The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko

3

Sarima,” said her youngest sister, “wake up. Naptime’s over. We have a houseguest at supper, and I need to know if we have to kill a hen. There are so few left, and what we give the traveler we miss all winter in eggs . . . What do you think?”

The Dowager Princess of the Arjikis groaned. “Details, details,” she said, “can’t I train you to figure out anything for yourself?”

“Very well,” snapped the sister, “I shall decide, and then you can go without your morning egg when we’re one short.”

“Oh Six, don’t mind me,” said Sarima, “it’s just that I’m scarcely awake. Who is it? Some patriarch with bad breath, who plans to bore us with tales of the hunting he did fifty years ago? Why do we allow it?”

“It’s a woman—more or less,” said Six.

“Now that’s uncalled for,” said Sarima, sitting up. “We are none of us the blushing nymphs we once were, Six.” From across the room she saw herself reflected in the wardrobe glass: pale as milk pudding, her still pretty face nestled in the puddles of fat that fell according to the laws of gravity. “Just because you’re the youngest, Six, and can still locate your waist, there’s no need to be unkind.”

Six pouted. “Well, it’s just a woman, then: so chicken or no? Tell me now so Four can hack off its head and get to plucking, or we won’t eat before midnight.”

“We’ll have fruit and cheese and bread and fish. Is there fish in the fishwell, I suppose?” Yes, there was. Six turned to go, but remembered to say, “I brought you a glass of sweet tea, it’s there on your vanity.”

“Bless you. Now tell me, without sarcasm if you please, what’s our guest like, really?”

“Green as sin, thin and crooked, older than any of us. Dressed in black like an old maunt—but not all that old. I’d guess about, oh, thirty, thirty-two? She won’t give her name.”

“Green? How divine,” said Sarima.

“Divine isn’t the word that comes to mind,” said Six.

“You don’t mean green with jealousy—you mean actually green?”

“Maybe it’s from jealousy, I could not say, but she is surely green. Genuine grass green.”

“Oh la. Well, I’ll wear white tonight so as not to clash. Is she alone?”

“She came in with the caravan we saw down in the valley yesterday. She stopped here with a little company of beasts—a wolfdog, a hive of bees, a youth, some crows, and a baby monkey.”

“What’ll she do with all of them in the mountains in winter?”

“Ask her yourself.” Six wrinkled her nose. “She made me shudder.”

“Half-set gelatin makes you shudder. When’s dinner tonight?”

“Seven chimes and a half. She turns my stomach.”

Six left, having run out of expressions of disgust, and Sarima had her tea in bed until her bladder complained. Six had banked up the fire and drawn the curtains, but Sarima pulled them back to look down into the courtyard. Kiamo Ko boasted corner turrets and towers, built on massive circular salients thrusting upward from the stone of the mountain itself. After the Arjiki clan had wrested the building from the waterworks commission, they had added toothy crenellations for defense. Despite the reworkings, the plan of the house was still simple. It was built in the general shape of a U, a central hall with two long narrow wings thrusting forward around a steeply pitched yard. When it rained, the water churned over the cobbles, and slipped out under the carved gates of iron oak and jasper panels, past the sickly cluster of village houses nestled up against the castle’s outside walls. At this hour the courtyard was charcoal gray. Cold and filthy with scraps of hay and bits of leaf flying in the wind. There was a light in the old cobbler’s shed, and smoke spinning from the chimney that badly wanted repointing—like everything else in this decaying manse. Sarima was glad the guest hadn’t been shown into the house proper. As Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, she enjoyed the privilege of welcoming a traveler into the private chambers of Kiamo Ko.

After bathing, she dressed in a white shift with white piping, and put on the beautiful torque that had arrived, like a message from the Other Land, from her dear departed husband several months after the Incident. Out of habit Sarima shed a few tears admiring herself within the flat embrace of its jeweled, segmented collar. If it was too dressy for this itinerant, Sarima could always drape a napkin over it. But she would still know it was there. Even before her tears had dried she was humming, looking forward to the novelty of a guest.

She peeped in on the children before going down. They were jumpy; strangers always did that to them. Irji and Manek, twelve and eleven, were almost old enough to want to bust out of this nest of venomous doves. Irji was soft and cried a lot, but Manek was a little bantam, always had been. If she let them go off to the Grasslands with the clan, in the summer migration, they both might have their throats slit—there were too many clansmen to claim leadership for themselves or their sons. So Sarima had kept her boys near.

Her daughter, Nor, long-legged and thumb-sucking at nine years old, still needed a lap to crawl into before going to sleep. Dressed for the meal, Sarima was inclined to forbid it, but relented. Nor had a delicate lisp and she said wunning in the wain for running in the rain. She befriended stones and candles and blades of grass that grew against all logic in the cracks of the coping stones around the windows. She sighed and rubbed her face against the torque and said, “There’s a boy too, Mama. We played with him in the mill yard.”

“What’s he like? Is he green too?”

“Nah. He’s all right. He’s a big baby—fat and strong, and Manek was throwing stones at him to see how far they would bounce off him. He let him do it. Maybe if you’re so fat it doesn’t hurt?”

“I doubt it. What’s his name?”

“Liir. Isn’t that a queer name?”

“It sounds foreign. And his mother?”

“I don’t know her name and I don’t think she’s his mother. He wouldn’t say when we asked. Irji said he must be a bastard. Liir said he didn’t care. He’s nice.” She moved her right thumb to her mouth, and with her left hand felt the cloth of Sarima’s gown just below the torque, until she found a nipple, and she ran her thumb over it lovingly as if it were a small pet. “Manek made him pull down his trousers so we could make sure his thing wasn’t green.”

Sarima disapproved—on the grounds of hospitality if nothing else—but was compelled to ask, “And what did you see?”

“Oh well you know.” Nor turned her head into her mother’s neck, and then sneezed from the powder with which Sarima kept her chins from chafing. “Stupid-looking boy’s thing. Smaller than Manek and Irji. But not green. I was so bored I didn’t look much.”

“Neither would I. That was very rude.”

“I didn’t make him do it. Manek did!”

“Well, no more of that. Now let’s have a story before sleeping. I’ve got to go down soon, so a short one. What do you want to hear, my little one?”

“I want to hear the story of the Witch and the fox babies.”

With less drama than usual Sarima rattled through the tale of how the three fox babies were kidnapped and caged and fed to fatness, in preparation for a cheese-and-foxling casserole, and how the Witch went to get fire from the sun to cook them. But when the Witch came back to her cave, exhausted and in possession of father flame, the foxlings outwitted her by singing a lullaby to make her sleep. When the Witch’s arm fell, the flame from the sun burned the door off the cage, and out the foxlings ran. Then they howled down old mother moon to come and stand as an unmovable door in the entrance of the cave. Sarima ended with the traditional back-and-forth. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

“Did she ever come out?” asked Nor, doing her line from an almost hypnagogic state.

“Not yet,” said Sarima, kissing and biting her daughter on the wrist, which made them both giggle, and then lights out.

The stairs from Sarima’s private apartment ran without railings down into the castle keep, hugging first one wall and then, after the corner, another. She descended the first flight full of grace and self-possession, her white skirts billowing, her torque a yoke of soft colors and precious metals, her face a careful composition of welcome.

At the landing she saw the traveler, sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking up at her.

She made it down the second flight to the flagstoned level, aware of the cynicism that seethed beneath her loyal remembrance of Fiyero, aware of her overbite; of her lost prettiness; of her weight; of the silliness of being the doyenne over nothing but irritating children and backbiting younger sisters; of the thin pretense of authority that scarcely masked her fear of the present, the future, and even the past.

“How do you do,” she managed.

“You are Sarima,” said the woman, standing, her stalactite of chin thrust forward like a rotted swede.

“Likely to be!” she said, glad of the torque; it seemed like a shield now, to protect her heart from being punctured by that chin. “Greetings to you, my friend. Yes, I am Sarima, mistress of Kiamo Ko. Where do you come from, and how are you called?”

“I come from the back of the wind,” said the woman, “and I have given up my name so often I don’t like to bring it out again for you.”

“Well, you are welcome here,” said Sarima as smoothly as she could, “but if we have nothing else to call you by, you will have to be Auntie. Will you come in to dine? We’ll be serving out soon.”

“I won’t eat until we speak,” said the guest. “Not under your roof in false pretenses for one night; I’d rather lie at the bottom of a lake. Sarima, I know who you are. I went to school with your husband. I’ve known about you for a dozen years or so.”

“Of course,” said Sarima then, things clicking. The old, treasured details of her husband’s life came rushing up. “Of course Fiyero talked of you—and of your sister, Nessie, right? Nessarose. And of the glamorous Glinda, with whom I think he was a little in love, and the playful inverted boys, and Avaric, and solid old Boq! I had wondered if that happy time of his life was always to be self-contained, always his and never mine—you are good to have come to call. I should have liked a season or two at Shiz, but I didn’t have the brains, I fear, nor my family the money. I would have remembered you in a minute, well, the color of your skin, there’s nothing like it, is there? Or am I too provincial?”

“No, it’s unique,” said the guest. “Before we say ten sentences of polite nonsense to each other, I have to tell you something, Sarima. I think I was the cause of Fiyero’s death—”

“Well, you’re not the only one,” interrupted Sarima, “it’s a national pastime out here, blaming oneself for the death of a prince. An opportunity for public grieving and atonement, which I secretly believe people enjoy just a little bit.”

The guest twisted her fingers, as if to pry open a space for herself in Sarima’s opinions. “I can tell you how, I want to tell you—”

“Not unless I want to hear it, which is my prerogative. This is my house and I choose to hear what I want.”

“You must hear it, so that I can be forgiven,” said the woman, turning her shoulders this way and that, almost as if she were a beast of burden with an invisible yoke on her.

Sarima did not like to be ambushed in her own home. Time enough to consider these sudden implications. When she felt up to it. And not until. She reminded herself that she was in charge. And thus she could afford to be kind.

