On a clammy late summer evening about three years after graduating from Shiz University, Fiyero stopped at the unionist chapel in Saint Glinda’s Square, to pass some time before meeting a fellow countryman at the opera.

Fiyero hadn’t taken to unionism as a student, but he had developed an eye for frescoes that often adorned the cubbyholes of older chapels. He was hoping to find a portrait of Saint Glinda. He had not seen Glinda of the Arduennas of the Uplands since her graduation—she had finished a year before he did. But he hoped it wouldn’t be sacrilegious to light a charmwax candle in front of Saint Glinda’s likeness, and to think of her namesake.

A service was ending, and the congregation of sensitive adolescent boys and black-scarved grandmothers drifted slowly out. Fiyero waited until the lyre player in the nave had finished fingering a tricky diminuet, then he approached her. “Do forgive me—I’m a visitor from the west.” Well obviously, with his rich ochre skin color and tribal markings. “I don’t see a sexton—a verger—a sacristan, whatever the word is—nor can I find a pamphlet to tell me—I was looking to find an ikon of Saint Glinda?”

Her face remained grave. “You’ll be lucky if it hasn’t been papered over with a poster of Our Glorious Wizard. I’m an itinerant musician, only through this way once in a while. But I think you might look in the last aisle; there’s an oratory to Saint Glinda, or used to be. Good luck.”

Locating it—a tomblike space with an archer’s slit instead of a true window—Fiyero saw, lit by a pinkish sanctuary light, a smoky image of the Saint, leaning a bit to the right. The portrait was merely sentimental and not robustly primitive, a disappointment. Water damage had made great white stains like laundry soap mistakes on the Saint’s holy garments. He couldn’t remember her particular legend, nor the uplifting way that she had gagged on death for the sake of her soul and for the edification of her admirers.

But then he saw, in the underwatery shadows, that the oratory was inhabited by a penitent. The head was bowed in prayer, and he was about to move away when it struck him that he knew who it was.

“Elphaba!” he said.

She turned her head slowly; a lace shawl dropped to her shoulders. Her hair was looped on her head and skewered with ivory hair corkscrews. Her eyes batted once or twice slowly, as if she were moving toward him from a great distance away. He had interrupted her at prayer—he hadn’t remembered her to be religious—maybe she didn’t recognize him.

“Elphaba, it’s Fiyero,” he said, moving into the doorway, blocking her exit, and also the light—suddenly he couldn’t see her face, and wondered if he heard correctly when she said, “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Elphie—I’m Fiyero—we were at Shiz,” he said. “My splendid Elphie—how are you?”

“Sir, I believe you are mistaking me for someone else,” she said, in Elphaba’s voice.

“Elphaba, the Thropp Third Descending, if I remember the nomenclature,” he said, laughing stoutly, “I’m not mistaken at all. I’m Fiyero of the Arjikis—you know me, you remember me! From Doctor Nikidik’s lectures in the life sciences!”

“You have confused yourself,” she said, “sir.” That last word sounded a bit shirty, absolutely Elphaba. “Now you don’t mind if I am about my devotions in peace?” She drew her shawl up above her head, and arranged it to fall about her temples. The chin in profile could slice a salami, and even in the low light he knew he wasn’t wrong.

“What is it?” he said. “Elphie—well, Miss Elphaba, if you require—don’t shab me off like this. Of course it’s you. There’s no disguising you. What game are you about?”

She didn’t answer him in words, but by telling her beads ostentatiously she was telling him to get lost.

“I’m not going,” he said.

“You’re interrupting my meditation, sir,” she said softly. “Do I have to call the verger and have you removed?”

“I’ll meet you outside,” he said. “How long do you need to pray? Half an hour? An hour? I’ll wait.”

“In an hour, then, across the street; there’s a small public fountain with some benches. I’ll talk with you for five minutes, five minutes only, and show you that you’ve made a mistake. Not a serious one, but increasingly annoying to me.”

“Forgive the intrusion. In an hour then—Elphaba.” He wasn’t going to let her get away with whatever game she was playing. He withdrew, however, and went to the musician at the back of the nave. “Is there another exit to this building besides the main doors?” he asked, over her spurts of arpeggio. When it was convenient to answer him, she tucked her head and moved her eyes. “Side door through to the cloister of the maunts, it’s not open to the public, but you can get out to a servants’ delivery alley through there.”

He lingered in the shadow of a pillar. In about forty minutes, a cloaked figure entered the chapel and moved, hobbling with a cane, directly to the oratory Elphie occupied. He was too far away to hear if words were exchanged, or anything else. (Perhaps the newcomer was merely another disciple of Saint Glinda, and wanted solitude to pray.) The figure didn’t linger; it left again as quickly as its stiff joints would allow.

Fiyero dropped an offering in the poor box—a note, so to avoid the clink of coin. In a quarter of the city so infested with the urban poor, his situation of comparative wealth required the penitential gift, though his motivation was characterized more by guilt than charity. Then he slipped out through the side door, into an overgrown cloister garden. Some ancient women in wheeled chairs were chortling at the far end and didn’t notice him. He wondered if Elphaba belonged to this community of monastic nuns—maunts, they were called. He now remembered that they were females living in that most paradoxical of institutions: a community of hermits. Apparently, however, their vows of silence were revoked in the decay of old age. He decided that Elphaba couldn’t have changed that much in five years. So he let himself out the servants’ entrance, into an alleyway.

Three minutes passed, and Elphaba emerged from the same servants’ entrance, as he had suspected she would. She was intent on avoiding him! Why, why? The last he had seen of her—he remembered it well!—was the day of Ama Clutch’s funeral, and the drunken party at the pub. She had fled to the Emerald City on some obscure mission, never to return, while he had been dragged off to the eye-opening joys and terrors of the Philosophy Club. Rumor held that the great-grandfather, the Eminent Thropp, had engaged agents to look for her in Shiz, in the Emerald City. From Elphaba herself there was never a postcard, never a message, never a clue. Nessarose had been inconsolable at first, and then grew to resent her sister’s putting her through this pain of separation. Nessa had lost herself deeper in religion, to the point where her friends had begun to avoid her.

Tomorrow Fiyero would make his apologies for missing the opera and standing up his business colleague. Tonight he would not lose Elphaba. As she hurried through the streets, checking over her shoulder more than once, he thought: If you were trying to lose someone, if you did think someone was on your trail, this is the time of day to do it—not because of shadows, but because of light. Elphaba kept turning corners into the summer sun that, setting, was bowling blinding shafts of light along side streets, through arcades, over the walls of gardens.

But he had had many years of practice at stalking animals under similar conditions—nowhere in Oz was the sun as much an adversary as in the Thousand Year Grasslands. He knew to squint his eyes and follow the persistence of motion, and forget about identifying by shape. He also knew how to duck sideways without tipping over or losing his balance, how to crouch suddenly, how to look for other clues that the prey had begun to move again—the startled birds, the change in sound, the disrupted wind. She could not lose him, and she could not know he was on her trail.

So he wound halfway across the city, from the elegant city centre to the low-rent warehouse district, in whose shadowy doorways the destitute made their malodorous homes. Within spitting distance of an army barracks, Elphaba stopped before a boarded-up corn exchange, ferreted a key from some inner pocket, and opened the door.

He called from a short distance, in an ordinary voice—“Fabala!” Even in the act of turning she caught herself and tried to rearrange her expression. But it was too late. She had shown that she recognized him, and she realized it. His foot was blocking the way before she could slam the heavy door shut.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“Leave me alone,” she said, “please. Please.”

“You’re in trouble, let me in.”

“You’re trouble. Stay out.” Pure Elphaba. His last doubts fled. He cracked the door open with his shoulder.

“You’re making me into a monster,” he said, grunting with the effort—she was strong. “I’m not going to rob you or rape you. I just—won’t—be ignored like that. Why?”

She gave up then, and he fell stupidly against the unplastered brick wall of the stairwell, like a pratfalling twit in a vaudeville hour. “I remembered you as full of delicacy and grace,” she said. “Did you catch something by accident, or did you study awkwardness?”

“Come on,” he said, “you force someone to behave like a clumping boor, you give them no choice. Don’t be so surprised. I can still manage grace. I can do delicacy. Half a minute.”

“Shiz got to you,” she said, eyebrows up, but mockingly; she wasn’t really surprised. “Listen to those graduate school affectations. Where’s the native boy reeking that appealing naiveté like a well-chosen musk?”

“You’re looking well too,” he said, a bit hurt. “Do you live in this stairwell or are we going someplace even a little bit homey?”

She cursed and mounted the stairs; they were covered with mouse turds and scraps of packing straw. A soupy evening light seeped in the grimy gray glass windows. At a bend in the stairs a white cat was waiting, haughty and disaffected like all its kin. “Malky, Malky, miaow miaow,” said Elphaba as she passed it, and it deigned to follow her up to the pointy arched doorway at the top of the stairs.

“Your familiar?” said Fiyero.

“Oh, that’s rich,” said Elphaba. “Well, I’d as soon be thought a witch as anything else. Why not. Here Malky, some milk.”

