1.
Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows, was waiting in front of the Bureau of National History to meet La Mombey’s conveyance. The Emperor had given him the dirty job of emcee at the armistice negotiations. At first he wore the sneer of a playground monitor. Well, the place was a shambles. No one had taken a broom to the city yet. The piazza was littered with fragments of marble Ozmas. The sound of trumpeteen and brass-flummery, though shrill, inadequately masked the muttering of the mingy crowd.
It’s a loser’s job to broker the conference, thought Brrr, who peered from behind a toppled column. How surprising that they didn’t offer it to me.
The Lion was looking out for signs of Liir, on Rain’s behalf as well as his own, but the Lion wasn’t eager to be recognized by Avaric. Later, Brrr would hold his tongue when people said of the Margreave that through the truce negotiations he had comported himself with a deference to the Eminence of Munchkinland that seemed little short of concupiscent. Such is the shame of the lawyer. Avaric, they whispered, had never managed to be that fawning even before His very Sacredness, the divine Emperor of Oz.
Which comment, true or not, attached itself to Avaric for the rest of his life and made public dining at the Oak Parlor in the Florinthwaite Club a bloody pain in the arse.
La Mombey alighted in uncinched bell-curves of pure white linen dropping from the shoulder. The mob of spider-things clustered about her with the devotion of bloodhounds until she clicked her fingers, and then they rolled themselves up into bobbins and an assistant swept them into a casket. Once they were gone everyone breathed a bit more easily.
The Lion watched carefully. He’d always possessed a decent eye for detail. He saw how Hiri Furkenstael might have treated the pomp of the occasion. How a student of the School of Bertius might have handled La Mombey’s bib, freely suggesting its pale mink tippets and its appliquéd off-white lozenges inscribed with sigils like letters in a foreign script.
He was memorizing the moment so he could tell his companions about it. How the pale beautiful woman appeared as a smudgy blankness, almost, among the colored leaves of those ornamental shrubs and trees that hadn’t been blasted by shrapnel. Something about her so—so lambent and concealed at once. Floating amid the blur of dissolving Ozmists, or was that sentiment clouding his eye? How to put it?
But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off. From his place near the ruined Hall of Approval, the Cowardly Lion watched the impossible happen: Loyal Oz falling to the upstart Free State of Munchkinland. Words would fail him, later on.
La Mombey paused so Avaric could approach her. In rounded public tones she summoned the Emperor of Oz to join her for a discussion of the terms of peace. Then her voice dropped, and Brrr couldn’t hear what else was said. After she retreated to her sledge, Avaric stood nodding and bobbing till it slid away. He turned almost at once to where Brrr was hunched behind broken stone. Apparently not hidden well enough, then.
“Sir Brrr, Namory of Oz,” called Avaric. Naturally, thought Brrr, the only time my title is used in public is after the throne that conferred it has collapsed. Figures. “I see you there. I need your advice.”
Brrr prowled up to the man who, once upon a time, had arranged the Lion’s plea bargain and brought him into service of the Emperor’s secret agencies hunting for the Grimmerie.
Avaric spoke as if they’d just fallen in step somewhere in Oz Deer Park or along the Shiz Road. “A propitious time to return to the capital. Now that the army of Animals can lay down its—teeth. But I see you didn’t personally drag in the sledge of La Mombey.”
“I’ve done enough menial toil in my day. That foursome of Tsebras managed an elegant enough job of it without me. Oh, are you implying I’ve arrived as part of a conquering army? Me? How droll. As if I was ever on the winning side. Really, you flatter me.”
Brrr was glad the crowd had melted away with La Mombey’s departure. No one was close by to hear Avaric reply, “You were assigned to discover the whereabouts of the Grimmerie and you never returned. It’s not for me to prosecute you, but I’ll remind you that you jumped probation as set by the magistrates of the Law Courts—”
“One might wonder if those resolutions have been nullified. Given that there’s about to be a new administration in Oz. Anyway, the Law Courts are in recess just now. I passed what was left of them on my way here.”
“Exactly so,” said Avaric. “Leaving other matters aside, I need your help. I can tell by your bedraggled state that you’ve been out and about on the streets of the city. Tell me what you know. What building left standing might be large and dignified enough to house the teams that will work out the conditions for a ceasefire? The Palace is intact, or most of it is, but it might seem ungracious to invite La Mombey in for tea only to have the central dome collapse upon her.”
The Lion thought for a moment. “Well. The People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics is closed for business. That’s out. The Lord Chuffrey Exposition Hall, which had such beautiful light, now has beautiful shadows. But I think the Lady’s Mystique, that small theater on the edge of Goldhaven, is still standing. And what luck—I’ll bet the afternoon matinee has been canceled.”
“Too small, and too—theatrical. The Emperor will need room to be at some distance from La Mombey. Space around His Sacredness.”
The Lion eventually suggested the Aestheticum, a circular brick coliseum of sorts, long ago roofed over for trade shows. A place where antiques vendors displayed their wares—fine art, and the more collectable of historic furniture. He had once cut something of a figure among the great and the good who ran the Aestheticum, back when he had fancied himself a connoisseur. In exchange for any lingering obligation to the Throne Minister of Oz, current or future, to the extent that the Margreave could plead his case, the Lion agreed to make arrangements. “Deal?” asked Avaric.
“Deal,” said Brrr. “Though I suppose it would be overmuch to request an elevation of my title?”
“To Brrr bon Coward, Lord Level of Cowardly Custard and Environs?” Avaric hadn’t lost his capacity to sneer. Brrr realized he’d gone too far.
“Well, tell me this then, because everyone’s asking,” he countered, as much to change the subject as to hear the reply. “Shell Thropp has shown little love for the people he ruled all these years, the people he’s driven into war and ruined. Why is he yielding to Mombey’s aerial attack? It can’t be concern for massive civilian death or the destruction of the Emerald City. Can he really have begun to fear for his own life? Isn’t he immortal?”
“He’s the sort of immortal who will live eternally after his corruptible human sleeve—his shell, as it were—succumbs.” Avaric could talk political theology as smoothly as if he were discussing the point spread in a wager over the gooseball playoffs. “I suppose you know that his real name, the name given him by his unionist minister father, is Sheltergod?”
“And my real name is Birthdaysuit—” the Lion began, but Avaric cut him off.
“The name reflects a sentiment that some spark of the Unnamed God burns within us all. His Sacredness may have determined that he received the lion’s share—”
“Well, he sure got mine, because I harbor no god within me. It sounds like worms. One would need castor oil, or dipping.”
“—but in the panic of La Mombey’s attack, and in sure and certain fear of an insurrection by his own followers, he has been called to yield.”
“Who called him? Who gets to place that call?”
“Now you’re being snarky. He called himself, of course. Are we done?”
The Lion walked away. He didn’t mind sashaying this time. So God talks to himself. Just like the rest of us do.
All the vendors had taken off during the first of the attacks and by now were either dead on the road amidst shreds of their favorite paintings or were lingering in some summer home waiting to hear news from the capital. The Aestheticum was boarded up. After some pounding and a couple of roars the Lion managed to raise attention at the loading dock. The thrice-bolted door was opened by that clubfooted society hostess from Shiz, Piarsody Scallop, with whom, however inanely, the Lion had once been paired in the press.
“I haven’t got room for another postage stamp,” said Piarsody, but when she recognized the Lion, she added, “especially from you,” and tried to close the door. Her clubfoot got in the way somehow, and Brrr barreled past.
“I’m not negotiating art, either purchase or sale,” he growled.
“You’re the only one in the city who’s not.”
He saw what she meant. The Aestheticum was jammed to the ceilings of the mezzanine with furniture, bibelots, treasured artworks, bolts of better tapestry, carpets. “It’s a madhouse warehouse,” said Piarsody. “People know high-end decoratives will come back, and they stash their valuables here until the first collector sniffs that the war is truly over and moves in for the firesale bargain. But we’re stuffed to the gills. I can’t move, I can’t do inventory, I can’t even see well enough to be able to tell what is good and what is better used to build a fire to cook my lunch.”
“I don’t care if you burn it all and have a really big lunch,” said the Lion. “I want the center of the hall cleared out by noon tomorrow.”
“You’ve lost your mind. I always knew you would,” said Miss Scallop. “A bit too high-strung. Back in Shiz they whispered that to me when you were in the Gents’. They will say it here, too.”
