1.
In the streets of the city they were saying that Ozma had come back. Within weeks, illustrated pamphlets in six colors became available at every vendor. One edition with bronze ink on the cover cost two farthings extra and sold out to collectors in an hour. It purported to present an entire modern history of Oz, starting with the arrival of the Wizard and the deposing of the Ozma Regent, Pastorius. The best part was a grotesquely colored section that everyone turned to first: the murder of Pastorius. Oh, the blood! Like a fountain all down the steps of the Palace of the Ozmas. Then the Wizard’s vile contract with Mombey, Pale Queen of Sorcery, to secret the child away while the Wizard set up shop to hunt for the fabled Grimmerie. For which he’d come to Oz in the first place, and over which, failing to secure it, he left, disconsolate.
In one of the final panels of that section, Mombey secretly made a pact with the Ozmists, and siphoned a zephyr or so of them for pumping up the Wizard’s balloon, to assure he could never return across the Deadly Sands. A lovely and theatrical conceit, if unsupportable by the testimony of witnesses, who wrote letters to the editor complaining about the rewriting of history. The liberties these artists take! Hacks, the lot of them.
Dorothy had her own section. Part III. They colorized her too highly and she looked like a Quadling afflicted with St. Skimble’s Rash. With her familiar, Toto, who could speak in the funny pages (arf arf !), Dorothy careered around Oz like some sort of a drunken sorceress, spilling mayhem out of her basket and kicking up her sparkly heels in musical numbers that didn’t translate particularly well on the page.
A nod was made to Elphaba and to Nessarose Thropp, and to Dorothy’s crime spree against them. However, maybe because the Emperor was about to abdicate the Throne Ministership of Oz, his portrayal was accorded a certain respect, if only for his having served as a place holder until Ozma could be released from her spell. How quickly a history of offenses can be rewritten. Yet there was some sour truth to it: Shell Thropp may have ordered the invasion of Munchkinland, but he hadn’t killed Pastorius. Nor had he imprisoned Ozma Tippetarius in a spell so deep it could keep her in a near perpetual boyhood until, through trickery played by a magic mouse (a magic mouse?) La Mombey accidentally reversed her own spell, revealing her depraved plan for world dominance. Or Oz dominance.
The extravaganza went into seven printings in a fortnight. It didn’t begin to show up wrapped around take-out fried fish for at least a month.
Little was made in print, either by the popular press or by pulpit expositories, of the material waste and psychic distress of the recent past. The dragons of Colwen Grounds, the war, the long privations, the fight for water, the death of so many on both sides of the conflict. The negotiations remained in a delicate stage. It didn’t do to allow sensibilities to become inflamed with reference to abominations too recent to be forgiven—if ever they could be forgiven.
Would Ozma come to rule? How would her legitimacy be determined since eighty-five years, give or take, had passed since her birth, but she was apparently still in her minority? Had Mombey herself not unwittingly identified the girl as Ozma—by that unsavory magicking of Tip homeward from boy to girl—the metamorphosis might have gone unremarked as any other backstreet carnival trick. (The details of the transformation were too squeamish for most citizens to imagine closely, except the depraved.) “Not Ozma!” Mombey had cried, out of her skull. Everyone present had heard her, and when Tip had been carried away for medical attention, the form of a teenage girl in a lad’s dress sartorials had escaped no one’s notice. (A number of men had trouble satisfying their wives for months in the ensuing vexation to their own makeup.)
Whether Ozma still wore the red locket on its chain—only one person knew enough to ask that question, and she would not ask it.
Hardly anyone else alive had ever seen Tip’s mother, Ozma the Bilious. No one could comment on any family resemblance the new Ozma might have to her forebears except by the fading rotogravured portraits that had remained hung, seditiously, during the reigns of the various Throne Ministers, in houses left shabby because their tenants could never afford redecoration.
And would Ozma Tippetarius accept the mantle? Did she have to? Did she have a choice?
