The Patchwork Conscience of Oz

1.

The Lion backed up as the dwarf turned a red no beet would ever manage. “I sent you to collect a library book, and you come back with a child?”

Uh-oh, thought Brrr. Bad move. He arched his backbone—a bit of alley cat attitude that no one could be fooled by, but it made him feel better. He hadn’t seen the dwarf this seriously off his nut before.

To Ilianora, the dwarf added, “Look, Little Nanny Ninnykins, I always thought you were simple, but I see I was wrong. You’re demented. Take her back where you got her.”

To Brrr’s surprise, Ilianora gave Mr. Boss no quarter. “You’re interested in the future,” she said to him. “Any child is a head start on the future, no matter who they are.”

“So we should maybe kidnap a whole orphanage? Listen, I won’t stand for this. Send her packing.”

“Don’t get your little knickers in a twist,” the Lion said mildly. “We can take care of her. Principles of child governance—how hard could it be?”

“You couldn’t govern a coffee grinder. You’re too big a sissy to run a nursery school.”

“On the contrary. Cowardice is a virtue when it comes to protecting the young and frail. If I can be as scared as a child is of, oh, bumblebees or something, I can better remember to keep us both safely away from them.”

“I en’t scared of no bumblebees,” inserted Rain.

The dwarf ignored her, and snapped at the Lion, “You sure put the pussy in pussycat. You couldn’t even stand up to Lady Glinda when she foisted this hoyden on you.”

Well, there is truth in that, thought Brrr.

Ilianora said to the child, “When did you last have something to eat?”

“I am hungerful,” admitted the girl. “Lady Glinda en’t all that good a cook.”

Brrr let the child slip off his back. The dwarf fumed and spat but the Lion stood his ground. “We’ve got bigger problems than kindercare,” he said. “Have you forgotten that the fleet that the Clock showed us has been attacked? Someone will be wondering who did it, and putting it all together.”

“It gots stuck in the middle of the water,” said Rain.

Ilianora, rooting about in a satchel, located some shreds of ham and bread. A pot of mustard and a spoon. The dwarf took the Grimmerie off into the underbrush of the pine barren, probably to return it to the Clock. In a clearing upslope, the assistants pitched quoits, ponying about and paying no mind.

“Why should he be so aggravated about a kid tagging along?” Brrr asked his wife. “He’s already saddled with us. What’s one more, and a little one at that?”

“Let me first see to some supper for the child, Brrr.”

When she had finished her meal, Rain looked about her with brightening interest. “Here’s where you live?” she asked.

“Until Mr. Boss gives us the word to press on.” Ilianora removed her veil and shook it out. Her white braid was coiled upon her head in a henge of black pins.

The Lion said, “I do hope we’ll get going soon. There’ll be a marksman or even a posse on our trail by dawn, I bet. Anyway, this place gives me gooseflesh.” He had never liked the forest, any forest. That sense of lostness. How a horizon so quickly gets knotted up in the fractal digression of branches. Though this stand of junk trees was thinner than some.

Sotto voce, Brrr to his all-too-human wife: “I don’t want to be the only timid one at the table, but don’t you agree we should light out before that General sends hit men to find the Grimmerie? And to mow us down while they’re at it? We could move faster on our own, you and me. With the girl, of course. Since her welcome to our own little tribe has been, shall we say, a little thin.”

Ilianora bit her upper lip, considering. “I’ve felt we should all keep together, but now that we’ve obeyed the Clock, delivering the Grimmerie to Lady Glinda and collecting it from her again, you might be right. Though where would we go?”

“You need to find your brother.”

“I don’t need to do that.” She lived and breathed, Brrr knew, with a high tolerance for detachment—like a lake jellyfish floating in a glass casket, oblivious of japing crowds.

He’d been with her for six months now. In that time she’d learned—or remembered—how to laugh. Gulpily. Bitten-off retorts, like poorly suppressed hiccups. She’d seemed to grow younger through the winter. He didn’t want to see her lose any ground. “Shall we skive off?” asked the Lion again, in a lower voice.

She shrugged. She’d know what was to come next when she knew it, thought Brrr. And though no magistrate had recorded their union—any cross-species romance revolted Mice and Munchkinlanders alike—he and Ilianora enjoyed a marriage just the same, and he’d stick by her side either in or out of the shadow of the Clock.

The dwarf was waddling back. Not for nothing was he called Mr. Boss. “You lot of layabouts, this is no picnic. We’ve got problems to see to. Up, up, off your furry rump, Sir Brrr. Miss Fiddlefuck of the Fairies. Hey, you noisy boysters, shape up—we’re hotfooting it back to the lookout bluff, where we can see down the lake, and catch the news on the wind.”

Brrr raised his eyebrows to the child, and she understood; she galloped toward him and sprang onto the Lion’s back. “Don’t get used to me,” he found himself saying over his shoulder. “I’m no one’s defender. I’m not reliable.” Her finger dug into the rolls of skin at the nape of his neck and she nuzzled her face in his mane. This made her cough. He wished he’d given himself a shampoo more recently, but conveniences were in short supply in the Pine Barrens. Another reason to detest the place.

They’d stashed the Clock at the dead end of an old logging road; above this, the hills mounded to a lookout. Brrr didn’t wait for Ilianora, the dwarf, his boys. He vaulted ahead, passing the Clock, breasting the hill.

The sun was just beginning to set. The stripe of glare down the lake, too bright to see at first, pinned the flotilla within it. Then the Lion’s sight steadied, and Rain’s must have too. The girl murmured, “Holy Ozma.”

They saw four ships and six impossible dragons encased in a floating belt of ice, a flat island of white. Ice had run up the ratlines and shrouds and stiffened the sails into glass. Men had shucked their uniforms in the summer heat and jumped onto the floe. In little but braies and singlets they were hacking with axes. Here and there campfires had been set, as if to puncture the ice with melt-holes. The dragons bellowed!—you could hear it even at this distance. One or two had worked a wing loose. The military were staying clear of the twisting, snakelike heads, which snarled and snapped in rage at everything and nothing.

“They din’t do nothin’,” said Rain. “T’ent their fault, them beasties.”

“Fell in with the wrong crowd,” said Brrr, “and they’ll pay. Mind who you choose for friends, Rain.”

“Friends,” snorted the girl, skeptical of the concept, maybe.

Out from Sedney and Bigelow to the south, from Haventhur and Zimmerstorm to the north, Munchkin boats were emerging. Shabby little barks such as had been snugged into port or tucked under screens of pine branches proved trim and ready for this opportunity for sabotage. Twelve, fifteen, twenty vessels. Compared to the mighty ships Cherrystone’s men had built, these were laughable toyfloats. Powered by forearm and sail and cheery, puffing steampipes. Here came a bark shaped like a gilded swan—that must be from one of the ancestral piles farther up the lake.

“High holy hysteria,” said Mr. Boss, arriving with the others in time to see the Munchkinlanders take revenge for the burning of their crops.

The dragons were making so much noise, down below, that the soldiers seemed slow to comprehend the net of lake midges drawing around them.

“Brrr, turn around, take the girl away from this,” said Ilianora suddenly.

“This is the world in which she has been born,” barked the dwarf. “Better to know early. Take a good look, girlie.”

Ilianora came up beside Brrr and reached for one of Rain’s hands; Rain shrugged her away. She didn’t take her eyes off the lake.

“The local riffraff is ready with muskets of some sort,” said Brrr, as punches of thready smoke also bloomed out around the raggle-taggle peasant fleet. It wasn’t long before columns of cloud smeared the air from the gunnels of The Vinkus, the Munchkinland, the Gillikin, the Quadling Country. A hearty response from professional artillery.

Perhaps the kickback of Cherrystone’s cannon began to shatter the ice. The rocking worked some play into the frozen girdle, and the navy Menaciers seemed encouraged. But soon it became clear that the Munchkinlanders were united in a simple strategy. Spare the ships; attack the creatures. The slaughter of one dragon, then a second and third simultaneously, made all the onlookers, even Mr. Boss, catch his breath. The great dragon-heads fell to one side, old sunflowers listing. The dragon-wings burst into thin flame, translucent first, then oranged, rouged; they fell to ash within minutes.

“Ow,” said Brrr. “You’re hurting me, Rain.”

The fourth dragon died. The fifth broke loose in the commotion, at last, and rose above the fray so high that the company on the bluff drew back, ready to scatter should its eye fall upon them. But it dove upon one of Cherrystone’s ships to snap the stubbed mast. Then it whirled about and attacked the gilt-tipped swan boat. It caught the silly hooped neck of the prow and rose in the air with it, dashing it upon one of the frozen ships. Brrr couldn’t see if the swan’s navigator or skipper had dived to safety.

The liberated dragon dropped from the air again. At first they thought it was attacking another ship, but the dragon was heaving in a death throe. In the muck of ice floes and floundering vessels, it overfreighted one of Cherrystone’s vessels to the starboard side, and the ship upended with a sound of suction and shattering, stove through.

The sixth and final dragon managed to rip free, now that the spell was losing its grip. Into the sky it racked its way. Taking no notice of floating armies or vengeful ambushers, it staggered in the sunset light. Crazed perhaps. It turned to the south, heaving over Bigelow and the foothills of the Great Kells. Heading for the Disappointments, maybe, or the murk of the badlands. None of its band would follow it into Quadling Country. It had no living mates left.

2.

After soaking a puck of congealed tadmuck and mashing it up, the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon disported itself about a small fire of coals to cook their penance and eat it. They were silent at first. The smoke kept the jiggering mosquitoes off, but the light drew the moths. Cross-legged on the ground, Rain cupped her chin in her hands. Her eyes followed the mauve wings. As if she’d never seen moths before, Brrr thought. Or perhaps she was contemplating the kinship possibilities between moth and dragon.

“Not to ruin anyone’s digestion,” said Brrr at last, “but we’re probably marked enemies of the administration lording it up in the Emerald City. Ilianora and I were talking and—well, don’t you think we should scram while we can?”

“I don’t work by committee, never did,” snapped Mr. Boss. “I want your sympathy, you faggoty cat, I’ll ask for it. You can go foul your knickers for all I care.”

“What’s the matter? Some mountain goat nibble at your testicles?”

Ilianora shot Brrr a look and indicated the child. But Rain continued oblivious to anything but the flutter of moth and flame, and Brrr kept at the dwarf. “What is it? You don’t like anyone else making a decision? Such as our taking on the girl when Lady Glinda suggested it?”

Mr. Boss had been kind to Ilianora for the past year. She had always before been able to cozen the dwarf from his tempers. Now, when she sat down near him and put a hand on his knee, he swatted it away. “You want somebody more functional than Sissyboy Lion, help yourself to one of the lads. I’m not interested in you.”

Behind the dwarf’s back, Brrr mouthed singsongingly to his wife, You’re i-in trou-ble.

“We’ll only keep the girl till we can find somewhere safe for her to stay,” she said to the dwarf. “We more or less promised Lady Glinda. In exchange for releasing the book back to us.”

Mr. Boss flicked a piece of ratty bark into the fire, taking out one of the moths. Rain gasped, quietly.

“We got your precious book,” said Brrr, trying not to sound panicky. “The girl is a bonus. What’re we waiting around for?”

“I don’t know. How the hell should I know?” Mr. Boss’s tone was darker than usual.

“Ask the Clock?” suggested Ilianora, as if that thought might not have occurred to him.

“I can’t.”

Brrr had only been with the company of the Clock for the past six months. Still, he’d heard that the Clock decided for itself when it needed a rest. When this happened, the company would sometimes disband for a while. Maybe it was time. The Lion asked, “What, is the thing on strike again? Holding out on us?”

Mr. Boss shifted this way and that without answering. Off to one side, to the plinks from a silver guitar and a set of jingle-tongs, the bawd came through clearly. The seven lads were improvising more lewd verses to their nightly lay of the endless lay. Some evenings the boys sang of themselves taking their pleasures in a whorehouse, sometimes in a female seminary, sometimes in front of an audience of kings and bishops. The boys were equally godlike in endurance and readiness, the girls indistinguishably gorgeous except for variations in hair color. Hardly lullabye material, but soon enough Rain slumped in the Lion’s forearms and noodled herself toward sleep.

“Now,” said the Lion, “I don’t mean to rush you, but assassins are no doubt starting out to find us, the Clock, and the book. They’ll have put it all together, given we showed them an excerpt of what to expect. Do you want to tell us what’s going on?”

Mr. Boss sighed, and a single golden tear slid out of his eye and lost itself in his bottlebrush mustache. Brrr didn’t trust the tear of a dwarf any more than he trusted the Unnamed God to appear in the clearing and settle the universal contest of good versus evil. Or even good versus bad taste.

Ilianora extended their chieftain the benefit of the doubt. “What’s upset you? It surely can’t be the child?”

The dwarf sunk his chin farther into his chest, as if he’d rather speak to his lap. “I hoped getting the book back from Lady Glinda would refresh the Clock’s executive function, but I don’t believe it has done so.”

Ilianora and Brrr exchanged glances, and waited.

“You always see the entertainment message of the Clock,” explained Mr. Boss. “That’s all anyone ever sees. The audience side with the stages, the apertures and balconies and suchlike. But there’s a difference between public demonstration and private revelation. Around the corner? Not the side with the storage cabinets, but the back end of the cart? Where the placard says HE DREAMS YOU UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN? That advertisement hides from everyone’s view a private stage you never saw because I never mentioned it. To anyone. When I’m alone I go sneak a look there. I watch for direction every few days. Even if the Clock prefers to show no opinion about what might happen, always before this it has quivered with secrecy. It’s been like a child trying to keep perfectly still. Can’t be done. No one can play dead dead enough, not even a Clock. Until now. It gave me one more tirade while you were gone, today. Then—it died. It’s mastered the art of being dead. Or comatose.”

“What did the Clock say?” asked Ilianora.

“It said keep away from any grubby underage girlykins who have no business mucking with history.” He tossed his brow toward Rain but couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “And then it collapsed.”

The lads were settling down into their usual mound. They always slept apart from management. Rain was lost into a dream of her own.

“Perhaps the Clock needs the Grimmerie to function properly?” suggested Brrr. “Like a kind of yeast, or a key? Maybe now that we have it back…?”

“More often than not, the book has been clear of the Clock, and still the Clock told me whatever it needed me to know. The Clock and the book are separate systems, though sharing a cousinly interest in influence.”

“Then maybe the Clock doesn’t like having the Grimmerie back,” said Brrr. “Maybe you should hot-potato it back to Lady Glinda’s lap.” He wouldn’t relish being delegated for that mission, not in the current climate.

“Right. And maybe the stars are really the toenail cuttings of the Unnamed God. Don’t talk about that which you don’t bloody get, Sir Pussykit.”

So even history can get tired too, thought Brrr. How many futures has the Clock told in its time? It’s been humping around Oz for what, thirty, forty, fifty years now? And the dwarf slaving in attendance to it except during the periods when the Clock was hidden in some crevice of Oz, and the dwarf could go out and live something of a life? “Well, if you can’t start it up with a hand crank, maybe it wants to be dead,” said Brrr. “Ever think of that?”

The dwarf only groaned. “The Clock isn’t just a font of prophecy. It’s—a kind of conscience, I think.”

“It won’t be the first conscience ever nodded off. I’m joining it. Good night.”

But the Lion’s rest was pestered by the calls of hootch-owls and the slither of pelican beetles under dried pine needles. He was worried that the dwarf seemed immobilized by the Clock’s paralysis. He was worried they shouldn’t be sleeping here, but should be on the road already, getting away. He could hear marksmen in every scrape and shudder of forest.

Always some itch that worrying couldn’t scratch. Brrr slipped sideways in and out of the kind of sleep that masquerades neatly as the actual moment—is he a Lion aware of being almost asleep in a summery pine forest, or is he dreaming of that same reality?

Apparitions of his past detached from the fretwork of chronology and drifted into consciousness, out again. The Lion swam in that underwater wonderland where action and consequence lose their grip on each other.

Look who’s here on conscience’s catwalk: striking poses between wakefulness and dream.

The nobleman who’d thought up for the Lion an agent’s assignment. The man who had smelled of licorice and tobacco. Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows. His thin pumpkin-colored mustache and goatee, that bearing few Animals could imitate. Damn the confidence of the titled!

Avaric gave way to Jemmsy, the first human Brrr could remember meeting—a humble soldier of the Wizard of Oz. The Lion’s first friend, so his first betrayal. What made Brrr think he could care for a little girl, even for a while? Doing damage—that was the Lion’s métier.

Jemmsy flew apart into ashes. In the Lion’s hypnogogic paralysis, Jemmsy resembled the swarm of Ozmists, said to be fragments of ghost who haunted the Great Gillikin Forest. What had they asked? “Tell us if the Wizard is still ruling Oz.” And Cubbins, the boy-sheriff of the Northern Bears, had asked them a return question: “Tell us if Ozma is alive.”

Why didn’t hooded phantasms in their sepulchral moan ever ask, “Tell us if salted butter is better than unsalted in a recipe for a Shiz mincemeat pasty?” Prophetic questions and answers only cared about rules—powers, thrones, pushiness.

Cubbins faded away into a pattern of sedges and paisleys. Brrr was nearly asleep, and then a thought of the ancient oracle known as Yackle intruded upon the artsiness of the mind yielding to dream.

She was so robust in his thoughts that he sat bolt upright. That cunning fiend! In his mind she was more demanding than ever. “Take care of the girl,” she’d hectored him not six months ago. “I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for.” She’d been talking about the child of Liir and Candle. None other than Elphaba’s granddaughter. But was this girl who showed up—Rain—the right one? The Clock seemed leery of her, according to the dwarf. And Brrr couldn’t be sure. He lay down again. Behind his closed eyelids, as the girl stretched and rubbed against his spine and rolled over, he tried to imagine her as green, though in daylight she seemed the same filmy milkweed color of so many Munchkinlanders and Gillikinese.

Clocks are color-blind, thought Brrr. Let the Clock recover its spring and go back to being the conscience of Oz. It can sort out Rain’s reality. I’m too tired.

All his previous disasters danced attendance upon him now, a big lousy finish. That nightly inquisition, as character relievedly dissolves into oblivion: Who are you really? The Lion had a wife with whom he didn’t sleep, not only for the problem of incompatible proportions but because Ilianora was stitched into a finalizing virginity. The Lion had fixated on many humans and Animals alike, and loved only one, Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tiger. That had gone nowhere in a hurry. Had he sired litters? No. His part in the Matter of Dorothy and the death of the Wicked Witch of the West was puzzling to all, himself included—was he an enemy of the state? Or a hero of the nation? Or just an empty space in the world wearing an acceptably impressive mane—that was how he accounted for himself, up and down and be done with it.

So maybe he wasn’t capable, he concluded, of fulfilling Yackle’s request of him. “Take care of the girl.” Why should he? Elphaba had done him no favors, unless you believed those who said he’d been a Lion cub in Shiz, and she and her friends had rescued him from some unsavory experiment in a lab. No way to prove it, of course.

But here was Rain, in her sleep, rudely scratching herself between her buttocks. The Lion could feel the girl’s spindly arm. His spine and hers, back to back.

But why wasn’t he capable? Come on. Lady Glinda had looked after Rain without drawing attention to the matter. And face it, Lady Glinda was hardly Old Mother Glee from the operettas. If Glinda could manage, couldn’t Brrr? With Ilianora’s help? With or without the dwarf’s help, the Clock’s advice?

But the Clock had gone somnolent, Brrr remembered. A conscience in a coma.

But but but. The endless clockwork spin of self-doubt.

He had come to no conclusion in his roundabout reflections. Sleep rescued him temporarily from the obligation to fret about it any longer.

3.

The new others were still asleep. Rain picked her way around them: the white-haired woman with the hard-soft face, the goldeny Lion, the little mean man. Also the seven acolytes of the Clock, who were tickling one another in their sleep, she thought.

She didn’t miss Glinda. She didn’t miss Puggles. She half expected Miss Murth to be lurking under the pines with a face flannel at the ready, but when Murthy didn’t show up Rain pushed on. She was intent on climbing back up to the lookout to see what could still be seen of the dragons in the water.

Her mind for a path was clever enough. The light rowed like slanted oars along the way, showing her how to go. It felt good to be out in the world. Not dangerous at all, no matter what Miss Murth had kept saying, especially lately.

Ah, the lake. At this hour its surface steamed black-silver. Green glowed on the hills. Green painted the southern coves like a skin of algae. She noticed smoke above Zimmerstorm, though she was too young to wonder if it signified the remains of a town burned in reprisal. She couldn’t see the mansard roofs of Mockbeggar Hall, and she didn’t think to look for them.

The dragons were gone. The ice was gone. The ruins of one ship drifted like a broken island. Two of the ships were yoked and listing. The fourth ship was gone, maybe sunk entirely, or paddled to port somewhere out of sight.

