought so. But she wasn’t skilled at indirection. She was more arrow than hummingbird. “I want to read the burning words,” she said at last.

She couldn’t think of Liir as her father, she couldn’t.

Liir looked at her with sudden sharpness. “What do you mean, the burning words?”

She shrugged at that and she would have wandered off to make a point about how free of him she was. But there was the book. He was sitting on it. She wanted to see where he would put it. In case.

Was he still waiting for her to speak?

She couldn’t force a remark any more than she could force a smile, any more than she’d been able to force herself to read before she’d been taught the rubrics. She waited, squatting on her haunches, casting sideways looks at the Grimmerie in case it began to leak language out onto the stones.

“You want to read the burning words,” prompted Liir.

“Don’t you?”

He blinked. Another language she didn’t get, how people blink. How they make their eyes go wet. “Where do you find the burning words?” he asked her.

She thought of the armada scorching the ice. Something was being spelled out there; fire moved in such a way, and smoke issued from fire, as if to hide what was being spelled inside the heat. Oh, but all that was too fussy a thought. She took up a bug that didn’t mind the chilly air and studied it on her forefinger instead.

She could tell this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out. She only saw charred letters in a lake. The alphabetic remains of ships.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Liir.

She thought and thought about that. She felt her calves begin to ache; she felt the tickle of the bug’s legs against her fingers. Someday, presumably, she wouldn’t have these legs or these fingers, but the legs and fingers of someone who stood as tall as this man could. She twisted in her thinking, trying to be honest since she didn’t believe she could be smart, and she gave the answer to the insect rather than to the man who claimed to be her father. She wouldn’t think of Liir as her father.

What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”

6.

Gone, when she grew up. A terrible thought. But in a way she was gone already, right now. Her form had come back to them but her spirit was balking.

Candle mourned that Rain wasn’t bothering with her much. Liir asked himself: What mother wouldn’t? But it seemed as if, instead of Liir’s and Candle’s warmth melting Rain’s resistance, it worked the other way around. The child’s aloofness was contagious. Candle and Liir were learning to weather a mutual pain separately, independently. No matter the closeness of the marriage bed, the history between them.

Maybe to distract himself from his other worries, Liir tried to fasten on his half-sister. He and Nor shared a father, presumably, though Liir had never met that distant figure, Fiyero. But Nor was also floating at some distance away from Liir. The great reunion that he’d dreamed of for years was a sham. Kidnapping, prison, escape, disappearance? You’d never know it by her self-effacing manner. She might as well just have come home after shopping for biscuits.

He didn’t want to crowd his sister any more than he wanted to crowd his daughter. He watched Nor move about with a woodenness that sometimes seemed like grace, and sometimes not. Maybe this was her normal way? He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been abducted. Back when she’d been a girl roughly the age that Rain was now.

Never confident about women, Liir scrutinized his sister—with equal parts interest, patience, and suspicion—to see in what way might she turn out to be damaged.

As if he were writing a catalog on the subject of human misery.

Another way to avoid admitting how it had settled in too close, like lice.

The opportunity to engage Nor without threatening her arose naturally enough. Every couple of weeks Liir was in the habit of descending from the mount to a wildwood garden. He collected mushrooms, fiddleheads, frostflower pods, and lettuce. It was half a morning’s hike. The next time he needed to thin the lettuce or lose it, he bundled up a few baskets, some stakes, a trowel, and he asked Nor to come along.

They strolled equably enough, chatting about the landscape and the moods of the climate. From time to time they fell into silence. A bird hopped on a blighted oak limb. A few chipmunks, at the business of growing their hoards, scampered like shadows of something overhead. The wind sawed through the thickery. You could hear the autumn inching in.

“Looks as if this has been a productive yard for generations,” said Nor, indicating the ancient stone tablets tilting at the end of the sunnier furrows.

“Behold: here lies the last person to tell the truth.”

She blinked at him.

“Sorry. Graveyard humor. But if those stones ever said anything like that, they stopped saying it long ago.”

Nor nodded. “They look like teeth. And your hermitage, or whatever it once was—it looks like a mouth too. A big open jaw swallowing the wind.”

“Swallowing the poppy trade, probably,” said Liir. Nor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the poppy trade?”

“I don’t know much. Even though we swam through the bloody sea of them.”

“Sometimes the Yunamata venture south as far as here to harvest the poppy pods. The takings are useful for their groggy rituals, and the illegitimate opiate market is always eager to barter. Your little Munchkinlander apothecaire knows all about that, I’m sure. Some of the harvest seeps through the black market for smoking in certain parlors in Shiz and the EC, I’m told.”

“You’re not an habitué?”

“I haven’t been into a parlor of any sort since I grew facial hair.”

Nor bent to pick the lettuce, which was near to bolting. “Situated where it is, maybe your private stronghold used to be a countinghouse for the poppy merchants. Or maybe the defense headquarters against such a trade.”

“Whoever might tell us is probably long ago buried in the lettuces. It’s all guesswork.”

“But the trade has dropped off?”

“Seems so. Certainly the EC authorities don’t approve; they’re afraid the opiates will get to the conscripted soldiers and erode morale. You didn’t see sign of anyone marking out a little meadow for harvesting?”

“Not a soul.”

They worked in companionable silence. Liir staked the stems of frostflower so they would winter over. They were best cut down in the early spring. Finished with the lettuce, Nor put her hand on the small of her back and stretched. She dropped the heap of curled green pages into her shawl, and turned her attention to some radishes, but she gave up when one after another pulled up mealy. “What next?” she asked.

Liir leaned back on his heels. “I have something to show you.” She waited. He pulled from his tunic a folded bit of paper. “I found this at Kiamo Ko. Can you bear to look at it?”

She came over to squat next to him. The browning paper, creased into softness, showed a faded drawing of a young girl. Hardly more than an infant, though with a certain crude spark in the eye. A personality. The letters in childlike hesitancy said

Nor by Fiyero.

This is me Nor
by my father F
before he left

It took her a half an hour to compose herself. Liir left his arm slung around her as if around the shoulder of a drinking mate—not too close. Not imprisoning. Just there. When she was ready, she tapped the page twice with a forefinger and said, “I found that drawing before you did. It was in the Witch’s room at the castle. My father had drawn me for his mistress, and she had kept it. She who seemed impervious to sentimentality had kept it all those years. When I came across it—I must have been rooting through her room one day, bored, as children will be—I wrote the caption and put the page back where it was, so the Witch would know she could keep the paper but she couldn’t keep my father from me, not in my memory.”

“How much do you remember about those times? With your mother and brothers and me and the Witch? And those other aunts of yours? Back in Kiamo Ko?”

“I was hardly a teenager when I was abducted,” she said. “And so of course I remember almost all of it. Or I thought I did. But I’d forgotten this.”

“Do you remember they took me too?—but Cherrystone decided I wasn’t worth the labor of hauling overland? He left me tied up in a sack and hanging from a tree. I had to gnaw through the burlap, which took the better part of a day … then I fell twelve feet and almost killed myself. And by the time I came around, you were gone. You were all gone. I made my way home to the castle and waited for the Witch to come back—she was in Munchkinland, I think. That was just when her sister, Nessarose, orchestrated the Munchkinlander schism, and they seceded from Loyal Oz.” He’d been talking too fast. He slowed down. “What happened to you when they took you?”

“What I do remember I don’t want to talk about.” She’d been with her mother and her older brother, Irji. And those aunts. Gruesome. Maybe Nor was right: maybe Liir didn’t really want to know. After all. Nor had been the only one to survive.

“Do you know that I talked my way into Southstairs Prison to find you?” he asked her. “After the Wizard abdicated and Lady Glinda came to be Throne Minister? My guide was none other than Shell Thropp. Shell Thropp, the Witch’s brother. My uncle, though I didn’t know it yet. A cad of the first order, and now he’s the Emperor.”

“We’ve just learned he’s divine. Being related to him, does that make you a saint?”

Liir bowed his head, though not in piety. “When I finally got into the prison, you had just escaped from Southstairs. A few days earlier. I was that close to finding you. They said you’d hidden yourself between the corpses of some Horned Hogs and been carried out in a pudding of putrescent Animal flesh.” He tried to laugh. “Really?”

“I don’t care to think about it.” The way she spoke told Liir it was all too true.

“It sounds as if you were so close to Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall. Didn’t you want to take revenge on him? After all, at the Wizard’s instructions he abducted and murdered your family. Or had them murdered. Much later, once I went AWOL from the service of the Emerald City Messiars, he began to have me hunted too. He attacked the mauntery called Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows because we were said to be there. He—”

“We? You and Candle?”

“Me and Trism. My bosom companion. We’d torched the stable of flying dragons that were being used to terrify the Scrow and the Yunamata, so Cherrystone was out for our blood. And when Cherrystone caught up with Trism at last he probably beat the bloody hell out of him. Listen, at Mockbeggar Hall, didn’t you want to put a stiletto through Cherrystone’s throat? I would have. Wanted to, at least.”

She went back to the lettuces and began to arrange them in ranks of size, as if that mattered. Her voice was flat and unconcerned when she spoke again. “I’ve spent all my adult life either fighting the excesses of the Emerald City hegemony or trying not to fret myself into paralysis. One can only do what one can do, Liir. Today I can harvest a little lettuce. Tonight you and your wife and your child and my unlikely husband and your Goose and my colleagues, Mr. Boss and Little Daffy, will have some lettuce to eat. One day perhaps I will not find lettuce in my hands, but a knife. Maybe General Cherrystone will have come to eat lettuce but will dine on the blade that cuts the lettuce. If I only think about that, I can think about nothing else, and then I might as well lie down under these stones and join the others who can’t think anymore, either.”

In a steely but warm voice, she added, “I might ask the same of you, Liir. Cherrystone’s zeal to find you, because you might lead him to the Grimmerie, has broken you apart from your own daughter no less fiercely than I was broken apart from my mother—and from my father. From our father. You might’ve spent these years of your strong youth hunting him down.”

“I might’ve done,” he agreed. “But if I’d been unsuccessful, Rain would’ve had no father to come home to, sooner or later. A fate we fatherless understand, you and I.”

“We do,” she said. “We understand lettuces, and we understand that. We don’t understand Cherrystone. But we don’t need to. Maybe.”

They walked back to the hostel slowly, without talking, that final maybe like a heavy boulder slung between them, on a yoke laid across both their backs.

7.

About the darkness recently apparent in his wife’s eyes, the Lion was puzzled. He knew Ilianora hadn’t been prepared to find her brother. She hadn’t been looking for Liir. Maybe having found him, then, had slapped awake an old buried ache for others who’d been slaughtered.

This was a sore that Brrr couldn’t lick clean no matter how he tried. Maybe if Rain had taken to Nor … maybe his wife would have softened a little more … but no. Rain never took to anyone.

Except, a little bit, to him. Which was damn awkward under the circumstances. With her parents and her aunt moping around for scraps of attention. The girl wasn’t capable though. Or she just wasn’t interested in them.

What were they all waiting for in this Chancel of the Ladyfish, as Highsummer turned to Harvest’our, and Harvest’our gave way to Masque? Were they all glued to Rain, as if she might give them a sign? Were the companions of the Clock to linger indefinitely? The question became moot when the snow blew in, and they were more or less ice-bound. They were no longer quite guests, these months along. But neither were they at home.

The Lion listened as Liir and Candle talked to each other in the coded abbreviations that couples develop. He couldn’t make much of Candle—a cipher, that one. But he remembered Liir from ages ago, that time when Brrr had arrived, with Dorothy and the shambolic others, at the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The flying monkeys! They’d given him the creeps. The loopy old Nanny who had nonetheless seemed the sanest of the lot. The mysterious way Dorothy had vanquished the Witch while the Lion and Liir were trapped in a larder. Then the beginning of their long journey back to the Emerald City.

All the time Liir had been the least of them, a stringy, cave-chested marionette of a kid. The thinnest fleck of hair on the upper lip, the cracking voice, the sidelong glances at Dorothy, as if he couldn’t believe his luck but still didn’t know if it was good luck or bad.

The Lion hadn’t expected to meet up with the lad ever again. Now it was—what?—fifteen or twenty years later. The boy-turned-man still projected something imprecise. But his back was strong and his love for Candle was tender, and he regarded Rain as a jewel so precious he couldn’t touch her. That was Rain’s fault, to set herself like that, but it was her father’s fault too, to accept her terms. I never would, thought Brrr, with the smugness of the perfect parent, or dog handler, or litigator.

One day during a thaw, when Candle mentioned a hankering for a hare to roast, Liir braved the slippery paths to check his traps. The Lion decided to go along. They all but slid into the carcass of the decrepit Clock, its open stage gaping. They looked over the wrecked set. Snow upon fallen buildings.

“It’s acting out the death of a civilization,” said the Lion.

Liir peered with interest. “It looks like an earthquake. Growing up in the Great Kells, I saw my share. Those slides of scree when the mountains shake their shoulders. The circular felt tents of the Arjiki nomads collapse, and the herders just put them up again.”

“Mr. Boss imagines the magician of the Grimmerie went to be a hermit in some cave in the Great Kells and an earthquake slammed boulders over the entrance. He’s either dead or trapped for good. Though I think if he’s that magnificent a wizard he could magick open a mountain.”

“Yes, Elphaba mentioned hearing about a magician in the outback. Before her time. Like everyone else, he’s no doubt waiting for his cue to return in Oz’s bleakest hour, et cetera.”

They strolled around the corner of the Clock, looking for a way into its secrets, and for a way into each other’s. He never calls her his mother, thought the Lion. Only Elphaba.

He never comments on Elphaba, thought Liir. What did the Lion really think of her? Lunatic recluse or dangerous insurrectionist? Or mad scientist lady making flying monkeys with magic stitchery?

But who cares what Brrr thought, when Elphaba was dead and gone, dead and gone. “What time does it tell?” asked Liir.

“It’s not a real Clock. The time on it is fixed. It’s always a minute short of midnight.” They poked through the broken drawers and cracked shutters. Spools of orange thread, scissors, pots of evil glop whose drips obscured their handwritten labels. “Did the dwarf used to sit up all night preparing for the next day’s revelations?” asked Liir.

“No. The magic of it was beyond the dwarf. He was only the custodian.”

“Not the custodian of much, now. It would make useful firewood this winter.”

“I think he’d kill you before he’d let you tear it apart.”

“I call that an unhealthy affection for the theater.” Liir swallowed. “Speaking of affections, healthy or otherwise, do you think there’s any chance you’re going to release my daughter into our care?”

The Lion gave him a sharp look. “We brought her here, didn’t we?”

“Oh, yes. And all due gratitude. Medals for courage, bravocatories on the bugle. All that. But it’s been several months now, and Candle frets that Rain continues to sleep in your room. You’ve planted yourself like a big furry hedge between a daughter and her parents.”

“I don’t tell her where to sleep. Neither do I tell her what to say or think or feel.”

“Candle will go mad if Rain doesn’t open up to us some.”

“You can’t be surprised. There was always going to be some collateral damage. Don’t be disingenuous. I mean, you did let her go, after all. What kind of parents would do that?”

Liir’s eyes were agate hard and dry. “I believe you’ve never been a father. So you don’t understand. Any parent whose child was in danger would do the same.”

“I know what justification means. Believe me. Had a fair amount of time nursing wounds of my own and trying out different explanations for all my behavior. In the end, you know what? I’m the only one responsible for what I chose to do.”

Liir sat on a boulder and kicked at some snow.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” said the Lion. “You had your reasons. Just don’t go accusing me of, I don’t know, whatever you might call it.”

“Alienation of affections.”

Brrr observed how readily the phrase came to his old friend’s lips. The Lion growled low, warningly.

Liir relented. Head sunk in his hands, he began to tell the Lion the story of Rain’s birth nearly a decade ago. He and a friend had been trapped in a siege at a mauntery in the Shale Shallows—

“I know. Your bucko companion. Trism bon Cavalish,” supplied Brrr. Liir’s head whipped up. “I was doing some state work for the EC before I got mixed up with the crew of the Clock,” admitted the Lion. “An old maunt named Yackle told me about your handsome sweetheart.”

“That part of the story is over.” Liir went on to tell how he’d escaped the mauntery by broom. Flying by night above Cherrystone’s forces. Leaving Trism to make his way by land, if he could, to the secret haunt where Candle, pregnant with Rain, was waiting for Liir. By the time Liir arrived six weeks later, after the Conference of the Birds, Candle admitted to him that Trism had indeed shown up. Briefly. But she wouldn’t say what had happened. Something had happened. Affection, lust, attack, revulsion, envy—she never clarified it, and Liir had stopped asking. Husbands manage their silences like stock portfolios. He’d left again, to escort the corpse of a dead princess toward an elephants’ graveyard. By the time he’d returned, Candle had given birth to Rain just as Cherrystone’s men had sniffed out Apple Press Farm. They were closing in, but Candle had slipped the noose, hoping to draw them off the scent of her child and of Liir. She had left the infant for Liir to discover. It had worked.

“How had the forces found the place you’d been hidden?” asked the Lion.

“They must have used Trism, one way or the other. Maybe they tracked him there. Or after he left, they caught him and beat the information out of him. Either way, he betrayed us, and betrayed our daughter. Intentionally or through stupidity. Neither excuse is forgivable.”

“What happened then?”

The Messiars from the EC had intercepted Candle. Turned out she’d been cradling and crooning to a bundle of washing, not a child. Thinking her simple, they’d let her go. Some advantages to being a filthy Quadling! Candle had taken herself to the mauntery to rest up from the unhealed bleeding that had followed childbirth. Not knowing any of this yet, Liir had headed west, into the wilderness, with the child in his arms. He’d followed the Vinkus tribe from which he’d recently parted.

“I know the Scrow,” pointed out the Lion. “With their elephant chief, Princess Nastoya. I was with you the day you met them, on our way back from killing the Witch at Kiamo Ko.”

“Even you’ve bought into the propaganda? You were there.” Liir spat. “You didn’t kill any witch! You and I were locked in the scullery.”

“Figure of speech. We were talking about the Scrow.”

Relenting, Liir continued. Through his years of tending the dying Princess, the new chieftain, a fellow named Shem Ottokos, had learned something about the magic of disguises. Liir had meant to apply to the Scrow for sanctuary, and Ottokos had agreed to extend it. But only if Rain could be suitably hidden so as to bring no trouble to the Scrow or to herself should she ever be found.

“Hidden how?” asked the Lion.

“You haven’t understood? You’ve been traipsing around with my daughter for who knows how long, and you’re that clueless?”

“I know she walks a bit askew from the rest of us,” said Brrr, as gently as he could. He knew what he knew, by now, but wanted to hear it spoken.

“She was born green,” said Liir. “That’s like being born with a bull’s-eye painted on your forehead. Ottokos did his best, but he couldn’t manage the spell to conceal her stamp of bloodline. Iskinaary, who kept a watch on the comings and goings around the Scrow camp, spotted a caravansary approaching with some EC personnel. So I lit out with the child in the opposite direction—by now Rain was about a year old, maybe—and I circled overland back toward Apple Press Farm. Back toward Munchkinland. I didn’t really know where to go, where we could be safe—”

“Welcome to Oz, where nowhere is safe,” said the Lion.

“I stopped at the mauntery in the Shale Shallows and was reunited with Candle. We were beside ourselves with fear for our green Rain. We were young. I mean, I was twenty-four, roughly, but a young twenty-four. A stupid twenty-four. We set out without a destination, just to keep moving. A chance encounter with—with a snake charmer on the road—it provided us our only hope, and we arranged to have Rain disguised as a pale human of uncertain lineage. Then, as we approached Munchkinland’s border, I thought of Lady Glinda, who had helped me several times before. We presented ourselves at Mockbeggar Hall, and Lady Glinda deigned to see me. She took a good look at Rain, and persuaded us that the safest place to hide the girl would be in her own household. Among the staff. So hidden that Rain herself wouldn’t know about her origins, and couldn’t give herself away.”

So that was how it had happened. Lady Glinda, the protector of Elphaba’s granddaughter. Well, it sort of figured.

“That was the best thing to do for a young child, I suppose.” The Lion’s tone was supercilious; he could hear it himself, and couldn’t help it.

“Hey. She’s still alive,” said Liir. “It’s almost ten years later, and she’s still alive. Candle was apprehended and let go, and I’ve been an outlaw since I was a teen, but Rain—Rain was safe.”

The Lion said, “They were never looking for her. They wanted the Grimmerie. They still want it. The highest secrets of magic that Oz has ever held are contained in that wretched book. They couldn’t care a twig about a stupid angry little girl. And you made her that way, by giving her up. You squandered her childhood.”

“What gives you the right of superiority? So you walked her home from school. Kudos. We’re grateful, or haven’t we mentioned it? But note that she is alive to be walked, Sir Brrr.”

Liir had a capacity for cold rage, Brrr observed, just like Elphaba’s own. But Brrr hadn’t come here to be woodshedded. “How alive, exactly? She’s more like an otter in human shape than she is like a girl. Look, I mean, really. Lady Glinda? She couldn’t raise a child. She couldn’t raise an asparagus fern.”

“Well, you can yield Rain back to us and give us a second chance. Stop circling about her with your big furry mane, keeping her chained to your heel.”

“She’s been abandoned one time too many,” snapped Brrr. “Listen, I don’t mutter about you behind your back. And I don’t lock any doors. She can walk your way any time she wants. She’s a child and she’ll come to trust who she can, in her own good time. I don’t have anything to do with that. But I’m not leaving her alone with you here till she’s ready.”

They were all but shouting at each other. They stood en garde, panting, though their concern for the child’s welfare was mutual. “You’ve been so thoughtful,” said Liir, seething. “Hauling Rain off with the Grimmerie. When the Emperor of Oz has been seeking it on and off all these years. That’s a really secure situation for a child?”

“Don’t think the irony hasn’t escaped me. With the Emperor calling in all magical totems. Isolating us for easier location. You think I’ve enjoyed becoming a sitting duck just to tend to your daughter?”

Liir was nonplussed. The book was a huge part of the problem. “How much longer can the Grimmerie be kept out of the Emperor’s hands, especially now that its charmed vault has come to its untimely end?”

Brrr shrugged. At least Liir’s tone was more moderate. The Lion paced around the fourth corner of the Clock. Liir followed. They looked up at the clock face just as a small bird, a Wren, came pock-pocking down out of the sky. She landed without the mildest sense of alarm upon the dragon’s snout. The man and the Lion looked up at it, and their jaws dropped, for several reasons.

The Lion was agog because the clock face, which had read one minute to midnight since the first moment he’d seen the Clock two years earlier, now read midnight.

“We meet again,” said the Wren to the Lion; it was the humble bird who had warned them to flee the Emperor’s soldiers on the Yellow Brick Road.

As for Liir, he didn’t dare believe he recognized the bird. Wrens, after all, look rather alike, at least to human eyes. But as the Wren spoke, Liir knew her to be Dosey, whom he’d last seen a decade ago after the Conference of the Birds had swum the skies over the Emerald City crying Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!

Dosey said, “Mercy fritters, but I’ve been winging your way for a week! Begging pardon, gents, but your Goose just told me you were having a bit of a chinwag down this way. I thought you’d want to hear what I have to say. The message comes direct from General Kynot. I translate from High Eagle. ‘Apparently a few months ago, the impossible happened. She’s back.’ ”

“She’s back?” said Liir.

“Elphaba?” said the Lion, his blood hurrying at once, so he could get himself out of the way.

“If you please, sir, not Elphaba. Dorothy,” replied the Wren. “Dorothy Gale.”

8.

At the Chancel of the Ladyfish, the dwarf snarled at Liir and the Lion. “I don’t believe in Dorothy. Wasn’t that all a ruse? Some tricky business to divert the crowd while the Wizard was being turfed out of the Palace?”

“She was real enough to me,” said Liir.

“And to me,” said the Lion. “Haven’t I got the emotional scars to prove it?”

“Assuming a Dorothy,” ventured Nor, “I doubt she’s back. Her supposed return sounds like just another variation on the theme of the legendary Ozma. ‘Beautiful heroine disappears, but she’ll return in our darkest hour, amen.’ Hah. That sort of bluff only postpones and displaces our need to reform. Listen: nobody ever comes back to save us. We’re on our own.”

“Dorothy wasn’t as beautiful as all that,” said the Lion, “so I doubt she’d be convincing as everyone’s favorite martyr mounting a comeback tour. I bet it isn’t her. Probably some out-of-work male escort doing a send-up. In our modern times nobody can tell the difference anymore.”

“Let’s assume it is Dorothy,” said Liir. “For the sake of conversation. Once upon a time I almost had a crush on her, after all. How did she get back? What’s she doing here? Where is she?”

“What’s said, sir, is that she arrived about a half a year ago,” said Dosey. “Up in the Glikkus. The Scalps jostled up and down. Tremors were felt all over Oz. Some called it an earthquake, others the Great Heave-Ho. A Glikkun village known as High Mercy were flattened, just about to pebbles, they say. And when they’s cleared away the rubble they finds this female character in a squarish conveyance of some sort. Its dented walls are only open iron curlicues, but the frillwork has kept the creature from being crushed until herself could be dug out.”

Rain looked up. “We had our earthquake too. The Clock did. Remember? All them buildings fallen, after the Clock rolled down the hill into the poppy pasture?”

They had remembered. Mr. Boss was looking uneasy.

“Did our Clock cause Dorothy’s earthquake?” asked Rain.

“Don’t speak about what you don’t know,” snapped Mr. Boss.

“We all did that, we’d be mute forever,” Liir said softly, in her defense, and a silence followed until Candle brokered a return to the subject.

“So what happened?” she asked. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Almost total good luck for them Glikkuns,” warbled the Wren. “The entire village were out larking in some high meadow. It were a holiday, seems, and nobody bothering in the local emerald mine. Which was great good fortune, don’t you know, as those mines collapsed whole and entire. But a cow tied up to a tree came to a sorry end.”

“So what did they do with this Dorothy?” asked Nor. “Where is she now?”

“Since she came to ’em caged in a sort of cell, all imprisoned already, they blamed her for the wreck of their homes. Then the pox and parcel of ’em up and moved into the village next door, which had seen no damage to speak of. They brought her with them. None could say whether she was concussed or whether she’d arrived two worms short of a breakfast, if you catch my drift.” Dosey looked around brightly for an opinion about Dorothy’s capacities. No one spoke.

“Anyroad,” she continued, “they tended to her for months until she recovered somewhat of her memory. Apparently she’d been hauling about some little dog, but it had gone missing. Either got itself crushed in the rubble or took its chance to make a getaway through the bars while Dorothy was trapped inside. By the time herself was sound enough to remember her name, the snows had come. The pass down into Munchkinland is closed until spring—gotta get through snow season and most of mud season before anyone can go cross-country. But ’em Glikkuns has alerted Colwen Grounds, and they mean to send her down there. For legal processing and what-have-you.”

“So Dorothy is back in Oz.” Liir could hardly believe it.

“Word has it that when she finally realized she was in Oz, she said, ‘I suppose that cow was a sacred cow, beloved of the nation and so on,’ and then wasn’t she all over crying like she cain’t warm to the pleasures of travel.”

“If the Glikkuns had aligned with the Gillikinese instead of Munchkinlanders, she’d be on her way to the Emerald City for a high royal celebration,” said the Lion. “A return to old times! Music, parades, the whole foldiddly fuss.”

“Instead, she’ll be sent from High Mercy to Colwen Grounds for repatriation into Munchkinland, is my guess,” surmised Mr. Boss.

“Begging your pardon, but there en’t much of High Mercy left,” said Dosey. “She’s jailed in the town next door. Little Mercy.”

Little Daffy sniffed. “Who cares about that Dorothy anymore? Nothing more than a bother, always dropping in when she’s not invited.”

“I doesn’t pretend to know how any humans think, nor government officials neither,” replied the Wren. “But I’m told they’re going to hold her accountable this time.”

“For arriving on a landslide and squishing a cow?” Little Daffy laughed.

“Hey, cows have feelings too, I’m told,” interrupted the Lion.

“No, no,” said Dosey. “It weren’t no special cow with virtues or such. That Dorothy is going to stand trial for the death of Nessarose Thropp and her sister, Elphaba. That’s why I come all this way to find you. Liir and Lion especially. General Kynot thought you should know.”

“We live in the hamlet of No Mercy,” snapped the dwarf. “What do we care about what happens to her?”

“I don’t get it,” said Liir. “Didn’t the Munchkinlanders consider Nessarose something of a dictator? Sure, she was the one to call for secession! So she’s the mother of Munchkinland. But then they went sour on her because of her tyrannical piety. They’re the ones who called her the Wicked Witch of the East, after all. Now suddenly they’re missing her enough to bring her unlucky assailant to trial?”

“I en’t prepared to comment on the matter,” said Dosey. “I’m just doing the job given me by the General. You can choose to come and defend this Dorothy or not. There. I’ve delivered my message as was asked of me. I’ll be happy to accept nest for the night, and I’ll be off in the morning.”

“You’ve wasted your time, Dosey Dimwit,” insisted the dwarf. “We have no interest in this matter.”

“She’s convicted of the murder of Nessarose, she’ll be hanged.”

“Good. One less illegal immigrant to feed.”

“I agree with Liir. This doesn’t add up,” said the Lion. “Why would they bother?”

“You can’t be so thick.” Nor’s voice was cross. “It’s a public relations stunt. Don’t you see? They’re doing the scapegoating thing again. Probably some Munchkinlanders are wavering about the high cost in blood and treasury of defending their country. Nothing recommits the public to the cause than a good public mocking of the enemy.”

Nor seems to have a better sense of political gesture than the rest of us, thought Liir.

She went on. “Munchkinlanders stoop this low, they’re courting danger. We’ve been talking all winter about the need to keep out of the gunsights of the Emperor of Oz. But you know, certain individuals among us are in as much danger from Munchkinland.” Her eyes passed toward Rain meaningfully, flitted away. “If Elphaba were still alive,” Nor pressed on, “her presence would negate the Emperor’s claim to Munchkinland. Though he’s her brother, she’d take precedence, by age and by dint of her gender.”

“And so does her issue,” said the Lion wearily. “Even if you’re male, Liir. And your issue even more than you—when she reaches her majority.”

Now they all looked at Rain. She squirmed under their attention. She had an even stronger right to be ruler of Munchkinland than her great-uncle Shell, Emperor of Oz, did. The Emperor must know this too, if rumor of Rain’s birth had been beaten out of Trism bon Cavalish. What chance the Munchkinlanders were also factoring in some advantage in locating Rain? The Munchkinlanders had just as much interest in finding her too—maybe more. Her presence there would pull the rug out from under Shell’s claims.

The girl might be in no less danger now than she’d been in during the past decade.

“She’s not safe unless she flies,” said Dosey, voicing what they were all thinking. “And you must fly with her, of course. You’re her flock.”

“Ah, we’ve got wing-cramp,” said the dwarf. “We’re ready for a cunning little bedsit with a coal fire. You bring unwelcome gossip, little birdy-on-the-breeze. Always crying panic. Go find yourself a perch somewhere else.”

Candle rarely spoke before all of them, and her voice was deferential. Her fingers knotted on the tabletop before her. “Dosey is as welcome to stay here as you are, Mr. Boss.”

Liir interceded. “Dosey, let’s go outside, for a moment, while Candle prepares you a perch.”

Iskinaary apparently took Liir’s attention to Dosey otherwise. He hissed in that aggressive way Geese have, lunging at the Wren as if to wrench her legs off. The Goose was rewarded by a wet little plop of bird spatter on his bill while Dosey escaped, squawking, “Heavens ahead a’us! En’t we all confederates and veterans of Kynot’s Conference?”

Out in the air again, Liir tried to wipe the smile off his face. “Envy runs in every direction that air and light do,” he told Dosey. “Never thought I’d see that old Goose go after another Bird.”

“I can see ’e’s your familiar, as ever was,” replied the Wren. “Not one to stick my beak in where I’m not wanted, I’m not. I’ll take myself downslope. I can see to my own needs.”

“That would be a disgrace.” Liir wished there were a way to embrace a Bird; he put his finger out, and the Wren hopped upon it. “It’s been ten years since the Conference where I met General Kynot and Iskinaary and all you others. How is he, the crusty old salt?”

“The Eagle is ready, steady, and stalwart as ever, if afflicted with wing-nits, sadly. Cain’t fly as high as he once did. But he sends his regards.”

“Where is he located?”

“That’s confidential, begging your pardon, sir. He don’t command a mighty following anymore, mind. But we Birds is always suspect of treachery by every party, given our freedom to wander the skies. So we keeps certain facts close to our breast-feathers as we can do. Pays to be circumspect.”

“Ought we, up here in our own aerie, to be cautious about any particular Bird population?”

“Cain’t say for certain. Birds of unlike feather rarely flock together—that was the great success of Kynot’s Conference. We various clans and congregations, we don’t much attach to one another. Nor do we go in for argy-bargy. I’d say we mostly minds our own affairs.”

“But you’ve gone out of your way to find us and tell us about Dorothy.”

“I’m nothing special,” said Dosey. “But I had my reasons.”

Liir cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m a bit stout in the bosom, or where my bosom would be if I had a bosom,” said Dosey. “And my hearing en’t all that particular, and there’s silver in my wing and a rasp in my morning song. But when the word was going around about this Dorothy, and that you and the Lion would want to know in case she needed some defending, I volunteered for the mission.”

“Strong feeling for a human being you never met.”

“It en’t that Dorothy. She can hang on a gibbet,” said Dosey, cheerfully enough. “It were you, sir. Begging your pardon and all that. I’ve had my own clutches in my time, and when the current nestlings call to me, they have to chirp so many greats before the granny that they run out of breath. So I know what it’s like when an egg rolls out of the nest. Your child were just about to be born when we was flying together, and I had a scared feeling that the Emperor might swoop like a serpent upon your nest, in revenge. I wanted to see for myself, sir. I’m glad you’ve got her tight under your wing now.”

“You’re a mother many times over,” said Liir. “You’ve only observed her a moment here or there, I know. But what do you make of her?”

Dosey’s bill was made of chitinous horn. The only way Liir could identify a smile was by the way her downy cheeks puffed out, tiny grey berries at the corners of her beak. “Boy broomist, listen to me. She’s the ugliest little duckling I ever seen, but as I lives and breathes, she’s got flight in her, too.”

9.

Once the Wren departed, next morning, the claws came out.

“We have no reason to trust that Dosey,” said Mr. Boss. “She could’ve been lying through that common little beak of hers. How do we know Dorothy’s really returned? Far more likely she was killed as dead as Ozma was murdered before her.”

“Utter rot,” said Liir. “Dosey put herself in considerable danger, making a solo flight at this winterish time of year, just to find us. She has no reason to lie. The Birds are aligned neither to Munchkinland nor to Loyal Oz.”

“But Liir,” said his wife. “We can’t fly like Dosey over the border, not during wartime. We can’t forge into Munchkinland as if we’re off to market day. Who knows how fiercely those margins are now guarded? So you maintain a holdover affection for Dorothy. Fine. But whoever this Dorothy turns out to be these days, surely she won’t want your child put in danger?”

Liir saw the wisdom of this, but not the charity.

Brrr cleared his throat. “Dorothy has nothing to do with a civil war between Loyal Ozians and Munchkins. She’s a political prisoner no less than Nor was at her age. If Rain were in the same situation, wouldn’t we go through hell trying to rescue her?”

“For you, there’s a bruised child behind every campaign isn’t there,” said the dwarf. “I’m just saying.”

“She’ll be a matron by now,” argued Brrr, “and in any case, she asked me to look after Liir. Doesn’t she deserve the same? What friends has she in Oz, if not us?”

“It’s a diversion,” insisted the dwarf.

“From what? Saving your own skin? I’m all for rolling out,” said Brrr.

So was Nor. There was a reason the Lion and Nor had struck sparks as a couple. Brrr saw it more clearly now. Nor was no homebody, and Brrr would rather be on the prowl, too. At this late date, with arthritis in his hips and a permanent case of halitosis, Brrr was discovering a certain quality of Lion about himself he’d never identified before.

It came down to a vote. They all elected to leave except Mr. Boss, who was tired of endless commuting. Rain wasn’t asked her opinion.

Iskinaary, who since Dosey’s visit had begun to shadow Liir about eight feet behind, like a shawled wife of an Arjiki chieftain except more garrulous, said, “Let’s go. What are we waiting for? If this good weather lapses, we’ll be snowed in as deep as Dorothy. All winter long.”

On the eighth day of cold sunny weather, a thaw of sorts, when the cobbles were dry of snow but the ground still hard enough not to be mud, they harnessed Brrr up to the shafts of the dead Clock. Liir wrapped the Grimmerie in what remained of Elphaba’s old black cape and carried it under his arm.

Rain shunned Nor’s outstretched hand, cradling her shell instead. Tay rode on Rain’s shoulder. Little Daffy shouted, “Come on, you,” as Mr. Boss pretended to have died of a stroke, but he got up and stumped after them.

They’d gone a third of the way down the slope, when Rain suddenly said, “Wait, but we forgot the broomflower.”

“What’s she croaking about?” asked the dwarf.

Liir put his hand to his mouth—sweet Ozma, in the stress of the moment and the presence of the Grimmerie, he had left it behind—but Rain bolted back up the hill. A few moments later she had returned balancing Elphaba’s broom over her shoulder.

“Where’d you get that flea-ridden thing?” asked Little Daffy.

“Stuck in the level chink in the stones running below the Ladyfish,” said Candle in a low voice. “How did she find it there? I thought we hid it well enough.”

“The Fishlady tolded me it was there, and not to forget it,” said Rain. “Almost I did, but then I ’membered.”

Whatever accompanied them down the hill—a mood, a spirit, an apprehension, a spookiness, a sense both of mission and of menace—made them all fall silent for quite some time. Iskinaary was the first to break out of it by singing a ditty straight out of the beer hall

The night is dark, my hinny, my hen

Romance in the air, my dove, my duck;

The less I see of you, my dear,

The more I bless my blessed luck.

Come near for a kiss, come near for a cluck,

I’ll climb aboard and blindly—
until they all told him to shut up.

Liir and Candle had made the trip through the passes north of the Sleeve of Ghastille so long ago that they hardly recognized the way back. Six, seven years ago, was it? And at a different time of year. Now, as the ragged travelers abandoned their hideaway, a cold wind gripped and pulled at their cloaks and manes and shawls. Liir looked back, squinting, at where the Chancel of the Ladyfish tucked itself against the slope. He nudged Candle to see. It was hidden to view, even though they knew where it was.

Mr. Boss insisted he wasn’t going to take the Clock into Munchkinland again. He didn’t trust those squirrely little people, except of course his wife. Who knew if General Cherrystone had put out a bulletin of arrest on the basis of the Clock’s having predicted some disaster involving the dragons in Restwater? The dwarf would rather take his chances in Loyal Oz, he said.

So the companions turned their heads west, toward the Disappointments and the oakhair forest. Maybe they were postponing the moment they would have to separate. That moment would come, soon enough, near one of the great lakes or the other. No one was certain about relative distances across the terrain, but in Oz you tended to show up where you needed to get, sooner or later.

The little detour, the loop west, would be their coda, at least for the time being. Who knew how much time they had left together? (Who ever knows?) Without naming it as such, they all felt the tug of their imminent separation. At least, all the adults did. What Rain thought, or Tay, or for that matter the Time Dragon hunched in paralysis up there, couldn’t be guessed at.

They lurched through upland meadows and past escarpments of scrappy trees, through lowland growths of protected firs, along streambeds partially glazed with ice. The warm snap had returned to the air a sense of the rot of pine needles and mud, but the air eddied with the sourness of ice, too.

They were walking into a trap.

Or they were walking home at last.

They didn’t know—who does?—where they were going.

But the world was specifically magnificent this week, in this place. Behold the diseased forest east of the Great Kells, called by some the Disappointments. Largely unpopulated due to barren soil—only scrub could grow in the wind off the Kells, and only tenacious and bitter farmers bothered to hang on. The few unpainted homesteads were scrappy, the sheds for the farmer’s goats identical to those for the farmer’s children. The companions avoided human settlements as they could, preferring to pitch camp amidst the deer droppings and rabbit tracks in the scrapey woods.

A rainstorm blew in then and parked over their heads. Their passage slowed down due to the mud, and they couldn’t build a fire. The little girl shivered but didn’t complain. Four or five days in, they came to a dolmen on which someone had painted destinations. One side was scrawled with VINKUS RIVER FORD, TO THE WEST, with an arrow pointing left. The other side read MUNCHKINLAND AND RESTWATER LAKE. Brrr was for turning east, but Liir stopped him.

“We’re not more than a day or two from Apple Press Farm in the other direction,” he told them. “Where Rain was born. We still have two months before Dorothy can travel down from the Glikkus to be put on trial. Let’s take a couple of days at the farm. At the least, we’ll have a roof over our heads. We can dry out. Warm up the child. Maybe something survived in the root garden after all these years.”

“I didn’t pack for a nostalgia tour,” said Mr. Boss, but Liir insisted. Candle agreed that they might enjoy a night or two with a fire in a hearth before proceeding cross-country toward Munchkinland. Since it was only a brief interruption of their progress, the company turned about, keeping the Great Kells to their left. The massed fortress of basalt and evergreen and snow looked inhospitable but breathtaking.

That night the rain let up for a spell. The company took turns singing around a campfire and telling stories. Nor told the tale of the Four Improbable Handshakes. Candle sang in Qua’ati, something long and inexpressibly boring, though everyone smiled and swayed as if entranced. (Except Rain.) Iskinaary barracked a raft of Goose begats, and Mr. Boss finally riled himself out of his somnolence to provide a few short poems of questionable virtue.

A certain young scholar of Shiz

Right before a philosophy quiz

Guzzled splits of champagne

So that he could declaim

“I drink, and therefore I is.”

And

A sweet cultivated young Winkie

Could do civilized things with her pinkie

Which excited young men

Who cried, “Do me again!”

Though the pinkie emerged somewhat stinky.

“That’ll do,” said Nor, Candle, and Little Daffy, all at once.

Even Liir, without a whole lot of confidence in his tone, tried to dredge up some scrap of song he had sung when he was in the service. He could only get a bit of the one called, he thought, “The Return of His Excellency Ojo.”

Sing O! for the warrior phantom phaeton

Carrying Ojo over the mountain

His saturnine sword was the scimitar moon

Soon, thundered Ojo, vengeance soon!

This went on too long and no one could tell what Ojo was trying to achieve, and Liir said that was pretty much standard operating procedure for the military. But then Little Daffy recalled something from her own childhood.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

“How does it go now?” She tried again.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

Woke to life in a pumpkin bed

Made his breakfast of pumpkin bread

Fell and squashed his pumpkin head

Went to the farmer and the farmer said

Pumpkins smash but can’t be dead

Plant your brains in the pumpkin bed

Grow yourself a brand-new head.

That’s what he said he said he said

’Cause the farmer liked his pumpkin bread.

Rain admired that one and clapped her hands.

“That’s a nursery ditty from a soundly agrarian society,” said the Lion, “no doubt about it.”

“Do you have a song to sing?” Candle asked of Rain.

“I knew about a fish once that was locked in a apple-shaped room in the ice. But I don’t know what happened to it.”

They waited in case she might remember; they waited with that affectionate and bothersome patience with which elders heap expectation on the shoulders of the young. When Rain spoke again, though, she seemed not to be aware of their appetite for anything more about the fish. She said, “I don’t know what happens to us.” She said it as a question.

“Oh well,” said Candle. “None of us knows that.”

“What happens to us is a joke, and don’t pretend otherwise,” said the dwarf.

“What happens to us is sleep,” said Liir firmly. “Time to go have a pee, Rain. I’ll walk you a little way out.”

Tay didn’t let Rain go anywhere without scampering after her, no matter how asleep it had seemed to be. It woke itself up when Rain moved, and it followed Rain and her father to a blind of scattercoin, where Liir turned his head just far enough to simulate modesty, but not far enough to allow Rain to escape his peripheral vision.

They wandered about for three more days, slogging through mud and sluicing through rain that sometimes preferred to be snow. Between low tired hills, through unnamed valleys formed by streams threading down from the Kells for ten thousand years. “You ought to know if we’re closing in on the farm,” said Liir to Candle as they blundered along shallow slopes. Their ankles all ached from the slant. “You can see the present.”

“This isn’t the present anymore,” said Candle. “Apple Press Farm is in our past now, and one hill looks much the same as another.”

Finally they discovered the right arrangment of slopes and dips, and they began to drive down ancient agricultural tracks kept clear by animal passage. They came upon a tapering winter meadow. A thwart-hipped woman with a basket and a set of rusting loppers was moving about the weird beautiful verdant green glowing wetly in the thin snow and the thinning rain.

“As I live and breathe,” said Little Daffy.

The woman turned, straightened up, her hand on her hip. “So the prodigal turncoat returns to the nunnery,” she said. “It’s hallelujah time; get the bacon out of the larder and trim off the moldy bits.”

“Nice to see you too, Sister Doctor,” said Little Daffy. “What are you doing here?”

“Double the work I’d be doing if you hadn’t scarpered,” said Sister Doctor. “If you’ve come home for forgiveness, you’re going to have to fill out quite a bill of penitence first. Who are your traveling companions?” She took a pair of spectacles from her apron pocket and reared back a little to see the Clock at the meadow gate. “Not that thing again? And the Lion—Sir Brrr, I remember, I’m not that gaga yet—and the dwarf too. So you’ve joined a cult, Sister Apothecaire.”

“It’s Little Daffy now,” said the Munchkinlander. “I’ve left the mauntery.”

“I suppose you have.” Sister Doctor snapped the spectacles closed so fiercely that one lens popped out and lost itself in the snow. Rain and Tay dug it out for her. “Are you here to sing a few pagan carols and pass the basket? You’ll get neither coin nor comfort from us.”

“I always admired your largesse,” said Little Daffy. “But what are you doing here?”

“Trying to keep the community together, that’s what. When the army of Loyal Oz advanced on the mauntery two years ago, we had no choice but to flee. It didn’t go unnoticed that you absented yourself at the first opportunity. We assumed you must have hurried back to your homeland.” She said homeland as if she were saying bog.

“I went back to release our guests from their locked chambers,” said Little Daffy, “and I apologize to no one for that. I fell on the stairs, and by the time I came around, your dust on the horizon had already settled. Thanks for the show of sorority. Sister.”

“Well, let bygones be bygones and all that,” said Sister Doctor with a new briskness. “In a panic, missteps are taken. Have you come to rejoin your community?”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“Where else would we be? The mauntery was burned to the ground.”

“Sister Doctor. The mauntery is made of stone.”

“Well, I mean the roofs and floors. The furniture, such as it was. There’s nothing to return to without a massive rebuilding effort. And our divine Emperor of Oz isn’t about to channel funds into the repair of a missionary outpost that he ordered to be torched. So we’ve crowded in here.”

“How did you come to find this place?”

“It always belonged to the mauntery,” replied the maunt. “Back in the days of the Superior Maunt, as you may remember, some skilled artisans among us used this outclave as a place to hide a printing press. We circulated broadsides anonymously, warning against the increasing theocracy of the Emperor. Ha! If we only knew. And him divine, can you credit it. Not a smart career move for a bunch of unmarried women trying to live out of the limelight. And with Lady Glinda our sponsor, no less. Oh, a great vexation for her too, I’ll wager, unless she swanned her way through it.”

Brrr looked at Little Daffy to see how she was taking the news of her former community. The little bundle from Munchkinland seemed at home, having this discussion with an associate who had been both a comrade and an adversary. The Lion said, “News of the old gang is all very well, but we’re sore and soggy here and more than a bit peckish. I hope you’re going to invite us in.”

At this Sister Doctor seemed to recover her sense of stature. “Well, we have less than we ever had, but of what we have, we share willingly. I wonder if winter broccoli appeals?”

“A hot bath would appeal more,” said Liir.

Sister Doctor took out her spectacles again, wiped the rain off them, and peered at him through the intact lens. “I thought I recognized that voice. It’s Liir, isn’t it—the one they say is Elphaba’s son. Oh, now the soup is on the boil. What are you doing with this lot?”

“Hoping for supper, maybe.”

“I’ll get you something, something for all of you.” She threw her implements together in her basket and looked over her shoulder. “It isn’t safe to come into the farm, though. Let me organize something and I’ll be back.”

“Why not safe?” asked Mr. Boss. “We can defend ourselves against maunts in the wilderness.”

“Eat first; we’ll talk later. Just hunker down here, and come no farther.”

“Well, we’re not going to push down the barricades, but I say, we have a child with the chills. A hot posset would be most—”

“That’s an order,” said Sister Doctor. Little Daffy put her hand on the dwarf’s arm, and he fell silent, although he growled like a bratweiler. “Build a fire, that won’t hurt,” added the maunt. “There’s a mess of drying firewood stacked up a half mile on, near where the orchard peters out.”

They walked through the apple orchard—candelabrum of branches sporting sprigs of snow, not all that unlike apple blossom—and Liir remembered the instance of magic he’d witnessed here. Using the power of her music and her own musky capacity, Candle had called up the voices of the dead to help the Princess Nastoya lose her human disguise and to revert to her Elephant nature, and so finally to die the way she wanted and needed.

Now, to return to this orchard…! Another season, another crackling moment in his life. Rewarding, not morose. He reached for Candle’s hand, and she squeezed his in return. Maybe everything would be all right. Sooner or later.

He recalled an outdoor oven some distance from the farmhouse and sheds. They built a fire. The grate was hooded and the flue hooked, so the fire could burn in the intermittent rain. They rinsed some of the broccoli that Sister Doctor had left behind. They munched on woody florets, hoping for better. Rain sat closest and grew less grey. In an hour the maunt was back with a donkey on which were saddled baskets and bags with bottles of claret, a ham, ropes of onions and twists of sourswift. A tablecloth, once unbundled, revealed six loaves of onion bread and a caramel cake burned on the bottom. “Heaven,” said the Lion. “Don’t suppose you brought any port, or some cigars?”

“Maunts go through cigars like termites through doorsills. We have none to spare.”

“Thought you might say that.”

Beneath the saddlebags, Sister Doctor had piled four or five pelts and two woolen blankets. The rain had faltered again, but the shadows blued up in a frosty way. Liir was about to renew the request for indoor lodging, but Sister Doctor anticipated his request.

“You can’t be allowed to stay, I’m afraid,” she told them. “I was distracted by seeing Sister Apothecaire—Little Daffy as she styles herself now. I didn’t really take in the measure of the difficulty until I realized you had Liir with you. It’s too dangerous for you to come into the house. No one must know you are here.”

“You have stool pigeons among the maunts?” asked the Lion. “So much for your professed neutrality.”

“I’m protecting my sisters as much as I’m trying to protect you. We’ve been visited three times in the past two years by emissaries from the EC military to check and see who’s been through. I can’t vouch that every voice among our sorority is equally devoted to neutrality—how could I? How could I plead knowledge into all of their souls? Nor can I attest that they’d stand up to harsh questioning if the investigators sniffed out that we were hiding something. Better for all that you should move on.”

“What are they looking for?” asked Liir, and “When were they last here?” asked his half-sister, at the same time.

“You’ve eluded them for so long that some believe you are dead,” said Sister Doctor to Liir. “But they don’t believe you brought the Grimmerie into the Afterlife with you. So they’re convinced they’ll find it sooner or later. You may have heard that the invasion of Munchkinland is stalled. General Cherrystone’s army has taken Restwater, but the struggle around Haugaard’s Keep is a standoff. The Munchkinlanders can’t reclaim the lake; nor can the EC forces advance as far as Colwen Grounds to finish their reannexation of Munchkinland. The Munchkinland farms won’t sell bread or grain to Loyal Oz until the invading forces yield Restwater and retreat.”

“Never yield,” hissed Little Daffy, almost to herself.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Sister Apothecaire, Munchkinland won’t starve. But with no one to sell bread to, much of their unharvested grain just rots in the fields. The EC meanwhile hankers for bread but has plenty of water to drink. The term on a game board is called stalemate, I think.”

“How does this figure in surveillance of maunts?” asked the Lion.

“Isn’t it plain as the nose on your plain face? The EC once again ramps up its campaign to find the Grimmerie. In the hopes that it might reveal secrets of how to unleash a mightier force against central Munchkinland, and strike a blow at the heart of the government at Colwen Grounds. Finishing the job.

“In short,” she said, “if you lot thought you were out of danger, you’re sadly mistaken. Whoever travels with Liir Thropp courts danger, by association.”

“And you’ve given us broccoli, bread, and wine,” said Little Daffy. “Sister, thank you.”

“I maintain my vows.” She passed the strawberry compote for spooning upon the more burnt bits of caramel cake.

They told her what they’d heard about the legendary Dorothy making a comeback tour. Sister Doctor hadn’t been apprised of this, but she wasn’t much interested. “We haven’t had a reprisal of the Great Drought for some time now, but if it should come as soon as next summer, punishing the fields with blight, the Munchkinlanders have little left in their coffers to buy supplies from Loyal Oz, and trading agreements are suspended anyway. The uneasy balance settled upon now seems more or less peaceful—only a few soldiers die a week on one side or the other, in this skirmish or that—but one doesn’t know who will give out first, Loyal Oz or Munchkinland.”

“You’ve become callous,” remarked Little Daffy. “‘Only a few soldiers die a week?’ Time was you and I would go out on the battlefield and tend to the sick, and care about it.”

“Don’t hector me. I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve. I tend to my maunts and keep us out of harm’s way. Right now I’m feeding the hungry and harboring enemies of the state. I can’t do all that and work in international diplomacy too. Pass me the butter pot.”

The Lion said, “Look, we have a little girl here. Surely she deserves a roof over her head for one night? We’ve been on the road a week or more.”

“Don’t think I haven’t guessed who she is,” said Sister Doctor. “I’m trying to protect you all. Have you no sense? Or do you really not believe me?” She sighed, and then slipped off the starched yoke of her religious garb, and without evidence of humility or shame she let the bib of her garment slip down almost to her nipple. The scar on her shoulder was rippled, a plum color, like congealed tadmuck. Glossy and hideous. “Do you remember how Mother Yackle went blind? These men don’t come to play parlor games. I am trying in as calm a voice as I can to tell you that you’re in danger at Apple Press Farm. They know from that fellow Trism that you were here once, Liir and Candle, and they suspect this will be one of the places you might return. They’ve turned the house inside out three times thinking they might yet find the Grimmerie on the premises. We’ve had to put it to rights as best we could, over and over again. Thank the Unnamed God for Sister Sawblade, that’s what I say.”

She dressed herself again and concluded her sermon. “Even the house might be bugged. Do you know what I mean? We have a weird infestation of woggle-bugs. I’m told there is some thought they can be communicated with—don’t ask me how. My capacity for comprehending mystery doesn’t extend to science, only to faith. But I can’t be sure they aren’t capable somehow of alerting the next contingent of investigators that you were in residence, were I to make a mistake of mercy and let you in. You see,” she finished, “you can’t stay. For our sake, but also for your own good. Tonight, all right, to the barn, but quietly. For the sake of a croupy child. After dark. I’ll take Sister Manure off muckout detail. But tomorrow you’ll be on your way. No one will be the wiser, no one but me and the donkey. And I can stand anything.”

“She can,” said Little Daffy miserably, when she had gone. “I don’t like the old bitch anymore, but she’s a tough little biscuit, and she means what she says. Anyone else in Oz would crack under torture before she did.”

10.

Before dawn. At the sound of maunts beginning their devotional song, Sister Doctor nipped in with a cornucopia of supplies the travelers could use during the next stage of their journey. She refused to advise them which way to go or what to do. “I don’t want to know if you have the Grimmerie with you,” she told them. “However, I do believe it’s time to lose the Clock. You’d move faster without it, and what good is it doing you now?”

Liir pondered the question as they slipped away, unheeded, from Apple Press Farm. Here he had learned to love a woman—to love this wife, this mother of their child—and even more, he had learned to love at all. He had felt a pang at coming near, had been afraid, however stiff his face and controlled his upper lip, that he would mourn for the lost simpleton he’d once been. He needn’t have worried. Leaving Apple Press Farm, his mind returned to the present and the future as they headed north into drier air.

Iskinaary had kept silent while on the farm. Liir remembered only after they’d left it that the Goose, too, had been there before. Falling into step with the Bird, Liir asked him what he had concluded about the maunt’s revelations.

“I could have finished off an entire generation of woggle-bugs in an afternoon’s work,” said the Goose. “I should have thought that might be apparent, but did anyone ask me for help? Noooooo. Just a silly Goose, old Iskinaary.”

“You can be some help now, and take to the wing,” said Liir. “Do a little scouting for us. Sister Doctor’s caution seemed well founded. Some pots can take years to come to the boil, but when they do, the scalding is ferocious.”

“I’ll do that,” said the Goose. “For you. For you and Candle. Oh, and for the girl too, I suppose. By extension. Though I wish she would show a little more oomph. I don’t mean to be cruel, but she’s a bit slow out of the eggshell, isn’t she?”

“I’d go do that surveillance right now before you get an additional thrust to your liftoff by a boot in the behind,” said Liir, and Iskinaary obliged.

And then Liir thought: How are we ever going to protect her?

They walked single file. The farther from Apple Press Farm, the farther apart from one another they straggled. Even Tay kept a little distance from Rain. It was as if they had all taken in the message that there would be no safe harbor for them, not while the world was at war—so, presumably, not ever.

Liir tried to remember being Rain’s age—eight, nine, ten. Whatever it was. He had been in Kiamo Ko at that age, playing with Nor, surely? Or had Nor already been taken away by Cherrystone and his men? In any case, he’d been alone in his life, as alone as Rain seemed to be. He’d lived with his mother, with the Wicked Witch of the West (which might be the name of any mother, all mothers, he realized), but he’d lived apart, not unlike the way Rain kept apart from him and Candle. Of course Elphaba had shown little interest in him. Or if she had shown some kind of interest, he’d been too dull to read it as such—the way, presumably, Rain was too dull to recognize Liir’s love, even passion, for her.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little.

The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get—the more specificity you harvest—the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Would he ever know anything about Rain? Or would he have to accept that he would live in a world adjacent to hers, with her tantalizingly nearby, but a mystery always, growing into her own inviolable individuality?

Maybe it had been better, he caught himself thinking, if he had kept her close to his side, for even if she’d been ripped from his arms at the age of six, she would have known six good years of close fatherly affection—

No, he couldn’t think that; he couldn’t bear to. Even in an alternate history. He couldn’t tolerate the thought of her being taken from him. Even though he’d given her away.

There she loped, scuffing up snow, head down between her shoulders. He could walk the rest of his life. He would never catch up to her.

Iskinaary returned. “She was more right than she knew, that old crow,” he told Liir. “Menaciers four miles along, and on the very path we’re trudging. We’ll have to turn off. There’s a parallel track a mile to the west that looks less traveled; we should divert across country to it at once.”

They began to turn the Clock.

“We’re adjusting further and further off our goal,” complained Mr. Boss, but Brrr was hauling the cart, not him. And the Lion never minded veering off any track that led straight into the sights of marksmen.

“Later we’ll compensate and arc back eastward. If we continue to believe we should try to steal across the border into Munchkinland and be present to defend Dorothy,” said Brrr. “Though perhaps she won’t need our help. She seems to come equipped with all kinds of fatal architecture attached to her. First a farmhouse, and now this giant wrought-iron birdcage or whatever it is she was trapped in. The girl does wreak havoc on the physical universe. Why is that?”

“Shhh,” said Liir. “The soldiers may have fanned out since Iskinaary saw them half an hour ago.”

“I doubt they have,” said the Goose. “They were playing cards. Five Hand Slut, if I could read the markings, though I don’t have the eye of an eagle. They didn’t look in any particular hurry, but I’ll go take another gander. If you hear a gunshot and a strangulated cry for ‘peace among all nations! peace in our time,’ find my corpse and turn me into a Goose-feather bolster, and use me to suffocate one of our foes.” He looked proud at the thought. “We have so many.”

Liir said, “Are you going to continue to plan your own memorial service or are you going to go on a reconnaissance mission for us?”

“That Dosey has made you all military again. If I were a different sort of Goose I’d find it kind of sexy,” said Iskinaary, and took off.

For the next ten days or so Iskinaary became their early warning system. Not until he came back from his rounds and sounded the all clear would they advance another three or four miles.

Liir hauled the Grimmerie on his back. When he tried to put it in a drawer in the Clock, or on a shelf, the drawer wouldn’t open or the shelf broke. The shutters wouldn’t latch, due to new swelling in the jambs. Even in its paralysis the Clock managed to have an opinion. The Clock didn’t want the Grimmerie anymore.

A winning tribe of pygmy warthogs came through one day, snuffling around the wheels of the conveyance and peeing all over the place. Tay hissed and leapt upon the dragon’s dead snout, and the Lion went upright even in his shafts, spooked. The wagon rocked and tilted and looked about to smash to one side till Nor whipped off her shawl. She gave the warthogs a cotton lashing at which they merely laughed before continuing to rootle on through the undergrowth.

Another afternoon, the companions surprised a bear doing something downright pornographic with a beeless hive of honey. Brrr almost said “Cubbins?” in case it was his old friend—but a Gillikin Bear wouldn’t have wandered this far south, and since this bear showed no capacity for shame he couldn’t be a talking Bear.

Nor took off her shawl again and wrapped it around Rain’s head, making a blinder for her eyes so she wouldn’t too closely examine the inappropriate.

“Really, that’s disgusting,” said Little Daffy. “Wildlife.”

“Disgusting? Inventive.” Mr. Boss had perked up for the first time in weeks, and he nudged his wife. “Maybe if we ever get to a trading post we can invest in a pot of honey, honey, and have a honeymoon.”

The Goose had become a bard of advice. “Good spot to camp,” he would report, or “Long slope ahead; we’ll have to take it slow.” Or “Rainclouds on the horizon; better stop the afternoon here where the fir branches will give us cover.” Or even “Skarks passing behind us, let’s pick up the speed in case they decide they want Lion steaks for supper.”

Day after day. The winter waned, but reluctantly, with glacial speed. Finally, the beginning of woodland blossom, those brave early ground-level markers like filarettes and snowdrops.

One afternoon Iskinaary reported that they were nearing the edge of a great lake. At first the companions imagined they might have veered back toward the east. But Iskinaary said he could see no sign of habitation, no coracles or villages. Just barren cliffs around flat black water bereft of whitecaps. Devoid even of avian populations. “Kellswater, then,” said the dwarf. “Uck. I’ve seen it once or twice before. It gives me the creeps.”

“Why?” asked Rain, whose experience of lakes had only involved Restwater.

“It’s a dead lake, dead as doormats. Nothing swims in it. Neither fish nor frog. Nothing living floats upon it, not a water skeetle or a lily pad.”

“We should make a swift detour,” said Nor. “That time the Munchkinlander rebels forced the EC Messiars back into Kellswater, the soldiers didn’t so much drown as—as melt. Kellswater possesses some of the properties of acid. Cold acid. It pulled their skin from their bones even as they thrashed, we were told.”

“Well, that puts the tin hat on our hopes to practice our synchronized swimming,” said Brrr. “Oh well. No matter what they say about me in the columns, I never fancied prancing about the beach in a singlet and a cache-sex.”

“How could a lake be dead?” asked Rain. “Or how could it be alive, either?”

Little Daffy said, “Someone in the tribe of the Scrow told me that legend suggests Kumbricia the demon-goddess lives there. Or died there. Or something. Maybe she only has a summer home. I don’t remember.”

“Who is Kumbricia?”

“Stop,” said Candle. “Children don’t need to know stories like that.”

“Yes, they do,” said the Goose. “Kumbricia, little gosling, is the opposite number to Lurline, in the oldest tales of Oz. She is the hex, she is the curse, she’s always implicated when things go wrong…”

“She’s there when the shoelace snaps as you’re trying to outrun the horsemen of the plains,” said Nor.

“She’s what breathes the pox on the wheezy child for whom the poultice, oddly, won’t work,” said Little Daffy.

“She is the itch where you can’t quite reach,” said Mr. Boss.

“Stop,” said Candle. “I mean it.”

“Not before my turn,” said the Lion. “Kumbricia is the way the whole world arches its eyebrow at you before it smacks you down. Where is she, you ask? Not in the lake. Not in the pox. Not in the shoelace or the horse hooves. She’s in the interference of effects, nothing more than that. In the crossroads of possibility, giggling through her nose at us.”

“You’ll slice open the child with that nonsense!” Candle yelled at them. They almost laughed to hear her raise her high ribbony voice, but the expression on her face stopped them.

Apologetically, even though he hadn’t joined in, Liir said, “But then, on the other hand, there’s Lurlina. The soul of … of grace … grace, and—”

Mr. Boss wasn’t daunted by Candle. “No one believes in Lurline. A goddess of goodness? Forget it. She’s been taking a cigarette break since the year dot. She’s as gone as the Unnamed God. Pretty enough in the stories, to be sure, but once she finished breathing green into every corner of Oz, she vanished. No return in the second act, I’m afraid.”

“I hate you all,” said Candle. She grabbed Rain’s hand and Rain tried to pull away, but this time Candle wouldn’t let her.

“What you hate is the world,” said Mr. Boss placidly. “We’re just as blameless in talking about it as the pox is blameless, or the shoelace. What you hate is that your child is stuck here. Well, get used to it. The only exit is the final one.”

“To the bosom of Lurline,” muttered Little Daffy.

“And a scratchy bosom it is, I bet,” said the dwarf.

Liir opened his mouth again but found he couldn’t say anything more. There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing—somehow—not to give up. Not to give up on Rain, and her chances—whatever they might be. In fact, not to give up on anyone.

“I want to see the dead lake,” said Rain.

“Can’t hurt you if you don’t go near it,” said the dwarf.

But they’d been walking as they talked, and suddenly Kellswater opened up before them. The greyness of it under a fine blue sky seemed to deaden the entire district. The forest wouldn’t grow within a hundred yards of it. The margins of sand and tumbles of rock were desolate. No yellow pipers, no reeds, no bouncing sand-sprites. No breeze, no reflections. A scent of salt and iron, perhaps.

“I know a lot of families that would pay good cash to send their kids to a summer camp pitched on this shore,” murmured Mr. Boss.

“Enough, you,” said Little Daffy. “Do stop. It’s too hideous. Somehow.”

Iskinaary took wing again and circled about. They waited safely back on a limestone promontory some twenty feet above the lake. The Goose rose, banked, rose again. When he returned, he seemed shaken. “One senses almost a magnetic pull,” he told them. “On a sunny day I usually can ride the updrafts over a body of water, but this water works to the contrary. Let’s not linger here.”

“Which way looks safest?” asked Liir.

“Northeast,” replied Iskinaary. “Keeping the lake on our left. We’ll come upon the oakhair forest that spans the divide between Kellswater and Restwater. That’s as far as we go together. If the forest isn’t filled with border patrols, those heading for a rescue mission might slip eastward here and find themselves back in Munchkinland, back near the banks of Restwater. With another big push. Shall we?”

They should, yes. They would. As they turned about to leave Kellswater behind, however, a couple of stray warthogs who must have been following them these past few days came charging up the slope from the underbrush.

The warthogs of Kumbricia: innocently troublesome, like all aspects of the world.

They darted beneath the cart and between the legs of the Lion, spooking him badly but spooking Tay worse. They caught the otter for a moment, pinned him to the ground on the edge of the bluff, and played with him prettily as they readied to gore him. Brrr twisted in his shafts. The others screamed and waved their arms. Rain dashed forward, between the grunting terrors, and thwacked one of them over the forehead with her shell. It didn’t break, but blood gushed forth from an eye socket of that creature.

The rice otter broke free and dove for Rain’s leg, snaking up her thigh onto her shoulders. The second hog charged Rain. The Lion was nearest and the first to arrive in defense. Shooting his claws, he raked half the pelt off the warthog, which grunted in fury and surprise. Rain fell back into the arms of Candle and Liir. As the Lion twisted about to check for the first warthog, in case it was readying for another feint, the Clock on the wagon overbalanced. The replacement axle, carved from the sallowwood dragon wing, buckled at last. A wheel caved inward. The snout of the dragon reared up at the sky as if trying, one final time, to escape its tethered post upon this theater of doom. Its broken wings flapped, but there was no wind to catch, not in this open air tomb-land. Slowly, and then faster the Clock hurtled down the slope toward Kellswater. Wheels and shaft, temple of fate adorned with a clock face at midnight and dragon up top—and the Lion still laced to it.

The dwarf managed a partial rescue. Dragged down the bluff, still he managed to pull his dirk from some inner pouch and slash the leather harness. On sands that shifted, conspiring with gravity to drag them to their wet grave, Brrr scrabbled for a purchase. The Lion escaped, the dwarf leapt clear, but the Clock careered off the bluff. Brrr turned in time to watch the wheels, the carriage, the theater, and finally the Time Dragon disappear into oily deeps. The last thing they saw was its red red eye, until black liquid blinked out whatever final vision it might have enjoyed.

“Ladyfish got ’m at last,” murmured Rain.

And when the Lion had caught his breath—some hours later—he thought: maybe that’s why the Clock told the dwarf to avoid taking on a girl child as an associate. It could see in that decision the chance of its own destruction. When we disobeyed it—it shut down. It wouldn’t accept the Grimmerie anymore. For the Clock, then, it was only a matter of time.

11.

That was the end of the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Four days later they prepared for a parting of ways.

The dwarf expressed no preferences. Cross-country to Munchkinland or north, deeper into Loyal Oz—it made no difference now. The Clock was extinct and the Grimmerie deeded to Liir. “Come to Munchkinland,” suggested the Lion. “Without the Clock to slow us down or the book to guard, what harm might come to us? If we need to outrun a border patrol, I can easily carry you and Little Daffy on my back.” He held back from saying, “Your stint as a kindergarten supervisor is over.” He owed his life to the dwarf.

In any event, Munchkinland would be safer for the Lion, who in Loyal Oz might still be considered AWOL from his mission to locate the Grimmerie. Brrr intended to light out to Bright Lettins or to Colwen Grounds or wherever the trial of Dorothy would be staged. He had always thought Dorothy a bit of a blockhead, but not a malicious one. Maybe he could help her. It would be good to help someone. He was beginning to accept that he couldn’t do as much for his own wife as he’d have liked. He couldn’t remove from her history, by force of either comfort or magic, the fact that she’d spent some of her girlhood in prison. He couldn’t repair her. But he could, just possibly, do for Dorothy what he couldn’t do for Nor.

Whom he now would leave behind. But not, they both promised each other, for good.

Little Daffy, for her part, was eager to return to her home after all these years. She’d emigrated as a child, entering the mauntery after a stint at a home for incurables in the Emerald City, but she was returning a married woman in this time of trial. She was ready to stand at the ramparts of her homeland and spit in the eye of any gangly Emerald City Messiar who might deserve it. As long as she had a ladder to stand upon, for the height.

She kept her husband close to her side. What would he do, who would he turn out to be, now that the Grimmerie was traded to Liir, and the Clock of the Time Dragon was history? Maybe he’d find her Munchkin cousins affable, and he’d adjust to domestic life. Maybe when the troubles were over, they’d settle in her childhood home of Center Munch or even in Far Applerue, nearer the Glikkus. Perhaps Mr. Boss would find he had an affinity with the troll-people of the Glikkus, who didn’t farm but mined emeralds for their livelihood. Little Daffy didn’t know. The Clock wasn’t there to advise them. They would have to make it up as they went along.

She was glad, however, she’d collected in a few private pockets a little bit of the poppy dust from the great red flourish in the Sleeve of Ghastille. She was finding that, used in moderation, it came in handy at moving her poor aggrieved husband ahead.

The companions made their good-byes in a grove of oakhair trees. Long strands of new growth, acorns forming at the tips, dropped a kind of silent rain among them. An outdoor room laced with harp strings. As the companions stood there, reluctant to take their leave of one another, a breeze scurried along the floor of the forest. It strummed the strings of the oakhair fronds, a soft and jangled music, an orchestral evocation of the mood that had settled upon them.

“You’ll be better off the farther away from the fighting you get,” the Lion told Liir. “But, taking a leaf from Sister Doctor, don’t tell me where you’re going. It’ll be safer for you if we don’t know.”

“I don’t know myself,” said Liir. “I have an idea or two, but time will have to tell. We wish we could come with you to the defense of Dorothy. But it’s too dangerous.”

“No joke,” replied the Lion. “If you show yourself in Bright Lettins, the Munchkinlanders might impress you to take the Eminenceship of Munchkinland whether you want to do it or not. You’d give Munchkinland an edge. Your investiture would render void the claim that the Emperor Shell is making upon Munchkinland. It wouldn’t be safe for you, and certainly not safe for Rain.”

“We aren’t done keeping her hidden,” agreed Liir.

“We’ll never be done with that,” added Candle. “I think that will be our curse.”

Nor knelt down before the Lion and spoke as if to her knees, not her husband. “I don’t want you to go, but it’s for the best. You do the work at the trial that I would do if I could. The public statement is beyond me, in any venue. And I may be useful yet in helping take care of Rain. If Liir and Candle are ever recognized, if they’re accosted in any way, I’ll be able to stand in for Rain. She is my niece, after all.”

“I know,” said Brrr. “She is closer to you than I am.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Nor, “and furthermore it isn’t true. No one is closer to me than you are. But she’s in greater peril. She will be grown one day. She may be safe sooner than we think. We’ll meet up again.”

Liir took his sister’s hand as he disagreed with her. “Dear friends. While the country is at war, no living citizen is safe. If we choose to find one another again—and we may never have that choice—let’s agree to use the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a mail drop. We can leave notes for one another on paper weighed down by Rain’s favorite stone—that one with the tiny carving of the question mark sporting the head of a horse. Agreed?”

They all nodded. In this treacherous land, the chapel seemed as safe a rendezvous point as any other.

“It’s time to go,” said Liir.

“Check anytime a Goose flies overhead,” said Iskinaary to the Lion. “If I lose my bowels in your direction, it’s not personal.” He ducked his head under a wing, pretending to work at a nit, to save face in the face of strong feeling.

Rain wouldn’t come forward to say good-bye to Little Daffy or to Mr. Boss. And she wouldn’t look at Brrr. But she seemed to understand that there was a need to move on, even if she didn’t understand why. She put her grandmother’s broom on the ground. She set her shell on the ground next to it. She walked forward to the Cowardly Lion. She didn’t stretch her arms for a hug—how does a girl hug a Lion? Her arms lay straight at her side, as if she were a member of a military guard on duty. She sloped forward and she fell woodenly against the Lion’s cheek and mane and brow. She didn’t cry, but leaned upright against his face as he cried for both of them.

The Judgment of Dorothy

1.

By night the Lion and his pair of comrades crossed into Munchkinland without incident. They’d skirted to the north, avoiding Haugaard’s Keep and those aggrieved lake villages. Restwater and the Pine Barrens were behind them. It felt pretty damn good to be pacing a well-maintained stretch of the Yellow Brick Road. The Free State of Munchkinland might be nearing insolvency, but trust little farming people to keep their blue roofing tiles scrubbed clean of birdshit and their tomatoes staked as if they were prize philanthriums.

“The Munchkinlanders,” said Little Daffy, “call this season of the year Seedtime.”

“I can see why,” said Brrr. It seemed to belie the anxiety of wartime, to spit in its face, this bounty of Munchkinland. Mile after mile of pasture rilled with green fringe. Paddocks dizzy with birdsong and cloudy with bugs. Meadows patrolled by farmers, by the occasional tiktok contrivance on its wheels and pulleys and traction belts. “A Gillikin abomination in Munchkinlander fields is my partisan sentiment,” said Little Daffy.

“Machinery in exchange for grain. It’s called free trade,” said Brrr.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the traditional scarecrow. Any chance we’re going to run into your friend? Might he be heading to rescue Dorothy too?”

“Doubtful. He had the brains to make a clean break of the matter. Me, I’m too much of a coward.”

“Mmm,” said Mr. Boss, which was as opinionated as he got these days.

“No wonder this part of Munchkinland is known as the Corn Basket,” said the Lion. He had only ever seen the scrappier bits, the hardscrabble places that Animals had retreated to a generation or two ago, when Loyal Oz kicked them out of the law and commerce and the tonier echelons of the banks and colleges. Now he saw Animals in the fields, more than he’d expected. True, they were labor rather than management. But it was still work. “Do they comb off anything in the way of sharing the profits?”

“I couldn’t possibly say,” puffed Little Daffy. “I left Munchkinland years ago, before the infusion of new labor. Why? Are you looking for a farmhand position after we scope out this business about the trial of Dorothy?”

Well, he wasn’t. He’d done his share of farmwork on pocket handkerchief farms to the south. Barely subsistence enterprises. He’d hauled manure and brought in spattery little crops. He’d been paid in last winter’s carrots and he’d been loaned a flea-infused blanket to sleep under. No one had talked to him for seven years, and that had been fine with him. But had central Munchkinland always been so prosperous? He hadn’t noticed. Too distracted by self-loathing.

With every mile Little Daffy grew more cocky. She’d been born, she told them, up near the terminus of the Yellow Brick Road—Center Munch. From a family of farmers, of course. One of four or five siblings whose names she couldn’t now recall. She’d only traveled the Yellow Brick Road once before, when she was a teenager starting as a student nurse in Bright Lettins. “It was hardly more than a hamlet back then,” she said, “at the head of a tributary of the Munchkin River. I can’t wait to see it gussied up as a capital city.”

“It won’t look like the EC, anyway,” said the Lion. “This place is so different from Loyal Oz. I wonder that Munchkinlanders were ever willing to be ruled by the Emerald City.”

Little Daffy replied, “Nessarose Thropp rose to prominence by exploiting a provincial identity that Munchkinlanders had always felt, but suppressed. We never trusted Loyal Ozians even before the secession. We’re not like you.”

“Well, I’m an Animal,” said Brrr, “but I take your point.”

“I’m not like me anymore, either,” said the dwarf.

“And it’s not just the height thing,” said Little Daffy. “Lots of Munchkinlanders are tall as other Ozians.”

“Lots of us are taller inside our trousers than outside,” said her husband.

“Shut up, you,” said Little Daffy, but lovingly. At least he was verbal.

