To Call Winter upon Water

1.

One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tell, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green.

Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part.

The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn’t see over horizons of any sort. At a small clearing where (she later realized) a farmer’s cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass.

The mouse pelt was still soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and all, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk.

She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away.

It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret.

She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.

2.

Please,” said Miss Murth. “He won’t take no for an answer. It’s been an hour and a half.” She laid her palm on her bosom as if, thought Glinda, it were in danger of being noticed. Her fingers fluttered. Murth’s fingers were notched and rickety, like her teeth.

“There is no need to be afraid of men, Miss Murth.”

“It’s an imposition for you to be expected to receive visitors when you are not ‘at home,’ but these are trying times, Lady Glinda. You must hurry. And I can tell by the bars and braids upon his dress uniform that he is a commanding officer.”

“How commanding? Don’t answer that. At least he carries dress uniform into the field.” She worked with a brush and then plunged an ivory comb into her hair, buttressing a heap of it at the nape of her neck. Ah, hair. “This whole thing is vexing. When I was young and at school, Miss Murth—”

“You’re still young, Lady Glinda—”

“Compared to some. Don’t interrupt. How times have changed!—that a woman of position can be importuned almost at the doors of her boudoir. And without so much as a letter of introduction.”

“I know. Can I help you in any way…?”

Glinda picked up a small looking glass with a handle of rather fine design. She peeked at her face, her eyes, her lips—oh, the start of vertical pleats below the join of chin to neck; before long she would look like a concertina. But what could she do? Under the circumstances. A little more powder above the eyebrows, perhaps. At least she was younger than Miss Murth, who was hugging senility. “You may give me your appraisal, Miss Murth.”

“Quite acceptable, Lady Glinda. There aren’t many who could wear a sprigged foxille with such confidence … under these circumstances.”

“Considering we’re wallowing in a civil war, you mean? Don’t answer that. Show the unwelcome visitor to the pergola. I shall be down presently.”

“In any weather, you do us proud, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda said nothing more for the moment, just waved her hand. Miss Murth disappeared. Glinda continued to dally at her dressing table in order to buy time to think. Strategy had never been her strong suit. So far the time spent over her toilet had bought her precious little except for a manicure. Well, she could admire her cuticles after the chains were slapped on, if that was where this was heading.

She was affixing an earring when the door burst open and Miss Murth entered the room backward. “Sir, I protest, I do protest—Madame, I have protested—Sir, I insist!” He pushed her into a chair so hard that three top buttons of her respectable blouse popped and spun onto the floor. Several inches of Miss Murth’s private neck were exposed. She grabbed a pillow to conceal herself.

Poor little me, surrounded by the retinue I deserve, thought Glinda. She nodded at Cherrystone and waved to a tufted stool. He remained standing.

“I was told you were ready to see me,” said General Cherrystone.

“Well, I was almost ready to see you in the pergola, where thanks to the grapevines the light is less accusatory.” She finished putting on the second earring. “Still, we must move with the times. Miss Murth, if you have finished composing yourself? A little air, the window, such stifling… Excuse the atmosphere, sir. Ladies in their chambers and all that.”

“I was afraid I’d hear that you’d been spotted leaving through the servants’ entrance and taken into custody by my men. I wanted to spare you the indignity. I assumed that ninety minutes was enough for you to compose yourself, and I see I was right. You remain a captivating woman, Lady Glinda.”

“When I was the Throne Minister of Oz, that would have been a most impertinent remark. Still, I’m retired now, so thanks a lot. To what boysy sort of escapade do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“Don’t play the naïf; it doesn’t suit you any longer. I’m here to requisition Mockbeggar Hall.”

“But of course you’ll do nothing of the sort. You have no grounds and I am certain you have no authority. You will stay for elevenses though? Do.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that your name has come up for questioning in the Emerald City. For your refusal to evacuate the premises. Some call it seditious.”

She studied him before he spoke. It had been some years since their paths had crossed, and she had once been his boss. Had she treated him well? But what did that matter? Here he was. With a good head of hair; she admired that in any man past fifty. Though the gloss in his locks was gone, and the color was of dirty coins. He’d shaved. A missed stand of stubble under one ear betrayed the grey. Shaved—for her? Should she feel flattered? Curious: his eyes were no more guarded than they’d once been. That was how he had gotten ahead, she thought—oh, mercy, a moment of clarity, how unusual and piercing, but concentrate, what was that thought again?—Cherrystone had always seemed … approachable. Sanguine. Ordinary, cheery. Those peppery, bitten smiles, the self-deprecation. The shrugs. A pose like any other. Beware, Galinda, she said to herself, not realizing she was addressing herself with her childhood name.

“Sedition?” she ventured. “Bizarre, but you’re joking.”

He spoke in even tones, as if briefing a dull-witted client. “Lady Glinda. Loyal Oz has mounted an invasion of Munchkinland. We are at war. Under the circumstances, the Emerald City magistrates have found your refusal to leave Mockbeggar Hall and Munchkinland all but treasonous. You hardly need me to explain; the Emperor’s counsel has sent you petitions by diplomatic pouch, to which you have refused to respond.”

“I’m not much for correspondence. I could never choose the right stationery, rainbows or butterflies.”

“You make it impossible for anyone to mount a case in your favor. Even your supporters in the EC are flummoxed at your obstinacy. What’s your rationale? Lord Chuffrey, rest his soul, was from the capital, while you originate in Gillikin Country. You can claim no family roots here. Ergo, your insistence at residing in a state with which we are at war is tantamount to a betrayal of Loyal Oz.”

“Is that what determines one as a traitor these days? One’s address?”

“It makes no difference now. It’s my sad duty to inform you that you are under arrest. Still”—the good guy at work, she saw it—“you’re free to make a statement on record, as we have a witness in your lady-in-waiting. What do you call yourself? A rebel? Or a loyalist?”

“I call myself well bred, which means not talking politics in society.”

He gave a half-nod, though she couldn’t guess if it was acknowledgment of protocol or proof that he considered her borderline berserk. Still, he continued in a dogged manner. “You understand the thinking of the EC magistrates. You must. Mockbeggar Hall is in Munchkinland. And you haven’t been seen in the city in five years. You haven’t hosted a soirée in your house in Mennipin Square in too many seasons to count.”

“When one has become famous, one finds it harder to go out to the shops without being pestered by well-wishers and rabble. And really: Where would I go? The Emerald City? Please. I couldn’t step foot outside the front door in Mennipin Square without people flocking to me. It’s tiresome to have to … beam so. My face hurts.”

He looked as if he thought her quite the incapable liar.

Doggedly she went on. “I prefer the quiet life now. I look after my garden… I train the climbing roses, deadhead the pansies.” This was sounding feeble. “I like to arrange flowers.”

Their eyes both drifted to a milk jug on the table between them where a fistful of listing tulips, papery and translucent with age, had dropped a few browned petals. Sad, really. Condemning. She tried again. “In truth, I’ve been composing my memoirs, and the country is conducive to reflection, don’t you see.”

“But why have you parked yourself in a country home abroad instead of in Loyal Oz, from where the Arduennas and the Uplands hail?”

“Darling Cherrystone. Lord Chuffrey’s family had this house long before Munchkinland seceded—what, is it thirty years ago by now? And when I became Throne Minister, and this place remained accessible via the east-leading branch of the Yellow Brick Road, why shouldn’t I repair here? I could get back and forth to the capital with ease and safety.”

“You could have relocated. There are other great houses within a few days’ ride of the Palace.”

“But this house. It’s the real thing. Pallantine Revival, don’t you know. Without any of those tacky so-called improvements affixed with sticky tape and safety pins … no, it’s simply the best of its kind. You must have noticed the twice-etched pillars inlaid with strabbous onyx on either side of the south porch? In ranks of three? Genuine Parrith’s, I tell you, verified by the Parrith Society. He didn’t work in onyx anywhere else, not even in the Emerald City.”

“In fidelity to the nation, a patriot would pick up and move house…” His tone was ominous, as if he had forgotten to notice the south porch. The oaf.

“This house doesn’t move. Most don’t. Or are you referring to Dorothy?” she said coldly. “She moved house rather capably, as we all remember. Mercy, could she move house.”

“Always clever. But, Lady Glinda, you align yourself with the wrong sort if you do not step in line.”

“I didn’t draw this line, or any others. And if by ‘the wrong sort’ you are referring to the departed Thropp sisters, Nessarose and Elphaba, well, that’s tired business. They’ve been dead and gone, what, fifteen, sixteen years now.”

“I have little time for this; I’ve heard what I need. You have not declared yourself unequivocally patriotic. That’s now a matter of public record. But I warn you, Lady Glinda. There are borders one should not cross.”

“If Elphaba observed any border, she’d go out of her way to trespass against it. Or are we talking, obliquely, about social class? Have a brandy, it’s nearly noonday. Miss Murth, are you composed enough to decant something for us?”

Cherrystone said, “I must decline. There is much to arrange. You have been served notice of detention at home. I am taking over Mockbeggar Hall as my headquarters.”

Glinda sat forward and gripped the arms of her chair, though her voice remained casual. “I would do the same were I you, I suppose. It isn’t often that a boy of your humble beginnings gets to lodge in a jewel box like this. Will you be a honey, though, and do mind your bloody boots when it comes to the sofas?”

His boots shone like ice, of course.

“And where will you expect me to lodge?” she continued in a stiffer voice. “Do you intend to plunge me and my staff into some oubliette?”

“You may maintain your private apartments and you won’t be disturbed. I am afraid we shall have to dismiss your staff.”

She gave a laugh. “I don’t do without staff. Sir.” Her refusing to use his military title was intended as an insult, and she watched it land.

“A skeletal company then. Two, three.”

“A dozen. And the departing staff will need guarantee of safe passage through the armies that seem”—she indicated the window—“to be wreaking havoc in the hydrangeas.”

“Please submit a list of those who will remain so we can have them vetted.”

He crossed his long legs, as if making bivouac in some forest glade. The nerve.

“I mean now,” he added.

“Oh, my goodness, military life is so brusque. I had quite forgotten. Have you forgotten, Commander Cherrystone, that in my station—”

“General. General Cherrystone, not Commander.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon.” Could he tell she was having him on? “Nonetheless, though I wish I’d maintained a private army to turf you out, I shall do as you request in return for your promise not to molest those staff who must be made redundant. I shall require, let’s see. A chef, a sommelier, a butler. That’s three. An ostler and a driver. That’s five. And a lady-in-waiting as chaperone at home…” She gestured toward the woman nearby. “Not you, Miss Murth, you are too dour.”

Miss Murth wailed.

“Only kidding, Miss Murth! Though I turn serious if you shriek again.”

“That’s six,” said Cherrystone. “More than enough. Though in actual fact you won’t need an ostler or a driver.”

“Surely you don’t plan to confine me? To keep me from making my rounds among the poor of the parish?”

He snorted. “You’re doing charity?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s bundles of fun.”

“When you wish to dispense largesse, you can rely on me to supply you a driver and a chaperone. We’ll subtract two from your list of six. No ostler, no driver. That leaves you four. That sounds quite enough.”

“Oh, and yes, I shall need a girl to help me bathe.”

“You’ve forgotten how to bathe?”

“The powders, dear Sir. The unguents. The gentle persuasion of peroxide. You need study me more closely, or do you think such beauty as I pretend to is wholly of the natural order?”

He colored slightly. She had him, and carried on. “Unless you want to dispatch a young foot soldier to do the work? In the interest of military economies? Very well, if I must. Provided I get to interview the nominees and make the choice myself. I pride myself on being able to tell a healthy—”

“Five retainers, then. Submit to me their names and their points of origin. You will not be allowed to maintain Munchkinlanders, I am afraid.”

“Well, we stand in agreement on that matter, for I always found old-stock Munchkins too petite to reach the sideboard. In any event one is wise to keep the sherry on an upper shelf, don’t you know.”

He ticked on the fingers of one hand. “A companion, a butler, a chef, a sommelier, a private maid. You may take the afternoon to write out their references. But we’ll drop the sommelier, I think. I know a bit about wine. I’ll take pleasure in making recommendations myself.”

“I don’t supply supporting documents, General Cherrystone. I am Lady Glinda.” She stood up so suddenly she felt light-headed. “Your horses are eating my roses. Miss Murth, would you see the General out?”

When he’d gone, she remained at the window. Restwater, the largest of Oz’s lakes, glowed keenly white in the high sun. A few storks waded in the rushes of the nearer cove. She could glimpse little sign of the fishing fleet out on the water. The fishermen had tucked their vessels up tightly somewhere, and were hoping to sit out the invasion without starving.

There was no safe place in Oz for Glinda. She knew this. The government administrators in the Emerald City—the Emperor’s men—were just waiting for her to emerge. She was too popular a figurehead to be allowed to swan about freely in the EC. Her longtime sponsorship of an institute of maunts latterly accused of printing seditious broadsides was enough reason to lock her away. Risky business, offering patronage. No, her bread was buttered good and hard on the wrong side. Better to tough it out here and manage her private obligations as best she might, for as long as she could.

3.

By noontime the next day the soldiers’ horses had drunk the fountain dry. The forecourt of crushed lake abalone reeked with horse manure. “Do bring a message to the General,” said Glinda, “and inform him that there’s a whole lake forty feet beyond the lawns. Since this invasion is all about the appropriation of water, perhaps he’d be so kind as to lead his cavalry down to the water’s edge?”

“I do not think, Lady Glinda, that he listens to me overmuch,” said Miss Murth unhappily. “I would not command his attention.”

“Try. We are all under pressure, Miss Murth. We must do our best. And we may be confined for some time, so I suppose I should convene a colloquy among the help. Propose a common attitude toward this intrusion, and so on. What do you think?”

“I was never good at current affairs. I preferred the arts of needlework and correspondence.”

“Correspondence? To whomever would you write?”

“Well. The papers.”

“So you took the papers. You never read the papers, surely?”

“I found news somewhat sullying.” Miss Murth fluffed the feathers on Lady Glinda’s afternoon hat; they remained droopy. But Lady Glinda wasn’t going anywhere. “It wasn’t a wise choice, I now see,” said Miss Murth. “I might have followed politics, but I preferred the society columns. When you were in them.”

“Surely I’m in them still.”

Miss Murth sighed. “It’s a shame about the horse droppings.”

“Miss Murth. Are you listening?”

Miss Murth straightened her shoulders to indicate that she was indeed listening, damn it.

“You ought to follow events, Miss Murth. You remember that skirmish by Munchkinlanders into Loyal Oz last fall? Oh, don’t look at me like that, it was west of here, near that strip of land that divides Kellswater and Restwater. You remember. Near the mauntery of Saint Glinda, where I sometimes like to go and consider my soul, my debts, my diet, and so on? Yes?”

“Yes. With those cloistered ladies who think they’re so holy.”

“Miss Murth. Do try to attend. Out of the goodness of my heart I’m sharing what I have picked up.”

“The skirmish. Yes. Everyone was so vexed,” recalled Miss Murth, aiming at drollery and achieving condescension. “It completely upended the social season.”

Damn the attitude of help; Glinda was talking this out to get it straight in her own head. “When by winter’s end our Munchkinlander tenants and neighbors had retreated under the superior fire of the EC forces, they scurried back east. I hear they’ve been beavering about, renovating some antique fortress at the easternmost end of the lake. Where the Munchkin River debouches. So I believe General Cherrystone is stopping here to wait for reinforcements before pressing farther east. If he takes the fort at the head of the lake, he’ll have access to the river, which is a virtual high road of water straight into the breadbasket of Oz, straight to Bright Lettins and to the seat of the Munchkinland government at Colwen Grounds.”

“Where the Thropp family used to live, back in the day.” Miss Murth sniffed.

“Indeed. Well, not Elphaba, nor her brother Shell. Oh excuse me: Emperor. But their great-grandfather the Eminent Thropp ruled from that house. A pretentious heap compared to Mockbeggar’s understated charm! But never mind all that. It’s on the strength of his bloodlines that Shell Thropp claims Colwen Grounds and, by extension, the right to rule all of Munchkinland. So he starts with Restwater, which until the secession of Munchkinland twenty-umpty years ago, or something like that, had always provided water for the Emerald City.”

“If we’re through reviewing current events,” said Miss Murth, “the General is waiting for the list of staff. He threatens to imprison the whole lot of us if he doesn’t receive it by teatime.”

“Very well. Find a quill and take down this list. You can remind me of the names, if you will. Put yourself first, Miss Murth. Have you a first name?”

“Yes, in fact.”

“How alarming. Next, Chef. What’s he called?”

“Ig Baernaeraenaesis.”

“Write Chef. Write Puggles the Butler.”

“His real name is Po Understar.”

“Oh, this is so tedious! Am I expected to remember these names? Is that the lot? Are we missing anyone? I think that’s it.”

“You requested a chambermaid.”

“That’s right, I did. Now whom should I pick? There’s Mirrtle. She’s a little cross-eyed but she plays a mean hand of graboge. There’s the broomgirl who does the steps. I don’t recall her name. And then silly Floxiaza. No, she steals my cologne. Not Floxiaza. What do you think? Mirrtle, shall we?”

“I like Mirrtle,” said Miss Murth. “One can rely on Mirrtle to keep a civil tongue to her superiors.”

“Then I’ll choose the broomgirl. Write down the broomgirl. What is her name?”

“I’ll ask her,” said Miss Murth. “Nobody ever uses it so I doubt she’ll remember, but maybe she’ll surprise us all. May I deliver this now? I don’t want to appear cowering but the General seems insistent.”

“I suppose I should sign it.”

“I have signed it for you.”

“You’re a blessing in disguise.” Glinda looked her over. “A very capable disguise. You may consider yourself dismissed.”

4.

She was standing at a weir. Though later she realized someone must have built it, at the time it seemed just another caprice of nature. An S-shaped curve of broad flat stones, to channel the water, slow it, creating a deep pool on the upstream edge. Along that side a fretwork of bentlebranch fronds had been twisted and laced together laterally, further helping to slow the water that coursed through—when water coursed, that is. Today it was frozen.

Probably she’d been wearing boots, but she didn’t remember boots, or mittens, or even a coat. What the mind chooses to collect, and what it throws away!

She leaned from the walkway over the top of the artificial thicket. She could see that the whole affair guided the stream through a channel. Good for fishing.

The surface of the stream was glassy, here and there dusted with snow. Beneath the surface of the ice some hardy reed still waved underwater with the slowed-down motion of a dream. She could almost see her face there beneath all this cold, among the hints of green, of spring.

Never one for studying herself, though, her eye had caught a flick of movement a few feet on. In a pocket in the ice of the stream, a little coppery fish was turning round and round, as if trapped. How had it gotten separated from the members of its school, who were probably all buried in the mud, lost in cold dreams till spring? Though she couldn’t have known about hibernation yet.

One hand on the unstable balustrade, she ventured onto the ice. The trapped fish needed to be released. It would die in its little natural bowl. Die of loneliness if nothing else. She knew about loneliness.

A stick came to her unmittened hand somehow. She must have dropped her mittens, the better to grasp the stick. Or she’d been out without protection. It didn’t matter. She bashed at the ice for some time, never thinking that the floor could capsize and she might go in the drink. Drown, or freeze, or become mighty uncomfortable some other way.

Little by little she hacked away a channel. The fish heard the vibrations and circled more vigorously, but there was no place for it to go. Finally she had opened a hole big enough for her finger.

The fish came up and nestled against her, as if her forefinger were a mother fish. The scrap of brilliance leaned there, at a slight tilt.

That’s what she remembered, anyway.

She had gone on to release the fish. What had she done with it? With the stream frozen over? The rest was lost, lost to time. Like so much.

But she remembered the way the fish bellied against her finger.

This must be another very early memory. Was no one looking after her? Why was she always out alone?

And where had this taken place? Where in the world did childhood happen, anyway?

5.

Glinda finished her morning tisane and waited, but no one came to take away the tray. Oh, right, she remembered. But where was Murth when you needed her? The woman was useless. Useless and pathetic.

A light rain pattered, just strong enough to make the idea of Glinda’s giving an audience in the forecourt something of a mistake. She’d rather send remarks through a factotum, but that was the problem: the factotums were getting the boot. The least she could do was give her good-byes in person.

There was nothing for it but that Glinda must poke about the wardrobe herself and locate some sort of bumbershoot.

Puggles saw her struggling with the front door and rescued her. “Let me help, Mum,” he said, relieving her of the umbrella. It had a handle carved to look like a flying monkey; she hadn’t noticed that. Probably Cherrystone would decide that the umbrella was grounds for her execution. Well, stuff him with a rippled rutabaga.

“Everyone’s assembled, Mum,” said Puggles. “As you requested. Too bad about the weather, but there you are.”

She’d written some notes all by herself, but raindrops smeared the ink when she took them out of her purse. “Goodness, Puggles,” she said in a low voice. “Do so many work here?”

“Until today.”

“I never quite realized. Well, one rarely assembles the staff all at once.”

“Once a year. The below-stairs staff party at Lurlinemas. But you don’t attend.”

“I send the ale and those funny little baskets from the Fairy Preenella, one for everybody.”