The room was large and seemed only casually arranged for dwelling. Originally a storeroom, it had barricaded double doors that could be swung outward, to receive or dispense sacks of grain hauled up by a winch from the street. The only natural light fell in through a couple of cracked panes of glass in a skylight open four or five inches. Pigeon feathers and white-and-bloody flux on the floor below. Eight or ten crates in a circle, as if for sitting. A bedroll. Clothes folded on a trunk. Some odd feathers, bits of bones, strung teeth, and a wizened dodo claw, brown and twisted like beef jerky: These were hung on nails pounded into the wall, and arranged for art or for a spell. A sallowwood table—a nice piece of furniture, that!—whose three arching legs tapered down into elegantly carved doe’s hooves. A few tin plates, red with white speckles, some food wrapped in cloth and cord. A pile of books at the bedside. A cat toy tied to a string. Most effectively, and gruesomely, the skull of an elephant hung on a rafter, and a bouquet of dried creamy pink roses emerged from the central hole in the hull of its cranium—like the exploding brains of a dying animal, he couldn’t help thinking, remembering Elphaba’s youthful concerns. Or maybe an homage to the putative magical talents of elephants?

Below it hung a crude glass oval, scratched and chipped, used as a looking glass, perhaps, though its reflective qualities appeared unreliable.

“So this is home,” said Fiyero as Elphaba brought out some food for the cat and ignored Fiyero some more.

“Ask me no questions and I’ll spell you no lies,” she said.

“May I sit down?”

“That’s a question”—but she was grinning—“oh, well then, sit for ten minutes and tell me about yourself. How did you of all people turn into a sophisticate?”

“Appearances are deceiving,” he said. “I can afford the garb and affect the language, but I’m still an Arjiki tribal boy underneath.”

“What is your life like?”

“Is there something to drink? Not alcohol—I’m just thirsty.”

“I don’t have running water. I don’t use it. There’s some questionable milk—at least Malky will still drink it—or perhaps there’s a bottle of ale up there on the shelf—help yourself.”

She took a little ale in a pipkin, left the rest for him.

He told her the barest outline of things. His wife, Sarima, the childhood bride grown up and grown fecund—their three children. The old Office of Public Works waterworks headquarters at Kiamo Ko, which by ambush and occupation his father had converted to a chieftain’s seat and a tribal stronghold back in the time of the Ozma Regent. The dizzying schizoid life of moving every year from the Thousand Year Grasslands in the spring and summer, where the clan hunted and feasted, to a more settled autumn and winter at Kiamo Ko. “An Arjiki prince has business interests here in the Emerald City?” said Elphaba. “If it were banking you’d be in Shiz. The business of this city is military, my old friend. What are you up to?”

“You’ve heard enough from me,” he said. “I can play coy and deceptive too, even if it’s all pretend and no dark secrets to speak of.” He guessed the quiet business of trade agreements would not impress his old friend; he was embarrassed his affairs weren’t more audacious or thrilling. “But I’ve gone on. What of you, Elphie?”

She wouldn’t say anything for a few minutes. She unrolled some dried sausage and some graying bread, and found a couple of oranges and a lemon, and put them unceremoniously on the table. In the mothy atmosphere she looked more like a shadow than a person; her green skin seemed oddly soft, like spring leaves at their tenderest, and beaten, like copper. He had an unprecedented urge to grab her wrist and make her stop moving about—if not to make her talk, at least to keep her still, so he could look at her.

“Eat this stuff,” she said at last. “I’m not hungry. You eat it, go on.”

“Tell me something,” he begged. “You left us at Shiz—you disappeared like the morning fog. Why, where to, and what then?”

“How poetic you are,” she said. “I’ve a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

But she was agitated. Her fingers twitched; she called for the cat, and then irritated it and sent it flying off her lap. Finally she said, “Oh well, this much then. But you’re never to come here again. I don’t want to have to find a new place, this is too good for me. Do you promise?”

“I will agree to consider promising, that’s all. How can I promise any more than that? I don’t know a thing yet.”

She said, hurriedly, “Well, I was fed up with Shiz. The death of Doctor Dillamond vexed me, and everybody grieved and nobody cared. Not really. It wasn’t the right place for me anyway, all those silly girls. Although I liked Glinda well enough. How is she anyway?”

“I’m not in touch. I keep expecting to run into her at some Palace reception or other. I hear through the grapevine that she married a Paltos baronet.”

Elphaba looked annoyed and her back stiffened. “Only a baronet? Not a baron or a viscount at least? What a disappointment. Her early promise was never to pan out, then.” Meant as a joke, her remark was stiff and unfunny. “Is she a mother?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking the questions now, remember?”

“Yes, but Palace receptions?” she said. “Are you in cahoots with Our Glorious Wizard?”

“I hear he’s mostly gone reclusive. I’ve never met him,” Fiyero said. “He shows up at the opera and listens behind a portable screen. At his own formal dinners he dines apart, in an adjoining chamber behind a carved marble grill. I’ve seen a profile of a stately man walking along a promenade. If that’s even the Wizard, that’s all I’ve met of him. But you, you: you. Why did you cut us all off?”

“I loved you too much to keep in touch.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said, thrashing a bit, her arms like oars rowing in the blue summer evening lightlessness.

“Yes, I am asking. Have you lived here ever since? For five years? Do you study? Do you work?” He rubbed his bare forearms as he tried to guess about her: What would she be up to? “Are you associated with the Animal Relief League, or one of those defiant little humanitarian organizations?”

“I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

“You’re evading again.”

“That’s my job,” she said. “There, that’s a clue for you, dear Fiyero.”

“Amplify.”

“I went underground,” she said softly, “and I am still underground. You’re the first one to crack my anonymity since I said good-bye to Glinda five years ago. So you now know why I can’t say any more, or why you can’t see me again. For all I know you will turn me in to the Gale Force.”

“Hah! Those martinets! You think very little of me if you think I—”

“How do I know, how could I know?” She twisted her fingers together, a puzzle of green sticks. “They march in those boots all over the poor and the weak. They terrify households at three in the morning and drag away dissenters—and break up printing presses with their axes—and hold mock trials for treason at midnight and executions at dawn. They rake over every quarter of this beautiful, false city. They harvest a crop of victims on a monthly basis. It’s government by terror. They could be massing on the street right now. Never having yet followed me, they may have followed you.”

“You’re not as hard to follow as you think,” he told her. “You’re good but not that good. I could teach you a few things.”

“I bet you could,” she said, “but you won’t, for we won’t meet again. It’s too dangerous, for you as well as for me. That’s what I mean when I say I loved you all too much to keep in touch. Do you think the Gale Force is above torturing friends and family to get at sensitive information? You’ve got a wife and children, and I’m merely an old college friend you ran into once. Clever you to have followed me. Never again, do you hear? I will move if I find you’re trailing me. I can pick up right now, and be away in thirty seconds. It’s my training.”

“Don’t do this to me,” he said.

“We’re old friends,” she said, “but we’re not even especially good friends. Don’t turn this into a sentimental rendezvous. It’s nice to see you but I don’t ever want to see you again. Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won’t be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.”

“At what—twenty three years old?—you’re playing the Lady Rebel?” he said. “It’s not becoming.”

“It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un. Though I point out you are the same age as I, and prancing about as a prince. But have you eaten enough? We have to say good-bye now.”

“We don’t,” he said, firmly. He wanted to take her hands in his—he didn’t remember that he’d ever touched her before. He corrected himself—he knew he never had.

It was almost as if she could read his mind. “You know who you are,” she said, “but you don’t know who I am. You can’t—I mean you can’t and you can’t—it’s not allowed, for one, and you’re not capable for the other. Godspeed, if they use that phrase in the Vinkus—if it’s not a curse. Godspeed, Fiyero.”

She handed him his opera cape, and held out her hand to shake his. He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.

“What do you hear of Boq?” she asked, the next time they met.

“You just won’t answer me anything about yourself, will you?” he said. He was lounging with his feet up on her table. “Why did you finally agree to let me come back if you keep yourself locked up like a prisoner?”

“I rather liked Boq, that’s all.” She grinned. “I let you come back so I could pump you for news of him, and of the others.”

He told her what he knew. Boq had married Miss Milla, of all surprising turns. She had been dragged out to Nest Hardings, and she hated it. She kept trying suicide. “His letters sent at Lurlinemas every year are hysterical; they annotate her failed attempts at killing herself like a sort of annual family report.”

“It makes me wonder, in the same circumstances, what my mother must have gone through,” said Elphaba. “The privileged childhood in the big home of the ascendancy, then the rude shock of a hard life out there in nowhere-land. In Mama’s case, from Colwen Grounds to Rush Margins, then the Quadling lowlands. It’s actually a penance of the most severe sort.”

“Like mother like daughter,” said Fiyero. “Haven’t you left a certain amount of privilege yourself, to live here like a snail? Hidden and private?”

“I remember the first time I saw you,” she said, shaking drops of vinegar over the roots and vegetables she was preparing for a supper. “It was in that lecture hall of what’s-his-name—Doctor . . .”

“Doctor Nikidik,” said Fiyero. He blushed.

“You had those beautiful markings on your face—I’d never seen such before. Did you plan that entrance, to win your way into our hearts?”

“On my honor, could I have done anything else, I would have. I was both mortified and terrified. Do you know, I thought those enchanted antlers were going to kill me? And it was prancing Crope and flibberty Tibbett who saved me.”

“Crope and Tibbett! Tibbett and Crope! I’d forgotten all about them. How are they?”

“Tibbett was never the same after that escapade at the Philosophy Club. Crope, I think, entered an arts auction house, and still flits around with the theatrical set. I see him from time to time at occasions. We don’t speak.”