She was sorry for the ships but sorrier for the dragons. She bet no one had asked them if they was interested in swimming boats around. She had helped to ice them in—somehow she knew that. She didn’t know the word ashamed, or even the notion, but she felt punky and wished it hadn’t happened. Lady Glinda was in trouble and there weren’t no other way; but still.

The bits of timber on water looked like broken letters.

This reminded her of the word man. Cherrystone. Once he had found a book with big letters—whether it was for children or for blindish adults she didn’t know—and he had sat it on his knee facing her. She hunched on the floor. He’d taken out his littlish silvery dagger and had used it as a pointer. What’s that? The E. What’s that? The I? No, the other one. The L. Right? Right. And this? The, um, the one like an E. The F! E-L-F? Can you spell it so far?

She could, but for some reason she’d shaken her head. She hadn’t wanted this to go too fast.

Now she saw a big stick and went to pick it up so she could scrape letters into the pine needles. How to spell sorry? The stick wiggled off and she chased it. She knew it had become a snake, but maybe it would hold still and be a stick for her. Maybe it could spell better than she could. “Wait.”

It hustled away, but slower, she thought; it was considering her plea. Then it paused and turned its needle head. It was allover green except where it wanted to be brown. Its eye—she could only see one—was a tight shiny opaque black lentil.

She said, “Did you wriggle up from the water this morning? Do you know what happened down there? Is those dragons friends of yours? Is any of them okay?”

The snake lowered its head, perhaps in mourning.

“One of ’em flied away. Did you see that part?”

The snake didn’t move, but Rain thought it maybe looked a little interested.

“Oh, it did. I en’t got any notion where it flied itself off to. Out beyond the shores over that way.”

The snake seemed to be trying to turn a different color, to blend in with the bit of lichen on one side and a scrap of stone on the other, but it was slow work. She squatted down to watch it go. “Whoa-ey. I din’t know snakes could shift to green and back agin.”

The creature’s lidless eyes were baleful and patient. “A lot could go green if they tried harder,” it said. “Keep it in mind.” Rain reared back, never having met a talking Snake before, nor heard of one even. She thought they were only storylike. The Snake finished its conversion to camouflage, and she couldn’t see it anymore.

She missed the Snake but she appreciated the advice. “Right-o,” she said to where it had been. “Oh and—sorry.”

4.

Rain told them about the ships all ruined, and the dragons, dead or fled. The companions looked at Mr. Boss. He just shrugged.

“Assuming most of the soldiers survived and regrouped on shore, Cherrystone’s first order of business will be to find us,” said Brrr. Patient as a marmoreal Lion. Though he was finding it hard not to scream. “The Clock predicted a watery rout, remember? And Cherrystone might guess we had a mighty charm for making it come true. We really can’t hang around waiting for the Clock to stamp our hall slip.”

“Hey, the Lion’s right. We’ve been romping back and forth across hostile ground for the better part of a year now.” This from a boy with a chestnut mop. Brrr had never heard him speak before. “With that watery zoo in flames last night, we’re going to be everyone’s first target of revenge.”

The towhead said, “And how. Thankth to the bloody Clock’th little prophethy to the military. That wath a collathal fucking mithtake, that wath.”

Yet another virgin opinion: “It’s time we decided which way—”

The dwarf interrupted the boy. “When you start to think about deciding, it’s time for you to decide to leave.”

“Maybe we will,” groused a fourth fellow. “Being wanted in military sabotage is different from being a hand servant to Fate.”

“And you can’t risk bossing Fate around,” spat the dwarf. “You’re going to second-guess me, get out. I mean it.”

The speaker, a kid shaggy with corkscrews of cobalt black, lost a measure of his resolve. He backed up a step, as if to give the dwarf room to back down too.

“I’m not stopping you,” said Mr. Boss, “nor you other fellows. We’ve managed for years either to negotiate a kind of diplomatic immunity or to squelch out of any cowpie we happen to step into. Our stretch of luck might be over, though. Get used to it or get another hobby.”

“But luck, what is luck, up next to Fate—” The boys couldn’t wriggle out of the propaganda snarled around their hearts.

“Save yourselves. Last one to leave, put out the moon. You too, daughter.” The dwarf pointed a gnarled forefinger at Ilianora. “Nothing’s holding you here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she responded. “Yet.”

The lads were packed up and ready to leave within the hour. Abandoning their orange camisoles, they hoisted rucksacks on their backs and tied civilian kerchiefs at their necks. They figured to strike out north across the Pine Barrens, avoiding militias of either stripe.

Brrr thought it best. These boys hadn’t signed on to become agents provocateurs in some accidental war. Most of the lads had wanted merely to see the world and to claim their importance as acolytes of history. Or to postpone indenture in some family grocery or gravel-and-sand concern.

“You’re next,” said the dwarf. “Out. Vamoose. Scrammylegs.”

“Not without you,” said Ilianora. “Mr. Boss, you’re not yourself.”

“I’m not going anywhere with that ruinous child,” said Mr. Boss.

“If we leave, you’re not going anywhere, period,” observed Brrr. “You just dismissed your backup labor force, and I’m the only one left who can drag that Clock. Unless you’re ready to walk away from it.”

“Curses,” bellowed the dwarf, and demonstrated some.

“Hush,” said Ilianora. “If they’ve really decided to hunt us down, you’ll only pinpoint our location for them.”

The dwarf went and sat under the wagon.

“I’m all packed,” said the Lion to his spouse. “Nothing holding us, I think. Since we seem to be dismissed.”

“He rescued me,” said Ilianora. “I can’t just leave him over this slight difference of opinion.”

“Why en’t you ask the Clock?” suggested Rain. “If you talked nice to it? What’s its name, anyway?”

Ilianora gave the wrinkled wince that, in her, passed for a grin. “Oswald. But I think of it as Oswalda.”

Rain went to look at it. “It en’t very breathy,” she admitted, but she walked about it, giving it the benefit of the doubt. From beneath, the dwarf pitched stones at her scraped ankles.

Brrr saw the dragon as a cutthroat charm, a vulgar but effective contrivance of tiktok ingenuity designed to remind gullible audiences of the archaic folk belief known as the Time Dragon. Though himself reared without such nonsense—because self-reared—the Lion had learned of Oz’s origin legends well enough. The snot-fired underground creature, asleep in some unreachable cavern, dreaming the universe from its beginning. A fiery fatalism.

And not the only type of fatalism to grip Oz. Other more phlegmatic theories proposed existence as the result of some unholy combustion of oils and embers. Even today, some peasants credited their filthy lot to the dilettantism of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, trying her hand at creating a world. And eggheads smart enough to suffer gout or glaucoma argued that life was a benighted experiment in ethics or cruelty invented by the Unnamed God. But the dragon story was older—so old in folk knowledge that the dragon had no name. Oswald was a nom de théâtre: deep fate is always run from behind the curtain, from which we are asked to divert our attention.

Today the dragon of the Clock was inert. A clapped-out heap of oxidizing technology. Could it be a disguise? Oswald had so often seemed a half-creature, sinister in its apparent sense of impulse, decided in its attitude toward wrong and right. The dragon’s head had rotated like the headlamp of some pedicycle rollicking down the college lanes of Shiz. The jaws snapped in four different positions. None of them smiling. When did conscience smile?

“It looks deaded out,” concluded Rain, cheerfully enough.

“Rain, a little less noise,” suggested the Lion. No sense in salting the dwarf’s wounds.

“Why en’t we hunting in the Grimmerie for words to wake ’m up?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” said Brrr. “I vote yes.”

“Suddenly we’re a democratic synod? That’s what having children does for you? Remind me to neuter myself with a grapefruit spoon.” But with what Ilianora had been through, that remark was thoughtless, and despite his distress the dwarf caught himself. “Oh, all right. But I’m not promising to play by any suggestion a stupid book makes, magic or not.”

He got the Grimmerie out of a drawer that opened with a pop, as if it had been eager to deliver the book to Rain. “Reading never did much for me, in my line of work,” he grumphed.

Ilianora spread her shawl on the needled ground, and Mr. Boss dumped the book upon it. “I don’t like to touch the Grimmerie,” said the woman, but Rain knelt down before the tome. She put her hands on the cover as if she’d like to hug the thing, and opened the great lid of it.

“It feels hummy. Like moss with sugarbees in it,” she said.

“And you look like clot without the cream.” The dwarf snorted. “Find what you need to find and close the damn thing up again. It makes me nervous. This book isn’t for the likes of us to examine. We’re just the keepers.”

“Maybe the world is changing,” said the Lion, “and it’s up to us now.”

The dwarf stifled himself as Rain turned the versos. Today each page seemed made of a different sort of paper. Different colors and weights, sieved and pressed with a variety of trash: rag content and straw, string and fuse. To Brrr’s eye the hand-lettered words seemed overly hooked and pronged, a foreign language if not, indeed, a foreign alphabet. Though his spectacles needed updating. Sometimes the marginalia designs appeared engaged and in motion, flat little theater pieces performing for themselves. On other pages a single portrait without caption stared out, its eyes moving as the page lifted, wavered, settled, was covered by the next. “How do we even know what we’re looking for?” asked the Lion.

“When we find it,” said Rain. Simple enough.

Brrr saw it before she did. They had come upon a page that seemed sheathed in ice or glass, across which embossed patterns of frost and snowflake were wheeling, interleaving the way, presumably, the cogs of the Clock did when the Clock was in fettle. The paper glinted with sparkles as of light on snow. Rain said, “Is this calling winter upon water?”

“Who knows?” said Brrr. “No text I can recognize, unless the snowflakes are their own prose. The book has stopped riffling itself, though. Seems to be the destination page, anyway.”

The girl agreed; she clasped her hands over the page eagerly as if to warm herself on a winter’s afternoon. “Where is my mittens?” she murmured, almost to herself.

The snowflake patterns pulled apart like theater curtains, revealing a dark blue background that filled the whole page, like a night sky during Lurlinemas. Stars shone in midnight ink. “If this is an advertisement for classes in faith formation, honeyclams, I’m taking a match to the whole damn thing,” whispered Mr. Boss.

“Shut up,” said Brrr politely.

A single dot of white began to grow larger, as if nearing from a great distance across the heavens. It looked like a sort of snow globe, of the type Brrr had seen in the shops at holidays. An ice bubble, maybe? A perfect crystal drop. Hovering. It swelled almost to the margins of the page. When it stopped, they could see that the globe was clear, and a hunched figure imprisoned within.

“The Z in the O,” said Rain.

They couldn’t quite tell who it was.

“It’s meant to be Lady Glinda,” said Mr. Boss, despite himself. “People said she used to come and go by bubble. Though it was really a White Pfenix.”

“No, it’s meant to be Elphaba, only you can’t see she’s green,” said Ilianora, “not behind that icy white window. It reminds me of her crystal globe at Kiamo Ko.”

“It’s neither.” The Lion didn’t know why he felt so decisive about it. “It’s Yackle. Old Mother Yackle, the senile sage of the mauntery. She’s the one who took up lodging within these very pages, if you recall. And the glass ball—maybe that’s what’s become of Shadowpuppet—Malky, the glass cat. It has swallowed her up as if she were a bird. Well, she had those wings, remember.”

The figure—it was surely a she—pointed out at them as if she could see them from the book. One finger at Brrr, one at Ilianora, one at the dwarf, and one at Rain. With her other hand she collected four upright fingers and bunched them together like asparagus spears tied with string. She gripped them, indicating—quite cleary—together. Together.

Then she raised her right hand and pointed over their shoulders. South. She made a shooing motion with her hand, a farmwife annoyed by chickens. Go! Go. Together. South.

Flee.

Hurry!

“She could get a job at Ticknor Circus doing charades,” admitted the dwarf. “She’s pretty good, though who’s to say she’s not some dybbuk tempting us to our doom?”

The snowflakes began to close in, obscuring the figure. The Grimmerie became stiff, the pages blocked. Nothing to do but close the damn book before the ground around it began to ice up and the Grimmerie froze to the earth.

“I’m going south,” said Brrr. “With Ilianora and with Rain. I’ll haul the Clock if you choose to come along, Mr. Boss. If you can’t bring yourself to join us, well, it’s been jolly when it hasn’t been a total nightmare.”

The dwarf pulled at his hands, all but whimpering, “The Clock said no girl.”

“Haven’t you ever known a Clock to tell the wrong time?” Though Brrr stopped there.

“All right. I’m beat.” The dwarf walked up to Rain; their faces were almost the same height. He waggled a finger. “But hey? Little funny kid? You’re not to touch this book again. I don’t like that look of entitlement on your smug face.”

“It’s called reading,” she retorted.

Whatever else they griped about—whoever the image had meant to remind them of, and they argued over it—they’d come to agreement about this much, at least: better to be caught on the road headed for other mischief than to be found squatting in a cul-de-sac like mice in a tin bucket. Since the battle for Restwater might be joined again at Haugaard’s Keep, to the east, then they’d head around the western tip of the lake, until they could follow the book’s advice and turn south.

Now the Lion discovered that the boys had been letting him do all the work since the day he arrived a half a year ago, back when the autumn came upon them to the sound of gunpowder explosions and the odd bugle bravocatory. The harness strained against his shoulders no less than it had last week.

The dwarf walked on one side of the wagon, Rain on the other.

Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success.

Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination.

Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. Not for nothing does the assignment of hauling the Clock of the Time Dragon between the shafts of a wooden cart seem a sort of vacation. A Lion in Oz glows in the gloom: hustlers and harlots, here’s your mark! But adjacent to the Time Dragon, however slackened it might be, a Lion could enjoy being overshadowed.

5.

Deciding on a destination always makes the weather improve, or seem to improve. Though the sun remained brutal and the winds weak, and the humidity felt heaped on like a sodden coat, the uncompanionable companions stepped sprightly. The farther they got from Mockbeggar Hall, the better off they’d be. The pines gave way to long gravelly stretches, like dried-up streambeds, perhaps evidence of a flow that had once moved from Kellswater into Restwater. The companions camped by day if they could find shade; by night they trod, wordless and lost but not, Brrr thought, in despair. Or not yet, anyway. As soon as the moon sank they stopped and rested too. No matter how hot it was, Rain slept against Brrr as if she were his kit.

Some days later, on the horizon, the first of the great oakhair trees began to lift their frondish heads. Brrr remembered this terrain from last fall. At noontime, they came within sight of the mauntery where Brrr had interviewed Yackle, and she him.

It sat and sulked by itself on its flat, like an armoire set out on a lawn. It looked deserted, but Brrr didn’t propose going nearer to satisfy his curiosity. Neither did anyone else. They kept to one side of the establishment, pushing south, deeper into the oakhair forest.

Ilianora carried the scythe the boys had sometimes wielded and she knocked down what bracken she could. If shadier, the woods were stiller, too. More spiders. Brrr hated spiders, but Rain scurried sideways to peer through each fretted oculus.

“What are you looking for?” he heard Ilianora ask her once.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The spider world. The world the spider sees. The other world.”

“Little goose.” Ilianora takes such a fond tone when trashing the dreams of the young, Brrr observed. “Little monkey. Little moron. There is no other world. This world is enough.”

“Of course no one asks me my opinion about other worlds,” growled Mr. Boss. “I who actually have traveled a good deal wider than some.”

“Well?” Rain rarely addressed the dwarf. “What would you say?”

He glowered at the girl, as if she were responsible for the Clock having suffered its rigor mortis. “Ah, what I could say, were I free to spill the beans.”

“Don’t fill her head with nonsense,” snapped Ilianora. “It’s unkind.”

“What about that Dorothy?” asked Rain. “En’t she from the other world?”

“Who told you anything about her?” asked the dwarf.

“Murthy did. When Lady Glinda was busy twisting her hair with that hot fork.”

“I knew it,” said Brrr, shaking his natural curls.

“Wherever she was from, Dorothy was a stooge of the Wizard,” said Ilianora. “She did his bidding, from what I heard. She killed Auntie Witch—”

She paused. Brrr rarely heard her mention Elphaba Thropp. He knew his wife well enough to guess that the phrase Auntie Witch, rising to her own lips, had startled her. He swished his tail in his wife’s face to amuse her. She blinked at him in a noncommittal way.

“Dorothy could have come from anywhere,” he drawled. “There’s a lot of Oz untraveled by the likes of Ozians. More outback than city centre in Oz, no? And beyond the sands, Fliaan and Ix, and other murky badlands too impossible to imagine.”

“That’s not what Murth says,” protested Rain. “She says Dorothy was from the Other Land. You can’t get there by a cart. Just by magic.”

“It’s a one-way ticket, honey,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me on this one.” He turned his pocket out as if looking for a chit for the return voyage: nothing.

“Dorothy went back, though.”

“Hah. They probably topped her and tumbled her in some hole. And made up another story. Just like they did to Ozma. People will believe anything if it’s impossible enough.”

“Don’t,” said Brrr. “Let Rain learn the world the same way we all did.”

“The scientific method of child rearing? Analysis by trial and terror?” The dwarf cracked his knuckles. “Move aside, Lion. I’m going for a walk. I can’t sit here and listen to you corrupt a child with the limits of logic. You’re all boobs and bobbycats.”

He humped himself straight through the big spiderweb that Rain had been examining. Then he turned around and said, “Look, little wastrel girl. I’m on the other side. And what’s the news? It stinks over here, too.”

The Lion whispered to his spouse, “Is he going to hold against Rain until she’s old enough to jab him one between the eyes?”

“Who likes being cut out of the future?” she replied. “The Clock is giving no opinions—so how does he learn his way?”

“The same as the rest of us. Dread, shame, and luck.”

When he came back, forty minutes later, Mr. Boss had a wife in tow. His own wife. An unregenerate Munchkinlander whom Brrr believed he’d met before. The woman, like many of her kind, was compact, half as wide as she was tall, slightly bowed of leg, a face like a dented saucepan. Some sort of weed in her hands—she’d been collecting herbs, maybe. She stumped forward into the clearing with the confidence of a woodcutter.

It took him a moment to place her. “Sister Apothecaire. As I live and breathe. I thought you’d taken a vow of chastity?”

“I accidentally left it behind in the mauntery when you carried me off in that cart six months ago. Oh well. Whoever finds it can keep it; I’m through with it. Anyway, mind your own beeswax.”

Ilianora turned to look. “It’s good to see you so recovered.”

“From my fall down the stairs? Or from my life as a maunt? Never mind. Now I appreciate that you were kind to carry me and my cracked noggin away from the mauntery before the EC forces arrived. Being a Munchkinlander, I might’ve been taken hostage. As I remember, I was rather cranky at the time, though. With some relief you passed me over to a team of women wheelers on their way to the EC for a championship tournament. I stayed with them for a few weeks, as they rehearsed their moves in a farmer’s meadow northwest of here,” explained Sister Apothecaire. “After a while, I realized even sports competitions are essentially political in nature. Who needs it. Besides, as a Munchkinlander I was too short to keep up with the team. So I found an abandoned woodman’s lean-to and made do.”

“Did you give no thought to returning to your roots in Munchkinland?” asked Ilianora. “Or repairing to the motherchapel in the Emerald City?”

“The motherhouse? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve been co-opted by the Emperor’s religious diktats for years. I’m not bowing to fix the sandal of the Emperor Apostle, no sirree. I may be short but I’m not that short. As to Munchkinland, I don’t have many relatives left in Center Munch. They were all ruined by the effects of that twister that passed through when I was a child. The one that carried that little fiend of the winds, Dorothy. So I’m an orphan spinster apostate, and this morning I woke up all alone, until I met Mr. Boss, who has improved my prospects.”

“I have no intention of improving anyone’s prospects,” said the dwarf, “my own included. That’s why I married you. Someone to share a similarly sour outlook, or even degrade it some. This lot is entirely too rosy now. They’re going to break into song any moment. They’ve even taken on a child to raise.”

“Ha,” said Ilianora. “No one raises that girl. We’re escorting her to safety. That’s all.”

At this Rain looked neither right nor left. She just kept studying the bole of a tree in which a squirrel might live, or an owl, or a chipmunk. Something secret, animal, magical. Unrelated.

“The curse of parenthood. As if the world can be safe.” The dwarf almost smiled at his traveling companions. “Anyway, you all can come back to our little hovel-in-the-hellebore and we’ll serve you an omelet. Her specialty is plover’s eggs and scallions.”

“It was all I was ever able to find,” confessed Sister Apothecaire. “I’m neither a hunter nor a gatherer, it seems. I’m more of a pantry parasite. Though I can bake a captivating muffin, given the right ingredients.”

They accepted the invitation. “Congratulations,” said Brrr to the dwarf as they walked along. “If I had a cigar, I’d give it to you to smoke in honor of your impending nuptial experience.”

“Oh, we’ve already consummated our union,” he replied.

Brrr raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a dwarf on a lonely road and I’ve been giving my life to this fool contraption as if there was something in it for me. She’s a Munchkinlander maunt who has been celibate since before her first milk tooth came in. Put it this way: we were ready.”

Well, thought the Lion. Bested at that game, too. By a dwarf, no less.

