1

Afterward, there was a lot of discussion about what people had thought it was. The noise had seemed to come from all corners of the sky at once.

Journalists, armed with the thesaurus and apocalyptic scriptures, fumbled and were defeated by it. “A gulfy deliquescence of deranged and harnessed air” . . . “A volcano of the invisible, darkly construed” . . .

To the pleasure faithers with tiktok affections, it was the sound of clockworks uncoiling their springs and running down at a terrible speed. It was the release of vengeful energy.

To the essentialists, it seemed as if the world had suddenly found itself too crammed with life, with cells splitting by the billions, molecules uncoupling to annihilation, atoms shuddering and juggernauting in their casings.

To the superstitious it was the collapsing of time. It was the oozing of the ills of the world into one crepuscular muscle, intent on stabbing the world to its core for once and for all.

To the more traditionally religious it was the blitzkrieg of vengeful angel armies, the awful name of the Unnamed God sounding itself at last—surprise—and the evaporation of all hopes for mercy.

One or two pretended to think it was squadrons of flying dragons overhead, trained for attack, breaking the sky from its moorings by the thrash of tripartite wings.

In the wake of the destruction it caused, no one had the hubris or courage (or the prior experience) to lie and claim to have known the act of terror for what it was: a wind twisted up in a vortical braid.

In short: a tornado.

The lives of many Munchkinlanders were lost—along with square miles of topsoil from hundred of years of cultivation. The shifting margins of sand in the eastern desert covered several villages without a trace, and no survivors were left to tell the tale of their suffering. Whirling like something from a nightmare, the wind funnel drove into Oz thirty miles north of Stonespar End, and delicately maneuvered around Colwen Grounds, leaving every rose petal attached and every thorn in place. The tornado sliced through the Corn Basket, devastating the basis of the economy of the renegade nation, and petered out, as if by design, not only at the eastern terminus of the largely defunct Yellow Brick Road, but also at the precise spot—the hamlet of Center Munch—where, outside a local chapel, Nessarose was awarding prizes for perfect attendance at religious education classes. The storm dropped a house on her head.

All the children survived to pray for Nessarose’s soul at the memorial service. Perfect attendance was never more perfect.

There were a great many jokes about the disaster, naturally. “You can’t hide from destiny,” some said, “that house had her name on it.” “That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house!” “Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes, but sometimes HOME DOESN’T LIKE IT.” “What’s the difference between a shooting star and a falling house?” “One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches.” “What’s big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?” “I don’t know, but can you introduce me?”

Such a maelstrom had not been known in Oz before. Various terrorist groups claimed credit, especially when news got around that the Wicked Witch of the East—also known as the Eminent Thropp, depending on your political stripe—had been snuffed out. It was not widely understood at first that the house carried passengers. The mere presence of a house of exotic design, set down almost intact upon the platform rigged up for the visiting dignitaries, was stretching credulity enough. That creatures might have survived such a fall was either patently unbelievable or a clear indication of the hand of the Unnamed God in the affair. Predictably, there were a few blind people who suddenly cried “I can see!” a lame Pig that stood and danced a jig, only to be led away—that sort of thing. The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.

2

When the news of Nessarose’s premature death arrived at Kiamo Ko by carrier pigeon, the Witch was deep in an operation of sorts, stitching the wings of a white-crested male roc into the back muscles of one of her current crop of snow monkeys. She had more or less perfected the procedure, after years of botched and hideous failures, when mercy killing seemed the only fair thing to do to the suffering subject. Fiyero’s old schoolbooks in the life sciences, from Doctor Nikidik’s course, had given some leads. Also the Grimmerie had helped, if she was reading it correctly: She had found spells to convince the axial nerves to think skyward instead of treeward. And once she got it right, the winged monkeys seemed happy enough with their lot. She had yet to see a female monkey in her population produce a winged baby, but she still had hopes.

Certainly they had taken better to flying than they had to language. Chistery, now a patriarch in the castle menagerie, had plateaued at words of one syllable, and still seemed to have no clear idea of what he was saying.

It was Chistery, in fact, who brought the pigeon’s letter in to Elphaba’s operating salon. The Witch had him hold the fascia-slasher while she unfolded the page. Shell’s brief message told of the tornado and informed her of the memorial service, which was scheduled for several weeks later in the hope that she would receive this message in time to come.

She put the message down and went back to work, placing grief and regret away from her. It was a tricky business, wing attachment, and the sedative she had administered to this monkey wouldn’t last all morning. “Chistery, it’s time to help Nanny down the stairs, and find Liir if you can, and tell him I need to talk to him at lunch,” she said, through her gritted teeth, glancing again at her own diagrams to make sure she had the overlapping of muscle groups in the correct arrangement, front to back.

It was an achievement if Nanny could now make it to the dining room once a day. “That’s my job, that and sleeping, and Nanny does both very well,” she said every single noontime when she arrived, hungry from her exertions on the stairs. Liir put out the cheese and bread and the occasional cold joint, at which the three of them hacked and nibbled, usually in an unsocial mood, before darting off to their afternoon chores.

Liir was fourteen, and insisted he was going to accompany the Witch to Colwen Grounds. “I have never been anywhere, except that time with the soldiers,” he complained. “You never let me do anything.”

“Someone has to stay and take care of Nanny,” said the Witch. “Now there isn’t any point in arguing about it.”

“Chistery can do it.”

“Chistery can’t. He’s getting forgetful, and between him and Nanny they’d burn the place to the ground. No, there’s no more discussion about it, Liir; you’re not going. Besides, I’m going to have to travel on my broom, I think, to get there in time.”

“You never let me do anything.”

“You can do the washing up.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What’s he arguing about now, sweet thing?” asked Nanny loudly.

“Nothing,” said the Witch.

“What’s that you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you going to tell her?” said Liir. “She helped raise Nessarose, didn’t she?”

“She’s too old, she doesn’t need to know. She’s eighty-five, it’ll only upset her.”

“Nanny,” said Liir, “Nessie’s dead.”

“Hush, you useless boy, before I remove your testicles with my foot.”

“Nessie did what?” screeched Nanny, looking rheumily out at them.

“Did died dead,” intoned Chistery.

“Did what?”

“Nessie DIED,” said Liir.

Nanny began to weep at the idea before she had even confirmed it. “Can this be true, Elphie? Is your sister dead?”

“Liir, you’ll answer for this,” said the Witch. “Yes, Nanny, I cannot lie to you. There was a storm and a building collapsed. She went very peacefully, they say.”

“She went straight to the bosom of Lurlina,” said Nanny, sobbing. “Lurlina’s golden chariot came to take her home.” She patted the piece of cheese on her plate, inexplicably. Then she buttered a napkin and took a bite. “When do we leave for the funeral?”

“You’re too old to travel, dear. I’m going in a few days. Liir will stay and look after you.”

“I will not,” said Liir.

“He’s a good boy,” said Nanny, “but not as good as Nessarose. Oh, sorrowful day! Liir, I’ll take my tea in my room, I can’t sit and talk to you as if nothing’s happened.” She hauled herself to her feet, leaning on Chistery’s head. (Chistery was devoted to her.) “You know, darling,” she said to the Witch, “I don’t think the boy is old enough to see to my needs. What if the castle is attacked again? Remember what happened the last time you went away.” She made a small, accusatory moue.

“Nanny, the Arjiki militia guard this place day and night. The Wizard’s army is well housed in the town of Red Windmill down below. They have no intention of leaving that safe haven and risking decimation in these mountain passes—not after what they did. That was their skirmish, that was their campaign. Now they’re just watchdogs. They staff the outpost to report signs of an invasion or trouble from the mountain clans. You know that. You have nothing to fear.”

“I’m too old to be taken in chains like poor Sarima and her family,” Nanny said. “And how could you rescue me, if you couldn’t get them back?”

“I’m still working on that,” said the Witch into Nanny’s left ear.

“Seven years. You’re very stubborn. It’s my opinion they’re all moldering in a common grave, these seven long years. Liir, you have to thank Lurlina that you weren’t among them.”

“I tried to rescue them,” said Liir stubbornly, who had rewritten the escapade in his own mind to give himself a more heroic role. It was not longing for the companionship of soldiers, he told himself, no, it was a courageous effort to save the family! In fact, Commander Cherrystone out of kindness had had Liir tied up and left him in a sack in someone’s barn, to prevent their having to incarcerate him with the others. The Commander had not realized Liir was a bastard son of Fiyero, for Liir himself didn’t know it.

“Yes well, that’s a good boy.” Nanny was now distracted from the sad news, drifting back to the tragedy she remembered more viscerally. “Of course I did everything I could, but Nanny was an old woman even then. Elphie, do you think they’re dead?”

“I could find out nothing,” said the Witch for the ten thousandth time. “If they were spirited to the Emerald City or if they were murdered, I could not tell. You know this, Nanny. I bribed people. I spied around. I hired agents to follow every lead. I wrote to the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow for advice. I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure.”

“It was my failure, I’m sure,” said Nanny peacefully; they all knew she didn’t think so for a minute. “I should have been younger and more vigorous. I’d have given that Commander Cherrystone a piece of my mind! And now Sarima is gone, gone, and her sisters too. I suppose it’s none of our fault, really,” she concluded disingenuously, scowling at the Witch. “You had someplace to go, so you went; who can criticize you for that?”

But the image of Sarima in chains, Sarima as a decaying corpse, still withholding from the Witch her forgiveness for Fiyero’s death—it pained her like water. “Give up, you old harridan,” said the Witch, “must my own household whip me so? Go have your tea, you fiend.”

The Witch sat down at last and thought of Nessarose, and what might come. The Witch had tried to stay removed from the affairs of the political world, but she knew a change of leadership in Munchkinland could throw things out of balance—maybe to a positive effect. She felt a guilty lightness at the death of her sister.

She made a list of things to bring with her to the memorial service. Foremost was a page of the Grimmerie. In her chamber she pored over the huge musty tome, and finally she ripped out an especially cryptic page. Its letters still continued to contort beneath her eyes, sometimes scrambling and unscrambling as she looked, as if they were formed by a colony of ants. Whenever she gazed at the book, meaning might emerge on a page that a day earlier had been illegible chicken scratches; and meaning sometimes disappeared as she stared. She would ask her father, who with his holy eyes would see the truth better.

3

Colwen Grounds was draped in black swags and purple bunting. When the Witch arrived, she was greeted by a one-man less-than-welcoming committee, a bearded Munchkinlander named Nipp, who seemed to be concierge, janitor, and acting Prime Minister. “Your lineage no longer allows you any particular liberties in Munchkinland,” she was told. “With the death of Nessarose, the honorific of Eminence is at last abolished.” The Witch didn’t much care, but she wasn’t inclined to accept a unilateral dictum without a retort. She answered, “It is abolished when I accept that it is abolished.” Not that the honorific had been used much in recent years; according to the occasional rambling letter from Frex, Nessarose had begun to be amused by the slur of “Wicked Witch of the East,” and had considered it a public penance worthy of a person with such high moral standing. She even took to referring to herself as such.

Nipp showed her to her room. “I don’t need much,” said the Wicked Witch of the West (as, in contrast, she allowed herself to be called, at least by these Munchkinlander upstarts). “A bed for a couple of days, and I’d like to see my father and attend the service. I’ll collect a few things, and be off soon. Now, do you know if our brother, Shell, will be here?”

“Shell has disappeared again,” said Nipp. “He left his regards. There is a mission he is undertaking in the Glikkus, it can’t wait. Some of us think he is defecting, worried about a change in government here now that the tyrant is dead. As well he might,” he added coldly. “Have you fresh towels?”

“I don’t use them,” said the Witch, “it’s all right. Go away now.” She was very tired, and sad.

At sixty-three, Frex was even balder, and his beard whiter, than he had been last time. His shoulders hunched in, as if trying to meet each other, his head sank into a natural cavity made by a deteriorating spine and neck. He sat covered by a blanket on the verandah. “And who is this,” he said when the Witch came up and sat next to him. She realized his sight had nearly gone for good.

“It’s your other daughter, Papa,” she said, “the one that’s left.”

“Fabala,” he said, “what will I do without my pretty Nessarose? How will I live without my pet?”

She held his hand until he fell asleep, and wiped his face though his tears burned her skin.

The liberated Munchkinlanders were destroying the house. The Witch had no use for frippery, but it seemed a shame to waste a property this way. Desecration was so shortsighted; didn’t they know that, however they now decided to live, Colwen Grounds could be their parliament building?

She spent time with her father, but they didn’t speak much. One morning, when he was more alert and energetic than usual, he asked her if she really was a witch. “Oh well, what’s a witch? Who has ever trusted language in this family?” she replied. “Father, will you look at something for me? Will you tell me what you see?” She withdrew from an inner pocket the page from the Grimmerie and she unfolded it like a large napkin on his lap. He ran his hands over it, as if he could pick up meaning through his fingertips, and then held it near, peering and squinting.

“What do you see?” she asked. “Can you tell me the nature of this writing? Is it for good or for ill?”

“The markings are crisp enough, and large. I ought to be able to make it out.” He turned it upside down. “But little Fabala, I can’t read this alphabet. It is in a foreign tongue. Can you?”

“Well, sometimes I seem to be able to, but the talent is fleeting,” said the Witch. “I don’t know if it’s my eyes or if it’s the manuscript that’s being tricky.”

“You always had strong eyes,” said her father. “Even as a toddler you could see things no one else could.”

“Hah,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You had a looking glass that sweet Turtle Heart made for you, and you looked in it as if you could see other worlds, other times.”

“I was probably looking at myself.”

But they both knew that wasn’t true, and Frex, for once, said so. “You didn’t look at yourself,” he said, “you hated to. You hated your skin, your sharp features, your strange eyes.”

“Where did I learn that hate?” she asked.

“You were born knowing it,” he said. “It was a curse. You were born to curse my life.” He patted her hand affectionately, as if he didn’t mean much by this. “When you lost your weird baby teeth, and your second teeth came in normally, we all relaxed a little. But for the first couple of years—until Nessarose was born—you were a little beast. Only when saintly Nessarose was delivered to us, even more scarred than you, did you settle down like a normal child.”

“Why was I cursed to be different?” she said. “You are a holy man, you must know.”

“You are my fault,” he said. Despite his words he was somehow pinning blame on her instead of himself, though she still wasn’t clever enough to see how this was done. “For what I had failed to do, you were born to plague me. But don’t worry yourself about it now,” he added, “that’s all long ago.”

“And Nessarose?” she asked. “How do the weights and balances of shame and guilt account for her?”

“She is a portrait of the lax morals of your mother,” Frex said calmly.

“And that’s why you could love her so much,” said the Witch. “Because her human frailty wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t stew so, you always stewed,” Frex said. “And now she is dead, so what does it matter?”

“My life is still running on.”

“But mine is running out,” he answered, sadly. So she put his hand back on his lap, and kissed him gently, and folded up the page of the Grimmerie and tucked it in her pocket. Then she turned to greet the person approaching them across the lawn. She thought it was someone with tea (Frex was still accorded a measure of service, due to his age and his mildness, and, she supposed, his vocation), but she stood and pressed down the front of her homespun black skirt when she saw who it was.

“Miss Glinda of the Arduennas,” she said, her heart churring.

“Oh, you came, I knew you would,” said Glinda. “Miss Elphaba, the last true Eminent Thropp, no matter what they say!”

Glinda approached slowly, either through age or shyness, or because her ridiculous gown weighed so much that it was hard for her to get up enough steam to stride. She looked like a huge Glindaberry bush, was all the Witch could think; under that skirt there must be a bustle the size of the dome of Saint Florix. There were sequins and furbelows and a sort of History of Oz, it seemed, stitched in trapunto in six or seven ovoid panels all around the skirting. But her face: beneath the powdered skin, the wrinkles at eyelid and mouth, was the face of the timid schoolgirl from the Pertha Hills.

“You haven’t changed a whit,” said Glinda. “Is this your father?”

The Witch nodded but shushed her; Frex had dropped off again. “Come, we’ll walk in the gardens before they root up the roses out of some beknighted attempt at eradicating injustice.” The Witch took Glinda’s arm. “Glinda, you look hideous in that getup. I thought you’d have developed some sense by now.”

