The Judgment of Dorothy

1.

By night the Lion and his pair of comrades crossed into Munchkinland without incident. They’d skirted to the north, avoiding Haugaard’s Keep and those aggrieved lake villages. Restwater and the Pine Barrens were behind them. It felt pretty damn good to be pacing a well-maintained stretch of the Yellow Brick Road. The Free State of Munchkinland might be nearing insolvency, but trust little farming people to keep their blue roofing tiles scrubbed clean of birdshit and their tomatoes staked as if they were prize philanthriums.

“The Munchkinlanders,” said Little Daffy, “call this season of the year Seedtime.”

“I can see why,” said Brrr. It seemed to belie the anxiety of wartime, to spit in its face, this bounty of Munchkinland. Mile after mile of pasture rilled with green fringe. Paddocks dizzy with birdsong and cloudy with bugs. Meadows patrolled by farmers, by the occasional tiktok contrivance on its wheels and pulleys and traction belts. “A Gillikin abomination in Munchkinlander fields is my partisan sentiment,” said Little Daffy.

“Machinery in exchange for grain. It’s called free trade,” said Brrr.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the traditional scarecrow. Any chance we’re going to run into your friend? Might he be heading to rescue Dorothy too?”

“Doubtful. He had the brains to make a clean break of the matter. Me, I’m too much of a coward.”

“Mmm,” said Mr. Boss, which was as opinionated as he got these days.

“No wonder this part of Munchkinland is known as the Corn Basket,” said the Lion. He had only ever seen the scrappier bits, the hardscrabble places that Animals had retreated to a generation or two ago, when Loyal Oz kicked them out of the law and commerce and the tonier echelons of the banks and colleges. Now he saw Animals in the fields, more than he’d expected. True, they were labor rather than management. But it was still work. “Do they comb off anything in the way of sharing the profits?”

“I couldn’t possibly say,” puffed Little Daffy. “I left Munchkinland years ago, before the infusion of new labor. Why? Are you looking for a farmhand position after we scope out this business about the trial of Dorothy?”

Well, he wasn’t. He’d done his share of farmwork on pocket handkerchief farms to the south. Barely subsistence enterprises. He’d hauled manure and brought in spattery little crops. He’d been paid in last winter’s carrots and he’d been loaned a flea-infused blanket to sleep under. No one had talked to him for seven years, and that had been fine with him. But had central Munchkinland always been so prosperous? He hadn’t noticed. Too distracted by self-loathing.

With every mile Little Daffy grew more cocky. She’d been born, she told them, up near the terminus of the Yellow Brick Road—Center Munch. From a family of farmers, of course. One of four or five siblings whose names she couldn’t now recall. She’d only traveled the Yellow Brick Road once before, when she was a teenager starting as a student nurse in Bright Lettins. “It was hardly more than a hamlet back then,” she said, “at the head of a tributary of the Munchkin River. I can’t wait to see it gussied up as a capital city.”

“It won’t look like the EC, anyway,” said the Lion. “This place is so different from Loyal Oz. I wonder that Munchkinlanders were ever willing to be ruled by the Emerald City.”

Little Daffy replied, “Nessarose Thropp rose to prominence by exploiting a provincial identity that Munchkinlanders had always felt, but suppressed. We never trusted Loyal Ozians even before the secession. We’re not like you.”

“Well, I’m an Animal,” said Brrr, “but I take your point.”

“I’m not like me anymore, either,” said the dwarf.

“And it’s not just the height thing,” said Little Daffy. “Lots of Munchkinlanders are tall as other Ozians.”

“Lots of us are taller inside our trousers than outside,” said her husband.

“Shut up, you,” said Little Daffy, but lovingly. At least he was verbal.

A few days later they approached the new capital over a series of low bridges spanning irrigation canals. Something of the feel of a holiday park for families, thought Brrr. Bright Lettins wasn’t gleaming and garish, like the Emerald City, nor ancient and stuffed with character, like Shiz, the capital of Gillikin. But it ornamented the landscape with its own brand of Munchkin confidence. From this approach, the effect at a distance was of a huddle of children’s building blocks: roofs of scalloped tile, blue or plum. Entering the city, the travelers found buildings made of stone-covered stucco painted in shades of grey and sand. Many structures were joined by arches over the street, creating a series of outdoor chambers, squares funneling into allées debouching into piazzas. Pleasing, welcoming.

And clean? Gutters ran under iron grills next to the coping in the streets, carrying away ordure of every variety. Windows clearer than mountain ice. The buildings ran to three and a half stories, by diktat apparently, though since they were Munchkin stories they weren’t very high.

“Where do taller people and Animals stay?” asked Brrr.

“Not here,” was the answer they got from chatelaine and inn master alike. After a while someone directed them to an Animal hostelry in a shabbier neighborhood. Reportedly the only place where Animals and humans could find rooms under the same roof, with a sign outside that read A STABLE HOME. The entrance for taller people and Animals was supplied at a side door marked OTHERS. “Well, I’ve been waiting almost four decades to decide who and what I am, and I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer,” said Brrr. “I’m an Other. But how are we going to pay?”

Little Daffy dug from some hidey-purse under her aprons a clutch of folded notes. “Whoa, have you been peddling poppy dust behind our backs?” asked Brrr when he caught sight of the wad.

“Before I left the mauntery several years ago, I dashed to its treasury,” she said. “I guessed that Sister Petty Cash abandoned her stash as she and the others were fleeing for their lives. I’ve never had the need to spend it yet.”

“Isn’t that theft?”

“I consider it back wages for thirty years of sacrifice.”

“I’m not complaining.”

The innkeeper was a dejected widow fallen on hard times. Taking in lodgers out of need. She resented them from the start. But rent was rent. “Your old fellow needs a rest,” she said to Little Daffy as she glanced over at where Mr. Boss was propped against a wall. “He’s not from around here. Sick, is he?”

“He’s a dwarf. He comes like that,” said Little Daffy. “It’s been a long trip. We’ll be grateful to take our key and find our room.”

“You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything.”

“What’s your name so I can call it out during wild sex?” asked Mr. Boss. Grumpiness made him come to life.

“You won’t need my name. I’m in business only until the troubles are over. I don’t leave the establishment untended. Now I’ll thank you to avoid monkey business while in this hostel.”

“I’ll call you Dame Hostile,” said Mr. Boss, grinning to show his tobacco-stained smile.

“I’ll be happy to help you sweep up. I can remove splinters, bake a little,” said Little Daffy hastily. “We’ll be ideal guests, believe me.”

“You,” said the chatelaine to the Lion, “your room is out back. Down the alley. Don’t brush your mane in the public rooms, I have allergies.”

Ah, little has changed for the Animals, thought Brrr. His room, though separate and sparely fitted, was clean enough.

The next day, market day in Bright Lettins. The central district was packed dense with stalls and shoppers. Plenty indeed—mounds of baby squash, punnets of spring berries like pucklegem and queen’s beads. Lettuces so new and tender you could hold the leaves up to the light and see through them. Despite the abundance, however, the haggling was fierce. Voices raised on both sides, vendor and housewife. “No spare coin to be had in this crowd,” murmured Little Daffy. One furious merchant upended a cart of his own pricey white asparagus tips and let his pig eat them rather than sell them for the pittance that had been proferred. The pig sported the only satisfied smirk Brrr saw all morning.

The newcomers settled for elevenses at a café, hoping to overhear something useful. Farmers muttered over the weather, the prices, the progress of the war. Words were said about General Jinjuria, the peasant warrior, and about Mombey, the head of the government. Little Daffy ordered tea and beer and river prawns in tarragon. They ate in silence, listening for all they were worth.

“They’ll never starve us out,” said one old bearded fellow with a prosthetic ear made of tin. “They can siphon all the water they want from our precious Restwater, but as long as our farms are upstream of the lake, we’ll not go short of water and so we won’t go short of food.”

“We should dam the Munchkin River and dry out the lake,” said the waitress, settling down with her own beer.

“We couldn’t drain that lake any way shy of a miracle. It’s fed by runoff of the Great Kells,” someone argued. “That’s part of the rationale for the EC requisitioning the water in the first place.”

“How is this Jinjuria holding the EC forces at Haugaard’s Keep?” asked Brrr. The Munchkinlander locals glanced at one another. Maybe, thought Brrr, Animals don’t talk across café tables to humans they didn’t know socially.

“The Lion asked you a question,” said Little Daffy. “Nicely.”

The old man looked suspicious of their ignorance. He stroked his taffy-colored beard, combing it with his fingers. “Jinjuria, she could have held on to Haugaard’s Keep, you know that. It’s almost impregnable. Slitted windows high up, and a pair of moated entrances. With their superior numbers the EC Messiars swarmed up the lakeside of the keep, see, and General Jinjuria’s forces put on a handsome show of repelling them—but only as a lure. Soon as the assailants had gained the ramparts on ladders and arrow-slung ropes, Jinjuria set in motion the quick retreat she’d planned. The bulk of our forces that had held Haugaard’s Keep retreated on the land side, burning the wooden decking on the moat entrance as they went. Not everyone made it out, of course, and the heads of our patriot martyrs were bowled down into the moat for several weeks afterward and bobbed there like muskmelons. But Jinjuria’s strategy worked. She boxed up the Emerald City high command, General Cherrystone as they call him, and the cream of his forces too. She can’t starve him out, as she can’t prevent supplies from arriving on the lakeside, by flotillas of this sort or that. But she can prevent him from leaving by land. And if he left by lake—well, that would be a retreat, pure and simple. No, she’s got him cornered, like a cat playing with a larder mouse.”

“Brilliant.” Little Daffy’s eyes glowed with pride.

“It’s a stalemate, no pretending otherwise,” said the garrulous one among the locals. “Where have you lot been, that this is all news to you?”

“Doing missionary work,” said Little Daffy quickly, before Brrr could falter or fudge. “Is Mombey here?”

“Said to be in residence at Colwen Grounds.”

“And Dorothy?” asked Brrr. “Is she expected soon?”

They didn’t know what Brrr was talking about. “Dorothy? Her? We won’t see the likes of Dorothy again. Not in this lifetime.”

“She shows up here for a pint, I charge her triple,” promised the waitress, and bit the farthing Little Daffy was paying with. “She has a lot to answer for, knocking off our lady governor like she did.”

The old farmer chided the waitress. “You’re not old enough to remember Nessarose Thropp. That Dorothy may have played fast and loose with government figures, but there was quite a bit of singing and dancing back in the day. Folks fell to their knees in thanksgiving for their release from bondage.”

“Munchkinlanders don’t have too far to fall,” said the waitress, swishing a rag at a table. “Who can even tell when we’re on our knees?”

“Well, she fell from a great distance, that girl,” insisted the farmer.

“Wearing a wooden house around her as some sort of defense. A weird cleverness in that child.”

“She wasn’t all that clever,” said Brrr, realizing too late that neither was he.

“You have a point of view? Listen—you’re not that Lion? The Cowardly Lion, they called him? One of Dorothy’s lackeys? Say it en’t so.”

“Not so, I’m afraid,” said Brrr.

“You have no right to any opinion then.” The other farmers dropped their chins over their steins and frowned across the froth. The atmosphere had a tang to it, like saltpetre. “I think it was you. Wasn’t it? Got her out of here safely before she could be asked to account for herself?”

“That would be my brother,” said Brrr. “My twin brother, I’m afraid. A luckless sort, but there you have it.” For the first and perhaps the last time in his life, he was glad to have an identical twin he’d never met. “Finish that prawn, Mr. Boss, and we’ll be on our way.”

2.

Why don’t the Munchkinlanders sue for peace?” asked the Lion of his cronies. “Sure, they’ve lost Restwater, and it’s an insult and an outrage. But if their agriculture carries on nicely enough upstream, why not make the best of a bad situation and call for an armistice? Give up the lake and get their lives back to normal?”

They asked around, they gossiped, they eavesdropped. It turned out that supplying the EC with water all those years had been fiscally advantageous to Munchkinland, and the government of the Free State was as reluctant to part with the income stream as with the territory itself.

The deeper question—why do populations squabble for dominance?—remained unanswered. Native pride, the patriotism of different peoples, seemed jejune to the Lion. Mawkish, embarrassing. Though since he’d grown up without any pride of his own—neither a family tribe nor that pestery, myopic little fuse of self-admiration—he no longer expected to understand what motivated others.

But was it even true that Dorothy had come back to Oz? No one in Bright Lettins seemed to have heard about it. Maybe the rumor of her return had been planted to stir things up, to try to flush the Grimmerie into the open somehow. Or maybe strategists had hoped to flush Liir into the open. In which case, what a relief to have left the great book behind with Liir and his family.

Maybe Dorothy had taken ill and died before a show trial could commence. Or maybe she was being held incognito until her public humiliation could do the most good, at least in terms of lifting homeland morale.

The Lion and his friends took to wandering the streets after their morning coffee and cheddar-and-onion butty, ambling and window-shopping and keeping their ears open. Brrr was surprised to see little in the way of a police force. “Is the absence of a civic constabulary a sign of self-confidence?”

“I bet the Munchkinland defense is all occupied in the apron of land around Haugaard’s Keep,” said Little Daffy. “But who cares? We’re not here to bring down the nation or to save it. We’re just here to help Dorothy if we can. Look, a distress sale at that milliner’s shop.” She came out sporting a bonnet of uncertain charm.

The dwarf snorted. “We’re looking for Dorothy. You’re looking like you’re wearing a failed dessert.”

“I love you too,” said Little Daffy, clearly glad to see him returning to form. “Let’s go back to our room and play Tickle My Fancy.”

“The loud version,” agreed Mr. Boss, cheerily enough. “Give Dame Hostile a little entertainment through the keyhole.”

“I’ll catch you up later,” said the Lion.