“I’ll help you. I can get others to help. We’ll shift everything to the motherhouse of Saint Glinda across the square, assuming it’s still standing. The war with Munchkinland is over, Miss Scallop, and the little buggers won.”
“Don’t they always?” said Piarsody Scallop.
All afternoon they sorted out antiquities. The better paintings could be hung over the railing of the mezzanine to grace the event. Some of the furniture could be packed drawer against door along the outside walls, under the balconies, slotted so thickly in place as to make a six-foot wooden henge. The rest of the stuff had to go.
Brrr roared himself into the cloisters across the square and commandeered them. The motherhouse had long been under the thumb of the Emperor, unlike the cenobitic mauntery in the Shale Shallows, and the women scurried to oblige, driven nearly mad with delight at having a part to play. The mauntery afforded plenty of space along the arcades to stash a museum’s worth of antique fussiness in home decor.
When the job was almost done, Brrr happened to back into an oak chest standing on its end. The lock sprung open and the lid popped, spilling the contents on the tiles of the mauntery floor. Included were no fewer than seven sets of jeweled shoes modeled after the famous set that Lady Glinda had given to Dorothy Gale once upon a time. The Lion threw all the shoes into the well in the center of the cloister garden. Any splash they had, they’d made a long time ago.
2.
For his work helping Avaric bon Tenmeadows to set up the council for peace, Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary of Traum, Gillikin, was invited to sit in attendance.
“I’ve come up in the world,” he told the meagres under the bridge. “I’m still small fry, but I could probably sneak a few of you in if you want to get a peek at history.”
“Busy. Sorry,” said Rain, in her new iron-hard voice.
“We have to do something useful,” explained Candle to the Lion. “With Liir’s death—we have no choice. It’s that or die.” The Goose, under the obligations of family loyalty, bobbed his head in agreement. He had never liked either Candle or Rain, but was now something of a retainer in their broken circle.
“As for me, I wouldn’t come within a mile of Mombey,” said Dorothy. “It was her court that convicted me of murder, remember. And even if I wanted to brandish that stupid testimonial of my character, it’s probably null and void under the new regime. By the way, Brrr, you risk being imprisoned for aiding and abetting a psychopathic criminal in her notorious escape from justice.” She batted her eyelashes.
But the Lion had lost too much, and gained too much, to be prey to the same worries that had bewitched him most of his life. Nor gone first, and now Liir. What else could they do to him? Really?
It was left to Avaric to plead the terms of the truce with His Sacredness who, rumor had it, was keeping comfortable in a bare cell in the prison of Southstairs. Living on water and celery, and approaching the mercy of a deeper aestheticism.
Avaric had to work to get the Emperor’s attention. Either poor Shell’s mind had snapped or he’d ventured further toward divinity than he may have intended. “It’s a bit of a nonstarter, some conversations,” Avaric said to Brrr. “But we’ll get there. Those creepy Ozmists are lifting little by little—even the dead can’t be bothered to haunt you forever, it appears that they have other things to do—and the dragons are camped on the Plains of Kistingame outside of the Emerald City to the north. Mombey can call them in again to move matters along if the Emperor proves unwilling to focus. On some level he knows this. He and his ministers are doing what they can to set matters right.”
“What are the preconditions of surrender?” asked Brrr.
“That’s confidential,” said Avaric, but when the Lion pinned him down and threatened to rip off his arms with a novel dental technique, Avaric changed his mind about confidentiality.
“No, no,” said Brrr. “I’m not interested in what the Emperor is giving up. I know what he’s giving up, and what was never really his to yield, either. What I want to know is what demands he is making of Mombey.”
“The niceties of military surrender are new to me, but it’s my understanding His Sacredness is not in a position to make demands.”
“Of course he is. He can refuse to yield unless Mombey offers something. And if you refuse to yield—”
“I take your point,” said Avaric. “I think I may need that elbow in the future? Thank you. Is there something special that you’d like His Sacredness to request of La Mombey?”
“There is indeed,” said Brrr. “I should like her to bring the corpse of Liir Thropp to the Emerald City so his family can bury him.”
“Mombey has murdered Liir Thropp?”
“Apparently. Well, it stands to reason. If the EC didn’t kidnap Liir from Kiamo Ko, Mombey’s men did. That must be how she managed to marshal the violence of those dragons. She got to him first after all. And to the Grimmerie.”
“If you had done what the court asked of you—find us the Grimmerie—Munchkinland would be suing Loyal Oz for peace instead of the other way around.”
“What His Sacredness is demanding in exchange for signing the treaty of surrender,” said the Cowardly Lion, “is Liir’s earthy remains. Are you sure you’re getting all this?”
That evening, the Lion told his companions—including Rain and Candle—that he’d negotiated the release of Liir’s corpse. Although what kind of achievement, really, did it count as? The dead are no less dead whether buried at home or abroad.
Around the brazier they’d set up underneath the struts of the bridge, they talked about Liir. Thirty or forty homeless citizens of the Emerald City listened as they shared stories of the Emperor’s nephew. Dorothy had known Liir for too short a time, back when he was fourteen or so. “I don’t remember much about him. I think he was sweet on me for a while. But in the end I probably wasn’t his type. Seems my lot in life.”
Her eyes tracked the dirty hem of her dress. She’d carried a torch for him from the age of ten, thought Brrr. Poor thing.
Candle said, “I saw Kynot this afternoon. He has been very kind to me. I told him we hoped to have a pyre to burn the body, if the corpse hasn’t corrupted so fully it has had to be burned already, or been buried in Munchkinland. The Eagle is calling veterans of the Conference of the Birds to attend as an honor guard.”
Rain said, “I’m not sure I want to be there. Am I required?”
Her mother said, “When have we required anything of you, Rain? Except to survive? You do as you see fit.”
The girl sat hollowly in the light of the fire until the fire slumped, and then she did too. The Lion tried to offer comfort, but she would have none of it. All night she lay on the ground shivering, and would take no blanket, as if trying to learn in advance what chill of the grave might be visited upon her father. Tay squirreled into her arms, half a comfort.
Three days later, a caparisoned and hooded cart was escorted by mounted guard through Munchkin Mousehole, the southern gate of the city, and through the Oz Deer Park and along the Ozma Embankment to Saint Glinda’s Square. In lieu of Candle, who had decided her place was at the side of her living daughter and not her dead husband, the Lion stood to receive Liir’s Black Elephant corpse.
In a silence broken only by the rush of the wings of pigeons as they pivoted about city skies now safe again, His Sacredness the Emperor of Oz emerged through some secret egress from Southstairs. The prison governor, Chyde, carried the Ozma scepter and Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows, the crown.
Mombey waited on the steps of the Aestheticum. In keeping with the gravity of the day she displayed herself as aquiline of nose, cheeks of pale ice. Her straight tresses, colored steel, almost violet, were looped and fixed in place with constellations of emerald set in mettanite.
It took Brrr a moment to realize that the attendant at her side was Tip.
3.
Walking back to where his friends were camping under one end of the bridge, the Cowardly Lion didn’t know if he should mention the presence of Tip. With the arrival of her father’s corpse and the need to attend to her mother, Rain already had so much on her mind. To say nothing of the work she’d taken on this week, to attend to the needy. Why that selfless labor, Brrr had no idea; Rain had hardly ever seemed conscious, before, of the sores of others—indeed, of her own sores, either. The Lion wondered if Rain’s summoning the Ozmists to help had put her in a position of noticing both what those ghost-bits had done, and what they couldn’t do.
So many burdens on her young back. She might not be able to tolerate the return of her friend Tip, for whom her affection had been no secret except, perhaps, to herself.
In any case, Tip would guess that Rain might be in the city as well. What else had he expected her to do after he set out to find her father and the Grimmerie? It wasn’t hard algebraics. He’d be looking for Rain here, if he wanted to find her.
But if he didn’t want to find her, was it doing her any good to help her find him?
In the end it was Dorothy who decided the Cowardly Lion on the matter. The Lion had walked her to a clutch of broken pipes protruding from the back of a collapsed Spangletown whorehouse. The dripping pipes were set high enough in the wall that larger creatures could wash without too much crouching, and since Dorothy still had a tendency to croon given half a chance, the Lion stood guard over her virtue, her modesty, and her critics while Dorothy sponged herself and performed a musical set for unbelieving rats and such harlots as hadn’t yet fled the district.
