The Chancel of the Ladyfish

1.

The outlaws had been told by a Swift that Muhlama would be heading a delegation of exiles, but not who would be among them.

Liir gripped his wife by the hand. Hold back this instant longer, Candle. We’ve been waiting for all these years. Don’t scatter her into the clouds, like the little wren she resembles.

She was here. She had come back. (She’d been brought back. She’d been brought in.) There would be time enough to study her. Time had begun again.

He could feel his wife strain to break free, to surround the child with scary, pent-up love. His forearm would be bulging as he staked Candle immobile. Don’t rush the girl.

Our girl.

He tried to advise Candle by the theatrical turn of his own head. Look at Brrr instead. That old Cowardly Lion, as he’d come to be known. There he stands, dropped to all fours like an animal, naked but for a kind of painter’s blue serge smock with a bow at the back. And rolling his boulderlike head from the girl to her parents, back and forth. The Lion could look at her. He’d earned the privilege. Liir and Candle would have to wait another moment. Now that there were extra moments.

Brrr had gone silvery about the whiskers. He must be nearing forty, surely? So was it age, exhaustion, or nerves that made the Lion’s left rear leg quiver? His mane was full and nicely aerated though even his jowls were bejowled. He’d developed not only a paunch but also a bit of an overbite. However, both tokens of age disappeared when the Lion reared to his hind legs. As if he’d suddenly remembered he was a Namory of Royal Oz. He looked ready to curtsey, but he extended his front paw to Liir.

The Cowardly Lion said, “A lifetime or two ago, somebody you may remember as Dorothy Gale once browbeat me to look after you. I paid little attention. Later, a ripe old fiend named Yackle asked me to protect this child if I could. I tolerated her request without imagining I could oblige her. Yet here I am—surprise, surprise. Presenting my consort, Ilianora, and my young friend who goes by the name of Rain. I’ve unwittingly obeyed both bossy females and done you two services on the same day.” Dropping the sarcasm, he said more huskily, “Would that I could have been of greater service, Liir son of Elphaba.”

Liir hooted. “Don’t take that tone to me. It sounds like you’ve wandered out of some pantomime about Great Moments of Chivalric Oz. ‘Liir son of Elphaba’? I call myself Liir Ko now.” Nonetheless, he fell into the Lion’s embrace. The musk of the Lion’s mane was rank; it smelled like young foxes and incontinent humans. “You old pussy,” he murmured. “I never liked you much, and damn it, now I’ll be in your debt the rest of my life.”

“A rare thing, for me to have any advantage,” replied Brrr. “I’m sure I’ll squander it.” The dwarf nodded in agreement, character assassination at work.

Liir pulled back to say, “This is Candle Osqa’ami.” He beckoned his wife forward. She nodded from the waist; but her eyes never left the girl, who was twisting her ragged tresses around her forearm as if in an agony to tear off her own head. A small greeny-white creature, a ferret or a rotten mink maybe, writhed at the girl’s ankles as a hungry cat might do.

Finally Liir turned to the woman the Lion had introduced as his consort. Only now was she folding the veil back off her foreheard, pulling its drapes away from her cheekbones. The cry Liir gave made everyone start except for Rain, who seemed oblivious.

Nor held up her hand, holding Liir back. “Food first, and water,” said Nor, in a voice that was and wasn’t the voice Liir remembered from childhood. “Our histories have waited this long; they can wait till the washing up. Candle Osqa’ami, show me a chore, and I’ll help you with what needs doing. I’m south any appetite for overwrought reunions.” As she passed Liir, she trained her eyes forward, but the fingers of her left hand reached out to graze his elbow and his hip.

Candle didn’t budge, just flapped a hand toward the crumbling narthex as if to let the busybody find whatever she would in there. “We’ll follow right along,” said Liir. Nor drifted into the building alone.

Candle dropped to her knees, so Liir dropped too. Candle clapped three times. The girl looked at Candle with mild curiosity, maybe aversion. Candle clapped again, twice, and this time their daughter clapped back. Once. Feebly. It was a start.

“Oziandra Osqa’ami,” said Candle.

“Commonly called Rain,” remarked the dwarf, to whom no one had been paying attention. “And as we old ones remember from those decades of the Great Drought, Rain rarely comes when she’s called. Even when she’s called by the name she knows. Rain.”

“Oziandra Rain,” said Candle.

“Child,” said Liir. He didn’t know the significance of that Quadling clapping. He just lifted his hands, palms out, as he might to a sniffing hound or a hurt wolf-cub. Safe, open. No stone, no knife.

The dwarf cuffed Rain on the crown of her head. “Go to them, bratling, or we’ll never get a bite to eat. After all that poppy-dust in the nostrils I’m stranded on the famished side of peckish.” So Rain stepped forward, out of everyone’s shadows—out of the shadows of the last eight years. And Liir looked at her.

In the sloping light of evening Liir couldn’t tell if he was noting a condition of facial structure or an expression. Or was it a lack of expression? The girl’s eyes seemed cloaked. She had Candle’s high cheekbones and hazelnut jaw, but she was urchin-thin and dusty as a rebel. She held a translucent porcelain something tucked into an elbow. A shell, he saw. Far the largest shell he’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re nice but that’s nicer,” he said, pointing at it. “May I see it?”

“You’re taking liberties before you have a license,” observed the dwarf, but the Munchkinlander dame cuffed him good and proper. Then the small square couple followed Nor into the keep. Even Brrr started to pad away, but the girl whimpered, so the Lion sat down halfway. He set to grooming himself with a desultory air.

“It’s awfully pretty,” Liir said of the shell. His heart was beating as if he were in a court of law—a court of recriminations and, maybe, pardons. “Can you hear anything in it?” He inched forward on his knees, only a scosh.

The girl put the thing up to her ear and listened. Then she turned away to ramble after her companions through the shattered archway of the porch and into the open-roofed ruin of the building. The verdant creature—perhaps an otter?—scampered after her. Candle’s face had fallen but her weeping remained silent, at least for now.

“I think that went pretty well,” said the Lion.

“Is the child all right?” asked Liir. His eyes followed her as she crossed a patch of gloaming light, the sort that gilds every feature at the last minute. She looked normal as a copper farthing. Not a sign of green in her skin, not at this hour, not in this sunset attention. “Is she all right, do you think?”

“Begging pardon, it’s been a long day. It’s been a long year,” said Brrr, “and believe me, I’m no expert. But I’d say she’s right as rain.”

2.

Liir caught Candle’s hand as they hurried up the sandy steps to their sanctuary. “She’ll need to adjust,” he said. “We have to give her time.”

“We’ve given her all those years. I have no more moments to spare.”

Their daughter had gone ahead wispily, surlily perhaps. Liir tried to see this hideout anew, as if through Rain’s eyes, realizing that he had no notion of what she’d ever seen before. Stowed away in Lady Glinda’s entourage as she’d been. And who knows what else she’d witnessed on the road.

The place where he and Candle had washed up—how improbable it seemed. Perched high over the pass that led from the Sleeve of Ghastille toward central Oz. A nameless hill, so far as they knew—in sillier moods Liir sometimes referred to it as Mountain Objection. Travelers watching their footing below would have no reason to lift their eyes; in any case, the spot was camouflaged by overgrowth.

The place may have been established as a guard keep or a pilgrim’s destination. But when Liir and Candle had found it—they were hunting for a cave in which to hunker down, out of sight—it’d been abandoned for decades. Longer, maybe. For some community of cliff dwellers time out of mind, this outpost had been home. Home, or maybe an inn for passersby, for the underground warren was supplied with small cells and the remains of bedsteads and mattresses.

The ruin aboveground, through which Liir and Candle now walked, looked designed for some public function. At this stage in its collapse, the wall facing southwest was gone. The pavers of the great formal floor lay open to the sky. All that was left of the outside wall were the stumps of a line of columns. Like a lower jaw full of bad teeth. Ivory, grey, eroded. The opposite wall, hugging the hill that rose behind it, featured columns leading to the ribs of a missing roof and a dais of some sort.

In the few unionist chapels Liir had ever bothered to visit, the lectern had always stood at the far end of a rectangle, opposite the vestibule and porch. Here totemic sculptures and a sort of throne were inset against the hill wall, in the long side of the box, rather than tucked into the far apse. The carvings between the intact columns faced the broken columns and the sky and valley beyond, as if visitors on giant birds might swoop in for an audience.

Now he and Candle caught up with Rain. She’d paused at the altarpiece or whatever it was, and there she stood, tracing her hands over the surface.

At first Liir was puzzled. After an initial glance at the graven images, years ago, he’d ignored them except as hooks for bleeding a wild lamb or muttock, ledges for drying berries and onions. But Rain had set her pink shell in a niche, just so. The supports of the ledge were carved like shells too. He’d never noticed.

The shelf capped a panel of carved marble. Like a blind person, Rain was feeling the sculpture with a curiosity and openness she hadn’t shown to her mother or father.

A type of fish-woman, perhaps a lake mermaid of some sort. Her lower half tapered into a scaley tale and fins. From each of her hips flared a pair of spinnerets. Her arms and breasts were naked. Her face, set in profile against a dial or plate of some sort, gave the effect of a head on a coin. Liir didn’t know who she was—maybe some fishy variant of Lurline, maybe the invention of a bored unionist monk with a chisel and an appetite for breasts. But the creature looked in equal measure both beneficent and ferocious.

Rain’s hands touching the stern blank eye, the weatherworn stone breasts, the imbrications of those stony scales—his daughter made Liir see that the carving had character. He hadn’t noticed.

Still so much to see, so much to take in, and he was thirty or thereabouts—halfway through his life, assuming the Emperor’s assassins didn’t find him out at last and cut his life short.

Candle couldn’t hold back any longer. She wrenched away from Liir and moved forward to kneel beside Rain. He could see the similar shapes of their skulls, but the girl’s shoulders were tight, as if wound onto her spinal column like a wing nut, whereas Candle had tended toward a sexy fullness of form the past few years.

“I like this one,” said Candle in her soft, bruised voice. Her hand reached out to touch a star-shaped protrusion humping along with others in a welter of runes. For all Liir knew, this row of roughs was only the pattern-block of an anonymous instructor of ancient carving. He didn’t care. He had an aversion to magic, implied or actual.

“Me too,” said Rain, “but this better.” She chose from a protected cubby a small freestanding stone Liir had never noticed. He neared to look over her shoulder. About the size of a breviary, the display side was polished smooth as milk pudding. In it was carved something impossibly small and delicate. Liir couldn’t imagine the human hand that might manage such particularity, nor the instrument that such a hand might use. A relief of a vaguely animal-shaped creature. A sort of snouted feather, a legless head of a pony erect on a curved spine or tail. An inch high, no more. “What is it?” asked Rain.

“I don’t know,” said Candle.

“Pure fancy, I suspect,” said Liir, trying out the pedagogical function of fatherliness. “Nothing living can stand upright without at least two legs.”

“A tree can. What’s this?” The girl pointed to another shape carved into the lintel, a protrusion too peculiar for Liir to compare to anything else.

“An accident of the artist’s adze? Or maybe it was once something remarkable, but wind and rain took away its character over time. So now it’s just a mystery.”

“Wind and rain?”

“They blow from the west, clear cross the hall, or from the south. Sometimes—once a year—a storm with tiny teeth of salty sand, which rub at these carvings.”

“I never knowed of storms that could change off the face of a creature.” Rain looked surprised at the idea of the ravage of the world. “How many storms was it?”

“Hundreds of years of storms,” Candle answered her. “More years than I could count. We’ve only been here a handful of years, and the damage was done when we arrived. Nothing’s changed since we got here, but the sand comes and settles. I brush it off with feathers when the great wind subsides.”

Rain made her fingers like feathers, brushing, brushing. “What is this place?”

“It’s your home,” said Candle, and extended her hand to touch Rain’s hand—to cover it as Rain had covered the star shape.

This was a venture too bold. “I got no home,” said Rain, and pulled away and walked into the dark doorway that led to the stairs and the catacomb apartments in which Candle and Liir had hid, and lived, through the time it had taken seven rainstorms to deposit seven skins of sand upon the evaporating stone.

3.

Just before they’d met Muhlama yesterday, Ilianora had cried out to the Lion that Rain had no fear. Rain had heard this, and she knew it was wrong. She had plenty of fear, all right. For instance, she didn’t trust these two new people in their hilltop hideaway. The man was possessed by something aggravated, something with the intensity of hornets. He tried to disguise it, but she could see. The woman was no calmer, even though she looked like a Quadling, and Rain’s exposure to Quadlings in Ovvels had led her to consider them kindly and placid. Up till now.

I’ll have no part of this, she thought, though she knew she had little choice.

She found Brrr downstairs, pacing in and out of stone doorways, checking out the lodgings. “Time was I might have expected the sheets turned down and a chocolate bourbonette placed upon the pillow,” he said. “But since there are no sheets or pillows, I suppose hoping for a chocolate bourbonette is a waste of energy. Rain, where should we sleep?”

“Far away from here.”

“Tiss toss, somebody’s cross. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“En’t nothing under my skin but my underskin.” She threw herself down on the floor, purposefully hard so she could bang her coccyx and try out a cuss. Tay twisted its head at her, confused.

Brrr had learned enough not to take the bait. He said nothing.