“When in the provinces,” she said, “you have to show them a little style. I don’t think it’s so bad. Or are the satin bells at the shoulder a bit too too?”

“Excessive,” agreed the Witch. “Someone get the scissors; this is a disaster.”

They laughed. “My dear, what they’ve done to this grand old place,” said Glinda. “Look, those pediments are meant to support graven urns, and those revolutionary slogans are painted all over that exquisite belvedere. I hope you’ll have something done, Elphie. There isn’t a belvedere to match that outside of the capital.”

“I never had the love of architecture that you did, Glinda,” said the Witch. “I just read the slogans: she walked all over us. Why shouldn’t they paint all over her belvedere? If she did in fact walk all over them?”

“Tyrants come and go, belvederes are forever,” said Glinda. “I can recommend topnotch restorers the moment you ask.”

“I hear you were one of the first on the scene,” said the Witch, “when Nessarose died. How did that come to be?”

“Sir Chuffrey—my hubby—he has some investments in pork futures, you know, and Munchkinland is trying to diversify its economic base so as not to be at the mercy of Gillikin banks and the Emerald City Corn Exchange. You never know what relationship might develop between Munchkinland and the rest of Oz, and it’s best to be prepared. So where Sir Chuffrey does business, I do good. It’s a partnership made in heaven. You know I have more money than I can give away?” She giggled and squeezed the Witch’s arm. “I never imagined that doing public charity would provide such a rush.”

“So you were here in Munchkinland—?”

“Yes, I had been at an orphanage on the shores of Mossmere, and for a lark I thought I’d go to the game park—they have dragons there now, and I’d never seen a dragon—so I was scarcely a dozen miles away when the storm hit. We had terrible winds even there; I cannot imagine how a ceremony could have been in progress in Center Munch. In Mossmere there were whole sections of the park closed to visitors due to the fear of falling trees and escaping Animals—”

“Oh, so they call it a game park, with Animals?” said the Witch.

“You must go, dear, it’s a lark. Well, as I was saying, the house came right out of the blue, and I suppose I mean that literally—if they’d sensed a big storm, they’d surely have canceled the event and run for cover. Anyway, the news system is very advanced now in parts of Munchkinland; Nessarose herself oversaw a system of beacons and tiktok code signals, to warn of invasions from the Wizard and points west. So it was only a matter of minutes before the news was being flashed in all directions. I commandeered a Mature Pfenix and asked her to bring me to Center Munch, and I arrived before most of the locals had quite figured out what had hit them.”

“Tell me about it,” said the Witch.

“You’ll be pleased to hear there was no blood. I venture to guess there were massive internal injuries, but there was no blood. Of course Nessarose’s last few devoted followers thought this meant her spirit was taken up intact, and that she suffered little. I don’t imagine she suffered much, not with that kind of clonk on the noggin. Her more unhappy subjects, who were the greater in number, thought it a droll act of Lurlina, releasing them from Nessarose’s particular sort of fundamentalist bondage. There was revelry when I arrived, and much feting of the funny girl and the dog who seem to have lived in the house.”

“Oh, who’s that?” said the Witch, who hadn’t heard this part.

“Well, you know how Munchkinlanders bow and scrape no matter what their democratic inclinations. No sooner had I arrived than they deferred to me, introducing me as a witch. I tried to correct them, a sorceress is really much more apt, but never mind. It was no doubt the outfit, it cowed them. I was in a salmon-pink fantasy that day, and really it suited me.”

“Go on,” said the Witch, who had never liked talking about clothes.

“Well, the child introduced herself: Dorothy from Kansas. I didn’t know the place, and said as much. She appeared as much surprised as anyone else about what had happened, and she had a nasty little pooch yapping about her heels. Tata or Toto or something. Toto. So this Dorothy was in some state of shock, I can tell you. A fairly homely little girl with little fashion sense, but I suppose that comes later in life for some than others.” She glanced sideways at the Witch. “Much later, in some cases.” And they both chuckled at that.

“Dorothy supposed she should try to get back to her home, but as she couldn’t remember having studied anything about Oz in school, nor could I recall a place named Kansas, we decided that she should look for help elsewhere. The fickle Munchkinlanders seemed ready to nominate her as Nessie’s successor, which would have angered Nipp and all those ministers in Colwen Grounds who’ve spent their careers jockeying for position when and if Nessarose ever saw fit to die. Besides, there may be other developments afoot. Dorothy might have gotten in the way.”

“An eye to public affairs, well, somehow I’m not surprised,” said the Witch, in fact quite pleased. “I always knew you were in there somewhere, Glinda.”

“Well, I thought the better move would be to get Dorothy out of Munchkinland before a civil war tore this place up even worse than it already is. There are factions, you know, who support the re-annexation of Munchkinland by Oz. It would do the girl no good to get caught in the crossfire of opposing interests.”

“Oh, so she’s not here,” said the Witch. “I had thought I’d meet her.”

“Dorothy? Now you’re not going to take against her, are you?” said Glinda. “She’s a child, really. Big by Munchkinlander standards, of course, but a squat little thing nonetheless. She’s an innocent, Elphie; I can see by the gleam in your eye that you’re up to your old paranoia thing again. She wasn’t piloting that house, you know, she was trapped in it. This would be one struggle you’d do well just to leave alone.”

The Witch sighed. “You may be right. You know, I’m getting used to stiff muscles in the morning. Sometimes I think that vengeance is habit forming too. A stiffness of the attitude. I keep hoping that the Wizard will be toppled in my lifetime, and this aim seems to be at odds with happiness. I suppose I can’t take on avenging the death of a sister I didn’t get on all that well with anyway.”

“Especially if the death is an accident,” Glinda said.

“Glinda,” said the Witch, “I know you must remember Fiyero, and you have heard of his death. Fifteen years ago.”

“Of course,” said she. “Well, I heard he died, under mysterious circumstances.”

“I knew his wife,” said the Witch, “and his in-laws. It was suggested to me once that he had been carrying on an affair with you in the Emerald City.”

Glinda turned yellow-pink. “My dear,” she said, “I was fond of Fiyero and he was a good man and a fine statesman. But among other things, you will remember he was dark-skinned. Even if I took up dalliances—an inclination I believe rarely benefits anyone—you are once again being suspicious and cranky to suspect me and Fiyero! The idea!”

And the Witch realized, sinkingly, that this was of course true; the ugly skill at snobbery had returned to Glinda in her middle years.

But for her part, Glinda had no real inkling that the Witch was implicating herself as Fiyero’s adulterous lover. Glinda was too fussed to listen that closely. The Witch in fact alarmed her a little. It was not just the novelty of seeing her again, but the strange charisma Elphaba possessed, which had always put Glinda in the shade. Also there was the thrill, basis indeterminable, which made Glinda shy, and caused her to rush her words, and to speak in a false high voice like an adolescent. How quickly you could be thrown back to the terrible uncertainty of your youth!

For when she chose to remember her youth at all, she could scarcely dredge up an ounce of recollection about that daring meeting with the Wizard. She could recall far more clearly how she and Elphie had shared a bed on the road to the Emerald City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

They walked for a way in a restless silence.

“Things might begin to improve now,” said the Witch after a time. “I mean Munchkinland will be a mess for a while. A tyrant is terrible, but at least he or she imposes order. The anarchy that follows the deposition of a tyrant can be bloodier than before. Still, things may work out all right. Father always said that when left to themselves, the Munchkinlanders had a great deal of common sense. And Nessie was, for all practical purposes, a foreigner. She was raised in Quadling Country, and you know, she may have been half Quadling herself, I’ve come to realize. She was a foreign queen on this soil, despite her inherited title. With her gone, the Munchkinlanders might just right themselves.”

“Bless her soul,” said Glinda. “Or do you still not believe in the soul?”

“I can make no comment on the souls of others,” said the Witch.

They walked some more. Here and there the Witch saw, as before, the totemic straw men, pinned to tunics, and erected like effigies in the corners of fields. “I find them somewhat creepy,” she said to Glinda. “Now one other thing I want to ask you; I asked this of Nessa once. Do you remember Madame Morrible’s corralling us into her parlor, and proposing we become three Adepts, three high witches of Oz? Sort of secret local priestesses, shaping public policy behind the scenes, contributing to the stability—or instability—of Oz as required by some unnamed higher authority?”

“Oh, that farce, that melodrama, how could I forget it?” said Glinda.

“I wonder if we were put under a spell then? Do you remember, she said we couldn’t talk about it, and it didn’t seem that we could?”

“Well we are talking about it, so if there was any truth to it, which I doubt, it’s certainly worn off by now.”

“But look what’s happened to us. Nessarose was the Wicked Witch of the East—you know that’s what they called her, don’t pretend to be so shocked—and I have a stronghold in the West, and I seem to have rallied the Arjikis around me, by dint of the absence of their ruling family—and there you are, sitting pretty in the North with your bank accounts and your legendary skills at sorcery.”

“Legendary nothing; I simply see to it that I am admired in the right circles,” said Glinda. “Now, my memory is just as good as yours. And Madame Morrible proposed that I be an Adept of Gillikin, but that you be an Adept of Munchkinland, and Nessa be an Adept of Quadling Country. The Vinkus she didn’t think worth bothering about. If she was seeing the future, she got it wrong. She got you and Nessa all wrong.”

“Forget the details,” said the Witch tartly. “I just mean, Glinda, is it possible we could be living our entire adult lives under someone’s spell? How could we tell if we were the pawns of someone’s darker game? I know, I know, I can see it in your face: Elphie, you’re sniffing conspiracy theories again. But you were there. You heard what I heard. How do you know your life hasn’t been pulled by the strings of some malign magic?”

“Well, I pray a lot,” said Glinda, “not terribly genuinely, I admit, but I try. I think the Unnamed God would have mercy on me and give me the benefit of the doubt, and release me from a spell if I had accidentally fallen under one. Don’t you? Or are you still so atheistic?”

“I have always felt like a pawn,” said the Witch. “My skin color’s been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life’s work of my own, I haven’t found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.”

“I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”

“Well, I wonder,” said the Witch.

They walked on. Graffiti was splattered on the sides of the granite plinths of statues. NOW THE SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT. Glinda tchtched. “Animal husbandry?” she said.

They crossed a little bridge. Bluebirds twinkled music above them like a sentimental entertainment.

“I sent this Dorothy, this girl, on to the Emerald City,” said Glinda. “I told her I’d never seen the Wizard—well, I had to lie, don’t look at me like that; if I told her the truth about him she would never have left here. I told her to ask him to send her home. With his reconnaissance spies all over Oz, and no doubt elsewhere, he has heard of Kansas, I’m sure. Nobody else has.”

“That was a cruel thing to do,” said the Witch.

“She’s such a harmless child, no one should take her seriously,” said Glinda carelessly. “If the Munchkinlanders started rallying around her, reunification might be a more bloody affair than we all hope.”

“So you hope for reunification?” muttered the Witch, disgusted. “You support it?”

“Besides,” Glinda went on blithely, “having some motherly instinct somewhere inside this pushed-up bosom of mine, I gave her Nessa’s shoes as a sort of protection.”

“You what?” The Witch whirled and faced Glinda. For a moment she was dumb with rage, but only for a moment. “Not only does she come whomping out of the sky and stepping her big clumsy house all over my sister, but she gets the shoes too? Glinda, those shoes weren’t yours to give away! My father made them for her! And furthermore, Nessa promised I could have them when she died!”

“Oh yes,” said Glinda in a false calm, surveying the Witch up and down, “and they would make the perfect accessory for that glass-of-fashion outfit you have on. Come on, Elphie, since when have you cared about shoes, of all things? Look at those army boots you have on!”

“Whether I’d wear them or not is none of your concern. You can’t go handing out a person’s effects like that, what right had you? Papa reshaped those shoes from skills he learned from Turtle Heart. You’ve stuck your fancy wand in where it wasn’t wanted!”

“I’ll remind you,” said Glinda, “that those shoes were coming apart until I had them resoled, and I laced them through with a special binding spell of my own. Neither your father nor you did that much for her. Elphie, I stood by her when you abandoned her in Shiz. As you abandoned me. You did, don’t deny it, stop those lightning bolt looks at me, I won’t have it. I became her surrogate sister. And as an old friend I gave her the power to stand upright by herself through those shoes, and if I made a mistake I’m sorry, Elphie, but I still feel they were more mine to give away than yours.”

“Well, I want them back,” said the Witch.

“Oh, put it behind you, will you, they’re only shoes,” said Glinda, “you’re behaving as if they’re holy relics. They were shoes, and a bit out of style, truth be told. Let the girl have them. She has nothing else.”

“Look how the people here thought of them,” said the Witch; she pointed to a stable on which was scrawled, in broad red letters, walk all over you you old witch.

“Please, give it a rest,” said Glinda, “I have such a headache coming on.”

“Where is she?” said the Witch. “If you won’t retrieve them, I’ll get them myself.”

“If I’d known you wanted them,” said Glinda, trying to make things all right, “I’d have saved them for you. But you have to see, Elphie, the shoes couldn’t stay here. The ignorant pagan Munchkinlanders—Lurlinists all, once you scratch the skin—they had put too much credit in those silly shoes. I mean, a magic sword I could understand, but shoes? Please. I had to get them out of Munchkinland.”

“You are working in collusion with the Wizard to render Munchkinland ready for annexation,” said the Witch. “You have no agenda of charity, Glinda. At least don’t fool yourself. Or are you really under some rusty spell of Madame Morrible, after all this time?”

“I won’t have you snapping at me,” said Glinda. “The girl has left, she’s been on the road for a week now, she headed west. I tell you, she’s only a timid child, and means no harm. She’d be distressed to know she’d taken something you wanted. There is no power in them for you, Elphie.”

The Witch said, “Glinda, if those shoes fall into the hands of the Wizard, he’ll use them somehow in a maneuver to reannex Munchkinland. By now they have too much significance to Munchkinlanders. The Wizard mustn’t have those shoes!”

Glinda reached out and touched the Witch’s elbow. “They won’t make your father love you any better,” she said.

The Witch pulled back. They stood glaring at each other. They had too much common history to come apart over a pair of shoes, yet the shoes were planted between them, a grotesque icon of their differences. Neither one could retreat, or move forward. It was silly, and they were stuck, and someone needed to break the spell. But all the Witch could do was insist, “I want those shoes.”

4

At the memorial service, Glinda and Sir Chuffrey perched in the balcony reserved for dignitaries and ambassadors. The Wizard sent a representative, resplendent in his dress reds with the emerald cross marking quadrants on his chest, a crew of bodyguards at attention all around him. The Witch sat below, and did not meet Glinda’s eyes. Frex wept until he brought on an attack of asthma, and the Witch helped him out a side door, where he could catch his breath.

After the service, the Wizard’s emissary approached the Witch. He said, “You have been invited to an audience with the Wizard. He is traveling by special diplomatic immunity, via a Pfenix, to offer his condolences to the family this evening. You will be prepared to meet him at Colwen Grounds this evening.”

“He can’t come here!” said the Witch. “He wouldn’t dare!”

“Those who now make the decisions think otherwise,” said the emissary. “Be that as it may, he comes under cover of darkness, and only to speak to you and your family.”

“My father is not up to receiving the Wizard,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it.”

“He will see you, then,” said the emissary. “He insists. He has questions of a diplomatic nature to put to you. But you are not to make this visit public, or it could go very hard on your father and your brother. And on you,” he added, as if that were not already evident.

She considered how she might use this command audience to her own advantage: Sarima, the safety of Frex, the fate of Fiyero. “I agree,” she concluded. “I will meet him.” And, despite herself, she was glad for a moment that Nessarose’s magicked shoes were safely out of the vicinity.

As the vesper bells rang, the Witch was summoned from her room by a Munchkinlander maid. “You will have to submit to a search,” said the Wizard’s emissary, meeting her in an antechamber. “You must understand the protocol here.”

She concentrated on her fury as she was probed and prodded by the officers who ringed the waiting area. “What is this?” they said when they found the page of the Grimmerie in her pocket.