A few days later they approached the new capital over a series of low bridges spanning irrigation canals. Something of the feel of a holiday park for families, thought Brrr. Bright Lettins wasn’t gleaming and garish, like the Emerald City, nor ancient and stuffed with character, like Shiz, the capital of Gillikin. But it ornamented the landscape with its own brand of Munchkin confidence. From this approach, the effect at a distance was of a huddle of children’s building blocks: roofs of scalloped tile, blue or plum. Entering the city, the travelers found buildings made of stone-covered stucco painted in shades of grey and sand. Many structures were joined by arches over the street, creating a series of outdoor chambers, squares funneling into allées debouching into piazzas. Pleasing, welcoming.

And clean? Gutters ran under iron grills next to the coping in the streets, carrying away ordure of every variety. Windows clearer than mountain ice. The buildings ran to three and a half stories, by diktat apparently, though since they were Munchkin stories they weren’t very high.

“Where do taller people and Animals stay?” asked Brrr.

“Not here,” was the answer they got from chatelaine and inn master alike. After a while someone directed them to an Animal hostelry in a shabbier neighborhood. Reportedly the only place where Animals and humans could find rooms under the same roof, with a sign outside that read A STABLE HOME. The entrance for taller people and Animals was supplied at a side door marked OTHERS. “Well, I’ve been waiting almost four decades to decide who and what I am, and I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer,” said Brrr. “I’m an Other. But how are we going to pay?”

Little Daffy dug from some hidey-purse under her aprons a clutch of folded notes. “Whoa, have you been peddling poppy dust behind our backs?” asked Brrr when he caught sight of the wad.

“Before I left the mauntery several years ago, I dashed to its treasury,” she said. “I guessed that Sister Petty Cash abandoned her stash as she and the others were fleeing for their lives. I’ve never had the need to spend it yet.”

“Isn’t that theft?”

“I consider it back wages for thirty years of sacrifice.”

“I’m not complaining.”

The innkeeper was a dejected widow fallen on hard times. Taking in lodgers out of need. She resented them from the start. But rent was rent. “Your old fellow needs a rest,” she said to Little Daffy as she glanced over at where Mr. Boss was propped against a wall. “He’s not from around here. Sick, is he?”

“He’s a dwarf. He comes like that,” said Little Daffy. “It’s been a long trip. We’ll be grateful to take our key and find our room.”

“You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything.”

“What’s your name so I can call it out during wild sex?” asked Mr. Boss. Grumpiness made him come to life.

“You won’t need my name. I’m in business only until the troubles are over. I don’t leave the establishment untended. Now I’ll thank you to avoid monkey business while in this hostel.”

“I’ll call you Dame Hostile,” said Mr. Boss, grinning to show his tobacco-stained smile.

“I’ll be happy to help you sweep up. I can remove splinters, bake a little,” said Little Daffy hastily. “We’ll be ideal guests, believe me.”

“You,” said the chatelaine to the Lion, “your room is out back. Down the alley. Don’t brush your mane in the public rooms, I have allergies.”

Ah, little has changed for the Animals, thought Brrr. His room, though separate and sparely fitted, was clean enough.

The next day, market day in Bright Lettins. The central district was packed dense with stalls and shoppers. Plenty indeed—mounds of baby squash, punnets of spring berries like pucklegem and queen’s beads. Lettuces so new and tender you could hold the leaves up to the light and see through them. Despite the abundance, however, the haggling was fierce. Voices raised on both sides, vendor and housewife. “No spare coin to be had in this crowd,” murmured Little Daffy. One furious merchant upended a cart of his own pricey white asparagus tips and let his pig eat them rather than sell them for the pittance that had been proferred. The pig sported the only satisfied smirk Brrr saw all morning.

The newcomers settled for elevenses at a café, hoping to overhear something useful. Farmers muttered over the weather, the prices, the progress of the war. Words were said about General Jinjuria, the peasant warrior, and about Mombey, the head of the government. Little Daffy ordered tea and beer and river prawns in tarragon. They ate in silence, listening for all they were worth.

“They’ll never starve us out,” said one old bearded fellow with a prosthetic ear made of tin. “They can siphon all the water they want from our precious Restwater, but as long as our farms are upstream of the lake, we’ll not go short of water and so we won’t go short of food.”

“We should dam the Munchkin River and dry out the lake,” said the waitress, settling down with her own beer.

“We couldn’t drain that lake any way shy of a miracle. It’s fed by runoff of the Great Kells,” someone argued. “That’s part of the rationale for the EC requisitioning the water in the first place.”

“How is this Jinjuria holding the EC forces at Haugaard’s Keep?” asked Brrr. The Munchkinlander locals glanced at one another. Maybe, thought Brrr, Animals don’t talk across café tables to humans they didn’t know socially.

“The Lion asked you a question,” said Little Daffy. “Nicely.”

The old man looked suspicious of their ignorance. He stroked his taffy-colored beard, combing it with his fingers. “Jinjuria, she could have held on to Haugaard’s Keep, you know that. It’s almost impregnable. Slitted windows high up, and a pair of moated entrances. With their superior numbers the EC Messiars swarmed up the lakeside of the keep, see, and General Jinjuria’s forces put on a handsome show of repelling them—but only as a lure. Soon as the assailants had gained the ramparts on ladders and arrow-slung ropes, Jinjuria set in motion the quick retreat she’d planned. The bulk of our forces that had held Haugaard’s Keep retreated on the land side, burning the wooden decking on the moat entrance as they went. Not everyone made it out, of course, and the heads of our patriot martyrs were bowled down into the moat for several weeks afterward and bobbed there like muskmelons. But Jinjuria’s strategy worked. She boxed up the Emerald City high command, General Cherrystone as they call him, and the cream of his forces too. She can’t starve him out, as she can’t prevent supplies from arriving on the lakeside, by flotillas of this sort or that. But she can prevent him from leaving by land. And if he left by lake—well, that would be a retreat, pure and simple. No, she’s got him cornered, like a cat playing with a larder mouse.”

“Brilliant.” Little Daffy’s eyes glowed with pride.

“It’s a stalemate, no pretending otherwise,” said the garrulous one among the locals. “Where have you lot been, that this is all news to you?”

“Doing missionary work,” said Little Daffy quickly, before Brrr could falter or fudge. “Is Mombey here?”

“Said to be in residence at Colwen Grounds.”

“And Dorothy?” asked Brrr. “Is she expected soon?”

They didn’t know what Brrr was talking about. “Dorothy? Her? We won’t see the likes of Dorothy again. Not in this lifetime.”

“She shows up here for a pint, I charge her triple,” promised the waitress, and bit the farthing Little Daffy was paying with. “She has a lot to answer for, knocking off our lady governor like she did.”

The old farmer chided the waitress. “You’re not old enough to remember Nessarose Thropp. That Dorothy may have played fast and loose with government figures, but there was quite a bit of singing and dancing back in the day. Folks fell to their knees in thanksgiving for their release from bondage.”

“Munchkinlanders don’t have too far to fall,” said the waitress, swishing a rag at a table. “Who can even tell when we’re on our knees?”

“Well, she fell from a great distance, that girl,” insisted the farmer.

“Wearing a wooden house around her as some sort of defense. A weird cleverness in that child.”

“She wasn’t all that clever,” said Brrr, realizing too late that neither was he.

“You have a point of view? Listen—you’re not that Lion? The Cowardly Lion, they called him? One of Dorothy’s lackeys? Say it en’t so.”

“Not so, I’m afraid,” said Brrr.

“You have no right to any opinion then.” The other farmers dropped their chins over their steins and frowned across the froth. The atmosphere had a tang to it, like saltpetre. “I think it was you. Wasn’t it? Got her out of here safely before she could be asked to account for herself?”

“That would be my brother,” said Brrr. “My twin brother, I’m afraid. A luckless sort, but there you have it.” For the first and perhaps the last time in his life, he was glad to have an identical twin he’d never met. “Finish that prawn, Mr. Boss, and we’ll be on our way.”

2.

Why don’t the Munchkinlanders sue for peace?” asked the Lion of his cronies. “Sure, they’ve lost Restwater, and it’s an insult and an outrage. But if their agriculture carries on nicely enough upstream, why not make the best of a bad situation and call for an armistice? Give up the lake and get their lives back to normal?”

They asked around, they gossiped, they eavesdropped. It turned out that supplying the EC with water all those years had been fiscally advantageous to Munchkinland, and the government of the Free State was as reluctant to part with the income stream as with the territory itself.

The deeper question—why do populations squabble for dominance?—remained unanswered. Native pride, the patriotism of different peoples, seemed jejune to the Lion. Mawkish, embarrassing. Though since he’d grown up without any pride of his own—neither a family tribe nor that pestery, myopic little fuse of self-admiration—he no longer expected to understand what motivated others.

But was it even true that Dorothy had come back to Oz? No one in Bright Lettins seemed to have heard about it. Maybe the rumor of her return had been planted to stir things up, to try to flush the Grimmerie into the open somehow. Or maybe strategists had hoped to flush Liir into the open. In which case, what a relief to have left the great book behind with Liir and his family.

Maybe Dorothy had taken ill and died before a show trial could commence. Or maybe she was being held incognito until her public humiliation could do the most good, at least in terms of lifting homeland morale.

The Lion and his friends took to wandering the streets after their morning coffee and cheddar-and-onion butty, ambling and window-shopping and keeping their ears open. Brrr was surprised to see little in the way of a police force. “Is the absence of a civic constabulary a sign of self-confidence?”

“I bet the Munchkinland defense is all occupied in the apron of land around Haugaard’s Keep,” said Little Daffy. “But who cares? We’re not here to bring down the nation or to save it. We’re just here to help Dorothy if we can. Look, a distress sale at that milliner’s shop.” She came out sporting a bonnet of uncertain charm.

The dwarf snorted. “We’re looking for Dorothy. You’re looking like you’re wearing a failed dessert.”

“I love you too,” said Little Daffy, clearly glad to see him returning to form. “Let’s go back to our room and play Tickle My Fancy.”

“The loud version,” agreed Mr. Boss, cheerily enough. “Give Dame Hostile a little entertainment through the keyhole.”

“I’ll catch you up later,” said the Lion.

He was perusing the goods in a pushcart and being ignored by the merchant when a sudden cloudburst forced him under a nearby portico. Waiting out the rain in a throng of Munchkins, he heard the swell of their comments include the words La Mombey. Brrr didn’t need to push to the front of the crowd. He could see over their heads. One of a pair of horses pulling a brougham had cast a shoe, and a farrier was sent for. Without fanfare the door to the carriage opened. An attendant in Munchkinlander formal couture, cobalt serge and silver buttons, held up a parasol as a woman alighted.

Could this be Mombey? The murmur at ground level suggested so. She was tall and striking, nowhere near as old as Brrr had imagined. Her full shimmery-coppery silk garment draped, uncinched, from the fabric yoke at her shoulders. Her pale hand looked linen smooth. She pivoted to study the street with a languid air, her face impassive, cut almost too prettily, as if a wax model for a bronze casting of Lurline, or maybe the Spirit of Munchkinlander Assiduity. She gave a half-curtsey toward the citizens crowded under the arcade, and retired into a private home whose astounded owners, standing on either side of the door, appeared ready to explode with honor and subservience.

The Munchkinlanders resumed gabbling in appreciation of their leader. Brrr listened for some reference to Dorothy, but he heard only about Mombey; her behavior discreet, intelligent, warm, reserved. Her military sense subtle and her clothes sense impeccable. We’ll win out over the EC in the end. She has talents she hasn’t yet used.

“What exactly do you mean, ‘talents she hasn’t yet used’?” asked the Lion. But by now he knew that while Munchkinlanders tolerated talking Animals in their capital city, they rarely wanted to exchange more than pleasantries.

He waited along with the rest of the crowd. When an hour had passed and the rain let up, he left his post and returned to A Stable Home.

The disgruntled chatelaine was dusting the ferns and sneezing. To his report, the old woman said, “Mombey makes her way west from time to time, to discuss military strategy with General Jinjuria. We’re quite used to having Her Eminence pass through and we think nothing of it. We are now the capital city of Munchkinland, after all.”

“What was meant by the rumor ‘talents’?” asked Brrr.

“Oh, she’s got more than a touch of magic skill.” The old woman flapped her rag out the window. Most of the dust blew back in and landed on the top of the credenza.

“I didn’t know Munchkinlanders approved of magic.”

“I don’t approve of discussing politics with Animals. You want another opinion, try the Reading Room down by Clericle Corners. A bit of a pong but what do you expect.”

Brrr decided he would and was glad he did. At the end of a long reading table, peering out of one eye through a handheld lens, sat an elderly Ape whom Brrr had once known. Mister Mikko. A former professor at Shiz, now sporting a fiercely unconvincing set of false teeth. Which he bared at Brrr when Brrr approached, and then had to pick up and jam back into his mouth because they fell out on the table.

“I’m joining no Benevolent Societies for Stray Cats today, sir,” the Ape barked at Brrr. “How dare you approach me in this sanctuary of repose.”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“I couldn’t recognize my own grandmother if she bit me on my blue behind. My cataracts have baby cataracts of their own.” Still, Mister Mikko squinted, fitting his monocle under his brow. “Upon my word. It’s the Lion who helped me lose half of my savings. Have you come to pay it back, with interest?”

“Take it up with the banks at Shiz. The harm done you originated there.”

“You stiffed me of a higher rate of interest than the banks allowed, and you got in trouble for it. Don’t think I didn’t hear about the scandal. We may be at war with Loyal Oz, but that doesn’t stop the financial news from getting through. I follow the papers, sir!”

“Well, if my pot of gold ever turns up at the end of the rainbow, you’ll get the first scoop.”

“I don’t want a scoop of whatever is in the pot at the end of your rainbow.” Still, Mister Mikko folded the paper and closed his arms around his chest. “I’m surprised you’d show your face to me, after that larceny.”

“I’ve paid my debt to society, and I’ll make it up to you if I ever get the chance. How is Professor Lenx?” Mister Mikko had lodged with a Boar, another professor retired from Shiz during the enactment of the Animal Adverse laws.

“He passed away, poor sod. I couldn’t keep the house up on my own. Didn’t have the heart, and what’s more, couldn’t afford the help. Thank you very much for that. So I abandoned the old place at Stonespar End and I moved here, where I live in a disgusting hotel for elderly Animals. It’s a good thing I lost my sense of smell a long time ago, believe me. No, don’t sit down, I didn’t invite you.”

“This isn’t the Emerald City under the Animal Adverse laws. I can sit where I like.” Brrr looked about to see if their conversation was annoying anyone, but the only other patron was a White Parrot who had fallen asleep clinging to the windowsill.

“Don’t mind him,” said the Ape. “He’s both deaf and asleep. We can’t disturb him even if we shouted fire into his ear.”

“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” replied the Lion.

“Welcome to the club.” But the Ape relented a little; he clearly was lonely after the death of his companion. “Not that paranoia seems an inappropriate response to a government that relies on secrecy to protect itself. Rather it seems quite sane. Oh, yes. I lectured in Oz history, so you see I know whereof I speak. Surely you remember.”

“No, I was never a student of yours. I was your fiscal agent.”

“Time runs together. How recently did you fleece me?”

“How recently did Professor Lenx die?” This was cruel of Brrr, but he had to move the conversation on.

Mister Mikko removed his monocle and looked coldly out the window. “I never can remember,” he said, quite evidently lying: probably he could remember every hour of his life since. “My area was the early and middle Ozma realms. I never was good at Modern History. Why are you interrupting my meditations with your prattle?”

For all his meekness and tendency to isolationism, the Lion had never entirely trusted sentient Animals. He would have to speak carefully and try to avoid attitude. “I’m told that the Eminence herself has arrived in town today—Mombey, I mean,” in case Mister Mikko’s short-term memory was faulty and he was imagining Nessarose Thropp.

“I’m not a nincompoop,” barked the Ape. “I know who Mombey is. She has the right to come and go as she pleases. What is your problem?”

“I’ve been trying to find out if she’s here to convene a legal investigation. A court case, I mean.”

“You’re afraid you’re being brought up on charges of embezzlement? Where’s the party? Sign me up as a witness for the prosecution.”

“No.” He supposed there was nothing for it. “I’m told that the girl from the Other Land has returned.”

“Ozma?” The Ape snorted his teeth onto the table again, and a good deal of saliva too. “You are imbecilic. Ozma Tippetarius was flung into an infant’s grave eleventy-seven years ago. She decides to come back to life after all this time, she’ll be in a wheelchair. She can have my teeth as tribute.”

“Not Ozma. Dorothy.”

The Ape snorted again. “You’ll have to remind me about Dorothy. Was she one of those idiotic Gillikinese scholarship girls from Settica or Frottica? It was all the rage for about ten years, sending milkmaids off to college. A bad plan all around.”

“Dorothy from Kanzass. The one whose house flattened Nessarose and released the Munchkinlanders from tyranny.”

“Oh yes. So they could rise and embrace another tyranny: our good queen Mombey.”

“Look, Mister Mikko. I’m only asking if you know anything about the return of Dorothy. I heard that she was going to be put on trial, and I wondered if Mombey’s arrival in Bright Lettins means Dorothy is about to be brought in too. If you’re not interested in current affairs, well, don’t let me bother your nap.” The Lion stood up to leave.

“Oh, don’t mind me, you young fool,” snapped the Ape. “I’m less interested in the return of Dorothy than I am in the return of my missing bank deposits. But let me put my ancient ear to the thin walls of my single room and catch what’s squawking, and I’ll be back here tomorrow to tell you what I have heard.”

The next day, a brighter day on the unpleasant side of warm, Brrr met Mister Mikko again. After spending the fee to enter, and finding the Reading Room as sparsely used as the day before, he learned from Mister Mikko that the Ape had had no luck scaring up any information about Dorothy. “I didn’t expect to,” said the Ape, “but in good faith I did ask.”

“You didn’t ask,” said the Lion. “You just wanted me to have to spend money to find out you were useless. Thanks a lot.”

“Nothing like old friends when you need ’em, is there.”

The Lion supposed he deserved this. He had, after all, bilked the Ape of some part of his portfolio. Before Brrr could think of a parting comment that would suggest even a shred of remorse, the White Parrot opened its eyes and said, “Well, you didn’t involve me in the question, but in fact, good sir, I’ve done a little investigation of my own.”

“Oh, my,” said the Lion.

“You’ve got keen instincts,” observed the Parrot. “Yes, Mombey is in town, and yes indeed, to open a court proceeding against Dorothy. It’ll all come out in the town squares tomorrow. I know this from a few Pigeons who live on the rough in a gutter outside a printery. The bills are being run up for posting on kiosks and newsboards. One has to wonder how you knew.”

“A little bird told me,” said the Lion.

3.

DOROTHY: ASSASSIN OF PATRIOTS read one broadside.

INCOMING! said another. SHE’S BACK.

THE TRIAL OF OUR TIMES read a third.

“Tell me about it,” said Mister Mikko. He summarized for the Lion. “The proceedings will start in five days. That gives magistrates for the defense and for the prosecution a chance to prepare their cases. It looks like Mombey herself picked the barristers.”

Brrr had had his brushes in court before, and always on the wrong end of the law. But that was back in the Emerald City. Were things done differently in whatever passed for Munchkin justice? Mister Mikko set Brrr straight.

“Generally disputes in Munchkinland are settled on a case-by-case basis. The tradition of reliance on precedent isn’t deeply rooted in Munchkinland, given the rural and piecemeal settlement of the county. Most cases are decided behind closed doors, the traveling magistrate serving as confessor and adjudicator both. I’ll wager he pockets the fine, too. It’s my belief that jurisprudence in Munchkinland doesn’t exist at all except to reinforce the prejudices of the top dog. Which despite the metaphor is never an Animal, at least in Munchkinland.”

“I didn’t know you had a Dog in this fight,” said Brrr.

“Ha-ha. Well, pay attention. This trial will be more formal. No executive sessions here, this one will be open to the public—you can’t be surprised at that.”

“Are there jurors? Witnesses?”

Mister Mikko elaborated. For a so-called open trial, a five-member jury was usually empaneled at its own cost. In this instance, it seemed Mombey was going to present the case herself, in an initial declamation, and then turn the proceedings over to a celebrity magistrate appointed to the position for this trial only. The barristers pleading the cases for the prosecution and for the defense would post their requests for witnesses on a billboard on the door of the Grange Central. Potential witnesses only had to show up in time to get a seat. Generally they could nominate themselves of their own free will, or refuse to testify if they weren’t in the mood. But rules could vary case by case, so who knew.

“Nipp,” Brrr told Little Daffy back at the inn. “He’s the appointed magistrate. Does that name ring a bell?”

“Not to me,” said Little Daffy. “But don’t forget I was cloistered for all those years.”

“I know of him,” said Mr. Boss. “He was the first governor of Munchkinland after Nessarose Thropp was murdered in cold blood by that prim little Miss Dorothy, bless her little soul.” He was in a good mood.

“You’re not opinionated, I see,” said Brrr, though he was glad Mr. Boss seemed to be coming back around some.

The trial was designated for Densloe Den, a little salon theater, but for fears of crowding was soon shifted to a venue called Neale House. A former armory now used for the spring cattle fair. Above its arches on three sides ran a gallery. The Neale could sit a large number of visitors, but on the first day the interest seemed slim, so Little Daffy, Mr. Boss, and Brrr easily got tickets to attend the instructions to the jury. The room wasn’t a quarter full. They could have had front row seats, though Brrr by dint of his size was required to recline on the floor to one side. He couldn’t have fit a single thigh in a folding chair scaled for Munchkinlanders, not for money nor love.

The day’s newsfolds, left on the seats of chairs, presented potted biographies of the trial’s dramatis personae. Brrr only had time to read about the magistrate. Nipp had begun his career as a kind of concierge at Colwen Grounds, serving Nessarose Thropp up until the day she was squished. Apparently because he’d held the keys to the actual house, Nipp had stepped in as emergency Prime Minister until the Munchkinlanders’ appetite to be governed by an Eminence reasserted itself. Mombey had emerged from a prior anonymity—the argument for her elevation wasn’t rehearsed here. Whereupon Nipp had retired with honors that included a fancy cake, a sash, and a lifetime supply of ammonia salts, which apparently had some symbolic significance no one at the city desk of the press had bothered to identify.

Brrr had hardly finished the bio when Nipp entered the chamber. Among the taller of Munchkinlanders, he wore a conical hat whose brim was sprightly with felt balls. He flung the hat onto the top of a coat stand, to a spatter of applause. That he could land it like a horseshoe, Brrr deduced, was proof of his capacity to serve with a steady hand. Then Nipp took the bench. It was supplied with the traditional gavel, the bell, a slate on which messages could be scrawled for private viewing in case the magistrate didn’t want to be overheard, and a small pile of ham sandwiches under a net to keep off the flies. Behind him two grammar school students were ready with fans made of blue ostrich plumes in case it became too warm.

“Citizens of Munchkinland,” Nipp began, in a voice quavery with age but strengthening by the sentence, “we are here to keep our big mouths shut and to listen. To listen to what is presented. Anyone in Neale House who makes a fuss or disrupts our attention to the proceedings shall be taken out and fined, or shot, or put in the stocks. Which this time of year are very uncomfortable what with mosquito season just beginning. Are there any questions?—then let us continue. I predict this trial will last a week—perhaps two. Those who can’t tolerate the heat should stay at home. Babies are not allowed. If there is a fire don’t everyone scream ‘Fire!’ all at once—it’s terribly muddling and only makes people nervous. Should I feel the need to call additional witnesses I shall do so and I hereforth declare that for this trial there is no right of resistance—if you’re in the room, you’re considered fair game for service. Furthermore if you’re not in the room and you are required you shall be apprehended by deputized mobs and escorted here whether you like it or not. Tell your friends and neighbors. If you are wanted and you’re on holiday up at Mossmere or someplace, you shall be sent to prison when you return for taking a holiday thoughtlessly. Are there any questions—speak up—no questions—I see—then let us begin by my presenting the barristers and the jurors.”

“This isn’t going to take two weeks,” whispered Brrr to Little Daffy, who was sitting in a chair on the end of her aisle.

Nipp introduced the envoy for the prosecution, a part-time barrister whose regular job was being a professional mourner. Dame Fegg. She emerged from a curtained doorway dressed in something that looked to Brrr as if it had been cut down from a choir robe—about five minutes earlier, without benefit of a seamstress. She was still putting pins in her hair as she came through. A no-nonsense middle-aged farm frau with pockets beneath her eyes deep enough to hold tokens for an EC omnibus. “Yoiks,” muttered Brrr.

The envoy for the defense was introduced next, a certain Temper Bailey, who turned out to be a brown Fever Owl. “They couldn’t spring for a human?” muttered Little Daffy. “Guess this is what is called an open-and-shut case.”

“Animals still draw lower salaries, I bet,” replied Brrr.

The Owl flew to a perch and rotated his head on his neck, all the way round. Not an unusual gesture for an Owl, but unsettling in a court of law; accusatory, somehow, of them all, even the spectators. Temper Bailey then nodded to Dame Fegg, but she was applying some sort of liquid paint to her nails and didn’t return the obeisance.

Only when the jurors had been seated did the magistrate seem to notice that the room was sparsely populated. He stood on his toes and regarded the audience with disdain, as if it were they who were skiving off. “The Eminence suggests this is a trial of interest to all Munchkinlanders,” said Nipp. “I need hardly mention that without the unprovoked invasion by Dorothy a generation ago, we wouldn’t be in the position of defending Restwater from the Emerald City. The Eminence of that day, Miss Nessarose Thropp, would likely still be ensconced in Colwen Grounds. Or else she and her consort would have brought forth a new Eminence to take her place.”

A rude titter, quickly suppressed. Enough of the crowd was old enough to recall that Nessarose had not been thronged with suitors. She had died without benefit of spouse or spawn.

“When are we going to see Dorothy?” asked Temper Bailey. Brrr would have guessed that the defense might have had a chance to question his client before opening ceremonies, but it seemed the government was running this trial on the cheap.

Nipp made his first ruling, not with a gavel but with a bell. “I am dismissing all parties until tomorrow morning. Come back with your relatives and friends. Tell them that La Mombey herself will be here to introduce the accused. If this hall isn’t filled to capacity word will get back to the Emerald City that Munchkinlanders have lost all public spirit. Do as I say, in the name of justice.”

“I should think he meant ‘in the name of public relations,’ ” said Brrr.

“I heard that, you,” said Nipp. “I’ll brook no backtalk from the floor, especially from an Animal. Dismissed.”

As might have been expected, the next day saw the gallery nearly full. Munchkins en masse. Perhaps Nipp’s refusing to bring out Dorothy for the introductory session had whetted appetites. At any rate, it was a good time of the summer for a trial. Harvest was still six weeks out. Among a bunch of farm people come to town for the fun, Brrr and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, brandishing their tickets, took their places. Little Daffy was equipped with a sack of muffins and fruit and a thermos of potato brandy in case things got dull. A couple of teenage scowlawags nearby played a game of Hangman using the word DOROTHY as the clue.

Nipp marched in followed by Dame Fegg and Temper Bailey. The Owl had been slip-covered with a tunic not unlike Dame Fegg’s. It made him look like a tea cosy with an owl head. He winced at the laughter of the crowd. Everyone settled down when Nipp clapped the gavel on its stand and introduced the Eminence of Munchkinland, La Mombey. “And rise, you dolts. This isn’t one of your talent shows!”

The crowd obliged as a pair of Chimpanzees in livery swung open the double doors at the back of the bench. The Eminence flooded into the room in another tidal barrage of silks, these flowered, white petals against maroon. Brrr studied her face. It seemed different. Less chiseled, more delicate, even fragile. And the hair on her head, in a chignon so crisp it might have been a crown, looked darker, spikier. But he didn’t dare mutter in her presence. She looked full of sorrowful dignity. He found himself lowering his head just for a moment in the presence of something he couldn’t name. Self-possession, if nothing else.

“We are Munchkinlanders,” she told the crowd. Her voice was like honey coating the knife. “We are hospitable to all, even those who arrive on our homeland to spite us and murder us. I ask you to extend the courtesy of our traditions to the accused, Dorothy Gale. I beg to remind you that there is no statute of limitations where crimes against the heart are concerned. If we must convict the accused, let us convict her justly. If we choose to decide she is not guilty of the charges of murder, let us not harbor thoughts of malfeasance when she is liberated.” Mombey turned to the five jurors, who stood to one side. They were all unrepentently human. “You five are the eyes and ears of Munchkinland, and you must be the heart and soul of justice. Bring Dorothy to trial with merciful dispatch. Whatever you recommend to the magistrate will be taken under deepest consideration, but it is his conclusion that we will follow. You are here as advisors only. And the public is here not to second-guess the proceedings but to witness them, so that they can tell their children and their grandchildren that justice is alive in Oz.

“For his services to our country, today I elevate our former Prime Minister to the peerage. Henceforth he shall be Lord Nipp of Dragon Cupboard. Let the constabulary bring forth the alien.”

La Mombey retired behind the doors through which she’d emerged, as if to be seen in the same room as the accused would constitute an affront to her dignity. Only when the Chimpanzees had closed the double doors with a click did Brrr notice a trapdoor to one side. The Chimpanzees put their overknuckled paws to the ring, and together they pulled it up. Then they retreated to the far side of the pen. The Lion leaned forward to catch a glimpse of Dorothy again, after all this time.

4.

As she emerged, clumsily, reaching for a hand to help her up the ladder, though there was no one to stretch out such a hand, the Lion realized he’d been thinking of Dorothy as about ten years old. Just about the age Rain was now, more or less. A few other assumptions followed, nearly simultaneously.

His affection for Rain was related to his memory of Dorothy.

He hadn’t ever done much for Dorothy except provide a few laughs and some companionship on the road.

He’d done no better for Rain, yet he felt more implicated in Rain’s future than he had in Dorothy’s. Was this age and maturity on his part? Or sentimentality?

Or was it that Rain was less competent than Dorothy had been at that age? Needed him more?

The crime for which Dorothy was being charged had occurred fifteen, eighteen, twenty years ago. She ought to be a mature woman now, able as needed to explain away or to apologize for the accidents of her youth.

In her maturity, will she recognize me?

He held his breath, but his tail thumped on the floor. Agitation, pleasure, and the curiosity that sometimes killed the likes of him and his kin.

5.

Dorothy’s head rose farther out of the square in the flooring. She was facing the magistrate, who glared upon her as if he hadn’t seen her before. Maybe she’d been kept sequestered from everyone involved in this trial. Six times Temper Bailey rotated his head on his stem.

“This is like climbing into the hayloft back in Kansas.” Yes, it was Dorothy’s voice, her real voice, misguidedly cheerful as always. Brrr felt the muffin lurch up his throat. “Still, you’d never see a Kansan owl dressed up in a petticoat!”

Something stronger than a titter rippled through the hall. Temper Bailey blinked balefully. “Mind your manners,” said Lord Nipp. “That’s your representation.”

“What a hoot,” Dorothy replied. “Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

She turned to look at the crowd seated on the floor and in the galleries. Brrr knew himself to be in shadow, as he had crouched down by the wainscoting below where strong sunlight was heaving in through the windows. He doubted that she could see him, at least not at first, and that gave him a chance to study her.

Either she’d become stunted by her experience in Oz a generation ago or some perverse magic was at work. Yes, she was quite recognizably Dorothy. Those cocoa-bright eyes. The way she led with her shoulders and clavicle. Surely she ought to be middle-aged by now? But she seemed merely a few years older than he remembered her. Taller but hardly leaner. Her baby fat had only begun to reorient itself into incipient womanliness. Her face remained eager and unshuttered even after her latest travails. Proof of Dorothy.

Lord Nipp banged a gavel, as if to remind himself he was in charge. “Identify yourself. Name, age, origin, and your designs upon us.”

“Well, that’s easy enough,” said Dorothy. As if she couldn’t decide who to love first, she turned this way and that, toward Temper Bailey, who inched away on his perch, and then to Lord Nipp, and finally to Dame Fegg. “I’m Dorothy Gale, if you please, from the state of Kansas. The thirty-fourth state in the union, a free state now and proud of it. No slavery to speak of.” She made a clumsy curtsey to a family of Pigs in the second row, one of the few groups of Animals present. “We’re still working out a few wrinkles.”

“Answer the questions,” said Nipp.

“Oh yes. Well, I’m sixteen at my last birthday, you know.”

Nipp scribbled a few marks upon a pad and frowned. “And your intention in returning to Oz after your long absence?”

“Goodness, there was no intention involved. After what I’d been through, do you think I’d choose to return? I’d have to be mad … well, never mind. The truth is I seem to have no control over my whereabouts. Makes me dangerous to let out on the streets, says Uncle Henry. Or said Uncle Henry.” She teared up a little. “I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

“What are you cawing about?” asked Dame Fegg. “You haven’t answered the first question posed by the magistrate.”

“I have no designs in Oz,” said the girl. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Em and I had gone to San Francisco, see, for various family reasons. My mental fitness for marriage among them, to be blunt. We ate funny food and saw sights till we felt like gagging. And then, one morning, oh my word! I took a trip to the roof of my hotel and the whole building began to shake and buckle, and I could hear stones falling and people screaming. For a moment the elevator stopped and everything became dark, and I could detect a bad smell, though maybe that was Toto. My dog. Then the elevator began to move again, sliding faster and faster, and I thought I would smash to my death at the bottom of the chute! It was much the scariest thing that ever happened to me since the twister. The noise grew louder, the air grew thick with powder; a moment later, while in the elevator, I lost my mind for my dog had got away…”

Brrr had to concede it. She was dotty as ever, but blistering buckets, how people listened to her. They were nearly swaying in time with her rhetoric.

“The earth began to quake, for goodness’ sake; I knew I’d made a big mistake when the cage began to shake…”

“A little restraint in the theatrics,” said the magistrate.

“When I came to,” she continued, less sonorously, “I found myself in the elevator cage half buried in a landslide. When people dug me out I assumed they would be San Franciscans. But just my luck. Imagine: a tribe of little people! Again! At first I thought I’d discovered yet another tiresome country, but eventually someone called Sakkali Oafish told me I was in Oz. So you see, your honor, I had no designs at all, except to have a nice holiday and maybe buy some lace for my hope chest, in the off chance any fellow ever gets interested in me.” She looked with big eyes across the room again. “I don’t think my prospects for a husband are terribly strong, not at this particular point in time.”

“First things first,” said Lord Nipp. “Dorothy Gale, you are charged with crimes against Munchkinland. Crimes of the most grievous sort because they conflate aggression against the state with assault against individuals. You are charged with the murder of Nessarose Thropp, the onetime Eminent Thropp and de facto governor of Munchkinland. Also with the murder of her sister, Elphaba Thropp of Kiamo Ko, though originally of Munchkinland.”

“Well, that’s a pretty big plate of sauerkraut, if you ask me,” said Dorothy. “I never murdered a soul. Do you think I was navigating that house from Kansas, back in the day?”

“It is my first duty to make sure you understand the seriousness of the charges brought against you. If convicted, you could be put to death.”

The girl opened her eyes wider than usual. “Everyone in Oz is far too nice to do a nasty thing like that to an accidental immigrant.”

“I must ask you to restrict your remarks to answering the questions. I don’t know what experience of legal proceedings you might have gained in your tenure in Kanziz—quite a bit, I would suspect, as you seem to career about wreaking mayhem—but here in Oz we maintain a certain decorum in court. This goes for those unwrapping sandwiches in the gallery. If you must arrive with lunch, make sure it is wrapped in cloth so it doesn’t make so much noise when you bring it out!”

“I understand the charges,” said Dorothy, “but I’m sure when I explain the circumstances you’ll see that this is all a dreadful misunderstanding. And certainly there will be witnesses to testify in my defense? You’ve arranged for character witnesses, at the least? I did have some friends here, once upon a time.”

“We’ve had to pull this trial together rather quickly.”

“Then perhaps we should postpone this little charade until we’ve all gotten ourselves prepared adequately.” Dorothy could still say the most inappropriate things and get away with them, thought Brrr.

“The job is put to us by the Eminent Mombey. These are desperate times for Munchkinland. We will perform our duties as best we can under the circumstances.”

“Are you saying there’s no one here who remembers me?” Dorothy turned and looked out at the crowd again, shading her eyes against the sloping sunlight. “Can you call for a show of hands, Lord Nipp?”

“You don’t get to decide how we proceed. You’re the accused.”

“I should like to request that Dorothy’s idea be acted upon,” ventured Temper Bailey. “Before we proceed, may we see if anyone present has direct knowledge of the Matter of Dorothy?”

“Very well,” said the magistrate. “If among us there is anyone who has ever laid eyes on this Dorothy Gale before today, you are ordered to rise.”

This was why they had come to Munchkinland, after all. His heart not quite in his throat—somewhere south of the esophagus, it felt—the Lion stood up. A murmur of Munchkinlanders caused Dorothy to turn toward his side of the chamber.

“Oh, I don’t believe it!” she cried. “I knew someone would come. I had hoped it would be the Scarecrow, but even so.”

“Approach the bench,” said Nipp.

Brrr did, trying not to sashay. It was still sometimes a problem in public. “I am Brrr. I come with several other names. Popularly known as the Cowardly Lion in some circles, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing I can do about that. When in Gillikin I’m sometimes addressed as Sir Brrr, Namory of Traum.”

“That’s Loyal Oz,” said Nipp. “Cuts no mustard here, Lion.”

“I was elevated by Lady Glinda when she was Throne Minister,” said the Lion. “I don’t require the honorific. I’m just trying to be sure you don’t accuse me of concealing pertinent facts. I’m probably wanted for sedition by the Emerald City for having jumped bail after a spot of legal trouble on that side of the border.”

“We have no extradition treaties, so you’re safe here as far as that goes,” said Nipp. “Not that you deserve to be harbored, necessarily.”

The Lion turned to Dorothy. They were only six feet apart now. She was too mature to throw her arms around him. Indeed, she looked a little frightened. “Up until now I had hoped this might all be a dream,” she said. “But you are just like yourself, and yet different than you were. Put on a little weight? I think you have.”

“You’re a sight for sore eyes yourself,” he told her.

“Save your chatter for after hours,” advised the magistrate. “Anyone else?”

Brrr oughtn’t to have been surprised to see Little Daffy approach the bench. She had murmured something once about having seen Dorothy. “I suppose I have an obligation to make myself known to you. I am called Little Daffy. My name originally was Daffodil Sully, but I was known for some years as Sister Apothecaire, a unionist maunt housed at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, in the southern corner of Gillikin.”

“And how do you know the accused?” asked the magistrate.

Little Daffy looked sideways at Dorothy Gale. “I can’t say I know her. I’m merely answering your call to identify myself as someone who has crossed paths with her before. I was present in Center Munch on the day when Dorothy first arrived in Oz. The day that her house tumbled out of the sky and killed Nessarose.”

The mumble in the room grew louder. It was one thing to have an Animal or an illegal immigrant questioned by a magistrate. But a Munchkinlander present at the death of Nessarose Thropp! Brrr wasn’t sure if the susurrus suggested admiration, disbelief, or alarm. Little Daffy gave a curt nod to Dorothy and said, “When it comes time to discuss what happened that day, I’ll put my bootblack on my brogans, same as anyone else.”

Nipp sent them back to their seats but ordered their continued attendance through the duration of the trial. They’d be called to testify in time. Probably not today, he suspected. There were other matters to get through first.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in a recital of previous cases that had been heard in Bright Lettins. Dame Fegg had enjoyed quite a career of prosecution. Each description of her most famous wins was met with bursts of applause. The matters at hand involved hexed chickens, tax evasion, one or two cases of lechery. Interesting enough, but they didn’t seem pertinent to the task of trying Dorothy for murder. Temper Bailey, on the other hand, had never won a case.

After catching Little Daffy’s eye and signaling that he should be roused if something interesting began to happen, the Lion put his head on his paws and slept. He didn’t waken until the magistrate concluded proceedings for the day with a loud bang of the gavel. “You didn’t miss anything. The good stuff starts tomorrow,” said Little Daffy.

“Oh, Brrr,” said Dorothy over her shoulder, as she was prodded toward the trapdoor by the Chimpanzees. “It makes such a difference to me that you would come to my defense.”

“If you knew my record of accomplishments in the years since I last saw you,” said the Lion, “you wouldn’t feel so cheery. But I’ll do what I can, Dorothy. I never understood you for a single moment, but in the choice between wishing you ill and wishing you well, I wish you well.”

“I should think so,” said Dorothy, and she opened her mouth as if to say more, but the Chimpanzees slammed down the trapdoor, narrowly missing the crown of her head.

6.

By the time Brrr and Little Daffy arrived the next morning, the room was full to bursting. After Lord Nipp entered and called Dorothy from the musty holding pen below, Dame Fegg minced forward and said, “Since we’ve concluded the opening statements, may I begin to question the witness, Your Honor?”

“One moment,” said Lord Nipp. He fished out a paper from beneath his robes. “Dorothy Gale, you claim to be sixteen years old, and you certainly look and sound like a child of that age, if rather big by local standards. Can you tell us how old you were when you first arrived in Oz and murdered Nessarose Thropp?”

“I take exception to that definition of my actions,” said Dorothy, “but letting that go for a moment, I will tell you: it was 1900 when the twister came through our parts. I was ten years old.”

“And you say you are sixteen now. That’s six years older. Yet by my figuring, and believe me I have counted it frontward and backward since I left here yesterday, it is about eighteen years since you spent a few months in Oz.”

The girl looked flummoxed. She counted on her fingers for a moment. “I didn’t go far in school. Eventually the teacher said I was too fanciful and sent me back to the farm. But here, I can do these sums…”

“Nessarose Thropp and her sister Elphaba have been dead for eighteen years,” said Nipp sternly, as if this were proof enough of Dorothy’s guilt.

“But how odd. How irregular! The last time I was in Oz I was ten years old. Big for my age, but even so. And this time around I am sixteen. That is six years older, you’re right about that. And you tell me that those witch sisters have both been gone for about eighteen years? How can this be?”

“Maybe time moves slower in Kansas,” said the magistrate.

“Time crawls in Kansas. But some say Kansas is a state of mind.” She sat up and pushed her bosom forward as if she’d just remembered she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “It’s uncanny. Perhaps I’ve become mentally unfit.”

Dame Fegg delivered a moue in the direction of the jurors to make sure they caught Dorothy’s admission.

The accused brightened up. “We can work this out. I just need to know how you count time in Oz. What year did I first arrive?”

The court waited for her to explain. A fly drove itself insanely around an upper windowpane.

“You arrived the year that you arrived,” said Lord Nipp evenly, patiently, the way a parent responds because to some child’s question of why?

“Yes. But what was the year named? I mean, at home I was born in 1890 and I was ten years old when the cyclone came and drove the farmhouse from Kansas to Oz, so that was 1900. Was it the year 1900 in Oz? The year I made my first visit? And so what is this year called? I mean, if anything ought to be universal, time ought to be.”

The magistrate said, “I’m not here to be your tutor, Miss Gale. Nonetheless, I’ll tell you that you seem to be relying on a system of naming years that is unfamiliar to us. In Oz we have no universal method of notching time or assigning arbitrary numbers to year-spans. I’m told that the Quadlings live quite comfortably without any system at all, since the climate there more or less precludes seasonal variation. The Gillikinese and the Emerald City refer to the passage of time in terms of the reigns of the various Ozmas or, since the Wizard first arrived, the various reigns of the Throne Ministers. The first, the seventh, the twelfth year of the Emperor Shell’s reign, and so on. Here in Munchkinland the length and disposition of our months vary according to cycles of the moon. In years of a jackal moon, for instance, we skip the month of Masque, out of some old superstition no one remembers. In years when the sun casts no shadow on Seeding Day, we add seven weeks of agricultural season called the Corn Time. If it rains too much in the spring we just skip over Guestlight. So, our years being irregularly shaped, they don’t line up for easy counting. No one tries to do it.”

“Besides,” added Little Daffy, speaking from the sidelines, “if I might add a word, arithmetic has its own cultural moods. In the mauntery, for instance, any span of years more than six we counted as a decade. It doesn’t always mean ten years. It just meant ‘looks about like ten years, sooner or later.’ ”

“To say nothing of the fact,” added Brrr, as long as this was turning into a colloquy, “that when nothing seems to be happening, you can’t tell if time is stuck a little. Six years might go by—call it a decade or call it the blink of an eye—but until something else happens to make you pay attention, it doesn’t matter what you call it. If there’s no reason to notch the memory, why waste time counting dead time?”

The magistrate said, “I didn’t ask for opinions from the floor.”

Dorothy looked withered and testy. “So I say I was here six years ago, and now I’m sixteen. You say it was about eighteen years ago, depending on the moon, the province, and whether anyone remembered to notice that time was passing. According to you I could be twenty-eight. In Kansas that’s downright grandmotherly.”

Clearing his throat, Temper Bailey ventured his first remark. “Time is fascinating, sure, but why are we spending time on this?”

“If I’m twenty-eight,” said Dorothy, “then I’ve reached my majority and I can serve as my own attorney. I want to call for a recess. I’m going out to try my first whiskey smash. Uncle Henry says they’re great. Anyone want to join me?” She held out a forearm to the Owl so he might perch there.

“It’s hardly past breakfast, and the court hasn’t adjourned for the day,” said Nipp. “Not to mention that you are under arrest.”

“Oh, right.” Still, Dorothy’s shoulders squared a little straighter on her spine.

“I shall begin,” said Dame Fegg, and Nipp nodded his assent. “I would like to start with a question about your life of crime prior to your first arrival in Oz, Dorothy Gale.”

“Oh, do call me Dorothy,” said the defendant. “Everyone does.”

“In your home territory, Dorothy Gale, is killing witches something one might have trained for in grammar school? Or taken up as an extracurricular hobby?”

“Goodness, Dame Fegg—is that how I should address you?—they didn’t teach much in grammar school. Some simple sums. Our letters and how to form them on a slate. A little Virgil. The Christian principles of government. Also how to share. In any case, there are no witches in Kansas, nor as far as I could tell in San Francisco either, though frankly I don’t believe I got to the bottom of what was going on there. It sure wasn’t like Kansas, though there felt like some kind of magic at work. In any case, I wouldn’t have killed anyone, witches or no. Uncle Henry says we’re makeshift Quakers. We don’t believe in violence except of course at hog-killing time, because as the waiter said to me in the San Francisco hotel, there is nothing like a nice hot sausage slapped between warm buns first thing in the morning.” The Sow in the second row turned grey and put her hooves over the ears of her littlest Piglet. “He was ’tremely agreeable you know but I do believe he wasn’t my type. Uncle Henry said I didn’t have a type as far as he knew and in any case by the looks of things I wasn’t going to find a fellow for myself, suitable or otherwise, in San Francisco.”

Dame Fegg had stopped as if calcified at Dorothy’s reply. Her mouth opened once or twice and when she made a note her hand was trembling. “Dorothy Gale, I must remind you to answer only the question I ask. Otherwise we could be here for a year. However we count it.”

“Oh, yes, Dame Fegg. Answer only the question. That’s what my teacher in Kansas used to say. That’s why I had to take my lessons sitting on a bench outside the school building. I could lean my books and my slate on the windowsill. If I started talking too much, the teacher would come over to the sill and close the window. So if I couldn’t hear him I just would look around at Kansas, which is maybe what first gave me a yen to travel. I mean you’d have to stand on your head to make Kansas novel, and even that only works for a while. Have you ever traveled, Dame Fegg?”

“Not to Kanziz,” said the prosecutor, in a voice that made it into a kind of joke, as if she were saying haven’t gone out of my mind—yet. The crowd tittered, not knowing if that was allowed, but Nipp hid his mouth behind his hand too, so maybe it was all right.

“I’d like to be the first to invite you to visit,” said Dorothy. “I would have to be your chaperone, of course, because a little woman like yourself might be considered a child, and then you couldn’t get a whiskey smash either. Not that you could get one in Kansas under any circumstances. It’s a dry state. Dry, dry, dry.”

Dame Fegg pounced on those words as if Dorothy were casting a spell. “When you first came from Kanziz, Dorothy Gale, we were recovering from a drought that had plagued most of Oz for as long as we could remember. In a great wind you arrive, you with your suspicious name of Gale, which suggests windstorms and rain. You succeed in a matter of months in doing away with both of the Thropp sisters, who with their magic capacities might have further united and strengthened Munchkinland. In their absence, however determined our own population to govern itself, Munchkinland has not thrived. The annual rainfall has improved only slightly, and the armies of Loyal Oz have invaded our fair province and requisitioned Oz’s largest basin of potable water, the lake called Restwater. You have a great deal to answer for.”

“Well, let me start by saying we know drought in Kansas, believe me. I—”

“You may start by being quiet,” said Nipp. “Dame Fegg, at the moment please confine your questions to the matter of the murders. We may not number our years in Oz as they do in this place called Kanziz, but we number our days as precious, and we don’t want to be here until our grandchildren have grandchildren. And you, missy, keep your answers short and to the point. You are brought up on most serious charges indeed.”

“Got it,” said Dorothy.

“Briefly, I beg you, briefly,” said Dame Fegg, “describe your arrival in Center Munch for us, however many years ago we pretend it was or wasn’t. I would like you to answer for us particularly how you knew that Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, would be present that day, and how you organized an assassination of such cunning and precision, and also when and how you decided to proceed with your march on the Emerald City.”

Chastised and trying to please, Dorothy recounted what she could of her first arrival in Oz, either six or eighteen years ago. Off to the side, Brrr remembered quite a bit of what she’d told him, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. As far as he recalled she’d gotten the facts of her alibi down straight, if alibi it was. In the safety of her family’s farmhouse, the child Dorothy had taken refuge from a storm. Through some sort of catastrophe of nature, aided perhaps by a deep magic, the house had been lifted into the air, whirled through dark agency across the uncrossable sands that surround Oz, and deposited in Center Munch. Right on top of Nessarose Thropp. Apparently Dorothy hadn’t been taught about Oz in her schooling on national geographics, though perhaps that was part of the curriculum she missed by being exiled to the bench outside the closed window. She had never been able to ask about Oz even after she returned to Kansas because the teacher, frightened out of his mind by the twister coming so near, had taken off for Chicago.

“Taken off for Shiz?” asked Dame Fegg, scratching her ear.

“Chicago,” said Dorothy, but trying not to run on at the mouth she just mimed a cityscape with huge buildings. “Chi-caaaaa-go.”

Dorothy continued her narrative. It was a grisly tale. After landing, she’d learned that a good part of the town of Center Munch and outliers had gathered that morning for some sort of religious festival. Young students had been receiving prizes. Experiencing a sudden darkness, they all dove into the shrubbery and nearby homes. They heard a weird whistling followed by a shattering crash at which precise moment all their eyes were closed in terror. When they emerged from hiding, they found that a house had stove in the grandstand erected for the occasion. Dorothy stood in the center of the town square, not far from the start of the Yellow Brick Road. It took the astounded citizens of Center Munch a few moments to realize that Nessarose Thropp, alone of them, had refused to move an inch, even under the signs of the imminent attack.

“How like her,” murmured Dame Fegg. “Proof of her character.” Though Brrr had remembered it being said that her standing her ground had been proof of her noxious superiority. Once she had learned to stand on her own two feet, that is.

“At any rate,” continued Dorothy, “you may call it murder now, but at the time no one clapped me in chains. They celebrated their release from a wicked fiend. Or that’s how they said it to me. The Wicked Witch of the East had claimed for herself all powers of deciding right and wrong.” Dorothy straightened up. “I was hailed as a liberator, and soon Glinda arrived to set me on the road to the Emerald City to accept my reward.”

“Maybe she intended you to be imprisoned there, in Southstairs,” said Dame Fegg. “Getting a dangerous criminal out of commission is the first duty of a public figure.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said Dorothy. “There was singing and dancing, and someone brought out sweet bricks of bread spread with a hideous sticky cream jam of some sort. I had never meant to kill a witch—I hadn’t even known witches existed, except in storybooks, and not the kind of storybooks we were allowed to read in Kansas, believe me. It was all so sudden, you see.”

“There are a great many holes in your testimony,” said Dame Fegg. “For your house to crash exactly upon the place our Eminent Thropp stood, killing her and her alone—it beggars credulity. It smacks of a conspiracy in high places. I suspect someone in the Emerald City was involved.”

“When I landed, they didn’t call it an impossible coincidence,” said Dorothy in about as cold a voice as Brrr had ever heard her use. “They called it a miracle.”

“I put it to the judge and the jury that with malice aforethought the defendant conspired to alight in a most deadly manner,” said Dame Fegg. “She wreaks havoc wherever she goes, both last time and this. The poor cow.” Though it was unclear whether she meant Dorothy or the Glikkun milk cow she squashed upon arrival this time.

Brrr saw Little Daffy’s arm waving right in front of his nose. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I add a word?” She popped out of her chair and approached the magistrate’s desk.

“If it’s pertinent, go ahead,” said Nipp.

“I was there at Center Munch. I was about the age then that Dorothy is now, or says she is, I mean. I was sixteen or eighteen years old. It was the end of our year of studies of the writings of the unionist fathers. I can speak to what actually happened and to the sentiment at the time.”

Nipp nodded, and Dame Fegg seemed wary, but she waved her quill at Little Daffy to proceed. Temper Bailey hopped on one leg, looking interested for the first time.

“Of course I was young,” said Little Daffy. “But none of us had ever seen anything like the arrival of Dorothy before. She wore that preposterous costume and carried that inarticulate puppy—”

“Oh, please don’t mention Toto or I just might cry,” said Dorothy.

“—and I verify that it seemed to all of us as if she might be a sorceress or a saint, arriving out of nowhere in some sort of portable house, to liberate Munchkinland from a tyrant of sorts.”

“The tyranny of Nessarose being primarily religious?” asked Dame Fegg.

“Yes. That’s right.”

“And yet you went on to spend your life in a mauntery. So your illustration of Nessarose Thropp as a bigoted dominatrix of some sort is a bit lacking in smack.”

“It’s true I was dressed up as a sunflower or a daisy, or maybe even a daffodil,” replied Little Daffy. “It was a pageant of sorts. And as a young person of course I was susceptible to the special pleading of startling atmospherics. But my memory isn’t at fault here. Dorothy was greeted by wild regaling. The death of Nessarose was viewed as an accident. And I insist, a happy accident. I stand up to tell this because it is so.”

“Very nice, very sweet. Testimony of a daffodil. You may stand down,” said Nipp.

“And it wasn’t just me,” said Little Daffy. “Lady Glinda arrived soon thereafter.”

“That’ll do,” said Nipp.

“May I pose a question?” The Owl seemed entirely too timid, thought Brrr, though perhaps that was a courtroom strategy of legal counsel who happened to be Animal.

“If you must,” said Nipp. Dame Fegg curled her lip.

The Owl said, “Did you like being a sunflower on display for Nessarose Thropp?”

“I adored it,” said Little Daffy. “I wore a kind of snood on which were sewn big flat yellow petals cut out of felt. We stood in ranks and had our own lines to sing when Nessarose walked by in those glamourous shoes she had. It was a children’s song called ‘Lessons of the Garden.’ ”

“What was your line to sing? Can you recall it?”

“Out of order. Inappropriate,” said Nipp. “Besides, no one cares.”

“I do,” said Dorothy. “I love to sing.”

“If it pleases the court,” said Little Daffy, “and I won’t do the whole thing—I just had a single stanza. Correcting for pitch, as back in those days I was a soprano and now I’m a beery contralto, it went like this.”

“Oh, please,” said Dame Fegg. Brrr bared a canine at her. Just one.

“Go on, and perhaps I can become a sort of musical anthropologist, collecting melodies. I’ll call it ‘Songs of the Munchkinland,’ ” said Dorothy, clapping her hands.

Little Daffy sang,

Little sorry sunflower seed,

I know exactly what you need.

The love of the Unnamed God is pure,

As good for you as rich manure.

“Or maybe not,” said Dorothy.

“That took up a few valuable moments of my life,” said Nipp to Temper Bailey witheringly.

“I’ve established the innocent nature of Little Daffy and proven she isn’t lying to protect the accused,” said Temper Bailey.

“I was a maunt,” said Little Daffy. “I took vows not to lie.”

“You also presumably took vows of commitment, and you seem to have thrown those over when they got inconvenient,” snapped Dame Fegg, indicating Mr. Boss, who was holding his wife’s hand. “I recommend that we count as inadmissible anything the little Munchkinlander dandelion sings.”

“She’s as tall as you are. I’ll snap your legs, you,” said Mr. Boss, “and then you’ll see who is little,” and so he was tossed out of court for rudeness.

“I don’t believe we can consider the testimony of a witness so young and impressionable as Little Daffy evidently was,” said Nipp. “Please strike her remarks from the record.” But since he’d neglected to appoint a court reporter no one moved to obey.

“I’m as young today as she was then,” said Dorothy. “If she was too young then to be taken seriously, you can’t try me now. I’m a minor.”

“You’re a middle-aged woman by our count, even if you look like a big lummox,” snapped Nipp. “We’re not taking that up again. Over to you, Dame Fegg. And let’s hurry this up. We’re going to break at lunchtime and reconvene tomorrow, and I’m uncommonly ready for lunch.”

Dame Fegg spent the next ninety minutes grilling Dorothy on her knowledge of Munchkinland. The prosecutor seemed to be trying to trick Dorothy into giving away some scrap of privileged information about the geography and politics of Oz, but either Dorothy was a canny defendant or she genuinely remained, even now, largely clueless about how Oz was organized. She floundered along, Dame Fegg darted and carped, Nipp groaned and made noises with his implements. Whenever deference was shown to Temper Bailey, his questions couldn’t seem to provoke Dorothy into proving her innocence. By the time Nipp sounded the bell and closed the proceedings for the day, the whole exercise seemed pretty much a waste of time to Brrr. Still, as the crowd of spectators filed out of the courtroom, the buzz was loud, argumentative, laughing. It was going over well as an entertainment, anyway. And so maybe it would be a successful trial, depending on whose measure of success you chose to adopt.

7.

At a café, in the shade of aromatic fruit trees unruffled in the breezeless evening, they discussed the day’s proceedings with Mister Mikko, who had been persuaded to leave the Reading Room behind and dare the public agora.

“I still wonder what this trial is intended to achieve,” said Little Daffy. “It’s one thing to build up a villain to help concentrate a sense of national purpose and struggle. But I should think the divine Emperor of Oz and his chief commanding officer, General Cherrystone, already qualify as enemies of the Free State of Munchkinland. Finding out whether Dorothy is now sixteen or sixty-one doesn’t seem worth the public fuss. What good does it do anyone to persecute this poor girl?”

“The Free State of Munchkinland can’t get at Shell, more’s the pity, and their engagement with Cherrystone seems at a permanent standstill,” observed Mister Mikko. “This exercise against Dorothy is meant to siphon off national frustration. Give the Munchkinlanders a sense of achievement.”

Brrr said, “So this isn’t going to be a fair trial? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course it isn’t. The very premise of the accusations is bizarre. Conflating the deaths of both sisters! Though Elphaba Thropp was born in Munchkinland, she maintained no political association with her sister Nessarose, and Elphaba ignored the opportunity to seize power once her sister was dead. And a Munchkinlander court prosecuting anyone for the murder of the Wicked Witch of the West? Absurd. The west is deep in Loyal Oz. The premise is prejudicial and proves that what’s wanted here isn’t a trial but a conviction.”

“I’m with you,” said Mr. Boss. “Nothing cheers folks up like a public beheading.”

“I’m no student of history,” said Little Daffy, “but I don’t like the way this has all lined up. Mombey and General Jinjuria, two strong defenders of Munchkinland, concentrating the attention of the country upon a legal assault of another female? The real enemies of Munchkinland are the man in the Emerald City and his chief officer at Restwater.”

“Total bitch gripe,” agreed Mr. Boss. “You’ve never seen that before? And you lived with maunts for several decades? What were you, blind?”

“She has a point,” said Mister Mikko, who after all had taught history back in his day. “Shell in his emerald towers, and Cherrystone holed up in Haugaard’s Keep … two powerful men in Oz, after the forty-year history of the Wizard’s oppression that beleaguered my parents’ generation, and their parents’, too. It’s been sixty years since Pastorius was deposed, and so maybe sixty-five, is it, since the last Ozma died? A lot of rule by men in a land with a long tradition of matriarchy.”

Little Daffy said, “That’s it exactly. If Munchkinlanders needed to take against someone to prove their strength, you’d think they’d nominate someone who stood in for the Emperor of Oz a little more keenly. This Dorothy seems a pale substitute.”

“She’s what turned up,” said Mr. Boss. “You’re not going to rear back and change her gender for the sake of a more satisfying trial.”

“But Little Daffy has a point,” insisted Mister Mikko. “Since Ozma the Bilious died leaving her husband the Ozma Regent and the baby, Ozma Tippetarius, there’s been only one female minister of Loyal Oz as we know: Lady Glinda. And she ruled well but all too briefly.”

Brrr said, “But what’s the point of the prosecution of Dorothy?”

Mister Mikko responded with a tone of gentle irony. “The fight to retake Restwater won’t be won in the court of public opinion.”

“Then what is really going on here?” asked Brrr. “It seems important to figure out, if only to find a way to defend the hapless Dorothy.”

They sat, confounded, fiddling with the silverware until the dwarf said, “I often thought the displays of the Clock of the Time Dragon were intended to divert the attention of the public from the Clock’s real mission: to serve as the secret vault that housed the Grimmerie. I wonder if this trial isn’t so much a public relations exercise as a diversion. Is something going on elsewhere on the war front that La Mombey doesn’t want us to be noticing? The Clock might have given us a clue. Damn its rotted soul.”

On their way back to the dubious comforts of A Stable Home, they passed a beer garden. Over their pints, little lager louts were singing something clangorous. The words were slurred.

Ding dong, the bitch will swing

Like a clapper on a string

Back and forth until the bitch is dead!

“What has gotten into my countrymen?” said Little Daffy.

“Don’t dawdle and gawk, you’ll only draw attention,” said Brrr, his old irritable-bowel thing threatening to flare up. “Eyes front, move along.”

“It’s just that the melody is so jolly,” said Little Daffy. “True, we used to hold singing festivals, but the texts weren’t so rabid.”

“Climate of the times,” said Mr. Boss. They hurried past.

When the court convened in the morning, the room was full to capacity. Lord Nipp instructed the Chimps to wave large rush fans. The casement windows were cranked open to their fullest, and more spectators gathered outside. There, the sight lines being poor and the sun hot, a pretty penny was to be made passing among the crowd selling cups of lemon barley. Mister Mikko, who was waiting outside, would later report that the atmosphere seemed a cross between a state funeral and a harvest festival, morbid and giddy at once.

Since yesterday Dorothy had been allowed a change of clothes, but the selection offered her hadn’t been the kindest. She seemed to be wearing a dirndl of some sort, cut for someone with the proportions of a Baboon. The sleeves were so long they could have been tied together in a bow. She looked like a child in her father’s nightshirt.

Dame Fegg dove into questioning at a gallop today, returning to the subject of Dorothy’s prior arrival in Oz. “You say that Glinda Chuffrey gave you Nessarose’s enchanted shoes and advised you to tiptoe out of town?” asked Dame Fegg. “She has a great deal to answer for herself, that Glinda. Those shoes should have belonged to the treasure-house of Munchkinland.”

“I can’t speak to Glinda’s motives,” said the defendant. “She simply told me that the Wizard of Oz could help me, and that the Yellow Brick Road would lead me to him. For all I knew she was in the tourist business and wanted me to see the sights.”

“She gave you no armed guard, no escort, no inkling that Munchkinland was devolved from Loyal Oz?”

“I don’t think so. But it seems such a long time ago, and of course everything was so new. And I did love those shoes. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“Maybe, Miss Dorothy, you have never paid enough attention.”

The crowd chortled quietly at this line, as if it were the end of a scene of some parlor farce on a stage at Shiz. But Brrr thought Dame Fegg had made a mistake. Hitherto she had not addressed Dorothy as “Miss.” Having started now, she wouldn’t be able to retreat, and that accorded the girl a little more dignity than she seemed to deserve, given her ridiculous getup.

“Dame Fegg,” piped up Dorothy, “if you were suddenly, magically carried off to my home of Kansas, how long do you think it would take you to pick up on our ways?”

“That calls for speculation,” said Dame Fegg.

“You’re not asking the questions, Miss Dorothy,” said Lord Nipp. Aha, thought Brrr, there it is: she has graduated to Miss Dorothy. In her zanily earnest way, she’s commanding the respect of her enemies despite themselves. Brrr would never call it charisma but oh, Dorothy had charm of a sort, for sure.

Dame Fegg proceeded to grill the girl about the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars, as in popular lore they had become known. Having spent his life timid enough over every living thing, and a few gloomy stationary things as well, Brrr had his concerns about being tarred by association with Dorothy. But he was a Lion, after all. A Lion among Munchkins. And thanks to good dental hygiene he had all of his natural teeth. So he straightened up and tossed his head to make of his mane a more impressive quiff, to make himself look stouthearted, even if it was all public relations.

“And the Scarecrow was so dear and so helpful,” said Dorothy, “and then the Tin Woodman such a sweetheart. And the Lion, when he showed up, a total mess.” She smiled at him as if she weren’t out to ruin his reputation, that is if he had had a reputation he cared about. “If I ever get you back to San Francisco with me, I think you would all fit in there just fine.”

“At what point did you let them in on your secret background as a regicidal maniac?” asked Dame Fegg.

“I object. Leading the witness,” said Temper Bailey, who most of the time looked as if he were napping on his perch.

“They called her a witch, that Nessarose,” explained Dorothy. “It took me a while to cotton on to the fact that she was governor as well.”

“In your single-minded campaign to deprive both Munchkinland and Loyal Oz of its entire bank of leaders, you collected a mob of collaborators,” pushed Dame Fegg.

“May I speak?” said Brrr, and stood. He was roughly ten times the girth and weight of either Lord Nipp or Dame Fegg, so they couldn’t object, though Dame Fegg focused her pious squinty bloodshot eyes on him with contempt. “Dorothy didn’t entice me with plans of sedition or the overthrow of any government. Truth to tell, I was rather at loose ends at that stage in my life. I wanted to put behind me the shame of some poor choices and some dead-end experiences—”

“Please, spare us the melodrama,” said Lord Nipp. “We’re a court of law, not a guidance counsellorship.”

“We went to the Emerald City, Your Lordship, to see if we could find a way to help Dorothy return home,” said Brrr. “As I heard it told, no one in Munchkinland had had any bright ideas about that.”

“That’s true enough,” said Dorothy. “But at least no one put me under arrest, that time.”

“And then the Wizard of Oz, so called, enlisted you in the assassination of Nessarose’s sister,” said Dame Fegg.

“Well now, that much I can’t deny,” said Dorothy. “The Wizard said the Wicked Witch of the West was tremendously evil and needed to be stopped. I was young and didn’t think to ask ‘stopped from what?’ He said she deserved to die. He wouldn’t entertain my request for help until I’d killed her.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dame Fegg was steely with purpose.

“I had no choice but to head to the west,” said Dorothy. “But I had no intention of doing the Wizard’s dirty work for him. Doesn’t that count for something? It was either leave town or take on a job as a chambermaid in one of the seedier neighborhoods of the EC.”

“Nonsense,” said Fegg. “There’s always choice.”

“No, I’m not explaining it correctly. I mean, for myself, I had no choice. For it had dawned on me how dreadful the accidental squashery of Nessarose Thropp had been. I wanted to apologize to the closest survivor for my inadvertent part in her sister’s demise. That’s why I went west. That, and for no other reason.”

“You expect us to believe that?” Fegg looked offended. “The Wizard, by your own admission, asks you to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, and you carry out his plans with cunning and immediacy, and then you claim you had no culpability in the matter? It’s preposterous.” She gave a sneer that could have won her an acting award.

“Hey now, wait,” said Dorothy. “The coincidence of the Wizard’s aims and my experiences at Kiamo Ko, the Witch’s castle, is no proof of my guilt.”

Coincidence again, thought Brrr. Not proof, but not helpful, either.

Temper Bailey spoke up again. “Let’s hear more from the Lion. He was on that mission too, was he not?”

Nipp turned a cold eye on Brrr and nodded.

The Lion thought: If this does end poorly, what happens to Dorothy—? To me?

He said, “I wasn’t present at Dorothy’s commission from the Wizard. I can’t confirm what he said to her. I do concur that the Wizard asked me to kill the Witch too, and about their private meetings with the Wizard, both the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman reported the same. We proceeded to the west not to fulfill the Wizard’s request but to lend succor to our companion on the road, who we all could see was young and innocent if not a few sequins short of a diadem, if you know what I mean.”

Dorothy pulled a face at that.

“And what can you tell us about the murder of Elphaba Thropp?” asked Temper Bailey.

“I can tell you precious little about her death; I don’t answer to its being called a murder,” said the Lion. “I was locked in a kitchen larder with the Witch’s son, Liir, and by the time we’d escaped the room and dashed up the tower stairs to the parapet of the castle, Dorothy was already descending the stairs, weeping her eyes out.”

“I cried so hard,” said Dorothy, “I looked like I’d thrown that bucket of water over myself.”

“And so the question is,” said Brrr, “what happened up there? Did Dorothy kill the Witch? Either on purpose or by accident? All any of us know about the matter is that the Witch is done with. She’s gone. But was she killed?”

The room fell silent. Dame Fegg turned to Dorothy and so did Temper Bailey. Several hundred Munchkinlanders paused in their knitting or their munching of small round breakfast pastries. The Chimpanzees held their fans still.

“I shall remind you that you are under oath to answer honestly,” murmured Lord Nipp, almost as if afraid to break the spell of the question.

Dorothy put her face in her hands, a sloppy gesture given the length of her sleeves. When she lifted her teary cheeks, her upper lip was creamy with mucus; it looked as if she had applied a depilatory unguent. “I believe in taking responsibility for what happens,” she admitted. “I believed it six years ago, and that’s why I went to Kiamo Ko, to confess my part in the death of Nessarose Thropp. And I confess my part in the death of Elphaba Thropp too, to the extent I can be sure that it happened. But when I threw a bucket of water at the Witch, to save her from burning to death in her black skirts, what happened was a huge plume of smoke and a sizzle, as of fatback on a griddle, and the Witch collapsed amid the drapes of her skirts and the billows of smoke. The acrid stench and the burning in my eyes made me turn away, and I vomited in terror and surprise, and when I looked back—well, she was gone.”

“Killed,” said Fegg.

“Gone,” said Dorothy.

“Is that the same thing?”

“Who can say?”

“Very good question,” said Temper Bailey. “Who can say? Were there witnesses?”

“Only Toto, and he used to be the strong silent type,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, now, let’s not start that sniffling again,” scoffed Fegg.

“The Witch’s old Nanny finally made it up the stairs, and she swept me away while she cleaned up,” said Dorothy. “I never went up there again, and I never examined the scene of the death. I was a witness at her disappearance—and, sure, maybe it was a death. But wouldn’t there have been a corpse?”

“Of course there was a corpse,” snorted Dame Fegg. “You’ve proven yourself to be an unreliable witness any number of times. In your glee and relief you just didn’t check, or you’re pretending not to have checked.”

The room seemed to rock a little; maybe it was the heat, or maybe that Dorothy carried personal earthquakes with her to deploy at will. Brrr sat up straight. Temper Bailey emitted a series of small who-who-whos, but whether that was a stutter or an admission in Owlish that he was not wise enough for this particular job was hard to say.

“Before you kill again,” said Dame Fegg, “I will see you put to death.”

Lord Nipp had to pound his gavel repeatedly. When silence returned at last, he called a halt in the proceedings for two days. He made the suggestion that Animals should be invited to hear the final assessments and the judgment of Dorothy, and Munchkinlander farmers should roundly encourage their lodgers and farmhands to show some civic spirit and witness the conclusion of the trial. After all, a cow had been killed in the Glikkus. There was such a thing as solidarity.

8.

Why the adjournment? From the point of view of the prosecution, it seemed to Brrr a clumsy move. The hiatus might allow that rumor—that Elphaba was somehow still alive—to gain weight and sway public opinion in Dorothy’s favor. Mister Mikko agreed and concluded that Nipp must have a sound reason for delaying. Might they be trying to dig up a witness, somewhere, someone who could confirm Elphaba’s death by revealing anything about the disposition of her corpse?

“Preposterous,” said Brrr. Who could it be? Back on that dreadful day, neither he nor Liir had been allowed up the stairs to the parapet where Elphaba had died. The only human souls who might give testimony about the scene of that tragedy were Dorothy herself and the Witch’s old Nanny, who had gone up after Dorothy had come down but who had refused Liir access. Brrr had assumed it was out of kindness; Liir had, after all, been a mere fourteen years old. And a young fourteen at that.

Could Elphaba’s old Nanny have been capable of a deceit of any magnitude? Concealing the Witch?… Brrr thought not. Even then Nanny had been stunningly unmoored from reality. Were she still alive, she’d be over a hundred years old now. At any rate, Kiamo Ko was a thousand-some miles away any route you took. They wouldn’t be putting Nanny or her ghost on the witness stand.

Then, he wondered, what about Chistery? The chief of the flying monkeys? As far as Brrr knew, Chistery was an anomaly in Oz. He’d begun life as an animal incapable of language, and yet he had managed to learn it, thanks to Elphaba’s ministrations and maybe to her magic. Brrr had no idea how old Chistery would be now, nor how long snow monkeys generally lived. He asked Mister Mikko his opinion, but the Ape bared his false dentures at Brrr and refused to get into a discussion about it. “I don’t even know my own expected life span,” he snapped; “how could I possibly be conversant on the life span of an invented line like a flying monkey?”

Even if he were alive, Chistery would likely be too old to fly all those miles to speak in confirmation of the Witch’s death, decided Brrr. And an Animal’s testimony would carry only so much weight.

The evening before the trial was set to reopen, Mr. Boss said, “In the absence of any other clue about why Nippy Nipp Nipp adjourned for two days, I’ve been wondering if emissaries of La Mombey have been working to get information out of Dorothy now that she’s been threatened with execution.”

“Information about what?” asked his wife.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “La Mombey must be as interested in locating the Grimmerie as the Emperor is. Maybe she thinks that only something as powerful as that book could have drawn Dorothy back to Oz, and that Dorothy knows something about its location. A threat of death might loosen her tongue.”

“Dorothy’s is one tongue that doesn’t need any more loosing,” said the Munchkinlander. But Brrr wondered if Mr. Boss had a point.

They made the mistake of walking back to their lodgings through the piazza outside Neale House. Flares had been set up so that the tradesmen could hammer together a kiosk of some sort. “They’re going to sell souvenirs that say THE JUDGMENT OF DOROTHY! Headbands or armbands,” guessed Little Daffy.

“They’re building her a little house she can ride back to Kansas,” said Mr. Boss.

They stopped joking then, as someone strung up a rope, and someone else tested the trapdoor. “They wouldn’t,” said Little Daffy, dabbing her eyes. “My own folk, coarsened so?”

At A Stable Home, she ventured to ask Dame Hostile, “Do you think Lord Nipp will order Dorothy to be hanged?”

“She’ll swing like a bell, ding dong, they say,” replied the widow. “And by the way, I’m giving notice to you lot. When you booked in, you concealed your association with that Dorothy. So I want you to clear out tomorrow. I don’t need this house to get a reputation for attracting lowlife.”

“But I’m a Munchkinlander!” cried Little Daffy.

“That’s pretty low,” said the dwarf, “though I’m not one to talk.”

“I’m retiring,” said the chatelaine. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”

“We didn’t do anything to you,” said Little Daffy. “I know my manners. We clean up after ourselves. Look, I’ll bake you a coffee bread for the morning.” She was almost beside herself, to be treated this way by her own kind.

The only response from upstairs was a slammed door.

Brrr had had enough. He repaired to his chamber, from where he could hear the distant sound of hammering and cheering half the night, as the laborers tested and retested their equipment.

Regardless of the reasons for the postponement, when the trial reconvened Neale House was even more crowded the next day. A thousand Munchkinlanders surrounded the building and spilled into the square by the front doors. The Animals that Munchkin farmers had cajoled or browbeat into joining them were largely of the junior variety—kits, cubs, pups in training harness. They were escorted by Ewes and Dames, in hooded expressions and the occasional going-to-town bonnet. The human factor in the crowd snickered and occasionally nickered. Even a jaded old Goat with a beard on her chin and a wen on her rump commanded little respect in a crowd of beer-barrel farmers.

“So far in this picture-pretty town, my size and presence has seemed more than enough to allow me to pass through any crowd,” murmured Brrr to the dwarf and his wife. “But the Munchkinlanders seem to be gigantic in menace, or is that just me?”

Mister Mikko said, “I’m turning back. This atmosphere reminds me too much of the crowds that gathered to hear about the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws. I can wait till tonight to hear what develops. And if I happen to die today of hexus of the plexus or bonkus of the konkus, don’t think I go unwillingly. It’s been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.”

The room was filled to the rafters, literally, since Munchkinlanders sat straddling the beams. The atmosphere had gone grave. Nipp cleared his throat and took sips of water and cleared his throat again before harrumphing, “Due to circumstances on the international front, I’ve been required to speed up the trial. In the absence of further witnesses this morning, I’m going to ask the advocates to present their final arguments. I will then charge the jury with making a judgment of Dorothy Gale: guilty as charged or innocent of some or all charges. I retain to myself the privilege of listening to the jury’s advice and determining if it is sound. May I remind you all that the final arbitration of justice remains in the hands of the magistrate. Me. Dame Fegg, you may begin.”

The prosecutor, clearly, had been briefed about the change in calendar. She’d come cloaked in some sort of dark academic robe that set off her iron braids, this morning coiled and pinned to each temple with treacherous-looking hair swizzlers. In a voice rounded with theatrical tones, perhaps the better to carry out the windows, she called Dorothy to the chair for a final time.

The defendant emerged from belowstairs in the usual manner. No one lent a hand, but at least for her final turn on the stand she’d been allowed to appear in her own clothes, an ensemble that had no origin in Oz—a blue velvet skirt with shiny black jet piping at the hem that, at intervals, looped waistward in hand-stitched arabesques. Cut to the midcalf and girdled with a wide stomacher, it cinched a white linen blouse with mutton sleeves. A toque filigreed with spiky feathers and fake linen roses in blue and silver perched at a drunken angle upon her head. She clutched her gloved hands repeatedly as if in her distress she were about to burst into song.

“Lord Nipp,” began Dame Fegg. “Counsel Bailey. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Ladies and gentlemen of the gallery and beyond. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen of history: I address you all.”