“If I remember rightly,” said Sarima—her mind was racing with memory—“you’re the one, Fiyero talked of you, of course—Elphaba, that’s it—you’re the one who didn’t believe in the soul. I remember that much, so what’s to forgive, dearie? I know you’re travel weary—it’s impossible to get here without being travel weary—and you need a good hot meal and a few nights of sleep, and we’ll chat some morning next week?”

Sarima linked her arm with Elphaba’s. “But I’ll preserve your name from them, if you like,” said Sarima. She walked Elphaba through the tall warped oak doors into the dining hall and called, “Look who’s here, Auntie Guest.” The sisters were standing beside their chairs, hungry and curious and impatient. Four had the ladle in the tureen, stirring; Six had dressed in a hostile puce; Two and Three, the twins, looked piously at their prayer cards; Five was smoking and blowing concentric rings toward the platter of yellow eyeless fish they had dragged up from the underground lake. “Sisters, rejoice, an old friend of Fiyero’s has come to share fond memories and enliven our lives. Welcome her as you do me.” Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, as the sisters all resented and despised Sarima. Why had she married someone who would die so early and condemn them not just to spinsterhood but to deprivation and denial?

Elphaba didn’t speak through the entire meal or look up from her plate. She devoured the fish, though, and the cheese and the fruit. Sarima deduced from her eating habits that she had lived under a rule of silence at meals, and wasn’t surprised, later, to hear about the mauntery.

They took a glass of precious sherry in the music room, and Six entertained them with a wobbling nocturne. The guest looked miserable, which made the sisters happy. Sarima sighed. The one thing that could be said about the guest was this: She was older than Sarima. Perhaps, for the short while of her stay, Elphaba would come out of that sulk and lend an ear to hear how troubling and trying Sarima’s life was. It would be nice to chat with someone not in the family.

2

A week passed before Sarima said to Three, “Please tell our Auntie Guest that I’d like to see her tomorrow for elevenses in the Solar.” Sarima thought that Elphaba had had enough time now to get the measure of things. The suffering green woman was in some sort of slow-motion thrall, or fit. She moved jerkily, stalking about the courtyard, or stamping in to meals as if trying to poke holes in the flooring with her heels. Her elbows were always bent at right angles, and her hands clenched and unclenched themselves.

Sarima felt stronger than ever, which wasn’t very. It did her some good to have a contemporary around, however thwarted she might be. The sisters disapproved of Sarima’s cordiality, but the higher mountain passes were already closed for the winter, and you just couldn’t send a stranger packing into the treacherous valleys. The sisters conferred in their parlor, as they busied themselves knitting hateful gray potholders for the undeserving poor at Lurlinemas. She’s sick, they said; she’s inert, unfinished (even more than they were, was the unspoken corollary, an immensely gratifying notion); she’s damned. And is that fat balloon of a boy her son, or a child slave, or is he one of her familiars? Behind Sarima’s back they called the woman living in the cobbleshed Auntie Witch, echoing the old legends of Kumbricia, which were viler—and more persistent—in the Kells than elsewhere in Oz.

It was Manek, Sarima’s middle child, who was the most curious. One morning, as the boys all stood on a battlement pissing over the side (a game poor Nor had to pretend no interest in), Manek said, “What if we peed on Auntie? Would she scream?”

“She’d turn you into a toad,” said Liir.

“No, I mean would it hurt her? She looks like water gives her the aches and shakes. Does she even drink it? Or does it make her insides hurt?”

Liir, not an especially observant child, said, “I think she doesn’t drink it. Sometimes she washes things, but she uses sticks and brushes. We better not pee on her.”

“And what does she do with all those bees and the monkey? Are they magic?”

“Yeah,” said Liir.

“What kind of magic?”

“I don’t know.” They stepped away from the dizzying drop and Nor came running up. “I have a magic straw,” she said, holding up a brown bristle. “From the Witch’s broom.”

“Is the broom magic?” said Manek to Liir.

“Yes. It can sweep the floor real fast.”

“Can it talk? Is it enchanted? What does it say?”

They got more interested, and Liir bloomed and blushed under their curiosity. “I can’t tell. It’s a secret.”

“Is it still a secret if we push you off the tower?”

Liir considered. “What do you mean?”

“Will you tell us or we’ll do it.”

“Don’t push me off the tower, you oafs.”

“If the broom is magic it’ll come flying by and save you. Besides, you’re so fat you’d probably bounce.”

Irji and Nor laughed at that, despite themselves. It made a very funny picture in their minds.

“We only want to know what secrets the broom says to you,” said Manek with a big smile. “So tell us. Or we’ll push you off.”

“You’re not being nice, he’s company,” said Nor. “Come on, let’s go find some mice in the pantry and make friends.”

“In a minute. Let’s push Liir off the roof first.”

“No,” said Nor, beginning to cry. “You boys are so mean. Are you sure that broom is magic, Liir?”

But Liir by now didn’t want to say any more.

Manek tossed a pebble off the roof and it seemed a very long time before the ping of impact.

Liir’s face had, in a matter of moments, developed deep black pockets under the eyes. He held his hands down by his sides like a traitor at a court martial. “The Witch’ll be so mad at you that she will hate you,” Liir said.

“I don’t think so,” said Manek, taking a step forward. “She won’t care. She likes the monkey more than she likes you. She won’t even notice if you’re dead.”

Liir gasped for air. Although he had just peed, the front of his baggy trousers turned dark with wet. “Look, Irji,” said Manek, and his older brother looked. “He’s not even very good at being alive is he? It’s not like it would be much of a loss. Come on, Liir, tell me. What did the damned broom say to you?”

Liir’s upper torso was going in and out like a bellows. He whispered, “The broom told me—that—that—you’re all going to die!”

“Oh, is that all,” said Manek. “We already knew that. Everybody dies. We knew that already.”

“You did?” said Liir, who hadn’t.

“Come on,” Irji said, “come on, let’s catch some mice in the pantry and we can cut off their tails and use Nor’s magic straw to prick their eyes.”

“No!” said Nor, but Irji had swiped the straw from her. Manek and Irji went clattering, loose-limbed as marionettes, along the parapet
and down the stairs. With a huge, aggrieved sigh, Liir composed himself and adjusted his clothes, and followed them like a condemned dwarf laborer in the emerald mines. Nor stayed behind, her arms folded defiantly, her chin working with frustration. Then she spit over the edge and felt better, and chased after the boys.

At midmorning, Six showed the guest into the Solar. With a smirk behind Auntie’s back, she deposited a tray of cruel little biscuits, hard as slate, on a table covered with a carpet gone brown and patternless. Sarima, having made her way through what she could of her daily spiritual ablutions, felt ready.

“You’ve been here a week and it’s likely to be longer,” said Sarima, allowing Six to pour out some gallroot coffee before dismissing her. “The trail north is snowed in by now, and there’s not a safe haven between here and the plains. The winters are hard in the mountains, and while we can make do with our stores and our own company, we treasure a change. Milk? I do not know exactly what you had—intended. Once you had visited us sufficiently, I mean.”

“There are rumors of caves in these Kells,” Elphaba said, almost more to herself than to Sarima. “I lived for some years at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, outside of the Emerald City. Dignitaries would visit, and while we were often under a vow of silence, nonetheless people would talk of what they knew. Monastic cells. I had thought, when I was done here, that I might take myself to a cave and—and—”

“And set up housekeeping,” said Sarima, as if this were as usual as marrying and bearing babies. “Some do it, I know. There’s an old hermit on the western slope of Broken Bottle—that’s a peak nearby—they say he’s been there for some years, and has reverted to a more primitive moment of nature. Of his nature, I mean.”

“A life without words,” Elphie said, looking in her coffee and not drinking it.

“They say this hermit has forgotten about personal hygiene,” said Sarima, “which, given how the boys smell when they go unwashed for a couple of weeks, strikes me as nature’s defense against marauding beasts.”

“I didn’t expect to be here for a long time,” Elphie said, twisting her head on her neck like a parrot and looking at Sarima in an odd way. Oh, beware, thought Sarima carefully, though she tended to like this guest: Beware, she’s taking the direction of the discussion into her own hands. This won’t do. But the guest went on: “I had thought that I would have a night or two, maybe three, and could find myself a hidey-hole before winter set in. I was working on the wrong calendar, I was thinking of how, and when, winter came to Shiz and the Emerald City. But you’re six weeks ahead here.”

“Ahead in the autumn and behind in the spring, alas,” said Sarima. She took her feet off her hassock and placed them on the floor, flatly, to indicate seriousness. “Now, my new friend, there are some things I need to say to you.”

“I have things too,” Elphie said, but Sarima went on this time.

“You will think me an unpolished person, and you are right of course. Oh, when I was selected to be a child bride, a good governess was hired from Gillikin to teach me and my sisters how to use verbs and pronouns and salad forks. And lately I have begun to master reading. But most of what I picked up about polite behavior was from what Fiyero was good enough to instruct me in when he returned from his education. No doubt I make social mistakes. You have every right to snigger behind my back.”

“I am not given to sniggering,” snapped Elphaba.

“As it may be. But I still have opinions, and I’m observant even if unschooled. Despite my sheltered life, married at the age of seven as you may know, raised and reared behind castle curtain walls. I trust my own sense of things and won’t be dissuaded. So let me continue,” she said, as Elphaba tried to interrupt. “There is plenty of time and the sun is nice in here, isn’t it? My little hideaway.

“It seems to me that you have come here to—shall we say—relieve yourself of some sad business or other. You have the look about you. Don’t be startled, my dear, if there’s a look I do recognize, it’s the look of someone carrying a burden. Remember, I listen to my sisters, year in and year out, as they graciously share with me all the ways they hate me, and why.” She smiled, amused at her own wit. “You want to throw down your burden, throw it down at my feet, or across my shoulders. You want perhaps to weep a little, to say good-bye, and then to leave. And when you leave here you will walk right out of the world.”

“I will do no such thing,” said Elphie.