They approached the cottage in the woods, a ragged-roofed thing covered in old oakhair leaves. “Are you going to stay here?” asked Brrr. “Taking up the life of a retired husband? Collecting scallions instead of being bishop of the book, dragoman of the dragon?”

“Of course not. After a hundred years of service, or whatever it’s been—it’s felt that long anyway—I want to see this escapade to its natural end. Wifey can wait for me or come along, makes no difference to me. Ours is not a very strong marriage. Still, I love her, in my way.”

Mr. Boss grinned at his four-square bride. “What’s your name before you became Sister Apothecaire?”

She squinted, and put a finger to her lips. “I forget. In faith classes, they called me Little Daffodil.”

“Little Daffy. I like it. Well, come on, Little Daffy; let’s break out the best linen and tap a keg of springwater for our guests. It’s a wedding party, after all.”

Rain was skeptical about the newcomer. Her hard little face was like an old rye loaf left out in the sun. But in general the girl didn’t care for people, so her specific apprehensions of Little Daffy came and went, uncataloged, evanescent.

Brrr murmured to Ilianora, “Maybe this is our opportunity to peel off. Who would have guessed it? After all this time, our confirmed bachelor takes a wife.”

“Perhaps, the Clock being somnolent, he needed something else to nag him, and a wife serves that function handily,” said Ilianora, coming as close as she ever did to joking. Still, there was something to it.

After a slap-up supper Mr. Boss readied himself to get back on the road. Little Daffy went inside to tie on a fresh apron. Brrr admitted to being dubious about taking on another liability.

“You saddled us with a child, and you’re second-guessing me about picking up a wife?” The dwarf raised his fists at the Lion. “I’ve had it with you. Come on. Last one standing. It’s time to settle this.”

“I merely mean that your ladyfriend should be told about the danger we’re in,” said Brrr. He wasn’t going to fight a dwarf. He had no chance against that pipsqueak barbarian.

Ilianora said, “Listen, you louts, I’ll just lay out the details and let Little Daffy decide for herself.” She called Little Daffy from the cottage and made short work of it. “One. We’re probably wanted for aiding in the sabotage of the Emperor’s fleet of ships on Restwater. Two. They’ll guess we have the Grimmerie with us, since the damage done was substantial. Three. The Clock is broken, and we can’t rely on its advice. Four, the Grimmerie won’t open for us anymore, once it gave us its advice to go south. So we’re on our own.”

“South?” That was the only part that made Little Daffy blink. “The mud people? Munchkinlanders don’t venture into the clammy zone. Offends our sense of rectitude, both moral and hygienic. Why not west? I know some decent Scrowfolk who would hide us a while.”

“The advice was south,” said Brrr, “and that’s where we’re headed.”

“The advice was also to keep miles away from wretched girl-children,” interrupted Mr. Boss, “so this enterprise already starts off on a bad footing.”

“I’m going south, with the Clock or without it,” said Brrr, “so if you want to stay with the Clock and you want me to pull it for you, the matter’s settled. Little Daffy, join us or not, but make up your mind now.”

6.

The Munchkin woman decided in favor of adventure, to see if her marriage would hold. Before she left the woodcutter’s shed, she buried a spoon in the soil beside the doorsill. She explained: an old Munchkinlander custom before travel was undertaken. If you ever make it home, there’ll be something to eat with, even if the only thing left to eat is dirt.

“Lady Glinda could cook dirt,” said Rain.

Highsummer turned into Goldmonth, though Brrr insisted that up north the season was known as Tattersummer, for the fringing of the leaves by insects. Little Daffy countered that in Munchkinland these late summer days were called Harvest Helltime, as farmers struggled to get crops in before thunderstorms or the occasional dustbillow. “Munchkinland is losing acres of good soil to the desert every year,” she clucked. “If the EC really intends to polka on down and set up housekeeping, they’ll need a good broom.”

Rain listened to pictures more than people. Spoons in the ground, thunderstorms, dustbillows. The use of a good broom. The complexity of the world’s menace was daunting, but perhaps she’d learn to read it as she had learned her letters. First step of reading, after all, is looking.

Eight-foot spiderwebs toward the southern edge of the oakhair forest. The Lion squealed whenever he stumbled into them, but Rain loved them. If she found them before they were battered by her companions, she looked through them, to see what she could see.

It was, indeed, like peering through a window. From one side, she was a human-ish enough girl looking in to the spider world. She saw spiders with short eyelashy legs and spiders with thoraxes like lozenges. Spider-mites with bodies so small you couldn’t even make them out, but who sported legs that could span a skillet.

Hello, little capery-leg. And how do you do today?

What Rain didn’t see, and she kept looking, was groups of spiders. Did spiders have attachments? Other than to their webs? She watched each silvery gumdrop sink on its strings, but when the spider climbed back up, nobody else was ever home. Any guests who blundered into their threaded nets became supper, which seemed unsociable.

Spiders had nerve, and speed, and art of a sort, but they had no friends. They didn’t go get married just like that.

From the other side of the web, being a spider, Rain peered back at the humans, to see in pictures what she could see.

For instance. The dwarf had called Ilianora “daughter” one time too many, so Little Daffy wondered if the veiled woman actually was his child. Ilianora was miffed. “Mr. Boss? Are you joking? My father was a prince, for all the good it did him.”

Everything looked like something. So what did this look like now? Mr. Boss looked like he’d been stung by a flying scorpion. His lips were blown out and bitten back.

Little Daffy looked suddenly ravished with interest by her fingernails.

As a spider, Rain thought Mr. Boss and Little Daffy looked like tiny little matching grandparents, sour as mutual crab apples. They looked like they were playing at living. Or was this living? Rain wasn’t sure. She stayed out of the dwarf’s way as much as she could.

She heard Brrr and Ilianora talk quietly, out of range of the dwarf and the Munchkin, but not out of the range of a spider’s attention. Ilianora proposed that, given the Clock’s new reticence, being married was a legitimate diversion for a dwarf at loose ends. Surely?

“That attitude toward marriage makes of our union a slight mockery, don’t you think?” Brrr purred Ilianora up the side of her neck. “Anyway, they’re at it like a tomcat and the parish whore. Every night. It’s embarrassing.”

“He’s got to do something. He’s not the type to take up knitting by a fireside, is he?”

Rain turned her head. The dwarf was pitching a penknife into a tree trunk at forty feet. His face was sweaty, his raveling beard in need of a shampoo. He didn’t look as if he would favor doing piecework.

“At least he’s stopped fussing so much over Rain,” continued Ilianora. “The book’s told us what to do—stick together, head south—but not why. You and I aren’t captives, though. If you have any other ambitions once we ditch the Grimmerie somewhere safe, spell them out.”

Do I care what they do? wondered Rain, and couldn’t think of an answer.

“I can’t go back to the Emerald City unless I’m willing to hand over the Grimmerie to them,” said Brrr. “Otherwise I’ll be thrown in Southstairs, and it won’t be pretty. You’ve told me how unpretty it would be, in no uncertain terms.”

“I don’t want to talk about Southstairs.” Ilianora’s face turned a shade of stubbornness no spider had ever seen before. “I was asking you about your ambitions. No interest in your companions on the Yellow Brick Road? That Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman?”

“The Scarecrow has all but disappeared. I suppose straw succumbs to mold and weevils. And last I heard, the Tin Woodman is still a labor agitator in Shiz. Wish he could organize our mechanical conscience here. Fat chance of that. Really, that Matter of Dorothy was a sorry passage, let me tell you. In a generally sorry life.”

“Mine hardly prettier. After prison, to slip from doing resistance work into writing fanciful stories for a while. The dilettante’s gavotte, I think one would call it.”

Rain saw their faces screw up more complicated, pancakes trying to become soufflés. Faces bloated, contorted, deflated, endlessly in disguise. Tiresome but curious.

“That General Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall?” Brrr spoke in a softer voice; he didn’t know spiders have good hearing. “Cherrystone was the one who kidnapped you when you weren’t that much older than Rain is now. He didn’t recognize you all grown up, I know. But do you feel—in that vault of your heart—the yearning for vengeance?”

Ilianora held her tongue for what seemed to Rain like a couple of years, but finally she spoke. “We took a risk walking into Mockbeggar Hall carrying the Grimmerie right under Cherrystone’s nose. I believed Mr. Boss when he said the book was only on temporary loan to Lady Glinda. Getting it safely out of there, away from Cherrystone’s hands, seemed the more crucial objective. If the day arrives when I’m ready to take vengeance on him for slaughter—of my family—well, I suspect I’ll know it. It’ll come clear to me, privately, all in good time.”

Secret knowledge, thought Rain. My head hurts.

“As for now,” continued Ilianora, “let history have its way: I’m only a bystander. A dandelion, a spider, nothing more.”

“We aren’t aimless. We have a goal,” the Lion reminded her. “We’re keeping the Grimmerie out of the hands of the Emperor of Oz. We’re heading south, as the book advised. And, incidentally, whether Mr. Boss likes it or not, we’re rescuing the girl.”

At this they both looked up at her, and Rain found the spiderweb too thin between them. It had become a gunsight that focused her in its crosshairs. Their look of affection was brazen. To break the spell of their myopia, to divert them, she brayed, “I want to keep reading but we got no books. You write stories? Write me some words I can practice on.”

“I don’t write anymore,” said Ilianora in one of those voices. “Ask someone else.”

“Who’s to ask?” Rain felt fussed and hot. “The world en’t gonna write nothing for me. No words in the clouds. No printed page among these dead leaves. Can a spider write letters in a web?”

“What nonsense,” said the dwarf from his distance, pitching his knife through the web a few feet above her head, severing a prominent girder so it collapsed like shucked stockings. “That would be some spider.”

7.

They didn’t dawdle but they moved without haste. The Lion had concluded that attention must still be centered upon the battle for Restwater, since goons with guns hadn’t shown up yet. A few days on, as they entered the hardscrabble terrain known as the Disappointments, they spotted the next oddkin, the latest of Oz’s free-range lunatiktoks. “It was ever thus,” the dwarf averred.

“No, war is driving the entire country nuts,” replied the Lion.

The creature seemed to be a woman, sitting in the only tree on this wide stony plain. She held an umbrella for shade and protection from the rains. Evidence of a cookfire in one direction, a latrine in the other. The place was open enough to appear attractive to lightning. Perhaps she wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.

She scrambled down when they approached and stood her ground. She wore what had once been a rather fine dress of white duck with cerulean blue piping, though the skirt had gone grey and brown. That’s a useful camouflage, thought Brrr. A starched blue bib rode against her bosom. Her shoes were torn open at the toe. “Hail,” she said, and stuck her arm out in a salute, and chopped it once or twice. Her eyes wobbled like puddings not fully set.

The hair piled up on her head reminded Rain of a bird’s nest; the girl half expected a beaky face to peer out from above. She all but clapped with joy.

“Let me guess. You are the Queen of the Disappointments,” said the dwarf. “Well, given our recent history, we must be your loyal subjects.” He spat, but not too rudely.

She looked left and right as if someone might be listening. She appeared familiar to Brrr, but he imagined that most loopy individuals seem recognizable. They mirror the less resolved aspects of ourselves back at us, and the shock of recognition—of ourselves in their eyes—is a cruel dig.

“Are you all right?” asked Ilianora. Ever the tender hand, especially for a female in trouble, Brrr knew.

The woman cawed and flapped her arms. They saw she had stitched some sort of a blanket of feathers to her white serge sleeves.

“Wingses!” said Rain happily.

“She’s so far round the bend, she’s back home already,” muttered Mr. Boss.

“Hush, husband,” said Little Daffy. “Hold your snickering; she’s dehydrated. In need of salts, powder of cinnabar, a tiny dose. Also a brew of yellowroot and garlic to take care of the conjunctivitis.” She dove her hands into her waistband, inspecting the contents of pockets sewn on the inside of her skirt. She had, after all, been a professional apothecaire. “Heat up some water in the pot, Ilianora, and I’ll shave up a few herbs and hairy tubers for the poor Bird Woman.”

The woman wasn’t much frightened by them. After several sips of something red and cloudy that Mr. Boss offered from his private flask, she blinked and rubbed dust out of her eyes as if she were just coming up to room temperature. When she opened her mouth, it was not to twitter but to speak more or less like a fellow citizen. “God damn fuckheads,” she said. “Give me some more of that juice.”

“That’s the ticket,” said Mr. Boss, obliging.

She lifted her chin at the Clock. “What’s that thing, then? A portable guillotine?”

“That’s as good a word for it as any,” said the dwarf. “A cabinet of marvels, once upon a better time.”

The Bird Woman looked it up and down and walked around it on her toes. That accounts for the condition of the boots, Brrr thought.

“No. I know what this is. I’ve heard tell of it. Never thought it would feature in my path. It’s the Clock of the Time Dragon, isn’t it? What are you doing dragging it out here in Forsaken Acres?” She ruffled her wings as she stepped about, like a marabou stork.

“Brought it here to die,” he said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Oh, more or less the same thing,” she replied. “Isn’t that the general ambition of living things?”

“Hush, there’s a child,” said Ilianora.

The Bird Woman peered at her. “So there is. How grotesque.” She put out a hand and rubbed the side of the Clock. “I figured this sort of entertainment went out once they started doing girlie shows in Ticknor Circus.”

Mr. Boss made a point of humphing. “This isn’t a sort of anything. It’s sui generis.”

She took on the expression of a crazed docent. “You’re small and barky but you don’t know everything. This Clock is the latest and maybe the most famous of a long line of tiktok extravaganzas. They used to circulate several hundred years ago in the hamlets of Gillikin, telling stories of the Unnamed God. Such contrivances specialized in the conversion stories of the Saints. Saint Mettorix of Mount Runcible, who was martyred when a coven of witches flew overhead and dropped frozen cantaloupes onto his scalp. Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall, you probably have heard of her. Hidden from sight for decades, emergent at last, in some versions. Also Saint Glinda.”

“I know the tale of Saint Glinda, thank you for nothing,” said Little Daffy. “I spent my professional life in the mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows.”

“A sordid little tale of grace through glamour,” said the Bird Woman dismissively. “Then, little by little, as unionism rooted more deeply in the provinces, the tiktok trade became secular, pretending toward prophecy and secret-spilling.”

“We specialized in history and prophecy in conjunction with civic conscience.” Mr. Boss sounds like a traveling salesman, thought Brrr.

“Charlatanism,” insisted the Bird Woman. “And sometimes dangerous. The masters of traveling companies used to send their acolytes ahead to sniff out local gossip, so the puppets could be seen to imitate the bellyaches of real life.”

“I never needed to do that,” said Mr. Boss. “Different organizing principle entirely. Real magic, if you don’t mind. The rough stuff.”

“You only carried on all these years because there was a tradition to hide behind,” said the harridan. “You’re the last one and you stick out like a sore behind. People have got to be asking why. Especially in times like this.”

“Doesn’t matter what people say. Anyway, you’re right about one thing: this famous Clock has had it. The tok is divorced from the tik.”

“It’s not dead yet,” she said.

“I didn’t come for a second opinion,” said the dwarf. “What are you, a witch doctor?”

“I know a thing or two about spells, as it happens.”

“Who are you?”

“I used to have a name, and it used to be Grayce Graeling. But without a social circle, a name quickly becomes moot, I realized. So never mind about me.”

“How do you know about spells?” asked Ilianora. “Seems to be a dying art in Oz.”

“What do you expect, with the Emperor wanting to husband all the magic in his own treasury?” chirped the Bird Woman. “It’s not going to work, of course. Magic doesn’t follow those rules. It carves its own channels. But why don’t you fire this thing up and show me what you’ve got?”

“I told you, it’s paralyzed. Maybe dead,” said Mr. Boss.

“Can you fly?” asked Rain.

“It isn’t dead. I should know. I could tell you a thing or two about spells. I taught magic once, I was on the faculty at Shiz several yonks ago. I was never very skilled, mind you, but I was a devoted teacher to my girls, and I picked up more than anyone credited.”

“The entire former faculty of Shiz seems to retire to the suburbs,” observed Brrr. “Did you know a Professor Lenx? And Mister Mikko?”

“I knew how to lace up a boot from across a room,” she said. “I knew how to produce crumpets and tea in fifteen seconds, for when a trustee arrived unexpectedly in one’s chambers. I knew that Elphaba Thropp, once upon a while.”

“Oh, sure you did,” said Mr. Boss. “Seems like everyone in Oz knew her. Can’t walk across the street without running into someone from the alumnae association. By the math of it, there were seventy thousand people who entered Shiz that year with her.”

“How high can you fly?” asked Rain.

“She wasn’t so special,” said the Bird Woman, picking a nit from her feathers and looking at it with something like avarice. She didn’t eat it, just flicked it off her thumb. “She was an ordinary girl with a talent for mischief and more serious complexion issues than sick bay knew what to do with. What happened to her in the end was a crime.”

“What happens to all of us in the end is a crime,” said Mr. Boss. “Take it up with the authorities.”

“I tell you, this instrument isn’t quite done,” she insisted. “Or maybe it’s just responding to me and my long dormant talents. Open it up. I haven’t had an entertainment in months.”

“What are you doing here? Did you fly here?” asked Rain.

The dwarf shrugged his shoulders and turned to Ilianora. “Well, Miss Mistress of the Mysteries, unstrap the belts, like the good old times. I’ll wind up some cranks and see if she responds.”

“Do you live in a nest?” Rain asked.

“Hush, child, don’t ask personal questions,” said the Lion.

“That’s the only kind I have,” said Rain.

“I know you,” said the Bird Woman to Brrr.

“I had a feeling you would,” he replied.

“You worked for the Emperor. You scab.”

“I was in a bit of a legal squeeze. That’s all over now.”

Hunching down before the stage, she paid Brrr no further attention. Rain went and squatted next to her, and tried to angle her elbows out to mimic the Bird Woman. “Can you lay an egg?”

“Any eggs get laid around here, let the dragon do it,” said Mr. Boss, huffing. “Well, what do you know. Some phantom juice left in the gears, after all. You aren’t as flighty as you seem, Queen Birdbrain.”

“I could paint stationery with butterflies and lilac sprays and shit like that,” said the Bird Woman, “without picking up a paintbrush. I wasn’t good at controlling the flow of watercolors, though. They tended to puddle.”

“Don’t we all. Grab your privates and say your prayers, folks. Here she goes.” The dwarf went round to release some final clasps and rebalance the counterweights. “What do you say,” he called, “if it comes to life and tells us to give the girl to the hermit lady as a present? We’ll call it magic, eh?”

Rain looked around. Her expression was intense and occluded. “He doesn’t mean it,” said the Lion, without conviction.

A wobble, a spasm, the sound of a pendulum wide of its arc and striking the casing. The shutters folded back, courtesy of magnets on tracks. Brrr and Ilianora exchanged glances. This should cheer up the dwarf.

“If today’s matinee has anything about the Emperor in it, I’m walking out, and I want a full refund,” declared the woman who had been Grayce Graeling.

“Shhh,” said Rain.

The dragon at the top of the cabinet moved one of his wings in a stiff way, as if arthritis had set in. His head rolled. One eye had become loose in its socket, for the look was cross-eyed and almost comical. Little Daffy began to giggle, but Ilianora put her hand on the woman’s wrist. The dwarf wouldn’t like to hear laughter. The Clock wasn’t a device for comedy.

The main stage whitened with a camphorous fog. A backdrop unrolled but got stuck halfway down. Hanging in midair against another scrim, one of rushes and cattails, the scene was of a tiled floor in some loggia. Brrr muttered to Ilianora, “Should someone go forward and give it a tug?” but she shook her head.

On an invisible track a cradle came forward, rocking. An ornate was carved on its headboard. Over it stood a puppet of a roundish man with a pair of oily mustaches ornamentally twirled in bygone fashion. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, possibly signaling grief. The sound that came was less nasal than industrial, like a train whistle. He didn’t notice. He was just a puppet on rusty wires.

He was moving, he was turning this way and that, but he was just a puppet. He had no life. Brrr could tell that Rain was disappointed.

Down from the fly space dropped a cutout of a hot-air balloon with a smooth-cheeked charlatan grinning and waving a cigar. “It’s the arrival of the Wizard,” said Brrr. “I’d know any cartoon of him, for in real life he was hardly more than a cartoon.”

Ilianora turned her back.

“The mustached marionette below must be Pastorius, the Ozma Regent,” decided Brrr.

“Who’s that?” asked Rain.

“The father of Ozma, the infant queen of Oz when the Wizard arrived. She was just a baby, see, and her father was to rule in her place until she grew old enough to take the throne. Shhh, and watch.”

The Ozma Regent picked up his motherless infant. He carried the bundle of swaddle to stage right.

Out from the wings hobbled a creature dressed in a cloak all of sticks, small sticks bound together with thread. Her head was carved from a rutabaga and the stain had darkened, so she looked like a creature made entirely of wood. She wore a pale red scarf pulled over her head and tied at the nape of her twiggy hair. She lurched and grinned—her teeth were made of old piano keys, four times too large for her face, and yellowed, foxed with age—but the grip with which she yanked the baby from the father was fierce. She backed up off the stage in a crude motion. A duck walking backward: impossible.