“Oh that,” she said, thinking fast. “His Highness will want to see that.”

“You can bring nothing in with you,” they told her, and they took the page from her.

“By my bloodlines, I can reinstate the office of the Eminent Thropp tonight and have your leader arrested,” she called after them. “Do not tell me what I can and cannot do in this house.”

They paid her no mind and ushered her into a small chamber, bare but for a couple of upholstered chairs set upon a flowery carpet. Along the baseboards, dust mice rolled in the draft.

“His Highness, the Emperor Wizard of Oz,” said an attendant, and withdrew. For a minute the Witch sat alone. Then the Wizard walked into the room.

He was without disguise, a plain-looking older man wearing a high-collared shirt and a greatcoat, with a watch and fob hanging from a waistcoat pocket. His head was pink and mottled, and tufts of hair stuck out above his ears. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down, motioning the Witch to sit, too. She did not sit.

“How do you do,” he said.

“What do you want with me,” she answered.

“There are two things,” he said. “There is what I had come here to say to you, and then there is the matter of what you bring to my attention.”

“You talk to me,” she said, “for I have nothing to say to you.”

“There is no point in beating around the bush,” he said. “I would like to know your intentions about your position as the last Eminence.”

“Had I any intention,” she said, “it would be none of your business.”

“Ah, alas, it is my business, for reunification is under way,” said the Wizard, “even as we speak. I understand that Lady Glinda, bless her well-meaning foolishness, has sensibly evacuated both the unfortunate girl and the totemic shoes from the district, which should make annexation less troublesome. I should like to have those shoes in my possession, to prevent their giving you ideas. So you see, I need to know your intentions in the matter. You were not, I take it, in warm sympathy with your sister’s style of religious tyranny, but I hope you do not intend to set up shop here. If you do, we must strike a little bargain—something I was never able to do with your sister.”

“There is little for me here,” said the Witch, “and I am not suited to govern anyone, not even myself, it seems.”

“Besides, there’s the small matter of the army at—is it Red Windmill?—the town below Kiamo Ko.”

“So that’s why they’ve been there all these years,” said the Witch.

“To keep you in check,” he said. “An expense, but there you are.”

“To spite you, I should reclaim the title of Eminence,” said the Witch. “But I care little for these foolish people. What the Munchkinlanders do now is of no interest to me. As long as my father is left unharmed. If that is all—”

“There is the other matter,” he said. His manner became more lively. “You brought a page with you. I wonder where you got it?”

“That is mine and your people have no right to it.”

“What I want is to know where you got it, and where I can find the rest.”

“What will you give me if I tell you?”

“What could you want from me?”

This was why she had agreed to meet him. She drew a deep breath, and said, “To know if Sarima, Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, is still alive. And where I might find her, and how I might negotiate her freedom.”

The Wizard smiled. “How all things work together. Now isn’t it interesting that I could guess of your concern.” He waved a hand. Unseen attendants outside the open door ushered in a dwarf in clean white trousers and tunic.

No, it wasn’t a dwarf, she saw; it was a young woman crouching. Chains sewn into the collar of her tunic ran through her clothes to her ankles, keeping her bent over; the chains were only two or three feet long. The Witch had to peer to see for sure that it was Nor. She would be sixteen by now, or seventeen. The age that Elphie had been when she went up to Crage Hall at Shiz.

“Nor,” said the Witch, “Nor, are you there?”

Nor’s knees were filthy and her fingers curled around the links of her bondage. Her hair was cut short, and welts were visible beneath the patchy tresses. She tossed her head as if listening to music, but she would not shift her gaze toward Elphaba.

“Nor, it’s Auntie Witch. I’ve come to bargain for your release, at last,” said the Witch, improvising.

But the Wizard motioned the unseen attendants to usher Nor out of sight. “I’m afraid that is not possible,” he said. “She is my protection from you, you see.”

“The others?” said the Witch. “I must know.”

“Everything is undocumented,” said the Wizard, “but I believe Sarima and her sisters are all dead.”

The Witch’s breath caught in her chest. The last hopes of forgiveness gone! . . . but the Wizard was continuing. “Perhaps some underling who had no authority in the matter had an appetite for a bloodbath. It’s so hard to get reliable help in the armed forces.”

“Irji?” said the Witch, gripping her elbows.

“Now he had to die,” said the Wizard apologetically. “He was the next in line to be Prince, wasn’t he?”

“Tell me it was not brutal,” said the Witch. “Oh, tell me so!”

“The Paraffin Necklace,” admitted the Wizard. “Well, it was a public affair. A statement needed to be made. There now, against my better judgment, I have told you what you wanted to know. Now it is your turn. Where can I find the book that this page is from?” The Wizard took the paper out of his pocket and pressed it out onto his lap. His hands were trembling. He looked at the page. “A spell for the Administration of Dragons,” he said, wonderingly.

“Is that what it is?” she said, surprised. “I could not be sure.”

“Of course. You must have a hard time making this out,” he said. “You see, it does not come from this world. It comes from my world.”

He was mad, obsessed with other worlds. Like her father.

“You are not telling the truth,” said the Witch, hoping she was right.

“Oh, what care I for the truth,” he said, “but I am truthful, as it happens.”

“Why would you want that?” said the Witch, trying to buy some time, trying to figure out how she could barter for Nor’s life. “I don’t even know what it is. I don’t believe you do either.”

“I do,” he said. “This is an ancient manuscript of magic, generated in a world far away from this one. It was long thought to be merely legendary, or else destroyed in the dark onslaughts of the northern invaders. It had been removed from our world for safety by a wizard more capable than I. It is why I came to Oz in the first place,” he continued, almost talking to himself, as old men are prone to do. “Madame Blavatsky located it in a crystal ball, and I made the appropriate sacrifices and—arrangements—to travel here forty years ago. I was a young man, full of ardor and failure. I had not intended to rule a country here, but just to find this document and return it to its own world, and to study its secrets there.”

“What kind of sacrifices?” she said. “You do not stint from murder here.”

“Murder is a word used by the sanctimonious,” he said. “It is an expedient expression with which they condemn any courageous action beyond their ken. What I did, what I do, cannot be murder. For, coming from another world, I cannot be held accountable to the silly conventions of a naive civilization. I am beyond that lisping childish recital of wrongs and rights.” His eyes did not burn as he spoke; they were sunk behind veils of cold blue detachment.

“If I give the Grimmerie to you, will you go?” she said. “Give me Nor and take your brand of evil and leave us alone at last?”

“I am too old to travel now,” he said, “and why should I give up what I have worked for all these years?”

“Because I will use this book and destroy you with it if you don’t,” she said.

“You cannot read it,” he said. “You are of Oz and you cannot do such a thing.”

“I can read more of it than you suspect,” she said. “I do not know what it all means. I have seen pages about unleashing the hidden energies of matter. I have seen pages about tampering with the orderly flow of time. I have seen disquisitions about weapons too vile to use, about how to poison water, about how to breed a more docile population. There are diagrams of weapons of torture. Though the drawings and the words seem misty to my eyes, I can continue to learn. I am not too old.”

“Those are ideas of great interest to our times,” he said, though he seemed surprised that she had taken in as much as she had.

“Not to me,” she said. “You have done enough already. If I give it to you, will you surrender Nor to me?”

“You should not trust my promise,” he said, sighing. “Really, my child.” But he continued to stare at the page she had handed over to him. “One might learn how to subjugate a dragon to one’s own purposes,” he mused, and flipped the page over to read what was on the back.

“Please,” she said. “I think I have never begged for anything before in my life. But I beg of you. It is not right that you should be here. Assuming for a moment you can sometimes tell the truth—go back to that other world, go anywhere, just leave the throne. Leave us alone. Take the book with you, do with it what you will. Let me accomplish at least this in my life.”

“In exchange for my telling you about the kith and kin of your beloved Fiyero, you are to tell me where this book is,” he reminded her.

“Well, I won’t,” she answered. “I have revised my offer. Give me Nor, and I will get you the Grimmerie. The book is already hidden so deeply that you will never find it. You have not the skill.” She hoped she was being persuasive.

He stood and pocketed the page. “I shall not have you executed,” he said. “At least, not at this audience. I will have that book, for here or for there. You cannot bind me to a promise, I am beyond being bound by words. I will think of what you have said. But meanwhile, I will keep my young slave-girl at my side. For she is my defense against your anger.”

“Give her to me!” said the Witch. “Now, now, now: Act like a man, not like a mountebank! Give her to me and I will send you that book!”

“It is for others to bargain,” said the Wizard. Rather than sounding offended, he seemed merely depressed, as if he were talking to himself instead of to her. “I do not bargain. But I do think. I will wait and see how the reunification with Munchkinland goes, and if you do not interfere, I may be kindly disposed to think about what you have said. But I do not bargain.”

The Witch breathed in deeply. “I have met you before, you know,” she said. “You once granted me an interview in the Throne Room, when I was a schoolgirl from Shiz.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Oh, of course—you must have been one of the darling girls of Madame Morrible. That wonderful aid and helpmeet. In her dotage now, but in her heyday, what she taught me about breaking the spirits of willful young girls! No doubt, like the rest, you were taken with her?”

“She tried to recruit me to serve some master. Was it you?”

“Who can say. We were always hatching some plot or other. She was good fun. She would never be as crude as that”—he pointed to the open door through which crouching Nor could still be seen, humming to herself—“she could manage girl students with much greater finesse!” He was about to leave the room, but he turned back at the door. “You know, now I remember. It was she who warned me about you. She told me you had betrayed her, you had rejected her offers. She was the one who advised me to have you watched. It is because of her that we found out about your little romance with the diamond-skinned prince.”

“No!”

“So you met me before. I had forgotten. In what form did I appear?”

She had to clutch herself to keep from vomiting. “You were a skeleton with lighted bones, dancing in a storm.”

“Oh, yes. That was clever, that was. Were you impressed?”

“Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.”

“And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”

“Wait,” she called as he headed away through the panel, “wait, please. How will I receive your answer?”

“I will send a messenger to you before the year is out,” he said. The panel slammed tightly behind him.

She fell to her knees, her forehead dropping almost to the floor. At her sides her fists clenched. She had no intention of surrendering the Grimmerie to such a monster, ever. If need be she would die to keep it out of his hands. But could she arrange a deception so that he would surrender Nor to her first?

She left a few days later, first making sure that her father was not to be turned out of his room in Colwen Grounds. He did not want to join her in the Vinkus; he was too old to make the journey. Besides, he thought that Shell would come back sooner or later looking for him. The Witch knew that Frex wouldn’t live long, grieving so for Nessarose. She tried to put away her anger at him when she said good-bye for what she suspected was the last time.

As she strode through the forecourt of Colwen Grounds, she crossed paths once again with Glinda. But both women averted their eyes and hurried their feet along their opposing ways. For the Witch, the sky was a huge boulder pressing down on her. For Glinda it was much the same. But Glinda wheeled about, and cried out, “Oh Elphie!”

The Witch did not turn. They never saw each other again.

5

She knew that she couldn’t afford the time to mount a full-scale chase against this Dorothy. Glinda ought to be hiring accomplices to track those shoes down; it was the least she could do, with her money and her connections. Still, the Witch stopped here and there along the Yellow Brick Road, and asked those taking an afternoon tipple at a roadside public house if they had seen a foreign girl in blue and white checks, walking with a small dog. There was some animated discussion as the patrons of the pub struggled to decide whether the green Witch intended the child harm—apparently the child had that rare skill of enchanting strangers—but when they had satisfied themselves that no harm was likely, they responded. Dorothy had come through a few days ago, and it was said that she had spent the night with someone a mile or two down the road, before continuing on. “The well-kept house with the yellow domed roof,” they said, “and the minaret-chimney. You can’t miss it.”

The Witch found it, and she found Boq on a bench in the yard, dandling a baby on his knee.

“You!” he said. “I know why you’re here! Milla, look, who’s here, come quickly! It’s Miss Elphaba, from Crage Hall! In the flesh!”

Milla came, a couple of naked children clutching her apron strings. Flushed from laundry, she lifted her straggling hair out of her eyes and said, “Oh my, and we forgot to dress in our finery today. Look who’s come to laugh at us in our rustic state.”

“Isn’t she something!” said Boq fondly.

Milla had kept her figure, though there were four or five offspring in evidence, and no doubt more out of sight. Boq had gone barrel-chested, and his fine spiky hair had grown prematurely silver, giving him a dignity he had never had as an undergraduate. “We heard about your sister’s death, Elphie,” he said, “and we sent our condolences to your father. We didn’t know where you were. We heard you had come here following Nessie’s ascension to governor of Munchkinland, but we didn’t know where you went back to when you left. It’s good to see you again.”

The sourness that she had felt over Glinda’s betrayal was ameliorated by Boq’s common courtesy and direct speech. She had always liked him, for his passion and for his sense. “You are a sight, you are,” she said.

“Rikla, get up off that stool and let our guest have a seat,” said Milla to one of the children. “And Yellowgage, run to Uncle’s and borrow some rice and onions and yogurt. Hurry now, so I can start a meal.”

“I won’t be staying, Milla, I’m in a hurry,” said the Witch. “Yellowgage, don’t bother. I’d love to spend some time, and catch up on all your news, but I’m trying to locate this girl stranger, who passed by here, someone said, and stayed a night or two.”

Boq shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, she did that, Elphie. What do you want with her?”

“I want my sister’s shoes. They belong to me.”

Boq seemed as surprised as Glinda had. “You weren’t ever into fancy trappings like society shoes,” he said.

“Yes, well, perhaps I’m about to make my belated debut in Emerald City society at last, and have a coming-out ball.” But she was being tart with Boq, and didn’t want that. “It’s a personal matter, Boq; I want the shoes. My father made them and they’re mine now, and Glinda gave them to this girl without my permission. And woe betide Munchkinland if they fall into the Wizard’s hands. What is she like, this Dorothy?”

“We adored her,” he said. “Plain and straightforward as mustard seed. She shouldn’t have any problems, although it’s a long walk for a child, from here to the Emerald City. But all who see her are bound to help her, I’d say. We sat up till the moon rose, chatting about her home, and Oz, and what she might expect on the road. She hasn’t traveled widely before this.”

“How charming,” said the Witch. “How novel for her.”

“Are you brewing one of your campaigns?” said Milla suddenly, cannily. “You know, Elphie, when you didn’t come back from the Emerald City with Glinda that time, everyone said you’d gone mad, and had become an assassin.”

“People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

“You’re not wicked,” said Boq.

“How do you know? It’s been so long,” said the Witch, but she smiled at him.

Boq returned the smile, warmly. “Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

“Like Nessarose,” said Milla meanly, but she was telling the truth, too, and they all nodded.

The Witch took one of Boq’s children on her knee and clucked at it absentmindedly. She liked children no more than she ever had, but years of dealing with monkeys had given her an insight into the infant mentality she had never grasped before. The baby cooed and wet itself with pleasure. The Witch handed it back quickly before the wet could soak through her skirt.

“Regardless of the shoes,” said the Witch, “do you think a child like that should be sent unarmed straight into the jaws of the Wizard? Has she been told what a monster he is?”

Boq looked uncomfortable. “Well, Elphie, I don’t like speaking ill of the Wizard. I’m afraid there are too many pitchers with big ears in this community, and you never know who is on what side. Between you and me, I hope Nessa’s death will result in some sort of a sensible government, but if we are overrun with an invading army in two months I wouldn’t want it bruited about that I’d been bad-mouthing the invaders. And there are rumors of reunification.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re hoping for that,” she said, “not you too.”

“I’m not hoping for anything, except for peace and quiet,” he said. “I have enough trouble getting crops out of these rocky fields. That’s what I was in Shiz to learn, do you remember?—agriculture. I’ve put the best of my efforts into our small holdings, and we only manage to eke out a living.”

But he looked rather proud about it, and so did Milla.

“And I guess you have a couple of Cows in your barn,” said the Witch.

“Oh, you’re testy. Of course we don’t. Do you think I could forget what we worked for—you and Crope and Tibbett and I? It was the high point of a very quiet life.”