On the way back, Dorothy said, “I’ve been wondering what to make of myself here in the Emerald City.” The Lion, his mind on Rain, didn’t take in what she meant at first. “I mean,” continued Dorothy, “there seems no particular campaign to ship me out of Oz the way there was the first time. Everyone’s so distracted, and who can blame them? So I’ve been wondering if I should just go into some line of work, and settle down here. Back a ways we passed an old sandwich board advertising the eighteenth annual comeback tour of Sillipede at the Spangletown Cabaret. Did you see it? Do you think I might look her up, if she’s still alive, and maybe get some professional advice? I could perform on the boards, you know, and put a few pennies together.”
The Lion shook his head and heard his wattles wuffle. “What are you on about, Dorothy? We’re witnessing an historic change in government, not hosting a jobs fair for immigrants. A little perspective, if you please.”
“You’re not going to stick by me forever. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow haven’t been popping up like vaudeville headliners to welcome me with a song-and-dance upon my return to Oz. Do you think I haven’t noticed? Life goes on, Brrr. We move on. I have so few choices, really, if I can’t get myself back home. Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end—you go out far enough in the direction of—somewhere—and you realize that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.”
“I never use that word.”
“Neutered? Sorry.”
“No. I never say home.” And Brrr realized it was true, and that Dorothy was right, too. We don’t get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there’s no place remotely like home.
“We’ll get you back to purple waves of grain and amber plain, somehow,” said Brrr, though he had no ideas at the moment. What was he going to do? Go fish those knock-off slippers from the well in the mauntery motherhouse and make a mockery of Dorothy’s own fond memories of enchanted travel?
They were almost back to the bridge. A mile away some strafed building was finally collapsing. The clouds of dust, even at this hour, evoked the haunting by Ozmists and made those who dozed nearest death to tremble at the sight. “We don’t get too many chances, do we?” said Dorothy. “I’ve had more than my share, even while buildings fall around me on a regular basis.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think we—as individuals—have much choice in our affairs, after all. Despite any fond hope for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I haven’t been able to avoid Oz or to get out of Oz. I’m just a pawn. I didn’t ask to be born an orphan, or to be taken on by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. I didn’t ask to annoy everyone with my soapy character. It wasn’t my idea that an earthquake should punish San Francisco the week I arrived. We really can’t do much about our given circumstances, can we? We may have free will but it isn’t, in the end, very free. I might as easily have been born in China.”
The Lion purred in agreement, though it was a wise, consoling purr. “Limited range. We get relatively few chances to make good.”
“Still.” Dorothy’s eyes were unnaturally bright, even for her. “I suppose if we don’t even have bootstraps with which to pull ourselves up, we had better become highway robbers and steal some off someone who has extra.”
“Dorothy,” said the Cowardly Lion, “did anyone ever tell you that you are a piece of work?”
She wasn’t listening. She was staring at a small scrap of caninity barreling with businesslike dispatch along the road, away from the thud of the collapsing architecture. His nose was to the gutter and his tail wagging ferociously as if he, for one, had never doubted the nature of home or the adequate play of his own personal free will. “Toto!” cried Dorothy.
So that was home, then, thought the Lion, as the dog catapulted into Dorothy’s bosom. That’s as good as it gets. I have no right to deprive Rain of the possibility of reunion with Tip because I fear it might not satisfy her. Let her take her chances and make that decision herself.
“Rain,” he said before they turned in for the night, “let me tell you what I saw today.”
4.
She didn’t know what to think about Tip arriving with Mombey. Rain needed to see him first before talking to him, to make sure that in returning to Mombey he hadn’t betrayed Rain somehow, been party to her father’s death. Maybe he’d been a secret envoy of Munchkinland all along.
After all—that coincidence—that he should have come to be hiding in her wardrobe! They’d talked about it, laughed and loved it. She was much older now, and it seemed suspicious.
“I’ll install you in the Aestheticum,” Brrr told her. “There are a dozen places to hide among the legs of all that compacted furniture. You can watch and decide what to do as you like. If you’re quiet enough, you will witness history.”
“I’ve witnessed enough history,” said Rain. “But I can be quiet. That’s one of my strengths, remember.”
She got ready to go with Brrr the next morning. Early, before dawn. The wind off the canals was disturbing ash and dirt from where it had settled overnight, gritting the air for the day. Candle got up too and silently helped Rain dress—not that Rain needed help. Mother and daughter fussing with a face flannel, apron strings, getting in each other’s way. A few feet off, Dorothy snored softly, Toto in her arms. The light in the sky a system of beveled intensities, pale, less pale. Candle said, “I don’t want you to make the wrong choice, Rain.”
Rain didn’t look at her. “How do you know what choices I have?”
“I don’t. But I know… I know you are going to select among what possibilities are offered you. Every parent knows this, and I know it as well as any.”
“No matter how far from me you have lived.”
“No matter.” Candle brushed her daughter’s hair. “We’ve lived apart, but I see what you know today, and that you don’t know everything. Rain, don’t…” She paused.
“Don’t make the mistake I made?” Rain heard her own voice, low and mean. Rain was the result of Candle’s mistake. Or maybe the mistake itself. No doubt about that.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” said Candle. “Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn’t be a choice—just policy. What I mean is—” She turned her attention to Tay, who was now awake and grooming itself. “I mean, don’t sleep with the boy.”
“Oh, well, I’ve already had my sleep for tonight.” Larky-snarky. Such kindness as Rain might have wakened with had evaporated. The dawn began to steep in the limbs of the pummeled trees. In the company of the Lion and the rice otter she took her leave, and without turning around she waved her hand over her shoulder at her mother’s farewell.
Dawn over the Aestheticum. A mawkish pink. Word had apparently gotten out among the Birds. The silhouette of the shallow dome, its granite ribs and quoins picked out a pale yellow, was punctuated with sentinels of Birds. The old Eagle, Kynot, saw the Lion and the girl approach, and he swooped down to meet them with a guard of three or four.
“It’s not quite the original gang,” said General Kynot. “Birds don’t tend to live as long as humans. But respectable enough, to see our companion off.”
“Lurline love-a-chickadee, but you’ve grown,” said a Wren to Rain. “You remembers me? Doesn’t you, sweet? Quadling margin lands, when you was traveling with that Clock? It’s Dosey, begging your pardon, miss.”
Brrr glanced at Rain. Her face was blank. She who had always had more time for Animals was eager to see her human. “We can’t stop to chat about the old times,” said the Lion. “We must get in before the girl is spotted here.”
“We’ll be up top,” said the Eagle. “If you need us, roar for us, Lion. We’ll break through the high windows if we can.”
Brrr pawed out the keys to the Aestheticum. Since he and Rain were the first to arrive, he gave her a quick tour. “This platform here, with the single schoolroom bench—the Emperor will come in and sit upon that. Opposite, a platform of exactly the same height but, notice, covered with that rather rare Varquisohn carpet, is where La Mombey will sit. Her throne is actually a stage prop from a community theater production of The King of Squirreltown’s Daughter, but I don’t think Mombey will object. Her ministers will be here, see, and here. While the Emperor’s staff and emissaries of the counties will be installed behind that velvet rope. Do you think the jeweled beeswax candles are a little over the top? Yes, I think they are.” He plucked out the emeralds, pursed his lips, and then put them back in.
Rain wandered about. All the alcoves under the balcony that ringed the whole room were piled thick and high with dusty furniture. She found a cove she could wriggle into. An old marble tomb ornament of a knight and his lady afforded some height. Rain could climb up, kneel onto the flat of the knight’s stone sword laid along his breastplate and down between his knees, and peer through filigreed gewgawkery scrolling along the tops of wooden pillars. If she stayed in gloom and no further illumination was cast, she might remain unobserved and still catch most of what was going on.
She pulled open the door of a wardrobe and removed a couple of broken umbrellas, making room so she could duck inside to hide in the event of necessity. In another piece, a huge linen press, she found a bottom drawer two feet longer than she was herself, and deep enough to sleep in. She took a pillow from yet another drawer and arranged herself a bed in case this festival of political mortification went all night and she was stuck here unable to move. On a second pillow she set the shell, for safekeeping. She even found a royal chamber pot tagged with a stamped provenance: OZMA THE BILIOUS. Well, she’d use that if she had to.
“There will be pastries at the tradesmen’s entrance in half an hour,” said Brrr. “You can be my assistant until a certain moment, then when I give the signal, you’d better make yourself scarce.”