“How long are we here? When are we going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t yet really understand where we’ve arrived. Shall we go help with food, and see what we can learn?”

“I can’t learn anything.”

Brrr decided to consider morbid self-loathing something of an advance in the consolidation of Rain’s character. “Well, if you’re enjoying a little hissy-mood, why don’t you come along and find more to disapprove of upstairs?”

“You can leave me here to die.” She stretched out on her back and put an arm over her head. She made an unconvincing corpse, though Brrr knew that with enough practice—sixty, seventy years on—she’d get it right.

“Well, I’m going to sleep here. I think this room is kind of cozy. I like how a little natural light comes in through that slit. I bet you can see stars on a cloudless night, inching by.” She didn’t look. “But while there’s work to be done for supper, it’s cowardly to shirk down here. So now I’m going above. You can do as you like.”

“I know that.”

He had to suppress a smile. A vexed Rain was slightly more coherent: there was more of her on display. He knew she’d follow eventually.

Back outside, in a summer kitchen beyond the nave of the sacred fishy lady, Liir and Candle were scrubbing some turnips. A rusty kettle hanging on a hook bubbled, a rich onion broth. Ilianora—Brrr couldn’t yet think of her as Nor, which was how Liir addressed her—was mashing carrots with a pestle. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were collecting from the compartments of the Clock anything that might be of use. Scissors, forks, banged-up pewter plates. Dried herbs. Candle’s eyes went wide and delighted at the sight of oregano and pumperfleck.

Brrr was no better at dicing cubes of salted grite than he was at the preparation of radish roses. His arthritic paws were devoid of opposable anythings. Settling to take some of the evening wind onto his jowls, he closed his eyes to listen to the murmur of human malcontent. It was comfortingly so like his own.

When Rain cried out, because splashed by moiling soup—so she’d emerged, no surprise there—Brrr opened his eyes. They focused to pick out a statue of an iron goose framed in a collapsing archway of unpruned peony hedge.

The bush was past its prime. Like the rest of us, he guessed. Then the statue kinked a leg and spoke.

“None of my business, of course, but have you paid any attention to the question of whether or not your dinner guests are being followed?” He appeared to be addressing the peonies, since one could not tell on whom his glazed eye was fixing.

“We’ll get to that,” said Liir to the Goose. “We’ll talk after we eat. If you’re so concerned, launch yourself and take a loop around once or twice. Settle your mind about it.”

“Couldn’t be bothered to exercise myself. The moment your incarceration arrives, I take to wing with a song in my breast and the old heave-ho.”

“Ever the optimist,” Candle said to the newcomers, shrugging. “This is Iskinaary. Liir’s familiar.”

“Not as familiar as all that,” protested the Goose.

“I never knew a Bird to shelter with humans,” said Brrr.

“I never knew a Lion to mind his own business,” snapped the Goose.

“Don’t let the Goose vex you,” said Liir. “We haven’t had company for so long, he’s forgotten how to be cordial.”

“You’ve forgotten how to be suspicious,” complained the Goose. “These vagabonds come creaking like the Walking Dust of St. Satalin’s Graveyard and you don’t worry it’s the opening salvo of an ambush attempt?”

“Muhlama has promised to stalk the perimeter tonight before she slinks away in the morning,” soothed Liir. “No need to ginger up the atmosphere, Iskinaary. This feast has been postponed for too long. You were there when the little girl was born. You can manage to be glad she’s back. No?”

“This is all my fault. I saw the Clock from the air, we sent Muhlama to investigate since she was passing through. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. But the girl is trouble, Liir, and dragging trouble in her wake. Mark my words. And I’m not crazy about the otter.” At Liir’s lowered brow, the Goose hurried on, “Not that I mind, of course. I love trouble. The spice of life and proud progenetrix of all progress, yes yes. Don’t mind me.”

“I think someone’s being sentimental,” suggested Liir. “We’ve never had reason to see how a Goose gets sentimental before. High emotion is nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”

“We have a Cowardly Lion and a Sentimental Goose, is that it? No thank you,” said Iskinaary. “I’m not interested in the position.” He curled his neck like the hoop of an iron rail marking out the edge of an ornamental border and he nipped viciously at his breast. “I’ll dine alone on my own nits, thank you.”

The humans sat cross-legged on a blanket. Under the circumstances Little Daffy offered a brief grace in a general sense, addressed to Sender. The slop was good as well as plentiful. Brrr ate with his tongue rather than a spoon. He was getting too old to fuss with a spoon at every meal. Rain sulked and wouldn’t touch a bite.

When they were done, Candle suggested that she and Rain might take a knife to the peonies and cut some to arrange on the shell altar. Tay slunk after, docile as an old family collie. After they’d wandered away, Liir ventured softly, “Before they come back, in case it’s upsetting to Candle, can anyone tell me about Rain?”

“She’s a bothersome girl, more trouble than she’s worth,” said Mr. Boss. He’d hardly spoken since they arrived. Well, observed Brrr, ever since the Clock took its tumble, Mr. Boss has gone very silent indeed.

Liir’s fixation on the girl seemed to annoy the dwarf, who continued, “What you see when you look at Rain is all there is. You can’t get milk from a salamander. I want to know what’s going on down there.” He swept his hand skyward to the north and east. “We’ve spent a year with Quadlings who wouldn’t know a current event if it rolled over and squashed their granny. I can see you’ve removed yourself from the cocktail party circuit, but you must hear something in your aerie up here, if you have an assortment of winged foreign correspondents. What’s the news out of Oz?”

“Since when?” asked Liir.

“When we left Munchkinland more than a year ago,” replied Mr. Boss, “Lady Glinda was confined to Mockbeggar Hall. Her country estate on Restwater, as you may know. An army of Loyal Oz had gotten halfway up the lake, heading inland, but its armada was destroyed by a spot of magic. A dragon escaped and flew south, we think, and that’s the last we heard for certain.”

Some bad memory there, thought Brrr, seeing Liir pale at the mention of the beast. Evenly enough, though, Liir replied, “We’ve seen or heard no sign of any dragon.”

The dwarf snorted. “Yes, Lord Limp in the Lap, but what about the armies bucking about Restwater?”

“We came here to get out of the path of armies.”

The Goose suddenly snapped to life again and hissed at Liir. “You’ve invited them to stay the night and you’re suddenly above gossip? Has the arrival of that child mischiefed your mind? Listen, little man,” he told the dwarf, “the last we heard, General Cherrystone had taken the lake, even storming Haugaard’s Keep. The Munchkinlanders cleverly vacated their stronghold so they could isolate and contain Cherrystone once he took it. They have him holed up there. He retains lake access but he can’t move farther inland toward Bright Lettins, the new capital. Some fortresses are harder to quit than they are to breach.”

The dwarf said, “Smart. And…?”

The Goose went on. “Tit for tat, the Munchkinlanders have formed an alliance with the Glikkuns to their north, and appropriated the emerald mines in the Scalps. Easy enough to defend those mountain passes. And the Glikkuns have cut the rail line into Loyal Oz. You can hardly be surprised. They’ve been taken advantage of by the Emerald City for decades. It’s all stupefyingly predictable. The Glikkuns, those trolls, are natural allies to the stumpy Munchkinlander folk.”

“You should talk,” said Little Daffy. “You’re not any taller than I am.”

“Who’s leading the Munchkinland government?” asked Brrr, to keep the conversation civil, and also to find out.

The Goose gargled and hootled. “Liir himself would be eligible for Eminence in Munchkinland, should he ever claim the seat. His aunt, the so-called Wicked Witch of the East, having been the last Eminent Thropp.”

Liir shrugged. “Not interested in the job. Anyway, I’ve changed my name to Liir Ko, so maybe I’m not eligible.”

“Since the Emperor of Oz, Shell Thropp, was Nessarose’s younger brother,” said the Goose, “it’s on the basis of a blood claim to the position of Eminence of Munchkinland that the Emperor validates his invasion. You’d pass muster too, Liir.”

“But names,” said Brrr. “Who’s holding Munchkinland together?”

“To the north, the Glikkun alliance is managed by a mangy old troll-woman named Sakkali Oafish,” replied Iskinaary.

Brrr closed his eyes. He remembered Sakkali Oafish. The Massacre at Traum, for which he’d earned his sobriquet as the Cowardly Lion. The one thing about a social indignity was that, like several of the nastier rashes, it was never completely cured, and could flare up at a moment’s notice.

“In Munchkinland proper,” the Goose continued, “the mastermind is an old witch named Mombey.”

“That’s not a Munchkinlander name,” scoffed Little Daffy.

“She’s Gillikinese originally. But as you may have noticed, the Munchkinlander that might serve, won’t.” Again Iskinaary indicated Liir. “And the one that would serve, namely the Emperor, isn’t welcome. So Mombey’s holding things together somehow. Her chief military strategist, who’s kept Cherrystone boxed up in Haugaard’s Keep all year, is a saucy young warrior princess named Jinjuria. General Jinjuria, she calls herself.”

“Yes, Muhlama told us about her. Well, Munchkinland was ever a stomping ground for strong women,” said Little Daffy. “Nessarose Thropp, this Mombey, this General Jinjuria. You got to hand it to them.”

“Yes, they’re just as bitter and conniving as men,” said Iskinaary. “They might’ve offered a position to one of the many Animals who took refuge inside their borders all those years ago, back during the Wizard’s pogroms. But noooooo. When women share power, they share power with women.”

“And you have a problem with that?” Little Daffy picked up a small sharp stone and tossed it up and down.

The dwarf intervened. “Come on, Husky Honey, remember we’re guests. Not nice to stone our hosts.”

“This is hardly news,” said Iskinaary, “but Nessarose was no fainting sweetheart, once she took the chair. The way I hear tell it, Elphaba Thropp had her own permanent case of broom rage too. Don’t murder the messenger. I’m just answering the question you posed.”

Once again Brrr broke in. “Is Lady Glinda free?”

“The latest gossip,” said the Goose, “is that she was charged with treason against Loyal Oz. For somehow arranging the assault on the armada. As if she could manage that!—she who can’t manage to thread a needle. But if she’s been taken from Mockbeggar I couldn’t say. My circle of informants doesn’t stoop to information of such particularity.”

“It en’t all her fault.” They hadn’t seen Rain and Candle come back, arms full of satiny white peonies glowing in the fading light. The girl said, “Me and Lady Glinda—we did it together.”

“Keep marching in the direction you’re going, little girl,” said Iskinaary, “and you’ll hit the banks of Restwater again. If you apologize to General Cherrystone nicely, maybe he’ll only slap you in prison for the rest of your life instead of killing you outright.”

Ilianora gasped, and Liir bellowed, “Iskinaary! Mind yourself.”

“Somebody’s got to tell that girl the truth,” snapped the Goose. “Or eventually she’ll put herself in the same kind of danger she’s putting you.” He craned his neck and looked, just for an instant, regal—at least regal for a Goose. He kick-stepped his way across the stones to where Candle and Rain had paused and he stood before them. From Brrr’s vantage point, his graphite feathers made a sort of silhouette against the white blossoms drooping from Rain’s arms. The Goose all but honked at the girl. “I have no reason to like you, Miss Oziandra Rain, but neither will I let a damaged child waltz into peril because her companions are congenitally foolish.”

“Well, I don’t like you either,” said Rain, pelting the Goose with her heap of blooms. Unfazed, he poked his bill among them to enjoy the ants crawling in the sweetness. Brrr had to admire his composure.

Candle hid a small smile of her own by raising her armful of blooms up to her nose.

4.

Under their common blanket Liir comforted Candle that evening. “You hover too close, you’ll scare her away,” he murmured. “She feels safe with the Lion. There, there. Hush, don’t let them hear you.”

“You always said I could see the present,” said Candle, when she could speak. “But I can see nothing about her—my own daughter.”

Liir smoothed his hand over her silky flank. “Maybe that’s not so surprising. Maybe all parents are blindest to their own offspring.”

“It isn’t right. It isn’t natural.”

“Hush. They’ll hear you. Remember—the morning is always brightest after the moonless night.”

Eventually she fell asleep, if only, he guessed, to escape his platitudes. But it was the best he could do.

Even at this slight elevation, Highsummer was passing more quickly than in the valley. The dawn revealed a new ruddiness to the greenery. “I want to have a better look at that Clock,” Liir told the dwarf after breakfast. “You’re the chargé d’affaires about that, right?”

“You could call me the timekeeper,” said Mr. Boss, “only I seem to have lost track of the time. Sure, come along. There’s little to be lost or gained in the Clock’s prophecies anymore.”

They stumped down the stone path to where they’d left the Clock the night before. The assemblage look weather-beaten with age. Which it had every right to look, after all these years.

“I always thought this Clock was apocryphal,” said Liir.

“It is apocryphal. That’s the point.” The dwarf seemed to be tilting into a sour mood.

“I never expected to see it,” said Liir. “Somehow it’s smaller than I imagined.”

“Most of us are. You too, bub.”

Liir had more than his share of personal flaws, but rushing to take offense wasn’t one of them. “How’s this thing work, anyway?”

“It doesn’t. That’s the crisis.”

The stage curtains yawned open like a fresh wound. “Is this supposed to simulate something?”