“You will indeed, even if you don’t know it. You will have nothing left to tie you to the world. But I know my own limits, Auntie Guest, and I know what you’re here for. You told me. You told me in the hall, you said you felt you were responsible for Fiyero’s death—”

“I—”

“Don’t. Just don’t. This is my home, I am a nominal Dowager Princess of Duckshit, but I have a right to hear and I have a right not to hear. Even to make a traveler feel better.”

“I—”

“Don’t.”

“But I don’t want to burden you, Sarima, I want to unburden you with the truth—if you permit me, you are the larger, the lighter; forgiveness blesses the donor as well as the receiver.”

“I’ll overlook that remark about my being the larger,” said Sarima. “But I still have the right to choose. And I think you wish me ill. You wish me ill and you don’t even know it. You want to punish me for something. Maybe for not being a good enough wife to Fiyero. You wish me ill and you fool yourself to think it’s some therapeutic course of tablets.”

“Do you know how he died, at least?” said Elphaba.

“I know it was a violent action, I know his body was never found, I know it was in a little love nest,” said Sarima, for a minute losing her resolve. “I don’t care to know who it was exactly, but I have heard enough about that vile Sir Chuffrey to have my strong opin—”

“Sir Chuffrey!”

“I said no. I said no more. Now I have an offer to make of you, Auntie, if you will have it. You and the boy may move into the southeast tower if you like. There are a couple of big round rooms with high ceilings, and good light, and you’ll be out of that drafty cobbleshed, and warmer. You’ll have your own staircase to come and go into the main hall, and you won’t bother the girls and they won’t trouble you. You can’t stay in that cobbleshed all winter. The boy has been looking pale and blubbery, I think he’s always cold. You’re there on the condition, I’m afraid, that you accept my firmest word on these matters. I don’t care to discuss my husband or the affairs of his death with you.”

Elphaba looked horror-struck, and beaten. “I have no choice but to accept,” she said, “at least for the time being. But I warn you, I intend to befriend you so thoroughly that you will change your mind. And I do think you need to hear things, you need to talk about them, as I do—and I can’t leave into the wilderness until I have your solemn promise of—”

“Enough!” said Sarima. “Call the porter from the gatehouse and have him bring your luggage to the tower. Come, I’ll show you. You haven’t touched your coffee.” She stood. For an awkward moment there was respect and suspicion, in equal measure, simmering on the carpet like the dust in the sunbeams. “Come,” Sarima said, more softly, “at the very least you need to be warm. You must be able to say that much of us country mice here at Kiamo Ko.”

3

As far as Elphaba was concerned, it was a witch’s room, and she reveled in it. Like all good witch’s rooms in children’s stories, it was a room with bowed walls, following the essential form of a tower. It had one broad window that, since it faced east, away from the wind, could be unbarred and opened without blowing everyone and everything out into the snowy valleys. Beyond, the Great Kells were a rank of sentinels, purple-black when the winter sun rose over them, draining into blue-white screens as the sun moved overhead, and going golden and ruddy in the late afternoon. There were sometimes rumbling collapses of ice and scree.

The winter gripped the house. Elphaba learned soon enough to stay put unless she was sure another room had a warmer fire. And except for Sarima, she didn’t care for the other human company the house afforded. Sarima lived in the west wing, with the children: the boys Irji and Manek, the girl Nor. Sarima’s five sisters lived in the east wing—they were called numbers Two through Six, and if they had ever had other names they had withered away from disuse. By right of their unmarriageability, the sisters claimed the best rooms in the place, although Sarima had the Solar. Where Liir curled up to sleep Elphaba did not know, but he reappeared every morning to change the rags at the bottom of the crows’ perch. He brought her cocoa, too.

Lurlinemas drew near, and out came some tired decorations from which the gilt had all but vanished. The children spent a whole day tying baubles and toys to the archways, making the grown-ups bump their heads and curse. Manek and Irji took a saw and without permission went beyond the castle walls to claim some boughs of spruce and sprigs of holly. Nor stayed behind and painted scenes of happy life in the castle on sheets of paper that she and Liir had found in Auntie Witch’s room. Liir said he couldn’t draw, so he wandered off and disappeared, perhaps to stay clear of Manek and Irji. The house fell still until there was a flurry of copper pans thrown about the kitchen. Nor went running to see, and Liir arrived from some hiding cubby to look too.

It was Chistery. The monkey was having a fit, and all the sisters, baking gingerbread, were throwing gobbets of batter at him, trying to knock him off the wheel that hung, noisy with swinging utensils, above the worktable.

“How’d he get in here?” said Nor.

“Get him out, Liir, call him!” said Two. But Liir had no more authority over Chistery than they did. The monkey flew to the top of a wardrobe, then to a huge dried goods canister, and he pulled open a drawer and found a precious store of raisins, which he stuffed in his mouth. Six said, “Go get the ladder from the hall, you two, and bring it here,” but when they had, Chistery was back on the wheel, making it whirl and clatter like a roundabout at a carnival.

Four put a lump of mashed melon in a bowl. Five and Three took off their aprons, ready to rush him when he came down. Chistery was still eyeing the fruit when the door smacked open against the wall and Elphaba came lolloping in. “All this commotion, how can you hear yourselves think?” she cried, and then took in the sight of Chistery, suddenly abject and remorseful, and of the sisters, poised to ensnare him in their floury aprons.

“What the hell is this?” she said.

“No need to yell,” said Two sulkily, quietly, but they put down their aprons.

“I mean, what is this? What is really going on here? You all look like Killyjoy, with blood lust in your faces! You’re white with rage at this poor beast!”

“I think it’s not rage, it’s flour,” said Five, which made them giggle.

“You filthy savages,” said Elphie. “Chistery come here, come down here. Right now. You women deserve to be unmarried, so you don’t bring any little savage creepy children into the world. Don’t you ever lay a hand on this monkey, do you hear me? And how did he get out of my room anyway? I was in the Solar with your sister.”

“Oh,” said Nor, remembering, “oh, Auntie, I’m sorry. It was us.”

“You?” She turned and looked at Nor as if for the first time, and Nor didn’t like it much. She shrank back against the door of the cold cellar. “What were you skulking about in my room for?” said Elphie.

“Some paper,” said Nor faintly, and in a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble, said, “I made some paintings for everybody, do you want to see, come here.”

Chistery in her arms, Elphaba followed them into the drafty hall, where the wind under the front door was making the papers flutter against the carved stone. The sisters came too, a safe distance behind.

Elphie got very quiet. “This is my paper,” she said. “I didn’t say you could use it. Look, it has words on the back. Do you know what words are?”

“Of course I do, do you think I am slow?” responded Nor sassily.

“You leave my papers alone,” said Elphaba. She and Chistery then flew up the steps, and the door to the tower slammed behind them.

“Who wants to help roll out the gingerbread?” said Two, relieved that skulls hadn’t been knocked together. “And this hall looks very pretty, chickadees, I’m sure Preenella and Lurline will be impressed tonight.” The children went back into the kitchen and made gingerbread people, and crows, and monkeys, and dogs, but they couldn’t do bees, they were too small. When Irji and Manek came in, dumping snowy greens on the slate floor, they helped at the gingerbread shapes too, but they made naughty shapes that they wouldn’t show the younger children, and they kept gobbling up the raw dough and laughing hysterically at it, which made everyone else testy.

In the morning the children awoke and ran downstairs to see if Lurline and Preenella had been there. Sure enough, there was a brown wicker basket with a green and gold ribbon on it (a basket and a ribbon that Sarima’s children had seen many years in a row), and in it were three small colored boxes, each one with an orange, a puppet, a small sack of marbles, and a gingerbread mouse.

“Where’s mine?” said Liir.

“Don’t see one with your name on it,” said Irji. “Look: Irji. Manek. Nor. Guess Preenella left it for you at your old house. Where did you used to live?”

“I don’t know,” said Liir, and started to cry.

“Here, you can have the tail of my mouse, just the tail,” said
Nor kindly. “First you have to say, May I please have the tail of your mouse?”

“May I please have the tail of your mouse,” said Liir, though his words were almost unintelligible.

“And I promise to obey you.”

Liir mumbled on. The exchange was eventually completed. From shame, Liir didn’t mention the oversight. Sarima and the sisters never took it in.

Elphaba didn’t show her face all day, but she sent down a message that Lurlinemas Eve and Lurlinemas always made her ill, and she was taking a few days in solitary comfort, and she wanted to be disturbed neither with meals, nor visitors, nor noise of any kind.

So while Sarima took herself off to her private chapel to remember her dear husband on this holy day, the sisters and the children all sang carols as loudly as they could.

4

A few weeks later, when the children were having snowball battles, and Sarima was concocting some medicinal toddy in the kitchen, Elphie left her room at last and skulked down the stairs and knocked on the door of the sisters’ parlor.

They didn’t like it, but they felt obliged to welcome her. The silver tray with bottles of hard liquor, the precious crystal carried on donkey all the way from Dixxi House in Gillikin, the prettiest and red-richest of native carpets on the floor, the luxury of fireplaces at both sides of the room, each blazing merrily—well, they would have toned it down some had they had any warning. As it was, Four hid in the sofa cushions the leather volume from which she had been reading aloud, a racy history of a poor young woman beset by an abundance of handsome suitors. It had been a gift from Fiyero once, the best gift he had ever sent the sisters—also the only one.

“Would you like some lemon barley water?” said Six, ever the servant until the day she died, unless by luck everyone else died sooner.

“Yes, all right,” Elphaba said.

“Do take a seat—this seat here, you’ll find it most comfy.”

Elphie didn’t look as if she wanted to be comfy, but she sat there anyway, stiff and uneasy in that quilted cocoon of a room.

She took the tiniest sip possible from her drink, as if suspecting hellebore.

“I suppose I need to apologize for that flurry over Chistery,” she said. “I know I am your guest here at Kiamo Ko. I just flew off the handle.”

“Well, you did just that,” started Five, but the others said, “Oh, think nothing of it, we all have days like that, in fact for us it usually happens on the same day, it’s been that way for years . . .”