He was perusing the goods in a pushcart and being ignored by the merchant when a sudden cloudburst forced him under a nearby portico. Waiting out the rain in a throng of Munchkins, he heard the swell of their comments include the words La Mombey. Brrr didn’t need to push to the front of the crowd. He could see over their heads. One of a pair of horses pulling a brougham had cast a shoe, and a farrier was sent for. Without fanfare the door to the carriage opened. An attendant in Munchkinlander formal couture, cobalt serge and silver buttons, held up a parasol as a woman alighted.

Could this be Mombey? The murmur at ground level suggested so. She was tall and striking, nowhere near as old as Brrr had imagined. Her full shimmery-coppery silk garment draped, uncinched, from the fabric yoke at her shoulders. Her pale hand looked linen smooth. She pivoted to study the street with a languid air, her face impassive, cut almost too prettily, as if a wax model for a bronze casting of Lurline, or maybe the Spirit of Munchkinlander Assiduity. She gave a half-curtsey toward the citizens crowded under the arcade, and retired into a private home whose astounded owners, standing on either side of the door, appeared ready to explode with honor and subservience.

The Munchkinlanders resumed gabbling in appreciation of their leader. Brrr listened for some reference to Dorothy, but he heard only about Mombey; her behavior discreet, intelligent, warm, reserved. Her military sense subtle and her clothes sense impeccable. We’ll win out over the EC in the end. She has talents she hasn’t yet used.

“What exactly do you mean, ‘talents she hasn’t yet used’?” asked the Lion. But by now he knew that while Munchkinlanders tolerated talking Animals in their capital city, they rarely wanted to exchange more than pleasantries.

He waited along with the rest of the crowd. When an hour had passed and the rain let up, he left his post and returned to A Stable Home.

The disgruntled chatelaine was dusting the ferns and sneezing. To his report, the old woman said, “Mombey makes her way west from time to time, to discuss military strategy with General Jinjuria. We’re quite used to having Her Eminence pass through and we think nothing of it. We are now the capital city of Munchkinland, after all.”

“What was meant by the rumor ‘talents’?” asked Brrr.

“Oh, she’s got more than a touch of magic skill.” The old woman flapped her rag out the window. Most of the dust blew back in and landed on the top of the credenza.

“I didn’t know Munchkinlanders approved of magic.”

“I don’t approve of discussing politics with Animals. You want another opinion, try the Reading Room down by Clericle Corners. A bit of a pong but what do you expect.”

Brrr decided he would and was glad he did. At the end of a long reading table, peering out of one eye through a handheld lens, sat an elderly Ape whom Brrr had once known. Mister Mikko. A former professor at Shiz, now sporting a fiercely unconvincing set of false teeth. Which he bared at Brrr when Brrr approached, and then had to pick up and jam back into his mouth because they fell out on the table.

“I’m joining no Benevolent Societies for Stray Cats today, sir,” the Ape barked at Brrr. “How dare you approach me in this sanctuary of repose.”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“I couldn’t recognize my own grandmother if she bit me on my blue behind. My cataracts have baby cataracts of their own.” Still, Mister Mikko squinted, fitting his monocle under his brow. “Upon my word. It’s the Lion who helped me lose half of my savings. Have you come to pay it back, with interest?”

“Take it up with the banks at Shiz. The harm done you originated there.”

“You stiffed me of a higher rate of interest than the banks allowed, and you got in trouble for it. Don’t think I didn’t hear about the scandal. We may be at war with Loyal Oz, but that doesn’t stop the financial news from getting through. I follow the papers, sir!”

“Well, if my pot of gold ever turns up at the end of the rainbow, you’ll get the first scoop.”

“I don’t want a scoop of whatever is in the pot at the end of your rainbow.” Still, Mister Mikko folded the paper and closed his arms around his chest. “I’m surprised you’d show your face to me, after that larceny.”

“I’ve paid my debt to society, and I’ll make it up to you if I ever get the chance. How is Professor Lenx?” Mister Mikko had lodged with a Boar, another professor retired from Shiz during the enactment of the Animal Adverse laws.

“He passed away, poor sod. I couldn’t keep the house up on my own. Didn’t have the heart, and what’s more, couldn’t afford the help. Thank you very much for that. So I abandoned the old place at Stonespar End and I moved here, where I live in a disgusting hotel for elderly Animals. It’s a good thing I lost my sense of smell a long time ago, believe me. No, don’t sit down, I didn’t invite you.”

“This isn’t the Emerald City under the Animal Adverse laws. I can sit where I like.” Brrr looked about to see if their conversation was annoying anyone, but the only other patron was a White Parrot who had fallen asleep clinging to the windowsill.

“Don’t mind him,” said the Ape. “He’s both deaf and asleep. We can’t disturb him even if we shouted fire into his ear.”

“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” replied the Lion.

“Welcome to the club.” But the Ape relented a little; he clearly was lonely after the death of his companion. “Not that paranoia seems an inappropriate response to a government that relies on secrecy to protect itself. Rather it seems quite sane. Oh, yes. I lectured in Oz history, so you see I know whereof I speak. Surely you remember.”

“No, I was never a student of yours. I was your fiscal agent.”

“Time runs together. How recently did you fleece me?”

“How recently did Professor Lenx die?” This was cruel of Brrr, but he had to move the conversation on.

Mister Mikko removed his monocle and looked coldly out the window. “I never can remember,” he said, quite evidently lying: probably he could remember every hour of his life since. “My area was the early and middle Ozma realms. I never was good at Modern History. Why are you interrupting my meditations with your prattle?”

For all his meekness and tendency to isolationism, the Lion had never entirely trusted sentient Animals. He would have to speak carefully and try to avoid attitude. “I’m told that the Eminence herself has arrived in town today—Mombey, I mean,” in case Mister Mikko’s short-term memory was faulty and he was imagining Nessarose Thropp.

“I’m not a nincompoop,” barked the Ape. “I know who Mombey is. She has the right to come and go as she pleases. What is your problem?”

“I’ve been trying to find out if she’s here to convene a legal investigation. A court case, I mean.”

“You’re afraid you’re being brought up on charges of embezzlement? Where’s the party? Sign me up as a witness for the prosecution.”

“No.” He supposed there was nothing for it. “I’m told that the girl from the Other Land has returned.”

“Ozma?” The Ape snorted his teeth onto the table again, and a good deal of saliva too. “You are imbecilic. Ozma Tippetarius was flung into an infant’s grave eleventy-seven years ago. She decides to come back to life after all this time, she’ll be in a wheelchair. She can have my teeth as tribute.”

“Not Ozma. Dorothy.”

The Ape snorted again. “You’ll have to remind me about Dorothy. Was she one of those idiotic Gillikinese scholarship girls from Settica or Frottica? It was all the rage for about ten years, sending milkmaids off to college. A bad plan all around.”

“Dorothy from Kanzass. The one whose house flattened Nessarose and released the Munchkinlanders from tyranny.”

“Oh yes. So they could rise and embrace another tyranny: our good queen Mombey.”

“Look, Mister Mikko. I’m only asking if you know anything about the return of Dorothy. I heard that she was going to be put on trial, and I wondered if Mombey’s arrival in Bright Lettins means Dorothy is about to be brought in too. If you’re not interested in current affairs, well, don’t let me bother your nap.” The Lion stood up to leave.

“Oh, don’t mind me, you young fool,” snapped the Ape. “I’m less interested in the return of Dorothy than I am in the return of my missing bank deposits. But let me put my ancient ear to the thin walls of my single room and catch what’s squawking, and I’ll be back here tomorrow to tell you what I have heard.”

The next day, a brighter day on the unpleasant side of warm, Brrr met Mister Mikko again. After spending the fee to enter, and finding the Reading Room as sparsely used as the day before, he learned from Mister Mikko that the Ape had had no luck scaring up any information about Dorothy. “I didn’t expect to,” said the Ape, “but in good faith I did ask.”

“You didn’t ask,” said the Lion. “You just wanted me to have to spend money to find out you were useless. Thanks a lot.”

“Nothing like old friends when you need ’em, is there.”

The Lion supposed he deserved this. He had, after all, bilked the Ape of some part of his portfolio. Before Brrr could think of a parting comment that would suggest even a shred of remorse, the White Parrot opened its eyes and said, “Well, you didn’t involve me in the question, but in fact, good sir, I’ve done a little investigation of my own.”

“Oh, my,” said the Lion.

“You’ve got keen instincts,” observed the Parrot. “Yes, Mombey is in town, and yes indeed, to open a court proceeding against Dorothy. It’ll all come out in the town squares tomorrow. I know this from a few Pigeons who live on the rough in a gutter outside a printery. The bills are being run up for posting on kiosks and newsboards. One has to wonder how you knew.”

“A little bird told me,” said the Lion.

3.

DOROTHY: ASSASSIN OF PATRIOTS read one broadside.

INCOMING! said another. SHE’S BACK.

THE TRIAL OF OUR TIMES read a third.

“Tell me about it,” said Mister Mikko. He summarized for the Lion. “The proceedings will start in five days. That gives magistrates for the defense and for the prosecution a chance to prepare their cases. It looks like Mombey herself picked the barristers.”

Brrr had had his brushes in court before, and always on the wrong end of the law. But that was back in the Emerald City. Were things done differently in whatever passed for Munchkin justice? Mister Mikko set Brrr straight.

“Generally disputes in Munchkinland are settled on a case-by-case basis. The tradition of reliance on precedent isn’t deeply rooted in Munchkinland, given the rural and piecemeal settlement of the county. Most cases are decided behind closed doors, the traveling magistrate serving as confessor and adjudicator both. I’ll wager he pockets the fine, too. It’s my belief that jurisprudence in Munchkinland doesn’t exist at all except to reinforce the prejudices of the top dog. Which despite the metaphor is never an Animal, at least in Munchkinland.”

“I didn’t know you had a Dog in this fight,” said Brrr.

“Ha-ha. Well, pay attention. This trial will be more formal. No executive sessions here, this one will be open to the public—you can’t be surprised at that.”

“Are there jurors? Witnesses?”

Mister Mikko elaborated. For a so-called open trial, a five-member jury was usually empaneled at its own cost. In this instance, it seemed Mombey was going to present the case herself, in an initial declamation, and then turn the proceedings over to a celebrity magistrate appointed to the position for this trial only. The barristers pleading the cases for the prosecution and for the defense would post their requests for witnesses on a billboard on the door of the Grange Central. Potential witnesses only had to show up in time to get a seat. Generally they could nominate themselves of their own free will, or refuse to testify if they weren’t in the mood. But rules could vary case by case, so who knew.

“Nipp,” Brrr told Little Daffy back at the inn. “He’s the appointed magistrate. Does that name ring a bell?”

“Not to me,” said Little Daffy. “But don’t forget I was cloistered for all those years.”

“I know of him,” said Mr. Boss. “He was the first governor of Munchkinland after Nessarose Thropp was murdered in cold blood by that prim little Miss Dorothy, bless her little soul.” He was in a good mood.

“You’re not opinionated, I see,” said Brrr, though he was glad Mr. Boss seemed to be coming back around some.

The trial was designated for Densloe Den, a little salon theater, but for fears of crowding was soon shifted to a venue called Neale House. A former armory now used for the spring cattle fair. Above its arches on three sides ran a gallery. The Neale could sit a large number of visitors, but on the first day the interest seemed slim, so Little Daffy, Mr. Boss, and Brrr easily got tickets to attend the instructions to the jury. The room wasn’t a quarter full. They could have had front row seats, though Brrr by dint of his size was required to recline on the floor to one side. He couldn’t have fit a single thigh in a folding chair scaled for Munchkinlanders, not for money nor love.

The day’s newsfolds, left on the seats of chairs, presented potted biographies of the trial’s dramatis personae. Brrr only had time to read about the magistrate. Nipp had begun his career as a kind of concierge at Colwen Grounds, serving Nessarose Thropp up until the day she was squished. Apparently because he’d held the keys to the actual house, Nipp had stepped in as emergency Prime Minister until the Munchkinlanders’ appetite to be governed by an Eminence reasserted itself. Mombey had emerged from a prior anonymity—the argument for her elevation wasn’t rehearsed here. Whereupon Nipp had retired with honors that included a fancy cake, a sash, and a lifetime supply of ammonia salts, which apparently had some symbolic significance no one at the city desk of the press had bothered to identify.

Brrr had hardly finished the bio when Nipp entered the chamber. Among the taller of Munchkinlanders, he wore a conical hat whose brim was sprightly with felt balls. He flung the hat onto the top of a coat stand, to a spatter of applause. That he could land it like a horseshoe, Brrr deduced, was proof of his capacity to serve with a steady hand. Then Nipp took the bench. It was supplied with the traditional gavel, the bell, a slate on which messages could be scrawled for private viewing in case the magistrate didn’t want to be overheard, and a small pile of ham sandwiches under a net to keep off the flies. Behind him two grammar school students were ready with fans made of blue ostrich plumes in case it became too warm.

“Citizens of Munchkinland,” Nipp began, in a voice quavery with age but strengthening by the sentence, “we are here to keep our big mouths shut and to listen. To listen to what is presented. Anyone in Neale House who makes a fuss or disrupts our attention to the proceedings shall be taken out and fined, or shot, or put in the stocks. Which this time of year are very uncomfortable what with mosquito season just beginning. Are there any questions?—then let us continue. I predict this trial will last a week—perhaps two. Those who can’t tolerate the heat should stay at home. Babies are not allowed. If there is a fire don’t everyone scream ‘Fire!’ all at once—it’s terribly muddling and only makes people nervous. Should I feel the need to call additional witnesses I shall do so and I hereforth declare that for this trial there is no right of resistance—if you’re in the room, you’re considered fair game for service. Furthermore if you’re not in the room and you are required you shall be apprehended by deputized mobs and escorted here whether you like it or not. Tell your friends and neighbors. If you are wanted and you’re on holiday up at Mossmere or someplace, you shall be sent to prison when you return for taking a holiday thoughtlessly. Are there any questions—speak up—no questions—I see—then let us begin by my presenting the barristers and the jurors.”

“This isn’t going to take two weeks,” whispered Brrr to Little Daffy, who was sitting in a chair on the end of her aisle.