“Ruin,” said the dwarf. “Of the Clock, or of my life. Makes little difference. Perhaps its time has come. Even a thing can die, I guess. Though I never thought about that before this year.”

“Maybe someone could fix it up?”

“Some magician, you mean?” The dwarf glanced up at Liir. “I know your mother is said to have been Elphaba. The Wicked Witch of the West. Great stage name, that. But I doubt you inherited the talent.”

“I have no capacity. I wasn’t volunteering for the job. I was just wondering.”

“The magic of the Clock doesn’t originate in Oz, so it can’t be amended here.” The dwarf kicked at the hub of a wheel. The drawer with the Grimmerie in it sprung open. “I suspect you were looking for this little number, once upon a time.”

“The Grimmerie?” guessed Liir.

“The same.”

“Yes, I was. Once, anyway. Maybe twice… I hunted through Kiamo Ko for it, but it’d either been hidden or taken away.”

“It’s made the rounds, this great book. It was given to Sarima, your father’s wife; then to Elphaba; then to Glinda, more than once. When it’s not being used it’s come back to me. But the Clock can’t keep it safe anymore, and I can’t determine through the Clock who should have it. So it’s yours now. Happy birthday and no happy returns. I don’t want it. You’re as deserving a candidate as any. Besides, I hear your daughter can read it some.”

“But—whoever brought it to Oz—whoever magicked the Clock—might want it back.”

“Whoever.” The dwarf snarled.

“I mean, your boss.”

“My liege and master?” Mr. Boss made a rude gesture. “He cast me away in this land with a job to do and a Clock by which to count the hours of my service. He hasn’t come back. If the Clock is done counting my shift, so am I. The book is yours, bub.”

“What if I don’t want it either?”

“Try to get rid of it and see what happens.” Mr. Boss grinned, nastily. “I wouldn’t like to be an enemy of that thing. I’ve managed to stay neutral, but even so.”

“Yeah. I’ve tried to stay neutral too. It isn’t always possible.”

They paused, in a stalemate about something neither could name.

“Well. Are you going to pick it up?” asked the dwarf.

“And what if I don’t? I came here with Candle to protect her, to protect myself. I’m not Elphaba. Never could be. I know my limitations. I don’t deserve anything this powerful. I can’t use it and I can’t protect it.”

“If you don’t take it, sir,” said the dwarf, “I shall give it to your daughter.”

So Liir had no choice. A moment that comes, sooner or later, to all parents.

5.

Rain saw Liir carry the Grimmerie into the chancel. She was uneasy about the great book now she knew that Lady Glinda had gotten into trouble by reading it. Yet Rain still felt the book’s subtle allure. Her mouth watered. She was eager not to do magic but to read. She’d had too little reading. What few things that General Cherrystone had taught her were languishing in her head, pollywogs that could never grow up into frogs.

“What you going to do with that?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“I don’t think this is a good thing for you to look at. It’s powerful stuff, from all I’ve heard.”

“I’m powerful stuff.”

He grinned and shook his head. Without having words to express it, Rain knew that a smile tends to avert or disguise the natural tension that pools around people trying to be in the same place at once. But Liir’s smile would have no effect on her. She would see to that. “Where you going to stow it?”

“I don’t know. No place seems safe enough.”

“I’ll hold it for you.”

“That would be like giving you a boa constrictor for a pet. No father would do that.”

“You’re not my father.” The words just slipped out—they weren’t antagonistic, just commentary.

“Actually, I am. Though I surely can see how you might doubt it.” As if he was afraid the book would open up of its own accord, he set it on the ground and sat on it. She hoped it would bite him on his behind. “If you could look in this book, what would you be looking for?”

“Words,” she said, cannily, honestly.

“Which ones? Magic ones?”

She didn’t feel like saying that all words were magic, though she thought so. But she wasn’t skilled at indirection. She was more arrow than hummingbird. “I want to read the burning words,” she said at last.

She couldn’t think of Liir as her father, she couldn’t.

Liir looked at her with sudden sharpness. “What do you mean, the burning words?”

She shrugged at that and she would have wandered off to make a point about how free of him she was. But there was the book. He was sitting on it. She wanted to see where he would put it. In case.

Was he still waiting for her to speak?

She couldn’t force a remark any more than she could force a smile, any more than she’d been able to force herself to read before she’d been taught the rubrics. She waited, squatting on her haunches, casting sideways looks at the Grimmerie in case it began to leak language out onto the stones.

“You want to read the burning words,” prompted Liir.

“Don’t you?”

He blinked. Another language she didn’t get, how people blink. How they make their eyes go wet. “Where do you find the burning words?” he asked her.

She thought of the armada scorching the ice. Something was being spelled out there; fire moved in such a way, and smoke issued from fire, as if to hide what was being spelled inside the heat. Oh, but all that was too fussy a thought. She took up a bug that didn’t mind the chilly air and studied it on her forefinger instead.

She could tell this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out. She only saw charred letters in a lake. The alphabetic remains of ships.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Liir.

She thought and thought about that. She felt her calves begin to ache; she felt the tickle of the bug’s legs against her fingers. Someday, presumably, she wouldn’t have these legs or these fingers, but the legs and fingers of someone who stood as tall as this man could. She twisted in her thinking, trying to be honest since she didn’t believe she could be smart, and she gave the answer to the insect rather than to the man who claimed to be her father. She wouldn’t think of Liir as her father.

What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”

6.

Gone, when she grew up. A terrible thought. But in a way she was gone already, right now. Her form had come back to them but her spirit was balking.

Candle mourned that Rain wasn’t bothering with her much. Liir asked himself: What mother wouldn’t? But it seemed as if, instead of Liir’s and Candle’s warmth melting Rain’s resistance, it worked the other way around. The child’s aloofness was contagious. Candle and Liir were learning to weather a mutual pain separately, independently. No matter the closeness of the marriage bed, the history between them.

Maybe to distract himself from his other worries, Liir tried to fasten on his half-sister. He and Nor shared a father, presumably, though Liir had never met that distant figure, Fiyero. But Nor was also floating at some distance away from Liir. The great reunion that he’d dreamed of for years was a sham. Kidnapping, prison, escape, disappearance? You’d never know it by her self-effacing manner. She might as well just have come home after shopping for biscuits.

He didn’t want to crowd his sister any more than he wanted to crowd his daughter. He watched Nor move about with a woodenness that sometimes seemed like grace, and sometimes not. Maybe this was her normal way? He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been abducted. Back when she’d been a girl roughly the age that Rain was now.

Never confident about women, Liir scrutinized his sister—with equal parts interest, patience, and suspicion—to see in what way might she turn out to be damaged.

As if he were writing a catalog on the subject of human misery.

Another way to avoid admitting how it had settled in too close, like lice.

The opportunity to engage Nor without threatening her arose naturally enough. Every couple of weeks Liir was in the habit of descending from the mount to a wildwood garden. He collected mushrooms, fiddleheads, frostflower pods, and lettuce. It was half a morning’s hike. The next time he needed to thin the lettuce or lose it, he bundled up a few baskets, some stakes, a trowel, and he asked Nor to come along.

They strolled equably enough, chatting about the landscape and the moods of the climate. From time to time they fell into silence. A bird hopped on a blighted oak limb. A few chipmunks, at the business of growing their hoards, scampered like shadows of something overhead. The wind sawed through the thickery. You could hear the autumn inching in.

“Looks as if this has been a productive yard for generations,” said Nor, indicating the ancient stone tablets tilting at the end of the sunnier furrows.

“Behold: here lies the last person to tell the truth.”

She blinked at him.

“Sorry. Graveyard humor. But if those stones ever said anything like that, they stopped saying it long ago.”

Nor nodded. “They look like teeth. And your hermitage, or whatever it once was—it looks like a mouth too. A big open jaw swallowing the wind.”

“Swallowing the poppy trade, probably,” said Liir. Nor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the poppy trade?”

“I don’t know much. Even though we swam through the bloody sea of them.”

“Sometimes the Yunamata venture south as far as here to harvest the poppy pods. The takings are useful for their groggy rituals, and the illegitimate opiate market is always eager to barter. Your little Munchkinlander apothecaire knows all about that, I’m sure. Some of the harvest seeps through the black market for smoking in certain parlors in Shiz and the EC, I’m told.”

“You’re not an habitué?”

“I haven’t been into a parlor of any sort since I grew facial hair.”

Nor bent to pick the lettuce, which was near to bolting. “Situated where it is, maybe your private stronghold used to be a countinghouse for the poppy merchants. Or maybe the defense headquarters against such a trade.”

“Whoever might tell us is probably long ago buried in the lettuces. It’s all guesswork.”

“But the trade has dropped off?”

“Seems so. Certainly the EC authorities don’t approve; they’re afraid the opiates will get to the conscripted soldiers and erode morale. You didn’t see sign of anyone marking out a little meadow for harvesting?”

“Not a soul.”

They worked in companionable silence. Liir staked the stems of frostflower so they would winter over. They were best cut down in the early spring. Finished with the lettuce, Nor put her hand on the small of her back and stretched. She dropped the heap of curled green pages into her shawl, and turned her attention to some radishes, but she gave up when one after another pulled up mealy. “What next?” she asked.

Liir leaned back on his heels. “I have something to show you.” She waited. He pulled from his tunic a folded bit of paper. “I found this at Kiamo Ko. Can you bear to look at it?”

She came over to squat next to him. The browning paper, creased into softness, showed a faded drawing of a young girl. Hardly more than an infant, though with a certain crude spark in the eye. A personality. The letters in childlike hesitancy said

Nor by Fiyero.

This is me Nor

by my father F

before he left

It took her a half an hour to compose herself. Liir left his arm slung around her as if around the shoulder of a drinking mate—not too close. Not imprisoning. Just there. When she was ready, she tapped the page twice with a forefinger and said, “I found that drawing before you did. It was in the Witch’s room at the castle. My father had drawn me for his mistress, and she had kept it. She who seemed impervious to sentimentality had kept it all those years. When I came across it—I must have been rooting through her room one day, bored, as children will be—I wrote the caption and put the page back where it was, so the Witch would know she could keep the paper but she couldn’t keep my father from me, not in my memory.”

“How much do you remember about those times? With your mother and brothers and me and the Witch? And those other aunts of yours? Back in Kiamo Ko?”

“I was hardly a teenager when I was abducted,” she said. “And so of course I remember almost all of it. Or I thought I did. But I’d forgotten this.”

“Do you remember they took me too?—but Cherrystone decided I wasn’t worth the labor of hauling overland? He left me tied up in a sack and hanging from a tree. I had to gnaw through the burlap, which took the better part of a day … then I fell twelve feet and almost killed myself. And by the time I came around, you were gone. You were all gone. I made my way home to the castle and waited for the Witch to come back—she was in Munchkinland, I think. That was just when her sister, Nessarose, orchestrated the Munchkinlander schism, and they seceded from Loyal Oz.” He’d been talking too fast. He slowed down. “What happened to you when they took you?”

“What I do remember I don’t want to talk about.” She’d been with her mother and her older brother, Irji. And those aunts. Gruesome. Maybe Nor was right: maybe Liir didn’t really want to know. After all. Nor had been the only one to survive.

“Do you know that I talked my way into Southstairs Prison to find you?” he asked her. “After the Wizard abdicated and Lady Glinda came to be Throne Minister? My guide was none other than Shell Thropp. Shell Thropp, the Witch’s brother. My uncle, though I didn’t know it yet. A cad of the first order, and now he’s the Emperor.”

“We’ve just learned he’s divine. Being related to him, does that make you a saint?”

Liir bowed his head, though not in piety. “When I finally got into the prison, you had just escaped from Southstairs. A few days earlier. I was that close to finding you. They said you’d hidden yourself between the corpses of some Horned Hogs and been carried out in a pudding of putrescent Animal flesh.” He tried to laugh. “Really?”

“I don’t care to think about it.” The way she spoke told Liir it was all too true.

“It sounds as if you were so close to Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall. Didn’t you want to take revenge on him? After all, at the Wizard’s instructions he abducted and murdered your family. Or had them murdered. Much later, once I went AWOL from the service of the Emerald City Messiars, he began to have me hunted too. He attacked the mauntery called Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows because we were said to be there. He—”

“We? You and Candle?”

“Me and Trism. My bosom companion. We’d torched the stable of flying dragons that were being used to terrify the Scrow and the Yunamata, so Cherrystone was out for our blood. And when Cherrystone caught up with Trism at last he probably beat the bloody hell out of him. Listen, at Mockbeggar Hall, didn’t you want to put a stiletto through Cherrystone’s throat? I would have. Wanted to, at least.”

She went back to the lettuces and began to arrange them in ranks of size, as if that mattered. Her voice was flat and unconcerned when she spoke again. “I’ve spent all my adult life either fighting the excesses of the Emerald City hegemony or trying not to fret myself into paralysis. One can only do what one can do, Liir. Today I can harvest a little lettuce. Tonight you and your wife and your child and my unlikely husband and your Goose and my colleagues, Mr. Boss and Little Daffy, will have some lettuce to eat. One day perhaps I will not find lettuce in my hands, but a knife. Maybe General Cherrystone will have come to eat lettuce but will dine on the blade that cuts the lettuce. If I only think about that, I can think about nothing else, and then I might as well lie down under these stones and join the others who can’t think anymore, either.”