At Brrr’s side, she hung out at the door, listening to the city come alive. Horsemen tethered their steeds to stanchions of iron; vendors showed up to sell early chestnuts, stale bread, apricots, onion tarts—mushy and a little rank. Sometimes she heard what Brrr muttered to her, a who’s who of contemporary Oz. The Lord Mayor of Shiz, here to represent all of Gillikin. A Scrow chieftain identifying himself as Shem Ottokos, to witness for some of the tribes of the Vinkus. “The Yunamata won’t cede to him rights of representation,” whispered Brrr, “but whoever knows what the Yunamata think about governance? They don’t even use hair combs.”
The delegation from the Quadling Country was late. Rain caught a lot of eye rolling. She overheard someone say, “You know the squelchy-folk.
But the Quadlings, ah, the Quadlings,
Slimy, stupid, curse-at-godlings…
They probably got lost in the big city.”
Then the advance party of the victors began to assemble—the Munchkinlanders. Most of them were squat and small, like Little Daffy. Others were more rangy, with their small breasts and big pelvises, kangaroo-folk as Rain had heard it put about at street corners.
Militia in dress habillard, ministers in robes of office, a few key generals called in from the field. Brrr wondered if General Jinjuria, who had held the terrain beyond Haugaard’s Keep for much of the past decade, would be arriving to witness, but she didn’t show up. On reflection, the Lion realized that any conquering leader who had the capacity to change her visage daily to capitalize on shifting opinions of beauty and glamour would probably be less than happy to have a popular female general known as the Foill of Munchkinland descending to divert attention away from her superior.
“Time to take your hiding place,” he murmured to Rain.
She looked both ways before slipping into the shadows. Everyone was busy with pots of ink and stacks of vellum, books of legal doctrine. Arguing over seating and who took precedence over whom. It was easy to disappear in plain sight.
Once inside the forest of furniture, she scrabbled this way and that to reclaim her vantage point. Memory, which rarely came together for her, woke up a little. This was like crawling around Lady Glinda’s bedroom, back in Mockbeggar Hall, the time they’d all been crowded into a single room. Would Lady Glinda arrive to witness the historic moment? Rain craned to look. The first person to come into her line of vision, appearing a little lost, was Tip.
Rain caught her breath. It hadn’t been long since they’d seen each other, but so much had happened in the meantime—the news of her father’s having been magicked into the form of an Animal, and of his death in that form. The assault by dragons upon the storied Emerald City. So Tip seemed different, in just those few weeks. One could change that fast. What had happened to him? What had he put himself through, and for whom? For her? Or for Mombey?
The earlier anxieties metastasized now there was so much to be lost. What if Tip had only stayed at her side until they had gotten to Kiamo Ko, where they found out that both Liir and the Grimmerie had been taken into custody? Had Tip been using her to locate her father and the book for Mombey, his admitted guardian? What if the abduction of her father hadn’t yet happened? Would Tip have stolen the volume and left her that way instead of the way he did?
A cold dampness covered her skin. She’d been used. He’d been planted somehow in her cupboard to seduce her, to learn her secrets. When she’d had no more to yield, he’d left her. On the double.
She huddled behind a varnished oak column carved with volutes and wooden ivy. Tay writhed at her ankles. Rain couldn’t breathe, just looking at how Tip moved cautiously into the open arena, holding himself in a new way. Stiff. Uncertain. Stronger. More supple. Or was it less supple?
Additional impedimenta were being hauled in. Some minions with fans, in case the heat grew oppressive. Some other lackeys with braziers in case of chill. Someone set up fifteen music stands and fifteen music stools, and moments later someone else came along and ordered them taken away again. Tip circulated, his eyes at the roof level, as if he were part of the guard detail, making effort to fortify the premises. But he looked goofy doing that.
The room was coming to order. There was no chair for Tip; clearly he had no formal role here. His pacing slowed down. Luck was playing games with Rain and Tip both: he paused in the very quadrant of the large hall in which Rain had hidden herself, and he began to hunt among the furniture for someplace to lean. He moved a few feet in under the overhang, where a low desk gave him a perch. He was in the next alcove to Rain’s, and an arched opening allowed her to see him through hat racks and the legs of overturned tables.
Was he honing in on her whereabouts as he might have done at St. Prowd’s? Was she a lodestone to his compass needle, that he should pick this section of the space to loiter? More certain than ever that something was amiss, she knew she must back away. As soon as she could breathe, and before she could die. But Tay slithered in the shadows and wriggled forward to wreathe Tip’s ankles the way the lake otter had been cavorting around Rain’s own, with a teasing alertness.
Tip was magnificently composed, Rain saw. His chin never dropped to indicate he’d noticed Tay. His eyes remained trained on the lintels of the room, the struts in the ceiling, as if flying monkeys intent on attack might be lurking in the shadows. His cheeks reddened and his breathing quickened.
The ground was shifting beneath her feet, and she must leap one way or the other.
On the basis of those involuntary clues—the beauty of how his body responded—she would leap toward hope, this time, and trust he was not Mombey’s agent. If he was to give her away, let him do it now, so she would know. She couldn’t live any longer without knowing one way or the other.
Tay returned to Rain, soundlessly. A furniture warehouse seemed as natural a habitat for a rice otter as a swamp, the way that green spirit moved about it.
Rain began to wriggle her way through the maze of tight spaces. Tip folded his arms across his chest, in the manner of a man hard to please but cautiously satisfied with what he saw. He backed up against the nearest pillar. He sank his right hand in the sash of his tunic, as if looking for peanuts or a key or a handkerchief. He put his left hand around the edge of the glossy polished cylinder, and Rain caught it. She was on her knees in the shadows, behind the pillar, kissing his fingertips, moving her mouth against his soft cupped palm, which had opened to receive her chin. She grazed his fingertips again with her lips, and parted her lips to take two fingers into her mouth.
“All unauthorized service force, five minutes,” bellowed Avaric. “We will clear the hall for the dignitaries.”
Factotums, servants, attachés, and minor satraps scurried, sending dust motes to eddy into the light slanting down from a ring of clerestory windows just below the shallow dome. More gentlefolk and fiercefolk from Munchkinland arrived. Though the hall became fuller and warmer, the noise began to subdue itself. Would he be forced to leave, her Tip, or had he received clearance to stay? She tugged at his wrist: come, come. She pulled him backward into the shadows and stood to meet him face-to-face.
“I may not be seen to disappear again,” he whispered.
“They know you’re here, they know you haven’t left,” she whispered back. “Have you left? Have you left me, Tip?” But if she’d ever known anything before in her life, she knew the answer now by looking at his face. He had not left her. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go. How will you find me again?”
“But you gave me a map. Of course I’ll find you.”
He pressed his fingers against her temples, pressed a forefinger to his lips to hush her, and sidled away. But the expression on his face said wait, the expression on his face said later; it said soon.
He went to his post behind the dais to which La Mombey would be escorted. With a new military bearing he stood, his polished boots just a little apart, his arms folded behind his back in that gesture that signifies no need for quick access to weaponry. His hair had been cut shorter. Someone had nicked the back of his neck with a razor. After all the blood and death Rain had seen, she wanted to weep over that nick as she hadn’t yet wept.
The Emperor arrived with such a lack of fanfare that at first Rain didn’t even notice. Shell was more hunched than she remembered. He wore a gown of gilded brocade that made a columnar sweep from his narrow pointed beard to his bare toes. Something in his bearing made Rain feel he was naked underneath the robe. Naked and proud. But his eyes looked glazed in a different way, as if perhaps he hadn’t been taking proper nourishment for some days running.
He sat at his schoolboy bench for a few moments. When the air became even grander with the puffery of incense, he removed himself to his knees. Someone hurried over with a cushion but he waved it away, and stayed on his knees, eyes closed, as La Mombey entered at last.
Rain had heard Brrr’s descriptions of the Eminence of Munchkinland—the various guises—and she remembered Tip’s story about how Mombey had come by the skill of transformations. La Mombey looked like—what was it? Yes—she had it—like one of those figureheads on the boats that were dragged across the lawns at Mockbeggar Hall. She might have been carved of ancient oak. Her brow was broad and her wide-set eyes the color of overripe plum. Her hair was not so much blond or carrot as a kind of livid gold, shining with metallic highlights, just as her full skirts and bodice did. She was taller than anyone else in the room.