Nipp introduced the envoy for the prosecution, a part-time barrister whose regular job was being a professional mourner. Dame Fegg. She emerged from a curtained doorway dressed in something that looked to Brrr as if it had been cut down from a choir robe—about five minutes earlier, without benefit of a seamstress. She was still putting pins in her hair as she came through. A no-nonsense middle-aged farm frau with pockets beneath her eyes deep enough to hold tokens for an EC omnibus. “Yoiks,” muttered Brrr.

The envoy for the defense was introduced next, a certain Temper Bailey, who turned out to be a brown Fever Owl. “They couldn’t spring for a human?” muttered Little Daffy. “Guess this is what is called an open-and-shut case.”

“Animals still draw lower salaries, I bet,” replied Brrr.

The Owl flew to a perch and rotated his head on his neck, all the way round. Not an unusual gesture for an Owl, but unsettling in a court of law; accusatory, somehow, of them all, even the spectators. Temper Bailey then nodded to Dame Fegg, but she was applying some sort of liquid paint to her nails and didn’t return the obeisance.

Only when the jurors had been seated did the magistrate seem to notice that the room was sparsely populated. He stood on his toes and regarded the audience with disdain, as if it were they who were skiving off. “The Eminence suggests this is a trial of interest to all Munchkinlanders,” said Nipp. “I need hardly mention that without the unprovoked invasion by Dorothy a generation ago, we wouldn’t be in the position of defending Restwater from the Emerald City. The Eminence of that day, Miss Nessarose Thropp, would likely still be ensconced in Colwen Grounds. Or else she and her consort would have brought forth a new Eminence to take her place.”

A rude titter, quickly suppressed. Enough of the crowd was old enough to recall that Nessarose had not been thronged with suitors. She had died without benefit of spouse or spawn.

“When are we going to see Dorothy?” asked Temper Bailey. Brrr would have guessed that the defense might have had a chance to question his client before opening ceremonies, but it seemed the government was running this trial on the cheap.

Nipp made his first ruling, not with a gavel but with a bell. “I am dismissing all parties until tomorrow morning. Come back with your relatives and friends. Tell them that La Mombey herself will be here to introduce the accused. If this hall isn’t filled to capacity word will get back to the Emerald City that Munchkinlanders have lost all public spirit. Do as I say, in the name of justice.”

“I should think he meant ‘in the name of public relations,’ ” said Brrr.

“I heard that, you,” said Nipp. “I’ll brook no backtalk from the floor, especially from an Animal. Dismissed.”

As might have been expected, the next day saw the gallery nearly full. Munchkins en masse. Perhaps Nipp’s refusing to bring out Dorothy for the introductory session had whetted appetites. At any rate, it was a good time of the summer for a trial. Harvest was still six weeks out. Among a bunch of farm people come to town for the fun, Brrr and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, brandishing their tickets, took their places. Little Daffy was equipped with a sack of muffins and fruit and a thermos of potato brandy in case things got dull. A couple of teenage scowlawags nearby played a game of Hangman using the word DOROTHY as the clue.

Nipp marched in followed by Dame Fegg and Temper Bailey. The Owl had been slip-covered with a tunic not unlike Dame Fegg’s. It made him look like a tea cosy with an owl head. He winced at the laughter of the crowd. Everyone settled down when Nipp clapped the gavel on its stand and introduced the Eminence of Munchkinland, La Mombey. “And rise, you dolts. This isn’t one of your talent shows!”

The crowd obliged as a pair of Chimpanzees in livery swung open the double doors at the back of the bench. The Eminence flooded into the room in another tidal barrage of silks, these flowered, white petals against maroon. Brrr studied her face. It seemed different. Less chiseled, more delicate, even fragile. And the hair on her head, in a chignon so crisp it might have been a crown, looked darker, spikier. But he didn’t dare mutter in her presence. She looked full of sorrowful dignity. He found himself lowering his head just for a moment in the presence of something he couldn’t name. Self-possession, if nothing else.

“We are Munchkinlanders,” she told the crowd. Her voice was like honey coating the knife. “We are hospitable to all, even those who arrive on our homeland to spite us and murder us. I ask you to extend the courtesy of our traditions to the accused, Dorothy Gale. I beg to remind you that there is no statute of limitations where crimes against the heart are concerned. If we must convict the accused, let us convict her justly. If we choose to decide she is not guilty of the charges of murder, let us not harbor thoughts of malfeasance when she is liberated.” Mombey turned to the five jurors, who stood to one side. They were all unrepentently human. “You five are the eyes and ears of Munchkinland, and you must be the heart and soul of justice. Bring Dorothy to trial with merciful dispatch. Whatever you recommend to the magistrate will be taken under deepest consideration, but it is his conclusion that we will follow. You are here as advisors only. And the public is here not to second-guess the proceedings but to witness them, so that they can tell their children and their grandchildren that justice is alive in Oz.

“For his services to our country, today I elevate our former Prime Minister to the peerage. Henceforth he shall be Lord Nipp of Dragon Cupboard. Let the constabulary bring forth the alien.”

La Mombey retired behind the doors through which she’d emerged, as if to be seen in the same room as the accused would constitute an affront to her dignity. Only when the Chimpanzees had closed the double doors with a click did Brrr notice a trapdoor to one side. The Chimpanzees put their overknuckled paws to the ring, and together they pulled it up. Then they retreated to the far side of the pen. The Lion leaned forward to catch a glimpse of Dorothy again, after all this time.

4.

As she emerged, clumsily, reaching for a hand to help her up the ladder, though there was no one to stretch out such a hand, the Lion realized he’d been thinking of Dorothy as about ten years old. Just about the age Rain was now, more or less. A few other assumptions followed, nearly simultaneously.

His affection for Rain was related to his memory of Dorothy.

He hadn’t ever done much for Dorothy except provide a few laughs and some companionship on the road.

He’d done no better for Rain, yet he felt more implicated in Rain’s future than he had in Dorothy’s. Was this age and maturity on his part? Or sentimentality?

Or was it that Rain was less competent than Dorothy had been at that age? Needed him more?

The crime for which Dorothy was being charged had occurred fifteen, eighteen, twenty years ago. She ought to be a mature woman now, able as needed to explain away or to apologize for the accidents of her youth.

In her maturity, will she recognize me?

He held his breath, but his tail thumped on the floor. Agitation, pleasure, and the curiosity that sometimes killed the likes of him and his kin.

5.

Dorothy’s head rose farther out of the square in the flooring. She was facing the magistrate, who glared upon her as if he hadn’t seen her before. Maybe she’d been kept sequestered from everyone involved in this trial. Six times Temper Bailey rotated his head on his stem.

“This is like climbing into the hayloft back in Kansas.” Yes, it was Dorothy’s voice, her real voice, misguidedly cheerful as always. Brrr felt the muffin lurch up his throat. “Still, you’d never see a Kansan owl dressed up in a petticoat!”

Something stronger than a titter rippled through the hall. Temper Bailey blinked balefully. “Mind your manners,” said Lord Nipp. “That’s your representation.”

“What a hoot,” Dorothy replied. “Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

She turned to look at the crowd seated on the floor and in the galleries. Brrr knew himself to be in shadow, as he had crouched down by the wainscoting below where strong sunlight was heaving in through the windows. He doubted that she could see him, at least not at first, and that gave him a chance to study her.

Either she’d become stunted by her experience in Oz a generation ago or some perverse magic was at work. Yes, she was quite recognizably Dorothy. Those cocoa-bright eyes. The way she led with her shoulders and clavicle. Surely she ought to be middle-aged by now? But she seemed merely a few years older than he remembered her. Taller but hardly leaner. Her baby fat had only begun to reorient itself into incipient womanliness. Her face remained eager and unshuttered even after her latest travails. Proof of Dorothy.

Lord Nipp banged a gavel, as if to remind himself he was in charge. “Identify yourself. Name, age, origin, and your designs upon us.”

“Well, that’s easy enough,” said Dorothy. As if she couldn’t decide who to love first, she turned this way and that, toward Temper Bailey, who inched away on his perch, and then to Lord Nipp, and finally to Dame Fegg. “I’m Dorothy Gale, if you please, from the state of Kansas. The thirty-fourth state in the union, a free state now and proud of it. No slavery to speak of.” She made a clumsy curtsey to a family of Pigs in the second row, one of the few groups of Animals present. “We’re still working out a few wrinkles.”

“Answer the questions,” said Nipp.

“Oh yes. Well, I’m sixteen at my last birthday, you know.”

Nipp scribbled a few marks upon a pad and frowned. “And your intention in returning to Oz after your long absence?”

“Goodness, there was no intention involved. After what I’d been through, do you think I’d choose to return? I’d have to be mad … well, never mind. The truth is I seem to have no control over my whereabouts. Makes me dangerous to let out on the streets, says Uncle Henry. Or said Uncle Henry.” She teared up a little. “I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

“What are you cawing about?” asked Dame Fegg. “You haven’t answered the first question posed by the magistrate.”

“I have no designs in Oz,” said the girl. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Em and I had gone to San Francisco, see, for various family reasons. My mental fitness for marriage among them, to be blunt. We ate funny food and saw sights till we felt like gagging. And then, one morning, oh my word! I took a trip to the roof of my hotel and the whole building began to shake and buckle, and I could hear stones falling and people screaming. For a moment the elevator stopped and everything became dark, and I could detect a bad smell, though maybe that was Toto. My dog. Then the elevator began to move again, sliding faster and faster, and I thought I would smash to my death at the bottom of the chute! It was much the scariest thing that ever happened to me since the twister. The noise grew louder, the air grew thick with powder; a moment later, while in the elevator, I lost my mind for my dog had got away…”

Brrr had to concede it. She was dotty as ever, but blistering buckets, how people listened to her. They were nearly swaying in time with her rhetoric.

“The earth began to quake, for goodness’ sake; I knew I’d made a big mistake when the cage began to shake…”

“A little restraint in the theatrics,” said the magistrate.

“When I came to,” she continued, less sonorously, “I found myself in the elevator cage half buried in a landslide. When people dug me out I assumed they would be San Franciscans. But just my luck. Imagine: a tribe of little people! Again! At first I thought I’d discovered yet another tiresome country, but eventually someone called Sakkali Oafish told me I was in Oz. So you see, your honor, I had no designs at all, except to have a nice holiday and maybe buy some lace for my hope chest, in the off chance any fellow ever gets interested in me.” She looked with big eyes across the room again. “I don’t think my prospects for a husband are terribly strong, not at this particular point in time.”

“First things first,” said Lord Nipp. “Dorothy Gale, you are charged with crimes against Munchkinland. Crimes of the most grievous sort because they conflate aggression against the state with assault against individuals. You are charged with the murder of Nessarose Thropp, the onetime Eminent Thropp and de facto governor of Munchkinland. Also with the murder of her sister, Elphaba Thropp of Kiamo Ko, though originally of Munchkinland.”

“Well, that’s a pretty big plate of sauerkraut, if you ask me,” said Dorothy. “I never murdered a soul. Do you think I was navigating that house from Kansas, back in the day?”

“It is my first duty to make sure you understand the seriousness of the charges brought against you. If convicted, you could be put to death.”

The girl opened her eyes wider than usual. “Everyone in Oz is far too nice to do a nasty thing like that to an accidental immigrant.”

“I must ask you to restrict your remarks to answering the questions. I don’t know what experience of legal proceedings you might have gained in your tenure in Kanziz—quite a bit, I would suspect, as you seem to career about wreaking mayhem—but here in Oz we maintain a certain decorum in court. This goes for those unwrapping sandwiches in the gallery. If you must arrive with lunch, make sure it is wrapped in cloth so it doesn’t make so much noise when you bring it out!”

“I understand the charges,” said Dorothy, “but I’m sure when I explain the circumstances you’ll see that this is all a dreadful misunderstanding. And certainly there will be witnesses to testify in my defense? You’ve arranged for character witnesses, at the least? I did have some friends here, once upon a time.”

“We’ve had to pull this trial together rather quickly.”

“Then perhaps we should postpone this little charade until we’ve all gotten ourselves prepared adequately.” Dorothy could still say the most inappropriate things and get away with them, thought Brrr.

“The job is put to us by the Eminent Mombey. These are desperate times for Munchkinland. We will perform our duties as best we can under the circumstances.”

“Are you saying there’s no one here who remembers me?” Dorothy turned and looked out at the crowd again, shading her eyes against the sloping sunlight. “Can you call for a show of hands, Lord Nipp?”

“You don’t get to decide how we proceed. You’re the accused.”

“I should like to request that Dorothy’s idea be acted upon,” ventured Temper Bailey. “Before we proceed, may we see if anyone present has direct knowledge of the Matter of Dorothy?”

“Very well,” said the magistrate. “If among us there is anyone who has ever laid eyes on this Dorothy Gale before today, you are ordered to rise.”

This was why they had come to Munchkinland, after all. His heart not quite in his throat—somewhere south of the esophagus, it felt—the Lion stood up. A murmur of Munchkinlanders caused Dorothy to turn toward his side of the chamber.

“Oh, I don’t believe it!” she cried. “I knew someone would come. I had hoped it would be the Scarecrow, but even so.”

“Approach the bench,” said Nipp.

Brrr did, trying not to sashay. It was still sometimes a problem in public. “I am Brrr. I come with several other names. Popularly known as the Cowardly Lion in some circles, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing I can do about that. When in Gillikin I’m sometimes addressed as Sir Brrr, Namory of Traum.”

“That’s Loyal Oz,” said Nipp. “Cuts no mustard here, Lion.”

“I was elevated by Lady Glinda when she was Throne Minister,” said the Lion. “I don’t require the honorific. I’m just trying to be sure you don’t accuse me of concealing pertinent facts. I’m probably wanted for sedition by the Emerald City for having jumped bail after a spot of legal trouble on that side of the border.”

“We have no extradition treaties, so you’re safe here as far as that goes,” said Nipp. “Not that you deserve to be harbored, necessarily.”