Dorothy gave a little cough. “Yes, Miss Dorothy, I address you too,” said Dame Fegg in exaggerated courtesy, the first nasty giggle of the morning. Brrr rolled his eyes at Little Daffy and Mr. Boss.

“This trial has not taken so long that we need to review point by point what’s been put before us already. I shall therefore make a cursory summary for the sake of the record. I put it to the jury that Dorothy Gale is guilty as charged of the murder of Nessarose Thropp and Elphaba Thropp. Whether she is also guilty of the murder of that cow in the Glikkus is not our concern this morning.”

“No one said it was a talking Cow,” said Dorothy. “But I’ve kind of noticed you don’t always pay attention to that distinction.”

“Ooooh,” said the humans in the crowd, as if this were a point in a debating tourney. Brrr couldn’t tell if they approved, generally, or if Dorothy was hitting too close to home. The Animals, he noticed, were silent, even stiff in their composure.

“I believe we’ve established that, some eighteen years ago, the collapse of Miss Dorothy’s domicile upon Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, indisputably resulted in her death. Though known at the time as the Wicked Witch of the East, Nessarose is honored for her role in launching Munchkinland independence. Therefore Dorothy Gale is guilty of slaying the mother of our country. Our dear Munchkinland.”

“Here comes the dump,” murmured Mr. Boss to Brrr. “I can smell it.”

Dame Fegg left the circular plinth from which she had conducted most of her examination. “We are a small people,” she said. “Before most of us were born, the Ozma Regent, Pastorius, began the job of strangling our native independence by renaming Nubbly Meadows in southern Gillikin as the Emerald City. Pastorius planned the early stages of what would become the Yellow Brick Road. His work, however innocently meant, was ready for exploitation by the Wizard of Oz. Until Nessarose Thropp inherited the mantle of Eminence that was rejected by her sister Elphaba, we were in thrall to the powers of what is now called Loyal Oz. So the recent history of Munchkinland—the history into which many of us were born—casts us most often as the handmaiden of the rich, the laborer in the field, the servant under the stairs, the midget comedy troupe.”

The room had gone fully silent, humans and Animals alike.

“Small, yes,” said Dame Fegg, reclaiming her dais now for emphasis and striking a pose, “small, but not insignificant. We accept from our forebears the stewardship of our dear Munchkinland. The bones of our ancestors herringbone the soil we plow. The land they tilled, the views they cherished, are ours. We shall never allow any invader, either Dorothy Gale or the Emerald City Messiars at Haugaard’s Keep, to abuse our liberty and to confiscate our sacred trust of land. From the slopes of the Scalps to the north, where the Glikkuns still dig for emeralds…” She paused to drag out a handkerchief, giving Mr. Boss a chance to mutter, “Technically the Glikkus isn’t Munchkinland; this lot is as blind to native borders as anyone else.” She continued, “… to the brave little hamlets perched on the edge of the great desert to the east—to the lonely, sere sweeps of the Hardings and the Cloth Hills that divide us from soggy Quadling Country, and over, yes, to Restwater! to Restwater, damn it! which shall not remain in the greedy grasp of the invaders, but shall return rightfully to those who cherish it most!”

A cheer went up. “This could turn into a riot,” muttered Mr. Boss to his companions. “I always enjoy a good riot.”

“We came to do a job, and we’ll see it through,” said Brrr, hoping he meant it. He glanced at Little Daffy to see how she was faring. She nodded that she was firm.

“And on up to the Madeleines,” continued Dame Fegg. “That rank of soft mountains to our west, dividing us from Gillikin. The longest stretch of unprotected border of Munchkinland, an easy bolster, nothing more, along whose slopes the clouds roll toward us, furnishing us with the rain that makes us the Corn Basket of Oz, nothing less. Productive Munchkinland, that part most of us know best—the soft rolling lavender fields, the farmsteads lit with cheery lamplight of an evening, the harvest festivals, the local traditions of long tables set out on village greens. The beer—yes, let us defend our right to brew hops!”

Another big cheer at this.

“All of it—all of our way of life, treasured bequest of those who went before—all of it threatened by invaders. I give you Miss Dorothy,” she said, playing to the crowd rather than the jury. “Miss Dorothy Gale, a young woman unreliable in her memories of how she came first to Oz to commit regicide against the ruling family of our motherland, our Munchkinland.”

Later, Brrr swore he heard someone from behind a door sound a note on a pitch pipe, but perhaps cynicism was getting the better of him. Someone in the crowd began to sing what the Lion had come to know as Munchkinland’s anthem.

Munchkinland, our motherland,

No other land is home.

We cherish best this land so blessed

As pretty as a poem.

We’ll never rest when from the west

By rude oppressors we’re oppressed.

We proudly stand with Munchkinland,

Our treasure chest, our humble nest,

Our motherland, no other land

Is home.

Brrr cast a glance to the front. Even Temper Bailey was singing—to keep mum was probably considered sedition. The cheering that followed could probably be heard all the way to Kanziz. Not good, the Lion thought. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see those Chimps come out with tankards of ale to sozzle the mood further.

Dame Fegg wiped her eyes. “And so, from the heartland of Oz, from the capital city of our Free State of Munchkinland, do I put it to the jury one final time. Dorothy Gale’s testimony about her youth and innocence in her prior sojourn in Oz can’t be considered admissible, as that very youth made her an unreliable witness to the events of the times. Nonetheless, in this country everyone must pay for what crimes they commit, and nobody can adequately defend Dorothy against the crime of murder of Elphaba Thropp. By extension one deduces that the accused’s aims were coherent, her capacity to assassinate our leaders honed to surgical precision, and her disguise as gullible sweetheart on a walking tour entirely convincing to those morons with whom she came in touch.”

“I object,” called Little Daffy. Mr. Boss looked at her sideways with a clenched lower lip, dubious but approving. His little Munchkinlander spitfire. “I may have been young and dressed as a daffodil, but I was no moron.”

“You aren’t counsel. You have no right to object,” said Lord Nipp.

“I should think that’s exactly the kind of right we are trying to defend in Munchkinland,” said Little Daffy. Brrr found he wasn’t so surprised at her brass. Purportedly she had spent a decade or so chafing under the direction of her former colleague Sister Doctor. She’s not shy, our Little Daffy.

“Counsel Bailey,” said Lord Nipp. “Have you anything to add?”

The Owl had come to court in native dress, which is to say naked. This was a risky gambit, Brrr thought, but who knows? It set him apart from the Munchkinlander prosecutor, who had returned to her stool and was blowing her nose with sentiment and force. Temper Bailey flew to a perch provided him halfway between the jury and Dorothy, who was sitting upright, back ramrod straight, eyes open too wide.

“I assert that my client, Miss Dorothy Gale from abroad somewhere, must be innocent of the charges of murder and assassination,” said Temper Bailey. “For one thing, while it is true that her arrival coincided with the death of Nessarose Thropp, there’s no way to prove that Nessarose didn’t look up into the heavens at the sight of a small house lurching through the clouds and have a heart attack from terror, falling down dead on the platform just before the house of Dorothy landed. I took advantage of our unscheduled recess to fly to Center Munch and search the coronor’s records. While Nessarose was conclusively determined to be dead, the cause of death is not mentioned.”

“Well, I doubt coroners are trained to identify the cause of every possible fatality in this universe,” said Lord Nipp. “Cause of death: Collapse of Real Estate? Please. Point dismissed.”

“Nonetheless, we must deal with the facts legally as we find them,” said Temper Bailey. “In any case, if we accept Counsel Fegg’s conclusion that Dorothy Gale is an unreliable witness to her own actions, we must also therefore strike from the record Dorothy’s observation that the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba Thropp, actually died.”

“Preposterous,” said Dame Fegg. “All of Oz knows that she died at the hands of this witch.”

“If you please, I am not a witch,” said Dorothy. She mimed tying a bonnet under her chin “I’ve been trying to make this point for some time, but you people here never seem to put on your listening caps.”

“I propose to the jury,” said Temper Bailey, “that of the charges brought against the defendant, we must strike them both off the chart of crimes.”

“Wait; we can get the coroner in here to testify what he saw,” said Lord Nipp.

“The coroner is dead, my Lord. So all we have are his records. May I close by saying that we’ve heard no conclusive evidence that the defendant committed the crimes with which she is charged? Here in loyal Munchkinland, even as we struggled against the encroachments of the Emerald City barbarians to our west, we must remember that what we are defending is not only the golden treasury of our arable fields and our native customs. We are defending our own honor, too. And we will not convict someone for whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” snapped Dame Fegg. “I suppose as a coda you’re going to propose that due to the contradiction in time schemes, that the defendant before us is not even the actual Dorothy Gale who was here eighteen years ago, but an impostor?”

“Oh, I’m me, all right,” said Dorothy earnestly.

“I haven’t given you the floor,” said Lord Nipp.

“Oh, but Your Reasonableness, may I have a word? Please?”

Brrr could see that Nipp was inclined to say no, but the crowd wanted to hear Dorothy speak. They rhubarbed away in an insistent manner. Maybe the magistrate was stuck between his formal obligations and his own curiosity. If so, his curiosity won. He waved her forward.

Dorothy stood up for the first time. She towered over the Munchkinlanders, even Lord Nipp on his stool. “When I first came to Oz however many years ago we count it, I was merely ten,” she said. “I don’t know if in Munchkinland a child of ten can be convicted of murder, but I believe in fairness, and I think you do too. When the twister lifted my house from its foundations, and I went whirling off in the skies, I was as helpless as a flea on the hide of a dog. I knew nothing of Munchkinland or anything about Oz, and I don’t see how I can be convicted of murder of a Wicked Witch whose presence I wasn’t even aware of until her corpse was pointed out to me by Lady Glinda.”

This was, perhaps, not a sound association for Dorothy to make, thought Brrr; Lady Glinda seemed to be persona non grata both in Loyal Oz and in Munchkinland. You couldn’t win.

“I’ve been fed newspapers in my jail cell—and a very comfortable jail cell it is, I might add. I have seen this trial referred to over and over as ‘The Judgment of Dorothy.’ With all due respect to my estimable hosts, today I would like to interpret that phrase as ‘Dorothy’s Judgment on the Matter.’ And so before you deliver your verdict, dear honorable jury and magistrate, I would like to deliver mine.”

“Entirely out of order,” said Nipp, sorry he’d let this cat out of the bag, but the crowd was straining to hear what Dorothy would say next.

“When I first came to Oz as an untraveled farmgirl,” she went on, “everything seemed magical to me. It took some getting used to, the presence of witches and wizards, and talking Animals, to say nothing of a Scarecrow who could walk and a man hammered with tin. It made Kansas look very tame. When I got home a few months later, thanks to the magic shoes that had caused so many problems, everything appeared pale by comparison. I thought maybe I’d somehow made the whole thing up. But then Uncle Henry and Auntie Em showed me a whole new house with a real indoor washroom instead of an outhouse, bought with insurance, and I hadn’t made that up. Plumbing is uniquely persuasive. So I decided my trip to Oz had been real, even if no one in Kansas believed in you.”

She looked at them. “Yes. No one believed in Munchkinland. They thought I was being fanciful or perhaps tetched in the head. But I never stopped believing in you. I never stopped believing in the Yellow Brick Road, and the Emerald City, and that frightening old humbug, the Wizard of Oz.”

She paused. She wasn’t quite as good as Dame Fegg, thought Brrr, but she had strengths of her own. “Here I stand now, before the very people I pledged never to forget, only to be accused by them of murders I didn’t intend to commit. I’m older now, as we’ve discussed. And I’ve traveled a little bit since I was ten. Uncle Henry took me by train all across the great mountains in my land to the city by the bay—to San Francisco—and for all that I have seen, the Rocky Mountains that, no offense intended, rival the magnificent Scalps in stature and purity—the great fertile plains of Nebraska—the ocean beyond the bay—I haven’t seen anything that could deflect my memories of Munchkinland and Oz. Not yet, not ever. My judgment of you is that you are a kind people and a fair people, and you will do what is right. You will make for me more memories of charity and justice that I can carry home, if I can ever reckon how to manage the return trip.”

She curtseyed at Lord Nipp and again at Dame Fegg, and then she curtseyed a third time, not to the jury but to the crowd in Neale House. A small spattering of applause, quickly repressed.

“Mmm, she’s good,” murmured Mr. Boss. “This should be rich.”

“I shall liberate the jury to its deliberations,” began Nipp, but then Dame Fegg stood up.

“There is a matter I meant to follow and I have just remembered,” she said. “May I be allowed to ask a question?” Nipp nodded. “I wonder if Miss Dorothy could describe for those of us who know nothing about Sanfran Tsitsko, or however it is said, the sea you mentioned once or twice. What sea is this?”

“Oh, goodness,” said Dorothy. “It’s called the Pacific Ocean. It is as wide as the sky, and as broad.”

“Poetic license is inadmissible in court,” said Dame Fegg. “Nothing could be as wide as the sky. The sky goes to both sides of us, you see, whereas a landscape to be viewed can only go in one direction.”

“You’re right, in a manner of speaking,” said Dorothy, “but you see, this sea is so broad that you can’t view the other side. It’s said to stretch as far as Asia, and to take many, many days to cross by boat. Once you are out in a sailing vessel or a steamer, you lose sight of the land, of California and all, and there’s nothing around you but water. The sea is as wide as the sky, exactly so, for the water, I am told, stretches under you and the sky above, in precisely identical proportions…”

“That’ll do,” said Dame Fegg. Munchkinlanders were vomiting into their lunch sacks. “You describe a mystical sea that bears no resemblance to reality. I hold you are criminally insane.”

“Just because you’ve never seen an ocean doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said Dorothy. “The same way that, when I go home, if I get home, your existence is not obliterated just because none of my family has ever been to Munchkinland.”

Dame Fegg said, “I have heard enough, Lord Nipp. I think you can send the jury out.”

“The presence or absence of an ocean of the mind has no bearing on this case!” hooted Temper Bailey.

“Are there any final remarks?” asked Nipp, picking up his gavel. He pointed at Brrr, who shrank back. But Little Daffy stood up and approached the table.

“I want to thank you for hearing my testimony, sir,” she said. “As the only Munchkinlander present who witnessed the arrival of Dorothy, I’m grateful to have been welcomed into the proceedings. It’s a custom of Center Munch to conclude a disagreement or a negotiation with a sweet, to show that honorable people can agree to disagree and still be courteous. So I have baked a little present for you.” No one could argue with Little Daffy; none of the Munchkinlanders from Bright Lettins knew the customs of Center Munch. She pulled from a basket on her arm a checkered cloth and unfolded it. “Please, in the name of those Munchkinlanders who remember Nessarose Thropp, accept this offering in the spirit in which I give it.”

Nipp took a little pastry between thumb and forefinger. Dame Fegg did the same. Temper Bailey, using his claws on his perch, declined an offering. “May I approach the defendant?” asked Little Daffy. “It’s the custom. ‘With special zest we greet the guest,’ ” she intoned daringly. “Or is that verse peculiar to Center Munch?”

“If you must,” said Nipp. Little Daffy angled the basket and shifted the napkin so Dorothy could see inside better.

“Take two, they’re small, and you’re a big girl,” said Little Daffy, and Dorothy obliged. Then Nipp instructed the jury to file out to a private chamber.

“I wouldn’t go far,” said Nipp, “if you want to be present at the declaration of the verdict. I have a feeling this isn’t going to take a long time. We’ll convene again in an hour and I’ll let you know if a decision has been reached.”

9.

They walked enough apart from the crowds to be able to talk. “This trial is a wholesale farrago of justice,” said Mr. Boss. “Not that I care much for justice, one way or the other. But even so. Your offer of defense, Brrr, hasn’t amounted to much. She’s dead meat, our little Giddy Girl Gale. Cooked and sliced and served on a party platter.”

“I think so too,” said Little Daffy. “Which is why I think we need to be ready to liberate her if things get ugly.”

“I doubt they could get any uglier,” said the Lion. The mob would have no trouble wrestling Dorothy up on the scaffold, but they’d never get his big neck in a noose. They’d think of something else for him. The mind went white-blank, and he didn’t speak for a moment for fear a tremble in his voice would betray him. “Do you have something in mind?”

“Just be on your toes. I mean that literally.”

Hardly fifteen minutes into the break, a bell began to ring, and the crowd surged to reassemble at Neale House. But the doors to the hall remained closed. The crowd murmured, and Brrr picked up a frisson of something different. Funny how news has a vibration in the air all its own. Something had happened. Something was happening. He shouldn’t have been surprised to see, when the door finally did open, that it wasn’t Nipp who emerged from the formal entrance but La Mombey herself.

The crowd broke into a cheer, rousing at first but subduing at the expression of their Eminence. A tall and striking woman, in this light she appeared more silvery blond and mature. Not unlike, Brrr thought, Dobbius’s portraits of the Kanraki, those mythical spirits of the ravines of Mount Runcible. He half expected La Mombey to open her painted lips and lead them in a reprise of the Munchkinlander anthem.

Mr. Boss must have been imagining the same. Sotto voce, he began to warble a few lines.

“‘Munchkinland, its truncheon lands on all who dare drop by…’ ”

“Shhh,” said his wife.

“Gentle patriots,” La Mombey addressed them. “Lord Nipp will call the proceedings to order momentarily. I beg your leave to address you on a matter of urgency in the meanwhile. It is my sad duty to tell you that our investigators have learned of disturbing developments. Word has come to the committees at Colwen Grounds that a new offensive against Munchkinland is soon to be launched. Not from the Scalps, where our noble Glikkun friends are holding the mountain passes as only they could do. Nor from Restwater, at least not that we can glean. No, the Emerald City is said to be commissioning new battalions to make skirmishes across the slopes of the Madeleines in Gillikin into the Wend Fallows of Munchkinland. The Wend Fallows are scrubby and inhospitable marches, but there is little in the terrain that could slow an army determined to cross it. Put frankly, our spies conclude that the aim of the Emerald City, after these several years of stalemate, is to up the ante. The enemy intends to press for a full surrender of the government at Colwen Grounds and Bright Lettins by engaging us on a second front.”

She raised a staff and a surge of gluey white light pulsed from it. Brrr had forgotten that La Mombey was a sorceress of sorts. He could detect no evidence that a charm had been cast, except the charm of pyrotechnic dazzle, but the crowd oohed and ahhed, and people in the back began to applaud. “We will not let this happen,” she said more fiercely. “In the defense of our homeland, today I declare a conscription of all Animals who originate outside our borders, including those born here whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Loyal Oz during the Animal Adverse laws. We gave you and your families succor when times were hard on you; we know you will stand with us and defend us when times are hard on us. Consequently, since yesterday I have secured the bridges and gates of Bright Lettins with a spell to help you Animals avoid the temptation to flee your duties. Links of lightning, I suppose, designed to deter any deserters. A little aversion therapy, we could call it. Following the close of this trial, Neale House will become the center for enlistment and assignment for the Animal Army of Munchkinland. May I suggest that mothers and their young among us right now be impounded for release until their husbands and fathers and mates come to ransom them. Since so many eligible male Animals seem to have had prior engagements today. For their valor in service, let us chant, hoorah!”

“Hoorah,” shouted everyone except the Animals.

Brrr said, “What’s the word for the tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time?”

“Fate’s foolery,” said Mr. Boss cheerily enough. “Give me one of those biscuits, wife. A surge in war fever always makes me peckish.”

He fished in the basket and came up with two confections and a piece of paper. “‘Dorothy, take these two,’ ” he read. “Oh, don’t tell me, you poisoned the others? I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.” He put them back.

“Nonsense, don’t be silly,” she said but could explain no further, as La Mombey had swooped away and the doors to the hall were opening.

When the crowd was reassembled in the broad chamber, quieter than ever, Lord Nipp emerged, and then the barristers. The Owl looked terrified. No wonder. However the verdict went, Temper Bailey would probably end up in an Animal line of defense trying to hold the Wend Fallows. Me too, if I’m not careful, Brrr thought.

The trapdoor opened and Dorothy began to climb up, but nerves, it seemed, were finally getting to her. She paused on the ladder, half into the hall, and swayed. Maybe she’d caught sight of the scaffold out the windows at the rear of the room. The Chimpanzees hurried forward and put a gloved hand under each of her armpits and more or less hauled her out. “Oh, my,” she said. “I sure hope it’s not my time of the month.”

“Nothing good ever happens to that girl,” said Mr. Boss.

“The judgment is called forth,” said Lord Nipp, and the jury proceeded into the room. The foreman handed a twist of paper to the magistrate. Then followed a bit of symbolism derived from older systems of jurisprudence in Munchkinland, Brrr guessed. Lord Nipp put the paper inside one half of an empty, hinged wooden ball and clapped the ball closed to make a full sphere. The judgment of Dorothy was imprisoned inside it. Next Nipp withdrew from under his table a round cage of metal bars, like a birdcage, that spun on a central axis. Through a hinged door he popped the wooden ball, and then latched the door and spun the cage.

“Oh don’t, it makes me dizzy,” said Dorothy. “And Lord knows I’m dizzy enough already.”

“You’re telling me,” whispered Mr. Boss.

“It reminds me of falling in the elevator, down in the dark, spinning around and about,” said Dorothy. She put her hands out as if to steady herself. The crowd in the hall began to murmur a low note, holding the drone throughout the building and beyond it. The ball clacked against the bars of the cage, making erratic syncopation against the dark hummed note. “I don’t feel quite myself,” said Dorothy. “But then I think that’s customary in Oz.”

The rotating cage slowed down and stopped. Lord Nipp opened the door and removed the ball. “Let justice be served,” he said. Then he unscrewed the two halves of the ball and took out the verdict. There’s no element of chance to this gesture, thought Brrr. In an older time perhaps more than a single ball danced and battered against others. But time eliminates alternatives until there’s only one eventuality, sooner or later.

Maybe that was the point.

“The opinion of the jury,” said Lord Nipp, glancing up from the folded paper, “accords with my own. I have no need to amend it. The court of Bright Lettins finds the miscreant Dorothy Gale guilty of all charges. The magistrate of this court concurs. She shall be put to death to defend the honor of Munchkinland.”

Dorothy swooned and nearly fell into the open trapdoor. Little Daffy was on her feet and at Dorothy’s side before anyone else could move. “I’m an apothecaire, and I was Matron’s Assistant at the Respite of Incurables in the EC. Before the troubles,” she added. She felt Dorothy’s pulse and put her hand on Dorothy’s head. “Wouldn’t it be just our luck if the murderess dies of a heart attack before she can be put to death? Just like what was suggested of Nessarose Thropp. Ironical in the extreme.” To the Chimpanzees who had rushed forward to help, Little Daffy barked, “Move aside, Monkey boys, she needs air if she’s to survive long enough to be killed.”

“Clear the front of the room,” cried Nipp. Temper Bailey obliged by flying through the open window.

Little Daffy motioned to Brrr to approach. “We’re losing her. Quick, quick. Mr. Boss, Lord Nipp—Dame Fegg! In the name of justice! Air at once. I’ve left my apothecaire’s satchel with my colleague just below the scaffold. We must get her on the Lion’s back; he can rush her there.” The magistrate and the barrister helped drape the insensate defendant on Brrr’s back.

Little Daffy slapped her husband’s rump and said, “Up, you too,” and Mr. Boss scrambled right onto Dorothy’s spine, his bowlegs splayed out on either side of her, clamping her in place. “To make sure she doesn’t fall,” said Little Daffy. “A hand up, please. Your Lordship, arrange that a vial of smelling salts be brought to the scaffold. It’s of utmost urgency. If we’re not careful, she just might slip away from us.”

Then, to Brrr, “Off, you,” and pointed her finger. Finally Brrr understood her scheme. He hoped he wasn’t too old to clear the windowsill, and in fact he scraped his loins rather badly in the effort. He emitted more of a yowl than a roar. The Munchkins in the alley scattered in terror as Brrr, Little Daffy, Mr. Boss, and the unconscious captive bolted into their midst. His heart pounding, Brrr tossed Munchkins aside like ninepins, and passed the scaffold, its ligature looped to a peg and swaying in the force of his rush. He careered around the edge of the crowd. Whatever shocking charm La Mombey might have set upon the bridge across the Munchkin River, to keep Animals from leaving before conscription, he would push through it. The charm couldn’t hurt half as much as his scraped underside already hurt. So what if links of lightning might neuter him: execution by firing squad would accomplish the same thing.

The plunge through rings of blue lightning was like being raked by sticks of fire on all inches of his body. It singed his whiskers and softened his claws, and the dewclaws dropped out and never grew back. The sizzle did give a measure of extra bounce to the curl of his mane, he could feel it through the torment. He’d make a prettier corpse in a moment or two.

Little Daffy and Mr. Boss seemed unfazed by the charmed barrier. They sat like human clamps upon their human saddle, who had not been revived by the scorching light.

Four or five miles beyond the city limits, on the west side of the Munchkin River, the Lion paused under a stand of quoxwood trees. Dorothy fell with a heavy clump off his back. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“No,” said Little Daffy. “But I don’t expect the effects of my poppified pastries to wear off for a few hours.”

By the time Dorothy began to come around, they were a dozen miles north of Bright Lettins. Village lights to one side and another suggested happy settlements, but the Dorothy Gale Rescue Brigade hunkered down in a cart shed aside a field of lettuces. They ate the rest of the pastries and quite a bit of lettuce, and drank from a bottle of plonk that a farmer had hidden inexpertly beneath some burlap sacking.

“I hate your new hairdo,” said Mr. Boss to Brrr. “Makes you look more dandified than ever. Hey, how did it feel to bust through that charm? You carried it off like a pro.”

“It tickled,” said Brrr, “the way being jabbed with red-hot pitchforks soaked in brine tickles.” He had never thought to get a compliment from the dwarf. It was almost worth the unending agony under his pelt, as if he’d survived an attempt at the skinning of his hide. Taxidermy while you wait.

Dorothy began to stir. Her first intelligible words were, “Now that we’re alone, I can ask. Where is Liir?”

“Hidden in the outback somewhere,” said Brrr. “With wife and child.”

“I must still be hallucinating. Wife?”

“He’s older than you,” said the Lion. “Remember that.”

“So am I, now,” said Dorothy, dizzily. But a bit of prairie reserve crept into the pitch of her voice and the upward jerk of her spine. “Why did you rescue me?” she continued, when whatever passed for coherence in her had returned.

“I did it because I don’t like bullies,” said Brrr, “and they were bullies to their boots, everyone except Temper Bailey.”

“I did it because I don’t think you’re guilty,” said Little Daffy. “I was there in Center Munch, no lie, and I was about the age you are now. I do remember your arrival. Everyone hated Nessarose. It was liberation. You were a Hero of the Nation. It’s political expediency to name you a villain now. Bald opportunism. You were being brought down only to drum up a patriotic fervor just before the Eminence announced another front is about to open in the war. Which means it isn’t going all that well for Munchkinland, I should guess. Really, do they think we are morons?”

“Evidently, the answer is yes,” said the Lion. “And you know, of course, their tactic will work just fine. They’ll find a way to make Dorothy’s escape from execution play into their war fever somehow.”

“As for me,” said Mr. Boss, “why did I help? Well, I hardly knew what we were doing until we did it. But in a deeper sense, why did I come to Bright Lettins at all? Because I wondered if your return to Oz was caused by the collapse of the Clock of the Time Dragon.”

They all looked at him as if his thinking had, perhaps, collapsed.

“You two remember,” he said to the Lion and the Munchkinlander. “Rain suggested it. Liir’s child,” he explained to Dorothy. “One of the last things the Clock showed us was an earthquake. After it fell down that slope near the Sleeve of Ghastille. Near as I can tell, that happened just about the same time as the earthquake in the Scalps. Maybe the Clock’s insidious magic brought Dorothy back, against her will.”

“Are you showing solidarity with something besides the Clock?” asked Little Daffy. “Senility hits at last.”

The dwarf grunted. “Least we could do is stand by her, since she never bought the ticket to come.”

“And I have no return ticket,” added Dorothy. “I don’t suppose there are any more of those pastries left? They leave a kick, but my, they are tasty.”

At St. Prowd’s

1.

Rain didn’t count the days or the hours in a day.

She didn’t count the items in the collections she made, neither of pinecones nor grey stones. Feathers ranging from the length of a human fingernail to that of a folded umbrella, in colors from pale white to coal and all the stations between. Animal bones—antlers, a bat wing, a femur someone had whittled partway into a flute and then abandoned. It was strange and triangular on one end and no one could identify the creature it must have come from.

She cataloged clouds but didn’t count the varieties; she noticed separate weathers but didn’t tally up the sorts. She gathered a bevy of small lake seashells like babies of her precious large one, or like its toys. The tin cup of arrowheads was her favorite. She knew each one by heft and design, by adze stroke and lichen stain. She didn’t know how many she had.

She didn’t look as closely at family matters. The incidents, the backgrounds, the causes-and-consequences, the self-delusions presented as potted biographies. To the extent she was aware of them—her relatives—they seemed like bundled, ambulatory atmospheres. But she’d picked up the art of pretending to listen. It seemed to calm them all down, and who knows, maybe she learned something. She didn’t count the lessons, if there were any.

In two years the family had managed, among them, to build a little home. It had been hard going at the outset. Not much more than a lean-to dug into the side of a hill. More cave than cottage. When they’d survived the first winter, Nor had made her way overland to the nearest settlement—some two weeks away by foot—and come back to Nether How with a sack of square-head nails. Useful enough, but since the art of construction wasn’t one of Liir’s strengths, everyone was grateful for the help of a trio of hunters heading west to hunt skark. They’d stopped to water their horses at Five Lakes, and by the time they’d left ten days later, they had framed up a tidy cottage on the stone foundation Liir had been carting into place for a year. It remained only for him to finish it. He got the roof shingled just in time, though that second winter the house had to double as a shed. (Candle had managed to befriend a goat and some wild chickens.) He and Nor worked all winter fitting the floor and walls with planking while Candle foraged in the woods for edible roots and bark and for seedpods to begin a lakeland farm.

“What does it take to grow a farm?” Liir asked his wife once. An old joke.

“A family,” she’d answered. Not so funny, but true. They all worked, husband and wife and sister and, to the extent they could get her attention, daughter.

In the luff of the Great Kells, which loomed over them to the west, the winter was warmer than they’d expected. Snow, to be sure, but many of the storms seemed to slide overhead, holding their worst until they’d moved farther east. Or maybe the site itself was magical. Long ago on a solitary trek Liir had discovered the isolated district he called Five Lakes. He’d had a certain vision right here, on the hummock of land where he’d now built their home. He told Candle and Nor about it one winter evening, after Rain had settled down.

That’s what they did, to see their way through the winters: tell their lives, as honestly as they could. Rain heard these tales as she heard the fire crackle. Pretty sounds, but no way to assemble them.

“It’s hard to remember for sure,” said her father through his patchy, unconvincing beard. “Maybe I’ve filled in parts of it to make more sense. But what I remember—what I think I remember—is that as I was lying on the ground in a spasm of regret, I seemed to detach from myself, to float above my restless body. I could see myself below, half awake, turning and tossing. I became aware of a movement on the side of the hill, not far from this home, though I don’t know where precisely. I saw an old man forming ghostily in the uprights of autumn saplings. He was stumbling in from somewhere, like a figure in fog taking definition as he neared. Or like the way a poaching egg goes from translucent to solid. He seemed lost, but not in that frantic manner of the very old. Just unsure of his location. He peered at the water with interest, and around at the land. But though he emerged from nowhere in a magical way, he didn’t see me, either on the ground or in the air. As he filled in, I saw he had in his arms a big book. Maybe it was the Grimmerie, but I suppose there are other big books in Oz. He nodded, as if approving where he’d washed up, and turned to the north.”

“I’ve always believed you can see the past,” said Candle. “I think he couldn’t notice you because you weren’t there yet. What you saw had happened much earlier.”

Nor grunted. “I remember hearing my mother and Elphaba talking about where the Grimmerie came from. My mother said that one day an old man had come to the door of Kiamo Ko, long before Elphaba arrived, before I was born probably, and taken a bite to eat. He said the book was a great weight to carry, and with Sarima’s permission he would leave it behind. It would be collected in time. My mother put it in some attic where Auntie Witch found it years later.”

Liir replied, “That weird apprehension of witnessing something past has only come over me once or twice, and a good thing too. I don’t miss it.”

“If we live long enough,” said his half-sister, “we all end up seeing the past. That’s all we can see.”

“I can see the present,” said Candle. Perhaps her skill was related to women’s intuition, but of a steelier sort. Tonight her understanding was humble. “I can see that somebody’s little girl is only feigning sleep. She’s listening to every word we say.”

In two years and some, Candle had learned how to be a mother. A mother to a reckless, feckless, one-off of a child—but what child isn’t?

Listening wasn’t quite what Rain was doing, but hearing—letting the sounds trickle by—well, yes. Caught out, she sat up in her trundle cot that, daytimes, slid under her parents’ higher bedstead. “I can’t sleep tonight.”

“Too much talk of magic,” said Nor.

“Tell me about the time you flew Elphaba’s broomstick,” said Rain. She had noticed that grown-ups liked to be asked to speak.

“Pfaah, magic, a set of poison hopes,” said Nor.

Candle said, “No more talk about magic. You need your sleep, Rain. We’re going to try to rush another wild sheep into the fold tomorrow, spancel it and dock its tail, and you make the best sheepdog I have. Come now. Lay down.” But Rain wheedled and whined until the grown-ups relented. The next telling was Nor’s.

“I was about your age, Rain,” said Nor, “and living at Kiamo Ko, a castle way north of here. Elphaba had come to live with us already, along with your father, who was younger than I.”

“I still am,” said Liir.

“I suppose Elphaba must have arrived at Kiamo Ko with that broom, but I don’t know if she understood its powers. I had taken it out to a barn to clean up after our guests, and I felt it twitch in my hands, to pulse with life. Like a garter snake when you grab it, but not wriggly. It’s hard to explain. I decided to ride it like a hobbyhorse, but when I threw my leg over it, it rose in the air.”

Rain’s eye was cool and flat but her face was bright. “Don’t glamourize danger,” said Liir. “I’ve ridden it in my time, too, Rain, and it’s no carnival ride of carved wooden stallions accompanied by tinny music. I was attacked on the broom by flying dragons and I nearly lost my life.”

But the attack had brought him to the ministrations of Candle, and that had brought Rain into the world, into their lives, so he stopped complaining.

“I want to fly,” said Rain. “I want to fly, and to see.”

“You touch that broom without permission, you’ll get a walloping you never knew I was capable of,” said Liir.

“And I’ll thwack you too,” said Candle, who was so tenderhearted she didn’t set traps for the field mice that ravaged her seed stock.

They all looked overhead; they couldn’t help it. In the apex of the ceiling, above the loft, Liir had closed in a triangular space by hammering up a ceiling three boards wide. He had boxed in the broom. If you didn’t know it was there you would never guess. As for the Grimmerie, he had planned to encase it in fieldstone next to the chimney stack, adjacent the bread oven. But worries about having to flee suddenly, leaving it where it might be found, had scuttled that strategy. Thus, the Grimmerie was wrapped in an old army satchel of Liir’s and kept on top of the dish cupboard. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. Everyone was forbidden to touch it.

2.

So of course Rain wanted to get the Grimmerie. Any number of times she pulled over a stool and settled her hands on the dark blue canvas sacking. But it wasn’t worrying about punishment from her parents that stopped her. Their cautions didn’t figure. It was the memory of what had happened with the dragons on the lake. To Call Winter upon Water. And that was merely one page. What good might be done through the agency of a single powerful page? What good, and what evil?

She wasn’t afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Still, how it called her! If Candle could sometimes tell the present, if Liir had once or twice been able to tell the past, Rain felt she could tell the hunger of the Grimmerie. A hunger to be read. The book had an active desire to be cracked open and have its messages delivered. The furnace’s lust for tinder.

They rarely left her alone in the cottage, those adults. Her people? She found the concept hard to take in. At any rate, the next group of people. More people to add to her collection of people. It seemed she would rotate through an endless set of temporary arrangements. She hadn’t forgotten the Lion, the dwarf, and the Munchkinlander herbalist lady. Or Murthy and Puggles and other warm cloudy presences without names, those who had lived belowstairs with her at Mockbeggar Hall and taken care of her scrapes and ailments.

Back then she had run about like a chipmunk, unnoticed unless she was about to trespass on some formal affair of Lady Glinda’s, in which case she’d be boxed about the ears or distracted with a boiled sweet. Here at Nether How, this scrappily forested hill hummocked up between two isolated mountain lakes, she was always under someone’s watchful eye. If the three adults had to go off somewhere, either Oziandra Rain had to traipse along or she was left under the care of Iskinaary.

“They love you because you belong to them,” he hissed at her once. “They can’t help it. But I think you’re trouble heating up on a slow flame. I’ve got my eye on you.”

“I never done nothing to you,” she replied, dropping the stone in her palm.

Sheep, companionable enough, roamed their neighborhood, keeping the ground cover cropped. Once a year the three adults managed to shear a few of them. How best to prepare the wool? There were tricks to it some traveler would eventually share, but in the meantime the family kept warm enough. None of them ate meat as a first choice, but if a lamb was found with a broken neck and it couldn’t thrive, they killed it out of mercy and Candle thanked some deity or other for its spirit and its chops. Liir and Nor wouldn’t join in the prayer. And Iskinaary refused to come to table if there was flesh upon it.

“One day I’ll break my neck, and then you’ll have a conundrum on your hands,” he told them.

“Not such a hard choice,” said Rain. “Chestnut stuffing or bread?”

“And to think your grandmother was a celebrated activist in defense of Animals. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

The lake was mad with fish, so they ate fish, which Tay caught for them. They sometimes discussed whether there was any such thing as a Fish, an opinionated cousin of the presumably nonsentient variety. Iskinaary, who liked fish as much as he disliked flesh, agreed to put his head under the water and try to speak to them. But there was no reason to suspect that Fish would speak the same language as air-breathing creatures. Since he could never manage to start a reasonable conversation among equals, the Goose always gave up and allowed himself a snack.

Still fascinated by letters and words, Rain had begun to work out languages in Oz. She collected languages, the idea of them anyway. There seemed to be a primary tongue that she had spoken since birth. For lack of another term it was called Ozish, though to a child it seemed effortless as breathing. But there were other languages. Qua’ati, of course, which she’d picked up in Qhoyre—Candle spoke it well, and Liir, haltingly. And variations of birdsong that Iskinaary seemed capable of using. Rain couldn’t tell if the language was universal among the airborne or specific to certain species, Goose subtly different from Duck or Swallow. But she was too proud to ask Iskinaary.

Nor told her that the Arjikis had a language of their own, though it shared a grammar with Ozish. The Scrow and the Ugubezi and Yunamata each had different language systems. The trolls in the Glikkus spoke a dialect of Ozish that sounded like sneezing, and who knows what tribes in the unexplored far west of Oz might be able to demonstrate yet more cryptic tongues? Rain’s aunt had heard that an isolated clan of Draffe people lived near Kvon Altar in the arid southwest of the Vinkus. “Draffe people? Part Draffe, part human?” wondered Rain, but Nor told her there had been no successful interspecies mating as far as she knew, and the term Draffe probably just meant the people were gangly and thin, the way Munchkinlanders were squat and short.

Still, Rain began to wonder about Nor and Brrr. A woman and a Lion. If they ever reunited, would they have children? Could the Grimmerie make it possible? Rain might get a kind of cousin who was part human girl and part Lion cub boy. She couldn’t quite see how it would work out, but she hoped it could happen. The Lion part might eat Iskinaary by accident. That would be fun.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Goose.

“You do not.”

He craned his neck and trained one beady eye at her. She tried not to rear backward. “Well, you’re right,” he admitted, “but I know it isn’t nice.”

“It’s nice to me,” she told him.

Then, toward the end of the third summer at Nether How, a trapper came through, an isolated Scrow who had been drummed out of his clan for some unmentioned reason. Maybe for being antisocial. Rain collected him; he was her first Scrow. His name was Agroya. He stayed a few days and helped the grown-ups shore up a terrace wall behind which Candle was trying to establish a stand of mountain rice. In halting phrases he brought news of the world beyond Nether How.

3.

Rain didn’t count years any more than days. She hardly knew how to understand Agroya when he said it was now the fourth year into the war between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland.

He told them about the conscription of Animals in Munchkinland and how the second front of the war—the battle of the Madeleines—was faring. (Not well for either army, a tidal sweeping of forces back and forth, with heavy loss of life on both sides.) Nor flinched at this and wondered if her husband might have been drafted to serve in the Munchkinland army.

“Brrr? Hah. He’ll have slipped through that duty,” said Liir consolingly. “They didn’t call him the Cowardly Lion for nothing.”

Nor didn’t speak to Liir for some time after this. Maybe, thought Liir ruefully, his half-sister had never entirely forgiven him—or his mother—for sweeping into the lives of her parents, unsettling everything, forever.

“How do you know so much about the progress of the war?” Candle asked Agroya. “Out in this wilderness, so far from the battle lines?”

In his halting way he replied, “I possess little else to pay for the goods of your table. I carry news in my mind. I traffic in it. A useful coin.”

“Tell us more, then,” said Liir. “What about Lady Glinda?”

But Agroya had never heard of Glinda, which made everything else he said a little suspect. “I don’t go to cities,” he admitted. “Tribal life among the Scrow is life in grasslands. Moving, camping, moving, always. Following the herds.”

“Is Shem Ottokos still the chieftain of the Scrow?” asked Liir.

Agroya spat but admitted as much. Ottokos must have been the one to exile him, Liir guessed. Then Liir regretted having asked the question, because Agroya turned and squinted at him. “So you’re Liir? The one who helped our queen through her final passage?”

Liir sat ramrod straight, unwilling to confirm his identity, and Candle picked up on his hesitation, but Agroya saw through their silence. He said, “I was in disgrace that time, in chains in a tent, but I heard what you did.”

“I never did,” interjected Nor. “This is news to me. Tell me.”

“Princess Nastoya was stuck between life and death, unable to move because of a disguise locked upon her, and together you two brought the disguise off.” Agroya pointed at Candle. “You played some stringed instrument so well you make dead relics to sing, and you”—now he pointed to Liir—“you had a charm of remembering; you helped our Nastoya leave behind her disguise as a human, and die as an Elephant. This is legend with our people.”

“How droll,” said Nor to their guest. Ever leery of pomposity. “I hope you sell little pictures of it to passing travelers.”

“And she talked to you before she died,” said Agroya to Candle.

“Oh, did she?” said Liir to his wife. He’d been away up until the last moment. “You never mentioned this.”

“She awakened, as the dying sometimes do,” the visitor reminded Candle. “She told you about your child.”

Candle, apologetically: “I was pregnant, very pregnant.”

After sending Rain out on a fool’s errand, and Iskinaary to keep her at bay, Liir returned to the subject. “What did Nastoya say?”

Agroya helped himself to a handful of walnut meats. “She said that she saw the promise and trouble your child will bring.”

“Oh, that,” said Candle. “What child isn’t full of promise and trouble?”

“Our princess said that we Scrow will watch for your child and help her if she needs help. Nastoya pledged us to this.”

“Wasn’t that sweet,” said Candle. “And then she died.”

“I’m no longer a full brother to my tribe,” he continued, “but in honor of my ancestors and my former queen, I must ask if your daughter needs the help we promised to give.”

“Oh, not today, thanks,” said Candle. “How kind of you to remember.”

The fluting formality of her voice made sense to Liir: Candle had become wary. She’d seen the danger too. “Let me get you some cakes to take on your way,” he said.

They loaded Agroya up with as much as they could spare. Nor agreed to escort him well beyond the northern lake. As soon as they were gone, Liir asked Iskinaary to rush Rain away to the southern lake, five hundred yards to the south, ostensibly to find owl pellets to add to her collection.

Then Liir rounded on Candle, but good. He was incensed that Princess Nastoya’s dying comments had never come up before. Candle pooh-poohed his sensitivity. “What did her comments mean anyway? Nothing that any dying old matron wouldn’t say to any pregnant young woman.”

“The trouble that Rain would bring—did Nastoya’s mention of that decide you to leave Rain behind when you slipped away from Apple Press Farm?”

At this Candle turned pale—in a Quadling it looked like fever—and she was unable to speak for some moments. When she regained her voice, she spoke in an unfamiliar register. Colder, acerbic. She said, “This isn’t about Rain, at its heart. Is it? You’re not even angry about what Nastoya said or not, or whether I told you before. Are you. Are you. You’re still angry about what I’ve never said about Trism.”

“Wide of the mark,” snapped Liir. But damn her, she was right. So Candle could still see the present. Her talent had seemed submerged as they’d gotten older.

Yes, he was cross about her never having mentioned Nastoya’s dying comments. But Candle was accurate that he was still harboring a wound about his old friend and lover, Trism. Another of the stories they didn’t rehearse in front of Rain.

Oh, Trism.

And it happened, all of an instant, in his mind again. Like seeing the past. This time his own.

Trism had come to Apple Press Farm that same dreadful season, while Liir was away, while Nastoya was in the orchard trying to die, while Candle was readying to give birth. Liir had never found out exactly what happened. Hunted by EC soldiers who’d once been colleagues, beautiful Trism had either taunted Candle with the knowledge of Liir’s affection for him or, just as possibly, fallen for Candle in Liir’s absence.

Maybe their mutual passion for Liir, their mutual worry about his safety, had brought Candle and Trism together. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. But Candle had never spoken about it, and Trism had disappeared from Liir’s life.

By the time Liir had returned, to find the ailing Princess Nastoya and a contingent of Scrow in residence at Apple Press Farm, Trism was gone. After Liir and Candle had helped Nastoya shuck her disguise as a human being and die as an Elephant, Liir had accompanied her corpse back over the highland route known as Kumbricia’s Pass. Returning only a few days later, he’d found that Candle had fled. The new baby, hardly a day old, lay wrapped up in cloths and hidden for him to find.

Of course Candle knew he was nearing; she knew that kind of thing. She’d left a goat so he could have milk for the child. He’d always assumed that she’d abandoned the child for fear that Trism might have been trailed by assassins in order to discover Liir’s hideaway. But now he wondered if she left infant Rain because Nastoya had said their daughter would bring promise and trouble. Candle’s apprehension of their daughter had always been different from his. Just as loving, but more stony and matter-of-fact.

He knew what happened next. Eventually she’d made her way back to the mauntery. Word had arrived there that Trism had been beaten—well, tortured was the uglier but more honest word. Presumably Trism hadn’t been able to reveal Liir’s whereabouts because he didn’t know them. And whether Trism, the top dragon mesmerist in the arsenal of the Emerald City, had even survived … there was no way to tell.

What had survived—maybe all that had survived of Trism—was Liir’s sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression—unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir’s heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism’s glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. To this day Liir had endured them in solitude, even as his beloved Candle sat across from him at the hearth.

Candle herself might dream of Trism, too, with dread or with desire. Liir didn’t know. She and Liir never talked of it. She’d refused to speak of Trism when Liir, baby in arms, met up with her again. To protect Liir’s good impression of his friend?—to keep Trism’s romance of Candle to herself? You could go around and around about it, but unless Trism showed up again and filled in the blanks, Liir couldn’t know.

Candle wasn’t telling.

And Liir and Candle had had more urgent things to deal with than the perils of shifting affections. They had a daughter born green as bottleglass.

Green, and with few obvious virtues. On her mother’s side, the girl was a bona fide peasant. Before she met Liir, Candle had been an itinerant Quadling, easily mattressed like all of her clan. Abandoned at the mauntery by an uncle who had wearied of her.

On Liir’s side, Rain descended from a line, if not noble, then at least notorious. One of her ancestors had been the Eminent Thropp, de facto governor of Munchkinland before secession. Her grandmother had been the divisive Wicked Witch of the West, no less. Who knew what license or limitation descended through that bloodline?

Liir had no reason to lord it over Candle, or anyone else. He knew himself to be anything but polished. He’d grown up without the attention of Elphaba or, most of the time, her affection. Deprived childhood, Your Honor! He hadn’t made things better for himself by going AWOL from the army under the command of Cherrystone. Another bad career move: he’d helped Trism destroy the EC’s stable of flying dragons being used to foment unrest among tribes in the west. Tally it up for us, my good man: at the time of Rain’s birth, Liir’d been no more than a ragamuffin ne’er-do-well being hunted down in case he might lead them to the Grimmerie.

Under these circumstances, to be presented with an iridescently verdant child even harder to hide than the famous and dangerous tome … what a lot of laughs, this life. I beg your mercy.

By the time he’d caught up with Candle again, after a series of misadventures with the Scrow, the infant was almost too big to carry in his arms. For Rain’s own protection, he’d drawn a hood upon her face and told passersby that she was afflicted with a sensitivity to light. What had this done to a child, for all those months to hear through burlap the sounds of human voices but rarely to see the face of anyone but her worried and stupid father?

What had he done to Rain, in order to preserve her life?

After he’d met up again with Candle at the mauntery, they wandered the landscape. Seeking a way to keep Rain from being smothered, literally and metaphorically. They had no plans, just kept moving.

One day, in some nameless hamlet, they’d stopped to barter for bread and milk and wine in return for doing fieldwork till sunset. On the far side of a sullen patch of finger potatoes, Candle straightened with her hand on her lower back and turned around with a cry. Set in a potato basket at the end of a hoed row, the baby was sitting up. Either she’d clawed her burlap caul off by herself or the fox at basket’s edge had pulled it away with its teeth.

“Easy,” said Liir to Candle, “easy. I haven’t known foxes to be vicious.”

“Clearly,” remarked the Fox, training his eyes on the green child, “you haven’t taken into account what recreational foxhunting by hounds and human brutes does to a Fox’s native sense of cordiality.”

“The light, please, it hurts her eyes,” began Liir.

“The dark hurts her far more.” The Fox sat down to look at the child, and the child looked back unblinkingly. Liir and Candle inched forward, gripping each other’s hands. “I never met that green firebrand out in the west, that one with the broom, but I heard tell of her. And I imagine she looked like this.”

“I suspect so,” said Candle, honestly enough. “I never met her either.”

“Your kit will have fights on her hands,” said the Fox. “I suppose you’re suitably traumatized over that.”

“Oh, very,” said Liir, “and then some.”

The Fox laughed. “I like her. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.”

“She’s seen very few creatures other than us,” said Candle.

“And I thought it was my native charm. Some consider me rather good-looking, but I’ll leave my social life out of it. She might benefit from a little protective coloring. Have you thought of that?”

Liir had, but Shem Ottokos of the Scrow hadn’t managed the job.

“You know what I mean? The green frog in the algae, the striped chipmunk upon the striped stone? But put a green frog in the middle of a snowy meadow and you don’t have a green frog for very long. I’m thinking you’ll want to afford this child a little protection.”

“We’d be less than sensible if we didn’t,” said Liir.

The Fox sat for a long time without speaking. His eyes and the eyes of the girl—almost a toddler now, had they let her toddle—didn’t break their hold. Finally the Fox said, “I believe I can offer advice.”

“What do you have in mind?” asked Candle.

“Though you’re correct that while she’s a child she needs the most protection, in your panic you’re just about killing her. Daily. Now, I happen to know a Serpent with a talent for sorcery. I’ve seen him do wonders with a poor albino hedgehog who begged abjectly enough…”

Liir and Candle walked a few steps away to discuss the proposal while the Fox kept a watch on Rain. The idea of a Serpent seemed alarming, and the whole concept of disguise could get dicey when it backfired—hadn’t they seen Princess Nastoya struggle at trying to shuck her disguise off? But the child was suffocating in her life, no doubt about that. And anyway, Candle and Liir together had managed to bring the human disguise off Nastoya when the time was right. Liir hadn’t inherited any of his mother’s talent at sorcery, but he did possess that occasional capacity for deep memory. And Candle could cast a certain charm of knowing with the practice of her music—she had done it for Liir and for Nastoya alike. So between them, Candle and Liir had the goods to help their child reveal herself when the time was right. Didn’t they? No small authority in the matter, being her parents.

So they had the Fox engage the Serpent, and the Serpent came at once.

They began to regret their decision when he arrived, for the Serpent looked menacing to them. But as he himself pointed out, what oily emerald Serpent doesn’t seem menacing to human eyes? The very argument for cloaking Rain’s green skin.

“I believe in certain laboratories they call it protective chromatization,” said the Serpent, each syllable sliding out with an almost slatternly emphasis. “You are wise to consider it, but she’ll need more help than camouflage. A very sluggy caterpillar can dress itself up as a butterfly, but that does it little good if the transformation occurs in a glade locked tight with the webs of poisonous spiders.”

“All due deference, and so on,” Liir said, “we’re only asking for the charm, if you care to give it. We’ll figure out on our own how to raise her safely.”

“Perhaps you’re right to resist my counsel. I am among those fathers who sometimes eat the eggs in the nest. I’ll restrict myself to the question of disguise and leave you to fail with your daughter on your own schedule.”

They discussed for a time where Rain might most safely be brought up. Candle, though paler than some, had the Quadling ruddiness. At best Quadlings were second-class citizens in the Emerald City, when they bothered to try to settle there. Winkies from any tribe were considered barbarians. And Liir, despite his Vinkus father and his green-skinned mother, had skin color that betrayed Elphaba’s Munchkinlander ancestry, an easily pocked and sunburnt pinky-cream. So the sheer fact of population figures—Gillikinese and Munchkinlanders far outnumbering other ethnicities and races in Oz—meant that the choice for Rain was clear. If she could be pale, she’d have a wider range of places to hide without being noticed.

The Fox sat with Liir and Candle in the stifling sun, as the distance wavered with heat and insects. He reassured them the Serpent was a good sort. A short way off, under a tree heavy with persimmons, the Serpent writhed around Rain. Sometimes he rose erect on his ribs, hissing; sometimes he wreathed around her on the ground. Still hissing.

When he was done, they saw he’d shed his own skin too. He was now the color of library paste, like a worm unused to sunlight. “Call it sympathy,” he told them, when they gaped. “Call it catharsis. When one of us changes, we are all changed.”

And so was Rain changed. An ugly, ordinary, safely bleached child sleeping in her wraps, unaware of what had gone on, but comfortable in the nest of crushed grass and the pulp of overripe fruit through which the Serpent had slithered.

Neither Fox nor Serpent would take payment, nor would they tell their names. “She has a future you don’t like, you’d seek us out and sue us,” said the Fox. “There are no guarantees so there is no fee. We help because you needed help. The transaction is done.”

“I will wrinkle myself back toward green,” said the Serpent, “but unless I am mistaken your daughter will find herself set for some time to come. Remember what I said about the butterfly, though, and consider how you can best protect your tadpole. She is still green inside, and if she is related to the Witch they will be looking for her. No child can thrive if it is predestined to be a pariah. I think of this sometimes, consolingly, when I’m about to gobble my own unborn young.”

“You could save them yourself,” said Candle, a little late. “Why don’t you change their colors?”

“I see you take my point,” he said. “A young serpent, even if she wears a coat done up like wrapping paper at Lurlinemas, can never pass as anything but a serpent.”

With that the Fox and the Serpent left them. Three days later, for no good reason, the family was stopped on the road by a drunk and disorderly band of Munchkinlander militants. Released after questioning, Liir and Candle were spooked enough to feel the truth of the Serpent’s words. They were all still targets, no matter how disguised. Liir had flown against the Emperor of Oz recently enough to be tagged as an enemy of the state. If he had made it so easily into Munchkinland, so could the Emperor’s agents. For the baby’s safety, then, because Mockbeggar Hall was not far off, they decided that Liir should approach Lady Glinda and ask her to raise Elphaba’s granddaughter until such time as it might be safe for her to emerge.

All this behind them. Family stories never told. The long years of hiding out without their daughter at the abandoned chapel in the hills above the Sleeve of Ghastille. Hoping perhaps the Emperor might be successful at confiscating that bloody Grimmerie and so lift part of the reason for their going to ground. Hoping that Rain was growing up happy and blameless. Learning to live without her, their primary satisfaction being to speculate on her safety.

Then, with Rain’s unexpected arrival in the company of the Cowardly Lion, the dwarf and his Munchkinlander mistress, Liir and Candle had taken up the welcome and exhausting job of worrying about their daughter more specifically but not more daily than they’d been doing already. And the resentments that they’d been able to ignore at the birth of their daughter, twelve years ago, began to seem current again. Maybe even to hurt more, this time.

“The promise and trouble your child will bring.” Nastoya had said that to Candle, and she’d never told Liir. About that, about Trism—about herself, deep down. A cold scorch Liir felt in his gut.

In Nether How, now, standing at the table. Unable to sit down. Looking away from Candle to hold from quivering with anger.

As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.

The pall clouded the household like smoke due to a blocked flue.

Liir and Candle didn’t quite make up. Some fights between couples don’t so much roil to a climax as settle somehow in an unnegotiated standoff. Neither “affable truce” nor “benefit-of-the-doubt stalemate” quite describes it. Liir and Candle kept to their tasks and to their promises, spoken and unspoken, to each other. They doubted that Rain ever noticed the formalizing silence that threatened to codify as policy between them.

Nor and Iskinaary, not ones to make common cause, fell to discussing the change in the household mood. They weren’t privy to the unspoken complaints. But something needed to be done.

Eventually the Goose thought up an idea, and Nor proposed it: they might pack up some bedrolls before the summer came to a close and make the trek partway up the nearest of the Great Kells where they could harvest a stash of wild ruby tomatoes. Dried, they lasted a year, and augmented any cold winter dish with a flavor of summer.

The family set out. It wasn’t a successful trip, too cold and blustery for so early in the fall. When they arrived at the trove they found some mountain greedyguts had already ravaged the plot. They came home sore, weary, empty-handed, and quieter than before. Iskinaary and Nor, walking behind, shrugged at each other. Well, we tried.

Rain of course seemed to notice nothing, just kept on. She was collecting acorns and hazelnuts. They rattled in her pockets when she skipped ahead.

The family returned to Nether How at the Five Lakes, to the sentry house, as they called it, because from the front door they could see the nearest northerly lake and from the opposite door they could glimpse the southern one. They found that their home had been ransacked in their absence. They figured Agroya as the culprit. Probably he’d circled back after Nor had said good-bye to him. He’d hung out on one of the hills above the lake, waiting for a day when the lack of smoke from a breakfast fire announced the absence of tenants. Four pewter spoons that Little Daffy and Mr. Boss had given them were missing, and a sack of flour and another of salt. Liir’s best skinning knife, and his only razor.

The broom was still incarcerated in the ceiling, they assumed, since they saw no sign of boards having been prised off and replaced. Candle’s domingon hung on the wall. Half out of its sack, the Grimmerie lay on the table in full view. It must not have appealed to the thief.

Still, whether or not the Grimmerie had been recognized, someone knew it was there. It could be described for someone else to identify. Someone knew that Rain was there. More had been stolen from them than spoons and a razor, flour and salt.

4.

Why does the day with the brightest blue sky come tagged with a hint of foreboding? Maybe it’s only the ordinary knowledge of transience—all comes to dust, to rot, to rust, to the moth. That sort of thing. Or maybe it’s that beauty itself is invisible to mortal eyes unless it’s accompanied by some sickly sweet eschatological stink.

The uneasiness they felt after the discovery of the Grimmerie by some stranger only grew by the day. Whoever had looked at it may have known what it was but been scared to take it. Or may have seen something uncanny in it, and fled. If the thief was Agroya—well, as he’d told them, he trafficked in news. The word was out, or would be soon. Too soon.

Iskinaary took it upon himself to do some reconnaissance work. Loyal as he was to Liir, he had a healthy respect for his own neck, too. He didn’t want to end up as a platter of Goose-breast unless there were no alternatives.

He came winging back in the middle of a spectacular afternoon. Rain was collecting milkweed pods from a scrap of meadow near the north lake. The women were cording wool. Liir heard Iskinaary clear his throat in the southern dooryard, and he came out into the light, into the aroma of piney resin. Sunlight steeping on dropped brown needles.

At the Goose’s expression, Liir said, “Let me guess. You saw a bug who had lost a leg in battle, and you know the end times have arrived.”

“Don’t make fun of me till you hear what I have to say,” snapped Iskinaary, trying to catch his breath. “All right then. About ten miles to the south of First Lake, I came upon a band of trolls—Glikkuns, I suppose—who had made common cause with an extended family of tree elves.”

Liir raised an eyebrow.

“I know, it sounds preposterous. Neither Glikkuns nor elves like society other than their own. The Glikkuns are suspicious of all talking Animals and wouldn’t speak to me, but elves chatter inanely. They told me what they were doing.”

“Coming here to rape and pillage, I presume.”

“No. And of course I didn’t let on there was a homestead here. But I heard that some of the trolls are becoming unhappy over the alliance they made with La Mombey and the Munchkinlanders. They’re beginning to think their ruler, Sakkali Oafish, was hasty, and that the Glikkus will become a plunderpot of Munchkinland much as Munchkinland felt itself to be a plunderpot of the EC. Ripe for despoiling and primed for heavy taxation, et cetera. And of course the emeralds in the Scalps, controlled by the trolls for time out of mind, would go far toward helping Munchkinland pay for the armies they’ve been maintaining. So this breakaway band of trolls wants none of it. They’re scouting out other mining possibilities in the Vinkus.”

“I doubt they’ll find much here,” said Liir, “but then, a stone looks pretty much like a rock to me. Maybe we’ve been harvesting potatoes in fields of gold nuggets, and I never noticed.”

“You’re missing the point. Trolls with elves? Listen—”

“I agree, an unlikely alliance. I only ever met one elf, a sort of gibbertyflibbet named Jibbidee. I don’t suppose he was among them?”

“I didn’t ask for their identification papers. Will you listen? The elves said that the second front of the war—the one opened up in the Madeleines—has disturbed their natural habitat. The Animal army of the Munchkinlanders has been particularly destructive. So some of the elves are looking west to see if it’s safe to settle around here. They’re traveling with the Glikkuns because you can always trust a troll in a fight.”

“What’s in it for the Glikkuns?”

“Nothing more than food, it seems. The Glikkuns are cow people; if they’re not down in their emerald mines they’re tending their cattle. They don’t know how to make anything to eat except for cheese and curds and yogurt. Foraging in the forest is beyond their ken, and it’s what tree elves do best. And all elves love to cook. I’d have thought this was common knowledge.”

“I never got any formal schooling,” said Liir. “But whether elves are natural gourmands hardly seems something for you to be gabbling about, all out of breath. Do you want some water?”

“I heard a troll addressing one of the elves as I was getting ready to leave. He said a heavy bounty had been put upon the discovery of a certain book of magic lost a few years back but almost certain to be hidden, uncorrupted, somewhere in the outback of Oz. A magic book might extend the variety of their menus. He was only joking, I think, but if marginalized populations like itinerant elves and disaffected Glikkuns know to be on the lookout for a book like the Grimmerie, I would say our recent kindness to that Scrow robber, Agroya, was a mistake.”

Liir was inclined to discount anything overheard between Glikkuns and tree elves. Still, he had to agree that the hemorrhaging of public funds due to the cost of this unwinnable war could only revive the fervor to find the Grimmerie. A fervor both parties would share. The book could supply a crucial advantage to whichever side got access to its unparalleled supply of spells. “I hope you don’t think we need to pack up and become traveling musicians or something like that,” said Liir. “I’ve come to consider Nether How a blissful place. Relatively speaking.”

“You’re not listening, are you. Your enemies have finally added it up. The tree elves and Glikkuns know that the book is expected to be found with a green-skinned girl the age of Rain. The powers that be remember the Conference of the Birds a decade ago, in which you and I both flew, cawing out ‘Elphaba lives!’ over the Emerald City. Only they don’t read it as political theater anymore. They think it was prophecy. Or that’s what they say. Maybe when your honey boy Trism was set upon by the Emperor’s soldiers, they beat out of him word of the green-skinned daughter.”

“He wasn’t here when she was born—” began Liir, but stopped. Candle hadn’t said when Trism was or wasn’t at Apple Press Farm. Maybe Trism had seen little green Rain even before Liir had taken her into his own arms.

“It doesn’t matter how they know,” said Iskinaary. “It could have been some oracle, it could have been some Wood Thrush squealing in exchange for clemency. What matters is that they’ve put it together. The conjunction in your household of a twelve-year-old girl and the Grimmerie is, I fear, a dangerous giveway.”

“If I could read the book, I might find a spell to make it invisible,” said Liir. “But I can’t read it.”

“Have you let Rain try?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“You don’t trust her. Nice father.”

“I don’t know what damage the book might do to her. I certainly couldn’t risk it.”

“Well, what do you propose we do?”

Not for the first time, Liir wondered just what he’d done to deserve the Goose’s loyalty. Iskinaary could take wing any day he liked. But he lived without family or flock, dogging Liir’s years like a retainer. “We’ll wait until my sister and my wife wake up, and we’ll talk it over with them.”

“They won’t ask my opinion,” said the Goose, “but I’ll give it anyway. Birds beware roosting in the same nest for more than a season. It may be time—”

Rain was hurrying around the house, Tay at her heels as usual, so Iskinaary stopped. “You’re a whip-poor-will in a hurry,” said the Goose.

“Some tree elves are bathing down on the shore of the south lake. I haven’t seen a tree elf since I lived at Mockbeggar, and then only once, from far off. These ones are singing some song and their voices come over the water like crinkly paper music. Don’t you hear it?”

The Goose and the man exchanged glances. Once more needing to be the heavy, the Anvil of the Law, Liir said as mildly as he could, “I don’t think you better go there, sweetie.”

“Oh, I’ll just—”

“He said no,” snapped the Goose, and dove at the girl’s legs. And maybe that’s why he stays around, thought Liir. He’s willing to provide that bite of discipline I can’t manage.

5.

It was summer, they needed no fire. They kept Rain indoors and quiet while the elves were in the neighborhood. “Sort out your collections,” said Liir. “No, you can’t bring a sack of rocks with you, or a cup of acorns. Take your favorite out of each collection and leave the rest behind. We’ll come back and get them another time. Hush your crying. We’re trying to draw no attention to ourselves. To keep still, like little mice under the eyes of a hawk.”

As far as the family knew, the tree elves and the renegade trolls never did take the measure of the hearthhold at Nether How. But after a full day of discussion and two days of preparation, the family was ready to leave their cottage home.

Heavy hearts, heavy tread, but very light luggage. They took little with them. The broom they would trust to the eaves, but they couldn’t leave the book. Maybe they’d come across Mr. Boss and somehow persuade him to take the Grimmerie back. Holding it from all those avaricious and willing readers of magic was taking its toll.

They started their trek on foot. They’d span the Vinkus River and then the Gillikin River before they’d need to say their good-byes.

Crossing the Vinkus looked problematic until they met a boatman. He charged punitively to steer his small vessel across the waters pummeling down from the slopes of the Kells, but he delivered them safely. On the other side, they found that the crescent of land between the Vinkus and the quieter Gillikin River was now under cultivation. Perhaps, Liir guessed, Loyal Oz was trying to make a go of supplying its own needs of wheat, corn, barley. A few grousing laborers disabused Liir of any notion of success, though. The storms that blew high over Nether How settled down here, and the snow came early and stayed deep.

At a crossroads of sorts on this undulating river plain, wagon carts rolling by from six or eight different directions, in and out as if along spokes of a wheel, the family members made their good-byes. Briskly, to the point. In a sense, they all followed Rain’s lead, her brusqueness steadying the adults, helping them avoid long faces and soggy remarks.

“You are a child of Oz,” said Liir to his daughter. “Your mother is Quadling, your grandmother was a Munchkinlander, and your grandfather from the Vinkus. You can go anywhere in Oz. You can be home anywhere.”

Liir turned north toward Kiamo Ko. The Grimmerie was under his arm. Iskinaary hustled like a civil servant self-importantly at his side. Candle—resentful but understanding of their strategy—walked a few steps ahead. Liir could see her try to control the shaking of her shoulders. He thought, Anyone who can be home anywhere really has no home at all.

6.

So, some days later, on an early autumn afternoon of high winds and intermittent squalls, with her aunt Nor at one side lurching under a luggage bundle, and Tay scampering at her heels, Rain came into the Gillikinese city of Shiz.

7.

Why do you think your child will thrive at St. Prowd’s?”

In her time Nor Tigelaar had faced insurrectionists and collaborationists and war profiteers. She’d endured abduction and prison and self-mutilation. She’d sold herself in sex not for cash but for military information that might come in handy to the resistance, and in so doing she’d come across a rum variety of human types. She didn’t think, however, she had ever seen anyone like the headmaster or his sister, who both sat before her with hands clasped identically in midair about six inches above their laps. As if they were afraid they might absentmindedly begin a duet of self-abuse in their own receiving chamber.

“I am not a widely traveled woman, Proctor Clapp—”

“Please, call me Gadfry,” said the brother. He flickered a smile so weak it might have been a toothache; then his face lapsed into the well-scrubbed prize calabash it most nearly resembled. His wiry hair was squared off in the back like a box hedge.

“Gadfry,” said Nor, trying to swallow her distaste. She hoped this school strategy wasn’t a mistake. “I have come in from the family home in the mountains to find a place for my girl. Her father died in an earthquake, you see, and I haven’t the wits to know how to teach her. We live far afield, out in the Great Kells, but we know St. Prowd’s comes with the highest recommendations.”

“Well yes naturally, but what makes you think that your little scioness will thrive under our particular scholarly regimen?”

What did he want to hear? “She hasn’t had the best preparation, admittedly.” Nor worked the edges of her shawl. “In certain families in the western heights, the academic education of girls isn’t considered essential, or even useful. But I—that is, my poor husband and I—wanted the best for her.”

The sister, Miss Ironish Clapp, unfolded a hand. “St. Prowd’s certainly counts itself among the best seminaries, but in this rough climate I’m afraid that the funds to support unprepared scholarship students simply don’t exist.”

Oh, thought Nor, is that all it takes? “Perhaps I misrepresented our hopes for Miss Rainary. I should have spoken more carefully: my dead husband and I wanted the very best for our daughter that money could buy.”

Miss Ironish brought her fingernails in to graze her pink pink palm. Her eyes did not narrow nor her breathing hasten when she said, “And how costs have risen, what with the scarcity of food in wartime.”

“I’m sure you can prepare me a bill for the first year that we can settle before I leave,” said Nor.

“Of course, Dame Ko,” said Gadfry Clapp. “That is my sister’s purview. But a child untutored in the basics may take longer to finish our course of studies than someone who has enjoyed a responsible formation. You should budget for a number of years.”

“We will scrutinize her for her strengths,” said Miss Ironish. “If she has any, that is.”

“Oh, she is a powerful enough child, you’ll see,” said Nor. “Not wilfull,” she added. “Nor unpleasant.”

“I can’t say that she presents well,” admitted Miss Ironish. “A St. Prowd’s girl is meant to have a certain. Ahem. Flair.”

They all turned and looked through the tall narrow windows that divided the proctor’s parlor from the waiting room. The oak mullions hung with panes of old green glass seized up with the vertical moraines of age. Beyond them, Rain sat hunched on a chair with her fingers in her mouth. The bow that Nor had purchased from a milliner had the exhausted appearance of a fox that has been run down by hounds.

“We rely on your good offices to perk her up,” said Nor.

“But how did you choose St. Prowd’s?” asked the proctor. A coquette primping for compliments.

Exhaustively Nor had prepared for this grilling; she was ready. “We considered a few places. The Home for Little Misses in Ticknor Circus seemed promising, but theirs is a horsey set, mostly from the Pertha Hills families. A bit close-minded. The Boxtable Institute seems to be in the grip of a raging ague and a quarantine made an interview out of the question. I realize that Madame Teastane’s Female Academy in the Emerald City comes very highly regarded, but one worries about the safety of a child left in their charges.”

“Safety?” Miss Ironish spoke as if it was a word in a foreign tongue, a word she had not come across before.

“Well, so much nearer the front.”

“Not that much nearer, as the dragon flies.”

“There’s near and there is nearer,” explained Nor. “Given a chance to attack one of Oz’s two great cities, the Munchkinlanders won’t hesitate to storm the Emerald City. I couldn’t take the chance. I am surprised any parent could.”

“Well, we hate to win by default.” Miss Ironish, Nor saw, was possessed of that skill of finding a way to take umbrage at any remark whatsoever.

It was time to go on the offense. “I chose St. Prowd’s for its traditions of excellence in the rearing of proper young men and women. I thought you might defend its record against your competition. I can examine the alternatives if this is proving a waste of your—”

“Oh, there is no competition, not seriously,” said Proctor Gadfry. “We’re almost within shouting distance of the great colleges of Shiz—not that our students are inclined to raise their voices in any unseemly display. I am sure you know the history of St. Prowd’s. We opened our doors in the third year of the reign of Ozma the Librarian, as you could guess from the magnificent carvings in the lintel. They were thought to be from the school of Arcavius, but we have documentation on file more or less proving the master did them himself.”

Nor hadn’t noticed the carvings and she didn’t turn to look. “It’s a beautiful building in a magnificent setting,” she said, indicating the narrow and sunless street on which Founder’s Hall fronted.

“Magnus St. Prowd was a unionist theologician whose work paved the way for the famous Debate on the Souls of Animals held at Three Queens College. Uncommonly prosperous for a bishop, he left his home to the causes of education—this was once a bishop’s palace—and he endowed the school to serve as a feeder pool for young students of unionism. As the times have become more secular, we’ve striven to retain as many of the customs of prayer and obedience as seem sensible.”

“Though we strive for a jolly nondenominational middle road that occasionally strikes me as lunatic,” remarked Miss Ironish, a rare instance, so far, of her appearing to disagree with her brother.

“I’m sure it’s difficult to strike the perfect balance between piety and populism, but I’m equally confident you manage it.” Nor was eager to get away before Rain did something to disqualify herself.

“Where did you train, Dame Ko?” asked Proctor Gadfry.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it. A very small local parish school in the Great Kells.”

“Ah, the godforsaken lands,” said Miss Ironish.

“Not godforsaken, merely godforgotten,” said Nor with a pretense at merriment. “But before we settle up, may I enquire about the size and makeup of the student body this year?”

“We began as a school for boys, of course,” said the proctor. “We opened to girls during the reign of Ozma the Scarcely Beloved.”

Miss Ironish put a gentle fist to her breast. “Kept hermetically distant from one another, of course. The girls lodged in the dormitory, with the boys in the annex above the stables.”

“In these sorry times, though,” said Proctor Gadfry, “the boys are all called to train for the army. So we’ve had to make arrangements to house them out of town. In a junior military camp. For drilling in the use of firearms and rapiers and such musical instruments as are required in marching bands.”

“The boys are kept intensely busy, so the girls here in town no longer mingle, even socially, with the boys in camp. St. Prowd’s Military Center, we’re calling it, though we don’t know if this is a permanent arrangement or if we will contract after the war is over.”

“Because I know mothers worry, I find it consoling, these days, that no boys are housed on this campus to pester any of our St. Prowd’s girls,” said the brother.

“Not that you worry overmuch,” said the sister to Nor. They both glanced again at Rain, who was slumping in her chair and showing scant devotion to the art of posture.

“And there are other girls her age?” asked Nor.

“We have about forty girls this year, from a little younger than Miss Rainary to a few years older. Some five or eight will finish next spring and proceed to Shiz University if they are lucky enough to secure a place. About eight have done very well on their O levels, but Z levels is where distinctions come out.”

Forty girls. Rain ought to be safe enough hidden in a bevy of forty girl students roughly her own age.

“How will we reach you in case there are problems?” asked Proctor Gadfry as his sister set about to draw up a bill.

“I shall take rooms at a small house of residence when I am in town,” said Nor. “Once I have settled myself, I’ll post you the address. But I will be unavailable much of the time, so I must trust that in a crisis you will treat Rainary as one of your own.”

“Upon that much you can rely,” said Proctor Gadfry.

“That much, and much more,” said Miss Ironish, blotting the paper and folding it demurely before handing it to Nor so she could open it again. Sweet Lurline. What a lucky thing that Nor’s former employer, that old lascivious ogre, had died leaving a small sack of gold and mettanite florins ripe for the plucking. Keeping the sack under the table so the Clapp siblings couldn’t see how much she had, she withdrew six coins and set them in a shiny line along the table.

“I forgot the food tax,” said Miss Ironish flatly, and a seventh coin came out to join the others.

“Miss Rainary is now a St. Prowd’s girl,” said Proctor Gadfry, standing and extending his hand to Nor. “She has come a long way already, and she has a long way to go.”

“I will find her a room and examine her,” said Miss Ironish. At Nor’s expression, she said, “I mean for what she knows, so we decide in what classroom to place her.”

“She is hard to place,” murmured Nor. They all looked at Rain once again, who didn’t notice them rising. She had taken Tay into her lap and seemed to be whispering to it.

“Oh, goodness, of course there are no pets,” said Miss Ironish.

Keeping her eyes upon Rain, Nor fingered an eighth coin and laid it slap upon the table. She didn’t know which coin it was, but she tucked her purse back into her sleeve and left the room without comment. She made sure the door had closed behind her, sealing the Clapp family inside, before she spoke.

“You may be happy here or you may not,” she said. “None of us knows where and when happiness happens. But I think you will be safe. We intend to head for Kiamo Ko, in the Kells, to see if a more private life might be had so far away.”

“How long do I have to stay here.” Presented as a statement.

Nor didn’t want to lie. Since Rain so often refused human contact, Nor put her hand on Tay’s scalp. Its bristles felt warm and papery. “Someone will come for you.”

From the end of the street she looked back at Founder’s Hall. It was a severe limestone box in the symmetrical mode, with narrow, watery windows set in deep recesses. Like nine icy tombstones sunk into the facade. Not so much as a single curl of carven ornament on the architrave or the capitals of the pillars holding up the portico.

The ribbon that Nor had bought for Rain to pretty her up for her new friends now seemed less a present than a blow. The heart-shaped locket, lacquered redder than yewberries, hung on a chain around the girl’s neck and was hidden behind the yoke of her shift. A silly sentimental thing picked up at a jeweler for an outrageous sum. The kind of thing Nor imagined a girl might like, though she would not have done so, and Rain had accepted it without comment. Nor hoped it might mean something to the girl one day, when and if she ever learned what a heart was.

Though maybe being an isolate already would help the girl not to suffer so much in the company of her peers. Oh, Rain, she thought. I had myself sewn so I could never have children to mourn, and you wandered into my life anyway.

8.

Let us not start with disapproval,” said Miss Ironish.

“But there’s no light,” said Rain. No, Rainary. She was trying to remember.