La Mombey approached her station and curtseyed to the Emperor of Oz and bade him rise. He did. The formal statements began in a humdrum tone, low to the ground, that Rain didn’t strain to interpret. She merely watched the attitudes of the two leaders, the Emperor’s form sagging, nearly listing, Mombey’s body cantilevered forward with unnatural strength.
Once the proceedings were under way, a steady stream of interpreters, legislators, orators, and reconciliators moved into place, speaking in the vernacular of ceremony. Men and women moved pieces of paper from ledgers to lecterns and back again. Other men and women brought tea. Someone welcomed, late, an emissary of the Nome King of Ev. Someone petitioned that the proceedings be halted until a Quadling representative arrived. Someone else petitioned that that previous petition be reproved. Then the Quadling emissary stood up and said he was already present, thank you very much. It was Heart-of-Mushroom, identifying himself as the Supreme Glaxony of Quadling Country. He wore the same loincloth he’d worn in the jungle, and nothing else.
Eventually the proceedings became humdrum enough that Tip could back up and stand down from the dais, turn to consult an honor guard posted underneath a vulgar plaster cast approximating the famous Ozma Lexitrice statue near the Law Courts Bridge. Tip then circulated the perimeter of the hall, choosing his moments carefully, until he’d returned to the edge of the nook where Rain waited for him.
All eyes were on Mombey and the Emperor. No one looked at Tip, no one saw Rain in the shadows. Even Tay seemed glued to the proceedings. Tip stepped back into the carrel, among the boxy secretaries and bureaus, the carvings, the wardrobes and linen presses. It was no longer like Lady Glinda’s salon. Now it was like the crowded basement shop in Shiz. BROKEN THINGS OF NO USE TO ANYONE BUT YOU.
They didn’t speak, but they mouthed words, and read each other’s lips. Read the language of relief on each other’s faces.
You’re all right.
You’re all right?
Yes, I’m all right. Now.
How did we manage?
How will we manage.
I love—
I love—
There they stuck for a moment, words failing them, until Tip leaned forward. He put his arms around her, cradling her bottom, lifted her till his face was between her breasts. Silently he stepped forward and sat her down on the statue of the knight, on the broad flat blade of the stone sword. We mustn’t, he said. No. It can’t be.
He climbed upon the memorial, clenching her hips with his knees. He cradled the crown of her head with his large soft capable hand; he pressed her backward so her head rested against the pommel and quillion of the marble weapon. Upon a marble homage to a forgotten soldier died in a forgotten battle at a forgotten time for a forgotten cause, he rested his form against hers. No, he said. We shouldn’t.
Tay looked away.
Rain reached up her hand to her neckline. She hooked a finger around the chain and pulled at it until the locket that Nor had given her appeared. She palmed it and then slipped it into her mouth and rolled it on her tongue.
She felt for the skin at the back of his neck, where his scalp had been cut too close. No, mouthed his words, we mustn’t, but his face disagreed, coming nearer to hers. He put his lips upon hers, just lightly grazing. She opened her mouth and gave him her heart.
5.
The prosecution of the surrender was being managed reasonably, with courtesy and even courtliness. The only sticking point emerged when Avaric reminded the ascending Throne Minister of Oz, La Mombey, of the Emperor’s private request. “His Sacredness requires the right to bury the corpse of his nephew, Liir Thropp, who has been taken prisoner by the Munchkinlanders and whose corpse has been brought, it is understood, to the EC from Colwen Grounds.”
“Oh, the bodily husk is of little use,” said La Mombey, at this point barreling through the negotiations herself, because she was getting bored with the high language of deference, and wanted elevation to the throne. “When the time comes, it’ll slough off soon enough.”
“The Emperor agrees about the insignificance of the human body,” countered Avaric, “but in deference to his family he has promised them a proper disposition of the corpse. So the formal grieving can begin.”
“Oh,” said La Mombey, dismissing the matter with her hand once she had understood. “The body of Liir! I see. But he’s not dead. Not essentially. Whoever said he was dead? Yes, I had him drugged and enchanted, to bring him to Munchkinland, and he proved sullen and torpid as a prisoner of war. Refused to help the cause, et cetera. It’s not my fault he’s made no effort to reject his disguise as a Black Elephant. It’s his own lack of will that causes the form to cling to him. The form will kill him if he won’t slough it off. I can’t help that. Hah!—more of a mouse than a man, even. In my opinion he’s not man enough to deserve to be an Elephant. He can’t carry it off. But I thought that was the corpse to which you were referring. True, he refused to come here with us to supervise the handover, either, so I had him drugged again, to spirit him away from my dragonmaster. Liir is not very well; he wasn’t meant to harbor so long in that form, and suffering it may be the death of him, in time. But for now he’s relatively alive in that shroud of an Elephant body, I’m afraid. I thought you wanted to demand his release. Wasn’t that it? I got up too early, I’m not focusing.”
At this Shell spoke for the first time, giving his final directive as Emperor. “He is, nonetheless, a relative, even if I never recognized him as such the few times our paths crossed. Sever him from his disguise, so I may honor my word to his kin and mine.”
“A condition of the surrender agreement,” intoned Avaric.
“Now? Dreadfully inconvenient. But very well. You’ll have to clear the hall.” Mombey waved her hand.
“You’ll need his wife. It’s only right and proper,” said the Cowardly Lion, and he sent for Candle.
“People, I want this finished,” said La Mombey. “If I’m to do what I can to return this Liir to his human form—hoping he doesn’t go and die on us in the operation—I’ll need to freshen up.”
The room never completely emptied. Underlings hastened about, scribes made copies by hand for an orgy of signatures. Rain and Tip remained in the shadows, warm from their romancing, thrillingly shy of garments. Learning every inch of each other’s forms using every measure at their disposal.
By evening most of the dignitaries had left. Under orders of the ascending Throne Minister of Oz, the great Varquisohn carpet had been shifted to the center of the vast concourse. Upon it waited some implements of her trade.
Only a dozen or two witnesses remained when La Mombey emerged from behind a screen. Brrr thought she was displaying a latent tendency to slumming. She returned not as a goddess in wings of hammered gold but as the Crone of a Thousand Years, almost Kumbricia-like in her hobbledy-hoyness. Her skirts were patched, and a bonnet sat on her head large enough to house a pair of alley cats. Rain, peering from her hideout, found Mombey smaller and more humble than expected—almost dumpy. Her shoulders were stooped as if she’d suffered rickets in childhood, and her chins seemed doughy and marmy. Around her shoulders she wore a woven shawl whose warp looked like dead ivy and whose weft was made of broken twigs.
“Mombey as she used to look in the old days,” whispered Tip. “I never expected to see her like this again.”
On a small black iron plate Mombey lit four coals. Into the throats of a trio of bottles of sarsaparilla or something she had plunged the feathers of a peacock. She set two keys down in a definitive way. “The Key of Material Disposition,” she said fatuously, “and the Key to Everything Else.” She seemed to be enjoying herself.
Rain and Tip dressed each other slowly so as not to allow a single rustle of garment. Their fingers lingering over ties, traced skin underneath the clothes as far as hands could reach. Tip sucked every button on the back of Rain’s simple shift. Rain lifted the chain off her neck and put it around Tip’s, where the red locket dropped behind the breastplate of his dress habillards. At last, decent, having returned to each other the disguise of their clothes, they stood, holding their hands together, all four of them knotted.
Rain couldn’t help feel that lying with Tip had brought her father back to life, a little, just as Liir’s lying with Candle had brought her to life, once upon a time. It was a sentiment only, but it suffused her.
Candle arrived with her domingon. Next to the sorceress Candle looked like the evening nurse. She didn’t bow or make other obeisance. She merely sat on the floor and put her domingon into her lap.
She’ll be a good help, thought Rain. She’d had experience drawing the human disguise off Princess Nastoya, just before I was born. Seeing the present: she can see what of Liir might still remain alive.
And she knows I’m here, thought Rain; she’s like that. But she’s protecting me with her silence.
Workers swung open the double doors of the loading dock and dragged the cart inside. It almost didn’t clear the lintel. Upon it lay the gently steaming form of the Black Elephant. Rain’s father, if word was to be believed. Alive somewhere, somehow, inside.
“Smoke and mirrors, don’t nobody ever tell ’em nothing?” snorted Mombey. Her voice had lost its toney veneer; she sounded like a common hill witch taking a holiday in town. “Everyone sit down, and do as I say. This will take a little concentration. I had a nice supper but it’s been quite a week and I want to make sure we get this right the first time. Are the doors barred? Light the candles, those ones there.”