“My, you’re disapproving!” She laughed. “Of course being as prurient as the next creature I always wondered what the Philosophy Club had turned out to be like. You know, in another life I’d like to see them all again. And Glinda, dear Glinda. And even nasty Avaric. What of him?”

“Avaric I do speak to. He’s most of the year installed in the Margreavate, but he has a house in Shiz. And when in the Emerald City we stay at the same club.”

“Is he still a smug boor?”

“My, you’re disapproving now.”

“I suppose I am.” They ate their dinner. Fiyero waited for her to ask more about his family. But it was their respective families they were keeping from each other, apparently: his Vinkus wife and children, her circle of agitators and insurrectionists.

The next time he came, he thought, he must wear a shirt open at the neck, so she could see that the pattern of blue diamonds on his face continued unbroken down his chest . . . Since she seemed to like that.

“Surely you don’t spend the entire autumn season in the Emerald City?” she asked one evening when the cold was drawing in.

“I’ve send word to Sarima that business is keeping me here indefinitely. She doesn’t care. How could she care? Plucked out of a filthy caravansary and married as a small child to an Arjiki prince? Her family wasn’t stupid. She’s got food, servants, and the solid stone walls of Kiamo Ko for defense against the other tribes. She’s going a little fat after her third child. She doesn’t really notice whether I’m home or not—well, she has five sisters, and they all moved in. I married a harem.”

“No!” Elphaba sounded intrigued and a little embarrassed at the idea.

“You’re right, no, not really. Sarima has proposed once or twice that her younger sisters could and would happily occupy my energies at nighttime. Once you pass over the Great Kells, the taboo against such an exercise isn’t as strong as it seems to be in the rest of Oz, so stop looking so shocked.”

“I can’t help it. Did you do it?”

“Did I ‘do it’?” He was teasing her.

“Did you sleep with your sisters-in-law?”

“No,” he said. “Not out of lofty moral standards, or a lack of interest, either. It’s just that Sarima is a shrewd wife, and everything in marriage is a campaign. I would have been in her thrall even more than I am.”

“Such a bad thing?”

“You’re not married, you don’t know: Yes, a bad thing.”

“I am married,” she said, “just not to a man.”

He raised his eyebrows. She put her hands to her face. He’d never seen her look like that—her words had shocked herself. She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, blow her nose. “Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire,” she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks.

She stood bent over like an old woman, one arm on the counter, the blanket falling from her face to the floor. “Elphie, Elphie,” he said, horrified, and lurched after her, and put his arms around her. The blanket hung between them, chin to ankles, but seemed about to burst into flame itself, or roses, or a fountain of champagne and incense. Odd how the richest images bloomed in the mind when the body itself was most alert . . .

“No,” she cried, “no, no, I’m not a harem, I’m not a woman, I’m not a person, no.” But her arms wheeled of their own accord, like windmill sails, like those magicked antlers, not to kill him, but to pin him with love, to mount him against the wall.

Malky, with a rare display of discretion, climbed to the windowsill and looked away from them.

They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

There were long days in a row when they couldn’t meet. “I have business, I have work, trust me or I shall disappear on you,” she said. “I shall write to Glinda and ask her to share the spell on how to go up in a puff of smoke. I am teasing, but I mean it, Fiyero.”

Fiyero + Fae he wrote, in the flour that spilled when she rolled out a piecrust. Fae, she had whispered, as if even to keep it from the cat, was her code name. No one in the cell could know one another’s real names.

She would not let him see her naked in the light, but since he also was not allowed to visit during the day this was hardly a problem. She waited for him on the appointed evenings, sitting naked under the blanket, reading essays on political theory or moral philosophy. “I don’t know that I understand them, I read them as poetry,” she once admitted. “I like the sound of the words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.”

“Is it changing by how you live?” he asked, turning down the light and slipping out of his clothes.

“You think all this is new to me,” she said, sighing. “You think I am such a virgin.”

“You didn’t bleed the first time,” he observed. “So what’s to think about?”

“I know what you think,” she said. “But how experienced are you, Lord Sir Fiyero, Arjiki Prince of Kiamo Ko, Mightiest Stalker of the Thousand Year Grasslands, Chiefest Chieftain in the Great Kells?”

“I am putty in your hands,” he said, truthfully. “I married a child bride and to preserve my power I haven’t been unfaithful. Until now. You are not like her,” he said. “You don’t feel like her, it doesn’t feel the same. You’re more secret.”

“I don’t exist,” she said, “so you’re still not being unfaithful, either.”

“Let’s not be unfaithful right now then,” he said, “I can’t wait,” running his hands along her ribs, down the tight plane of her stomach. She always brought his hands to her thin, expressive breasts; she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

He didn’t have enough to do during the days. Being the chieftain of the Arjiki people, he knew it was in their political interest to be tied ineluctably to the commercial hub of the Emerald City. Yet Arjiki business concerns only required Fiyero to show his face at social engagements, in board meetings and financial parlors. The rest of the time he wandered about, seeking frescoes of Saint Glinda and other saints. Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae would never tell him what she had been doing in the chapel of Saint Glinda attached to the mauntery in Saint Glinda’s Square.

One day he looked up Avaric and they had lunch. Avaric suggested a girlie show afterward, and Fiyero begged off. Avaric was opinionated, cynical, corrupt, and as good-looking as ever. There wasn’t much gossip to bring back to Elphaba.

The wind tore the leaves from the trees. The Gale Force continued to frog-march Animals and collaborators out of town. Interest rates in the Gillikin banks went soaring up—good for investors, bad for those who had adjustable rate loans. Foreclosures on a lot of valuable city-centre properties. Too early, businesses began stringing the green and gold lights of Lurlinemas, trying to woo cautious and depressed citizens into the shops.

More than anything else he wanted to walk the streets of the Emerald City with Elphaba—there was no more beautiful place to be in love, especially at dusk as the shop lights went on, golden against the blue-purple evening sky. He had never been in love before, he now saw. It humbled him. It scared him. He couldn’t bear it when their forced absence went four or five days.

“Kisses to Irji, Manek, and Nor,” he wrote on the bottom of his weekly letter to Sarima, who couldn’t write back because, among other things, she had never learned either alphabet. Somehow her silence seemed a tacit approval of this vow-shattering interlude. He didn’t write kisses to her, too. He hoped the chocolates would do.

He rolled over, tugging the blanket with him; she tugged it back. The air in the room was so cold it seemed clammy. Malky endured their thrashing legs in order to stay near them, to receive warmth, and to give whatever passes for affection in cats.

“My darling Fae,” said Fiyero. “You probably know this, and I’m not about to become a co-conspirator at whatever it is you’re working for—reducing library fines or revoking the need for cat collars or whatever. But I do keep my ears open. The Quadlings are under the thumb of the marching militia again. At least that’s what they’re saying in the lounge of the club, over newspapers and pipes. Apparently an army division has gone down into Quadling Country as far as Qhoyre, on some sort of a slash-and-burn mission. Your father, your brother, and Nessarose—are they still there?”

Elphaba didn’t answer for a while. She seemed to be working out not only what she wanted to say, but perhaps even what she could remember. Her expression was of puzzlement, even testiness. She said, “We lived in Qhoyre for a time, when I was about ten. It’s a funny little low town, built on boggy ground. Half the streets are canals. The roofs are low, the windows are grilled or louvred to provide privacy and ventilation, the air is steamy and the flora excessive—huge roundels of palmy leaf, almost like shallow quilted pillows, making a sound as they beat against each other in the wind—tirrr tirrr, tirrr tirrr.”

“I don’t know that there’s much of Qhoyre left,” said Fiyero carefully. “If the gossip I picked up is accurate.”

“No, Papa isn’t there now, thank—thank whoever, whatever, thank nothing,” continued Elphaba. “Unless things have changed. The good people of Qhoyre weren’t very responsive to missionary efforts. They’d invite Papa and me in, serve us little damp cakelets and lukewarm red mint tea. We’d all sit on low, mildewing cushions, scaring geckos and spiders into the deeper shadows. Papa would drone on about the generous nature of the Unnamed God, doing his basic xenophiliac slant. He pointed to me as proof. I would grin with horrible sweetness and sing a hymn—the only music Papa approved of. I was miserably shy and ashamed of my color, but Papa had convinced me of the value of this work. Invariably the gentle citizens of Qhoyre would capitulate out of hospitality. They’d allow themselves to be led in prayers to the Unnamed God, but you couldn’t say their hearts were in it. I think I sensed a great deal more—more dishearteningly than Papa did—how ineffectual we really were.”

“So where are they now? Papa, Nessarose, and the boy—your brother, what’s his name?”

“Shell, that’s his name. Well, Papa felt his work was farther south in Quadling Country, in the real outback. We had a series of small cramped homes around Ovvels–the Hovels in Ovvels, we called them—that dreary, beastly countryside, full of a bloody beauty.”

At his questioning expression she continued. “I mean, fifteen, twenty years ago, Fiyero, the Emerald City speculators discovered the ruby deposits there. First under the Ozma Regent, then after the coup, under the Wizard: same ugly business practices. Though under the Ozma Regent the exploitation did not require murder and brutality. Using elephants, the engineers hauled in gravel, they dammed up springs, they perfected a complicated system of strip mining under three feet of brackish groundwater. Papa thought this disarray in their little moist society was a situation ready-made for mission work. And he was right. The Quadlings struggled against the Wizard with ill-argued proclamations, they resorted to totems, but their only military weapons were slingshots. So they rallied around my father. He converted them, they went into the struggle with the zeal of the newly chastised. They were dispossessed and disappeared. All with the benefit of unionist grace.”

