THE AIR in the mauntery parlor seemed to have settled, as if nothing were alive but the past. “Not too much to say about the first years,” he concluded. The room had a funny buzz to it, though. Old granny vigor mortis was listening so cannily that the Lion began to wonder if he had shared more about his origins than the sentence or two he remembered speaking aloud. She’s a tricky one, he thought.
“Talented, rather than tricky,” she cut in. “But how did you come upon the name Brrr?”
“If you can read my mind,” he said, “—which frankly I find an abuse of my fucking privacy—then you know already.”
“I don’t read minds, and you haven’t got enough of a mind to browse through anyway.”
“What’s being an oracle, then, if you can’t read minds?”
She replied, “I can only guess at what you are thinking, and truth to tell, I’m not quite up to room temperature yet. Playing dead myself has caused me to lose a little of my usual concentration.”
“I don’t know who named me Brrr,” he told her, “and it doesn’t matter. Now you tell me of your own origins. For the record. For when I file my findings.”
“None of us knows our own origins. We only know what we’re told by our parents and the mythography of our national anthems.”
“Don’t hold out on me. Look, I gave you what you wanted. I offend you by being honest? Get used to it. Story of my life, which you can stay the hell out of.”
“I’m the last one to be offended at human behavior,” she replied calmly, “so a Lion’s petty moral conundrums mean even less to me. Besides, I’m no blushing spiritual nosegay myself.”
“Well, then, get on with it, will you? Why are you implicated in Madame Morrible’s journal? I haven’t got all day. I can’t read your mind, I can’t even read your expression, since your eyes are so screwed up. The Court doesn’t want minor philosophies. It wants the facts.”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
He mused. “A barter system. Like the Ozmists proposed, once upon a time. You want something of me, too. Don’t you? You must, since you’ve taken pains not to die till I got here. Well, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” He grunted. “You look like you got a mighty arthritic hunch on your back.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. Whatever could you do for me?”
“You tell me.”
She sat silent. He’d got her thinking. He was sure she was bargaining, too, though he didn’t yet know over what. He’d promise her the world to get this job over with. She wouldn’t live long enough to collect.
He slapped his notebook against his forehead as if to attract the attention of a simpleton. “I’m ready when you are.” He flipped the book open again. “It’s your relationship with the Thropp family that the Court is tracking down,” he said. If she called him on his dissembling—his peddling not a lie so much as a disguised truth—he’d have proof that she was the real deal, not a charlatan.
He was gratified at her response. In her chair she reared back a little, her dry, flaking nostrils flaring like those of a panicky horse.
“For what use does the Court want my deposition?” she demanded to know.
“When did you come to be involved with the Thropps of Colwen Grounds, Munchkinland?”
“Has she come back?” said Yackle. “Is she here?”
“Who?” said Brrr. He stifled a wince of triumph. It had worked. Even a seer could be startled, it seemed. “Which one do you mean?”
“Elphaba, of course,” said Yackle.
And, dullard that he was, Brrr could sense it: The mention of Elphaba, of her sorry history, had hurried a flush into Yackle’s old veins. Whoever she was herself, old Mother Yackle, death-defying crone, she was still human enough to be corrupted by feeling. After all these years, an ounce of regret or something else very urgent still tainted the bucketful of blood that seeped beneath her bunched, crepelike skin.
He saw this. He had her. He wasn’t as stupid as he thought.
“Has Candle been found?” she said. “And Liir?”
She had mentioned Liir before. Well, some folks just knew the wrong things to say. Liir was another thorn in the Lion’s own sore past, and he didn’t want to think about how casually he’d sauntered away from the homeless boy without a second thought.
Brrr flipped open his notebook again. “It’s your turn to talk, Yackle. And I got evidence from other sources to check your statement against, so don’t try slinging some phony hash at me, fair enough?”
She chewed on the nail of her little finger. It looked as if she were dining on the fin of a lake narwhal. Beyond the room, a gust of autumn wind rattled the drying ivy clinging to the shutters. “I hear a noise of marching,” she said at last.
“The Emerald City divisions are tramping their muddy boots into Munchkinland,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? On the grounds of retaliation. Self-defense by way of colonization, probably.”
“I never attended to human politics.”
“That’s sound practice. Stay far away. Very far away. Listen, you want the background? So far as I can pick up, our glorious Emperor asserts that he is the de facto Eminent Thropp, the satrap of Munchkinland. Because his great-grandfather was the Eminent Thropp those three, four generations back. Shell, the Apostle Emperor, claims a right to the manor house of Colwen Grounds, to the demesne, and even more so, to the governorship of the province. So he’s about to re-annex the Free State of Munchkinland.”
“But the Eminent Thropp had daughters, and the rights of inheritance pass down through the female line. Even I remember that much.”
“Ah, but Shell is the last of the line, and both his sisters, Elphaba and Nessarose, died without issue.”
“But did they?” cried Yackle.
“What do you know about it,” he asked, “and furthermore, to the point, why do you care?”
His voice was brutal, even in his own ear. He must be anxious, more than he wants to show, she thought. But she had no room for him right now, when her own tinderbox of memories was flaring to the strike. Her eyes, which had not yielded up moisture for a decade, went gummy, and her heart went hard and soft by turns.
“Tell me when you first became aware of them all,” he said. “Why not? It might help. You may be an oracle, but no oracle can know everything.”
At that remark of his, her sloppy tears did fall. When they dropped on her immaculate winding sheet, small tear-shaped holes burned through, showing shadowy flesh, rucked like flaky pastry.
“I will hold you to your promise,” she said, when she could speak, “or I will kill you.” Standing, she gripped the back of the chair as if she were at a Testimonial Pulpit. What was left of her irises rolled up into her head, slowly. It turned his stomach so far around he felt he could taste his own shit.
She didn’t begin to speak until there was nothing left but the whites of her eyes, like bloodshot stones embedded in her skull.
WHEN DID I first become aware of them? Of the witches of Oz?