“It’s very taxing,” Elphie said with some effort. “I spent many years under a vow of silence, and I haven’t always learned how—loud—it is permissible to get. Besides that, this is a foreign culture, in a way.”

“We Arjikis have always been proud of being able to speak to any other citizen in Oz,” said Two. “We are as equally at home with the ragged vagabond Scrow to our south as with the elite in the Emerald City to our east.” Not that they’d ever been out of the Vinkus.

“A little nibble?” said Three, bringing out a tin of marzipan fruits.

“No,” Elphie said, “but I wonder what you could tell me of your sister’s particular sadness.”

They sat poised, tempted, and suspicious.

“I enjoy my chats with her in the Solar,” said Elphie, “but whenever the talk gets around to her departed husband—whom as you may realize I myself knew—she is unwilling to discuss a thing.”

“Oh, well, it was so sad,” said Two.

“A tragedy,” said Three.

“For her,” said Four.

“For us,” said Five.

“Auntie Guest, take a little orange liqueur in your lemon barley,” said Six, “it comes from the balmy slopes of the Lesser Kells and is quite a luxury.”

“Well, just a drop,” said Elphie, but didn’t sip it. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward and said, “Please tell me how she learned of Fiyero’s death.”

There was a silence. The sisters avoided casting glances at one another, busying themselves with the pleats of their skirts. After a pause, it was Two who said, “That sad day. It stings in the memory still.”

The others adjusted themselves in their seats, turning slightly toward her. Elphaba blinked twice, looking like one of her own crows.

Two told the tale, without sentiment or drama. One of Fiyero’s business colleagues, an Arjiki trader, had come through the mountain pass at the first spring thaw, on the back of a mountain skark. He asked to meet with Sarima and insisted her sisters be around to support her at his woeful news. He told them how, on Lurlinemas, he had received at his club an anonymous message that Fiyero had been murdered. There was an address in a disreputable area—not even a residential neighborhood. The clansman hired a couple of brutes and broke down the door of the warehouse. Inside was a small apartment hidden upstairs, a place of assignation, obviously. (The clansman reported this without flinching, perhaps as a power-mongering maneuver.) There was evidence of struggle and massive quantities of blood, so thick in places that it was still tacky. The body had been removed, and it was never recovered.

Elphaba only nodded, grimly, at this recounting.

“For a year,” continued Two, “our dear distraught Sarima refused to believe he was really dead. We would not have been surprised at a ransom note. But by the following Lurlinemas, when no further word about it had arrived, we had to accept the inevitable. Besides, the clan had gone on as long as it could with an ad hoc collaborative leadership; they demanded a single chief, and one was put forward, and he’s served well. When Irji comes of age he may claim the rights of progenitorship, if he’s bold enough; he is not yet bold at all. Manek is the more obvious candidate, but he’s only second in line.”

“And what does Sarima believe happened?” said Elphie. “And you? All of you?”

Now that the grimmest part of the story had been told, the other sisters felt they could chime in. It emerged that Sarima had for some years suspected Fiyero of having an affair with an old college chum named Glinda, a Gillikinese girl of legendary beauty.

“Legendary?” Elphie said.

“He told us all how charming she was, how self-effacing, what grace and sparkle—”

“Is it all that likely he’d gush on and on about a woman he was committing adultery with?”

“Men,” said Two, “are, as we all know, both cruel and cunning. What better ruse than to admit fervently and often that he admired her? Sarima had no grounds on which to accuse him of slyness and deception. He never stopped being attentive to her—”

“In his cold, morose, withdrawn, embittered fashion,” interjected Three.

“Hardly the thing one reads about in novels,” said Four.

“If one read novels,” said Five.

“Which we don’t,” said Six, closing her lips over a marzipan pear.

“And so Sarima believes her husband was carrying on with this—this—”

“This dazzler,” said Two. “You must have known her, didn’t you go to Shiz?”

“I knew her a bit,” Elphie said, her mouth forgetting to shut itself. She was having a hard time keeping up with the multiple narrators. “I haven’t seen her in years.”

“And it is clear in Sarima’s mind what happened,” said Two. “Glinda was—for all I know still is—married to a wealthy older gentleman named Sir Chuffrey. He must have suspected something, and had her followed, and found out what was going on. Then he had some thugs kill the bastard. I mean poor Fiyero. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“It’s entirely plausible,” Elphie said slowly. “But is there any proof?”

“No proof at all,” said Four. “If there were, family honor would have required a retributive murder of Sir Chuffrey. But he may still be in robust good health. No, it’s only a theory, but it’s what Sarima believes.”

“Clings to,” said Six.

“And why not,” said Five.

“It’s her prerogative,” said Three.

“Everything’s her prerogative,” said Two sadly. “Besides, think of it. If your husband were murdered, wouldn’t it be easier to bear if you thought he deserved it, even just a little?”

“No,” Elphie said, “I don’t think it would.”

“Neither do we,” admitted Two, “but we think that’s what she thinks.”

“And you?” Elphie asked, studying the pattern in the carpet, the blood red lozenges, the thorny margins, the beasts and acanthus leaves and rose medallions. “What do you think?”

“We hardly can be expected to subscribe to a unanimous opinion,” said Two, but she barreled ahead anyway. “It seems reasonable to suppose that unbeknownst to us, Fiyero had gotten involved in some political enterprise in the Emerald City.”

“A stay that was to be a month became four,” said Four.

“Had he political—sensibilities?” said Elphaba.

“He was the Prince of the Arjikis,” Five reminded them all. “He had connections—responsibilities—allegiances—who of us could guess at them? It was his duty to have opinions on things we shouldn’t need to know about.”

“Was he sympathetic to the Wizard?” said Elphie.

“Are you saying was he involved in any of those campaigns? Those—pogroms? First the Quadlings, then the Animals?” said Three. “You look surprised that we should know about these things. Do you think we’re so very removed from the rest of Oz?”

“We are removed,” said Two. “But we listen to talk. We like to feed travelers when they come to stop. We know life can be rotten out there.”

“The Wizard is a despot,” said Four.

“Our home is our castle,” said Five at the same time. “Some removal from all this is healthy. We retain our moral fiber, unsullied.”

They all smirked, simultaneously.

“But do you think Fiyero had an opinion about the Wizard?” Elphaba asked again, pressing with some urgency.

“He kept his own counsel,” snapped Two. “For the sake of sweet Lurline, dear Auntie, he was a prince and a man!—and we were nothing but his younger, dependent sisters-in-law! Do you think he would confide in us? He could have been a high-level crony of the Wizard for all we know! He surely would’ve had liaisons with the Palace, he was a prince. Even if only of our small tribe. What he did with those liaisons—how are we to say? But we don’t think he died as the victim of a jealous husband. Maybe we’re sheltered, but we don’t. We think he got caught in the crossfire of some fringe struggle. Or he was found out in the act of betrayal of one excitable group or other. He was a handsome man,” said Two, “and none of us would deny it, then or now. But he was intense and private and we doubt he’d have loosened up enough to have an affair.” By the smallest gesture—a sucking in of her abdomen and a squaring of her shoulders—Two betrayed the foundation of her position: How could he have succumbed to this Glinda’s charms if he had been able to resist his own sisters-in-law?

“But,” Elphie asked in a small voice, “do you really think he was a spy for someone?”

“Why was his body never found?” said Two. “If it had been a jealous rage, his body needn’t have been removed. Perhaps he hadn’t died yet. Perhaps he was taken to be tortured. No, in our limited experience, we think that this smacks of treachery of a political stripe, not a romantic one.”

“I—” said Elphaba.

“You’re pale, dear. Six, please, a beaker of water—”

“No,” said Elphaba. “It’s just so—one never thought at the time—I never. Shall I tell you what little I know of it? And perhaps you can mention it to Sarima.” She began to pace. “I saw Fiyero—”

But, at the oddest possible moment, family solidarity kicked in. “Dear Auntie Guest,” said Two, in a responsible tone, “we are under the strictest orders from our sister not to allow you to tire yourself by chatting about Fiyero and the sad circumstances of his death.” Clearly Two had to work to get this out, as the appetite to hear what Elphaba had to say was huge. Stomachs were rumbling for the meat of it. But propriety won out, or fear of Sarima’s wrath if she were to find out. “No,” said Two again, “no, I’m afraid we mustn’t express undue interest. We may not listen and we will not tell Sarima what we hear.”

In the end, Elphaba left them, drooping. “Another time,” she kept saying, “when you’re ready, when she’s ready. You see it’s essential; there’s so much grief she could be released from—and that she herself could lift, too—”

“Good-bye for now,” they said, and the door closed behind her. The fires in the twin fireplaces mirrored back and forth across the room, and they took up positions of frustrated worthiness, at having to obey their older sister—curse her to hell.

5

Ice crusted the roofs, dislodged tiles, and dripped dirtily into the private chambers, the music room, the towers. Elphaba took to wearing her hat indoors to avoid the random icy dart on her scalp. The crows were mildewy around the beak and had algae between the claws. The sisters finished their novel, and collectively sighed—for life, for life!—and began to read it again, as they had done for eight years. In the fierce updraft from the valley, the snow seemed as often to be rising as falling. The children adored it.

One glum afternoon Sarima bedecked herself in red woolen wraps and, out of boredom, went wandering through musty, disused rooms. She located a staircase in a trapezoidal, slanting shaft—perhaps this high alcove leaned against the side of the gable you couldn’t see, she wasn’t good at imagining architecture in three dimensions. She mounted the stairs anyway. At the top, through a crude grillwork, she saw a figure in the white gloom. Sarima coughed so as not to startle her.

Elphaba was bent almost double over a huge folio laid out on a carpenter’s work bench. She turned, surprised but not very, and said, “We’ve had the same inclination, how curious.”

“You’ve found some books, I’d completely forgotten,” said Sarima. She could read now, but not well, and books made her feel inferior. “I couldn’t tell you what they’re all about. So many words, you’d hardly think the world deserved such scrutiny.”