“My, you’re bitter.”

“I was a tool. My dear father used me—and Nessarose less so, because of her trouble moving about—he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can—they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me. If the Unnamed God could love me, how much more responsible it’d be to the unadulterated them.”

“So, my dear, you don’t care where he is, or what happens to him now?”

“How can you say that?” She sat up, steaming. “I love the mad old tunnel-visioned bastard. He really believed in what he preached. He even thought that a Quadling corpse found floating faceup in a brackwater pond—provided it had a tattoo of conversion on it somewhere—was better off than a survivor. He felt he’d written a single ticket to the Other Land assembly of the Unnamed God. I think he considered it work well done.”

“And you don’t?” Fiyero had a fairly anemic spiritual life; he felt unqualified to voice an opinion about her father’s vocation.

“Maybe it was work well done,” she said sadly. “How do I know? But not for me. Settlement by settlement we reaped converts. Settlement by settlement the civil engineering corps came in, to detonate the village life. There was no outcry throughout Oz proper. Nobody was listening. Who cared about the Quadlings?”

“But what brought him there in the first place?”

“He and Mama had had a friend, a Quadling, who died in my family home—a Quadling itinerant, a glassblower.” Elphaba frowned and closed her eyes, and would say no more. Fiyero kissed her fingernails. He kissed the V between her thumb and forefinger, he sucked on it as if it were a lemon rind. She slipped backward to allow him greater purchase.

A while later he said, “But Elphie-Fabala-Fae—are you really not worried about your father and Nessarose, and little himmy-who?”

“My father chases hopeless causes. It gives his failure at life some legitimacy. For a while he proclaimed himself a prophet of the return of the last, lost tadpole of the Ozma line. That’s over now. And my brother Shell—he is probably fifteen by now. Look Fiyero, how can I be worried about them and be worried about the campaign of the season too? I can’t course around Oz—on that broomstick there, like a storybook witch!—I’ve chosen to go underground so that I can’t worry. Besides, I know what will happen to Nessarose at least. Sooner or later.”

“What?”

“When my great-grandfather finally pops off, she’ll be the next Eminent Thropp.”

“You’re in line, I thought. Aren’t you older?”

“I’m gone, dearie, I’m magicked away in a puff of smoke. Forget it. And you know, that’ll be good for Nessarose. She’ll be a sort of local queen out there in Nest Hardings.”

“She apparently did a course in sorcery, did you know? In Shiz?”

“No, I didn’t. Well, bully for her. If she ever comes down off that plinth—the one that has words written on it along the edges in gold, reading most superior in moral rectitude—if she ever allows herself to be the bitch she really is, she’ll be the Bitch of the East. Nanny and the devoted staff at Colwen Grounds will prop her up.”

“I thought you were fond of her!”

“Don’t you know affection when you see it?” scoffed Elphaba. “I love Nessie. She’s a pain in the neck, she’s intolerably righteous, she’s a nasty piece of work. I’m devoted to her.”

“She’ll be the Eminent Thropp.”

“Better she than I,” said Elphaba dryly. “For one thing, she has great taste in shoes.”

One evening through the skylight the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

She could get so angry, though!

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the pork roll you’re devouring, in such perfect mindless affluence, is cut from a Pig,” she snapped at him once.

“Just because you’ve already eaten, you don’t need to ruin my appetite,” he protested mildly. Free-living Animals were not much in evidence in his home territory, and the few sentient creatures he’d known at Shiz had, except at the Philosophy Club that night, made little impression. The plight of the Animals had not much touched him.

“This is why you shouldn’t fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”

“Now you have put me off my lunch.” He fed the rest of the pork roll to Malky. “What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.”

“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.

“And of women?”

“Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”

“And my capacity for evil?” said Fiyero, feeling implicated and uncomfortable. “And yours?”

“Fiyero’s capacity for evil is in believing too strenuously in a capacity for good.”

“And yours?”

“Mine is in thinking in epigrams.”

“You let yourself off lightly,” he said, suddenly a little annoyed. “Is that what you’re engaged by your secret network to do? Generate witty epigrams?”

“Oh, there’s big doings afoot,” she said, uncharacteristically. “I won’t be at the center of it, but I’ll be on the fringes helping out, believe me.”

“What are you talking about? A coup?”

“Never you mind, and you’ll stay blameless. Just as you want to be.” This was nastiness on her part.

“An assassination? And so what if you do kill some General Butcher? What does that make you? A saint? A saint of the revolution? Or a martyr if you’re killed in the campaign?”

She wouldn’t answer. She shook her narrow head in irritation, then flung the rosy shawl across the room as if it infuriated her.

“What if some innocent bystander is killed as you aim for General Pig Butcher?”

“I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.”

“Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.”

“There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.”

“Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?”

“Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—”

“Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.”

“Denial? Sin?”

“No. We.”

“I don’t know why—”

“The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?”

“You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.”

“Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .”

“Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.”

“I adore your looks and I acknowledge them. Fae!”

They parted that day without speaking, and he spent the evening at the betting parlor, losing money.

The next time he saw her, he brought three green candles and three gold candles and decorated her flat for Lurlinemas. “I don’t believe in religious feast days,” she said, but relented to admit, “they are pretty, though.”

“You have no soul,” he teased her.

“You’re right,” she answered soberly. “I didn’t think it showed.”

“You’re only playing word games now.”

“No,” she said, “what proof have I of a soul?”

“How can you have a conscience if you don’t have a soul?” he asked despite himself—he wanted to keep things light, to get back onto a better footing after their last episode of moral wrestling and estrangement.

“How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how all that is born must die, sob sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that’s all. I’m a forgettable leaf on a tree.”

“Since your work is terrorism, that’s the most extreme argument for crime I’ve ever heard. You’re eschewing all personal responsibility. It’s as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnameable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.”

“What is worse, Fiyero? Suppressing the idea of personhood or suppressing, through torture and incarceration and starvation, real living persons? Look: Would you worry about saving one precious sentimental portrait in a museum of fine arts when the city around you is on fire and real people are burning to death? Keep some proportion in all this!”

“But even some innocent bystander—say an annoying society dame—is a real person, not a portrait. Your metaphor is distracting and belittling, it’s a blind excuse for crime.”

“A society dame has chosen to parade herself as a living portrait. She must be treated as such. It’s her due. That denial of it, that’s your evil, to go back to the other day. I say you save the innocent bystander if you can, even if she’s a society dame, or he’s a captain of industry thriving mightily on all these repressive moves—but not, not, not at the expense of other, realer people. And if you can’t save them, you can’t. Everything costs.”

“I don’t believe in this concept of ‘real’ or ‘realer’ people.”

“You don’t?” She smiled, not nicely. “When I do disappear again, dearie, I’ll surely be less real than I am now.” She made to simulate sex against him; he turned his head, surprised at the vigor of his aversion.

Later that night, when they had made up, she suffered a racking paroxysm and painful sweats. She would not let him touch her. “You should go away, I’m not worthy of you,” she moaned, and some time later, when she was calmer, she murmured before sleeping again, “I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

She was right. He didn’t understand. He wiped her brow with a dry towel and kept close to her. There was frost on the skylight, and they slept beneath their winter coats to keep warm.

One brisk afternoon he sent off a propitiatory package of bright wooden toys for the children and a jeweled torque for Sarima. The pack train was going around the Great Kells via the northern route. It wouldn’t deliver Lurlinemas presents to Kiamo Ko until well into the spring, but he could pretend to have sent them earlier. If the snows held off, he would be home by then, restless and chafing in the tall narrow rooms of the mountain stronghold, but maybe he would get the credit for thoughtfulness. And perhaps deserved, why not? To be sure, Sarima would be in her winter doldrums (as distinct from her spring moods, her summer ennui, and her congenital autumn condition). A torque eventually would cheer her up, at least a little.

He stopped for a coffee in a café in a neighborhood just enough off the beaten track to be both bohemian and pricey. The management apologized: The winter garden, usually heated with braziers and brazen with expensive forced flowers, had been the site of an explosion the night before. “The neighborhood is troubled; who’d have thought it?” said the manager, touching Fiyero on the elbow. “Our Glorious Wizard was to have eradicated civil unrest: wasn’t that the whole point of curfews and containment laws?”

Fiyero was not inclined to comment, and the manager took his silence for agreement. “I’ve moved a few tables into my private parlor up the stairs, if you don’t mind roughing it amidst my family memorabilia,” he said, leading the way. “Finding good Munchkinlander help to repair the damage is getting harder, too. The Munchkinlander tiktok touch, there’s nothing like it. But a lot of our friends in the service sector have gone back to their eastern farms. Scared of violence against them—well, so many of them are so small, don’t you think they seem to provoke it?—they’re all cowards.” He interrupted himself to say, “I can tell you have no Munchkinlander relatives or I wouldn’t comment this way.”

“My wife is from Nest Hardings,” said Fiyero, lying unconvincingly, but the point was made.

“I recommend the cherry chocolate frappe today, fresh and delicious,” said the manager, retreating into repentant formality, and pulling out a chair at a table near high old windows. Fiyero sat and looked out. One fretted shutter had warped and couldn’t fold back against the outer wall as designed, but there was still enough of a view. Rooflines, ornamental chimney pots, the odd high window box stuffed with dark winter pansies, and pigeons swooping and scissoring like lords of the sky.