“You didn’t have to have a quiet life, Boq,” said the Witch.

“Don’t be superior. I didn’t say I was sorry for it, neither the excitement of a righteous campaign nor the relief of a family and a farm. Did we ever do any good back then?”

“If nothing else,” said the Witch, “we helped Doctor Dillamond. He was very much alone in his work, you know. And the philosophical basis for the resistance grew out of his pioneering hypotheses. His findings outlived him; they still do.” She did not mention her own experiments with the winged monkeys. Her practical applications were directly derived from Doctor Dillamond’s theories.

“We had no idea we were at the end of a golden age,” Boq said, sighing. “When’s the last time you saw an Animal in the professions?”

“Ah, don’t get me started,” the Witch said. She couldn’t stay seated.

“Do you remember, you hoarded those notes of Dillamond’s. You never really let me know what they were all about. Did you make any use of them?”

“I learned enough from his research to keep questioning,” said the Witch, but she felt bombastic, and wanted to stop talking. It made her feel too sad, too desperate. Milla saw this, and with a brusque charity declared, “Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we’re the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we’re in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”

“The Wizard doesn’t,” said the Witch.

“Well, Madame Morrible does,” said Milla. “Or so Shenshen told me in her last letter.”

“Oh?” said the Witch.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Boq. “Though from her bed of pain Madame Morrible continues to advise our Emperor Wizard on policy matters about education. I’m surprised that Glinda didn’t send Dorothy to Shiz to study with Madame Morrible. Instead she directed her to the Emerald City.”

The Witch could not picture Dorothy, but for a moment she saw the stooped figure of Nor. She saw a crowd of girls like Nor, in chains and yokes, drifting around Madame Morrible the way those schoolgirls had, all those years ago.

“Elphie, sit down again, you don’t look well,” said Boq. “This is a hard time for you. You didn’t get along well with Nessarose, I seem to remember.”

But the Witch didn’t want to think of her sister. “It’s a rather ugly name, Dorothy,” she said. “Don’t you think?” She sat back down heavily, and Boq relaxed on a stool a few feet away.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Actually we had a chat about it. She said that the King of her homeland was a man named Theodore. Her teacher explained that the name meant Gift of God, and that this was a sign that he was ordained to be King or Prime Minister. Dorothy remarked that Dorothy was a sort of backward Theodore, but the teacher looked it up and said no, Dorothy meant Goddess of Gifts.”

“Well, I know what she can give me,” said the Witch. “She can give me my shoes. Are you trying to say that you think she was a gift of God, or that she is some sort of queen or goddess? Boq, you used not to go in for superstition.”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m having a conversation on word derivations,” he answered calmly. “Let others more enlightened than I ferret out the hidden meanings of life. But I do think it interesting that her name so resembles the name of her king.”

Milla said, “Well, I think she’s a holy little girl, ordinary and sanctified just as any child is, no more no less. Yellowgage, get your paws off that lemon tart, I can see you from here, or I’ll whip you from now to eternity. The Dorothy child reminded me of what Ozma might have been like, or might yet be like, if she ever comes out of the deep sleep she’s supposed to be enchanted into.”

“She sounds like a little fright,” said the Witch. “Ozma, Dorothy—all this talk about savior children. I have always detested it.”

“You know what it is?” said Boq, thinking carefully. “Since we’re talking about the old days, it comes back to me . . . I wonder if you remember that medieval painting I once found in the library at Three Queens? The one with the female figure cradling the beast? There was a sort of tenderness and awfulness in that painting. Well, there’s something in Dorothy that reminds me of that unnamed figure. You might even call it the Unnamed Goddess—is that sacrilegious or what? Dorothy has this sweet charity toward her dog, a pretty dreadful little beast. And whiffy? You wouldn’t believe how repugnant. Once she swooped the dog up in her arms and bent over it, crooning to it, in just the same pose as that medieval figure. Dorothy is a child, but she has a heaviness of bearing like an adult, and a gravity you don’t often find in the young. It’s very becoming. Elphie, I was charmed by her, to tell you the truth.” He cracked a couple of walnuts and eastern macarands, and passed them around. “I am sure you will be, too.”

“I would like to avoid her at all costs, at the sound of it,” said the Witch. “The last thing I’m in a mood for these days is to be charmed by juvenile purity. But I insist on recovering my property.”

“The shoes are very magic, are they?” said Milla. “Or is it just symbolic?”

“How do I even know?” said the Witch. “I haven’t ever put them on. But if I could get them and they could walk me out of this parlous life, I wouldn’t be sorry.”

“Anyway, everyone blamed the shoes for Nessa’s tyranny. I think it’s good of Glinda to have gotten them out of Munchkinland. The child is smuggling them abroad without even knowing it.”

“Glinda has sent the girl to the Emerald City,” said the Witch pointedly. “If the Wizard gets hold of them, it’ll be a license to march into Munchkinland. And you’re fools to sit on the fence as if it makes no difference whether he does or not.”

“You’ll stay for something, at least some tea,” said Milla soothingly. “Look, I’ve had Clarinda make a fresh pot, and we’ve saffron cream. Remember the saffron cream party after Ama Clutch’s funeral?”

The Witch breathed heavily for a moment; there was a pain in her esophagus. She did not like to remember those trying times. And Glinda had known full well that Madame Morrible was behind the death of Ama Clutch. Now as Lady Glinda she was part of the same ruling class. It was hideous. And Dorothy, whatever her origins, was still only a child, and they were using her to help rid Munchkinland of those damned totemic shoes. Or to get the shoes to the Wizard. Just as Madame Morrible had used her students as Adepts.

“I can’t stop here chattering like an idiot,” she cried, startling them, spilling the bowl of nuts to the ground. “Didn’t we waste enough time talking ourselves to death in school?” She grabbed for her broom and her hat.

Boq looked startled and almost fell backward off his seat. “Well, Elphie, why are you taking offense—?”

She was beyond answering. She whirled in a small cyclone of black skirts and scarves, and ran out to the road.

She hurried on foot along the Yellow Brick Road, hardly realizing that a plan was forming in her mind. But she was thinking so hard that for a while she completely forgot she was carrying her broom, and it was only when she paused to rest, and leaned on it, that she remembered it.

Boq, Glinda, even her father, Frex: how disappointing they all seemed now. Had these folks deteriorated in virtue since their youth, or had she been too naive then to see them for what they were? She felt disgusted with people, and longed to be home. She was too out of sorts to seek lodging in an inn or a public house. It was warm enough to stay outside and rest.

She lay awake at the edge of a field of barley. The moon rose, huge as it sometimes is when first breaking over the horizon. It backlit a stake with a crossbar, standing as if awaiting a body to crucify, or a scarecrow to hang.

Why hadn’t she joined forces with Nessarose, and raised armies against the Wizard? Old family resentments had gotten in the way.

Nessarose had asked for help in governing Munchkinland, and the Witch had denied her request. Instead the Witch had gone back to Kiamo Ko these seven years. She had squandered the chance to merge forces with her sister.

Virtually every campaign she’d set out for herself had ended in failure.

She squirmed in the light of the moon, and at midnight, tortured by the thoughts of Nessa’s death—the physical fact of being squished like a bug finally taking on some imaginative shape in the Witch’s fantasies—she arose, and took a new path. Dorothy would no doubt follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, and someone as exotic as she could be easily located anywhere along the route. The Witch would go and try to accomplish the task set out for herself fifteen years ago. Madame Morrible still waited to be killed.

6

Shiz was a money factory now. The Colleges, occupying an historic district, remained largely unchanged, but for some contemporary dormitories and flashy athletic buildings. Outside the university district, however, Shiz had thrived in the war-alert economy. A huge monument in brass and marble, The Spirit of Empire, dominated what was left of Railway Square, and the air and light around it was cut off by hulking industrial buildings, spewing black columns of filth into the air. The bluestone was now grimestone. The air itself seemed warm and earnest—the ten thousand exhalations of a city panting every second to increase its wealth. The trees were shriveled and gray. And not a single Animal in sight.

Crage Hall looked absurdly older and newer at once. The Witch chose not to bother the porter, and flew herself up over the wall into the kitchen garden, where once Boq had tumbled off an adjoining roof, almost into her lap. The back lawn beyond the orchard was gone, and in its place stood a stone structure, above whose gleaming poxite doors was carved THE SIR CHUFFREY AND LADY GLINDA CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC AND THE THEATRICAL ARTS.

Three girls came hurrying down the path, chattering away, their books clutched close to their bosoms. They gave the Witch a start, as if they were ghosts of Nessarose, Glinda and herself. She had to hold on to her broomstick and steady herself. She had not taken in how far she had come, how much she had aged.

“I need to see the Head,” she said, startling them.

But one recovered her youthful aplomb and pointed the way. The Head’s office was still in Main Hall. “You’ll find her in,” they said. “She’s always in at this hour of the morning, having tea by herself or with contributors.”

Security must be greatly relaxed if none of them questions my being in the kitchen garden, thought the Witch. All the better; I may even escape unstopped.

The Head had a secretary now, a plump older gentleman with a goatee. “She’s not expecting you?” he said. “I’ll see if she’s free.” He returned and said, “Madame Head will see you now. Would you like to leave your broom in the umbrella stand?”

“How kind. No thanks,” said the Witch, and walked through.

The Head rose from a leather armchair. She wasn’t Madame Morrible anymore; she was a small pinky white woman with copper-colored curls and an energetic manner. “I didn’t catch your name?” she said politely. “You’re an old girl, but I’m a new one”—she laughed at her own witticism, and the Witch did not—“and I’m afraid I haven’t yet grasped the truth: dozens of old girls come back every month to relive the pleasant moments of their growing up here. Please, may I have your name, and I’ll call for some tea.”

With some effort, the Witch said, “I was called Miss Elphaba when I was here, more years ago than I realized could be possible. In fact I won’t take tea, I can’t stay long. I was misinformed. I was hoping to see Madame Morrible? Do you know of her whereabouts?”

“Well, is this good luck or is it bad?” said the current Head. “Up till very recently she has spent part of every semester in the Emerald City, consulting with His Highness himself, on education policies through Loyal Oz. But she’s recently returned to her retirement apartment in the Doddery—I’m sorry, that’s a joke of the girls and it slipped out. It is called the Daughter Building, really, as it was financed by the generous daughters of Crage Hall, our alums. You see, her health has deteriorated, and—though I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings—I fear she is very near the end.”

“I’d love to pop in and say hello,” said the Witch. Playacting had never suited her, and it was only because the new Head was so young, such a fool, such a girl herself, that the Witch could get away with it. “I was a great favorite of hers, you know; it would give her a wonderful surprise.”

“I’ll call Grommetik to take you there,” said the Head. “But I should ask Madame Morrible’s nurse first if she’s up to a visit.”

“Don’t call Grommetik, I can find my own way. I will chat with the nurse, and I will only stop in for a moment. And then I’ll come back here before I leave, I promise, and perhaps I can see my way clear to making a contribution toward the annual fund, or some little endowment drive you must be mounting at present?”

To the best of her recollection she had never lied before in her life.

The Doddery was a broad round tower, like a squat silo, sitting adjacent to the chapel in which Doctor Dillamond had been eulogized. A scout, passing by with buckets and brooms, told the Witch that Madame Morrible was one flight up, behind the door with the Wizard’s standard mounted on it.

A minute later the Witch stood looking at the Wizard’s standard. A balloon with a basket beneath it, commemorating his spectacular arrival in the Emerald City, and crossed swords below. From a few feet away it looked like a huge skull, and the basket a leering jaw, and the crossed swords a forbidding X. The doorknob turned under her tug, and she entered the apartments.

There were several rooms, all cluttered with school memorabilia and tokens of esteem from various Emerald City institutions, including the Palace of the Emperor. The Witch passed through a sort of parlor, with a fire burning in it despite the warmth of the season, and a kitchen-scullery area. To one side was a water closet, and the Witch could hear the sound of someone sobbing inside, and the blowing of a nose. The Witch pushed a dresser against the door, and continued on into a sleeping chamber.

Madame Morrible was propped halfway up in a huge bed shaped like a pfenix. A carved gold pfenix neck and head emerged from the headboard, and the sides of the bed simulated the bird’s wings. Its feet joined at the footboard. The idea of its tail feathers had apparently defeated the ingenuity of the cabinetmaker, for there weren’t any. It was a bird in an awkward position, actually, as if being blown backward through the air by gunshot, or as if laboring in a human way to deliver itself of the great mound of flesh sitting on its stomach and reclining against its breast.

On the floor was a pile of the financial papers, and an old-fashioned pair of spectacles was set on top of them. But the time for reading was past.

Madame Morrible rested in a gray mound, her hands folded upon her belly, and her eyes open and shallow, without motion. She was still like a mammoth Carp, in all but the fishy smell—a candle had been so recently lit that the stink of the match’s sulfur still lingered in the room.

The Witch pulled at her broom. From the other room came a pounding on the door of the water closet. “Did you think you would always be safe by hiding behind schoolchildren?” said the Witch, beyond herself, beyond caring, and she raised her broom. But Madame Morrible made a sluggish, indifferent corpse.

The Witch struck Madame Morrible with the flat of the broom, on the side of the head and the face. It made no mark. Then the Witch searched the mantelpiece for the testimonial trophy with the biggest marble base, and she bashed in Madame Morrible’s skull with it, with a sound like a splitting of firewood.

She left it in the old woman’s arms. Its statement could be read by all, except the carved pfenix who would be looking at it upside down. IN APPRECIATION OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DONE, it said.

7

The Witch had waited fifteen years, but her timing was off by five minutes. So the temptation to go back and dismember Grommetik was intense. But the Witch resisted. She didn’t care if she was sentenced and executed for the battery of Madame Morrible’s corpse, but she didn’t want to be caught because of vengeance against a machine.

She took a meal at a café and glanced at the tabloids. Then she wandered in the shopping district. Never one for frippery, she was intensely bored, but she wanted to hear them talking about the death of Madame Morrible. She was waiting for the reviews, as it were. And she would never come back to Shiz, she suspected, nor to any other city. This was her last chance to see Loyal Oz in action.

As the afternoon wore on, however, she began to worry. What if there was a cover-up? What if the current Head, to avoid scandal, hushed up the news of the assault? Especially a crime against one so close to the Emperor? The Witch began to fret that she would be denied the credit for her deed. She racked her brains for someone to confess to, someone who would be sure to rush to the authorities. What about Crope, or Shenshen, or Pfannee? Or, for that matter, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, nasty Avaric?

The town house of the Margreave was set out in the deer park at the edge of Shiz. It was late afternoon by the time she reached the Emperor’s Green, as it was now called. Private residences were dotted about the expanse, each protected by its own security force, high walls lined with broken glass bottles, fierce dogs. The Witch had a way with dogs and high walls didn’t bother her. She welcomed herself over the wall onto a terrace, where a maid tending a floxflower bed had a conniption and resigned on the spot. The Witch found Avaric in his study, signing some documents with a huge plumed pen, and sipping some honey-colored whiskey in a crystal glass. “I said that I won’t come out for cocktails, you’re on your own, can’t you listen?” he began, but then he saw who it was.

“However did you get in here without being announced?” he said. “I know you. Don’t I?”

“Of course you do, Avaric. I’m the green girl of Crage Hall.”

“Oh yes. What was your name?”

“My name was Elphaba.”

He lit a lamp—the afternoon was darkening, or perhaps clouding over now—and they looked at each other. “Have a seat, then. I suppose if society forces itself in one’s study door, one has no further right to deny it. A drink?”

“A wee one.”

Alone of them all, he, who had been too handsome to believe, had grown better looking. He wore his hair swept back; it was rich and full, the color of polished nickel, and he clearly had the benefit of a life of exercise and rest, for his figure was strong and slim, his bearing erect, his color good. Those born with advantages know how to capitalize on them, observed the Witch, after her first sip.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he said, seating himself across from her with a freshened drink in his own hands. “Or is the whole world playing reprises today?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I had a walk at noon,” he said, “in the park, with my bodyguards, as usual. And I came across a carnival entertainment set up there. It opens tomorrow, I think, and the park will be mobbed with clever students, household servants and factory workers, and with greasy gabbling families from Little Glikkus. There were the usual cast of children caught up in the allure of a good circus act, mostly teenage boys helping out, no doubt having run away from tiresome families and small provincial towns. But the guy in charge was a bloody little dwarf.”