In a steely but warm voice, she added, “I might ask the same of you, Liir. Cherrystone’s zeal to find you, because you might lead him to the Grimmerie, has broken you apart from your own daughter no less fiercely than I was broken apart from my mother—and from my father. From our father. You might’ve spent these years of your strong youth hunting him down.”

“I might’ve done,” he agreed. “But if I’d been unsuccessful, Rain would’ve had no father to come home to, sooner or later. A fate we fatherless understand, you and I.”

“We do,” she said. “We understand lettuces, and we understand that. We don’t understand Cherrystone. But we don’t need to. Maybe.”

They walked back to the hostel slowly, without talking, that final maybe like a heavy boulder slung between them, on a yoke laid across both their backs.

7.

About the darkness recently apparent in his wife’s eyes, the Lion was puzzled. He knew Ilianora hadn’t been prepared to find her brother. She hadn’t been looking for Liir. Maybe having found him, then, had slapped awake an old buried ache for others who’d been slaughtered.

This was a sore that Brrr couldn’t lick clean no matter how he tried. Maybe if Rain had taken to Nor … maybe his wife would have softened a little more … but no. Rain never took to anyone.

Except, a little bit, to him. Which was damn awkward under the circumstances. With her parents and her aunt moping around for scraps of attention. The girl wasn’t capable though. Or she just wasn’t interested in them.

What were they all waiting for in this Chancel of the Ladyfish, as Highsummer turned to Harvest’our, and Harvest’our gave way to Masque? Were they all glued to Rain, as if she might give them a sign? Were the companions of the Clock to linger indefinitely? The question became moot when the snow blew in, and they were more or less ice-bound. They were no longer quite guests, these months along. But neither were they at home.

The Lion listened as Liir and Candle talked to each other in the coded abbreviations that couples develop. He couldn’t make much of Candle—a cipher, that one. But he remembered Liir from ages ago, that time when Brrr had arrived, with Dorothy and the shambolic others, at the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The flying monkeys! They’d given him the creeps. The loopy old Nanny who had nonetheless seemed the sanest of the lot. The mysterious way Dorothy had vanquished the Witch while the Lion and Liir were trapped in a larder. Then the beginning of their long journey back to the Emerald City.

All the time Liir had been the least of them, a stringy, cave-chested marionette of a kid. The thinnest fleck of hair on the upper lip, the cracking voice, the sidelong glances at Dorothy, as if he couldn’t believe his luck but still didn’t know if it was good luck or bad.

The Lion hadn’t expected to meet up with the lad ever again. Now it was—what?—fifteen or twenty years later. The boy-turned-man still projected something imprecise. But his back was strong and his love for Candle was tender, and he regarded Rain as a jewel so precious he couldn’t touch her. That was Rain’s fault, to set herself like that, but it was her father’s fault too, to accept her terms. I never would, thought Brrr, with the smugness of the perfect parent, or dog handler, or litigator.

One day during a thaw, when Candle mentioned a hankering for a hare to roast, Liir braved the slippery paths to check his traps. The Lion decided to go along. They all but slid into the carcass of the decrepit Clock, its open stage gaping. They looked over the wrecked set. Snow upon fallen buildings.

“It’s acting out the death of a civilization,” said the Lion.

Liir peered with interest. “It looks like an earthquake. Growing up in the Great Kells, I saw my share. Those slides of scree when the mountains shake their shoulders. The circular felt tents of the Arjiki nomads collapse, and the herders just put them up again.”

“Mr. Boss imagines the magician of the Grimmerie went to be a hermit in some cave in the Great Kells and an earthquake slammed boulders over the entrance. He’s either dead or trapped for good. Though I think if he’s that magnificent a wizard he could magick open a mountain.”

“Yes, Elphaba mentioned hearing about a magician in the outback. Before her time. Like everyone else, he’s no doubt waiting for his cue to return in Oz’s bleakest hour, et cetera.”

They strolled around the corner of the Clock, looking for a way into its secrets, and for a way into each other’s. He never calls her his mother, thought the Lion. Only Elphaba.

He never comments on Elphaba, thought Liir. What did the Lion really think of her? Lunatic recluse or dangerous insurrectionist? Or mad scientist lady making flying monkeys with magic stitchery?

But who cares what Brrr thought, when Elphaba was dead and gone, dead and gone. “What time does it tell?” asked Liir.

“It’s not a real Clock. The time on it is fixed. It’s always a minute short of midnight.” They poked through the broken drawers and cracked shutters. Spools of orange thread, scissors, pots of evil glop whose drips obscured their handwritten labels. “Did the dwarf used to sit up all night preparing for the next day’s revelations?” asked Liir.

“No. The magic of it was beyond the dwarf. He was only the custodian.”

“Not the custodian of much, now. It would make useful firewood this winter.”

“I think he’d kill you before he’d let you tear it apart.”

“I call that an unhealthy affection for the theater.” Liir swallowed. “Speaking of affections, healthy or otherwise, do you think there’s any chance you’re going to release my daughter into our care?”

The Lion gave him a sharp look. “We brought her here, didn’t we?”

“Oh, yes. And all due gratitude. Medals for courage, bravocatories on the bugle. All that. But it’s been several months now, and Candle frets that Rain continues to sleep in your room. You’ve planted yourself like a big furry hedge between a daughter and her parents.”

“I don’t tell her where to sleep. Neither do I tell her what to say or think or feel.”

“Candle will go mad if Rain doesn’t open up to us some.”

“You can’t be surprised. There was always going to be some collateral damage. Don’t be disingenuous. I mean, you did let her go, after all. What kind of parents would do that?”

Liir’s eyes were agate hard and dry. “I believe you’ve never been a father. So you don’t understand. Any parent whose child was in danger would do the same.”

“I know what justification means. Believe me. Had a fair amount of time nursing wounds of my own and trying out different explanations for all my behavior. In the end, you know what? I’m the only one responsible for what I chose to do.”

Liir sat on a boulder and kicked at some snow.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” said the Lion. “You had your reasons. Just don’t go accusing me of, I don’t know, whatever you might call it.”

“Alienation of affections.”

Brrr observed how readily the phrase came to his old friend’s lips. The Lion growled low, warningly.

Liir relented. Head sunk in his hands, he began to tell the Lion the story of Rain’s birth nearly a decade ago. He and a friend had been trapped in a siege at a mauntery in the Shale Shallows—

“I know. Your bucko companion. Trism bon Cavalish,” supplied Brrr. Liir’s head whipped up. “I was doing some state work for the EC before I got mixed up with the crew of the Clock,” admitted the Lion. “An old maunt named Yackle told me about your handsome sweetheart.”

“That part of the story is over.” Liir went on to tell how he’d escaped the mauntery by broom. Flying by night above Cherrystone’s forces. Leaving Trism to make his way by land, if he could, to the secret haunt where Candle, pregnant with Rain, was waiting for Liir. By the time Liir arrived six weeks later, after the Conference of the Birds, Candle admitted to him that Trism had indeed shown up. Briefly. But she wouldn’t say what had happened. Something had happened. Affection, lust, attack, revulsion, envy—she never clarified it, and Liir had stopped asking. Husbands manage their silences like stock portfolios. He’d left again, to escort the corpse of a dead princess toward an elephants’ graveyard. By the time he’d returned, Candle had given birth to Rain just as Cherrystone’s men had sniffed out Apple Press Farm. They were closing in, but Candle had slipped the noose, hoping to draw them off the scent of her child and of Liir. She had left the infant for Liir to discover. It had worked.

“How had the forces found the place you’d been hidden?” asked the Lion.

“They must have used Trism, one way or the other. Maybe they tracked him there. Or after he left, they caught him and beat the information out of him. Either way, he betrayed us, and betrayed our daughter. Intentionally or through stupidity. Neither excuse is forgivable.”

“What happened then?”

The Messiars from the EC had intercepted Candle. Turned out she’d been cradling and crooning to a bundle of washing, not a child. Thinking her simple, they’d let her go. Some advantages to being a filthy Quadling! Candle had taken herself to the mauntery to rest up from the unhealed bleeding that had followed childbirth. Not knowing any of this yet, Liir had headed west, into the wilderness, with the child in his arms. He’d followed the Vinkus tribe from which he’d recently parted.

“I know the Scrow,” pointed out the Lion. “With their elephant chief, Princess Nastoya. I was with you the day you met them, on our way back from killing the Witch at Kiamo Ko.”

“Even you’ve bought into the propaganda? You were there.” Liir spat. “You didn’t kill any witch! You and I were locked in the scullery.”

“Figure of speech. We were talking about the Scrow.”

Relenting, Liir continued. Through his years of tending the dying Princess, the new chieftain, a fellow named Shem Ottokos, had learned something about the magic of disguises. Liir had meant to apply to the Scrow for sanctuary, and Ottokos had agreed to extend it. But only if Rain could be suitably hidden so as to bring no trouble to the Scrow or to herself should she ever be found.

“Hidden how?” asked the Lion.

“You haven’t understood? You’ve been traipsing around with my daughter for who knows how long, and you’re that clueless?”

“I know she walks a bit askew from the rest of us,” said Brrr, as gently as he could. He knew what he knew, by now, but wanted to hear it spoken.

“She was born green,” said Liir. “That’s like being born with a bull’s-eye painted on your forehead. Ottokos did his best, but he couldn’t manage the spell to conceal her stamp of bloodline. Iskinaary, who kept a watch on the comings and goings around the Scrow camp, spotted a caravansary approaching with some EC personnel. So I lit out with the child in the opposite direction—by now Rain was about a year old, maybe—and I circled overland back toward Apple Press Farm. Back toward Munchkinland. I didn’t really know where to go, where we could be safe—”

“Welcome to Oz, where nowhere is safe,” said the Lion.

“I stopped at the mauntery in the Shale Shallows and was reunited with Candle. We were beside ourselves with fear for our green Rain. We were young. I mean, I was twenty-four, roughly, but a young twenty-four. A stupid twenty-four. We set out without a destination, just to keep moving. A chance encounter with—with a snake charmer on the road—it provided us our only hope, and we arranged to have Rain disguised as a pale human of uncertain lineage. Then, as we approached Munchkinland’s border, I thought of Lady Glinda, who had helped me several times before. We presented ourselves at Mockbeggar Hall, and Lady Glinda deigned to see me. She took a good look at Rain, and persuaded us that the safest place to hide the girl would be in her own household. Among the staff. So hidden that Rain herself wouldn’t know about her origins, and couldn’t give herself away.”

So that was how it had happened. Lady Glinda, the protector of Elphaba’s granddaughter. Well, it sort of figured.

“That was the best thing to do for a young child, I suppose.” The Lion’s tone was supercilious; he could hear it himself, and couldn’t help it.

“Hey. She’s still alive,” said Liir. “It’s almost ten years later, and she’s still alive. Candle was apprehended and let go, and I’ve been an outlaw since I was a teen, but Rain—Rain was safe.”

The Lion said, “They were never looking for her. They wanted the Grimmerie. They still want it. The highest secrets of magic that Oz has ever held are contained in that wretched book. They couldn’t care a twig about a stupid angry little girl. And you made her that way, by giving her up. You squandered her childhood.”

“What gives you the right of superiority? So you walked her home from school. Kudos. We’re grateful, or haven’t we mentioned it? But note that she is alive to be walked, Sir Brrr.”

Liir had a capacity for cold rage, Brrr observed, just like Elphaba’s own. But Brrr hadn’t come here to be woodshedded. “How alive, exactly? She’s more like an otter in human shape than she is like a girl. Look, I mean, really. Lady Glinda? She couldn’t raise a child. She couldn’t raise an asparagus fern.”

“Well, you can yield Rain back to us and give us a second chance. Stop circling about her with your big furry mane, keeping her chained to your heel.”

“She’s been abandoned one time too many,” snapped Brrr. “Listen, I don’t mutter about you behind your back. And I don’t lock any doors. She can walk your way any time she wants. She’s a child and she’ll come to trust who she can, in her own good time. I don’t have anything to do with that. But I’m not leaving her alone with you here till she’s ready.”

They were all but shouting at each other. They stood en garde, panting, though their concern for the child’s welfare was mutual. “You’ve been so thoughtful,” said Liir, seething. “Hauling Rain off with the Grimmerie. When the Emperor of Oz has been seeking it on and off all these years. That’s a really secure situation for a child?”

“Don’t think the irony hasn’t escaped me. With the Emperor calling in all magical totems. Isolating us for easier location. You think I’ve enjoyed becoming a sitting duck just to tend to your daughter?”

Liir was nonplussed. The book was a huge part of the problem. “How much longer can the Grimmerie be kept out of the Emperor’s hands, especially now that its charmed vault has come to its untimely end?”

Brrr shrugged. At least Liir’s tone was more moderate. The Lion paced around the fourth corner of the Clock. Liir followed. They looked up at the clock face just as a small bird, a Wren, came pock-pocking down out of the sky. She landed without the mildest sense of alarm upon the dragon’s snout. The man and the Lion looked up at it, and their jaws dropped, for several reasons.

The Lion was agog because the clock face, which had read one minute to midnight since the first moment he’d seen the Clock two years earlier, now read midnight.

“We meet again,” said the Wren to the Lion; it was the humble bird who had warned them to flee the Emperor’s soldiers on the Yellow Brick Road.