The Lion nodded. Avaric and the Emperor took their places on the simple bench. Rain and Tip shuddered in the shadows. The Elephant, in this musty failing light, looked like a giant delivery of coal. Tay sat on the closed eyes of the stone knight. Upon her domingon, Candle struck up a tonic plangetive.
Herbs were brought out, and a magical powder of some sort. Maybe it was just a localized pyrotechnical conceit, for drama. The vapor was scented now of violets, now of a camphorous licorice.
Rain leaned against Tip’s shoulder. Everything was about to change once again. Her father would awaken. He was no longer a threat to Mombey now that the Grimmerie had been impounded. As the final condition of his uncle’s surrender, he would be liberated. Rain’s family would be reunited. A normalcy that Rain had never known might be waiting to punish them all.
But what would happen to Tip in all this? Mombey’s chosen boy? Would there be a place to which Rain and Tip might slip away, far from the Palace of the People, far from the clasping arms of parents who had never, could never get enough of holding their arrogantly independent daughter?
But they had made her so.
Twenty fingers intertwined, pulling, twisting, pushing back. Make me hurt, thought Rain, while I can feel something, in case I die during this and fail to feel anything again.
“It’s a stubborn enough spell,” muttered Mombey, and she began to refresh some aspects of it, picking up a little way back for momentum.
“Perhaps he’s already a bit deader than I figured,” she apologized a half an hour later. “I trust this isn’t going to present an insurmountable problem to His Sacredness.”
“Call me Shell,” said the Emperor.
“Liir is a quiet sort, but he’s never been much of a team player,” observed Brrr.
“Now you tell me,” complained Mombey, and started once again.
Another twenty minutes and she began to get alarmed. “I’m getting interference,” she complained. “Something is not right. I don’t believe this lad has the nuggets needed to block me. My power is honed over a hundred years.” She turned one of the keys at an angle to the other, then put it back the way it had been before.
“He’s the son of a witch,” said the Cowardly Lion. “Elphaba Thropp. Don’t forget that.”
“Never met the bitch,” murmured Mombey. She began to be lost in chanting. Her hands elevated, swanning about, making patterns of the smoke that issued from the scorching coals.
“I’m losing him,” she called out suddenly. “He can’t hold out against me. It’s not remotely possible. Let me try the book. Tip. Tip?”
Had she looked, had she noticed that Tip had wandered off into the shadows, perhaps she’d have paused. Secured the premises, sniffed Rain out as the disturbance skewing the results of her spell, sent the girl packing. The evening might have resolved in favor of a mundane result rather than as a manifestation of history’s aggressive atropism. But Mombey was tired and off her mettle. She didn’t look up. She just held out her hand and called him again, and Tip slipped from the shadows and came forward. He picked up the Grimmerie from a plant stand and he set it upon her bony palm.
She put it down and expertly, without hesitation, opened it and flipped its pages. A mighty witch, La Mombey, and further empowered by her victory. The Grimmerie could no longer hold its secrets from her. The pages rattled with a noise like silver chains, like ropes of rain through gutters of carven bone.
“To Call the Lost Forward,” she murmured, “I know I saw you in here. Don’t you betray me, after all I’ve been through to get you and use you.”
She was talking to herself now, but every syllable quivered in the air. “I’d’ve stayed a common witch but for hearing about you from the foreigner. A humbug if ever I stumbled over one. I can use this book better than he might’ve done. Obey me!”
She found the spell and turned it upon the air so swiftly that Rain gasped. The cold memory of trying, with Lady Glinda, to call winter upon the water, back in the days when Rain herself had hardly materialized yet. In remembering how difficult that spell had been to cast, yet how natural, Rain felt it all over again. As if she too were being acted upon by the strength of the spell Mombey was casting. As if the spell the old sorceress was invoking was calling Rain’s own past forward, reminding the girl of what it had meant to begin to read. The memory quickened, of how she awoke to life under the charm of the Grimmerie. She felt full of a salty disgust, an objection deep in the blood. She had done nothing but wing through her shallow days on earth like a shadow of something else, something only windborne, without initiative, without merit or aim. Her ears hurt.
“I’ve called the lost forward, damn it,” shouted the harridan. “You can’t resist me—I won’t have it. I’m stronger than you, Liir Thropp! You’ll come forward when I order you to!”
Watching Liir struggle to resist the spell, Tip had fallen on his hands and knees behind Mombey. She didn’t notice. Maybe Tip was stricken in sympathy by something like the throes with which Rain herself felt throttled. Her skin burned leprous, her hearing raged.
“You won’t die as an Elephant, damn it. Don’t you dare. You haven’t the willpower!” cried Mombey.
“Liir!” cried Candle. “Don’t! Don’t go!”
The pain squeezed Rain at her sides, to hold her back, but she wouldn’t be held. She burst out of the hiding place. Putting the shell to her lips, she added its long plaint to the thrum and pall of the domingon accompaniment. Candle’s eyes were closed against her own tears. She couldn’t have been surprised by her daughter’s clarion voluntary; Candle didn’t lose a note in her own playing.
The shell made a gravelly tone like that of a low horn in the fog banks of a summer morning on Restwater. Some tug leaving harbor to begin its day of taxiing sheep and goods and day-trippers across the lake.
Almost at once the floorboards in the great hall creaked. For a final time the last of the Ozmists seeped forth, a thousand individual fissures of steam. They clouded the room with a powdery warm presence, a fragrance. They turned, to Brrr’s astounded eyes, a different shade of white—at first lavender, he thought, but then a kind of silvery green. As if under the spell Mombey had cast they too remembered their particular origins, origins not in spirit but in spirit’s organic counterparts.
Tip rolled on the floor with a thud. Before her, Rain saw him go over. She was caught between twisting toward him and turning to her father, whose Elephant form was beginning to stir for the first time. In sympathy, was it, Rain’s own skin thrilled and stung, the bridge of her nose to the roots of her hair. Her fingertips and armpits and thighs all at once, as if the Ozmists were conveying some sort of airborne desiccant, a powder of ammonia or lye to vex her.
Mombey had come to a more perfervid attention. Her hat had fallen back off her head, revealing a scalp nearly as bald as a dragon’s egg. “What have you done!” she cried to Rain. She crawled and lurched halfway up, on one knee, as if she couldn’t rise fast enough and would have chosen to hurtle across the room to punch Rain down, if only she had maintained a more strapping form. One with more flexible joints. “What are you doing here? Where have you come from? No one gave you clearance. I never called you back!”
6.
The Elephant was rolling. Liir was rolling. The huge vertebrae were creaking as loudly as Ugabumish castenettas. The trunk swayed; the hooves scraped at the air and great swaths of black black hair, like handfuls of scorched grass, sifted through the gloom to the cart and the floor. The Elephant trumpeted, though whether it was a death throes or a calibration of mortal triumph, the Cowardly Lion couldn’t say. He didn’t bother to try. He was half scared to death himself.
Only the Emperor seemed unfazed. Still on his knees after all this time, still placid. He put his hands together and then he lifted back the collar of his great robe. It fell away from his neck, halfway down his arms, but stopped there. The Emperor opened his eyes and said, “Liir—Elphaba’s boy. I never knew you.”
As far as the Lion could tell, the noise was neither Animal nor human. The Elephant rose on his back feet, tremblingly, as if he might tumble upon La Mombey and flatten her. The Ozmists around him went iridescent emerald, like light striking a thousand whirring beetles in flight, gold and emerald, emerald and gold, the colors of Lurlinemas, the colors of pine pollen in champagne sunlight. In the dusk outside, the air was filled with the clattering of the wings of the honor guard of Birds, circling the dome, crying “Liir lives! Liir lives!”
“An ambush!” shrieked La Mombey. “A coup!” Her few guards had fallen to the floor, panicked and paralyzed, the way Tip also seemed to be, twisted, tilted onto his side, his hands between his legs. A seizure of some sort. The Elephant lifted onto one foot. His tusks fell away and his hide fell away. The bruised naked man lurked there, revealed, smaller than a newborn Elephant. Shaking off disguise, called forcefully back to live some while longer, whether he wanted to or not.
Outside, the Birds heard La Mombey shriek and swooped down upon the cordon militaire she had set around the building—the linked limbs of spider-thugs. Every Bird settled on a target. Even Dosey the Wren was able to wrestle one spider from its partners, heft it aloft, and when she had gone as high as her wings would carry her, drop her cargo to squish against the dome of the Aestheticum.