“Some local wet nurse to lend a helping—” began Brrr, not liking the menace of this twig witch. Everyone who tries to help a child is a kidnapper in the last analysis, he thought.

Pastorius turned and made as if to mop his brow in relief, but the Wizard pointed his cigar at the Ozma Regent and cocked his thumb. A little tiny noise of firecracker went off, no louder than an urchin lad’s Celebration Day bombcrack candy. The Regent fell over dead. The cords that had moved the puppet ruler were severed, so he rolled with more than just theatrical gravity. The Wizard put his cigar in his mouth and puffed genuine smoke, but it smelled like bacon. A spark caught on a curtain.

The Lion didn’t care to preserve any theater of the dramatic arts. Still, the Clock was the hidey-home of the Grimmerie, and he couldn’t stand by and watch that go up in flames. He leaped up and put out the fire by sucking his own tail for a few seconds and applying the wet mass against the nascent flame. The smell was filthy.

“Show’s over folks,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s nothing to see here. Exit to the left, through the gift shop, and please, not a word to the late afternoon crowd. Don’t spoil it for them.”

Ilianora turned back. “Did that end as unpersuasively as it began?”

“Pretty much,” said the Lion.

“What did it say about the Bird Woman?”

“That was the funny part,” said Brrr. “It didn’t seem to know she was here.”

“Like any old spouse,” said Mr. Boss, coming around from behind. “It’s unresponsive. It’s just going through the motions. I bet it showed some tired revelation from decades ago. I hate revivals. What was it about?”

“The fall of the House of Ozma,” insisted the Bird Woman. “Our sorry history. The Wizard arrived just as Pastorius was packing the infant Ozma away for safekeeping to some old hag. The Wizard did the Ozma Regent in with some sort of firearm. That part is history, the murder of the Regent, I mean. The rest is apocrypha. My guess is that the Wizard probably slaughtered the baby too. Fie, fie on the myth that she’s hidden, sleeping in some cave to return in our darkest hour. How dark does the hour have to get? Bunk. Bunk and hokum and sweet opiate for suffering fools. The Wizard was too canny to let a baby get away under the tinderwood fingertips of some rural wet nurse.”

“Did you ever meet the Wizard?” asked the dwarf. “That brigand?”

“I never had the pleasure.” The Bird Woman spat out the word as if it were an insect found swimming in her iced lemon-fresher.

“He came to Oz looking for the Grimmerie,” said the dwarf. “This book has a mighty broad reputation, to attract miscreants like that from beyond the margins of the known world.”

“And we lost our royal family in the bargain,” cawed the hermit. “That book has a lot to answer for, and so does whoever stowed it in Oz. To get it safely removed from some other paradise. Not in my backyard, is that the saying? But it got dumped here. And you’re its minder. You should be ashamed.”

Mr. Boss didn’t like this line of contempt. “But the Clock said nothing about you?” He stroked his beard with both hands. “The Clock is charmed to respond to the stimuli of the audience of the moment. It makes no sense for it to present a repeat performance. It’s never done that before.”

“It was fun,” said Rain, “but not as good as the dragon in the lake last time.”

“How long have you been out of touch?” asked the woman. “Do you know what’s going on in the Emerald City?”

“We’re clueless,” said Brrr. “Surprise us with the truth.”

“The Emperor of Oz—you know about him? No?”

“Of course. Shell Thropp. The younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. What about him?”

“He’s issued a proclamation. Your magic dragon couldn’t reveal that to you? Ha. Oh yes, the Emperor has called in to the palace all implements of magic the length and breadth of Oz. Every magic whittling knife, every charmed teapot that never runs dry. Every codex of ancient spells, every gazing ball, every enchanted pickle-fork. He has forbidden magic in Oz.”

“He can’t do that,” said Brrr, thinking about what he knew of the law—which wasn’t much.

“He can’t do that,” said Mr. Boss, whose tone implied he meant that the ambition was beyond any emperor, of Oz or other-Oz. “He might as well ask people to part with their ancestors, or the glint in their eyes. Or their skepticism. It’s not gonna happen.”

“Nonetheless, he has done it.” The Bird Woman began to look twitchy, her eyes went more hooded. “No doubt he’ll send out agents to round up those who taught in college, long ago. For debriefing. And though I spent a stint as an organist at chapel, I’m as much at risk as you are.” She began to shriek like a demented mongoose.

“Stop that,” said Ilianora. “What difference does it make if you taught magic once, or if you accompanied a choir? You’re here, among friends. We wouldn’t report you even if we were headed north into his receiving parlors. But we’re going south. We have our own reason to stay out of the way of the Emperor and his forces.”

“He’ll find you, wherever you go.”

“Oh, we can get pretty damn lost,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me.”

“He has no governance over me,” said Little Daffy. “I’m a Munchkinlander.”

“I’m not anything,” said Rain. “Yet. I’ll be a crow. Can I climb up in your tree with you? Can you teach me to fly?”

The deranged woman finally looked at the girl. “What are you flailing at me for?”

“No one gits me anything to read, and I got to practice my letters,” said Rain.

Something of the teacher she had once been made the Bird Woman glare at them all, as if they’d confessed to abusing the child with castor oil. “I have a pen and a pot of ink. I shall write you your name so you know it when you see it on a writ of arrest. Get away from this lot, child. They’re headed for a cliff edge at quite the gallop.”

“Oh, look who’s telling the future now,” scoffed the dwarf. “You going to take her off our hands?”

“Nothing doing,” said Brrr, “if you want to keep having hands, Mr. Boss.”

The Bird Woman was as good as her word. She wrote a number of words for Rain: the names of Brrr, and Ilianora; of Little Daffy and Mr. Boss; of Rain, too.

“Anyone else important in your life?”

Rain shook her head.

“What about Lady Glinda?” asked Ilianora, but Rain showed no sign of hearing.

The Bird Woman wrote, finally, Grayce Graeling.

“That was me before I was a bird,” she told them. “So if they ask you if you ever met me, you can say no.”

“Is that g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y?” said Brrr, whose spectacles were in his other weskit.

“The orthographics have it several ways,” she said. “I vary it for reasons of disguise. Now I prefer Graeling, using both vowels, because it sounds more like a bird.”

“They all sound the same,” said Rain. Grayce Graeling regarded Rain as if she were a conveniently placed spittoon, but she wrote out some extra words on a piece of paper so that Rain could practice reading. “Is this a magic spell?” the girl asked her.

“Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

“I know that,” Rain declared, sourly, grabbing the paper. “I seen some books before.”

“Even if it’s broken, I’d keep that Clock out of sight, were I you,” warned Grayce Graeling. “The Emperor doesn’t want anyone else to have any toys. You’re courting trouble.”

“Nosy crow. None of your business,” said Mr. Boss.

The Bird Woman began to scale her tree. “Mind what I say. I have a friend or two in high places.” She pointed to some birds flailing against the blue, way up there.

“Are you coming with us too?” asked Rain, who thought she’d discovered the Company’s new everyday trick, collecting lunatics. Behind Grayce Graeling, the other travelers made X-ing gestures at Rain with their hands.

8.

Why din’t she come along? She coulda taught us to fly,” groused Rain. “The book said us four,” said Brrr. “Remember? Four fingers, to the south?”

“Then what about her?” Rain pointed over her shoulder at Little Daffy.

“The book meant me too,” said Little Daffy. “I was hidden there in that spook-lady’s gesture, probably. The figure you described in the O. I was small, the thumb. You couldn’t see me in the prophecy, but I was there.”

“The blind, the lame, the halt, the criminally berserk,” said Mr. Boss. “You have to stop somewhere or you don’t have friends, you have a nation.”

The next day, meandering across the Disappointments, they kept looking back to make sure the Bird Woman wasn’t pacing after them. “Is them her friends?” Rain asked, over and over, of any local wren or raven, until the others stopped answering and the girl fell silent.

They paused for supper when the heat of the day finally began to lift a little. As the adult females organized a meal, the Lion rested his sore muscles and slept quickly, deftly, for a few minutes. Then he told them, “I emerge from my snooze remembering who the Bird Woman is. Or was.”

“Ozma herself, that’s it,” said Little Daffy. “A hundred years old but holding the line nicely. Am I right? Ya think?”

“She was the archivist in Shiz who helped me look at Madame Morrible’s papers,” said Brrr. “A gibbertyflibbet if ever I saw one, the kind of person who enters a café with such fluster and alarm one would think she’d never been out in a public space before. Frankly, I doubt she possesses enough talent at spells to have had to bother going dotty at the Emperor’s prohibition of magic.”

The dwarf lit his pipe and drew on it, releasing an odor of cherry tobacco cut with heart-of-waxroot. “Never underestimate the capacity of a magician to go dotty. Occupational hazard.”

“Maybe news has gotten out somehow. News that the Grimmerie has emerged from hiding. Makes me nervous, this impounding of sorcerers’ tools. If the Emperor has lowered a moratorium on items of magic, on the practicing of spells—if Shell has called for a surrender of instruments and such—perhaps he’s trying to coax the Grimmerie in by default.”

“Or make its presence in a barren landscape glow and shriek, so he can find it more easily,” said Mr. Boss. “I take your point. Our instruction to move south may prove to have been sound. We’ll keep going.

“But not tonight,” he said to Rain, who hopped up and was ready to run ahead. She was happy with her scrap of paper. Ilianora had shown her how to fold it into a paper missile, and Rain had spent the afternoon launching it and chasing it, finding it and trying to read it, launching it and chasing it again. “Settle down, you ragamunchkin. There’s no moon this time of month, so no night travel. We’ll take our rest in the cool and move again in the morning.”

“Read me what’s on the back,” Rain asked of Ilianora.

Brrr watched his common-trust wife unfold the chevron of paper. The Bird Woman’s handwriting was on one side, but the other side had print upon it. It was a page ripped from a book. A normal book. Without its own shifting editorial policy toward each specific audience.

“What do you know,” said Ilianora. “A scrap of an old tale. One of the fabliaux, one of the long-ago tales. They tell them at harvest festivals and bedtimes. This is one of the stories of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, and her bosom companion, Preenella.”

“One of them?”

“Oh, there are dozens. I think.” She squinted; the light from the fire wasn’t strong. “I think this is the one where they meet what’s-his-name.”

Brrr felt uncomfortable when confronted with the lore of childhood. It always made him want to sass someone, or fart like a pricklehog. He knew why: as a cub, he’d never had someone to tell him stories of Lurline, Preenella, and Skellybones Fur-Cloak, or whatever his name was. Not, Brrr supposed, that he’d missed much. While Ilianora tried to remember the full tale—the page apparently only gave some segment of the narrative—Brrr watched Rain attend, with yawns and solemn fierce eyes. She probably hasn’t had much of a childhood either, he thought. But there was still time. She was a fledgling.

By the time Ilianora was done, the fire had died down, and the dwarf and his Munchkin wife had cozied off for privacy. Rain took herself a few feet into the dark, to have a last pee. Ilianora murmured to Brrr, “What did you think of my storytelling?”

The Lion whispered, “Did you make that up?”

She nodded, shyly. “Most of it. Not the characters—not the famous ones, Lurline and Preenella and old Skellybones. But the rest.”

He looked in Rain’s direction, out of caution. “You have a knack.”

She laughed. “You weren’t listening, were you?”

“It took me back,” he said, and that was true enough.

Rain returned and settled down, pulling the hemp-wool blanket to her chin. This beastly hot summer wouldn’t last forever, said the night; perhaps the stars will turn into snowflakes and fall before dawn. It happens one night or another, eclipsing another summer night of youth. Snow on the blooms.

A few bugs beezled along, chirring their wings and sounding their sirens. An owl made a remark from miles off, but no one replied, except Rain, who murmured, “Lion?”

For some reason he loved, loved when she called him Lion. Loved it. When she avoided reminding him he was Brrr, the creature with the sad history of being known as Cowardly—Cowardly his professional name, just about—but chose to say simply: Lion. His head reared back a few inches (these days his eyes didn’t always like the distance they had to take to focus on someone speaking). “What do you want, girl?”

“Is Lurline real in the world? And those others?”

It was almost a question about the sleep-world, he thought; she’d drifted far enough along. Still, he loved her too much to lie to her. What did one say? He tried to catch Ilianora’s eye for help, but she had put on her veil and was in her own distance.

He would lower his voice in case, as he paused, she’d already slipped off to sleep. But when he said, “Well? What do you think?” she murmured something he couldn’t quite hear. He thought she might have said, “I can wait to find out.” Then again, she may have said something else.

In time, she would probably know the answer more richly than he ever would. The thought afforded him comfort, and on that he rested all night.

9.

The Kells began to loom up before them. The Lion said, “I’m not going to drag this caboose up the sides of those bluffs. Get yourself another workhorse, Mr. Boss. The book’s advice seemed to suggest we go south.”

“To get around them, we’ll have to head a little east, then,” said the dwarf. “It’ll take us into the southeast margins of Munchkinland, but we’ll meet up with the lower branch of the Yellow Brick Road eventually and then we can plunge to the south.”

“When precisely will we have gone south enough?” asked Ilianora. “Or are we now wandering to take in the views?”

“We’re putting as much distance as we can between us and the menace of the Emperor,” said the dwarf. “The EC never cared for Quadling Country except for the swamp rubies. And the taxes, when they could be collected. But given a war with Munchkinland, they’ll be letting the Quadling muckfolk lie fallow. A brief holiday from imperial oppression. We’ll be safer there. Can hide like pinworms in a sow’s bowels, like the book told us.”

Rain said, “The book didn’t suggest anything.”

They looked at her.

“It was the person in the book,” she explained. “And en’t it possible she weren’t saying ‘go south’ but only ‘get back’? Like, um, ‘get back from this book, it’s too dangerous?’ ”

“Oh, the Clock already told us who’s dangerous,” said Mr. Boss. “Keep your mouth shut. What makes you think you can read better than we can?”

They settled into a better pace, but a certain germ of doubt attended their progress.

As the weather finally cooled off, Rain was working on her letters. Little by little she figured out how to form them into words. She wrote comments by placing broken twigs on the ground. RAIN HERE. And TODAY. And WHO. And SORRY. She made words with pebbles on the beds of streams, big words that someone with an eye for stony language might see one day. WATER RISE she wrote, and WATER FALL. Rather expressing the obvious, thought Brrr, but he was as proud of her as if she’d been translating Ugabumish or inventing river charms.

The occasional farmstead gave way to the occasional hamlet, with its own chapel and grange, its antiquated shrines to Lurlina, its stables and inns and the unexpected tearoom. They passed farmers and tinkers on the rutted tracks. By stature they were Munchkins (“Munchkinoid,” suggested the dwarf, who was one to talk), but they seemed equable and not especially xenophobic. Little Daffy splinted someone’s shabby forearm, dosed someone with rickets, and pulled a tooth from the wobbly head of an old crone. Everyone nearly gagged, but the grandmammy smiled with a bloody gap the size of an orange when the job was done, and she invited them home for tooth soup. An offer they declined.

News of the troubles to the north was thin. One farmer asserted that the whole lake of Restwater had fallen to the invaders. “Any word of Lady Glinda?” asked Brrr.

The man was startled. “Haven’t heard of her since the turtles’ anniversary swim meet. Is she still alive?”

“Well, that’s what I was wondering.”

“Scratch my behind with a bear claw. I got no possible idea if it’s so or no. Why would she be dead? Other than, you know, death?”

On they trudged. The month being Yellowtime, their hours rounded golden, when the sun was out. But hours can’t dawdle—they only seem to. The leaves began to fall and the branches to show their arteries against the clouds.

Finally they reached the Yellow Brick Road. It was ill tended, here; the occasional blown tree or stream overrunning its banks made passage slow. The stretch was clearly untraveled. That night they camped in a copse of white birches whose peeling bark revealed eyes that seemed to be trying to memorize them.

“Can trees see?” asked Rain.

“Some say the trees are houses of spirits,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, stupid people say it, but even so.”

“I don’t mean tree-spirits,” said Rain. “I mean the trees. Can they see us?”

“They weep leaves upon the world every autumn,” said Little Daffy. “Proof enough they know damn well what’s going on around here.”

After Rain’s eyes had closed and her breathing softened, Brrr intoned to Ilianora, “Do you think everything is right with our Rain?”

She raised an eyebrow, meaning, In what context do you ask?

“I’ve known few human children. That Dorothy Gale just about completes the list. So I have no premise on which to worry. But doesn’t Rain seem—well—odd? Perhaps she is a girl severed from too much.”

Ilianora shut her eyes. “She’s young even for her age, that’s all. She still lives in the magical universe. She’ll outgrow it, to the tune of pain and suffering. We all do. Don’t worry so much. Look at how she touches the trees tonight, as if they had spirits she knew about and we didn’t. That’s not weird; that’s what being a child is. I was such a girl, when I was alive.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Oh, I’m alive enough now.” Her eyes opened, and they were filled with whatever passed for love in that woman. “I am alive. But I’m not that girl. I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago. I see her life like an illustrated weekly story I read long ago, and it is pictures of that that I carry in my head. Her life in Kiamo Ko. Her life with her father, long ago—that famous Fiyero Tigelaar, prince of the Arjikis. Her life with her mother, Sarima, and her father’s erstwhile lover, Elphaba Thropp. It’s a child’s story in my head, no more real than Preenella and the skeleton hermit in the everlasting cloak of pine boughs. I’m not sad; don’t shift; leave me be. We were talking about Rain.”

For her sake, he returned to the earlier subject. “I don’t fault her interest in the natural world. What I notice is her … her distance from us.”

“She’s here curled up against your haunches. To get her any closer you’d have to swallow her whole.”

“You know what I mean. She seems to float in a life next to ours, but with limited contact.”

Ilianora sighed. “We agreed to take her to safety, not to perfect her. What would you have us do? Sing rounds? Practice our sums as we march?”

“I don’t know stories. Maybe you could tell her more? I wish we could get through a little more. She loves us, perhaps, but from too great a distance.”

“She’ll have to cross the distance herself. Trust me on that, Brrr. I know about it. Either she’ll choose to visit us when there is enough of her present to visit, or day by day she’ll learn to survive without needing what you need and I need.”

“I think it’s called a knot in the psyche.”

“It’s called grief so deep that she can’t see it as such. Maybe she never will. Maybe that would be a blessing for her in the long run. If she can’t learn to love us, would that keep us from loving her? Brrr?”

Never, he thought. Never. He didn’t have to mouth the word to his wife; she knew what he meant by the way he tucked his chin over the crown of Rain’s head.

10.

A day of mixed clouds and sudden fiercenesses of light. Breezy but warm, and aromatic, both spicy-rank and spicy-balm. The road passed through open meadows interspersed with dense patches of black starsnaps and spruces, where clusters of wild pearlfruit glistened in caves of foliage. Rain paid no attention to the clacking of nonsense rhyme that Ilianora had taken up. Rain heard it but didn’t hear it.

Little Ferny Shuttlefoot

Made a mutton pasty.

Sliced it quick and gulped it quick

And perished rather hasty.

and

Reginald Mouch sat on a couch.

A ladybug bit him and he said ouch.

It smiled at him. He started to laugh

And bit that ladybug back. In half.

“What’s up with you today, all this mayhem?” said Mr. Boss to Ilianora. “Awful passel of nastiness in children’s rhymes. Toughens up the little simpletons, I guess.”

“A lot of biting too,” said the Lion, showing his teeth. He was proud that Ilianora was taking up the challenge to force-feed childhood lore to Rain.

“I remember a counting-out rhyme,” said Little Daffy, and proved it.

One Munchkinlander went out for a stroll,

Two girls from Gillikin danced with a troll.

Three little Glikkun girls chewed on their pinkies.

Four little Winkie boys showed us their winkies.

Five Ugabumish girls started their blood.

Six little Quadlings went home to eat mud.

Now who wins the prize for being most pretty?

The girl from the Emerald, Emerald City.

One Ozma, two Ozma, three Ozma.

“And on until you miss a step,” said Little Daffy.

“Which you rarely do,” said the dwarf.

“There’s a skipping game to that,” said Little Daffy. “We used to play it in Center Munch.” She found a stick of last night’s kindling saved for tonight, and with the charred end she drew squares and circles on the yellow pavement. She labeled them with numbers.

“No one learned me numbers yet,” said Rain.

“It’s easy.” The Munchkinlander skipped and huffed to the ninth circle. Whinging, Rain tried to follow, but she was stopped at the seventh circle by the explosion into the eighth of a small whirlwind of feathers and beaks. A Wren with a grandmotherly frown had landed onto the bricks in front of them. She was flustered and out of breath.

“No time for nursery games,” panted the Wren. “Unless you fly, me duckies, you’ll have enough time to skip stones in the Afterlife.”

“Sassy thing,” said the dwarf. “Are you available to stay for supper? We’ll serve roast Wren.”