The manager was of that peculiar stock; after so many generations in the Emerald City, it seemed a separate ethnic strand. The paintings of his family showed the bright gimlet hazel eyes, and refined receding hairlines on men and women alike (and plucked into the scalps of children, too, in the fashion of the Emerald City upwardly yearning middle class). At the sight of simpering boys in pink satin with frizzy-headed lapdogs, and girlettes in womanish dark rouge and plunging necklines (revealing their innocent lack of breasts), Fiyero felt the sudden longing, again, for his own cold and distant children. Though bruised by their particular family life—and who wasn’t?—in his memory Irji, Manek, and Nor managed more integrity than these hothouse scions of a family on the make.

But that was cruel, and he was responding to artistic convention, not to the actual children. He turned his gaze out the window when the order came, to avoid hideous art, to avoid the other people in the salon.

Having coffee in the winter garden below usually provided a view of vine-covered brick walls, shrubs, and the occasional marble statue of some improbably beautiful and vulnerably naked stripling. However, from a flight up, one could see over the wall, into an interior mews area. One part was a stables, another a neighborhood toilet, apparently; and just within the range of his vision was the wall broken by the explosion. Some sort of twisted, thorny wire netting had been erected across the opening, which led into a schoolyard.

As he watched, one of the doors of the adjacent school was pushed open, and a small crowd emerged, shaking and stretching into the sunlight. There seemed to be—Fiyero peered—a couple of elderly Quadling women and some adolescent male Quadlings, straplings with early mustaches making a bluish-colored shadow against their fine rose-rust skin. Five, six, seven Quadlings—and a couple of stout men who might have been part Gillikinese, it was hard to tell—and a family of bears. No—Bears. Smallish Red Bears, a mother and father and a toddler.

The little Bear went unerringly to some balls and hoops under the stairs. The Quadlings made a circle and began to sing and dance. The old ones, with arthritic steps, joined their hands with the teenagers and moved in a widdershins pattern, in and out, as if making a clock face that reversed the clockwise movement of time. The stocky Gillikinese men shared a cigarette and gazed out the wiry barrier across the break in the wall. The Red Bears were more dispirited. The male sat on the wooden edge of a sandlot, rubbing his eyes and combing the fur below his chin. The female moved back and forth, kicking at the ball just often enough to keep the cub occupied, then stroking the bowed head of her mate.

Fiyero sipped his drink and inched forward. If there were, what, twelve prisoners, and only a wire fence between them and freedom, why didn’t they rush it? Why were they separated into their racial and species groups?

After ten minutes the doors opened again and a Gale Forcer came out, trim and—yes, Fiyero had to admit it at last—terrifying. Terrifying in the brick red uniform with the green boots, and the emerald cross that quartered the breast of the shirt, one vertical strap from groin to high starched collar, the other strap from armpit to armpit across the pectorals. He was only a youth whose curly hair was so blond as to look nearly white in the winter sun. He stood with legs apart on the step of the school’s verandah.

Though Fiyero couldn’t hear a thing through the closed window, the soldier apparently gave a command. The Bears stiffened and the cub began to wail and clutch the ball to itself. The Gillikinese men came and stood quiescently ready. The Quadlings ignored the order and kept on with their dance. They swung their hips, and they held their arms at shoulder height, moving their hands in a semaphoric message, though what it meant Fiyero could only guess. He had never seen a Quadling before.

The Gale Forcer raised his voice. He had a truncheon in a thong loop at his waist. The cub hid behind the father, and the mother could be seen to growl.

Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile? Or are there relatives inside who will be tortured if you make a break for freedom?

It was all speculation; Fiyero couldn’t tell the dynamics of the situation, but he was riveted. He realized his hand was open, palm up against the glass of the window. Below, because the Bears had not stood to join the lineup, the soldier raised his cudgel and it came down on the skull of
the cub. Fiyero’s body jerked, he spilled his drink and the cup broke, porcelain shards on the buttery herringbone-laid oak flooring.

The manager appeared from behind a green baize door and tutted, and twitched the drapes closed, but not before Fiyero had seen one last thing. Recoiling as if he had never hunted and killed in the Thousand Year Grasslands, he averted his eyes and they wheeled upward, where he glimpsed the pale blond coins of faces—two or three dozen schoolchildren in the upper windows of the school, staring down with fascination and open mouths at the scene in their playing field.

“They have no concern for neighbors who have a business to run, bills to pay, and loved ones to feed,” snapped the manager. “You don’t need to see those antics as you enjoy your coffee, sir.”

“The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.”

“Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”

Fiyero didn’t take a replacement cup of cherry chocolate. There were racking cries from the mother Bear, and then a silence in the world outside the heavy damask drapes. Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn’t name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare to risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him. He held Elphie the tighter, trying to communicate a deeper passion without speaking it.

He noticed, too, that when she was agitated she was the more liberal in her lovemaking. He began to be able to tell when she was going to say “Not till next week.” She seemed more abandoned, more salacious, perhaps as a cleansing exercise before disappearing for a few days. One morning, as he was stealing some of the cat’s milk for his coffee, she rubbed some oil on her skin, wincing with sensitivity, and said over her shoulder of soft green marble, “A fortnight, my dear. My pet, as my father used to say. I need a fortnight of privacy now.”

He had a sudden pang, a premonition, that she was going to leave him. It was a way for her to get two weeks’ head start. “No!” he said. “That’s not on, Fae-Fae. It’s not all right, it’s too long.”

“We need it.” She expanded: “Not you and I, I mean the other we. Obviously I can’t tell you what we’re about, but the last plans for the autumn campaign are falling into place. There’s going to be an episode—I can’t say more—and I must be available to the network at all times.”

“A coup?” he said. “An assassination? A bomb? A kidnapping? What? Just the nature of it, not the specifics, what?”

“Not only can I not tell you,” she said, “I don’t even know. I’ll be told only my small part, and I’ll do it. I only know it’s a complicated maneuver with a lot of interlocking pieces.”

“Are you the dart?” he said. “Are you the knife? The fuse?”

She said (though he wasn’t convinced): “My dearie, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad. It’s all too expected. Security guards watch me like owls on a mouse. My very presence provokes alarm and heightened vigilance. No, no, the part I’ll play will be a handmaiden’s part, a little assistance in the shadows.”

“Don’t do it,” he said.

“You’re selfish,” she said, “and you’re a coward. I love you, my sweet, but your protests about this are wrongheaded. You just want to preserve my insignificant life, you don’t even have a moral feeling about whether I’m doing right or wrong. Not that I want you to, not that I care what you think about it. But I only observe, your objections are of the weakest sort. Now this isn’t something to be argued. Two weeks from tonight, come back.”

“Will the—the action—be completed by then? Who decides?”

“I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who decides, so don’t ask me.”

“Fae—” Suddenly he didn’t like her code name anymore. “Elphaba. Do you really not know who is pulling the strings that make you move? How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Wizard?”

“You are a novice at this, for all your status as a tribal prince!” she said. “Why shouldn’t I know if I was being a pawn of the Wizard? I could tell when I was being manipulated by that harridan, Madame Morrible. I learned something about prevarication and straight talking back at Crage Hall. Give me the credit for having spent some years at this, Fiyero.”

“You can’t tell me for sure who is or isn’t the boss.”

“Papa didn’t know the name of his Unnamed God,” she said, rising and rubbing oil on her stomach and between her legs, but modestly turning her back to him. “It never is the who, is it? It’s always the why.”

“How do you hear? How do they tell you what to do?”

“Look, you know I can’t say.”

“I know you can.”

She turned. “Oil my breasts, will you.”

“I’m not that stupidly male, Elphaba.”

“Yes you are”—she laughed, but lovingly—“come on.”

It was daylight, the wind roared and even shook the floorboards. The cold sky above the glass was a rare pinkish blue. She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands—as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her way.

The collapse of her reticence frightened him more than anything else.

He took some coconut oil and warmed it between his palms, and slid his hands like leathery velvet animals on her small, responding breasts. The nipples stood, the color flushed. He was already fully dressed, but recklessly he pressed himself against her mildly resisting form. One hand slid down her back; she arched against him, moaning. But perhaps, this time, not from need?

Still his hand moved down onto her buttocks, felt between her cheeks, beyond, felt the place one muscle pulled in crookedly, endearingly, felt the very faintest etching of hair beginning its crosshatch shadows, its swirl toward vortex. He worked his intelligent hand, reading the signs of her resistance.

“I have four companions,” she said suddenly, wrenching away in a motion soft enough not to disengage but to discourage. “Oh heart, I have four comrades; they don’t know who our cell leader is, it’s all done in the dark, with a masking spell to shadow the voice and distort the features. If I knew more, the Gale Force could catch me and torture it out of me, don’t you see?”

“What is your object?” he breathed, kissing her, loosening his trousers again, as if this were the first time, his tongue tracing the twisting funnel of her ear.

“Kill the Wizard,” she answered, looping her legs around him. “I am not the arrowhead, I am not the dart, I am just the shaft, the quiver—” She cupped more oil in her hand and as they slid and fell into the light, she made him bright and anguished with oil, took him deeper in than ever before.

“Even after all this time, you could be an agent for the Palace,” she said later.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m good.”