Rain heard the pelting of the dome. She cried out to her father even as she hurried toward Tip, but the scraping pain across every inch of her form tightened into a net that drew the air from her lungs, and she fell.
7.
Rain didn’t come around for seven days. In the meanwhile, the events of that evening having been deemed confidential, all of the Emerald City talked of nothing else.
In the light of the revelation of Mombey’s perfidy, Loyal Oz’s suit for peace had been postponed. Emissaries of both armies picked up their staffs and swords again, just in case. They didn’t hold them for long, however. After a decade, war has a way of getting old. Soldiers from opposing contingents shared their bread and settled down over portable game boards. Some of the battalions entered into singing competitions organized by Dorothy, who in the fray was turning into a kind of mad mistress of ceremonies, a mascot of both sides. “What can I tell you?” she said to her friends, shrugging. “War is lunacy.”
After Liir had recovered enough human muscle tone to be able to collapse upon the Varquisohn, Candle and Brrr brought him into a tent that had been readied for him just outside the doors of the Aestheticum. Little Daffy, having stocked up with unguents and palliatives of every strength and nastiness, whether useful or bogus, was waiting there. She went to work again on the patient whom she had first met as a young man attacked by dragons. Liir, young Liir, dropped out of the sky, bereft of possibility. All these years later she remembered his form, and she did her work well, slapping Mr. Boss on the wrist when he tried to help with too forceful a forearm. Her husband’s quiver of talents didn’t seem to include much of a bedside manner.
Candle had Rain brought in, too. She kept the lights low all night. On adjacent pallets father and daughter struggled for health, struggled against different resistances. Avaric scuttled to the edge of the tent, but Brrr wouldn’t let him enter. “This is no business of yours,” he said.
Later, well beyond midnight, the Emperor of Oz arrived, on his own. In the middle of the night, without a guard or an escort, without even a dog on a leash. The Lion stood up stiffly and emitted a low warning rumble, but Shell was family, like it or not, so the Lion had to let him pass.
“She is not your concern,” said Candle quietly to Shell.
“She is God’s great-niece,” said His Sacredness. “She is my older sister’s granddaughter. I can see that now.”
“Go away. What you couldn’t see when she was in disguise you can’t see now. All human forms are disguises. And you claim to be sacred? You know nothing but the shell of people, nothing. Go away.”
Liir sat up in the gloom and spoke for the first time, across the insensate body of his daughter. “Go away,” he agreed. “She has nothing for you.”
“She holds both the future and the past,” said Shell, wringing his hands.
“No more than the rest of us,” said Liir, and pitched a shoe at His Sacredness.
Near dawn, Dorothy came by the tent, exhausted from a night of revelry. Liir was asleep inside and she said again that she didn’t want to bother him. She joined Brrr, who was still sitting guard outside. “Something’s got to give,” she said. “I can’t go on like this. Here, I brought a flagon of freshwater. They’re saying that Mombey has been taken into custody.”
“Oh, they’ll say a lot, won’t they,” said the Lion huskily. “Get to the point. What are they saying about that Tip?”
“Not much.”
“Can you find out a little more?”
“Are you asking me to be a spy?” Dorothy smiled wanly. “Look, Brrr. I’ll do what I can. A lot of the Quadling army has removed itself to the Plains of Kistingame, along with the dragons. I can go sniff around there.”
“Dorothy, you think pretty highly of yourself, but even you risk trouble traipsing among an army of angry soldiers. You watch yourself. They came to conquer, and they feel themselves tricked into surrender. They’ll take it out on you.”
“Toto’s a little nipper. He’ll see me safe.”
“He’s dead asleep in your basket.”
Iskinaary emerged from the tent, shaking his head. He’d been keeping vigil too. “I’ll go with you, Dorothy. And I’ll bet General Kynot can send us a couple of Falcons.”
“Father Goose,” said Brrr.
“Don’t start,” said Iskinaary.
“The truth is,” said Dorothy, “I’d rather have something useful to do than sit here and wait.” She twisted her hands together looking, Brrr guessed, perhaps a little bit like that Auntie Em. He remembered his theory that the young Dorothy may once have had a crush on the Witch’s boy. Liir was solidly middle-aged while she was only now becoming marriageable. She’d come back to Oz too late, to a man who got away by growing up faster than she could. She’s had to put up with an awful lot, our Miss Dorothy, thought the Cowardly Lion. Meeting up with Liir if she doesn’t have to is one adventure I can see she’d rather avoid.
“Send word if you find anything out about Tip,” said Brrr fondly. “And while I don’t make the plans for this group, I’m guessing that as soon as Liir and Rain are well enough to be moved, the family will want to evacuate this tent and get out of the City. We can work out details later.”
On the sixth day, Little Daffy sat back on her heels and said to the Lion, “Come, you, we’re going to the Corn Exchange to try to scare up some flour wholesale so I can bake something and open up a little commercial concern of my own.”
“You can manage without me,” said Brrr.
“You heard me,” said the Munchkinlander. “With everything still in flux I never know if the good people of the Emerald City are going to set their dogs upon a humble Munchkin farm woman plying her trade.” She meant what she said. Certainly the Lion would prove a more useful defense than her dwarfish husband. But Brrr realized that she too was ready to let the Thropp family alone for a few hours, to come to what peace they might. And Dorothy thought the Lion should take himself out of the picture too.
Liir and Candle alone in the tent, Rain as catatonic upon the pallet as her father had been in his cart. Liir thought, I’ve given to her all the worst of my traits. If I had lost the will to live, for a time, how could I hope that she might be stronger? I’ve shared nothing with my daughter but my fear of inconsequence, that which has plagued me from my first days.
“In your disguise as an Animal, where did you go?” said Candle to him. The first direct remark she’d made since he’d been abducted from the castle in the west. The absence of the guardian Lion was giving her license to speak, it seemed.
Liir had thought about this. “The soldiers plying Mombey’s charm of bewitchment gave me a bigger choice than they thought. They believed it was a superficial charm, and perhaps in some persons it might have been. The hide of an Elephant, the guise of one. But I remembered how Princess Nastoya had lived as a human. Despite her long concealment she never stinted from embracing the fullness of a disguise, its meaning—she learned as much as she could about how to be a human while trapped inside the human’s form. Even though she wanted liberty from the disguise, in the end, so she could die an Animal. I thought perhaps she had made the wiser choice. I thought she had managed to become a human better than I, born one, had yet done. I thought I would rather die an Animal.
“A cowardly choice, perhaps,” he admitted, but Candle had said nothing.
“You didn’t help train the dragons to attack the city.”
“No, I didn’t. That was Trism.”
“I know who it must have been.”
They looked at opposite panels in the walls of the tent.
“In the end, Trism knew enough about dragons to do the job himself,” she said. “They never needed the Grimmerie, did they. After all that. After our ruined lives. They didn’t need you to read the book, nor Rain.”
All the wasted time running, hiding. All the years.
“No,” he admitted through his tears. “They only needed time—the time it took for Trism to experiment, over and over, with what he had learned from that one page of the Grimmerie torn out by Elphaba Thropp, those years ago, and given to the Wizard of Oz. Time to work it out. Once they’d gotten the book at last, they found—ha!—that Trism couldn’t read the book. They wanted me to try but I refused. It was then I must have chosen not to come back—to stay an Elephant, let the disguise kill me. Mombey was enraged. She tried to read the book, too. I don’t know how she managed the other evening, for she couldn’t crack it open when she had it in her hands.”
“Of course I know how she managed. Rain was there. The book obeyed her, not Mombey. The book itself brought the spell forward.”
“Rain didn’t do a thing.”
Candle rolled her eyes. “You didn’t do a thing. No, listen to me. You didn’t do a thing to stop any of this. You didn’t open the book to try to learn how to turn the dragons against their masters. You didn’t halt the attack in which very few families in the Emerald City failed to lose a loved one. You didn’t make any effort to … to call fire down upon the dragon hordes. You didn’t move to stop an assault that pitched itself against your own daughter.”
“I didn’t know she was here, of course.”
“Where else would she be?”
Liir thought of the girl thrown off the bridge at Bengda, the bridge he as a young soldier had set fire to. It was a bridge that had never stopped burning, and it never would. A child who had never stopped falling through the night, and she never would.