“I cain’t spend precious moments in foolflummery. I been hunting a while.” She was having a hard time talking while catching her breath; her voice came out whistley. “The crazy bird lady asked me to find you. I followed the words I saw on the ground. You’re in danger, the blessed lot of you. A thumping great crew of the Emperor’s nasty-men is on your tail and no mistake. Oh, all is lost! Unless it ain’t.”

It took them a while to piece together the silly creature’s message. The soldiers were armed and mounted. They’d interviewed the Bird Woman of the Disappointments, and wrung from her the information that the company of the Clock had passed that way, all jollylike and worms for brekkie.

“I wonder what wardrobe I should plan for prison?” drawled Brrr.

“Begging your pardon, sir, you’ll not get the privilege of prison, I bet,” said the Wren. “Not to judge by them fiercish faces. Why do you loiter so? Fly, I tell you!”

“I have short legs. I never move fast,” said Little Daffy. “Maybe we should split up?”

“It was a nice marriage while it lasted,” said Mr. Boss. “I never thought it would come to this, but life is full of pleasant shocks.”

“I didn’t mean you and I split up, oaf.”

Ilianora roused to alarm earliest. “Perhaps it’s a sign we should ditch the Clock and take the book; we can move faster on our own.” The Lion flashed her a warning look; however dizzy this Wren, they oughtn’t reveal to her that they had any books. But it was too late now.

“If you got the singular volume they’re after, pity upon you,” said the Wren. “Grayce Graeling thought you might. But the longer you sit here and mull it over, the easier a job to round you up. Those horsemen on their way are all done up in silver plate, bright as icicles, armed with saw-ribbed swords and quivers of skilligant arrows.”

The dwarf had heard enough. “On we go, then. When you return to that Bird Woman, tell her we thanked her for the warning.”

“There ain’t a whole lot of her left to thank,” said the Wren. “Ozspeed, you little egglings. Wind under your wings and all that. I’ll sing out to alert what remains of the Conference of the Birds that I saw you safe, once upon a time, and I left you safe. What happens next belongs to your decisions, and to luck. Is that girl who I guesses she is?”

“Don’t go,” said Rain. Brrr and Ilianora looked at each other. Even in the face of mortal danger parents are attentive to the smallest improvements in the capacities of their children.

“I’ll sing you cover best I can,” said the Wren kindly. “If you’re looking for Liir, he’s well hid. But what a sight for sore eyes you’d provide him, on some happy day! Meanwhile, I’ve done me best, and now you do yours.”

11.

Having finally been roused to worry, they made up for lost time. “We’re history,” said Little Daffy. “Even without the Clock, we can’t move faster than soldiers on horseback. Not with a child.”

“I can run faster than you can,” said Rain.

“I know. We’re both three feet tall but I’m two feet stout.”

“We’re not ditching the Clock,” said Mr. Boss. “That’s a nonstarter.”

They were hurrying along; their chatter was nervous chatter. “Why armor, at this time of year?” asked the Lion.

Little Daffy spoke up. “Against some sort of spell, hammered metal can afford a minimal protection. Or it can at least slow down a spell’s effectiveness.”

“You’re not a witch, except in the boudoir. Are you? You witch,” huffed her husband, almost admiringly.

“It’s no secret that some professional people can manage a bit of magic in their own line of work. Sister Doctor and I used to sew sheets of hammered tin into our clothes when we worked among the Yunamata, for instance. The mineral prophylactic. Only common sense.”

“Can you do us something useful? A pair of seven-league boots for each of us, to settle us more deeply into the safer mess of Quadling jungle?”

“I’ll need two pair,” said Brrr. “Though I’d also accept a seven-league settee.”

“Bring me an ingrown toenail and I’ll trim it without my sewing scissors,” huffed Little Daffy. “That’s about the size of what I can do, people. Anyway, even the most powerful enchanter doesn’t have the power to do anything he or she might want. Only certain things. No one can point a finger at a dozen horsemen and turn them, poof, into a dozen doughnuts. No one can, as a single campaign, magically remove the Emperor from his throne, nor bring Elphaba back from the dead. Magic powers are limited to start with, and more limited by the history and aptitudes of the person attempting a spell.”

“Look,” cried Rain. Brrr turned, aware that for once she was paying more attention than the rest of them.

Across the open meadows through which they were hurrying, they saw a clot of horsemen emerge from around a stand of larches, miles back. With a zealotry of spear and sawtooth sword. If the companions could see the horsemen, they could be seen too. It could be mere moments before the kettledrumming of horses at gallop.

“We’re lost,” cried the dwarf. “Brrr, take the girl onto your back; you can cover the ground faster.”

“Anything to get rid of her, eh?” roared the Lion. He turned once, three times, five in desperate circles. The cart turned with him. He was tempted by the moral acceptability of a personal escape for himself in the service of guarding a human girl—but then he set his pace forward again. “I’m not leaving the book to the Emperor,” he growled, “nor the rest of you to the Emperor’s spears.”

“We should fly,” cried Rain, “din’t the Wren say we should fly?”

“Now isn’t the time to discuss figurative language,” ventured Little Daffy, “not when our livers are about to be diced in situ.” She pulled herself up onto the Clock, where Rain and the dwarf were already riding.

Rain gave out as much of a curse as she could, given that her fund of vocabulary remained on the spare side. She crab-walked up the side of the Clock and put her foot upon one of the long wrought-iron hands on the time face. “I seen a real dragon that could fly. This one knows about it as good as I do,” she cried. Using the leathery flaps of the wings to scurry higher, she eventually thumped the dragon on its reticulated proboscis. “Fly, you stupid worm, and do the work you was made to do!”

Maybe she’d hit a secret lever or a magic nerve still potentially alert while the rest of the Clock remained paralyzed. The great wings shook. Browned leaves and the husks of forest insects dusted out upon them. The creak, when the sallowwood ribs attained their fullest extension, was like the snap of an umbrella when it catches. The batlike wingspan reached twenty-eight or thirty feet from tip to tip.

“Pretty, en’t it,” said the dwarf. “If they didn’t see us before, they’ll see us now. We’re a whole dragon-cloud on their horizon, soon as they look to their left.”

A cry of discovery. The avalanching sound of horses’ hooves. As Brrr strained to pull even harder, he noticed that the wind had swung round. It had been blowing from the north, bringing with it the cool of Gillikin summer farmland, but now from the west the wind picked up with a sudden, drier emphasis. As if it meant business.

The wings of the dragon caught the wind and billowed, to the extent that aging leather, softened by time, can billow. The wagon moved faster as if loaned spirit by the weather. “Whoa!” cried Ilianora. She scooped herself onto a running board.

Rain perched forward like a gargoyle on a chapel parapet. She hopped up and down on the shoulders of the dragon, looking forward, not scared at all, as the Clock accelerated.

If it starts to fly, thought Brrr, I’ll be hanging from the hasps of this cart like a kitten sagging out of the mouth of its mother. He couldn’t stop to disengage from the harness, though. There was no time. The Clock hurried on.

Brrr didn’t think the dragon could outpace military steeds, but maybe the horses had been ridden hard. By the time the Lion had either to pause or else risk a coronary, the assemblage had mounted a slight slope of the Yellow Brick Road and descended the other side. The gravity hurried them all the faster, into a copse that promised, just beyond, a deeper forest. Affording a small window of time to strategize before their predators were upon them.

The dragon’s wings folded so suddenly that Rain tumbled forward to the pavement. She didn’t complain about the scratches on her dirty limbs, the little blood. She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn’t smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It’s something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.

As if Rain’s enthusiasm had called it into being, they soon came to an opportunity. A fork in Yellow Brick Road. A high section running along a ridge, a lower road, perhaps an older line that had been superseded by later engineers. Mr. Boss selected the descending road, as it looked more brambly. Sure enough, the scrub trees and snarled hedges snapped back into place after the Clock pushed through, providing the companions deeper cover, hiding evidence of the choice they’d made. At least for the time being.

That night the dwarf said to Rain, “You made the dragon fly. Could’ve tickled me in the tickle zone with a tickle wheel. A good job, that. I guess you can stay.”

“I already stayed,” said Rain.

12.

They couldn’t imagine giving their pursuers the slip so easily, but it seemed so. A good thing too: another day or two, and the forest had petered out entirely. Pale meadows rounded beside them like billowing sheets being flapped dry by two laundresses. Here and there a rill wandered past them, and the company could pause to rinse a cup or soak a sore heel. They didn’t pause for long.

The little girl, thought Brrr, seems more thrilled than frightened by the urgency. Though he offered to carry Rain on his back, she preferred to walk and she didn’t tire. She often sprang ahead as he imagined his own cub might have done, had he been sprightly enough to father a cub. He had to resist the urge to cuff her, not out of annoyance but love. She seemed not to appreciate the stress beneath which her companions lumbered.

And then he thought, Oh, sweet Ozma. She doesn’t understand it. Deep down, she doesn’t get it. She is younger than her years. Is she simple? She doesn’t know that the world is made up of accidents jackknifed into every moment, waiting to spring out. Of poison saturating one mushroom and not another. Of pox and pestilence accordion-pleated in the drawing room drapes, ready to spread when the drapes are drawn of a chilly evening. Of disaster stitched in the seam of every delight. The fire ant in the sugar bowl. The serpent in the raspberries, as the old stories had it. She doesn’t know enough to worry. She hasn’t been educated enough to fret.

The General had been teaching her how to read her letters, but she hadn’t learned how to read the world.

The old branch line of the Yellow Brick Road began to peter out. Local scavengers with building projects of their own had dug up the looser bricks in such a patchwork fashion that traveling the road became difficult. Around here, the meadowgrass to either side grew more serrated. It scratched against them, as if each frond were rimmed with salt crystals. Then, at last, the white meadows dipped into the first stand of something more like jungle than forest.

They didn’t expect to find the going easy, as the Clock was tall and the growth was dense, but nor did they expect that the swift change in climate would surprise them with a huge increase in native population. Not forty feet under the canopy of marsh-jungle they were deafened by the jaw-jaw of life. Cawing birds and scolding monkeys. Ten thousand industrious insects chewing, sawing, fighting, digging, dragging, battling, zizzing by. The vines pulled away like spun-sugar candy. The Clock drove in deeper. The noise itself was a kind of camouflage, and welcome.

The first afternoon in the badlands, Little Daffy identified a plant whose small quilted leaves, when snapped open, oozed with an unguent that repelled mosquitoes. The need was urgent enough that the adult companions ventured out to harvest a goodly supply. For her safety, though, Rain was shoveled into the body of the Clock. Protected from mosquitoes there, and also from getting lost. She could tend to wander, thoughtlessly, and a jungle was no place for that.

Rain hadn’t often been in such an enclosed space. The great gears made of carved wood rose like clock faces, while those of hammered iron lay horizontal. The wooden ones smiled, but some of their teeth were splintered or missing. The iron gears looked more treacherous, as if they would stop for no mouse or magician, but chew up history any way they liked.

The dust-silted interior of the Clock was all-business—a different world from the gilded scrollwork of the outside. The air was drier in here, less punitive. Greenish banyan light seeped in where a board had warped or a shutter failed to hang true. She felt like a new seed in the green light of undergrowth, or a fish in scummy shallows.

Almost lackadaisically a twiglet of moss, sort of brown and green both, began poking through a crack at the bottom of one of the shutters. Thinner than a pencil, more like a pipette. It was joined by another, and then a third and a fourth. The sensate tentacles stiffly carved out half circles in the dust, reaching in, probing. Rain didn’t know what they were, but they were animated and curious.

There was room for them; they could come in. But try as she might, she couldn’t budge the shutter door. She was trapped in here until her companions opened the door from the outside.

If anything happens to the Clock’s minders, she finally thought (and this was perhaps the first time Rain had ever thought conditionally), I’ll be locked up here tight as Lady Glinda in her housey house.

She couldn’t hear any noise from outside. No chittering of mob monkeys. No appreciations of one’s own remarkable plumage by the teenage birds. Instead she sensed a kind of hush, a seasoned thickness of sound.

Oh, but those little crab-fingered fingerlings really wanted to get in! Now some were trying to claw up through an old knothole whose bole had aged and didn’t sit true in the plank. Six or eight of those strands poked up. If she could only knock the bole out, they could swarm in, maybe. She hit it tentatively with her hand but she couldn’t focus her force enough to make a difference. She saw that the back side of the wagon, through the screen of meshing gears and flywheels and pendulums, was also being explored for entrance by a host of twitching finger-limbs. But here came the dwarf opening her door, and the spiderlets melted away.

“Free and clear,” he said, “we’ve done ravaging the forest for medicinal help.”

“Did you see them twiggy spider folks? Where’s they get to?”

“What’re you on about? All we saw were buzz-bugs the size of luncheon plates.” The dwarf and Little Daffy and Ilianora insisted that the Clock hadn’t been besieged by anything. The Lion, who had kept an eye on the Clock even while scavenging, told Rain she was inventing things. “It sounds nasty,” he told her. “Like giant bedbugs. You’re trying to terrorize me. It isn’t hard to do, I realize, but just stop it. You know how I despise spiders.”

“I didn’t make ’em up.” Rain described their legs or fingers as best she could, but none of the party had seen a single creature like that, let along a posse of them. Little Daffy gave Rain a tonic to calm her nerves, but the girl threw up. She didn’t want her nerves either calmed or inflamed. She wanted the spiders to come back and tell her what the spider world was like.

Near sunset a human creature came slinking through the jungley-woods. He was neither a northern soldier, tall and armored, nor a Munchkinlander outcast. He looked more like a local drunk. His coloring was dark and his clothing brief. Knitting needles pinned the lanky hair piled on his head. On his back he carried a basket filled with mushrooms of a certain heft and texture and stink.

At first he spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand, but he made an effort to remember another tongue, and tried again. He was a scavenger plying his trade, and he could offer the more potent of wild mushrooms rooms for sale. Very very good specimens very very rare. Little Daffy looked interested, as she knew the medicinal properties of his stock, but Mr. Boss cut her off and said they had no use for recreational fungi.

The native never told them his name, but he recognized at once that the company must be the prey of the Emperor’s soldiers, of whom he had heard the gossip. Rain wondered from whom: Parrots? Monkeys? Spiders?

Haltingly, Heart-of-Mushroom told them, “Your soldiers? They looking for you still. But emergency make them to divert from their task. They are not to give up too quick-like. They to return. Risky if you to go on, but more deeper riskiness if you to stay put.”

“Well, that’s a nice menu to choose from,” said Mr. Boss. “And you look as if you wouldn’t hesitate to turn us in.”

“I to sell mushrooms, not people,” he replied, taking no offense. He flicked open his loincloth and urinated on the ground between them. Was this a gesture of disdain, or a proof of nonaggression, or merely sign of a full bladder? Brrr thought, Well, if I ever get back to high society, there’s a new trick to try out in a crowd.

The man said, “Emperor’s men not welcome in Quadling Country. Heart-of-Mushroom not to sell information to bad men.” He took a mushroom from his basket, scrubbed it against the hair in his armpit, and took a bite. When he offered it around, everyone professed to be full.

The Lion said, “Would it be better for us to leave the Yellow Brick Road and cut across country?”

The Quadling shook his head. “You are safer on the road of yellow brick. The trees and vines and clinging growth only thicken as you go south. Also jungle leopard to make short meal of you.”

“I can take on a jungle leopard,” said Brrr.

The mushroom vendor snorted and took another nibble. “Also forest harpie and small vicious deadly jungle dormouse.”

“Well, then,” said Brrr. “I take your point.”

“But even if you not to believe me, you to think of your baggage,” he concluded. “Quadling Country is wet to the shin.” He looked at the dwarf and then at the Munchkinlander. “Or to the waist. You to be bogged down in mud. Easy for soldiers to catch and kill. But yellow road is built dry and high. You to move deeper from your enemies that way. Faster away from the north.”

“But they’ll follow the Yellow Brick Road toward Qhoyre, surely,” said Brrr. “They’ll move faster than we can. I’m surprised they haven’t caught up with us yet. What was the emergency that diverted them?”

“They stumble upon rogue dragon,” said Heart-of-Mushroom. “Not ticky-toy thing like yours. Real one. They stop to try to capture it but cannot to manage it. It fly away. So now they to take up hunt for you again.”

“They saw a dragon close up, and I en’t seen nothing but spiders?” Rain was incensed.

“But if we stay on this road—they’ll be following us,” persisted Brrr.

“No road goes only one way. When engineers to build the only dry access into Quadling homeland, they also build only dry access out of Quadling homeland. So when EC soldiers betray Quadling hosts and kill and steal and burn their bridges? EC soldiers walking away on Yellow Brick Road make easy target for Quadling dart and Quadling arrow.” He spat out a mushroom bug and cursed in Qua’ati. “Quadlings not to kissy kiss EC soldiers any more.”

“What’s to stop your countrymen from shooting at us?” said the Lion. “I’m from Gillikin originally, and my wife is from the Vinkus. Little Daffy is a Munchkinlander, and Mr. Boss—”

“I’m undeclared,” said Mr. Boss.

“We’re a walking gallery of the enemies of the Quadlings. And you’d send us down Slaughter Alley? Hardly sociable,” finished Brrr.

“Not so,” said the Quadling. “You have your rafiqi, and Quadlings to give you safe passage.” He bowed just a little to Rain. “She is Quadling, no?”

Brrr looked at the girl. He hadn’t thought of her as positioned anywhere in Oz, ethnically speaking. But Brrr could see what the mushroom peddler meant. Rain’s face was somewhat heart shaped, a little flatter than those of her companions. Her lips fuller. You couldn’t say that her skin was as ruddy as Heart-of-Mushroom’s, but now, in this light, maybe…

Brrr caught the eye of Mr. Boss. “So the Clock told you to beware of a little girl. Did it. I think the Clock was just jealous. We got ourselves an ambassador.”

The itinerant vendor spoke to Rain in Qua’ati. She didn’t notice he was addressing her.

“Not to mind,” he told them. “My people to see what I can see. She is to promise you safe passage on the Road.” He nibbled another portion of his wares and smiled balefully. “Qhoyre is big city where you can to lose yourself. Such a small band of soldiers will not dare to follow you into Qhoyre. You to be safe there.”

“Safe from soldiers,” said Mister Boss. “How about invisible spiders?”

They tried to explain what Rain claimed to have seen. “Maybe the Emperor has trained bloodhound spiders through the magic he denies everyone else?” asked Ilianora.

“Invisible spiders,” said the Lion. “Did I mention that even visible spiders cause me angina of the psyche?”

They never learned what Heart-of-Mushroom thought about invisible spiders, for at their very mention he paled. In a moment he’d melted away back into the forest, for all practical purposes having gone invisible himself.

“Another one who didn’t come along,” said Rain. “We isn’t too friendified, is we.”

13.

The Quadling’s terror at spiders that only Rain had seen made the adults more squeamish than ever. Rain, however, experienced a sort of gingery buckling sensation inside. People couldn’t see the spiders and they couldn’t see inside of her—they hadn’t been able to figure out that she’d been telling the truth.

An apprenhension of isolation—that sudden realization of the privacy of one’s most crucial experiences—usually happens first when a child is much younger than Rain was now. The sensation is often alarming. Alone as a goose in a gale, as the saying has it. Rain felt anything but alarmed, though. The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

They heard her singing that night, a rhyme of her own devising.

Spidery spiders in the wood

No one knows you very good.

No one can and no one should.

14.

The deeper they penetrated into Quadling homelands, the more signs they saw of Quadling activity. Rushes laid out on the margins of the Yellow Brick Road to dry in the sun. Donkey dung and human feces. A broken harness for a water buffalo. Meanwhile, no alarums of horse hooves sounded behind them. The Yellow Brick Road south of Gillikin and Munchkinland might be Slaughter Alley, but not for a band of irregulars accompanied by a child with evident Quadling blood.

They made sure to keep Rain front and center, on the Clock’s most prominent seat. No one much believed in the spidery figments, but neither did they believe in taking chances with Quadling poison-tipped arrows.

“I’d like to know what our intention is, when we arrive in Qhoyre,” Ilianora said as they made an evening meal of poached garmot and swamp tomato. They sat right in the middle of the road, their cooking fire banked up upon the brick. “We’re about to have obeyed the advice mimed out of the Grimmerie. We’ll have stuck together and gotten south. But what next? And why? We’re going to take a flat there? Start a plantantion to harvest mildew? Set up a circus? Learn Qua’ati?”

“Tut tut, my little Minxy-Mouth of the Marshgrass.” The dwarf fingered out a fishbone. Marriage had eased his nerves somewhat. “No one knows where home is until it’s too late to escape it. We’ll know what to do when we know what to do.”

“Qhoyre can’t be anyone’s home,” argued Ilianora. “Otherwise so many Quadlings wouldn’t have migrated into the northern cities.”

“What is the world after Qhoyre?” asked Rain, who seldom listened to their discussions.

Mr. Boss shrugged. “The Road peters out, as I understand it, but Quadling Country squelches on.”