“Yes, Mum. I know. I order them and arrange for their delivery myself.”

Was he being uppity? She couldn’t blame him. She should have realized the household staff was this large. There must be seventy people gathered here. “If this is the number on which we normally rely, how are we to get along with only a skeletal crew, Puggles?”

But he’d stepped back to join the paltry retinue that would not be dismissed, which had lined up behind her.

Awkward. In what degree of affection or distance ought she to address them? The situation was grave; many of them were in tears. She was glad she had worn the watered-silk moss luncheon gown with the peek-a-boo calf flare and the carmine collar; she’d be stunning against Mockbeggar’s rose-colored stucco and ivory entablatures. A comfort to the staff, she hoped, her ability to maintain her style. An example.

She plunged ahead. “Dear friends. Dear laborers in the field, dear dusters of the furniture, and whoever uses the loppers to keep the topiary in check. Dear all of you. What a dreary day this is.”

She was reaching for a hankie already. How revolting, how mawkish. She didn’t know most of their names. But they looked so respectable and kind, in their common clothes. Men with hats in their hands, women in mobcaps and aprons. Surely they were going to leave their aprons behind? Aprons marked with House of Chuffrey crests? Well, better not to make a fuss over it.

“I know some of you have lodged here, lovingly tending Mockbeggar Hall, since long before I met Lord Chuffrey, rest his soul. For many of you—perhaps all of you, I’m a bit wobbly on the details—this has been your only home. Where you go to now, and what life awaits you there, is beyond my comprehension.”

One or two of the young women straightened up and put their hankies away. Perhaps, thought Glinda, this hasn’t started well.

“I have arranged for your safe passage off the estate. The General has promised you will not be accosted, nor will your allegiance to my welfare all these years be held against you. Indeed, I have not supplied him a list of your names or your destinations.” This much was true. Cherrystone hadn’t asked for that. He was irritatingly fair from time to time, which made resenting him a tricky business.

“Nothing should have pleased me more than to provide you with lodging and work here until the end of my days,” she said. “In the absence of that, I have had the seamstresses work overtime, hand stitching on some cotton geppling serviettes the lovely old-fashioned blessing OZSPEED. By the way, thank you, seamstresses; you must have had to stay up past midnight to manage supplying all this lot.”

“Actually, we’re a few short,” muttered Puggles.

She paid him no mind. Having been Throne Minister for that brief period had taught her several useful skills.

“Mum,” called someone; Glinda couldn’t tell who it was. “Will you have us back, in time?”

“Oh, if I have my say,” she replied cheerily. “Though I doubt you’ll recognize me when that day comes! I’ll be sun-bronzed and wizened and my elbows will be raw from the dishwater! You’ll think I’m the bootblack’s grandmother!”

They liked this. They laughed with unseemly vigor. Though perhaps commoners have a different sense of humor, she thought.

“Dear friends,” she continued. “I cherish the dedication to your tasks, your love of Mockbeggar, your sunny good natures at least whenever I came in the room. And next? None of us knows what waits down the lane for us.” She was about to refer to her own power as compromised, what with the house arrest, but caught herself. Surely they knew about it, and they wanted to remember her as being strong. She threw her shoulders back and pinched a nerve in her scapula. Ow. “As to whomever was in the habit of filching the leftover pearlfruit jelly from the sideboard in the morning room, you are forgiven. You are all forgiven any such lapses. I shall miss you. I shall miss every one of you. I hardly knew there were so many … so many”—but that sounded lame—“so many brave and dedicated friends. Bless you. Ozspeed indeed. And on your way out, don’t hesitate to snub the new sentries at the gatehouse. Don’t give them the benefit of a single word. This is your home, still. Not theirs. Never theirs.”

“Burn the place down!” cried someone in the crowd, but he was hushed, as the emotion seemed misguided at best.

“Don’t forget to write,” she said, before she remembered that quite likely some of them couldn’t write. She’d better get off the top step before she did more harm than good. “Farewell, and may we meet again when Ozma returns!”

The bawling began. She had ended as poorly as she’d begun. Of course, the common people believed that Ozma was a deity, and they must have concluded that Lady Glinda was referring to the Afterlife. Well, so be it, she thought grimly, hoisting her skirts to clear the puddle by the front door. The Afterlife will have to do for a rendezvous destination. Though I suspect I shall be lodged in separate quarters, a private suite, probably. “Puggles,” she murmured, “get the yard boy to pick up the mobcaps some of that lot were trampling into the mud as they left.”

“There’s no yard boy, Ma’am,” said Puggles gently. “He’s off with the others.”

“It’s a new era, then. You do it. It looks a sight. And then join the rest of us in the grand foyer.”

The others who were to remain had retreated inside and stood in a line with their hands clasped. Their uniforms dripped on the checkerboard marble. Glinda would fix each one with a dedicated personal beck. She could do this, she could. She’d been practicing all morning. This was important. “Miss Murth,” she began. “Ig Baernae…”

“Chef’ll do, Mum. Even I can’t say it unless I’m soused.”

“Ig Baernaeraenaesis.” She was glad to see his jaw drop. Puggles slid into place in the line; Glinda nodded at him. “Mister Understar. And—” She came to the chambermaid. “And you. Rain, I think it is? Very lovely name. Scrub your nails, child. Civil unrest is no excuse for lapses in personal hygiene. Dear friends…” But perhaps this was too familiar a note to strike now she was inside her own home. She had to live with these people.

“I’m grateful for your loyalty,” she continued in a brisker tone. “As far as I know my funds have not been impounded, and you shall stay on salary as usual.”

“We don’t gets salary, if you please, Mum,” said Chef. “We gets our home and our food.”

“Yes. Well. Home and food are yours as long as I can manage it. I cannot pretend this is a pretty time for Mockbeggar Hall or for any of us. Murth, don’t scowl; it’s not too late to exchange you for someone out in the forecourt lingering over farewells.”

Miss Murth slapped on an inauthentic expression of merriment.

“A few remarks. I am still the lady of the house. You are my staff, and according to your stations you shall maintain your customary retiring ways in my presence.”

“Yes, Mum,” they chorused.

“And yet, and yet.” She wanted a conspiratorial chumminess without a breakdown in authority. She must step softly. “We are now bound together in some unprecedented manner, and we must come to rely on one another. So. I shall ask you all to refrain from fraternizing with the military who will be bunking in the servants’ quarters, in tents in the meadows, in the barns and stables. I shall ask you to be no more than minimally polite and responsive to the officers who have taken up lodging in the guest quarters. If they ask for food, you must procure it. You must cook it, Chef. You need not season it and you must not poison it. Do you understand?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Mum.”

“I daresay. If they request their shirts and stockings done…” She looked about. She had forgotten about laundry. “Well, they will have to do it themselves, or hire a laundress. No doubt they will try to cozy up to some of you.” She took a dim view of cozying these days, though soldiers probably got lonely. She didn’t think Miss Murth was in danger of being meddled with, and as for the girl… “You, Rain,” she said, “how old are you?”

Rain shrugged. “I believe she is eight, Lady Glinda,” said Miss Murth.

“That should be safe enough, but even so, Rain, I’d like you to stick near to Miss Murth or to one of the rest of us. Chef, Puggles. No running about and getting into mischief. I’ve kept you here because you have work to do. Sweeping up. You’re the broomgirl. Remember that.”

“Yes, Mum.” The girl’s gaze lowered to the polished floor. She wasn’t overly bright, to judge by appearances, thought Glinda, but then some had said that about her, in her day. And look where she’d ended up.

In virtual prison, she concluded, sorry she’d begun the train of thought. “That’ll do. To your work, then. Hands to your task, eyes ever open, but keep custody of the lips. If you should hear anything useful, do tell me. Are there any questions?”

“Are we under house arrest too?” asked Puggles.

“Open up a bottle of something bubbly,” she replied. “When I figure out the answer to your question, I’ll let you know. You are dismissed.”

She stood for a moment as the foyer emptied. Then, mounting the first flight of the broad fleckstone staircase to her apartments, her eye drifted through the doors of the banquet hall. Before she knew what she was doing she had turned and pitter-patted down the steps and marched into the room. “Officer!” she shouted. She had never raised her voice in her own home before. Ever.

A soldier snapped to and saluted her. “Where is Cherrystone?” she barked.

“Not here, Mum.”

“You’re not in my staff. I’m not Mum to you. I am Lady Glinda. I can see he is not here. Where is he, I asked you.”

“That’s privileged information, Mum.”

She might have to throttle him. “Officer. I see charts and maps all over my banquet table. I am sure occupying armies need charts and maps. I am also sure they do not need to be held down flat by early Dixxi House spindle-thread vases. Do you know how rare these are? No more than thirty exist in all of Oz, I’ll wager.”

“Do not approach the table, Mum.”

She approached the table and she snatched up first one porcelain vase and then the second. They were almost four hundred years old. Handworked by artisans whose skill had been lost when Dixxi House went factory. “I will not have magnificent art used as … as paperweights. You put your boots on all the other furniture. Use your boots.”

The maps had rolled up.

“Begging your pardon, Mum, you’re striding in where you’ve no—”

“I don’t stride, young man. I never stride. I glide. Now you heard what I told you to do. Take off your boots and put them on the stupid maps.”

He did as he was told. She was impressed. She still had some little authority, then. She turned and left without addressing him again.

She cradled the vases against her breast as if they were puppies, but she wasn’t thinking of the vases. She had seen that one map featured a detailed drawing of Restwater, all its coves and villages, its islands, the locations of its submerged rocks. She had seen a dotted line drawn from Mockbeggar Hall to Haugaard’s Keep, the garrison fortress at the east end. The marking didn’t run along the north shore of Restwater, but right through the middle of it. But what army could march through a lake?

6.

Of an afternoon, Glinda had been accustomed to the occasional carriage ride. She would set out for nearby villages and take a full cream tea in someone’s front parlor. She would drag along Miss Murth and a novel, and ignore one or the other, sometimes both. From favorite overlooks she sometimes watched the sun subside toward the horizon. Spring in Munchkinland usually lent a certain cheer to her days. Summer the same. She didn’t suffer pangs of longing for the house in Mennipin Square until after the first frost of the autumn. And by now she had learned to endure those pangs. For the time being, those lovely fall social seasons in the Emerald City were a thing of the past.

Like, it seemed, her excursions by carriage. It only took a few days after Cherrystone’s appropriation of Mockbeggar for a new pattern to set in: the carriages were always spoken for when she requested one.

Unsettling, that the activities of the house were being determined by someone else’s needs instead of her own.

And what a commotion! The army had set up a sizeable village of tents and built a pair of rude temporary structures—latrines, she expected. One for officers, one for enlisted men. The farm animals were turned out of the barns—no hardship, since the weather was good—and the barns became ad hoc mess halls and, perhaps, a wood shop of some sort, as the sound of hammering went on all day and half the night.

Glinda had Puggles show her how to find the stairs to the parapet so they could peek from behind an ornamental urn and grasp something of the size of the operation.

“I should think there are a full three hundred men on the demesne, Lady Glinda,” said Puggles. “Given the amount of food I hear is being conscripted from local granges and farms.”

“Can that be enough force with which to prosecute an invasion?” she wondered.

“You’d have a better sense of that than I. You managed the armies of Loyal Oz for a time,” he reminded her. “And word has it you yourself once hoped for reunification.”

“Of course I did,” she snapped. “But not through military action. Too messy by half. I hoped if we put on a ball and went lavish with the refreshment budget, the Munchkinlanders would come back into the fold. I’m speaking figuratively, Puggles, don’t look at me like that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. How could we humble Munchkinlanders refuse an invitation to dance with the overlords of the Emerald City? But when that rogue missile of a Dorothy-house came down on Nessarose’s holy head? The Munchkinlanders discovered that liberation from sniffy Nessarose didn’t provoke them into wanting a return to domination by the EC. Can you blame them? What population signs on willingly for slavery?”

“You mean other than wives?”

“I’ve never married, Mum. Don’t accuse me by association.”

“Oh, never mind. I just think Cherrystone is going to need a vaster force if he expects to drive a division right into the heart of Munchkinland, to Bright Lettins or Colwen Grounds. Unless the Emerald City is simultaneously mounting an invasion from the north, through the Scalps. Though I can’t imagine the Glikkun trolls in the mountains would let them get very far with that. Or is Cherrystone going to be content with snatching Restwater and leaving us the rest of the province?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mum.”

“Well, what do you know, Puggles? How would we find out what’s going on in those barns, for instance? I can’t go waltzing around as if I’m used to milking the cows of a spring evening.”

“No, Mum. But I’m not allowed to wander about, either. Guards are posted, you see, beyond kitchen gardens on the barn side, beyond the forecourt on the carriage frontage, and beyond the reflecting pond and the parterre to the west.”

“Is that so.” She wasn’t surprised.

“I do hope you’re not going to contemplate some campaign, Mum.”

“You flatter me with that remark.”

“I have a hunch that General Cherrystone wouldn’t hesitate to restrict your liberties even further than he has already done.”

She began to cross the roof and head for the stairs. “I’m sure you don’t believe me capable of laying gelignite sandwiches on the party platter. Anyway, I can’t cook.”

When she was back in her salon she wandered along all the windows to see what she could see. She had never considered herself an inquisitive woman, but being confined to a suite of only eight rooms made her restless. She was also gripped with curiosity. Why hadn’t she thought to retain someone nubile? Someone who could smolder, sloe-eyed, near a vulnerable soldier? Someone who could pick up some useful information? She herself was too high, Murth was too dead, Rain hardly more than a babe in arms … and Glinda doubted that Chef or Puggles would attract much attention among itchy-triggered soldiers.

Was it too late to exchange Miss Murth for someone a bit younger—younger by, say, a half century? Glinda could pretend to do it out of concern for Miss Murth’s health.

But then Miss Murth came tramping in, hauling six logs of oak she had split and quartered herself, and she knelt down at the hearth to arrange the fire for when the evening chill took hold. Glinda knew that unless she herself brained Miss Murth with one of these spindle-thread vases, the old fiend would probably never die. She’d collapse over Glinda’s grave with dry, red eyes, and then take up a new position somewhere else.

The tedious never die; that’s what makes them tedious.

Glinda remembered the death of Ama Clutch, her governess. Almost forty years ago. Glinda never wakened from any sleep, even the luscious damp sleep that follows rousting sex, without sensing a pang of obscure guilt over her governess’s demise. Glinda didn’t feel she wanted to take on another such debt, especially over someone as irksome as Miss Murth.

“Miss Murth,” she found herself saying, “Puggles was telling me about how limited a range he is allowed to traverse these days. Does the same apply to you?”

“I suspect it does, Lady Glinda,” said Murth, “but I haven’t pressed myself to try. I have no place else to go, and for years I haven’t had reason to leave the premises unless you require my company.”

“What had you been used to doing when I would go to the Emerald City for six or eight months?”

“Oh … tidying up some. Dusting.”

“I see. Have you no family?”

“I’ve been in your employ for twenty years, Lady Glinda. Don’t you think I would have mentioned my family if I had any?”

“You may have nattered on about your kin for yonks. I never know if I’m listening.”

“Well, since you’re asking, no. I am the last of our line.”

And I the last of mine, thought Glinda, who had had no siblings. And she and Chuffrey had never managed to conceive. How quirky, to share this common a loneliness with a member of her staff. Whereas if Glinda had had children—even now, some child or children dashing in every direction, carrying on irresponsibly as the young do—well, what a different place Mockbeggar would seem.

“There are all sorts of maps and missives in the dining hall, Miss Murth, but I draw attention to myself when I enter. There’s no chance you could sneak a peak at them and report to me anything you read?”

“Out of the question. We’re all under supervision, not just you.”

“Do you think that our Rain has the run of the grounds?” She picked at a thread on her shawl as she spoke and didn’t look up. She could hear Murth settle on her heels in front of the fire and let out a worried hiss between those old well-chewed lips. “And does she have any family, do you think?”

“To the best of my awareness, she has no more family than you and I,” replied Miss Murth, vaguely.

7.

The first time a dinner invitation arrived from General Cherrystone, Glinda folded up the paper and said, “Thank you, Puggles. There will be no reply.” The second time she had Murth write a note to decline. “How shall I sign it?” asked Miss Murth. “Lady Glinda, or just Glinda?”

“The scandal of you. Sign it Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hall. And none of those twee little hearts and daisies and such.”

But the next night Glinda sent him an invitation. “Dinner at ten, on the roof of the south porch.” She had Puggles and Chef take apart the sallowwood table from the card salon, put it through the windows leg by leg, and reassemble it on the graveled flat of the porch roof. Then she arranged herself upon the balustraded area ahead of time so she wouldn’t have to be seen clambering through a window like a day laborer. The stars were out and the moon was wafery. She wore her midnight blue scallopier with eyelet fenestrae and a ruched bodice the color of wet sand. Chef would serve lake garmot stuffed with snails. “Is it a mistake about the candles?” called Murth through the lace swags. “They’ll drip wax all over the food.”

“Don’t hector me,” said Glinda. “I know what I’m doing.” The two precious spindle-thread vases held a bounty of prettibells and delphiniums selected for their vigor. They better not so much as drop a single petal if they knew what was good for them.

Cherrystone came up the grand staircase just at ten. She could hear the clongs of the grandmother clock strike and the clicking of his heels as he turned at the landing. The windows were wide but the sills two feet high, so he had to sit and swivel to get his long legs across. “A novel place to host a dinner guest. Perhaps you intend to push me over the rail as a divertissement,” he said. “Good evening, Lady Glinda.”

“General. You understand that a person of my position doesn’t entertain in her private apartment, and in any case I notice that the banquet hall has been requisitioned as a strategy center. So I’ve improvised. We dine at my invitation, as this is my home, but we dine neither in my own apartments nor in the spaces you have appropriated. Instead, a neutral territory. Above it all, as it were. Won’t you have a seat?”

He offered a bottle of wine. “Not from Mockbeggar cellars, so I apologize if it doesn’t suit. It’s Highmeadow blanc, a good year. I don’t travel without it. I hope you approve.”

“My butler is a bit stout to be climbing through windows. So this is something of an evening picnic, I’m afraid. Will you do the honors? There’s a cork-pull just here.”

The candles were guttering madly for the first ten minutes. Glinda took care to sip sparingly. “While I understand the intent toward courtesy in your recent notes to me, General, I can’t bring myself to accept an invitation to dine in my own home. My study of etiquette provides no precedent. So I thought I should be cordial and explain this to you in person.”

“Damned awkward I’m sure, but you’re being a brick, as I knew you would be.”

“The meal will grow cold, so please, shall we sit?” She waited for him to pull out her chair. From over his shoulder she could see the campfires of soldiers beyond the ha-ha. The distant sound of singing, more rowdy than tuneful. “How will you keep all these men occupied and out of trouble, General? You’ve clearly settled in for a while, and no matter what construction you’re overseeing in the barns, you can’t be employing more than a smattering of this large number.”

“I trust they’re being no bother. You let me know if they are.”

“I’ll let them know if they are.” She leaned forward, taking care not to seem coquettish, which, she recognized, seemed to be her default position. “Allow me to remove the covers, will you? Since it’s just the two of us?” She lifted the lids off the plated dinner of garmot, braised stalks of celery, and mashed spinach forced to look like a green rose. Oh, Chef could make magic out of whatever lingered in the larder. “I hope this meets with your approval, General.”

“Please; as we’re dining, I should be happy if you called me by my first name. Traper.”

She shook her head as if she were being pestered by mosquitoes. “You make it all very confusing. Traper. A most irregular season! I am detained in my own home, I am forbidden anything but emergency staff, I am asked to house a garrison or a committee or a division or whatever you call this lot—”

“We are roughly three hundred men, which in this instance means a command made up of three brigades. One of our brigades is a cavalry unit, and the other two are foot soldiers. Messiars, as we call them.”

“And Menaciers are officers in training. I know the nomenclature. I did govern the Home Guard once, as you recall. But if what you are overseeing is a command, what makes you a General instead of a Commander?”

“Long years of service, for one. I am allowed to direct as many commands as the Emperor in the Emerald City sees fit to supply me.”

“Then you’re waiting on more commands. I see. Traper. Please, eat; it’ll go cold. There’s slightly more breeze at this height than I’d anticipated.”

He tucked in. “You didn’t ask me here to discuss military strategy, and anyway, it would be boorish of me to bring my work to the dinner table. Tell me about yourself.”

“Oh, General—”

“Traper.”

“Yes. Traper. You know a woman loves nothing more than to talk about herself. But you have incarcerated me here and Lady Glinda is bored to migraines with Lady Glinda. Unable to get around as she did, or to invite old friends to spend weekends hunting or playing plunge-ball or Three-Hand Snuckett. No, I asked you here to learn about you. So I insist. I’ve given you your supper, and you must sing for it. Tell me about your long years in the service, as you put it, even if you must keep as confidential your present aims and designs.”