A little snow fell one week, then some more the next. The feast of Lurlinemas drew nearer. The unionist chapels, having appropriated and transformed the most visible parts of the old pagan beliefs, hung themselves shamelessly in green and gold, set out green candles and golden gongs and greenberry wreaths and gilded fruit. Along Merchant Row, shops outdid themselves (and the churches) in decor, with displays of fashionable clothes, and useless and expensive trinkets. In display windows, papier-mâché figures evoked the good Fairy Queen Lurline in her winged chariot, and her assistant, the minor fairy Preenella, who strewed gift-wrapped delights from her capacious magic basket.

He asked himself, again and again, if he was in love with Elphaba.

He also asked himself why he was so late coming to this question, after two months of a passionate affair; and if he knew what the words even meant; and if it mattered.

He chose more gifts for the kids and for sulky Sarima, that well-fed malcontent, that monster. He missed her a little; his feelings for Elphaba seemed not to vie with those for Sarima, but to complement them. No two women could be more unlike. Elphaba demonstrated the proud independence of Arjiki mountain women that Sarima, married so young, had never developed. And Elphie wasn’t just a different (not to say novel) provincial type—she seemed an advance on the gender, she seemed a different species sometimes. He caught himself with a mammoth erection just remembering that last time, and he had to hide himself behind some ladies’ scarves in a shop until it subsided.

He bought three, four, six scarves for Sarima, who didn’t wear scarves. He bought six scarves for Elphaba, who did.

The shop girl, a dull Munchkinlander midget who had to stand on a chair to reach the till, said over his shoulder, “Just in a minute, ma’am.” He turned to make room at the counter for the other customer.

“But Master Fiyero!” cried Glinda.

“Miss Glinda,” he said, flabbergasted. “What a surprise.”

“A dozen scarves,” she said. “Look, Crope, look who’s here!”

And there was Crope, a little jowly though he couldn’t be twenty-five yet, could he?—looking guiltily up from a display of feathery, plumy things.

“We must have tea,” said Glinda, “we must. Come now. Pay the nice little lady and off we fly.” In her voluminous skirts she rustled like a corps of ballerinas.

He hadn’t remembered her quite so giddy; maybe this was married life. He slid a glance at Crope, who was rolling his eyes behind her back.

“Just you put this on Sir Chuffrey’s account, and this, and this,” Glinda said, mounding things on the counter, “and have them sent along to our rooms in the Florinthwaite Club. I’ll need them for dining so have someone run over with them right now if you would. How dear. So kind. Ta ta. Boys, come along.”

She gripped Fiyero with a pinching hand and steered him away; Crope followed like a lapdog. The Florinthwaite Club was only a street or two over and they could easily have carried the purchases back themselves. Glinda capered and clattered down the grand staircase into the Oak Parlor, making enough noise so that every female resident looked up in a rewarding sort of disapproval.

“Now, you, Crope, there, so you can be Mother and pour when we’ve ordered, and dear Fiyero, you here, right next to me, that is if you’re not too married.”

They ordered tea; Glinda got used to him a bit and began to calm down.

“But really, who would have thought it?” she said, picking up a biscuit and putting it down again, about eight times in a row. “We were the great and the good at Shiz, really. Look at you, Fiyero—you’re a prince, aren’t you? Do we call you Your Highness? I never could. And you’re still married to that little child?”

“She’s grown up now, and we have a family,” Fiyero told her warily. “Three children.”

“And she’s here. I must meet her.”

“No, she’s back at our winter home in the Great Kells.”

“Then you’re having an affair,” said Glinda, “because you look so happy. Who with? Anyone I know?”

“I’m just happy to see you,” he said; and in fact he was. She looked wonderful. She had filled out some. That wraithlike beauty had bloomed but not coarsened. She was more woman than waif, and more wife than woman. Her hair was cut short in a boyish style, very becoming, and there was a tiaralike thing in her curls. “And now you’re a sorceress.”

“Oh hardly,” she said. “Can I even get that damned serving girl to hurry up with the scones and jam? I can not. Yes, I can sign a hundred greeting cards for the holiday season at one go. But it’s a very minor talent, I tell you. Sorcery is vastly overrated in the popular press. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Wizard just magick the hell out of his adversaries? No, I’m content to try to be a good partner for my Chuffrey. He’s at the exchange today, doing financial thingies. Oh do you know who else is in town? It’s too rich, Crope tell him.”

Crope, surprised to be given an opening, choked on his mouthful of tea. Glinda rushed in. “Nessarose! Can you believe it? She’s at the family home over there in Lower Mennipin Street—an address that’s come up quite a lot in the past decade, I might add. We saw her where, Crope, where? It was the Coffee Emporium—”

“It was the Ice Garden—”

“No, I remember, it was the Spangletown Cabaret! Fiyero do you know, we went to see that old Sillipede, do you remember? No you don’t, I can see it in your face. She was the singer who was performing at the Oz Festival of Song and Sentiment the day our Glorious Wizard arrived out of the sky in a balloon and orchestrated that coup! She’s making yet another of her innumerable comeback tours. She’s a bit camp now but so what, it was gales of fun. And there at a better table than we had, I might tell you, was Nessie! She was with her grandfather, or is it the great-grandfather? The Eminent Thropp? He must be eleventy-hundredy years old by now. I was shocked to see her until I realized she went merely to provide him an escort. She didn’t think much of the music—she scowled and prayed all through the entr’acte. And the Nanny was there too. Who would’ve imagined it, Fiyero—you’re a prince, and Nessarose just about installed as the next Eminent Thropp, and Avaric, of course, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, and humble little me-eee married to Sir Chuffrey, holder of the most useless title and the biggest stock portfolio in the Pertha Hills?” Glinda almost stopped for breath, but lunged on kindly, “And Crope, of course, dear Crope. Crope, tell Fiyero all about yourself, he’s dying to know, I can see it.”

Actually Fiyero was interested, if only for a rest from the staccato chatter.

“He’s shy,” Glinda pushed on, “shy shy shy, always was.” Fiyero and Crope exchanged glances and tried to keep their mouths from twitching. “He’s got this so avant-garde little palace of a loft apartment on the top floor of a doctor’s surgery, could you imagine? Stunning views, the best views in the Emerald City, and at this time of year! He dabbles a bit in painting, don’t you dear? Painting, a little musical operetta set design here and there. When we were young we thought the world revolved around Shiz. You know there’s real theatre here now, the Wizard has made this a much more cosmopolitan city, don’t you think?”

“It’s good to see you, Fiyero,” said Crope, “say something about yourself, fast, before it’s too late.”

“You cad, you kid me mercilessly,” sang Glinda. “I’ll tell him about your little affair with—well never mind. I’m not that mean.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Fiyero said, feeling even more taciturn and Vinkus than he had when he first arrived in Shiz. “I like my life, I lead my clan when they need it, which isn’t often. My children are healthy. My wife is—well, I don’t know . . .”

“Fertile,” supplied Glinda.

“Yes.” He grinned. “She’s fertile and I love her, and I’m not going to stay much longer as I’m meeting someone for a business conference across town.”

“We must meet,” said Glinda, suddenly plaintive, suddenly looking lonely. “Oh Fiyero, we’re not old yet, but we’re old enough to be old friends already, aren’t we? Look, I’ve gushed on like a debutante who forgot to splash on her Eau d’Demure. I’m sorry. It’s just that that was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness—and life isn’t the same now. It’s wonderful, but it isn’t the same.”

“I know,” he said, “but I don’t think I can meet you again. There’s so little time, and I have to go back to Kiamo Ko. I’ve been away since the late summer.”

“Look, we’re all here, me and Chuffrey, Crope, Nessarose, you—is Avaric around, we could get him? We could get together, we could have a quiet dinner together in our rooms upstairs. I promise not to be so giddy. Please, Fiyero, please, Your Highness. It would do me such an honor.” She cocked her head and put a single finger to her chin, elegantly, and he could tell she was struggling through the language of her class to say something real.

“If I think I can, I’ll let you know, but please, you mustn’t count on it,” he said. “There’ll be other times. I’m not usually in town so late in the season—this is an anomaly. My children are waiting—have you children, Glinda?”

“Chuffrey is dry as two baked walnuts,” said Glinda, making Crope choke on his tea again. “Before you go—I can see you’re getting ready to dash—dear, dear Fiyero—what do you hear from Elphaba?”

But he was prepared for this, and had readied his face to be blank, and he only said, “Now that’s a name I don’t hear every day. Did she ever turn up? Surely Nessarose must have said.”

“Nessarose says if her sister ever does turn up she’ll spit in her face,” Glinda remarked, “so we must all pray that Nessarose never loses her faith, for that would mean the evaporation of such tolerance and kindness. I think she would kill Elphaba. Nessa was abandoned, rejected, left to look after her crazy father, her grandfather-thingy, that brother, that nurse, that house, the staff—and you can’t even say single-handedly, as she doesn’t have any hands!”

“I thought I saw Elphaba once,” said Crope.

“Oh?” said Fiyero and Glinda together, and Glinda continued, “You never told me that, Crope.”

“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I was on the trolley that runs along the reflecting pool by the Palace. It was raining—some years ago now—and I saw a figure struggling with a big umbrella. I thought she was about to be blown away. A gust of wind blew the umbrella inside out and the face, a greenish face which is why I noticed, ducked down to avoid the splash of rainwater—you remember how Elphaba hated getting wet.”