“Oh, even Quadling Country ends, eventually,” said Little Daffy. “At least according to the lessons in map reading we got in petty nursery. The province meets up with the ring of desert that surrounds all of Oz.”

“But what’s after the desert?” asked Rain.

“More desert,” said the Munchkinlander. “Oz is it, sweetheart.”

“To hear Ozians speak, other places don’t exist,” said Mr. Boss. “There’s no place to the north, like Quox, for instance, except as a supply of fine brandy and the source of a certain plummy accent. Ev, to the south over the sands, doesn’t really exist—it wouldn’t dare. But oh, we do like our Ev tobacco if a shipment gets through.”

Rain scowled. She didn’t understand irony. The dwarf, more respectful of Rain now that she was their de facto rafiqi, took pity and explained. “Oz isn’t surrounded by sands. It’s enislanded in its own self-importance.”

“Hey, Oz is bigger than Ev or Quox or Fliaan,” said Brrr in mock effrontery. “Those dinky sinkholes are hickabilly city-states founded by desert tribespeople.”

“Who cares what’s outside of Oz?” agreed the dwarf. “No one goes there. Oz loves itself enough not to care about provincial outposts.”

“But after the deserts?” said Rain.

“Ah, the innocent stupidity of kids,” said the dwarf. “You might as well ask what is behind the stars, for all we’ll ever know. The sands aren’t deadly, that’s just the public relations put out by edge communities. Not that I’m proposing we keep dropping south to become nomads in bed linens. The deserts aren’t hospitable. It’s where dragons come from, for one thing.”

“She wants to know where we’re headed, that’s all,” said Ilianora. “I’m with her on this.”

“Headed to tomorrow. Equally impossible to tell what’s on the other side of that, but we’ll find out when we get there,” said the dwarf. “Everyone, stop your beefing. You’re giving me cramps.”

The tomorrows began to blur. In a climate that seemed to know nothing but one season of growth, maturity, decay, all happening simultaneously, perpetually, even time seemed to lose its coherence. The company grew quieter but their unhappinesses didn’t subside. The cost of wandering without a named destination was proving steep.

Eventually the Yellow Brick Road petered out—brick by brick, almost—but the tramped track remained wide enough to accommodate the Clock of the Time Dragon. The signs of human enterprise grew more numerous. The companions began to spot Quadlings in trees, in flatboats, even on the mud-rutted road. The natives gave the company of the Clock a wide berth but a respectful one. Brrr observed that Quadlings, the butt of ethnic smears all over Oz, seemed in their own homeland to be more capable of courtesy to strangers than Munchkinlanders or Gillikinese.

Ilianora put her veil back upon her brow despite the steamy everlastingness of jungle summer.

There was no good way to avoid Qhoyre. The provincial capital had colonized all the dry land making up the isthmus-among-the-reeds upon which it squatted. And squatted was the word. Brrr, who had lived in the Emerald City and in Shiz, knew capital cities to be places of pomp and self-approval. Qhoyre looked mostly like a collection of hangars for the drying of rice. Indeed, Brrr reasoned, that was probably how the city began.

At ground level, the stuccoed administration buildings showcased an extravagance of softstone carvings both profane and devotional. Above them, ornament was abandoned for louvers, weathered out of plumb, and perforated screens of raffia or stone. Shabby, genteel. The hulks of Rice House and Ruby House and the Bureau of Tariffs and Marsh Law—titles carved not in Qua’ati but in Ozish even Rain could now read—loomed beside soapbone shops that wobbled on stilts above household pork-pen and pissery. But government house and grocery alike featured spavinned roofbeams. To swale away monsoon-burst, Brrr later figured out. Sensible in that climate, though the first impression was of a dignified old city in its dotage.

The Quadlings swarmed about the companions without evident panic. “They never heard of the Clock,” said Mr. Boss under his breath. “How bizarre. They don’t want a glimpse of the future from us. We could retire here, no?”

“No,” said Ilianora, spooked by the crowds.

To Brrr’s eye the Quadlings seemed louche and convivial. They’d survived all attempts by unionist ministers to convert them, preferring their own obscure dalliance with fetishes, radishes, and the odd augury by kittlestones. Stalls on the edge of market squares might be shrines or chapels, or then again they might be the tipping place for one’s household refuse. Little Daffy, with her Munchkinlander’s lust for a good scrub, was appalled. “It’s not even the nakedness behind those loincloths,” she said. “It’s that you can see they haven’t even washed well back there.” With aggressive cleanliness she took to pumicing her own face on the hour.

When the company paused for the night in a blameless nook, natives emerged from alleys and mews-ways to bring rattan trays of steaming red rice and fresh fruit and stinking vegetables. They set their offerings before Rain as if she were their local girl made good, and skittered away. “Monkey people,” said Little Daffy.

Rain showed no particular interest in this population to whom, Brrr conceded, she did bear some resemblance. She tried to make friends with the myriad hairless white dogs who cowered everywhere, under open staircases of cedar and rope. Rain put out rice and then fruit, and they would venture forth to sniff at the offering, but scurry back. She tried with some of the brown vegetables, the ones like voluted woody asparagus, and they also turned up their snouts at that. Then she arranged some of the asparagus into a few words—FOR YOU. EAT. So they did.

“How does she do that?” asked the dwarf of Brrr. “Have you any idea?”

“I’m the muscle in this outfit, you’re the brains,” replied the Lion. “As long as they don’t come and eat us, I don’t care how she does it. Are they dogs?”

“Or rats. Or weasels.”

The torpor of the climate induced a lethargy that the companions didn’t mind indulging; they’d been moving about for some time now. Easier to have your meals delivered than to press on with no assurance of decent foraging ahead. “We’ll know when it’s time to go,” said Mr. Boss, from the hammock he had strung between the post of a bat house and a nearby wrinkleroot tree. “Climb up here and get cozy with me, wife.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon and that’s a see-through hammock,” protested Little Daffy.

“They don’t mind.” And it was true; the Quadlings acted on their impulses when so inclined, without shame or secrecy. Interestingly, Rain seemed not to notice, either. The innocence of that child, thought Brrr, was troubling when it wasn’t refreshing.

The dwarf and Little Daffy didn’t budge from the vicinity where they’d stodged the Clock. “We have to guard the book,” they reminded Ilianora languidly. “You’re feeling antsy about our prospects, you go find someone to talk to.”

Brrr’s wife held out as long as she could, but finally she wrapped her shawl so tightly around herself that only her eyes showed, and she began to explore the town on her own. She was looking for someone who could translate Qua’ati for them. She found an old woman in a tobacco shop whose feet had been chewed off by an alligator but who could hobble about on sticks. Ilianora persuaded her to come back to the Clock. The nearly deaf old woman agreed to answer what of their questions she could in exchange for a salve that Little Daffy swore would regenerate her feet—but not for a year, which would give them plenty of time to get far away from her. “Anyway, she’s not going to run after us protesting, is she,” murmured Little Daffy to the others, sotto voce.

Her name, as near as they could make it out, was Chalotin. A bitter orange rind of a woman passing herself off as a seer. Brrr, who not long ago had spent some intense hours with old Yackle, could tell the difference between chalk and chocolate. Chalotin was rather thin chalk.

Still, for an old broad she pivoted about on impressively flexible haunches. She ran pinkish fingertips over her perfect ancient teeth as she told them what she knew.

Yes, she said, though the Emperor’s forces got no love no more, no more, they still made a preemptory show of authority every now and then. The only way they ever arrived was the High Parade, the route the company of the Clock had taken—what was left of the Yellow Brick Road. Quadlings let them pass as long as they marched in dress uniform rather than field garb. They never came in the rainy season, though. Or never yet.

“So they could tromp in any day,” confirmed Brrr in a soft roar, that she could hear him.

Yes, her shrugging expression implied. Wouldn’t put it past ’em.

“Where do they set up?”

“One of the government houses.” Warming to her subject, she told them that the EC had once kept a firmer grip on Quadling Country, dating all the way back to the days of the Wizard, when the extension of the Yellow Brick Road first allowed swamp engineers to come in and cull the mud flats of their rubies.

“Emeralds from the northeast, rubies from the south,” said Mr. Boss. “No wonder the Emerald City got so powerful, filching from all over. I suppose there are diamonds in hidden caves in the Vinkus?” He looked at Ilianora hopefully. “We could all maybe get filthy stinking rich back at your place?”

Chalotin didn’t care about rubies except to say that in the act of diving for them, the swamp miners from the EC had upset the crops of vegetable pearls harvested out near Ovvels. It had taken three decades for the agrarian economy to begin to recover, she said, and she predicted it would take three decades more before the natives of Quadling Country could rise to the level of poverty they’d once enjoyed.

“We are no longer friendly to our overlords,” she finished, spitting, but smiling nicely too. “We are polite but we don’t let them to stay. Not after the burning of the bridge at Bengda. That massacre. Not after attack by flying dragons.”

“Dragons,” said Rain, looking up. “Have you seen a flying dragon?”

Chalotin made a gesture to ward off the notion. “When the EC to set flying dragons upon us, oh, years ago, a full five miles of swamp burn south of Ovvels. That much Chalotin know for herself, back when Chalotin could both to walk and to swim. But no dragons since then, no no.”

“So why aren’t your patriotic fellow citizens tossing us out on our arses?” asked Mr. Boss.

She replied that the presence of such a young rafiqi required of the Quadlings basic hospitality and even assistance. She indicated Rain when she spoke, but Rain had lost interest and was crawling around in the dirt, pretending to be one of those white hairless dogs.

“How do we get out of here then?” said Ilianora. “We don’t want to be cornered in Qhoyre if the Emperor is about to send a brigade in after us.”

Chalotin explained that the Yellow Brick Road only went as far south as here because beyond Qhoyre, arcing first to the southwest and then toward the north, a fairly dry and passable berm already existed. Whether it was a natural feature of the land or the remains of ancient earthworks, no one knew, but if the companions left Qhoyre by the road near the Mango Altar they’d be safe and dry.

“Though if the rains to start, to be careful not to step off the high road,” said Chalotin. “Chalotin not to believe that your dragony cart is also boat.”

“Where will that take us, though? An endless circle around Quadling Country?” asked Ilianora. “I’m done with circling!”

Chalotin had had enough. She insisted that Little Daffy supply the salve that would regenerate her missing feet, and when the Munchkinlander came out with a small pot of something rather like cold cream, Chalotin took a portion on her finger and swallowed it. She grimaced but pronounced it useful, if not as a medicinal unguent then as a dip for fennel.

From off her shoulder she pulled a belted sack. Rain wriggled closer to look at it. A lake shell of some sort, larger than anything Rain had ever seen on the shores of Restwater. “What’s that, with all its points?” asked Rain, indicating the reticulated spine of it.

“Deep magic, you buy?” asked Chalotin. “Cheapy cheap for you.”

“What kind of magic?” asked the girl.

“You can’t buy magic,” protested the dwarf, and then, in a softer voice, added, “Of course, you can’t buy feet, either.”

“The Emperor is calling in all magic tools and torques,” said Brrr, thinking he might wheedle the shell out of the old biddy without having to fling coin at her. Nice to supply Rain with her first toy. “That contingent arrives from the EC and finds you with something powerful, you’ll need more than new feet to get away safely.”

“How magic could it be, anyway, if you can’t summon up your own feet?” said Little Daffy, playing along.

“It makes noise,” Chalotin told them, and showed them how to blow it like a horn. “The tip has to be broken first. But Chalotin say: this shell not to sing its voice. This shell to listen to. Conch to talk to you. Conch to tell you what it know.”

“No magic. No buy,” said Mr. Boss. “No good. No deal.”

“Well, we have no coin of the traditional sort,” said Brrr, hoping to force a negotiation of some sort.

“What does the shell say?” asked Rain, nearly breathless with hope. But the old woman scurried backward and shook her head. Without another word she headed down the lane, galumphing along as well as she could on her stumps.

“Wait,” called Mr. Boss. “One more thing.”

Chalotin turned but didn’t stop moving away.

“What are these white critters? Are they puppies?”

“They to be albinoid otters,” she replied. “Smart to avoid them. They to overrun Qhoyre for long long time. When the rice terraces burn, the otters they to lose their protective coloring. Before that no one realize they color from their diet. Now they safer among pale stone buildings than in green-purple swamp. So they to overrun Qhoyre and to mess in the silk farms and to eat the worms. Bad fall of letter-sticks. Bad tumble of dominoes.”

“What color are they usually?”

“Rice otters? Green of course. To swim in paddies and marsh.” Chalotin crab-walked away then, and Brrr joined the others in discussing how quickly they might get out of Qhoyre, while they still had their own feet attached. Teasing and tempting the nearer rice otters, Rain wandered about, disappearing for a time and appearing again, a child with her own shadowy concerns among the green shadows of a busy neighborhood.

“But what are you doing with that?” asked Little Daffy at dinner, when Rain showed up with the shell. She checked her purse to make sure Rain hadn’t stolen any farthings. “Did you steal any of my cash?”

She shook her head. “Stole the shell,” she replied.

Little Daffy and Ilianora lit into Rain, but good. Had she learned nothing about honor, about moral competence? What was she thinking?

“You told her you could grow her some new feet,” said Rain. The equivalency of the crimes was debatable, but the girl effectively shut up her elders anyway.

The company left the capital of Quadling Country the next day, doing a favor for their hosts without meaning to. In the early morning, before everyone was awake, Rain had tried to blow a sound from the conch. She couldn’t hear what noise it might have made, but some several hundred white otters congregated around the Clock. The pack followed the companions past the Mango Altar and out along the high dusty road into deepening jungle. The stink was horrific, but at least the pack lagged about a half mile behind them. It was like being dogged by a murky white afghan whose segments came apart and rejoined at will. Neither Rain nor the adults were sure whether to be pleased or alarmed, but they could hear the sound of humans cheering from the squat cityscape behind them.

“Is that why the book sent us south?” muttered Ilianora. “So we could liberate a foreign capital of its pests?”

“We could look at the book agin,” said Rain, slyly enough. “If you en’t sure it was telling us to go south, let’s see. Mebbe now it’ll say go north, or go to the desert.”

But the Grimmerie wouldn’t open for them this time. Perhaps, thought Brrr, it had heard Rain’s suggestion that Yackle was warning them to get away from it. It was sulking. Anyway, keeping its own counsel, much as any unread book does.

Maybe we would be better off without it?

Then Brrr thought, maybe Chalotin set Rain up to steal that shell. If all magic totems are forbidden, Chalotin herself might be safer to be shy of a powerful item.

Oooh, but what a narcotic, paranoia.

15.

Rain had never taken into account creatures en masse. To her, the companions of the Clock retained a stubborn and incomprehensible separateness. But the otters conjoined like individual autumn leaves into a single pile.

She remembered the original lonely fish against her finger, the mouse in the field that was her oldest memory—maybe these were instances of aberration. Single creatures in their single lives.

One rice otter, maybe a little bit smaller than its mates, had a slightly rosier cast. (She couldn’t tell genders even when they were fucking; they seemed entirely too limber to be limited to a single gender. She found herself thinking of the rosier one as it.) Since she could identify it in the horde, she cared for it more than the others.

Miles beyond Qhoyre, miles beyond the ruins of Bengda on Waterslip, the rains began. A throng of pilgrims huddling under palmetto leaves, on their way back to Qhoyre from some ceremony in the swamplands, said in kitchen Ozish that the high city of Ovvels was only a day or two away. The companions would find succor there for the rest of the rainy season if they pressed on, said the pilgrims. Though the pilgrims might have softened their promise of a welcome if they’d known about the white river of otters following like a scourge behind.

High city? In this lowland swamp? What could that mean?

They found out. The track on which the companions had traipsed from Qhoyre slowly raised itself on gravel-banked shoulders. The ramp proved so slight an incline that Brrr hardly felt the strain, even though the wheels sucked into the mud. On either side of the highway—a literal highway—grew a town much smaller than Qhoyre, and more real, in a way. Ancient suppletrees, knitting their elbows together, supported small huts from which walkways were slung. A village of treehouses. Every roof was palmettoed, every window netted with gauzlin. Even in the drenching, some people were fishing from their front doors with strings let down into the swamp.

“Bird people!” cried Rain, though in many ways they proved to be more like fish people.

The main track on which the companions had arrived leveled out on top of a thick wall built of granite blocks. Twenty, twenty-four feet high, and just as wide. “Quadling know-how isn’t up to this job. The flatboat to haul such heavy stone has never been built. This wall was here long before the town,” said Mr. Boss.

“But the stones must have been cut by masons, and laid by engineers, time out of mind,” said the Lion. “If the Quadlings didn’t build this, some earlier population did.” Rain ran her hand over marks left in the surface by ancient adzes and chisels.

The characteristic hospitality of Quadlings asserted itself. Some kind of mayoral commission dragged itself together to negotiate lodging for the itinerants. The side of the wall that slanted northeast had been fitted with ledges and steps leading to cells and stalls. Maybe dug out by later generations. The company could take their choice of rooms. The floors might be muddy, but there were shelves on which the companions could dryly sleep.

It was a simple enough matter to drag the Clock into a barnlike warehouse in which it just fit, to cover the thing with banyan leaves until the rain moved over. The natives were fascinated by it, but Mr. Boss said, “Go away. No looky look.”

Rain was beginning to call the rosy-chinned otter Tay, after a Qua’ati word te, meaning “friend.” Rain and Tay slept in a cell with the Lion and Ilianora. Mr. Boss and Little Daffy took a chamber beyond that. Rain would rather have been in a tree.

She instructed the other otters to sleep outside. They didn’t mind. She couldn’t tell Brrr how she had done this. She didn’t know. The otters weren’t talking Animals.

On the outer wall of the defensive rampart, if that’s what it was, the Quadlings had painted illustrations of huge glowing fish. Gold and blue, ingesting each other, smiling at each other in passing, eliminating one another cloacally. “Is these fish as big as life?” Rain asked Ilianora. “Any fish so big en’t fitting in any rice paddy.”

“These fish look like giant ancestors dating back to the dawn of the gods. It’s art. Pay it no mind. It’s all fabrications and lies. I have no patience for lies of any kind, especially the lies of art.”

“What about the Clock?” asked Rain. “And what it says, or won’t say?”

Ilianora wouldn’t answer.

Rain loved the great staring ovoids. She was living in a wall of fish that were swimming toward her from the past. She hadn’t thought about the past much—not even her own past—but now her memory of the fish in the ice pocket accrued some meaning. It had wanted to get back to its gods or its grandparents. It had had someplace to swim to.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to be a fish. And have someplace to swim to.

16.

It took a while for the companions to realize that the monsoons weren’t necessarily annual events. A monsoon began when it began, and it lasted as long as it wanted. Until this one was over there was no hope to move on. Endless, endless rain. The company of the Clock of the Time Dragon spent almost a year in Ovvels waiting for a spell clear enough for the high road to dry.

A whole year in which no battalion of pursuers from the Emerald City swam up to the long island of the high road.

A year in which no foot-free seer from Qhoyre managed to stump up the ramp to demand her money back or to reclaim her purloined shell.

A year in which no news of the battle between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland seeped into the backwashes of soggy Quadling Country.

It was, therefore, a year of quiet. Mercy to some—including Rain—and hard luck on others. She learned to watch her companions more closely, even if she kept her distance.

Mr. Boss declared he’d had decades learning how to kick back when the opportunity presented itself. He could busy himself, thank you very much. Out of balsa bark he whittled figurines handicapped by oversize genitalia. To Rain they seemed more dead than mud, and when he wasn’t looking she stole them and sent them flying through the air, to swim a while and eventually drown.

She liked stealing things, though most of what she stole she threw away. To rescue it, to liberate it. The glossy pink shell, with its spiraled belt of spikes and its silky silvered mouth, was an exception. She kept waiting for it to talk to her.

When Mr. Boss protested that his little people were disappearing, Little Daffy replied, “I think they’re disgusting, but don’t look at me.” The Munchkinlander whiled away the hours trying to teach such advanced medicine as she could to the local fish doctors, though with limited resources her efforts were lacking in smack. The Quadlings took to the Munchkinlander as if she were a kind of toy grandmother. Rain heard Brrr mutter that Little Daffy was having too much fun and wouldn’t want to move on when and if the sun ever returned.

“You think I’m just a rural squash,” the Munchkinlander snapped at the Lion. “You think I’m drunk on exotica. You think I’m going native. Maybe you’ve heard that when I helped my old colleague and nemesis, Sister Doctor, tend to that ailing Scrow potentate, Princess Nastoya, I fell in love with the Scrow. Well, it’s true. I could’ve stayed there. But I had my calling.”

“I’m your calling now, honeybag,” said Mr. Boss. “Don’t you forget it.”

“You kidnapped me,” she told him. “But bygones be gone, as they say.”

Little Daffy gave up running a rural clinic and took to playing a kind of strip canasta with a bordello of Quadling maidens possessed both of loose clothing and morals. When Mr. Boss tried to peer in the shutters at them, she called him a perv and slammed them shut. Then the giggles! The dwarf sulked for a week, fouler than usual.