“Bloody, how do you mean?” asked the Witch.

“I mean offensive, pardon my slang. We’ve all seen dwarves before, that’s not the point. It’s just that I had seen this very dwarf before. I recognized him from years ago.”

“Fancy that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have thought anything more of it, but then you show up this afternoon from more or less the same zone of memory. Weren’t you there, yourself? Didn’t you go with us to the Philosophy Club that night, we got so drunk, and they had that charmed-sex thing, and that effeminate Tibbett got so wasted and lost his mind and just about everything else when that Tiger . . . ? You were there, surely.”

“I don’t think I was.”

“Weren’t you? Boq was, squiggly little Boq, and Pfannee, and Fiyero, I think, and some others. Don’t you remember? There was that hag who called herself Yackle, and the dwarf, and they let us in, and they were so creepy? Anyway, doesn’t matter—it’s just—”

“Not Yackle,” said the Witch. She dropped her drink. “This is insanity, my ears are having delusions. Everyone is right, I’m paranoid. No, Avaric, I refuse to admit you could remember someone’s name for twenty years like that.”

“She was a balding gypsy woman with a wig, and sort of chestnut-colored eyes, in thick with this dwarf. I don’t know what he was called. Why shouldn’t I remember it?”

“You didn’t remember my name.”

“You didn’t scare me half as much. In fact you never scared me.” He laughed. “I was probably pretty nasty to you. I was an asshole back then.”

“You still are.”

“Well, practice makes perfect, and more than once I’ve been called a perfect asshole.”

“I came by to tell you that I killed Madame Morrible today,” said the Witch. She was so proud of the phrase; it seemed less false when said aloud. Maybe it was true. “I killed her. I wanted someone who would be believed to know about it.”

“Oh, why ever did you do that?”

“You know, the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.” She sat up a little straighter. “Because she deserved it.”

“The Avenging Angel of Justice is now green?”

“A pretty good disguise, don’t you think?” They both grinned.

“So about this Madame Morrible, whom you claim to have killed? Did you know that she gathered your friends and associates together and gave us a little lecture after you’d run away?”

“You were never my friend.”

“I was too near to be excused. I remember the situation. Nessarose was mortified and shattered by the whole thing. Madame Morrible took out your records and read to us a profile of your character as assessed by your various teachers. We were warned about your spikiness, your fringiness, what were the words they used? I can’t remember that, they weren’t memorable words. But we were told you might try to recruit us in some sort of juvenile attempt to galvanize some sort of student uprising. You were to be avoided at all costs.”

“And Nessarose was mortified, well, that figures,” said the Witch grimly.

“Glinda too,” said Avaric. “She went through another slide, like the one she went into after Doctor Dillamond fell on his magnifying lens—”

“Oh please, is that hoary old lie still in circulation?”

“—oh all right, was brutally murdered by brigands unknown, have it your way. Brigands in the form of Madame Morrible, that’s what you mean me to suppose. So why really did you do it?”

“Madame Morrible had a choice. No one was better placed than she to see that her students got an education and not a brainwashing. By hooking up with the Emerald City, she sold out all her students who believed that a liberal education meant learning to think for themselves. Besides, she was a vile fiend, and she did conspire to have Doctor Dillamond murdered. No matter what you say.”

But the Witch stopped herself short, hearing in her words about Madame Morrible—she had a choice—an echo of what the Elephant Princess Nastoya had once said to her: No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst—there is always choice.

Avaric was rattling on. “And you’ve had her murdered. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as we boys used to chant on the playground, usually when we were on the ground with someone’s knee on our groin. Why don’t you stay for a meal? We’ve got guests, a clever bunch.”

“So you can call the police? No thanks.”

“I won’t call the police. You and I, we’re above petulant justice like that.”

The Witch believed him. “All right,” she said. “Who are you married to, by the way? Did you get married to Pfannee, or Shenshen, or someone else? I can’t remember.”

“Whoever,” said Avaric, pouring another finger of whiskey. “I can’t keep small details in my mind, never could.”

The Margreave’s pantry was fulsome, his cook a genius, and his wine cellar unparalleled. The guests tucked into snails and garlic, roast crest of fallowhen with cilantro and clementine chutney, and the Witch allowed herself a sumptuous helping of lime tart with saffron cream. The crystal goblets were never empty. The conversation was exalted and loopy, and by the time the Margreavess led them to the comfortable chairs in the drawing room, the plaster appliqué on the ceiling seemed to swirl like the cigarette smoke.

“Why, you’re flushed,” said Avaric. “You ought to have been a tippler all along, Elphaba.”

“I’m not sure red wine agrees with me,” she said.

“You’re in no condition to go anywhere. The maid will do up one of the corner rooms. It’s lovely, there’s a view clear to the pagoda on the island.”

“I don’t care for prepared views.”

“Don’t you want to wait for the morning papers, to see if they got it right? If they got it at all?”

“I’ll ask you to send me one. No, I must go, I feel the need of some fresh air. Avaric—Madame—friends—it’s been a surprise and I suppose a pleasure.” But she felt grudging as she said it.

“A pleasure to some,” said the Margreavess, who hadn’t approved of the conversation. “I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion.”

“Oh, but come,” the Witch said, “is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to ask ourselves such serious questions?”

“Well, I stick with my suggestion,” said Avaric. “Evil isn’t doing bad things, it’s feeling bad about them afterward. There’s no absolute value to behavior. First of all—”

“Institutional inertia,” claimed the Witch. “But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?”

“That’s why I say it’s merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed,” said a copper magnate. “And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible.”

“It’s an absence of good, that’s all,” said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz Informer. “The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.”

“Pigspittle,” said Avaric. “Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn’t progress . . .”

“I think it’s a presence, not an absence,” said an artist. “Evil’s
an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us.”

“Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?”

“Oh go on with you,” said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity.”

“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty . . .”

“It’s a power, like wind . . .”

“It’s an infection . . .”

“It’s metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation—”

“Blame it on the Unnamed God, then.”

“But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?”

“It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less—”

“I like pain, if I’m wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me—”

“No, you’re all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart—the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience—”

“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”

“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite.”

“I won’t have this talk in my drawing room,” said the Margreavess, near tears. “You’ve been behaving all night as if an old woman hadn’t been slaughtered in her bedclothes. Didn’t she have a mother too? Didn’t she have a soul?”

Avaric yawned and said, “You’re so tender and naive. When it’s not embarrassing it’s quite appealing.”

The Witch stood up, sat down quickly, and stood up again, aided by her broom.

“Why did you do it?” asked the hostess with spirit.

The Witch shrugged. “For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”

But as she wobbled toward the door, she said, “You know, you’re all a pack of fools. You ought to have turned me in instead of entertaining me all evening.”

“You entertained us,” said Avaric broadly, gallantly. “This’ll end up being the dinner party of the season. Even if you’ve been lying all evening about killing this old schoolmarm. What a treat.” The dinner guests drolly applauded her.

“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it—the human side, say—and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”

8

The moon was up again, a little less swollen than the night before. The Witch didn’t trust herself to ride on the broom, so she meandered in a zigzaggy way across the greensward. She would find a place to nap outside of the claustrophobia of a society den.

She came upon the construction that Avaric had talked about. It was an old, early tiktok thing, a sort of portable stupa made of carved wood and figurines, too variegated and numerous for the Witch to comprehend tonight. Perhaps there was a running board where she could rest underneath, a platform elevated just a couple of inches off the dampish ground. She peered, and moved forward.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

A Munchkinlander, no, a dwarf, stood in her way. He had a cudgel in one hand, and was thwacking it into the thick leathery palm of his other hand.

“Going to sleep, when I can,” she said. “So you’re the dwarf, and this is the thing Avaric talked about.”

“The Clock of the Time Dragon,” he said, “open for business tomorrow night, and not until.”

“I’ll be dead and gone by tomorrow night,” she said.

“No you won’t,” he answered.

“Well, gone anyway.” She looked at it and straightened up, then something came back to her. “I wonder how you knew Yackle,” she said.

“Oh, Yackle,” he said. “Who doesn’t know Yackle? Not such a surprise.”

“Was she killed today?” said the Witch. “By any chance?”

“No chance,” he answered.

“Who are you?” She was afraid, suddenly, after all this headiness of sorrow and violence.

“Oh, the least significant little one,” he said.

“Who do you work for?”

“Who haven’t I worked for?” said the dwarf. “The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man. But I have no name in this world, so don’t bother with me.”

“I’m drunk and disorderly,” she said, “and I cannot take any more riddles. I killed someone today, I can kill you too.”

“You didn’t kill her, she was already dead,” said the dwarf calmly. “And you can’t kill me, for I’m immortal. But you try very hard at life, and so I will tell you this. I am the guardian of the book, and I was brought to this dreaded, forsaken land to watch over the book’s history, to keep it from getting back to where it comes from. I am not good, I am not bad; but I am locked here, condemned to a deathless life to guard the book. I don’t care what happens to you or anyone else, but I protect the book: that is my charge.”

“The book?” She was struggling to understand; she felt drunker the more she heard.

“What you call the Grimmerie. It has other names—no matter.”

“Then why don’t you take it, why don’t you have it?”

“I don’t work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives. I interfere only to keep the book safe. To some extent I can see what’s coming, and to that extent I meddle in the affairs of men and beasts.” He jigged like a little fiend. “You see me here, you see me there. Having second sight is a great advantage in the security business.”

“You work with Yackle.”

“We sometimes have the same intentions, and we sometimes do not. Her interest seems to be different from mine.”

“Who is she? What is her interest? Why do you hover at the edges of my life?”

“In the world I come from, there are guardian angels,” said the dwarf, “but so far as I can work it out, she is an opposite number, and her concern is you.”

“Why do I deserve such a fiend? Why is my life so plagued? Who positioned her to influence my life?”

“There are things I don’t know, and things I do,” said the dwarf. “Who Yackle answers to, if anyone, if anything, is beyond my realm of knowledge or interest. But why you? You must know this. For you”—the dwarf spoke in a bright, offhand tone—“are neither this nor that—or shall I say both this and that? Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. Can you be so dull that you have not figured this out?”

“Show me something,” she said. “I do not know what you mean. Show me something the world hasn’t shown me yet.”

“For you, a pleasure.” He disappeared, and there was the sound of mechanical parts being wound up, moving against one another, the grind of lubricated gears, the slap of leather belts, the chuck-chuck of pendulums swinging. “A private audience with the Time Dragon itself.”

At the top, a beast prowled, flexing its wings in a dance of gestures, both bidding welcome and holding at bay. The Witch stared.

A small area halfway up was illuminated. “A three-act play,” came the voice of the dwarf, from deep within. “Act One: The Birth of Holiness.”

Later she could not have said how she knew what it was, but what she saw, in an abbreviated pantomime, was the life of Saint Aelphaba. The good woman, the mystic and recluse, who disappeared to pray behind a waterfall. The Witch flinched to see the saint walk straight through the waterfall (a guttering spout overhead drained real water out into a hidden tray below). She waited for the tiktok saint to come out, but she didn’t come, and eventually the lights went out.

“Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

“Wait, the Saint didn’t emerge as the tales say she did,” said the Witch. “I want my money’s worth or not at all, please.”

“Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

Lights came up on another little stage. There was a credible likeness of Colwen Grounds painted on a cardboard backdrop beyond. A figurine who was Melena kissed her parents good-bye and went off with Frex, a handsome little puppet with a short black beard and a jaunty step. They stopped in a small hut, and Frex kissed her and continued on to preach. All through the rest of the scene he was off to one side, yammering away to some peasants who were busy screwing each other on the ground before him, hacking each other to pieces and eating their sexual parts, which ran with a real gravy; you could smell the garlic and sauteed mushrooms. Melena, at home, yawned and waited, and teased her pretty hair. Along came a man whom the Witch could not identify at first. He had a small black bag and from it he extracted a green glass bottle. He gave it to Melena to drink, and when she had, she fell into his arms, either stupefied and drunk as the Witch was tonight, or liberated. It wasn’t clear. The traveler and Melena made love in the same bouncy rhythm as Frex’s parishioners. Frex started to dance to the rhythm himself. Then, when the act of love was done, the traveler pulled himself off Melena. He snapped his fingers, and a balloon with a basket beneath descended from the fly space above. The traveler got in. It was the Wizard.

“Oh, nonsense,” said the Witch. “This is pure poppycock.”

The lights dimmed. The voice of the dwarf sounded from inside the contraption. “Act Three,” he said. “The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked.”

She waited, but no area was illuminated, no puppet moved.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” he answered.

“Where’s the end of the play?”

He stuck his head out of a trap door and winked at her. “Who said the end was written yet?” he answered, and slammed the door shut. Another door opened, just by the Witch’s hand, and a tray slid out. Lying on it was an oval looking glass, cracked along one side, scratched on its surfaces. It looked like the glass she had had since childhood, the one she used to imagine she could see the Other Land in, back when she believed in such a thing. The last she remembered of the oval glass was in her hideaway digs in the Emerald City. Inside the glass lived reflections of a young and beautiful Fiyero, and a young and impassioned Fae. The Witch took the mirror and hid it in her apron, and wandered away.

There was nothing in the morning papers about the death of Madame Morrible. The Witch, with a treacherous headache, decided that she could wait no longer. Either Avaric and his beastly companions would spread the rumors, or they wouldn’t. There was nothing left to be done.

Just let word get to the Wizard, though, said the Witch to herself. I would like to be a fly on the wall of his bunker when that happens. Let him think I killed her. Let that be how the news goes.

9

She returned to Munchkinland in a punishing journey, exhausting herself. She had slept so little, and her head still throbbed. But she was proud of herself. She arrived in the front yard of Boq’s cottage, and called for the family to come.

Boq was out in the field, and one of his children had to be dispatched to fetch him. When he came running, he had an adze in one hand. “I wasn’t expecting you, it took me a minute,” he said, panting.

“You’d have run quicker if you’d left your blade behind,” she noted.

But he didn’t drop it. “Elphie, why have you come back?”

“To tell you what I have done,” she said. “I thought you would like to know. I have killed Madame Morrible, and she can no longer harm anyone.”

But Boq did not look pleased. “You took against that old woman?” he said. “Surely she was beyond the point of hurting anyone now?”

“You’ve made the mistake that everyone makes,” said the Witch, cruelly disappointed. “Don’t you know there is no such point?”

“You had worked to protect the Animals,” said Boq. “But you did not intend to sink to the level of those who brutalized them.”

“I have fought fire with fire,” said the Witch, “and I ought to have done it sooner! Boq, you’ve become an equivocating fool.”

“Children,” said Boq, “run inside and find your mother.”

He was scared of her.

“You’re sitting on the fence,” she said. “Here your precious Munchkinland is going to be sucked back into the folds of Royal Oz, under His Highness the Emperor Wizard. And you see what Glinda is up to, and you send that child on her way with the shoes that belong to me. You took a stand when you were young, Boq! How can you have—spoiled so!”

“Elphie,” said Boq, “look at me. You are beside yourself. Have you been drinking? Dorothy is just a child. You may not retell this to make her into some sort of fiend!”

Milla, alerted to the tension in the front yard, came out and stood behind Boq. She carried a kitchen knife. Whispering noisily, the children watched from the window.

“You do not need to defend yourselves with knives and adzes,” said the Witch coldly. “I had thought you would care to know about Madame Morrible.”

“You are shaking,” said Boq. “Look, I will put down this thing. Clearly you are upset. Nessa’s death has been hard on you. But you must get control of yourself, Elphie. Don’t take against Dorothy. She is an innocent creature. She’s all alone. I beg of you.”

“Oh, don’t beg, don’t beg,” said the Witch, “I could not abide begging, from you, of all people!” She ground her teeth and clenched her fists. “I will promise you nothing, Boq!”