Obediently the General ventured into a loose and nonspecific accounting of various assignments through the years. However, he underestimated the degree to which Glinda had paid attention while she was Throne Minister. She had read everything she could get her hands on, and various details had stuck because of references to old friends and cronies. She knew Cherrystone was from Mistlemoor, a small Gillikinese hamlet a few hours north of the Shiz Gate at the Emerald City. She knew the Wizard had sent Cherrystone out to Kiamo Ko when her old friend, Elphaba, had taken up residence there, and that Cherrystone had had something to do with the death or disappearance of Fiyero’s wife, Sarima, and their children, Irji and Nor. She knew he had had a hand in some nasty business in Quadling Country, where he’d been stationed for nearly a decade, and when things went hot there he was recalled to the Emerald City. A desk job for a few years, under the Emperor. But called into field service again. His final triumph? Before retirement with a pension? She wondered. And all the time she kept smiling like a barkeep, unassuming and unflappable.

“You have a family,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. His fork poked back and forth as if checking for poison darts hidden in the fish. “A wife and three daughters. Now mostly grown; indeed, a granddaughter at home too, who I rarely see.”

“I can’t imagine. It must be dreadful for you.”

“I’m sure it would be.” He smiled under his lowered brow. “I mean, the noise of a gabbling child and four women under one roof.”

“You don’t fool me. You miss them dreadfully. What are their names?”

“I choose not to talk about them. It helps me not miss them as much.”

“Is that breeze causing the candle to spit wax on your plate? Thoughtless of me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Miss Murth?”

Murth was sitting in an upright chair just inside the window, her hands folded in her lap. “Yes, Lady Glinda.”

“I know you aren’t spry enough to clamber out the window ledge with an oil lamp in a glass chimney. One that won’t gutter so in this updraft. Would you call the broomgirl to do it? She is agile enough, unlike the rest of us.”

“I’m happy to oblige, Lady Glinda,” said Cherrystone. “Allow me.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it. Miss Murth?”

“I think the girl is asleep, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda waited.

“But I’ll wake her.”

“How wonderful. The lamps on the escritoire. Both of them. Thank you.”

She tried without success to bring up the subject of the construction going on in the barns, but Cherrystone affably declared that too dull to discuss over such a fine meal. What next? He complimented the local landscape. She concurred: the lake before them in the moonlight, sheer silk spangled with diamond chunks, wasn’t it divine? Less cloyingly, they discussed the social makeup of the nearest villages. “I do trust you’re paying the local farmers for all the food you’re demanding from them,” she ventured.

“We’re at war, Lady Glinda. I try to make it look as much like a picnic as I can, but you can’t have forgotten that Munchkinlanders provoked the Ozian army to invade.”

“Well, nor have I forgotten that Oz was massing an army of invasion on the border for weeks and weeks before the Munchkinlanders made a raid against it.”

“Defensive positioning, Lady Glinda.”

“Spoiling for a fight, and the fools bit. Though had they not bit in time, you’d have come up with some other reason to invade. The Emerald City has had its eye on Restwater even since my own time in office, Traper, though I did my best to change the subject.”

“Don’t let’s talk military strategy. Do you play an instrument, Lady Glinda?”

“I have a set of musical toothpicks I must show you someday. Ah, here she is.”

Rain slung one leg over the windowsill. She was dressed in a man’s cast-off nightshirt. It made her look like an urchin. Her calves were smooth and pale, the color of new cream in the moonlight. Her dark hair hadn’t seen the benefit of a comb recently. Once through the window, she turned back and took the lamps Miss Murth handed her. The light on either side of her face made her look like a visitation from some chapel story of youthful piety. She was nearly pretty, but for the dirt on her face and her cross, sleepy expression.

“Where does you want ’em,” she said, forgetting to make it sound like a question.

“Oh, how about one on the table and then one on that stone ledge between the windows,” said Glinda. “Then if Miss Murth comes at the General with a crossbow we shall spy her before any damage is done. Miss Murth has many hidden talents.”

“Lady Glinda!” hissed Murth from inside. But Cherrystone was laughing.

“Stay, little Rain,” said Glinda. “We might need something else, and you’re better at getting over window ledges than we are. You can rest with your head against the wall there.” In the lamplight, squatting with her back against the stone, the girl looked like a beggar outside a train station in the Pertha Hills, back in the day. Frottica, Wittica, Settica, Wiccasand Turning…

The light of the oil lamps glazed Cherrystone; he became a more fixed target. Glinda had reached the end of that part of the strategy she’d been able to plan ahead, and she was improvising now. But how formidable he looked. Patient, wary, courteous, buckled up inside himself. He did have utterly lovely eyes for a marauder. A sort of faded cobalt. “I sense that these are early days, Traper. Still, I would be irresponsible to the memory of Sir Chuffrey if I didn’t ask what your ultimate intentions are toward Mockbeggar. I do hope you have no plans to raze it.”

“That wouldn’t be a decision of mine, though I think no one in the Emerald City would bother this place much. I see that it is a jewel. In these few days I’ve come to appreciate why you love it so.”

“Were I at the helm of strategy, I should think that securing Restwater as a permanent source of potable water for the Emerald City would be enough. I’m wondering, should that happen, if you intend Mockbeggar to serve as a satellite capital of the EC, and might decide to leave the rest of the Free State of Munchkinland alone? Munchkinland covers a vast territory, and though decidedly rural, it’s more evenly populated than the rest of Oz, which by comparison is either urban or hardscrabble and too remote to be habitable. The attempt to subdue all of Munchkinland would be punishing.”

“You have a good head for strategy, Lady Glinda, as befits a former Throne Minister. But you retired to seek other pleasures. Like gentlewoman farming, and flower arranging. So I shouldn’t fret about the future. What will happen will happen.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m too selfish to care primarily about Munchkinland. What happens to the stucco walls of Mockbeggar and to its staff also happens to me. What happens to Mockbeggar’s irises and prettibells happens to me. You think me shallow, but I have been breeding prettibells for eighteen summers now. It is my passion. I have a new variety that was even written about in our local newssheet, Restwater Dew Tell.” This was partly true. The gardener had been doing something with that ugly little orange flower. “Rain, can you slip into my library and find a copy of the newsfold with the article on prettibells?”

The girl said, “I don’t know how to find it.”

“It is a printed journal. It will say ‘Prettibells Galore’ in the headline, or something like that. Get up when I speak to you.”

She stood, but shrugged. “I don’t know how to read, Mum.”

“I can find it,” called Miss Murth.

“She’ll do it,” said Glinda tartly. “Child, there is an engraving on the page just under the masthead. You do know what a prettibell looks like, don’t you? A blossom like a kind of grubby little chewed sock?”

Cherrystone was laughing. “They are your passion. You speak with the sour affection of the convert.”

“Do as I say, Rain.” Glinda felt herself flushing and hoped it didn’t show in the lamplight. “I tell you, Traper, you abuse my ability to entertain when you reduce me to such a staff.”

“Your prettibells will likely suffer this year,” he admitted. “Sorry about that. Where are they in the garden, so we can avoid them?”

He almost had her there. “I can’t discuss it any longer. It’s too vexing to think of them in extremis. There’s a dormant polder of them out beyond the little village of Zimmerstorm. Won’t you allow Puggles to escort me to check on them?” There was no such polder. But if she could get out for a day on a false pretense, she might gain a better sense of what was going on.

“It may be possible. Depending.”

Rain clambered back over the sill with several papers. “Not sure which one you want, so here is the lot.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore. I’ve become distressed by the thought of them. You may return these.”

“No, wait,” said Cherrystone. He took several papers from Rain and studied the headlines. Then he turned the front page so the girl could see it and said, “Do you know your letters?”

“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Never had none to teach me, sir.”

“Your mother doesn’t know how to read?”

“If you remember, Cherrystone,” said Glinda, “you required me to dismiss almost everyone.”

“You kept a girl from leaving with her mother?”

“Well. Actually, the child is an orphan. I look after her out of charity. Don’t pick your fingernails, Rain.”

“But you don’t teach her the alphabet.” Cherrystone sounded incredulous.

“I can’t do everything. I have prettibells to propagate. Until recently I didn’t know this girl by name, so how could I know if she could read or not? Perhaps it’s time for the cheese board. Rain, clear the plates.”

“I’ll take them through,” called Miss Murth, stifling a shadowed yawn.

“My granddaughter is learning her letters,” said the General. “Letters are a kind of magic, Rain. Coming together, they spell words, and words then are a kind of spell, too.”

“She doesn’t want to learn to read. She wants to carry those plates to the window. Leave her be, Traper.” But Glinda was now on this. Could she play the hand? She’d never been good at bluffing when the local gentry came by for a couple of rubbers of Three-Hand Snuckett.

She picked up one of the papers and pretended to look at it for the article on prettibells, and then she moved the paper up close until it almost touched her lips. A little blind, to buy her some time, while Cherrystone asked the girl, “What does this letter look like? This thing?”

Rain said, “It looks like a stick for finding water with.”

“Doesn’t it just. It is called Y.”

“Why?”

“Indeed.”

“Too too touching,” said Glinda, “but I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. Our broomgirl is thicker than mud on the moor. Now, Rain, unless you want to annoy me, leave the General alone. He is a busy man and he needs his cheese.”

“I have the board,” called Miss Murth through the lace, which was now swaying in a stiffer wind off the lake. “A nice Arjiki goat-cheese and a Munchkinlander corriale, and an aged Zimmersweet made with the ash layer. Though one corner may be the wrong color of mold; it’s hard to tell in this light.”

“Would you like to learn to read, Rain?” asked Cherrystone.

“Do you specialize in impossible tasks?” interrupted Glinda. “You might as well ask a rural Munchkin-wife if she would like to brush the teeth of a mature draffe. The little scold can’t reach and she won’t reach no matter how many lessons in growing taller you squander upon her.”

“My granddaughter is seven and she can read,” said Cherrystone. “How old are you, Rain?”

“Now you’re impertinent. Rain, go with Miss Murth.” The girl shrugged and slung one leg over the windowsill. Straddling it, her hair fallen back about her neck, she reviewed the diners on the roof of the porch. Looking at the girl’s curious expression, with a certain thrill Glinda thought: she’s learning to read already. Letters are only the half of it.

She kept the paper over her face to hide her tiny twitch of triumph. What if Rain could be taught to read? She might sidle places in the house no one else could visit. Peer at maps. Directives to the field officers. Might be risky, but still…

When the girl had gone, and they had demolished a good deal of the cheese and two glasses of port each, Glinda returned to the subject to clinch the deal. “Do you want to help me survive the boredom of this incarceration, Traper? Shall we enter into a little wager? I’ll wager you can’t teach our broomgirl to read by the end of the summer. That is, assuming your tasks will keep you here all summer.”

“About our tenure here, I can make no comment. But I’ve had a grand time helping my daughters learn to read, when I was home on leave, and my granddaughter too. I can make of your stupid little maid a capable reader of simple texts in a month or two. By Summersend, anyway, if we’re here that long. It’s a deal.”

She raised her glass; the edges chinked to seal the wager.

“But you must have a challenge of your own,” he said. “I shall dare you to … oh, what is it you can’t do? Is there anything?”

She hoped he wouldn’t say generate a new strain of prettibell. “I’ve always had Chef, of one name or another,” she said. “I suppose I could enter into the fun of it and learn to prepare a meal on my own.”

“It’s a deal,” he said, and the glasses chinked again. “But really?” he added, as he stood to go. “Even in childhood you had a chef?”

“Mumsy was an Upland,” she said, as if that explained it.

“But didn’t you linger in kitchens and pick things up, as all small children do? Even I did that.”

“I don’t recall much of my childhood,” she told him. “It’s been such a full rich life ever since, I haven’t felt the need to dwell on that simpler time. Life, with whatever it has brought—university one decade, the Throne Ministry of Oz the next. The cultivation of roses and prettibells one year, house arrest another—well, daily life has always seemed distracting enough. Childhood? It’s a myth.”

“Good night, Lady Glinda. And thank you for a very pleasant evening. I shall send for your chambergirl in the next day or two.”

It was late. She dismissed Miss Murth and the girl, but not before thanking Rain for her help. Then Glinda prepared herself for bed. She didn’t need to check with the little mirror to see herself smiling. She believed she had won the hand.

Though as she settled herself upon the pillows, she found herself thinking about childhood. Had she meant what she had said? Had her own childhood really evaporated as thoroughly as all that? Or had she merely forgotten to pay it any attention once she’d left it behind and headed off to school in Shiz?

8.

The third, and as far as she could figure, the last of her early memories. Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentially?

Probably they are not.

Still, this was a memory of autumn. Either it was actual autumn or she was dressing her few memories in contrasting colors, the better to render them distinctive.

Apple trees? Yes, apples. An orchard hugging a slope. Hesitating in its ascent, the incline leveled off several times—built up manually, to accommodate carts, or maybe the hill just preferred itself like that. This was her only memory to begin with the setting first, and with her entering the place, rather than with herself central as a maypole and the situation emanating from her.

She was wandering about the contorted trunks, trees twisted in their growth by a constant upsweep of wind from the valley. (So there must have been a valley. What lay below? A house? A village? A river? Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail?)

Windfalls jeweled the grass, the colors of russet, burgundy, limeberry, freckled yellow. Fruit hung in the boughs like Lurlinemas ornaments. Leaves twitched as if signaling to one another: she approaches.

Around a certain tree she came upon a wounded bird humped in the grass like an overturned spindle. At first she thought it had bruised its head in an accident, twisted its neck. She had never seen a side-beak merin before.

The eye above the treacherous beak stared at her. She felt herself being pulled into the bird’s gaze, sacrificing her own centrality for a moment. She felt she was being seen and understood by the merin.

The merin is a waterbird, distant cousin to the duck and the swan, though devoid of both the duck’s work ethic and the swan’s narcissism. The unusual bill swivels sideways to filch morsels from other birds. When not in use the beak, on a double-hinged jaw, can swing and tuck backward into creamy neck feathers so that in flight the merin resembles a coat-knob with wings. This merin, the color of a stag-head beetle, didn’t store its beak in its ruff. It merely looked at her and opened its mouth as if to speak.

She hadn’t yet known that some creatures can speak. She did not learn it now—at least not through evidence. But she could tell by the serrated stroke of remark, by the waterfowl’s stuttery smoker’s vowels, that the merin had something specific to say.

She tried to lift the bird but it wouldn’t let her. The subsequent scratches on her forearms, chalk marks at first, slowly beaded up. Crimson stitches on an ivory bolster.

She said, “You’re hurt, but hurting me back won’t help you any.”

It humped itself a few inches away, as much by willpower as by mortal strength, and regarded her with need and fury.

“If I can’t pick you up and take you—”

But where would she have taken it? To some house, some village, some river?

She rolled an apple at it in case it liked apples. The merin knocked it away savagely.

Then—so why did she remember any of this?—she took care of it. She didn’t remember how, just that she did. She found a way to feed it for a while until it had gathered its strength.

Say what you know.

I remember pulling a golden minnow or smelt from my pocket, still flapping, as if I had just rescued it from the weir, and feeding it to the merin. I remember how the fishlette flopped in the beak, dropped in the grass, and with what acumen and zip the merin retrieved it, and swallowed it whole.

But what a patently false memory this was. The rescue of an ice-bound fish happened in winter. The merin’s recuperation from some unknown attack or disease clearly happened in the autumn—all those apples decorating the memory.

So—if the oldest memories could contaminate one another, could prove impossible—what good was memory at all?

Was that why she remembered nothing more?

Except that when the merin had recovered its nerve and its composure, it staggered to its bandy legs and rushed at her, clacking its beak like scissors. Until it pivoted. Like a one-legged man picking up his false leg and tucking it under his arm before hopping to bed, the merin swung its beak into place. Then the bird raised its weird puppet-head and opened its wings. She could see that one wing had been wrenched at; its feathers thinned. An ugly viscous patch glistened on the leading edge like wet shellac.

And still it somehow managed to launch itself. It battered through branches as it learned how to fly all over again, with new strength in its left wing correcting what it had lost in its right. Lopsidedly it lifted along the slopes of air that mimicked the steps of terraced orchard below. It wheeled against silver blue, heading for something beyond the scope of memory to imagine.

To climb up the invisible staircases of the sky—!

Without benefit of a mouth, which was in storage, it said to her, one way or the other, “Remember.”

9.

Cherrystone was true to his word. The next morning he sent an underling to collect Rain for her first lesson in reading. It would take place in the Opaline Salon. Safe enough. Miss Murth reported that the door had been left ajar, as if for Lady Glinda or her minions to be able to check for impropriety.

“Is that so. Well, then, be a dear, Murthy, and nip down there to investigate, just in case,” said Glinda.

“Lady Glinda. I do many things and I do them well, but I do not nip.”

Rain returned an hour later not visibly glorified with learning. She trotted off to water the potted prettibells in the south porch, since Glinda now felt obliged to keep the damn things alive.

Chef sent word that his supplies of potatoes had been appropriated. Also three whole smoked haunches of skark and a pair of hams. Would Lady Glinda settle for a lunch of coddled eggs and new carrots?

Miss Murth had a headache and retired for the afternoon.

Glinda walked the length of her apartments. Since Mockbeggar Hall crowned a headland, it enjoyed water views from three directions. Westward Glinda could see a flock of geese. Out the front windows she spied a lone tugboat plying the waves. Easterly, several stacks of smudgy smoke unfurled from an indeterminate source.

She rang for Puggles. “They’re not burning Zimmerstorm, surely?” she asked.

“I can’t say for certain, Mum,” he replied. “All our kitchen deliveries are now handled through an EC lout who acts mute. Perhaps he is. He is called Private Private, and he doesn’t speak to us or anyone else, near as I can tell. So I can get no word out of him.”

“This is intolerable.” She tried to summon Cherrystone, but the guard who seemed permanently stationed in the banquet hall replied, “He’s not at home, Mum.”

“Of course he’s not at home,” she snapped. “His home is someplace else. This is my home. Where is he?”

“Privileged information, I’m afraid, Mum.”

“I’m not Mum to you, laddie. Address me as Lady Glinda or Lady Chuffrey. Who are you?”

“Privileged information, Mum.”

She almost hit him. But Cherrystone came swooping in, pretty as you please, through the kitchens. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said, like a husband returning from an afternoon shooting grouse. She almost felt he was going to swing across the room and plant a kiss on her cheek.

“Traper. I need a word. Privately.”

He shrugged. “As you know, privacy doesn’t do either of our reputations any good.”

“This is war, Traper. Reputations be damned.”

“As you wish.” He made a gesture and the Menacier skated away.

She told him she wanted to know what was burning to the east. “Oh, that? It’s the cotton harvest, I’m afraid. The holdings between here and Zimmerstorm.”

She gasped. “You must be mad. What has cotton ever done to you?”

“Oh, very little. Cotton is blameless, I admit.”

“What is the point? Just to deprive the farmers of their cash crop? They sell to mills in Gillikin, you must know that. You’ll force up the price of cotton in Loyal Oz. That’s madness pure and simple.”

“Maybe there was a population of boll weevils doing the nasty on that farm.”

“I’ll say. Are you trying to foment the farmers into attacking you here? The Battle of Mockbeggar Hall? Seriously. Traper. I want an explanation.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you’d become the Good Witch of Munchkinland, Lady Glinda. They already have a pretender to the position of Eminence squatting up there in Colwen Grounds, I’m told.”

“And I have friends in the neighborhood.”

“Among cotton farmers? Please.”

It was a stretch; she saw that. She tried again. “Those farmers supply you and me both with dairy and grain and who knows what else. You’re playing with fire, General. Rather literally, I’m afraid.”

“Well.” He poured himself a small portion of her brandy. Before lunch! He offered her a glass. She didn’t acknowledge his offer. “The truth is, the boys are antsy. Soldiers like to be on the move, and they’re going slightly stir-crazy. They need to be kept busy. A little burning of fields is a useful exercise. Gets them out and working.”

She stared at him as if he were mad.

He added, “You haven’t had sons, you wouldn’t get it. Soldiers like to destroy as well as to build.”

She was flummoxed. “If you’re going to be here for months, what will you do—scorch the entire district?”

“Maybe we’ll take up lowland sports. Like hip-sprung dancing, the way the old ones do in the pub in Zimmerstorm. Or darts.” He was being amused by her consternation. “Or I could teach my men to speak Qua’ati, perhaps. By the way, your Rain made a creditable start at learning her letters this morning.”

“I need a carriage.”

“There’s nothing available today.”

“You’ll have to locate me one. I have an appointment. I’m leaving directly after luncheon.”

“I can’t spare a driver.”

“I’ll have Puggles or Chef. They’ll know how to manage a team.”

She turned to leave as he was speaking. “Where is your appointment?”

“East of the cotton fields,” she replied. “I haven’t decided the exact destination.”

Somewhat to her surprise, when she descended the stairs in her wine-colored summer cloak with the musset panels, the front doors were open and the Menacier from the banquet hall was waiting. “The name is Zackers, Lady Glinda,” he said with crystalline politeness. “I have orders to accommodate you within reason, and to turn back if you cannot be reasoned with.”

“I have nearly no sense of reason,” she told him, “so be forewarned.”

It wasn’t her best carriage but it was better than nothing. Miss Murth had brought a fan, but the breeze off the lake was strong this afternoon and the horseflies mercifully few. What a treat to hear the trap clicketing along on the abalone drive, and then the softer sound it made in summer dust when they passed through the front gates of Mockbeggar and turned east along the lake road. Lady Glinda hadn’t really felt imprisoned yet, but her release was more welcome than she’d anticipated.