“She was allergic to water,” Glinda opined. “I never knew how she kept herself so clean, and I her roommate.”

“Oil, I think,” said Fiyero. They both looked at him. “That is, in the Vinkus,” he stammered, “the elderly rub oil into their skin instead of water—I’ve always assumed that’s what Elphie did. I don’t know. Glinda, if I were to meet up with you again, what’s a good day?”

She rooted in her reticule for a diary. Crope took the opportunity to lean forward and say to Fiyero, “It really is good to see you, you know.”

“You too,” said Fiyero, surprised that he meant it. “If you ever get out into the central Kells, come stay at Kiamo Ko with us. Just send word ahead, as we’re only there for half a year at a time.”

“That’s just your speed, Crope, the wild beasts of the untamed Vinkus,” said Glinda. “I think the fashion possibilities, all those leather thongs and fringe and such, they might interest you, but I can’t see you as Mister Mountain Boy.”

“No, probably not,” agreed Crope. “Unless it affords fabulous cafés every four or five blocks, I don’t think a landscape quite developed enough for human habitation.”

Fiyero shook hands with Crope and then, remembering the rumors about poor Tibbett’s deterioration, kissed him; he threw his arms around Glinda and hugged her hard. She laced her arm through his and walked him to the door.

“Do let me shake off Crope and have you back, all to myself,” she said in a low voice, her patter evaporating into seriousness. “I can’t tell you, dear Fiyero. The past seems both more mysterious and more understandable with you right here before me. I feel there are things I could yet learn. I don’t want to wallow, dear boy, never that! But we go way back.” She held his hand between hers. “Something’s going on in your life. I’m not as dumb as I act. Something good and bad at the same time. Maybe I can help.”

“You were always sweet,” he said, and motioned to the doorman to hail a hansom cab. “How I regret that I won’t meet Sir Chuffrey.”

He moved out the doorway, across the marble entrance pavement, and turned to tip his hat at her. In the doors (the doormen held them open to enhance his parting view) she was a calm, resigned woman, neither transparent nor ineffectual—even, it might have been said, a woman full of grace. “If you should see her,” said Glinda lightly, “tell her I miss her still.”

He didn’t see Glinda again. He didn’t call at the Florinthwaite Club. He didn’t stroll past the Thropp family house in Lower Mennipin Street (though he was sorely tempted). He didn’t stop a scalper to try to get one of the tickets to Sillipede’s triumphant fourth annual comeback tour. He found himself in the Chapel of Saint Glinda in Saint Glinda Square, from which he could sometimes hear the cloistered maunts next door chanting and susurrating like a swarm of bees.

When the two weeks had passed at last, and the city was worked up to a froth over Lurlinemas, he went to see Elphaba, half-expecting she would have vanished.

But there she was, stern and loving and in the midst of making a vegetable pie for him. Her precious Malky was putting his feet in the flour and making paw prints all over the room. They talked awkwardly until Malky upset the bowl of vegetable stock, and that made them both laugh.

He didn’t tell her about Glinda. How could he? Elphaba had worked so hard to keep them all at bay, and now she was engaged in the major campaign of her life, the thing she had been working toward for five years. He did not approve of anarchy (well, he knew he was in lazy doubt about everything; doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction). But even after seeing the Bear cub struck down, he had to keep an even, cautious relationship with the Power on the throne—for the sake of his tribe.

Also, Fiyero didn’t want to make Elphie’s life harder than it was. And his selfish need to be comfortable with her surmounted his need to gossip. So he didn’t tell her Nessarose and Nanny were in town either, or had been. (For all he knew, he rationalized silently, they had already moved on.)

“I wonder,” she said that night, as the stars peered through the crazy frost pattern on the skylight, “I wonder if you should get out of town before Lurlinemas Eve.”

“Is all hell going to break loose?”

“I told you, I don’t know the whole picture; I can’t know; I shouldn’t know. But maybe some hell will break loose. Maybe it would be best for you to go.”

“I’m not going and you can’t make me.”

“I’ve been taking correspondence courses in sorcery on the side, I’ll go puff and turn you into stone.”

“You mean you’ll make me hard? I’m already hard.”

“Stop. Stop.”

“Oh you wicked woman, you have bewitched me again, look, it has a mind of its own—”

“Fiyero stop. Stop. Now look, I mean it. I want to know where you’re going to be on Lurlinemas Eve. Just so I can be sure you’re not going to get hurt. Tell me.”

“You mean we won’t be together?”

“It’s a work night for me,” she said grimly. “I’ll see you the next day.”

“I’ll wait here for you.”

“No you won’t. I think we’ve covered our tracks pretty well, but there’s still a chance even at this late date that somebody could come here to intercept me. No—you stay in your club and take a bath. Take a nice long cold bath. Got it? Don’t even go out. They say it might be snowy by then anyway.”

“It’s Lurlinemas Eve! I’m not going to spend the holiday in a bathtub all alone.”

“Well, hire some company, see if I care.”

“As if you don’t.”

“Just stay away from anything social, I mean theatre or crowds, or even restaurants, please, will you promise me that?”

“If you could be more specific I could be more careful.”

“You could be most careful if you left town completely.”

“You could be most careful if you told me—”

“Give over with that, cut it out. I don’t think I even want to know where you are, come to think of it. I just want you to be safe. Will you be safe? Will you stay inside, away from drunken pagan celebrations?”

“Can I go to chapel and pray for you?”

“No.” She looked so fierce that he didn’t even tease her about it again.

“Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?

“I love you,” said Elphaba.

“So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.”

Careful of us both, he thought.

So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all. She had swathed herself in long dark skirts, like some sort of a religious woman, and tucked up her hair inside a tall wide-brimmed hat with a crown like a cone. There was a dark scarf, purple and gold, wound around her neck, and pulled over her mouth, though she would need more than a scarf to mask that lovely prow of a nose. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves, a nicer type of accessory than she usually went in for, though he feared it was to allow for nimbler control of her hands. Her feet were lost in big, steel-toed boots like the kind worn by miners in the Glikkus.

If you didn’t know she was green, it would be hard to tell—in this dark afternoon, in this raking skittle of snow.

She didn’t look behind her; perhaps she didn’t care if she was being followed. Her circuit took her around some of the major squares of the city. She ducked in for a minute to the chapel of Saint Glinda next to the mauntery, the one where he had first seen her. Perhaps she was getting last-minute instructions, but she didn’t try to give him (or anyone else) the slip. She emerged in a minute or two.

Or perhaps—perish the thought—she was actually praying for guidance and strength?

She crossed the Law Courts Bridge, she wandered along the Ozma Embankment and cut diagonally through the abandoned rose gardens of the Royal Mall. The snow pestered her; she kept twining her cape the more tightly around; the silhouette of her thin, dark-stockinged legs in those huge comical boots showed up against the snowy blankness of the Oz Deer Park (now of course bereft of Deer and deer). She marched, head tucked down, past the cenotaphs and obelisks and memorial tablets to the Magnificent Dead of this escapade or that. The decades—Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love—the decades looked on and didn’t notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn’t see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

But the Wizard must not be her aim. She must have told the truth in saying that she was too untried, and too obvious, to be selected as the Wizard’s assassin. She must be involved in a diversionary tactic, or in taking out a possible successor or high-level ally. For tonight the Wizard would be opening the antiroyalist, revisionist Exhibit of Struggle and Virtue at the People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics near the Palace. Yet at the top of the Shiz Road Elphaba struck out sideways, away from the Palace district, cutting through the small, fashionable district of Goldhaven. The homes of the filthy rich were guarded by mercenaries, and she clopped past them on the pavements, past the stableboys out sweeping the snow off the pavement with their brooms. She did not look up or down or back over her shoulder. Fiyero guessed he was the more ostentatious figure, striding in his opera cape in the snow a hundred paces behind.

At the edge of Goldhaven was perched a small bluestone jewel of a theatre, the Lady’s Mystique. In the shallow but elegant square before it, white lights and gold and green spangles hung in profusion, looped from streetlight to streetlight. Some holiday oratorio or other was scheduled—he could only read SOLD OUT on the board in front—and the doors weren’t yet opened. The crowd was gathering, some vendors sold hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses, and a crowd of self-approving youngsters amused themselves and bothered some elderly people by singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow came down on all, on the lights, the theatre, the crowds; it landed in the hot chocolate, it was churned to mush and ice on the bricks.

Bravely, foolishly—without decision or choice, it felt like—Fiyero climbed the steps of a nearby private library, to keep an eye on Elphaba, who lost herself in the crowd. Was there to be a murder in the theatre? Was there to be arson, the innocent sybarites roasted like chestnuts? Was it a single mark, an appointed victim, or was it mayhem and disaster, the more, the worse, the better?

He didn’t know if he was there to prevent what she was about to do, or to save whomever he could from the catastrophe, or to tend anyone hurt accidentally, or even maybe just to witness it, so he could know more about her. And love her or not love her, but know which of the two it was.

She was circulating through the crowd, as if trying to locate someone. He believed, incredibly, that she didn’t know he was there—was she so intent on finding the right victim, and he didn’t fill the bill? Could she not feel her lover in the same open-air square with her as the wind moved the curtains of snow?

A phalanx of Gale Forcers appeared from an alley between the theatre and a school next door. They took up their places before the bank of glass doors in front. Elphaba mounted the steps of an ancient wool market, a kind of stone gazebo. Fiyero saw that she had something under her cloak. Explosives? Some magic implement?