“Get away from that window or you’ll go blind,” he growled at Rain, who was just passing, minding her own business.

She didn’t answer him, just slid on by. Watching. Adults were more broken than animals, she thought. She missed the birds of the sky, the big birds: in the jungle, only sodden little feather-fluffs hopped from branch to dripping branch under the jungle canopy.

Every now and then she went to look at the Clock, to see if it had wakened up. She was the only one to visit it as far as she knew, but the thing stayed frozen, dead as one of the dwarf’s ugly carvings.

For Brrr’s part, the months of inaction made him consider that the one thing that had characterized his life since infancy was his constant motion. No matter how much he’d enjoyed life among the great and the good in Shiz or the Emerald City, he wasn’t a house Lion at heart. He was a roving beast. Maybe his lifelong tendency to take umbrage at minor slights was a symptom of his chronic eagerness to get going somewhere else. He only ever needed a good reason.

He wouldn’t leave Ilianora, though. He could tell this waiting was hard on her too. Waiting for what? The book—they had kept trying to open it—offered no further advice. Meanwhile, Ilianora’s veil, which for so long had stayed down, was raised again, in more ways than one. She lived in a new silence, and slept with her back to him. They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

So Brrr was cross, too. Everyone was more or less cross except for Rain.

The Quadling children tried to make friends with Rain, but she felt unsure of their intentions. Anyway, they didn’t like the otters, who bit children when provoked. Though Tay never so much as nibbled at Rain. Except a little. And it hardly hurt.

Alone most of the day, Rain was turning into a little monkey on the vines and trestle-passes of the supplewood trees. Tay scurried along behind her like a kind of white trailing sock. Brrr watched her with cautious eyes. She was growing, their Rain. Her limbs liked this damp climate. Ilianora had had to sacrifice another veil to make a longer tunic for the girl, lest she flash her private parts by accident and invite a disaster.

Just in time, before a couple of marriages broke irreparably, the sun returned. Steamy yellow and obscure white. It hurt their eyes. With it arrived new generations of biting bug who were impervious to the few remaining sachets of unguent the companions had harvested more than a year earlier. It would be time to get moving before long. “What’re we waiting for?” asked Ilianora.

“For a sign of some sort,” said Mr. Boss.

“You’re not over that yet? The Clock is broken. There are no signs.” Her tone was aggrieved in a cosmic way. The dwarf rolled his eyes.

The painted fish looked now as if they were swimming in light instead of streaked green air. Early one morning Rain caught sight of an etiolated matron touching up one of the fishes with some blue paint ground up in a gourd. She was dabbing with her fingers and singing to herself. This old flamingo had never seen a big fish like that, but still she had the temerity to instruct it to swim for another year?

Strange. Another lie, thought Rain.

“We don’t have a prophecy from the Time Dragon, we get no reading from the Grimmerie,” said Mr. Boss one day. “The sun is our alarmus. We’re off and away with the piskies. Let’s unshroud the Clock and oil the axles and it’s hey, hey, for the open road. The book don’t like it, let it give us some better advice.” He got no argument, except from Little Daffy, who had to be encouraged to swaddle her breasts again. “I’m going to miss the old damp hole in the wall,” she said, sweeping it out with that Munchkinlander frenzy for housecleaning. “If we ever retire, darling Mr. Boss, perhaps we can come back here for our sunset years?”

He didn’t answer. He was cheery for once, swarming as high up the Clock as he could, though he was no match for Rain.

All of Ovvels gathered to see them drag the Clock out of its tomb. However feeble the Qua’ati that the companions had managed to learn in a year, it served well enough for good-byes. A berdache of some sort, a smeary-eyed young man with pinkened lips, made a speech hearkening back to some time when another troupe of northerners had come through and lived with them for a while. Before his day, but it was local lore. “They to try convince us to believe in something they say is not there,” he said, “the god who is unnamed.”

“Missionaries,” said Little Daffy, who had put her own past behind her with dizzying alacrity. But “Couldn’t you just puke?” had to do for social comment, and after that she kept her mouth shut.

“We did not to kill them,” said the berdache. “Minister come to educate and steal our souls for his god who won’t to name itself. Rude man. Man of moldy thought. But he has girl with him we do not forget.” He smiled at Rain as if she were that girl, and he wasn’t discussing something that happened a hundred thousand years ago in folk memory but this very week. “He has little green girl with him. His oldest girl. She to sing for him, when we to harvest vegetable pearl. She sing the pearl off the vine. I am not there but she is like you.” He nodded to Rain.

The others bowed to Rain. She put her shell up to her head and turned away, as if she preferred its windy noise over their attention.

Brrr said, “How can you know our Rain is like that girl if none of you were alive back then?”

The man shrugged. He indicated to Ilianora that he would accept the gift of her scarf. She didn’t hand it over. Sighing, he answered Brrr as best he could anyway. “Some Quadlings to have sense to see the present, to know the present,” he finished. “We to see your young rafiqi girl and we to know she is the one they talk about.”

“I to see myself into a loony bin in about one minute,” said Mr. Boss. “Let’s go.”

Brrr wondered what they saw when they looked at Rain, and why they waved at her so affectionately when for a year she hadn’t given them the time of day. Of any day.

“Aren’t you going to show us the Clock?” asked the berdache. “Before you go?”

“It doesn’t show truth to pagans,” said Mr. Boss. “Why would you believe it when you can’t believe in a god you can’t see?”

“We housed you and fed you through months of rains. You won’t deny us a look at the future. Quadlings, when they’re able, can sometimes see the present, but this Clock tells the truth of all things.”

“I never said that,” swore the dwarf, stamping.

“You never did,” agreed the berdache, batting his eyelids. “But I can see the present, and I know that is what you think.”

The companions were in a bind. They couldn’t leave without paying the Quadlings of Qhoyre something for a year’s lodging and board. Cursing up a head of steam, the dwarf made valiant effort to rev the old girl up. Put on a little demonstration. All things being equal and buyer beware, and so on.

“Come on,” said Rain on her haunches, bouncing up and down like the monkeys she played with. “Come on!”

The Clock obeyed nobody’s deepest wishes. Mr. Boss couldn’t get a shutter to open, a crank to turn, a single puppet to appear and blow a kiss at the assembled crowd. “It’s done for,” he declared. His furrowed expression showed him to be sincere. The Quadlings had no choice but to offer him their condolences on the death of the future.

“It died just like that god who slid off the world and lost his name,” said the berdache. “Never to mind. Is pretty dragon anyway.”

“The Unnamed God isn’t a person,” said Little Daffy, out of some final spasm of feeling for her religious past.

“And fate isn’t limited to a tiktok dragon’s sense of theatrics,” added the Lion.

“Nor the spell of any magic book,” offered Ilianora.

The Quadlings began to bow and wave the companions off. They didn’t want philosophics. They’d wanted a bite at the future, and were willing to live without it the way their ancestors had done. The berdache walked them a little way out of town, on the northern ramp off the elevated road. “Perhaps the world is to heal,” he said. “The vegetable pearls healthier this spring than I ever to see them. Perhaps the rice otters to learn their old way and go green as before, now there are pearls to help harvest.”

“Too much mystery for an old fraying hairdo like mine,” muttered the dwarf, disconsolate. “So long, chumpo.”

“Lord Chumpo,” said the berdache, rushing to give out embraces. Ilianora turned her head and beckoned Rain to walk with her. But Rain was getting too big to order around. Her head was higher than Ilianora’s elbow now—almost as high as her breast.

17.

Their spirits lifted as they left Ovvels behind. Such was the power of the sun that even under the jungle canopy a year’s worth of monsoon drippage burned off in a matter of days. The companions didn’t find the passage tough, only slow, as they had to clear undergrowth every quarter mile.

Brrr had hoped, once they began to move again, that Ilianora’s mood would improve, but she continued to seem vexed. It took him a few days of watching her watch the girl before he was able to frame his thought.

The girl was growing up. Their Rain. That’s what was agitating Ilianora.

Growing up, and growing beyond them.

Rain had not been theirs, not for a moment. Brrr could still read with a parental eye how the world could present itself to a young girl like Rain. And how Rain might respond, this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.

“She’s all right,” said Brrr, splashing through the lily pads, the floating beehives. And Rain was all right. But Ilianora—he had to face it—was not.

That night, he thought another, more common thought. Maybe it’s that time of Ilianora’s life. Maybe it hurts Ilianora to admit that Rain isn’t her daughter. That there will be no daughter now. Not even if Ilianora could unstitch the seam and find a human male as another husband. The vegetable pearls were not growing for Ilianora.

18.

They’d been told they’d leave the mucklands behind soon enough, and the road would climb some sandy slopes, and eventually debouche into the Sleeve of Ghastille. This broad and fertile valley led northeast, marking the border between the Vinkus and Quadling Country. The berdache of Ovvels had insisted that the companions would find few inhabitants in the valley, but they must beware nonetheless.

“If it’s so fertile, why is it uninhabited?” Mr. Boss had demanded. The answers had been incoherent. The natural landscape between the Great Kells to the west and the Quadling Kells to the east proved low and dry and well drained. Surely it seemed an ideal route for the Yellow Brick Road? Back in the day when it was being laid out? And why had any human travelers to the Thousand Year Grasslands to the west chosen to brave the inhospitable track over Kumbricia’s Pass rather than this lower and more welcoming approach?

It didn’t take long for the companions to see why. The pass was a set of gentle crescents around foothills that abutted the horizon from east and west. From slope to slope, at this time of year anyway, an ocean of carmine red flowers took their breath away. Poppies.

“I know about poppies,” said Mr. Boss. “Grim business, even for me, who likes a tidy profit if I can turn one.”

“I know about poppies,” agreed his wife. “All kinds of useful applications that you can rarely take advantage of because of side effects. We were forbidden to use them in the surgery when we could even get them, which was seldom.”

Brrr felt their effect at once. The odor was of scorched cinnamon, savagely beguiling. In the freshening light and the wind that swept west from the swamplands and the grasslands, the air pushed the pollen heavily ahead of them. It inflected the day no less than fog or rain or brutal heat might have done. The travelers struggled through the endless carpet. Were anyone to try to follow them after all this time, too bad: the tracks of the cart were swallowed up as the blossoms closed ranks.

Rain hunted daily for high-flying birds. Remembering the Wren? But even eagles and rocs seemed to give this valley a pass.

At night Brrr slept fitfully, with dreams of things he would rather not remember. Appetites long suppressed, for one—and healthily so, he remonstrated himself upon awakening. Chief among them an appetite for shame.

They were all affected. They pushed to get through the sweep of bloody blossom at as swift a clip as they could manage. But the Sleeve ran vaguely uphill, and the labor of hauling the Clock seemed harder than before. Or had Brrr grown soft again during nearly a full year of downpour?

The new anxiety came to a head on the third afternoon of wading through thigh-high blossoms. Rain had been caught stealing some sugar brittle from the Clock’s supplies, and the dwarf went overboard railing at her. Brrr lunged to the girl’s defense. “You’re so noble? Tricking people for decades about fate with this diabolical dragon routine? Give her a break. When’s she ever learned about right and wrong?”

“Not from you,” replied the dwarf. “You great big shameless Cowardly Lion.”

“Nor from your wife,” replied Brrr, “tricking that old seer in Qhoyre into thinking her feet would grow back.”

“You’re hardly one to talk about conscience,” began the Munchkinlander.

“Stop,” said Ilianora in a low, deadened sort of voice. They did, but only because she hadn’t spoken for a while. “Prophecy is dead, and conscience is dead too.”

They kept walking, making whiskery sounds of passage in the verdure.

She continued, dry as a sphinx in the Sour Sands. “That berdache believed that any Unnamed God must be a dead god. But it’s conscience that’s dead. Maybe the dragon really w-was … was the conscience of Oz. But it’s dead. Oz is broken in parts—Loyal Oz divided from Munchkinland, and who knows what polders and provinces might splinter off next? There isn’t any full Oz anymore, and no conscience, either. That’s why the dragon died. Just about the time those other real dragons threatened to attack Munchkinland. We’re broke. We’re broke and we can’t be fixed.”

“Nonsense,” said Brrr, trying to hurry a little to her side, but he was so tired, and the heavy cart of dead conscience dragged at him.

“And what’s left then?” The Lion’s wife tried to stifle a gasp of remorse. “We’re all schemers and liars, thieves and scoundrels. To our own private good cause. There’s no primary conscience to call us up.”

It was Little Daffy who replied—she who had toed the line of unionism the most faithfully all those years in the mauntery.

“If there’s no good conscience to trust,” she declared, “no Lurline, no Ozma, no Unnamed God, no standard of goodness, then we have to manage for ourselves. Maybe there’s no central girl in some hall in the Emerald City, all bronzed and verdigrised, all windswept hair and upthrust naked breast, lots of bright honor carved in her blind and focused eyes. No conscience like that, no reliable regula of goodness. So it’s up to us, each of us a part. A patchwork conscience. If we all make our own mistakes, from Rain stealing stuff to the rest of us lying to ourselves and each other—well, we can all make amends, too. No one of us the final arbiter, but each of us capable of adding our little bit. We’re the patchwork conscience of Oz, us lot. As long as the Unnamed God refuses to take off the mask and come for a visit. As long as the dragon has croaked on us.”

No one seconded the notion. No one objected. They staggered on. Wilting, aggrieved, conscience-stricken, dulled.

19.

They read the solar compass, the play of shadows on staggered sets of slope. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty hours to cross the Sleeve of Ghastille, they guessed. Still, every day they could manage no more than a few miles before exhaustion set in. Brrr was aware that sunlight was good for the eradication of mange, but he needed to rest under the cart. In the shadows. Outside, in the bright light, the red of poppies burned against his retinas through his closed eyelids. A siege of coral light, a siege of fire.

Even Little Daffy, with her familiarity with amelioratives and strikems, purges and preventicks, seemed dazed with the effect. “Consolidated airborne precipitate. How do these blossoms manage?” she moaned, and rolled down on the ground next to her husband, exposing her bosom to the glow. The liberty of Quadling mores had rooted in her in a big way.

Ilianora, however, became ever more shrouded in her veils. Only her eyes showed.

The Sleeve was ahead of them and behind them, a river of mocking full-lipped smiles lapping a third of the way up the foothills on either side of them. Had anyone been able to look overhead, they would have thought the sky was red, too, probably; red, or by that trick of compensation that human eyes manage briefly, perhaps green.

The companions had decided to try traveling under the red stars at night, when the effect of the vegetation was less oppressive. During the day they napped or lay down with handkerchiefs over their eyes, stoned. Ilianora, perhaps because she kept her veils over her nose and mouth, became the de facto lookout, and even she found her attention hard to marshal. “You should take some water,” she would murmur, to no one in particular, and then get some for herself when no one replied. On one such occasion she rounded the corner of the Clock and walked into a loosened shutter.

The main doors of the Clock had swung open. Rain was lying on the stage, a hand draped over the edge as if she were dabbling her fingers in a brook.

Then Rain sat up, and her eyes were wide and staring, but not at Ilianora. The child’s expression was equal parts horror and fascination. Rain seemed in a spell of delusion, beginning to reach out to invisible creatures on the ground, to pet something, to lift them up, then to recoil her fingertips as if they’d been bitten or burned.

The poppies near the wagon stirred, roiled, as of a wind along the ground, though there was no sign of any creature among their hairy twists of stem.

Ilianora’s voice issued, more steam than volume, the way that one attempts to scream in a dream but can’t get louder.

She tried to stagger forward herself, to help the girl in whatever new disaster this was. Her own limbs seemed locked, frozen, her mind slowed. Her carapaced form was hindered by the winding sheets of her veils.

Her utterance sounded hollow, and Brrr only snored on. The girl began to thrash. “Oh,” said Ilianora. It was the sound someone makes finding a common word in a surprising context. “Oh, hmmm.”

Before Rain could fall from the stage, though, or suffer a mental collapse right before Ilianora’s eyes, the poppies around the Clock of the Time Dragon whipped into frenzy. This time Ilianora could see the cause. As if swimming underneath the toxic tide, a school of rice otters approached through the greeny algae of poppy stem and leaves. The warm light silting through red petals turned their short fur greenish. Something happened that only Ilianora among the companions witnessed, unless Rain was watching too, behind her blanked-out eyes. A battle between the otters and an invisible foe. Ilianora couldn’t see the event, only its effects, as otters thrashed something silly, or the field of poppies thrashed itself. A blood that was not the stain of poppy dye ran from the mouths of otters.

Something was massacred in fifteen minutes, while Brrr hummed in his sleep and Little Daffy waved an inebriated fly from the canyon of her cleavage. Ilianora trembled as if in a gale. The petals ripped and shredded and blew about them. Eventually Rain began to soften, her paralysis to collapse, and she fell weeping on the stage floor.

But Ilianora couldn’t make herself move to comfort the girl. It was too horrible. She was frozen too.

By the time night fell, Ilianora was huddled against Brrr as he pulled himself up to a crouch. Little Daffy made some gloppy soup with a garnish of poppy pollen sprinkled on top. Mr. Boss was energized by the fact that the doors of the Clock had swung open, though once he refastened them they went right back into their old paralysis. Still, the fact they could still open seemed to be a useful kick in the butt. As he set to doing something of a tune-up, he whistled as he worked. Tunelessly.

“What happened?” asked Ilianora when the meal was done, and Brrr was cleaning the bowls with his tongue.

“Something was following us,” said Rain. “I don’t know what it was.”

“What did it look like? Soldiers?” asked Little Daffy.

“No. More like, um, spiders,” said Rain. “But more up-and-down than spread out. Their legs not so wide and curved like umbrella ribs, but more straight. Like what Murthy used to call a side table.”

Brrr said, “You had a dream of being attacked by a matched set of occasional tables? That reminds me of my setting up my first digs in Ampleton Quarters, back in the Shiz days. Green in judgment and all that. A case of nerves about being unpracticed at both sex and society was nothing compared to fretting that the wall hangings and the upholstery didn’t see eye to eye.” He knew he sounded berserk. He was trying to make light of Rain’s experience, whatever it had been.

“They wasn’t tables. They was beasties of some sort.”

“I suppose you took their names down, Rain, and all became quite cozy,” said Little Daffy. “You and your little party animals.”

“What did they want?” asked Mr. Boss. “You? Or the book?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t call ’em to me, but they came. They been following for a while I guess but I forgot to tell you.”

“Call me superior, but frankly I don’t think it’s likely you can see things we can’t,” said Little Daffy. “What were we saying earlier about conscience? In my day a girl who told tales would get a right smart spanking on her fanny.”

“You wasn’t looking. You was sunning.”

Ilianora roused herself. “Rain’s not pulling a fast one. I saw it happen. I saw something happen. Something came at the Clock, though whether it was for her or for the Grimmerie I don’t know.”

“They was the things that came to scrabble into the Clock the day I got locked in for safety,” said Rain. “The spiderish things from the jungle’s edge.”

The group fell silent. Brrr twitched his tail around exploratively, to see if it landed on something. No doubt he would scream like a schoolgirl if he touched … it. “Are they still here?” As baritone a voice as he could manage.

“They is all gone.” Rain began to cry a little. “I don’t know if they was good or bad or just hungry for something, but they is all gone. The rice otters got ’em.”

It was only then that they realized the rice otters had disappeared too. Hurried back to their swamp at last. All except for the one Rain had called Tay. It curled up on her lap and made itself at home, like a kitten. But its albino period was done. It looked like a mossy kitten entirely incapable of ripping a predator to shreds.

Brrr was consoled at the sight. He turned his attention to Ilianora, who continued to seem shattered at having witnessed an attack by an invisible foe. Anyone would be spooked by such a thing, he knew, but Ilianora—who shielded herself from notice by her veils—had been the one unlucky witness. She had withstood the opiate of the blossoms better than any of them. Why?

Well, she was sealed up, for one thing—actually and symbolically. That must be it. But having been protected by the suture, she was still vulnerable. The variety of despair brought on by panic and dread. She’d seen too much torture in her childhood. How well would she survive a genuine attack, one that had to be seen, that couldn’t be denied or filed away as delusion or fancy?

20.

The clouds skirted the bright moon in a well-behaved manner, so the companions pressed on through the Sleeve of Ghastille all night. They were eager to escape whatever the lure of poppies called up. Brrr, if he had put a name to it, would have said impatience with Ilianora.

Ilianora would have said panic, though panic had been dogging her footsteps since long before they entered the valley of the poppies.

Little Daffy regretted leaving such abundance of raw poppy material behind, but she went along grudgingly, making allowances for future needs.

Mr. Boss wanted his Clock to start working again.

Hugging Tay like a rag doll, Rain fell more silent than usual. She stayed closer to Brrr than to the others. He was the biggest even if the most squeamish.

