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.

“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.

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.