And this time she got on her broom and flew away. Recklessly, she mounted the sides of air currents, until the ground below had lost any detail sharp enough to cause her pain.

She was beginning to feel too long away from Kiamo Ko. Liir was an idiot, headstrong and lily-livered by turns, and Nanny sometimes forgot where she was. The Witch didn’t want to think about yesterday, the death of Madame Morrible, the accusations made by the puppet play. She could hardly be more averse to the Wizard than she already was; if there was a shred of possibility to that sick idea of his having fathered her, it only made her hate him the more. She would ask Nanny about it when she got home.

When she got home. She was thirty-eight, and just realizing what it felt like to have a sense of home. For that, Sarima, thank you, she thought. Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

But she decided to head toward Kiamo Ko by following the Yellow Brick Road. She would make one last try for the shoes. She had nothing left to lose. If the shoes fell into the hands of the Wizard, he would use them to bolster his claim to Munchkinland. Maybe, if she tried, she could shrug her shoulders and leave Munchkinland to its own fate—but damn it, the shoes were hers.

She finally found a peddler who had seen Dorothy. He stopped by the side of his wagon and rubbed the ears of his donkey as he discussed it with her. “She passed here a few hours ago,” he said, chewing on a carrot and sharing it with the donkey. “No, she wasn’t alone. She had a ragamuffin crew of friends with her. Bodyguards, I suspect.”

“Oh, the poor frightened thing,” said the Witch. “Who? Munchkinlander beefcake boys, I wonder?”

“Not exactly,” said the peddler. “There was a straw man, and a tin woodman, and a big cat who hid in the bushes when I passed—a leopard maybe, or a cougar.”

“A man of straw?” said the Witch. “She’s awakening the figures of myth, she’s charming them to life? This must be some attractive child. Did you notice her shoes?”

“I wanted to buy them from her.”

“Yes! Yes, did you?”

“Not for sale. She seemed very attached to them. They were given her by a Good Witch.”

“Pigspittle, they were.”

“None of my affair either way,” said the peddler. “Can I interest you in anything?”

“An umbrella,” said the Witch. “I’ve come out without one, and it looks nasty.”

“I remember the good old days of the drought,” said the peddler, fishing out a somewhat worn umbrella. “Ah, here’s the bumbershoot. Yours for a nickel florin.”

“Mine for free,” said the Witch. “You wouldn’t deny a poor old woman in need, would you, my friend?”

“Not and live to tell about it, I see,” he answered, and went on his way uncompensated.

But as the wagon passed, the Witch heard another voice: “Of course, no one asks a beast of burden, but it’s my opinion she’s Ozma come out of the deep sleep chamber, and marching on Oz to restore herself to the throne.”

“I hate royalists,” said the peddler, and lashed out with a crop. “I hate Animals with attitude.” But the Witch could not stop to intervene. So far she had been unable to save Nor, she had been incompetent at bargaining with the Wizard. She had been a moment too late to murder Madame Morrible—or had she been just in time? Either way, she should not try what was clearly beyond her.

10

The Witch trembled on the lip of an updraft. She had brought the broom higher than ever before; she was in a state of exhilaration and panic. Should she pursue Dorothy, should she snatch those shoes away—and what were her real motives? Was it to keep them out of the hands of the Wizard, just as Glinda had wanted them out of the hands of power-hungry Munchkinlanders? Or was it to snatch back some small shred of Frex’s attention, whether she had ever deserved it or not?

Beneath the broom, clouds began to gauze the view of rock-freckled hills and patchwork meadows of melon and corn. The thin twists of vapor looked like the marks of erasure made by a schoolchild’s rubber, streaking whitely along a watercolor sketch of a landscape. What if she should just keep on, urging the broom higher, yanking it up? Would it splinter as it beat itself against the heavens?

She could give up these efforts. She could forsake Nor. She could release Liir. She could abandon Nanny. She could surrender Dorothy. She could give up the shoes.

But a wind came up, a shoulder of hard air leaning onto her left side. She could not force the broom against it. She was driven sideways, and down, until the Yellow Brick Road once again etched a golden thread between forests and fields. There was a storm on the horizon, slotting bars of brownish rain between lavender-gray clouds and gray-green fields. She hadn’t much time.

Then she thought she caught sight of them below, and dove down to see. Were they stopping to rest beneath a black willow tree? If so, she could finish things up now.

11

By the time the storm lifted—and the Witch awoke from what she now identified as a horrible hangover—she wasn’t sure it was the same day. She wasn’t even sure she had gotten near them—could she have let them slip through her fingers like that? But whatever the case, delusion or foggy memory, the Witch didn’t dare follow them into the Emerald City. Madame Morrible had many friends in this rotten regime, and the news would have gotten through by now. There might even be search parties out for the Witch. So be it.

Though it galled her, for the time being she had to give up on the idea of reclaiming Nessa’s shoes. She scarcely rested during the entire trip back to Kiamo Ko, except to stop and pick some berries, and nibble some nuts and sweet roots, to keep her strength up.

The castle had not been burned down. The Wizard’s reconnaissance army was still camped at its outpost near Red Windmill in a state of bored readiness. Nanny was busy crocheting a pretty casket cover for her own funeral, and making guest lists. Most of the guests were already in the Other Land, presuming that for Nanny there was an Other Land. “How nice it would be to see Ama Clutch again, I quite agree,” shouted the Witch, giving Nanny’s shoulders a squeeze. “I always liked her. She had more character than that simpering Glinda.”

“You were devoted to Glinda, you were,” said Nanny. “Everyone knew it.”

“Well, no more,” said the Witch. “The traitor.”

“You smell of blood, go wash up,” said Nanny. “Is it your time?”

“I never wash, you know that. Where’s Liir?”

“Who?”

“Liir.”

“Oh, around somewhere.” She smiled. “Look in the fishwell!”

By now an old family joke.

“What new nonsense is this?” said the Witch, finding Liir in the music room.

“They were right all along,” he said. “Look what I finally caught, after all these years.”

It was the golden carp that had long haunted the fishwell. “Oh, I admit that it was dead and I brought it up with the bucket, not a hook or a net. But even so. Do you think we’ll ever be able to tell them we finally caught it?”

All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.

“We can only hope so,” she said. She wondered, faintly, if it was

immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked? “Everything else was all right while I was gone?”

“Just fine,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re back.”

She grunted, and went to greet Chistery and the chattering kin.

In her room she hung the old glass with a cord and a nail, and kept from looking at it. She had the horrible feeling that she would see Dorothy, and she didn’t want to see her again. The child reminded her of someone. It was that unquestioning directness, that gaze unblinkered by shame. She was as natural as a raccoon—or a fern—or a comet. The Witch thought: Is it Nor? Is it that Dorothy reminds me of how Nor was at this age?

But back then the Witch had not cared for Nor, not really, even though her face had been a small, velvet reworking of Fiyero’s. Except for Nessarose, and Shell, the Witch had never warmed to the glowing promise of children. She had always felt more alone in this regard than in her color.

No—and now her glance did fall on the tired old looking glass, despite her intentions. She thought: the Witch with her mirror. Who do we ever see but ourselves, and that’s the curse—Dorothy reminds me of myself, at that age, whatever it is . . .

. . . The time in Ovvels. There is the green girl, shy, gawky, and humiliated. To avoid the pain of damp feet, splashing around in clammy leggings made of swampcalf hide and waterproof boots. Mama, pregnant with Shell, huge as a barge. Mama praying nonstop for months that she might at last bring a healthy child into the world. Mama dumping the bottles of liquor and the pinlobble leaves into the mud.

Nanny tends to little Nessa, papoosing her around in the daily hunt for charfish, needle flowers, and broad bean vines. Nessa can see but she cannot touch: what a curse for a child! (No wonder she believed in things she couldn’t see—nothing is provable by touch.) For his atonement, Papa takes the green girl with him on an expedition to the relatives of Turtle Heart, a many-branched family living in a nest of huts and walkways suspended in a grove of broad, rotting suppletrees. The Quadlings, who are more comfortable on their haunches, duck their heads. The smell of raw fish in their homes, on their skin. They are frightened of the unionist minister, finding them out in their squalid hamlet. I have no firm memory of individuals, but for one old matriarch, toothless and proud.

The Quadlings come up, after a period of shyness, not to the minister but to me, the green girl. She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she, impenetrably mysterious and dense—she stands as Dorothy stood, some inborn courage making her spine straight, her eyes unblinking. Her shoulders back, her hands at her side. Submissive to the stroke of their fingers on her face. Unflinching in the cause of missionary work.

Papa asks forgiveness for the death of Turtle Heart, maybe some five years earlier. He says it is his fault. He and his wife had both fallen in love with the Quadling glassblower. What can I give you to make up for it, he says. Elphaba the girl thinks he is mad, she thinks they are not listening, they are mesmerized by her weirdness. Please forgive me, he says.

The matriarch alone responds to these words; maybe she is the only one who actually remembers Turtle Heart. She has a look of someone caught venturing out from beneath a rock. Well, in a people whose moral code is so lax, so little is wrong. For her this encounter is a mysterious, complicated transaction.

She says something like, We don’t shrive, we don’t shrive, and not for Turtle Heart, no, and she strikes Papa on the face with a reed, cutting him with thin stripes. I was only a witness, I was not really alive then, but I saw: This was when Papa began to lose his way, it dates from this whipping.

I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable. He blanches, onion white behind the blood-pearled perforations of her attack. Maybe she has every right to do what she’s done, but in Papa’s life she’s become old Kumbricia.

I see her, willful, proud: Her moral system doesn’t allow for forgiveness, and she is just as incarcerated as he, but she doesn’t know it. She grins, all gums and menace, and rests the reed on her collarbone, where its fletching tip falls like a necklace around her own neck.

He points to me, and says—not to me, but to them all—Isn’t this punishment enough?

Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.

I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame. Neither Dorothy nor young Elphaba can speak of this, but the belief of it is in both our faces . . .

The Witch had taken the green glass bottle, whose label still read MIRACLE ELI-, and placed it on her bedside table. She took a spoonful of the ancient elixir before sleeping, hoping for miracles, seeking some version of the fabulous alibi Dorothy was unwinding, that she had come from a country somehow other—not the real states across the desert, but a whole separate geophysical existence. Even metaphysical. The Wizard made such a claim for himself, and if the dwarf was right, the Witch had this ancestry too. At night she tried to train herself to look on the periphery of her dreams, to note the details. It was a little like trying to see around the edges of a mirror, but, she found, more rewarding.

But what did she get? Everything flickered, like a guttering candle but more harshly, more stridently. People moved in short, jerky motions. They were colorless, they were vapid, they were drugged, they were manic. Buildings were high and cruel. Winds were strong. The Wizard stepped in and out of these pictures, a very humble-looking man in this context. In one window, in a shop from which the Wizard was emerging rather dejectedly, she thought, she caught some words once, and willed herself with tremendous effort to wake up so she could write them down. But they didn’t make any sense to her. NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

Then one night she had a nightmare. Again the Wizard began it. He walked over some hills of sand, with tall gray grasses blowing in a fierce gale—a thousand thousand grasses like the scratchy sedge with which the old Quadling matriarch had struck Frex—and the Wizard stopped along a broad flat stretch. He stepped out of his clothes, and looked at a timepiece in his hands, as if memorizing an historic instant. Then he walked forward, naked and broken. When the Witch realized what he was approaching, she tried to back out of the dream with a howl, but could not manage to disengage herself. This was the mythical ocean, and the Wizard walked into water up to his knees, his thighs, his waist; he paused and shivered, and slopped water over the rest of himself as a kind of penance. Then he kept walking, and disappeared entirely into the sea, as Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall had disappeared behind her watery veil. The sea rocked like an earthquake, vomiting against the sandy shore, pounding in a kettledrum commotion. There was no Other Side to it. It threw the Wizard back, again and again, though again and again he forged in, more and more exhausted. The stoicism, the determination: no wonder he had managed to overcome a nation. The dream ended with him washed back on shore one last time, weeping with frustration.

She woke, gagging, terrified beyond telling, salt in her nostrils. Thereafter she avoided the miracle elixir. Instead, she concocted a potion derived both from Nanny’s recipe book and the Grimmerie’s marginalia, on how to keep awake. If she fell asleep again, she would be prey to that vision of earthly destruction, and she would rather die.

Nanny didn’t have very much to say about nightmares. “Your mother had them too,” she remarked at last. “She used to say she saw the unknown city of anger in her dreams. She was so enraged over how you turned out, you know—I mean physically, dear, don’t look like that at me: a green girl isn’t easy for any mother to explain away—that she gulped down those pills like candy when Nessarose was expected. If Nessarose were still around to take up a grudge, she could blame you, in a way, for what happened to her.”

“But where did you get that green bottle?” said the Witch into Nanny’s good ear. “Look at it, Nanny dear, and try to remember.”

“I suspect I bought it at a jumble sale,” she said. “I could stretch a penny, believe me.”

You could stretch the truth even further, thought the Witch. She suppressed a desire to smash the green glass. How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are, thought the Witch. None of us breaks free.

12

One afternoon a few weeks later, Liir came back from a ramble all hot and bothered. The Witch hated to hear that he had been hobnobbing again with the Wizard’s soldiers down in Red Windmill.

“They had news, a dispatch from the Emerald City,” he said. “A delegation of strangers got in to see the Wizard. And just a girl! Dorothy, they said, a girl from the Other Land. And some friends. The Wizard hasn’t allowed an audience with his subjects in years—he works through ministers, they say. A lot of soldiers think he died long ago, and it’s a Palace plot to safeguard the peace. But Dorothy and her friends got in, and they saw him, and told everyone what it was like!”

“Well well,” said the Witch. “Imagine that. All of Oz, Loyal and Otherwise, is yapping about this Dorothy. What did the fools say next?”

“The dispatch soldier said that the guests asked the Wizard to grant them some wishes. The Scarecrow asked for a brain, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman asked for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion asked for courage.”

“And I suppose Dorothy asked for a shoe horn?”

“Dorothy asked to be sent home.”

“I hope she gets her wish. And?”

But Liir got coy.

“Oh come on, I’m too old to be put off my supper by gossip,” she snapped.

Liir looked flushed with guilty pleasure. “The soldiers said that the Wizard had rejected the odd requests.”

“And you’re so very surprised?”

“The Wizard told Dorothy that he would grant them their wishes—when they had—when they had—”

“You haven’t stuttered in years. Don’t start again, or I’ll beat you.”

“Dorothy and his friends have to come here and kill you,” he finished. “The soldiers said it’s because you murdered an old lady in Shiz, a famous old lady, and you’re an assassin. Also you’re crazy, they said.”

“I’m a more likely murderer than those incompetent vagabonds could be,” she said. “He was just trying to get rid of them. Probably he’s instructed his own Gale Forcers to slit the girl’s throat as soon as she’s safely out of the limelight.” And no doubt the Wizard had confiscated the shoes. It galled her. But how flattered she felt that the news of her attack had gotten out. By now she was sure she had killed Madame Morrible. It only made sense that she had.

But Liir shook his head. “The funny thing,” he said, “is that Dorothy is called Dorothy Gale. The soldiers at Red Windmill said the Gale Forcers wouldn’t touch her, they’re too superstitious.”

“What do these soldiers know of intrigue, stationed here out at the edge of the moon?”

Liir shrugged. “Aren’t you impressed that the Wizard of Oz even knows who you are? Are you a murderer?”

“Oh Liir, you’ll understand when you’re older. Or anyway not understanding will become second nature, and it won’t matter. I wouldn’t harm you, if that’s what you mean. But you sound so surprised that I should be known in the Emerald City. Just because you disobey me and treat me like refuse, do you think the whole world does?” Yet she was pleased. “But you know, Liir, if there’s even the slightest chance that there’s any truth to these rumors, you had better stay away from Red Windmill for a while. They might kidnap you and hold you for ransom until I give myself up to this schoolgirl and her needy companions.”

“I want to meet Dorothy,” he said.

“You’re not that age already, please preserve us,” she said. “I always intended to pickle you before you got to puberty.”