“You’ll be here at night mostly. All rooms are dark at night.”

“Not if there’s a moon.”

“You’ll be too tired to stay awake mooning over the moon. It’s too bad that there is no extra bed downstairs but your mother paid no attention to the registration deadlines. You’re lucky we’re accommodating you at all. Call it charity on our part.”

“There’s no light. And no window.”

Miss Ironish seemed not to hear. “You have more catching up to do than any girl we have ever admitted. And believe me we have entertained some real losers in our time.”

Rain reached out her hands. She could touch the sloping beams on either side. This wasn’t a room. It was a coffin the shape of a tent. And it smelled of wood-mold; she could see the blotched rot where rain must come through the slates.

“You’ll want to watch these protruding nails,” said Miss Ironish. “They will rake your scalp if you sit up too fast. Breakfast is at five. There will be a bell, struck once. If you don’t hear it, you miss breakfast. You won’t miss it more than twice, I guarantee that.”

Rain put her small carpetbag down. She thought about the stone in it, the bone, the shell, the feather.

“You can hang your garments on that pair of hooks—I can tell you didn’t arrive with many. That’s proper humility, and I applaud it. I believe we shall get along very well, Miss Rainary.”

“What should I do now?”

“You can spend the evening settling in.”

“Can I get something to eat?”

“Your board doesn’t vest until breakfast tomorrow. However, I am not a monster. I shall send up a girl with a tray. Including water for your creature. What is it, anyway?”

“A rice otter. Its name is Tay.”

“I do not think it will be happy here.”

Rain thought better than to reply with the first thing that came to her mind. Who could? See, she was learning already. “Where is a lamp?”

“We did not budget for a lamp.”

“How can I study and catch up on my learning without a lamp?”

“Very well. I shall begin to keep a ledger and write down all your demands so that your mother can reimburse the academy when she comes on Visitation Day.”

“When is that? And a book too, if you have one.”

“Visitation Day is the month after Lurlinemas. Some eleven, twelve weeks away. As for your reading selections, I shall pick out a volume from my private library of devotional literature. How well do you read?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you can derive any grace and benefit from what I send up for you, I will be surprised.”

Me too, thought Rain. But anything to read was better than nothing.

Miss Ironish retired down the dusty wooden steps—not down one flight but several, as an attic filled with battered furniture separated the aerie from the dormitories in which the other girls slept. As she went she sang something quite cheerfully in a minor key. Rain took out her shifts, her petticoat, and the new pair of pale leather shoes that laced up the sides. A little light lanced through chinks in the roofing tiles, which meant, she suspected, that chill and wind and snow would sift through, too.

When she heard steps again, she went to the door to greet the girl. Mounting to the landing, hauling a lamp and a plate upon a tray, stumped a funny-looking kid with gappy teeth and freckles, and a weedy head of close-cropped ash-brown curls. “Here you be, then, Miss Rainary,” she said. “All’s you could hope for in the penthouse suite.”

“It’s not a lot. Is that supper?”

“Likewise it’s very nice to meet you,” said the girl pointedly.

Rain tried to sort this out, and made a second attempt. “My name is Rainary.”

“I know, Miss Rainary. And my name is Scarly. Them’s biscuits and some hunks of cheese hid under the serviette, if you please. I also tucked in two gingery scones when Cook weren’t looking.”

Rain took the tray. Tay, who liked cheese, made off with the lot of it. “Oooh, you gots your own private rat,” said Scarly. “That’ll help some, up here.”

“Would you,” said Rain, trying, trying to be normal, “would you like a scone?”

“I gets my own after cleanup time. When dinner’s done.”

“Will we be in studies together?”

“Miss Rainary, I en’t a student. I’m the scullery maid.”

Dim memories of Mockbeggar Hall. “I was a scullery maid once.”

“Hoo no! Really?”

But Rain had been told not to speak of her past, ever. Already she was breaking rules. She tried to correct her mistake. “No. I just wondered what it might be like.”

“It might be like a whole lot of fun. But it’s not. Now I have to go down. There’s the tables to lay. They gets roast crinklebreast of the fields tonight.” Scarly put her hands in her apron pocket. “Miss, I brought you a few extra rags to stick in those cracks. That one near the chimney stack is the worst of the lot. It’ll help.”

“How do you know?”

“This is usually my room.”

“Why do they put me here?”

“Not to feel special.”

“I don’t understand.”

“School begun two weeks ago. You’re late. The one thing Proctor Gadfry Clapp and Miss Ironish Clapp and the others agree on is that St. Prowd’s students shouldn’t feel special about nothing but being students of St. Prowd’s. The rich ones gets their fancy cloaks locked up and their allowances locked up too. The smart ones gets to learn enough other languages to make their heads spin.”

“What about the poor ones?”

“They en’t admitted most often. And you, I don’t know if you’re rich or smart, but I do know you’re late. So you got put in my room. Perbably you’ll shift out after they get a better sense of how humble you are.”

“Oh, I think I’m pretty humble.”

“That’s the right train to take.” Scarly laughed. “Oh, I almost forgot your book.” She pulled it from behind the bib of her apron and scowled at the silvery foil words stamped on the spine.

“What book is it? What does it say?”

“Miss Rainary, I already told you,” said the maid. “I’m not a student here. I can’t read. Pretty curly letters though, en’t you impressed?”

Rain took the book. She could hardly make out the title due to the flourishes of display type. “I think it says Read Me and Die,” she said.

“You’re a right card! We’ll like having you around.” Apparently Scarly thought Rain had made a joke. Hah! Her first joke, and she didn’t even get it herself.

When the maid was halfway down the top flight, Rain hurried to the door. “But, Miss Scarly, where will you stay tonight?” she asked.

“It’s only Scarly, no miss about it. I’ll doss down in the boys’ dormitory ’cross the way,” came the reply. “It’s empty of boys but haunted, say all the girls.”

“Haunted with what?”

“All the boys they wish was there!” She chortled to herself down both flights. She must be a bit dim, thought Rain.

The title of the book turned out to be Reach Me Each Day. It was a collection of prayers in tiny cramped print. Rain still couldn’t read well enough to be inspired by it. She did try. She ended up staring at the letters and imagining them to say something more juicy, and she fell asleep with Tay on her pillow. Tay’s warm odor helped mask the reek of mildew.

She missed the breakfast bell, not only that morning but for eight mornings more.

9.

There were six instructors. Proctor Clapp supervised them all. At whim he would strike the iron bell in the hall, and only then could the teachers stop at the current topic and proceed to the next. Perhaps in his study he suffered narcolepsy for hours on end, for some days they would spend all morning on a single matter—the number line, or the Chronologies of Ozmas, or Primary Divinity, or dictation and diction—before the bell finally sounded.

Rain (Miss Rainary, Miss Rainary, Miss Rainary) was in a class with girls apparently three years younger and six years smarter than she was. They were young enough to adore tattling on her.

“Madame Shenshen, Miss Rainary doesn’t even know how to do her algorhythmics.”

“Madame Shenshen, Miss Rainary didn’t finish her tallies so I can’t check my work against hers.”

“Madame Shenshen, I was paired with Miss Rainary for Spellification yesterday. Today may I have a partner who actually knows something?”

Madame Shenshen was a taurine woman who drenched herself in essence of floxflower to disguise the symptoms of a powerful digestive ailment. She was impatient with Rain up to a point, but however hard she might try, for the promotion of Rain’s humility, Madame Shenshen couldn’t disguise her admiration of Rain’s swift progress. “For someone so evidently abandoned to the winds of chance,” she claimed once, clasping her hands like a smithy, “you are proving yourself worthy of the opportunities St. Prowd’s supplies you, Miss Rainary Ko. Bravo. Except this word, admonition, is spelled incorrectly. Please, if you will, tonight prepare me a page on which you spell it correctly three hundred times.”

Rain could not yet count that high, but Miss Scarly was clever at figures and worked it out. Sort of. When Rain arrived the next day with five hundred admonitions, she was punished for showing off.

The girls were noisy at breakfast and lunch and sat in silence at dinner while Proctor Clapp or Miss Ironish read aloud from Meditations of the Divine Emperor, a slim volume bound in ivory kid that was all the stir in the bookstalls that season. Rain knew this for herself because once a week they went for promenades along the Suicide Canal or into Pfenix Park, taking care not to step on the dead pigeons. Inevitably they passed a book cart or a storefront, and Meditations was everywhere, in stacks and stacks.

Popular, or maybe not, as the stacks seldom seemed to shrink.

Rain wondered when the other girls were going to sort themselves out in her mind as individuals, or if they would. Unlike stones and pinecones, they never stayed still long enough for her to collect them. Perhaps because Rain had met Scarly first, she thought the maid was the most interesting of the bunch. Rain wasn’t well used to launching conversations, while Scarly was trained to keep her lips closed unless spoken to. It seemed a losing proposition in terms of friendship, except that Scarly could communicate more in a saucy expression tossed in Rain’s direction than the Divine Emperor seemed to be able to do in fifteen pages of discourse about his own divinity.

The reading was coming along. On the one hand, every now and then Rain regretted mastering the skill at last. She had imagined that books would have more to offer. What Miss Ironish supplied from the locked case of volumes in the front hall seemed a steady dribble of hectoring. Though very pious hectoring.

On the other hand, she saw that Shiz was full of writing in a way that the Chancel of the Ladyfish above the Sleeve of Ghastille hadn’t been, nor the cottage at Nether How. Rain’s least dreadful moment of the week was the walk from Ticknor Circus along Regent’s Parade, next to whichever sour-faced student had pulled the short straw and gotten stuck with the new girl. It was a promenade of courteously brief literature! Statements applied all over the place, some in letters a foot high.

GENTLY USED GARMENTS. PLEXODIE’S FAMOUS HARMONIA CAFÉ. SHIZ CONSTABULARY. PORTER’S LODGE PLS. KNOCK.

And sandwich boards on the paving stones! LATEST WAR NEWS WITH EVERY BEER advertised near the door of the Cock and Pumpkins. HAPPY HOURS ADD UP TO HAPPY DAZE: that one outside the Peach and Kidneys. And her favorite, a sign over a shop down some uneven steps, almost below ground, on a mews off Railway Square: SKURVY BASTARD’S EMPORIUM OF LOST AND BROKEN ITEMS. She loved to read that one. She thought she’d like to quit St. Prowd’s and go to school under the tutelage of Skurvy Bastard.

By Lurlinemas she had proceeded to the fourth primer, the one with the stories of Little Handy Mandy, a somewhat moronic child with kleptomania—she couldn’t keep her fingers out of anything. She seemed preternaturally prone to trouble. Rain had used to like to steal things—was she as dull as Handy Mandy? The little girls laughed until their eyes streamed with tears. Rain said, “Madame Shenshen, I think I have finished with Handy Mandy.”

“Too much for you?” said Madame Shenshen. “I’m not surprised. I believe you’re ready to move up, once the Overseers have come and gone. Congratulations. I’ll miss you. If you ever get a yen to look back in on Handy Mandy or on me, you know where to find me.”

The Board of Overseers came for dinner at Lurlinemas, so the quality of the food was expected to improve appreciably. “Our best Dixxi House service, and if you break a plate I’ll break your neck,” instructed Miss Ironish. “Stand behind your chairs until the Senior Overseer is seated, and then follow his every move. If he picks up a spoon to sample the broth, you do the same. If he finds the dinner roll not to his liking, you do the same. If he leaves half his chop or asks for more peas, you do the same. If he writes his name in the custard with the end of his spoon, you are to do the same. Are there any questions? Miss Rainary, are you attending?”

“Yes, Miss Ironish.”

“If the Senior Overseer puts his napkin upon his lap, Miss Rainary?”

“I will do the same.”

“If he tucks it in at his collar?”

“I will do the same.”

“Very well. Miss Ghistly, do you understand? Miss Mauna, Miss Igilvy? Miss bon Schirm?”

“Yes, Miss Ironish.”

Rain didn’t remember having celebrated Lurlinemas before. Maybe back at Mockbeggar Hall? She couldn’t work out how a festival day centering around some miracle of Lurline, the fairy goddess who had founded Oz, now honored the providence of the anonymous deity everyone called the Unnamed God. Or UG. Happily, on Lurlinemas the girls got maple syrup for their oatmeal sludge at breakfast, which almost mitigated the tedium of extra hours of prayers to the UG and a new devotional chant to the UG’s Divine Presence, Shell, Emperor of Oz.

Rain thought the maple syrup more divine than the Emperor, though she had learned not to give voice to such a sentiment.

At the service, candles were brought out, and little square bells the size of petits fours. The Senior Overseer, a stooped and mild old man prinked out in a plaid vest and a pince-nez, with sore skin that peeled in birch bark curls, read aloud the text and also the instructions for the ceremony, apparently not silencing himself for italics.

“For his charity to our holy blessed homeland, may the Divine Emperor be raised up. Ring bell three times. For his purity as an example to the fallen citizens of the Unnamed God, may the Divine Emperor be raised up. Ring bell two times and bow to the sky.” The Senior Overseer couldn’t work out how to bow to the sky, so keeping his eyes trained to the page he just waggled two fingers toward the ceiling.

Rain could see Scarly and her maties standing in mobcaps and fresh pinafores at the back of Meeting. A small sound escaped from Rain at the sight of Scarly’s comic twirl of her hands, imitating the Overseer. Miss Ironish glanced across the room at her and grimaced. Oh hell, thought Rain, a miracle at Lurlinemas. I think I may have just laughed out loud.

She almost did it again, right then, at the thought of it. And at the thought that Oh hell was a little bit of Mr. Boss in her still. That was a nice thought, under the circumstances.

The meal was the best food that Rain could ever remember seeing. Suspended in an iron ring, a shallow bowl of clear broth hovered about five inches behind each plate. The chops were jacketed with crispy crackling fat. Pickled beets and orrory root with a dollop of tamorna marmade on top. The aromas were subtle and strong.

The Senior Overseer, sunk in conversation with Proctor Gadfry Clapp on one side and Miss Ironish Clapp on the other, seemed to find the siblings so amusing that he kept pausing with his spoon in midair and pursing his lips in surprise at whatever they were saying. More than fifty spoons hovered when his spoon did, and though Rain slid her eyes left and right she didn’t see a single brown splash of broth. Finally the Clapps concluded the long story with which they were harrying the Overseer. He roared with artificial gusto and tucked into his meal before they could start up again. He used the crinkleknife to trim the savory fat off his chop, and then put down the knife to pick up the smaller of the forks, and smiled ferociously at the nearly translucent curl, and then he removed it to a side plate.

The students, the teachers, and several other visiting overseers did the same. Not the breath of a sigh, not a whimper. No hint of anguish. Miss Ironish looked prepared to explode with pride at the manners on display. Discreetly, of course.

When the Overseer had danced the tines of his fork through his peas without eating any, and busily mashed his orrory root so he could take precisely one spoonful, and broken his dinner roll into tiny crumbs on his plate and then dropped his napkin upon the whole wasted mess of it, all the girls followed his lead. The smaller girls were beginning quietly to cry, but they were sitting at the far end of the tables and the Senior Overseer apparently wasn’t keen of sight.

“There’s pudding to come, of course,” said Miss Ironish.

“First, let us have a gander at the finest of St. Prowd’s,” said the Senior Overseer. He hauled himself to his feet, his knuckles steadying himself on the linen.

Rain stood and put her knuckles on the tabletop. She wasn’t being bold, neither did she realize she was alone in the gesture, because she was sitting at a corner of a table near the front and from this angle most of the room was behind her.

“Oh my, a volunteer,” said the Overseer. He could see her. “May I ask you, what do you hope the Fairy Queen Lurline and her constant companion, Preenella, will bring you tonight in their magic basket?”

That was a mouthful but Rain was a quick study. “May I ask you, sir, what you hope the Fairy Queen Lurline and her constant Preenella will bring you in their basket? Magic basket?”

Miss Ironish’s eyes were flashing and Proctor Clapp’s mouth was open.

But the Senior Overseer just laughed. “Fair enough, young lady. I would like to see peace descend upon our fair land.” Looking at her kindly enough, he waited. “Have you anything to add?”

“Have you anything to add?” asked Rain.

“Is this surliness or is she an idiot savant?” the Overseer asked Proctor Clapp in a stage whisper, and they all heard the Proctor’s reply, “Just an idiot, I’m afraid.”

“Nonsense,” said the Overseer. “Come, tell me. What is your name?”

“What is your name?” asked Rain.

“I am Lord Manning. Now tell me your name.”

At last an instruction that was not a question. But Rain remembered she was to bring no special attention upon herself, and she had blundered badly. “I am a new student this year, Lord Manning, who doesn’t know her manners yet,” she tried.

“I have already confirmed that,” said the Senior Overseer, and to the proctor, “What’s the girl’s name, damn it?”

“Miss Rainary Ko, if you please, sir,” said the proctor.

“Miss Rainary Ko! Are you always so insolent, or are you trying to be amusing?”

By now Rain had figured out her mistake, and she didn’t return the question to the Overseer. “For Lurlinemas in my basket, if I got a basket from the Fairy Queen Lurline, I would like permission to room with the other girls, Lord Manning.”

“What do you mean?” he roared. It wasn’t clear if he was amused or offended by all this, but perhaps that was the result of the pearlfruit sherry which he had downed in lieu of dining, and which the girls hadn’t imitated as they hadn’t been served sherry. Only tall beakers of water, which they’d sipped sparingly so as not to need the loo before dismissal. “Wherever do you room now? On the rooftop?”

“Just under it, sir.”

“I don’t understand. Miss Ironish! Explain this child to me!” He didn’t look at the proctor or his sister. He leaned even farther out above his plate to peer at Rain, the poor girl who wanted nothing but to remain invisible to the world. His plaid ascot had come loose from his collar and a dangling edge of it trailed through the flame of the tabletop candle. In a second his vest was alight. “Oh! Mighty forces!” he cried, and took his water glass and doused himself with water.

First Rain, and then thirty-nine other girls, picked up their beakers of water and doused themselves, though a couple of the very younger girls doused each other and got away with it.

Miss Ironish fainted dead away in her chair. And so there was nothing else for her brother to do but to pick up his beaker of water and toss it in the face of his sister.

That was Rain’s last night in her aerie above the girls’ dormitory in Founder’s Hall. After Miss Ironish had recovered and the Overseers had departed—jollity masking a bitter rage on the part of the Clapps and impatience on the part of Lord Manning—Rain was ordered to collect her things.

“We will not toss you out on the street,” said Miss Ironish. “But until further notice you will house yourself in the boys’ dormitory across the schoolyard. Scarly will show you the way.”

This is how Rain came to be exiled to the haunted dormitory where, a few months later, the ghost first appeared.

10.

She loved her new arrangement. For one thing, though again on the top floor, she now had a window. The plastered ceiling was high, and no nails poked through. While Rain had hoped and longed to be a girl swimming in dailiness with the other girls, she had little capacity for gloominess, as far as she knew, and she didn’t feel lonely to be so alone.

Also, although Scarly now had relocated to the main building to take up her old room, paradoxically Rain saw her more often. The maid had greater liberty to roam the premises of the annex than any of the students. As long as Scarly carried a tray or a bucket or a lamp, she could come and go up the stairs to Rain’s attic without being stopped. Usefully, the unused boys’ dormitory was built above the storerooms and the stables, and the four maids were kept to a pretty clip, dashing back and forth all day. At nighttime when Scarly finished her final chores she could wander across the courtyard as if to count the clean sheets for the laundry or leave the morning list for the milk and eggs man. Then she could stand at the base of the steep winding staircase that rose two full flights and call out, “Hoo hoo!” as if she were an owl, or an Owl.

Rain’s room was so far back under the eaves that she couldn’t always hear Scarly. But Tay usually did. Tay would go sniffing and scraping at the closed door until Rain pulled on some socks and a tatty knitted houserobe and came inching out to meet her.

“Is the others being beastly to you?” asked Scarly, the first time she came to visit.

“Not really. At the start they were cross because Miss Ironish dumped the crawberry trifle in the horse trough behind the stables, but then the Lurlinemas baskets arrived anyway. All the girls had treats and presents enough to please them.” Rain had gotten no such basket, but she hadn’t expected to, and she imagined that Scarly had been similarly deprived. “Did you ever see a ghost here?” she asked, to change the subject.

“En’t no such thing as ghosts.”

“I hear some spooky-spooky noises at night.”

“Doves in the joists. They can’t sleep with them bats in the belvedere coming and going all night.”

“Shall we get down to it?”

“Right, Miss.”

Rain had decided to teach Scarly to read. They worked for almost an hour in the lamplight. From a classroom Scarly had pinched a slate and a slice of chalk, and Rain formed letters first while the maid copied them below. “Put more of a foot on that L or it will be mistaken for an I.”

Scarly labored with her tongue in the corner of her mouth. She was tired enough when she arrived and she could rarely work for long, but she came back every second or third night. Since there was no extra coal for the stove in Rain’s chamber, they sat huddled under a single coverlet like a giant slug with two heads. Tay liked to bask in the lamplight and bat at the scratching chalk the way a cat might.

One evening Scarly yawned and said, “I en’t the strength to do any more nasty vowels. Let’s just sit here and keep cozy for a moment till I get ready to run back through the cold to my room.” It was midwinter now, and the schoolyard between the annex and Founder’s Hall was hip deep in snow. “Tell me about your home.”

Rain liked Scarly as well as she imagined she could ever like anyone, but she still wanted to hew to the instructions that her aunt and her parents had given her. Avoid making idle conversation that might endanger anyone. Rain didn’t believe she knew how to tell stories, anyway, and neither did she want to lie. “I’m good at forgetting all that,” she said, which was truthful enough. “Tell me about yours instead. Have you got two parents?”

“Sure enough, man and wife, live in a hamlet that en’t got no name. A half hour on foot from Brox Hall, on the train line.”

“How did you get all the way here?”

“They had nine other mouths to feed, din’t they, so since my mouth was less sassy than some, they figured to put me to work in the city.”

“You have nine brothers and sisters?” Rain almost saw shooting stars.

“No, six of ’em, plus Grandmaw, that gormless old witch, and the goat and the milk-cow. The chickens don’t count as they feed themselves with grubs and such.”

Rain wasn’t sure how to frame the next question. “Do you miss them much?”

“I see ’em once a year, don’t I?” She tightened her lips and bobbed her chin in affirmation. “That’s more than my maties belowstairs, most of ’em, and also Cook, who has three sons in the army and thinks they must all be dead as dinner.”

“Are they older or younger, your brothers and sisters?”

“Oh, all sorts. How about you?”

“I have Tay,” said Rain.

“Anyone coming to see you on Visitation Day?”

She caught herself from saying my aunt. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any”—what was the word?—“correspondence.”

“I’m sure your maw will come. They all do. The girls expect it.”

“The girls are all sleeping in warm dormitories too.”

“I’m warm enough.” They giggled over nothing. Tay curled tighter, not so much a coil of greenish otter but a congealed heap of fur. Tay hadn’t cared for the winter in the Five Lakes and liked it even less in Shiz. All at once it perked up its ears, bowed points, and raised its head in a motion so fast they didn’t even see a blur.

“It hears something,” whispered Rain.

“What?”

“The ghost!”

They both tried to scare themselves more by making terrified faces, with huge eggy eyes showing white around the irises, with mouths dropped open. Then it stopped being fun and Scarly said, “I better go. You’ll be okay with the ghost on your own?”

“I have Tay.”

“Tay the Attack Otter.” Scarly got up and impulsively threw her arms around Rain from behind. “Really, you’ll be all right, Miss Rainary?”

“Honestly, Scarly. You don’t believe in ghosts, remember?”

The maid swore she didn’t believe in ghosts, but she left the annex in double time. Rain settled back in the blanket. It held in some of the maid’s warmth long enough for her to get to sleep. She didn’t dream of ghosts, though when she woke up once in the frosty moonlight she noticed that Tay was still sitting with an erect spine and a needle-sharp attentiveness. Probably a new family of mice, she thought.

11.

Visitation Day arrived at last. Since Rain had no callers, she helped Miss Ironish pour tea and squeeze lemons. “You’re a very good child, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish during a lull. “Madame Shenshen speaks highly of you, and Madame Chortlebush seems to be warming up. Slowly.”

“Madame Chortlebush is a fine lecturer.”

“I do hope you aren’t becoming attached inappropriately.” Miss Ironish saw impending doom in every situation. “It’s not correct to focus your attentions upon a single individual, Miss Rainary. These little tendresses can begin to happen in a school setting, but they must be strictly nipped in the bud. Using the Secateurs of Personal Government. Do you remember my lecture on the imaginary Secateurs we each have in our employ?”

Rain wasn’t paying much attention. “Do you have family to visit on Visitation Day, Miss Ironish?”

“The impertinence, Miss Rainary! My brother, Proctor Gadfry Clapp, is all the family one needs.” She arranged the lace cuffs of her sleeves for the thousandth time. “I would like to abolish Visitation Day as a distraction, but I am afraid we would have a revolution on our hands. I’m sorry, of course, that you haven’t heard from your mother. I trust no harm has come to her.”

Rain bobbed a slight curtsey. She had found that when she wasn’t sure what to say, a curtsey often smoothed over the silence. But today Miss Ironish said, “That’s common of you, Miss Rainary. A curtsey in this situation is what I would expect the parlor maid to drop. Don’t sell yourself short. Your mother may not have bothered to write or call, but still, you aren’t a member of the staff. You’re of finer stock than that. Despite your bullish awkwardness, good breeding will out. And if Madame Chortlebush and Madame Shenshen are right, you’ll be able to do solid academic work one day. So don’t pander.”

“Yes, Miss Ironish.” Rain stifled the urge to curtsey five or six times in a row.

At dinner Rain sat near Miss Mope, with her one-legged father in his narrow oiled beard, and Miss Igilvy, whose parents were so grizzled and birdlike their daughter must have been hatched from an egg. Above the chatter of schoolgirls, the talk was of the war.

“Fleecing us with taxes. Draining us dry,” asserted Father Mope.

“We defend all of Oz, and yet do the godless tribes of the Vinkus contribute anything in manpower or strategic thinking? I’m merely asking,” replied Father Igilvy.

“You wouldn’t want strategic thinking from the Yunamata. They can’t think far enough to build their houses with stone walls!”

The laughter was brisk and quickly over. “And yet we’re defending them, too,” said Mope. “And the Scrow, and I suppose those Arjiki clans in the Great Kells. They have more savvy than some of those other Winkies.”

“Oh yes,” said ancient Mother Igilvy, patting her daughter on the head as if she were a loaf of bread warm from the oven. “I went out to the West once, you know, and met some Arjiki royalty.”

“You never told me that, Mother,” chirped her equally ancient husband.

“Of course I did.”

“How divinely fascinating,” said Mope. “Did you write up your sentiments for the papers, or retail your anecdotes to Ladies’ Clubs?”

“Indeed. And I remember quite well telling about one castle high in the mountains. It was the place where that Witch was brought down, do you remember?”

Rain began to chew exceedingly quietly so as not to miss a syllable.

“The Arjiki family who had lived there had long ago been slaughtered by the Wizard’s forces, I came to understand. The place—Kirami something, Kirami Ko, I think—was crawling with flying monkeys who did their best to put on a full cream tea. I’m afraid monkeys are shambolic by nature. We were taken all over the shabby place. It was built as a waterworks, you know.”

“Miss Rainary’s surname is Ko,” said Miss Igilvy. “Pass the gravy boat?”

“I never knew that,” said Miss Igilvy’s father to her mother. “A waterworks. I never.”

“Of course you did, you old phony. You sat in the front row at each and every presentation I gave.”

“I was napping with my eyes open. Why a waterworks, so high in the mountain? Was the building put up on a river suitable for a waterwheel of some sort?”

“No, nothing of the sort. Don’t you remember? I had bright illuminatums, surely you recall! I had painted them myself, on vellum from Plutney & Blood’s.”

“When the house lights go low I tend to go low too.”

“I was led to believe that a giant reservoir, a lake of sorts, might lurk underneath the mountain, deep down, and that the castle of Kirami Ko was originally intended as the housing for a great artesianal device. A screw of some sort that would sink down oh for yonks, and pull up water in the way screws can manage to do.”

“That’s the hugest helping of nonsense I ever heard,” said Mope affably. “The Vinkus River that cascades from the heights carries all the water the Kells could possibly provide. And every drop debouches into Restwater. The notion of drilling for more water when Restwater just sits there—the Wizard or whatever Ozma initiated that plan couldn’t be so idiotic.”

“Well, don’t rely on my memory,” said Mother Igilvy. “But perhaps it wasn’t the Wizard’s plan after all. Maybe the Arjiki tribe thought it all up so as to be self-sufficient from the Emerald City, just like those truncated Munchkinlanders.”

“Is there any more gravy at that end?” asked Miss Igilvy.

“I never understood how the Wicked Witch of the West was killed by a bucket of water, as the legend has it,” said Mope.

“Oh, I’ve worked that out,” said Mother Igilvy. “I have concluded the bucket must have been filled to the brim with several gallons of Kellswater. It’s a drearily lifeless and poisonous liquor, you know. Everyone says so.”

“But what would she be doing with a bucket of Kellswater at the ready?” asked Mope.

“Dear husband, you eat any more popovers and gravy and you’ll rip a stitch. My good sir, the Witch obviously had stashed away a dousing of Kellswater as a prophylactic against an attacker. But it was used against her by that Doromeo.”

“Dorothy,” said Miss Igilvy firmly.

“Did you hear she has come back, and has been put on trial in Munchkinland? Condemned to death,” said Mope.

“The Munchkinlanders are a cruel, cruel people,” said Mother Igilvy with satisfaction. “They deserve the pummeling we’re giving them.”

“Perhaps not quite the pummeling we advertise,” said Mope in a quieter voice. “Miss Plumbago, what do you hear from your grandfather, that distinguished General Cherrystone?”

Rain swiveled her head; she couldn’t help it. Miss Plumbago was General Cherrystone’s granddaughter? How—how enwreathed life could manage to be. But just then Proctor Clapp got up to address the diners, and Father Igilvy fell asleep before the popovers and gravy were even removed from the table.

Rain knew they had been talking about Kiamo Ko, about her own grandmother, Elphaba Thropp. It made her feel dizzy. Hiding in plain sight. As soon as Proctor Clapp had finished, Rain excused herself, though no one noticed, and headed back to her room across the yard. The stables were filled with horses of the visitors, and out in the back street the ostlers and chauffeurs were having a smoke around a brazier and rubbing their hands to keep warm. She liked the sound of that commotion, she liked the smell of the horses. And the rising heat of their bodies warmed the annex right up to her room. She changed her clothes and took Tay in her arms and lay back on her bed, knowing she would not sleep easily tonight. Not with pictures in her head of some murdered Dorothy, some murdered grandmother, some castle she had never seen with a cellar shaped like a shaft and a giant screw plunging down, down, down, into the heart of the earth. And then she heard a noise as of someone coming through her wardrobe. It did not sound like a ghost, so she got up to see what it was.

12.

In the pearl-blue gloom of midnight she couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy. But Tay was usually skittish and aggressive around boys, she’d noticed, and now it seemed only calm and alert, not hostile. “Miss bon Schirm?” ventured Rain, naming one of the taller girls. “Did your parents fail to come on Visitation Day too?”

But it wasn’t Miss bon Schirm.

“You scared me half to death. Come out of there.”

A boy emerged. Three, four inches taller than Rain, though his hair was raked every which way, and maybe if it were properly combed he’d be closer to her height. The face was wary, urgent, perhaps clever—it was hard to tell in this light, and besides, Rain didn’t trust her estimations of people’s characters. Yet. She wondered, in fact, if she ever would. Perhaps now was a good time to start. Was he about to strike her?

But there was Tay, attentive, curious, but hardly rearing to attack. A pretty good barometer.

“What were you doing in there?”

He held out the large shiny shell she had carried with her from nearly as far back as she could remember. “What is this?”

“Mine.” She took it from him. His hands were shaking a little. “Did you come here to steal my things?”

“No. Of course not. You haven’t got much.”

“So I’m told. Are you going to hurt me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You hid in my cupboard and were going to jump out.”

“When I heard you coming up I hurried in there. I was waiting until you went to sleep, and then I was going to slip away. I didn’t want to scare you.”

“But what were you doing here in the first place?”

“Looking for something to eat.”

Rain shrugged. “Nothing to eat here. Pretty obviously. Unless you like books.” She took a closer look. “Are you very hungry? Are you starving? You don’t look in the pink of health.”

“I’m not stuffed and groaning, that’s for certain. My stomach rumbles like caves collapsing.”

She bit her lip and thought she should probably feel his forehead, but she didn’t care for touching people. “Are you ill?”

“Look, I’ll just go. I’m sorry for this rude surprise. I didn’t know anyone was living in this building.”

She was putting it together as best she could. “But you were hiding from someone.”

“Just putting the shell farther back on its shelf. For safety,” he said, reaching his hand. She didn’t give the shell back.

“Oh, that’s thoughtful. Do you ever break into anyone’s room and just, oh, knit? Or nip into someone’s house and just polish the wainscoting? You aren’t making any sense.”

“You’re uncommonly calm. I’m glad for that. If you had screamed I would have gotten in terrible trouble. I’ll leave now. If you don’t say a word about this I will be a little bit safer.”

Tay inched forward and sniffed at the boy’s very wet boots, which were open at the toe and heel and, now Rain thought of it, smelled dreadful. Then Tay wreathed itself around the boy’s ankle for a moment and looked up at Rain. She made herself do the improbable and reached out and put her palm to his forehead.

“Am I hot?”

She considered the answer to that, but while she had known how to be quiet her whole life, she had never quite learned how to lie. “I don’t know. I never felt someone’s forehead before.”

“Feeling your own doesn’t work. You can’t feel yourself sick.”

“Is that true?” She tried it. She just felt like herself. But what did herself feel like? She had never thought to ask.

“Do you know what yourself feels like?” she asked him.

“Oh, now that’s the question,” he replied, and buckled at the knees.

“I didn’t intend such a powerful question,” she commented. Then she realized he had passed out on the coverlet that she and Scarly sometimes huddled under.

She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing. She wasn’t allowed to leave her room after ninth bell, not until morning bell except to visit the privy. And there was nothing useful in the privy.

She remembered that the stables were full of guest horses. She told Tay to stay put while she hustled into a waist-length wool coat and hurried down both flights of stairs. The horses in their stalls nickered and wheezed, and shuffled at the sound of her, and she was glad for their noise and warmth. Various coachmen still lingered, smoking cheap tobacco rolled in old newsprint, and husbanding pints of ale that Proctor Clapp had sneaked out to them when his sister wasn’t looking. The ale had made the men jolly. They chattered on as Rain went quickly through the few satchels that had been lobbed into the shadows just inside the stable doors.

“My lady, she’s a right dab of codswallop, she is. She pays me but a penny farthing for the trip from Plaid Acres to Shiz, and then she’s late for the school supper because she’s got to stop and buy new gowns in that fancified silk depot over to Pennikin Lane!”

A small quarter of cheese. Better than nothing.

“My lady’s got yours beat in the mud with a beetroot up her arse. Mine’s so cheap she thinks I don’t merit the privacy of a loo with a closed door, so she stops before any town center at the last possible shrine to Lurlina and makes me take a dump behind it! Says it saves her a fee and helps stamp out paganism at the same time.”

Oooh, a hunk of bread. Pretty hard, but maybe if she held it over her candle?

“The old gov’nor en’t so bad. He’s a secret royalist, though. He prays for the Emperor every night like he’s told to do—he prays that the Emperor passes away peaceful in his sleep, and that some miracle return the Ozma line to the throne. He was born under an Ozma and he wants to die under one, he says. I tells him to his face, he’s gonna die under a lake narwhal, the missus keep putting on the pounds like she’s doing.”

“You don’t say that, you buggery liar!”

“I says it in my heart, like a prayer.”

A lot of laughter outside. In the last satchel, a trove—a mince pie, almost fresh by the smell of it, and two carrots and an apple, probably for the horse, and a small porcelain flagon of something liquid. She nicked it all, neat as Handy Mandy, and a rather nicely woven pink blanket that was thrown over a mare, and she scurried up the stairs. No one heard her. One of the ostlers was saying, “Give over some of that Baum’s Liquid Hoof Dressing, my pretty piebald is sorer than sandpaper on a sow’s behind.”

The intruder couldn’t wake, no matter how gently or roughly she rocked his shoulder. He couldn’t sample her terrific haul. It would be more stale in the morning. Damn. But she put the pink horse’s blanket on him, over the coverlet, and to keep herself warm she dressed herself in as many layers as she could. Thanks to Miss Ironish her wardrobe was fuller than it had been. She was grateful for the stiff wool stockings and the promenading cape.

Round about midnight a brawl started among the carriage attendants. Maybe someone had discovered his flask was missing. She didn’t mind. She sat with Tay in her lap—Tay kept her warm too—and maybe she dozed and maybe she didn’t, but after a while the morning came anyway.

He looked more bruised in the morning, but perhaps that was just the coloration of another ethnic group in Oz that Rain hadn’t previously collected. He sat up and said, “If I was full I would need the privy,” and she answered, “Well, eat up some of this and sooner or later.” She gave him a carrot that he chomped at quicker than a horse might. Then he followed it down with a sip from the flagon, which made him wince, and then a long gulp, which made him blush scarlet and pass out again.

Breakfast bell. If she didn’t show up someone might come looking—it had happened before. She didn’t bother to straighten her clothes or change them, as there was no time. She grabbed Scarly’s slate and scratched on it DO NOT LEAVE, and she propped it up against her chair leg so he would see it if he woke. “Don’t let him go, Tay,” she told the otter, who normally spent the day in the room anyway, under restrictions of the siblings Clapp.

After breakfast. “Your attire, Miss Rainary,” said Madame Chortlebush.

“There was a new leak in the annex,” said Rain. “I shall have to use free period to launder my other gowns.”

Later, Madame Chortlebush said, “I do not believe you are minding the lesson as you ought, Miss Rainary. Are you distraught because your mother couldn’t see her way to attending Visitation Day?”

Rain opened her mouth. Then she thought, I am quietly lying to my teacher by pretending nothing is wrong. And I lied about my clothes without even thinking about it. So what’s the difference if I lie upon careful consideration?

She didn’t know if there was a difference but she had to answer the question. “Yes,” she said to her teacher. As she spoke she realized that accidentally she was telling the truth. Effortlessly, she had learned to miss people a little bit. She didn’t know her Auntie Nor very well, but without saying it in so many words to herself, she had hoped to be surprised by a visit from her pretend mother anyway.

Oh well, she thought. I have a boy in my room, and none of the other girls have that.

“Come here. You need a good squeeze,” said Madame Chortlebush, who rather liked to give good squeezes.

“I think my frock is too wrinkled already,” said Rain, but her teacher wouldn’t relent, so Rain succumbed. Then at her desk she tried harder at her sums so as to throw off suspicion and not give the game away.

Because she had planted the story of ruined clothes in the morning, at luncheon she was released from the chore of healthful stretching in the basement game room, it being too cold to promenade. She plowed across the new snow in the yard and entered the annex. The last of the carriages had left after breakfast. The building felt quiet. All too quiet, in fact.

She hurried up the stairs, two at a time, ripping the hem in her skirt when her heel caught upon it, but she couldn’t stop.

Tay was at the desk in the window in usual fashion, taking what warmth there was. The horse blanket was folded up and laid upon Rain’s bed. At first she thought the boy was gone. Then she saw that he had found the ladder in the hallway and had propped it up in the alcove where she kept her clothes, which now really were rucked up and unpresentable. In the ceiling of the alcove, which she had never seen before because that corner was so dark, he had found a hatch of some sort, a trapdoor. And he had lifted the hinged hatch about a foot, and was standing on the ladder in a pool of unearthly light that had never before come into any room she had occupied. He looked magical. The light made his scruffy mousy curls seem pale and almost translucent. His arms were plump and hard.

She could tell he wasn’t looking into the schoolyard, but in the other direction. He wouldn’t have seen her coming. She didn’t want to frighten him and cause him to fall. She walked up softly and put her hand on his calf, to announce her presence. Startled, he nearly kicked her teeth out. She should have guessed. A fellow citizen of Oz who didn’t like to be touched.

“You nearly scared the knickers off me,” he said.

“Scootch over, I’m coming up,” she replied. He inched to one side, and there was just enough room for her to fit her feet on the rungs and join him.

She had never seen the city of Shiz from anywhere but gutter level, as her own window in the annex looked onto the cloistered schoolyard with its ivied walls. This high up, she saw a confusion of roofs in the bright cold glare of a winter noontime. Gables and domes—that was St. Florix, surely?—and crenellations, were they, and clock towers. And stone steeples. And scholars’ towers poking from the colleges. “That dark one with the pointy windows is Three Queens Library,” said the boy. “And do you see the one with the gold escutcheons high up, under the gutters? That’s the Doddery at Crage Hall, I think.”

“It’s like a field planted with toys.” She couldn’t stop her voice from sounding breathy and girly, but, hell, it was beautiful.

“And the weather vanes. You can make out the nearer ones. I see a werewolf over there. Can you see it?”

“The one on the little pointy bit of roof?”

“No, that’s a Queen Ant, for some reason. To the left, above the mansard roof with the pattern in the tiles.”

“It looks more like a were-pig than a werewolf.”

He laughed at that, which made her feel they were standing too close. But there was no choice if they wanted to survey Shiz from this height; the hatch was only so wide. Their shoulders were touching, and the only warm thing. The wind was fierce. “Look, a goose,” he told her.

“Iskinaary,” she said, before she could stop herself.

“What’s that?”

“The Quadling word for goose.” There, another lie. She was getting good at it.

The bells in one of the nearby towers rang the half. “I better pretend to be organizing my clothes or I’ll catch it, but good,” she said. She was reluctant to leave the airy world above Shiz, the spires and slopes and ravines topping the city’s close-built architecture. But she risked being tossed out of St. Prowd’s altogether if she was discovered this deep in the breaking of rules.

He descended after she did, replacing the hatch. Her room suddenly felt musty. Small. Inappropriate for entertaining a visitor. He seemed too close, now that they had touched shoulders. “Get me down my dresses, will you, I have to press one of them and look more presentable for afternoon classes.”

He handed her a gravely ugly frock, the color of mushy peas, a single broad ribbon sewn down the left thigh panel its only decoration. She had never thought about clothes and their decoration before. She had never thought about thinking about it, either. She was under a spell of multiple reflections and it felt too much for her. “Isn’t there anything nicer?” she snapped, as if she were a Pertha Hills dame in a high street establishment, and he the clerk.

“I don’t care about clothes,” he said, which was something of a relief. “How about this green one?”

“With the pucker in the bib? That one? It’ll do. Hand it here.”

She grabbed her change of clothes. She didn’t have time to do much but flatten out the skirts with her hand and twist the ties so they lay straight. She tried to think of what to say to him to make sure he stayed. She pulled the wrinkled garment she had slept in over her head. She’d already tossed it to the floor when she heard him gasp. She turned to him, questioningly, in nothing but her smalls and the red heart locket. He said, “Please—I’ll wait in the hall if you like.”

“Why?”

He couldn’t find a word for it, and finally blurted, “Courtesy, I guess.” By then she’d already slipped the replacement over her head and was wriggling her arms into its scratchy sleeves. “Never mind,” he said when she emerged looking at him in total bewilderment.

“Are you going to tell me who you are, and why you’re here?”

“You can call me Tip. I suppose. I’m guessing you haven’t reported me to the governors of this establishment?”

“I haven’t said anything to any of the girls or the teachers, if that’s what you mean. But why shouldn’t I?”

“I’m keeping out of sight, if I can.”

“Well, I hope no one saw your stupid head popping out of St. Prowd’s roof just now.”

“No one but cinder pigeons, I bet.”

“Look. I only have a few more moments, and then I’m away again until dinnertime. I’ll try to bring you back some real food if I can manage. But you have to tell me—”

“Actually I don’t have to tell you anything. And I don’t need your food. Though I’m glad you are nice enough not to have ratted on me. I’ll be gone by the time you get back, and I won’t steal anything, I promise, not even that shiny shell you have. Cor, but that’s a bit of wonderful.”

“Don’t go. You’re not well.”

“What are you, an infant doctor?”

“I have a cousin who is an apothecaire and I picked up a few things. You’re liable to frostbite in this weather, or the racking congestibles.”

“That sounds serious.” He was mocking her.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Really. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. You owe me that much. I risked getting discovered as a thief last night to find you food and drink.”

“Plenty powerful lemon barley you provided, too. All right. I’ll stay till you get back, but I’m not promising much beyond that.” He picked up the book that Scarly had been struggling through. “The Were-pig of Dirstan Straw,” he read. “Oh, that’s where you got the were-pig from.”

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

13.

His name was Tip; she knew that much, and knowing his name saw her through the rest of the endless day. She managed to brush past Scarly in the buttery and whisper for an extra few rolls to sneak to her room, which was forbidden under pain of expulsion. The maid contrived to deposit a tea towel with rolls and even a beet-and-ham pasty into Rain’s lap. Scarly’s faintly raised eyebrow made Rain feel cheap somehow. Still, she couldn’t risk giving Tip’s presence away to the maid. In the interest of keeping her position secure, Scarly might feel more beholden to her employers than Rain felt to her teachers.

After dinner and prayers she returned to find that Tip had spent the afternoon taking apart a small iron stove he’d found in some boys’ dormitory below. Piece by piece he had hauled it upstairs and reassembled it. “It kept me warm, all those steps,” he said. “And there’s a handsome little stash of coal in the cellar beyond the stable doors, too, so you can be set for a while.” For the venting of smoke he’d jerry-rigged a snake of cylindrical tin piping up through the hatch, which was now open three inches. The cold air flooding in defeated the effect of the warming fire. But the atmosphere was improved, anyway. He was proud of his work.

He wouldn’t tell her much about where he’d come from or why he was hiding. He admitted he’d been wandering the country outside Shiz during the summer and had come across the military camp of St. Prowd’s boys. One afternoon he’d befriended a few of them doing an exercise in bivouac, and they’d told him about this vacated dormitory in town. It hadn’t been hard to find. He hadn’t heard Scarly or Rain come or go; the stable walls were thick with horse shawls, and the hay stacked everywhere probably served as extra insulation.

“But what have you been doing during the daytime?” asked Rain.

He cadged food from the stalls on market day, which was easy enough, he told her. But when it grew too cold for outdoor market he was having a harder time of it. For a couple of weeks he’d worked as a kitchen boy in Deckens College, but he’d been caught trying to leave the larder with brisket in his shirtsleeves and been dismissed. Pickings had grown harder as the cold deepened. He’d taken to siphoning oats out of the feedbags of carriage horses, but the mash he could make of them was pretty indigestible. When his space downstairs had been invaded by the arrival of guests for what he’d learned was called Visitation Day, he’d had no choice but to scarper up the stairs just around the turn at the landing. He’d heard Rain come in from the schoolyard side and start up the steps. He’d panicked and kept ahead of her, sprinting, arriving at the top level before she did. Without knowing it, Rain had cornered him by going right to the room he had found at the top of the stairs.

“But where are you from? Have you no home? No family? Why are you hiding?”

“Where are you from?” he countered, as if he could tell by her expression that she was as guarded as he. And while she could lie about some things, to people who didn’t figure much, she found she couldn’t lie to Tip. Neither could she break her oath to her family and put those people in jeopardy by saying anything about them. So she said nothing.

She did, however, admit that he could call her Rain.

He spent the night on the floor beside her bed, under the horse blanket.

He slept very hard. He didn’t hear her get up and turn the coals and, finding no ember willing to catch again, remove the venting pipe and close the hatch, for warmth. When she went back to bed she saw that Tay had moved from her mattress to the crook in Tip’s elbow. Just for an instant she wished she were Tay, but that seemed such utter nonsense that she threw herself back onto her bed again so hard she banged into the wall and hurt her nose. Neither Tip nor Tay stirred to ask her if she was all right.

Before breakfast bell, Scarly appeared with a tea towel covering four hot scones, and so the brief time in which it was just the two of them, just Tip and Rain—well, and Tay—was already over. Rain tried not to resent Scarly standing there with her dropped jaw. Tip sat up and made to cover himself with the blanket, but since he wasn’t undressed there wasn’t much point. “Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, “en’t you cooked yourself up a pottage of mischief somehow, and no mistake.”

Rain took the scones and handed them to Tip. “Well, now you’re ruined too, for feeding the intruder, and I’ll say so if you squeal on us, Scarly. So it’s best to keep your mouth closed until we decide what we’re going to do.”

“We?” said Scarly. “Which we is that, I wonder?”

Rain wasn’t quite sure, but it felt a nice word to say.

All too easily Scarly became a conspirator with special duties in menu augmentation. Tip was no fool. Well-cooked, plentiful if simple fare, delivered almost hot from the griddle, was more appealing than cold scraps that the rats had gotten to first. Snowy alleys and college kitchen yards had lost their lustre.

Tip settled into Rain’s room, sometimes reading there all hours if the weather was beastly, or pacing the city streets for news and exercise if the day was relatively fine. Once in a while he came back late, slipping in from the service lane through the stables. The hinges were so old that one of them had snapped, permitting a door to be angled just so, allowing to slip through any boy narrowed enough by hunger.

Once Rain asked, “What are you hunting for?”

“News, that’s all.”

“News of your family? Is that it?”

But he wouldn’t talk about his family, and neither would she. A silent compromise they’d never discussed, and usually she remembered not to raise the subject.

This time he relented, up to a point. “I want to hear about the war.”

Rain had no interest in the war. She hardly remembered the time of the dragons on Restwater, except as an imprecise excitement that she sometimes believed she was imagining. The war had been going on as long as she could recall. It wasn’t a real thing in any useful way; it was just a condition of existence, like the forward lunge of time, and the ring of deadly sands that circled all of Oz, and the fact that cats hunted mice. “All the war news sounds made up,” she complained. “I never saw a cannon dragged through any country lane. I never heard a gunshot from the classroom window. If there was once more ample food to be had, it was before I was able to get used to it. I hardly believe that peace and war are opposites. I think to most people they’re the same thing.”

“You’ve put your finger on a huge problem, right there,” he said. “But if you’re crossing the Wend Hardings on foot, which is the only way to cross them, and if you come across a contingent of various Animals of different sizes and abilities and temperaments who, despite their natural hostilities and exhaustion, are training together to hold the line against professional soldiers—well, then.” He sighed, hardly willing to sum it up. “You see more than you’d like. Battle readiness seems a bundle of small disagreements trying to aim in a common direction against a common, larger disagreement.”

She had studied a little geographics under Madame Chortlebush. “Are you telling me you came from Munchkinland?”

“I’m not telling you anything. We’re talking about the war, and how people talk about it in Shiz.”

She tried not to pry. Too much. “How do people talk about it in Shiz?”

“You know as well as I do. You live here. You’ve lived here longer.”

“Yes, but.” Since he had given something away, inadvertent or not, she allowed the tiniest scrap of herself. “I’m not from here, either. So I’m not sure what I hear. Anyway, girls in school don’t talk about the war. They talk about their teachers and about boys.” She regarded Tip not in fondness but in appraisal. “They’d eat you alive.” At that comment he didn’t blush; he blanched. Rain hurried on. “War just seems to crest and crest until a checkmate is reached, and then it stays like that forever. Getting staler and staler. Nobody ever winning.”

“Until one side or the other manages a breakthrough strategy.”

“Like what?”

“Oh. Forcing the other side into bankruptcy. Or negotiating a pact with some useful third party, say. For instance, if Loyal Oz could persuade the trolls to switch their allegiance, the EC Messiars would be able to invade Munchkinland through the Scalps. Those trolls are pretty fearsome in battle.”

“Why don’t they then? It sounds pretty basic.”

“Because the trolls under Sakkali Oafish have a deep-seated grudge against Loyal Oz dating back to a rout of Glikkuns called the Massacre at Traum, which happened north of here. They wouldn’t unite with the Emerald City if there were only one troll left alive. They’re proud like that.”

“So if that strategy won’t work, what else might?”

“Maybe the Emperor will die, and the pressure to continue this endless war will lift.”

“Isn’t the Emperor divine? He can’t die.”

“I suppose time will tell. Or one side will discover a new weapon that’s stronger than what their enemy has.”

“Like what kind of weapon?” said Rain, as innocently as she could.

“Beats me. A great big cannon that can shoot a thousand arrows all at the same time? A poison someone can sneak into the food rations of the army cooks? An important book of magic spells that contains secrets no one has managed to unlock yet?”

“None of them sounds very likely,” said Rain.

“Who knows. The word in Shiz, since you asked, is about all these things.”

“And the word in Munchkinland?”

“Some of those same ideas. Being hoped for, anyway.”

She saw a chink. “But what are the other ideas in Munchkinland, that you don’t hear in Shiz?”

Maybe because he wouldn’t answer questions about his family, he felt obliged to answer her now. “Flying dragons would be a good idea. They were used once before by the EC, but in an attack by anarchists the Emerald City lost their stable of dragons and their expertise.”

“Dragons in Munchkinland. Imagine.”

“Few have heard of such a thing. And I’m not saying there are. Just that a lot depends on the fact that there might be. One day.”

“Are you a spy? Aren’t you a bit young to be a spy!”

“We’re all spies when we’re young, aren’t we?” She didn’t think he was being evasive. She knew what he meant. She agreed with him.

“Tell me what you find out, when you find out anything of interest,” she said. “Promise me that, Tip.”

“Spies never make promises,” he said, but now he was teasing her.

14.

He wasn’t going to stay there forever. That much was clear. Rain just didn’t understand what conditions would prompt his departure.

She lay awake at night sometimes when Tip was asleep, out of sight, his head on the floor a foot below her head. She could hear him breathing, a faint whine in his nose that never sounded when he spoke. A distilled aroma of sour raspberries on his breath, even from this short but crucial distance. She was becoming aware of the distance between human creatures at the same time she was becoming aware of their capacity to be entwined sympathetically. Perhaps, she thought, this is perhaps how it usually goes, but since she’d never been given to reflection, it seemed as if everything was breaking anew upon her at once.

Tip’s interests in current events made her listen more carefully to what the teachers said when they thought the girls were learning off rubrics of spelling or rehearsing acceptable dinner party remarks in their heads.

“Cutting the salary again, according to the magnificent Gadfry,” murmured Madame Shenshen to Madame Ginspoil one day in study hall.

“We shall be living on bread and water like the miserable armies,” replied Madame Ginspoil, helping herself to a pink marzipan pig secreted in her beaded purse. Rain thought: Armies. Miserable. Bread and water. She would tell Tip.

“It’ll be better though in the spring, which isn’t far off,” said Madame Shenshen. “Everyone says there will be a new push to bring down that General Jinjuria.”

“She seems a right smart tartlet, to hold our army at bay all this time. If she’s captured, she can be dragged here and made to tutor stupid young girls,” seethed Madame Ginspoil. “Quite the suitable punishment. She can live on bread and water for what she has cost Loyal Oz in comforts.”

“The cost of war is in human lives, you mean, surely.”

“Oh, bother, of course, that. It goes without saying. But I have chilblains, what with the reduction of coal allotments for our quarters. Chilblains, I tell you. I have refused to knit balaclavas for the troops this year. If they can’t win the stupid war after all this time, they’ll have no comfort from me. Miss Rainary, are you eavesdropping upon your elders and betters?”

Rain loved to have things to tell Tip. He puzzled over them as if he were a military strategist, but Rain took this to be largely boredom. It seemed almost everyone was more interested in the progress of the war than she was.

“Does your grandfather write you letters?” Rain once asked of Miss Plumbago.

“Grandfather Cherrystone? No,” snapped Miss Plumbago. “You’d think he might. After all, he taught me to read. But he’s apparently too busy to write letters or send me little bank cheques.”

He’s besieged at Haugaard’s Keep still, thought Rain, and ventured her conclusion to Tip, who thanked her for trying but seemed to know this already.

No, it couldn’t last forever. In a couple of weeks, Madame Streetflye told them, it would be time for Rain’s class to take up Butter and Eggs. Most of the girls giggled and blushed. Rain didn’t have a clue until Scarly filled her in. Butter and Eggs was the Pertha Hills softsoap way of talking about Human Sexual Techniques: Practical Clarifications. Rain guessed that once she sat through that class, she could no longer allow herself to share a room with a boy. Neither, probably, would she want to, if she read accurately Scarly’s repertoire of expressions. Primarily scowl and disgust. What would Tip do then?

The matter resolved itself with painful swiftness. On the very day she was bringing back to Tip the latest gossip she’d heard—that men were going to be conscripted from Shiz—Proctor Gadfry Clapp was called up to war.

The way it happened was this. Lord Manning, the Senior Overseer, had stopped to pay an unexpected call, which was his right and privilege. All might have gone horribly wrong, since Tip was just passing through the stables when Miss Ironish rushed in unexpectedly to give some instructions to Lord Manning’s coachman. Tip was caught between Miss Ironish entering the annex from the schoolyard side and the coachman arriving from the service entrance. Luckily, Miss Ironish took Tip for the coachman’s boy. She handed over some papers folded inside a clasped sleeve of leather, school accounts or an inventory of students or something. “Store these in Lord Manning’s pouch, young man.” Tip brought them to the horseman, who in return told Tip to ask the Cook for a few extra apples. The horses had been ridden hard on such urgent business.

Suddenly, on this risky morning, Tip became a fixture in the backstairs without anyone quite having twigged to his lack of specific sponsorship.

“Bring your man this carroty cream crumble, you,” said Cook, who by and large liked men, her several husbands ample proof of that.

“Tell your Cook this may be the best cream crumble in Shiz,” said the coachman back.

“Tell your fellow to tell me something I don’t know.”

Lord Manning had had enough of hysterics. Having delivered his sorry news to Gadfry Clapp, he was in no mood to stay for a cold school luncheon. The proctor sat in marmoreal paralysis in his study, but Miss Ironish followed Lord Manning right into the ablutorium and out again, hissing at him. (The teachers kept their doors open a crack to catch the drama.)

“I am not the Emperor of Oz, Miss Ironish,” snapped Lord Manning. “I do not order a thousand men to march to war. I scarcely order starch for my collars. I am merely implementing the diktat come directly from the Emerald City. Now will you spare me your tongue?”

“Would you leave us without a man in the establishment? Lord Manning! I could not hold my head up with the parents of our girls, if they learned we had left them unprotected!”

“I am confident in your professional skills, Miss Ironish. You are perfectly capable of fending off any attempt at assault or rapine.”

“I shall close the school.”

“You have no authority to close the school. Please do not give my headache a headache, Miss Ironish.”

“Without a male in residence, I will not answer to the consequences.”

By now Lord Manning had reached the kitchen, and he barreled through the yard as if he owned the place, heading for the stables. He caught sight of Tip munching a bacon butty courtesy of Cook, and he said, “This boy, he’s old enough to be some help, I’ll warrant.”

“You would take the seventeenth proctor of St. Prowd’s and send him to battle, and leave a strapping stable boy in charge of the protection of schoolgirls? Lord Manning, have you abdicated your senses?”

For an instant Lord Manning appeared to reconsider. But then he swiveled upon his boot heel and he poked a finger almost up one of Miss Ironish’s flared nostrils. “Our charge is the protection of children, Miss Ironish. Don’t you dare forget it. This boy isn’t old enough to be a soldier, but he is old enough and strong enough for lifting down the trunks from the box room and for chasing away beggars from the kitchen yard. He will be your factotum, and that’s the end of it. Boy, what is your name?”

Tip, according to Scarly who told Rain all about this later, was so startled that he leaped to his feet and answered without hesitation. “Pit.”

“Was your family too poor to give you a last name?” snarled Lord Manning.

“Well, yes, sir,” he answered, “I mean, in a manner of speaking, as I’m an orphan. All they left me was my name.”

Lord Manning blew out air between his teeth and buttoned his overcoat. As he beetled toward the kitchen door, he called over his shoulder, “You will be Miss Ironish’s right hand when she needs you, Pit. We’ll settle details of a salary allowance later, but for now housing and meals, the usual, and so on. Is that clear.”

The Senior Overseer didn’t wait for an answer. He ignored the uninterrupted flow of Miss Ironish’s protests. His carriage left with purpose.

The room slowly quietened down. Miss Ironish dried her face in a tea towel and said to Cook, “A cup of lemon tea to strengthen Proctor Gadfry, if you please, Cook.” And to Tip, she added, “Your employer left you behind in a school of young ladies. He must be mad. Straighten your shoulders and look at me when I talk to you. We’ll discuss your obligations this afternoon. For now…” But she couldn’t take the measure of her new situation yet, and fled the kitchen.

Scarly came to Rain’s room that night to fill her in on the details, but Rain had heard a good deal already through the gossip. Proctor Gadfry had taken to his bed; Scarly had spent much of the day attending him with hot compresses and yeasty correctives. Tip was installed in a kitchen nook behind the wall stove, a corner that had been previously used for storing the butter churn and the lesser china. He had his own bed. The room was windowless but decent warm, said Scarly with more pride than envy.

Come evening, he couldn’t sneak out to Rain’s room the way Scarly could. Cook, who missed her sons, marshaled Tip’s company for her own maternal needs. Besides, she was a guardian of the students’ virtue, so she took to sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. She put it across the door to his cubby so he would have to climb over her to get out at night. In the case of loo emergencies she supplied him with a basin for night waste and a plate to cover it from flies. From Rain, therefore, he was pinned good and proper, but not entirely from Scarly, who during the day had reason enough to pass through the kitchen. At night she brought news of Pit to Rain in the Annex.

“Pit ?” asked Rain, incredulous.

“It was the first thing he could think of. He didn’t want to say his real name, for his own reasons. The easiest thing was to turn his name backward, he said. Tip. Pit. Do you get it?” Scarly was very proud of getting it herself. Now that the stranger boy had been safely pegged into the class system of the household, which she could understand, the maid was eager to get back to studying the secret lessons that Rain had offered to resume.

Rain had her own scholastic travails to deal with. Despite the upheaval to the management of St. Prowd’s Academy, the session called Butter and Eggs proceeded on schedule. Miss Ironish, who customarily spoke to girls at great length about Feminine Virtue, this year marched to the doorway of the classroom and without bothering to enter said shortly, “Girls, the most important thing to know about Feminine Virtue is that you’re going to need a hell of a lot of it. Carry on, Madame Streetflye.”

Rain thought the mechanics of sex less compelling than, say, the way a bird learns to fly from a nest, or a snake contorts to shed its skin. She couldn’t imagine herself ever wanting to descend to what Madame Streetflye called the Happy Hello or to shiver with the Special Sneeze that sometimes followed. Despite all the rude information, she couldn’t picture how the experience was actually managed. But there was so much she didn’t know, and she would learn in time. People changed, sometimes more than you expect, she told herself.

For instance, she’d never imagined herself getting along with a bunch of children her own age. The one thing that hadn’t happened in all her peripatetic youth, she saw now, was having access to other kids. Adults had been such a mystery that she’d paid them no mind, but children might have provided something of a support circle. You don’t have to collect kids; they just clump of their own accord. Like rice otters or phantomescent spiders.

Now she had Tip, a best friend; and Scarly, who was a little miffed at being demoted to second position; and even Miss Igilvy wasn’t quite as damp as the others. Miss Plumbago was a rotter, though.

Still, Rain missed the few weeks of sharing a room with Tip, back in the paradise days before she’d heard of the Happy Hello. They’d never so much as touched hands after that one time their shoulders had brushed together on the ladder to the hatch. But they’d been closer without touching, without words, than all these girls who hugged and squealed and whispered and paraded about with their arms around one another’s waists.

At least she imagined that she and Tip had been closer. There was no way to know.

15.

One afternoon, when Proctor Gadfry had been gone for a while and things were settling down into the new arrangement, the sky suddenly brightened with a sideways, vermouthy light. The air grew tinny. Ropes of clouds divided in parallel lengths, like carded wool. Since there’d been almost two weeks of cold rains, everyone went mad for a promenade.

In the old days the teachers had been considered competent enough to escort young ladies on their excursions, but with Proctor Gadfry gone for a soldier (pity the poor army), Miss Ironish had become more skittish. Or perhaps Shiz was considered marginally less safe this year than last. Who knew? So Tip, the school’s jack of all trades, was enlisted to accompany Madame Chortlebush and eleven girls from Rain’s section on their brisk stroll through the streets of Shiz.

Madame Chortlebush took a dim view of Miss Ironish’s precautions but she tried to toe the line. “You walk first, Pit, and check for anything that might threaten us. Fissures in the paving stones, wild beasts lurking behind lampposts, bands of crazy Munchkinlanders determined to kidnap us in broad daylight and take us hostage. We shall follow behind, marching in pairs and screaming for our lives.”

Ten girls chose their partners so quickly that Rain had to team with Madame Chortlebush. This didn’t bother Rain as she still had little to say to her fellow students. And Madame Chortlebush did seem to enjoy Rain’s company so.

Pit, Pit. Rain was trying to memorize his new name the way she had successfully learned to call herself Rainary. It was funny to see him kitted out in a somewhat ill-fitting school uniform found in the boys’ clothes press. Marching along in knickerbockers and thick stockings, and a stupid jaunty scarf knotted around his neck. Pit, Pit. “Miss Ironish’s aide-de-camp while her brother is occupied in military matters,” murmured Madame Chortlebush to some friend on the street while the girls had been required to stop and gawp at the famous pleated marble dome of St. Florix. “Not my type, our Pit, but he has pretty legs for a boy.”

They had their lemon barleys at a café in Railway Square. Then they crowded onto a trestle bridge to watch the noon train for the Pertha Hills inch thrillingly beneath them, thickening the bright day with coal smoke and steam. When the air cleared and the girls were brushing smuts from their clothes and hair, Rain saw Scarly enter the plaza. She looked all around, frantically, until she spotted the school group descending the wrought-iron staircase at the other side of the tracks.

“Madame Chortlebush,” she cried, and waved. The teacher halted the girls on the pavement before Blackhole’s, the place where university students bought and sold their old textbooks. Scarly caught up with them there.

“Important news, Miss Ironish bade me find you at once,” Scarly said between gasped breaths. The news must be dreadful indeed, for what had been a bright sunny day an hour ago had gone glowery as they crossed the bridge, and the clouds that had pestered the region for two weeks were rushing back as if for a return engagement.

Scarly handed an envelope embossed with the St. Prowd’s emblem.

“I can’t imagine what is so important it couldn’t wait,” said Madame Chortlebush to Rain, while the other girls preened for the benefit of the young men from Three Queens or Ozma Towers brisking in and out of Blackhole’s. Madame Chortlebush ripped the envelope open with all the finesse of a hawk eviscerating a ferret.

Then those massive ankles, clad in boots like iron socks, twisted and buckled. The considerable weight of Madame Chortlebush fell upon Rain, who could barely keep from collapsing. Tip ran to help, and he and Scarly and Rain lowered the teacher to the pavement. A clerk outside Blackhole’s, covering the books on a pushcart in front in the event of rain, hurried over, too.

“She’s had news of some sort,” explained Scarly.

The clerk didn’t have to abide by the niceties of St. Prowd’s. He glanced at the folded sheet and said, “Quite quite dreadful. Her brother on the mountain front has taken a bullet.”

“Taken it where?” said Scarly, though Rain could guess, and by the look on his face, Tip could too.

“Taken it to hell, I suspect. Look, we can’t have fainting ladies on the pavement in front of the shop. Business is poorly enough as it is. I’ll whistle for a carriage over to Railway Square, and you can get her back to St. Prowd’s, if that’s where she goes.”

Someone came out with smelling salts. A passing student who studied magic tried to cast a charm of cheer, which made everyone’s noses dribble for a few moments but produced no other discernible effect. The clerk returned with the hired carriage. Wordless and shaken, Madame Chortlebush was helped aboard, and Scarly clambered in after her to see her home.

“Mind the girls are safe, will you, Pit, there’s a good lad,” murmured Madame Chortlebush through her tears as the landau bounced off.

It would have been easy enough for Tip to lead the girls back at a clip, since after months of pilfering and loitering he knew the streets of Shiz well. The skies, though, chose to open just then, with renewed vigor after the morning of sunny respite.

“What’ll I do?” he asked Rain, as the troupe of twelve huddled under an awning, pushing the elderly and indigent out into the downpour where they belonged.

“I saw a charabanc of some sort stationed at Railway Square,” she said. “If it’s still free, I bet we could all squeeze in.”

Tip ran for it. The girls continued to squeal or feel faint or profess to be quite vexed indeed. The omnibus was less capacious than it had looked, and instead of four horses for which it had been designed, its shaft and harnesses were fitted to two world-weary donkeys.

“I can take ten of you, no more,” said the driver, a thin mean man with toothbrush mustachios and a sorry case of pinkeye.

“Surely you can manage eleven?” said Tip. “There are eleven girls, and this isn’t a downpour but a deluge.”

“I’ll take ten, or none. It ought to be six, but as these young ladies are all asparagus stalks I’ll make an exception. I’ll make four exceptions. But I won’t kill my beasts for you lot. It’s always the last young miss who hobbles the enterprise. Call it superstition, them’s my terms.”

Tip looked out of ideas. “It’s all right,” said Rain. “I’ll walk.”

So off went the driver, promising to deliver the scholars to the front door of St. Prowd’s within half an hour. Rain and Tip stood a foot or two from each other, soaking but hardly chilled, looking and feeling clueless.

Rain said, “It’s not going to let up for a while, by the looks of it. If we’re going to get in trouble anyway, let’s duck into that shop around the corner. SKURVY BASTARD’S.”

They found it was closed and the storefront for lease. But the one past the newsagent’s, which said BROKEN THINGS OF NO USE TO ANYONE BUT YOU, looked open.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter if I’m fired, as I never applied for the job in the first place,” agreed Tip at last, and they splashed through the gauze of rain and stamped through the puddles, and hurtled down the slick stone steps into the basement shop.

It was empty of customers, but at the sound of the bell on the door the proprietor emerged through a curtain of strung grommets, washers, nuts, and crimped watch springs. It was a male Bear, thinner than a Bear ought to be. A Bear brought down by hunger and stooped, maybe arthritic too, with age. He wore a shaggy bathrobe and had a muffler wrapped around his throat.

“Well, that’s a nice pair of water rats the gutter has splashed down my steps this time,” he said, not unkindly. “How may I be of service?”

“We’re ducking the rain, actually,” said Tip.

“Ducks like rain, but I take your point. Be my guest. If you find something of interest, sing out. In the meantime, don’t mind me; I’ll settle myself here and read the racing forms.”

In time their eyes became accustomed to the gloom. “Of course, Loyal Oz wouldn’t dare race talking Animals now,” said the Bear. “These are antique forms. I just like to see if I can find any of my relatives. It makes me happy to see them referred to in print. I found one reference to my old auntie Groyleen, who I thought had perished in the skirmishes following the Mayonnaise Affair. She must be dead by now, of course, but in the form she was handicapped at seven to one, not bad for an old dame as she must have been even then. Don’t mind me, I’m mumbling.”

They wandered about. The ceiling was low, and many of the items were tall, so the high bookcases or old apothecaire’s cabinets or postal boxes or discarded card catalogs, grouped back to back, built a series of chambers and secret vaults. It reminded Rain of something, but she couldn’t think what. “Look, a set of wizard’s globes,” said Tip. “They must have had their ether extinguished or they’d be valuable. Valuable and dangerous.”

Rain thought, but she didn’t ask, How do you know what they are? “Here’s a set of illuminatums,” she said, reading the cover. “Views of Barbaric Ugabu, with Discreet Commentary by a Missionary.” She wasn’t too old yet to stop being proud of how well she could read.

“Your wares come from all over,” said Tip to the Bear.

“So do my clients,” he replied.

“And this is a stuffed scissor bird. I think they’re extinct now.”

“Well, that one is extinct, anyway.”

The Bear shuffled to his feet and poured himself a cup of tea. “You’re standing on a flying carpet,” he said.

“Is that so?” asked Tip and Rain at once.

“Assuredly so. Full of flies.”

Oh, but the place was musty. In one alcove a number of old tiktok contrivances stood in various stages of evisceration for spare parts. “The tiktok revolution never quite happened, no matter what the Tin Woodman said,” commented the Bear. “Who needs a rebellion in labor when honest laborers are hunting for a job? I’m speaking of humans, of course; most of the Animal workforce migrated to Munchkinland during the Wizard’s reign. If they could afford the punishing fees to process their applications.”

Rain guessed that the Bear wasn’t one of them. “You’re doing all right,” she said, unargumentatively.

“I’m one of the luckier ones,” he replied. “I suffer a sort of amnesia, you see, and I am happiest among artifacts and antiques. Times gone by are more comforting. I don’t understand these days.”

“Not many do,” murmured Tip.

They came across a creature made of skarkbone ribs and hooks. Some of it must be missing, for it was impossible to imagine how it might have stayed erect. In another corner, more or less intact, was a carved wooden man, quite tall, with an enormous porcelain pumpkin balanced on skinny shoulders. “That one arrived with an actual pumpkin head,” said the Bear, watching them over the tops of his spectacles. “Too many mice were making a home in his brains, though, and the pumpkin rotted. As my skull has done too. So when I came across that dreadful piece of porcelain I couldn’t resist sticking it on top of the wooden man, in memory of whatever weird individual that tiktok thing once was. Jack Pumpkinhead, a certain rural type.”

“It can’t be tiktok without gears and sprockets and flywheels, can it?” asked Rain, remembering what she had seen of the Clock of the Time Dragon.

“There’s more than one way to animate a life story,” remarked the Bear.

Next to the pumpkin head stood a squat little copper beast on casters. A perfectly round copper cranium perched atop its round body. After scraping with their fingernails, they could make out the words SMITH AND TINKER’S MECHANICAL MAN on a plate corroded with green blisters. Under that an additional plate had been added, in engraver’s boilerplate: PROP OF M MORRIBLE, CRAGE HALL.

He’d been messed with quite a bit. Snippers or loppers of some sort had opened his upper chest. Inside lay the dusty fragments of oraculum vials as well as coils and batteries disfigured with mouse droppings. When Rain stood back to get a look at the whole of him, for he was short and overshadowed by the others, she almost blushed. Part of the abdominal plate had come away, and a five-inch screw to which a couple of nuts were attached hung down obscenely between what you might call his legs.

“Look, we can do a Butter and Eggs lesson,” she said. Before she remembered that Tip had not been in the class, she’d cupped the rusty ribbed metal piece in her hand and tilted it forward.

“Clever girl,” said Tip as Rain’s action wore through a weak bit of the sheathing, and the screw came off in her palm.

“Don’t break the merchandise,” called the Bear mildly, but he was only responding to the creak of old metal. At his desk behind his stacks of junk he was now shuffling through ancient newsfolds and reading aloud predictions of long dead weather.

Rain’s manipulation had unstuck some narrow compartment in the tiktok creature’s undercarriage. A rusty drawer with thin black metal edges shot forward and fell on the floor. “We should leave before I bring down the house,” said Rain. “I’m a right danger.”

Tip knelt and fingered the dark recess. “Something’s wedged in here,” he said.

He worried out a narrow packet of black cloth. “Treasure,” said Rain, realizing that she knew the word but not, in fact, what might qualify as treasure in anyone else’s mind other than hers. She thought of that tiny perfect inch-high horse on its single curlicue leg, carved in miniature into a stone at the Chancel of the Ladyfish. The horse like a question mark. Why hadn’t she taken that as something to collect?

“Now what’ve we here,” murmured Tip, unfolding the cloth.

Not too much—nothing like treasure according to Rain. A small rusted dirk with black stains streaked upon the blade. A set of skeleton keys. Some scraps of pink thread that might once have been rose petals? And a bit of vellum, about five inches square, folded into eight or twelve sections.

It was too dark to look at it right here. Besides, they both felt responsible. They brought it to the counter and told the Bear what had happened.

“Well, let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said, putting aside the bits and bobs, and with his shaking paws he tenderly unfolded the parchment. “Looks to me like an old map,” he said. “Sadly, not a treasure map, as children would like. Let’s have a peep.” He adjusted his spectacles. “Hmmm. Seems to be a standard issue map out of some department of government ordinances. Maybe about the time of Ozma Glamouranda? To judge by the typography? But let me find my magnifying lens.” After a search he located the instrument on top of a pile of about forty children’s novels, a matched set that made a column halfway to the ceiling beams. “Now. We shall see what we shall see.”

“What if we bring the light closer?” asked Tip.

“My gentle friend, you are the very light of intelligence yourself. Bring the lamp. On a day this gloomy we need all the light we can find.”

A second look at the map showed it clearly to be Oz before the secession of Munchkinland. The EC wasn’t even called the Emerald City yet. It was an obscure hamlet assigned the name of Nubbly Meadows. However, the general outlines of the counties of Oz seemed more or less correct. Gillikin and Munchkinland sported the greatest number of towns marked out, and the Quadling Country was represented by a single graphic smear simulating a coarse picture of marshland. The Vinkus was called “Winkie Country” and in ink someone had scrawled below, “Utter wildness, don’t bother.” On the left-hand margin, beyond the ring of deserts indicated by a profusion of mechanically applied dots, that same hand had written “water?” and a printer’s hand-stamp of a whorled shell appeared like a messy thumbprint.

“That’s nice,” said Tip, pointing to the picture.

“You always liked my shell,” said Rain, remembering now that he had been cradling it the night she had discovered him in her wardrobe.

Near Center Munch, in Munchkinland, Rain thought at first she spied another shell, one standing on its tip. Or maybe not. Anyway, some kind of squiggly funnel, appended by hand in quick slashes of brownish ink, with an exclamation point beside it. The punctuation mark was underlined thrice.

“This is an admirable little map,” concluded the Bear. He ran his paw over the Great Gillikin Forest. “I hail from up this way, long ago. Look, does that tiny line read ‘Here there be Bears’? I feel positively anointed with a personal history. Somewhere in that thicket of identical trees I imagine Ursaless, the Queen of the Northern Bears, holding court, as it was back in my day. No,” he said, “I’m afraid you may not buy this thing. It has put me in mind of my past, and that happens all too seldom. If you come back tomorrow I won’t remember you were here today, and if you find this map on top of a chest of drawers I’ll probably sell it to you. Happily. But tonight I’m going to look at this and dream of my home, and better days long gone.”

The rain was still pelting down, but the drops were less forceful, less like hail. “We should go,” said Rain. They made their good-byes to the Bear, who already seemed to have forgotten them a little. As they went up the steps Tip took her hand for a moment.