The Lion turned to Dorothy. They were only six feet apart now. She was too mature to throw her arms around him. Indeed, she looked a little frightened. “Up until now I had hoped this might all be a dream,” she said. “But you are just like yourself, and yet different than you were. Put on a little weight? I think you have.”

“You’re a sight for sore eyes yourself,” he told her.

“Save your chatter for after hours,” advised the magistrate. “Anyone else?”

Brrr oughtn’t to have been surprised to see Little Daffy approach the bench. She had murmured something once about having seen Dorothy. “I suppose I have an obligation to make myself known to you. I am called Little Daffy. My name originally was Daffodil Sully, but I was known for some years as Sister Apothecaire, a unionist maunt housed at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, in the southern corner of Gillikin.”

“And how do you know the accused?” asked the magistrate.

Little Daffy looked sideways at Dorothy Gale. “I can’t say I know her. I’m merely answering your call to identify myself as someone who has crossed paths with her before. I was present in Center Munch on the day when Dorothy first arrived in Oz. The day that her house tumbled out of the sky and killed Nessarose.”

The mumble in the room grew louder. It was one thing to have an Animal or an illegal immigrant questioned by a magistrate. But a Munchkinlander present at the death of Nessarose Thropp! Brrr wasn’t sure if the susurrus suggested admiration, disbelief, or alarm. Little Daffy gave a curt nod to Dorothy and said, “When it comes time to discuss what happened that day, I’ll put my bootblack on my brogans, same as anyone else.”

Nipp sent them back to their seats but ordered their continued attendance through the duration of the trial. They’d be called to testify in time. Probably not today, he suspected. There were other matters to get through first.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in a recital of previous cases that had been heard in Bright Lettins. Dame Fegg had enjoyed quite a career of prosecution. Each description of her most famous wins was met with bursts of applause. The matters at hand involved hexed chickens, tax evasion, one or two cases of lechery. Interesting enough, but they didn’t seem pertinent to the task of trying Dorothy for murder. Temper Bailey, on the other hand, had never won a case.

After catching Little Daffy’s eye and signaling that he should be roused if something interesting began to happen, the Lion put his head on his paws and slept. He didn’t waken until the magistrate concluded proceedings for the day with a loud bang of the gavel. “You didn’t miss anything. The good stuff starts tomorrow,” said Little Daffy.

“Oh, Brrr,” said Dorothy over her shoulder, as she was prodded toward the trapdoor by the Chimpanzees. “It makes such a difference to me that you would come to my defense.”

“If you knew my record of accomplishments in the years since I last saw you,” said the Lion, “you wouldn’t feel so cheery. But I’ll do what I can, Dorothy. I never understood you for a single moment, but in the choice between wishing you ill and wishing you well, I wish you well.”

“I should think so,” said Dorothy, and she opened her mouth as if to say more, but the Chimpanzees slammed down the trapdoor, narrowly missing the crown of her head.

6.

By the time Brrr and Little Daffy arrived the next morning, the room was full to bursting. After Lord Nipp entered and called Dorothy from the musty holding pen below, Dame Fegg minced forward and said, “Since we’ve concluded the opening statements, may I begin to question the witness, Your Honor?”

“One moment,” said Lord Nipp. He fished out a paper from beneath his robes. “Dorothy Gale, you claim to be sixteen years old, and you certainly look and sound like a child of that age, if rather big by local standards. Can you tell us how old you were when you first arrived in Oz and murdered Nessarose Thropp?”

“I take exception to that definition of my actions,” said Dorothy, “but letting that go for a moment, I will tell you: it was 1900 when the twister came through our parts. I was ten years old.”

“And you say you are sixteen now. That’s six years older. Yet by my figuring, and believe me I have counted it frontward and backward since I left here yesterday, it is about eighteen years since you spent a few months in Oz.”

The girl looked flummoxed. She counted on her fingers for a moment. “I didn’t go far in school. Eventually the teacher said I was too fanciful and sent me back to the farm. But here, I can do these sums…”

“Nessarose Thropp and her sister Elphaba have been dead for eighteen years,” said Nipp sternly, as if this were proof enough of Dorothy’s guilt.

“But how odd. How irregular! The last time I was in Oz I was ten years old. Big for my age, but even so. And this time around I am sixteen. That is six years older, you’re right about that. And you tell me that those witch sisters have both been gone for about eighteen years? How can this be?”

“Maybe time moves slower in Kansas,” said the magistrate.

“Time crawls in Kansas. But some say Kansas is a state of mind.” She sat up and pushed her bosom forward as if she’d just remembered she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “It’s uncanny. Perhaps I’ve become mentally unfit.”

Dame Fegg delivered a moue in the direction of the jurors to make sure they caught Dorothy’s admission.

The accused brightened up. “We can work this out. I just need to know how you count time in Oz. What year did I first arrive?”

The court waited for her to explain. A fly drove itself insanely around an upper windowpane.

“You arrived the year that you arrived,” said Lord Nipp evenly, patiently, the way a parent responds because to some child’s question of why?

“Yes. But what was the year named? I mean, at home I was born in 1890 and I was ten years old when the cyclone came and drove the farmhouse from Kansas to Oz, so that was 1900. Was it the year 1900 in Oz? The year I made my first visit? And so what is this year called? I mean, if anything ought to be universal, time ought to be.”

The magistrate said, “I’m not here to be your tutor, Miss Gale. Nonetheless, I’ll tell you that you seem to be relying on a system of naming years that is unfamiliar to us. In Oz we have no universal method of notching time or assigning arbitrary numbers to year-spans. I’m told that the Quadlings live quite comfortably without any system at all, since the climate there more or less precludes seasonal variation. The Gillikinese and the Emerald City refer to the passage of time in terms of the reigns of the various Ozmas or, since the Wizard first arrived, the various reigns of the Throne Ministers. The first, the seventh, the twelfth year of the Emperor Shell’s reign, and so on. Here in Munchkinland the length and disposition of our months vary according to cycles of the moon. In years of a jackal moon, for instance, we skip the month of Masque, out of some old superstition no one remembers. In years when the sun casts no shadow on Seeding Day, we add seven weeks of agricultural season called the Corn Time. If it rains too much in the spring we just skip over Guestlight. So, our years being irregularly shaped, they don’t line up for easy counting. No one tries to do it.”

“Besides,” added Little Daffy, speaking from the sidelines, “if I might add a word, arithmetic has its own cultural moods. In the mauntery, for instance, any span of years more than six we counted as a decade. It doesn’t always mean ten years. It just meant ‘looks about like ten years, sooner or later.’ ”

“To say nothing of the fact,” added Brrr, as long as this was turning into a colloquy, “that when nothing seems to be happening, you can’t tell if time is stuck a little. Six years might go by—call it a decade or call it the blink of an eye—but until something else happens to make you pay attention, it doesn’t matter what you call it. If there’s no reason to notch the memory, why waste time counting dead time?”

The magistrate said, “I didn’t ask for opinions from the floor.”

Dorothy looked withered and testy. “So I say I was here six years ago, and now I’m sixteen. You say it was about eighteen years ago, depending on the moon, the province, and whether anyone remembered to notice that time was passing. According to you I could be twenty-eight. In Kansas that’s downright grandmotherly.”

Clearing his throat, Temper Bailey ventured his first remark. “Time is fascinating, sure, but why are we spending time on this?”

“If I’m twenty-eight,” said Dorothy, “then I’ve reached my majority and I can serve as my own attorney. I want to call for a recess. I’m going out to try my first whiskey smash. Uncle Henry says they’re great. Anyone want to join me?” She held out a forearm to the Owl so he might perch there.

“It’s hardly past breakfast, and the court hasn’t adjourned for the day,” said Nipp. “Not to mention that you are under arrest.”

“Oh, right.” Still, Dorothy’s shoulders squared a little straighter on her spine.

“I shall begin,” said Dame Fegg, and Nipp nodded his assent. “I would like to start with a question about your life of crime prior to your first arrival in Oz, Dorothy Gale.”

“Oh, do call me Dorothy,” said the defendant. “Everyone does.”

“In your home territory, Dorothy Gale, is killing witches something one might have trained for in grammar school? Or taken up as an extracurricular hobby?”

“Goodness, Dame Fegg—is that how I should address you?—they didn’t teach much in grammar school. Some simple sums. Our letters and how to form them on a slate. A little Virgil. The Christian principles of government. Also how to share. In any case, there are no witches in Kansas, nor as far as I could tell in San Francisco either, though frankly I don’t believe I got to the bottom of what was going on there. It sure wasn’t like Kansas, though there felt like some kind of magic at work. In any case, I wouldn’t have killed anyone, witches or no. Uncle Henry says we’re makeshift Quakers. We don’t believe in violence except of course at hog-killing time, because as the waiter said to me in the San Francisco hotel, there is nothing like a nice hot sausage slapped between warm buns first thing in the morning.” The Sow in the second row turned grey and put her hooves over the ears of her littlest Piglet. “He was ’tremely agreeable you know but I do believe he wasn’t my type. Uncle Henry said I didn’t have a type as far as he knew and in any case by the looks of things I wasn’t going to find a fellow for myself, suitable or otherwise, in San Francisco.”

Dame Fegg had stopped as if calcified at Dorothy’s reply. Her mouth opened once or twice and when she made a note her hand was trembling. “Dorothy Gale, I must remind you to answer only the question I ask. Otherwise we could be here for a year. However we count it.”

“Oh, yes, Dame Fegg. Answer only the question. That’s what my teacher in Kansas used to say. That’s why I had to take my lessons sitting on a bench outside the school building. I could lean my books and my slate on the windowsill. If I started talking too much, the teacher would come over to the sill and close the window. So if I couldn’t hear him I just would look around at Kansas, which is maybe what first gave me a yen to travel. I mean you’d have to stand on your head to make Kansas novel, and even that only works for a while. Have you ever traveled, Dame Fegg?”

“Not to Kanziz,” said the prosecutor, in a voice that made it into a kind of joke, as if she were saying haven’t gone out of my mind—yet. The crowd tittered, not knowing if that was allowed, but Nipp hid his mouth behind his hand too, so maybe it was all right.

“I’d like to be the first to invite you to visit,” said Dorothy. “I would have to be your chaperone, of course, because a little woman like yourself might be considered a child, and then you couldn’t get a whiskey smash either. Not that you could get one in Kansas under any circumstances. It’s a dry state. Dry, dry, dry.”

Dame Fegg pounced on those words as if Dorothy were casting a spell. “When you first came from Kanziz, Dorothy Gale, we were recovering from a drought that had plagued most of Oz for as long as we could remember. In a great wind you arrive, you with your suspicious name of Gale, which suggests windstorms and rain. You succeed in a matter of months in doing away with both of the Thropp sisters, who with their magic capacities might have further united and strengthened Munchkinland. In their absence, however determined our own population to govern itself, Munchkinland has not thrived. The annual rainfall has improved only slightly, and the armies of Loyal Oz have invaded our fair province and requisitioned Oz’s largest basin of potable water, the lake called Restwater. You have a great deal to answer for.”

“Well, let me start by saying we know drought in Kansas, believe me. I—”

“You may start by being quiet,” said Nipp. “Dame Fegg, at the moment please confine your questions to the matter of the murders. We may not number our years in Oz as they do in this place called Kanziz, but we number our days as precious, and we don’t want to be here until our grandchildren have grandchildren. And you, missy, keep your answers short and to the point. You are brought up on most serious charges indeed.”

“Got it,” said Dorothy.

“Briefly, I beg you, briefly,” said Dame Fegg, “describe your arrival in Center Munch for us, however many years ago we pretend it was or wasn’t. I would like you to answer for us particularly how you knew that Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, would be present that day, and how you organized an assassination of such cunning and precision, and also when and how you decided to proceed with your march on the Emerald City.”

Chastised and trying to please, Dorothy recounted what she could of her first arrival in Oz, either six or eighteen years ago. Off to the side, Brrr remembered quite a bit of what she’d told him, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. As far as he recalled she’d gotten the facts of her alibi down straight, if alibi it was. In the safety of her family’s farmhouse, the child Dorothy had taken refuge from a storm. Through some sort of catastrophe of nature, aided perhaps by a deep magic, the house had been lifted into the air, whirled through dark agency across the uncrossable sands that surround Oz, and deposited in Center Munch. Right on top of Nessarose Thropp. Apparently Dorothy hadn’t been taught about Oz in her schooling on national geographics, though perhaps that was part of the curriculum she missed by being exiled to the bench outside the closed window. She had never been able to ask about Oz even after she returned to Kansas because the teacher, frightened out of his mind by the twister coming so near, had taken off for Chicago.

“Taken off for Shiz?” asked Dame Fegg, scratching her ear.

“Chicago,” said Dorothy, but trying not to run on at the mouth she just mimed a cityscape with huge buildings. “Chi-caaaaa-go.”

Dorothy continued her narrative. It was a grisly tale. After landing, she’d learned that a good part of the town of Center Munch and outliers had gathered that morning for some sort of religious festival. Young students had been receiving prizes. Experiencing a sudden darkness, they all dove into the shrubbery and nearby homes. They heard a weird whistling followed by a shattering crash at which precise moment all their eyes were closed in terror. When they emerged from hiding, they found that a house had stove in the grandstand erected for the occasion. Dorothy stood in the center of the town square, not far from the start of the Yellow Brick Road. It took the astounded citizens of Center Munch a few moments to realize that Nessarose Thropp, alone of them, had refused to move an inch, even under the signs of the imminent attack.

“How like her,” murmured Dame Fegg. “Proof of her character.” Though Brrr had remembered it being said that her standing her ground had been proof of her noxious superiority. Once she had learned to stand on her own two feet, that is.

“At any rate,” continued Dorothy, “you may call it murder now, but at the time no one clapped me in chains. They celebrated their release from a wicked fiend. Or that’s how they said it to me. The Wicked Witch of the East had claimed for herself all powers of deciding right and wrong.” Dorothy straightened up. “I was hailed as a liberator, and soon Glinda arrived to set me on the road to the Emerald City to accept my reward.”