As for Liir, he didn’t dare believe he recognized the bird. Wrens, after all, look rather alike, at least to human eyes. But as the Wren spoke, Liir knew her to be Dosey, whom he’d last seen a decade ago after the Conference of the Birds had swum the skies over the Emerald City crying Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!

Dosey said, “Mercy fritters, but I’ve been winging your way for a week! Begging pardon, gents, but your Goose just told me you were having a bit of a chinwag down this way. I thought you’d want to hear what I have to say. The message comes direct from General Kynot. I translate from High Eagle. ‘Apparently a few months ago, the impossible happened. She’s back.’ ”

“She’s back?” said Liir.

“Elphaba?” said the Lion, his blood hurrying at once, so he could get himself out of the way.

“If you please, sir, not Elphaba. Dorothy,” replied the Wren. “Dorothy Gale.”

8.

At the Chancel of the Ladyfish, the dwarf snarled at Liir and the Lion. “I don’t believe in Dorothy. Wasn’t that all a ruse? Some tricky business to divert the crowd while the Wizard was being turfed out of the Palace?”

“She was real enough to me,” said Liir.

“And to me,” said the Lion. “Haven’t I got the emotional scars to prove it?”

“Assuming a Dorothy,” ventured Nor, “I doubt she’s back. Her supposed return sounds like just another variation on the theme of the legendary Ozma. ‘Beautiful heroine disappears, but she’ll return in our darkest hour, amen.’ Hah. That sort of bluff only postpones and displaces our need to reform. Listen: nobody ever comes back to save us. We’re on our own.”

“Dorothy wasn’t as beautiful as all that,” said the Lion, “so I doubt she’d be convincing as everyone’s favorite martyr mounting a comeback tour. I bet it isn’t her. Probably some out-of-work male escort doing a send-up. In our modern times nobody can tell the difference anymore.”

“Let’s assume it is Dorothy,” said Liir. “For the sake of conversation. Once upon a time I almost had a crush on her, after all. How did she get back? What’s she doing here? Where is she?”

“What’s said, sir, is that she arrived about a half a year ago,” said Dosey. “Up in the Glikkus. The Scalps jostled up and down. Tremors were felt all over Oz. Some called it an earthquake, others the Great Heave-Ho. A Glikkun village known as High Mercy were flattened, just about to pebbles, they say. And when they’s cleared away the rubble they finds this female character in a squarish conveyance of some sort. Its dented walls are only open iron curlicues, but the frillwork has kept the creature from being crushed until herself could be dug out.”

Rain looked up. “We had our earthquake too. The Clock did. Remember? All them buildings fallen, after the Clock rolled down the hill into the poppy pasture?”

They had remembered. Mr. Boss was looking uneasy.

“Did our Clock cause Dorothy’s earthquake?” asked Rain.

“Don’t speak about what you don’t know,” snapped Mr. Boss.

“We all did that, we’d be mute forever,” Liir said softly, in her defense, and a silence followed until Candle brokered a return to the subject.

“So what happened?” she asked. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Almost total good luck for them Glikkuns,” warbled the Wren. “The entire village were out larking in some high meadow. It were a holiday, seems, and nobody bothering in the local emerald mine. Which was great good fortune, don’t you know, as those mines collapsed whole and entire. But a cow tied up to a tree came to a sorry end.”

“So what did they do with this Dorothy?” asked Nor. “Where is she now?”

“Since she came to ’em caged in a sort of cell, all imprisoned already, they blamed her for the wreck of their homes. Then the pox and parcel of ’em up and moved into the village next door, which had seen no damage to speak of. They brought her with them. None could say whether she was concussed or whether she’d arrived two worms short of a breakfast, if you catch my drift.” Dosey looked around brightly for an opinion about Dorothy’s capacities. No one spoke.

“Anyroad,” she continued, “they tended to her for months until she recovered somewhat of her memory. Apparently she’d been hauling about some little dog, but it had gone missing. Either got itself crushed in the rubble or took its chance to make a getaway through the bars while Dorothy was trapped inside. By the time herself was sound enough to remember her name, the snows had come. The pass down into Munchkinland is closed until spring—gotta get through snow season and most of mud season before anyone can go cross-country. But ’em Glikkuns has alerted Colwen Grounds, and they mean to send her down there. For legal processing and what-have-you.”

“So Dorothy is back in Oz.” Liir could hardly believe it.

“Word has it that when she finally realized she was in Oz, she said, ‘I suppose that cow was a sacred cow, beloved of the nation and so on,’ and then wasn’t she all over crying like she cain’t warm to the pleasures of travel.”

“If the Glikkuns had aligned with the Gillikinese instead of Munchkinlanders, she’d be on her way to the Emerald City for a high royal celebration,” said the Lion. “A return to old times! Music, parades, the whole foldiddly fuss.”

“Instead, she’ll be sent from High Mercy to Colwen Grounds for repatriation into Munchkinland, is my guess,” surmised Mr. Boss.

“Begging your pardon, but there en’t much of High Mercy left,” said Dosey. “She’s jailed in the town next door. Little Mercy.”

Little Daffy sniffed. “Who cares about that Dorothy anymore? Nothing more than a bother, always dropping in when she’s not invited.”

“I doesn’t pretend to know how any humans think, nor government officials neither,” replied the Wren. “But I’m told they’re going to hold her accountable this time.”

“For arriving on a landslide and squishing a cow?” Little Daffy laughed.

“Hey, cows have feelings too, I’m told,” interrupted the Lion.

“No, no,” said Dosey. “It weren’t no special cow with virtues or such. That Dorothy is going to stand trial for the death of Nessarose Thropp and her sister, Elphaba. That’s why I come all this way to find you. Liir and Lion especially. General Kynot thought you should know.”

“We live in the hamlet of No Mercy,” snapped the dwarf. “What do we care about what happens to her?”

“I don’t get it,” said Liir. “Didn’t the Munchkinlanders consider Nessarose something of a dictator? Sure, she was the one to call for secession! So she’s the mother of Munchkinland. But then they went sour on her because of her tyrannical piety. They’re the ones who called her the Wicked Witch of the East, after all. Now suddenly they’re missing her enough to bring her unlucky assailant to trial?”

“I en’t prepared to comment on the matter,” said Dosey. “I’m just doing the job given me by the General. You can choose to come and defend this Dorothy or not. There. I’ve delivered my message as was asked of me. I’ll be happy to accept nest for the night, and I’ll be off in the morning.”

“You’ve wasted your time, Dosey Dimwit,” insisted the dwarf. “We have no interest in this matter.”

“She’s convicted of the murder of Nessarose, she’ll be hanged.”

“Good. One less illegal immigrant to feed.”

“I agree with Liir. This doesn’t add up,” said the Lion. “Why would they bother?”

“You can’t be so thick.” Nor’s voice was cross. “It’s a public relations stunt. Don’t you see? They’re doing the scapegoating thing again. Probably some Munchkinlanders are wavering about the high cost in blood and treasury of defending their country. Nothing recommits the public to the cause than a good public mocking of the enemy.”

Nor seems to have a better sense of political gesture than the rest of us, thought Liir.

She went on. “Munchkinlanders stoop this low, they’re courting danger. We’ve been talking all winter about the need to keep out of the gunsights of the Emperor of Oz. But you know, certain individuals among us are in as much danger from Munchkinland.” Her eyes passed toward Rain meaningfully, flitted away. “If Elphaba were still alive,” Nor pressed on, “her presence would negate the Emperor’s claim to Munchkinland. Though he’s her brother, she’d take precedence, by age and by dint of her gender.”

“And so does her issue,” said the Lion wearily. “Even if you’re male, Liir. And your issue even more than you—when she reaches her majority.”

Now they all looked at Rain. She squirmed under their attention. She had an even stronger right to be ruler of Munchkinland than her great-uncle Shell, Emperor of Oz, did. The Emperor must know this too, if rumor of Rain’s birth had been beaten out of Trism bon Cavalish. What chance the Munchkinlanders were also factoring in some advantage in locating Rain? The Munchkinlanders had just as much interest in finding her too—maybe more. Her presence there would pull the rug out from under Shell’s claims.

The girl might be in no less danger now than she’d been in during the past decade.

“She’s not safe unless she flies,” said Dosey, voicing what they were all thinking. “And you must fly with her, of course. You’re her flock.”

“Ah, we’ve got wing-cramp,” said the dwarf. “We’re ready for a cunning little bedsit with a coal fire. You bring unwelcome gossip, little birdy-on-the-breeze. Always crying panic. Go find yourself a perch somewhere else.”

Candle rarely spoke before all of them, and her voice was deferential. Her fingers knotted on the tabletop before her. “Dosey is as welcome to stay here as you are, Mr. Boss.”

Liir interceded. “Dosey, let’s go outside, for a moment, while Candle prepares you a perch.”

Iskinaary apparently took Liir’s attention to Dosey otherwise. He hissed in that aggressive way Geese have, lunging at the Wren as if to wrench her legs off. The Goose was rewarded by a wet little plop of bird spatter on his bill while Dosey escaped, squawking, “Heavens ahead a’us! En’t we all confederates and veterans of Kynot’s Conference?”

Out in the air again, Liir tried to wipe the smile off his face. “Envy runs in every direction that air and light do,” he told Dosey. “Never thought I’d see that old Goose go after another Bird.”

“I can see ’e’s your familiar, as ever was,” replied the Wren. “Not one to stick my beak in where I’m not wanted, I’m not. I’ll take myself downslope. I can see to my own needs.”

“That would be a disgrace.” Liir wished there were a way to embrace a Bird; he put his finger out, and the Wren hopped upon it. “It’s been ten years since the Conference where I met General Kynot and Iskinaary and all you others. How is he, the crusty old salt?”

“The Eagle is ready, steady, and stalwart as ever, if afflicted with wing-nits, sadly. Cain’t fly as high as he once did. But he sends his regards.”

“Where is he located?”

“That’s confidential, begging your pardon, sir. He don’t command a mighty following anymore, mind. But we Birds is always suspect of treachery by every party, given our freedom to wander the skies. So we keeps certain facts close to our breast-feathers as we can do. Pays to be circumspect.”

“Ought we, up here in our own aerie, to be cautious about any particular Bird population?”

“Cain’t say for certain. Birds of unlike feather rarely flock together—that was the great success of Kynot’s Conference. We various clans and congregations, we don’t much attach to one another. Nor do we go in for argy-bargy. I’d say we mostly minds our own affairs.”

“But you’ve gone out of your way to find us and tell us about Dorothy.”

“I’m nothing special,” said Dosey. “But I had my reasons.”

Liir cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m a bit stout in the bosom, or where my bosom would be if I had a bosom,” said Dosey. “And my hearing en’t all that particular, and there’s silver in my wing and a rasp in my morning song. But when the word was going around about this Dorothy, and that you and the Lion would want to know in case she needed some defending, I volunteered for the mission.”

“Strong feeling for a human being you never met.”

“It en’t that Dorothy. She can hang on a gibbet,” said Dosey, cheerfully enough. “It were you, sir. Begging your pardon and all that. I’ve had my own clutches in my time, and when the current nestlings call to me, they have to chirp so many greats before the granny that they run out of breath. So I know what it’s like when an egg rolls out of the nest. Your child were just about to be born when we was flying together, and I had a scared feeling that the Emperor might swoop like a serpent upon your nest, in revenge. I wanted to see for myself, sir. I’m glad you’ve got her tight under your wing now.”

“You’re a mother many times over,” said Liir. “You’ve only observed her a moment here or there, I know. But what do you make of her?”

Dosey’s bill was made of chitinous horn. The only way Liir could identify a smile was by the way her downy cheeks puffed out, tiny grey berries at the corners of her beak. “Boy broomist, listen to me. She’s the ugliest little duckling I ever seen, but as I lives and breathes, she’s got flight in her, too.”

9.

Once the Wren departed, next morning, the claws came out.

“We have no reason to trust that Dosey,” said Mr. Boss. “She could’ve been lying through that common little beak of hers. How do we know Dorothy’s really returned? Far more likely she was killed as dead as Ozma was murdered before her.”

“Utter rot,” said Liir. “Dosey put herself in considerable danger, making a solo flight at this winterish time of year, just to find us. She has no reason to lie. The Birds are aligned neither to Munchkinland nor to Loyal Oz.”

“But Liir,” said his wife. “We can’t fly like Dosey over the border, not during wartime. We can’t forge into Munchkinland as if we’re off to market day. Who knows how fiercely those margins are now guarded? So you maintain a holdover affection for Dorothy. Fine. But whoever this Dorothy turns out to be these days, surely she won’t want your child put in danger?”

Liir saw the wisdom of this, but not the charity.

Brrr cleared his throat. “Dorothy has nothing to do with a civil war between Loyal Ozians and Munchkins. She’s a political prisoner no less than Nor was at her age. If Rain were in the same situation, wouldn’t we go through hell trying to rescue her?”

“For you, there’s a bruised child behind every campaign isn’t there,” said the dwarf. “I’m just saying.”

“She’ll be a matron by now,” argued Brrr, “and in any case, she asked me to look after Liir. Doesn’t she deserve the same? What friends has she in Oz, if not us?”

“It’s a diversion,” insisted the dwarf.