“Why do you like shells?” she asked, the first thing that came to her mind in the panic of being touched on purpose.

“I like anything that is home to a secret life,” he said. “I always liked nests, and eggs, and the discarded skins of snakes, and shells, and chrysalises.”

“We should have bought you that flying carpet,” she said. “Full of flies.”

The joke wasn’t any funnier the second time than the first, and Tip let her hand go. They walked back to St. Prowd’s in silence to find that the girls had not been hijacked for ransom, Tip was not in line for a prison sentence or a dismissal, and Madame Chortlebush had departed already for her family home, to comfort her grieving parents.

If Miss Ironish noticed that Rain had been out alone with a boy, she chose to muscle her disapproval down. More likely, thought Rain, she doesn’t really care what happens to any child whose parents don’t bother to show up during Visitation Day.

But then, come to think of it, Tip himself had shown up on Visitation Day. A fairly acceptable substitution, under the circumstances.

16.

Rain thought, it’s almost as if Tip and I got too close, that day in the storm, in the shop of the absentminded Bear. But he grabbed my hand, not I his. Now he seems … aloof. Unmoored. Like one of those floating islands that had occasionally drifted by on Restwater and, catching in some eddy invisible from shore, gently spun in place for a couple of months. Out of reach. Tip was in perfect sight, all aspects of him, just … just further out.

For a mean moment she thought that he might be taking up with Scarly in the kitchens, a nearer and maybe more approachable friend. But that kind of thinking was solid St. Prowd’s girl attitude. Why shouldn’t he chum around with Scarly if he liked her, and she was right there, shuttling between Miss Ironish and Cook? Why should it bother Rain?

She attended to her lessons the best she could. She did better and better at them. The weather brightened. She was finishing her first full year with something that approximated honors. Astounding, given the paucity of her primary schooling. Miss Ironish remarked, “You’ve gone from preverbal to canny in record time,” though it didn’t entirely sound like a compliment.

Soon the school was abuzz with plans for the annual festival of Scandal, a city-wide hullaballoo dating to pre-Wizardic days but suppressed during his realm, due to excessive merriment and mild bawd. At recess older girls nattered to the newbies about it. A King and Queen of Scandal were elected from among the most smoldering of college students at Shiz. Comic pillorings of local magistrates and fellows at college were promised, as well as mock public punishments of random attractive passersby, administered with sprayed water or cushiony paddles. Food stalls everywhere. When the sun went down, candles would be lit in colored lanterns, magicking up the leafed-out tree boughs of Railway Square and Ticknor Circus. Music to dance by, to thrill by, to ignore. And the girls would be allowed to attend for a while, even to wander about, always under the hawkish eyes of their teachers of course.

The closer the day arrived, the less Rain was sure she wanted to attend. She hardly understood frivolity. The way everyone laughed when a bird shat once on Madame Chard’s hat—but then even Madame Chard laughed. Rain had thought it was neither funny nor not-funny. Women wear hats, birds excrete. The comedy of it seemed impoverished. Therefore, the idea of manufactured hilarity, having a good time by design or intention—well, bizarre. If not impossible or counterintuitive.

Still, she supposed, since she couldn’t grasp the concept, perhaps that was good enough reason to agree to attend. Something new to learn. She could always beg off early and sneak away. Ever since the day of the rainstorm she seemed to have a special dispensation for roaming by herself, as if she alone of all the St. Prowd’s girls was homely enough not to need close supervision on the street. She looked at herself in the mirror. She seemed merely to exist, neither prettier than an umbrella rack or a potted palm, nor less pretty.

Tip met her in a hallway between lessons; he was carrying a valise to Miss Ironish’s study. “Are you going to lark about tomorrow at that silly festival?” she asked him.

“I’ll have to wait to get my instructions for the day,” he said. “Miss Ironish may be going to see her brother, who has been given a few days off from his training exercises. He is hoping for a pass to the Emerald City for some rest and recovery. I may be required to accompany her as a chaperone.”

Rain’s regret must have showed on her face before she could mask it. Tip said, “I’d rather skive off with you and see what’s going on in the town centre.”

“If I see our friend the Northern Bear, I’ll give him your regards,” she said airily.

“Pit,” said Madame Chard from her doorway, “what are you doing loafing about in the hall? Miss Rainary, your books await you. We’re at Lesson Seventeenish. Making the Least of Fractions.”

The next day Rain’s fears proved reliable; Miss Ironish did commandeer Tip’s company for her excursion. They would travel by the rail line, recently completed, between Shiz and the Emerald City. It would cut their travel time in half, and they would return in under a week. Madame Skinkle would serve as proctress-pro-tem. “Honor her as you would myself,” advised Miss Ironish before alighting the carriage that would take her to Railway Square. Since none of the girls particularly honored Miss Ironish, the instruction seemed easy enough to follow.

Rain saw that Scarly was also traveling in attendance of Miss Ironish. “I hope you all have a very fine time,” Rain muttered as the carriage pulled away.

“What’s that, Miss Rainary?” asked Miss Igilvy.

“Nothing at all. Are you going to the silly affair in town?”

“Yes,” said Miss Igilvy. “Shall we be chums, after all? I’m going to wear my dotted morpheline with the lace trim. What will you wear?”

“Clothes, I suspect.” That was intended to put Miss Igilvy off, but it didn’t work. Rain was saddled with Miss Igilvy half the afternoon and into the evening. But she wasn’t so bad. Out of some sour mood, Rain even took her into the shop. The Northern Bear didn’t recognize Rain, and when she found the folded map tossed aside on top of an overstuffed and listing bookcase, she took it to the counter. “Would you sell me this?” she asked.

The Bear looked at it and named a modest price. Rain hesitated. But the Bear would never miss it. Another theft. She handed over a guilty coin.

“That kind of dive is what Miss Ironish would have us pass by,” said Miss Igilvy as they left. “Miss Rainary, we’re skirting the main events. It’s getting dark enough, they’ll have lit the trees. I can hear the music. Enough of antique tiktokery and old maps. We’re now, and here.”

The festival seemed to Rain overloud and feverish, sort of desperate. A fiddler and three country dancers made a ruckus in the square, and barmaids from local establishments were going about with tankards of ale or barleywater. Miss Igilvy and Rain caught up with a couple of the girls who were about to commence to one of the colleges in the fall. “It’s so different this year,” complained a droll young woman whose name Rain had never learned. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

“It’s a lack of men, you moron,” said her mate. “Look about you. Even the college boys are in short supply. They’ve been pulled for military duty. If you’ve come to the party hoping to snag a snog, I believe you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

The whole town seemed to have turned into an extension of the experience of life at St. Prowd’s—that is, without the distraction of lessons. Rain found it taxing and crude. “I think I’ll go back,” she said to Miss Igilvy. “Can I safely attach you to these graduates?”

“Shhh, the Lord Mayor is going to speak.”

The Lord Mayor of Shiz looked quite a bit like the Senior Overseer of St. Prowd’s. But what a girth of belly!

“There is a reason to celebrate on every given day,” he said, once the crowd had quietened down. “We shouldn’t go about the business of beating our breasts because of the hardships placed upon us by the war. And yet, as we dance and sing and feast and frolic, we should be mindful of our soldiers called up to duty. And we must remember, as all living and sentient creatures do, that the life we have today may be utterly changed by tomorrow.

“Change approaches as inevitably as the seasons. I urge you not to succumb to the rumors of threat to Shiz that abound this week, but savor every moment the Unnamed God confers upon you. What will happen next week, next season, next year, we will take in its turn. Meanwhile, in the shadow of the hallowed buildings of this ancient university, let us know ourselves to be alive. Whether we are the next generation to study peaceably in this haven or we are the final generation, let us study what we can. Learn what we can. Deliver what we have to whomever comes after, whether they sit in rubble and ashes or strut in finery upon the streets during Scandal Day.”

He had to blow his nose, and his wife led him off the stage. No one had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Madame Chard, the next day, offered a little enlightenment. “I went into a pub—only to visit the conveniences,” she admitted, “and the talk I heard there would have cured your bacon, believe me. In wartime all kinds of nonsense circulates, and we know from history that the enemy will use rumors to terrify the brave patriots at home. Still, you young ladies are old enough to take in what is being said, I believe, if you promise not to frighten the younger girls with the news. It’s being whispered that Shiz has been selected as a new target by the Munchkinlanders. No one knows how an attack will come, as of course our brave army is holding the Munchkinlanders off in the Madeleines.”

“Holding them off?” asked Miss Igivly. “I thought we were invading them.” Miss Igilvy isn’t as frivolous as she seems, thought Rain.

“Tactics, strategies; ours not to question the military mind,” replied Madame Chard. “But spies among us may be targeting Shiz for special attack. Perhaps localized explosions to frighten the populace. We shall stand firm. We shall not be moved.”

By the time Miss Ironish returned home a few days later, many of the girls had been moved. Their families had swum up out of nowhere to collect their precious daughters. Graduation was held in the dining hall, since the chapel was too large and would have pointed up the thinning of the ranks.

Rain avoided Scarly and Tip, both, trying not to be obvious about it. But the third evening after they had returned, Scarly showed up in Rain’s room and pressed her to talk to Tip.

“I have nothing special to say to him,” said Rain.

“He needs to talk to you,” she replied. “Don’t ask me why.”

Well, that’s something, thought Rain, so the next day, in as casual a manner as she could, she found a way to sidle up to him in the buttery pantry as she was helping to clear the luncheon things away. “Yoo hoo,” she said, sounding brittle even to herself. “I have a present for you.”

His eyebrows raised at the sight of the map. “You weaseled this out of the Bear? How could you do that?”

“I weaseled nothing. He told us we could come back and buy it later. Why are you so huffy?”

“Never mind. I’m just—surprised.”

She felt horrible and couldn’t say why. “Well, you wanted to see me,” she continued, all Ironish.

He shared the news about a suspected attack upon Shiz. It was all the word in the Emerald City, he said. “Yes, I’m aware of that,” she replied. “I’m not blind to the fact that the school population has been cut in half. But why do you think it should concern me?”

“Well, I shouldn’t want you to be caught in an attack,” he said, as if bemused she should have to ask.

“Don’t worry over me. You have yourself to think about.”

“Isn’t there a way to contact your mother? She won’t want you left here in danger, surely?”

“I think it’s all blather. Madame Streetflye flutters, ‘Speculation! designed—to, to … intimidate us!’ Tip, life seems the same to me as ever, if just that little bit more tedious.”

“I don’t know. In the EC they’re murmuring that the enemy has gotten its hands on some profoundly dangerous and powerful book of magic. If La Mombey, who is something of a sorceress, actually has it in her possession, and can decode it, there’s no telling what havoc may be unleashed upon us.”

“A book of magic?” Rain felt light-headed. “Where was it found? What is it called? How long have they had it?”

“I can’t answer any of those things. For all I know this is only one of your rumors, as you would have it. Designed to give a psychological upper hand to the Munchkinlanders. But that’s what they’re saying on every street corner of the EC. Proctor Clapp was devastated at the prospects; his sister says he’s quite shattered by his experiences and may never be the same.”

“Those aren’t rumors,” said Rain. “I must leave—I must leave tonight. Can you help me get out?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve changed my mind. I mean about the threat of empty rumors. If the Grimmerie has been acquired by anyone—by either of the antagonists—”

“Yes, that’s the name of it. The Grimmerie. How did you know?”

“Never mind. The danger is real. And I must go. I can’t say why, nor where. I must go. And you must go, too. Get out of Shiz.”

“You care that much about me?” His tone half taunting, half skeptical.

“If they’ve got the Grimmerie, they won’t hesitate to use it. Everyone tells me so. The war is bleeding both countries dry, and whoever has a fiercer weapon will punish their enemy with it. You’re in danger here if the Munchkinlanders have actually found the book. You have to go.”

“What about Madame Chard?” asked Tip. “Or Miss Ironish? Or Miss Igilvy, or Scarly? Or the others?”

“They’re all in danger, but I can’t spend a week convincing them. I’ll tell Miss Ironish right now, and she’ll have to use her powers as proctress to decide what to do with the information. But no matter what happens, I’m leaving tonight. You should too.”

“I have no place to go,” he said.

“Use the map I gave you and find one,” she couldn’t help snapping.

Miss Ironish saw her into the study. She had aged in the year since Rain had arrived. Her eyes were sunk into dark sockets and her skin had become crepey. “Miss Rainary, I have only a moment for you. I am not in the habit of having private interviews with my girls unless I call for them.”

“Thank you for seeing me, Miss Ironish.” Rain explained her concerns—that she believed the threat to Shiz wasn’t propaganda designed to scare the citizens of the city, but was real.

“If our enemy has acquired a weapon that might turn the tide of the war in their favor,” said Miss Ironish, “I doubt they’d bother to use it on our fair city. Symbolic of achievement though we may be, we are still only a provincial capital. The Emperor of Oz rules from the Emerald City and that’s where the war will be lost, should we lose it. And we could never lose it; Oz is too vast to be governed by the little people of the east.”

“I don’t know which city is more deserving of attack,” said Rain. “Maybe because Shiz is the college town of Oz, Munchkinlanders feel it would be a more terrible blow to crush it. Or maybe they intend to, like, practice their new technique of assault here? And frighten the EC into submission? So Loyal Oz might sue for peace? To preserve the palace and the administration buildings from devastation?”

“Govern yourself. Panic is a folly, Miss Rainary. I’m impressed though by your colorful language.”

“I don’t care. I just want you to know that the threat is real, and you should do everything you can to protect yourself, your teachers, Cook, the maids, the girls. It is your duty.”

“I will not be told my duty by a student.” Eyes blazing, Miss Ironish stood up. “I will not honor you by asking you on what basis you draw your conclusions. You are criminally impertinent. I shall consider your punishment. Miss Rainary, you are dismissed.”

Rain stood there, wringing her hands.

“Get out of my study, I said.”

That night Miss Ironish saw to it that the wonky stable door, which Tip had foolishly repaired as part of his chores, was bolted tightly. Then she locked the door to the annex, sealing Rain inside. “I may open the door in time for your breakfast, such as it is these days,” shrilled Miss Ironish through the door, “or I may not. Think upon your disgrace, Miss Rainary.”

Rain wasn’t sharply surprised, once the lights had gone out all over the school, to hear footsteps on the stairs. Tip arrived with a small satchel of clothes on his back.

“I saw her storming about like a maniac,” he said. “Muttering your name. And since you said you were leaving, I hid downstairs before she locked you in. I know mere locks won’t hold you.”

“I hardly know how I am going to get out,” said Rain, though she had packed a few clothes herself, and some rolls she had smuggled from dinner. She left behind the single rock, the feather, the acorn, the arrowhead. She had packed the large pink shell, though.

“Isn’t it obvious how you’re going to leave?”

It wasn’t, until he pointed a finger skyward.

He went up the ladder first. Remembering the time their shoulders had grazed, she waited until he had clambered out of the hatch. She lifted Tay through, and then followed. She had never looked over the roofs of Shiz at night. It was beautiful, but less distinct than she might have imagined. Maybe people were darkening their windows or conserving their oil, as month by month the prices of staples had continued to rise. She could make out the famous dome of St. Florix most easily, a dark perfect mound against a velvet sky that, as it rose, became pinned in place with frozen stars.

“Up is easy,” whispered Tip. “Down is tricky.” But they made it quickly enough across the leads, monkeying themselves groundward via rain gutters and downspouts and old dead ivy whose thick espaliered limbs had never been carved away from the back of the stables.

Once at the street level, Rain said, “Which way are you going?”

He answered, without catching her eye, “Which way are you going?”

Rain hesitated, then pointed west.

“Then I’m going that way too.”

17.

She argued furiously with him for half the night. She didn’t need a chaperone. She wasn’t scared to be on her own anymore. In fact, she said, she’d never been scared to be on her own.

He countered by saying that since he hadn’t applied for a job at St. Prowd’s he didn’t have to apply for permission to leave. He happened to be walking on the road from Shiz at the same hour and in the same direction she was going. What was wrong with that?

Often she sunk into black silences. She wasn’t used to arguing. She’d lived in her own world so much, she’d never had to apologize for it, nor explain. So a traveling partner her own age—even one she liked when she wasn’t arguing with him—was going to be a burden of sorts.

“You know,” she said, “if I have gotten older since we met, so have you. And while you might be young enough not to have been called up to service during this round of inductions, if you stand still in a public place like Shiz you’ll be old enough to be fingered the next time, certainly.”

“You’re certain about a lot of things of which you have no notion.”

“Explain,” she said. “Prove me wrong, then.”

But he changed the subject. “Where are you going? Off to find your mother?”

“In a matter of speaking,” she said, for she hadn’t entirely lost her habit of reticence, even though St. Prowd’s, and indeed the bricked walls of Shiz, were now several hours behind them.

The moon had risen. Tonight it looked without character. Just a disc cut out of paper and fastened with sticky string to the sky. A smell of arugula and basil pushed up from small cottage farms sunk a few feet below the high road. The wind was rousing but warm. No one was about except anonymous animals scrabbling in the hedgerows. Once they heard the low of a pained cow that some unreliable farmhand had forgotten to milk. Tip was unhappy about that cow and wanted to scurry off to help her, and Rain said, “Go ahead, do that good deed, but I must keep on the road as long as my legs will carry me,” so he left the cow in her misery and kept pace with Rain.

Gillikin west of Shiz.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, but when they came to a crossroads where a stone gave several choices—a boon, this moonlit night!—the fifth of five choices said simply THE WEST. That road looked the most desperate, and she struck out along that one, though the striking was slowing down some, and eventually they stopped to sleep a little. They burrowed under a hedgerow, mightily irritating some birds and some sort of family reunion of mice. Was it only a dream that they were talking to her? “If you’re headed for the Kells, you’ve chosen well enough. But once you reach the Gillikin River follow it to your left until the mountains come in sight. You will have crossed into the Vinkus by then, and be near enough to ask directions to Kiamo Ko.”

She woke before Tip did. His hand was on her breast, and he slept with his mouth open. Tay dozed greenly between them, closer to both than they could dare be to each other. She hadn’t heard Tip breathing in his sleep for what seemed like such a long time. She began to cry for no reason she could name. Tay stirred and licked Rain’s tears off her face with its sandpaper tongue.

Once there had been a mouseskin in a field. It had been on her finger. She had wanted to be a mouse. She had wanted to be something other than what she was. She had had so many chances, and she had passed so many of them by.

I must have become what Madame Chortlebush calls a teenmonster, crying for nothing, and feeling my life is over. She warned us about this, thought Rain.

“Wake up, it’s not morning but it’s light enough to walk,” she said to Tip, but she didn’t move, for she didn’t want his hand to slip away an instant sooner than it needed to.

He woke and shuddered and seemed not to notice he had been touching her. He shuffled to the other side of the hedge and let loose a long confident stream of pee, standing up. She turned her head away and softly smiled to herself, and couldn’t say why.

The road grew rougher, less traveled; and while there were farmers about, with carts and animals, no one paid the young walkers much mind. Well, Rain hardly looked like a St. Prowd’s girl, having slept in her best dress, which was never very good to start with. And Tip had left behind the penitential uniform that Miss Ironish had insisted he wear. They looked like brother and sister traipsing along, since they were too young still to be—to be anything else.

She tried to make small talk, as they called it, but it was too small for Tip, and she soon gave up. Tay capered after them almost as a dog might, and sometimes allowed itself to be carried on the shoulders of one or the other. They bought the cheapest food at any crossroad farmstand they passed, always taking care to follow signs for THE WEST, which by late in the day had begun to be called GILLIKIN R. With an attempt at good humor Tip referenced the map once or twice, but its markings were archaic, and Rain was happier when he put it away.

“Why aren’t you heading toward your own home?” Rain asked once.

“Why aren’t you minding your own business?” he replied.

So they walked, and ate, and sang a little bit—that was neutral enough—and slept again. Longer this time, for they had spent a whole day on shank’s mare. The next day Rain had blisters and the friends had to slow down. The day after that Tip had grown his own blisters, worse than hers, and they paused on the banks of a river they had found. They didn’t know if it was the Gillikin already or a tributary, but if they turned left at the water’s edge and kept walking west, they would either see the great mountains sooner or later on the horizon, or they would see their river merge with a larger one. That is, assuming the mice in the hedgerow were correct. But how could mice know where Rain wanted to go?

A series of bluffs and strands ran down to the water’s edge, which was frantic with fish life and seemed some sort of bird paradise as well. Tay dove away from them for the water, and for a moment Rain thought she might have lost her rice otter forever, but after a half hour’s frolic Tay returned, its hair slicked back and some sort of weed in its teeth, a very happy look on its face.

Rain and Tip found a kind of cave with a little ledge in front of it, almost a front porch with a river view. A single room, not too deep, nothing scary asleep inside but for a few bats in the ceiling. What could be better? Tay brought them some fish, and Tip, who’d come equipped with a flintstone, struck up a small fire. Whatever fish it was, he baked it wrapped in whatever greens. It was the best meal Rain had ever eaten.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she was suddenly sitting bolt awake. The bats were screeching in pitches too high to hear; they were saying something like “Oh!” and “No!” and “Blow!” Tip was gone, and Tay was asleep in some richly enviable dream. Rain leapt to her feet, her senses as alert as an animal’s, and cried out, not even in words.

The fire had gone down and she stepped in the embers in her haste, because she had heard Tip moan, perhaps. She fell to her hands and knees and looked over the edge of the bluff. Tip lay six or eight feet below, on his chest.

She remembered someone called Zackers, but not what or where about him. “Tip?” she called.

The moon was lowering at this hour but there was enough light still for her to see an animal of some sort, an overgrown grite perhaps, and a partner or mate behind it, growling and tensing to jump.

She reached for the first thing her hand fell upon, the shell, and she almost threw it, but something stopped her. “Blow!” said the bats. She put the broken tip to her lips and puffed up her cheeks and forced air through the aperture as if it were a trumpetina.

The sound screeched like ogre’s fingernails on an ogre’s slate, and any remaining bats in the cave fled the premises permanently. But so did the grites. Then Rain slithered down to crouch beside Tip and check to see how hurt he was.

Not very, it turned out. He wouldn’t admit until the next morning that he had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee off the edge of their cliff-porch, and misjudged. So, maybe not so hot to be a boy, thought Rain, but she didn’t say so.

She remembered the Clock crashing down a slope the time her forgotten companions had come across the Ivory Tiger in the poppy fields. That earthquake. And the other time, when the Clock slid off into Kellswater, up to its gills in fatal water. Now Tip himself was hurt from a fall. To aim high—to risk the prospect—well, there was no assurance of safety. Ever. As the world turned, it kept sloping itself into new treacheries. To live at all meant to risk falling at every step.

He couldn’t walk just yet; his ankle or his shin was bruised. He could hardly name the location of the pain, and Rain couldn’t tell. She wished Little Daffy were here. “A day’s rest won’t hurt,” she said.

“You are in such a hurry, can’t stop to help relieve an unmilked cow. So you should go on without me,” he taunted her.

She didn’t reply, just went scavenging for breakfast.

Later. “You saved my life, you know. Those overgrown grites were a nasty branch of the grite family. They were all ready to jump. I couldn’t have fended them off for long, or gotten away. After all this, to be eaten by beasts in the wild! A certain mythic justice, probably, but no fun for me.”

“After all this?” said Rain. And now, since she had saved his life, he more or less had to tell her something. Otherwise he’d have died and she wouldn’t even have known a thing about him, really.

“I know you were a fairly useless butler to Miss Ironish,” she declared.

“A studied ineffectuality,” he protested. “Kept me from being pestered for ever more boring chores.”

This is what he told her. He had come to Shiz from Munchkinland a year or so before he had met her in St. Prowd’s. He was an orphan but had escaped from the house of the person who had both raised him and imprisoned him. “A single woman,” said Tip. “A powerful and important woman, who had dozens of minions at her beck and call. I never knew why she paid attention to me, but she kept me closest of all, under her eye and in her chambers. I couldn’t bear it. All the time the ministers of war came and went, and I had to crouch on a stool behind her formal chair.”

“She sounds very important indeed,” said Rain politely. “A charwoman at some fine hotel, perhaps?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Don’t make a fool of me. I just saved your life, remember?”

So he told her. “I was in the household of the infamous Mombey, who serves as Eminence of Munchkinland, and who directs the war of defense against the mongrel Ozians.”

“Mongrel Ozians?” Rain had to laugh. She was quite a mongrel herself, part Quadling, part Arjiki, part Munchkinlander.

“They invaded Munchkinland,” Tip reminded her, but then he shook his head. “Oh, but that’s only part of why I left. I couldn’t bear the endless posturing. The Emperor of Oz may be a demiurge or whatever he has named himself, but La Mombey herself is a sorceress of no mean skill.”

“Do you think she has found the Grimmerie?” asked Rain.

“All I know is that she has had her people looking for it,” said Tip sadly. “For the book, and for the descendants of the Wicked Witch of the West, for in their hands the book would reveal its secrets most quickly, and Mombey is in urgent need of some sort of surge in the attempt to beat back the Ozians. Whether she got the book first or the Emperor’s men did, I can’t tell; but if it’s truly in the custody of one or the other of those adversaries, things will change before long.”

“Yes, they will,” said Rain. She told him who she was, and that she was heading for Kiamo Ko to see if her parents were still alive, since they had had the Grimmerie last. Then, because Tip clearly hated divulging secrets of his past as much as she did, she kissed him on the mouth so there would be no more talking for a while.

She collected the kisses one by one by one, but she didn’t count them.

God’s Great-Niece

1.

A good season to walk. Later—and not all that much later—Rain would look upon the six weeks it took them to find their way to Kiamo Ko as the happiest period of her young life.

They forded the Gillikin River easily enough, swimming when they had to, wading the rest of the way. When they reached the Vinkus River, a more treacherous waterspill channeled between obdurate yellow cliffs, they feared they’d been stopped. Spent days walking first north and then south along its banks, becoming desperate. Tay responded to their anxiety and made a whimpering sound but wouldn’t plunge into the water until they were ready to forge ahead too.

Finally, at a stretch where the river widened and slowed, they came across a beaver dam. How the colony had managed to build against such force was hardly short of miraculous, thought Tip. Rain, less inclined to consider anything miraculous, remarked that if they could interview a talking Beaver they might learn a good deal.

Such a moment presented itself once they were almost across. What had looked like detritus caught up against the brackwork of fortifications on the far side turned out to be a lodge. And, “Hullo there, don’t step too hard or you’ll bring down the ceiling on my mother-in-law,” said a Beaver, turning a fish over in her paws and eyeing them with wariness and courtesy alike.

She introduced herself as Luliaba. The lodge was empty at this hour except for her aging mother-in-law, who wanted to be put to the sea in a coracle and allowed to sail to her doom, but she was too beloved by the clan and so they had locked her in her room, the better to cherish her.

“Put to sea?” said Rain, to whom the phrase seemed excessive.

“Term we have, in Beaver lore,” said Luliaba companionably. “The mortal goal of our species is to build a dam big enough to flood all of Oz, as legend says once happened. Then all the rivers would flow together, making the mythical sea of story and song, and on the other side of that misty rainbow all the Beavers who’ve gone before will be having a fish fry, and waiting for us there. She’s anxious to git going, y’see. She’s been learning off new marinade recipes that have come in fashion since her lollymama and lollypapa died, and she’s afraid she’ll go soft in the noggin and forgit them before she gets there. The dear.”

“She thinks all that, she’s already soft,” said Rain, for whom the mystery of the silent animal had more potency than that of the chattering classes.

“The notion of a world of water, it always makes me feel ill,” said Tip. “But tell us how you came to build this magnificent barricade.”

“I’m chief engineer on this job site,” said Luliaba. “And I don’t mind saying that the sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation upon which to build. Two big ole stag-head oaks, uprooted upriver upmonth, floated into view one morning pretty as you please, and lodged for a while against some rocks you can’t see. About a third of the way out. Before they could work their way free, we’d established the underwater salients, using cedar logs we had stripped and at the ready. Cedar don’t rot under water like some woods, you know. By sunset the first day we’d begun the breakwater to slow the pressure moving against the twiggy firmament. Come a couple more days, we’d already completed the initial span. Your basic herringbone. Long since subsumed by upgrades done by artisan builders, of course. But the essentials we git all in place on day one.”

“Let me out!” cried the mother-in-law from below.

“Can we bring her something, maybe? A present?” asked Tip. “In exchange for your letting us cross over?”

“Bring me a gun!” cried the mother-in-law. “I’ll shoot my way out, or shoot my brains out if that don’t work!”

“A tasty flank of otter would be awful welcome.” Luliaba leered at Tay.

“We’ll be going now,” said Rain.

“Take me with!” came from inside the lodge. “I’ll be good! I won’t foul the nest any more than I can help it!”

“If we come back this way, we’ll try to bring you a little coracle,” called Tip, looking at Rain and shrugging.

“Not too little! I’m not the glass of fashion and the mirror of form I was in my springwater days!”

The travelers headed up the bank. Tip kept Tay safe in his arms. “You’re awfully sweet to a talky old Beaver,” said Rain. “Do you really mean you’d bring her a boat?”

“Well, if the opportunity presented itself.”

“Why are you so nice?”

“You make me nice. I’m pleased this all happened—that I ended up bursting out of your wardrobe instead of, say, Miss Ironish’s. Or Miss Igilvy’s.”

“Or Scarly’s?” She could risk making that almost-joke now that they had put so many miles between themselves and St. Prowd’s.

“Or Scarly’s.” He was sound and firm, and didn’t rise to the ribbing. “It’s just as Luliaba said. The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build. I might have gone in any direction once I escaped from Colwen Grounds. I might have gone to the Emerald City to throw myself on the mercy of the Emperor.”

“Smart move, avoiding that. For a deity, he isn’t widely known for his mercy.”

“Even ending up at Shiz, I might have found some sort of position at one of the colleges. Or hired out for that Bear, to help him in his shop in exchange for a mattress. I might even have come to St. Prowd’s before you’d been moved out to the annex. Really!—doesn’t coincidence hurt the sense of reason? What’s the likelihood that I’d have escaped the court of La Mombey, where I’d already heard of the Grimmerie, only to stumble across you, who seem to be one of its closest relatives?”

“We don’t do probability theory until third year at St. Prowd’s, but I’d guess about ozillion to one.” She trained her eyes on the tall grasses to select the best path across the plateau rising west of the Vinkus River. Butterflies hung like slow confetti as far as the eye could see. “The chances are so slim, in fact”—she paused as the thought consolidated—“that it might make me wonder if La Mombey had charmed you to find me.”

“Well.” He was taken aback by that. No easy riposte to offer. Finally he shrugged and said, “If she did, we have something to thank her for at last. But you’d expect she’d also have charmed me to kidnap you and take you back to her, so that even if she didn’t have the Grimmerie, she’d have you in custody. Then if the Emperor’s men found the book first, at least they wouldn’t have you, too.”

“Maybe she did charm you to do that,” said Rain, though she didn’t really believe it. “You just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“If she did, then you cast a stronger charm upon me,” he said.

“Stop that. You sound like one of the silly schoolgirls on the second floor.”

They walked in sunlight, in shadow, speaking and not speaking. The hours were long and their feet hurt, and their stomachs rumbled like thunder. They postponed fretting about what they would find at Kiamo Ko; it couldn’t be helped from this distance, not yet. Gradually the sentinel mountains emerged from heat haze, to supervise their progress. First filmy banks, easily mistaken for a low storm front on the horizon; then icy translucencies; then, too soon—all too soon—the silhoutte of Oz’s natural ramparts. The Great Kells.

Foot ahead of foot, step step step. They were in little need of omens. They trusted to the charm of chance. Why not? It had done them no harm so far.

2.

From the east the Kells rose, wrinkled solidity, and scored to two-thirds of their height by innumerable aromatic conifers. Few low valleys, but as Rain and Tip climbed they kept finding pockets of higher pastureland. Hung tarns. Sudden upland meadows where Arjiki tribespeople had been settled forever.

Like the chancel above the Sleeve of Ghastille, these villages were often invisible to climbers until the last few steps, and then the settlements would appear as if sprinkled there by the wind. The huts were made of stone and the roofs of thatch and grass, bundled in bristly fagots and weighed down by rocks tied into place. The first village on Knobblehead Pike was Fanarra, said the villagers, pointing to it and naming it. Tip and Rain could understand little else but the mountain courtesy that gestured, “Come, eat. Here, sleep. Blanket.” They treated Tip and Rain as a married couple, bedding them close, which Rain didn’t mind and Tip didn’t seem to either, as far as Rain could determine. Upon leaving the village they noticed other couples not much older than they were. They saw an infant in a sling who wailed every time the teenage mother hit it.

“That isn’t right,” murmured Tip as they passed.

“Send it down the everlasting sea in a little coracle, it’ll be fine,” said Rain. Tip didn’t talk to her for a while after that.

Fanarra led, another day’s steep hike, to Upper Fanarra, where the welcome was equally warm. Someone slaughtered a young goat and it was roasted at night, and the whole village celebrated. Tip sang a Munchkinlander spinniel that was intended to be comic, but the villagers closed their eyes and listened with painful care as if it were a voice from the beyond.

Silly me tender, silly me sweet,

Tickle me under the bandstand.

Handle me merciful, handle me neat

And I’ll tickle you under the waistband.

“I think Tip is tipsy,” said Rain that night, so he tickled her.

The villagers of Upper Fanarra responded eagerly to the mention of Kiamo Ko, and by wheeling motions they suggested it wasn’t a day or two farther on, three at most. Coming up for late summer now, thought Rain. Probably autumn arrived earlier in the high hills. Rain and Tip needed to warm themselves around a breakfast campfire for a few moments before starting out.

“I’m still thinking about that little baby,” Tip confessed. “I wish we had taken it with us.”

“We can’t even hold our liquor, can we,” said Rain, “how are we going to hold a baby?”

“Not for us,” he said. “I just mean, to save it from that poor exhausted mother.”

“We’re not old enough for a child. We’re children still.”

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Somewhere between school and college.”

“No, really.”

“I don’t know. I’ve grown used to ignoring the question. By the standards of the students at St. Prowd’s, I seemed to be about thirteen from some points of view, and fifteen from others. But perhaps I’m eleven, and quick for my age. How old are you?”

He shook his head. “Another way we are made for each other. I can tell even less clearly than you can. I just tramp on and on and I feel as if I never change much. I’ve been a boy since I was born.”

He had raised the subject, but now he seemed to regret it; there was tension in his face, and he walked ahead for a while. She let him go, looking at his stride, the easy throb of his lengthening hair against the straps of his rucksack. She knew what it was to have a broken childhood. It was easier to understand Tip, she now saw, than it had been to figure out the girls of St. Prowd’s. That wasn’t their fault, of course; perhaps she’d been supercilious to them. Too late now.

She caught up to him. “Tell me about La Mombey, then.”

That eased the invisible rack of distress on his shoulders. “She’s a mighty dangerous woman to have as a landlady,” was all he would say at first, but he relented. “She’s got scented oil instead of blood, I think; she slithers inside her clothes.”

“Do you mean that really, or are you prettifying through language?”

He laughed. “I’m not sure. Sometimes you say something to be pretty and it turns out to be pretty accurate. I guess I mean she’s a mystery even to me, and I’ve lived with her my whole life.”

“Well,” she said, “are you her son, then?”

“I am not.” Said firmly.

“If you don’t know who your parents are, how can you be so sure?”

“For a good many years Mombey was a ferocious old hag, like someone you’d see grubbing for coins in the street outside the opera. She had bristles on her chin, and her back was bent double. She couldn’t walk but for sticks and my shoulder; I was her ambulatory cane. Since she was unable to move without me, I went everywhere with her and I saw everything.”

“So she’s too old to be your mother, you’re saying.”

“Yes. I suppose she could be my great-great-great-grandmother. But who cares?”

“What is she doing without you now you’ve run away?”

“Oh, I’m talking about long ago, before she was named Eminence of Munchkinland. You wouldn’t recognize her by the description I’ve just given. I hardly can remember it myself.”

“What happened? She found a spa and took the waters?”

“No. But she dragged me on a long journey over the sands to one of the duchy principalities, I think it was Ev—”

Rain stopped in her tracks. “No one can cross the deadly sands.”

“You believe that?”

“Everyone believes it—isn’t it true?”

“Oh, well, if everyone believes it.” He was mocking her. “And lunch pails grow on trees, too, you know, in some parts of Oz. And even the little bunnies have their own Bunnytown.”

“Don’t make fun of me. I only had one year of schooling, and we concentrated on the life and times of Handy Mandy, a child burglar.”

“Well, I have had no schooling but whatever I picked up at Mombey’s hip. And those so-called deadly sands aren’t impossible to cross. They’re only deadly if you’re stupid enough not to pack properly. Though, to be fair, Mombey may have made it easier because of some spell or other. We had a sand sledge and pressed on through windstorms a week in duration, and when we arrived Mombey presented herself to some second-rate duchess who served us vile sandwiches on alabaster plates. The duchess knew a secret for changing the shape of her head and her body, and performed it for us as a kind of afternoon entertainment. Like charades. Or putting on a tableau vivant. There was only a screen at the end of the room, and she showed us that there were no trapdoors or hidden chambers in which a bevy of beautiful women could wait their turn to pretend to be the duchess. Her magic was limited to that one party trick, but she did enjoy demonstrating it. Her beauty made Mombey look even more hideous by comparison.”

“So…?”

“So when we left, we returned via a lengthy tour of other places where Mombey had private audiences with various potentates, and I watched the sledge. Eventually we reemerged in northern Gillikin, making landfall someplace near Mount Runcible. Mombey drove the vehicle into a gulley, so we had to catch the train heading south from the Pertha Hills. And on the train old Mombey went off to use the powder room, and she powdered herself pretty damn pretty, because I didn’t recognize her when she came back.”

“Had she bought the charm, do you think?”

“I didn’t ask. Later I wondered if the duchess of Ev woke up on her fainting couch the morning after we said good-bye to find herself dead. But La Mombey has never looked back, and presents herself effectively. Shortly after that, she managed to become elevated to Eminence of Munchkinland, due to some odd distant relationship to old Pastorius.”

Rain didn’t know ancient Oz history and didn’t much care, but Tip had never talked so much about his past before. She didn’t want to cut him off. She let him go on about Pastorius and how he was married to the last reigning Ozma, called Ozma the Bilious, who died of an accidental poisoning involving rat extermination pellets. Pastorius was to serve as Ozma Regent until his daughter grew up, but then the Wizard of Oz arrived in his famous balloon, blah blah, blah blah, and that was the end of Pastorius.

“And the baby?” said Rain, thinking of the Arjiki baby in the papoose.

“You really have wandered a far foreign strand, haven’t you? Old crones and cronies cherish the legend that the baby is nestled in some cradle underground, waiting to reemerge in Oz’s darkest hour. The second coming of Ozma, they call it. Since the first coming was a bit of a blunder.”

“Well, that’s old folks. What about anyone else?”

“The Wizard of Oz wasn’t known for sentimentality. Anyone who could send that Dorothy and her minions out to slaughter your grandmother in her retirement castle would just as easily have ground up a little of that rat poison into the baby’s formula and let the infant have her fatal teat. Poor mite.”

“Hey, watch your mouth. One of those so-called minions is Brrr, my defender.”

“I’m your defender now,” he told her.

“And I’m yours,” she sallied back at him. “So I’m advising you, as your counsel, to watch your mouth before I hit you.”

They were only teasing, but Tay became upset at the tone of their voices, and chattered in a scolding, magpie way. So they softened their tones, and held hands to pull each other up over the rocky way.

3.

They came into the hamlet of Red Windmill when the sun had just set. The mountains were dark cutouts above them, while the sky to the west retained its paleness, as if it rose so high it became scarce of air. One of the shepherds in the village could speak enough Ozish to tell them that the castle of Kiamo Ko was only a short distance along, but the climb was difficult at any hour and impossible by dark. Rain and Tip could be there in time for morning coffee, though, if they set out at sunrise.

Finally—because she could distract herself no longer with interviewing Tip on all subjects that came to mind—Rain had to think about what they might find. The village translator wouldn’t understand the questions she asked, perhaps on purpose. He said it would be safe for Rain to go and see for herself. Now good night, and leave the cups from the mint tea on the small carpet outside the door.

Tip was gentle and held her through the night, as her panic grew and then subsided. Surely Candle and Liir were there, and safe. Maybe the theft of the Grimmerie was only a rumor designed to strike fear and confusion into the military opposition. Or maybe her parents had fled, and left a note for her. Or fled and left no note at all, and there would be nothing but a hatchet on the floor and dark patches where the blood had dried to char.

Or maybe Candle and Liir—my parents, practice that!—would be waiting, a fork luncheon slapped out upon some sideboard, like St. Prowd’s on Visitation Day. After all, Candle had been able to see the present, somehow. Maybe Candle knew that her daughter was restless tonight in the village below the castle walls of Kiamo Ko.

Maybe her mother knew she was sleeping with her arms around Tip. Maybe she knew that Rain had finally understood that the one missing detail in the lectures about Butter and Eggs is that the basic effects become more gratifying the more clothes you remove.

She didn’t know if she slept. She must have. She must have dreamed that a little white rat poked its head out of the sack of millet in the corner of the storeroom where she and Tip had been made comfortable, and that the white rat had said, “Everything changes you, and you change everything.” But she must be awake now, for Tip was saying “And you’re going to dawdle, today of all days?”

She gulped a spoonful of some hot tea made of roasted straw and scarab chitin, and couldn’t wait any longer. She curtseyed as Scarly had used to do, back in that lost life when Scarly had been her only friend. Then Rain and Tip hurried out of Red Windmill, past the decrepit mill that stood sun-bleached of red and any other color and, since devoid now of sails, neutered in the buffeting winds. The travelers began the final ascent on a track wide enough for a cart, though only a pair of skark could have the strength to pull a cart up a slope this severe.

A condensation on the weeds of a local skip, a damp glisten upon the sunny side of boulders. Melted sugar on cobbles. Rain and Tip couldn’t speak to each other even if they wanted, the climb that arduous. They scrabbled around the brutal finials of standing stones lurking at a corner of the mountain, and then Kiamo Ko loomed above them. It wasn’t at the peak of Knobblehead Pike, not even close, but it crowned its own calf of hill with an air of mold and decay one could smell from here.

A moat of sorts, dry now, and a drawbridge of sorts, permanently down. Not much by way of defenses, if anyone could get this far, thought Rain. All of the timbers but two had rotted into the moat’s ravine, so Tip and Rain held hands and balanced each other like street performers as they trod across the breach and tiptoed into the castle courtyard through gates of iron oak and jasper warped permanently open.

Four flying monkeys stood in some sort of ceremonial arrangement, two on each side. Lances crossed to make a triangular passage underneath. “I thought they were figures of myth,” whispered Tip. Other flying monkeys were less elegantly disported about the sloping cobbled yard leading past sheds, stables, gardemangers, collapsed greenhouses, and ornamental stone pergolas. Beyond loomed the central castle keep and its several wings and dependences.

A broad flight of outdoor steps led to a door opened to the light and air, and the sound of horrible singing filtered out from some room deep inside.

“You’ll have to hurry, they’ve begun already,” said one of the monkeys, lowering his rip-edged staff to scratch his behind.

Rain and Tip walked up the steps to the front door, neither hurrying nor dawdling, as if they knew they were expected, as if they knew themselves what to expect. The entrance hall was huge and barren, almost a second courtyard, roofed with a groined ceiling. A steep staircase without benefit of balustrade rose against several of the walls of the irregularly shaped space. The music drew Rain and Tip along the ground level though, farther in. Through three or four successive chambers, each a few steps above the previous one. As if the castle itself had continued climbing the hill before deciding to rest.

The chambers were sparsely furnished, if at all; a rickety spindle here, an occasional table with a broken clock upon it. But the baseboards were lined with wildflowers stuffed in every conceivable receptacle: milk jugs and butter churns, washing buckets and chamber pots, tin pails and rubber boots.

They paused at the last door, and then went into a room more like a chapel than anything else, because the narrow tall windows were filled with colored glass set in lead fretwork. Two dozen congregants turned at the sound of their arrival. Neither Candle nor Liir was among them. The first one to speak was the Lion. No, not speech—but a howl such as Rain had never heard before and hoped never to hear again.

He paced toward Rain and looked her forehead to foot as if he was worried he was conjuring her up. His mane was in disarray, his spectacles blotched with tears. Transfigured by distress, and Rain was a little frightened of him. She said softly, “I en’t grown up that much, have I? It’s Rain, Brrr.” Then she was running her hands through his mane, and he nuzzling her hip, smearing her tunic with damp. He only wept, and she said, “It’s Rain, it’s Rain,” and looked over his great trembling head at Tip and shrugged her shoulders to say, What? What did you expect, a fanfare? Then she noticed the coffin in its shadows on a bier made of sawhorses.

After the fuss over their arrival had died down, the Goose had to continue with the ceremony of funerary rites. Rain sat them out, feeling incapable of taking up the study of new grief. Tip, in her stead, who ought to have been freed of strong emotion in this matter, attended and witnessed and wept on Rain’s behalf. Some older girl was singing a song that made no sense at all.

Nor was dead, Auntie Nor. She was dead and laid to rest in a coffin milled from starsnap pine. She was dead and never to walk again, never again to sit up and in that affectless manner look around at the treacherous world and its chaotically foolish citizens. She was dead and had stopped steaming and had begun to reek, and the flowers on the coffin were meant to cancel as much of the smell as possible. She was dead of grief, or dead of pain, or dead by the unsweet accident of coincidence. She was dead from pitching off a cliff just as Tip had done, though she didn’t fall six feet but sixty. The fatal tumble, thought Rain. It was always about to happen to someone. Ilianora Tigelaar was dead now and would be dead tomorrow and all the tomorrows too numberless to name. All that was best of her had been carried away in Lurline’s golden chariot, and the leftovers needed to be hurried off somewhere before the mourners succumbed to retching from the odor.

By lunchtime the pyre had begun to consume the coffin, by evening the coffin had been burned to ash. No one looked at what remained. The flying monkeys would sit watch all night to make sure the ice griffons didn’t come down to snatch charred bones to crack in their wicked beaks. The monkeys were used to this, practicing the same rituals when the day of final flight arrived for one of their own. They considered it an honor to stand guard. Tip brought them cups of lemonade but kept his eyes trained away from the bonfire that hissled in the orchard beyond the castle walls.

It was easy enough for Rain to hear the bare structure of the incidents that had led to her aunt’s death, but it was hard to understand them. Iskinaary filled her in with what he knew.

The raid had occurred before dawn some eight, ten weeks earlier. The Lion and his companions hadn’t yet arrived in Kiamo Ko—they were still a couple of weeks out. They might have made the difference. Even a cowardly Lion can throw his weight around sometimes. As it was, panicked monkeys launched themselves airborne, shrieking. Liir had been manhandled out of his bed, and the nearby Grimmerie snatched up and satcheled. He’d been identified as Liir Ko, only child of Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West who had once lived as a hermit in this very place. He’d been hog-tied and roped over the flanks of a mountain skark, and the five men in black hoods and gloves rode off with him. They hadn’t been Arjikis. If they were Munchkinlanders, they were among the taller type who couldn’t be distinguished from Gillikinese by height. Maybe they were abductors hired by La Mombey. No one could venture a guess.

Though Candle had screamed to be taken too, the dawn intruders had tossed her aside. They had no interest in her. They thought her weak in the mind. Probably a Quadling woman held no interest for them. Candle had bundled herself in goatskin boots and raced after them on foot, and though her pursuit proved fanciful and vain, she kept at it for a few days.

Upon returning, she had pleaded with Nor to break the pledge under which she’d been bound—bound by Liir and Candle themselves—to conceal from them where Nor had hidden Rain. Originally they hadn’t wanted to know, for fear that just such an ambush might happen at last, and that Liir or Candle might reveal their daughter’s whereabouts if they were beaten to the margins of death for it. Liir had made Nor promise never to tell them. Never.

Rain could work out Nor’s motives in resisting Candle’s entreaties. Back at the crossroads between Nether How and St. Prowd’s, Nor wouldn’t have been hard persuaded to carry out the task laid upon her. She had understood. She who’d been kidnapped about the age Rain had been when entering St. Prowd’s—she who’d tried to live with the knowledge that her own mother, her aunts, her full-blood brother had all been slaughtered by Commander Cherrystone, as he was then—she who’d been incarcerated in Southstairs Prison deep in the bowels below the Emerald City—she understood full well what crimes mortals might commit in the name of some advantage or other. She had promised not to reveal Rain’s whereabouts until the girl would have reached the age of maturity.

No matter how Candle railed and wept, Iskinaary continued, Nor couldn’t go back on her word. She reminded Candle that if Liir’s abductors killed him in their attempt to get him to decode the deadly book for them, they would need Rain even more desperately. They would hunt for her even more diligently. They would stop at nothing. Nor knew such men. She had sewn herself up with a rough needle and a coarse thread soaked in vinegar. She afforded the world no child of her loins to maim and abuse, and she wouldn’t let Rain escape from her womb, either.

The Lion took up the story.

After his long absence from his wife, he’d arrived at Kiamo Ko from Munchkinland in time to see that the reunion was for naught. Under the relentless pleading and hectoring of Candle, Nor had gone mad, said Brrr, his paws in his mane and his back sore from the heaving of his sobs. His wife’s fragile hold on anything like hope had given out. She took to wandering out of the castle to avoid Candle’s weeping rages, to avoid the Lion’s own overtures and condolences. Whether Nor slipped or whether she threw herself, unable to bear the unreadable future, no one could venture a sound opinion.

Maybe the mountain merely shuddered, as it had been doing for some time now. With a kind of mercy only the wild world knows, maybe the hillside had buckled, no longer willing to give fair purchase to a soul in such torment. The tremors that had begun with the great quake—the one that had toppled the east wing, where Sarima had once held her apartments—had continued reverberating on and off ever since. The residents of Kiamo Ko had almost become used to them.

“I shouldn’t have left her in order to rescue Dorothy,” Brrr muttered in a voice Rain had to strain to hear. “We took our sweet months on a switchback journey in case we were being followed—we went to the Chancel of the Ladyfish first, to see if your kin had returned there, or had left word under the stone with the question-mark horse. When we found nothing, we decided to come here, hoping to find Candle and Liir. It was his boyhood home, after all. In any event, we thought this castle might be a safe hole to hide Dorothy in. But I never guessed Ilianora would come back here too. The very site of her childhood trauma, the abduction and the murders—and now it happens all over again. No wonder she couldn’t bear it.”

At the death of Nor a few days earlier, Brrr continued, Candle had been unable to contain herself. She had bundled some nuts and sandwiches in a cloth and said good-bye to the travelers who had arrived shortly after Liir’s abduction—Brrr, and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, with that big horsey farmgirl in tow. Candle had left on foot. She intended to go to Nether How and tear the ceiling apart with her fingernails, if she had to. She would pull down the witch’s broom if it hadn’t already been found and stolen by the same brigands who had stolen her husband. She would climb to the top of the house and jump off. She would teach herself to fly on that broom or die. She would dare the broom to fail her.

She would find Liir before he went farther from her than he’d already drifted.

Rain and Tip might almost have passed Candle on the trail, Iskinaary implied, but the Quadling woman was traveling by night.

Impossible, said Rain’s face, now knowing the pitilessness of the landscape.

No, it was true, assured the Goose. Candle had the benefit of a lamp-lark that she had charmed with her music and petitioned to accompany her. “A lamp-lark can shine like a small beacon in the night if it’s singing to a mate. Trust our Candle to play her domingon to sound like something of which the lamp-lark approved.” Candle also took an uncharacteristically tame mountain goat who would allow a saddle on her.

The Arjiki period of mourning for Nor had begun while Candle’s mount was passing out of sight. It was over now, just as Brrr and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss finished filling Rain and Tip in on the news.

The girl they called Dorothy sat a little way off on a milking stool, listening gravely, wrinkling her nose at the stench of roasted death stealing in on the updraft. An old woman nobody had yet introduced to Rain sat next to her.

4.

So her father was gone, who knew where. Her mother was equally gone. Her aunt Nor was gone even further. The small family that Rain had inherited late in her childhood was scattered. As a social unit families have only a limited tenure, though it’s the rare soul who comprehends this while still a child. Rain was that soul.

All that was left to her was the Lion.

More than Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, the Lion stood for Rain. For her, beside her. His great lined face had turned to her finally, as if it had taken effort to slough off grief and register who Rain really was.

This upright young woman able to look him in the eye—what a sharply direct look it was, too. Loving and unflinching, the native opposite of how she had seemed several years ago. Living with her parents, then boarding at school, Brrr now learned, had straightened her out. Life had given her language. He was impressed and a little intimidated—but from the distance that a new grief imposes.

While all Rain could see, looking back at the Lion both fondly and clinically, was a creature sodden with sorrow. Shocked, and barked at into something nearing old age. His very whiskers trembled with palsy.

Tip tried to help her take measure of their situation, their resources. Laughably pregnable, this castle of Kiamo Ko. No place to stay if Rain wanted to be safe. How had Candle and Liir ever thought they could protect themselves here? Brrr, who hadn’t seen Liir since parting from him in the Disappointments and turning toward Munchkinland to rescue Dorothy, couldn’t answer. “I told you, it was his home, once upon a time,” the Lion insisted. “He grew up here. The first time I ever saw him was in this very courtyard, when the Witch’s flying monkeys had carried Dorothy and me up the slopes and dumped us onto the cobbles. You know, my left rear ankle has never been the same. I’ve always had to favor it.”

Rain could tell, even in his bereavement, that the Cowardly Lion was trying to encourage her, to cheer her up. It didn’t help. Perhaps one day she would look back and it would help then.

She was growing up, to be able to conceive of a “one day” and a “looking back.”

“But that it was his home? So what?” Rain had no sentimentality about places. “His home is built on the edge of a chasm during earthquake season, and he feels safe so he stays there? Because it’s, it’s home?”

“No place like it,” said Brrr. “Don’t be withering, it’s not becoming.”

Rain didn’t get it. She asked Mr. Boss and his wife what they thought, but they seemed not to be taking the full measure of the tragedy. They slept a lot. Maybe scaling a mountain this steep was harder on their little legs than on Brrr’s or Dorothy’s.

Of Dorothy, Rain was dubious. The foreigner seemed spooked to be here in the Witch’s castle; she didn’t like to be left alone. At first Rain was afraid that Dorothy was going to make a play for Tip, and it would be the Scarly thing all over again, but Dorothy seemed oblivious to Tip’s sweetness. “I just keep thinking about Toto,” she said. “I wonder if he’s still hunting for me somewhere, out in this blasted hideous world you cretins inhabit.”

“You’ve gone sassy, you have,” said Mr. Boss.

“Being convicted of double murder and condemned to death has helped erode some of my native midwestern taciturnity.”

“I think your little dog probably met up with some great big dog,” said Mr. Boss, “who is a lot more fun to hang out with than you.”

“How dare you make fun of me in my distress. I’d like to find a pack of those great big dogs and introduce them to your behind.”

“They’re doing this for your benefit, you know,” said Brrr to Rain, but she wasn’t sure she believed him.

She walked with Tip out of the castle again, in the direction from which they’d approached. Away from the smoldering embers. She cried, but turned her head away from his shoulder, not wanting to shame herself that much. Tip knew better than to ask why she was crying. It wasn’t really the death of her aunt, or the splintered lives her parents were living in defense of her, who had never asked to be defended. It was the whole pitfall of it, the stress and mercilessness of incident. She felt she was living on a stage controlled by tiktok machinery, and the Time Dragon dreaming her life was prone to nightmares.

Tip seemed to know all this without saying a word. He was the only article of faith that stood between her and the edge of the cliff, which looked eager to buckle if only she gave it half a chance.

She didn’t sleep much, in the small room to which the senior flying monkey had showed her. Tay crowded her pillow, shivering. Apparently the rice otter didn’t take to mountain air. Tip slept nearby, but apart, on a pallet outside her door. She could hear his breathing when he finally fell off to sleep. That was the first comfort afforded her since they’d arrived.

In the morning, she was all business. “Who is that old woman at the window?” she asked Iskinaary.

“Her name is Cattery Spunge, but she’s called Nanny,” said the Goose. “She’s already passed through her second childhood and she’s in her second adolescence now, and has decided to be sprightly again after spending a generation in bed.”

“What’s she doing here?”

“She raised your grandmother Elphaba, and she lived here with Liir until he was about fourteen. She’s been retired for about forty-five years but she’s considering looking for a new position as governess or possibly manager of a granary or something.”

“Hello, Nanny,” said Rain, approaching her.

The woman turned and put down her bowl of frumenty. Rain had never seen anyone so old. Her cheeks and neck were wrinkled like a piece of vellum scrunched and only partly reopened. “Elphie?” said Nanny.

“No. My name is Rain.”

The old woman said, “My cataracts are puddings. I’d like to dig them out with sugar tongs. My, but you do look like Elphaba. Are you sure?”

“I just arrived.”

“Well, I’ve been expecting you for a long time.”

Rain wasn’t certain that she had convinced Nanny who she was, but she decided it didn’t matter. “You are the only one who knew Nor when she was a child.”

“Yes, that I did.”

“What was she like?”

“She was the first one to ride the broom, you know. Elphaba told me. She was bright and peppy and full of beans.”

“But how could she ride that broom? She didn’t have an ounce of magic in her.”

“I’d have said so too. But who is to say that magic follows our expectations. Give me your hand, child.”

“Are you going to read my palm?”

“With my eyes? I can’t even see your fingers, let alone your lifelines. No, I just want to warm up my own hands. The young have so much fire in them.”

“Do you have any idea where my father might be?”

“Oh, my dear, Frex went off to the Quadling lands to bring faith to the noble heathen, don’t you know.”

“My father,” she said. “I’m talking about Liir. Liir Ko.”

“Liir Thropp, you mean,” she said. “Elphaba’s boy. When the soldiers came and kidnapped the family, and little Nor among them, Elphaba was out somewhere. Shopping, or raising mayhem. Or conducting lessons in sedition. I don’t want to talk about that part. Liir followed them and got kidnapped too, but then they let him go because they didn’t know who he was. They thought he was a kitchen boy. Well, he always was grubby, I’ll give them that. They’d have saved themselves a lot of bother if they’d kept him when they had him.”

“That was then,” she said. “What about this time? Did you hear them arrive, did they say anything that would give you a clue about where they were taking him?”

“I’ve always been a very sound sleeper. It’s my best talent.” She took out a few teeth and cleaned them with her thumb, and then reinserted them. “Popcorn kernels, you know; the old gums can’t take it anymore.”

“What do you think?”

“I think,” said Nanny, “that there is nothing more I would like right now than to tell you what you want to know. But I can’t. So the next best thing I would like is to have a nap in this sunlight. I feel the winter chill something fierce, you know. If when I wake I find I’ve remembered anything further, I’ll call for you. What did you say your name was?”

“Rain.”

“I don’t think so.” She squinted at the bright summer sun. “Snow, perhaps, or hail; it’s too cold for rain at this time of year.” She pulled a tippet about her shoulders and almost immediately began to snore.

Rain continued her circuit, stopping to press Iskinaary for his opinions. “Why didn’t you go with him? You’re supposed to be his familiar, aren’t you?”

“Only a witch has a familiar, and he’s not a witch.”

“That’s no answer, and you know it.”

Iskinaary refused to budge on the matter, but Rain pestered. “It doesn’t make sense. You’ve always stayed by his side. You could have followed him from a height and seen where he was being taken. I can’t believe you failed him at this point in your long friendship, if that’s what you call it.”

She goaded him further until finally he hissed, “If you must know, I wanted to go with him, but he yelled at me to stay behind and take care of Candle. So I followed his word though it broke my heart.”

“You’re a big fat liar. You didn’t follow his word at all, or you’d be traveling with my mother down to Nether How, to get that broom. You broke your promise to him. You are as cowardly as the Lion.”

“I resent that,” called the Lion, who wasn’t listening although certain phrases do carry.

“Save it for the magistrate.” Iskinaary drew himself up to his full height. His cheeks were sunken in a way they had not been before, but his eye was steely menace still. “Candle told me to stay here because you were likely to show up. She has that talent. She sensed your approaching.”

“And so she left,” said Rain, without mercy, for what mercy had her mother ever shown her? “A talent for lighting out just when I show up. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

“She wanted to protect you. She said you were more important than she was.”

“I doubt you believe that,” said Rain.

“I never said I believe it.”

The senior flying monkey, Rain learned, was called Chistery. He was so stooped that his chin nearly touched his knees. He was devoted to Nanny and agreed with her that Rain had something of Elphaba about her. “Frankly, when I first saw you, I thought you were Elphaba returning.”

“As I understand it, Elphaba was green.”

“So I’ve heard. But flying monkeys are color-blind, so I wasn’t going by your pallor. You do have something of Elphaba about you. I can’t quite name what it is.”

“The talent of being in the wrong place almost all the time?”

“Maybe, Rain, a feeling for magic. Have you ever tried it?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Or maybe it’s your air of disdain. Elphaba was strong in that department.”

Perhaps to distract the disconsolate group, Dorothy told Rain and Tip about her day in court. The subject of her trial and her conviction bore heavily on her. At lunch one day, Dorothy turned to Nanny and said, “You were present, Nanny. You were here when Elphaba disappeared. The day her skirts went up in flames and I threw the bucket of water on her. I ran weeping away when I saw her disappear, but you came rushing up the stairs as I went down.”

“Oh yes, I used to have very good knees. An attractive domestic, according to certain opinions posted anonymously to me.”

“What did you see when you got there? You never would say. You came down the turret stairs and locked the door, and said she was dead, but whatever happened? I don’t remember a funeral such as the one we had for Nor.”

“The times were different, the standards were different, and I was on my own. After all these years you can’t hold me to lapses in decorum. Who are you, anyway? Are you a tax collector, asking all these nosy questions? I tithed to my eyeteeth and anyway I never earned a penny. I never stole that golden garter. Melena gave it me. Everything I did, I did for love of Melena Thropp, my lovely Melena with the powdery skin and the lavender nosegays. Sue me.”

“I’m Dorothy,” said Dorothy. Her voice was taking on a peevish edge. “Dorothy Gale, from Kansas.”

“Oooh she’s smart,” said Nanny to the rest of the table. “Wants us to know her name and address so when we read it in the columns we’ll go oooh la la. I’m not impressed. Pass the port.”

Little Daffy handed down a pitcher of well water and poured it for Nanny. She took a big gulp of it and said, “Yum, smackers,” and fell asleep in her chair. Chistery came around to wipe her lips and to wheel her away, which wasn’t easy, since his chin hardly came up to the seat of her chair. But his long arms, crooked with bone spurs, could still reach up to the chair’s handles, so off they went.

“But what happened to Elphaba?” asked Rain. Perhaps cruelly, she added, “Look, we know what happened to Nor. We saw it. What happened to the Witch?”

The Lion left the table without asking to be excused, uncommon rudeness for him, but no one blamed him.

“That’s the big question, isn’t it,” said Dorothy. “What really happened to the Witch?”

After her first reunion with the Lion, Rain noticed that he was keeping to himself. He had taken to sleeping in the very larder, Chistery whispered, that old Nanny had locked Liir and the Lion in when the Witch was hounding Dorothy up the stairs to her tower, and thence to the parapet over the gorge. “If I had only lived up to my name,” Rain heard the Lion mutter once, to himself or maybe to Tay, who was hunting for something along the baseboards under the flour bins.

“What do you mean?” she couldn’t help asking.

“If I’d been as cowardly as they called me, ever since the Massacre at Traum, I’d never have accompanied that foreign agitatrix, Dorothy, out this way. The first time, I mean. I’d have gone on to a long and sorry life as the confirmed bachelor I was really cut out to be.”

Meaning, Rain supposed, what? That he regretted the consequences caused by the death of the Witch? That he regretted having fallen in love with Nor, a human woman? Could he really wish that he hadn’t ever met her, to avoid this suffering now? Rain knew herself to be young, untried by any suffering that really counted. (Rain was still alive, after all, and though her parents were dispersed and endangered, she wasn’t stretched out upon a stone floor with her chin in her paws.) But even were something to happen to Tip, she thought, she couldn’t imagine wishing she had never met him.

Maybe she just didn’t know Tip well enough yet. Maybe you have to earn the kind of grief that the Lion was exhibiting. Though privately, and perhaps this was callous of her, she also wondered if Brrr was putting it on just a bit thick.

Still, he had the benefit of knowing what Kiamo Ko had been like with his common-law wife in the next room, for a few days anyway, of fatal reunion, and now—where was she? Where was she really? Where did the dead go?

Where had Elphaba gone?

5.

It took Rain two or three days to realize that Chistery and the other flying monkeys were deferring to her, as if she were the owner of the castle now. “I’m not Elphaba,” she reminded Chistery, after he came down from Nanny’s room where he had been discreetly changing her bedding.

“Don’t I know it,” he told her, but nicely.

“And I’m not my father.”

“You’re quite a bit like your father, you know.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know him at all.”

“See, that’s what he always said about his mother too. Disavowal of family resemblances; it’s a family trait.”

“Chistery,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“Rain,” he answered, “don’t you see? It’s up to you.”

“I’m a child, for the love of Ozma!”

“And I’m a flying monkey. I wasn’t born either to fly or to talk, but your grandmother Elphaba brought both capacities out of me. I am the patriarch in a line of creatures that wouldn’t exist without your family’s interference. Now I can’t fly from here to the washtub, but I will use my tongue to give you my mind. You have to figure out on your own how to use your talents.”

She pouted at him. “That sounds like the motto of every improving sermon made by any teacher at St. Prowd’s. You could lecture there.”

“Don’t mock me. How could I decide for you what should be done next? I’ve lived fifty years on this estate and I’m not trained at situational analysis.”

He handed her the sheets and nodded with his chin toward where she should bring them. “Child of woe,” he added, “don’t you see? You’re in charge now. Nor is dead and the Lion is incapacitated. Liir is gone and Candle is gone and dear old Nanny is feeling fitter than usual but she’s not ready yet to lead a cavalry charge. Tip seems sensible enough but he’s not family. And the little people seem to think they’ve come to a holiday resort.” He snorted. “They could make up their own bed of a morning, in my humble.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired too.”

“I’m sure you are. Get over it. There’s work to be done.”

“May I go up to what used to be the Witch’s room?”

“I told you. It’s your castle now. You can go where you want.”

So after lunch, Tip and Rain, with Tay at their heels, followed Chistery’s directions and found the staircase leading up to what used to be the Witch’s room, at the top of the curving stairs in the southeast tower.

The flying monkeys, who lived mostly in the outbuildings but took care of basic housekeeping, had by all appearances done little more than dust in here once or twice a year. The room looked as if it were being kept as a kind of installation of a Witch’s offices, or possibly a memorial chamber to bring faint tears to any pilgrims able to brave the journey. Though so far no one had ever shown up.

The room was broad and circular, wide enough in circumference to hold a dance competition if the furniture were cleared out. In the center of the room the floor was level, but on several sides, up a few steps, a sort of mezzanine or gallery stretched, lowest underneath the room’s one great east-facing window, higher on the other side. Perhaps originally this had been an armory, and these stone flats designed for the laying out of lances. Clearly, Elphaba had used the chamber to study arcana derived from her twin interests in natural history and matters numinous.

A huge stupa of a beehive collapsing in on itself—it must have held five thousand bees. (What a song they sang; they must have driven the Witch mad, thought Rain.) A deceased crocodrilos pickled in brine still hung on chains from a rafter. Some wag, maybe a monkey, had put game dice in its eye sockets, so it peered out at Rain and Tip with a pair of singletons. A flat file revealed sixty or seventy bat skeletons, all different. On a stiff board they found a full mouth of wolf’s teeth, uppers and lowers, laced in by wire and labeled from front to back in a script that had faded illegible. Several umbrellas had been left opened to dry, and had dried well enough by now that their fabric had given way, leaving only ribs and tatters. On one umbrella, spiders had built webs between every one of the struts. It was creepy and wonderful at once, and reminded Rain of her thirst for a spiderworld, long ago.

The great window was like a web through which to peer at Oz.

Collections, thought Rain. My shell belongs here.

Maybe Chistery is right. Maybe I do have something of my grandmother in me. For as long ago as I can remember, I’ve listened better to the animals than to any person. Though I have no magic in me, and I cannot tell what they are saying.

“Here’s a ball of glass, somewhat mirrored, I think,” said Tip, rubbing dust off with a rag. It stood on a table in the center of the room. “I doubt it’s an ornamental gazing ball. She doesn’t seem to have gone in for interior decoration of that sort.”

“I’m not sure I want to look at it,” said Rain. “I’ve never liked looking at myself.”

“That makes two of us. But we’ve come to see what is here. Don’t you think we should try?”

She moved around the room, learning things with her fingers and her nose as much as with her eyes. He waited, slumped against a stand-up desk, arms folded.

Rain scowled, not at him but in the act of walking her thoughts along. “Both my parents have their own weirdness—maybe that’s what drew them together. My mother can see the present, she said. I thought she meant she could tell when I was about to snitch a scone from the larder at Nether How. But what mother can’t tell that? Now I think she meant something else. She had—she has—some capacity to understand the present. It probably only affects those she loves or cares about. She could tell, if my father was away hunting for a week, that he was almost home. Is that just intuition, or is it a special kind of seeing?”

He waited. He knew she was talking mostly to herself.

“And my father? He didn’t speak about it much, but my mother told me. Once or twice he could see the past. He saw an image of his parents—Elphaba and Fiyero—together. More than once—like a vision. He thought it was just his imagination, that he was trying to invent a relationship between them, to convince himself who his forebears were. But he could see a little more than that, my mother told me. She told me about what happened just before I was born, when Liir had brought the dried faces of human beings—”

“Don’t,” said Tip, wincing.

“Is that any harder to consider than a dried crocodrilos?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Liir had brought them to the farm where I would soon be born. He hung them in the trees, and my mother played the domingon. He saw that they had histories, that they could speak if they were charmed to do so, and my mother laid the spell upon them to come into the present and recite the—the beauty of their lives, I guess she said. And that testimony of soundness, of themself-ness, helped lift the disguise of a human off of old Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, and she died as she had wished to go, as the Elephant she was behind her disguise.”

“Maybe your mother’s singing—your father’s memory—called forth the lost Elphaba into you. While you were in the womb.”

“Maybe you believe in tooth fairies? Or time dragons?”

“So don’t you want to peer in the ball? What if you have some scrap of the talent in your eyes that your parents do? That your grandmother did?”

“I can’t bear to see the present, if it involves my father being tortured. I can’t. I can’t bear to see the past, in case it involves him having been murdered. I can’t bear to see my mother fleeing this house of disaster. I prefer my disguise of blindness a little longer.”

He asked in a low voice, “Can you bear to see yourself unveiled? Or me?”

She looked abruptly at him in case he was tending sexy. But he meant it truer, deeper than that. “I don’t know,” she finally answered. “What if I do have a talent, and it is neither Liir’s nor Candle’s, but my own? What if I can see the future? I don’t think I want to know.”

“Can you live without knowing?”

She almost laughed. “I have lived without knowing most of my life. Isn’t that what we’re all so good at? That’s the easy part.”

So they didn’t look in the gazing ball, either of them, Rain by conviction and Tip out of deference. Instead Tip opened the shutters on one side of the wide window. Facing east, away from the wind off Knobblehead Pike, the window showed a view of the valley they had walked up from. They could see the ruined stump of Red Windmill, and the valley where Upper Fanarra lay hidden. Through a dip in the mountainous horizon, probably harboring the track of their arrival, they could see where the plain of the Vinkus River must begin. And somewhere down there the beaver dam, with the mother-in-law of Luliaba waiting for them to return with a coracle to float her to her future.

Before leaving, they made a halfhearted search for accoutrements of magic, but they could only picture tchotchkes from a pantomime about Sweet Lurline and Preenella, her aide-de-sorcière. What were they expecting to locate? Magic wands? They found a bristling bunch of cattails, which magically still had their fur, but that was all the magic in them. What else might they wish for? Some faded pamphlet of practical magic, to help summon up a nice flank of terch or garmot instead of endless salads? A corked vial of smelling salts that might revive the Cowardly Lion into something of his usual growly but steadfast self? They found none of that. The only magic thing they were sure of was the crystal sphere on its stand of carven dragons in the middle of the room, and that much magic was too much. They would have to make their way without it.

In the welter of so much animal zoologics, they almost forgot Tay. They couldn’t find the otter at first, and then Tip laughed and pointed. Tay had leaped up somehow and landed on the back of the airborne crocodrilos. The green rice otter was swaying back and forth, defying gravity, having a modest little carnival ride for itself.

“Come here, you nutcase,” said Rain, and Tay obliged.

“It’s trying out what flying on a broom might be like,” said Tip. “You should try it someday too. If your mother returns with that broom.”

If Chistery is right, and it’s up to me to take charge, she thought, then I have to decide what to do.

She called a council that evening, after Nanny had gone to bed. Of the flying monkeys only Chistery sat in. Brrr was cajoled and then browbeaten to leave his larder, and the Munchkinlander and the dwarf bestirred themselves to climb onto the edge of a sideboard so they could see better. Rain took one side of the circular table, Tip opposite her. Dorothy and Iskinaary perched on stools, completing the round. Eight of them.

Tay played with a dust mouse under the big table. A broom only goes so far.

They seemed a small and enervated group, too wasted in strength to mount much of a campaign. That couldn’t matter. There was no one else, even if all they did was think.

“We can’t stay here like this,” Rain said. “Not for the threat to us—the threat is everywhere now. We can’t stay because to stay is to let more of the worse things happen. To stay is to give up.”

“We have given up,” said Mr. Boss, linking hands with Little Daffy.

“We haven’t. Have we?” asked his wife. “Well, we’ve given up the Clock, yes, there’s that. But we haven’t given up on each other.”

“That’s the point,” said Rain. “We haven’t given up on my father, surely? Or defending one side or the other against a fiercer attack than has yet been seen?”

“Wait a minute. Which side are you intending to defend?” asked Little Daffy, waving her bonnet for attention.

“Either side,” said Rain.

“That’s insane. You’re insane,” said Mr. Boss. “She’s insane,” he told his wife.

“Listen to her a moment,” said Brrr, from his lethargy.

Rain spoke as slowly as she could, working her way like a tightrope artist across her thoughts, feeling them an instant before walking the words out. “Mr. Boss. You never showed any allegiance either to Loyal Oz or to Munchkinland. What difference does it matter to you who we defend?”

“If I showed no allegiance to either, why defend either?” he shot back. “Waste of effort. I showed loyalty to the Clock, because my job was to keep it in tiktokety trim as a house and harbor for the Grimmerie.”

“And the Clock is drowned, so that burden is lifted from you. Meanwhile the book is stolen and about to do damage, serious damage, by whatever faction nabbed it. Isn’t that part of your job?”

“I quit. I was to mind the book when it was handed to me, to keep it safe. But my employer scarpered on me, leaving me holding the goods. Anyway, I gave the book to Liir. His problem now.”

“But that’s my point. The book isn’t safe. It’s on the loose, in the wrong hands—whosever hands it is in are the wrong hands. We can’t excuse ourselves from the need to stop it harming anyone—on either side—the damage could be immense.”

“After you finish St. Prowd’s,” said Chistery, “go to law school.”

“There won’t be a St. Prowd’s if Mombey has the book and can torture my father into decoding it for her. If he’s able. Or maybe being so powerful Mombey can decipher some of it herself.”

“You could read it,” said Tip to Rain. “You told me.”

“Yes, well,” said Rain, “I was only learning to read back then. Not having a history of other writing to complicate me, I managed. Lucky guesses.”

“It’s in her blood,” said Chistery, pointing at Rain. “Elphaba could read it at once, I’m told. She used it to help give me language.”

“You’re right about one thing,” said the dwarf to Rain. “I never took up with political or religious clans. Never cared to. But I suppose since my wife is a Munchkinlander and our children will be part Munchkin—”

“Not to spring any surprises on you, darling, but I’m so far beyond the changes that I’m more of a dwarf than you are,” said Little Daffy.

“Our symbolic children,” he said to her. “The children of your hometown in Center Munch. You’ve professed a love for your besmirched land. You’ve persuaded me to join you wherever you are. If you’re on that side, so I am.”

“I love you too, ducks. Though what Munchkinland has become, a shame. A bloody shame.”

The Lion turned his head this way and that as if not quite believing what he heard. The dwarf and Little Daffy were holding hands.

Tip said, “Well, I’ve been all over Loyal Oz and renegade Munchkinland, and it seems to me that no people own the land they live on. The land owns them. The land feeds them by growing them their wheat and such, in the Corn Basket of Munchkinland, or growing them their meadows for the grazing of livestock, in the agricultural patches of Gillikin. Or growing them their emeralds in the mines in the Glikkus, or their windswept pampas or steppes in the wide grasslands west of here, which I’ve never seen, but which support the horse cultures of the Scrow and other tribes.”

“Bollocks. Natural geography may be hospitable—or not—but human history claims geography,” argued the Lion. “Love for nature is a hobby for the mentally unfit. History trumps geography. And thus you can’t blame the Munchkinlanders for defending themselves, however cruel it makes them.”

Dorothy hadn’t spoken so far. She drummed one hand on the tabletop and put the other hand on her hip. None of them of course had ever seen the Auntie Em about whom she complained, but Rain guessed that Dorothy looked quite a bit like old Auntie Em right about now.

“I’ve seen a fair amount of Oz, too, you know,” she said, “and as far as I’m concerned loving any part of it without loving the whole thing is a load of fresh ripe hooey. Not that I’m especially enamored of any of Oz on this trip, mind you. But I have a treasury of song in my heart and I can summon up affection for anything with just a little concentration. Would you like me to sing?”

“No,” they all said.

“Too bad,” she replied, and stood up.

She got out about four lines.

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain…

Little Daffy was already in tears. Mr. Boss was rolling his eyes heavenward and plugging his ears. Iskinaary murmured to Rain, “What rainbow is she from?”

“Let her go on,” said Tip, who had no authority here, but they obeyed him as a matter of courtesy. He was a guest, after all.

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

“There’s that sea thing again, it makes me want to heave,” said Brrr.

“Good is always crowned, isn’t it?” said Little Daffy. “The argument for royalty.”

“What’s amerika? Part of that game the beauty boys used to play, shamerika?” asked Mr. Boss.

“It’s another name for Kansas,” said Dorothy.