“Over here is an archaic geography,” said Elphie, “and some records of usufruct pacts among various families of the Arjiki—I bet there are leaders who would be very happy to see these. Unless they’re outdated. Some texts that Fiyero had in Shiz—I recognize them too, the life sciences course of studies.”

“And this big thing—purple pages and silver ink, how grand.”

“I found it on the floor of this wardrobe. It seems to be a Grimmerie,” Elphie said, running her hand down a page only softly buckled with moisture. It made a pretty contrast, her hand on the vellum.

“What is that, besides beautiful?”

“As I understand it,” Elphie said, “a sort of encyclopedia of things numinous. Magic; and of the spirit world; and of things seen and unseen; and of things once and future. I can only make out a line here or there. Look how it scrambles itself as you watch.” She pointed to a paragraph of hand-lettered text. Sarima peered. Though her skill at reading was minimal, she gaped at what she saw. The letters floated and rearranged themselves on the page, as if enlivened. The page was changing its mind as they watched it. The letters clotted together in a big black snarl, like a mound of ants. Then Elphaba turned a page. “Here, this section is a book of beasts.” There were elegant, attenuated drawings in blood red and gold leaf, on the front and rear elevations of (it seemed) an angel, with notes in a fine hand on the aerodynamic aspects of holiness. The wings flexed up and down and the angel smiled with a saucy sort of sanctity. “And a recipe on this page. It says ‘Of apples with black skin and white flesh: to fill the stomach with greed unto Death.’”

“I remember this book now,” Sarima said. “I do remember how it came to be here, I even put it up here myself; I had forgotten. Well, books are so easy to set aside, aren’t they?”

Elphie looked up, her eyes leveling out under her smooth, rocklike brow. “Tell me, Sarima, please.”

The Dowager Princess of Kiamo Ko was flustered. She went to a small window and tried to open it, but encrustations of ice prevented her. So she sat down in a flump on a packing crate and told Elphaba the story. She couldn’t remember exactly when, but it was a long time ago, when everyone was young and slim. Beloved Fiyero was still alive but he was off in the Grasslands with the tribe. Complaining of a headache, she was home in the castle all alone. The bell at the drawbridge sounded and she went to see who it was.

“Madame Morrible,” Elphaba said. “Some Kumbric Witch or other.”

“No, it was no madame. It was an elderly man in a tunic and leggings, with a cloak badly in need of attention by a seamstress. He said he was a sorcerer, but perhaps he was just mad. He asked for a meal and a bath, which he got, and then he said he wanted to pay by giving me this book. I told him with a castle to run I didn’t have much time for frivolity, reading and such. He said never mind.”

Sarima drew her robes about her, and traced a pattern in the cold dust on a nearby stack of codexes. “He told me a fabulous tale and persuaded me to take this thing from him. He said that it was a book of knowledge, and that it belonged in another world, but it wasn’t safe there. So he had brought it here—where it could be hidden and out of harm’s way.”

“What a load of tripe,” said Elphie. “If it came from another world I shouldn’t be able to read any of it. And I can make out a little.”

“Even if it’s as magic as he says?” said Sarima. “But you know, I believed him. He said there was more congress between worlds than anyone would credit, that our world has attributes of his, and his of ours, a kind of leakage effect, or an infection maybe. He had a long fringy white-and-gray beard, and a very kind and abstracted manner, and he smelled of garlic and sour cream.”

“Indisputable proof of other-worldliness—”

“Don’t mock me,” said Sarima blandly, “you’ve asked me, so I’m telling you. He said it was too powerful to be destroyed, but too threatening—to that other place—to be preserved. So he made a magic trip or something and came here.”

“Kiamo Ko called to him and he couldn’t resist her attractions—”

“He said we were isolated, and a stronghold,” said Sarima, “and I couldn’t disagree! And what did it mean to me to take another book? We just lugged it up here, and put it with the rest. I don’t even know if I told anyone about it. Then he blessed me and left. He walked with an oakthorn staff over the Locklimb Trail.”

“Can you really say you thought the man who brought this here was a sorcerer?” said Elphie. “And that this book comes from—another world? Do you even believe in other worlds?”

“I find it a great effort to believe in this one,” said Sarima, “yet it seems to be here, so why should I trust my skepticism about other worlds? Don’t you believe?”

“I tried to, as a child,” said Elphie. “I made an effort. The mothy, gormless, indistinct sunrise of salvation world—the Other Land—I couldn’t get it, I couldn’t focus. Now I just think it’s our own lives that are hidden from us. The mystery—who is that person in the mirror—that’s shocking and unfathomable enough for me.”

“Well he was a very nice sorcerer, or madman, or whatever.”

“Maybe it was some agent loyal to the Ozma Regent,” said Elphie. “Secreting some ancient Lurlinist tract here. Anticipating a revival of royalism, a Palace coup, worried about the kidnapped, sleep-charmed Ozma Tippetarius, coming in disguise to hide this document far away, but still retrievable. . . .”

“You are full of conspiracy theories,” said Sarima. “I’ve noticed that about you. This was an elderly gentleman, very elderly. And he spoke with an accent. He surely was a wandering magician from some other place. And hasn’t he been right? The thing has sat here, forgotten, for what, ten years or more already.”

“May I take it and look at it?”

“I don’t care. He never said not to read it,” said Sarima. “At the time I perhaps couldn’t read at all—I forget. But look at that beautiful angel there! Do you really mean to say you don’t believe in the Other Land? In an afterlife?”

“Just what we need.” Elphaba snorted as she picked up the tome. “A post Vale-of-Tears Vale-of-Tears.”

6

One morning, after Six had tried and given up once again at some sort of lessons for the children, Irji suggested an indoor game of hide-and-seek. They drew straws and Nor lost, so she hid her eyes and counted. When she got bored with waiting she called out “One hundred!” and looked about.

She tagged Liir first. Though he liked to disappear alone for hours at a time, he was bad at hiding when it was required of him. So they hunted together for the older boys, and found Irji in Sarima’s Solar, crouching behind the velvet ruffles suspended from the perch of a stuffed gryphon.

But Manek, the best at hiding, couldn’t be found. Not in the kitchen, the music room, the towers. Running out of ideas, the children even dared to go down into the musty basement.

“There’s tunnels from here all the way to hell,” said Irji.

“Where? Why?” said Nor, and Liir echoed.

“They’re hidden. I don’t know where. But everybody says so. Ask Six. I think because this used to be a waterworks headquarters—it did. Hell burns so hot they need water, and the devils tunneled up to here.”

Nor said, “Look, Liir, here’s the fishwell.”

In the center of a low-vaulted room, damp with moisture beaded up on its stone walls, stood a low well with a wooden lid. There was a simple device with a chain and a stone for shifting the lid sideways. It was child’s play to uncover the shaft.

“Down there,” said Irji, “is where we get the fish we eat. Nobody knows if there’s a whole lake down there or if it’s bottomless, or if you can go down right to hell.” He moved the rushlight about, and there was a round of black water shining back a reflection, in chips and circles of chilly white light.

“Six says there’s a gold carp in there,” said Nor. “She saw it once. Biggest old thing, she thought it was a floating brass kettle bobbing to the surface, and then it turned and looked at her.”

“Maybe it was a brass kettle,” said Liir.

“Kettles don’t have eyes,” said Nor.

“Anyway, Manek’s not here,” said Irji. “Is he?” He called, “Hello, Manek,” and the echo rolled and dissolved in the wet dark.

“Maybe Manek went down to hell in one of those tunnels,” said Liir.

Irji swung the lid back on the fishwell. “But you’re it, Nor, I’m not going to look down here anymore.”

They gave themselves the creeps, and raced back upstairs. Four yelled at them for making too much noise.

Nor found Manek at last on the stairs outside the door to Auntie Guest’s rooms. “Shhh,” he said as they came near, and Nor tapped him anyway, saying, “You’re out.”

“Shhh,” he said again, more urgently.

They took turns looking through the crack in the weathered grain of the door.

Auntie had her finger in a book, and she was mumbling things to herself, sounding them out this way and that. On the dresser next to her squatted Chistery, in an uneasy, obedient silence.

“What’s happening?” said Nor.

“She’s trying to teach him to talk,” said Manek.

“Let me look,” said Liir.

“Say spirit,” said Auntie in a kind voice. “Say spirit. Spirit. Spirit.”

Chistery twisted his mouth to one side, as if considering it.

“There is no difference,” said Auntie to herself, or maybe to Chistery. “The strands are the same, the skeins are the same; the rock remembers; the water has memory; the air has a past for which it can be held accountable; the flame renews itself like a pfenix. What is an animal, but made of rock and water and fire and ether! Remember how to speak, Chistery. You are animal, but Animal is your cousin, damn you. Say spirit.”

Chistery picked a nit off his chest and ate it.

“Spirit,” sang Auntie, “there is spirit, I know it. Spirit!”

“Spit,” said Chistery, or something like it.

Irji shoved Manek aside and the children almost fell through the door trying to see Auntie laugh and dance and sing. She picked up Chistery and hugged him, and said, “Spirit, oh spirit, Chistery! There is spirit! Say spirit!”

“Spit, spit, spit,” said Chistery, unimpressed with himself. “Spite.”

But Killyjoy woke from a nap at the sound of a new voice.

“Spirit,” said Auntie.

“Speared,” said Chistery patiently. “Spared. Spored. Sput sput sput. Spat spate spit, speed spurt spot.”

“Spirit,” said Auntie, “oh, my Chistery, we’ll find ourselves a link with Doctor Dillamond’s old work yet! There is a universal design among us all, could we get in deeply enough to see! Everything is not in vain! Spirit, my friend, spirit!”

“Sport,” said Chistery.

The children couldn’t stop laughing. They clattered down the stairs and fell into the dormitory, and giggled into the bedclothes.

They didn’t mention what they saw to Sarima or the sisters. They were afraid Auntie would be stopped, and they all wanted Chistery to learn enough language so that he could play with them.