The road rose and fell as the low hills of the Pine Barrens to the north approached the lake. This part of Oz had been farmed for hundreds of years. Some tedious old geezer at a dinner party once had told Glinda that the Munchkins of antiquity had settled here first before colonizing the breadbasket of Oz to the northeast. How anyone could deduce such a thing seemed dubious to her, though in time her eye for architecture began to assemble clues that supported his thesis. And, she had to acknowledge, the fecundity of this district would have appealed to any wandering troll or trollop.

How she’d come to love Restwater. As if she didn’t see it every day from her chambers, she marveled once again. Every bend in the road, every dip after every rise, bringing new vistas of blue shattered by sunlight. Blue between the pines, one shade; blue between the birches, another. Blue in chips and fragments; blue opening up. If there were such a place as heaven, she thought, it could do worse than modeling itself on the road from Mockbeggar to Zimmerstorm.

All too soon, however, she began to smell the stench of char, and most of those blues went brown with heavy hovering smoke, a kind of industrial fog. She coughed, and Murth coughed, and their eyes stung and then ran. “Shall I turn back, for your health, Mum?” asked Private Zackers.

“Press on.”

The fields were destroyed. At least—she peered through the streams in her eyes—at least the outbuildings and farmsteads seemed standing. Those visible from the road, anyway.

What had those farmers done? Where had they gone while their livelihoods were being torched?

The carriage passed a vegetable garden that for the fun of it, she guessed, had also been ravaged. A scarecrow shrugged its shoulders at the sky, presiding over ruin, as if asking the Unnamed God the reason for such wantonness.

Murth’s tears were real tears. She was a fool, after all, if a dear one. For herself, Glinda felt ready to take some training with a halberd.

Before long—not soon enough—they had cleared the worst of the damage and were beginning the descent into Zimmerstorm. Its town hall steeple, its pitched roofs clad in the blue-grey tiles of the region—it all looked more or less correct. A mercy.

Glinda directed Zackers to halt the trap in the village square. “We shall take our tea, my companion and I,” she told Zackers. “Your company is not required.”

He stood on guard at the street door of the local tearoom anyway.

Then Lady Glinda had the most unfortunate experience of realizing—very slowly, picking up cues as if they were bug bites—that the residents of Zimmerstorm didn’t fully believe the testimony of those who’d been dismissed from Mockbeggar. They harbored a suspicion that Lady Glinda was in collusion with the occupiers.

She could hardly blame them. She was Gillikinese herself, of course, and she had had high-ranking association with the Emerald City. And she couldn’t mount an explanation in public—former Throne Ministers didn’t do that. Besides, who would believe her? She just had to sit in stony silence as the cabbage-faced Munchkinlander hostess grunted and scowled and made as if to dump the tea in her lap. “A biscuit,” Glinda begged.

“No biscuits,” snapped the proprietress. “Your military friendsies scarfed ’em all up. For ’emselves.”

“Perhaps a roundlet of toast?” wondered Miss Murth.

The toast came about twenty minutes later. It had been burnt inedible. As burnt as the cotton fields.

“Perhaps a constitutional,” suggested Lady Glinda.

“That’s five farthings, Mum,” said Sour Peasant Woman.

Lady Glinda wasn’t in the habit of carrying coin. Miss Murth had none to carry. How embarrassing to have to petition Private Zackers to pay the establishment. I won’t make that mistake again, Glinda thought.

Still, while Zackers was settling up, Glinda and Murth got ahead of him, across the village square. A miniature escape! Oh, hilarity.

“Into the lending library, Murthy,” said Glinda. “Quickly now. Move your arthritic hips or I’ll run you down.”

The librarian was a retired Munchkin on a stool. She recognized him though she didn’t know his name. “I’m looking to borrow a book that can teach one the essentials of preparing a meal,” she said. “For dining, I mean. For human dining.”

“Books en’t going to teach that, Lady Glinda,” he said. “Mothers teach that. Closest I can help you with is a volume on animal husbandry, which has an illustrated index on slaughtering your own livestock.”

“I think not,” she murmured. Turning, she saw a notice board behind his desk. A scroll was posted with nails. She peered at it. A crude drawing with a handwritten announcement. She hadn’t brought her reading glasses. “Miss Murth, can you decipher that message?” she asked.

Miss Murth could not. “You want something read, you should’ve brought Rain,” she said, somewhat cruelly.

“I can read that for you, Lady Glinda,” said the librarian. “It says that the Clock of the Time Dragon is coming through in the next week or so, weather and the military situation permitting.”

“It looks like a chapel on wheels of some sort.”

“It’s an entertainment, Mum. Sort of a puppet show for adults. You en’t never seen it?”

“Nor heard of it.” She intended frost in her tone, but thought better of it. “My dear man, would you tell the managers of this traveling enterprise to make their way to Mockbeggar Hall? I do believe that if the soldiers had something to look forward to, we might keep them from doing any more damage than they have already done, for instance, today.”

Luckily, this Munchkinlander wasn’t as suspicious as the tea-wife in the shop. “Can’t say them traveling clocksters will listen to me,” he replied. “But I can pass on the word and see what they’ll do. They operate with cheeky diplomatic immunity, far as I’ve heard. Cross these parts every few years, don’t matter if it’s Wicked Witch of the East or the old Eminent Thropp or that mean old Zombie Mombey in charge. They seem pretty fearless. I’ll give ’em your message.”

“You’re too kind,” she told him. Here came Private Zackers, looking red under the collar.

“You were nice to my sister, that time she lay in childbirth a month too long,” said the librarian softly. “You put a cloth to her brow. Don’t pretend you forget.”

She turned away, confused by an accusation of charity. “How impertinent!” hissed Murth on her behalf.

10.

Day after day as different plantings came to flower, blossoms patterned the gardens and the meadows with a shifting palette. Now the eggy frill of late forsythia, now the fringe of fern. Now the periwinkle mycassandrum on the hillsides, until pale daisies overtook the lavender, and then wild dusteria the daisies. The leaves on the trees flexed their palms wider. Let me in, said the sun. Let me out, said the tree.

Beyond the reflecting pool, the topiary hedges thickened into rooms again, chambers of green set round with statues, plinths, benches of marble carved to look like rural twigwork. Once the daily cloudburst had passed, Glinda often grabbed a parasol and picked her way through the maze. Miss Murth had an allergy to the mites that came out of the ivy after a downpour so she stayed inside, and Glinda got herself a little privacy. The Green Parlor, as they called it, was considered an extension of her private chambers, so she had no cause to worry about some wayward soldier interrupting her meditations.

She was surprised, therefore, one afternoon about a week later, to come upon a dwarf with a hoary beard sitting upon the drum of an aesthetically collapsed column.

“I beg your pardon.” Her tone was High Frost.

“No offense taken,” he told her, lighting a pipe with a long stem.

“This is a private garden.”

“You’d better take yourself off, then.” He winked at her. The nerve. “Or should I say, All the better for a private conversation.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Glinda, or else I made a wrong turn,” he answered. “Easy enough to do in a hedge maze. Especially for a dwarf.”

“I’ll set the dogs on you unless you leave.”

He looked up over the tops of his spectacles. “That’s a sour welcome considering you called for me. You don’t remember we’ve met before? Or is it, Seen one dwarf, seen ’em all? They all look alike to me?”

“Forgive me. I’m not myself. I no longer have the staff to hand me notes of reference.” She peered at him sideways. “Oh. I see. You’re with that circus. That pantomime troupe. No?”

“We prefer to think of ourselves as social critics. The conscience of Oz. But we take any cash comes our way, so you can call us dancing bears or moral vivisectionists, whatever you like. Makes no difference to me.”

He gave his name as Mr. Boss, which rang no bells with her.

“How did you know how to find me in the maze?” she asked.

He laughed. “Oh, knowing things; that’s my line of work, missy.”

“Well … thank you for coming, I suppose. I had thought maybe you could put on a performance or rally or sing-along, whatever, to entertain the men garrisoned here. Is that the sort of thing you do?”

“I do anything that suits me. But it can be made my while, I think.”

“Well, what do you charge?”

“I’ll let you know. Can you show me the setup?”

“First remind me how we came to meet the first time. For the life of me I can’t recall.”

He didn’t comply with her request. “You must meet so many dwarfs in your line of work. Let’s go.”

She didn’t like to be seen taking the air with a dwarf, but she supposed she had no choice. And really, she thought, what do I care what soldiers think? Bloody hell. They’ve spent the week burning cotton fields.

But she did care, which was annoying.

Still, she ushered Mr. Boss out of the Green Parlor. The dwarf breathed noisily and spat his tobacco into the prettibells.

In the widest open space among the farm buildings, where two stables and three barns and some carriage sheds fronted a sort of ellipse, Private Zackers showed up to refuse her further access. “I have no interest in the barns right now, Zackers,” she told him. “I’m engaging a troupe of traveling players and I’m examining the barnyard as a possible venue.”

“Has the General approved this?” asked Zackers.

She made a disagreeable face. “I’m not submitting to him for reimbursement, Zackers; there’s nothing to approve. I’m supplying my uninvited guests with a little weekend entertainment. I am the lady of Mockbeggar Hall, after all.” She turned to the dwarf. “What do you think?”

“Some can sit in the upper windows and get a balcony view,” he said. “Shall we say sunset tomorrow?”

“How will I reach you in case plans need to be changed?”

“You won’t need to reach me.”

He was confident. As well he might be: Cherrystone had no objection. “I saw posters mounted on various kiosks in Zimmerstorm and Haventhur,” he said. “I’d been wondering what it was all about. Bring it on.”

So, ten days after the burning of the first cotton field, Glinda left Miss Murth and Chef and Rain behind. They could keep an eye on the silver if nothing else. She accepted the arm Puggles extended to her because the cobbles were uneven. Cherrystone had arranged a chair for her—one of the precious bon Scavella chairs from the Hall of Painted Arches!—but she pretended not to be outraged.

Men surrounded her in jostling, good-natured mumble. The ones nearer the appointed arena had brought cloaks upon which to sit, but most of the fellows stood, arms about one another’s shoulders, or leaned against the various walls. Several hay carts provided mezzanine seating, while other fellows appeared in the hay doors under the peaks of the barn roofs. From a height sometimes known as the gods they swung their heels and hooted at their buddies.

General Cherrystone hauled out a camp chair for himself. He sat some distance away from her, as was correct. She nodded, acknowledging him briefly before turning her attention to nothing of interest in her purse.

Just as the sun was slotting between two hills to the east, raging the lake with ruddy copper, she heard the sound of wheels on stone from around the edge of the farthest barn. This was the signal, apparently, for soldiers to light some torches. Within a few moments the last of day became the first of night, a magic as peculiar and welcome as any other.

A wheeled monstrosity of some sort emerged. Nothing less than a small building erected on a dray. Between the shafts, where one might expect a team of horses or donkeys, a lion strained, head down, mane over his eyes. The temple of entertainment was accompanied by a number of young men in tangerine tunics, black scarfs covering their noses and mouths. A slim white-haired woman in a golden veil struck a set of chimes with a mallet. She looked spiky and consumptive. The dwarf drew up the rear, banging a drum almost as big as he was.

Glinda hoped she wasn’t going to ask to be converted. She didn’t have much to be converted from. She began to wish she’d sat farther back. Now where had she met that dwarf before? She’d been racking her brains for a day and had turned up no clue. She supposed, not for the first time, that she didn’t have a whole lot of brains to rack. Or was she at the age already when memory begins to fail? She couldn’t remember.

The lion muttered something to the veiled woman. So it was a Lion, then. Curious. Most respectable Animals wouldn’t be seen doing menial labor like pulling a cart, but perhaps this was a sort of penance. Glinda knew that Animals in Munchkinland fared no better than Animals in Loyal Oz; you rarely saw a professional Animal on the shores of Restwater. But then her social circuit was circumscribed by her position; who knew what Animals might be getting up to in the back of beyond? All kinds of unsavory mischief. She preferred not to contemplate it; life at Mockbeggar these days was vexing enough.

She turned her attention to the performance. Things were starting up.

The jittery-totteriness of it. A sort of omphalos made of wood, capped by the semblance of a dragon. Its countenance was lurid, its eyes glowed red, like embers. Clever and banal. Long struts carved of sallowwood flexed to suggest the limbs of a bat. When the dragon shifted its wings to reveal a clock-face, the sound of leathery creases shifting was like wet laundry on the line, flumping in a stiff wind.

So this was the Clock of the Time Dragon. Ready for all manner of foldiddy-doodle.

Then the facade of the great structure along the length of the cart, the long side, began to separate into segments. It folded back cunningly, the best of tiktok play. Small stagelets receded or nested against each other. Protrusions locked into recesses. The whole thing was a set of shutters collapsing against one another like a sentient puzzle.

All this clockwork commotion revealed a central arena, cloaked from view by a curtain as broad as two bed linens hemmed together. The drape must be stiffened with wooden braces. The surface of the cloth was painted with a fanciful map of Oz. More iconography than geography. The Emerald City glowed in the middle through some apparatus of backlighting; a loose approximation of the four main counties fanned out to the margins. Gillikin to the north, Quadling Country to the south, the Vinkus to the west, and Munchkinland—the Free State of Munchkinland, for her pains!—to the east.

She was sitting close enough to peer at the margins of the map. The outlying colonies and satrapies of Ugabu and the Glikkus. A few arrows pointing, variously, away, off margin, to countries across the band of deserts that isolated the giant Oz as competently as a ring of seas might, were seas anything other than a mystical notion of everlastingness.

Some sort of music began. She was dimly aware that the boys in their sunset robes had picked up nose whistles and cymberines, tympani and strikes. Someone drew a bow across a squash-bellied violastrum. Someone lit a muskwax-taper that smelled of rose blossoms. To a man, the soldiers squatted, relaxing on their haunches; this was well done enough to be convincing before it had even begun.

Cherrystone, she saw, was lighting a cigarette.

The dwarf gave a bow at the close of the prelude. The curtain rose on a lighted stage as the yard appreciably darkened by three or four degrees of violet.

A couple of figures strutted lazily onstage. What were they called again? Homunculards. Puppets on strings. Marionettes, that was it. They were meant to resemble the Messiars and Menaciers squatting in the barnyard of Mockbeggar Hall, no doubt. They were hale and fit, and their ash limbs had been carved to exaggerate military physique. Waists tapered to pencil points, while biceps and buttocks and pectorals were all globular as oranges. Faces were blank but rosy-cheeked, and one chin had a sticking plaster across it, suggesting a soldier so young he was still learning how to shave.

The two soldiers sauntered across the stage, looking hither and yon. Lights came up further to reveal the painted backdrop, which seemed to be a field of corn or wheat or cotton. A rough fence, a scarecrow, a few squiggles of bird painted in the sky across fat clouds in summersweet blue.

What craft the handlers showed! The puppet soldiers were bored. They whistled (how did they do that?). They kicked an imaginary stone back and forth. Funny how in the telling of it, thought Glinda, in the arc of the leading foot and the posture of the defense, the presence of the implied stone seemed as real, or even realer, than the puppet fellows themselves.

The puppets soon tired of kick-the-pebble. They approached the front of the stage and looked out at the audience, but it was clear they weren’t peering at real soldiers in the gloaming. One of the carved Menaciers put a palm to his eyebrows as if shielding it from sun while he scanned the horizon. The other knelt down and dipped his hand a little below stage level, and the audience heard the sound of water swishing about. The puppet guard was meant to be on the shores of Restwater.

From offstage a melody started up, a saucy two-step in the key of squeezebox. The soldiers looked at each other and then off to one side. On came a line of dancing girls with high-stepping legs, bare to the knee and venturing quite a bit of thigh. In the porphyrous barnyard, General Cherrystone’s soldiers roared and applauded the arrival of this squadron of hoofers. Well, they were cheery, Glinda had to agree. And so smart! Eight or nine dancers. Their dresses, sequinned and glittery, were made of silvery blue tulle netting stitched from the hip of the first dancer on the left all along to the last dancer on the right. Their kicks were so uniform they were no doubt managed by a single lever or pulley of some sort. Offstage, some of the musicians were hooting out in falsetto as if the dancers were catcalling the men, “Heee!” and “What ho!” and “Oooh la la!” and “Oz you like it!”

Then, through some sleight of theater that Glinda couldn’t work out, they’d turned back-to-front somehow. The vixens put their hands to the floor and their legs in the air, and their skirts fell down over their bosoms and heads, revealing pink panties that looked, from here, like real silk. Their costumed behinds faced the audience. Each one of the girls had a bull’s-eye painted on her smalls.

The soldiers in the barnyard roared their approval. Glinda noticed that the two puppet Menaciers had disappeared. Well, who needed male puppets when females were available?

You could no longer make out the heads of the dancers, nor even their legs. The blue netting seemed to be rising and thickening; there was more and more of it, until all that was left were nine pink behinds bobbing in a sea of blue.

Thank mercy she had left Miss Murth at home, she thought, as—oh sweet Ozma—the dancers somehow dropped their drawers. The pink sleeves slid under the waves, and on each of the nine bobbing unclefted arses a different letter was painted.

R-E-S-T-W-A-T-E-R.

The articulate rumps quickly disappeared beneath the blue waves of the lake. The audience booed good-naturedly. But Glinda noticed that the smell of roses had given over to a smell of smoke.

From wing to wing, across the back of the stage, some long slit in the floor must have opened, for the dancing girl puppets and then their drowning lengths of blue skirt drained within the aperture. Their disappearance revealed one of the soldiers from earlier. His face had been smudged with coal dust, his clothes as well. He carried in his hand a torch. The fire was made of orange flannel lit from within; a spring-wound fan made the flames dance to the same melody that the girls had jigged to.

Oh, thought Glinda suddenly, as the smell of smoke intensified. Oh dear.

The aperture opened again and up from beneath the stage rose a stiffened flat. It was in the shape of a hill, the same shape as the hill on the backdrop, and very soon it stood in front of the backdrop, blocking the view of Highsummer crops. The hill was denuded of crop, and blackened. The scarecrow was a scorched skeleton with hollows for eyes.

The second soldier came on, and the two companions returned to the shore of Restwater. Somehow while the audience had been distracted by the rising dead hill, a segment of the stage had slid forward, like the broad bowed front of a shallow drawer. From the recesses flashed scraps and humps of the costumes of the dancing girls, now clearly signifying the waves of Restwater. Then—oh, horrid to see!—from the surface of the tulle-water emerged the head of the Time Dragon itself. Its eyes glowed red; its scissoring jaws seethed with smoke.

The two soldiers waded in the water, one on either side of the puppet Dragon, and they clasped their arms around its neck. They fell to kissing the creature as if it were one of the dancing girls, and as its smile turned into a leer, it sank beneath the waves, dragging the two soldiers with them. They couldn’t pull away. They courted the dragon with affection until they drowned.

“Enough!” barked Cherrystone in the dark, but he hadn’t needed to say this. The lights were going down and the music fading upon a weird, unresolved chord.

The barnyard fell silent. The dwarf came around from the back of the Clock and gave a little skip and a bow and a flick of his teck-fur cap.

Glinda stood and applauded. She was the only one until she turned and made a motion with her hands. Then the men joined in, grumblingly and none too effusive.

Improvising, she walked over to Cherrystone and pretended she couldn’t read his ire. “Would you care to join the troupe of entertainers back at the house for a light refreshment before they go on their way?”

He didn’t answer. He began barking orders to his men.

She couldn’t resist fluting after him, “I’ll take that as regrets, but do feel free to change your mind if you’re so inclined.” Then she cocked her head at Mr. Boss and indicated Mockbeggar Hall’s forecourt.

11.

My, but Cherrystone needed to sort out his men. They seemed bothered by the turn toward tragedy that the episode had taken. Clever little dramaturg, thought Glinda, sneaking a glance at Mr. Boss and his associates as they dragged the Clock of the Time Dragon across the forecourt of Mockbeggar.

Puggles had rushed ahead to light a few lanterns and arrange for a beverage. But Mr. Boss said, “There’s no time. We have to get out quickly before your General Mayhem arrives to put us under lock and key.”

“But you’re my guests,” said Glinda.

“Fat distance that’ll get us, when you’re in durance vile yourself.” He turned to the Lion. “Brrr, guard the gateway, will you? If you can manage to look menacing, you might hold off the law for a valuable few moments.”

“Menacing isn’t my strong suit,” said the Lion. “How about vexed? Or inconvenienced.”

Glinda recognized the voice, dimly. Not the famous Cowardly Lion? Doing menial labor for a bunch of—shudder—theater people? She had made him a Namory once, hadn’t she? “Sir Brrr?” she ventured.

“The same,” he replied, “though I drop the honorific when I’m touring.” He seemed pleased to be recognized. “Lady Glinda. A pleasure.”

“To your station, ’fraidycat,” snapped the dwarf. Brrr padded away. The brittle woman in the veils went with him, one hand upon his rolling spine. In the lamplight he looked quite the golden statue of a Lion, regal and paralyzed, and his consort like some sort of penitent. The lads in orange were still strapping up the Clock and securing it.