“I thought you hated Kansas,” said the Goose.

“Let me have my say, if you’re ready for it. Or I’ll sing the next verse.”

“We’re ready, we’re ready.”

“Everyone has a right to love the land that gives them the things they need to live,” said Dorothy. “It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think, now I’ve seen a bit more of America and a lot more of Oz, that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful, too. That’s what the song says. That’s why I sang it. You can’t see the shining sea from the purple mountains—”

“I should hope not,” said the Lion. “You’d just cave.”

Rain said, “I don’t know about the mountain and sea business. But I suppose we’re saying something of the same thing. It’s more important to try to stop what may be about to happen, whichever way it goes—because it’s all worthwhile to someone. The beaver dam is worth something to the beavers, the—the shell to the lake creature that built it—the roost to the hen, the swamp to the marshstalker. Nether How to my father.”

“And this place to me,” said Chistery, “though Kiamo Ko could do with a bit more in the way of central heating.”

“Are we going to decide what to do, though?” asked Rain. “That’s why we’ve come here to sit together for a few moments.”

Iskinaary said, “Well, Chistery is too old to fly anyplace.”

“Speak for yourself,” replied the flying monkey, but admitted he had obligations to Nanny that would keep him from leaving his highland home.

“Are we to break up into groups? One to the Emerald City, one to Colwen Grounds, and try to intercept the Grimmerie somehow?” asked Iskinaary. “I’m sorry, Rain, but I’m not quite getting your drift.”

“I don’t have a plan yet. We’re working on it together.”

“I am not going back to Munchkinland, thank you very much,” said Dorothy. “Don’t forget there’s an order of execution on my head.”

“My countryfolk were beastly to you,” agreed Little Daffy. “But don’t be harsh on them, dear. They’re under so much stress, invaded by Loyal Oz. Now, as to schemes. Personally, I have precious little interest in ever visiting the Emerald City again. Who would ever give me the time of day there, if the sons of the EC and Gillikin are dying in battle against my countrymen?”

“Against the Animals,” corrected the Lion. “But point taken. Sentiment is fine over a round table, but once you decide to come down from this high peak, you have to make a choice one way or the other. That’s the human condition.

“I know,” he added. “And I’m a Lion. Same difference.”

“We’ll sleep on it,” said Rain.

Once again she was asleep and then she heard a voice, but she could hardly tell what it was saying. She half-woke, and rolled over in the moonlight to see if there was a mole, or maybe a goldfish come up from the fishwell in the basements. The only thing she saw was the iridescent shell, its usual gleam even brighter against the gloom of a mountain night in late summer.

She picked her way over Tip, careful not to disturb him, and hardly knowing what she intended, she retraced the steps she’d taken earlier in the day and walked up the stairs to Elphaba’s chamber.

Snaggle-toothed autumn was loping in. A jackal moon was assembling its features in the sky. Rain had heard that the constellation appeared only once in a generation or so. It didn’t last long, but while it lasted, peasants and mill laborers alike considered it a time of peril and possibility.

Without Tip to watch her, she had a different kind of courage. She creaked open the shutters of the Witch’s great window, both sides, and the moon stepped through spiderweb fretwork into the chamber.

A patter at her heels made her turn. Tay had appeared from nowhere. It must have sensed her moving at night. She smiled at it—and almost could have sworn it smiled back. Though a creature of the wild has no smile we can recognize.

“Look in the glass,” said Tay.

“You can’t talk,” she said, not alarmed; she realized she was sleep-walking.

“I know,” said Tay. “I’m sorry. Look in the glass.”

Because this was not a nightmare, and because a calm had lit upon her, she wasn’t scared to look. She rubbed the surface of the globe and huffed upon it to make it shiny. The moonlight helped, one sphere to another. Tay leapt to the table and entwined, almost snakelike, around the carved legs of the stand.

The initial sense was of flatness—more like peering through a porthole than into a fishbowl. She remembered staring at a page in the Grimmerie once, when a glassy circlet had shown an unidentified figure gesturing at her. Trying to make a landfall of some message or other. She left that memory behind, and leaned closer.

At first she saw nothing, just shifting smudges. Clouds seen from below the surface of a lake, as if you were a fish. Or it might be clouds seen from above, she thought, if you were a kind of creature who wasn’t tethered by gravity to the time and place in which you were born, and if you could approach from anywhere, see anything.

The mothy batting pulled apart, like the spun sugarbrittle sold at Scandal Day. She began to focus.

It took a moment to realize she was examining something of what Dorothy had been warbling about. The mountains of Oz stood up first—not as in a map, flattened out and drawn, but built up in miniature, as if in pastry-dough. From a great distance mountains show earliest; they are the first face of a world. She could see Oz the way Dorothy had said to see it in a song, all at once: Mount Runcible to the north, poking up like a king-hill, uncrowded and pompous; and the Great Kells in their scimitar curve, bending to the left and then angling to the right, toward the south, softening. She could see that the Quadling Kells and the Wend Hardings were just smaller cousins of the Great Kells, and that the Madeleines and the Cloth Hills were second cousins who had moved out of town to get a little room. And the Scalps, up in the Glikkus, were the high bishops of the whole affair, in their emerald crowns, although of course she couldn’t see the emeralds.

The picture shifted. An angle of moonlight picked up the silver that shines on water, and then she could see the eight or ten queenly lakes of Oz drawn out as neatly as Madame Chortlebush could have done on a map. The long silvered leaf of Restwater at the center, the birthing pool of all of Oz; and bootblack deadly Kellswater not far off. Spottily, here and there, the turquoise lakes that depended on mountain runoff for their bounty: Lake Chorge in Gillikin, Mossmere and Illswater in Munchkinland, and a shifting lake in the Thousand Year Grasslands at the far west of the Kells. The moving lake that she’d heard came and went at its own choice, drawing thousands of prairie beasts like magnets back and forth to its iron will.

Another shift of the snout of the jackal moon, pointing out the forests of Oz. A lot of Oz was woods, from the snarl of northern wilderness, the Great Gillikin Forest, to virtually every slope and vale in regions mountainous or gentle. And see, the rustling abundance of the eastern Corn Basket, a neatly governed patchwork cousin to the wild grasses of the west. Look how the marshes of Quadling Country are the damp wet footing for the tall pines of the Great Gillikin Forest fifteen hundred miles to the north.

She peered for the slopes below Kiamo Ko, to see if the Five Lakes around Nether How came to view. Reluctantly, like shy fish, they winked up at her. But this was a dream, and like all dreams it had some conditions. One of them is that she couldn’t push for more than it would give. She couldn’t screw her focus tighter, or by force of desire pull the world into greater resolution. Though she thought she could even find the kindly hillock of Nether How itself, she couldn’t make it any clearer. She couldn’t see the house. She couldn’t see her mother. She just couldn’t see her mother.

Neither could she see anyone, she realized, not human or Animal or animal. From the height of an angel, there seemed to be no sign of occupation of this vast textured complexity. Not even a city—not even the Emerald City, which she might have expected to spy blooming in the center of Oz like a big throbbing bee stinging the living organism, or sucking the bloom of its sweetness.

Then, even in her dreaminess, her mind remembered the map she and Tip had found in the shop in Shiz on that rainy afternoon. She remembered the story of Tip and his trip to Ev, out of Oz across the deadly sands, and of the stamp of the shell on the left edge of the map, beyond the Outer Vinkus. She rose on tiptoe to see beyond the sands north of Mount Runcible, and south of Quadling Country. She torqued her face to try to peer beyond the sands west of the Thousand Year Grasslands. But the jackal moon wouldn’t loan its light through the glass at so oblique an angle. She could only see what it would show her.

As if she had done the world wrong by being curious, the picture of Oz began to shrink, sinking deeper in. But then she realized the dioramic glimpse was no less particular, just smaller, just sized differently. It took up a modest segment of the globed glass, like no more than a scrap of colored apple peel plastered on an ornament from Lurlinemas, leaving the rest unknown, unfounded. So much unknown.

The clouds began to move in. She guessed her dream was about over, and she wondered if she needed to walk back downstairs or if she could just drift, too, like the clouds, and let the dream wake her in her bed when it wanted. But the clouds swirled some, and cleared, and she looked again just in case.

All she saw was her own face. That face she hardly ever dared scrutinize. She identified the Quadling cheekbones from Candle, the stiff, thick, flowing dark hair from Liir. Oh, what a dream this was! For she saw herself green, green, if you could believe it.

She laughed at the gifts of sight and blindness, and turned to go.

“Did you see?” asked the crocodrilos, rolling its eyes into a pair of sixes.

“Oh, I saw.”

“What did you see?” asked the ghosts of bees, crawling out of the hive and standing in a ceremonial line as if she were the new Lord Mayor of Kiamo Ko.

“I saw the hills and waters of Oz, the growth and wetness and dryness of it.”

“What else did you see?” asked the smile of the wolf teeth.

“I saw no sign of any crying child smacked too often by a tired mother, or any old Dame Beaver wanting release from her daughter-in-law. I saw no kidnapped father, and no mother gone AWOL.”

“Just because you didn’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” said the phantom of a dog named Killyjoy, who had been sniffing at something dirty and interesting in a bottom drawer that he couldn’t scratch open.

“What else didn’t you see?” asked the spiders in a chorus of shrill, pinched voices.

“I didn’t see the edge beyond Oz.”

“Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” said Killyjoy.

“I know,” said Rain. “That’s one thing I know.”

“What else didn’t you see?” asked the drawer of bat skeletons, in an uncoordinated recitation that took Rain a while to decipher.

“I didn’t see the woman who brought you all here,” said Rain.

“Just because you don’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t there,” said Killyjoy, wagging his ghost tail and panting over his extended ghost tongue.

“What else didn’t you see?” asked any number of crows—she couldn’t tell if they were ghosts or maybe living crows, not in this light—who appeared to perch on the top of the wardrobe and crowd each other, so that every now and then one would tumble off the near edge and then flap back and shove till someone else tumbled off the far edge.

“I didn’t see you when I was here earlier,” said Rain. “You’d have scared me off, I think.”

“Oh, we’re nice enough,” said the crows, but then they all flew away.

“Is there anything else you saw, or didn’t see?” asked Tay, who now seemed to be the master of ceremonies of this dream.

“No,” said Rain. “Not that I can name tonight.”

“Well, then, I guess we’re done.”

“Oh, there is one thing,” she said to Tay, as the room settled, the wolf teeth stopped chattering, the crocodrilos stopped its swaying, the phantom dog and bees dissolved and the spiders curled up into little circles, like handbags for lady mice attending a mouse opera. “I didn’t see if you are male or female. I have never known.”

“Does it matter?” asked Tay.

She didn’t answer. They left the room and walked downstairs. This was still a dream. The dwarf was asleep at the kitchen table with the end of his beard in a round of soft cheese Chistery had been saving for breakfast, and the Lion seemed to be knitting in his sleep, making his paws go back and forth. Little Daffy was nowhere to be seen, though there was a smell of baking in the air. Tip was invisible too, but she stepped over where she knew he would be in the morning when she awoke, and settled down with her back to him, looking at the shell. Tay went instantly to sleep.

She thought the dream was over, and maybe it was. Maybe she was awake now. She picked up the shell and remembered what someone had said to her. She couldn’t remember who it was. That insane birdwoman in the tree, that’s who it was. No? Doesn’t matter.

Listen to what it is telling you.

She put it to her ear for the thousandth time and tried to make out a sound beyond the hush. It was fruitless, as usual, after such a noisy night of cryptic dream messages. She fell asleep that way, and when the shell dropped from her cheek an hour later and another fragment of its tip snipped off, she didn’t even hear it.

In the morning there was a note from Tip on the table, pinned in place under the shell.

La Mombey may not be the one to have taken the Grimmerie, and your father. Then again, she might be. I will find out. I know we can’t bring Dorothy back to Munchkinland. I am the only one who can get in safely. Mombey will punish me but not torment me—though I am not her son, I am her only family. She will forgive me and I will learn what is to be learned.

Don’t worry about my leaving by night. The jackal moon has lit up the path like torches. I will be safe.

And I will come back to you.

Love, Tip

6.

They had beaten him at first, chained him naked and whipped him in the hot sunlight filtering through the canopy of a dunderhead pine. Riverines of blood drained down his calves and made carmine socks over his heels and arches. The dripping resin from sap stung in his wounds. They weren’t as merciless as they might have been. When he loosed his bowels upon his calves they realized that they’d gone too far, and then someone had the sloppy job of cleaning him up because he couldn’t move his spine. They were gentler after that. Apparently they didn’t want him to die en route.

They were careful to conceal their destination.

Five of them. Men of few words, quick movements, each one of them athletically taut—sleek and trained. Professional abductors. Once they reached the base of the Kells they slaughtered the skark, for target practice as far as Liir could tell, or to alarm him. They continued on horseback. Liir had never been much of a rider; with his hands tied behind his back he was in constant danger of falling off and being dragged to death. Clever, one of them figured out a way to harness Liir’s shoulders loosely to the horse’s bridle, so he would have to fall forward if he blacked out from loss of blood.

“Just waiting to bleed, weren’t you,” was the only phrase he heard at first. “Just saving it up for us to wring it out of you. Some are like that.” But the speaker was hushed, perhaps so as not to give away an accent of origin.

They avoided farmsteads. If they had to venture into villages they waited until dusk, when they stuffed Liir’s mouth with rags and hooded his head so he couldn’t see where they were going. But in the open country, night or day, they left his head bare, and he could tell they were continuing east, picking their way into Gillikin. But how far? If to the Emerald City, they’d need to turn south soon enough. If all the way to Munchkinland, sooner or later they’d meet up with the battle lines of the soldiers of Loyal Oz. They’d have to find a way to break through somehow. Any chance to escape would come in a moment of panic and confusion.

But his kidnappers were seasoned soldiers.

Not any older than Liir was, but hardened in a different way. How can I feel that I belong to a different species, he wondered, not for the first time in his life.

He could intuit no chink of friendship, imagine no possibility of cozening up to his captors. They steeled themselves against that. They didn’t drink. They didn’t joke with one another, even. Most of their days were spent in silence.

Though he’d never been one to consider weeping a weakness, Liir didn’t weep. The contusion on his brow from when he had slipped and fallen against a boulder, unable to stop himself because of his yoked arms—that was a badge of honor. The ache in his thighs from riding, the split lip from that mailed hand across his face—he could taste the blood two or three times a day, as the wound kept reopening with the jolting in the saddle—he treasured these, in a way. Tokens, medallions of his love for his daughter. If the soldiers had him, they might soften their hunt for her. His job since the day Rain had been born had been to keep her as safe as he could.

In some ways, though, he wasn’t functioning well. He couldn’t eat much because of his lip, not to mention the lost teeth in the back. (They’d pulled a couple for fun, to see if he would read the Grimmerie for them, and there had been so much pus and pain he couldn’t talk for two days. At least the sacrificed teeth were in the back, so if he ever had to bite a hand he could at least try. And he still had his beautiful smile, ha-ha.)

His grip on now and then began to soften. The heat brought on mild slips of focus. At times he thought he was being captured by Cherrystone’s men, following that time he’d been stationed in Quadling Country, in Qhoyre. After he’d helped torch the bridge at Bengda, with Ansonby and Burny and the other fellows. After he’d seen the Quadling parents, their own backs sporting wings of fire, slinging their daughter into the water, hoping she might clear the burning oil on the river, hoping she might survive somehow. He wept for that little girl now. He would never know if she had made it, or if he had succeeded in fulfilling his military mission and murdering her and her parents. He deserved to be caught at last, though Cherrystone would be clapping him on the back, rum chap, for a campaign carried out successfully. Liir would make Prime Menacier if he could be forgiven for skedaddling.

Daughters. The girl should have been able to fly above the flaming waters. But who could teach daughters to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.

He once thought he was crossing the Disappointments on horseback, Trism on a mount just behind him. It was dawn, a rimefrost was on the ground, but however Liir twisted, he couldn’t catch sight of his lover.

Other times Liir thought he’d reached the sanctuary of Nether How. The men on horseback around him seemed to shimmer and disappear, and the horses too, and Liir, the scourge of Oz, was continuing alone, on foot. He wanted to sleep against a hill, he wanted to fall into the falling leaves. To melt away the soil as he might melt away a snowbank. To sink into a grave he had burned for himself. But as he lay there in the dappled grass among the sheep droppings, he began to elevate out of his body—maybe he was dying—and he saw an old codger materialize in the trees and look about with a curious or perhaps a guilty expression. He carried the Grimmerie with him. He consulted the book for a moment, closed it decisively, and headed north.

This time Liir shouted out, “You have no right to plant that danger here! Take it back! We don’t want it!”

But the horsemen reemerged and cuffed him silent. He was on a horse, being taken somewhere by men to whom he’d never been properly introduced.

He noticed the jackal moon, sooner or later, and remembered the last time he’d seen it. That was just before he met Candle and fell in love with her, before he met Trism and fell in love with him. The jackal moon was no friend to love. Fall under its spell and look what happens. Your wife never forgives you for giving her a child who must be hidden to survive. Your boyfriend never returns. You have your life, that scrappy thing you keep dragging after you as long as you can. Less visible than the weightless shadow you also drag but oh, so much heavier. You have your hopes for your daughter. You have little else.

Except the damn book.

He turned his head from the jackal moon, unwilling to meet its eye. Cutting it in society. You’ve already had your truck with me. I’m not going to scombre in the snowdrifts for you like a poodle. Look elsewhere, jackal. Hunt up some other jerk. I want no more love and no more regret than the investments I’ve already made.

It was a better day. Maybe more protein in the diet, or his blood was slowly replenishing itself. He was more alert. He realized that by now they must have passed any turnoff to the Emerald City. They’d been weeks on the road, no? They were approaching a range of low hills spiked with the scorched trunks of scrub pine. Maybe torched to reduce coverage for snipers. The Madeleines, probably. So he worked it out. They were coming up near the border between Gillikin and Munchkinland, where the second army of the Emerald City was said to be in fierce hostilities with an Animal contingent roped up by the Munchkinlanders. Though he could read no sign of activity at the moment. Were they going to try to make a run for it, cross the breach of wasteland?

Or maybe hostilities had been concluded, miraculously. It could happen. Wars stop eventually, don’t they? If not in our own lifetimes, surely peace hies into sight for our children?

Around midafternoon on a day of dry, hurrying winds that whipped the first leaves of autumn around the horses’ hooves, the captors stopped. An outcropping of feldspar trusset, sparkling with mica, big enough to be a landmark.

“The cart is supposed to be here,” said the captain.

“It en’t here.”

“You’ll have to go find one.”

His colleague cursed, but two of them took off and returned next morning with a cart and several donkeys looking dubious.

“They’re not talking Animals, are they?” asked the chief abductor. “Fled over the border to escape the war, and passing as stupid beasts?”

“They tell me they’re not,” replied his colleague. For that, the donkeys were whipped with a riding crop to see if they would cry out in Ozish, but they only haw-heed as they bucked.

“All right,” said the captain to Liir. “You have a choice now.”

“I prefer two choices, if you’re offering,” said Liir.

“You can open that book of charms and find a way to make us all invisible until we get across the border.”

“You wouldn’t trust me with that book,” said Liir. “If I could read it at all, I would turn you into shoes or ships or sealing wax.”

“If we don’t arrive within the next few days, the word will go out to take in your wife,” said the captain. “We left her there as an encouragement to you to cooperate, but if you try to escape, the vengeance will be swift.”

“So. That’s one choice,” said Liir.

“The other one is to ingest a little potion we’ve had supplied for us. It will put on you a disguise that will help us smuggle you over the border.”

“A disguise,” said Liir.

“The trouble is, there’s no telling how long it will last,” said the captain. “It’ll probably work itself off in a few days.”

“Do I get to know what it is?”

“You’ll be an Animal. You’ll appear to be dead. We’ll be seeking a mercy crossing to bring you to burial in the land you fought for. The EC brass are cruel but not inhuman; the armies exchange their dead every few days.”

“I’m not sure I can adequately play a dead Animal. I haven’t had academy training.”

“You’ll learn on the job. What’ll it be?”

“I don’t believe I could be much good to La Mombey if I remained a dead Animal for very long. So I’ll risk the disguise, and I’ll go that way across the border. If the sentries don’t believe you and they kill me, well, I’ll be dead already, won’t I? So presumably it won’t hurt a great deal more.”

“I would try the book if I were you,” said the captain.

“You’ve been so kind with advice along the way,” said Liir. “But I can’t read that book. All your labors will be for naught in the end, I’m afraid.”

“We’ve had our job, and it’s almost done. Put the book in its casing, and lie on top of it in the cart. I’m afraid you’re going to have to take off your clothes. You’d look a bit rare splitting out of your tunic and leggings.”

“Oh, I’m going to be something larger than a bread box?”

“Hurry up.”

He did as he was told. The air felt good on his skin. They let him pee as a human, and then helped him climb into the cart. Nakedness among men might once have bothered him for all sorts of reasons, but it didn’t bother him now. He was going to his death in a tumbrel, humble as a deposed king.

The captain cradled Liir’s head in his gloved hand and forced the vial to his lips; he was like a child being given medicine. Elphaba had never given him medicine, though. It had been Sarima, or Nor, or Nanny. Elphaba hadn’t noticed if he was ever sick or dead. The feel of the captain’s strong hand on his scalp and the plug of the silvery flask at his still bruised lips felt almost tender. He could see only fans of golden leaves against the autumnal blue sky. The world was waving him out, cheerily enough. He closed his eyes not to betray his sense of final calm.

“For all our sakes, may this be a safe crossing,” said the captain. The last thing Liir heard. Behind his eyelids, the sun began to blacken in segments, and sound peeled back like a rind, exposing the silence within it.

Above the cart, an old Eagle watched with a steady eye. He saw the donkeys struck with cudgels, he saw the naked man curled like an overgrown embryo. He saw poison administered. He didn’t know this was intended as a temporary death, a coup de théâtre. He hadn’t been able to hear well; hearing he left for his friend the Hawk, who was nowhere near.

When the cart moved, the Eagle waited a while and then made a short circling flight, keeping to a height. He didn’t want to be seen paying his last respects. Liir would have preferred this final indignation to be private, he knew. Liir was like that.

Kynot watched as his old friend, the boy-broomist, began to tremble in his death, and thicken. Liir’s lifeless body didn’t so much disappear as become bloated with something that looked fungal, growing from his limbs, spine, buttocks. The swellings emerged pale, like new mushrooms after an overnight downpour, but blackened as they enlarged. The wounds on Liir’s back disappeared, and that was a mercy, even to an Eagle who abhors sentiment of any variety.

He waited only to see what shape Liir would take in death, in case the information was ever useful to him. One never knew. By the time the Eagle was ready to fly away on his unsteady wings—he was good only for short hauls with longish rests, these days—he recognized Liir as the corpse of a small Black Elephant. The soldiers must have known that was the aim of the liquor, as they pulled from their supplies a silly sort of mash-up of harness and brocade and arranged it on Liir’s back like a crumpled howdah, ruined in battle. Then they took on the aspect of mourning, and raised a periwinkle standard, the sign of request for safe passage.

Go in peace, or something like that, thought Kynot, and flew away.

7.

If Tip has been brave enough to go look for the Grimmerie in Munchkinland,” said Rain, “I’m going to the Emerald City and present myself to the great and powerful Emperor of Oz. If he has the Grimmerie, he can keep it. But if he has my father, I want him back.”

Chistery had only been acquainted with Rain for a week, but he knew her well enough not to doubt her. “Suicidal, but I’ll pack you a satchel,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” said Iskinaary. “Your parents have spent their whole lives keeping you out of the way of trouble. They’ve lived and, who knows, they’ll die for it. And you’re identifying some adolescent martyr impulse in that flat breast of yours? Squelch it, darling, or I’ll squelch it for you.”

“I’m going,” said Rain. “How much good has choosing to be fugitive done anyone? No one has ever stood up to Shell, at least not since the Conference of the Birds. That political gesture should have been only a beginning. Discussion comes next. I’ll bargain with him if I have to.”

“Hi-ho, I don’t think we can be of use in this particular venture,” said Mr. Boss.

“We’re going,” said Little Daffy. “At least as far as the gates of the Emerald City, anyway.”

“Isn’t marriage bliss?” he replied, and went to ready his kit.

“Well, it’s a fool’s errand, and I suppose I’m fool enough to qualify. I’m coming too, then,” said the Goose, but Rain said, “Think again. If you didn’t go with my father when he was kidnapped, you can bloody well stay here. When my mother comes back with the broom, you need to tell her where we are.”

“Chistery can do that,” said the Goose.

“Chistery can’t fly on his old wings. If my mother has the broom and can learn to fly it, she’ll have to catch up to us soon enough. You can accompany her, if you want to accompany someone. And if she doesn’t come back, but something else happens…” She meant, if Tip returns for me, and they all knew what she meant though she didn’t put it into words. “… you can come let me know.”

There was sense in what she said, but Iskinaary didn’t like being bossed around by a schoolgirl. He hissed and rushed at her legs. She batted him away absentmindedly as if she couldn’t bother to feel the pinches.

She was furious at Tip, and fury made a useful source of energy. She’d never known. It was almost fun until she realized that the fury was partly a disguise for raw fear. How could he keep safe? In some ways Tip was more innocent than she was. However hobbled a childhood she’d had, she’d learned to be more wary than he had.

One final time she mounted the steps to the Witch’s chambers. She looked around to see if there was some scrap of something bewitched she might take as a souvenir, in case she never came back. In a wild sense, this was her ancestral home, though she’d never seen it before, and by the looks of things the castle wouldn’t survive the next earthquake. She might never see it again.

She couldn’t find anything worth saving. The dead scraps of beast bored her now. She intended to live among the living for a while longer, so she wanted no huffle yet with bones and bits. “You’re enough for me, Tay,” she said to the otter.

For reasons she couldn’t name, she went up to the gazing globe. It came off the stand easily enough. She held the world in her hands, if it was still the world. “I don’t care,” she told it, “don’t show me another glimpse more, it’s too much.” But she looked again. Was she seeing herself, cold and heartless at last? The face in the globe looked green and leering, mocking. Almost daring her to manage this mayhem. She hurtled the glass bubble out the window so widely that she never heard a crash.

From under a bench she pulled a few baskets. One of them revealed a substantial collection of deer antlers; she left them there. Another had desiccated bits of moss, or that’s what it looked like now; she didn’t want to know. A third had a scatter of spare buttons. Imagine the Witch sewing on her own buttons! Rain clattered the lot all over the floor and left the room with the basket, which was the right size.

She didn’t look back to see if the crocodrilos was rolling its dice at her. She didn’t care.

On the way downstairs she passed a children’s dormitory and went in. Underneath one of the beds was a grey stuffed mouse. Rain put it on her finger for a moment, then slipped it in her pocket.

Next level down, she stopped to peek in at Nanny, who now slept in a library off the reception rooms. Nanny was awake, awake enough, and sat up happily among her pillows when Rain came forward.

“My Elphie, give Nanny a kiss,” she said.

“I’m not Elphaba, Nanny, I never was.”

“That’s a duck. No, I suppose you’re not, or not today. When is she expected back? Off larking I suppose?”

“I suppose.” But Rain had never mastered lying and she didn’t want to lie to Nanny as she left her behind. “She’s not coming back, Nanny. She’s gone.”

“Oh, she’s a tricky one, she is,” said Nanny. “Don’t you fret.”

“I’m leaving now, too,” said Rain.

“If you see her, tell her to hurry herself up. I can’t be doing about the oven any more or I’ll set myself on fire, the way she did.”

“Nanny.” Rain tried one final time. “What did you come upon when you got to the parapet? The day Dorothy threw the bucket of water at her? You were the first one up the stairs, and you never let anyone else see.”

“No, I didn’t, did I,” said Nanny. “I was a smartypuss, I was.”

“But—but what? What was there? What did you do with her body?”

“Little girl,” said Nanny, “you don’t need to worry your head about that. I did the right and proper thing, to save that Liir any more grief. Adults know what to do. What to do, and what to say, and while I haven’t always been the most honest woman in my life, I’m telling you the truth now.”

Rain leaned forward and grasped Nanny’s hands.

“And the truth is this. What I did is none of your business.”

Rain almost hit her.

“Was that you throwing Elphie’s globe out the window, or has that air-bubble Glinda been floating around in her private pfenix again? Never a moment’s peace around here. Child, let me confess something to you.”

Was this it? “Yes, Nanny.”

“I stole a lot in my time. Garters, beads, a considerable amount of cash. A pretty little green glass bottle, once. It did me some good. You have to learn to take what you need. But don’t tell anyone I said so.”

The original Handy Mandy, thought Rain. “I’ve stolen a bit already. Good-bye, Nanny.”

“Good-bye, dear,” said Nanny. “Good-bye, Rain. Yes, I see it now. You’re not Elphaba, are you? But you’ll do.”

They left before dinner, to make it at least to Red Windmill, maybe even to push on to Upper Fanarra. Since the skies were cloudless, the jackal moon would be usefully glary. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, the dwarf and the Munchkinlander, Rain and Tay. On the stony path again.

Iskinaary and Chistery waved from a wobbly wooden porch that looked about to become unglued from the side of a turret. A raft of flying monkeys tossed their jaw-edged spears into the air as a salute. They clattered into the dry moat and blunted, which would give the monkeys a lot of work to do over the long winter, repointing all those blades.

At Upper Fanarra they paused long enough for Rain to scour the weaving collective and single out the tired teenage mother who’d kept smacking her child. Rain offered the babykin the small stuffed mouse she’d found in the vacant dormitory in Kiamo Ko. The infant grinned and gummed it at once. “Tell the mother,” said Rain to a factotum of the clan who could translate, “the mouse is from Tip. From me, a promise that if she keeps hitting that child I’ll come back and wallop the crap out of her. I’m not as nice as Tip.”

Easier going down than up, though hard on the calves. It only took about five days for them to get to the dam where they could cross the Vinkus River. Once again most of the Beavers were out foraging, but Luliaba was still hanging about, minding the mother-in-law.

“Let her go,” said Rain.

“It’s none of your concern,” said Luliaba.

“The little girl said let her go,” said Mr. Boss, baring his teeth.

“I could take you in a bite fight, mister buster,” replied the Beaver, baring her own.

“Let her go,” said Little Daffy.

“I keep her locked up for her own good. She’s a menace to herself.”

They all looked at Brrr, but he didn’t speak. Since the death of Nor he chose his moments more carefully.

Dorothy said, “Let her go, or I’ll sing.”

“Sing away!” called the mother-in-law inside her prison. “She hates that. I do it all day to annoy her.”

Dorothy began that song about plain fruits and majestic purples. The others joined in as best as they could. They sang it twice, three times, four, until Luliaba said, “Stop! I give up. You win. I can’t take that kind of malarkey. What kind of a patriotic song is it that doesn’t even mention Beaver dams? That’s what makes our nation great. Come on out, you old bitch. Your constant carping has set you free at last. What your son will say when he gets home I don’t want to think.”

“He’ll thank you for it,” said the old Beaver, emerging and blinking and twitching her white nose. “He never liked me neither. So, who’s the little dolly who was leading that anthem?”

They all pointed at Dorothy. The Beaver mother-in-law said, “Most disgusting song I ever heard, but it did the trick. You’re a sweetheart.”

“Here’s your coracle,” said Rain, handing her the button basket.

“I hope it floats, but where I’m going, it doesn’t really matter,” she replied, climbing in and rocking it a little. “Hmmm. Sound bottom, near as I can make out. Push me off, honeybunches, and let me go find my sweet Lurline and give her a little love nip on her holy ankle.”

As she rocked away on the vicious water, they heard her begin to sing.

O beautiful, to make escape

And leave this world behind.

Had I to stay another day

I’d lose my fucking mind…

Over the roar of the water they couldn’t hear any more after that, and were grateful for it.

8.

The corpse of the Black Elephant was hauled through the porte cochere of Colwen Grounds and around to the back. Here the ground sloped away, allowing access to some whitewashed stables, clean to clinical standards. All had gone according to plan so far. Various Munchkinlanders helped drag the cart into a stall with a bricked barrel vault ceiling, also white. They kept this place in fine fettle, but that was what Munchkinlanders were like.

Its formal name was Parliament House, though since no parliament had ever been convened everyone still called it Colwen Grounds. The ancestral home of the Thropp family, the place old Nanny had started out in domestic service as Cattery Spunge, late of the spindlemills. Back when she was young Nanny. Or young enough. When she’d been engaged to help raise Melena Thropp, the randy and irresponsible mother of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Shell, now Emperor of Oz.

No one from the Thropp line was here to see Liir return to his birthright at last. And maybe for the best. The humiliation of being a prisoner. What would Liir’s ancestor Eminence, Peerless Thropp, have made of this?

Taking it for a genuine corpse, the palace staff began to prepare the pyre. But La Mombey herself descended into the basements—they’d never known her to do that before—and required the corpse to be rolled over. The book in its sack wasn’t appreciably squished, and she grabbed it with both hands.

“Shall we continue our preparations to burn the corpse?” asked the grounds overseer.

Mombey said, “Do you smell the stench of death?”

“I don’t know what the stench of death is for a Black Elephant.”

“Believe me, you’d know if you smelled it. Hold the torches. It might pull through.”

“Can I take that for you, Your Highness?” asked her handmaid.

Mombey said, “Jellia Jamb, I can carry my own books to school, thank you very much. Don’t you ever touch this one.” She took the book in her arms and stalked away with it. The handmaid shrugged and made a face at the farm overseer. You never knew what Mombey was going to say or do; she was a different woman every hour of the day.

Not so different from the rest of the race of women, though, thought the overseer.

9.

At this point in the early autumn, the waters of the Gillikin River had fallen. Fording the great broad flat was almost a picnic. They were ahead of the seasonal rains by two or three weeks, maybe.

It felt good to be going somewhere again. Maybe I’m just a wanderbug, thought Rain. Everyone I care about most in the world is off and in trouble, and I’m noodling along on the road as if it’s my job.

Tay looked at her almost as if it could read her mind, accusatorily. Everyone you most care about? Hello?

Well, not everyone, she thought. Come here, you. And she carried Tay a stretch.

She remembered the marking stone that had shown a fork in the road, but she wasn’t sure that she had crossed the Gillikin River at the same place where she and Tip had done those weeks ago. Still, after they passed through a couple of fairly prosperous town centers and some dustier cousins, too, they came to a sarcen on which directions were painted, with arrows. Sitting on top of the stone was an Owl.

“Which way now?” asked Dorothy to the Owl.

“Depends, I suppose, on where you want to go.”

“Out of Oz, and the sooner the better,” said Dorothy, and then she recognized the voice. “Why, it’s Temper Bailey. What are you doing here?”

“Relocated after my professional humiliation.”

Little Daffy said, “Oh, that was a rigged case if ever I saw one. You never should have taken it on.”

“I was required under pain of caging.”

“And you’re now a Loyal Ozian?” asked Dorothy. “Have you no patriotism toward Munchkinland?”

“None.”

That seemed to be that. “Well, we’re headed toward the Emerald City,” said Rain.

“If you stay on this road, you’re too far north. You’ll eventually end up in Shiz.”

“No, thank you,” said Rain. “I might be tempted to kidnap Miss Plumbago and hold her for ransom until I get my father back, and I don’t want to stoop to their tactics.”

“Then turn around and find the crossroads in the village you just quit. Take the left road out of town, the one by the ironmonger. That’ll bring you to a high road that joins up with the Yellow Brick Road.”

“You’ve done me a service again, as you did once before,” said Dorothy. “Will you come with us to the Emerald City?”

The Owl scuffled his talons. “You’re going there again? Are you in complete denial ? You’ve picked the wrong support group with this lot. Or what, are you going to ask the Wizard to grant you your heart’s desire?”

Dorothy took no offense. “Well, I’ve come to see you have a point. Concentrating on getting your own heart’s desire is myopic at best. Or just plain selfish. But there isn’t any Wizard anymore, is there? He hasn’t made a comeback?”

“Of course not. I was just testing to see if you’d regained any more of your marbles. I don’t think you did your cause any good, by the way. Being so scatty.”

“I don’t imagine you’ve seen Toto? My little dog?”

“Never met the chap, and have no interest.”

Dorothy crossed her arms. “Temper Bailey, are you sorry you took my case?”

“Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. I’ve lost my home and my family, and my professional reputation. I haven’t been eating well and my pellets are punky. If I’d known you would be coming this way I would have hid in a roasting pan somewhere with a gooseberry in my mouth and a twig of rosemary up my ass.”

“So you won’t join our merry band?” asked Rain.

“You losers?” The Owl hooted. “Dorothy’s gathering another pilgrimage to storm the gates of the Emerald City? In the fine tradition of the Wizard, the Emperor’s going to grant you all your hearts’ desires? Forget it. Besides, I thought the Lion already got his medal for courage.”

“Get out of our way,” said Little Daffy.

“You have no way,” said Temper Bailey.

Mr. Boss stooped down and picked up a stone.

“Stop,” said the Lion. His voice buzzed with catarrh; he hadn’t spoken in days. “He couldn’t help what happened. The Owl was set up just as mercilessly as Dorothy was.”

“If you should come across a Goose called Iskinaary—” began Rain, but Temper Bailey had taken wing.

“If he’s such a crabbycakes, can we even trust his directions?” wondered Little Daffy. “Maybe he’s flying off to alert the authorities we’re coming.”

“Cheeky twit-owl. I should have popped him one,” muttered the dwarf.

“We’re walking into trouble any way we go,” said Rain. “We can’t stop now. Let’s press on. Surely we’ll find another shortcut through to the Yellow Brick Road. If we accidentally detour to Shiz, well, maybe some good will come of it. Maybe we’ll find they’ve taken my father there instead of to the Emerald City, for some reason. We can always take the train, or follow the Shiz Road to the EC. If we need to.”

“You’re still so young,” said the dwarf. “The world is so big, and you always think you’re going to walk right down the middle of it.”

10.

The first thing to return was a sense of smell.

Oh, it was rich. A sense like none he’d ever had before. Confounding, complex, an appreciation of distinctions changing instant by instant. A symphonic approach to odor. Aromas were not separate after all, nor settled. They changed in relation to one another, varying as quickly as the shadows under a young summer tree in a high wind.

He could tell the separate ages of the wood from different pieces of furniture and from the doorframes; he could even tell it was furniture and doorframes before he opened his eyes. He knew about the mothballs in the third drawer down (he could count with his nose) and the relative moments of death of the generations of moths that had immolated themselves around the globe of an oil lamp overhead. He could tell colors too.

Time to open his eyes.

He was lying on his side. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, or whether he’d always been an Elephant. He did remember he was a he, but his name took a little while to return. He couldn’t lift his head and he wasn’t either uncomfortable or alarmed at the situation. He reached to scratch a patch of dry skin, and the mobility of his nose surprised and delighted him, but he drifted off to sleep again before he could question why he might be surprised.

Then again, it’s always somewhat surprising to wake up and be alive again.

A doctor of some sort was shining a light in his eyes.

“He’s going to come around soon enough,” said the doctor. “Ready to have a drink, little fella?” The doctor pushed a cart with a bucket of well water too rich in the riskier algae, but fresh this hour, and Liir drank it gratefully by suctioning it through his trunk and then spraying it into his mouth, which had gone dry as bones and felt in need of a good gingerscotch gargle.

“Can you speak?” asked the doctor, a little man who was standing on a stool. A Munchkinlander physician.

Liir thought he might be able to, but didn’t answer. He needed to remember more before he spoke.

The next time the door opened, a woman came through it. She was taller than the physician by double, with a head of flaxen-rose hair and a stern and loving expression. “They have said you’re making progress, Liir Thropp,” she told him. “I am La Mombey Impeccata, the Eminence of Munchkinland. I should like you to sit up now and pull yourself together.”

He thought about it, and then heaved himself over by rolling back and forth like an old dog. Under the low table on which he rested, the newly installed supports made of tree trunks creaked, and sawdust sifted onto the slate floor beneath the table.

“You ought to be coming out of your stupor now. I calibrated the semblance of death to last only so long. Can you hear me?”

He couldn’t remember why there might be a reason to hesitate, but he erred on the side of caution. He could smell high intention in her pheromones, and duplicity, and mastery, superscribed with patchouli and underlit by garlic chive.

“I need your help and I need it quickly. I have the power of life and death over your wife and your daughter.”

He could smell the lie, but knew it lay soon enough to the possible truth to be important to consider.

“Nothing has been done to you that you cannot outlive, and much good will come your way if you cooperate. We are within striking distance of the conclusion of this sorry war. The quicker you decide to help, the fewer people will fall. The fewer Animals will die. As I have made you a Black Elephant, I can keep you that way, or I can have you shot like the skark you saw my men take down. It’s your choice. Every moment you delay your return to full consciousness and due diligence is a moment that soldiers put their lives on the line, waiting for you. And a moment nearer to the forced repatriation of your daughter, who is after all, going back a generation or three, a frond of Munchkinland, just as you are yourself. Have you any questions?”

He had a few questions, but he didn’t ask them of her.

She turned to leave. He could smell her dress whispering comments of straw brushing along the slate. The soap that had not been rinsed out well four washings ago. He could smell her anger and her cunning. What he couldn’t smell—and, if he’d ever really been a human man, he didn’t recall having been able to smell it then, either—was the lure of power, the attractiveness of it. He seemed bereft of a certain lust for strength and dominance. He didn’t think the lack had pestered him much.

Unless its absence had put his family in danger all too often. There was that.

At the door, she said, “I know about you. Not as much as I will, not as much as I’d like, but enough. I know you have hesitations and you also have capacities. I know you admire the Elephant as a creature and you consider hiding inside. I know about Princess Nastoya and your campaign years ago to release her from her spell. Who do you think she first turned to, all those decades past, for a charm to give her the guise of a human being? Mombey Impeccata, at her service. I am the foremost master of forms and shapes in all of Oz. Go up against me, Liir, and you will see what form and shape of vengeance that I take against you.”

He closed his eyes. He had already died as a human being, and in fact it hadn’t seemed a noticeable effort. If the time came to die as an Elephant, maybe he would come across Princess Nastoya in the Afterlife. Maybe after all this time he might meet up with Elphaba Thropp again, his so-called mother. He could give her a piece of his mind. He could give her a great thumping with his trunk for being such a bitch.

He smelled time passing as he slept, and learned as he slept to smell it in minutes and hours as well as in warmths and darknesses.

Then he was stronger, and more Liir, more aware of himself as the old Liir inside the Elephant skin, though a changed Liir in ways he still couldn’t smell. There’s a reason we live in time. We are too small a flask, even as an Elephant, to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to allow only moments of apprehension. Moments diffuse and miniature enough to be survived.

The door opened again. Now that he was more aware of hearing, he tried before turning his head to hear who it might be. The little physician? The maid, Jellia Jamb? Or La Mombey herself? If La Mombey, could he smell her as a blonde, or as a Quadling with that plaited dark hair like Candle? Or as a chestnut-coiffed karyatid with lilacs and turquoises in her headpiece?

He didn’t believe what he smelled, so he rolled over and turned his head. His eyes were the least strong of his senses so far, but he strained to focus as well as he might.

The man stood at the door, light glaring around him. The Elephant’s eyes stung for a moment, and so tears stood, but they were tears of ocular pain and adjustment, not of emotion. Not on Liir’s part, though maybe on Trism’s. “Is it you, or is it another of her tricks?” asked the Elephant’s old lover.

Liir might have asked the same, if Mombey had used a semblance of Trism to trick Liir into a confidence, but his nose was strong enough to tell this was Trism, no disguise. He remembered the smell of every follicle root, every breath, every fold and crevice, every secretion and hesitation. The sight and the knowledge took Liir’s breath away, but when it came back, his voice came back with it.

“It is I,” he said, “more or less. Rather more, I should guess. I mean, I’d actually gotten wiry since I last saw you, up until recently when I seem to have put on a few pounds.”

Trism closed the door. He came across the room, but stood outside the range of Liir’s waving trunk, which was raking in ten years’ worth of nasal history, satisfying the longing Liir had so long denied himself the right to feel.

“Why are you here?” asked the Elephant.

Trism drew himself up. He’d gone thicker. A barrel cage for a chest instead of a butter churn. Still, he’d maintained his military trim, a strong stomach and tight waist, and his bearing was all that the Emerald City home guard had taught him years ago.

But he was working for the enemy.

Depending on who was the enemy.

Trism answered quickly enough. “I came over, I fled Loyal Oz after—after you know what.”

“I don’t entirely know what.”

“After we torched the dragon stables in the Emerald City, and we fled by night,” he said. “After we became lovers for a moment. After I followed you to that farm—”

“Apple Press Farm.”

“I remember its name. You weren’t there. After all that.”

All that might have happened with or against Candle, all that she had never told Liir about, never spoken about.

After all this time, though, here stood Trism. If Candle had preserved her feelings for Trism as her own secret, Liir found he had uncovered new reserves of patience to let those feelings remain unknown. Perhaps another skill of Elephants that we so-called humans would be wiser if we could learn.

“You left, under whatever circumstances,” said Liir. He hadn’t moved off the table since he’d been put there, and he was rolling in his excrement, that which the helpers had not been able to reach to scrape away. There was so much of interest to smell in manure, but in any case, Trism didn’t seem offended.

Liir tried to work his huge pie-plate front hooves to the floor, to close the gap that Trism still maintained.

“You left,” said Liir, “and you went over.”

“They were always looking for you. As soon as they’d figured out who you were. You were behind the flight of the Birds, and the Emperor sorted that out easily. And of course Cherrystone knew what the Emperor knew. They put us together soon enough, you and me, and they had me followed, hoping I’d lead them to you. They thought I couldn’t resist your charms enough to save your skin.”

“I was never very supple, but I seem to have sidestepped them a good many years running.”

“Yes, and sidestepped me.”

“I didn’t know where you’d gone, Trism.”

“And you had a wife. You told me about Candle but you never told me about a wife. You had a wife and a child on the way.”

Liir supposed Trism had a point. “If it makes any difference to you, I didn’t know she was my wife at first. Though that’s a bit of a story to explain.”

“I remember. She told me once. You think I have ever forgotten a scrap about you? A single blessed word?”

No, Liir didn’t think that, not any longer. He could smell that it was true. “But why did you come here? If I could go underground in Oz for ten or fifteen years, why didn’t you?”

“Can you fathom what they did to me, looking for you?” Trism didn’t know which of Liir’s Elephant eyes to look into; you couldn’t look into both at once. Then Trism turned around and raked up his tunic and dropped his leggings to his knees, and bent over the sideboard with its medicines and the scrub brushes. His behind was still high and beautiful, if puckered on the flanks of it, and Liir reached forward and caressed it with his nose, traced its cleavage. But then, as Trism rolled a little onto his right side, Liir saw that his mate was not baring himself for mortification or attention. The skin on the forward side, from the second rib down to his left calf, was vitrified pink, hairless as a boiled ham.

“Cherrystone did this,” said Trism, and pushed Liir’s attentive nose away and dressed himself. “Under the Emperor of Oz, your uncle Shell Thropp, Cherrystone did this to me. Cherrystone. Do you think I would stay in Oz where I could be caught again? Slowly peeled away with hot knives? Until I had decided to seek you out and lead them to you, betray you to protect myself from being shaved like a carrot? I’m lucky this is all they took off.”

“You did that for me,” said Liir.

“Don’t look for satisfaction. None of us knows why we did what we did back then. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing now. And I’m here to ask you to listen to Mombey’s request, and help us.”

Liir listened. His ears were big enough now to hear anything.

“Your uncle, taking a leaf out of the old tricks of one of his predecessors, the Wizard of Oz, has been launching an attack on the Animal armies, which have been pushed entirely out of the Madeleines into the Wend Fallows. Another foothold in Munchkinland, see. Shell has ordered the construction of small-scale aerial balloons filled with light gas. He’s sending them over the hills to explode upon impact as they descend. The panic is immense and the Animals are close to scattering, or worse yet, surrendering. If we lose the Wend Fallows, the EC Messiars will be in Colwen Grounds in a matter of days, and it’s all over.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised the Animals didn’t scatter at the first chance.”

“Many of them remember their parents having to flee Loyal Oz a generation ago, under the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws. They harbor an old grievance, and when Animals fight, they fight fiercer than humans. But few creatures, human or Animal, will fight to the death to defend the honor of a dead generation. So the strictest of Mombey’s human commanders are in charge of the Animals, and the Animal conscripts receive a more merciless punishment for going AWOL than I did.”

“The Animals are an army of prisoners, effectively.”

“Indentured mercenaries. But without pay. You said it. And when those prisoners finally panic and break loose, the bedlam will not be believed. We’re in the final days of this war, one way or another.”

“So why have you brought me here?”

“It wasn’t my idea. Mombey brought you, to read the book to us.”

“I still don’t understand. How are you involved, then?”

“You remember my original training in the Emerald City? Your mother long ago had given the Wizard of Oz a page from the Grimmerie, On the Proper Training and Handling of Dragons. I was the chief dragonmaster. I trained those dragons who attacked you years ago, the ones we later slaughtered before we fled.”

“I remember. Trism the cute dragon mesmerist.”

“When I left Loyal Oz, I carried with me the secrets of the trade. It’s hard enough to secure a dragon’s egg and raise it to life, and keep it alive—dragons don’t like Oz. Oz is too wet and full of life for them. Dragons are desert creatures. But a few years ago Cherrystone got his hands on a clutch of eggs and managed to raise them to maturity. The creatures were to be used in the attack on Haugaard’s Keep.”

“I heard about that,” said Liir, though he didn’t understand that his daughter had been partly responsible for slowing the attack. “Do you remember Brrr, the so-called Cowardly Lion? He told me what he knew about that campaign. He was in the vicinity when it happened.”

“I never met that Lion.”

“The dragons were destroyed, I understand.”

“Not all of them. One of them escaped, and it was found tending its wounds on the banks of Illswater in the south of Munchkinland. It was captured by Mombey’s people, brought north, and stabled not far from here. It yielded a clutch of eggs a short time later. They came to term.”

“With no male to fertilize them? Capable dragon.”

“There is much we don’t know about dragons.” Trism still had that I’m-older-than-you tone, Liir noticed.

“So you’ve raised the baby dragons up, you traitor dragonmaster.”

“I have indeed,” he said. “And not a moment too soon. They’re ready to go. But Mombey knows this is her last chance. She can’t risk their failure. The dragons have to do the job right.”

“She’s not one for letting things slide? Just my luck.”

“She’s been smart about keeping the Munchkinlanders focused and fired up. That show trial of Dorothy happened in the nick of time, as interest was flagging and recruitment was off, what with the endless stalemate. The arrival of Dorothy and the attention paid to her trial helped Mombey corral her first battalion of Animals in a single week.”

“The conscription of Animals was promoted as defense, but really she needed to open a new front in the war. I see.”

“Yes. General Jinjuria had lured Cherrystone in Haugaard’s Keep but forgot to figure in the cost of keeping him under siege there. She can’t knock him out of Haugaard’s Keep; it’s said to be so well fortified that he has imported a barge full of dancing girls and a craps game that goes on all night. He’s running a fucking resort there on Restwater. He keeps Jinjuria guessing and occupied. And she can’t rush what’s left of her forces up to the Fallows. Something’s got to give, and soon.”

“So you’ll use the dragons to attack Haugaard’s Keep.”

“If you can help, we’ll use the dragons to attack the Emerald City.”

He had said it. Liir turned his head and looked at Trism with the other eye, to see if his first eye had missed something. “There are civilians in the Emerald City.”

“There are civilians in both armies, too. At least they were civilians before they were drafted. Look, if we can strike against the Emerald City hard enough, we might be able to pull Cherrystone and his floating vacationers out of Haugaard’s Keep; they would be recalled to defend the Emperor. Munchkinland could retake Restwater and offer a truce. How many civilians’ lives will have been saved then?”

“A lot of ifs, I suppose.”

“With your great schnoz, can you smell possibility in this plan?”

It was a shame to say that he could. So he didn’t say it. He just looked at Trism. They had both grown old enough to have learned how to ignore the needs of individual lives for the purported good of the lives of nations.

Trism knew him still; he saw what Liir was thinking; he threw himself against where Liir’s arms would be if Liir had had arms; Liir wrapped the shattered stranger in his trunk and held his best beloved tight.

11.

Perhaps they ought to have followed Temper Bailey’s advice, because the track they chose to wander along faltered and lost itself in a small but confounding wood. The leaves were beginning to change, the lavender of pearlfruit and the red of red maple and the gold of golden maple. The tarnishy tang of fox musk under the jealous snout of the jackal moon, who wanted to be down there with them—it was all a glorious adventure. But they were lost and doing no one much good.

“We’ll find our way out tomorrow,” said Dorothy. “I think there’s some song about that. There ought to be.”

The next morning they woke up even more lost. A bank of fog canted from the warmish earth into the chilling air, rather thicker than what they might have expected at this time of year. It wasn’t only visibility that gave out, but also sound. Stifled. A clammy tightness seemed to filter through the lower branches, as if the air was congested. Any leaves much above head level dissolved into a pale ruddy glow.

“You stay close to me, Tay,” said Rain.

“Shall we sing to keep up our nerve?” asked Dorothy. No one bothered to reply.

Then Brrr paused and said, “I know what this is. Or I think I do.”

He had spoken so seldom recently that they were all surprised. They waited for him to continue.

“I saw this once before, this trick of atmospherics. When I was hardly more than a cub. I think this is the Ozmists. But what are they doing so far south? We can’t have wandered off course so badly that we missed Shiz and entered the Great Gillikin Forest? That’s where they live, as I understood it.”

“Not a chance,” said Mr. Boss, who of them all had traveled the widest in Oz, and for the longest time. “We’d’ve had to cross the rail line to the Pertha Hills, and we never did. So we’re still west of the forest and west of Shiz. Though whether we’re heading south still or have veered some other way I can’t say in this swamp of wet tissues. Anyhow, I never heard of any Ozmists. Who are they? The essence of royalists gone to ground, literally, and their appetite for the crown seeping up?”

Brrr spoke with more urgency than he’d shown for weeks. From this new danger, a new capacity for governance. “Listen. If something comes over us—everyone—listen carefully. You must not ask them any questions if you don’t have something to tell them in return.”

“But Ozmists,” demanded Rain. “We don’t know about them.”

“They’re particles of ghosts, I think,” hurried the Lion, “ghosts who can’t congeal into anything like the individuals they once were. Fragments of rotted leaves in a puddle never coalesce into living leaves again. Listen, once I saw a friend lose his way in life by forgetting to give them news. You see, the Ozmists exist—it’s not living, but it is existing, I guess—for their future. Their future, which is our present. They hunger to learn what they couldn’t know in life—and they might answer a question if we chose to ask it. But our question can’t be about now, for they are dead and don’t know now. Now is what they’re hungry for. Our question must be about something in the past that they might have knowledge of—this is important, pay attention! Or you’ll pay too steep a price.”

They heard the tremor in his voice; it was their old Lion, forceful and worried for them, herding them together. They gathered into a circle, and even as he spoke a cloud of sparks seemed to shimmer with its own fulguration, an orgy of lightning bugs packed into a space the size of a stable.

“Hang on,” said Brrr. His voice sounded far away to them though he was right there; they were all right there.

They hung more than stood in a void not like the world. For a while they couldn’t see their feet or paws or hands, just their profiles, like dolmens rendered flat and brooding by soft weather.

Then the Ozmists greeted their audience, just as the Lion remembered it, in one voice, though indistinctly. The way a single head can have a thousand overlapping shadowy profiles if a thousand candles are placed about it. Barter, chuntered the Ozmists.

The companions waited for Brrr to answer for them. Would he have the courage? It took a moment. Or a week.

“I know about barter,” replied Brrr. “What do you want to know?”

Is Ozma returned to the throne of Oz?

“She is not,” said the Lion.

“Not as far as we know,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, we haven’t had news of the Emerald City”—she heard the Lion fake a cough and she amended her statement in time—“not the Emerald City, of course; but we know that Munchkinland is fighting strong to remain independent, holding the line at Haugaard’s Keep, holding the line at the Madeleines, keeping faith with the Glikkuns to the north, and sweeping the poison sand off their thresholds at the desert back door.”

The Ozmists seemed to take a few moments to absorb this considerable punch of news. Where is Ozma? they answered.

“It’s our turn to ask a question,” said Brrr. Rain tugged at his mane to quiet him, but he wouldn’t be silenced. “Where is Nor?”

“No, Brrr, don’t,” whispered Mr. Boss. “Don’t do that.” But the question had been asked.

The Lion waited as the lights spiraled, not unlike the waltz of corpuscles that sometimes trickle across the surface of the eye.

“Where is Nor?” asked Brrr again, more firmly still. “I know how this works. I’ve been here before. We’ve answered your question. Now you answer ours. You can’t hold out on us.”

There is nothing of Nor here, came the reply.

“She isn’t dead? But of course she’s dead,” murmured Little Daffy.

We consist only of the appetites that would not die, the Ozmists churned. There was nothing of her left that wanted to know more. This is how it is with some deaths. We know little more about where her spirit is than we know about the lives of the living. We are caught in the middle by our lust for answers. We are the part of Oz’s past that cannot give up its hope for the present. That is all.

“Since you ask about Ozma,” said Rain, “then it follows that she isn’t there with you. But perhaps Ozma, like Nor, has passed into nothingness. She was only an infant when she was killed. She could have no appetite for the present; she was too young to know the difference between past and present and time to come.”

She never passed through us, said the Ozmists. It is believed here that she has not died.

“She’d be a thousand and eighty,” said Little Daffy wonderingly.

“No one is that old, except Nanny,” said Rain.

“Baby Ozma might have taken an omnibus to hell. You Ozmists aren’t the only filter to the Other Side,” said Dorothy staunchly, in that bullishly public voice she sometimes had.

If there could be said to be a pause in a hissle of ghostly fragments, there was a pause.

“What happened to my parents, then?” asked Dorothy. “If you’re so comprehensive? They died at sea, in a boat going to the old country. It sunk, and that was that. Where are they? What did they want to know about me? I don’t believe you have a thing to say about it.”

The Ozmists had nothing to say about it. Neither, noticed Brrr, did they pester Dorothy for news. Perhaps they didn’t want to know about the Other Side that Dorothy hailed from. Even ghosts have their limits of tolerance.

“Tell us about Elphaba,” said Rain.

Barter, said the Ozmists, a sense of relief in their voices.

“The head of St. Prowd’s, Proctor Gadfry, has gone for a soldier.”

That’s of no significance to us.

“It is to him, and it’s his history,” said Rain. “Unless he’s died and is with you now, it’s as significant as anything else. The history of this war hinges on what every single person alive chooses to do or not to do. Now tell me about Elphaba.”

Still they resisted. Clangingly, silent-noisily, dark-lightly.

Rain said, “Okay, my great-uncle Shell is Throne Minister of Oz. He is Elphaba’s brother. That’s current events, up to the minute. But we can’t find out what happened to Elphaba Thropp, my grandmother, once Dorothy threw a pail of mucky water at her. She’s been dead and gone almost twenty years, I’m told. Why is there no evidence of it?”

When the Ozmists spoke, they were cautious, even a little apologetic.

In all of history, of most human lives, there is no proof of passage, they said, neither coming in nor going out. Don’t be offended if someone you love has left no trace. That doesn’t mean they were absent in their own time.

“So you’re going to be coy about it too?” asked Rain. “Figures. Useless phantoms.”

You think that someone with the capacity of Elphaba Thropp would let us gossip about her, even if she were here in our midst? In life she paid no attention to the rules of the game. In death she’d not suddenly go corporate.

“So she’s not dead? Or is she?” asked Rain. But this they wouldn’t answer.

You strayed at the stand of four beeches, several miles back, they said, relenting.

“I don’t remember four beeches,” said the Lion.

We’ve been moving while we’ve been congregating. Ghosts can’t keep still. You won’t find the beeches again. But keep the stream on your left and you’ll soon be on the right track.

“And what track is that?” asked Dorothy.

To the future, they said, wistfully. And, you? With the shell?

“Yes,” said Rain.

Blow it once, they said.

She did. It had almost no sound in this cloaking paleness, but the Ozmists took on a glow like that of lights in water, a wetter look. A blueness, as of heat lightning.

If you need us, blow the horn for us, they said. We will come if we can.

“Why would you do that? I’ve given nothing to you. It’s all about barter, isn’t it?

You give news even when you don’t open your mouth. What you’ve given to us is for us to know. It is enough. There is no balance due.

“Hey, what about Toto?” Dorothy thought to call out. “Is he a phantom dog now, romping about with you?” But the Ozmists were lifting and would not reply.

The world they left behind—the commonplace world of now—felt a little more tightly pulled together, as in a blackout between scenes of a theatrical piece stagehands rush on and plump the pillows. Each glowing rotting leaf on its trembling stem stood out to be counted.

Rain looked, noticed. She did not count them.

“Really, we got precious little out of that but a chill,” said Little Daffy, rubbing her forearms. “Anyone for a pastry, to get the juices flowing again?”

12.

The Black Elephant had regained the native strength that elephant musculature and armature allow. He was standing on all four legs in the sunlight outside, being washed with buckets of water and scrubbed toward ecstasy with long-handled brooms. The sun smelled of everything in the entire cosmos. His eyes were closed and the water was paradise, was better than air in his lungs and beetles in his bowels. But his ears heard the commotion when a boy was escorted into the yard. The newcomer was tied and bound and laid on the back of two yoked Wolves running in tandem.

Liir didn’t think he was intended to see this miscreant’s arrival, but the Wolves were thirsty for water after their hard run, and they made straight for the buckets from which the Elephant minders were working. And Wolves have little regard for hierarchy even when the hierarchy is La Mombey. They let foot soldiers and garden boys and Jellia Jamb pull the lad off their backs as they slavered up the water meant for Liir’s capacious backside. The Elephant trumpeted in their faces but they paid him no mind. Not the first ones to do so.

La Mombey came out on a balcony above him. Liir could smell that her face was more puckish, like the rosewater face of a maid over a counter of chocolates. Younger, fuller. He could smell the pink in her cheeks, augmented by powdered sugar mixed with dust of sun-dried and pummeled red grape that had come into season four and a half weeks ago, on the sunnier side of some slope fed by iron-rich aquifers. Oh, to have a nose.

“You dare to come back?” shouted Mombey. “Or you are fool enough to be entrapped? Answer me, don’t make me stand here waiting.”

The boy—half boy, half man, like the rest of us, thought Liir, forgetting for a moment he was actually an Elephant—rolled onto his knees and stood up with an enviable elasticity. Ah, to be young, too. Though maybe the lad had been treated relatively better than Liir had. The boy dusted himself off and said to the Wolves, “You did your job and you managed to avoid eating me. Fellows, my commendations.”

“Answer me,” bellowed Mombey.

“I went on a bit of a walkabout,” called the arriviste. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, and I hope I haven’t made trouble. I was on my way back to accept my sentence already when your Wolves recognized me and insisted on ushering me home. Find a prison deep enough for me, a chore too hard to survive, and I’ll endure it for as long as I can. I’ve learned I have no place out there without you, and I accept my punishment as the price of what I’ve learned.”

A stinking bouquet of lies, and Liir almost tromboned his laughter at them; but he noted Mombey’s caught breath, and he thought, She loves him so much she is unwilling to believe he might be lying. Smart as she is, she can’t see a lie from this kid.

“You had me frantic,” said Mombey. “I thought you’d been kidnapped so someone could barter with me for your release.”

“Who would kidnap your boot boy?” His voice was innocent but scornful. “Would you kidnap someone just to get advantage?”

“You shall pay for your mistakes,” she said, but her voice was full of joy; no revised countenance could disguise that. “Sir Fedric, Sir Cyrillac, you have done your duty well. A year’s liberation from the effort of the war for you and all your kin.”

“We are a randy pair,” said Fedric, and Cyrillac nodded. “We are related to every Wolf in your army.”

“Then a year’s liberation for you and your wives and cubs, and let that be enough.”

“Thank you, Your Eminence,” said Fedric, and Cyrillac added, “We are not of a monogamous bent, and we have between us married every female we know and sired every cub younger than we are.”

“It’s the wolf in us,” said Sir Fedric, modestly and without shame.

“Then a year’s liberation for you two alone, and if you make any other conditions, a year’s incarceration for dragging this conversation out.”

The Wolves nodded and skulked away like dogs that have been scolded.

“Tip, come up here,” said Mombey. “Come into the house and let me see that you are all right.”

“Hi, Tip,” whispered Jellia Jamb, waving one hand and biting a nail on the other.

Liir’s nose followed the boy as he made his progress to a flight of stone steps on which the servants were spreading spittlegreek and lavender to dry upon an oilcloth. Liir could smell that Tip had the brush of Rain on his lips. For the safety of the boy, in whom he could smell no honesty but no menace either, and for the safety of his daughter, Liir held his tongue, but his nose was primed for more salient information. Had he come across this lad once before? Liir’s nose had a better memory than his brain.

As Tip was succumbing to Mombey’s embrace, Trism appeared from around the conservatory. He noticed—for he was no fool—the rapt attention that Liir the Elephant was paying to this reunion. Before Trism could say anything, though, before the yard could clear, an Owl flew down from the corner of the building and landed clumsily on the drying lavender, clouding the air with the scent of old ladies’ water closets.

“Abysmally bad timing,” said Mombey to the Owl. “I’ll take no report out here in the open.”

“As you wish, my liegitrice,” said the Owl. A more obsequious creature Liir had never met, either as Elephant or man.

But he heard what the Owl said before the final shutter was pulled. Liir’s nose might be more magnificent but his ears were also as large as palmetto fans. “I found her on a road west of Shiz, but I lost her in a sudden and puzzling fog. When it lifted, I studied the road to which I had directed them, where your spidery agents were waiting to apprehend them. But somehow the travelers slipped through the unseasonable weather, and I lost—”

“Indeed you did,” Mombey said, and there was a sound of something not quite a whip, not quite a mousetrap, but something iron and deadly. Liir heard no more from the Owl after that.

When the yard had cleared, and the maids put away their brushes, and Liir had come to accept that no one would scratch his rump again today in the way that gave him joy, he turned to look at Trism, who had remained.

“Tip?” said Liir.

“Her factotum,” said Trism.

“Her son, it must be.”

“No one knows. He was lost and he is back. This means she will move immediately into action. The dragons are ready. The only hold against our striking earlier was whether she might inadvertently be putting him in danger, not knowing his whereabouts. If the boy is back, and secured, any remaining prohibition against an attack has been lifted. You’ll be propositioned tonight. Mark my words.”

“Propositioned. Hmmm.”

“They’ll ask you to confirm that the spells I’m trying to cast through the arcane language of that solitary page of the Grimmerie are accurate. They’ll ask you to examine the book and refresh the spells, refine and intensify them, with any other charm that you can find. It’s why you’ve been brought here. Only your mother showed any real skill with that book; everyone else has fumbled and failed with it. Even Mombey is dubious about reading it. She will promise you something real, and she’ll keep her promise, if you help her bring down your uncle.”

“That boy knew my daughter,” said Liir.

“You must put that sort of thought aside. Perhaps you can survive long enough to be a help to your daughter again.”

“I have been no help to her at all. Ever.”

“Get ready for what they will ask. They’ll ask only once.”

“Will you love me whatever I say?”

“No. I don’t promise that. I may have made my own choices, for my own reasons, but I won’t love you unless you make your own choices, for your own reasons. That’s the bargain of love.”

A man and an Elephant, talking about love, and neither of them shamed. What a world I’ve come up through, said Liir to himself. Oh, what a world, what a world.

Trism knew about which he spoke. By the light of the jackal moon Mombey came into the garden behind Colwen Grounds, where Liir had been allowed to graze. She presented herself as a woman of gravity, with a furrowed brow and silvering hair, and she walked with a cane, but she hadn’t gone so far as to concede to a wrinkled neck. Trism walked four feet behind her, his head down, his eyes cloaked, his hands clasped, trying to be as remote as possible in the presence of an Elephant who still loved him.

“We will launch our attack by dawn,” La Mombey said. “Will you help?”

“I can tell by my sight, my smell, and my hearing that my family is not here. Beyond that, I don’t know where they are,” Liir replied. “Naturally, I can’t help you target anyplace they might be, and they might be anywhere.”

“What if I told you we know where they are? Both of them?” said La Mombey. “Your wife and your daughter? And they would be spared? What if I gave you proof? Would you help us then?”

“It doesn’t matter that your proof could be false.” He stood firm on his big Elephant feet. “You’ve also targeted places that harbor any child who is not mine, and I find no difference between them and a child who is mine.”

“With your proboscis, you can’t smell the difference between your own kin and someone foreign?” she said, laughing.

“With my proboscis,” he said, “I can smell that there is no difference. I will not help you.”

He didn’t have to bother to say that he believed the skill to read the Grimmerie, just as the tendency to be born with green skin, might skip a generation, the way corrupted thumbs skipped in the northern Quadlings, or obesity in certain fruit flies. It didn’t matter. He turned from Trism, who was wringing his hands; he turned from Mombey, who was drunk with elation. “Ready the fleet,” she said to her dragonmaster. To Liir, she said, “You have sealed your own doom by your refusal to assist in this campaign. Count your final moments.”

“Trism, no,” said Liir.

“Mercy on your soul,” said Trism to Liir.

“Mercy on yours,” replied the Elephant, without malice, only heartache.

13.

With the advice of the Ozmists, Rain and her companions managed to avoid Shiz entirely. Unwittingly, they also sidestepped the cohort of jumbo shadowish spider-thugs Mombey had sent across the border to apprehend them. The travelers approached the capital, just another clutch of private citizens set roaming by wartime hysteria. Rain hadn’t known what to expect of the EC. From a distance, it looked seven, nine, nineteen times more immense than the university city of Shiz.

Dorothy proposed that they make their way into the Emerald City via the great squared archways known as Westgate. So the companions stopped to take stock on the graveled slopes outside the city walls, where travelers arriving from the West were required to unroll their Vinkus carpets, lay out their satchels for inspection, and present papers of introduction if they had serious government business. Rain was daunted.

So were her friends. “It’ll be impossible to find a kidnapped man in this canyon of towers,” said Mr. Boss. “Tall buildings, begging your pardon, dwarf me.” He looked dubious. He’d never dared risk bringing the Clock of the Time Dragon through any of the gates of the capital, so the EC was one district of Oz about which he was entirely ignorant.

“I’ve come this far, but I don’t know as I’d be welcome farther, being a Munchkinlander,” said Little Daffy. “Sadly, I have no state secrets to sell to the Emperor of Oz. Only curious cupcakes and the like.”

Rain turned to Brrr.

“Well, I’m with you,” he said. “I’m not bailing.”

“But aren’t you still wanted in this town?” Rain asked him.

“Yes, I had a prison sentence converted to a civilian assignment, to find the location of the Grimmerie and report it, from which I went skipping away five or six years ago. And yes, some magistrate or another might remember. But I’d venture everyone has other matters on their minds these days.”

“You must be mad,” said Rain. “Back then, you were one of the centerpieces of their campaign to locate the Grimmerie. You failed to bring it in. You can’t risk showing your face here. You’d never get out alive.”

“Nobody does,” said the dwarf. “You’ll have figured that out by now, sweetheart.”

“I’m going alone,” said Rain.

“You can’t go alone,” said Brrr. “We can’t let you.”

“I’ll go with her,” said Dorothy. “It’s safest for me. Anyway, I remember this place. I can do the Emerald City. I’m older now, I’ve been to Kansas City and San Francisco. We can find our way together.”

Rain turned on her. “Not on your life. I’ll need to be circumspect. You couldn’t be circumspect even with your mouth tied up in muslin bandages.”

“You know, I used to like you people in Oz a lot more than I do now,” replied Dorothy. “Time was I could just open my mouth and people would be quiet and listen. Now it’s just jabber jabber jabber, shut up and sit down. Well, too bad, Rain. I’m coming with you.”

“But you’re Dorothy,” said Rain. “You make a spectacle of yourself just by how you stare at things so deeply.”

“It’s called astigmatism and it’s correctable with lenses but they got crushed in the landslide in the Glikkus. As far as I’ve ever heard, it’s a free country, Rain. So I’m traipsing along. I’ll promise not to sing and I’ll go buy a shawl from one of those vendors. We’ll get by just fine. I can be your big sister. You can call me Dotty.”

The dwarf and the Munchkinlander looked at each other. “Dotty. It has a certain legitimacy,” said Mr. Boss. Rain gave up.

Dorothy found a shrub to hide behind as she wriggled out of her skirt. She turned it inside out. The several kinds of cloth used to patch and line it were unmatched and worn. Suitably seedy. “We make do in Kansas,” said Dorothy. The reversed garment helped conceal that look of dirty glamour a tourist can bear. Draped in a rough grey wool shawl, Dorothy could almost pass as a peasant milkmaid from the Disappointments—one who has somehow avoided rickets and malnutrition due to fierce inner strength.

Meanwhile, Rain had always managed to mosey along without attracting attention even though she’d been hunted her whole life long. She said to Dorothy, “You better carry the shell. I don’t want Tay disappearing into the crowds,” and she drew Tay up into her arms.

“Heavens, not that,” agreed Dorothy. “If Tay is anything like Toto, you’ll be dropping the avoirdupois chasing after him. I’d have always preferred a French poodle, frankly. Though I’d never tell Toto that to his face. It would ruin him.”

Rain said good-bye to the Lion, the dwarf, and the Munchkinlander. “We’ll make up a plan as we go along,” she said. “Maybe Dorothy will be an asset after all.”

“Maybe this time,” sang Dorothy, but then restated that without musical expression.

“Rain, are you sure about this?” asked the Lion. He seemed to have shrugged off some of his distractedness following the death of Nor. The congress with the Ozmists may have set his mind at rest—whatever else might be said, Nor was no longer suffering. Anywhere. Now, Brrr could look with beaded focus and a certain concern at the girls standing before him.

Rain shrugged. “Dorothy might be able to get an audience with the Emperor. She once saw the very Wizard of Oz himself, even though he was a recluse. Few can say they ever did that.”

“Indeed,” said the Lion.

“She might be able to find out if they are holding my father. She might be able to strike a bargain for his release. I’ll keep my head down. I promise. We’ll just look about. We’ll see what we can learn, and we’ll come back. Will we find you here?”

The Lion said, “Rain, when thunderheads are about to open, it’s hard to say which way anyone will run. Think about it. Various thugs hunted your parents down in Apple Press Farm. You yourself had to flee from Mockbeggar Hall. Then someone found out about Nether How. Now your father is hauled away from Kiamo Ko. The only place you’ve ever stayed unmolested is the Chancel of the Ladyfish above the Sleeve of Ghastille. Should we get separated, remember our plan to leave messages there. Weighed down by that question mark horse-stone. All right? Agreed? But I promise you this, we won’t leave here unless we have no choice.”

“There is no safe place in Oz, is there,” said Rain.

“There is no safety anywhere,” said the Cowardly Lion.

Those to stay behind took their leave in a formal fashion, like parents departing from their scholar daughter in the reception room at St. Prowd’s Academy. As the storm clouds gathered—literal, heavy rain clouds, the seasonal burst approaching at last—Rain and Dorothy and Tay turned to slip among a large group of foreigners come for market day, some plains Arjiki and some Yunamata froggy-folk. Together Dorothy and Rain passed under the massive carved transoms of Westgate. Through which so many years ago (but how many?) Dorothy and the Lion, the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow had originally emerged after their famous interviews with the Wizard of Oz, their instructions firmly in hand: to march to the castle at Kiamo Ko and kill the Wicked Witch of the West.

Dorothy didn’t remember the names of the thoroughfares that interlaced the vast city, but once they reached the knoll of a public park she identified the towers of the Palace in the distance. “That much hasn’t changed,” she promised. “It was called the Palace of the Wizard when I had my several audiences with him, and just as I was leaving Oz last time around they were talking about renaming it the Palace of the People. But it doesn’t look any different. A Palace is a palace.”

Rain barely listened to Dorothy’s prattle. She was trying not to be daunted by the weirdness of it all. Not the buildings—what meant buildings to her, really? The statues on their plinths, the great crescents of fine houses, the iron railings and the pushcarts, the monumental stone tombs of art and commerce. Rain was more aware of the people. So many. Who could ever make a collection of so many people?

When they passed one of the market squares, it was life as Rain knew it, people squabbling for food, bargaining over prices. But the trestle tables set up under bentlebranch arbors offered small choice, and more to the point—Dorothy saw this too—the vendors and the shoppers were predominantly female. An occasional elderly bearded man in green glasses, carrying a blunderbuss; that seemed the police force and the minister and the army, the whole local patriarchy all at once. Schoolboys, to be sure, and toddler boys nearly indistinguishable from toddler girls, and genderless babies. But men the age of her father? Absent.

“We wouldn’t want to start our search for your father in Southstairs, would we?” whispered Dorothy.

“The prison? I hope not,” replied Rain. “Let’s go directly to the Emperor. If we can’t get in to see him by dint of one trick or another, you can reveal yourself as Dorothy.”

“What if that doesn’t cut the mustard with him?”

“You can warble him into submission. Or I’ll come forward and claim the Emperor as my blood relation. What is there to lose now?”

Dorothy bit her lower lip. “As I hear it told, you’ve spent your whole life on the run from this man. It seems a dicey strategy to go up to him and holler a big ole Kansas howdy.”

“Yeah, well, running in place hasn’t gotten me very far, has it. I’m tired of skulking through my life. We’re facing the music.”

“Do you think your father would help the Emperor use the Grimmerie against the Munchkinlanders?”

Rain said, “Don’t ask me a question like that. There are so many ways I don’t know who my father is.”

Dorothy was silent for a while. They made their way along a canal colonnaded with cenotaphs celebrating various Ozmas of history. A dead cow floated by, and even Tay wrinkled its nose. “The city has seen better days,” said Dorothy. “I have to add, though, I don’t know who my father was, either. Really. Lost at sea and all that. Makes you wonder what any of us knows about who we are.”

Rain hadn’t taken to Dorothy, and she didn’t think she was about to start now. But she reached out and squeezed her hand. She had learned to touch people, a little, by touching Tip, and Dorothy was a stranger here. Stranger than most.