Furthermore, would Munchkinland accept her as a ruler of a reunited Oz? No stalwart Munchkinlander could forget the crunchy little fact that the Ozma clan was Gillikinese. But it was Mombey who’d brought Ozma Tippetarius back to the throne from Munchkinland, which gave the rebel nation a stake. Before a month had passed some began, quietly, to call Mombey the savior of the nation. Without an Ozma to pull the warring factions together, the fighting might have gone on a good deal longer.
It was said that at Haugaard’s Keep, on Restwater, when they learned what a mess things had gotten to in the Emerald City, General Traper Cherrystone called a ceasefire and invited the Foill of Munchkinland into the Keep to discuss an end to the hostilities. No one was quite sure what happened next. The only witness was a tree elf named Jibbidee, and he wasn’t talking. In the Oak Parlor of the Florinthwaite Club, bruited about over a third glass of port, thank you, retired military officers whispered the rumors. Loyal Oz’s General Cherrystone had proposed to General Jinjuria that together they decline to accept the nonsense about the return of Ozma to the Emerald City, join forces, and rule as a military tribunal over Restwater themselves, setting up a protectorate over the access rights to the great lake. Jinjuria was said to have refused, whereupon Cherrystone shot her, and then took his own life.
The legal standing and even location of Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hall remained unknown.
So, too, the confused reputation of the Wicked Witch of the West. But in the rush of sentimental and even patriotic fervor that greeted the unexpected return of Ozma Tippetarius, word began to circulate that the great spell cast by La Mombey, to call the lost forward, had done more than stay Liir Thropp from his death and reveal the green skin of his daughter, Rain. It had done more than sabotage Mombey’s own plan to keep Ozma Tippetarius young, hidden, dumb, and male for another hundred or two hundred years. Mombey’s application of the spell from the Grimmerie, they said, had also inadvertently summoned Elphaba Thropp from—well, from wherever it was she had gone.
“As if she’d come back when asked,” said Mr. Boss. “What do they think she is? A charwoman?” The accidental family—what was left of it with the death of Nor, with the departure for Nether How of a frosty Liir and an angry Candle and an eye-rolling though mute Goose—was squatting in a garden flat below a shell-shocked semidetached villa off the Shiz Road in the Northtown neighborhood. Rain had refused to follow her parents unless she had settled things in her own mind.
Until the circumstances righted themselves somehow, they’d resigned themselves to this dump for the winter. The rising damp gave them all headaches of a morning but tenacious ivy hid the worst of the damage to the building’s exterior plaster. The place had views on a strip of garden that hadn’t benefited from the firebombing of the dragons a few months ago. Nonetheless, Tay liked to climb on what remained of the shattered ornamental cherryfern.
“I can understand the rage for Elphaba. It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight,” said the Lion. “Didn’t Nor used to say that? Also easier on your moral comfort, for one thing, to keep waiting for redemption of one sort or another rather than work it out for yourself. Since its time hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Well, that’s a matter of opinion we never asked you for,” said Dorothy, who had agreed to return to the fold after Liir had made his departure. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do my warm-ups. Right here.”
“I mean, look,” explained the Lion. “The so-called where’s-the-Witch mania has simply displaced Ozma hunger, that’s all. No one alive can remember what it was like to live under blood royalty. Three generations have grown up without the crown—to go back to it again just like that satisfies the appetite for resolution too quickly. People need something to be missing. They need to crave something they don’t have.”
“It used to be Lurline, when I was growing up,” said Little Daffy. “Lurline would come back eventually and grace us all with the spirit of better posture, or something. If the Ozma vacancy has been filled, then the people on the street need a new hunger. Why shouldn’t it be for that old witch?”
“This new hunger you’re talking about,” said the dwarf. “Better get going or we’ll miss the morning rush.”
They were making quite a killing with Little Daffy’s Munchkinlander Munchies. Once they had set aside enough capital they were planning to fund a trip back to the Sleeve of Ghastille to harvest more of the secret ingredient.
“There’s someone here at the door,” called Mr. Boss as he and Little Daffy were leaving with their bakery wheelbarrow.
“It’ll be for you, Dorothy. You go. I’ve got blisters from padding halfway across town chasing after your damn dog,” said the Lion. “It doesn’t know how to pee without dashing all the way to Burntpork. Dorothy, if you don’t get that Toto a leash and a muzzle, I’m going to get one for you.”