“I have been trying to think of where we met,” said Glinda. “I ought to have kept better notes.”

“You ever intend to write your memoirs,” the dwarf said, “you’re going to have to make up an awful lot. Maybe this will remind you.”

He motioned to the young men to stand back. They looked singularly strong, stupid, and driven. Ah, for a stupid young man, she thought, losing the thread for a moment. Lord Chuffrey had been many wonderful things, but stupid he was not, which made him a little less fun than she’d have liked.

The dwarf approached the Clock. She couldn’t tell if he pressed some hidden mechanism or if the Clock somehow registered his intentions. Or maybe he was merely responding to its intentions; it seemed weirdly spirited. “The next moment,” he murmured, “always the next moment unpacks itself with a degree of surprise. Come on, now.”

The section of front paneling—from which the lake of blue tulle had swelled—slid open once more. There was no sign of the dragon head, the drowned Menaciers, the rustling waves. The dwarf reached in and put his thwarty hands on something and pulled it out. She recognized it at once, and her memory snapped into place.

Elphaba’s book of spells. Glinda had had it once, after Elphaba had died; and then the dwarf had come along, and Glinda had given it to him for safekeeping.

“How did you persuade me to give it to you?” Her voice was nearly at a whisper. “I can’t remember. You must have put a spell on me.”

“Nonsense. I don’t do magic, except the obvious kind. Fanfares and mistaken identities, chorus lines and alto soliloquies. A little painting on black velvet. I merely told you that I knew you had the book of spells, that I knew what was in it, and that I knew your fears about it. I’m the keeper of the Grimmerie. That’s my job. If not to hoard it under my own protection, then to lodge it where it will do the least harm.”

He held it out to her. “That’s why I’ve come. It’s your turn. This is your payment for our service tonight. You will take it again. It’s time.”

She drew back, looked to make sure that Cherrystone wasn’t approaching from the barns or the house itself. “You’re a mad little huskin of a man, Mr. Boss. This is the least safe place for the Grimmerie. I am incarcerated here.”

“You will use it,” he said, “and you must use it.”

“I don’t respond to threats or prophecies.”

“Prophecy is dying, Lady Glinda. So I’m going on a hunch. Our best thinking is all we have left.”

“My best thinking wouldn’t boil an egg,” she told him.

“Look it up. This thing is as good a cookbook as any you’re likely to find. Come on, sister. Didn’t Elphaba trust you once to try? It’s your turn.”

“I don’t mention her name,” said Glinda. Not coldly, but in deference.

“Shall I leave you the Lion to help you protect the book?”

“I am not allowed pets.”

Brrr, circling the court and sniffing for trouble, gave a low growl.

“Sorry. I’m flustered. I meant to say staff. I have a skeletal crew on hand to look after me, but I think you need the Lion’s services more than I do.”

“His services aren’t much to speak of,” said the dwarf. The boys laughed a little nastily. They were Menaciers themselves, she saw, just in a different uniform, serving a different commander. She wanted nothing to do with any of them.

“When I saw you once before,” she told Mr. Boss, “you were on your own. You didn’t have this extravagance of tiktok mechanics at your heels.”

“Once in a while I park the Clock in secrecy when the times require it. That instance, as I recall, I was making a little pilgrimage on foot. I told you that I knew you had the Grimmerie, and what was in it. I told you things about Elphaba that no one could know. That’s how I convinced you to relieve yourself of the Grimmerie then, before Shell Thropp had acceded to the Throne and approached you, intending to impound the book. I trust he did make that effort?”

She nodded. The dwarf had predicted events quite cannily. Thanks to him, she’d had nothing to show Shell, not in the palace treasury nor in her private library, not in Mennipin Square nor in Mockbeggar Hall. She’d been clean of this dangerous volume.

And now, Cherrystone breathing down her throat every day, she was expected to take it back again? To hide it in plain sight?

“Are you working to set me up for execution?” she hissed.

“I never talk about the end game.” He winked at her. “I’ve lived so long without death that I’ve stopped believing in it.”

From the shadows of the great Parrith onyx pillars with strabbous inlay, the Lion spoke. “Things are settling down now. Campfires being lit, men sorted out. We don’t have much time.”

“Please,” said Mr. Boss to her. “And I don’t say please often.”

Glinda kept her hands tucked under her arms. She looked up at the dark windows of Mockbeggar. If she took this book, she wanted to make certain that Miss Murth and Puggles and Chef were ignorant of it. She didn’t want to put them under any more danger than necessary.

There was no sign of a shape at the windows. Or was there? Perhaps a little thumbnail of darkness at a lower pane. Surely Rain was off and asleep?

The spooky woman in the veil hesitated, but then left the Lion’s side to approach Glinda. The lamplight etched shadows from her veil along the sides of her face, but Glinda could make out her strong thin nose and full lips and a shock of white hair, odd in one who seemed otherwise so young. A wasting ailment, perhaps. Her skin was dark, like a woman from the Vinkus. “We do not play at intrigue,” she said to Glinda. “We work to avoid it wherever we can. But I ask you. Do this for Elphaba. Do this for Fiyero.”

Glinda reared back. “What license have you to take their names to me!”

She replied, “The right of the wounded, for whom propriety is a luxury. I beg you. In their names. Take the book.”

“Listen to Missy Flitter-foot of the Prairies,” said Mr. Boss to Glinda. “Before they tear us limb from limb.”

The Lion shook his mane. “Ilianora. Gentlemen. Mr. Boss. They’re beginning to marshal their forces. I can hear them coming.”

She didn’t know why she took the Grimmerie from the dwarf, but Brrr was already settling himself between the shafts of the Clock, and the lads in tunics were putting shoulders to the carriage. The one they called Ilianora drew her veil down upon her forehead. “If they catch us up, and tear the Clock apart with their fingers, they won’t find its heart,” she said to Glinda, and put two dusky fingers upon Glinda’s pale hand. “Much depends on you now.” Then she turned, a corkscrew twist of white sleeves and ripples, and hurried after the Clock as it passed through the gates of the forecourt and into the dark, heading not toward Zimmerstorm and the Munchkin strongholds, but west along the road leading toward Loyal Oz.

The dwarf was walking away backward, hissing at Glinda. “We won’t go far. Into a tuck between low hills in the Pine Barrens. Just until we’re sure everything is copacetic.”

“You have no reason to look after me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. We want to make sure the book doesn’t come to harm.” Then on his bandy legs he stumped to catch up with his companions.

She was alone for a moment, alone with the Grimmerie in the guttering light of lanterns. It weighed against her breast and clavicle like the child she had never had. It was nearly warm to touch. It was warm to touch. The tooled binding seemed to relax in her hold.

Nonsense.

She flung herself inside and up the grand staircase. She was huffing by the time she reached the top, and she could hear soldiers returning to their posts in the banquet hall and the reception rooms. She heard the crystal chink of stopper against bottleneck; brandy was being decanted. Disagreements about the Clock’s presentation were being aired. She achieved her private suite, however, without molestation.

A single candle glowed in a sconce. Miss Murth sat ramrod straight, looking directly ahead. The girl was on the floor, her head in Miss Murth’s lap. Murth was stroking her hair.

“You fool. You should be abed. I can manage my own nightgown,” snapped Glinda.

“The girl couldn’t sleep and I didn’t dare let her wander about alone.”

“So where did the two of you wander to? The ramparts?”

Miss Murth pursed her lip. “The girl was curious. But I did not care for the entertainment. It did not seem suitable.”

“Suitable for whom? I’m disappointed in you both. Take yourselves off somewhere else to sulk. I didn’t write the script. Go on, I’m in no mood to talk.”

Miss Murth arose. She didn’t glance at the Grimmerie, which Glinda felt was glowing against her bosom like a red-hot breastplate. “You will bring us to ruin, Lady Glinda,” she said in a low voice. “Come along, girl.”

The sleepy child stood and yawned. As much to herself as to Glinda or Murth, she murmured, “My favorite was the Lion.”

12.

Whatever happened, Glinda was pretty sure she wouldn’t be subject to a midnight inquisition, so she just stuffed the Grimmerie under her pillow. Then she humped herself into bed and blew her own candle out, and failed to sleep till nearly dawn.

What to do about the book? Cherrystone had already scoured her apartments, but he was no fool. He might work out that the performance of such a seditious little one-act was a diversionary tactic. That some transaction had occurred in the forecourt. He could come storming in here at dawn and tear the place apart. What to do? Where to turn?

And why was she the point person? Was it simply too obvious for words—that she was known to be more capricious than clever? That no one would think to look for an instrument of parlous magic in her presence? That she was a silly, dispensable figure whose moment had passed? She couldn’t dispute any of this. And she still couldn’t sleep.

Her thoughts returned to Elphaba Thropp. It was more than fifteen years since they had parted ways. What an uncommon friendship they had had—not quite fulfilling. Yet nothing had ever taken its place. Years later, when that boy Liir had shown up at Glinda’s house in the Emerald City, she had known him at once for Elphaba’s son, though he seemed in some doubt on that matter. (Children.) He had had Elphaba’s broom, after all, and her cape. More to the point, he had had her look: that look both haunted and thereby abstract, but at the same time focused. A look like a spark on a dry winter’s day, that staticky crackle and flash that leaps across the air from finger to the iron housing of the servant’s bell.

What would Liir do, were he handed the Grimmerie? What would Elphaba?

She drifted to sleep at last as the summer dawn began. Birds insisted on their dim pointless melodies. She didn’t believe she dreamed of Elphaba; she didn’t have the kind of aggravated imagination that loitered in dreams. Maybe she dreamed of a door opening, and Elphaba coming back from the Afterlife. To settle Glinda’s consternation; to save her. Or maybe this wasn’t a dream, just a foundational longing. Still, when she rose to a clamor of soldiers practicing in formation outside, she found that she had an inkling about what to do. Like a bit of advice from Elphaba, in her dream! But that was fanciful.

Miss Murth was drawing the bath. “I fear a slight headache,” called Glinda. “I will do without tea until later. Leave me alone.”

“Very good, Mum,” said Miss Murth in a voice of superiority and disdain. She slammed the door on the way out.

Glinda approached the wardrobe and removed the Grimmerie. She sat it on a towel on her dressing table. The volume was as long as her forearm and almost as wide, covered in green morocco and gussied up with semiprecious stones and silvergilt. No title upon its spine. The pages were rough cut, she could see, and when she ran her finger across the deckle edges she believed she felt a curious charge. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t fully awake yet.

She opened the book. This is to say, she prised up the cover and a certain portion of pages. The book wouldn’t allow her to select any old page. It seemed to know what she was looking for, and sure enough, she found it. The facing page was blank, but the inscribed page read, in majuscule so ornate as to look like lace, On Concealment.

A knock on the door. Without thinking Glinda murmured, “Come in.” Murth approached with tea on a tray. “I said I would wait,” said Glinda.

“But it’s noon, Mum,” said Miss Murth. “And you haven’t taken your bath yet? It’ll be glacial cold by now.”

“Leave the tea,” said Glinda, frightened. She hadn’t felt more than a minute go by as she was trying to scrutinize the spell. Apparently she had lost a morning.

“I have news, Lady Glinda,” said Miss Murth.

“Later,” said Glinda, flustered. “I mean it, Murth. I’ll ring for you presently. Good-bye.”

Miss Murth departed. Glinda was almost there. She had to concentrate.

She stood. Her back was sore from hunching over. She had been studying this one page for several hours! Mercy. Had she learned to concentrate at last? Perhaps she was ready to take some correspondence classes in, oh, table gooseball. Or poem writing. Or the foreign service.

She put the fingers of both hands spread out upon the tabletop—that seemed to be part of it, to stabilize herself. It was almost as if the book wanted her to succeed, wanted to be concealed; there was a sort of sharpening of focus upon each word as she spoke it, though she scarcely knew what the words meant. “Debooey geekum, eska skadilly sloggi,” she recited. “Gungula vexus, vexanda talib en prochinka chorr.” She didn’t think herself at all convincing, but the book didn’t seem to notice.

She reached the last syllables—and the book shuddered and jumped, as if someone had kicked the table from beneath. She put one knuckle between her teeth to keep herself from shrieking in surprise. Success! Or sabotage. Anyway, something. Something was happening.

The Grimmerie began to change shape. She couldn’t have said how. It was shrinking and growing at the same time, and the balsam-needle color of its spine seemed to be burning off. The book flexed and retracted. It took several moments before it returned to seeming lifeless, like most books. It was thick and square and yellow—the size, shape, and color of a bad cake. A kind of papery cover, a shiny scarf cut to order, was folded into the front and back boards and jacketed around the spine of the volume.

Glinda picked up the Grimmerie and shook it. It made no sound except the riffling of pages, which fluttered in a respectably bookish way. There was no warmth or life in it. She studied the cover as if she were Cherrystone looking for the Grimmerie. The author’s name was unintelligible gibberish. Big squarish letters above it, though, which must indicate the book’s title, said Gone with the Wind.

She humped it into a shelf next to her favorite books, A Girl’s First Guide to Coquettery and The Little Mercenary: A Novel of Manners. It looked quite at home. It certainly didn’t look like the Grimmerie.

She rang for tea. She was famished.

Tea arrived with bad news. Miss Murth looked at her balefully. Chef had been dismissed. Forcibly. “No,” said Glinda.

“While you were busy reading your book,” replied Miss Murth with spite.

“Where are the others? Rain? Puggles?”

“Rain is off at her reading lesson with the General. Puggles is trying to stake tomatoes upon the roof. Chef left him with several pages of instructions before he was carted away.”

Glinda dressed in haste and hurried downstairs, but she cast a last look at the bookshelf before she did. Gone with the Wind sat smugly in its place. What a good title for a hidden book, she thought. The Grimmerie has a sense of humor.

Any sense of accomplishment she felt at the successful completion of a spell soon evaporated in the granite presence of General Cherrystone. She paused at the door to the library, where Rain was sitting at a table, her bare legs swinging and her finger tracing letters in the pollen that had sifted through the windows and settled yellowly on the tabletop. Where the hell is that maid, thought Glinda madly, before remembering, of course, that the maid had gone wherever Chef had been sent.

Cherrystone lifted a finger to his lips. She fell silent but quivering at the doorway.

“That was decent work today, my little scholar,” he told the girl. “You’re becoming very good at your standing-up letters. Next time we’ll begin on the letters shaped like circles, or parts of circles. Don’t forget to practice.”

The child fled so fast that her dirty little soles flicked themselves at Glinda. Oh, standards, she thought. Then she pulled herself together.

“I have a bone to pick with you,” she said.

“Lady Glinda.” He didn’t rise as she came into the room. The absolute nerve of him! Leaving her standing as if she were a … a servant.

She pulled out a chair so hard it scraped the parquetry. “Miss Murth tells me you’ve dismissed Chef. You have no right to meddle with my people.”

“You’ve brought this upon yourself, Lady Glinda, by your endorsement of that provocative display last night.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not an impresario. This was no command performance. I didn’t know what entertainment that troupe was going to provide. I merely invited them. You welcomed the notion, yourself. Furthermore I have no idea what you mean by provocative. I thought the repertoire slight, coarse, and pointless.”

“I’m afraid there have had to be repercussions.”

“Are you setting me up as a collaborationist of some sort? That’s nonsense. I have retired to the country to write my memoirs.”

“And to learn to cook. I know. How is it going?”

“How am I to learn without Chef?”

“I’m sure, like your chambermaid learning to read, you’ve picked up some basics. It’s merely a matter of putting them together.”

“Cherrystone. This is intolerable. I want Chef reinstated at once.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. For one thing…” He paused, putting his hands flat on the tabletop, spreading them apart, as if smoothing a bedsheet, then bringing them together so their thumbs touched. “For one thing, he’s in no condition to take up cooking at the moment.”

Glinda gaped. “You—you—”

“He met with an accident.”

“I thought you dismissed him.”

“I did. I dismissed him. And then somehow he walked into Restwater without removing his heavy clothes, and he seemed to drown. Not unlike the set piece that concluded the little performance you so enjoyed last night, though without the involvement of any tiktok dragon.”

She stood. “I don’t believe it. A man who teaches a child to read doesn’t turn around and condemn an innocent man to death. You’re lying. I want him back.”

“The subject is closed. But in any instance, I’m afraid I am moving more men into the house. I’m going to require the use of the chambers on the piano level and in the servants’ quarters, both backstairs and up top. You’ll have to ask your people to clear out.”

“Impossible. Where will they sleep?”

“You have room in your private apartment. I will have my men move bedding and cots into one of your salons.”

“Are you insane? Traper? I can’t have Puggles in my apartments. He is my butler. A man!”

“You were married for some time, Lady Glinda. Surely you know how to close the door against ill-timed attentions. That’s a skill every wife learns.”

She was badly frightened. She needed to find out if Chef was really drowned. Ig, his name. Ig Baernaeraenaesis. “The time has come for me to ask how long you intend to loiter in my home, General.”

“That, my dear, is privileged information. Private Zackers!” he called suddenly. Zackers came through the swinging pantry door. “Some sparkling cider-tea for Lady Glinda, and one for me.”

“I will tell you this,” she said. “You may not release another member of my staff. You may have nothing to do with any of them beyond your lessons with the girl. If anyone is to be dismissed from now on, I’ll make the decision and I’ll alert you by note. Is that clear?”

“Surely you’ll stay for a glass of refreshment? Zackers isn’t Chef, of course, but he’s learning his way around the larder, much as you are.”

She didn’t reply, but swept away. In her rooms, she wept momentarily, feeling foolish. She rang for Murth and asked her to find out more about Chef, but neither Murth nor Puggles was allowed outside of the house anymore. “I didn’t hear ‘drowned,’ ” insisted Miss Murth. “I only heard ‘let go.’ But he couldn’t swim.”

After lunch the Menaciers began moving soldiers’ trunks and sleeping rolls into the gilt-ceilinged guest chambers. Zackers oversaw the setting up of cots in Glinda’s retiring parlor. Three of them, one for Puggles, one for Murth, one for Rain. “I can’t sleep in the same room as Puggles,” begged Miss Murth. “I am an unmarried woman.”

Glinda didn’t answer. She told Puggles to find Rain. Glinda would see her at once, in the privacy of her boudoir.

13.

I need something of you, Rain,” said Glinda.

The girl didn’t answer. She doesn’t speak often, noted Glinda, not for the first time. Maybe learning to read will change that.

“We are being asked to keep from walking about in the gardens for a while,” she said. “But you’re young and can run and dash about, and no one much notices. Can you find out something for me?”

Rain looked up sideways at her mistress. Despite years of Glinda’s watching her own diet and performing knee-bends in the privacy of her chambers, she suddenly felt fat. Fat and squat and old. And she feared she smelled of caramelized carrots. But enough about me, she said to herself, and shook her curls, which were due for a bleaching in a solution of lemon juice and extract of milkflower. Later. Concentrate.

“Are you up for this, Rain?”

The girl shrugged. Her hair was dirty and her calves were dirty, but prettying the child up wouldn’t do her any good, Glinda thought. She was safer looking a little revolting. That snarled cloud of unbrushed brown hair! “What do you want me to lookit?” Rain finally said.

“I want you to find out what they are building in the barns. Can you do that?”

Rain shrugged again. “They’re always hammering inside there, and the doors are shut.”

“You’re small. You can stick to the shadows.” Glinda fixed the girl with as fierce a glare as she could manage. “Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better try, or I might have to cancel your reading lessons.”

The girl looked up sharply, more keenly than before. “Not that, Mum.”

“I trust the General is treating you well?”

“He teaches me good enough,” said the girl. “I knows a passel of letters now.”

Glinda pursed her lips. She didn’t believe in putting children in danger, nor of frightening them overmuch. “He’s permitted to teach you no more than letters,” she finally said. “If he tries to teach you anything else, you come let me know. Is that understood?”

The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaller, but more honest.

“That’ll do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

“He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

14.

While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squall of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spell that would send Cherrystone and his men packing. After all, if she could use a spell to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spells. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spells therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t really make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

She replaced the book on the shelf. What had she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so well through that concealing spell that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventually Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubiousness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

15.

Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shell kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift scullery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

“Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg rolled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shell quite efficiently.

“I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?”

Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

“I’m sure you found a way.”

“I waited till the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

Glinda waited.

Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”

“It’s hard to say what I saw. It was upsy-wrongedy houses, sort of like.”

“I see,” said Glinda, though she did not.

“Like the houses in Zimmerstorm, but on their heads.”

“Were the upsy-wrongedy roofs made of blue tile, as in Zimmerstorm?”

“No. Strokes of wood all hammered close together, going like this.” Rain pushed her hands away from her belly as if describing a long melon in the air.

“Wouldn’t the upsy-wrongedy houses fall over if they were trying to balance on their narrow roofbeams?”

“They all had leggses. Like spiders, sort of. Wooden leggses.”

“How many of these houses?”

“You din’t tell me to counts ’em.”

“A lot?”

“They were too big to be a lot. They took up the whole space nearly, between the lofts for straw up high and the stalls below.”