One windless day, when it seemed they must get out of Kiamo Ko or expire of boredom, Sarima had the idea that they go skating on a nearby pond. The sisters agreed, and dug out the rusting skates Fiyero had brought back from the Emerald City. The sisters baked caramel sweets and prepared flasks of cocoa, and even decorated themselves with green and gold ribbons, as if it were a second Lurlinemas. Sarima adorned herself in a brown velvet robe with fur tippets, the children put on extra trousers and tunics, and even Elphaba came along, in a thick cloak of purple brocade and heavy Arjiki goatskin boots, and mittens, carrying her broom. Chistery lugged along a basket of dried apricots. The sisters in sensible men’s tribal overcoats, belted and latched, drew up the rear.

The villagers had cleared the snow off the center of the pond. It was a ballroom dance floor of silver plate, engraved with the flourishes of a thousand arabesques, mounded round with pillows and bolsters of snow to provide a safe repose for skaters who forget how to brake or turn. In the fierce sunlight, the mountains looked razor sharp against the blue; great snowy egrets and ice griffons wheeled high above. The ice rink was already noisy with screaming urchins and lurching adolescents (taking every opportunity to tumble and heap each other cozily in suggestive positions). Their elders moved more slowly, processionally around the ice. The crowd fell silent as the household of Kiamo Ko approached, but, children being children, the silence didn’t last for long.

Sarima ventured out onto the ice, her sisters in a knot around her with linked arms. Being largish, Sarima was nervous of falling, nor were her ankles strong. But before long she had remembered how things went—this foot, then that, long languorous strides—and the uneasy meeting of social classes was accomplished. Elphaba looked like one of her crows: knees out, elbows flailing, rags flapping, gloved hands raking for balance.

After the adults had had enough excitement (but the children were only still warming up) Sarima and the sisters and Elphie collapsed on some bearskins that the citizenry had spread out for them.

“In the summer,” said Sarima, “we have a huge bonfire and slaughter some pigs, before the men descend to the plains, or the boys ascend to the slopes to guard the sheep and the goats. They all come into the castle for a chew of pork and a few tankards of ale. And of course, any time there’s a mountain lion or a particularly nasty bear, we let them into the keep until the beast is killed or wanders away.” She smiled with noblesse oblige in an abbreviated way, off into the middle distance, though the locals were ignoring the castle folk by now. “Auntie dear, you looked quite the sight in that robe, and poking along with that broom.”

“Liir says it’s a magic broom,” said Nor, who had run up to throw a handful of granular snowflakes into her mother’s face. Elphaba turned her head quickly and tugged her collar up to avoid ricocheting snow spray. Nor laughed unkindly in a beautiful phrase like a woodwind, and scampered away.

“So tell us how your broom came to be magic,” said Sarima.

“I never said it was magic. I got it from an elderly maunt named Mother Yackle. She took me under her wing, when she was alert enough, and gave me—well, guidance, I suppose you’d call it.”

“Guidance,” said Sarima.

“The old maunt said the broom would be my link to my destiny,” said Elphie. “I assume she meant that my destiny was domestic. Not magic.”

“Join the sisterhood.” Sarima yawned.

“I never knew if Mother Yackle was completely mad or a wise, prophetic old hen,” said Elphie, but the others weren’t listening, so she lapsed into silence.

After a while Nor came flinging herself into her mother’s lap again. “Tell me a story, Mama,” she said. “Those boys are nasty.”

“Boys are vexing creatures,” agreed her mother. “Sometimes. Shall I tell you the story of when you were born?”

“No, not that,” said Nor, yawning. “A real story. Tell me about the Witch and the fox babies again.”

Sarima protested, knowing full well that the children considered Auntie Guest a witch. But Nor was stubborn and Sarima relented, and told the tale. Elphaba listened. Her father had taught her moral precepts, had lectured her about responsibility; Nanny had gossiped; Nessarose had whined. But no one had told stories to her when she was young. She pulled herself forward a little so she could hear over the noise of the crowd.

Sarima recited the tale with little dramatic involvement, but even so, Elphaba felt a twinge when she heard the conclusion. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

“Did she ever come out?” recited Nor, eyes gleaming with the fun of the ritual.

“Not yet,” answered Sarima, and leaned forward, pretending to bite Nor on the neck. Nor squealed and jiggled herself away, and ran to rejoin the boys.

“I think that’s shameful, even if it’s just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil,” said Elphaba. “Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It’s shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.”

“Don’t,” Sarima said. “For one thing, that’s where Fiyero is waiting for me. And you know it.”

Elphaba’s jaw dropped. When she least expected it, Sarima always seemed ready to rush in with a surprise attack. “In the afterlife?” said Elphie.

“Oh, what you do take against,” said Sarima. “I pity the community of the afterlife when they’re asked to welcome you in. What a sour apple you always are.”

7

She’s crazy,” said Manek knowledgeably. “Everyone knows that you can’t teach an animal to talk.”

They were in the abandoned summer stable, jumping off a loft, making puffs of hay and snow billow in the patchy light.

“Well, what is she doing with Chistery then?” asked Irji. “If you’re so sure of it?”

“She’s teaching him to mimic, like a parrot,” said Manek.

“I think she’s magic,” said Nor.

“You, you think everything’s magic,” Manek said. “Stupid girl.”

“Well, everything is,” said Nor, launching herself away from the boys as a further editorial comment on their skepticism.

“Do you really think she’s magic?” said Manek to Liir. “You know her better than any of us. She’s your mother.”

“She’s my Auntie, isn’t she?” Liir said.

“She’s our Auntie, she’s your mother.”

“I know,” said Irji, pretending full immersion in the topic to avoid another jump. “Liir is Chistery’s brother. Liir is what Chistery was like before she taught him how to talk. You’re a monkey, Liir.”

“I’m not a monkey,” said Liir, “and I’m not magicked.”

“Well, let’s go ask Chistery,” said Manek. “Is this the day that Auntie has her coffee with Mama? Let’s go see if Chistery has learned enough words to answer some questions.”

They scampered up the stone spiral staircase to Auntie Witch’s apartment.

True, she was gone, and there was Chistery nibbling on some nutshells, and Killyjoy dozing by the fire, growling in his sleep, and the bees doing their ceaseless chorus. The children didn’t like bees much, nor did they care for Killyjoy. Even Liir had lost interest in the dog once he had children to play with. But Chistery was a favorite. “Sweet thing, oh the little baby,” said Nor. “Here, you little beast, come to Auntie Nor.” The monkey looked doubtful, but then on knuckles and capable feet he swung across the floor and vaulted into her arms. He inspected her ears for treats, peered over her shoulders at the boys.

“You tell us, Chistery boy, is Auntie Witch really magic?” said Nor. “Tell us all about Auntie Witch.”

“Watch Witch,” said Chistery, playing with his fingers. “Which wretch which?” They could have sworn it was a question, the way his forehead wrinkled like eyebrows.

“Are you under a spell?” said Manek.

“Spell ill. Spoil spell,” answered Chistery. “Spill all.”

“How do we spoil the spell? How do we turn you back to a boy?” asked Irji, the oldest but just as caught up as the others. “Is there a special way?”

“Why way?” said Chistery. “We woo, we weigh woe. Why?”

“Tell us what to do,” said Nor, petting him.

“Do, die,” said Chistery.

“Great,” said Irji. “So we can’t break the spell you’re under?”

“Oh, he’s only babbling,” Elphaba said from the doorway. “Look, I have visitors I didn’t even invite.”

“Oh hello, Auntie,” they said. They knew they shouldn’t be there. “He’s talking, sort of. He’s magicked.”

“He mostly just repeats what you say,” said Elphaba, moving closer. “So leave him alone. You’re not allowed here.”

They said, “Sorry,” and left. Back in the boys’ room, they fell on the mattress and roared until they wept, and couldn’t say what was so funny. Maybe it was the relief of having escaped without harm from the Witch’s rooms, even though they had no business there. The children decided they were no longer scared of Auntie Witch.

8

They were tired of being housebound, but finally it was raining out instead of snowing. They played hide-and-seek a lot, waiting for the rain to lift so they could go outside.

One morning, Nor was it. She kept finding Manek easily, because Liir always hid near him and gave him away. Manek lost his patience. “I always get caught, because you’re so hopeless. Why can’t you hide well?”

“I can’t hide in the well,” Liir said, misunderstanding.

“Oh yes you can,” Manek said, delighted.

The next round began, and Manek led Liir right down the basement steps. The basement was even damper than usual, with the groundwater seeping through the foundation stones. When they swiveled the lid off the fishwell, they could see the water level had risen. But it was still a good twelve or fourteen feet down.

“This’ll just be fine,” Manek said, “look, if we loop the rope over this hook, the bucket will hold steady enough for you to climb in it. Then when I let the crank out, the bucket will slowly slide down the side of the well. I’ll stop it before it gets to the water, don’t worry. Then I’ll put the lid on and Nor will look and look! She’ll never find you.”

Liir peered into the clammy shaft. “What if there are spiders?”

“Spiders hate water,” said Manek authoritatively. “Don’t worry about spiders.”

“Why don’t you do it?” said Liir.

“You’re not strong enough to lower me, that’s why,” said Manek patiently.

“Don’t hide far away,” said Liir. “Don’t let me down too far. Don’t push the cover on all the way, I don’t like the dark.”

“You’re always complaining,” Manek said, giving him a hand. “That’s why we don’t like you, you know.”

“Well, everybody’s mean to me,” Liir said.

“Crouch down now. Hold on to the ropes with both hands. If the bucket scrapes against the wall a little bit just push yourself away. I’ll let it down slowly.”

“Where are you going to hide?” Liir said. “There isn’t anyplace else in this room.”

“I’ll hide under the stairs. She’ll never find me in the shadows, she hates spiders.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any spiders!”

“She thinks there are,” Manek said. “One two three. This is really a good idea, Liir. You’re so brave.” He grunted with the effort. Liir was heavier in the bucket than he had figured, and the rope spooled too quickly. It jammed in the joint between the windlass and the struts, and the bucket stopped and smashed against the wall with an echoing thud.

“That was too fast,” came Liir’s voice, ghostly in the gloom.