“From what? Saving your own skin? I’m all for rolling out,” said Brrr.

So was Nor. There was a reason the Lion and Nor had struck sparks as a couple. Brrr saw it more clearly now. Nor was no homebody, and Brrr would rather be on the prowl, too. At this late date, with arthritis in his hips and a permanent case of halitosis, Brrr was discovering a certain quality of Lion about himself he’d never identified before.

It came down to a vote. They all elected to leave except Mr. Boss, who was tired of endless commuting. Rain wasn’t asked her opinion.

Iskinaary, who since Dosey’s visit had begun to shadow Liir about eight feet behind, like a shawled wife of an Arjiki chieftain except more garrulous, said, “Let’s go. What are we waiting for? If this good weather lapses, we’ll be snowed in as deep as Dorothy. All winter long.”

On the eighth day of cold sunny weather, a thaw of sorts, when the cobbles were dry of snow but the ground still hard enough not to be mud, they harnessed Brrr up to the shafts of the dead Clock. Liir wrapped the Grimmerie in what remained of Elphaba’s old black cape and carried it under his arm.

Rain shunned Nor’s outstretched hand, cradling her shell instead. Tay rode on Rain’s shoulder. Little Daffy shouted, “Come on, you,” as Mr. Boss pretended to have died of a stroke, but he got up and stumped after them.

They’d gone a third of the way down the slope, when Rain suddenly said, “Wait, but we forgot the broomflower.”

“What’s she croaking about?” asked the dwarf.

Liir put his hand to his mouth—sweet Ozma, in the stress of the moment and the presence of the Grimmerie, he had left it behind—but Rain bolted back up the hill. A few moments later she had returned balancing Elphaba’s broom over her shoulder.

“Where’d you get that flea-ridden thing?” asked Little Daffy.

“Stuck in the level chink in the stones running below the Ladyfish,” said Candle in a low voice. “How did she find it there? I thought we hid it well enough.”

“The Fishlady tolded me it was there, and not to forget it,” said Rain. “Almost I did, but then I ’membered.”

Whatever accompanied them down the hill—a mood, a spirit, an apprehension, a spookiness, a sense both of mission and of menace—made them all fall silent for quite some time. Iskinaary was the first to break out of it by singing a ditty straight out of the beer hall

The night is dark, my hinny, my hen

Romance in the air, my dove, my duck;

The less I see of you, my dear,

The more I bless my blessed luck.

Come near for a kiss, come near for a cluck,

I’ll climb aboard and blindly—

until they all told him to shut up.

Liir and Candle had made the trip through the passes north of the Sleeve of Ghastille so long ago that they hardly recognized the way back. Six, seven years ago, was it? And at a different time of year. Now, as the ragged travelers abandoned their hideaway, a cold wind gripped and pulled at their cloaks and manes and shawls. Liir looked back, squinting, at where the Chancel of the Ladyfish tucked itself against the slope. He nudged Candle to see. It was hidden to view, even though they knew where it was.

Mr. Boss insisted he wasn’t going to take the Clock into Munchkinland again. He didn’t trust those squirrely little people, except of course his wife. Who knew if General Cherrystone had put out a bulletin of arrest on the basis of the Clock’s having predicted some disaster involving the dragons in Restwater? The dwarf would rather take his chances in Loyal Oz, he said.

So the companions turned their heads west, toward the Disappointments and the oakhair forest. Maybe they were postponing the moment they would have to separate. That moment would come, soon enough, near one of the great lakes or the other. No one was certain about relative distances across the terrain, but in Oz you tended to show up where you needed to get, sooner or later.

The little detour, the loop west, would be their coda, at least for the time being. Who knew how much time they had left together? (Who ever knows?) Without naming it as such, they all felt the tug of their imminent separation. At least, all the adults did. What Rain thought, or Tay, or for that matter the Time Dragon hunched in paralysis up there, couldn’t be guessed at.

They lurched through upland meadows and past escarpments of scrappy trees, through lowland growths of protected firs, along streambeds partially glazed with ice. The warm snap had returned to the air a sense of the rot of pine needles and mud, but the air eddied with the sourness of ice, too.

They were walking into a trap.

Or they were walking home at last.

They didn’t know—who does?—where they were going.

But the world was specifically magnificent this week, in this place. Behold the diseased forest east of the Great Kells, called by some the Disappointments. Largely unpopulated due to barren soil—only scrub could grow in the wind off the Kells, and only tenacious and bitter farmers bothered to hang on. The few unpainted homesteads were scrappy, the sheds for the farmer’s goats identical to those for the farmer’s children. The companions avoided human settlements as they could, preferring to pitch camp amidst the deer droppings and rabbit tracks in the scrapey woods.

A rainstorm blew in then and parked over their heads. Their passage slowed down due to the mud, and they couldn’t build a fire. The little girl shivered but didn’t complain. Four or five days in, they came to a dolmen on which someone had painted destinations. One side was scrawled with VINKUS RIVER FORD, TO THE WEST, with an arrow pointing left. The other side read MUNCHKINLAND AND RESTWATER LAKE. Brrr was for turning east, but Liir stopped him.

“We’re not more than a day or two from Apple Press Farm in the other direction,” he told them. “Where Rain was born. We still have two months before Dorothy can travel down from the Glikkus to be put on trial. Let’s take a couple of days at the farm. At the least, we’ll have a roof over our heads. We can dry out. Warm up the child. Maybe something survived in the root garden after all these years.”

“I didn’t pack for a nostalgia tour,” said Mr. Boss, but Liir insisted. Candle agreed that they might enjoy a night or two with a fire in a hearth before proceeding cross-country toward Munchkinland. Since it was only a brief interruption of their progress, the company turned about, keeping the Great Kells to their left. The massed fortress of basalt and evergreen and snow looked inhospitable but breathtaking.

That night the rain let up for a spell. The company took turns singing around a campfire and telling stories. Nor told the tale of the Four Improbable Handshakes. Candle sang in Qua’ati, something long and inexpressibly boring, though everyone smiled and swayed as if entranced. (Except Rain.) Iskinaary barracked a raft of Goose begats, and Mr. Boss finally riled himself out of his somnolence to provide a few short poems of questionable virtue.

A certain young scholar of Shiz

Right before a philosophy quiz

Guzzled splits of champagne

So that he could declaim

“I drink, and therefore I is.”

And

A sweet cultivated young Winkie

Could do civilized things with her pinkie

Which excited young men

Who cried, “Do me again!”

Though the pinkie emerged somewhat stinky.

“That’ll do,” said Nor, Candle, and Little Daffy, all at once.

Even Liir, without a whole lot of confidence in his tone, tried to dredge up some scrap of song he had sung when he was in the service. He could only get a bit of the one called, he thought, “The Return of His Excellency Ojo.”

Sing O! for the warrior phantom phaeton

Carrying Ojo over the mountain

His saturnine sword was the scimitar moon

Soon, thundered Ojo, vengeance soon!

This went on too long and no one could tell what Ojo was trying to achieve, and Liir said that was pretty much standard operating procedure for the military. But then Little Daffy recalled something from her own childhood.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

“How does it go now?” She tried again.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

Woke to life in a pumpkin bed

Made his breakfast of pumpkin bread

Fell and squashed his pumpkin head

Went to the farmer and the farmer said

Pumpkins smash but can’t be dead

Plant your brains in the pumpkin bed

Grow yourself a brand-new head.

That’s what he said he said he said

’Cause the farmer liked his pumpkin bread.

Rain admired that one and clapped her hands.

“That’s a nursery ditty from a soundly agrarian society,” said the Lion, “no doubt about it.”

“Do you have a song to sing?” Candle asked of Rain.

“I knew about a fish once that was locked in a apple-shaped room in the ice. But I don’t know what happened to it.”

They waited in case she might remember; they waited with that affectionate and bothersome patience with which elders heap expectation on the shoulders of the young. When Rain spoke again, though, she seemed not to be aware of their appetite for anything more about the fish. She said, “I don’t know what happens to us.” She said it as a question.

“Oh well,” said Candle. “None of us knows that.”

“What happens to us is a joke, and don’t pretend otherwise,” said the dwarf.

“What happens to us is sleep,” said Liir firmly. “Time to go have a pee, Rain. I’ll walk you a little way out.”

Tay didn’t let Rain go anywhere without scampering after her, no matter how asleep it had seemed to be. It woke itself up when Rain moved, and it followed Rain and her father to a blind of scattercoin, where Liir turned his head just far enough to simulate modesty, but not far enough to allow Rain to escape his peripheral vision.

They wandered about for three more days, slogging through mud and sluicing through rain that sometimes preferred to be snow. Between low tired hills, through unnamed valleys formed by streams threading down from the Kells for ten thousand years. “You ought to know if we’re closing in on the farm,” said Liir to Candle as they blundered along shallow slopes. Their ankles all ached from the slant. “You can see the present.”

“This isn’t the present anymore,” said Candle. “Apple Press Farm is in our past now, and one hill looks much the same as another.”

Finally they discovered the right arrangment of slopes and dips, and they began to drive down ancient agricultural tracks kept clear by animal passage. They came upon a tapering winter meadow. A thwart-hipped woman with a basket and a set of rusting loppers was moving about the weird beautiful verdant green glowing wetly in the thin snow and the thinning rain.

“As I live and breathe,” said Little Daffy.

The woman turned, straightened up, her hand on her hip. “So the prodigal turncoat returns to the nunnery,” she said. “It’s hallelujah time; get the bacon out of the larder and trim off the moldy bits.”

“Nice to see you too, Sister Doctor,” said Little Daffy. “What are you doing here?”

“Double the work I’d be doing if you hadn’t scarpered,” said Sister Doctor. “If you’ve come home for forgiveness, you’re going to have to fill out quite a bill of penitence first. Who are your traveling companions?” She took a pair of spectacles from her apron pocket and reared back a little to see the Clock at the meadow gate. “Not that thing again? And the Lion—Sir Brrr, I remember, I’m not that gaga yet—and the dwarf too. So you’ve joined a cult, Sister Apothecaire.”

“It’s Little Daffy now,” said the Munchkinlander. “I’ve left the mauntery.”

“I suppose you have.” Sister Doctor snapped the spectacles closed so fiercely that one lens popped out and lost itself in the snow. Rain and Tay dug it out for her. “Are you here to sing a few pagan carols and pass the basket? You’ll get neither coin nor comfort from us.”

“I always admired your largesse,” said Little Daffy. “But what are you doing here?”

“Trying to keep the community together, that’s what. When the army of Loyal Oz advanced on the mauntery two years ago, we had no choice but to flee. It didn’t go unnoticed that you absented yourself at the first opportunity. We assumed you must have hurried back to your homeland.” She said homeland as if she were saying bog.

“I went back to release our guests from their locked chambers,” said Little Daffy, “and I apologize to no one for that. I fell on the stairs, and by the time I came around, your dust on the horizon had already settled. Thanks for the show of sorority. Sister.”

“Well, let bygones be bygones and all that,” said Sister Doctor with a new briskness. “In a panic, missteps are taken. Have you come to rejoin your community?”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“Where else would we be? The mauntery was burned to the ground.”

“Sister Doctor. The mauntery is made of stone.”

“Well, I mean the roofs and floors. The furniture, such as it was. There’s nothing to return to without a massive rebuilding effort. And our divine Emperor of Oz isn’t about to channel funds into the repair of a missionary outpost that he ordered to be torched. So we’ve crowded in here.”

“How did you come to find this place?”

“It always belonged to the mauntery,” replied the maunt. “Back in the days of the Superior Maunt, as you may remember, some skilled artisans among us used this outclave as a place to hide a printing press. We circulated broadsides anonymously, warning against the increasing theocracy of the Emperor. Ha! If we only knew. And him divine, can you credit it. Not a smart career move for a bunch of unmarried women trying to live out of the limelight. And with Lady Glinda our sponsor, no less. Oh, a great vexation for her too, I’ll wager, unless she swanned her way through it.”

Brrr looked at Little Daffy to see how she was taking the news of her former community. The little bundle from Munchkinland seemed at home, having this discussion with an associate who had been both a comrade and an adversary. The Lion said, “News of the old gang is all very well, but we’re sore and soggy here and more than a bit peckish. I hope you’re going to invite us in.”

At this Sister Doctor seemed to recover her sense of stature. “Well, we have less than we ever had, but of what we have, we share willingly. I wonder if winter broccoli appeals?”

“A hot bath would appeal more,” said Liir.

Sister Doctor took out her spectacles again, wiped the rain off them, and peered at him through the intact lens. “I thought I recognized that voice. It’s Liir, isn’t it—the one they say is Elphaba’s son. Oh, now the soup is on the boil. What are you doing with this lot?”

“Hoping for supper, maybe.”

“I’ll get you something, something for all of you.” She threw her implements together in her basket and looked over her shoulder. “It isn’t safe to come into the farm, though. Let me organize something and I’ll be back.”

“Why not safe?” asked Mr. Boss. “We can defend ourselves against maunts in the wilderness.”

“Eat first; we’ll talk later. Just hunker down here, and come no farther.”