Glinda went to a table and looked at the implements. She selected a knife and a loaf of bread. She cut off the heels and a good deal of the crusts and made the loaf into a statue of a house, as well as she could. “So. It was like this?”

“Yes but turned over.” Rain reached out and upended it. “And the spider leggses all up and down here and here. But this end was more pointy.”

“Oh. Oh yes, of course. I see now.” Glinda plucked a paring knife and quickly made of the upside-down house a sort of tugboat. “Like this. And if the spider legs were knocked away, it would look like a boat.”

“Boats don’t have such pointy bottoms.”

“Some do. You’ve probably never seen a boat out of the lake, that’s all.” She put the knife down softly. “They’re building boats. They’re going to take a flotilla up the lake and attack Haugaard’s Keep by water. Of course. It makes sense.” She thought of the map she had seen, and the dotted line up the middle of Restwater. In the center of the lake the invaders would be beyond the reach of any local ambush brigade mounted by Zimmerstorm or Haventhur to the north, or Bigelow or Sedney to the south. Though the progress of such vessels, if they were indeed as large as Rain suggested, would be clearly visible, and allow impromptu navies up and down the lake to row out to attack them. What was Cherrystone playing at?

“You’ve done very well, Rain,” said Glinda. She hesitated a moment, and then—something she had resisted doing for years—she put her hand on Rain’s shoulder. “You deserve a reward. What would you like?”

“Do you got anything I can read?”

“Nothing suitable, I’m afraid. Besides, I hear from the General that you’re at early stages yet. But perhaps you’ll learn.”

“I’ll learn,” said Rain. “Meanwhile, if you en’t got no bookses, give me two slices of boat and some butter spread on ’em.” She twisted her hands and grinned at Glinda. It was the first time in, what, seven years.

16.

For what was Glinda waiting? To be rescued? To have a tantrum? To be inspired to act? To warble an anthem of protest to an incredulous shoreline? She did a little crochet work, a sunny pillow with a motto. OZMA BEFORE US. She watched the thunderheads of Highsummer massing to the west, and she fled if they threatened to let loose. She studied the long lake, which curved between the foothills of the Great Kells on the far southern side and the lower slopes of the Pine Barrens on the northern. The placement of Mockbeggar on its little promontory gave her limited advantage; as the lake curved subtly to the southeast, it narrowed and disappeared between opposing banks. Same to the northwest. Due to the angle, she couldn’t glimpse Haugaard’s Keep even had she the eyes of a hawk. Unless she had the wings of a hawk too, of course.

Her household wobbled on. Systems seemed maintained not so much through stamina as through an inertia borne of fear. Nothing more came to light about Chef. Puggles did what he could with the odd breast of fallowhen, with parsleyfruit and wristwrencher beans, with eggs and cheese and a militant sort of pastry pot pie that refused to yield to a knife. Miss Murth lived on tea and she smelled of tea and she began to resemble a tall stalk of ambulatory celery, and she trembled when she talked, which was less often than usual. What Rain ate was a mystery to Glinda, mostly.

One day when the cloudburst began earlier than usual, the girl showed up fresh from her lesson. She hunted for Os and Zs all over Glinda’s parlor, in the gnarly filigrees of preposterously carved furniture. She all but capered with the fun of it. “I know Oz, now,” she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. “Usually letters don’t hide inside each other,” she told Glinda firmly.

“No, that’s true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding, though.”

The girl turned and as if by magnetism walked directly over to the little bookshelf beside the window. She tugged the yellow book out. It might as well have been her primer. “What’s this book? I can’t read these words yet.”

“It’s called, um, The Wind Blew Away. Or something.”

“Is it about the big wind that blew Dorothy here?”

“Where did you hear about Dorothy?”

“Miss Murth told me the story.”

“Never listen to Miss Murth. She’s too old to be valid. Now put that book back.”

I must seem too old to be valid, too, thought Glinda, as Rain ignored her. The girl opened the cover and ran her hand along the page. “What’s hidden here?”

Glinda felt a chill. “What nonsense you speak. What do you mean?”

“This book. It’s like a creature. It’s alive.” She turned to Glinda. “Can you feel it? It gots a heart, almost. It’s warm. It’s purring.”

“Do you come in here and touch this book when I’m not looking?”

“No. I never seen it before. But it was sort of shimmery.”

Glinda snatched it away. She had never noticed a shimmer to the book and she didn’t see one now. But Rain was on to something. The Grimmerie had a kind of urgent low heat to it. A kind of soundless hum.

She found herself saying, nearly whispering, “What page would you like to look at?”

Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

The thunder made a menacing comment, but it was comfortably distant. Rain turned to a page about two-thirds through.

“You can’t read this. Can you?”

Rain peered. “Everything’s hitched up and kicking.”

“Yes yes, but can you read it?”

Rain shook her head. “Can you?”

How mortifying. Glinda looked. A heading of some sort was squeezing like a bellows; at full extension it seemed to suggest To Call Winter upon Water.

“It’s about dressing warmly enough. Sort of,” she said. She slapped the book closed. “Why did you open to that page?”

Rain murmured, “I was remembering something once. About a goldfish.”

Suddenly Glinda was tired of Rain. Tired, and a little scared of her. “Would you run tell Miss Murth it’s time for my tea? And no touching this book unless I ask you to. Do you understand?”

Rain was out the door, on to the next thing in her stunted little life. “Sure,” she called, disingenuously no doubt.

Glinda carried the volume to her escritoire. She opened it again, but now she couldn’t even fan the pages. The book fell open to the page it preferred. To Call Winter upon Water. How had Rain called this spell up out of the book?

I chose to be the patron of arts festivals over dabbling in the science of charms, she thought. But there’s no help for it now. I am stuck here with a book of magic that won’t let me go.

She read a little bit of the charm, as best she could, and then sat back, exhausted. Thought about the Grimmerie, and its wily ways. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into Rain’s capacity to hone in on the tome. She was learning to read, after all. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page—but then the world is the same way, isn’t it? The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

How does anyone learn to read? she thought. How did I?

By the time Miss Murth arrived with tea, Glinda had worked through a good deal of the spell, though she didn’t understand its possible uses. She closed the volume gently, drawing no attention to it, in case Miss Murth was in one of her beaky prowly moods. But Murth had other things on her mind. “The storm has moved on toward Sedney,” she said, “and the General has called for the barn doors to be open. They are breaking down the front of two of the barns, Mum. They are bringing out the boats.”

“You know they’re boats?” Glinda felt a little cheapened.

“You think you’re the only one pays attention to Rain,” said Murth.

17.

The vessels rolled out on an ancient technology: clean-hewn logs set parallel. At once Glinda saw the serviceability of Mockbeggar in a new light. The appeal to Cherrystone of her country house wasn’t the formal aspect of the great house. A Pallantine masterpiece meant nothing to the armed forces. It was the barns. They were tall enough to have served as incubators for these four massive ships. Sequestered, men had worked through the daily downpours and on through the night.

Even more important, the grade from the barnyard to lake would accommodate a launch. A clear access presented itself across the drive, through the wildflower meadow and down the pastures, neatly avoiding the ha-ha and (mercifully) Virus Skepticle’s bentlebranch folly in honor of freshwater mermaids.

Glinda considered herself in the mirror, then drew a lace shoulderette from the wardrobe and freshened her lashes. A parasol to suggest idle ambling. She wished she had lap dogs so she could seem to be taking them for a walk, but ever since that monstrous Toto had nipped her heel and torn the hem of her favorite pink reception gown she had gone off the cussed creatures.

Puggles was making an effort to concoct some sort of soup. “I weren’t raised to this grade of domestic work, Mum,” he said, wiping his brow and nearly clocking himself through the clumsy application of a meat mallet.

“You’re doing admirably. I shall take notes one day. But Puggles, did Miss Murth tell you? The builders have unveiled their constructions.”

“She did.”

“How will they avoid being attacked? The ships, I mean?”

“Lower your voice, Mum, there’s soldiers everywhere now.” He pounded harder as he spoke, to drown out his whisper. “It’s hard to get word through the cordon of guards, but I have it on pretty solid authority that the farmers and fishermen of the area already have worked out for themselves what was going on here. I think some of the Munchkinlander beached fleet might be readying to venture out again after their nice long rest.” He winked at her. “Suicidal, I know…”

“There’ll be cannon on board Cherrystone’s warships, no doubt.”

“Cannons are good for hammering at the stone walls of fortresses, Mum, but they’re less good for swiping at your little lake heron or your quick minnow. If you take my meaning.”

“Well.” She chose her words carefully. “If you hear more about the wildlife on the lake this season, do let me know.”

“I’m no longer permitted outside the house, Mum,” he told her. “I’m not likely to hear more.”

She moved on, worried for the local Munchkins. Cherrystone was too smart to display these lummoxy floating wooden castles without being prepared to deal with any attack on them. Still, Glinda was infected with a sense of excitement as she descended the great stairs. She admired the well-made thing, whatever it was: a slipcover, a compliment, a man-o’-war.

She ignored the muddy boots lined up on the floor, just plowed through the banquet hall and the kitchens as if she’d been used to taking charge there for years. “Zackers. Hat off in the presence of a lady,” she barked at him, who whirled around from where he was rooting through a bin of biscuits. Feeling a warm breeze from an open door, she continued on through a larder and a maze of pantries, and found an exit into an herb garden. How useful, now that she knew what herbs were for. But she had no time to pause and take notes.

From the ground the four ships were even larger than they’d looked from her windows. Bowl-bellied wooden narwhals. Men with their shirts off were swarming up ladders on all sides, caulking and scraping and wielding brushes to apply some sort of gleaming oil. It made the fresh wood glow like skin.

She located Cherrystone near a commissaire or clerk who was taking notes. She bearded the General. “Traper, you are to be congratulated. This is an installation of most magnificent hue and heft. I can’t think where you got all the lumber.”

“There’s a mill or two in the Pine Barrens. You pay enough, you can find the help you need.”

“Pay with cash, or with threat of violence?” But she smiled as she said it, and he grinned back, replying, “Oh, the coin of the realm appears to be good cheer, as I understand it. We imported white oak for the ribbing, but the local fir stock is suitable for cladding and masts. Amazing how generous the locals are, if you put it to them persuasively enough.”

“I don’t know sail-lacing, so this is deepest arcana to me. However, Restwater being Oz’s largest lake, I believe I’d have noticed vessels of such magnificent profile if they’d ever sailed by me before. They don’t look like riverboats, yet the masts are lower than I would imagine useful to help propel such a capacious hold.”

“Oh, it’s a manly art, is shipbuilding,” said the General. “I can’t pretend to follow a word of it. I have a hard time lacing my own boots.”

Glinda caught herself from making a remark about not lacing her own stays. “We all know the EC wants to divert the lake for its private use, in the capital and in the mill towns and factory hamlets springing up between the Emerald City and Shiz. And so I realize these ships are intended to attack Haugaard’s Keep. But I can’t understand why you’d take four weeks and some to build them, giving the local farmers a chance to plan their resistance and fortify the lake, when you could’ve marched your army along through the villages and circled Restwater six times over by now.”

“Straight through a gauntlet of pint-size guerrillas? No, thanks. But too terribly dry, this business of strategy,” he said, as if in agreement. “I’d love to chat more. Shall we dine again? I can wax hysterical about the cost of labor in wartime, and you can catch me up on your successes in the field of cuisine.”

“Are you inviting me to a reception upon the virgin decks of your commanding vessel?”

He blushed. She hadn’t known she could make him blush. “I’m afraid it’ll be some time before the accoutrements are fitted, the paint applied and dried, and so on. It’s why I had the ships brought out into the sunlight, so this work could proceed apace.”

“But the daily thunderstorms?”

“Spittle and eyewash. Won’t slow us down.”

She almost asked permission to take a promenade around the boats, but remembering herself, she started out at a pace. He caught up with her and took her by the arm, but gently, as a husband might, and escorted her about the graveled yard. She commented, “I trust you’ll be putting my barn fronts back together. One bad storm and the places would collapse like houses of cards.”

He didn’t answer, just pointed out admirable bits of carving on the figureheads. “You have some very talented, very bored soldiers,” she said. “Surely that’s not a portrait of me?”

“No, it’s meant to be Ozma.”

“Dreadfully royalist of you. Positively seditious. I’d expect it to be the Emperor.”

“Some of the men are simple. But if you want to get good work out of them, you have to allow them their prejudices.”

“Tell that to the Munchkins.” But she was trying to be slick as boiled sweeties. “What will you call these fine dames of the lake?”

“We’ll slap their names upon them when they’re waterworthy.”

“I can’t wait that long. I might die in my sleep tonight, of impatience.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Glinda.”

He had used her name without the honorific. She smiled a little less winningly, more inscrutably, reeling him in. “No, do tell. Traper.”

“Can’t you guess what the Emperor’s four lake ambassadors would be called?”

She blinked at him, grateful she’d taken time to darken her lashes.

He said, “The Vinkus, Gillikin, and Quadling Country.”

“I see,” she said. “And the lead vessel … the Emerald City.”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “Munchkinland. In anticipation of the reannexation, whenever we achieve that happy marriage, and make Oz whole again.”

18.

In truth, she’d begun looking over Chef’s shoulder—before he disappeared. A bit sullenly, she now peered in at the efforts of Puggles. She was starting to know just enough to be dangerous in the kitchen. She watched things being ladled out of cast-iron gorgeholds and dumped into porcelain kettles or copper skillets. She understood how a single squeeze of lemon could salvage a crime against cuisine, and how a misplaced spray of orange balsam could sabotage a masterpiece. About things like salt and sugar and blanched pepper she became more confused, as they all looked more or less snowy.

She had no time to waste, though.

“Grab a sheet of paper, Miss Murth. The pen is on the blotter. Date: 18th Highsummer comma, 11 of the clock. Dear Traper comma, Unable to wait for a kind offer to dine on the deck of the Emperor’s good ship Munchkinland comma, I propose instead—”

“Dear Traper?” Miss Murth’s outrage was controlled and magnificent.

“—that you join me for a meal in the knot garden. Stop. The prettibells are perfection and the roses aren’t too shabby either. Stop. I’ll cook. Underline the I’ll twice. Tomorrow night at eight question mark? Are you keeping up, Murthy?”

“Shall I sign it, Love and kissies, your little Glinda?”

“Don’t be absurd. I’ll sign it myself.”

“I’ve already signed it.”

Glinda snatched the paper and read Cordially, Lady Glinda, Arduenna of the Uplands.

“Exactly how I would have signed it. You have perfected my signature after all this time.”

“I aim to serve,” said Murth, aiming herself out the door.

“Miss Murth,” said Glinda.

Murth turned.

“Would you kindly try not to be so cheerless. It’s unsociable and it taxes the nerves. I do know what I’m about. I’m not the idiot you take me for.”

Miss Murth attempted a kind of curtsey that had gone out of fashion four decades earlier. Her knees clacked like ivory dominoes dropped on a plate.

Glinda in the kitchen. “Zackers.”

“Mum.”

She gave up on insisting on Lady Glinda. “In the absence of Ig Baernaeraenaesis, otherwise known as Chef, I’m attempting to put together a little meal. Do you know where the cookery books are kept?”

Zackers found a shelf under a window seat. Some parish committee’s collection: Munchkinlander Aunties Share Secrets of the Sauce. And Glinda liked this one, printed in large type with droll and useful drawings: Avoid Prosecution for Poisoning: Cooking by the Book. Particularly well thumbed was Widow Chumish’s famous volume, Food You Can Actually Stomach. She grabbed all three and told Zackers she would send down a list of ingredients.

She was almost excited. The dishes, the pans, the wooden spoons! The heat of the stove would rosy up her cheeks and curl her hair. She hoped it wouldn’t also steam off the highlights. She had found more than one frizzle of grey nestled among the gold and wrenched it out, but now it was either dye the traitorous locks or resign herself to mid-age baldness.

Glinda with Rain. The Grimmerie lay on the games table, sweetly dull in its disguise. Glinda sat before it, and Rain stood at her side.

“Your interest in reading seems to inspire this book’s playfulness,” said Glinda. “I wonder if you could open this book to any page?”

The girl didn’t understand. Lurline, but she was a slow train to Traum!

“Now watch me.” Glinda banged open the cover. The merciless slabs of dense print on every page looked like torture. No pictures, no diagrams, very little white space on which to rest the eye and let the mind wander. Glinda riffled the pages to make the book’s point, whatever it was. “Now you do it.” She closed the book and pushed it toward Rain.

The girl paused, then opened the volume. It transformed under her hands, becoming the Grimmerie, proffering the page with the spell: To Call Winter upon Water.

“But you see, I don’t want to call winter upon water,” said Glinda, as if she were talking to a simpleton. She wasn’t sure if she was addressing Rain or the Grimmerie. “I’m looking for a recipe for starched muttock, maybe, or grip of lamb with a crawberry chutney to lend a sort of alto chromatic to the gaminess of the enterprise. A genteelly quibbling complement.” Or did she mean compliment? She had no idea what she was talking about. She couldn’t speak gourmandese. She just wanted to see Rain handle the Grimmerie.

The book, however, had its own notions. While Rain could slip the pages a little from the gentle steppe of parallel deckled edges, she couldn’t move them to reveal more than an inch or two. The pages husband their secrets; the book was only interested in suggesting how To Call Winter upon Water.

“Well, it prefers its opinions, I see.” The mistress of Mockbeggar sighed. “Personally I hate uppity books. Don’t you?”

“I never got to no book yet. Books is still all secrets.” Disgruntled, the girl slumped in her seat and, forgetting her place, leaned against Glinda. “The mister says that letters are the key, but even when you know the whole family, there’s so many combinations you can make. And they break their word.”

“Yes. Well. You’ll get there.” Against her better judgment she couldn’t help putting her hand on the girl’s hip. “I don’t remember learning to read, but clearly I did, because I can.”

“What does that bit say?” Rain pointed.

“Well, this is hard, even for me.” She couldn’t serve winter on a bed of water to Cherrystone, however often the Grimmerie recommended it. She closed the book, and it slid back into the casing of its casual disguise.

“Secrets. Pfaaah.” The girl was vexed. “Look at that Oz, what I showed you previous.” She traced her finger against the inlay of the table, along the Z whose termini and angles met the encircling O at four points of the oval: . “It looks like a person trapped in an egg. Bent back, on her knees. Can’t stand up straight. Can’t get out. Why don’t the O let her out?”

“That’s Oz for you,” said Glinda. “All about crimping. And I don’t mean piecrust.” Perhaps a lambkin pie with a summer salad of peas and potatoes?

Glinda with Miss Murth, later in the day. “Please take down this message. Eighteenth Highsummer four hours beyond noon. Zackers colon: I need the following colon: four little thingies of lamb eight potatoes the yellow jacket kind blue peppercorn four ripe pears peeled two cloves a dish of clover mayonnaise about sixty peas all the same size and a sharp small knife stop. Oh, and some bickory root. Read that back to me.”

Murth did. “How shall I sign it for you?”

“I really need these things. Sign it Mum.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Murth took so long writing out the signature that Glinda knew she was adding a paragraph of specifics she’d cribbed from Cranston’s Encyclopedium of Gentry. The honorary degrees, the citations of merit in the cause of charities from Madame Teastane’s Female Academy to Crage Hall at Shiz. The whole nine yards of it. “Oh, Miss Murth. Are you so jealous as all that?”

“My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda, even if you are losing your mind.”

The kitchen, next day. Zackers served as sous chef and personal bodyguard. Twice he saved Glinda from immolation. His pimples hadn’t improved, but he wasn’t a bad sort. His grandparents had been Munchkinlanders from Far Applerue, he told her, but they’d migrated to Tenniken in Gillikin after the Wicked Witch of the East had risen to be the de facto governor. They had smelt secession in the winds, he told Glinda, and they didn’t like it.

“Oh, who would,” agreed Glinda absently. “Especially if it smells like this poaching liqueur.”

“You might try removing the trotters. Here’s a pincers. Or shall I?”

That seemed to help. “But aren’t you conflicted, Zackers? A soldier of Loyal Oz, going to war against Munchkinlanders who might have been friends and neighbors of your grandparents?”

“If they were friends and neighbors of the wrinklies, they won’t be up to throwing pitchforks at me. They’ll be belted into their rockers like my old kin.”

“The principle of it, I mean.”

“Munchkinland belongs to Oz.” Adamant. “A lot of Munchkins remain Loyal Ozians despite that Mombey, arriviste Eminence in Colwen Grounds. A fair lot of Munchkins quietly think Oz isn’t Oz when it’s severed like this.”

“What is it then? If it’s not really Oz without Munchkinland?”

He replied, “It’s spoiled. Like this reduction. I think we better start over.” He would say no more about himself, and became curt. But the second batch turned out less disagreeable.

In the late afternoon, she directed Puggles to set up a table for two in the rose garden.

“I’m not allowed in the rose garden, Mum.”

“But who will serve? I can’t be expected to cook a meal and then haul it to the table like a milkmaid.”

“Were I you, I should take it up with that buttery-boy Zackers. You seem to be chummy enough with him. Lady Glinda.”