It began to sprinkle. A smell riled up from drains that had gone too long untended—the municipal workers all having been called to the eastern front, probably. The city was hard to navigate. They ended up in a place called the Burntpork district and bought a few rolls to eat, but had to give them to Tay because they were too hard. “I’ve come this far, and I keep losing my way,” said Dorothy. “Let’s try that sloping bridge over the canal; it looks as if it carries a funicular, or maybe it’s an aqueduct. It’s heading vaguely upslope, so it has to get us to the higher ground of the city. We make another misstep and we’ll plunge into the sinkhole of Southstairs and be stuck in prison the rest of our born days.”

By midafternoon, tired, they found the forecourt of the Palace, or one of them. “Is this it, then?” asked Dorothy.

“Yes, I think we’re ready.”

The Kansan turned to the Ozian. “You know, if we’ve played this wrong—if the Emperor wasn’t the one behind the abduction of your father—we’re in for big trouble. You know that.”

“It’s a risk I’m ready to take. Are you?”

“The Munchkinlanders tried and convicted me of murder,” said Dorothy, “so if I’m a villain on that side of the border, I should be welcomed as a heroine here. How do I look?”

“Don’t forget you killed both sisters of the Emperor.”

“Yes, there is that. Perhaps I should switch my skirt around again.”

But it was too late. The door of the military offices of the forecourt opened. A bleary stooped man with only one leg wheeled himself out and examined a clipboard, and then looked at the two young women standing before him.

“Miss Rainary?” he said in a dubious voice.

“Proctor Gadfry,” said Rain.

“I take it you’ve fled Shiz like everyone else,” he said. “I can offer you no succor here. You’re looking for a certificate of matriculation? Go away. St. Prowd’s statute of limitations has expired until after the war. Or has my tyrannical sister sent you here to pester me? I have more than enough to do than see to the mess she’s made of all our hard work.”

“Proctor Gadfry,” said Rain. “You went to battle.”

“And battled till I could battle no more,” he said, flicking one wrist toward where his absent knee should be. “I’m lucky to get a sinecure here until hostilities are concluded, one way or the other. But I was expecting a coven of downscale marsh witches who want to file a protest about something that happened about twelve thousand years ago. You’re not with that group?”

“I have brought someone,” said Rain. “To see the Emperor.”

“Hah. Go away.”

“A visitor named Dorothy Gale,” said Rain. “A friend of mine.”

Dorothy curtseyed a little clumsily and almost lost hold of the shell, but then turned and smiled at Rain with an expression both soft and fierce. It was the use of the word friend. Rain dropped her eyes.

“I see,” said Proctor Gadfry, sizing up the situation for how it might be used to his own advantage.

Her uncle Shell. Her great-uncle Shell. The Throne Minister of Loyal Oz until he named himself Emperor of Loyal Oz and its colonies, Ugabu and the Glikkus and Dominions Yet Unrecorded. And eventually the Emperor had declared himself divine. Quite the career path.

Hard to know exactly how to prepare to meet the Unnamed God, thought Rain. Especially when he’s given himself a name and he’s related to me on my father’s side.

Dorothy and Rain were brought to a dressing chamber and asked to change into simpler robes. Then they were escorted into a parlor that showed no signs of being the worse for wear due to the long war. Fresh prettibell spikes arched against the burnished leather walls, and an aroma of arrowscent and pickled roses issued from braziers set in brass wall brackets. The windows were draped with lace worked over with scenes from the life of some Ozma or other. The visitors had to take off their shoes to stand on the patterned carpet, which felt like moss on its first day.

“I am Avaric bon Tenmeadows,” said a gentleman with a pince-nez and a silvery whirl of mustache. “I will direct you on proper comportment for your audience with His Sacredness.”

“Are we meeting His Sacredness all by itself, or are we actually meeting him?” asked Dorothy. “I just wanted to ask,” she sidelined to Rain, who was shushing her.

“Enter with your heads covered and do not remove your veils until directed by His Sacredness. Do not speak until you are spoken to. Do not turn your back on His Sacredness—when instructed, you will leave the room by walking backward, heads covered, eyes down. Mention no subject with His Sacredness that His Sacredness does not introduce. Ask for the blessing of His Sacredness in your life past, present, and to come. Ask for the mercy of His Sacredness in considering your petitions, if you have any. You will have about ten minutes. Have you any questions?”

“Well, it reminds me what it was like with the Wizard,” said Dorothy. “There must be a rule book everyone follows, generation to generation.”

“All this fuss. It reminds me of the visiting Senior Overseer at St. Prowd’s,” said Rain. “I hope His Sacredness doesn’t douse himself with water.”

“No, not that party trick,” agreed Dorothy. “Had enough of that one!”

“I will retire through this near door. When the far door opens, that’s your sign to approach,” said Avaric. “You will proceed through it. But before I go, Miss Gale, may I be permitted to make a personal remark?”

“No one’s stopping you, far as I can see.”

“I want to thank you for your service to our country,” said Avaric. “I knew the witches of Oz, those Thropp sisters. We were well rid of them.”

He clearly thought of Rain as little more than Dorothy’s retainer. Fair enough, thought Rain. A few more moments of anonymity in this life—let me treasure it before it’s trampled to extinction.

The far door swung wide. Obeying Avaric’s instructions, the pair of visitors made their approach to His Sacredness, Shell Thropp.

He didn’t sit on the throne, an impressive carved chair capped by an octagonal canopy chained to the ceiling with golden links. Rather, he squatted upon an overturned bucket. Three small tiktok creatures, narrower and more locustlike than the round brass figure Rain had once seen in that shop in Shiz, moved around in the shadows behind him, performing devotional measures with fans and also seeing to the flies, which were everywhere.

A man about fifty, maybe. He didn’t wear the glorious robes of office, just a humble sort of sackcloth loin rag and a skirt. A beggar’s shawl about his shoulders. His eye was keen and his form sleek despite the initial impression of poverty.

He said, “His Sacredness never knew those women very well. Nessarose Thropp, Eminence called Wicked Witch of the East. Elphaba Thropp, miscreant called Wicked Witch of the West. His Sacredness lived with them in the Quadling badlands when His Sacredness was young. His Sacredness’s sister Elphaba was born with infirmities. His Sacredness’s sister Nessarose was born with infirmities. His Sacredness himself was born whole and clean and is the Emperor of Oz and Demiurge of the Unnamed God.”

There didn’t seem to be a question yet, so they just waited.

He said, “His Sacredness sits on the bucket that was used to kill His Sacredness’s sister Elphaba Thropp. It represents to His Sacredness the loss of the living water of grace. A loss that will be reclaimed once the battle for dominance with Munchkinland is completed and Restwater is permanently appropriated as the basin of water to cleanse and to nourish the suffering citizens of Oz’s capital city.”

Rain saw Dorothy peer at the bucket to see if she recognized it, but Dorothy just shrugged at Rain. A bucket is a bucket.

He said, “Both of the sisters of His Sacredness were removed from life by the hand or the hearthstone of Dorothy Gale, leaving the Eminenceship of Munchkinland open to question. Therefore His Sacredness offers gratitude to the visitor. She delivered unto His Sacredness the rights to Eminenceship of Munchkinland. This moral privilege underpins and sanctifies the military effort to subdue the traitorous Munchkinlander rebels. For that reason has His Sacredness deigned to extend the right to an audience with His Sacredness. His Sacredness is aware of certain Munchkinlander accusations against Dorothy. His Sacredness proposes the publication of a divine testimonial clearing Dorothy of all suspicion of malfeasance in the matter of the death of his kin. The certificate.” A tiktok minion rolled forward holding a salver upon which lay a scroll bound with a green ribbon and a clump of sealing wax. Shell handed it to Dorothy.

He put his hands together in a tender way. His eyes never left Dorothy’s.

He said, “His Sacredness allows that the visitors may now retreat. Go with the blessings of the Unnamed God conferred through this avatar on earth.” Only now did he close his eyes, in acknowledgement of his own immortal splendor.

Rain said, “But we’ve come to find my father.”

The chirring of the tiktok acolytes wheeled faster, as if spinning out disbelieving air from their metal lungs. A stench of hot oil spilled from some gasket with a slipped ring, maybe. Shell, her great-uncle Shell, said nothing. It was as if Rain hadn’t spoken to him but perhaps to his machinery.

“We have come to barter,” she said, but she wasn’t sure to whom she was talking. Maybe not the man nor the tiktok-niques but to the empty throne itself behind them.

“You don’t barter with God,” said Shell, in a quiet voice, not deeply fussed at the breaking of protocol. Most likely he could see that his visitors were young and foolish. “Go now. I am tired and I am waging a war in my heart. Only if I win it in my heart can it be won in the land, for I am the blood of Oz itself. I am its sacredness and I am His Sacredness.”

Rain felt cornered by sacredness.

She knew her great-grandfather had been a unionist missionary to the Quadlings, trying to convert them. She knew her great-aunt Nessarose had inherited his convictions and institutionalized them in Munchkinland, a theocracy overturned only when Dorothy arrived the first time. She knew her great-uncle Shell was divine, or divine enough.

On the other hand, of her grandmother Elphaba’s convictions she knew nothing. And while Liir had expressed admiration for the courage of independent establishments of outspoken maunts like the place Little Daffy had come from, he had perpetrated in Nether How no ritual of prayer, no theological discussion. And Candle’s faith was limited to herbs and intuition.

So Rain had avoided the questions of devotion, mostly. The concept of an Unnamed God was too much for her. If you’re abandoned by your parents, do you hunt them down to love them more deeply, or do you learn to do without? If the Unnamed God has gone to ground leaving no forwarding address, why bother to pester him?

Still. Rain had had just enough schooling at St. Prowd’s to be able to think for herself. It would take a pretty talented godhead to infuse itself in a single person as the living essence of the land—the very Ozness that made it be Oz. If this were really true, then what would happen to Oz if Shell Thropp, Emperor, happened to get a splinter in his naked heel? And die a week later of a rude infection that refused to acknowledge the divinity of the foot it blistered?

“You are too great for me to know who you really are,” she admitted. “But I know something of who I am. I am the daughter of Liir. I’m told that I’m the granddaughter of Elphaba. I’m your great-niece. My name is Rain.”

“She’s also the rightful daughter of Munchkinland,” Dorothy interrupted. “If I’ve got the line of succession straight, and I’ve been keeping track, the Eminenceship of Munchkinland descends through the female line. So the nearest female relative of the last ruling Eminence has preference. That would be my friend Rain here.”

“I don’t care about that,” said Rain. “I only want to know if you have taken my father. Your nephew, Liir. Someone kidnapped him and made off with the Grimmerie. We have come to secure his release.” She rephrased that to be more docile. “I mean, to beg for his release. Humbly.”

The divine Emperor looked just a little annoyed. “I don’t barter with human lives.”

“You attacked Munchkinland when I was eight,” said Rain. “Human lives tend to be involved in military attacks.”

“His Sacredness has consternation in his heart. Go away.”

Dorothy drew herself up. “Look, you. I know what I’ve done and not done. I have no need of your certificate of forgiveness unless I ever meet up with Toto and in all the excitement he has an accident. He’s not a puppy. A convenient roll of testimonial parchment could come in handy just then.”

“His Sacredness has a headache. Do go away.”

“You’ll have more than a headache when I get through. When I arrived first time I came in a house that smashed your first sister. Before I left I threw a bucket that splashed your second sister. Is it time for me to take care of you, too? As I was preparing for my encore, I brought down a good deal of San Francisco with me. I arrived from heaven in a gilded elevator cage right down the side of a mountain. I’m getting pretty good at this. I can bring upon your holy kingdom an entire downtown district of hearty commercial buildings. Just try me.”

A pretty bold bluff, Rain thought, but it may not work on someone like Shell, who has lived in power for so long he doesn’t remember what it’s like to be powerless.

Dorothy clasped her hands together and prepared to break her promise not to sing. Rain motioned to her, don’t, don’t. Dorothy filled her lungs with air and, consumed with trust in the conviction of sweet melody, fixed upon her countenance an expression of mighty choral readiness. La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Great-uncle Shell, you’re not the only one who’s become deranged by power, thought Rain.

As the tiktok characters ran for cover, the door of the magnificent salon opened up, and Avaric bon Tenmeadows rushed in. “What is the meaning of this?” he cried.

Dorothy opened her mouth and began to sing about rainbow highways and raindrops and storms. Awful lot of rain in there, thought Rain. The thunderclouds broke overhead at the same instant, a tympanic accompaniment to the sound of Dorothy’s voice. When she reached the end of her musical preamble and paused for breath before launching into the melody proper, the thunder roll was deteriorating and another mounding behind it to take its place. They realized that it wasn’t only thunder overhead.

14.

The autumn clouds covering central Oz had screened the approach from the east of the dragons trained by Trism bon Cavalish. Maybe their arrival over the Emerald City had kindled the lightning and signaled the thunder. Or maybe it was only the meanness of the Unnamed God, allowing fire and destruction to rain upon the capital under the guise, initially, of an ordinary cloudburst.

In the sudden darkness, Rain and Dorothy ran for cover. They followed the tiktok acolytes until, one by one, the tiktokery exploded their glass gaskets due to barometric anomalies, spinning out on the marble floors, knocking over the plinths of fresh flowers. The girls didn’t know if Shell was behind them, but they could hear the man named Avaric calling to someone, so perhaps he was leading the Emperor to safety.

“Don’t go outside,” they heard Avaric’s voice yell, but Dorothy was freaked by the sound of collapsing buildings. “We’ll be crushed in this damn place, a mausoleum in the making,” she yelled at Rain, and grabbed her hand. “It’s this way, I’m sure. I’m pretty good at directions.”

“How do you get out of Oz, then?” screamed Rain, with a touch of hysteria of her own. Was her father here in this roar of tumbling stone, or was he safe somewhere else? Or, anyway, safer?

Dorothy’s sense of the architecture of the palace wasn’t quite what she advertised. They ran through a long, slightly bowed corridor of steep arches, like the hollowed-out chambers of a lake nautilus built on a scale for giants, and they came across Avaric approaching from the other direction. He was leading Shell by the hand. A contingent of palace apparatchiks and staff huddled behind them.

“The city is under attack,” Avaric told them.

“And I’m just warming up,” said Dorothy, assuming a performance pose.

“Don’t!” cried Shell.

“Where is Liir?” demanded Dorothy, going up to the Emperor. “Where’s that damn book? Tell us, or I’ll go into a reprise.”

“We haven’t got him,” said Avaric. “Not for lack of trying, but the enemy must have got to him first. Do you think they could unleash this havoc without his assistance? Mercy, girl; the city is falling. Don’t make it worse.”

Dorothy took a breath, then closed her mouth. “Well, all right then. But I’m warning you.”

“We can see the buildings collapsing,” said Avaric. “The Law Courts is flaming rubble. Look, there’s a passage from the Palace directly to Southstairs Prison. We’ll be safer from assault from the sky if we’re underground, and Southstairs is nothing but underground. Come; we owe you that much, child of Liir. Come with us.”

“If my father isn’t in prison, I’m not going,” said Rain. “I’ll take my chances outside.”

Avaric said, “On your own head, then. We can’t wait. His Sacredness must descend to the safety of the megalithic tombs, to emerge in triumph when the aerial assault is over.” He began to beetle away, and the fragments of court society that had continued to gather in the corridor flooded after him.

Shell, in his humble garments, stood his place a moment longer. “Rain Thropp,” he said. “I never had daughter nor son of my own. I took many a woman but never a wife, as I couldn’t find one suitable for my ambitions. His Sacredness does not have a wife.”

“You’d better hurry,” said Rain, as the thunder gathered again.

“Your right to the Eminenceship of Munchkinland supersedes mine,” he concluded. “Your being my only living female relative also consolidates in you the right to be Throne Minister of Oz, as the historical line of Ozma is severed and dead these five decades. Should I fail to emerge for reasons of transcendence, it is your throne to accept, your scepter to grasp.”

She didn’t answer. She grabbed Dorothy’s hand and they ran away.

The guardhouse had been hit. What had been Proctor Gadfry Clapp lay in pieces, his other limbs severed and spread out from his chest as if hunting their missing brother leg. Farther out, poorhouses had collapsed, and the corpses of men too frail to have gone for soldiers were already being laid upon the streets. Something called the Ministry of Offense was in flames. It was hard to value the relative sounds of terror: that of the thunderous clouds, from which dragons stitched down like great herons gaping underwater to gobble up terrified minchfish, or that of response from the ground, where buildings shuddered, and the trapped and the shocked and the grieving and the terrified wailed with one voice.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Dorothy. “Back to Westgate, back to our friends.”

But there was a child who’d been jettisoned in a tree, somehow, and Rain said, “We can’t leave that infant there.” Its mother in the dirt with her skirts over her face, dead, and the baby carriage on its side, wheels still spinning. “Tip wouldn’t let that child loiter in branches.”

They claimed the child and placed it in the arms of a woman who was rushing somewhere with a barrel of melons; she took the baby without comment and hurried away.

At the Ozma Embankment the girls came upon a bevy of ladies who had flung themselves into the water to escape the first wave of flaming parcels dropped by the dragon fleet. In their big skirts they couldn’t clamber out. Dorothy and Rain yoked themselves together and pulled, but unless the women conceded to abandoning their finery to the ashen water and climbing up in their petticoats, they would remain only floating lily pads in a pond that reflected skies of lightning, gold fire, and scudding clouds. The women bowed to the urgency of the moment and allowed themselves to be rescued, and hurried off, giggling, as if public nudity were a greater scandal than the fall of the Emerald City.

Rain hadn’t seen dragons since her efforts, with Lady Glinda, to call winter upon the water. She remembered the creatures with some affection, but she wasn’t as inclined to admiration now. The beasts swooped from the clouds with a malice she couldn’t have imagined. She didn’t know if from Munchkinland her father had used the Grimmerie to focus their attack, or if the climate of storm from which they emerged had terrified them to fight harder. She couldn’t tell what they carried in their claws and what they dropped, but all about the Emerald City explosions burst as large as torched trees—like trees turned into flame, a central trunk of impact from which limbs and arteries and fringed hems of fire bloomed instantaneously.

The dragons and their detonations would do more than bring down the government, if they hadn’t managed that already. They would slaughter every living creature in Oz.

Only then did Rain realize that in the welter of panic she had lost track of Tay. “We have to go back,” she told Dorothy.

“We can’t,” said Dorothy. “Tay will find us.”

“Like Toto?” said Rain. “Come on.”

“Tay is smarter than Toto. Not that it’s hard to be smarter than Toto.”

Rain was no hero, she was no saint; she knew that. It was no lost child hanging from a tree branch, no dead school administrator in pieces on the ground that pitched her mind to thinking of a solution. It was the loss of Tay, her silent companion. She couldn’t bear to lose the rice otter, not when she’d lost so much else. Over and over again, the losing.

She stood on the edge of a schoolyard of some sort, amid some children’s rusticated ramps and gymnasial fretwork, and she said to Dorothy, “Give me the shell.” Dorothy obliged without comment, for once. Rain said, “I don’t know if this will work, but it can’t hurt.” She lifted the shell to her lips and sounded a call as long and hard and intensely as she could.

When Rain had finished, Dorothy supported her to keep her from falling over and passing out from the effort. “The Ozmists?” asked Dorothy.

“They said they’d come if they could. And they’re already dead, so how could anything harm them? The dragons have cover from the clouds; perhaps the Ozmists can provide cover from the ground.”

No one hurries for history, not even ghosts. The Ozmists emerged slowly, evincing themselves more as a kind of cloaking odor at first than anything else—the laundry sweetness of freshly prepared shrouds—but they did come.

On the first day, the lower districts of Oz saw shreds of white tendril coalescing as thin filmy fountains. They appeared to emerge from the cobbles, and before long they joined to form a low canopy about four feet above the street. The air beneath was breathable, and survivors searching for water or for the bodies of their kin could safely make their way—squatting, hunched, lurching from the well to the lean-to and back again.

The maw of the high-security prison, Southstairs, open to the sky, and the Burntpork district, and the corn warehouses beyond the military garrisons near Westgate, and the taverns of the so-called Quadling Quarter—that is, the haunts of the downtrodden—were hidden first. Properties on higher ground, the Mennipin Squares, the government houses, the theater and opera circuit, remained exposed. They took their beating by the dragons, who had apparently been taught only to attack what they could see. The dragons had no power against the poor and the lowly as long as the poor remained properly invisible, which suited the poor just fine, this once.

On the second day the Ozmists strengthened. More of the Emerald City was protected, though the assaulting dragons sounded fiercer because frustrated. But people will pick themselves up and go about the next day’s work, whether it be hunting for potatoes or looting in the rubble of Mirthless Neddy’s Ruby Exchange. A cadre of Palace ministers stormed the doors of St. Satalin’s Nook for the Criminally Insane, recognizing it as the safest spot to convene a crisis government, in case His Sacredness the Emperor of Oz proved undivinely mortal. The criminally insane, however, threw them out, saying they already had their lives under control as well as could be expected, thank you very much.

Before dawn on the third day Brrr found Rain sleeping under the steps to a bridge on the Ozma Embankment. “Why didn’t you come back to us?” he said, nosing her awake.

“I knew you would brave it if I needed you,” she replied to him, putting her arms around his neck. “But how did you find us?”

“Tay came and led us here,” said Brrr. And there was Tay, hanging back, green as a goblin’s hoard, whiskering now up to Rain’s ankles.

Rain told the Lion she didn’t believe her father was in the EC; the attack coming from the east must prove he and the book had been abducted by the Munchkinlanders.

“So we’ll go there,” said the Lion. “No?”

“Not yet. There’s too much to do here.”

The Lion didn’t reply at first. Then he said, “Well, tell me what to do.”

“I have no plan. Never did. But if Munchkinland is winning this war, their army will enter the city before long. We’ll wait and greet them when they come. If the Grimmerie is important enough to La Mombey, she’ll bring it with her, and she’ll bring my father with it.”

“Any day we wait might be a day she takes his life,” said Brrr.

“Any day we wait might be—” began Rain, but she was fully awake now. Dorothy was rousing from under a greasy tarpaulin of some sort, yawning. The first work beckoned—finding breakfast for those children living under the steps on the far side of the bridge. So Rain’s reticence kicked in. “Where’s Little Daffy? And Mr. Boss?”

“They’ve come forward, despite their apprehensions. She’s liberating decoctions from ruined apothecaries and administering them as best she can. And she’s bossing Mr. Boss around to help her. We’ll meet up with them later, if we survive the day.”

“We’ll survive this day,” said Rain, grinning. “The Ozmists are strengthening daily, don’t you think?” It was true. As the day advanced, the mist thickened. It made travel difficult but also safer in some ways, and the sound of attacks from dragons was limited to ever more circumscribed neighborhoods.

On the fourth day Candle arrived by broom, accompanied by Iskinaary and the venerable old Eagle named Kynot. She found Rain at the edge of the Ozma Fountain, rinsing the sores on what was left of the legs of a teenage pickpocket. Rain hardly looked at her, just handed her mother a roll of bandage and explained what needed to be done. Only in the evening, when Candle crowded under the bridge with Dorothy, Rain, the others, did the daughter learn what the mother had done. But Candle brought out her news slowly, cautiously.

“I remembered that Nor could learn to fly the broom as a young woman,” said Candle, lying on stones, her eyes closed and one palm over her forehead, the other palm tucked into Rain’s two hands. “I thought: maybe the ability to fly isn’t given just to the young or to the talented, but to the needy, too. In any event, if I couldn’t fly on the broom, I thought you might. I found the thing and I mastered it. Well, let me be honest. I didn’t master the art of flying, but I managed it.”

“You managed,” murmured Rain, apprehending the feel of her mother’s palm but almost asleep herself. “How did you know how to find me?”

Candle said, “But that’s the intuition. The seeing the present. You may have it too, someday, if you don’t have it yet.”

“I can’t see my own toenails,” said Rain. “Too tired.”

“Tomorrow we’ll start in Quadling Quarter,” said Little Daffy to Mr. Boss. “There’s a nasty rash flushing up on the hindquarters of the squelchy-folk that I don’t like the look of one bit. We’ll boil up some unguent in that copper laundry tub you nicked from the kitchen yard of Fancy-Pantsie House or whatever it was called.”

“Never marry a dominatrix,” said Mr. Boss, and he rolled over to snore himself silly.

“Have you heard what has happened to your father?” whispered Candle, once everyone else had gone silent.

Rain tried to find in herself some capacity for knowing the present. All she could know of the present was exhaustion. “I have not,” she admitted.

Her mother sat up. “Ready yourself, Rain.”

“I’m never ready for this,” she replied. “But tell me.”

Candle spoke carefully, drawing each phrase from her mouth like a rounded stone she could set down in a line, barely touching the next. “An old friend. Saw your father. Bewitched into a foreign corpus. And die on a cart. That Eagle named Kynot. He broke with the habit. Of Birds. To stay aloof. He sent out word. To let me know. For Liir had been an honorary Bird once. Before you were born.”

“What can Eagles know?” whispered the haunted child.

“Liir was born a bastard. He flew as a Bird. As an Elephant he was hauled across the border into Munchkinland. He has died inside that skin. I’m afraid this is so, dear Rain. I cannot see it otherwise.”

Rain wept a little. The tears were hard as ice. Dorothy sat up, eyes closed. Her shoulders shook just a moment, and then she sleep-hummed a tune of mourning or condolence, something that seemed to provide her some comfort. Perhaps for once her melody comforted the others, too. Though Rain didn’t expect to sleep, she drifted off holding her mother’s hands, dreaming of her father’s hands.

The shreds and selvage of a life, her own or her father’s—she couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

Iskinaary kept a vigil by the bridge, his eye for Liir dry.

By the fifth day there was nothing left for the dragons to attack but the great dome of the Palace of the Emperor. It alone rose above the bank of Ozmists that had saved the City of Emeralds from annihilation. As the sole final target of the dragons, the dome suffered tremendous damage, though not as much damage as the pickpocket, the proctor, the laundress or the nursery orphan. It never collapsed upon the palace, but it remained scarred and defiant in the fog of history.

Midday, the dragons were called off. Almost immediately the Ozmists began to thin, but not to disperse. At dusk on the fifth day, La Mombey entered the Emerald City triumphant. A pack of nearly visible spider-thugs on their furry scrabbling stems surrounded her gilded sledge, which ran along the drifts of silted ash as neatly as if they were drifts of snow.

To Call the Lost Forward

1.

Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows, was waiting in front of the Bureau of National History to meet La Mombey’s conveyance. The Emperor had given him the dirty job of emcee at the armistice negotiations. At first he wore the sneer of a playground monitor. Well, the place was a shambles. No one had taken a broom to the city yet. The piazza was littered with fragments of marble Ozmas. The sound of trumpeteen and brass-flummery, though shrill, inadequately masked the muttering of the mingy crowd.

It’s a loser’s job to broker the conference, thought Brrr, who peered from behind a toppled column. How surprising that they didn’t offer it to me.

The Lion was looking out for signs of Liir, on Rain’s behalf as well as his own, but the Lion wasn’t eager to be recognized by Avaric. Later, Brrr would hold his tongue when people said of the Margreave that through the truce negotiations he had comported himself with a deference to the Eminence of Munchkinland that seemed little short of concupiscent. Such is the shame of the lawyer. Avaric, they whispered, had never managed to be that fawning even before His very Sacredness, the divine Emperor of Oz.

Which comment, true or not, attached itself to Avaric for the rest of his life and made public dining at the Oak Parlor in the Florinthwaite Club a bloody pain in the arse.

La Mombey alighted in uncinched bell-curves of pure white linen dropping from the shoulder. The mob of spider-things clustered about her with the devotion of bloodhounds until she clicked her fingers, and then they rolled themselves up into bobbins and an assistant swept them into a casket. Once they were gone everyone breathed a bit more easily.

The Lion watched carefully. He’d always possessed a decent eye for detail. He saw how Hiri Furkenstael might have treated the pomp of the occasion. How a student of the School of Bertius might have handled La Mombey’s bib, freely suggesting its pale mink tippets and its appliquéd off-white lozenges inscribed with sigils like letters in a foreign script.

He was memorizing the moment so he could tell his companions about it. How the pale beautiful woman appeared as a smudgy blankness, almost, among the colored leaves of those ornamental shrubs and trees that hadn’t been blasted by shrapnel. Something about her so—so lambent and concealed at once. Floating amid the blur of dissolving Ozmists, or was that sentiment clouding his eye? How to put it?

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off. From his place near the ruined Hall of Approval, the Cowardly Lion watched the impossible happen: Loyal Oz falling to the upstart Free State of Munchkinland. Words would fail him, later on.

La Mombey paused so Avaric could approach her. In rounded public tones she summoned the Emperor of Oz to join her for a discussion of the terms of peace. Then her voice dropped, and Brrr couldn’t hear what else was said. After she retreated to her sledge, Avaric stood nodding and bobbing till it slid away. He turned almost at once to where Brrr was hunched behind broken stone. Apparently not hidden well enough, then.

“Sir Brrr, Namory of Oz,” called Avaric. Naturally, thought Brrr, the only time my title is used in public is after the throne that conferred it has collapsed. Figures. “I see you there. I need your advice.”

Brrr prowled up to the man who, once upon a time, had arranged the Lion’s plea bargain and brought him into service of the Emperor’s secret agencies hunting for the Grimmerie.

Avaric spoke as if they’d just fallen in step somewhere in Oz Deer Park or along the Shiz Road. “A propitious time to return to the capital. Now that the army of Animals can lay down its—teeth. But I see you didn’t personally drag in the sledge of La Mombey.”

“I’ve done enough menial toil in my day. That foursome of Tsebras managed an elegant enough job of it without me. Oh, are you implying I’ve arrived as part of a conquering army? Me? How droll. As if I was ever on the winning side. Really, you flatter me.”

Brrr was glad the crowd had melted away with La Mombey’s departure. No one was close by to hear Avaric reply, “You were assigned to discover the whereabouts of the Grimmerie and you never returned. It’s not for me to prosecute you, but I’ll remind you that you jumped probation as set by the magistrates of the Law Courts—”

“One might wonder if those resolutions have been nullified. Given that there’s about to be a new administration in Oz. Anyway, the Law Courts are in recess just now. I passed what was left of them on my way here.”

“Exactly so,” said Avaric. “Leaving other matters aside, I need your help. I can tell by your bedraggled state that you’ve been out and about on the streets of the city. Tell me what you know. What building left standing might be large and dignified enough to house the teams that will work out the conditions for a ceasefire? The Palace is intact, or most of it is, but it might seem ungracious to invite La Mombey in for tea only to have the central dome collapse upon her.”

The Lion thought for a moment. “Well. The People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics is closed for business. That’s out. The Lord Chuffrey Exposition Hall, which had such beautiful light, now has beautiful shadows. But I think the Lady’s Mystique, that small theater on the edge of Goldhaven, is still standing. And what luck—I’ll bet the afternoon matinee has been canceled.”

“Too small, and too—theatrical. The Emperor will need room to be at some distance from La Mombey. Space around His Sacredness.”

The Lion eventually suggested the Aestheticum, a circular brick coliseum of sorts, long ago roofed over for trade shows. A place where antiques vendors displayed their wares—fine art, and the more collectable of historic furniture. He had once cut something of a figure among the great and the good who ran the Aestheticum, back when he had fancied himself a connoisseur. In exchange for any lingering obligation to the Throne Minister of Oz, current or future, to the extent that the Margreave could plead his case, the Lion agreed to make arrangements. “Deal?” asked Avaric.

“Deal,” said Brrr. “Though I suppose it would be overmuch to request an elevation of my title?”

“To Brrr bon Coward, Lord Level of Cowardly Custard and Environs?” Avaric hadn’t lost his capacity to sneer. Brrr realized he’d gone too far.

“Well, tell me this then, because everyone’s asking,” he countered, as much to change the subject as to hear the reply. “Shell Thropp has shown little love for the people he ruled all these years, the people he’s driven into war and ruined. Why is he yielding to Mombey’s aerial attack? It can’t be concern for massive civilian death or the destruction of the Emerald City. Can he really have begun to fear for his own life? Isn’t he immortal?”

“He’s the sort of immortal who will live eternally after his corruptible human sleeve—his shell, as it were—succumbs.” Avaric could talk political theology as smoothly as if he were discussing the point spread in a wager over the gooseball playoffs. “I suppose you know that his real name, the name given him by his unionist minister father, is Sheltergod?”

“And my real name is Birthdaysuit—” the Lion began, but Avaric cut him off.

“The name reflects a sentiment that some spark of the Unnamed God burns within us all. His Sacredness may have determined that he received the lion’s share—”

“Well, he sure got mine, because I harbor no god within me. It sounds like worms. One would need castor oil, or dipping.”

“—but in the panic of La Mombey’s attack, and in sure and certain fear of an insurrection by his own followers, he has been called to yield.”

“Who called him? Who gets to place that call?”

“Now you’re being snarky. He called himself, of course. Are we done?”

The Lion walked away. He didn’t mind sashaying this time. So God talks to himself. Just like the rest of us do.

All the vendors had taken off during the first of the attacks and by now were either dead on the road amidst shreds of their favorite paintings or were lingering in some summer home waiting to hear news from the capital. The Aestheticum was boarded up. After some pounding and a couple of roars the Lion managed to raise attention at the loading dock. The thrice-bolted door was opened by that clubfooted society hostess from Shiz, Piarsody Scallop, with whom, however inanely, the Lion had once been paired in the press.

“I haven’t got room for another postage stamp,” said Piarsody, but when she recognized the Lion, she added, “especially from you,” and tried to close the door. Her clubfoot got in the way somehow, and Brrr barreled past.

“I’m not negotiating art, either purchase or sale,” he growled.

“You’re the only one in the city who’s not.”

He saw what she meant. The Aestheticum was jammed to the ceilings of the mezzanine with furniture, bibelots, treasured artworks, bolts of better tapestry, carpets. “It’s a madhouse warehouse,” said Piarsody. “People know high-end decoratives will come back, and they stash their valuables here until the first collector sniffs that the war is truly over and moves in for the firesale bargain. But we’re stuffed to the gills. I can’t move, I can’t do inventory, I can’t even see well enough to be able to tell what is good and what is better used to build a fire to cook my lunch.”

“I don’t care if you burn it all and have a really big lunch,” said the Lion. “I want the center of the hall cleared out by noon tomorrow.”

“You’ve lost your mind. I always knew you would,” said Miss Scallop. “A bit too high-strung. Back in Shiz they whispered that to me when you were in the Gents’. They will say it here, too.”

“I’ll help you. I can get others to help. We’ll shift everything to the motherhouse of Saint Glinda across the square, assuming it’s still standing. The war with Munchkinland is over, Miss Scallop, and the little buggers won.”

“Don’t they always?” said Piarsody Scallop.

All afternoon they sorted out antiquities. The better paintings could be hung over the railing of the mezzanine to grace the event. Some of the furniture could be packed drawer against door along the outside walls, under the balconies, slotted so thickly in place as to make a six-foot wooden henge. The rest of the stuff had to go.

Brrr roared himself into the cloisters across the square and commandeered them. The motherhouse had long been under the thumb of the Emperor, unlike the cenobitic mauntery in the Shale Shallows, and the women scurried to oblige, driven nearly mad with delight at having a part to play. The mauntery afforded plenty of space along the arcades to stash a museum’s worth of antique fussiness in home decor.

When the job was almost done, Brrr happened to back into an oak chest standing on its end. The lock sprung open and the lid popped, spilling the contents on the tiles of the mauntery floor. Included were no fewer than seven sets of jeweled shoes modeled after the famous set that Lady Glinda had given to Dorothy Gale once upon a time. The Lion threw all the shoes into the well in the center of the cloister garden. Any splash they had, they’d made a long time ago.

2.

For his work helping Avaric bon Tenmeadows to set up the council for peace, Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary of Traum, Gillikin, was invited to sit in attendance.

“I’ve come up in the world,” he told the meagres under the bridge. “I’m still small fry, but I could probably sneak a few of you in if you want to get a peek at history.”

“Busy. Sorry,” said Rain, in her new iron-hard voice.

“We have to do something useful,” explained Candle to the Lion. “With Liir’s death—we have no choice. It’s that or die.” The Goose, under the obligations of family loyalty, bobbed his head in agreement. He had never liked either Candle or Rain, but was now something of a retainer in their broken circle.

“As for me, I wouldn’t come within a mile of Mombey,” said Dorothy. “It was her court that convicted me of murder, remember. And even if I wanted to brandish that stupid testimonial of my character, it’s probably null and void under the new regime. By the way, Brrr, you risk being imprisoned for aiding and abetting a psychopathic criminal in her notorious escape from justice.” She batted her eyelashes.

But the Lion had lost too much, and gained too much, to be prey to the same worries that had bewitched him most of his life. Nor gone first, and now Liir. What else could they do to him? Really?

It was left to Avaric to plead the terms of the truce with His Sacredness who, rumor had it, was keeping comfortable in a bare cell in the prison of Southstairs. Living on water and celery, and approaching the mercy of a deeper aestheticism.

Avaric had to work to get the Emperor’s attention. Either poor Shell’s mind had snapped or he’d ventured further toward divinity than he may have intended. “It’s a bit of a nonstarter, some conversations,” Avaric said to Brrr. “But we’ll get there. Those creepy Ozmists are lifting little by little—even the dead can’t be bothered to haunt you forever, it appears that they have other things to do—and the dragons are camped on the Plains of Kistingame outside of the Emerald City to the north. Mombey can call them in again to move matters along if the Emperor proves unwilling to focus. On some level he knows this. He and his ministers are doing what they can to set matters right.”

“What are the preconditions of surrender?” asked Brrr.

“That’s confidential,” said Avaric, but when the Lion pinned him down and threatened to rip off his arms with a novel dental technique, Avaric changed his mind about confidentiality.

“No, no,” said Brrr. “I’m not interested in what the Emperor is giving up. I know what he’s giving up, and what was never really his to yield, either. What I want to know is what demands he is making of Mombey.”

“The niceties of military surrender are new to me, but it’s my understanding His Sacredness is not in a position to make demands.”

“Of course he is. He can refuse to yield unless Mombey offers something. And if you refuse to yield—”

“I take your point,” said Avaric. “I think I may need that elbow in the future? Thank you. Is there something special that you’d like His Sacredness to request of La Mombey?”

“There is indeed,” said Brrr. “I should like her to bring the corpse of Liir Thropp to the Emerald City so his family can bury him.”

“Mombey has murdered Liir Thropp?”

“Apparently. Well, it stands to reason. If the EC didn’t kidnap Liir from Kiamo Ko, Mombey’s men did. That must be how she managed to marshal the violence of those dragons. She got to him first after all. And to the Grimmerie.”

“If you had done what the court asked of you—find us the Grimmerie—Munchkinland would be suing Loyal Oz for peace instead of the other way around.”

“What His Sacredness is demanding in exchange for signing the treaty of surrender,” said the Cowardly Lion, “is Liir’s earthy remains. Are you sure you’re getting all this?”

That evening, the Lion told his companions—including Rain and Candle—that he’d negotiated the release of Liir’s corpse. Although what kind of achievement, really, did it count as? The dead are no less dead whether buried at home or abroad.

Around the brazier they’d set up underneath the struts of the bridge, they talked about Liir. Thirty or forty homeless citizens of the Emerald City listened as they shared stories of the Emperor’s nephew. Dorothy had known Liir for too short a time, back when he was fourteen or so. “I don’t remember much about him. I think he was sweet on me for a while. But in the end I probably wasn’t his type. Seems my lot in life.”

Her eyes tracked the dirty hem of her dress. She’d carried a torch for him from the age of ten, thought Brrr. Poor thing.

Candle said, “I saw Kynot this afternoon. He has been very kind to me. I told him we hoped to have a pyre to burn the body, if the corpse hasn’t corrupted so fully it has had to be burned already, or been buried in Munchkinland. The Eagle is calling veterans of the Conference of the Birds to attend as an honor guard.”

Rain said, “I’m not sure I want to be there. Am I required?”

Her mother said, “When have we required anything of you, Rain? Except to survive? You do as you see fit.”

The girl sat hollowly in the light of the fire until the fire slumped, and then she did too. The Lion tried to offer comfort, but she would have none of it. All night she lay on the ground shivering, and would take no blanket, as if trying to learn in advance what chill of the grave might be visited upon her father. Tay squirreled into her arms, half a comfort.

Three days later, a caparisoned and hooded cart was escorted by mounted guard through Munchkin Mousehole, the southern gate of the city, and through the Oz Deer Park and along the Ozma Embankment to Saint Glinda’s Square. In lieu of Candle, who had decided her place was at the side of her living daughter and not her dead husband, the Lion stood to receive Liir’s Black Elephant corpse.

In a silence broken only by the rush of the wings of pigeons as they pivoted about city skies now safe again, His Sacredness the Emperor of Oz emerged through some secret egress from Southstairs. The prison governor, Chyde, carried the Ozma scepter and Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows, the crown.

Mombey waited on the steps of the Aestheticum. In keeping with the gravity of the day she displayed herself as aquiline of nose, cheeks of pale ice. Her straight tresses, colored steel, almost violet, were looped and fixed in place with constellations of emerald set in mettanite.

It took Brrr a moment to realize that the attendant at her side was Tip.

3.

Walking back to where his friends were camping under one end of the bridge, the Cowardly Lion didn’t know if he should mention the presence of Tip. With the arrival of her father’s corpse and the need to attend to her mother, Rain already had so much on her mind. To say nothing of the work she’d taken on this week, to attend to the needy. Why that selfless labor, Brrr had no idea; Rain had hardly ever seemed conscious, before, of the sores of others—indeed, of her own sores, either. The Lion wondered if Rain’s summoning the Ozmists to help had put her in a position of noticing both what those ghost-bits had done, and what they couldn’t do.

So many burdens on her young back. She might not be able to tolerate the return of her friend Tip, for whom her affection had been no secret except, perhaps, to herself.

In any case, Tip would guess that Rain might be in the city as well. What else had he expected her to do after he set out to find her father and the Grimmerie? It wasn’t hard algebraics. He’d be looking for Rain here, if he wanted to find her.

But if he didn’t want to find her, was it doing her any good to help her find him?

In the end it was Dorothy who decided the Cowardly Lion on the matter. The Lion had walked her to a clutch of broken pipes protruding from the back of a collapsed Spangletown whorehouse. The dripping pipes were set high enough in the wall that larger creatures could wash without too much crouching, and since Dorothy still had a tendency to croon given half a chance, the Lion stood guard over her virtue, her modesty, and her critics while Dorothy sponged herself and performed a musical set for unbelieving rats and such harlots as hadn’t yet fled the district.

On the way back, Dorothy said, “I’ve been wondering what to make of myself here in the Emerald City.” The Lion, his mind on Rain, didn’t take in what she meant at first. “I mean,” continued Dorothy, “there seems no particular campaign to ship me out of Oz the way there was the first time. Everyone’s so distracted, and who can blame them? So I’ve been wondering if I should just go into some line of work, and settle down here. Back a ways we passed an old sandwich board advertising the eighteenth annual comeback tour of Sillipede at the Spangletown Cabaret. Did you see it? Do you think I might look her up, if she’s still alive, and maybe get some professional advice? I could perform on the boards, you know, and put a few pennies together.”

The Lion shook his head and heard his wattles wuffle. “What are you on about, Dorothy? We’re witnessing an historic change in government, not hosting a jobs fair for immigrants. A little perspective, if you please.”

“You’re not going to stick by me forever. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow haven’t been popping up like vaudeville headliners to welcome me with a song-and-dance upon my return to Oz. Do you think I haven’t noticed? Life goes on, Brrr. We move on. I have so few choices, really, if I can’t get myself back home. Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end—you go out far enough in the direction of—somewhere—and you realize that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.”

“I never use that word.”

“Neutered? Sorry.”

“No. I never say home.” And Brrr realized it was true, and that Dorothy was right, too. We don’t get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there’s no place remotely like home.

“We’ll get you back to purple waves of grain and amber plain, somehow,” said Brrr, though he had no ideas at the moment. What was he going to do? Go fish those knock-off slippers from the well in the mauntery motherhouse and make a mockery of Dorothy’s own fond memories of enchanted travel?

They were almost back to the bridge. A mile away some strafed building was finally collapsing. The clouds of dust, even at this hour, evoked the haunting by Ozmists and made those who dozed nearest death to tremble at the sight. “We don’t get too many chances, do we?” said Dorothy. “I’ve had more than my share, even while buildings fall around me on a regular basis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think we—as individuals—have much choice in our affairs, after all. Despite any fond hope for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I haven’t been able to avoid Oz or to get out of Oz. I’m just a pawn. I didn’t ask to be born an orphan, or to be taken on by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. I didn’t ask to annoy everyone with my soapy character. It wasn’t my idea that an earthquake should punish San Francisco the week I arrived. We really can’t do much about our given circumstances, can we? We may have free will but it isn’t, in the end, very free. I might as easily have been born in China.”

The Lion purred in agreement, though it was a wise, consoling purr. “Limited range. We get relatively few chances to make good.”

“Still.” Dorothy’s eyes were unnaturally bright, even for her. “I suppose if we don’t even have bootstraps with which to pull ourselves up, we had better become highway robbers and steal some off someone who has extra.”

“Dorothy,” said the Cowardly Lion, “did anyone ever tell you that you are a piece of work?”

She wasn’t listening. She was staring at a small scrap of caninity barreling with businesslike dispatch along the road, away from the thud of the collapsing architecture. His nose was to the gutter and his tail wagging ferociously as if he, for one, had never doubted the nature of home or the adequate play of his own personal free will. “Toto!” cried Dorothy.

So that was home, then, thought the Lion, as the dog catapulted into Dorothy’s bosom. That’s as good as it gets. I have no right to deprive Rain of the possibility of reunion with Tip because I fear it might not satisfy her. Let her take her chances and make that decision herself.

“Rain,” he said before they turned in for the night, “let me tell you what I saw today.”

4.

She didn’t know what to think about Tip arriving with Mombey. Rain needed to see him first before talking to him, to make sure that in returning to Mombey he hadn’t betrayed Rain somehow, been party to her father’s death. Maybe he’d been a secret envoy of Munchkinland all along.

After all—that coincidence—that he should have come to be hiding in her wardrobe! They’d talked about it, laughed and loved it. She was much older now, and it seemed suspicious.

“I’ll install you in the Aestheticum,” Brrr told her. “There are a dozen places to hide among the legs of all that compacted furniture. You can watch and decide what to do as you like. If you’re quiet enough, you will witness history.”

“I’ve witnessed enough history,” said Rain. “But I can be quiet. That’s one of my strengths, remember.”

She got ready to go with Brrr the next morning. Early, before dawn. The wind off the canals was disturbing ash and dirt from where it had settled overnight, gritting the air for the day. Candle got up too and silently helped Rain dress—not that Rain needed help. Mother and daughter fussing with a face flannel, apron strings, getting in each other’s way. A few feet off, Dorothy snored softly, Toto in her arms. The light in the sky a system of beveled intensities, pale, less pale. Candle said, “I don’t want you to make the wrong choice, Rain.”

Rain didn’t look at her. “How do you know what choices I have?”

“I don’t. But I know… I know you are going to select among what possibilities are offered you. Every parent knows this, and I know it as well as any.”

“No matter how far from me you have lived.”

“No matter.” Candle brushed her daughter’s hair. “We’ve lived apart, but I see what you know today, and that you don’t know everything. Rain, don’t…” She paused.

“Don’t make the mistake I made?” Rain heard her own voice, low and mean. Rain was the result of Candle’s mistake. Or maybe the mistake itself. No doubt about that.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” said Candle. “Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn’t be a choice—just policy. What I mean is—” She turned her attention to Tay, who was now awake and grooming itself. “I mean, don’t sleep with the boy.”

“Oh, well, I’ve already had my sleep for tonight.” Larky-snarky. Such kindness as Rain might have wakened with had evaporated. The dawn began to steep in the limbs of the pummeled trees. In the company of the Lion and the rice otter she took her leave, and without turning around she waved her hand over her shoulder at her mother’s farewell.

Dawn over the Aestheticum. A mawkish pink. Word had apparently gotten out among the Birds. The silhouette of the shallow dome, its granite ribs and quoins picked out a pale yellow, was punctuated with sentinels of Birds. The old Eagle, Kynot, saw the Lion and the girl approach, and he swooped down to meet them with a guard of three or four.

“It’s not quite the original gang,” said General Kynot. “Birds don’t tend to live as long as humans. But respectable enough, to see our companion off.”

“Lurline love-a-chickadee, but you’ve grown,” said a Wren to Rain. “You remembers me? Doesn’t you, sweet? Quadling margin lands, when you was traveling with that Clock? It’s Dosey, begging your pardon, miss.”

Brrr glanced at Rain. Her face was blank. She who had always had more time for Animals was eager to see her human. “We can’t stop to chat about the old times,” said the Lion. “We must get in before the girl is spotted here.”

“We’ll be up top,” said the Eagle. “If you need us, roar for us, Lion. We’ll break through the high windows if we can.”

Brrr pawed out the keys to the Aestheticum. Since he and Rain were the first to arrive, he gave her a quick tour. “This platform here, with the single schoolroom bench—the Emperor will come in and sit upon that. Opposite, a platform of exactly the same height but, notice, covered with that rather rare Varquisohn carpet, is where La Mombey will sit. Her throne is actually a stage prop from a community theater production of The King of Squirreltown’s Daughter, but I don’t think Mombey will object. Her ministers will be here, see, and here. While the Emperor’s staff and emissaries of the counties will be installed behind that velvet rope. Do you think the jeweled beeswax candles are a little over the top? Yes, I think they are.” He plucked out the emeralds, pursed his lips, and then put them back in.

Rain wandered about. All the alcoves under the balcony that ringed the whole room were piled thick and high with dusty furniture. She found a cove she could wriggle into. An old marble tomb ornament of a knight and his lady afforded some height. Rain could climb up, kneel onto the flat of the knight’s stone sword laid along his breastplate and down between his knees, and peer through filigreed gewgawkery scrolling along the tops of wooden pillars. If she stayed in gloom and no further illumination was cast, she might remain unobserved and still catch most of what was going on.

She pulled open the door of a wardrobe and removed a couple of broken umbrellas, making room so she could duck inside to hide in the event of necessity. In another piece, a huge linen press, she found a bottom drawer two feet longer than she was herself, and deep enough to sleep in. She took a pillow from yet another drawer and arranged herself a bed in case this festival of political mortification went all night and she was stuck here unable to move. On a second pillow she set the shell, for safekeeping. She even found a royal chamber pot tagged with a stamped provenance: OZMA THE BILIOUS. Well, she’d use that if she had to.

“There will be pastries at the tradesmen’s entrance in half an hour,” said Brrr. “You can be my assistant until a certain moment, then when I give the signal, you’d better make yourself scarce.”

At Brrr’s side, she hung out at the door, listening to the city come alive. Horsemen tethered their steeds to stanchions of iron; vendors showed up to sell early chestnuts, stale bread, apricots, onion tarts—mushy and a little rank. Sometimes she heard what Brrr muttered to her, a who’s who of contemporary Oz. The Lord Mayor of Shiz, here to represent all of Gillikin. A Scrow chieftain identifying himself as Shem Ottokos, to witness for some of the tribes of the Vinkus. “The Yunamata won’t cede to him rights of representation,” whispered Brrr, “but whoever knows what the Yunamata think about governance? They don’t even use hair combs.”

The delegation from the Quadling Country was late. Rain caught a lot of eye rolling. She overheard someone say, “You know the squelchy-folk.

But the Quadlings, ah, the Quadlings,

Slimy, stupid, curse-at-godlings…

They probably got lost in the big city.”

Then the advance party of the victors began to assemble—the Munchkinlanders. Most of them were squat and small, like Little Daffy. Others were more rangy, with their small breasts and big pelvises, kangaroo-folk as Rain had heard it put about at street corners.

Militia in dress habillard, ministers in robes of office, a few key generals called in from the field. Brrr wondered if General Jinjuria, who had held the terrain beyond Haugaard’s Keep for much of the past decade, would be arriving to witness, but she didn’t show up. On reflection, the Lion realized that any conquering leader who had the capacity to change her visage daily to capitalize on shifting opinions of beauty and glamour would probably be less than happy to have a popular female general known as the Foill of Munchkinland descending to divert attention away from her superior.

“Time to take your hiding place,” he murmured to Rain.

She looked both ways before slipping into the shadows. Everyone was busy with pots of ink and stacks of vellum, books of legal doctrine. Arguing over seating and who took precedence over whom. It was easy to disappear in plain sight.

Once inside the forest of furniture, she scrabbled this way and that to reclaim her vantage point. Memory, which rarely came together for her, woke up a little. This was like crawling around Lady Glinda’s bedroom, back in Mockbeggar Hall, the time they’d all been crowded into a single room. Would Lady Glinda arrive to witness the historic moment? Rain craned to look. The first person to come into her line of vision, appearing a little lost, was Tip.

Rain caught her breath. It hadn’t been long since they’d seen each other, but so much had happened in the meantime—the news of her father’s having been magicked into the form of an Animal, and of his death in that form. The assault by dragons upon the storied Emerald City. So Tip seemed different, in just those few weeks. One could change that fast. What had happened to him? What had he put himself through, and for whom? For her? Or for Mombey?

The earlier anxieties metastasized now there was so much to be lost. What if Tip had only stayed at her side until they had gotten to Kiamo Ko, where they found out that both Liir and the Grimmerie had been taken into custody? Had Tip been using her to locate her father and the book for Mombey, his admitted guardian? What if the abduction of her father hadn’t yet happened? Would Tip have stolen the volume and left her that way instead of the way he did?

A cold dampness covered her skin. She’d been used. He’d been planted somehow in her cupboard to seduce her, to learn her secrets. When she’d had no more to yield, he’d left her. On the double.

She huddled behind a varnished oak column carved with volutes and wooden ivy. Tay writhed at her ankles. Rain couldn’t breathe, just looking at how Tip moved cautiously into the open arena, holding himself in a new way. Stiff. Uncertain. Stronger. More supple. Or was it less supple?

Additional impedimenta were being hauled in. Some minions with fans, in case the heat grew oppressive. Some other lackeys with braziers in case of chill. Someone set up fifteen music stands and fifteen music stools, and moments later someone else came along and ordered them taken away again. Tip circulated, his eyes at the roof level, as if he were part of the guard detail, making effort to fortify the premises. But he looked goofy doing that.

The room was coming to order. There was no chair for Tip; clearly he had no formal role here. His pacing slowed down. Luck was playing games with Rain and Tip both: he paused in the very quadrant of the large hall in which Rain had hidden herself, and he began to hunt among the furniture for someplace to lean. He moved a few feet in under the overhang, where a low desk gave him a perch. He was in the next alcove to Rain’s, and an arched opening allowed her to see him through hat racks and the legs of overturned tables.

Was he honing in on her whereabouts as he might have done at St. Prowd’s? Was she a lodestone to his compass needle, that he should pick this section of the space to loiter? More certain than ever that something was amiss, she knew she must back away. As soon as she could breathe, and before she could die. But Tay slithered in the shadows and wriggled forward to wreathe Tip’s ankles the way the lake otter had been cavorting around Rain’s own, with a teasing alertness.

Tip was magnificently composed, Rain saw. His chin never dropped to indicate he’d noticed Tay. His eyes remained trained on the lintels of the room, the struts in the ceiling, as if flying monkeys intent on attack might be lurking in the shadows. His cheeks reddened and his breathing quickened.

The ground was shifting beneath her feet, and she must leap one way or the other.

On the basis of those involuntary clues—the beauty of how his body responded—she would leap toward hope, this time, and trust he was not Mombey’s agent. If he was to give her away, let him do it now, so she would know. She couldn’t live any longer without knowing one way or the other.

Tay returned to Rain, soundlessly. A furniture warehouse seemed as natural a habitat for a rice otter as a swamp, the way that green spirit moved about it.

Rain began to wriggle her way through the maze of tight spaces. Tip folded his arms across his chest, in the manner of a man hard to please but cautiously satisfied with what he saw. He backed up against the nearest pillar. He sank his right hand in the sash of his tunic, as if looking for peanuts or a key or a handkerchief. He put his left hand around the edge of the glossy polished cylinder, and Rain caught it. She was on her knees in the shadows, behind the pillar, kissing his fingertips, moving her mouth against his soft cupped palm, which had opened to receive her chin. She grazed his fingertips again with her lips, and parted her lips to take two fingers into her mouth.

“All unauthorized service force, five minutes,” bellowed Avaric. “We will clear the hall for the dignitaries.”

Factotums, servants, attachés, and minor satraps scurried, sending dust motes to eddy into the light slanting down from a ring of clerestory windows just below the shallow dome. More gentlefolk and fiercefolk from Munchkinland arrived. Though the hall became fuller and warmer, the noise began to subdue itself. Would he be forced to leave, her Tip, or had he received clearance to stay? She tugged at his wrist: come, come. She pulled him backward into the shadows and stood to meet him face-to-face.

“I may not be seen to disappear again,” he whispered.

“They know you’re here, they know you haven’t left,” she whispered back. “Have you left? Have you left me, Tip?” But if she’d ever known anything before in her life, she knew the answer now by looking at his face. He had not left her. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go. How will you find me again?”

“But you gave me a map. Of course I’ll find you.”

He pressed his fingers against her temples, pressed a forefinger to his lips to hush her, and sidled away. But the expression on his face said wait, the expression on his face said later; it said soon.

He went to his post behind the dais to which La Mombey would be escorted. With a new military bearing he stood, his polished boots just a little apart, his arms folded behind his back in that gesture that signifies no need for quick access to weaponry. His hair had been cut shorter. Someone had nicked the back of his neck with a razor. After all the blood and death Rain had seen, she wanted to weep over that nick as she hadn’t yet wept.

The Emperor arrived with such a lack of fanfare that at first Rain didn’t even notice. Shell was more hunched than she remembered. He wore a gown of gilded brocade that made a columnar sweep from his narrow pointed beard to his bare toes. Something in his bearing made Rain feel he was naked underneath the robe. Naked and proud. But his eyes looked glazed in a different way, as if perhaps he hadn’t been taking proper nourishment for some days running.

He sat at his schoolboy bench for a few moments. When the air became even grander with the puffery of incense, he removed himself to his knees. Someone hurried over with a cushion but he waved it away, and stayed on his knees, eyes closed, as La Mombey entered at last.

Rain had heard Brrr’s descriptions of the Eminence of Munchkinland—the various guises—and she remembered Tip’s story about how Mombey had come by the skill of transformations. La Mombey looked like—what was it? Yes—she had it—like one of those figureheads on the boats that were dragged across the lawns at Mockbeggar Hall. She might have been carved of ancient oak. Her brow was broad and her wide-set eyes the color of overripe plum. Her hair was not so much blond or carrot as a kind of livid gold, shining with metallic highlights, just as her full skirts and bodice did. She was taller than anyone else in the room.

La Mombey approached her station and curtseyed to the Emperor of Oz and bade him rise. He did. The formal statements began in a humdrum tone, low to the ground, that Rain didn’t strain to interpret. She merely watched the attitudes of the two leaders, the Emperor’s form sagging, nearly listing, Mombey’s body cantilevered forward with unnatural strength.

Once the proceedings were under way, a steady stream of interpreters, legislators, orators, and reconciliators moved into place, speaking in the vernacular of ceremony. Men and women moved pieces of paper from ledgers to lecterns and back again. Other men and women brought tea. Someone welcomed, late, an emissary of the Nome King of Ev. Someone petitioned that the proceedings be halted until a Quadling representative arrived. Someone else petitioned that that previous petition be reproved. Then the Quadling emissary stood up and said he was already present, thank you very much. It was Heart-of-Mushroom, identifying himself as the Supreme Glaxony of Quadling Country. He wore the same loincloth he’d worn in the jungle, and nothing else.

Eventually the proceedings became humdrum enough that Tip could back up and stand down from the dais, turn to consult an honor guard posted underneath a vulgar plaster cast approximating the famous Ozma Lexitrice statue near the Law Courts Bridge. Tip then circulated the perimeter of the hall, choosing his moments carefully, until he’d returned to the edge of the nook where Rain waited for him.

All eyes were on Mombey and the Emperor. No one looked at Tip, no one saw Rain in the shadows. Even Tay seemed glued to the proceedings. Tip stepped back into the carrel, among the boxy secretaries and bureaus, the carvings, the wardrobes and linen presses. It was no longer like Lady Glinda’s salon. Now it was like the crowded basement shop in Shiz. BROKEN THINGS OF NO USE TO ANYONE BUT YOU.

They didn’t speak, but they mouthed words, and read each other’s lips. Read the language of relief on each other’s faces.

You’re all right.

You’re all right?

Yes, I’m all right. Now.

How did we manage?

How will we manage.

I love—

I love—

There they stuck for a moment, words failing them, until Tip leaned forward. He put his arms around her, cradling her bottom, lifted her till his face was between her breasts. Silently he stepped forward and sat her down on the statue of the knight, on the broad flat blade of the stone sword. We mustn’t, he said. No. It can’t be.

He climbed upon the memorial, clenching her hips with his knees. He cradled the crown of her head with his large soft capable hand; he pressed her backward so her head rested against the pommel and quillion of the marble weapon. Upon a marble homage to a forgotten soldier died in a forgotten battle at a forgotten time for a forgotten cause, he rested his form against hers. No, he said. We shouldn’t.

Tay looked away.

Rain reached up her hand to her neckline. She hooked a finger around the chain and pulled at it until the locket that Nor had given her appeared. She palmed it and then slipped it into her mouth and rolled it on her tongue.

She felt for the skin at the back of his neck, where his scalp had been cut too close. No, mouthed his words, we mustn’t, but his face disagreed, coming nearer to hers. He put his lips upon hers, just lightly grazing. She opened her mouth and gave him her heart.

5.

The prosecution of the surrender was being managed reasonably, with courtesy and even courtliness. The only sticking point emerged when Avaric reminded the ascending Throne Minister of Oz, La Mombey, of the Emperor’s private request. “His Sacredness requires the right to bury the corpse of his nephew, Liir Thropp, who has been taken prisoner by the Munchkinlanders and whose corpse has been brought, it is understood, to the EC from Colwen Grounds.”

“Oh, the bodily husk is of little use,” said La Mombey, at this point barreling through the negotiations herself, because she was getting bored with the high language of deference, and wanted elevation to the throne. “When the time comes, it’ll slough off soon enough.”

“The Emperor agrees about the insignificance of the human body,” countered Avaric, “but in deference to his family he has promised them a proper disposition of the corpse. So the formal grieving can begin.”

“Oh,” said La Mombey, dismissing the matter with her hand once she had understood. “The body of Liir! I see. But he’s not dead. Not essentially. Whoever said he was dead? Yes, I had him drugged and enchanted, to bring him to Munchkinland, and he proved sullen and torpid as a prisoner of war. Refused to help the cause, et cetera. It’s not my fault he’s made no effort to reject his disguise as a Black Elephant. It’s his own lack of will that causes the form to cling to him. The form will kill him if he won’t slough it off. I can’t help that. Hah!—more of a mouse than a man, even. In my opinion he’s not man enough to deserve to be an Elephant. He can’t carry it off. But I thought that was the corpse to which you were referring. True, he refused to come here with us to supervise the handover, either, so I had him drugged again, to spirit him away from my dragonmaster. Liir is not very well; he wasn’t meant to harbor so long in that form, and suffering it may be the death of him, in time. But for now he’s relatively alive in that shroud of an Elephant body, I’m afraid. I thought you wanted to demand his release. Wasn’t that it? I got up too early, I’m not focusing.”

At this Shell spoke for the first time, giving his final directive as Emperor. “He is, nonetheless, a relative, even if I never recognized him as such the few times our paths crossed. Sever him from his disguise, so I may honor my word to his kin and mine.”

“A condition of the surrender agreement,” intoned Avaric.

“Now? Dreadfully inconvenient. But very well. You’ll have to clear the hall.” Mombey waved her hand.

“You’ll need his wife. It’s only right and proper,” said the Cowardly Lion, and he sent for Candle.

“People, I want this finished,” said La Mombey. “If I’m to do what I can to return this Liir to his human form—hoping he doesn’t go and die on us in the operation—I’ll need to freshen up.”

The room never completely emptied. Underlings hastened about, scribes made copies by hand for an orgy of signatures. Rain and Tip remained in the shadows, warm from their romancing, thrillingly shy of garments. Learning every inch of each other’s forms using every measure at their disposal.

By evening most of the dignitaries had left. Under orders of the ascending Throne Minister of Oz, the great Varquisohn carpet had been shifted to the center of the vast concourse. Upon it waited some implements of her trade.

Only a dozen or two witnesses remained when La Mombey emerged from behind a screen. Brrr thought she was displaying a latent tendency to slumming. She returned not as a goddess in wings of hammered gold but as the Crone of a Thousand Years, almost Kumbricia-like in her hobbledy-hoyness. Her skirts were patched, and a bonnet sat on her head large enough to house a pair of alley cats. Rain, peering from her hideout, found Mombey smaller and more humble than expected—almost dumpy. Her shoulders were stooped as if she’d suffered rickets in childhood, and her chins seemed doughy and marmy. Around her shoulders she wore a woven shawl whose warp looked like dead ivy and whose weft was made of broken twigs.

“Mombey as she used to look in the old days,” whispered Tip. “I never expected to see her like this again.”

On a small black iron plate Mombey lit four coals. Into the throats of a trio of bottles of sarsaparilla or something she had plunged the feathers of a peacock. She set two keys down in a definitive way. “The Key of Material Disposition,” she said fatuously, “and the Key to Everything Else.” She seemed to be enjoying herself.

Rain and Tip dressed each other slowly so as not to allow a single rustle of garment. Their fingers lingering over ties, traced skin underneath the clothes as far as hands could reach. Tip sucked every button on the back of Rain’s simple shift. Rain lifted the chain off her neck and put it around Tip’s, where the red locket dropped behind the breastplate of his dress habillards. At last, decent, having returned to each other the disguise of their clothes, they stood, holding their hands together, all four of them knotted.

Rain couldn’t help feel that lying with Tip had brought her father back to life, a little, just as Liir’s lying with Candle had brought her to life, once upon a time. It was a sentiment only, but it suffused her.

Candle arrived with her domingon. Next to the sorceress Candle looked like the evening nurse. She didn’t bow or make other obeisance. She merely sat on the floor and put her domingon into her lap.

She’ll be a good help, thought Rain. She’d had experience drawing the human disguise off Princess Nastoya, just before I was born. Seeing the present: she can see what of Liir might still remain alive.

And she knows I’m here, thought Rain; she’s like that. But she’s protecting me with her silence.

Workers swung open the double doors of the loading dock and dragged the cart inside. It almost didn’t clear the lintel. Upon it lay the gently steaming form of the Black Elephant. Rain’s father, if word was to be believed. Alive somewhere, somehow, inside.

“Smoke and mirrors, don’t nobody ever tell ’em nothing?” snorted Mombey. Her voice had lost its toney veneer; she sounded like a common hill witch taking a holiday in town. “Everyone sit down, and do as I say. This will take a little concentration. I had a nice supper but it’s been quite a week and I want to make sure we get this right the first time. Are the doors barred? Light the candles, those ones there.”

The Lion nodded. Avaric and the Emperor took their places on the simple bench. Rain and Tip shuddered in the shadows. The Elephant, in this musty failing light, looked like a giant delivery of coal. Tay sat on the closed eyes of the stone knight. Upon her domingon, Candle struck up a tonic plangetive.

Herbs were brought out, and a magical powder of some sort. Maybe it was just a localized pyrotechnical conceit, for drama. The vapor was scented now of violets, now of a camphorous licorice.

Rain leaned against Tip’s shoulder. Everything was about to change once again. Her father would awaken. He was no longer a threat to Mombey now that the Grimmerie had been impounded. As the final condition of his uncle’s surrender, he would be liberated. Rain’s family would be reunited. A normalcy that Rain had never known might be waiting to punish them all.

But what would happen to Tip in all this? Mombey’s chosen boy? Would there be a place to which Rain and Tip might slip away, far from the Palace of the People, far from the clasping arms of parents who had never, could never get enough of holding their arrogantly independent daughter?

But they had made her so.

Twenty fingers intertwined, pulling, twisting, pushing back. Make me hurt, thought Rain, while I can feel something, in case I die during this and fail to feel anything again.

“It’s a stubborn enough spell,” muttered Mombey, and she began to refresh some aspects of it, picking up a little way back for momentum.

“Perhaps he’s already a bit deader than I figured,” she apologized a half an hour later. “I trust this isn’t going to present an insurmountable problem to His Sacredness.”

“Call me Shell,” said the Emperor.

“Liir is a quiet sort, but he’s never been much of a team player,” observed Brrr.

“Now you tell me,” complained Mombey, and started once again.

Another twenty minutes and she began to get alarmed. “I’m getting interference,” she complained. “Something is not right. I don’t believe this lad has the nuggets needed to block me. My power is honed over a hundred years.” She turned one of the keys at an angle to the other, then put it back the way it had been before.

“He’s the son of a witch,” said the Cowardly Lion. “Elphaba Thropp. Don’t forget that.”

“Never met the bitch,” murmured Mombey. She began to be lost in chanting. Her hands elevated, swanning about, making patterns of the smoke that issued from the scorching coals.

“I’m losing him,” she called out suddenly. “He can’t hold out against me. It’s not remotely possible. Let me try the book. Tip. Tip?”

Had she looked, had she noticed that Tip had wandered off into the shadows, perhaps she’d have paused. Secured the premises, sniffed Rain out as the disturbance skewing the results of her spell, sent the girl packing. The evening might have resolved in favor of a mundane result rather than as a manifestation of history’s aggressive atropism. But Mombey was tired and off her mettle. She didn’t look up. She just held out her hand and called him again, and Tip slipped from the shadows and came forward. He picked up the Grimmerie from a plant stand and he set it upon her bony palm.

She put it down and expertly, without hesitation, opened it and flipped its pages. A mighty witch, La Mombey, and further empowered by her victory. The Grimmerie could no longer hold its secrets from her. The pages rattled with a noise like silver chains, like ropes of rain through gutters of carven bone.

“To Call the Lost Forward,” she murmured, “I know I saw you in here. Don’t you betray me, after all I’ve been through to get you and use you.”

She was talking to herself now, but every syllable quivered in the air. “I’d’ve stayed a common witch but for hearing about you from the foreigner. A humbug if ever I stumbled over one. I can use this book better than he might’ve done. Obey me!”

She found the spell and turned it upon the air so swiftly that Rain gasped. The cold memory of trying, with Lady Glinda, to call winter upon the water, back in the days when Rain herself had hardly materialized yet. In remembering how difficult that spell had been to cast, yet how natural, Rain felt it all over again. As if she too were being acted upon by the strength of the spell Mombey was casting. As if the spell the old sorceress was invoking was calling Rain’s own past forward, reminding the girl of what it had meant to begin to read. The memory quickened, of how she awoke to life under the charm of the Grimmerie. She felt full of a salty disgust, an objection deep in the blood. She had done nothing but wing through her shallow days on earth like a shadow of something else, something only windborne, without initiative, without merit or aim. Her ears hurt.

“I’ve called the lost forward, damn it,” shouted the harridan. “You can’t resist me—I won’t have it. I’m stronger than you, Liir Thropp! You’ll come forward when I order you to!”

Watching Liir struggle to resist the spell, Tip had fallen on his hands and knees behind Mombey. She didn’t notice. Maybe Tip was stricken in sympathy by something like the throes with which Rain herself felt throttled. Her skin burned leprous, her hearing raged.

“You won’t die as an Elephant, damn it. Don’t you dare. You haven’t the willpower!” cried Mombey.

“Liir!” cried Candle. “Don’t! Don’t go!”

The pain squeezed Rain at her sides, to hold her back, but she wouldn’t be held. She burst out of the hiding place. Putting the shell to her lips, she added its long plaint to the thrum and pall of the domingon accompaniment. Candle’s eyes were closed against her own tears. She couldn’t have been surprised by her daughter’s clarion voluntary; Candle didn’t lose a note in her own playing.

The shell made a gravelly tone like that of a low horn in the fog banks of a summer morning on Restwater. Some tug leaving harbor to begin its day of taxiing sheep and goods and day-trippers across the lake.

Almost at once the floorboards in the great hall creaked. For a final time the last of the Ozmists seeped forth, a thousand individual fissures of steam. They clouded the room with a powdery warm presence, a fragrance. They turned, to Brrr’s astounded eyes, a different shade of white—at first lavender, he thought, but then a kind of silvery green. As if under the spell Mombey had cast they too remembered their particular origins, origins not in spirit but in spirit’s organic counterparts.

Tip rolled on the floor with a thud. Before her, Rain saw him go over. She was caught between twisting toward him and turning to her father, whose Elephant form was beginning to stir for the first time. In sympathy, was it, Rain’s own skin thrilled and stung, the bridge of her nose to the roots of her hair. Her fingertips and armpits and thighs all at once, as if the Ozmists were conveying some sort of airborne desiccant, a powder of ammonia or lye to vex her.

Mombey had come to a more perfervid attention. Her hat had fallen back off her head, revealing a scalp nearly as bald as a dragon’s egg. “What have you done!” she cried to Rain. She crawled and lurched halfway up, on one knee, as if she couldn’t rise fast enough and would have chosen to hurtle across the room to punch Rain down, if only she had maintained a more strapping form. One with more flexible joints. “What are you doing here? Where have you come from? No one gave you clearance. I never called you back!”

6.

The Elephant was rolling. Liir was rolling. The huge vertebrae were creaking as loudly as Ugabumish castenettas. The trunk swayed; the hooves scraped at the air and great swaths of black black hair, like handfuls of scorched grass, sifted through the gloom to the cart and the floor. The Elephant trumpeted, though whether it was a death throes or a calibration of mortal triumph, the Cowardly Lion couldn’t say. He didn’t bother to try. He was half scared to death himself.

Only the Emperor seemed unfazed. Still on his knees after all this time, still placid. He put his hands together and then he lifted back the collar of his great robe. It fell away from his neck, halfway down his arms, but stopped there. The Emperor opened his eyes and said, “Liir—Elphaba’s boy. I never knew you.”

As far as the Lion could tell, the noise was neither Animal nor human. The Elephant rose on his back feet, tremblingly, as if he might tumble upon La Mombey and flatten her. The Ozmists around him went iridescent emerald, like light striking a thousand whirring beetles in flight, gold and emerald, emerald and gold, the colors of Lurlinemas, the colors of pine pollen in champagne sunlight. In the dusk outside, the air was filled with the clattering of the wings of the honor guard of Birds, circling the dome, crying “Liir lives! Liir lives!”

“An ambush!” shrieked La Mombey. “A coup!” Her few guards had fallen to the floor, panicked and paralyzed, the way Tip also seemed to be, twisted, tilted onto his side, his hands between his legs. A seizure of some sort. The Elephant lifted onto one foot. His tusks fell away and his hide fell away. The bruised naked man lurked there, revealed, smaller than a newborn Elephant. Shaking off disguise, called forcefully back to live some while longer, whether he wanted to or not.

Outside, the Birds heard La Mombey shriek and swooped down upon the cordon militaire she had set around the building—the linked limbs of spider-thugs. Every Bird settled on a target. Even Dosey the Wren was able to wrestle one spider from its partners, heft it aloft, and when she had gone as high as her wings would carry her, drop her cargo to squish against the dome of the Aestheticum.

Rain heard the pelting of the dome. She cried out to her father even as she hurried toward Tip, but the scraping pain across every inch of her form tightened into a net that drew the air from her lungs, and she fell.

7.

Rain didn’t come around for seven days. In the meanwhile, the events of that evening having been deemed confidential, all of the Emerald City talked of nothing else.

In the light of the revelation of Mombey’s perfidy, Loyal Oz’s suit for peace had been postponed. Emissaries of both armies picked up their staffs and swords again, just in case. They didn’t hold them for long, however. After a decade, war has a way of getting old. Soldiers from opposing contingents shared their bread and settled down over portable game boards. Some of the battalions entered into singing competitions organized by Dorothy, who in the fray was turning into a kind of mad mistress of ceremonies, a mascot of both sides. “What can I tell you?” she said to her friends, shrugging. “War is lunacy.”

After Liir had recovered enough human muscle tone to be able to collapse upon the Varquisohn, Candle and Brrr brought him into a tent that had been readied for him just outside the doors of the Aestheticum. Little Daffy, having stocked up with unguents and palliatives of every strength and nastiness, whether useful or bogus, was waiting there. She went to work again on the patient whom she had first met as a young man attacked by dragons. Liir, young Liir, dropped out of the sky, bereft of possibility. All these years later she remembered his form, and she did her work well, slapping Mr. Boss on the wrist when he tried to help with too forceful a forearm. Her husband’s quiver of talents didn’t seem to include much of a bedside manner.

Candle had Rain brought in, too. She kept the lights low all night. On adjacent pallets father and daughter struggled for health, struggled against different resistances. Avaric scuttled to the edge of the tent, but Brrr wouldn’t let him enter. “This is no business of yours,” he said.

Later, well beyond midnight, the Emperor of Oz arrived, on his own. In the middle of the night, without a guard or an escort, without even a dog on a leash. The Lion stood up stiffly and emitted a low warning rumble, but Shell was family, like it or not, so the Lion had to let him pass.

“She is not your concern,” said Candle quietly to Shell.

“She is God’s great-niece,” said His Sacredness. “She is my older sister’s granddaughter. I can see that now.”

“Go away. What you couldn’t see when she was in disguise you can’t see now. All human forms are disguises. And you claim to be sacred? You know nothing but the shell of people, nothing. Go away.”

Liir sat up in the gloom and spoke for the first time, across the insensate body of his daughter. “Go away,” he agreed. “She has nothing for you.”

“She holds both the future and the past,” said Shell, wringing his hands.

“No more than the rest of us,” said Liir, and pitched a shoe at His Sacredness.

Near dawn, Dorothy came by the tent, exhausted from a night of revelry. Liir was asleep inside and she said again that she didn’t want to bother him. She joined Brrr, who was still sitting guard outside. “Something’s got to give,” she said. “I can’t go on like this. Here, I brought a flagon of freshwater. They’re saying that Mombey has been taken into custody.”

“Oh, they’ll say a lot, won’t they,” said the Lion huskily. “Get to the point. What are they saying about that Tip?”

“Not much.”

“Can you find out a little more?”

“Are you asking me to be a spy?” Dorothy smiled wanly. “Look, Brrr. I’ll do what I can. A lot of the Quadling army has removed itself to the Plains of Kistingame, along with the dragons. I can go sniff around there.”