Did she have colleagues in the square? Were they lining themselves up one with another? The crowd kept getting thicker, as the hour for the oratorio drew near. Inside the glass doors, house management was busy lining up stanchions and stringing velvet ropes to promote a genteel entry into the hall. Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.

A carriage came around the corner of a building on the far side of the square. It couldn’t come right up to the doors of the theatre, as the crowds were too dense, but it proceeded as far as it was able. Sensing the presence of someone with authority, the crowd drew a little still. Could this be the elusive Wizard, on an unannounced visit? A coachman in a teck-fur headpiece flung the door open, and reached his hand in to assist the passenger in alighting.

Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.

Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.

He saw that Elphaba knew that this was the one she must kill; she had known this; in an instant all was dead clear. If she was caught and captured and tried, her motivation couldn’t be more wonderful—she was merely a mad student from Madame Morrible’s own Crage Hall, she carried a grudge, she never forgot. It was too perfect.

But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?

Elphaba’s cape twitched; her hand went up and down inside it, as if priming something. Madame Morrible was growling a greeting to the crowd, which, while not necessarily knowing who she was, appreciated the spectacle if not the bulk of her arrival.

The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.

But then were thrown open the front doors of the building Madame Morrible was walking past—not the theatre, but the adjacent school, Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. Out the doors swarmed a cluster, a little upper-class mob of schoolgirls. What were they doing in school on a Lurlinemas Eve? Fiyero caught Elphaba looking wildly surprised. The girls were six or seven, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity, spooned into furry muffs and tucked into furry scarves and tipped into boots with furry edges. They were laughing and singing, raucous and rough as the elite adults they would become, and in their midst was a pantomime player, someone being the Fairy Preenella. It was a man, as the convention had it, a man done up in silly clownlike makeup, and mock bouncing bosom, and a wig and extravagant skirts, and a straw hat, and a huge basket with trinkets and treasures spilling out. “Oh la, socie-tee,” he fluted at Madame Morrible, “even Fairy Preenella can have a present for the Lucky Pedestrian.”

For a moment Fiyero thought the man in drag was going to pull out a knife and kill Madame Morrible right in front of the children. But no, espionage was organized but not that organized—this was a real accident, a disruption. They hadn’t figured on there being a school occasion this evening, nor on a screaming flock of schoolgirls greedily tugging at an actor in skirts and falsetto.

Fiyero turned back to look at Elphaba. Her face struggled with disbelief. The children were in the way of whatever she was supposed to do. They were a small unruly mob, chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him/her, grabbing for presents. The children were the accidental context—noisy, innocent daughters of tycoons, despots, and butcher generals.

He could see Elphaba working, he could see her hands fighting with each other, to do it anyway, to keep from doing it—whatever it was.

Madame Morrible pushed on, like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, devil come what may, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him.

The audience filed into the theatre. The children shrieked their song in the street, awash with greed and joy. The carriage that had brought Madame Morrible around was able to draw up in front of the theatre and start its long wait for her to come out again. Fiyero paused, unsure, in case there was a backup plan, in case Elphaba had something else up her sleeve, in case the theatre exploded.

Then he began to worry that, in the few minutes of losing sight of her, Elphaba had been rounded up by the Gale Force. Could they have whisked her out of sight that fast? What should he do if she became one of the disappeared?

At a clip, he headed back across town. Mercifully he found a waiting cab, and he had the cab drive him directly to the street of warehouses adjacent to the military garrison in the city’s ninth district.

In a state of profound agitation he arrived back at Elphaba’s little eyrie atop the corn exchange. As he climbed the stairs, his bowels turned suddenly to water, and it was only with effort he managed to make it to the chamber pot. His insides slopped noisily, wetly out, and he held his perspiring face in his hands. The cat was perched atop the wardrobe, glaring down at him. Voided, washed down, and at least loosely done up again, he tried to coax Malky with a bowl of milk. She would have none of it.

He found a couple of dried crackers, and ate them miserably, and then pulled on the chain to open the skylight, to help air the room. A couple of plops of snow fell in and sat there not melting, it was that cold in the damn place. He went to build up a fire, pulled open the iron door of the stove.

The fire caught, then flared, and the shadows detached themselves and moved as shadows will, but these shadows moved fast, across the room, at him before he could register what they were. Except that there were three, or four, or five, and they were wearing black clothes, and black char on their faces, and their heads were wrapped in colored scarves like the ones he had bought for Elphaba, for Sarima. On the shoulder of one he saw the glint of a gilded epaulet: a senior member of the Gale Force. There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat then scarpered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.

The youngest maunt was obliged to answer the convent door if the bell sounded during mealtime. In fact she was clearing away the remains of pumpkin soup and rye brisks, the other maunts already wafting, in a cerebral mood, toward their cloister chapel upstairs. She hesitated before deciding to answer the bell—in another three minutes she too would have been losing herself in devotions, and the bell would have gone unheeded. She had rather get the dishes to soak, frankly. But the seasonal cheer bullied her into charity.

She opened the huge door to find a figure crouched like a monkey in the dark corner of the stone porch. Beyond, snow was wrinkling the facade of the adjacent Church of Saint Glinda, making it look like a reflection in water, only right way up. The streets were empty and a noise of choirs came filtering out of the candle-lit church.

“What is it?” said the novice, remembering then to add, “Good Lurlinemas, my friend.”

She decided, once she saw the blood on the odd green wrists, and the darting look in the eyes, that holiday decency required her to drag the creature inside. But she could hear her sister maunts assembling in their private chapel, and the mother maunt beginning to sing a prelude in her silvery contralto. This was the novice’s first big liturgical event as a member of this community, and she didn’t want to miss a moment of it.

“Come with me, dolly,” she said, and the creature—a young woman a year or two older than she was—managed to straighten up enough to walk, or hobble, like a cripple, like a person so malnourished that their extensors cannot flex and their limbs look as if they are about to snap.

The novice stopped in a washroom to rinse the blood off the wrists, and to make certain that it was indeed splattered mess from the beheading of some hen for a holiday supper, and not a sad attempt at suicide. But the stranger recoiled from the sight of water, and looked so deranged and unhappy that the novice stopped. She used a dry towel instead.

The maunts were beginning antiphonal chants upstairs! How maddening! The novice took the path of least resistance. She dragged the forlorn thing down toward the winter salon, where the old retired biddies lived out their lives in a haze of amnesia and the discreetly placed clumps of marginium plants, whose sweet miasma helped mask the odors of the old and incontinent. The crones lived in a time of their own, they couldn’t be carted upstairs to the sacred chapel anyway.

“Look, I’ll sit you down here,” she said to the woman. “I don’t know if you need sanctuary or food or a bath or forgiveness, whatever. But you can stop here, warm and dry and safe and quiet. I’ll come back to you after midnight. It’s the feast day, you see. It’s the vigil service. Watch and wait, and hope.”

She pushed the hunted, haunted woman into a soft chair, and found a blanket. Most of the crones were snoring away, their heads nodding on their breastbones, dribbling softly onto bibs ornamented with green and gold berries and leaves. A few were telling their beads. The courtyard, open in summer, was now welled in with glass panels for the winter, so it looked like a square fish tank in an aquarium; snow falling in it always made them peaceful.

“Look, you can see the snow, white as the grace of the Unnamed God,” said the novice, remembering her pastoral requirements. “Think on that, and rest, and sleep. Here’s a pillow. Here’s a stool for your feet. Upstairs we’ll be singing and praising the Unnamed God. I’ll pray for you.”

“Don’t—” said the green ghostly guest, then slumped her head against the pillow.

“It’s my pleasure to,” said the novice, a bit aggressively, and fled, just in time to catch the processional hymn.

For a while the winter salon was still. It was like a fishbowl into which a new acquisition has been dropped. The snow moved as if done by a machine, gently and mesmerizingly, with a soft churr. The blossoms of the marginium plants closed a bit in the strengthening cold of the room. Oil lamps issued their funereal crepe ribbons into the air. On the other side of the garden—hardly visible through the snow and the two windows—a decrepit maunt, with a more precise grasp of the calendar than her sisters, began to hum a saucy old pagan hymn to Lurline.

Up to the shivering figure of the newcomer came one of the elders, inching forward in a wheeled chair. She leaned forward and sniffed. From a cloak of plaid blanket, blue and ivory, she pawed her old hands along the armrests. She reached out and touched Elphaba’s hand.

“Well, the poor dolly is sick, the poor dolly is tired,” said the ancient thing. Her hands felt, as the novice’s had done, for open wounds on the wrists. Nothing. “Though intact, the poor dolly is in pain,” she said, as if approving. A dome of near-balding scalp came into view under the hood of the blanket. “The poor dolly is faint, the poor dolly is faltering,” she went on. She rocked a bit and pressed Elphaba’s hands between her own, as if to warm them, but it was doubtful that her anemic and incompetent old circulatory system could heat a stranger when it could scarcely heat herself. Still she kept on. “The poor poppet is failure itself,” she murmured. “Happy holidays to one and all. Come my dear, lay your breast on old Mother’s bosom. Old Mother Maunt will set things right.” She couldn’t quite pull Elphaba out of her position of dreamless, sleepless grief. She could only keep Elphaba’s hands tightly clutched within her own, as a sepal sockets the furls of young petal. “Come, my precious and all will be well. Rest in the bosom of mad Mother Yackle. Mother Yackle will see you home.”