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.

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

And then

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

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.