“Well, we’re not going to push down the barricades, but I say, we have a child with the chills. A hot posset would be most—”

“That’s an order,” said Sister Doctor. Little Daffy put her hand on the dwarf’s arm, and he fell silent, although he growled like a bratweiler. “Build a fire, that won’t hurt,” added the maunt. “There’s a mess of drying firewood stacked up a half mile on, near where the orchard peters out.”

They walked through the apple orchard—candelabrum of branches sporting sprigs of snow, not all that unlike apple blossom—and Liir remembered the instance of magic he’d witnessed here. Using the power of her music and her own musky capacity, Candle had called up the voices of the dead to help the Princess Nastoya lose her human disguise and to revert to her Elephant nature, and so finally to die the way she wanted and needed.

Now, to return to this orchard…! Another season, another crackling moment in his life. Rewarding, not morose. He reached for Candle’s hand, and she squeezed his in return. Maybe everything would be all right. Sooner or later.

He recalled an outdoor oven some distance from the farmhouse and sheds. They built a fire. The grate was hooded and the flue hooked, so the fire could burn in the intermittent rain. They rinsed some of the broccoli that Sister Doctor had left behind. They munched on woody florets, hoping for better. Rain sat closest and grew less grey. In an hour the maunt was back with a donkey on which were saddled baskets and bags with bottles of claret, a ham, ropes of onions and twists of sourswift. A tablecloth, once unbundled, revealed six loaves of onion bread and a caramel cake burned on the bottom. “Heaven,” said the Lion. “Don’t suppose you brought any port, or some cigars?”

“Maunts go through cigars like termites through doorsills. We have none to spare.”

“Thought you might say that.”

Beneath the saddlebags, Sister Doctor had piled four or five pelts and two woolen blankets. The rain had faltered again, but the shadows blued up in a frosty way. Liir was about to renew the request for indoor lodging, but Sister Doctor anticipated his request.

“You can’t be allowed to stay, I’m afraid,” she told them. “I was distracted by seeing Sister Apothecaire—Little Daffy as she styles herself now. I didn’t really take in the measure of the difficulty until I realized you had Liir with you. It’s too dangerous for you to come into the house. No one must know you are here.”

“You have stool pigeons among the maunts?” asked the Lion. “So much for your professed neutrality.”

“I’m protecting my sisters as much as I’m trying to protect you. We’ve been visited three times in the past two years by emissaries from the EC military to check and see who’s been through. I can’t vouch that every voice among our sorority is equally devoted to neutrality—how could I? How could I plead knowledge into all of their souls? Nor can I attest that they’d stand up to harsh questioning if the investigators sniffed out that we were hiding something. Better for all that you should move on.”

“What are they looking for?” asked Liir, and “When were they last here?” asked his half-sister, at the same time.

“You’ve eluded them for so long that some believe you are dead,” said Sister Doctor to Liir. “But they don’t believe you brought the Grimmerie into the Afterlife with you. So they’re convinced they’ll find it sooner or later. You may have heard that the invasion of Munchkinland is stalled. General Cherrystone’s army has taken Restwater, but the struggle around Haugaard’s Keep is a standoff. The Munchkinlanders can’t reclaim the lake; nor can the EC forces advance as far as Colwen Grounds to finish their reannexation of Munchkinland. The Munchkinland farms won’t sell bread or grain to Loyal Oz until the invading forces yield Restwater and retreat.”

“Never yield,” hissed Little Daffy, almost to herself.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Sister Apothecaire, Munchkinland won’t starve. But with no one to sell bread to, much of their unharvested grain just rots in the fields. The EC meanwhile hankers for bread but has plenty of water to drink. The term on a game board is called stalemate, I think.”

“How does this figure in surveillance of maunts?” asked the Lion.

“Isn’t it plain as the nose on your plain face? The EC once again ramps up its campaign to find the Grimmerie. In the hopes that it might reveal secrets of how to unleash a mightier force against central Munchkinland, and strike a blow at the heart of the government at Colwen Grounds. Finishing the job.

“In short,” she said, “if you lot thought you were out of danger, you’re sadly mistaken. Whoever travels with Liir Thropp courts danger, by association.”

“And you’ve given us broccoli, bread, and wine,” said Little Daffy. “Sister, thank you.”

“I maintain my vows.” She passed the strawberry compote for spooning upon the more burnt bits of caramel cake.

They told her what they’d heard about the legendary Dorothy making a comeback tour. Sister Doctor hadn’t been apprised of this, but she wasn’t much interested. “We haven’t had a reprisal of the Great Drought for some time now, but if it should come as soon as next summer, punishing the fields with blight, the Munchkinlanders have little left in their coffers to buy supplies from Loyal Oz, and trading agreements are suspended anyway. The uneasy balance settled upon now seems more or less peaceful—only a few soldiers die a week on one side or the other, in this skirmish or that—but one doesn’t know who will give out first, Loyal Oz or Munchkinland.”

“You’ve become callous,” remarked Little Daffy. “‘Only a few soldiers die a week?’ Time was you and I would go out on the battlefield and tend to the sick, and care about it.”

“Don’t hector me. I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve. I tend to my maunts and keep us out of harm’s way. Right now I’m feeding the hungry and harboring enemies of the state. I can’t do all that and work in international diplomacy too. Pass me the butter pot.”

The Lion said, “Look, we have a little girl here. Surely she deserves a roof over her head for one night? We’ve been on the road a week or more.”

“Don’t think I haven’t guessed who she is,” said Sister Doctor. “I’m trying to protect you all. Have you no sense? Or do you really not believe me?” She sighed, and then slipped off the starched yoke of her religious garb, and without evidence of humility or shame she let the bib of her garment slip down almost to her nipple. The scar on her shoulder was rippled, a plum color, like congealed tadmuck. Glossy and hideous. “Do you remember how Mother Yackle went blind? These men don’t come to play parlor games. I am trying in as calm a voice as I can to tell you that you’re in danger at Apple Press Farm. They know from that fellow Trism that you were here once, Liir and Candle, and they suspect this will be one of the places you might return. They’ve turned the house inside out three times thinking they might yet find the Grimmerie on the premises. We’ve had to put it to rights as best we could, over and over again. Thank the Unnamed God for Sister Sawblade, that’s what I say.”

She dressed herself again and concluded her sermon. “Even the house might be bugged. Do you know what I mean? We have a weird infestation of woggle-bugs. I’m told there is some thought they can be communicated with—don’t ask me how. My capacity for comprehending mystery doesn’t extend to science, only to faith. But I can’t be sure they aren’t capable somehow of alerting the next contingent of investigators that you were in residence, were I to make a mistake of mercy and let you in. You see,” she finished, “you can’t stay. For our sake, but also for your own good. Tonight, all right, to the barn, but quietly. For the sake of a croupy child. After dark. I’ll take Sister Manure off muckout detail. But tomorrow you’ll be on your way. No one will be the wiser, no one but me and the donkey. And I can stand anything.”

“She can,” said Little Daffy miserably, when she had gone. “I don’t like the old bitch anymore, but she’s a tough little biscuit, and she means what she says. Anyone else in Oz would crack under torture before she did.”

10.

Before dawn. At the sound of maunts beginning their devotional song, Sister Doctor nipped in with a cornucopia of supplies the travelers could use during the next stage of their journey. She refused to advise them which way to go or what to do. “I don’t want to know if you have the Grimmerie with you,” she told them. “However, I do believe it’s time to lose the Clock. You’d move faster without it, and what good is it doing you now?”

Liir pondered the question as they slipped away, unheeded, from Apple Press Farm. Here he had learned to love a woman—to love this wife, this mother of their child—and even more, he had learned to love at all. He had felt a pang at coming near, had been afraid, however stiff his face and controlled his upper lip, that he would mourn for the lost simpleton he’d once been. He needn’t have worried. Leaving Apple Press Farm, his mind returned to the present and the future as they headed north into drier air.

Iskinaary had kept silent while on the farm. Liir remembered only after they’d left it that the Goose, too, had been there before. Falling into step with the Bird, Liir asked him what he had concluded about the maunt’s revelations.

“I could have finished off an entire generation of woggle-bugs in an afternoon’s work,” said the Goose. “I should have thought that might be apparent, but did anyone ask me for help? Noooooo. Just a silly Goose, old Iskinaary.”

“You can be some help now, and take to the wing,” said Liir. “Do a little scouting for us. Sister Doctor’s caution seemed well founded. Some pots can take years to come to the boil, but when they do, the scalding is ferocious.”

“I’ll do that,” said the Goose. “For you. For you and Candle. Oh, and for the girl too, I suppose. By extension. Though I wish she would show a little more oomph. I don’t mean to be cruel, but she’s a bit slow out of the eggshell, isn’t she?”

“I’d go do that surveillance right now before you get an additional thrust to your liftoff by a boot in the behind,” said Liir, and Iskinaary obliged.

And then Liir thought: How are we ever going to protect her?

They walked single file. The farther from Apple Press Farm, the farther apart from one another they straggled. Even Tay kept a little distance from Rain. It was as if they had all taken in the message that there would be no safe harbor for them, not while the world was at war—so, presumably, not ever.

Liir tried to remember being Rain’s age—eight, nine, ten. Whatever it was. He had been in Kiamo Ko at that age, playing with Nor, surely? Or had Nor already been taken away by Cherrystone and his men? In any case, he’d been alone in his life, as alone as Rain seemed to be. He’d lived with his mother, with the Wicked Witch of the West (which might be the name of any mother, all mothers, he realized), but he’d lived apart, not unlike the way Rain kept apart from him and Candle. Of course Elphaba had shown little interest in him. Or if she had shown some kind of interest, he’d been too dull to read it as such—the way, presumably, Rain was too dull to recognize Liir’s love, even passion, for her.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little.

The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get—the more specificity you harvest—the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Would he ever know anything about Rain? Or would he have to accept that he would live in a world adjacent to hers, with her tantalizingly nearby, but a mystery always, growing into her own inviolable individuality?

Maybe it had been better, he caught himself thinking, if he had kept her close to his side, for even if she’d been ripped from his arms at the age of six, she would have known six good years of close fatherly affection—

No, he couldn’t think that; he couldn’t bear to. Even in an alternate history. He couldn’t tolerate the thought of her being taken from him. Even though he’d given her away.

There she loped, scuffing up snow, head down between her shoulders. He could walk the rest of his life. He would never catch up to her.

Iskinaary returned. “She was more right than she knew, that old crow,” he told Liir. “Menaciers four miles along, and on the very path we’re trudging. We’ll have to turn off. There’s a parallel track a mile to the west that looks less traveled; we should divert across country to it at once.”

They began to turn the Clock.

“We’re adjusting further and further off our goal,” complained Mr. Boss, but Brrr was hauling the cart, not him. And the Lion never minded veering off any track that led straight into the sights of marksmen.

“Later we’ll compensate and arc back eastward. If we continue to believe we should try to steal across the border into Munchkinland and be present to defend Dorothy,” said Brrr. “Though perhaps she won’t need our help. She seems to come equipped with all kinds of fatal architecture attached to her. First a farmhouse, and now this giant wrought-iron birdcage or whatever it is she was trapped in. The girl does wreak havoc on the physical universe. Why is that?”

“Shhh,” said Liir. “The soldiers may have fanned out since Iskinaary saw them half an hour ago.”

“I doubt they have,” said the Goose. “They were playing cards. Five Hand Slut, if I could read the markings, though I don’t have the eye of an eagle. They didn’t look in any particular hurry, but I’ll go take another gander. If you hear a gunshot and a strangulated cry for ‘peace among all nations! peace in our time,’ find my corpse and turn me into a Goose-feather bolster, and use me to suffocate one of our foes.” He looked proud at the thought. “We have so many.”

Liir said, “Are you going to continue to plan your own memorial service or are you going to go on a reconnaissance mission for us?”

“That Dosey has made you all military again. If I were a different sort of Goose I’d find it kind of sexy,” said Iskinaary, and took off.

For the next ten days or so Iskinaary became their early warning system. Not until he came back from his rounds and sounded the all clear would they advance another three or four miles.

Liir hauled the Grimmerie on his back. When he tried to put it in a drawer in the Clock, or on a shelf, the drawer wouldn’t open or the shelf broke. The shutters wouldn’t latch, due to new swelling in the jambs. Even in its paralysis the Clock managed to have an opinion. The Clock didn’t want the Grimmerie anymore.

A winning tribe of pygmy warthogs came through one day, snuffling around the wheels of the conveyance and peeing all over the place. Tay hissed and leapt upon the dragon’s dead snout, and the Lion went upright even in his shafts, spooked. The wagon rocked and tilted and looked about to smash to one side till Nor whipped off her shawl. She gave the warthogs a cotton lashing at which they merely laughed before continuing to rootle on through the undergrowth.

Another afternoon, the companions surprised a bear doing something downright pornographic with a beeless hive of honey. Brrr almost said “Cubbins?” in case it was his old friend—but a Gillikin Bear wouldn’t have wandered this far south, and since this bear showed no capacity for shame he couldn’t be a talking Bear.

Nor took off her shawl again and wrapped it around Rain’s head, making a blinder for her eyes so she wouldn’t too closely examine the inappropriate.

“Really, that’s disgusting,” said Little Daffy. “Wildlife.”

“Disgusting? Inventive.” Mr. Boss had perked up for the first time in weeks, and he nudged his wife. “Maybe if we ever get to a trading post we can invest in a pot of honey, honey, and have a honeymoon.”