“Dorothy, you think pretty highly of yourself, but even you risk trouble traipsing among an army of angry soldiers. You watch yourself. They came to conquer, and they feel themselves tricked into surrender. They’ll take it out on you.”

“Toto’s a little nipper. He’ll see me safe.”

“He’s dead asleep in your basket.”

Iskinaary emerged from the tent, shaking his head. He’d been keeping vigil too. “I’ll go with you, Dorothy. And I’ll bet General Kynot can send us a couple of Falcons.”

“Father Goose,” said Brrr.

“Don’t start,” said Iskinaary.

“The truth is,” said Dorothy, “I’d rather have something useful to do than sit here and wait.” She twisted her hands together looking, Brrr guessed, perhaps a little bit like that Auntie Em. He remembered his theory that the young Dorothy may once have had a crush on the Witch’s boy. Liir was solidly middle-aged while she was only now becoming marriageable. She’d come back to Oz too late, to a man who got away by growing up faster than she could. She’s had to put up with an awful lot, our Miss Dorothy, thought the Cowardly Lion. Meeting up with Liir if she doesn’t have to is one adventure I can see she’d rather avoid.

“Send word if you find anything out about Tip,” said Brrr fondly. “And while I don’t make the plans for this group, I’m guessing that as soon as Liir and Rain are well enough to be moved, the family will want to evacuate this tent and get out of the City. We can work out details later.”

On the sixth day, Little Daffy sat back on her heels and said to the Lion, “Come, you, we’re going to the Corn Exchange to try to scare up some flour wholesale so I can bake something and open up a little commercial concern of my own.”

“You can manage without me,” said Brrr.

“You heard me,” said the Munchkinlander. “With everything still in flux I never know if the good people of the Emerald City are going to set their dogs upon a humble Munchkin farm woman plying her trade.” She meant what she said. Certainly the Lion would prove a more useful defense than her dwarfish husband. But Brrr realized that she too was ready to let the Thropp family alone for a few hours, to come to what peace they might. And Dorothy thought the Lion should take himself out of the picture too.

Liir and Candle alone in the tent, Rain as catatonic upon the pallet as her father had been in his cart. Liir thought, I’ve given to her all the worst of my traits. If I had lost the will to live, for a time, how could I hope that she might be stronger? I’ve shared nothing with my daughter but my fear of inconsequence, that which has plagued me from my first days.

“In your disguise as an Animal, where did you go?” said Candle to him. The first direct remark she’d made since he’d been abducted from the castle in the west. The absence of the guardian Lion was giving her license to speak, it seemed.

Liir had thought about this. “The soldiers plying Mombey’s charm of bewitchment gave me a bigger choice than they thought. They believed it was a superficial charm, and perhaps in some persons it might have been. The hide of an Elephant, the guise of one. But I remembered how Princess Nastoya had lived as a human. Despite her long concealment she never stinted from embracing the fullness of a disguise, its meaning—she learned as much as she could about how to be a human while trapped inside the human’s form. Even though she wanted liberty from the disguise, in the end, so she could die an Animal. I thought perhaps she had made the wiser choice. I thought she had managed to become a human better than I, born one, had yet done. I thought I would rather die an Animal.

“A cowardly choice, perhaps,” he admitted, but Candle had said nothing.

“You didn’t help train the dragons to attack the city.”

“No, I didn’t. That was Trism.”

“I know who it must have been.”

They looked at opposite panels in the walls of the tent.

“In the end, Trism knew enough about dragons to do the job himself,” she said. “They never needed the Grimmerie, did they. After all that. After our ruined lives. They didn’t need you to read the book, nor Rain.”

All the wasted time running, hiding. All the years.

“No,” he admitted through his tears. “They only needed time—the time it took for Trism to experiment, over and over, with what he had learned from that one page of the Grimmerie torn out by Elphaba Thropp, those years ago, and given to the Wizard of Oz. Time to work it out. Once they’d gotten the book at last, they found—ha!—that Trism couldn’t read the book. They wanted me to try but I refused. It was then I must have chosen not to come back—to stay an Elephant, let the disguise kill me. Mombey was enraged. She tried to read the book, too. I don’t know how she managed the other evening, for she couldn’t crack it open when she had it in her hands.”

“Of course I know how she managed. Rain was there. The book obeyed her, not Mombey. The book itself brought the spell forward.”

“Rain didn’t do a thing.”

Candle rolled her eyes. “You didn’t do a thing. No, listen to me. You didn’t do a thing to stop any of this. You didn’t open the book to try to learn how to turn the dragons against their masters. You didn’t halt the attack in which very few families in the Emerald City failed to lose a loved one. You didn’t make any effort to … to call fire down upon the dragon hordes. You didn’t move to stop an assault that pitched itself against your own daughter.”

“I didn’t know she was here, of course.”

“Where else would she be?”

Liir thought of the girl thrown off the bridge at Bengda, the bridge he as a young soldier had set fire to. It was a bridge that had never stopped burning, and it never would. A child who had never stopped falling through the night, and she never would.

He said, “I haven’t the words to answer you. The Grimmerie has brought nothing but grief to every soul who has used it. I wouldn’t use it against my kind—Loyal Ozian or Munchkinlander—even if I had ceased to be my own kind.”

Candle said, “That is not like you, Liir. That is vile. It is inhuman.”

“I do not claim,” he admitted, “to have made the human choice.”

8.

When Brrr looked into the tent flaps the next morning, Rain was sitting up in the cot. “No, don’t leave,” she said to the Cowardly Lion. “I know already.”

He shrugged. Liir got up and went out to find some facilities to use, to shave. The weather was coming in colder and they couldn’t stay in a tent much longer, if Rain was to continue to recover. Candle, who after last night wasn’t yet talking to her husband, left too but in a separate direction. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss sat down in the sun outside with a coffee tin to share. They counted up their earnings. Little Daffy called into the tent, “When is Dorothy going to come home and regale us with tales of her night’s adventures before sacking out to sleep the morning away?”

The Lion intended to keep private his sense of Dorothy’s hope to avoid seeing Liir. “She’s on a mission,” he replied.

“Isn’t she always.”

Rain said in a low voice to the Lion, “You don’t have to pretend. I know. I know it all, Brrr. I know it already.”

He arranged himself as he thought a stone lion in front of a library might do, with dignity and a sense of starch. “Well, everything’s changed,” he said, companionably enough, as if the acrobats had evacuated the arena overnight and a troupe of fire-eating tree elves had arrived to set up instead. “Not such a big surprise. Things do roll on.”

“On the strength of this one accusation against Mombey, the war has been called for Loyal Oz? Who did the calling, then?”

“I have a theory, Rain,” said the Lion. “Hiding in the heart of every downtrodden commoner is where the romance of the crown lives strongest. Alarming, I know. The citizens of Oz struck with mobs and protests, days and nights of rioting, and neither army would take up weapons against them.”

“How is Tip? Brrr, I know what happened. I’m not blind. And I think maybe I’ve always known. Just tell me—how is Tip?”

He had to decide if she was working him to find out what little he knew himself, and had heard, or if she was confessing a knowledge beyond his. Probably the latter. For all her youth she was proving basalt at the bone.

“Dorothy and Iskinaary have gone to reconnoiter. The Goose sent a report via that Wren. Tip is recovering nicely enough, that’s what is said on the streets. The Hall of Approval has been meeting right next door, in our own Aestheticum, to try to work out the proper course of action, but Tip isn’t attending—hasn’t the strength yet.”

“Where is my … where is my friend?” she ventured.

“They’ve made space in a private apartment in Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, which is somewhere on the edge of Goldhaven.”

“With attendants, I assume. An armored guard.”

“Well.” The Lion tried to smile. “An old chum of yours, as I understand it. A woman from Shiz named Miss Ironish. She’s been brought in from St. Prowd’s, since Madame Teastane’s staff and students all fled the city weeks ago and are sitting out the troubles comfortably on the shores at Lake Chorge. Miss Ironish claims to have known Tip in a small but honorable way. Her blameless record convinced the Emperor that she was the right one for the job.”

“And Mombey?”

“Ah, that’s another story. Some say she’s in Southstairs, secreted there for her own safety under cover of darkness. The Palace will neither confirm nor deny that rumor. Others say Mombey accidentally called her own past upon her as she called that of others, and too much corruption crept up in her blood, and she expired of extreme old age as she ought to have done a century ago. That’s hard to confirm or deny either, and the Palace has its reasons for keeping the matter in doubt. They don’t want to be accused by patriotic Munchkinlanders of having assassinated the Munchkinlander Eminence the minute she entered the capital.”

“What do you think?”

“I think if she had the strength to change her visage just one last time, she became a woggle-bug and someone stepped on her in the rush to catch the latest newsfold.”

“Or swatted her with a rolled-up newsfold.”

He waited.

“I learned how to read, once upon a time,” she told him. “I can read the headlines, you know.”

“I suppose you can.”

“The royalists will be having mighty parties.”

“It’s too early to tell. Though the confetti factories are probably going into overnight shifts.”

She sighed. “And my great-uncle?”

“Well, it’s all up in the air still, isn’t it? There’s the question of how ready to rule the new leader might be. As we know from Dorothy, age doesn’t always constitute wisdom. And people grow up on different schedules, one from the next.”

“Has Shell abdicated the throne?”

“It’s still unsettled whether the Palace will accept a return to the rule of monarchy. And the question of whether the monarch wants to rule. I understand there is human choice involved.”

“I don’t know if there is,” said Rain.

“Oh,” said the Lion. “Don’t give me that. I’m the Cowardly Lion, remember. There’s always human choice.”

She put her face to his shoulder, her greening hand upon his paw. “All right then,” she said. “Enough grieving. Can you make arrangements for me to have an audience?”

“I have it on the highest authority that Tip has been waiting for you to ask.”

“Who’s authority is that high?”

“A little Bird told me.”

9.

Miss Ironish opened the door of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. She shooed the guards on the stoop to one side and told them if they didn’t stop bristling their bayonets in her face she’d give them what for and no mistake. “Come in, Miss Rainary,” she said. A new sobriety had tightened her corset. She never mentioned the change in Rain’s appearance, except to mutter, “My, how you’ve grown.”

Scarly took Rain’s umbrella and put it against a hat stand.

“I believe you will be comfortable in the parents’ parlor,” said Miss Ironish. “Scarly will bring you a biscuit or a glass of water if you like. Please wait here and I will announce the Crown in a few moments.”

“I can help myself to a glass of—”

“This is hard on everyone,” said Miss Ironish sternly. “Wait.”

She left the room with a backward glance rich in opprobrium. A few moments later Scarly tiptoed in with three lemon brickums and a cheese tempto congealing upon a porcelain salver. Apparently school fare didn’t improve even for royalty.

“Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, moving out of the sight of the crowds who haunted the paving stones, the faithful who waited outside day and night, desperate to catch a glimpse of the miracle. “Oh, Miss Rainary.” She couldn’t control the gasp in her voice.

“I hope it isn’t too horrible,” said Rain, a little coldly.

“It en’t horrible,” said Scarly, and she took Rain’s hand. She could get nothing else out, though, and fled through the butler’s pantry when she heard Miss Ironish return.

“You may arise, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish, and stood back against the door as Tip came through, making every effort not to twist her hands. Miss Ironish retreated and the door closed firmly though without the sound of a click.

Rain said, “Am I to call you Ozma?”

“You may call me Tip,” she answered.

“I’m told that when you discovered what had happened, you fainted dead away. I thought, when I could think, ‘Well, isn’t that just like a girl.’ ”

“Not funny, Rain. Under the circumstances. How did you find out?”

Rain neither moved away nor did she come closer, and neither did Ozma Tippetarius. They stood nine feet apart on opposite margins of a sun-bleached carpet. “I suppose—I don’t know—maybe I dreamed it.”

“You’re lying. You don’t lie. Have you changed?”

“Well.” She held up her green fingers. “A little.”

Tip waited.

“Tay always liked you,” said Rain, “and Tay didn’t like men, generally.”

“Was that it?”

Rain thought. “Yes, I think that was it.”

“You’ve never even known if Tay is male or female itself, have you? Yet you claim to know how Tay can respond to me, even when a disguise is laid upon me for—for all those years I can’t remember?”

“We’re unlikely to make an acceptable ruling couple,” said Rain. “For one thing, you’re about a hundred years older than I am.”

“Well, I hide it well, don’t I.” The tone was bitter.

“You knew it all along,” said Rain.

“I didn’t. Mombey kept me apart from other children. We always shifted about every few years. I’m told most childhoods feel eternal, Rain. Mine did too. I wasn’t to know it was longer than anyone else’s. Perhaps I wasn’t smart, but grant me that. Or maybe Mombey charmed some sense of calendar out of me. It doesn’t matter. We’ve both had our childhoods filched from us, Rain. There’s that. If there’s nothing else.”

“There’s that,” Rain agreed.

They stole glances at each other, the green girl and the queen of Oz. Those forgotten called forward, against their wishes, into themselves. Rain might as well have been Elphaba at sixteen. Ozma Tippetarius had eyes the color of half-frozen water.

They could not cross the carpet to take each other in their arms. Maybe someday, but not today. More of their childhoods had to be stolen, yet, for that to happen—or maybe some of it returned to them. The charmless future would show them if, and when, and how.

Somewhere

1.

In the streets of the city they were saying that Ozma had come back. Within weeks, illustrated pamphlets in six colors became available at every vendor. One edition with bronze ink on the cover cost two farthings extra and sold out to collectors in an hour. It purported to present an entire modern history of Oz, starting with the arrival of the Wizard and the deposing of the Ozma Regent, Pastorius. The best part was a grotesquely colored section that everyone turned to first: the murder of Pastorius. Oh, the blood! Like a fountain all down the steps of the Palace of the Ozmas. Then the Wizard’s vile contract with Mombey, Pale Queen of Sorcery, to secret the child away while the Wizard set up shop to hunt for the fabled Grimmerie. For which he’d come to Oz in the first place, and over which, failing to secure it, he left, disconsolate.

In one of the final panels of that section, Mombey secretly made a pact with the Ozmists, and siphoned a zephyr or so of them for pumping up the Wizard’s balloon, to assure he could never return across the Deadly Sands. A lovely and theatrical conceit, if unsupportable by the testimony of witnesses, who wrote letters to the editor complaining about the rewriting of history. The liberties these artists take! Hacks, the lot of them.

Dorothy had her own section. Part III. They colorized her too highly and she looked like a Quadling afflicted with St. Skimble’s Rash. With her familiar, Toto, who could speak in the funny pages (arf arf !), Dorothy careered around Oz like some sort of a drunken sorceress, spilling mayhem out of her basket and kicking up her sparkly heels in musical numbers that didn’t translate particularly well on the page.

A nod was made to Elphaba and to Nessarose Thropp, and to Dorothy’s crime spree against them. However, maybe because the Emperor was about to abdicate the Throne Ministership of Oz, his portrayal was accorded a certain respect, if only for his having served as a place holder until Ozma could be released from her spell. How quickly a history of offenses can be rewritten. Yet there was some sour truth to it: Shell Thropp may have ordered the invasion of Munchkinland, but he hadn’t killed Pastorius. Nor had he imprisoned Ozma Tippetarius in a spell so deep it could keep her in a near perpetual boyhood until, through trickery played by a magic mouse (a magic mouse?) La Mombey accidentally reversed her own spell, revealing her depraved plan for world dominance. Or Oz dominance.

The extravaganza went into seven printings in a fortnight. It didn’t begin to show up wrapped around take-out fried fish for at least a month.

Little was made in print, either by the popular press or by pulpit expositories, of the material waste and psychic distress of the recent past. The dragons of Colwen Grounds, the war, the long privations, the fight for water, the death of so many on both sides of the conflict. The negotiations remained in a delicate stage. It didn’t do to allow sensibilities to become inflamed with reference to abominations too recent to be forgiven—if ever they could be forgiven.

Would Ozma come to rule? How would her legitimacy be determined since eighty-five years, give or take, had passed since her birth, but she was apparently still in her minority? Had Mombey herself not unwittingly identified the girl as Ozma—by that unsavory magicking of Tip homeward from boy to girl—the metamorphosis might have gone unremarked as any other backstreet carnival trick. (The details of the transformation were too squeamish for most citizens to imagine closely, except the depraved.) “Not Ozma!” Mombey had cried, out of her skull. Everyone present had heard her, and when Tip had been carried away for medical attention, the form of a teenage girl in a lad’s dress sartorials had escaped no one’s notice. (A number of men had trouble satisfying their wives for months in the ensuing vexation to their own makeup.)

Whether Ozma still wore the red locket on its chain—only one person knew enough to ask that question, and she would not ask it.

Hardly anyone else alive had ever seen Tip’s mother, Ozma the Bilious. No one could comment on any family resemblance the new Ozma might have to her forebears except by the fading rotogravured portraits that had remained hung, seditiously, during the reigns of the various Throne Ministers, in houses left shabby because their tenants could never afford redecoration.

And would Ozma Tippetarius accept the mantle? Did she have to? Did she have a choice?

Furthermore, would Munchkinland accept her as a ruler of a reunited Oz? No stalwart Munchkinlander could forget the crunchy little fact that the Ozma clan was Gillikinese. But it was Mombey who’d brought Ozma Tippetarius back to the throne from Munchkinland, which gave the rebel nation a stake. Before a month had passed some began, quietly, to call Mombey the savior of the nation. Without an Ozma to pull the warring factions together, the fighting might have gone on a good deal longer.

It was said that at Haugaard’s Keep, on Restwater, when they learned what a mess things had gotten to in the Emerald City, General Traper Cherrystone called a ceasefire and invited the Foill of Munchkinland into the Keep to discuss an end to the hostilities. No one was quite sure what happened next. The only witness was a tree elf named Jibbidee, and he wasn’t talking. In the Oak Parlor of the Florinthwaite Club, bruited about over a third glass of port, thank you, retired military officers whispered the rumors. Loyal Oz’s General Cherrystone had proposed to General Jinjuria that together they decline to accept the nonsense about the return of Ozma to the Emerald City, join forces, and rule as a military tribunal over Restwater themselves, setting up a protectorate over the access rights to the great lake. Jinjuria was said to have refused, whereupon Cherrystone shot her, and then took his own life.

The legal standing and even location of Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hall remained unknown.

So, too, the confused reputation of the Wicked Witch of the West. But in the rush of sentimental and even patriotic fervor that greeted the unexpected return of Ozma Tippetarius, word began to circulate that the great spell cast by La Mombey, to call the lost forward, had done more than stay Liir Thropp from his death and reveal the green skin of his daughter, Rain. It had done more than sabotage Mombey’s own plan to keep Ozma Tippetarius young, hidden, dumb, and male for another hundred or two hundred years. Mombey’s application of the spell from the Grimmerie, they said, had also inadvertently summoned Elphaba Thropp from—well, from wherever it was she had gone.

“As if she’d come back when asked,” said Mr. Boss. “What do they think she is? A charwoman?” The accidental family—what was left of it with the death of Nor, with the departure for Nether How of a frosty Liir and an angry Candle and an eye-rolling though mute Goose—was squatting in a garden flat below a shell-shocked semidetached villa off the Shiz Road in the Northtown neighborhood. Rain had refused to follow her parents unless she had settled things in her own mind.

Until the circumstances righted themselves somehow, they’d resigned themselves to this dump for the winter. The rising damp gave them all headaches of a morning but tenacious ivy hid the worst of the damage to the building’s exterior plaster. The place had views on a strip of garden that hadn’t benefited from the firebombing of the dragons a few months ago. Nonetheless, Tay liked to climb on what remained of the shattered ornamental cherryfern.

“I can understand the rage for Elphaba. It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight,” said the Lion. “Didn’t Nor used to say that? Also easier on your moral comfort, for one thing, to keep waiting for redemption of one sort or another rather than work it out for yourself. Since its time hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Well, that’s a matter of opinion we never asked you for,” said Dorothy, who had agreed to return to the fold after Liir had made his departure. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do my warm-ups. Right here.”

“I mean, look,” explained the Lion. “The so-called where’s-the-Witch mania has simply displaced Ozma hunger, that’s all. No one alive can remember what it was like to live under blood royalty. Three generations have grown up without the crown—to go back to it again just like that satisfies the appetite for resolution too quickly. People need something to be missing. They need to crave something they don’t have.”

“It used to be Lurline, when I was growing up,” said Little Daffy. “Lurline would come back eventually and grace us all with the spirit of better posture, or something. If the Ozma vacancy has been filled, then the people on the street need a new hunger. Why shouldn’t it be for that old witch?”

“This new hunger you’re talking about,” said the dwarf. “Better get going or we’ll miss the morning rush.”

They were making quite a killing with Little Daffy’s Munchkinlander Munchies. Once they had set aside enough capital they were planning to fund a trip back to the Sleeve of Ghastille to harvest more of the secret ingredient.

“There’s someone here at the door,” called Mr. Boss as he and Little Daffy were leaving with their bakery wheelbarrow.

“It’ll be for you, Dorothy. You go. I’ve got blisters from padding halfway across town chasing after your damn dog,” said the Lion. “It doesn’t know how to pee without dashing all the way to Burntpork. Dorothy, if you don’t get that Toto a leash and a muzzle, I’m going to get one for you.”

“You try muzzling me and watch the nation rise against you.”

Dorothy came back. “For you, Brrr,” she said. “They asked for Sir Brrr.” She mimed a mean little curtsey but ruffled his mane as he went by. “Where is Rain, anyway?” she asked in general, but only a grandmother clock ticked in answer. Brrr had gone into the garden to talk to a military guard of some sort. No one else was home.

For a few days, like the other curiosity seekers who thronged the kerbstones of Great Pullman Street, Rain found herself drawn to the facade of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. A sober building made of brick, painted in a no-nonsense black flatwash and finished in white trim, it signaled with confidence the rectitude of public office. The windows at street level remained curtained. No one came and no one went except ministers, who refused to comment. Rain saw Avaric bon Tenmeadows once, with a satchel, ducking a rotten apricot lobbed at him by someone impatient for news of the Ozma. Their queen. If queen she was.

Rain’s life had been spent in hiding. Disguised with ordinariness. She now felt cursed with this glare of green upon wrists and cheeks and everywhere else—she couldn’t bear to look at herself much. But as she wandered about the streets of the Emerald City like any one of the thousand paupers hoping to filch a meal, cadge a donation from some softie, work for an hour or maybe fall in love for less, she realized that no one bothered to bother her.

She hadn’t needed to hide her whole life long. No one wanted to find her anyway.

The winter had come in mild, and the shrubbery of the Oz Deer Park remained in sufficient leaf to give her cover. She felt she blended in better than, say, the starving families of the Quadling Corner, who took the most menial jobs and for breakfast ate paper and leaves with mustard. She could walk along the Ozma Embankment, looking for her life. Wherever it might be.

It wasn’t housed on a top floor of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, that much was certain.

Perhaps, she thought, she would go up to Shiz. If they would have her. She was a year early but Miss Ironish had concluded that, against all odds, Rain was clever. Perhaps she could have a private tutor for a year to prepare. She didn’t quite qualify as a legacy student, as her grandmother had never matriculated. But those were mere details. Miss Ironish could arrange it.

Tay scampered after Rain but she felt the creature was suffering from the lack of a campaign. Maybe she would take it back to Quadling Country and release it to its companions. Male or female, it could find what company it might. Perhaps she owed the rice otter that much.

She was circling around the ramparts of Southstairs Prison, slowly heading for home, or what passed for home, when she stopped to let a carriage go by. Two small children of the Vinkus—Arjikis, she thought, in those leggings—were splashing in the gutters. “A lion could beat a dragon any day,” said one, speaking pidgin Ozish. “Could not,” said the other. “Brrr could,” protested the first, “now he’s in charge.”

That was how Rain learned that Tip had accepted the institutional role of the Ozma only provisionally, on a condition of deferred elevation. Tip had finalized a military settlement for peace by proposing for elevation to Throne Minister, as her regent, the Lord Low Plenipotentiary from Traum, Gillikin. None other than Sir Brrr. The Cowardly Lion as he once had been known. When Ozma reached her maturity, she would reconsider whether to rule.

Well well, thought Rain, Tip had only a handful of days in which to ascertain the Lion’s strengths. And all he had done during that period following Nor’s death was to grieve. Is that, in the end—that capacity to hurt—the most essential ingredient for a ruler?

In a ceremony of surpassing simplicity, Sheltergod Thropp, His Sacredness, turned over the accoutrements of power to the Cowardly Lion. Shell handed over two keys, a few folded documents, some receipts for personal items that had gone missing during his term in office, and one or two crowns. He wasn’t sure which was more legitimate, so Brrr had them placed on a wooden hat rack in his dressing room where they wouldn’t pester his mane. He hated to have his waves flattened now that he could afford to have them done again.

“You’ll stay for the formal investiture?” the Lion asked Shell.

“I don’t believe so, if you don’t mind.”

“We are recalling Lady Glinda from Munchkinland.”

“I never cared much for Glinda. No, I’ll just tootle along if it’s all the same to you.”

“But where will you go? Private life could afford little by way of satisfaction to one of your, um, background.”

The former Emperor said, “There was a story my old Nanny used to tell me at darktime. A fisherman and his fishwife lived by the side of the mythical sea that shows up in so many old tales. The fisherman caught a great thumping carp, all covered in golden scales. The Fish spoke—fish can talk in stories, you know—and in return for being thrown back into the sea, it promised to give the man a wish. The man couldn’t think of much to wish for—a ladle for his wife, maybe—but when he got home that night and she had a ladle, she hit him with it for having such low self-esteem as to request only a kitchen implement. Go back, she said, and ask for something better. I want a cottage, not this bucket of seaweed we sleep in. A cottage with real glass windows, and roses round the dovecote.”

“Indeed,” said the Lion, who had always felt skittish about stories and anyway had a country to begin running.

“You can imagine how it goes. She kept sending him back over and over. The Fish was obliging. Whatever the fishwife wanted, the fishwife got. And it was never enough. In succession, she required to be a duchess, to have a castle, to be a queen, to have a palace, to be an empress and have an empire. Why the man didn’t throw her into the sea, I don’t know. Stories don’t make much sense sometimes.”

“He must have loved her.”

“Eventually, in the teeth of a horrible storm, lightning and thunders from all sides, she demanded to be made like the Unnamed God itself. Quaking for his life, the fisherman crawled to the sea and made the petition. The golden Fish said, ‘Just go back, she’s got what she wished for.’ And when he went back home—”

“She wore the golden sun on her brow and the silver moon on her fanny,” guessed the Lion.

“She was sitting in the bucket of seaweed again.”

“She overreached herself,” said the Lion. “Ah, morals.”

“Or did she?” said Shell. “Perhaps the most godly thing is to be poor, after all, to give up trappings and influence.”

“So.” The Lion was trying to steer this interview to a close. “You’re going to take up telling stories to children during Library Hour?”

Shell clasped his hands. Only now did the Lion notice they were mottled and trembling. Shell had his sister Elphaba’s long nose, and a drip was forming just below the tip. High sentiment, or an aggrieved immune system? “There are rumors of caves in the Great Kells—as far as Kiamo Ko, even farther. Hermits go there to live, to hide, to die. Sometimes earthquakes come and bury them in their homes. I should be prepared for that, don’t you think?”

The Lion didn’t reply. He was learning to hold his opinion to himself. For a few years, until Ozma was ready, he was no more or less than Oz itself. Oz didn’t have opinions. It had presence.

Plans for the installation of Brrr as Throne Minister would have involved Rain, but she couldn’t bear to be close to Ozma in some public setting. Ozma—Tip—Ozma (but which one?) had the greatest power in the country, and could send for Rain at any hour of any day, for a private audience, and Rain would have come. But that message never arrived. So the thought of accepting a formal invitation to sit in a formal chair for hours a few feet away from the young monarch-in-waiting gave Rain a feeling in her chest as if her very heart was somehow suffocating in there.

But she had no heart, she’d given it away.

Her accidental family never mentioned the matter. They protested, too robustly to be convincing, that they would much rather stay home with her. They preferred cards. But when the afternoon of the Lion’s elevation arrived, a scrappy sense of jubilation broke through anyway. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss celebrated by whooping it up like a couple of teenagers, drinking too much whiskey-sweet from a hip flask. Dorothy sat in the garden even though the air had turned chilly. When the time came near for the actual coronation, the four of them changed their minds, linked arms—well, Little Daffy and Mr. Boss linked arms and, at a different altitude, so did Rain and Dorothy—and they hurried through the streets to stand at the back of the crowd and watch from afar. Both the hall and the piazza in front were hung with banners of Ozian emerald, but they were interspersed with standards of red and gold. The Lion’s chosen colors, perhaps. They tended to mute the patriotism of the event in a way Rain admired.

The music was atrocious, though, and way too loud.

Just before Rain slipped out of the proceedings a guard collared her and said, “There you are. You’re requested in a reception room in Mennipin Square this evening.”

Her heart skipped up some stairs. “Surely you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Not bloody likely.” He grinned at her. “You don’t exactly pass, you know.”

She supposed she didn’t. “I don’t want to meet Ozma in some chaperoned chamber—” she began.

He interrupted. “Begging your pardon. I’m not representing Ozma.”

She waited until she could govern her quavering voice. “I see. Then am I under arrest?”

“Only socially. Do you want an escort?”

“Are you offering to be my boyfriend?”

He blushed. “No, miss, and no offense intended. I merely meant to suggest if you didn’t care to travel alone at night—there’s some young ladies who wouldn’t dare, you see—I was offering my services, I mean the services of my regiment. Miss.”

“Well, I’m not one who is troubled by being out at night,” said Rain, and took down the address. She had accepted no invitation to dance at any of the installation balls that were mounted all over the city. With whom would she dance? Her grandmother’s old broom?

She walked to the assignation more or less impervious to the explosions of colored lights that scratched themselves against the black sky over standing sections of the Palace of the People. She thought she could hear Dorothy leading a sing-along at the Lady’s Mystique, but that couldn’t be right. Now that the official business was over, Dorothy would be at the Lion’s side. Must be one of those entertainers who impersonated her. Rain moved herself along.

Crossing a bridge over one of the nicer city canals, Rain paused for a moment to look at the pyrotechnics reflected in the water. The fireworks were like great colored spiders. For an instant she saw the Emerald City under attack again, this time by monstrous insects. But Mombey was in custody now, and her bloodhound spiders no longer hunting for Rain or the Grimmerie. The past was the past. Rain had to get out of here. She was going mad.

At first she didn’t recognize the man who answered the door. Neither did he twig in to who Rain was until they had said their good evenings to each other. Their voices cued them both. Then she fell into his arms in a way she had never fallen into her father’s. Puggles said, “To think I lived to see this day! You are a sight for sore eyes.”

“No, I make eyes sore. Tell the truth!”

But they laughed, and she had not laughed—well, she hadn’t laughed much in her life at all. Had she.

“So this is Lady Glinda’s house? Why didn’t they just tell me?”

“She doesn’t want her circumstances to be widely known,” said Puggles. “It’s a temporary posting, you see. She can’t be bothered to become engaged in the skeltery-heltery of social callers. Not under these conditions.”

“May I ask what conditions you’re being cagy about?”

“I’ll leave it to her to tell you herself. She’s awaiting you in the front parlor. Can you see yourself up? The double doors on the right. I can’t do the stairs as well as I ought.”

She was halfway up but turned and called lightly to him, “Puggles? What happened to Murthy?”

He shook his head and made some obscure pious gesture that country folk persisted in making, against all odds.

Lady Glinda sat in warm lamplight with a throw rug upon her knees.

“I should have thought you’d be kicking up your heels at the prime event,” said Rain, coming in as if she’d just gone to pick up a pack of perguenays at the local newsagent.

“Oh, I’ve long since gotten over the taste for fuss, though I was obscenely pleased to be extended an invitation.”

“A former Throne Minister of Oz, no less, taking a quiet night at home, and on such a night. You surprise me.”

“Come here, my dear, and stop remonstrating. Let me look at you.”

Lady Glinda’s voice was still warm, but a little frail, and a tremor pestered the stem of her neck so her chin dove and rose in the tiniest of hummingbird flutters. She hadn’t lost her taste for pearls, and the at-home tiara was vintage Glinda, though it looked as if it had gotten sat upon more than once. So too the spectacles that fell on a loop from Lady Glinda’s neck. She’d been reading. Who knew.

Glinda put the pince-nez to her face. “So it’s true. Oh, my darling, it’s true.”

“That I’ve gone native?”

Glinda nodded and patted the sofa next to her. “I had to accept it on faith, you know—that you were Liir’s daughter. By the time I met you the concealing spell had already been cast. You could have been any other urchin child brought for protection to a big house and left there by a loving and canny parent who didn’t know how to care for a child.”

Rain said, “They dropped me off like laundry, didn’t they? To be washed and dried and cared for? By a stranger.”

“Now don’t be like that, child. They were under extraordinary pressures. We all were, back then. Some of us still are.”

“Tell me about it.”

“They did the best they could. Besides, I was hardly a stranger. I had known your grandmother. We were like this.” She twinned her second and third fingers together as if they might strangle each other.

“All that I might have had of them,” said Rain. “Access to my mother’s instincts for the present, for knowing the truth of what was happening now, here. Access to my father’s occasional capacity to read the past, to tell it. And what did I get in exchange?”

“You lived,” said Glinda simply. “You survived. I won’t say in style, for I can see that doesn’t mean a whole lot to you.”

“I lived alone,” said Rain. “Until General Cherrystone came to Mockbeggar Hall and put you under house arrest, I had the run of the kitchen yard and the run of the backstairs workrooms and the ledge at the edge of the lake from which to jump into the water. There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s. I can’t repair that.”

“The history of a nation was happening around you. Children don’t often notice this, but it happens, most years, to be true. For you no less than some, but no more, either. Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That’s called growing up, Rain.”

“My first memories are of mice, and fish, and a frog in the mud,” said Rain.

“Is that anyone’s fault?” replied Glinda. “And is that so terrible, after all?”

“No one has to be so alone.” She gritted her teeth. “I pushed my hand in the pocket of ice and pulled up a little golden fish, and saw how alone it was. It was the first family I had, you know.”

Glinda sighed. “Your hand was bare. The fish flopped upon it, I suppose? Tickled some, maybe?”

“Yes. Just about my earliest memory, I think.”

“Who do you think was holding your mittens while you pawed about to rescue the fish?”

Rain looked at her lap.

“Who do you think put the fish back in the water so it could swim to its own kind when the sun went down?”

The spectacles slid off Glinda’s lap into a pile of knitting on the floor.

“Who do you think walked you back across the weir and handed you over for a bath to warm you up?”

Rain said, “And you didn’t even know if I was really Elphaba’s granddaughter.”

“And I didn’t know if you were Elphaba’s granddaughter.”

They had tea brought in by a parlor maid. Glinda showed Rain her collection of bubbles on ormolu stands. “Don’t talk to me about the present,” said Glinda. “I know something about what is going on. Tell me what you’ve done. Where you’ve been since you left Mockbeggar all those years ago.”

Rain obliged with brevity. Glinda paid only scant attention, taking up her knitting and counting stitches under her breath. When Rain began to talk about the Chancel of the Ladyfish above the Sleeve of Ghastille, though, Glinda began to listen more closely. “Describe that place to me,” she said. “I love architecture, you know. It’s one of my passions. Always was.”

Rain did the best she could—the low stumped pillars, the altarpiece built lengthwise into the wall, the view from the height. The figure of the fishy goddess or whatever it was. “I never could do mythology,” admitted Glinda. “The Great Morphologies of vin Tessarine totally defeated me back at Shiz. I cheated on the final, but don’t tell anyone or they’ll revoke my grade, which wasn’t very high even with the cheating.”

“I don’t do mythology either,” said Rain.

“It’s the building I’m interested in,” said Lady Glinda. “The way you describe it sited on that slope. I’ve always paid attention to the temples of Lurline—so many small and insignificant Lurline sightings were claimed in the Pertha Hills of my childhood. The dales are positively crusty with chapels. You can’t ride the hounds without breaking your mount’s leg at least once a season on some sacred stone omphalos overgrown with ivy. But what you describe doesn’t sound Lurlinist to me, or if it is, it represents a watery variation of the myth of our sky-goddess and avatrice.”

“The great stone woman was maternal and stern and supplied with a fishtail. Beyond that I can’t say; I don’t remember the details. I had just met up with my parents for the first time in memory and frankly I was distracted by the inconvenience of them.”

“Well, if I had to venture an opinion at a meeting of the Crowned Heads’ Book Discussion Group and Jug Band, I’d guess your parents stumbled upon the remnants of a temple built for quite a different purpose than the consolidation of religious feeling. It sounds more like a business center to me. Commerce always builds fancier temples than faith does.”

“A fishmongery in the highlands?” Rain laughed. “You ought to have studied for that test a little harder.”

“Well, if you go up to Shiz, you study for me, now, will you? Learn from my mistakes.” Glinda laughed too. “Rain, what will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do good, though, will you?” She blinked brightly at the green girl. “If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?”

“I don’t know what good I could do.”

“None of us does. That doesn’t let us off the hook.”

“What will you do?” asked Rain challengingly.

Glinda sighed. “Haven’t you heard?”

Rain shook her head.

“I am being sent to Southstairs. I go tomorrow.”

“What for? That’s impossible!”

“It’s not impossible and now don’t you go upsetting yourself or you’ll upset me. It’s quite right and proper that I pay for my mistakes. When I was at Mockbeggar Hall I unleashed the power of the Grimmerie against those dragons, and the dragons were indirectly under the supervision of Shell Thropp. I attacked the armed forces of the Throne Minister of Oz, Rain. That’s just about treason. I can be pardoned, but not quickly. Haste would not be seemly. The Lion, if he’s to rule wisely and deserve the trust of the citizens of Oz, must be seen to have no favorites. Including me. Justice demands no less. I am a former Throne Minister but I’m not above making mistakes. I leave in the morning.” She laughed. “I had been hoping to finish this little bed-jacket before I went, but I think I’m going to have to have the carriage stop at Brickle Lane on the way to Southstairs so I can pick up something ready-made. I don’t want to arrive looking less than my best.”

“But it’s outrageous. Southstairs! If you go, I should go too.”

“You were a child, dear. Not responsible. If you persist in objecting, you’re a child still.” She put out her hand so Rain could help her stand. “I mustn’t keep you, dear. And I have much to attend to myself. I just so wanted to know if it was true, and now I know. Maybe Elphaba will come back one day, or maybe she won’t, but in the meantime I have known you. That will see me through, I do believe.”

Elphaba is not coming back, thought Rain, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Not to an old fool like Glinda.

“Oh, Rain,” said Glinda, when the girl was almost out the door. “One more thing. About Tip. You may think that a story should have a happy ending—”

“Whoever told me stories?” asked Rain. “I’m not looking for happiness. But I’m not looking for an ending either.” She wouldn’t talk about Tip to Glinda. She just waggled her green fingers and slipped away.

It wasn’t hard for Rain to get the attention of the Cowardly Lion, though it was difficult to get a private moment. He was surrounded by staff.

“I want architects from the planning council all over that dome, do you hear me. Extra buttressing against tremors. Talk to some professor of aesthetics about the designs if you must, but I want to approve them. I don’t care which college, pull a straw from a broom and make a wish. Tell the Glikkun contingent they can go to hell. No, don’t tell them that; give them some chits for supper and have them come back after dark. Pursley, have you the list? I want a delegate sent to the town of Tenniken to see if you can find any contemporaries who knew a soldier named Jemmsy. Died in the Great Gillikin Forest thirty odd years ago, a member of the Wizard’s army. Don’t ask me why, just do it. I’m issuing a new line of medals for courage, and his relatives deserve a whole bunch of them. They can flog them in the streets for all I care.”

Rain almost grinned. The rogue Lion as a functionary of the government.

“Was Rain here? Where is she? There you are, my dear. Have you come to advise me about the Glikkuns? They’ve refused to be party to the peace we brokered with Munchkinlanders and a nasty little situation is brewing up in the Scalps. Sakkali Oafish, the troll chieftain, wants nothing to do with me. The harridan. We go back a ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to get the Nome King involved. Common cause among the trollfolk. It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement. And what about the Munchkinlander problem? They’re not cooperating with my proposal of extension of health benefits to the Animals who served in their army. Can we be shocked, do you think?”

“You look in clover, Brrr. If not particularly rested.”

“It’s the weskit, isn’t it? A Rampini original. How do you like the curls?”

She shook her head.

“I was afraid so, but I’ve gotten used to them. It keeps the mane out of my eyes without my having to resort to a hairband. Now, about the color? I was silvering prematurely, but is this look a bit rancid?”

“You’re expecting Muhlama H’aekeem to come find you here, now you’re single again and, oh, by the way, the king of the forest. Ha!”

“Ha,” he agreed, brought down a bit. “She hated authority. Did everything in her power to avoid it. She didn’t come to the installation nor send a card. When did the noble old concept of tribute go out of style? Well, maybe when my term limit has expired, she’ll show up again.” He began to comb out his whiskers with his claws, worrying in advance.

“Brrr. Pay attention. You can’t seriously be intending to put Lady Glinda in Southstairs prison?”

The assistants bustled, but more quietly, so they could eavesdrop. He roared them out of the room, but then told Rain she had understood the matter perfectly correctly. He hoped it would not be for long. Glinda would be given every courtesy possible under the circumstances, but liberty was costly, and she would have to pay. “It’s for the good of the nation, Rain,” he said. “I shall haul her up again just the first moment that my advisors recommend it safe to the polity to do so.”

Mister Mikko, the Ape, came to the door with a few statements needing signatures, but Brrr sent him packing. “So glad to be able to put him on payroll. I owe him. Now what are we going to do about Dorothy?” he asked Rain.

“Don’t look at me,” said Rain “You’re the Ozma Regent now.”

“She hangs around the Emerald City any longer, she’ll become a demagogue,” said the Lion. “Either that, or a parody of herself. Like the rest of us.”

“What does she want?”

“Well, I believe she wants to go home. Again. Doesn’t she?”

“Last I heard. She’s not insane, you know. I’d want to leave too.”

“But I haven’t got any ideas,” said Brrr. “I’m the leader now; I don’t have time to think.”

“We could always try the Grimmerie,” said Rain.

“Mister Mikko, bring the book from the treasury,” roared Brrr. “I do so love having my whims indulged in,” he admitted to Rain. “How about some chocolates?”

“You’ll suffer again, Brrr. No elevation is eternal.”

“Don’t I know it. I’m just trying to have fun while it lasts.”

So, thought Rain, an Animal as Throne Minister of Oz. After all this time. Whatever would Elphaba think of that?

Dorothy’s departure from Oz was arranged so hastily that Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were absent—out of town, engaged in their harvesting expedition in the Sleeve of Ghastille. They didn’t get to say farewell, or anything saltier.

Before dawn, Brrr escaped his royal guards and commandeered a hansom cab so he could make his good-byes to Dorothy in person. He met Rain and Mister Mikko in the insalubrious courtyard of a private atelier in the Lower Quarter, a back-neighborhood place Mister Mikko had located where they might attract less attention. Mister Mikko commandeered the book. An elderly chatelaine, Miss Pfanee, opened the gate to the few who had gathered. She curtseyed low when she saw the Cowardly Lion among the delegation. His presence had not been advertised. But when she caught sight of Rain gleaming green in the predawn gaslight, she gasped and fled and didn’t come back.

Amid the wheelbarrows and compost and some rangy geraniums put out to die but refusing, so far, Rain settled on an old blanket and touched the Grimmerie for the first time since the pine barrens above Mockbeggar Hall.

Mister Mikko stood on one side, almost asleep from the strain of his new responsibilities. Dorothy knelt at the other, Toto gnawing the edge of one of her heels. Rain pulled back the cover. The book flew open to a blank page—at least it began blank.

They didn’t know the word for a watermark, but a faint green huzzle of light seemed to radiate from the page—so dimly at first that they thought it a refraction cast by a drop of water balanced upon a nearby leaf. A zigzag—a Z escaped from the O, thought Rain. The edges of the image were blurred, as if they were made of the smallest bits of paper, the kind of airy nothings that fly in the light when the pages of a book are turned. Ozmists of the page, perhaps.

“It’s almost Elphaba, isn’t it,” said Dorothy tearily.

“Nonsense,” said Mister Mikko, who had taught Elphaba Thropp in the good old days, back at Shiz. “It’s nothing at all like Elphaba. It’s the soul of a deceased bookworm, nothing more. Let’s get this over with.”

“She’s not coming back,” said Dorothy, “and I’m not either.”

Rain flipped through the pages, which were docile enough under her touch. On the Extermination of Pests. No! Dorothy was a hot ticket, but hardly a pest. To Call Winter upon Water. There it had all begun, for Rain: the beginning of a coherent memory of her own life, not just a collection of incidents. For Tomfoolery, Its Eradication or Amplification. Please.

Was there a spell To Make the Heart Whole, Regardless?

She better be careful before she mischiefed herself—or Ozma—into disaster.

She laughed when she saw the next page. Gone with the Wind. Well, Dorothy had arrived via a mighty big windstorm the first time, no? Maybe it was time to call it up again.

“Are you ready?” she asked Dorothy.

“Next time I want a holiday,” said Dorothy, “I’m going to try overseas. The Levant, maybe. Or the Riviera. Or the Argentine pampas. Over the great ocean to meet the China people. All this gadding about Oz has confirmed in me a taste for travel.”

“Overseas. Please.” Rain looked up from where she was bent over the book. She knew herself well; she wasn’t the type to mouth pithy sentiments suitable for crocheting. All she could think of to say was, “Dorothy, next time? Take out some travel insurance.”

“Right. And I’m going to choose my fortune cookie a little more carefully next time too. Now listen. Rain.” Ever tit for tat with Dorothy. “Before it’s too late? Don’t give up on Tip. I mean Ozma. There’s so much ahead for you still. I wish—”

“Don’t wish,” said Rain, “don’t start. Wishing only…”

“And about your grandmother,” said Dorothy. “I don’t know if—”

“I don’t want to talk, I have work to do.”

“I just mean,” said Dorothy, smiling painfully, “there’s no need for her to come back. I mean, look. Here you are.”

Rain glanced around herself miserably. The Lion and Dorothy were gazing at her with watery grins. She wanted to throw a potted geranium at each one of them. “I’m going to send you on your way before you feed me any more of your nonsense,” she barked.

Dorothy then turned to Brrr. “I used to like the Scarecrow best,” she began.

He gruffed at her, “So did I. Now are you ready to take some advice from a Cowardly Lion? Make your way safely home. With our royal blessing. But when you get there, don’t surrender, Dorothy. Never surrender.”

“You didn’t, did you,” replied Dorothy. “Local Lion Makes Good. Well, first thing I’m going to do when I get back is find out what happened to Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, bless ’em. And if San Francisco is in as much of a mess as the Emerald City, well, I’ve learned something from Little Daffy about setting a bone. I’ll pitch in. Singing all the way, of course.” She was making fun of herself to settle her nerves. “We might’ve made a nice duo, Brrr, but courage called you elsewhere.” They didn’t speak again, but it took them a few moments to pull out of each other’s grip.

Rain began to intone the spell. A small local windstorm kicked up from the cobbles. For a moment it looked like the Ozmists, once again, but it was grittier. An updraft lifted Dorothy in the air as if she were flying high in the elevator she’d never stopped describing to anyone who would listen. All that was left of Toto, as Dorothy snatched him up, was a little pointed turd, which Mister Mikko kicked into the compost. No one had time to say goodbye to the dog. The basket in which Toto had traveled was left behind on the ground, rocking in the force of their disappearance.

Still, Tip remained in Madame Teastane’s. Maybe, thought Rain, Tip is only waiting until the right moment to steal away. And then what? And then what? Crack open the Grimmerie and—and what? We’d do what? Steal from the truth and lock each other in disguises again? That could do no good.

But weeks went by, and then months. No message arrived.

When to stay any longer would be to accept paralysis as permanent, Rain readied to make her departure from the Emerald City. Once the warm weather settled in she would leave by foot. Alone. She sent word to the Cowardly Lion. He replied by messenger. Perhaps he’d experienced one too many good-byes. As casually as sharing a loaf of bread, Brrr deeded Rain the Grimmerie in its blue sack. “You’re the only one who can use it,” he wrote. “It’s too dangerous to have in town. I don’t want to know what you do with it, just don’t bring it back to me. Love, Brrr.”

A packet in brown paper, done up in string, slid out of the sack after the book. Rain opened it. A medal that said COURAGE on it. Brrr making fun of himself? The ribbon was of ivory silk with a silver thread. No doubt he’d supervised the design. She turned it over. Oooh, fancy, a bit of engraving. RAIN, it said. WHO KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME PAST, PRESENT & TO COME.

The matinal hour suited her now. Ever since the day Dorothy had made it out of Oz—safely, one hoped, though if ever a girl was trouble prone it was La Gale of Kansas—Rain found that she preferred to walk the streets as night was shifting toward dawn. Perhaps at that hour a native greenness in the atmosphere hovers below the registration of our easily blinded eyes.

In any case, before dawn one weekday she put Tay in Toto’s old basket and left it on the doorstep of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. “For Tip” said her own note, “from Rain. For as long as Tay allows.” Tay hadn’t fussed at being left on Tip’s doorstep. It was as if the rice otter knew where Tip was, and who Tip was, and what job it had to do. A small job of comfort, if green comfort was possible. Half a comfort. Who could say.

She walked to Nether How in total silence.

The next year, when the Grasstrail Train came through and delivered one of those color supplements to the gang at Kiamo Ko, Chistery borrowed Nanny’s glasses and read every panel out loud to her.

“Oh my,” said Nanny, and “Read that bit again, will you,” and “Mercy!”

“And that’s that,” said Chistery when he was through.

“A load of hogswallop,” said Nanny, “but affecting in its way. Is she coming back, do you think?”

“Elphaba?” said Chistery. “Now, Nanny.”

“No, Rain, I mean,” said Nanny. “Really, monkeyboy. I’m not moronic. She wouldn’t care to stay around in the Emerald City. Do you think she’s coming back here to live? This is her castle, after all. And something tells me she has that old book that has caused so much trouble.”

Chistery was humbled by the correction. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no clue about Rain’s future. I thought you were asking if Elphaba was coming back.”

“The very idea,” said Nanny, removing the hard-boiled egg from its shell and settling down to eat the shell. “Besides,” she said a few moments later, “Elphaba’s already come back. I saw her last week on the stairs.” But Chistery was clattering the cutlery. Having gone hard of hearing, he didn’t take this in.

Candle and Liir lasted another year or so in the house at Nether How, but in the end, Candle decided to leave her husband. Rain wept and thought it was her fault. She shouldn’t have come back; she shouldn’t have brought her endless ache to infect the rooms of the cottage of her parents. She should be the one to go.

But Candle insisted she herself needed to light out until she could come to some understanding about how she could have been persuaded, all those years ago, to give their daughter’s childhood away to someone else. She and Liir had never fought again, but nor had they spoken like lovers or even friends. It was time.

“My childhood was never yours to have, and anyway, you gave it to me the best way you could,” said Rain, sniffling. She’d come to believe this.

“Liir was frightened for his life, so he was frightened for yours,” said Candle of Liir. “When you were born green, he choked, and hid you away. I let it happen. That’s how it seems to me now, Little Green. Maybe I’ll learn to forgive him, or to forgive myself. Maybe I’ll come back then. I can only see the present, not the future.”

After she was gone, Liir said, “I’m to blame for more than everything. And if I mention, Rain, that Candle left you first—when you were a newborn—it was for a good reason. To save you. She knew who you were. She had that touch. She knew you’d survive, and she left you for me to find. She had that confidence in you and that instinct to protect you too. Maybe what she’s doing now—for you, for me—is no less kind. Though we can’t see it yet. She does see the present, remember.” He tried to disguise a wince. “I can vouch for that. On some level, as an Elephant, I was dead to her—that’s probably why she couldn’t see the present, see me as still alive.”

“Do you think she’s gone off to find the famous Trism? Now that you located him after all these years?” Rain couldn’t help herself; it was easier to hurt someone else than to plumb her own griefs.

“You know,” said Liir, “when I met your mother at the mauntery of Saint Glinda’s in the Shale Shallows, everyone called her Candle. Candle Osqa’ami. She did herself. But I think that was a mispronunciation from the Qua’ati. Her name is nearer to Cantle. It means ‘a part of a thing.’ A segment, portion. Sometimes something that has broken off, a shard. A potsherd. A cantle of a statue, of a shell.”

“Stop talking about it. Either she’ll come back or she won’t.”

“You know, I’ve heard only a shell with a broken tip can make any music.”

Iskinaary said, “I was thinking quail eggs for supper? Or a nice lake trout.” Neither father nor daughter answered him. Rain went out to the front yard and looked at the hills. There was nothing to collect anymore that had meaning, nothing to count or to count on. She walked anyway, dropping fistfuls of nothing, trying to empty herself out of herself.

They buried the Grimmerie on the slope of Nether How, as close as Liir could remember to the spot where he’d seen it emerging in the arms of that ancient magician. They marked the spot by staking Elphaba’s broom into the ground, thinking it would last the winter. In the spring they would haul some stones to mark the spot permanently.

When they returned in the spring, though, the broom had taken root and was starting to sprout virgin green, so they left it where it was as marker indeed.

Another year passed. No word came from Tip. Rain didn’t want to hear news from the Emerald City or, indeed, from anywhere in Oz. She took to wandering the hills around the Five Lakes, and she ventured farther and farther upslope into the Great Kells. Though she had applied by mail and been admitted into Shiz University, she never accepted the position or the bursary and she let the matter slide.

The world seemed slowly to unpopulate, the winds to speak to her in subtle and aggressive tones that she couldn’t understand.

Then one day in spring, when the afternoon had a summery clamminess to it though the mountain slopes were only starting to leaf out, she thought again about the shell that had summoned the Ozmists and, perhaps, helped trick La Mombey into giving away the location of the hidden Ozma Tippetarius. The Ozmists had only spoken of appetite for the current day, which was for them the future. One day Rain would be dead too, though she would still be curious about the future. She would be among the Ozmists herself no doubt, eager to know about the children of Ozma Tippetarius, if any could ever be born. The appetite to know ever further what might happen—it was an endless appetite, wasn’t it? The story wants to go on and on. She couldn’t fault the Ozmists for the permanence of their affection for life, even in death. Half dead herself, she felt that affection too, though it had no focus, no object upon which to address itself.

She took up the shell she’d stolen from Chalotin, that old Quadling seer without feet. She didn’t blow it. She felt the broken tip of it—the breakage that allows it to sing. She remembered someone once saying something like “Listen to what it says to you.”

She put it to her ear. That same spectacular hush, the presence of expectation, the sound of expectation. A cantle of nothing whole.

She could make no words out, of course. She had tried for years and had never heard so much as a syllable. She laid it back upon the table. The Goose, who had gone rather silent the last year, eyed her balefully. “Well?” snapped Iskinaary. “Anyone leave a message for you?”

His question provoked the answer. What was it saying to her? Nothing in words—she’d been listening to the wrong thing. It didn’t speak to her through its hush. It spoke to her through its presence.

It was saying to her: I exist, so what does that say to you?

Liir took no interest in the buried Grimmerie. Instead he negotiated with a tinker to hunt out and eventually deliver to the cottage at Nether How a set of eighty pages of blank paper. Then Liir spent most of the month of Lurlinetide binding them with glue and string into a codex of sorts. After some sloppy experimentation, he managed to accumulate a pot of lampblack by scraping the soot from the chimneys of the oil lamps and grinding it with resin and the char of burnt bark. Iskinaary donated a quill, and Liir sat down to write. It seemed to make him happy while he was waiting for—well, whatever he was waiting for.

“What are you doing?” His industry made her cross.

He looked up as if from a long distance away. His eyes were green; she’d never noticed that.

“I’m writing a treatise, maybe. A letter, anyway. To send to—to Brrr. And Ozma.”

She was insulted already. He was barging into her life, trying to make it better. It was less trouble to be abandoned. “About?”

“About. About, I guess—power. About governance. About the birds of no like feather who flew together, to make up the Conference of the Birds. About the maunts who decided to govern themselves by committee rather than by obedience to a superior. About Ozmists and their need to listen to the future as well as to the past. I haven’t gotten it straight in my head yet.”

“You’re angling for a court position? As advisor to the Throne Minister?”

“I’m only angling to question the rationale of a court and a throne. The justice of it.”

“Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.”

“Except, maybe, to think.” He went back to work.

Rain thought he was too young to be so meditative, and his patience made her impatient.

To escape the sound of his thoughts scratching along, she stayed out in cold weather and worked on building a fieldstone wall around the asparagus patch. She remembered the polished chunk in the Chancel of the Ladyfish, with that tiny inscribed creature that seemed as much feather as horse. Maybe one day she would set out on a walkabout across Oz by herself and collect that stone. Inanimate objects were somewhat less bother than people.

She was pausing from her labors late one morning, wiping sweat from her brow despite the rime on the grass and the shelves of ice cantilevering from the shores of the lakes, when she saw a twitch of movement near the broom-tree. Ever wary of some fiend or sorcerer coming by and sniffing out the Grimmerie somehow, she moved closer to check. In the shadows of the tree she startled a serpent of sorts, who proved Serpentine when he reared up, flared his striped lapels, and addressed her.

“You don’t need to apply that heavy stone to me,” said the Snake. “I mean you no harm.”

She shifted it to her hip. “I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong place to digest your breakfast. That tree is off bounds to you. It’s a memorial garden of sorts.”

“I’m no fool. I know what lies in this grave.”

Rain didn’t think he was being impertinent, but she had long ago lost the gift of a catholic sympathy. She’d grown up too much. “You’d better move along.”

“I recognize you, I think. I believe I may have helped your parents degreenify you. I see the spell wore off at last. Most do.” He leaned closer on one of his several dozen snake-hips. “You’re doing all right, then? You made it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t give interviews, Mr. Serpent.”

With alacrity he wound himself around the stem of the tree to get a little more height, and then dropped his head from a branch so he could be closer to her. His eyes were acid yellow, not unkind. “Quite wise. I don’t either. I find it does the likes of me no good. Everyone twists your words so.”

“Are you ready to move along?”

“Are you? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m merely a concerned citizen of Oz. Also I am a venerable if not downright ancient Serpent, and as such I suffer the affection for the young that afflicts the elderly. I can tell what you hoard buried beneath this tree, Miss Oziandra Rainary Ko Osqa’ami Thropp. And as I keep my ear to the ground—little joke, that—I know something of what you’ve been through. What I can’t guess is why you don’t use the tools at your disposal to do something about it. And put down that granite cudgel while I’m talking to you. It’s distracting and not at all polite.”

She put the boulder down but kept her hands and her heart clenched.

“I’m merely saying. You have the richest bloodlines for magic in all of Oz. You have the strongest instrument for change this land has ever seen. And you have your own need to answer to. There is Tip, turned into Ozma. You could turn, too. You could be Rain, or you could be—well, I won’t name you. But you could name yourself. Why do you resist?”

“I think you’d better go.”

“If I see no future for my own offspring, I eat them,” said the Serpent. “If I didn’t eat you when I was introduced to you as an infant, why would I sink my venomous fangs into you now? You’ve done much good. You’ve helped complete Elphaba’s work, and in a way your father’s work, too. Don’t you deserve a reward? Oh come now, don’t look at me like that. What I’m bringing up is a morally neutral proposition. You think it is purer to be one gender or the other? That it makes a difference? I know—no one listens to a Serpent. And I’ll move along now, as promised. But think about it.”

He passed through the grass. When she looked closer, she saw he’d left his skin behind. A green sheath. It could be made into a scabbard for a dirk. Before going back to the asparagus, she put her finger in the skin and tried to feel the magic of being a Serpent.

She asked her father for permission to leave.

“As if you need my permission,” he said calmly, with a clumsy attempt at cheer. “But what shall I say if someone comes looking for you with a message from Ozma?”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“Rain,” he said softly, “anyone who spent the better part of a century being prepubescent is going to need some time to figure out how to be grown up. It could happen.”

“Yes. And Candle might come back. And Trism too.”

He wasn’t hurt. “I leave the front door unlocked for one of them and the back door unlocked for the other. They know where I am. I’ve cherished them both, Rain, and I do still. Whoever they are. I love both Trism and Candle. It isn’t impossible for you to love both Tip and Ozma.”

“What’s impossible,” she said, “is to know the truth inside someone else’s heart if they don’t tell you.”

He agreed with that. “Well, I love you. Just in case you ever wondered. And don’t forget that I’ve spent some brief time of my life as an Elephant. They say Elephants never forget, and as I live and breathe, I’m telling you that this is true of humans no less than Elephants. Now, listen. I’m being serious, my desperate sweetheart. What about if a message arrives for you? Where shall I say you’ve gone?”

She threw an arm about airily. “Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.”

2.

In her cell, Glinda woke up with a start. The lumbago was more punishing than the incarceration, but a sense of spring had filtered all the way down the open canyon roof of Southstairs, and she caught a whiff of freshness, of arrogant possibility. Her glasses had broken a year ago. She didn’t need them anymore, not really. She knew who was turning the door handle of her cell. She called her name sleepily, and added, “You wicked thing. You’ve taken your own sweet time, of course.”

3.

Elphaba’s broom, planted at Nether How and fed by the magic of the Grimmerie buried beneath it, had grown into a tree of brooms. Enough to supply a small coven of witches. Too much to say that the breeze soughing through them all was, well, bewitching? On a spring day of high winds, Rain broke off a broom from the treasury tree of them.

But she waited until her father was deeply asleep one night, and Iskinaary collapsed in front of the stove like a Goose brought down by buckshot, snoring. She took her father’s spade over her shoulder and went back to the tree of brooms. She said softly, “Okay, Nanny, I’m following in your footsteps,” and she dug up the Grimmerie. Stole it. She left the spade below the tree so her father would know what she’d done. Then she wrapped the fierce book in an oilcloth and strapped the satchel upon her back. She began by walking west across the Kells, which took her several months. She didn’t look back, not once, to see if Tip was following her.

By the autumn it was too cold to go on, and she spent the winter with a breakaway tribe of the Scrow, none of whom had ever heard of Elphaba Thropp or Ozma Tippetarius and who seemed unconcerned about Rain’s skin color or, indeed, her solitary pilgrimage through the Thousand Year Grasslands. Rain taught herself a bit of Scrow and tried to tell the story of Dorothy, to amuse the clan on the long tent-bound evenings when the icy winds howled, but one of the grandmothers bit her on the wrist, a sign to stop. So she stopped.

She brought out the shell once or twice, to Animals who had learned some Ozish, to itinerants the following spring who had wandered too far to the west and were happy to get directions back to civilization. They nodded about it, unconcerned, unsurprised. One rather lumpy sand creature with an irritable disposition wouldn’t talk to her at all but pointed west, west. Farther west. And then dug itself into the sand and wouldn’t come out for any pleading at all.

She saw a clutch of dragon eggs in the sand once, and let them be.

Though the thought of them made her sling her leg over the broom for the first time. If she was going to hell in a handbasket, maybe she could fly there faster, get it over with.

She kept herself going by remembering the clues. The great salty marshes of Quadling Country. The huge stone wall upon which paintings of colored fish were refreshed annually, though no such fish ever existed in any lake or river of Oz. The way the berm of Ovvels was built like a quay. The image of a shell stamped in the margins on the left-hand side of a map of Oz. The way that Lady Glinda had deciphered the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a market center of some sort. Something more than a temple, more like the seat of an empire. An empire ruled by a goddess with the tail of a fish.

Listen to what the shell says to you.

The grasslands were beginning to give way to sand, but in no particular hurry, she’d noticed. There would be miles of grass, as far as she could see from the height she was learning to achieve on her broom (which was not impressive). Then sands, in belts between grasslands, until the grasslands gave out. They called it the endless sands, and she saw why. They rippled in waves and crests, static on clear days, fierce and active in the darkness, shifting and reshaping themselves on a nightly basis. There was no track across sands. They rewrote their own topography endlessly.

But then came another stretch of grassland, and beyond that, another swatch of desert. The world was not as definite as the few dots on any map would suggest.

Almost a year after her departure, she was living for a week in a temporary hut she’d built for herself somewhere to the west of Kvon Altar in the southwestern Vinkus. She’d come down with a cough of a sort, and was afraid that perhaps she was dying and might die but forget to notice, and so keep flying forever over alternating patches of wilderness. She gathered liquor from where it beaded up on the shell every night, she licked the dew collected there. Just enough to keep herself from parching. She didn’t think she had much time left.

She didn’t want to leave the Grimmerie lying around in the desert where some scorpion might find it and teach itself to read, as she had taught herself to read. Almost in a fever one dawn, she took the shell and nourished herself with it as best she could, and then, remembering an old life, she blew the horn once again through the broken tip.

Even Ozmists can’t survive in the desert, she thought to herself, sinking into a sleep as the sun rose. The wind blew her lean-to apart but she was too removed from reality to notice. Through the vast sky the sun threatened to burn her green skin brown and mottled. Light wriggled behind her clenched eyelids like threads of blood.

Around midday, delirious with thirst, she opened her eyes. She thought she saw a figure of bones standing nearby, looking down at her. He wore a coat made of greenery. Mountain pine, fir, holly, laurel. Impossible life. The skeleton looked at her. He seemed to smile. All skeletons smile. She closed her eyes and forgot about it.

Back there.

Disturbed in the middle of a moonless night by something unseen, a cock chortily hacked at the silence in a northern barnyard. A farmer threw a soup ladle at it, threateningly. The cock subsided.

In the forest of Gurniname outside Wiccasand Turning, a stand of rare bone-oak trees, famous for their centuries of barrenness without decay, burst into bloom. The blossoms glowed, not white, but a rich velvety jade with lavender margins. A gourmand hunting for truffles discovered it, and for a while painters flocked to catch the mystery on canvas. But the effect was always too startling. It looked fake. Eventually most of the canvases were painted over. Patrons of art preferred their bone-oak blossoms white, or dead.

Kellswater at dawn. A giant Tortoise emerged from a cleft between two stone plates nearly collapsed one upon the other. She’d lived eighty of her two hundred years in private meditation, prayer and fasting, and she was on the morning side of munch-ish. The history described in the pages of this and previous volumes had escaped her, and she it. Undeterred by such scathing ignorance she moved forward on fungoidal flippers, and her rust red horny beak scratched at the air. The light leaching over the horizon snagged and pulled upon ripples of water fletching the lake. Small circles as if from invisible drops of rain puckered the surface. The Tortoise remembered. She knew the commotion was the morning activity of swarmgits upon water, and that where swarmgits could skate in buggy congress of a fine morning, a hungry carp or a lake terch wouldn’t be far behind.

And—and this Kellswater. The dead lake. But she did not comment.

That’s the way it looked to plants and animals. Somewhere else in Oz—the province, the town doesn’t matter—a prissy and adenoidal tutor straight out of Three Queens College had taken a position to hector local schoolchildren into their letters and morals. Intending to set an early example of the mercy of discipline, he arrived in the schoolroom with a small box made of close-meshed wire. “Approach and regard,” he said to the boys and girls in his thrall. “We must be wary of the natural world, learn from its habits of violence and self-interest, and tame it so it may survive. This morning upon my hearth I found an insect of a sort never known before in Oz. I studied entomology and lepidoptery under Professor Finix at Three Queens, so I claim some wide experience with bugs. I say this is an aberration of an existing species—smaller, cannier, and more cunningly hued for camouflage. Were it allowed to breed, it could chew its way through our ‘Oz in endless leaf.’ For our own protection I have caged it in this box. It looks faintly related to the locust of the Grasslands or to the marsh fernhopper. It saws music from its legs, when it is happy. It isn’t happy now, but we will require it to learn to be happy in a cage. And so will you—”

The youngest student, a lad who still wore double padding against accidental leakage, picked up the willow switch in the corner and cracked it upon the docent’s remonstrating finger. The other students rioted. They threw books out the window and chased the teacher into the henhouse, locking him inside. He sat most of the morning blubbering. Then the students ate all their lunch at once and left the wrappings to blow about in the schoolyard, and sang songs of loyalty to anarchy as they released the cricket from its cage.

Not too much should be read into all this. It is the sometime nature of children to be wild. And in wildness, as a traveler from another land has reminded us, is the salvation of the world.

In the coolness of the evening—that evening or the next, maybe—Rain came around enough to find—she must be hallucinating—that her face was shaded from the setting sun by an umbrella.

“Very nice,” she said, admiring her psychosis.

“I’d hoped you appreciated it,” said a familiar voice. Iskinaary peered out from behind the upturned bowl of the fabric.

“Are you the angel of death? Goodness, you scared me enough in life, you’re not going to accompany me across the divide, are you?”

“Very funny. Have a cracker.” With his bill he secured a hard round biscuit from a little satchel slung over his neck. “Don’t worry, it’s not one of Little Daffy’s Curious Cupcakes.”

“I should be glad for one of those right about now. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been following behind you for the better part of a year. Your father sent me to look for you when you didn’t come back after that hard winter in the grasslands, and I heard you’d continued on. I’ve been waiting out of sight, a few miles back, for several months. Not wanting to be presumptuous.”

“Oh, a little presumption is welcome now and then.”

“You’re dehydrated. Let me take that shell and fly to find some freshwater somewhere.”

“There’s no water here.”

“You don’t know where to look.”

Iskinaary, if it was really he and not some irritating mirage, allowed himself to be fixed with the shell in a kind of sling, and went off for a while. When he came back, the basin of the shell slopped over with freshwater. Rain drank so quickly that she vomited most of it back up again. He didn’t mind. He got her more, and she kept the second portion down more neatly.

In the morning, or the morning after that, she felt better again. “You carried that umbrella all the way from Nether How?”

“I used it too, on certain nights. My feathers are thinning and the drainage isn’t what it used to be.” Yes, Iskinaary was an old Goose.

“You never liked me,” she said.

“I don’t like you now. But I am your father’s familiar, so let’s put personal feelings aside. We have a ways to go, I’ll warrant.”

“I don’t know how far I’m going to get.”

“I don’t know either.” He smiled at her or winced, it was hard to tell the difference in any Goose, and particularly in Iskinaary. “But I think we are not very far from the edge.”

“The edge,” she said.

“Where you are going.”

“You don’t know where I am going.”

“Not ultimately.”

They considered this stalemate a while, and then Iskinaary relented. “Your father wasn’t much of a witch, was he?”

“He wasn’t much of a father either.”

“But he was pretty good as a Bird, when he flew with Kynot and the Conference. He learned a little bit. He didn’t learn enough.”

She waited.

“The Birds have always known,” said Iskinaary. “At least, some have. But Birds, and birds, keep to themselves usually. They flock with their kind. It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them. Your father conducted one such campaign, in those dark days when the dragons first threatened Oz, threatened the skies for all the Birds, and the earth for all crawling creatures. Liir flew with us on his broom, as you fly now. He might have learned more from us, but he was young, and Birds, well, they don’t volunteer much. It’s not in their nature. They are neutral, and possessed of a certain appealing reticence.”

“Some of them,” admitted Rain. “Not you.”

“So,” Iskinaary continued, “we’ve known. We have always known, or anyway we’ve heard rumors. We could have told you what we’d heard. I could have told you. Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”

“Is everything all right back there in Oz?”

“I’ve not followed along all these months to gossip.” He seemed angry. “I’m trying to tell you to keep going.”

“Well, all right then. But if I’m right, I go alone.”

“You make the rules for the ground. I’ll make the rules for the air.”

She launched herself and didn’t look behind to see if he was following. She knew he was, the rolled-up umbrella in his claws. It would be kinder if she were to carry it, but she wasn’t ready to be kind.

That night, among scratchy grass, she slept and dreamed of Tip. She didn’t know if it was Tip or Ozma, really; it was that kind of a dream that made her furious with need and regret and hope all at once. She awoke in the dark, clammy in a cold sweat even though it would be a warm day, she could tell. A sort of fog, as from Restwater, hung over the sedge.

She said to herself, Did my father send Iskinaary after me because a message had arrived at last?

But she wouldn’t ask the Goose for fear of the answer, either way it might be spoken. She wasn’t ready to know.

She found a place to squat, and after that she broke her fast with Iskinaary. More dry biscuits. Delicious. The wind, the world of shadows. The taunting stars strung on their invisible threads across the glowing velvet black. They didn’t speak—not girl, not Goose, not stars.

Near dawn, she strode through the grass to the top of the near slope, to see if the air would clear, if she could catch a glimpse of the next stretch.

Beyond the slope, at bluff’s edge, the ground dropped away in a returning curve, a bevel carved out by a stronger breeze. The air felt stronger, brusquer, colder, more filled with tang, almost a strange kind of vinegar in the wind.

She kept going, down that slope and up the curve of the next. The wind possessed bluster and noise she’d never heard at ground level before. Ever.

The fog had oriented itself into a composite of colored scarves through which the sun from behind her was beginning to seethe, gilding the unnatural hills.

They weren’t hills of earth.

The world’s edge was water; water as far as the eye could see; water from the scalloped strand out to the horizon. There was no end to it. The noise wasn’t the sound of wind, after all, but of moving water that made endless avalanche against the sand, punching and pulling back. Foundries of spume and spit, and salt stinging her eyes. Thrashes of weight from side to side, streaked laterally with zinc; mettanite; emerald; lamb’s wool; turquoise. The great weeping rim of the world.

She didn’t wait for the Goose. She slung her leg over the broom and launched at once. A new technique for flying would be needed against this force. Later in the day, if she lasted, she might glance back and find that the Goose had anticipated her departure and was steadily keeping pace a mile or more behind. She trusted that this would be true.

She would make no plan but this: to move out into the world as a Bird might, and to perch on the edge of everything that could be known. She would circle herself with water below and with sky above. She would wait until there was no stink of Oz, no breath of it, no sight of it on any horizon no matter how high she climbed. And then she would let go of the book, let it plunge into the mythical sea.

Live life without grasping for the magic of it.

Turn back, and find out what that was like; or turn forward, and learn something new.

A mile above anything known, the Girl balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the sea itself, flung up by the turbulent air and sent wheeling away.

FINIS

About that country there’s not much left to say.

Blue sun, far off, a watery vein
in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself
unremarkable: familiar ruins
littered with standing stones our people
had lost the ability to decipher.

How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish
umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,
and the effervescent stars, strange currents
tugged at our thoughts like tapestries
unraveling into war. All spring
the nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.

The rats had abandoned the temples.

My mind was a voyage hungering to happen.

—Todd Hearon, “Atlantis”

… we must learn to live a secondary life in an unmarked world.

—Ron MacLean, “Duck Variations”

Acknowledgments

Thank you, one and all, to the many friends and colleagues who helped one way or the other in the work of getting Out of Oz out on paper.

—Douglas Smith, artist, for the splendid jacket and case, section art, and maps

—David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, for their close reading and helpful remarks

—William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, for the same

—Cassie Jones, Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, and other fine people at HarperCollins: Rich Aquan, Ben Bruton, Jessica Deputato, Tavia Kowalchuk, Shawn Nicholls, Lisa Stokes, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Chelsey Emmelhainz, and Lorie Young

—the producers and creators and performers of Wicked the musical, at home and around the world, whose good cheer has become a constant background melody in my life

—Scott Glorioso, Lori Shelly, and Elizabeth Williams in the GM office, for managing crises from technological to overnight posting to accounting, but perhaps especially to Emily Prabhaker, for helping me compose an index and synopsis to the first three books of The Wicked Years, which was an invaluable map and guide as I drove the complicated story to its complicated conclusion

—Todd Hearon and Ron MacLean, for permission to quote from their work at the novel’s close

—Andy and the next generation of Maguire Newmans, for all the life that cannot be found in the pages of novels

Coda

Before you close the cover of the present volume, and allow the writer to sink back into its pages, living both through and beside his characters, let’s grab a last look from the promontory. The next eyes to glance over our horizon will see something else. Something new, prompting a separate issue to propose and explore.

Oz before sunrise. The ancient predawn light makes of the earth below a mystery, and of all those anonymous lives more mysteries still. The tired stars winking out, the smear of cloud dividing the midnight from pale marigold dawn. The sheet of the heavens holds the stage a moment longer, eclipsing earthbound dramas of tedium, resurrection, and despair; of individual aspiration and sacrifice; of national effort and disgrace. A welcome amnesia, our capacity to sleep, to be lost in the dark. Today will shine its spotlights to shame and to honor us soon enough. But all in good time, my pretty. We can wait.

Oz at sunrise. What one makes out, from any height, are the outlines. The steel-cut peaks of the Great Kells, the pudding hills of the Madeleines. The textured outcroppings of Shiz, Bright Lettins, the Emerald City. Ignore the few pixilated dots of gold in the black (early risers—those with ailing relatives, or scholars late at their books, nothing more than that). We see little of human industry and ambition to chart at this hour. This is a roughed-out landscape only coming into life. A map done in smudged pencil, a first draft. Much to be filled in when light arrives. But thank you, Mr. Baum, for leaving the map where I could find it.

Watching the world wake up, dress itself in the dark, take on its daily guise, reminds me of how we fathom human character when we encounter someone at a distance, at a gallop, in the shadows. We get no more than a quick glance at the man on the street, the child in the woods, the witch at the well, the Lion among us. Our initial impression, most often, has to serve.

Still, that first crude glimpse, a clutch of raw hypotheses that can never be soundly clinched or dismissed, is often all we get before we must choose whether to lean forward or to avert our eyes. Slim evidence indeed, but put together with mere hints and echoes of what we have once read, we risk cherishing one another. Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

Credits

Cover illustration by Douglas Smith

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About the Author

Gregory Maguire is the bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, Mirror Mirror, and the Wicked Years series, which includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Wicked, now a beloved classic, is the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

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Other Books by Gregory Maguire

Confessions Of An Ugly Stepsister

Lost

Mirror Mirror

Leaping Beauty

Missing Sisters

The Next Queen of Heaven

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

SON OF A WITCH. Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Maguire.
Epub Edition © September 2005 ISBN 9780061752513

WICKED: THE LIFE AND TIMES OFTHE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST. Copyright © 1995 by Gregory Maguire.
Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061792946

A LION AMONG MEN. Copyright © 2008 by Gregory Maguire.
Epub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061981746

OUT OF OZ. Copyright © 2011 by Gregory Maguire.
Epub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062101235

The Wicked Years Complete Collection
Copyright © 2013 by Gregory Maguire.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Epub Edition OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062332868

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