“Maybe she intended you to be imprisoned there, in Southstairs,” said Dame Fegg. “Getting a dangerous criminal out of commission is the first duty of a public figure.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said Dorothy. “There was singing and dancing, and someone brought out sweet bricks of bread spread with a hideous sticky cream jam of some sort. I had never meant to kill a witch—I hadn’t even known witches existed, except in storybooks, and not the kind of storybooks we were allowed to read in Kansas, believe me. It was all so sudden, you see.”

“There are a great many holes in your testimony,” said Dame Fegg. “For your house to crash exactly upon the place our Eminent Thropp stood, killing her and her alone—it beggars credulity. It smacks of a conspiracy in high places. I suspect someone in the Emerald City was involved.”

“When I landed, they didn’t call it an impossible coincidence,” said Dorothy in about as cold a voice as Brrr had ever heard her use. “They called it a miracle.”

“I put it to the judge and the jury that with malice aforethought the defendant conspired to alight in a most deadly manner,” said Dame Fegg. “She wreaks havoc wherever she goes, both last time and this. The poor cow.” Though it was unclear whether she meant Dorothy or the Glikkun milk cow she squashed upon arrival this time.

Brrr saw Little Daffy’s arm waving right in front of his nose. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I add a word?” She popped out of her chair and approached the magistrate’s desk.

“If it’s pertinent, go ahead,” said Nipp.

“I was there at Center Munch. I was about the age then that Dorothy is now, or says she is, I mean. I was sixteen or eighteen years old. It was the end of our year of studies of the writings of the unionist fathers. I can speak to what actually happened and to the sentiment at the time.”

Nipp nodded, and Dame Fegg seemed wary, but she waved her quill at Little Daffy to proceed. Temper Bailey hopped on one leg, looking interested for the first time.

“Of course I was young,” said Little Daffy. “But none of us had ever seen anything like the arrival of Dorothy before. She wore that preposterous costume and carried that inarticulate puppy—”

“Oh, please don’t mention Toto or I just might cry,” said Dorothy.

“—and I verify that it seemed to all of us as if she might be a sorceress or a saint, arriving out of nowhere in some sort of portable house, to liberate Munchkinland from a tyrant of sorts.”

“The tyranny of Nessarose being primarily religious?” asked Dame Fegg.

“Yes. That’s right.”

“And yet you went on to spend your life in a mauntery. So your illustration of Nessarose Thropp as a bigoted dominatrix of some sort is a bit lacking in smack.”

“It’s true I was dressed up as a sunflower or a daisy, or maybe even a daffodil,” replied Little Daffy. “It was a pageant of sorts. And as a young person of course I was susceptible to the special pleading of startling atmospherics. But my memory isn’t at fault here. Dorothy was greeted by wild regaling. The death of Nessarose was viewed as an accident. And I insist, a happy accident. I stand up to tell this because it is so.”

“Very nice, very sweet. Testimony of a daffodil. You may stand down,” said Nipp.

“And it wasn’t just me,” said Little Daffy. “Lady Glinda arrived soon thereafter.”

“That’ll do,” said Nipp.

“May I pose a question?” The Owl seemed entirely too timid, thought Brrr, though perhaps that was a courtroom strategy of legal counsel who happened to be Animal.

“If you must,” said Nipp. Dame Fegg curled her lip.

The Owl said, “Did you like being a sunflower on display for Nessarose Thropp?”

“I adored it,” said Little Daffy. “I wore a kind of snood on which were sewn big flat yellow petals cut out of felt. We stood in ranks and had our own lines to sing when Nessarose walked by in those glamourous shoes she had. It was a children’s song called ‘Lessons of the Garden.’ ”

“What was your line to sing? Can you recall it?”

“Out of order. Inappropriate,” said Nipp. “Besides, no one cares.”

“I do,” said Dorothy. “I love to sing.”

“If it pleases the court,” said Little Daffy, “and I won’t do the whole thing—I just had a single stanza. Correcting for pitch, as back in those days I was a soprano and now I’m a beery contralto, it went like this.”

“Oh, please,” said Dame Fegg. Brrr bared a canine at her. Just one.

“Go on, and perhaps I can become a sort of musical anthropologist, collecting melodies. I’ll call it ‘Songs of the Munchkinland,’ ” said Dorothy, clapping her hands.

Little Daffy sang,

Little sorry sunflower seed,

I know exactly what you need.

The love of the Unnamed God is pure,

As good for you as rich manure.

“Or maybe not,” said Dorothy.

“That took up a few valuable moments of my life,” said Nipp to Temper Bailey witheringly.

“I’ve established the innocent nature of Little Daffy and proven she isn’t lying to protect the accused,” said Temper Bailey.

“I was a maunt,” said Little Daffy. “I took vows not to lie.”

“You also presumably took vows of commitment, and you seem to have thrown those over when they got inconvenient,” snapped Dame Fegg, indicating Mr. Boss, who was holding his wife’s hand. “I recommend that we count as inadmissible anything the little Munchkinlander dandelion sings.”

“She’s as tall as you are. I’ll snap your legs, you,” said Mr. Boss, “and then you’ll see who is little,” and so he was tossed out of court for rudeness.

“I don’t believe we can consider the testimony of a witness so young and impressionable as Little Daffy evidently was,” said Nipp. “Please strike her remarks from the record.” But since he’d neglected to appoint a court reporter no one moved to obey.

“I’m as young today as she was then,” said Dorothy. “If she was too young then to be taken seriously, you can’t try me now. I’m a minor.”

“You’re a middle-aged woman by our count, even if you look like a big lummox,” snapped Nipp. “We’re not taking that up again. Over to you, Dame Fegg. And let’s hurry this up. We’re going to break at lunchtime and reconvene tomorrow, and I’m uncommonly ready for lunch.”

Dame Fegg spent the next ninety minutes grilling Dorothy on her knowledge of Munchkinland. The prosecutor seemed to be trying to trick Dorothy into giving away some scrap of privileged information about the geography and politics of Oz, but either Dorothy was a canny defendant or she genuinely remained, even now, largely clueless about how Oz was organized. She floundered along, Dame Fegg darted and carped, Nipp groaned and made noises with his implements. Whenever deference was shown to Temper Bailey, his questions couldn’t seem to provoke Dorothy into proving her innocence. By the time Nipp sounded the bell and closed the proceedings for the day, the whole exercise seemed pretty much a waste of time to Brrr. Still, as the crowd of spectators filed out of the courtroom, the buzz was loud, argumentative, laughing. It was going over well as an entertainment, anyway. And so maybe it would be a successful trial, depending on whose measure of success you chose to adopt.

7.

At a café, in the shade of aromatic fruit trees unruffled in the breezeless evening, they discussed the day’s proceedings with Mister Mikko, who had been persuaded to leave the Reading Room behind and dare the public agora.

“I still wonder what this trial is intended to achieve,” said Little Daffy. “It’s one thing to build up a villain to help concentrate a sense of national purpose and struggle. But I should think the divine Emperor of Oz and his chief commanding officer, General Cherrystone, already qualify as enemies of the Free State of Munchkinland. Finding out whether Dorothy is now sixteen or sixty-one doesn’t seem worth the public fuss. What good does it do anyone to persecute this poor girl?”

“The Free State of Munchkinland can’t get at Shell, more’s the pity, and their engagement with Cherrystone seems at a permanent standstill,” observed Mister Mikko. “This exercise against Dorothy is meant to siphon off national frustration. Give the Munchkinlanders a sense of achievement.”

Brrr said, “So this isn’t going to be a fair trial? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course it isn’t. The very premise of the accusations is bizarre. Conflating the deaths of both sisters! Though Elphaba Thropp was born in Munchkinland, she maintained no political association with her sister Nessarose, and Elphaba ignored the opportunity to seize power once her sister was dead. And a Munchkinlander court prosecuting anyone for the murder of the Wicked Witch of the West? Absurd. The west is deep in Loyal Oz. The premise is prejudicial and proves that what’s wanted here isn’t a trial but a conviction.”

“I’m with you,” said Mr. Boss. “Nothing cheers folks up like a public beheading.”

“I’m no student of history,” said Little Daffy, “but I don’t like the way this has all lined up. Mombey and General Jinjuria, two strong defenders of Munchkinland, concentrating the attention of the country upon a legal assault of another female? The real enemies of Munchkinland are the man in the Emerald City and his chief officer at Restwater.”

“Total bitch gripe,” agreed Mr. Boss. “You’ve never seen that before? And you lived with maunts for several decades? What were you, blind?”

“She has a point,” said Mister Mikko, who after all had taught history back in his day. “Shell in his emerald towers, and Cherrystone holed up in Haugaard’s Keep … two powerful men in Oz, after the forty-year history of the Wizard’s oppression that beleaguered my parents’ generation, and their parents’, too. It’s been sixty years since Pastorius was deposed, and so maybe sixty-five, is it, since the last Ozma died? A lot of rule by men in a land with a long tradition of matriarchy.”

Little Daffy said, “That’s it exactly. If Munchkinlanders needed to take against someone to prove their strength, you’d think they’d nominate someone who stood in for the Emperor of Oz a little more keenly. This Dorothy seems a pale substitute.”

“She’s what turned up,” said Mr. Boss. “You’re not going to rear back and change her gender for the sake of a more satisfying trial.”

“But Little Daffy has a point,” insisted Mister Mikko. “Since Ozma the Bilious died leaving her husband the Ozma Regent and the baby, Ozma Tippetarius, there’s been only one female minister of Loyal Oz as we know: Lady Glinda. And she ruled well but all too briefly.”

Brrr said, “But what’s the point of the prosecution of Dorothy?”

Mister Mikko responded with a tone of gentle irony. “The fight to retake Restwater won’t be won in the court of public opinion.”

“Then what is really going on here?” asked Brrr. “It seems important to figure out, if only to find a way to defend the hapless Dorothy.”

They sat, confounded, fiddling with the silverware until the dwarf said, “I often thought the displays of the Clock of the Time Dragon were intended to divert the attention of the public from the Clock’s real mission: to serve as the secret vault that housed the Grimmerie. I wonder if this trial isn’t so much a public relations exercise as a diversion. Is something going on elsewhere on the war front that La Mombey doesn’t want us to be noticing? The Clock might have given us a clue. Damn its rotted soul.”

On their way back to the dubious comforts of A Stable Home, they passed a beer garden. Over their pints, little lager louts were singing something clangorous. The words were slurred.

Ding dong, the bitch will swing

Like a clapper on a string

Back and forth until the bitch is dead!

“What has gotten into my countrymen?” said Little Daffy.

“Don’t dawdle and gawk, you’ll only draw attention,” said Brrr, his old irritable-bowel thing threatening to flare up. “Eyes front, move along.”

“It’s just that the melody is so jolly,” said Little Daffy. “True, we used to hold singing festivals, but the texts weren’t so rabid.”

“Climate of the times,” said Mr. Boss. They hurried past.

When the court convened in the morning, the room was full to capacity. Lord Nipp instructed the Chimps to wave large rush fans. The casement windows were cranked open to their fullest, and more spectators gathered outside. There, the sight lines being poor and the sun hot, a pretty penny was to be made passing among the crowd selling cups of lemon barley. Mister Mikko, who was waiting outside, would later report that the atmosphere seemed a cross between a state funeral and a harvest festival, morbid and giddy at once.

Since yesterday Dorothy had been allowed a change of clothes, but the selection offered her hadn’t been the kindest. She seemed to be wearing a dirndl of some sort, cut for someone with the proportions of a Baboon. The sleeves were so long they could have been tied together in a bow. She looked like a child in her father’s nightshirt.

Dame Fegg dove into questioning at a gallop today, returning to the subject of Dorothy’s prior arrival in Oz. “You say that Glinda Chuffrey gave you Nessarose’s enchanted shoes and advised you to tiptoe out of town?” asked Dame Fegg. “She has a great deal to answer for herself, that Glinda. Those shoes should have belonged to the treasure-house of Munchkinland.”

“I can’t speak to Glinda’s motives,” said the defendant. “She simply told me that the Wizard of Oz could help me, and that the Yellow Brick Road would lead me to him. For all I knew she was in the tourist business and wanted me to see the sights.”

“She gave you no armed guard, no escort, no inkling that Munchkinland was devolved from Loyal Oz?”

“I don’t think so. But it seems such a long time ago, and of course everything was so new. And I did love those shoes. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“Maybe, Miss Dorothy, you have never paid enough attention.”

The crowd chortled quietly at this line, as if it were the end of a scene of some parlor farce on a stage at Shiz. But Brrr thought Dame Fegg had made a mistake. Hitherto she had not addressed Dorothy as “Miss.” Having started now, she wouldn’t be able to retreat, and that accorded the girl a little more dignity than she seemed to deserve, given her ridiculous getup.

“Dame Fegg,” piped up Dorothy, “if you were suddenly, magically carried off to my home of Kansas, how long do you think it would take you to pick up on our ways?”

“That calls for speculation,” said Dame Fegg.

“You’re not asking the questions, Miss Dorothy,” said Lord Nipp. Aha, thought Brrr, there it is: she has graduated to Miss Dorothy. In her zanily earnest way, she’s commanding the respect of her enemies despite themselves. Brrr would never call it charisma but oh, Dorothy had charm of a sort, for sure.

Dame Fegg proceeded to grill the girl about the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars, as in popular lore they had become known. Having spent his life timid enough over every living thing, and a few gloomy stationary things as well, Brrr had his concerns about being tarred by association with Dorothy. But he was a Lion, after all. A Lion among Munchkins. And thanks to good dental hygiene he had all of his natural teeth. So he straightened up and tossed his head to make of his mane a more impressive quiff, to make himself look stouthearted, even if it was all public relations.

“And the Scarecrow was so dear and so helpful,” said Dorothy, “and then the Tin Woodman such a sweetheart. And the Lion, when he showed up, a total mess.” She smiled at him as if she weren’t out to ruin his reputation, that is if he had had a reputation he cared about. “If I ever get you back to San Francisco with me, I think you would all fit in there just fine.”