Another day or two, another week, it was hard to tell, but things were improving. Maybe they were all just drying out after the wet year. Eventually other growth began to appear among the poppies—a stand of ferns here by the streamside, a clot of sunflowers. Then a few trees, the sort that can find a scrabblehold in sandy soil. The sound of birds up in the greeny shadows. Real birds at their private lessons, then flying high and free against outrageous blue.

The sandy road began to lead along a series of ridges. Brrr had to step carefully lest the ground begin to slide. Though not quite dunes, the slopes were certainly unstable.

Worrying about the apparent conspiracy of the world against the girl, whether Rain knew it or not, Ilianora was a mess of nerves. So Brrr wasn’t surprised when she lost it big-time one afternoon nearing sunset. Mr. Boss was just loosening the Lion from his tethers as the Clock perched on a sedge-grass knoll. Little Daffy was snipping some wild runner beans into a salad. Suddenly Tay set up a careering lollop as if bit by a stag-head beetle. The rice otter went plunging over the edge of the rise. Ilianora followed it with her eyes—more spiders?—to see Rain walking through grass forty, fifty feet down the steepening slope, toward a fell tiger of some sort who was emerging from the shadows of a copse of birches and terrikins.

“Brrr!” cried Ilianora, for she couldn’t sprint that fast, and the Lion could. Brrr was slow to twig, though. “Brrr! She has no fear!”

The Lion slewed about. He let out a roar more iconic than anything else, and he powered his haunches to cover the ground between Rain and the interloper. The dwarf fell back as leathern straps snapped. Probably half-rotted from a year in Quadling Country. The cart inched as if to see for itself, and a curvet of sandhill gave under the rim of the forward wheel. The Clock went plunging down the slope after the Lion; after Rain.

Into this bowl of poppies, the last gasp of their color and prominence, Brrr pounded to the rescue, endangering the Clock. It was a false alarm—or false enough. The stalking creature was a Tiger with Spice Leopard markings. He knew her by the affectionate disregard that rose in her eyes as she turned at the sound of his approach; he knew her for his first love, Muhlama H’aekeem.

21.

You always were rash. I wasn’t going to snack on her,” said Muhlama. She neither flinched nor flushed at seeing him again. As if he hadn’t been chased from her tribe by her chieftain father bent on vengeance—oh, all those years ago, twenty was it? As if Brrr had merely stepped out for an evening constitutional.

She was a matron Ivory Tiger now. Not given over to fat as some might have done, but sleek still. Markings about her cheeks had gone a silver that verged on purple. “I never took you for a pack Lion,” she added as Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, like stout grasshoppers, came hopping down the hill toward the Clock, which lay on its side, the dragon snout collapsed into its own poppy cushions, laid to rest.

“Get back, Rain,” growled Brrr. “Go to Ilianora. She’s having a fit up there.”

“I just wanted to…” Rain put out her hand, palm down, indicating something to Muhlama, but Brrr had no patience. He roared at Rain and she backed up, not so much horrified as, perhaps, embarrassed for him.

“I never thought I’d see you do that,” said Muhlama as the girl retreated. “Roar, I mean. Didn’t quite seem in your makeup. She’s only a human cub, of course. But that was relatively convincing. Have you gone on the stage?”

He couldn’t chitchat. “Were you going to harm her?”

“Why would I want to do that? Of course not. I’ve been looking for her. For you all. The aerial reconnaissance team finally located you after what, a year? I’ve been sent here to swim in the Field of Lost Dreams and drag you out by the scruff of your necks, if I needed to. You’ve been a long time making your way.”

“It’s quite a passage, this Sleeve of Ghastille.”

“You’re almost through. Two miles on there’s real grass. Let’s decamp there.”

“I have to see to the Clock.”

“Not much left of that, it looks like.”

They both soft-footed it over to the heap of split canvas and detritus. One wheel was spinning slowly like a roulette. Mr. Boss was pale, and Little Daffy was trying to fling her arms around him, but he was having none of it. “We’re over, we’re history,” he was saying. “Conscience dead, history buried.”

Rain sat down in the shadow of the wreck and draped one of the leather wings over her head, a tent of sorts. Ilianora stared at Brrr with fierce eyes as if something were all his fault. Well, he was used to that, but not in a while, and not from her.

“How bad is it?” he asked the dwarf. Mr. Boss was blubbering. So the Lion looked for himself.

The wheels on the right side had buckled so that the left side, the most prominent of the stage areas, was exposed to view like a corpse. The Clock’s last revelation? Brrr felt prurient to peer at it, but peer he did. They all did.

The shutters were flung wide. The proscenium had split at the top and its segments overlapped like misaligned front teeth. The red velvet curtain, fallen from its rings, draped off the front of the stage, a lolling tongue.

In the mouth of the Clock, its main stage, lay some composite material, papier-mâché perhaps, made up to look like stones. On one side of the stage they resembled boulders having avalanched down a cliffside, but on the other side they seemed more carved, as if to imitate the rusticated facades of great stone buildings.

The place didn’t look much like the Emerald City, nor like Shiz. Nothing like Qhoyre.

No, this looked like a foreign city-state. Maybe someplace in Ix or Fliaan, if those places even existed. Brrr had his doubts.

Or an imagined place. As if such places existed, either.

Bits and pieces of puppets lay strewn about, spilled into an effectively ropey sort of red, almost like poppy juice. No figure resembled anyone even marginally familiar. No stripe-stockinged witch crushed under a farmhouse. No corpse of baby Ozma bundled upside down into an open sewer. No costume, even, that anyone could identify—no Messiars or Menaciers from the military of Loyal Oz’s Home Guard, no cunning Munchkinlander folk getup for delighting tourists, no glamour gowns from palace balls. In their rictus, the puppets looked only like carved bits of wood and painted plasticine. The strings that held them in place lay snapped atop them. Dead, they convinced nothing about Death, except via the corollary that Life, perhaps, had always been made from scrap materials, and always would be.

“It’s an earthquake,” said Mr. Boss at last. He turned to Brrr. “You did this to it. You killed it.”

“She called out,” said the Lion. His use of the pronoun for his wife was the cruelest remark he had ever made, but he couldn’t help himself. “The girl comes before the Clock. As you should have known this last year, and some.”

“I told you we shouldn’t take her on!” The dwarf staggered about in a circle, beating his forehead with his fists. “The Clock saw the danger, and warned me against her!”

“I don’t cause earthquakes,” said Rain.

“Looks a heap of damaged goods to me,” said Muhlama.

Little Daffy found the Grimmerie a few feet away, lying where it had been pitched. Hidden in the shadow of the dragon’s ripped wing, as if the last act of the failing tiktokery had been to protect the magic book.

The Clock might be sprung at last, its mechanism despoiled after a century of charm, but the book remained closed to prying fingers.

“Let’s right the old lady, anyway, and see if we can cobble together a repair,” said Brrr. He wept a little, as if the dragon had been a companion too, and dissected one of its wings to remove a sallowwood humerus. With his little knife the dwarf fashioned enough of a substitute axle to manage.

They dragged the dead Clock through the last few miles of the Sleeve of Ghastille. In a shadowy meadow where the brook widened out, they paused to breathe the air less thick with poppy dust.

Brrr noticed it was autumn again. More than a year had passed since they had taken Rain from Lady Glinda. The twisted bows of pretzel puzzle trees were raging with hornets doing their anxious final dance. The leaves were falling, red and gold. They fell into the open mouth of the theater. When the sun began to set over the Great Kells and its light struck the stage, the earthquake event glowed as if it had been further plagued by a conflagration.

After a pick-me-up supper had been prepared and mostly ignored, and they were sitting around a small fire of their own, the company of the Clock without, it seemed, the Clock to cohere them, Brrr asked of Muhlama, “On whose agency have you been trying to rope us in? You weren’t a team player when last we met, as I recall.”

“Still not,” she said, yawning. “I’ve turned my back on my tribe, as you did on yours, Sir Brrr. But I never took up with humans. Yes, I’ve heard all about your later … accomplishments.” She had lost none of her power of condescension, he saw, almost affectionately. She continued. “I have no money on the matter of governments either way. I owe no loyalty to the grandees of the Emerald City or to the pipsqueaks of Munchkinland.” Little Daffy glowered at her in defense of her people, but Muhlama was impervious to a Munchkin glower.

“Someone sent you,” prompted Brrr.

“Someone asked me to come,” she agreed. “Someone said you might be in danger. I thought it might be amusing to watch. I had owed you something, after all.”

She had. Brrr’s dalliance with her had given her the alibi to leave the line of succession of the Spice Tiger camp. To escape the destiny of leadership her father, Uyodor H’aekeem, had required of her. Brrr saw that much more clearly now, since he too hadn’t been above using others as pawns for his own ambitions. “I was happy to help,” he said. “Way back then.”

“I made you happy to help,” she admitted. She flicked her tail in a way that reminded him of her seduction, the sordor of it, the ardor of it. But her tail was a commentary on Animal relations, not a come-on. “You freed me from my own prison. These years later, the moment arrived for me to try to do the same for you.” She looked sideways at Ilianora, who appeared as if carved out of ivory, staring at the flames, and added drily, “If that’s your wife, perhaps I didn’t come soon enough.”

“Tell us what you know,” he said. “Has the invasion by Loyal Oz been successful? Has Haugaard’s Keep fallen? Is the Emperor still blathering on his throne? It’s been a year since we’ve lost touch with the news.”

She limned it in quickly. “The Munchkinlanders defended their positions for as long as they could, but eventually they had to abandon the lake. All but the eastern fort. For a while it’s looked as if Loyal Oz will keep Restwater, requiring a retrocession of that edge of Munchkinland. Perhaps, folks said, to avoid further incursions, the Munchkinland Eminence would settle the matter, accepting the loss of the lake in exchange for political integrity of the rest of Munchkinland.”

“The EC only ever wanted water,” said the Lion.

“Not true. They also need the grain supplied by the breadbasket of Oz, in central Munchkinland,” Muhlama argued. “They need enough of a détente that commerce can begin again. There’s been a certain amount of unrest and deprivation in the Emerald City while Oz is engaged in this civil war.”

“So what’s the problem?” asked Brrr. “They sue for peace.”

“The Emperor,” said Muhlama, and yawned. “Shell Thropp. You remember him? I see you do. The younger brother of those sister witches, Elphaba and Nessarose. He has declared himself divine. He has promoted himself god.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” said Mr. Boss, his first comment in hours.

“The Munchkinlanders had enough of godliness after their years under the yoke of Nessarose,” replied the Ivory Tiger. “They’re commonsense when it comes to commerce, but they get their backs up when it comes to dogma. They won’t negotiate with a god. Who could? So just as it seemed a peace might be brokered, the Emperor had to go do a pious makeover and provoke the humble Munchkinlanders, who never ever shall be slaves. It’s not money. It’s some dim little ember of self-respect that won’t die out in the stout breasts of Munchkinlanders.”

“I’m not that stout,” said Little Daffy. “I’d say pleasingly plump.”

“The plumper, the pleasinglier,” said Mr. Boss, laying his head thereupon.

“Who is leading this Munchkinlander resistance to a brokered settlement?” asked Brrr. “When Nessarose was killed by that house of Dorothy…”

“I remember that,” said Little Daffy. “I was there that day.”

Brrr continued. “… the first response upon liberation was to revoke the rights of the Eminences of Munchkinland and centralize control. No? I remember someone named Hipp, or Nipp, who named himself Prime Minister.”

“I didn’t read history, ancient or modern,” said Muhlama. “I’m a creature of the hills and shadows. As you ever knew. But the Eminenceship is not entirely dead. Titles never die, they just go somnolent. Some crone or crony of the old Wizard of Oz has emerged to claim authority, if I have it right. Someone named Mombey. A kind of witch.”

“Hasn’t the Emperor called in all magic utensils, hasn’t he forebade the casting of spells? I thought the time of witches was done,” said Brrr.

“It’s never done,” said the Tigress. “Besides, you’re forgetting the Emperor doesn’t have the rights to legislate about magic in Munchkinland. That’s part of what they’re fighting against.”

“I’m going to bed,” said Ilianora, and she crept into the shadows of the useless Clock, pulling the ratty leather wing over her head like a blanket. “Come, Rain, settle with me. There’s no need to hear gossip about government. It’ll only give you gas.”

“It’s my belief that Munchkinlanders will launch a counterinvasion,” said Muhlama. “Won’t that be fun? Overrunning the EC with pudgy little ferret people? They have a dynamic military commander who has managed to hold on to Haugaard’s Keep, after all. A steeltrap farmgirl now goes by the name of General Jinjuria. She calls herself the Foill of Munchkinland.”

“A stage name for a commanding officer,” said the Lion. “It’s all stage stuff now, isn’t it?”

“Get me my wrap, I don’t need the second act,” she replied.

The dwarf and the Munchkinlander retired on the other side of the Clock. Rain and Tay crept in among the earthquake ruins, and no one stopped them. Muhlama and Brrr stayed awake, side by side, looking not at each other but at the horizon to the east, where creatures with names like Mombey and Jinjuria were providing some background static to the story of the Cats’ rendezvous.

22.

Under stars at first, then under a waterstain of vaporous cloud, high up. They didn’t talk anymore, not till morning.

Ilianora gave the Tiger ample distance, and offered her no coffee.

“I’m no threat to you, Brrr. I’m joining no mission,” said Muhlama. “I’m bringing you out to your counterparts where they wait, and then going my own way. Ever was a rogue Tigress. But I confess to a little curiosity about that Matter of Dorothy. When I heard you were involved, I admit I was surprised. You didn’t seem to have it in you to get so deep into a mess like that.”

“Yes, well, life, it does broaden you. It was just after I left you.”

“I left you,” she reminded him. “But let’s not monkey with nuance. Tell me about that creature. The things that are said about her! A holy fool, say some. A saint. A termagant. A pawn of someone’s larger campaign. She brought down the Wicked Witch of the West, for all her clumsiness—maybe through her clumsiness, for all I know. You were there. What happened?”

“I was nearby,” said the Lion. “I wasn’t present, no matter what the papers said. No one was there but Dorothy and the Witch. No one saw what happened. Liir and I were locked in the scullery, and I had managed to break through the door…”

“My hero,” she purred, meanly.

“But I didn’t get up to the parapet on time. The Witch was gone, and Dorothy descended, blasted and incoherent about what had happened. She was never coherent about very much, come to think of it.”

“Spoken like someone trying to distance himself from the inconvenience of a prior sympathy. But I never understood about the shoes. Magic shoes. Shoes, of all things? Why not magic braces? Or underwear?”

“I didn’t write the script. Don’t ask me.”

“The Witch’s reputation is ripe for a comeback,” said Muhlama. “At least in Munchkinland it is. That peculiar creature, Elphaba Thropp, had positioned herself in opposition to the stony faith that ran in her family. Her minister father, her totalitarian sister—and now her brother is god himself! Never underestimate the mood swings of the crowd. Dorothy’s gone from being thought a heroine to being tagged as an assassin, and Elphaba from Wicked Witch to martyred champion. At least in some circles.”

“The pendulum will swing.”

“Ah, but is there such a thing as a pendulum anymore?” They looked at the collapsed Clock, which Mr. Boss continued to try to clean and organize as if by dint of polish and spit he could persuade it to revive. But it was the preparing of a corpse, no more than that. Everyone could see it.

“You haven’t said to whom we’re headed,” said Brrr. “Is it Lady Glinda? Is she released from house arrest?”

“I don’t follow the columns,” said Muhlama. “Anyway, I’m not talking.” She glanced over at Tay, the rice otter, who lay unrepentantly greenly in Rain’s arms. “You never know who is a squealer.”

Brrr had to agree. “So enough is enough,” said Muhlama. “I’ve done my work, I need to get on.”

“But get on where?” he asked her, as they righted the husk of the Clock. The broken dragon head cantilevered forward, eyeless and insensate.

“Where are you going? And alone? Or is there a companion?”

“You’re so coy.”

“Stay with me, now,” said Ilianora to Rain. “Keep close.” But the girl paid her no more attention than she ever had.

“I’m causing trouble,” said Muhlama to Brrr, tossing her head toward Ilianora. “Pity.”

“Only so much I can do,” replied the Lion, equivocating.

That night Brrr asked of the companions, “Are we going our separate ways?” Muhlama, having said she would deliver them to their party in the morning, had taken herself off for a hike, to give the companions privacy to confer. “I mean, there can be no company of the Clock of the Time Dragon anymore, can there, if there is no Clock?”

“It’s resting. It’s called Time Out,” said the dwarf, back to his old belligerence.

“The Lion has a point. Your primary charge was security for the Grimmerie, wasn’t it?” said Little Daffy to her husband. “To hear you tell it, the Clock was invented as a wheeled cabinet for safekeeping. Distraction to the masses on the one hand, a magic vault on the other. No one would fault us if we ditched the scabby thing now. We sure could move ahead faster without it. The book is still intact.”

“You don’t need me to carry a book,” continued Brrr. “I was a helpful donkey in the shafts of the cart, sure, but I’m not a house pet.”

“Brrr, you do what you like,” said Ilianora to her husband. “It makes no difference to me. You are no house pet. Go with Muhlama, or not.”

“I’m not going with her,” said Brrr, though he didn’t know if it was go with in the adolescent sense, or go with as in the future intentional. And he also didn’t know if he was telling the truth. Ilianora’s suffering charged the conversation with horseradish. If he couldn’t know what his wife felt or meant anymore, how could he understand his own changing aspirations?

“I’ll see the girl to the next juncture,” decided Ilianora, “and I’ll carry the book that far too. I can’t care for her anymore.” Because caring for Rain would hurt—that much was evident. Too much of the young wounded Nor was still, after all this time, alive in the elegant veiled adult. Alive and dead at once. Like the dragon, whose wings flopped in the grass as if with spirit, but nothing like the spirit it had once, magically, possessed.

Midmorning came, a series of brief squalls. Cool, without monsoon steam—glorious. Acorns thrown from trees; the last of some wild plums. Native woodland, nothing magnificent—but at least northern. On the lip of a promontory ahead of them, Muhlama pointed out the arches of some ancient helm that had probably guarded the environs of Restwater from any predation ascending through the Sleeve of Ghastille. “That’s where you’re headed,” the Ivory Tiger told them. “There’s something of a roof left still. You can shelter from the rain there, should it come down stronger, and meet your maties. Then my job is done, and I’m off.”

Brrr didn’t comment. He just pulled the hobbledy-hoy cart, maybe for the last time. Up a road packed with ancient grey cobbles, a road fringed with drying nettles and slipweed knot. He thought of the toddler’s game, building a church with the fingers of two hands. The guardhouse raised its ribs like the fingers of one of those hands, cupped against the air. Built like that? Or had the fingers of an opposite hand collapsed down the slope years earlier? Yes, he could see ancient slates cladding a shed dependence. He could smell a kitchen fire, a roasting haunch of venison, or maybe loin chops of mountain grite. For a moment when the wind died down he heard the sound of a stringed instrument.

The approach to the ruined keep rose to a point slightly higher than the fingertips of the broken arches. Then the path descended in a gentle S-shaped curve. Muhlama led the way, pacing elegantly, her whiskers twitching to sniff out trouble. But the stiffness in her shoulders relaxed. No danger here apparently except the danger that new circumstance presents to old allegiance. “I’ve done what I said,” she called. “Oley oley in-free. Wherever you are, come out, come out. They’re here.”

Brrr was released from his shafts, slipped from buckles and leathers, by the time a low wooden door opened and their hosts emerged. He didn’t recognize the Quadling woman with a domingon in her hands, though he guessed her to be the one called Candle. He knew Liir, though. Coming behind her, his palms on her shoulders. Liir at thirty or thirty-two, maybe. Fuller in the shoulders, higher in the brow, a great mane of dark hair even a Lion could admire. A habit of youthful quiet and temerity aged into something almost like courage. But what would the Lion know about courage?

“The book,” announced Muhlama, “and the girl who comes with it, as a kind of bonus.”

The humans looked at one another. Curiosity and wariness shaded into something not yet like recognition, not yet like wonder. A mathematically perfect pivot, equal amounts of hope on one side and, on the other, alarm that the hope might be unfounded, that this revelation might yet be a mocking lie.

Brrr let them have their human moment. He kissed his good-bye to Muhlama—a final one, a temporary one? He didn’t know. He realized that Ilianora would soon be relieved of responsibility for Rain. Perhaps her distress would lift, once Rain’s parents took in the fact of their daughter. He wouldn’t abandon Ilianora in any pain, whether he could help that pain or not. If, in time, he couldn’t help it—if, in time, he realized that his not being able to help was making it worse—well, he would reconsider.

But not yet. For now, he’d stay by her side, through the next round, whatever it might be. Together he and Ilianora, the dwarf and the Munchkinlander, had delivered Rain to her home, or such home as she might hope to have. Rain was safe, or safe enough.

Now Brrr was left to shield the other bruised girl, the stillborn one huddled inside the veiled woman, for as long as he could. If he could. There wasn’t now, nor would there ever be, any shortage of girl children whose safety he would need to worry about, either in or out of Oz.