The Goose had become a bard of advice. “Good spot to camp,” he would report, or “Long slope ahead; we’ll have to take it slow.” Or “Rainclouds on the horizon; better stop the afternoon here where the fir branches will give us cover.” Or even “Skarks passing behind us, let’s pick up the speed in case they decide they want Lion steaks for supper.”

Day after day. The winter waned, but reluctantly, with glacial speed. Finally, the beginning of woodland blossom, those brave early ground-level markers like filarettes and snowdrops.

One afternoon Iskinaary reported that they were nearing the edge of a great lake. At first the companions imagined they might have veered back toward the east. But Iskinaary said he could see no sign of habitation, no coracles or villages. Just barren cliffs around flat black water bereft of whitecaps. Devoid even of avian populations. “Kellswater, then,” said the dwarf. “Uck. I’ve seen it once or twice before. It gives me the creeps.”

“Why?” asked Rain, whose experience of lakes had only involved Restwater.

“It’s a dead lake, dead as doormats. Nothing swims in it. Neither fish nor frog. Nothing living floats upon it, not a water skeetle or a lily pad.”

“We should make a swift detour,” said Nor. “That time the Munchkinlander rebels forced the EC Messiars back into Kellswater, the soldiers didn’t so much drown as—as melt. Kellswater possesses some of the properties of acid. Cold acid. It pulled their skin from their bones even as they thrashed, we were told.”

“Well, that puts the tin hat on our hopes to practice our synchronized swimming,” said Brrr. “Oh well. No matter what they say about me in the columns, I never fancied prancing about the beach in a singlet and a cache-sex.”

“How could a lake be dead?” asked Rain. “Or how could it be alive, either?”

Little Daffy said, “Someone in the tribe of the Scrow told me that legend suggests Kumbricia the demon-goddess lives there. Or died there. Or something. Maybe she only has a summer home. I don’t remember.”

“Who is Kumbricia?”

“Stop,” said Candle. “Children don’t need to know stories like that.”

“Yes, they do,” said the Goose. “Kumbricia, little gosling, is the opposite number to Lurline, in the oldest tales of Oz. She is the hex, she is the curse, she’s always implicated when things go wrong…”

“She’s there when the shoelace snaps as you’re trying to outrun the horsemen of the plains,” said Nor.

“She’s what breathes the pox on the wheezy child for whom the poultice, oddly, won’t work,” said Little Daffy.

“She is the itch where you can’t quite reach,” said Mr. Boss.

“Stop,” said Candle. “I mean it.”

“Not before my turn,” said the Lion. “Kumbricia is the way the whole world arches its eyebrow at you before it smacks you down. Where is she, you ask? Not in the lake. Not in the pox. Not in the shoelace or the horse hooves. She’s in the interference of effects, nothing more than that. In the crossroads of possibility, giggling through her nose at us.”

“You’ll slice open the child with that nonsense!” Candle yelled at them. They almost laughed to hear her raise her high ribbony voice, but the expression on her face stopped them.

Apologetically, even though he hadn’t joined in, Liir said, “But then, on the other hand, there’s Lurlina. The soul of … of grace … grace, and—”

Mr. Boss wasn’t daunted by Candle. “No one believes in Lurline. A goddess of goodness? Forget it. She’s been taking a cigarette break since the year dot. She’s as gone as the Unnamed God. Pretty enough in the stories, to be sure, but once she finished breathing green into every corner of Oz, she vanished. No return in the second act, I’m afraid.”

“I hate you all,” said Candle. She grabbed Rain’s hand and Rain tried to pull away, but this time Candle wouldn’t let her.

“What you hate is the world,” said Mr. Boss placidly. “We’re just as blameless in talking about it as the pox is blameless, or the shoelace. What you hate is that your child is stuck here. Well, get used to it. The only exit is the final one.”

“To the bosom of Lurline,” muttered Little Daffy.

“And a scratchy bosom it is, I bet,” said the dwarf.

Liir opened his mouth again but found he couldn’t say anything more. There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing—somehow—not to give up. Not to give up on Rain, and her chances—whatever they might be. In fact, not to give up on anyone.

“I want to see the dead lake,” said Rain.

“Can’t hurt you if you don’t go near it,” said the dwarf.

But they’d been walking as they talked, and suddenly Kellswater opened up before them. The greyness of it under a fine blue sky seemed to deaden the entire district. The forest wouldn’t grow within a hundred yards of it. The margins of sand and tumbles of rock were desolate. No yellow pipers, no reeds, no bouncing sand-sprites. No breeze, no reflections. A scent of salt and iron, perhaps.

“I know a lot of families that would pay good cash to send their kids to a summer camp pitched on this shore,” murmured Mr. Boss.

“Enough, you,” said Little Daffy. “Do stop. It’s too hideous. Somehow.”

Iskinaary took wing again and circled about. They waited safely back on a limestone promontory some twenty feet above the lake. The Goose rose, banked, rose again. When he returned, he seemed shaken. “One senses almost a magnetic pull,” he told them. “On a sunny day I usually can ride the updrafts over a body of water, but this water works to the contrary. Let’s not linger here.”

“Which way looks safest?” asked Liir.

“Northeast,” replied Iskinaary. “Keeping the lake on our left. We’ll come upon the oakhair forest that spans the divide between Kellswater and Restwater. That’s as far as we go together. If the forest isn’t filled with border patrols, those heading for a rescue mission might slip eastward here and find themselves back in Munchkinland, back near the banks of Restwater. With another big push. Shall we?”

They should, yes. They would. As they turned about to leave Kellswater behind, however, a couple of stray warthogs who must have been following them these past few days came charging up the slope from the underbrush.

The warthogs of Kumbricia: innocently troublesome, like all aspects of the world.

They darted beneath the cart and between the legs of the Lion, spooking him badly but spooking Tay worse. They caught the otter for a moment, pinned him to the ground on the edge of the bluff, and played with him prettily as they readied to gore him. Brrr twisted in his shafts. The others screamed and waved their arms. Rain dashed forward, between the grunting terrors, and thwacked one of them over the forehead with her shell. It didn’t break, but blood gushed forth from an eye socket of that creature.

The rice otter broke free and dove for Rain’s leg, snaking up her thigh onto her shoulders. The second hog charged Rain. The Lion was nearest and the first to arrive in defense. Shooting his claws, he raked half the pelt off the warthog, which grunted in fury and surprise. Rain fell back into the arms of Candle and Liir. As the Lion twisted about to check for the first warthog, in case it was readying for another feint, the Clock on the wagon overbalanced. The replacement axle, carved from the sallowwood dragon wing, buckled at last. A wheel caved inward. The snout of the dragon reared up at the sky as if trying, one final time, to escape its tethered post upon this theater of doom. Its broken wings flapped, but there was no wind to catch, not in this open air tomb-land. Slowly, and then faster the Clock hurtled down the slope toward Kellswater. Wheels and shaft, temple of fate adorned with a clock face at midnight and dragon up top—and the Lion still laced to it.

The dwarf managed a partial rescue. Dragged down the bluff, still he managed to pull his dirk from some inner pouch and slash the leather harness. On sands that shifted, conspiring with gravity to drag them to their wet grave, Brrr scrabbled for a purchase. The Lion escaped, the dwarf leapt clear, but the Clock careered off the bluff. Brrr turned in time to watch the wheels, the carriage, the theater, and finally the Time Dragon disappear into oily deeps. The last thing they saw was its red red eye, until black liquid blinked out whatever final vision it might have enjoyed.

“Ladyfish got ’m at last,” murmured Rain.

And when the Lion had caught his breath—some hours later—he thought: maybe that’s why the Clock told the dwarf to avoid taking on a girl child as an associate. It could see in that decision the chance of its own destruction. When we disobeyed it—it shut down. It wouldn’t accept the Grimmerie anymore. For the Clock, then, it was only a matter of time.

11.

That was the end of the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Four days later they prepared for a parting of ways.

The dwarf expressed no preferences. Cross-country to Munchkinland or north, deeper into Loyal Oz—it made no difference now. The Clock was extinct and the Grimmerie deeded to Liir. “Come to Munchkinland,” suggested the Lion. “Without the Clock to slow us down or the book to guard, what harm might come to us? If we need to outrun a border patrol, I can easily carry you and Little Daffy on my back.” He held back from saying, “Your stint as a kindergarten supervisor is over.” He owed his life to the dwarf.

In any event, Munchkinland would be safer for the Lion, who in Loyal Oz might still be considered AWOL from his mission to locate the Grimmerie. Brrr intended to light out to Bright Lettins or to Colwen Grounds or wherever the trial of Dorothy would be staged. He had always thought Dorothy a bit of a blockhead, but not a malicious one. Maybe he could help her. It would be good to help someone. He was beginning to accept that he couldn’t do as much for his own wife as he’d have liked. He couldn’t remove from her history, by force of either comfort or magic, the fact that she’d spent some of her girlhood in prison. He couldn’t repair her. But he could, just possibly, do for Dorothy what he couldn’t do for Nor.

Whom he now would leave behind. But not, they both promised each other, for good.

Little Daffy, for her part, was eager to return to her home after all these years. She’d emigrated as a child, entering the mauntery after a stint at a home for incurables in the Emerald City, but she was returning a married woman in this time of trial. She was ready to stand at the ramparts of her homeland and spit in the eye of any gangly Emerald City Messiar who might deserve it. As long as she had a ladder to stand upon, for the height.

She kept her husband close to her side. What would he do, who would he turn out to be, now that the Grimmerie was traded to Liir, and the Clock of the Time Dragon was history? Maybe he’d find her Munchkin cousins affable, and he’d adjust to domestic life. Maybe when the troubles were over, they’d settle in her childhood home of Center Munch or even in Far Applerue, nearer the Glikkus. Perhaps Mr. Boss would find he had an affinity with the troll-people of the Glikkus, who didn’t farm but mined emeralds for their livelihood. Little Daffy didn’t know. The Clock wasn’t there to advise them. They would have to make it up as they went along.

She was glad, however, she’d collected in a few private pockets a little bit of the poppy dust from the great red flourish in the Sleeve of Ghastille. She was finding that, used in moderation, it came in handy at moving her poor aggrieved husband ahead.

The companions made their good-byes in a grove of oakhair trees. Long strands of new growth, acorns forming at the tips, dropped a kind of silent rain among them. An outdoor room laced with harp strings. As the companions stood there, reluctant to take their leave of one another, a breeze scurried along the floor of the forest. It strummed the strings of the oakhair fronds, a soft and jangled music, an orchestral evocation of the mood that had settled upon them.

“You’ll be better off the farther away from the fighting you get,” the Lion told Liir. “But, taking a leaf from Sister Doctor, don’t tell me where you’re going. It’ll be safer for you if we don’t know.”

“I don’t know myself,” said Liir. “I have an idea or two, but time will have to tell. We wish we could come with you to the defense of Dorothy. But it’s too dangerous.”

“No joke,” replied the Lion. “If you show yourself in Bright Lettins, the Munchkinlanders might impress you to take the Eminenceship of Munchkinland whether you want to do it or not. You’d give Munchkinland an edge. Your investiture would render void the claim that the Emperor Shell is making upon Munchkinland. It wouldn’t be safe for you, and certainly not safe for Rain.”

“We aren’t done keeping her hidden,” agreed Liir.

“We’ll never be done with that,” added Candle. “I think that will be our curse.”

Nor knelt down before the Lion and spoke as if to her knees, not her husband. “I don’t want you to go, but it’s for the best. You do the work at the trial that I would do if I could. The public statement is beyond me, in any venue. And I may be useful yet in helping take care of Rain. If Liir and Candle are ever recognized, if they’re accosted in any way, I’ll be able to stand in for Rain. She is my niece, after all.”

“I know,” said Brrr. “She is closer to you than I am.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Nor, “and furthermore it isn’t true. No one is closer to me than you are. But she’s in greater peril. She will be grown one day. She may be safe sooner than we think. We’ll meet up again.”

Liir took his sister’s hand as he disagreed with her. “Dear friends. While the country is at war, no living citizen is safe. If we choose to find one another again—and we may never have that choice—let’s agree to use the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a mail drop. We can leave notes for one another on paper weighed down by Rain’s favorite stone—that one with the tiny carving of the question mark sporting the head of a horse. Agreed?”

They all nodded. In this treacherous land, the chapel seemed as safe a rendezvous point as any other.

“It’s time to go,” said Liir.

“Check anytime a Goose flies overhead,” said Iskinaary to the Lion. “If I lose my bowels in your direction, it’s not personal.” He ducked his head under a wing, pretending to work at a nit, to save face in the face of strong feeling.

Rain wouldn’t come forward to say good-bye to Little Daffy or to Mr. Boss. And she wouldn’t look at Brrr. But she seemed to understand that there was a need to move on, even if she didn’t understand why. She put her grandmother’s broom on the ground. She set her shell on the ground next to it. She walked forward to the Cowardly Lion. She didn’t stretch her arms for a hug—how does a girl hug a Lion? Her arms lay straight at her side, as if she were a member of a military guard on duty. She sloped forward and she fell woodenly against the Lion’s cheek and mane and brow. She didn’t cry, but leaned upright against his face as he cried for both of them.