Puggles didn’t know she had a strategy, but she didn’t dare whisper about it. She only said, “This is intolerable. You can’t be tethered like a cow, Puggles. I shall protest. Meantime, give Zackers instruction in the correct layout of a summer table.” But she didn’t protest; she had to whip up the cream and egg yolk for the crawberry fool. And she had to study the Grimmerie.

At seven, as a half-moon appeared opposite the sunset and the lake went hazy and golden with midges, she dressed. Miss Murth saw to Glinda’s hair and perked into compliance the bows that ran from her peplum to the end of her diaphanous train. “The pearl pendants, I think, will do. A jaunty little tiara would be putting on airs. This is alfresco, after all. If I’m in the mood I shall adorn my hair with a rose or two.”

“The thorns will scrape your scalp and you’ll bleed into the dessert.”

“It could only help. I’m ready to descend. Will you carry my parasol?”

“You’ve not been paying attention, Mum. We’re not allowed out of the house anymore.”

“No? I’ll take it up with Traper if the moment arrives. Don’t wait up, Miss Murth. I can see myself to bed.”

“I’m sure you can.” Miss Murth pursed her lips so hard they looked broken.

The General arrived on time in a suit of ivory sartorials Glinda hadn’t seen before. Crimson braid. He was as vain as she; he’d checked the colors of the prettibells, or he’d had Zackers check. She felt eclipsed in her ash satin with the double-backed sparstitch in chrome and salmon.

Zackers had done the job as Puggles had directed. The table was laid correctly enough, and an occasional table had been arranged to one side for the parking of domed serving dishes and beakers of wine. Next to it, eyes trained forward, stood Zackers. He was all in black like a maître d’ in a midrange lunchery in Bankers’ Court in Shiz. His pimples matched the roses nicely too.

He pulled out the chairs and poured the wine. He offered Lady Glinda a fan, as the humidity had risen during the day and there was no breeze off the water. She felt more gluey than dewy after her afternoon imprisoned in the furnace of ovens and hobs. But Cherrystone looked sticky, too, which was some comfort.

Betraying their convention, she plunged into a discussion of government policy. “Traper. With my staff ever more circumscribed—we’ll get to that—I feel the need of understanding the larger picture. I’ve been thinking about this campaign of the Emperor to annex Restwater for Loyal Oz. It was being bruited about even during the Wizard’s time, don’t deny it, and my own ministers used to try to get me to consider military action. But in the years since I left off being Throne Minister—”

“—and took up cooking. Delicious,” he muttered, through a mouthful of penance. She knew it. The gum-rubber little cutlets lay drowned in puddles of grainy sauce that tasted, somehow, violent.

“—I have rather lost the thread of the rationale of this conquest. The western Vinkus isn’t arable due to the aridity of the plains, I know, and the slope of the Great Kells in the Eastern Vinkus makes plowing impossible. Quadling Country is a stew of mud and marshgrass. My own dear Gillikin Country—though forested, lightly hilled, with such a soft climate—features soil more conducive to manufacturing than to farming. So much iron in it. But three-quarters of the grain we all require annually grows in Munchkinland. Why would Loyal Oz want to annex Restwater? Doesn’t it threaten the agricultural base of the source of Oz’s food supply? What if Munchkinland embargoes its sale of wheat and other crops? The EC would starve. And the rich farmers of Munchkinland might see their bank balances dip, but they wouldn’t go hungry. They have what they need. They can hold out.”

“Glinda, you’re the sweetest peach in the fruit bowl, but I don’t believe you understand the aquifers in Oz and their effect on riparian systems.” Cherrystone took several lettuce leaves with his fingers and dumped them on the tablecloth. He mounded up one leaf higher than the other. “Look. The Great Kells of the Vinkus over here, right? And the lower Madeleines over here. Emerald City between them.” (He put a radish, with its single-fringe dome, in the middle.) “And the three great rivers? Let’s see.” Several of the longer green beans. “The Vinkus, like so. The Gillikin River. Munchkin River. More or less. Do you see?”

“Yes, and that little woggle-bug on the radish is the emperor of all it can survey. Traper, I did attend primary school.” Did his knee touch hers under the table? In the act of leaning forward as if captivated, she grazed his knee glancingly and then shifted her leg away, just in case. “Go on.”

“The Gillikin River, though long, is shallow. The river water leaches easily into the landscape. Gillikin is the Oz of which the poet speaks—‘land of green abandon, land of endless leaf.’ The river makes Gillikin into the kind of pretty picture of Oz that I expect to think of on my deathbed.”

“How absurd. I shall be thinking of my portfolio, and if I’ve adequately kept dividends from grasping hands. Go on.”

“The Munchkin River is the longest, but the Munchkins have hundreds of years of experience in irrigation by canal and aqueduct. You’ve seen them?”

“Of course I have. Don’t patronize me. Cross-ditching, they call it.”

He raised an eyebrow. Score for her. “The point is, Munchkinlanders use their water wisely—upstream. They bleed it all along its length. So the Munchkin River, like the Gillikin, gives little more than lip service to Restwater as it debouches therein. And the EC to the north long ago overwhelmed the United Gillikin Canal Company’s capacity to supply it. Here’s my main point, Glinda. Your lovely lake called Restwater is replenished daily by the water that courses down from the snowy peaks and wintry ice packs of the Great Kells. Every single peak of which looms solidly in Loyal Oz. The shortest but the healthiest, the fiercest, the wettest of the rivers of Oz is the Vinkus. And as it runs between banks of hard fleckstone ten thousand years old, it doesn’t leach into and make fertile the parched land. Indeed, the flat through which it passes is known as the Disappointments. The land is poor and affords farmers little more than a sullen, resentful crop of whatever is planted.”

“I always thought the Disappointments was the name of some sort of old-age hostelry.”

He wasn’t amused. “No, the mighty Vinkus River, all that runoff of the Great Kells, pours without subtraction into Restwater. I’m sure you’ve circumnavigated this broad lake and seen the Vinkus tumbling over those rounded stones—the Giant’s Toes, they call it—delivering Oz’s best water to the Free State of Munchkinland. Our enemy.”

He picked up the Vinkus River and took a chomp. “We have every reason to claim Restwater. For one thing, the Munchkins don’t use it for their farming. For another, the water in it is ours. Damn, this is a good meal, Glinda. You’re going to qualify as a chef before I get your parlor maid to crack the code of the written language, I fear.”

“I meant to ask. How is she doing?”

“She’s a spiky little thing, she is. I don’t know how much she has upstairs, frankly. She’s too quiet for me to guess. But she does attend. Maybe it’s just lack of other diversion.”

“Well, she used to be allowed to run in the meadows leading up to the Pine Barrens when she was released from duties. You’ve cut down the range of all of us, Traper.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to be cutting it some more.”

“Have another cutlet. How do you like the wine?”

“I’m going to have to move a few men into part of your suite.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. I’m afraid they’re up there shifting furniture as we speak.”

“Traper. Really. We can’t tolerate this abuse. Will you have me snuggling in the same bed with Puggles and Miss Murth?”

“You could release one of them. You may have to.”

“You haven’t tried the mashed bickory root.”

He took a long sip of his wine. “I wish we didn’t have to fuss over this, Glinda. It isn’t to my liking, you know. The mission has other ambitions that take priority over mine and yours. But I had accepted the assignment hoping that our paths might cross, and in an agreeable way.”

“You have a wife and children.”

“Grown children,” he said.

As if that made a difference. But then how would she know? “By crowding me into tenement conditions in my own home, you expect to win my affection? I fear the bickory root is overmashed, by the way; I’d avoid it. Or oversomething.”

“Oversalted,” he proposed. “Well, winning hearts comes second. My commission from the Emperor comes first, and I’m required to carry out his instructions completely.”

“How is Shell, anyway? And who is he, these days. Do you know, I’ve rarely met him? Elphaba didn’t mention him much when we were together at Shiz—he’s four or five years her junior, I believe, and who remembers their families when they go up to college? As a former Throne Minister I did attend his installation, as was only fitting. But Chuffrey had a spoiled spleen or something, and I had to rush off, so in fact we didn’t speak. Shell hasn’t been one to come seeking advice of former Throne Ministers. Doesn’t so much as send me a greeting card at Lurlinemas.”

“Oh, he’s a deeply devout unionist. Lurlinism and paganism are as one to him. Do you know there’s almost no public celebration of Lurlinemas in the Emerald City anymore?”

“Another reason to keep to my country villa. Is the wine too warm?”

“Ah, it’s nice.” He drained his glass. “But yes, it’s a little warm.”

“Would you like some ice in your refill?”

“If you don’t mind.”

She got up. “Zackers, allow me. And if you don’t mind, I have some private business with the General. If you would repair to the portico, I’ll signal when we need you.”

Zackers stood his ground. “I don’t think I can see you from there, Lady Glinda. The rosebushes are too high.”

“I know, aren’t they wonderful? A banner year for roses.”

She raised an eyebrow at Cherrystone, who dismissed Zackers with a flutter of fingers. “And how are your prettibells faring in this lush warm weather?” the General continued.

Glinda almost replied, My what? but she caught herself. “Goodness, what with entertaining myself through cookery education, I have hardly a moment to check on them. There are some over there in the weeds. Aren’t they special.”

“You cook as if by magic,” he said.

“Don’t I wish.” She reached for the wine, a rather smoothly turned-over mountain antimerguese imported from the Ugubezi. “I picked up all my best recipes through my sisters in séance.”

“You’re joking.”

She smiled over her shoulder. A roll of evening thunder unsettled itself some distance away. She made slow work of pouring the wine, and her whisper was so low she could hardly hear herself. “Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” she muttered.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Reciting ingredients in my head, that’s how I train myself. How do you manage to teach my girl anything? She’s too silent to rattle off her alphabet.” Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta. She circled her palm over the pale wine in the goblet. Had she ever learned anything from Miss Grayling back in Shiz?

Cherrystone mused aloud. “I wonder why the girl wants to learn to read. A domestic won’t have any prospects. Particularly as she has no family. Is that what I understand?”

She squared her shoulders. Traversa psammyad…

A little ice forming a coin on the surface of the wine. She swirled faster. The ice packed itself into a white lump, split in two. Two white lumps a little larger than lumps of sugar.

“Your wine, sir.” She handed it to him as if she were the domestic. She was so proud of herself she was glowing. Cherrystone misread the expression.

“Either you’ve slipped a love potion in here, or you’ve poisoned it.”

“Neither. And to show you, I’ll sip myself. To your health.” Scandalously she took a sip of the newly chilled wine. Heavenly. She returned him the glass and she lowered her gaze to her plate. The food was heinous, mushy and parched by turns. But the ice was perfect. She had learned to cook.

At the end of the meal, most of the crawberry fool having been abandonded in its dishes, Cherrystone escorted her through the rose garden and around the corner of the south porch. There they discovered Puggles in a broken heap on the gravel. He seemed to be dead.

19.

But he wasn’t dead. After Zackers and a few others had carried him into the reception room, where men on cots had leapt up to provide him a bed, Glinda saw that he was still breathing. “You have a physician among your men,” she said to Cherrystone. “If not, there’s a doctor in Haventhur who will come to Mockbeggar, assuming you promise her safe passage here and back again. Though I hardly know if I can rely on your word.”

“I assure you, Lady Glinda, whatever happened will prove to have been an accident.” In front of his men he returned to formality in addressing her. But she hardly cared about that now. She put her hand on Puggles’s forehead as if feeling a servant were part of her routine. She had no idea what to think about how his forehead felt, though. It felt like a parsnip, which until this week she had never felt, either.

She refused an escort upstairs and took her leave of Cherrystone without ceremony. The evening had ended badly—horribly, for poor Puggles—but not without some small reward. She had used a spell to draw winter upon the water. A baby step, to be sure. But that wine had been nicely chilled by her work.

Her step hastened as she realized that if men had been in her private chambers rearranging her furniture, someone might have removed the books from her shelves. Luckily, soldiers seemed uninterested in books. The little library had been lifted intact and installed in her bedroom.

Miss Murth and Rain were huddled together on a settee. Miss Murth’s face had been wet but was now dry as if permanently. Her grim strength had an aspect of fleckstone about it.

“This is a furniture warehouse,” said Glinda. One could get about the room by climbing on top of the wardrobe, dressers, chairs. A cat would love this room, leap up and never descend again. But there was hardly enough floor space to do her daily kick-ups to keep her bottom pert. “We can’t live like this. Murthy, what happened?”

“You weren’t gone half an hour, Lady Glinda, before they beefed their way through the door. General’s orders, they said. They locked us in this room till they’d cleared out. Puggles tried to stop them, but they’d have none of it. There were almost a dozen of them, and all young men, showing no respect for a man of his age. They took him up the stairs to the parapet to get him out of the way. I don’t know what happened next. They told me he broke away and fell over the balustrade. Dreadful liars, the lot of them. What will become of us?”

“You will have to sleep on the settee. Rain, can you settle down?”

But Rain had become a cat. She had climbed up a chest of drawers and crossed on top of the escritoire and scrabbled aboard the wardrobe. “I can sleep up here!” she crowed. For her, this was fun. Well, Glinda thought, perhaps it felt to her like having a family. Which is less fun than is generally acknowledged in the popular press.

“You’ll do no such thing. Get down from there. You’ll be the next one to bash your skull.”

Murth fussed. “Oh, Mum, is that what happened to Puggles?”

“He’s alive, at least he was when I left him. I don’t know his condition. I think they’re sending for Dame Doctor Vutters.”

Rain said, “Did your supper get all et up?”

“How kind of you to remember.” Under the circumstances, Glinda was touched. “It was as well received as I might have hoped for.”

Murth set her straight. “She means, is there any left. We didn’t get a meal, what with the invasion of the furniture snatchers.”

“I’ll see to it at once.” The queen of the kitchen now, she sallied forth from her room. But in her large salon she was stopped by four soldiers in dress habillard. They carried rapiers, ceremonial but sharp. None of them was Zackers.

“Curfew, Lady Glinda,” said one. “Apologies from the General.”

“But I’m peckish. I’m off to collect myself a little pick-me-up.”

“We’re here to be of service.”

“Nonsense. What, are you going to remove the night soil as well? Sing us to sleep if we have a bad dream? Boys. Out of my way.”

“Orders, Lady Glinda. We’ll dispatch to the commissary for what you need. Will bread and cheese do?”

“Rye brisks. And milk. I have a child, don’t you know.” And how odd to make that statement. “I have a lady companion as well. So a bottle of savorsuckle brandy while you’re at it.”

Returning to her room, she felt defeated. When the door closed behind her, Rain and Miss Murth glanced up with eyes like sunken puddings. (For the rest of Glinda’s life, would everything look like spoiled food? A sad commentary.) She had nothing to say. But thunder outside the house, nearer this time, said it for her. “Let’s open the curtains and raise a window. The air is stuffy in here with the three of us. At least two of us ought to have bathed more recently, had we known we’d be lodging together.”

She directed Miss Murth to the sash, and in doing so realized that they’d been crowded into a room with windows that looked only in one direction—east. Glinda had always preferred sleeping in a room served by the sunrise, but now that she was exiled from other chambers, she had no view of the front gardens, and none of Restwater except the distances toward Haugaard’s Keep. A flotilla sailing in from the Gillikin River and western Restwater could be approaching the boathouses and she’d never see them till they passed—or arrived.

“Thunder, but no sign of rain,” said Miss Murth. “The night is cloudless.”

“This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.

“Get in your nightdress,” snapped Glinda.

“It’s in my trunk. Up in the attics, where I sleeps.”

“You’ll have to borrow something of mine. Miss Murth, find her a camisole. Something.”

After a light supper that was rather like a picnic—they all sat on Glinda’s bed and got crumbs everywhere—they made their good nights and Miss Murth blew out the candle.

“Miss Murth. Are there evening prayers for a child?”

“Lady Glinda,” said Murthy through the dark, “you never assigned me the task of raising this child. Give her whatever childhood prayers you remember. My own prayers are private ones.”

“I know, you’re praying for my immediate death, by my own hand, food poisoning myself. Very well. Rain, here is what we said in the Pertha Hills, when my mother would tuck me in.”

The memory, like ice forming, was slow to arrive. In the end, Glinda said,

Sweet and sure the lilacs bloom,

And the heather, and the broom.

Every mouse and mole rejoices

When the sparrows raise their voices.

“That’s not a prayer, that’s a nursery rhyme, and you’ve got it all wrong,” snapped Murthy.

“God bless us, every one. Except you,” said Glinda.

20.

The weather remained clear but stifling. Glinda and Miss Murth were allowed to sit in the parlor daily and play cards in the presence of four armed men. Rain was called once or twice for her lessons.

“Can you read enough to find out what’s happening?” Glinda whispered before Rain left. “Snoop a bit?”

Rain rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

On the third night of the intolerable situation, Rain waited until lights were out. Then she interrupted Glinda’s continuing attempt at devotional doggerel by saying, “The teaching man was called away while we was doing our letter writing and no one else was in the room. Somefin was happening so I creeped to the door and then snucked out. I went round by the barns. No one saw me.”

“Entirely too dangerous. Don’t do that again or I’ll slap you. What did you see?”

“That weren’t no thunder we hear at nights. It’s dragons in the dairy barns up the slope.”

Glinda sat straight up in the dark.

“It’s true. They got dragons for them boats I think. I heard Cherrystone yelling at someone for treating one of ’em beasties wrong. The lad got his foot crushed and they had to cut it off. Dame Doctor Vutters is living there now, like us. In the shed with the mattocks and grub hoes and stuff. It’s her surgery.”

“Dragons!” Miss Murth sounded as if she would have wept had she been less desiccated. “Lurline preserve us!”

“They’re big as houses,” said the girl, “and they glint gold even in the shadows. But they stink and they spit and strike out like catses.” She pounced a forearm and made the cry of a shrike.

Glinda plumped her pillows up in the dark. “It’s beginning to make sense. Why we’ve been crowded into a room that faces only east. And why they burned down the fields around here. They don’t want news of the dragons getting out to the Munchkinlanders.”

“And why Cherrystone was so angry after that puppet show, with the dragon in the lake!” said Murth excitedly.

“I thought you weren’t watching. You were supposed to be minding the girl.”

“We peeked. So put us in prison.”

“We’re already there.” Glinda bit her lip. “I assume they’re flying dragons—I’ve never seen a dragon, so I don’t know if there are other varieties. Do they have wings, Rain?”

“Like great sloppy tents. When they stretches ’em, they goes to the ceilings of the barns! They disturb the pigeons, who poop on ’em. Then they eats the pigeons.”

“Perhaps this makes sense of the vessel designs as well,” added Murth. “Those stumpy masts, and the odd twin prows. They may not be entirely sailboats, but boats to be pulled by dragons in harness. The dragon may slot between the double-breasted prow.”

“How ingenious.”

Glinda knew she had to get to the Grimmerie again, but she didn’t dare do it with Miss Murth hovering about. Rain was taciturn to the world, but Miss Murth might gabble if cornered. “Rain,” said Glinda, “I think we’d better cancel your reading lessons now. The point has been made. You are not incapable of learning your letters.”

Rain’s mouth made an O. “But I’m nearly reading, real reading! Cherrystone keeps bringing me old papers and training me up on them, and I’m getting the hang of it.”

It was as if the ice Glinda could form in a glass of wine had begun to cloud the blood in her veins. “What pages are those?”

“I can’t say. Old magicks, I think, but I can’t get ’em yet.”

So he knew who she was. Pure peril now and no mistake.

“Not another word,” said Glinda, “it’s sleepytime. If you blather any more I shall subject you to more nursery verses.”

The room fell silent, and soon Murth was snoring, and Rain’s breath had silenced to below the level of hearing. But Glinda did not sleep.

The next day she requested an audience with Cherrystone. He didn’t reply until late in the day, and said he’d be up to see her at sunset. Through the intermediary, she asked for permission to allow Rain and Miss Murth to take the air in the herb garden—which she knew was sufficiently hidden from both barns and lakeside not to alarm the Menaciers—so that she and Cherrystone could have some privacy in her room. This he allowed, said his emissary.

He arrived on time, looking more worn than before.

“You’ve finally beaten my resistance,” she told him. “Here I am, General, entertaining you in all but the very bed in which I sleep.”

“I apologize for the inconvenience.” He had grown more courtly and more distant. “How may I be of service?”

“I need to know about Puggles.”

He looked confused.

“Po Understar. Puggles. My butler.”

“Oh, yes. Well, he is hanging on. He’s recovered consciousness, somewhat, but not his language.”

“What does Dame Doctor Vutters say?”

“A broken spine.”

And to think he might have left with the others had she not required a butler.

“General, I would like to talk with the doctor, and to see the patient.”

“I’ve dismissed the doctor. She’s done all that can be done, she says.”

“Where is Puggles?”

“He’s been made a chamber in a closet under one of the staircases.”

Glinda stood and began to walk toward the door. Cherrystone stood and said, “I can’t allow this.”

“Then stop me forcibly. You ought to enjoy that.” She brushed past him, angry, alert, sensitized to her earlobes and toes. He didn’t touch her.

She swept past the Menaciers in the next room with their rapiers raised. “Gentlemen,” she said. Behind her, Cherrystone must be signaling that she be allowed to pass.