“At what point did you let them in on your secret background as a regicidal maniac?” asked Dame Fegg.

“I object. Leading the witness,” said Temper Bailey, who most of the time looked as if he were napping on his perch.

“They called her a witch, that Nessarose,” explained Dorothy. “It took me a while to cotton on to the fact that she was governor as well.”

“In your single-minded campaign to deprive both Munchkinland and Loyal Oz of its entire bank of leaders, you collected a mob of collaborators,” pushed Dame Fegg.

“May I speak?” said Brrr, and stood. He was roughly ten times the girth and weight of either Lord Nipp or Dame Fegg, so they couldn’t object, though Dame Fegg focused her pious squinty bloodshot eyes on him with contempt. “Dorothy didn’t entice me with plans of sedition or the overthrow of any government. Truth to tell, I was rather at loose ends at that stage in my life. I wanted to put behind me the shame of some poor choices and some dead-end experiences—”

“Please, spare us the melodrama,” said Lord Nipp. “We’re a court of law, not a guidance counsellorship.”

“We went to the Emerald City, Your Lordship, to see if we could find a way to help Dorothy return home,” said Brrr. “As I heard it told, no one in Munchkinland had had any bright ideas about that.”

“That’s true enough,” said Dorothy. “But at least no one put me under arrest, that time.”

“And then the Wizard of Oz, so called, enlisted you in the assassination of Nessarose’s sister,” said Dame Fegg.

“Well now, that much I can’t deny,” said Dorothy. “The Wizard said the Wicked Witch of the West was tremendously evil and needed to be stopped. I was young and didn’t think to ask ‘stopped from what?’ He said she deserved to die. He wouldn’t entertain my request for help until I’d killed her.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dame Fegg was steely with purpose.

“I had no choice but to head to the west,” said Dorothy. “But I had no intention of doing the Wizard’s dirty work for him. Doesn’t that count for something? It was either leave town or take on a job as a chambermaid in one of the seedier neighborhoods of the EC.”

“Nonsense,” said Fegg. “There’s always choice.”

“No, I’m not explaining it correctly. I mean, for myself, I had no choice. For it had dawned on me how dreadful the accidental squashery of Nessarose Thropp had been. I wanted to apologize to the closest survivor for my inadvertent part in her sister’s demise. That’s why I went west. That, and for no other reason.”

“You expect us to believe that?” Fegg looked offended. “The Wizard, by your own admission, asks you to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, and you carry out his plans with cunning and immediacy, and then you claim you had no culpability in the matter? It’s preposterous.” She gave a sneer that could have won her an acting award.

“Hey now, wait,” said Dorothy. “The coincidence of the Wizard’s aims and my experiences at Kiamo Ko, the Witch’s castle, is no proof of my guilt.”

Coincidence again, thought Brrr. Not proof, but not helpful, either.

Temper Bailey spoke up again. “Let’s hear more from the Lion. He was on that mission too, was he not?”

Nipp turned a cold eye on Brrr and nodded.

The Lion thought: If this does end poorly, what happens to Dorothy—? To me?

He said, “I wasn’t present at Dorothy’s commission from the Wizard. I can’t confirm what he said to her. I do concur that the Wizard asked me to kill the Witch too, and about their private meetings with the Wizard, both the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman reported the same. We proceeded to the west not to fulfill the Wizard’s request but to lend succor to our companion on the road, who we all could see was young and innocent if not a few sequins short of a diadem, if you know what I mean.”

Dorothy pulled a face at that.

“And what can you tell us about the murder of Elphaba Thropp?” asked Temper Bailey.

“I can tell you precious little about her death; I don’t answer to its being called a murder,” said the Lion. “I was locked in a kitchen larder with the Witch’s son, Liir, and by the time we’d escaped the room and dashed up the tower stairs to the parapet of the castle, Dorothy was already descending the stairs, weeping her eyes out.”

“I cried so hard,” said Dorothy, “I looked like I’d thrown that bucket of water over myself.”

“And so the question is,” said Brrr, “what happened up there? Did Dorothy kill the Witch? Either on purpose or by accident? All any of us know about the matter is that the Witch is done with. She’s gone. But was she killed?”

The room fell silent. Dame Fegg turned to Dorothy and so did Temper Bailey. Several hundred Munchkinlanders paused in their knitting or their munching of small round breakfast pastries. The Chimpanzees held their fans still.

“I shall remind you that you are under oath to answer honestly,” murmured Lord Nipp, almost as if afraid to break the spell of the question.

Dorothy put her face in her hands, a sloppy gesture given the length of her sleeves. When she lifted her teary cheeks, her upper lip was creamy with mucus; it looked as if she had applied a depilatory unguent. “I believe in taking responsibility for what happens,” she admitted. “I believed it six years ago, and that’s why I went to Kiamo Ko, to confess my part in the death of Nessarose Thropp. And I confess my part in the death of Elphaba Thropp too, to the extent I can be sure that it happened. But when I threw a bucket of water at the Witch, to save her from burning to death in her black skirts, what happened was a huge plume of smoke and a sizzle, as of fatback on a griddle, and the Witch collapsed amid the drapes of her skirts and the billows of smoke. The acrid stench and the burning in my eyes made me turn away, and I vomited in terror and surprise, and when I looked back—well, she was gone.”

“Killed,” said Fegg.

“Gone,” said Dorothy.

“Is that the same thing?”

“Who can say?”

“Very good question,” said Temper Bailey. “Who can say? Were there witnesses?”

“Only Toto, and he used to be the strong silent type,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, now, let’s not start that sniffling again,” scoffed Fegg.

“The Witch’s old Nanny finally made it up the stairs, and she swept me away while she cleaned up,” said Dorothy. “I never went up there again, and I never examined the scene of the death. I was a witness at her disappearance—and, sure, maybe it was a death. But wouldn’t there have been a corpse?”

“Of course there was a corpse,” snorted Dame Fegg. “You’ve proven yourself to be an unreliable witness any number of times. In your glee and relief you just didn’t check, or you’re pretending not to have checked.”

The room seemed to rock a little; maybe it was the heat, or maybe that Dorothy carried personal earthquakes with her to deploy at will. Brrr sat up straight. Temper Bailey emitted a series of small who-who-whos, but whether that was a stutter or an admission in Owlish that he was not wise enough for this particular job was hard to say.

“Before you kill again,” said Dame Fegg, “I will see you put to death.”

Lord Nipp had to pound his gavel repeatedly. When silence returned at last, he called a halt in the proceedings for two days. He made the suggestion that Animals should be invited to hear the final assessments and the judgment of Dorothy, and Munchkinlander farmers should roundly encourage their lodgers and farmhands to show some civic spirit and witness the conclusion of the trial. After all, a cow had been killed in the Glikkus. There was such a thing as solidarity.

8.

Why the adjournment? From the point of view of the prosecution, it seemed to Brrr a clumsy move. The hiatus might allow that rumor—that Elphaba was somehow still alive—to gain weight and sway public opinion in Dorothy’s favor. Mister Mikko agreed and concluded that Nipp must have a sound reason for delaying. Might they be trying to dig up a witness, somewhere, someone who could confirm Elphaba’s death by revealing anything about the disposition of her corpse?

“Preposterous,” said Brrr. Who could it be? Back on that dreadful day, neither he nor Liir had been allowed up the stairs to the parapet where Elphaba had died. The only human souls who might give testimony about the scene of that tragedy were Dorothy herself and the Witch’s old Nanny, who had gone up after Dorothy had come down but who had refused Liir access. Brrr had assumed it was out of kindness; Liir had, after all, been a mere fourteen years old. And a young fourteen at that.

Could Elphaba’s old Nanny have been capable of a deceit of any magnitude? Concealing the Witch?… Brrr thought not. Even then Nanny had been stunningly unmoored from reality. Were she still alive, she’d be over a hundred years old now. At any rate, Kiamo Ko was a thousand-some miles away any route you took. They wouldn’t be putting Nanny or her ghost on the witness stand.

Then, he wondered, what about Chistery? The chief of the flying monkeys? As far as Brrr knew, Chistery was an anomaly in Oz. He’d begun life as an animal incapable of language, and yet he had managed to learn it, thanks to Elphaba’s ministrations and maybe to her magic. Brrr had no idea how old Chistery would be now, nor how long snow monkeys generally lived. He asked Mister Mikko his opinion, but the Ape bared his false dentures at Brrr and refused to get into a discussion about it. “I don’t even know my own expected life span,” he snapped; “how could I possibly be conversant on the life span of an invented line like a flying monkey?”

Even if he were alive, Chistery would likely be too old to fly all those miles to speak in confirmation of the Witch’s death, decided Brrr. And an Animal’s testimony would carry only so much weight.

The evening before the trial was set to reopen, Mr. Boss said, “In the absence of any other clue about why Nippy Nipp Nipp adjourned for two days, I’ve been wondering if emissaries of La Mombey have been working to get information out of Dorothy now that she’s been threatened with execution.”

“Information about what?” asked his wife.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “La Mombey must be as interested in locating the Grimmerie as the Emperor is. Maybe she thinks that only something as powerful as that book could have drawn Dorothy back to Oz, and that Dorothy knows something about its location. A threat of death might loosen her tongue.”

“Dorothy’s is one tongue that doesn’t need any more loosing,” said the Munchkinlander. But Brrr wondered if Mr. Boss had a point.

They made the mistake of walking back to their lodgings through the piazza outside Neale House. Flares had been set up so that the tradesmen could hammer together a kiosk of some sort. “They’re going to sell souvenirs that say THE JUDGMENT OF DOROTHY! Headbands or armbands,” guessed Little Daffy.

“They’re building her a little house she can ride back to Kansas,” said Mr. Boss.

They stopped joking then, as someone strung up a rope, and someone else tested the trapdoor. “They wouldn’t,” said Little Daffy, dabbing her eyes. “My own folk, coarsened so?”

At A Stable Home, she ventured to ask Dame Hostile, “Do you think Lord Nipp will order Dorothy to be hanged?”

“She’ll swing like a bell, ding dong, they say,” replied the widow. “And by the way, I’m giving notice to you lot. When you booked in, you concealed your association with that Dorothy. So I want you to clear out tomorrow. I don’t need this house to get a reputation for attracting lowlife.”

“But I’m a Munchkinlander!” cried Little Daffy.

“That’s pretty low,” said the dwarf, “though I’m not one to talk.”

“I’m retiring,” said the chatelaine. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”

“We didn’t do anything to you,” said Little Daffy. “I know my manners. We clean up after ourselves. Look, I’ll bake you a coffee bread for the morning.” She was almost beside herself, to be treated this way by her own kind.

The only response from upstairs was a slammed door.

Brrr had had enough. He repaired to his chamber, from where he could hear the distant sound of hammering and cheering half the night, as the laborers tested and retested their equipment.

Regardless of the reasons for the postponement, when the trial reconvened Neale House was even more crowded the next day. A thousand Munchkinlanders surrounded the building and spilled into the square by the front doors. The Animals that Munchkin farmers had cajoled or browbeat into joining them were largely of the junior variety—kits, cubs, pups in training harness. They were escorted by Ewes and Dames, in hooded expressions and the occasional going-to-town bonnet. The human factor in the crowd snickered and occasionally nickered. Even a jaded old Goat with a beard on her chin and a wen on her rump commanded little respect in a crowd of beer-barrel farmers.

“So far in this picture-pretty town, my size and presence has seemed more than enough to allow me to pass through any crowd,” murmured Brrr to the dwarf and his wife. “But the Munchkinlanders seem to be gigantic in menace, or is that just me?”

Mister Mikko said, “I’m turning back. This atmosphere reminds me too much of the crowds that gathered to hear about the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws. I can wait till tonight to hear what develops. And if I happen to die today of hexus of the plexus or bonkus of the konkus, don’t think I go unwillingly. It’s been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.”

The room was filled to the rafters, literally, since Munchkinlanders sat straddling the beams. The atmosphere had gone grave. Nipp cleared his throat and took sips of water and cleared his throat again before harrumphing, “Due to circumstances on the international front, I’ve been required to speed up the trial. In the absence of further witnesses this morning, I’m going to ask the advocates to present their final arguments. I will then charge the jury with making a judgment of Dorothy Gale: guilty as charged or innocent of some or all charges. I retain to myself the privilege of listening to the jury’s advice and determining if it is sound. May I remind you all that the final arbitration of justice remains in the hands of the magistrate. Me. Dame Fegg, you may begin.”

The prosecutor, clearly, had been briefed about the change in calendar. She’d come cloaked in some sort of dark academic robe that set off her iron braids, this morning coiled and pinned to each temple with treacherous-looking hair swizzlers. In a voice rounded with theatrical tones, perhaps the better to carry out the windows, she called Dorothy to the chair for a final time.

The defendant emerged from belowstairs in the usual manner. No one lent a hand, but at least for her final turn on the stand she’d been allowed to appear in her own clothes, an ensemble that had no origin in Oz—a blue velvet skirt with shiny black jet piping at the hem that, at intervals, looped waistward in hand-stitched arabesques. Cut to the midcalf and girdled with a wide stomacher, it cinched a white linen blouse with mutton sleeves. A toque filigreed with spiky feathers and fake linen roses in blue and silver perched at a drunken angle upon her head. She clutched her gloved hands repeatedly as if in her distress she were about to burst into song.

“Lord Nipp,” began Dame Fegg. “Counsel Bailey. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Ladies and gentlemen of the gallery and beyond. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen of history: I address you all.”

Dorothy gave a little cough. “Yes, Miss Dorothy, I address you too,” said Dame Fegg in exaggerated courtesy, the first nasty giggle of the morning. Brrr rolled his eyes at Little Daffy and Mr. Boss.