“Well, I’m not getting kidnapped, so don’t worry,” he said. “Besides, I want to be here when they get here.”

“Worry is the last thing I’d do if you got kidnapped,” she answered. “It’d be your own damn fault, and a great relief to me to have one less mouth to feed.”

“Oh well, then who’d carry the firewood up all those stairs every winter?”

“I’ll hire that Nick Chopper fellow. His axe looks pretty sharp to me.”

“You’ve seen him?” Liir’s mouth dropped open. “No, you haven’t!”

“I have, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Who says I don’t travel in the best circles?”

“What’s she like?” he said, his face eager and bright. “You must have seen Dorothy too. What’s she like, Auntie Witch?”

“Don’t you Auntie me, you know that makes me sick.”

He pestered without stopping until finally she had to screech at him. “She’s a beautiful little dolt who believes everything everybody says to her! And if she gets here and you tell her you love her, she’ll probably believe you! Now get out of here, I have work to do!”

He lingered at the door, and said, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?”

“A little peace and quiet.”

“No, really.”

She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—”

He blinked at her.

“And you?” she said in a quieter voice. “What do you want Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?”

“A father,” he answered.

13

She wondered, briefly, if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and thought about what she had said.

A person who doesn’t believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can’t believe in a soul.

If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?

The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

Perhaps in our age’s generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.

For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick.

More appealing—she now saw, for once—the old-timers’ notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can’t ever be suspected of a surprise visit.

And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?

14

Sometimes she napped, against her will, her chin sagging on her chest, sometimes driving right down to the tabletop, jarring her teeth and rattling her jaw, and startling herself awake.

She had taken to standing at the window, looking down in the valley. It would be weeks before Dorothy and her band arrived, if indeed they hadn’t already been murdered and their corpses burned, just as Sarima’s must have been.

One night Liir came back from a visit to the barracks. He was teary and inarticulate, and she tried not to care about it, but was too curious to let it go. Finally he told her. One of the soldiers had proposed to his fellows that when Dorothy and friends arrive, the friends be killed and Dorothy be tied up for a little amusement among the lonely, randy men.

“Oh, men will have their fantasies,” said the Witch, but she was troubled.

What had made Liir cry was that his friends had reported the soldier’s remarks to their superior. The soldier had been stripped and castrated, and nailed to the windmill. His body rotated in circles as the vultures came and tried to peck at his entrails. He still wasn’t even dead.

“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.” But she was struck at the vehemence of the Commander’s response against one of his own. So Dorothy might well be alive still, and was apparently under orders of protection from the highest military offices in the land.

Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir.

“Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?”

Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.

She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight?

If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she?

They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence.

She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow.

She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.

She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other effect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.”

It would take brains to think up such a plan.

She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would be able to find them, and lead them home rejoicing.

And though she tried not to sleep, on occasion she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.

15

There was a day, in the first gusts of autumn, that the banners and standards of the camp below were shifted and bugles blew tinnily up the slopes to the castle. By this the Witch guessed that the troupe had arrived in Red Windmill, and were being given a royal welcome. “They’ve come so far, they won’t wait now,” she said. “Go, Killyjoy, go find them and show them the quickest way here.”

She loosed the senior dog, and so strong were his exhortations that the entire pack of his kin went racing along with him, howling with joy and frantic to do their duty.

“Nanny,” cried the Witch, “put on a clean petticoat and change your apron, we’ll have company by nightfall!”

But the dogs didn’t come back, all afternoon and into the gloaming, and the Witch could see why. With a telescopic eye in a cylindrical casing—invented by the Witch along the lines of Doctor Dillamond’s discovery about opposing lenses—she followed a shock of carnage. Dorothy and the Lion trembled with the Scarecrow beyond while the Tin Woodman struck the heads of her beasts one after the other with his axe. Killyjoy and his wolfy relations lay scattered like dead soldiers on a field of retreat.

The Witch danced with rage, and summoned Liir. “Your dog is dead, look what they did!” she cried. “Look and make sure that I didn’t only imagine it!”

“Well, I didn’t like that dog very much anymore,” said Liir. “He had a good long life, anyway.” He concurred, tremblingly, but then trained the glass on the slope again.

“You fool, that Dorothy is not for messing with!” she cried, slapping the instrument out of his hand.

“You’re awfully on edge for someone about to have company,” he said sullenly.

“They are supposed to be coming to kill me, if you remember,” she said, although she had forgotten that, as she had forgotten her desire for the shoes until she saw them again in the glass. The Wizard had not demanded them of Dorothy! Why not? What fresh campaign of intrigue was this?

She wheeled about her room, whipping pages of the Grimmerie back and forth. She recited a spell, did it wrong, did it again, and then turned and tried to apply it to the crows. Though the original three crows had long since fallen stiffly from the top of the door frame, there were plenty of others in residence still, rather inbred and silly, but suggestible in a stupid, moblike way.

“Go,” she said. “Look with your eyes more closely than I can, pull the mask off the Scarecrow so we can know who he is. Get them for me. Peck out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion. And three of you, go on ahead to the old Princess Nastoya, out there in the Thousand Year Grasslands, for the time is coming when we will be reunited, all of us. With the help of the Grimmerie, the Wizard may topple at last!”

“I never know what you’re talking about anymore,” said Liir. “You can’t blind them!”

“Oh, watch me,” snarled the Witch. The crows blew away in a black cloud and dropped like buckshot through the sky, down the jagged precipices, until they came to the travelers.

“A pretty sunset, is there?” said Nanny, coming up to the Witch’s room in one of her rare forays, Chistery as always providing service.

“She’s sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!”

“What?”

“She’s BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!”

“Well, that’s one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”

“Will you lunatics hush up?” The Witch was twitching as if with a nervous disorder; her elbows flapped, as if she were a crow herself. She gave out a long howl when she found them in the glass.

“What, what, let me see,” said Liir, grabbing the thing. He explained to Nanny, because the Witch was almost beyond speech by now. “Well, I guess the Scarecrow knows how to scare crows, all right.”

“Why, what’s he done?”

“They’re not coming back, that’s all I’ll say,” said Liir, glancing at the Witch.

“It still could be him,” she said at last, breathing heavily. “You might get your wish yet, Liir.”

“My wish?” He didn’t remember asking for a father, and she didn’t bother to remind him. Nothing had yet suggested to her that the Scarecrow wasn’t a man in disguise. She would not need forgiveness if Fiyero had not died!

The light was failing, and the odd band of friends was making good time up the hill. They had come without an escort of soldiers, perhaps because the soldiers really believed that Kiamo Ko was run by a Wicked Witch.

“Come on, bees,” said the Witch, “work with me now. All together on this one, honeys. We need a little sting, we need a little zip, we want a little nasty, can you give us a little jab? No, not us, listen when I talk to you, you simpletons! The girl on the hill below. She’s after your Queen Bee! And when you’re through with your job, I’ll go down and collect those shoes.”

“What’s that old hag blathering about now?” said Nanny to Liir.

The bees were alert to the pitch in the Witch’s voice, and they rose to swarm out the window.

“You watch, I can’t look,” said the Witch.

“The moon is just like a pretty peach rising over the mountains,” said Nanny with the telescope to her old cataracted eye. “Why don’t we put in some peach trees instead of all those infernal apples in the back?”

“The bees, Nanny. Liir, take that from her and tell me what happens.”

Liir gave a blow-by-blow recounting. “They’re swooping down, they look like a genie or something, all flying in a big clump with a straggly tail. The travelers see them coming. Yes! Yes! The Scarecrow is taking straw out of his chest and leggings, and covering the Lion and Dorothy, and there’s a little dog, too. So the bees can’t get through the straw, and the Scarecrow is all in pieces on the ground.”

It couldn’t be. The Witch grabbed the eyepiece. “Liir, you are a filthy liar,” she shouted. Her heart roared like a wind.

But it was true. There was nothing but straw and air inside the Scarecrow’s clothes. No hidden lover returning, no last hope of salvation.

And the bees, having none left to attack but the Tin Woodman, flung themselves against him, and dropped in black heaps on the ground, like charred shadows, their stingers blunted on his fenders.

“You’ve got to give our guests credit for ingenuity,” said Liir.

“Will you shut up before I tie your tongue in a knot?” said the Witch.

“I suppose I should start down and get some hors d’oeuvres going, they’ll be peckish after these ordeals you’re setting them,” said Nanny. “Have you an opinion as to cheese and crackers or fresh vegetables with pepper sauce?”

“I say cheese,” said Liir.

“Elphaba? What’s your opinion?”

But she was too busy doing research in the Grimmerie. “It’s up to me, as always was the case,” said Nanny. “I get to do all the work. I’m supposed to be teary with joy, at my age. You’d think I could rest my feet for once, but no. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”

“Always the godfather, never the god,” said Liir.

“Will you two please have mercy on me! Now go on, Nanny, if you’re going!” Nanny headed out the door as fast as her old limbs could take her. The Witch said, “Chistery, let her go under her own steam, I need you here.”

“Sure, let me tumble to my death, delighted to be of service,” said Nanny. “It’s going to be cheese, for that.”

The Witch explained to Chistery what she wanted. “This is foolish. It’ll be dark before long, and they’ll tumble over some cliff and die. The poor dears, I’d rather not. I mean the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, they can tumble all they want, and not be much hurt, I imagine. A good tinsmith could repair a battered torso. But bring me Dorothy and the Lion. Dorothy has my shoes, and I have a rendezvous with the Lion. We’re old friends. Can you do this?”

Chistery squinted, nodded, shook his head, shrugged, spat.

“Well try, what good are you if you don’t try,” she said. “Off with you, and your cronies with you.”

She turned to Liir. “There, are you satisfied? I haven’t asked them to be killed. They’re being escorted here as our guests. I’ll get the shoes and let them go on their way. And then I’ll walk this Grimmerie into the mountains and live in a cave. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Who needs forgiveness now? Well?”

“They’re coming to kill you,” he said.

“Yes, and aren’t you just breathless with anticipation for that!”

“I’ll protect you,” he said, uneasily, and then added, “but not to the extent of harming Dorothy.”

“Oh, go set the table, and tell Nanny to forget the cheese and crackers, and go with the vegetables.” She shook her broom at him. “Go, I tell you, when I tell you to go!”

When she was alone, she sank in a heap. Either phenomenal luck lay with these travelers, or they had enough courage, brains, and heart among them to do quite well. She was taking the wrong approach, clearly. She should welcome the child, explain the situation nicely, and get the damned shoes while she could. With the shoes, with the help of the Princess Nastoya, maybe there would be vengeance against the Wizard yet. Anyway, the Grimmerie would be hidden. One way or the other. And the shoes removed outside the Wizard’s reach.

But the shock of the death of her familiars made her blood run cold inside her. She could feel her thoughts and intentions tumbling over and over one another. And she wasn’t really sure what she would do when face-to-face with Dorothy.

16

Liir and Nanny stood on either side of the doorway, smiling, when Chistery and his companions came down with an ill-judged whump, dumping their passengers onto the cobbles of the inner courtyard. The Lion moaned in pain and wept from vertigo. Dorothy sat up, clutching the small dog in her arms, and said, “And where might we be now?”

“Welcome,” said Nanny, genuflecting.

“Hello,” said Liir, twisting one foot around the other and falling over into a bucket of water.

“You must be tired after your long trip,” said Nanny. “Would you like to freshen up some before we have a little light meal? Nothing fancy, you know, we’re way off the beaten track.”

“This is Kiamo Ko,” said Liir, beet red and standing up again. “The stronghold of the Arjiki tribe.”

“This is still Winkie territory?” said the girl anxiously.

“What’d she say, the little poppins, tell her to speak up,” said Nanny.

“It’s called the Vinkus,” said Liir. “Winkie is a kind of insult.”

“Oh goodness, I wouldn’t want to offend anyone!” she said. “Mercy, no.”

“Aren’t you a pretty little girl, all your arms and legs in the right place, and such delicate sensible inoffensive skin,” said Nanny, smiling.

“I’m Liir,” he said, “and I live here. This is my castle.”

“I’m Dorothy,” she said, “and I’m very worried about my friends—the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow. Oh, please, can’t somebody do something for them? It’s dark, and they’ll be lost!”

“They can’t be hurt. I’ll go get them tomorrow in the daylight,” said Liir. “Promise. I’d do anything. Really, anything.”

“You’re so sweet, just like everyone else here,” said Dorothy. “Oh, Lion, are you all right? Was it terrible?”

“If the Unnamed God had wanted Lions to fly, he’d have given them hot-air balloons,” said the Lion. “I’m afraid I lost my lunch somewhere over the ravine.”

“Warm welcomes,” Nanny chirped. “We’ve been expecting you. I’ve worn my fingers to the bone, making a little something. It’s not much, but everything we have is yours. That’s our motto here in the mountains. The traveler is always welcome. Now let’s go find some hot water and soap at the pump, shall we, and then go in.”

“You’re too kind—but I need to find the Wicked Witch of the West,” Dorothy said. “I said THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST. I’m so sorry to trouble you. And it looks like a perfectly wonderful castle. Perhaps on the way back, if my travels take me this way.”

“Oh, well, she lives here, too,” said Liir. “With me. Don’t worry, she’s here.”

Dorothy looked a little pale. “She is?”

The Witch appeared at the doorway. “She is indeed, and here she is,” she said, and came down the steps at a clip, her skirts whirling, her broom hurrying to keep up. “Well, Chistery, you did good work! I’m glad to see all my efforts haven’t been for naught. You, Dorothy, Dorothy Gale, the one whose house had the nerve to make a crash landing on my sister!”

“Well, it wasn’t my house, in a legal sense, strictly speaking,” said Dorothy, “and in fact it hardly belonged much to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, except for maybe a couple of windows and the chimney. I mean the Mechanics and Farmers First State Bank of Wichita holds the mortgage, so they’re the responsible parties. I mean if you need to be in touch with someone. They’re the bank that cares,” she explained.

The Witch felt suddenly, oddly calm. “It’s nothing to me who owns the house,” she said. “The fact is that my sister was alive before you arrived, and now she’s dead.”

“Oh, and I’m so very sorry about that,” said Dorothy nervously. “Really I am. I’d have done anything to avoid it. I know how terrible I’d feel if a house fell on Auntie Em. Once a board in the porch roof fell on her. She had a big bump on her head and sang hymns all afternoon, but by evening she was her old cranky self.”

Dorothy tucked her little dog under her arm and went up and took the Witch’s hands in hers. “Really I’m sorry,” she insisted. “It’s a terrible thing to lose someone. I lost my parents when I was small, and I remember.”

“Get off me,” said the Witch, “I hate false sentiment. It makes my skin crawl.”

But the girl held on, with a ragged sort of intensity, and said nothing, just waited.

“Let go, let go,” said the Witch.

“Were you close to your sister?” asked Dorothy.

“That’s not the point,” she snapped.

“Because I was very close to my Mama, and when she and Papa were lost at sea, I could hardly bear it.”

“Lost at sea, how do you mean,” said the Witch, detaching herself from the clinging child.

“They were on their way to visit my grandmama in the old country, because she was dying, and a storm came up and their ship went over and broke in half and sank to the bottom of the sea. And they drowned, every soul onboard.”

“Oh, so they had souls,” said the Witch, her mind recoiling at the image of a ship in all that water.

“And still do. That’s all they have left, I suspect.”

“Please will you not cling so. And come in for something to eat.”

“Come on, you too,” said the girl to the Lion, and it sulkily rolled onto its big padded paws and followed along.

So now we turn into a restaurant, thought the Witch darkly. What, shall I send a flying monkey down to Red Windmill to engage a violinist, for mood music? What a most peculiar murderer she is turning out to be.

The Witch began to think about how she might disarm the girl. It was hard to tell what her weapons were, except for that sort of inane good sense and emotional honesty.

During dinner Dorothy began to cry.

“What, she would have preferred the vegetables to the cheese?” said Nanny.

But the girl would not answer. She set both her hands on the scrubbed oaken tabletop, and her shoulders shook with grief. Liir longed to get up and wrap his arms around her. The Witch nodded grimly that he was to stay put. He whacked his milk mug hard on the table, in annoyance.