She hadn’t known there was a cupboard under the west staircase. It reeked of rising damp. Mouse droppings dotted the unpainted floor. Puggles was swathed in a crude overshirt and his knees were exposed. He didn’t move to cover them when he saw her. He did see her—she was sure of that, by the tracking of his eyes—but he couldn’t move his hands. Or he no longer cared about whether he was exposing his knees to his superior.

“Oh, Puggles,” she whispered. She sat right on his bed and took his fingers in hers. Clammy and lifeless, but not cold. “Can you tell me anything about what happened? Can you talk?”

He blinked. The skin at his lower eyelids pouched, shadowy grey.

“I know you were behaving in proper service. I shall see you are tended to as you deserve, to the best of my ability. I want you to know that.” She swallowed. “Po. Po Understar. Do you understand?”

There was no way of knowing if he did. She sat there, stroking the top of his hand, and then left him. Her escort returned her to her room. At least she was alone for a moment, for Murth and Rain were still enjoying the herb garden. She should have gone to join them, but ten minutes of solitude was bliss itself.

She took up the Grimmerie and hoped, with the success of her little exercise in ice generation, that it might relent and allow her access to other pages, other spells, but as usual it kept its own counsel. She wanted to throw it out the window, but knew better.

After lunch, when Glinda was having a little lie-down with the shades drawn, Rain flapping a palmetto fan to keep the flies away and provide some breeze, a knock came at the door. One of the Menaciers handed Miss Murth a letter from Cherrystone to Lady Glinda. “I’ll look at it later, Murth,” said Glinda, and she drifted off into a troubled rest. For a moment, or ten, she was back in Shiz, darting up some alley of flowering quinces, racing Elphaba to the fountain at the back of the quad. Elphaba was glowing with the effort—glowing emerald!—and Glinda, in her dream, was almost absent to herself, caught up in admiring her friend. It happened so seldom, vacating the prison of one’s limited apprehensions. Even dreams seemed ego-heavy, she thought as she was waking. But oh, to see Elphaba, even in dreams, is both reward and punishment, for it reminds me of my loss.

“Where’s Murth? I mean Miss Murth?” she asked Rain.

“Dunno.”

Thunder came up—real thunder, not dragon cry—and the long delayed cloudburst pummeled the house. Rain leaped to help Glinda slam the windows closed. She hoped someone downstairs would remember to shutter the windows to protect the parquetry, but with Murth called away and Puggles incapacitated, the floor would probably be drenched and need refitting in the fall. Damn damn damn.

They played cards. The rain continued.

As long as Miss Murth was taking her time, they checked the Grimmerie. Again Rain could open it while Glinda could not, but as usual they could turn to no other page than the one that the Grimmerie seemed inclined to let them see.

By teatime Glinda suffered the throes of a snit gunning to become a rage. “I am expected to do everything around here?” she said to Rain.

“I’m a parrot,” said Rain from the top of the wardrobe. “Tweetle twee.”

When the fellow arrived with afternoon tea, Glinda accosted him. “Where is Miss Murth? Find her and tell her to stop gallivanting. She can’t be outside; she’s not allowed. Furthermore, it’s bucketing barrels out there.” She paused. Perhaps Miss Murth was tending to Puggles. Was there a tenderness between them?

No. Impossible. Not Murth. She wasn’t capable of that fine a feeling, and she wouldn’t inspire it in anyone else, either.

“Is Miss Murth with Puggles?” she snapped.

“I’m just doing your tea, Mum,” he said.

“Are you all imbecilic? Is that a requirement of enlisted men? It’s Lady Glinda!” She was losing it, big time. “Get me Murth!”

At sundown, when the rain had finally passed over and the heat returned as if the drenching had never happened, Zackers appeared. He had his cap twisted in his hands as if he was paying a social call.

“What is it, Zackers?”

“You asked about Murth, Mum, and the General doesn’t understand.”

“What are you chattering about?”

“The note that the General sent you just after lunch, Mum.”

“There was a note,” said Rain helpfully, leaping from wardrobe to the bed like a demented bandit monkey. The bedclothes flew up. “Isn’t it still over there, under the what-chit?”

A paper folded beneath the decanter of sherry. Glinda hurried to look.

Lady Glinda,

I regret the further inconvenience. In pursuance of your request to be allowed to name what member in your service might be released due to mounting pressures upon the household, I would like your recommendation. I would suggest the girl, as she must be of less service to you than your lady-in-waiting. I could use her somehow.

Cordially,

General Traper L. Cherrystone,

Hx. Red., Advanced

“This makes no sense to me. I did not receive it. I was napping.”

Zackers looked distinctly uncomfortable. “The General acted upon your suggestion.”

“I made no suggestion. I was napping, I tell you.”

He handed her a folded page of her own stationery.

General:

Under the circumstances, I shall release Miss Murth.

Lady Glinda of Mockbeggar Hall

Arduenna of the Uplands,

Dame Chuffrey,

Throne Minister Emerita,

Honorary Chair of Charities,

Patron of Saint Glinda’s in the Shale Shallows, etc., etc.

Murth had brought Glinda’s signature to too fine a facsimile.

21.

She went to shove past Zackers as she had done past Cherrystone, but he blocked her way. “En’t allowed, Mum,” he said. “Quarantine.”

“Quarantine? What are you on about?”

“That’s what I’m told. You’re confined to your room. Meals will be supplied.”

“What’s been done with Miss Murth?”

“I’ve got my orders.” Suddenly his pimples seemed a disguise; he was a man holding on to the scabby shield of youth to use it to his advantage. “You’d be wise to return to your room, Lady Glinda.”

She fixed as spirited and venomous a look upon him as she could, but even within a moment she softened it. “Zackers. I don’t want to make trouble for you. Send for your commanding officer and we’ll sort this out.”

“The General has given orders not to be disturbed.”

So she went into the room and closed the door. Rain had been jumping on the bed, and sat down flump with her legs outstretched. “Where’s Miss Murth gone off to?”

“Never you mind about that.” She went to the window and threw up the sash. Was there any way to escape? Her own windowsill extended to join a sort of stone rim or lintel, some three inches wide, that ran around the building, connecting all the windows on this level. She could not hope to get a purchase on a ledge that narrow.

She looked down. A nine-foot drop onto the flat roof of the ballroom below. Even if one could leap or lower one’s self down under cover of darkness, the ballroom was twenty-two feet high, she knew—she’d had the room redone last year. The ballroom stretched out in its own wing, and its windows on three sides opened onto terraces, so fevered dancers could cool themselves by taking the evening air. This meant there were no useful trees growing up near the building, no climbing cypress or espaliered ivy to serve as an escape route.

“I were a bird, I could just wing the air down,” said Rain, as if reading her thoughts.

“You won’t move an inch from my side unless I say so. Not one inch. Do you hear me?”

Rain fell asleep almost at once. Perhaps, thought Glinda somewhat guiltily, perhaps she never slept in anyone’s encircling arms before. They spent the night holding each other.

By morning it was clear that evacuation orders had been given. Breakfast was nothing but tea and slightly stale bread. If they sat very still at the open window, they could hear the sound of the ships being rolled to the launching point. How could they have been kitted out so quickly? Glinda supposed that, under a firm enough manager, three hundred men with time on their hands could achieve quite a lot.

At noon on this day of lancing summer light, Glinda began to hear the sound of the dragons. Their cry was at once serrated and tuneful. Glissandi of violoncello interrupted by the yowls of cats in heat. Now that Glinda was really and truly imprisoned, her aggressors clearly felt no more need for secrecy. The dragon trainers led the fearsome creatures around the east edge of the house, below the ballroom. A military parade of sorts. Six of them. Perhaps one each to haul the four warships, and an extra dragon at the front and another to the rear, as sentries.

Fearsome? She thought she might never dream of anything else again. Each one of the foul creatures was ridden by a soldier in leather chaps. Each soldier, equipped with a whip and dirk, looked terrified. Each leaned forward, wrapped obscenely around the neck of his mount, whispering to it. Dragonmasters. She had heard tell of such.

But the creatures themselves. Rain had told only the glamour part of it. Yes, there were scales that burned in the sun, imbrications of bronze and bruise-purple gold. But a lizardy dankness obtained as well, the stench of the bog. Their skulls were shaped less like horses than like some strange elongated insect. And eyes! She remembered the glowing eyes of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Like genuine eyes, those had gleamed with life, but these actual dragon eyes looked polished, blank, black, deadly. They reflected all, they gave nothing away. “Pull back, lest one of them see you,” said Glinda, but Rain behaved as if she were at the parade of a traveling zoo. Glinda had to hold Rain’s hands to keep her from clapping.

“Let’s try the book one more time, shall we?” she said when the dragons had passed. Before they could pull it out, Zackers opened the door without knocking and Cherrystone strode in.

“I’m taking my leave,” he told her. “Zackers will stay behind to see to your needs. I apologize for the inconveniences, but you can see why we couldn’t allow you the run of your house and the service of your aides.”

“Why do you not kill me, and save yourself the trouble of abusing my staff?” she said, putting Rain behind her and holding her in place with clamped hands. Nonetheless, she felt Rain peering around her hip.

“Depending on how the matter unfolds, you may yet come in use. Not to me—to your country. Your liberated staff will have spread the word that you are detained against your wishes. All of western Munchkinland knows that you are locked up here. Should we decide to sue for peace, you are advantageously placed as a loyal Ozian with strong affections for Munchkinland. A former Throne Minister with personal ties to the rebel province. Munchkinlanders would accept you as an emissary of the Emperor. We have arranged it for you to be ready to serve.”

“What have you done with Murth?”

He inched forward. In the heat of the impending battle was he going to kiss her at last? But he had in mind something more of a sneer. “Why should you care?” he said. “You don’t even know her first name.”

She sputtered and thought of slapping him, but that would be too drawing-room farce. He said, “I want to take the girl with me.”

“I think the phrase is, over my dead body. And since you intend to keep me alive, you may as well go off on your capers. Your days of being a tutor are through, anyway; you’ve got your army to manage. Though I suppose now they’ve become a navy.”

“I’ll take up the matter when I have completed the mission of the hour. Good afternoon, Lady Glinda.”

“May you freeze in hell.”

He gave the briefest of bows, not so much from the waist as from the chin, and turned to leave.

And the Grimmerie proved as recalcitrant as ever.

They watched the first of the ships roll into view on the water. Glinda had to admit there was something terrific about the sight. The ships were painted red and gold, from this distance looking like wooden cousins of the dragons. Their sails puffed out; the wind was strong and apparently from the right quarter. Behind the stubby masts Glinda and Rain tracked the movement of those stubby masts against the hills, which helped them mark the acceleration of two, then three ships. The fourth would be coming along.

From this distance the dragons resembled immense overheated ducks.

There would be no stopping a fleet with six dragons. Haugaard’s Keep was lost. But Rain didn’t need to be lost. There was still time.

“Quick,” said Glinda. “How is your head for heights?”

“I’m gooder than a bird in any tree, Mum.”

It was too late to insist on Auntie or anything like that. “Can you balance yourself here without falling?”

Rain looked out the window at the three-inch ledge. “If there’s no big wind to scrape me down.”

“Blessings on you. There, that’s a prayer, best I can do. I’ll give you a leg up.” She helped Rain out the lower sash. Thank Ozma the windows were tall; Rain could almost stand up straight before she’d scrambled out. She fit her naked feet (still dirty, Glinda saw) this way and that, a dancer’s pose, until she was erect and balanced.

“Anyone’s walking in the rose garden’ll see up my frock.”

“Never mind about that. Do you think you can safely inch beyond the edge of this window? Not far—only a bit at a time to see how it feels.”

“Oh, I’m a spider on a wall. It’s easy florins, this one.”

“Now listen to me, Rain. I want you to inch—if you feel you can—until you’re about halfway between this window and the next one. No farther. Have you anything on which to cling?”

“My fingernails.”

“That’ll have to do.”

“What does I do when I gets there?”

“Just wait for further instructions. I am going to scream a little bit, but I don’t want you to be startled. I am only acting.”

“Acting?”

“Like the puppets in that play. I’m not really screaming. It’s like—it’s like singing.”

“I didn’t know you sung, Mum. Songs, like?”

“Oh, I have lots of little talents. Cooking is the least of them.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Don’t be snarky. Are you ready? You won’t be startled and lose your grip?”

“Spiders don’t fall off the wall when they hear a singer.”

“I may have to double the octave to get some attention.”

“I’m watching the fleet. Sing away.”

“Here I go.” Please, Lurlina, please. Or the Unnamed God. Anyone who might be paying attention. Elphaba.

She reeled her voice out. It wasn’t very convincing. “That was it?” called Rain.

“That was my warm-up. Here comes the real thing.”

She was gratified that when she let loose, two of the dragons turned their heads. But she couldn’t watch them. Zackers was unlocking the door. “Glory and gumption, Lady Glinda? Are you all right?”

She wheezed, holding her side. “The girl! She’s trying to escape! Out the window! Oh, Cherrystone will have my head!

“Also yours,” she added, in a more normal voice, as Zackers rushed to the open window.

“Holy Saint Florix,” said Zackers. “Get in here, girl, before I whup you. You’ll break every little riblet in your skinny little frame. Take my hand.”

“Oh, oh,” screamed Glinda, beginning to enjoy the role.

“Don’t worry, Mum; I’ve almost got her. She’s quite the little scorpion, en’t she?”

Glinda walked backward, screeching, the way she’d seen opera singers do onstage—only of course their sound was musical, while she was working to deliver something convincingly atonal. In midscreech, she stopped dead. Zackers, his head and torso leaning out the window, turned at the sudden silence. She lifted her skirts and rushed him like a bull, kicked his damn boots off her good carpet, and tumbled him out the window. For Puggles, she thought.

“Nicely managed, Rain,” she said. “You can come in now.”

“I like it out here,” said Rain.

“You heard me.” She didn’t want to look down. She had appreciated Zackers, for a few days anyway, and she hoped he wasn’t dead. But he was moaning and cursing. It was only nine feet after all.

But too high to climb up, even if his ankle wasn’t broken, which it looked to be, the way his foot was improperly hinged. And he could never leap to the ground.

“How clumsy of me,” she called down to the roof. “I must take a refresher course in deportment to restore my glide.” Zackers’s reply wasn’t suitable for Rain’s hearing, and Glinda hustled her away. But not before picking up the Grimmerie.

The house was empty of soldiers, as far as she could tell; they had all evacuated onto the ships except, she supposed, a skeleton crew holding Mockbeggar hostage. Knowing an unencumbered view would be essential, she hurried Rain up the dusty steps to the parapet. Ah!—free from this summer bondage for a few moments at least.

“You need to help me with this one, Rain,” she told the girl.

“I’m ready, Mum.”

Glinda taught her the words. They stood facing the fleet—The Vinkus, the Quadling Country, the Gillikin, the Munchkinland—its four powerhouse dragons yoked between prows, as Murth—Murth!—had imagined, and the two extra dragons paddling along in the rear like a pair of proud snarling parents.

“Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” said Glinda. “That’s the start of it. Can you memorize this quickly? We have so little time.”

Rain nodded. Her eyes were like iron, hard and true.

They held hands and leaned across the parapet. The wind was blowing from behind them; maybe it would carry their words far enough. “Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” they chanted in unison. Glinda taught her the rest, line by line. Rain drank it in like fizzy wine and remembered it faultlessly.

“A wand would help, but I haven’t had a wand in years,” said Glinda. “Wands go wandering. We’ll have to do without.”

She stretched out her left arm, Rain her right. They delivered the spell to bring winter upon the water.

It was unclear whether it was working at first, for the strong wind continued to blow, the sails to billow and flap, audible even at this distance. Glinda held her breath and trained her gaze on the foothills of the Great Kells. It seemed as if the masts were making slower progress against them. Slower, slower still. Then the masts shivered and creaked, and one of them split because the soldiers-turned-sailors didn’t yet know their progress had stopped, that the sails had needed to be brought about or cut.

The four boats and the six dragons were pinned in an island of ice that had come up from the water below and congealed around webbed feet and submerged hulls. The dragons were enraged and crashing their wings. Shrieking.

“They sound like you, Mum,” said Rain.

“We haven’t time to watch them drown, or burn their way loose, or turn around to catch us. We’re cooked any way you look at it. Let’s go.”

22.

Safe enough to set one of the barns on fire, one that stood away from the house. And anyway, it had been more or less eviscerated; she saw that the soldiers had appropriated a good many of the posts and beams from the hayloft. A security measure, bringing the structure down, she could say. The clouds of black smoke would alarm residents of Haventhur and Bigelow and the rest, and ready them for whatever punishment Cherrystone and the forces of the Emerald City might still manage to loose against them.

Glinda had never saddled up a carriage, but Rain had spent her childhood in the barns. While the girl wasn’t big enough to handle the tackle, she knew what was needed, and she could demonstrate how it hooked and snaggled together. In the time it would have taken them to walk to Zimmerstorm on their hands and knees, Glinda had readied the lightest of carriages. So they set out along the coast road, heading west—away from the wreckage on the water.

As it happened, they didn’t need to go very far. Four miles out—away from the burning barn, the ships frozen in the summer lake, the panicked and furious dragons, and General Cherrystone—waited the Lion and that high-strung veiled woman with the pretty white hair. She was pacing and he was lolling, but when the Lion saw the carriage he drew himself to his hind legs and smoothed his mane.

“How did you know I would come here?” asked Glinda.

“You forget for whom we work,” said the woman. “The Clock tells us things that may happen. Not what should happen, mind, or what will happen. But what might.”

“Anything might happen,” said Glinda.

“The secret of why prophecy is so popular,” agreed the woman. “Good for business.”

“I brought you back the book,” said Glinda. “It’s too fussy for me to have. I thought so the first time I had it, and I think so again.”

The Lion said, “We’ll take it. You’re safer without it now, in case there are reprisals. But from the hill where the Clock is hidden—we have a good view of the lake. We saw what you were able to do with the Grimmerie. You used it well.” He grinned at her. “Nice piece of work, sister.”

Glinda remembered the play. “Have the sailing Menaciers all drowned?”

“It’s not over yet,” said the woman. “But they saw the Clock’s performance, and the fear of their own drowning will undo them usefully. You’ve pinched exactly the right nerve. The alarm has been given, and the dragons have been slowed or made ill.”

“A dragon with a head cold. Nasty thought.”

“You never knew a dragon to live in an icy realm, did you? Cold is perishing pain to them, one hears tell.”

Glinda took the Grimmerie from where it had lain like an old farmer’s manual on the floor of the carriage. It had shed its disguise while they clattered on the road, and it looked like itself. Perhaps a bit more tattered. Could a book that old continue to age?

“You’ve done a great service,” said the Lion, taking it from her. “Some wouldn’t have thought you capable.”

“Well, I learned to cook. At my age,” she told him. “What’s next? Arts therapy? Anyway, I’ve had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases on down any road. Come, Rain. A quick good-bye, and off you go.”

“Good-bye,” said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman.

“Not to them,” said Glinda. “To me.”

She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. “Mum?”

“He was too interested in you,” she said in as bland a voice as she could manage. “It’s become too dangerous. You are better off with them.”

“We don’t have those instructions from Mr. Boss,” said the Lion. He growled low in the back of his throat.

“Mr. Boss is not the only one who gives instructions,” she told him. “I am a Throne Minister Emerita. As I remember it, Sir Brrr, I am the one who conferred a Namory upon you. Many years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, pussying about with his lapel. “Very nice and all that, but Lady Glinda.”

“I gets to go with the Lion?” Rain was unskilled at the control of elation. It cut Glinda like onion juice in a fingertip newly slit with a paring knife. Or worse.

“You do,” said Glinda. “Off with you then.”

Rain clambered down and ran to the Lion. He backed away with his paws out. The veiled woman with him just laughed. “You’ve faced worse, Brrr. Come. Let’s see what the dwarf has to say about this.”

“You do know who she is—her name is Rain—” said Glinda, but her voice was failing her, and she didn’t know if they heard. They were moving away, turning, cutting up through the scrappy barrens of pine.

Just when it was too much, when Glinda thought she might sob, Rain suddenly twisted about. “But en’t you coming?” she called.

“Can’t possibly.”

“Why not?” The girl sounded petulant, as if suddenly she decided the whole world ought to go her way, all the time.

“Zackers is stuck on the roof. I have to fling some sandwiches down at him so he won’t starve. And there’s Puggles. He can’t move, Rain. Now that I know how to make soup, I have to make some soup and spoon it into his mouth until I can find somebody to care for him, to make him better if it can happen.”

“And there’s Murth,” said the girl ruminatively.

Glinda didn’t believe there was Murth any longer. “You take care of one another. Come and see me sometime if you are passing through.”

Rain had already turned back around and was chattering to the Lion. The woman lifted the girl up on the Lion’s back—he was down on all fours again—and Rain squealed with glee. She grabbed his mane by two fistfuls and her little naked feet came up as her knees went down. Her head went back in joy. Blinding joy. She looked like a girl in the best of times. She looked like a girl broken out of the prison egg. But she didn’t look back.