“This trial has not taken so long that we need to review point by point what’s been put before us already. I shall therefore make a cursory summary for the sake of the record. I put it to the jury that Dorothy Gale is guilty as charged of the murder of Nessarose Thropp and Elphaba Thropp. Whether she is also guilty of the murder of that cow in the Glikkus is not our concern this morning.”

“No one said it was a talking Cow,” said Dorothy. “But I’ve kind of noticed you don’t always pay attention to that distinction.”

“Ooooh,” said the humans in the crowd, as if this were a point in a debating tourney. Brrr couldn’t tell if they approved, generally, or if Dorothy was hitting too close to home. The Animals, he noticed, were silent, even stiff in their composure.

“I believe we’ve established that, some eighteen years ago, the collapse of Miss Dorothy’s domicile upon Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, indisputably resulted in her death. Though known at the time as the Wicked Witch of the East, Nessarose is honored for her role in launching Munchkinland independence. Therefore Dorothy Gale is guilty of slaying the mother of our country. Our dear Munchkinland.”

“Here comes the dump,” murmured Mr. Boss to Brrr. “I can smell it.”

Dame Fegg left the circular plinth from which she had conducted most of her examination. “We are a small people,” she said. “Before most of us were born, the Ozma Regent, Pastorius, began the job of strangling our native independence by renaming Nubbly Meadows in southern Gillikin as the Emerald City. Pastorius planned the early stages of what would become the Yellow Brick Road. His work, however innocently meant, was ready for exploitation by the Wizard of Oz. Until Nessarose Thropp inherited the mantle of Eminence that was rejected by her sister Elphaba, we were in thrall to the powers of what is now called Loyal Oz. So the recent history of Munchkinland—the history into which many of us were born—casts us most often as the handmaiden of the rich, the laborer in the field, the servant under the stairs, the midget comedy troupe.”

The room had gone fully silent, humans and Animals alike.

“Small, yes,” said Dame Fegg, reclaiming her dais now for emphasis and striking a pose, “small, but not insignificant. We accept from our forebears the stewardship of our dear Munchkinland. The bones of our ancestors herringbone the soil we plow. The land they tilled, the views they cherished, are ours. We shall never allow any invader, either Dorothy Gale or the Emerald City Messiars at Haugaard’s Keep, to abuse our liberty and to confiscate our sacred trust of land. From the slopes of the Scalps to the north, where the Glikkuns still dig for emeralds…” She paused to drag out a handkerchief, giving Mr. Boss a chance to mutter, “Technically the Glikkus isn’t Munchkinland; this lot is as blind to native borders as anyone else.” She continued, “… to the brave little hamlets perched on the edge of the great desert to the east—to the lonely, sere sweeps of the Hardings and the Cloth Hills that divide us from soggy Quadling Country, and over, yes, to Restwater! to Restwater, damn it! which shall not remain in the greedy grasp of the invaders, but shall return rightfully to those who cherish it most!”

A cheer went up. “This could turn into a riot,” muttered Mr. Boss to his companions. “I always enjoy a good riot.”

“We came to do a job, and we’ll see it through,” said Brrr, hoping he meant it. He glanced at Little Daffy to see how she was faring. She nodded that she was firm.

“And on up to the Madeleines,” continued Dame Fegg. “That rank of soft mountains to our west, dividing us from Gillikin. The longest stretch of unprotected border of Munchkinland, an easy bolster, nothing more, along whose slopes the clouds roll toward us, furnishing us with the rain that makes us the Corn Basket of Oz, nothing less. Productive Munchkinland, that part most of us know best—the soft rolling lavender fields, the farmsteads lit with cheery lamplight of an evening, the harvest festivals, the local traditions of long tables set out on village greens. The beer—yes, let us defend our right to brew hops!”

Another big cheer at this.

“All of it—all of our way of life, treasured bequest of those who went before—all of it threatened by invaders. I give you Miss Dorothy,” she said, playing to the crowd rather than the jury. “Miss Dorothy Gale, a young woman unreliable in her memories of how she came first to Oz to commit regicide against the ruling family of our motherland, our Munchkinland.”

Later, Brrr swore he heard someone from behind a door sound a note on a pitch pipe, but perhaps cynicism was getting the better of him. Someone in the crowd began to sing what the Lion had come to know as Munchkinland’s anthem.

Munchkinland, our motherland,

No other land is home.

We cherish best this land so blessed

As pretty as a poem.

We’ll never rest when from the west

By rude oppressors we’re oppressed.

We proudly stand with Munchkinland,

Our treasure chest, our humble nest,

Our motherland, no other land

Is home.

Brrr cast a glance to the front. Even Temper Bailey was singing—to keep mum was probably considered sedition. The cheering that followed could probably be heard all the way to Kanziz. Not good, the Lion thought. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see those Chimps come out with tankards of ale to sozzle the mood further.

Dame Fegg wiped her eyes. “And so, from the heartland of Oz, from the capital city of our Free State of Munchkinland, do I put it to the jury one final time. Dorothy Gale’s testimony about her youth and innocence in her prior sojourn in Oz can’t be considered admissible, as that very youth made her an unreliable witness to the events of the times. Nonetheless, in this country everyone must pay for what crimes they commit, and nobody can adequately defend Dorothy against the crime of murder of Elphaba Thropp. By extension one deduces that the accused’s aims were coherent, her capacity to assassinate our leaders honed to surgical precision, and her disguise as gullible sweetheart on a walking tour entirely convincing to those morons with whom she came in touch.”

“I object,” called Little Daffy. Mr. Boss looked at her sideways with a clenched lower lip, dubious but approving. His little Munchkinlander spitfire. “I may have been young and dressed as a daffodil, but I was no moron.”

“You aren’t counsel. You have no right to object,” said Lord Nipp.

“I should think that’s exactly the kind of right we are trying to defend in Munchkinland,” said Little Daffy. Brrr found he wasn’t so surprised at her brass. Purportedly she had spent a decade or so chafing under the direction of her former colleague Sister Doctor. She’s not shy, our Little Daffy.

“Counsel Bailey,” said Lord Nipp. “Have you anything to add?”

The Owl had come to court in native dress, which is to say naked. This was a risky gambit, Brrr thought, but who knows? It set him apart from the Munchkinlander prosecutor, who had returned to her stool and was blowing her nose with sentiment and force. Temper Bailey flew to a perch provided him halfway between the jury and Dorothy, who was sitting upright, back ramrod straight, eyes open too wide.

“I assert that my client, Miss Dorothy Gale from abroad somewhere, must be innocent of the charges of murder and assassination,” said Temper Bailey. “For one thing, while it is true that her arrival coincided with the death of Nessarose Thropp, there’s no way to prove that Nessarose didn’t look up into the heavens at the sight of a small house lurching through the clouds and have a heart attack from terror, falling down dead on the platform just before the house of Dorothy landed. I took advantage of our unscheduled recess to fly to Center Munch and search the coronor’s records. While Nessarose was conclusively determined to be dead, the cause of death is not mentioned.”

“Well, I doubt coroners are trained to identify the cause of every possible fatality in this universe,” said Lord Nipp. “Cause of death: Collapse of Real Estate? Please. Point dismissed.”

“Nonetheless, we must deal with the facts legally as we find them,” said Temper Bailey. “In any case, if we accept Counsel Fegg’s conclusion that Dorothy Gale is an unreliable witness to her own actions, we must also therefore strike from the record Dorothy’s observation that the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba Thropp, actually died.”

“Preposterous,” said Dame Fegg. “All of Oz knows that she died at the hands of this witch.”

“If you please, I am not a witch,” said Dorothy. She mimed tying a bonnet under her chin “I’ve been trying to make this point for some time, but you people here never seem to put on your listening caps.”

“I propose to the jury,” said Temper Bailey, “that of the charges brought against the defendant, we must strike them both off the chart of crimes.”

“Wait; we can get the coroner in here to testify what he saw,” said Lord Nipp.

“The coroner is dead, my Lord. So all we have are his records. May I close by saying that we’ve heard no conclusive evidence that the defendant committed the crimes with which she is charged? Here in loyal Munchkinland, even as we struggled against the encroachments of the Emerald City barbarians to our west, we must remember that what we are defending is not only the golden treasury of our arable fields and our native customs. We are defending our own honor, too. And we will not convict someone for whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” snapped Dame Fegg. “I suppose as a coda you’re going to propose that due to the contradiction in time schemes, that the defendant before us is not even the actual Dorothy Gale who was here eighteen years ago, but an impostor?”

“Oh, I’m me, all right,” said Dorothy earnestly.

“I haven’t given you the floor,” said Lord Nipp.

“Oh, but Your Reasonableness, may I have a word? Please?”

Brrr could see that Nipp was inclined to say no, but the crowd wanted to hear Dorothy speak. They rhubarbed away in an insistent manner. Maybe the magistrate was stuck between his formal obligations and his own curiosity. If so, his curiosity won. He waved her forward.

Dorothy stood up for the first time. She towered over the Munchkinlanders, even Lord Nipp on his stool. “When I first came to Oz however many years ago we count it, I was merely ten,” she said. “I don’t know if in Munchkinland a child of ten can be convicted of murder, but I believe in fairness, and I think you do too. When the twister lifted my house from its foundations, and I went whirling off in the skies, I was as helpless as a flea on the hide of a dog. I knew nothing of Munchkinland or anything about Oz, and I don’t see how I can be convicted of murder of a Wicked Witch whose presence I wasn’t even aware of until her corpse was pointed out to me by Lady Glinda.”

This was, perhaps, not a sound association for Dorothy to make, thought Brrr; Lady Glinda seemed to be persona non grata both in Loyal Oz and in Munchkinland. You couldn’t win.

“I’ve been fed newspapers in my jail cell—and a very comfortable jail cell it is, I might add. I have seen this trial referred to over and over as ‘The Judgment of Dorothy.’ With all due respect to my estimable hosts, today I would like to interpret that phrase as ‘Dorothy’s Judgment on the Matter.’ And so before you deliver your verdict, dear honorable jury and magistrate, I would like to deliver mine.”

“Entirely out of order,” said Nipp, sorry he’d let this cat out of the bag, but the crowd was straining to hear what Dorothy would say next.

“When I first came to Oz as an untraveled farmgirl,” she went on, “everything seemed magical to me. It took some getting used to, the presence of witches and wizards, and talking Animals, to say nothing of a Scarecrow who could walk and a man hammered with tin. It made Kansas look very tame. When I got home a few months later, thanks to the magic shoes that had caused so many problems, everything appeared pale by comparison. I thought maybe I’d somehow made the whole thing up. But then Uncle Henry and Auntie Em showed me a whole new house with a real indoor washroom instead of an outhouse, bought with insurance, and I hadn’t made that up. Plumbing is uniquely persuasive. So I decided my trip to Oz had been real, even if no one in Kansas believed in you.”

She looked at them. “Yes. No one believed in Munchkinland. They thought I was being fanciful or perhaps tetched in the head. But I never stopped believing in you. I never stopped believing in the Yellow Brick Road, and the Emerald City, and that frightening old humbug, the Wizard of Oz.”

She paused. She wasn’t quite as good as Dame Fegg, thought Brrr, but she had strengths of her own. “Here I stand now, before the very people I pledged never to forget, only to be accused by them of murders I didn’t intend to commit. I’m older now, as we’ve discussed. And I’ve traveled a little bit since I was ten. Uncle Henry took me by train all across the great mountains in my land to the city by the bay—to San Francisco—and for all that I have seen, the Rocky Mountains that, no offense intended, rival the magnificent Scalps in stature and purity—the great fertile plains of Nebraska—the ocean beyond the bay—I haven’t seen anything that could deflect my memories of Munchkinland and Oz. Not yet, not ever. My judgment of you is that you are a kind people and a fair people, and you will do what is right. You will make for me more memories of charity and justice that I can carry home, if I can ever reckon how to manage the return trip.”

She curtseyed at Lord Nipp and again at Dame Fegg, and then she curtseyed a third time, not to the jury but to the crowd in Neale House. A small spattering of applause, quickly repressed.

“Mmm, she’s good,” murmured Mr. Boss. “This should be rich.”

“I shall liberate the jury to its deliberations,” began Nipp, but then Dame Fegg stood up.

“There is a matter I meant to follow and I have just remembered,” she said. “May I be allowed to ask a question?” Nipp nodded. “I wonder if Miss Dorothy could describe for those of us who know nothing about Sanfran Tsitsko, or however it is said, the sea you mentioned once or twice. What sea is this?”

“Oh, goodness,” said Dorothy. “It’s called the Pacific Ocean. It is as wide as the sky, and as broad.”

“Poetic license is inadmissible in court,” said Dame Fegg. “Nothing could be as wide as the sky. The sky goes to both sides of us, you see, whereas a landscape to be viewed can only go in one direction.”

“You’re right, in a manner of speaking,” said Dorothy, “but you see, this sea is so broad that you can’t view the other side. It’s said to stretch as far as Asia, and to take many, many days to cross by boat. Once you are out in a sailing vessel or a steamer, you lose sight of the land, of California and all, and there’s nothing around you but water. The sea is as wide as the sky, exactly so, for the water, I am told, stretches under you and the sky above, in precisely identical proportions…”

“That’ll do,” said Dame Fegg. Munchkinlanders were vomiting into their lunch sacks. “You describe a mystical sea that bears no resemblance to reality. I hold you are criminally insane.”

“Just because you’ve never seen an ocean doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said Dorothy. “The same way that, when I go home, if I get home, your existence is not obliterated just because none of my family has ever been to Munchkinland.”

Dame Fegg said, “I have heard enough, Lord Nipp. I think you can send the jury out.”

“The presence or absence of an ocean of the mind has no bearing on this case!” hooted Temper Bailey.

“Are there any final remarks?” asked Nipp, picking up his gavel. He pointed at Brrr, who shrank back. But Little Daffy stood up and approached the table.