“You try muzzling me and watch the nation rise against you.”
Dorothy came back. “For you, Brrr,” she said. “They asked for Sir Brrr.” She mimed a mean little curtsey but ruffled his mane as he went by. “Where is Rain, anyway?” she asked in general, but only a grandmother clock ticked in answer. Brrr had gone into the garden to talk to a military guard of some sort. No one else was home.
For a few days, like the other curiosity seekers who thronged the kerbstones of Great Pullman Street, Rain found herself drawn to the facade of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. A sober building made of brick, painted in a no-nonsense black flatwash and finished in white trim, it signaled with confidence the rectitude of public office. The windows at street level remained curtained. No one came and no one went except ministers, who refused to comment. Rain saw Avaric bon Tenmeadows once, with a satchel, ducking a rotten apricot lobbed at him by someone impatient for news of the Ozma. Their queen. If queen she was.
Rain’s life had been spent in hiding. Disguised with ordinariness. She now felt cursed with this glare of green upon wrists and cheeks and everywhere else—she couldn’t bear to look at herself much. But as she wandered about the streets of the Emerald City like any one of the thousand paupers hoping to filch a meal, cadge a donation from some softie, work for an hour or maybe fall in love for less, she realized that no one bothered to bother her.
She hadn’t needed to hide her whole life long. No one wanted to find her anyway.
The winter had come in mild, and the shrubbery of the Oz Deer Park remained in sufficient leaf to give her cover. She felt she blended in better than, say, the starving families of the Quadling Corner, who took the most menial jobs and for breakfast ate paper and leaves with mustard. She could walk along the Ozma Embankment, looking for her life. Wherever it might be.
It wasn’t housed on a top floor of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, that much was certain.
Perhaps, she thought, she would go up to Shiz. If they would have her. She was a year early but Miss Ironish had concluded that, against all odds, Rain was clever. Perhaps she could have a private tutor for a year to prepare. She didn’t quite qualify as a legacy student, as her grandmother had never matriculated. But those were mere details. Miss Ironish could arrange it.
Tay scampered after Rain but she felt the creature was suffering from the lack of a campaign. Maybe she would take it back to Quadling Country and release it to its companions. Male or female, it could find what company it might. Perhaps she owed the rice otter that much.
She was circling around the ramparts of Southstairs Prison, slowly heading for home, or what passed for home, when she stopped to let a carriage go by. Two small children of the Vinkus—Arjikis, she thought, in those leggings—were splashing in the gutters. “A lion could beat a dragon any day,” said one, speaking pidgin Ozish. “Could not,” said the other. “Brrr could,” protested the first, “now he’s in charge.”
That was how Rain learned that Tip had accepted the institutional role of the Ozma only provisionally, on a condition of deferred elevation. Tip had finalized a military settlement for peace by proposing for elevation to Throne Minister, as her regent, the Lord Low Plenipotentiary from Traum, Gillikin. None other than Sir Brrr. The Cowardly Lion as he once had been known. When Ozma reached her maturity, she would reconsider whether to rule.
Well well, thought Rain, Tip had only a handful of days in which to ascertain the Lion’s strengths. And all he had done during that period following Nor’s death was to grieve. Is that, in the end—that capacity to hurt—the most essential ingredient for a ruler?
In a ceremony of surpassing simplicity, Sheltergod Thropp, His Sacredness, turned over the accoutrements of power to the Cowardly Lion. Shell handed over two keys, a few folded documents, some receipts for personal items that had gone missing during his term in office, and one or two crowns. He wasn’t sure which was more legitimate, so Brrr had them placed on a wooden hat rack in his dressing room where they wouldn’t pester his mane. He hated to have his waves flattened now that he could afford to have them done again.
“You’ll stay for the formal investiture?” the Lion asked Shell.
“I don’t believe so, if you don’t mind.”
“We are recalling Lady Glinda from Munchkinland.”
“I never cared much for Glinda. No, I’ll just tootle along if it’s all the same to you.”
“But where will you go? Private life could afford little by way of satisfaction to one of your, um, background.”