“Oh, don’t be a sissy,” Manek said. “Now shhh, I’m going to pivot the cover back on partway, so she won’t guess. Don’t make any noise.”

“I think there’s fish down here.”

“Of course there are, it’s a fishwell.”

“Well, I’m awfully near the water. Do they jump?”

“Yes they jump, and they have sharp teeth, you ninny, and they like fat little boys,” said Manek. “Of course they don’t jump. Would I put you in danger like that if they did? Honestly, you don’t trust me at all, do you?” He sighed, as if disappointed beyond words, and when the cover slid all the way on instead of part way, he noted without surprise that Liir was too hurt to complain.

Manek hid under the stairs for a little while. When Nor didn’t come down he decided that behind the altar skirts of the old musty chapel would be an even better hiding place. “Be right back, Liir,” he hissed, but since Liir didn’t answer Manek guessed he was still nursing his grievances.

Sarima was taking a rare turn in the kitchen, concocting a stew out of limp vegetables from the keeping room. The sisters were having a dance recital amongst themselves in the music room overhead. “Sounds like a herd of elephants,” Sarima said, when Auntie Guest came wandering through, looking for something to snack on.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Elphaba. “You know, I have a complaint to lodge against your children.”

“The sweet little vandals, what now,” Sarima said, stirring. “Have they been putting spiders in your bedsheets again?”

“I wouldn’t mind spiders. At least the crows could eat them. No, Sarima, the children rifle through my belongings, they tease Chistery unmercifully, and they will not listen when I talk to them. Can’t you do anything with them?”

“What’s to be done?” said Sarima. “Here, taste this rutabaga, is it gone to the dogs?”

“Even Killyjoy wouldn’t touch this,” decided Elphie. “You better stick with the carrots. I think those children are ungovernable, Sarima. Oughtn’t they be off to school?”

“Oh yes, in a better life they would be, but how can they?” said their mother placidly. “I’ve already told you that they’re sitting targets for ambitious Arjiki tribesmen. It’s bad enough even to let them run around on the slopes near Kiamo Ko in the summer, I never know when they’re going to be found, trussed, and bled like a pig, and brought home for burying. It’s the cost of widowhood, Auntie; we must do the best we can.”

“I was a good child,” Elphie said stoutly. “I took care of my little sister, who was horribly disfigured from birth. I obeyed my father, and my mother until she died. I tramped around as a missionary child and gave testimonials to the Unnamed God even though I was essentially faithless. I believed in obedience, and I don’t believe it hurt me.”

“Then what did hurt you?” asked Sarima wittily.

“You won’t listen,” said Elphie, “so I won’t even say. But for whatever reasons, your children are ungovernable. I disapprove of your lax ways.”

“Oh, children are good at heart,” Sarima said, intent on scraping carrots. “They are so innocent and gay. It cheers me up to see them dashing about the house in this game or that. All too soon these precious days will be past, dear Auntie, and then we will look back on when this house was filled with peals of childish laughter.”

“Fiendish laughter.”

“There is something inherently good about children,” said Sarima decidedly, warming to the subject. “You know that little Ozma, who all those years ago was deposed by the Wizard? They say that she is off someplace, frozen in a cave—perhaps even in the Kells, for all I know. She’s preserved in her childhood innocence because the Wizard hasn’t the courage to kill her. One day she’ll come back to rule Oz, and she’ll be the best and wisest sovereign we ever had, because of the wisdom of youth.”

“I’ve never believed in child saviors,” Elphaba said. “As far as I’m concerned, children are the ones who need saving.”

“You’re just cross because the children have such high spirits.”

“Your children are evil sprites,” Elphie said, in a snit.

“My children aren’t evil, nor were my sisters and I evil children.”

“Your children aren’t good,” said Elphie.

“Well, how do you judge Liir in this regard, then?”

“Oh, Liir,” Elphie said, and made an expression, and said pfaaaah, with her tongue and hands. Sarima was about to pursue this—a matter she had long been curious about—when Three came rushing into the kitchen.

“The passes below us must have melted sooner than usual,” she said, “for we have sighted a caravan struggling its way over the Locklimb Trail, coming from the north! It’ll be here by tomorrow!”

“Oh, rapture,” Sarima said, “and the castle such a mess! This always happens. Why don’t we learn? Quick, call the children and we’ll have to organize a scrub and polish. You never know, Auntie, it could be an honored guest. You have to be prepared.”

Manek and Nor and Irji came running from their game. Three told them the news, and they immediately had to dash up the highest tower to see what they could see through the slackening rain, and to wave aprons and handkerchiefs. Yes, there was a caravan, five or six skarks and a small wagon, pulling through the snow and the mud, having trouble fording this stream, stopping to mend a split wheel, stopping to feed the skarks! It was a wonderful treat, and all through the dinner meal of vegetable soup the children chattered away at the surprises they might find among the passengers in the caravan. “They’ve never stopped thinking their father is going to come back,” said Sarima under her breath to Elphaba. “This excitement is a hope for him, though they don’t remember it.”

“Where is Liir?” asked Four, “it’s a perfect waste of good soup when he doesn’t show up on time. He shan’t get any if he comes whining to me afterward. Children, where is Liir?”

“He was playing with us earlier. Maybe he fell asleep,” said Irji.

“Let’s go set a bonfire and smoke the travelers a hello,” said Manek, leaping from the table.

9

It was lunchtime when the skarks and the wagon began the final, difficult ascent up the slope to the castle portcullis and the gates of jasper and oak. The townspeople came out from their hovels and leaned their weight against the carriage, helping it through the ruts of mud and ice, until at last it turned in and crossed the open drawbridge. Elphaba, her curiosity as piqued as anyone else’s, stood with the Dowager Princess of the Arjikis and her sisters on a parapet above the crudely carved front doorway. The children waited in the cobblestoned yard below, all but Liir.

The leader, a grizzed young man, made the faintest mountain obeisance to Sarima. The skarks defecated sloppily on the cobbles, to the delight of the children, who had never seen skark fewmets before. Then the leader went to the cabin and opened the door, and climbed inside. They could hear his voice, raised loudly as if talking to someone hard of hearing.

They waited. The sky was a piercing blue, really almost a spring blue, and the icicles hung from the eaves in dangerous daggers, melting like mad. The sisters all sucked in their stomachs, cursing the extra piece of gingerbread, the honeyed cream in the coffee, vowing to do better. Please, sweet Lurlina, let it be a man.

The leader came out again, and proffered a hand, and he helped a figure alight from the cabin: an old, creaky-limbed figure, in sad dark skirts and a hideously out-fashioned bonnet, even from the provincial point of view.

But Elphaba was leaning forward, cleaving the air with her sharp chin and hatchet nose, and sniffing like a beast. The visitor turned and the sun struck her face.

“Good glory,” breathed Elphie. “It’s my old Nanny!” And she left the parapet to run and gather the old woman in her arms.

“Human feeling, will you look at that,” said Four, sniffily. “I wouldn’t have guessed her capable.” For Auntie Guest was all but sobbing with pleasure.

The caravan leader wouldn’t stay for a meal, but Nanny with her valises and trunks clearly did not intend to go any farther. She settled in a small musty room just below Elphaba’s, and took the endless time it takes the elderly to make her toilet. By the time she was ready to be sociable, dinner was served. A gamey old hen, more rope than flesh, lay in a thin pepper sauce on one of the good salvers. The children were dressed in their best, and allowed this once to dine in the formal hall. Nanny came in on the arm of Elphaba, and sat at her right hand. Because this was a visitor to Elphie, the sisters had kindly put Elphie’s napkin ring at the foot of the table, opposite Sarima—a place by custom left vacant, in honor of poor dead Fiyero. It was a big mistake, and they would recognize it almost immediately, as Elphaba never relinquished her advancement. But for now all was smiles and savory hospitality. The only small annoyance (besides that Nanny wasn’t a young eligible princeling looking for a bride) was that Liir still conducted his campaign of sullen disappearance. The children didn’t know where he was.

Nanny was a tired and fruity old woman, skin cracked like dried soap, hair thin and yellowy white, hands with veins as prominent as the cords around a good Arjiki goat cheese. She communicated wheezily, with lots of pauses to breathe and think, that she had heard through someone named Crope, in the Emerald City, that her old charge Elphaba had attended Tibbett in his last days at the Cloister of Saint Glinda outside the Emerald City. No one in the family had heard from Elphaba in years and years, and Nanny had decided to take it upon herself to find her. The maunts were reluctant at first, but Nanny had persisted, and then she had waited until a new caravan was ready to leave. The maunts had told her about Elphaba’s mission in Kiamo Ko, and Nanny had booked passage the following spring. And here she was.

“And of the outside world?” asked Two eagerly. Let them catch up on family gossip on their own time.

“What do you mean?” said Nanny.

“Politics, science, fashion, the arts, the driving edge!” said Two.

“Well, our redoubtable Wizard has crowned himself Emperor,” said Nanny. “Did you know that?”

They hadn’t heard. “By whose authority?” asked Five, scoffing, “And furthermore, Emperor over what?”

“There isn’t anyone who has any more authority, he said,” said Nanny calmly, “and who could argue with that? He’s in the business of handing out honors annually as it is. He just tacked on an extra one for himself. As for Emperor over what, I couldn’t say. Some people whisper that this implies expansionist aims. But where he could expand to—I couldn’t say, I just couldn’t. Into the desert? Beyond, to Quox, or Ix, or Fliaan?”

“Or does he mean to have a more tight-fisted hold on terrain he’s only loosely governed,” asked Elphaba, “like the Vinkus?” She felt a chill, like an old wound deep beneath her breastbone.

“No one is particularly happy,” said Nanny. “There is an enforced conscription now, and the Gale Force threatens to outnumber the Royal Army. One doesn’t know if there could be an internal struggle for power, and the Wizard is preparing against an eventual takeover attempt. How can one have an opinion about such things? Old and female as we are?” She smiled to include them all. The sisters and Sarima glared as youthfully as they could back at her.

10

The next day hardly dawned at all, so gloomy with rain, so glowery with featureless clouds.