“It’s all very nice,” Dorothy said at last, sniffling, “but I am so worried for Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. Uncle Henry frets so when I’m just a wee bit late from the schoolhouse, and Auntie Em—well, she can be so cross when she’s upset!”

“All Aunties are cross,” said Liir.

“Eat up, for who knows when another meal will come your way,” said the Witch.

The girl tried to eat, but kept dissolving in tears. Eventually Liir began to tear up, too. The little dog, Toto, begged for scraps, which made the Witch think of her own losses. Killyjoy, who had been with her eight years, a fly-ridden corpse going stiff on the hill among all his progeny. She cared less about the bees and the crows, but Killyjoy was her special pet.

“Well, this is some party,” said Nanny. “I wonder if I should have prettied things up with a candle.”

“Kindle candle can dull,” said Chistery.

Nanny lit a candle and sang “Happy Birthday to You,” to make Dorothy feel better, but no one joined in.

Then silence fell. Only Nanny kept eating, finishing the cheese and starting on the candle. Liir was turning white and pink by turns, and Dorothy had begun to stare blankly at a knothole in the polished wood of the trestle table. The Witch scratched her fingers with her knife, and ran the blade along her forefinger softly, as if it were the feather of a pfenix.

“What’s going to happen to me,” said Dorothy, lapsing into a monotone. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Nanny, Liir,” said the Witch, “take yourselves off to the kitchen. Bring the Lion with you.”

“Is that old bag talking to me?” Nanny asked Liir. “Why’s the little girl crying, our food not good enough for her?”

“I’m not leaving Dorothy’s side!” said the Lion.

“Don’t I know you?” said the Witch in a low, even voice. “You were the cub they did experiments with in the science lab at Shiz long ago. You were terrified then and I spoke up for you. I’ll save you again if you behave.”

“I don’t want to be saved,” said the Lion petulantly.

“I know the feeling,” said the Witch. “But you can teach me something about Animals in the wild. Whether they revert, or how much. I take it you were raised in the wild. You can be of service. You can protect me when I go out of here with my Grimmerie, my book of magicks, my Malleus Maleficarum, my mesmerizing incunabulum, my codex of scarabee, fylfot and gammadion, my text thaumaturgical.”

The Lion roared, so suddenly they were all jolted in their seats, even Dorothy. “Thunder at night, devil’s delight,” observed Nanny, glancing out the window. “I better take in the laundry.”

“I’m bigger than you,” said the Lion to the Witch, “and I’m not letting Dorothy alone with you.”

The Witch swooped down and gathered the little dog in her arms. “Chistery, go dump this thing in the fishwell,” she said. Chistery looked dubious, but scampered away with Toto under his arm like a yapping furry loaf of bread.

“Oh no, save him, someone!” said Dorothy. The Witch shot out her hand and pinned her to the table, but the Lion had catapulted into the kitchen after the snow monkey and Toto.

“Liir, lock the kitchen door,” shouted the Witch. “Bar it so they can’t come back.”

“No, no,” cried Dorothy, “I’ll go with you, just don’t hurt Toto! He’s done nothing to you!” She turned to Liir, and said, “Please don’t let that monkey hurt my Toto. The Lion is useless, don’t trust him to save my little dog!”

“Do I take it we’ll have pudding by the fire?” said Nanny, looking up brightly. “It’s caramel custard.”

The Witch took Dorothy’s hand and began to lead her away. Liir suddenly leaped over and took hold of Dorothy’s other hand. “You old hag, let her alone,” he shouted.

“Liir, really, you pick the most awkward times to develop character,” said the Witch wearily, quietly. “Don’t embarrass yourself and me with this charade of courage.”

“I’ll be all right—just take care of Toto,” said Dorothy. “Oh Liir, take care of Toto, no matter what—please. He needs a home.”

Liir leaned over and kissed Dorothy, who fell against the wall in astonishment.

“Release me,” mumbled the Witch. “Whatever my faults, I don’t deserve this.”

17

She pushed Dorothy ahead of her into the tower room, and locked the door behind her. The long period of sleeplessness was making her head spin. “What have you come for,” she said to the girl. “I know why you have tramped all the way from the Emerald City—but go on, tell me to my face! Have you come to murder me, as the rumors say—or do you carry a message from the Wizard, maybe? Is he now willing to bargain the book for Nor? The magic for the child? Tell me! Or—I know—he has instructed you to steal my book! Is it that!”

But the girl only backed away, looking left and right, for an escape. There was no way out except the window, and that was a deadly fall.

“Tell me,” said the Witch.

“I am all alone in a strange land, don’t make me do this,” said the girl.

“You came to kill me and then to steal the Grimmerie!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“First give me the shoes,” said the Witch, “for they’re mine. Then we’ll talk.”

“I can’t, they won’t come off,” said the girl, “I think that Glinda put a spell on them. I’ve been trying to get them off for days. My socks are so sweaty, it’s not to be believed.”

“Give them me!” snarled the Witch. “If you go back to the Wizard with them, you’ll be playing right into his hands!”

“No, look, they’re stuck!” shouted the girl. She kicked at one heel with the other toe. “Look, see, I’m trying, I’m trying, they won’t come off, honest, promise! I tried to give them to the Wizard when he demanded them, but they wouldn’t come off! There’s something the matter with them, they’re too tight or something! Or maybe I’m growing.”

“You have no right to those shoes,” said the Witch. She circled. The girl backed away, stumbling over furniture, knocking over the beehive, and stepping on the queen bee, who had emerged from the fragments.

“Everything I have, every little thing I have, dies when you come across it,” said the Witch. “There’s Liir down below, ready to throw me over for the sake of a single kiss. My beasts are dead, my sister is dead, you strew death in your path, and you’re just a girl! You remind me of Nor! She thought the world was magic, and look what happened to her!”

“What, what happened?” said Dorothy, pitiably playing for time.

“She found out just how magic it was, she was kidnapped, and lives her miserable life as a political prisoner!”

“But so have you kidnapped me, and I asked for none of it, nothing. You must have mercy.”

The Witch came near and grabbed the girl by the wrist. “Why do you want to murder me,” she said. “Can you really believe the Wizard will do as he says? He doesn’t know what truth means, so he does not even know how he lies! And I did not kidnap you, you fool! You came here of your own accord, to murder me!”

“I didn’t come to murder anyone,” said the girl, shrinking back.

“Are you the Adept?” said the Witch suddenly. “Aha! Are you the Third Adept? Is that it? Nessarose, Glinda and you? Did Madame Morrible conscript you for service to the hidden power? You work in collusion: my sister’s shoes, my friend’s charm, and your innocent strength. Admit it, admit you’re the Adept! Admit it!”

“I’m not adept, I’m adopted,” said the girl. “I’m sure not adept at anything, can’t you tell that?”

“You’re my soul come scavenging for me, I can feel it,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have a soul; with a soul there is everlastingness, and life has tortured me enough.”

The Witch pulled Dorothy back to the corridor, and stuck the end of her broom in a torch fire. Nanny was hobbling up the stairs leaning on Chistery, who had some dishes of pudding on a tray. “I locked the whole lot of them in the kitchen until they stop their roughhousing,” Nanny was muttering. “Such a hubbub, such a racket, such a wild rumpus, Nanny won’t have it, Nanny is too old. They’re all beasts.”

Below, in the dusty recesses of Kiamo Ko, the dog barked once or twice, the Lion roared and pounded against the kitchen door, and Liir shrieked, “Dorothy, we’re coming!” But the Witch turned and shot out her foot, and toppled Nanny over. The old woman rolled and slid, oohing and woohing, down the stairs, Chistery chasing after her in consternation. The kitchen door had burst its hinges, and the Lion and Liir came tumbling out, falling over the big heap of Nanny at the foot of the stairs. “Up, you, up,” shouted the Witch, “I’ll have done with you before you have done with me!”

Dorothy had wrenched herself free and dashed up the corkscrew stairs of the tower ahead of the Witch. There was only one exit, and that was to the parapet. The Witch followed in good speed, needing to finish the deed before the Lion and Liir arrived. She would get the shoes, she would take the Grimmerie, she would abandon Liir and Nor, and disappear into the wilderness. She would burn the book and the shoes, and then she would bury herself.

Dorothy was a dark shape, huddled over, retching on the stones.

“You haven’t answered my question,” said the Witch, poking the torch up high, releasing spectres and ghosts among the shadows of the castellations. “You’ve come hunting me down, and I want to know. Why will you murder me?”

The Witch slammed the door behind her and locked it. All the better.

The girl could only gasp.

“You think they’re not telling stories about you all over Oz? You think I don’t know the Wizard sent you here to bring back proof that I was dead?”

“Oh, that,” said Dorothy, “that is true, but that’s not why I came!”

“You can’t possibly be a competent liar, not with that face!” The Witch held the broom up at an angle. “Tell me the truth, and when you’ve finished, then I’ll kill you, for in times like these, my little one, you must kill before you are killed.”

“I couldn’t kill you,” said the girl, weeping. “I was horror-struck to have killed your sister. How could I kill you too?”

“Very charming,” said the Witch, “very nice, very touching. Then why did you come here?”

“Yes, the Wizard said to murder you,” Dorothy said, “but I never intended to, and that’s not why I came!”

The Witch held the burning broom even higher, closer, to look in the girl’s face.

“When they said . . . when they said that it was your sister, and that we had to come here . . . it was like a prison sentence, and I never wanted to . . . but I thought, well, I would come, and my friends would come with me to help . . . and I would come . . . and I would say . . .”

“Say what,” cried the Witch, on the edge.

“I would say,” said the girl, straightening up, gritting her teeth, “I would say to you: Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!”

The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what? A fragment of the brush of the broom fluttered off, and lit on her skirt, and there was a run of flames in her lap, eating up the dryest tinder in the Vinkus. “Oh, will this nightmare never end,” screamed Dorothy, and she grabbed at a bucket for collecting rainwater that, in the sudden flare-up of light, had come into view. She said, “I will save you!” and she hurled the water at the Witch.

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.

They become others; they become Nanny in her prime, tart and officious; and Ama Clutch and Ama Vimp and the other Amas, lumped together now in a maternal blur. They become Boq, sweet and lithe and earnest, as yet unbowed; and Crope and Tibbett in their funny, campy anxiety to be liked; and Avaric in his superiority. And Glinda in her gowns, waiting to be good enough to deserve what she gets.

And the ones whose stories are over: Manek and Madame Morrible and Doctor Dillamond and most of all Fiyero, whose blue diamonds are the blues of water and of sulfurous fire both. And the ones whose stories are curiously unfinished—was it to be like this?—the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, whose help could not arrive in time; and Liir, the mysterious foundling boy, pushing out of his pea pod. Sarima, who in her loving welcome and sisterliness would not forgive, and Sarima’s sisters and children and future and past . . .

And the ones who fell to the Wizard, including Killyjoy and the other resident creatures; and behind them the Wizard himself, a failure until he exiled himself from his own land; and behind him Yackle, whoever she was, if anyone, and the anonymous Adepts, if they existed, and the dwarf, who had no name to share.

And the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.

18

Oz stretched out from Kiamo Ko a good several hundred miles to the west and north, and even farther to the east and south. On the night the Wicked Witch of the West died, anyone with the eyes to see so well could have looked out from the parapet. Westward, the moon was rising over the Thousand Year Grasslands. Though the peaceful Yunamata refused to join them, the Arjiki clans and the Scrow were meeting to consider a pact of alliance, given the Wizard’s armies massing up in Kumbricia’s Pass. The Arjiki chieftain and the Princess Nastoya agreed to send a delegation to the Witch of the West, and ask for guidance and support. As they toasted her and wished her well, not an hour after her death, the messenger crows Elphaba had dispatched for help were swooped upon by nocturnal rocs and devoured.

The moon ran silver up and down the sides of the Great Kells, and silver shadows settled in the valleys of the Lesser Kells. The scorpions of the Sour Sands came out to sting, the skark of the Thursk Desert mated in their nests. At the Kvon Altar practitioners of a sect so obscure that it had no name made their nightly oblations for the souls of the dead, assuming, as most do, that the dead had had souls.

The Quadling Country, a wasteland of mud and frogs, rotted quietly all night, except for an incident in Qhoyre. A Crocodile entered a nursery and chewed up a small baby. The Animal was destroyed, and both corpses were burned, with loud wailing and anger.

In Gillikin, the banks turned over their money to keep it fresh and vibrant, the factories turned over their wares, the merchants turned over their wives, the students in Shiz turned over intellectual propositions, and the tiktok labor force met secretly, in what had used to be the Philosophy Club, to hear the freed and grieving Grommetik talk class revolution. Lady Glinda had a bad night, a night of shakes and regret and pain; she guessed it was the early signs of gout from her rich diet. But she sat up half the night and lit a candle in a window, for reasons she couldn’t articulate. The moon passed overhead in its path from the Vinkus, and she felt its accusatory spotlight, and moved back from the tall windows.

Across the low ridge of hills known as the Madeleines, into the Corn Basket, looking into the windows of Colwen Grounds, the moon continued its journey. Frex was asleep, dreaming of Turtle Heart and yes, of Melena, his beautiful Melena, making him breakfast on the day he went in to preach against the evil clock. Melena was a froth of beauty, huge as a world, spinning him courage, daring, love. Frex hardly stirred when Shell tiptoed in, back from some clandestine rendezvous, and came to sit by the side of his bed. Shell wasn’t sure he noticed, he wasn’t sure his father really woke up. “What I never could understand was the teeth,” mumbled Frex, “why the teeth?”

“Who knows why?” said Shell fondly, not understanding the dreamy murmur.

The moon on the Emerald City? It couldn’t be seen; lights too bright, energy too high, spirits too wired. No one looked for it. In a room, surprisingly bare and simple for one so powerful and elevated, the sleepless Wizard of Oz wiped his brow, and wondered how long his luck would hold out. He had been wondering the same thing for forty years, and he had hoped that luck would begin to seem habitual, deserved. But he could hear the very mice chewing away at the foundations of his Palace. The arrival of that Dorothy Gale, from Kansas, was a summons, he knew it; he knew it when he saw her face. There was no point in searching after the Grimmerie any longer. His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

He had sent Dorothy, locked in those shoes as she was, to kill the Witch. He had sent a girl in to do a man’s job. If the Witch was the victor—well, that was the troublesome girl out of the way, then. Perversely, though, in a fatherly way, he half hoped Dorothy would get through her trials all right.

It became a celebrated event, the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was hailed as political assassination or a juicy murder. Dorothy’s description of what had happened was deemed self-delusion, at best, or a bald-faced lie. Murder or mercy killing or accident, in an indirect way it helped rid the country of its dictator.

Dorothy, more stunned than ever, made her way back to the Emerald City with the Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and Liir. There Dorothy had her second famous audience with the Wizard. Perhaps he again tried to pry the slippers off her for his own purposes, and perhaps Dorothy outwitted him, spurred by the Witch’s warnings. At any rate, she presented him with something from the Witch’s house to prove that she had been there. The broom had been burnt beyond recognition, and the Grimmerie had seemed too cumbersome to carry, so she brought the green glass bottle that said MIRACLE ELI- on the paper glued to the front.

It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived—a hot-air balloon—just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

A lot of nonsense has been circulated about how Dorothy left Oz. There are some who say that she never did; they say as they said of Ozma before her that she is in hiding, in disguise, patient as a maiden, waiting to come back and show herself again. Others insist she flew up into the sky like a saint ascending to the Other Land, waving her apron giddily and clutching that damn fool dog.

Liir disappeared into the sea of humanity in the Emerald City, to hunt for his half-sister, Nor. He was not heard of again for some time.

Whatever may have happened to the original shoes, everyone remembered them as beautiful, even stunning. Well-fashioned name-brand imitations were always available and never went out of style for very long. The shoes or their replicas, with their suggestion of residual magic, cropped up at so many public ceremonies that, like the relics of saints, they began to multiply to fill the need.

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is—alas, or perhaps thank mercy—no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

“And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time.”

“And did she ever come out?”

“Not yet.”