“I want to thank you for hearing my testimony, sir,” she said. “As the only Munchkinlander present who witnessed the arrival of Dorothy, I’m grateful to have been welcomed into the proceedings. It’s a custom of Center Munch to conclude a disagreement or a negotiation with a sweet, to show that honorable people can agree to disagree and still be courteous. So I have baked a little present for you.” No one could argue with Little Daffy; none of the Munchkinlanders from Bright Lettins knew the customs of Center Munch. She pulled from a basket on her arm a checkered cloth and unfolded it. “Please, in the name of those Munchkinlanders who remember Nessarose Thropp, accept this offering in the spirit in which I give it.”

Nipp took a little pastry between thumb and forefinger. Dame Fegg did the same. Temper Bailey, using his claws on his perch, declined an offering. “May I approach the defendant?” asked Little Daffy. “It’s the custom. ‘With special zest we greet the guest,’ ” she intoned daringly. “Or is that verse peculiar to Center Munch?”

“If you must,” said Nipp. Little Daffy angled the basket and shifted the napkin so Dorothy could see inside better.

“Take two, they’re small, and you’re a big girl,” said Little Daffy, and Dorothy obliged. Then Nipp instructed the jury to file out to a private chamber.

“I wouldn’t go far,” said Nipp, “if you want to be present at the declaration of the verdict. I have a feeling this isn’t going to take a long time. We’ll convene again in an hour and I’ll let you know if a decision has been reached.”

9.

They walked enough apart from the crowds to be able to talk. “This trial is a wholesale farrago of justice,” said Mr. Boss. “Not that I care much for justice, one way or the other. But even so. Your offer of defense, Brrr, hasn’t amounted to much. She’s dead meat, our little Giddy Girl Gale. Cooked and sliced and served on a party platter.”

“I think so too,” said Little Daffy. “Which is why I think we need to be ready to liberate her if things get ugly.”

“I doubt they could get any uglier,” said the Lion. The mob would have no trouble wrestling Dorothy up on the scaffold, but they’d never get his big neck in a noose. They’d think of something else for him. The mind went white-blank, and he didn’t speak for a moment for fear a tremble in his voice would betray him. “Do you have something in mind?”

“Just be on your toes. I mean that literally.”

Hardly fifteen minutes into the break, a bell began to ring, and the crowd surged to reassemble at Neale House. But the doors to the hall remained closed. The crowd murmured, and Brrr picked up a frisson of something different. Funny how news has a vibration in the air all its own. Something had happened. Something was happening. He shouldn’t have been surprised to see, when the door finally did open, that it wasn’t Nipp who emerged from the formal entrance but La Mombey herself.

The crowd broke into a cheer, rousing at first but subduing at the expression of their Eminence. A tall and striking woman, in this light she appeared more silvery blond and mature. Not unlike, Brrr thought, Dobbius’s portraits of the Kanraki, those mythical spirits of the ravines of Mount Runcible. He half expected La Mombey to open her painted lips and lead them in a reprise of the Munchkinlander anthem.

Mr. Boss must have been imagining the same. Sotto voce, he began to warble a few lines.

“‘Munchkinland, its truncheon lands on all who dare drop by…’ ”

“Shhh,” said his wife.

“Gentle patriots,” La Mombey addressed them. “Lord Nipp will call the proceedings to order momentarily. I beg your leave to address you on a matter of urgency in the meanwhile. It is my sad duty to tell you that our investigators have learned of disturbing developments. Word has come to the committees at Colwen Grounds that a new offensive against Munchkinland is soon to be launched. Not from the Scalps, where our noble Glikkun friends are holding the mountain passes as only they could do. Nor from Restwater, at least not that we can glean. No, the Emerald City is said to be commissioning new battalions to make skirmishes across the slopes of the Madeleines in Gillikin into the Wend Fallows of Munchkinland. The Wend Fallows are scrubby and inhospitable marches, but there is little in the terrain that could slow an army determined to cross it. Put frankly, our spies conclude that the aim of the Emerald City, after these several years of stalemate, is to up the ante. The enemy intends to press for a full surrender of the government at Colwen Grounds and Bright Lettins by engaging us on a second front.”

She raised a staff and a surge of gluey white light pulsed from it. Brrr had forgotten that La Mombey was a sorceress of sorts. He could detect no evidence that a charm had been cast, except the charm of pyrotechnic dazzle, but the crowd oohed and ahhed, and people in the back began to applaud. “We will not let this happen,” she said more fiercely. “In the defense of our homeland, today I declare a conscription of all Animals who originate outside our borders, including those born here whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Loyal Oz during the Animal Adverse laws. We gave you and your families succor when times were hard on you; we know you will stand with us and defend us when times are hard on us. Consequently, since yesterday I have secured the bridges and gates of Bright Lettins with a spell to help you Animals avoid the temptation to flee your duties. Links of lightning, I suppose, designed to deter any deserters. A little aversion therapy, we could call it. Following the close of this trial, Neale House will become the center for enlistment and assignment for the Animal Army of Munchkinland. May I suggest that mothers and their young among us right now be impounded for release until their husbands and fathers and mates come to ransom them. Since so many eligible male Animals seem to have had prior engagements today. For their valor in service, let us chant, hoorah!”

“Hoorah,” shouted everyone except the Animals.

Brrr said, “What’s the word for the tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time?”

“Fate’s foolery,” said Mr. Boss cheerily enough. “Give me one of those biscuits, wife. A surge in war fever always makes me peckish.”

He fished in the basket and came up with two confections and a piece of paper. “‘Dorothy, take these two,’ ” he read. “Oh, don’t tell me, you poisoned the others? I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.” He put them back.

“Nonsense, don’t be silly,” she said but could explain no further, as La Mombey had swooped away and the doors to the hall were opening.

When the crowd was reassembled in the broad chamber, quieter than ever, Lord Nipp emerged, and then the barristers. The Owl looked terrified. No wonder. However the verdict went, Temper Bailey would probably end up in an Animal line of defense trying to hold the Wend Fallows. Me too, if I’m not careful, Brrr thought.

The trapdoor opened and Dorothy began to climb up, but nerves, it seemed, were finally getting to her. She paused on the ladder, half into the hall, and swayed. Maybe she’d caught sight of the scaffold out the windows at the rear of the room. The Chimpanzees hurried forward and put a gloved hand under each of her armpits and more or less hauled her out. “Oh, my,” she said. “I sure hope it’s not my time of the month.”

“Nothing good ever happens to that girl,” said Mr. Boss.

“The judgment is called forth,” said Lord Nipp, and the jury proceeded into the room. The foreman handed a twist of paper to the magistrate. Then followed a bit of symbolism derived from older systems of jurisprudence in Munchkinland, Brrr guessed. Lord Nipp put the paper inside one half of an empty, hinged wooden ball and clapped the ball closed to make a full sphere. The judgment of Dorothy was imprisoned inside it. Next Nipp withdrew from under his table a round cage of metal bars, like a birdcage, that spun on a central axis. Through a hinged door he popped the wooden ball, and then latched the door and spun the cage.

“Oh don’t, it makes me dizzy,” said Dorothy. “And Lord knows I’m dizzy enough already.”

“You’re telling me,” whispered Mr. Boss.

“It reminds me of falling in the elevator, down in the dark, spinning around and about,” said Dorothy. She put her hands out as if to steady herself. The crowd in the hall began to murmur a low note, holding the drone throughout the building and beyond it. The ball clacked against the bars of the cage, making erratic syncopation against the dark hummed note. “I don’t feel quite myself,” said Dorothy. “But then I think that’s customary in Oz.”

The rotating cage slowed down and stopped. Lord Nipp opened the door and removed the ball. “Let justice be served,” he said. Then he unscrewed the two halves of the ball and took out the verdict. There’s no element of chance to this gesture, thought Brrr. In an older time perhaps more than a single ball danced and battered against others. But time eliminates alternatives until there’s only one eventuality, sooner or later.

Maybe that was the point.

“The opinion of the jury,” said Lord Nipp, glancing up from the folded paper, “accords with my own. I have no need to amend it. The court of Bright Lettins finds the miscreant Dorothy Gale guilty of all charges. The magistrate of this court concurs. She shall be put to death to defend the honor of Munchkinland.”

Dorothy swooned and nearly fell into the open trapdoor. Little Daffy was on her feet and at Dorothy’s side before anyone else could move. “I’m an apothecaire, and I was Matron’s Assistant at the Respite of Incurables in the EC. Before the troubles,” she added. She felt Dorothy’s pulse and put her hand on Dorothy’s head. “Wouldn’t it be just our luck if the murderess dies of a heart attack before she can be put to death? Just like what was suggested of Nessarose Thropp. Ironical in the extreme.” To the Chimpanzees who had rushed forward to help, Little Daffy barked, “Move aside, Monkey boys, she needs air if she’s to survive long enough to be killed.”

“Clear the front of the room,” cried Nipp. Temper Bailey obliged by flying through the open window.

Little Daffy motioned to Brrr to approach. “We’re losing her. Quick, quick. Mr. Boss, Lord Nipp—Dame Fegg! In the name of justice! Air at once. I’ve left my apothecaire’s satchel with my colleague just below the scaffold. We must get her on the Lion’s back; he can rush her there.” The magistrate and the barrister helped drape the insensate defendant on Brrr’s back.

Little Daffy slapped her husband’s rump and said, “Up, you too,” and Mr. Boss scrambled right onto Dorothy’s spine, his bowlegs splayed out on either side of her, clamping her in place. “To make sure she doesn’t fall,” said Little Daffy. “A hand up, please. Your Lordship, arrange that a vial of smelling salts be brought to the scaffold. It’s of utmost urgency. If we’re not careful, she just might slip away from us.”

Then, to Brrr, “Off, you,” and pointed her finger. Finally Brrr understood her scheme. He hoped he wasn’t too old to clear the windowsill, and in fact he scraped his loins rather badly in the effort. He emitted more of a yowl than a roar. The Munchkins in the alley scattered in terror as Brrr, Little Daffy, Mr. Boss, and the unconscious captive bolted into their midst. His heart pounding, Brrr tossed Munchkins aside like ninepins, and passed the scaffold, its ligature looped to a peg and swaying in the force of his rush. He careered around the edge of the crowd. Whatever shocking charm La Mombey might have set upon the bridge across the Munchkin River, to keep Animals from leaving before conscription, he would push through it. The charm couldn’t hurt half as much as his scraped underside already hurt. So what if links of lightning might neuter him: execution by firing squad would accomplish the same thing.

The plunge through rings of blue lightning was like being raked by sticks of fire on all inches of his body. It singed his whiskers and softened his claws, and the dewclaws dropped out and never grew back. The sizzle did give a measure of extra bounce to the curl of his mane, he could feel it through the torment. He’d make a prettier corpse in a moment or two.

Little Daffy and Mr. Boss seemed unfazed by the charmed barrier. They sat like human clamps upon their human saddle, who had not been revived by the scorching light.

Four or five miles beyond the city limits, on the west side of the Munchkin River, the Lion paused under a stand of quoxwood trees. Dorothy fell with a heavy clump off his back. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“No,” said Little Daffy. “But I don’t expect the effects of my poppified pastries to wear off for a few hours.”

By the time Dorothy began to come around, they were a dozen miles north of Bright Lettins. Village lights to one side and another suggested happy settlements, but the Dorothy Gale Rescue Brigade hunkered down in a cart shed aside a field of lettuces. They ate the rest of the pastries and quite a bit of lettuce, and drank from a bottle of plonk that a farmer had hidden inexpertly beneath some burlap sacking.

“I hate your new hairdo,” said Mr. Boss to Brrr. “Makes you look more dandified than ever. Hey, how did it feel to bust through that charm? You carried it off like a pro.”

“It tickled,” said Brrr, “the way being jabbed with red-hot pitchforks soaked in brine tickles.” He had never thought to get a compliment from the dwarf. It was almost worth the unending agony under his pelt, as if he’d survived an attempt at the skinning of his hide. Taxidermy while you wait.

Dorothy began to stir. Her first intelligible words were, “Now that we’re alone, I can ask. Where is Liir?”

“Hidden in the outback somewhere,” said Brrr. “With wife and child.”

“I must still be hallucinating. Wife?”

“He’s older than you,” said the Lion. “Remember that.”

“So am I, now,” said Dorothy, dizzily. But a bit of prairie reserve crept into the pitch of her voice and the upward jerk of her spine. “Why did you rescue me?” she continued, when whatever passed for coherence in her had returned.

“I did it because I don’t like bullies,” said Brrr, “and they were bullies to their boots, everyone except Temper Bailey.”

“I did it because I don’t think you’re guilty,” said Little Daffy. “I was there in Center Munch, no lie, and I was about the age you are now. I do remember your arrival. Everyone hated Nessarose. It was liberation. You were a Hero of the Nation. It’s political expediency to name you a villain now. Bald opportunism. You were being brought down only to drum up a patriotic fervor just before the Eminence announced another front is about to open in the war. Which means it isn’t going all that well for Munchkinland, I should guess. Really, do they think we are morons?”

“Evidently, the answer is yes,” said the Lion. “And you know, of course, their tactic will work just fine. They’ll find a way to make Dorothy’s escape from execution play into their war fever somehow.”

“As for me,” said Mr. Boss, “why did I help? Well, I hardly knew what we were doing until we did it. But in a deeper sense, why did I come to Bright Lettins at all? Because I wondered if your return to Oz was caused by the collapse of the Clock of the Time Dragon.”

They all looked at him as if his thinking had, perhaps, collapsed.

“You two remember,” he said to the Lion and the Munchkinlander. “Rain suggested it. Liir’s child,” he explained to Dorothy. “One of the last things the Clock showed us was an earthquake. After it fell down that slope near the Sleeve of Ghastille. Near as I can tell, that happened just about the same time as the earthquake in the Scalps. Maybe the Clock’s insidious magic brought Dorothy back, against her will.”

“Are you showing solidarity with something besides the Clock?” asked Little Daffy. “Senility hits at last.”

The dwarf grunted. “Least we could do is stand by her, since she never bought the ticket to come.”

“And I have no return ticket,” added Dorothy. “I don’t suppose there are any more of those pastries left? They leave a kick, but my, they are tasty.”