In the parlor, waiting for Nanny to emerge and continue her obligation of entertaining them, the sisters and Sarima discussed what new facts they had learned about their Auntie Guest. “Elphaba,” mused Two. “It’s a pretty enough name. Where does it come from?”

“I remember,” said Five, who had once gone through a faintly religious phase when she realized marriage possibilities were growing dim. “I had a Lives of the Saints once. Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall—she was a Munchkinlander mystic, six or seven centuries ago. Don’t you remember? She wanted to pray, but she was of such beauty that the local men kept pestering her for—attention.”

They all sighed, in chorus.

“To preserve her sanctity, she went into the wilderness with her holy scriptures and a single bunch of grapes. Wild beasts threatened her, and wild men hunted after her, and she was sore distressed. Then she came upon a huge waterfall coursing off a cliff. She said, ‘This is my cave,’ and took off all her clothes, and she walked right through the screen of pounding water. Beyond was a cavern hollowed out by the splashing water. She sat down there, and in the light that came through the wall of water she read her holy book and pondered on spiritual matters. She ate a grape every now and then. When at last she had finished her grapes, she emerged from the cave. Hundreds of years had passed. There was a village built on the banks of the stream, and even a milldam nearby. The villagers shrank in horror, for as children they had all played in the cavern behind the waterfall—lovers had trysted there—murders and foul deeds had taken place there—treasure had been buried there—and never had anyone ever seen Saint Aelphaba in her naked beauty. But all Saint Aelphaba had to do was open her mouth and speak the old speech, and they all knew that it must be she, and they built a chapel in her honor. She blessed the children and the elderly, and heard the confessions of the middle-aged, and healed some sick and fed some hungry, that sort of stuff, and then disappeared behind the waterfall again with another bunch of grapes. I think a bigger bunch this time. And that’s the last anyone has seen of her.”

“So you can disappear and not be dead,” said Sarima, looking out the window a little dreamily, past the rain.

“If you’re a saint,” said Two pointedly.

“If you even believe it,” said Elphaba, who had come into the parlor during the end of the recitation. “The reemerging Saint Aelphaba might have been some hussy from the next town over who wanted to give gullible peasants a good going over.”

“That’s doubt for you, it scours hope out of everything,” Sarima said dismissively. “Auntie, you kill me sometimes, you really do.”

“I think it would be charming to call you Elphaba,” said Six, “because that is a charming story. And it’s nice to hear your real name on Nanny’s lips.”

“Don’t you try it,” said Elphie. “If Nanny can’t help herself, so be it; she’s ancient and it’s hard to change. But not you.”

Six pursed her lips as if to make an argument, but just then there was a clattering of feet from downstairs, and Nor and Irji burst into the room.

“We found Liir!” they said. “Come on, we think he’s dead! He’s fallen in the fishwell!”

They all pounded down the stairs to the basement. Chistery had been the one to find him. The snow monkey’s nose had wrinkled when he and the boys passed the fishwell, and he had whined, and whimpered, and tugged at the weighted cover. Nor and Irji had had an idea to lower him down in the bucket then, but when they swiveled the cover off, the lurid gleam of light on pale human flesh had terrified them.

Manek came running when he heard the noise of his mother and the others exclaiming before the well. They pulled Liir up. The water had risen, what with continued melting and the further rain. Liir was like a corpse left in a stream, bloated. “Oh, is that where he was,” said Manek in a funny voice. “You know he said he wanted to go down in that fishwell once.”

“Get away, children, you shouldn’t see this, go upstairs,” Sarima said, scolding. “Come on now, behave, upstairs for you.” They didn’t know what they were looking at and they were afraid to look too closely.

“I cannot believe it, this is so terrible,” said Manek excitedly, and Elphaba gave him a sharp, hateful look.

“Obey your mother,” she snapped, and Manek made a nasty face, but he and Irji and Nor clomped upstairs, and huddled around the open doorway at the top to listen, and peer.

“Oh, who has the art of medicine in their hands, have you, Auntie?” asked Sarima. “Quick now, there may be time. You have the arts, don’t you, you studied the life sciences! What can you do?”

“Irji, go get Nanny, tell her it’s an emergency,” shouted Elphie. “We’ll bring him up to the kitchen, gently now. No, Sarima, I don’t know enough.”

“Use your spells, use your magic!” exclaimed Five.

“Bring him back,” urged Six, and Three added, “You can do it, don’t be hidden and shy about it now!”

“I can’t bring him back,” said Elphaba, “I can’t! I have no aptitude for sorcery! I never did! That was all a foolish campaign of Madame Morrible’s, which I rejected!” The six sisters looked at her askance.

Irji escorted Nanny to the kitchen, Nor brought the broom, Manek brought the Grimmerie, and the sisters and Sarima brought the body of Liir, dripping and bloated, and laid him on the butcher’s block. “Oh, now who’s this one,” mused Nanny, but got to work pumping the legs and the arms, and set Sarima to pressing in at the abdomen.

Elphaba flipped through the Grimmerie, she screwed up her face and hit herself on the temple with her fists, and wailed, “But I have no personal experience with a soul—how can I find his if I don’t know what one looks like?”

“He’s even fatter than usual,” said Irji.

“If you prick his eyes out with a magic straw from the magic broom, his soul will come back,” said Manek.

“I wonder why he went in the fishwell?” said Nor. “I never would.”

“Holy Lurlina, mercy on us, mercy!” said Sarima, weeping, and the sisters began to mumble the service of the dead, honoring the Unnamed God for the life departed.

“Nanny can’t do everything,” snapped Nanny, “Elphaba, be some help! You’re just like your mother in a crisis! Put your mouth on his and push air into his lungs! Go on!”

Elphaba wiped the wet off Liir’s pasty face with the edge of her sleeve. The face stayed where it was pushed. She grimaced, and nearly vomited, and spit something into a bucket, and then she sank her mouth down on the child’s, and breathed out, pushing into the sour passage her own sour breath. Her fingers tensed at the sides of the butcher’s block, gouging splinters, as if in an ecstasy of sexual tension. Chistery breathed along with her, breath for breath.

“He smells like fish,” Nor said under her breath.

“If that’s what you look like when you drown, I’d rather burn to death,” said Irji.

“I’m just not going to die,” Manek said, “and nobody can make me.”

The body of Liir began to choke. They thought at first it was an involuntary reaction, air from Elphaba’s mouth pocketing and blurting out again, and then there was a small stream of yellowish yuck. Then Liir’s eyelids moved, and his hand twitched of its own accord.

“Oh mercy,” Sarima murmured. “It’s a miracle. Thank you Lurlina! Bless you!”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Nanny. “He may still die of exposure. Quick now, off with his clothes.”

The children watched the silly indignity of grown-up women tearing stupid Liir’s trousers and tunic off. They rubbed him all over with lard. This gave the children a case of the giggles, and made Irji feel very funny in his trousers, for the first time in his life. Then they wrapped Liir in a woolen blanket, which made quite a mess, and prepared to put him to bed.

“Where does he sleep?” said Sarima.

They all looked at one another. The sisters looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba looked at the children.

“Oh, sometimes on the floor in our room, sometimes on the floor in Nor’s,” said Manek.

“He wants to sleep in my bed too but I push him out,” said Nor. “He’s too fat, there’d be no room for me and my dollies.”

“He doesn’t even have a bed?” Sarima coldly asked Elphie.

“Well, don’t ask me, this is your house,” said Elphie.

And Liir stirred somewhat, and said, “The fish talked to me. I talked to the fish. The goldfish talked to me. She said she was. . . .”

“Hush, little one,” said Nanny, “time for that later.” She glared around at the women and children in the kitchen. “Well, it shouldn’t take Nanny to have to find him a proper bed, but if there’s none other for him he can come up to my room, and I’ll sleep on the floor!”

“Of course not, the very idea,” began Sarima, bustling ahead.

“Barbarians, the lot of you!” snapped Nanny.

For which no one in Kiamo Ko ever forgave her.

Sarima lectured Auntie Guest severely for what had happened to Liir. Elphaba tried to say that it was not her doing, it was not her fault. “It was some boys’ trick, some game, some dare,” she said. Their accusations spent, they fell to talking about the differences between boys and girls.

Sarima told Auntie Guest what she knew of the boys’ initiation rite in the tribe. “They are taken out in the grasslands, and left with nothing but a loincloth and a musical instrument. They are required to call forth spirits and animals out of the night, to converse with them, to learn from them, to soothe them if they need soothing, to fight them if they need fighting. The child who dies at night clearly lacks the discretion to decide if its company needs fighting, or soothing. So it is correct that he should die young and not burden the tribe with his foolishness.”

“What do the boys say of spirits who approach them?” asked Auntie Guest.

“Boys say very little, especially about the spirit world,” she answered. “Nonetheless, you pick up what you pick up. And I think some of the spirits are very patient, very wearing, very obdurate. The lore supposes there should be conflict, hostility, battle, but I wonder, in contact with spirits, if what the boy needs is a good helping of cold anger.”

“Cold anger?”

“Oh yes, don’t you know that distinction? Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.”

“Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering.

Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.” She glared at Elphaba, pinning her with unspoken accusations about Fiyero, about Liir.

Elphaba thought about this. She thought about hot anger and cold anger, and if it divided by the sexes, and which she felt, if either, if ever. She thought about her mother dying young, and her father with his obsessions. She thought about the anger that Doctor Dillamond had had—an anger that drove him to study and research. She thought about the anger that Madame Morrible could barely disguise, as she tried to seduce the college girls into the secret service of government.

She sat and thought about it the following morning as she watched the strengthening sun beat down on the mounds of snow on the sloping tiled roofs below. She watched the sun bleed ice water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

In a fashion—without any way to confirm it, of course—she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts . . .

Liir survived, but Manek did not. The icicle that Elphaba trained her gaze on, thinking on the weapons one needed to fight such abuse—it broke like a lance from the eaves, and drove whistling downward, and caught him in the skull as he went out to find some new way of beleaguering Liir.