He said, “I haven’t the words to answer you. The Grimmerie has brought nothing but grief to every soul who has used it. I wouldn’t use it against my kind—Loyal Ozian or Munchkinlander—even if I had ceased to be my own kind.”
Candle said, “That is not like you, Liir. That is vile. It is inhuman.”
“I do not claim,” he admitted, “to have made the human choice.”
8.
When Brrr looked into the tent flaps the next morning, Rain was sitting up in the cot. “No, don’t leave,” she said to the Cowardly Lion. “I know already.”
He shrugged. Liir got up and went out to find some facilities to use, to shave. The weather was coming in colder and they couldn’t stay in a tent much longer, if Rain was to continue to recover. Candle, who after last night wasn’t yet talking to her husband, left too but in a separate direction. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss sat down in the sun outside with a coffee tin to share. They counted up their earnings. Little Daffy called into the tent, “When is Dorothy going to come home and regale us with tales of her night’s adventures before sacking out to sleep the morning away?”
The Lion intended to keep private his sense of Dorothy’s hope to avoid seeing Liir. “She’s on a mission,” he replied.
“Isn’t she always.”
Rain said in a low voice to the Lion, “You don’t have to pretend. I know. I know it all, Brrr. I know it already.”
He arranged himself as he thought a stone lion in front of a library might do, with dignity and a sense of starch. “Well, everything’s changed,” he said, companionably enough, as if the acrobats had evacuated the arena overnight and a troupe of fire-eating tree elves had arrived to set up instead. “Not such a big surprise. Things do roll on.”
“On the strength of this one accusation against Mombey, the war has been called for Loyal Oz? Who did the calling, then?”
“I have a theory, Rain,” said the Lion. “Hiding in the heart of every downtrodden commoner is where the romance of the crown lives strongest. Alarming, I know. The citizens of Oz struck with mobs and protests, days and nights of rioting, and neither army would take up weapons against them.”
“How is Tip? Brrr, I know what happened. I’m not blind. And I think maybe I’ve always known. Just tell me—how is Tip?”
He had to decide if she was working him to find out what little he knew himself, and had heard, or if she was confessing a knowledge beyond his. Probably the latter. For all her youth she was proving basalt at the bone.
“Dorothy and Iskinaary have gone to reconnoiter. The Goose sent a report via that Wren. Tip is recovering nicely enough, that’s what is said on the streets. The Hall of Approval has been meeting right next door, in our own Aestheticum, to try to work out the proper course of action, but Tip isn’t attending—hasn’t the strength yet.”
“Where is my … where is my friend?” she ventured.
“They’ve made space in a private apartment in Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, which is somewhere on the edge of Goldhaven.”
“With attendants, I assume. An armored guard.”
“Well.” The Lion tried to smile. “An old chum of yours, as I understand it. A woman from Shiz named Miss Ironish. She’s been brought in from St. Prowd’s, since Madame Teastane’s staff and students all fled the city weeks ago and are sitting out the troubles comfortably on the shores at Lake Chorge. Miss Ironish claims to have known Tip in a small but honorable way. Her blameless record convinced the Emperor that she was the right one for the job.”
“And Mombey?”
“Ah, that’s another story. Some say she’s in Southstairs, secreted there for her own safety under cover of darkness. The Palace will neither confirm nor deny that rumor. Others say Mombey accidentally called her own past upon her as she called that of others, and too much corruption crept up in her blood, and she expired of extreme old age as she ought to have done a century ago. That’s hard to confirm or deny either, and the Palace has its reasons for keeping the matter in doubt. They don’t want to be accused by patriotic Munchkinlanders of having assassinated the Munchkinlander Eminence the minute she entered the capital.”
“What do you think?”
“I think if she had the strength to change her visage just one last time, she became a woggle-bug and someone stepped on her in the rush to catch the latest newsfold.”
“Or swatted her with a rolled-up newsfold.”
He waited.
“I learned how to read, once upon a time,” she told him. “I can read the headlines, you know.”
“I suppose you can.”
“The royalists will be having mighty parties.”
“It’s too early to tell. Though the confetti factories are probably going into overnight shifts.”
She sighed. “And my great-uncle?”
“Well, it’s all up in the air still, isn’t it? There’s the question of how ready to rule the new leader might be. As we know from Dorothy, age doesn’t always constitute wisdom. And people grow up on different schedules, one from the next.”
“Has Shell abdicated the throne?”
“It’s still unsettled whether the Palace will accept a return to the rule of monarchy. And the question of whether the monarch wants to rule. I understand there is human choice involved.”
“I don’t know if there is,” said Rain.
“Oh,” said the Lion. “Don’t give me that. I’m the Cowardly Lion, remember. There’s always human choice.”
She put her face to his shoulder, her greening hand upon his paw. “All right then,” she said. “Enough grieving. Can you make arrangements for me to have an audience?”
“I have it on the highest authority that Tip has been waiting for you to ask.”
“Who’s authority is that high?”
“A little Bird told me.”
9.
Miss Ironish opened the door of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. She shooed the guards on the stoop to one side and told them if they didn’t stop bristling their bayonets in her face she’d give them what for and no mistake. “Come in, Miss Rainary,” she said. A new sobriety had tightened her corset. She never mentioned the change in Rain’s appearance, except to mutter, “My, how you’ve grown.”
Scarly took Rain’s umbrella and put it against a hat stand.
“I believe you will be comfortable in the parents’ parlor,” said Miss Ironish. “Scarly will bring you a biscuit or a glass of water if you like. Please wait here and I will announce the Crown in a few moments.”
“I can help myself to a glass of—”
“This is hard on everyone,” said Miss Ironish sternly. “Wait.”
She left the room with a backward glance rich in opprobrium. A few moments later Scarly tiptoed in with three lemon brickums and a cheese tempto congealing upon a porcelain salver. Apparently school fare didn’t improve even for royalty.
“Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, moving out of the sight of the crowds who haunted the paving stones, the faithful who waited outside day and night, desperate to catch a glimpse of the miracle. “Oh, Miss Rainary.” She couldn’t control the gasp in her voice.
“I hope it isn’t too horrible,” said Rain, a little coldly.
“It en’t horrible,” said Scarly, and she took Rain’s hand. She could get nothing else out, though, and fled through the butler’s pantry when she heard Miss Ironish return.
“You may arise, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish, and stood back against the door as Tip came through, making every effort not to twist her hands. Miss Ironish retreated and the door closed firmly though without the sound of a click.
Rain said, “Am I to call you Ozma?”
“You may call me Tip,” she answered.
“I’m told that when you discovered what had happened, you fainted dead away. I thought, when I could think, ‘Well, isn’t that just like a girl.’ ”
“Not funny, Rain. Under the circumstances. How did you find out?”
Rain neither moved away nor did she come closer, and neither did Ozma Tippetarius. They stood nine feet apart on opposite margins of a sun-bleached carpet. “I suppose—I don’t know—maybe I dreamed it.”
“You’re lying. You don’t lie. Have you changed?”
“Well.” She held up her green fingers. “A little.”
Tip waited.
“Tay always liked you,” said Rain, “and Tay didn’t like men, generally.”
“Was that it?”
Rain thought. “Yes, I think that was it.”
“You’ve never even known if Tay is male or female itself, have you? Yet you claim to know how Tay can respond to me, even when a disguise is laid upon me for—for all those years I can’t remember?”
“We’re unlikely to make an acceptable ruling couple,” said Rain. “For one thing, you’re about a hundred years older than I am.”
“Well, I hide it well, don’t I.” The tone was bitter.
“You knew it all along,” said Rain.
“I didn’t. Mombey kept me apart from other children. We always shifted about every few years. I’m told most childhoods feel eternal, Rain. Mine did too. I wasn’t to know it was longer than anyone else’s. Perhaps I wasn’t smart, but grant me that. Or maybe Mombey charmed some sense of calendar out of me. It doesn’t matter. We’ve both had our childhoods filched from us, Rain. There’s that. If there’s nothing else.”
“There’s that,” Rain agreed.
They stole glances at each other, the green girl and the queen of Oz. Those forgotten called forward, against their wishes, into themselves. Rain might as well have been Elphaba at sixteen. Ozma Tippetarius had eyes the color of half-frozen water.
They could not cross the carpet to take each other in their arms. Maybe someday, but not today. More of their childhoods had to be stolen, yet, for that to happen—or maybe some of it returned to them. The charmless future would show them if, and when, and how.