The former Emperor said, “There was a story my old Nanny used to tell me at darktime. A fisherman and his fishwife lived by the side of the mythical sea that shows up in so many old tales. The fisherman caught a great thumping carp, all covered in golden scales. The Fish spoke—fish can talk in stories, you know—and in return for being thrown back into the sea, it promised to give the man a wish. The man couldn’t think of much to wish for—a ladle for his wife, maybe—but when he got home that night and she had a ladle, she hit him with it for having such low self-esteem as to request only a kitchen implement. Go back, she said, and ask for something better. I want a cottage, not this bucket of seaweed we sleep in. A cottage with real glass windows, and roses round the dovecote.”
“Indeed,” said the Lion, who had always felt skittish about stories and anyway had a country to begin running.
“You can imagine how it goes. She kept sending him back over and over. The Fish was obliging. Whatever the fishwife wanted, the fishwife got. And it was never enough. In succession, she required to be a duchess, to have a castle, to be a queen, to have a palace, to be an empress and have an empire. Why the man didn’t throw her into the sea, I don’t know. Stories don’t make much sense sometimes.”
“He must have loved her.”
“Eventually, in the teeth of a horrible storm, lightning and thunders from all sides, she demanded to be made like the Unnamed God itself. Quaking for his life, the fisherman crawled to the sea and made the petition. The golden Fish said, ‘Just go back, she’s got what she wished for.’ And when he went back home—”
“She wore the golden sun on her brow and the silver moon on her fanny,” guessed the Lion.
“She was sitting in the bucket of seaweed again.”
“She overreached herself,” said the Lion. “Ah, morals.”
“Or did she?” said Shell. “Perhaps the most godly thing is to be poor, after all, to give up trappings and influence.”
“So.” The Lion was trying to steer this interview to a close. “You’re going to take up telling stories to children during Library Hour?”
Shell clasped his hands. Only now did the Lion notice they were mottled and trembling. Shell had his sister Elphaba’s long nose, and a drip was forming just below the tip. High sentiment, or an aggrieved immune system? “There are rumors of caves in the Great Kells—as far as Kiamo Ko, even farther. Hermits go there to live, to hide, to die. Sometimes earthquakes come and bury them in their homes. I should be prepared for that, don’t you think?”
The Lion didn’t reply. He was learning to hold his opinion to himself. For a few years, until Ozma was ready, he was no more or less than Oz itself. Oz didn’t have opinions. It had presence.
Plans for the installation of Brrr as Throne Minister would have involved Rain, but she couldn’t bear to be close to Ozma in some public setting. Ozma—Tip—Ozma (but which one?) had the greatest power in the country, and could send for Rain at any hour of any day, for a private audience, and Rain would have come. But that message never arrived. So the thought of accepting a formal invitation to sit in a formal chair for hours a few feet away from the young monarch-in-waiting gave Rain a feeling in her chest as if her very heart was somehow suffocating in there.
But she had no heart, she’d given it away.
Her accidental family never mentioned the matter. They protested, too robustly to be convincing, that they would much rather stay home with her. They preferred cards. But when the afternoon of the Lion’s elevation arrived, a scrappy sense of jubilation broke through anyway. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss celebrated by whooping it up like a couple of teenagers, drinking too much whiskey-sweet from a hip flask. Dorothy sat in the garden even though the air had turned chilly. When the time came near for the actual coronation, the four of them changed their minds, linked arms—well, Little Daffy and Mr. Boss linked arms and, at a different altitude, so did Rain and Dorothy—and they hurried through the streets to stand at the back of the crowd and watch from afar. Both the hall and the piazza in front were hung with banners of Ozian emerald, but they were interspersed with standards of red and gold. The Lion’s chosen colors, perhaps. They tended to mute the patriotism of the event in a way Rain admired.
The music was atrocious, though, and way too loud.
Just before Rain slipped out of the proceedings a guard collared her and said, “There you are. You’re requested in a reception room in Mennipin Square this evening.”
Her heart skipped up some stairs. “Surely you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“Not bloody likely.” He grinned at her. “You don’t exactly pass, you know.”
She supposed she didn’t. “I don’t want to meet Ozma in some chaperoned chamber—” she began.
He interrupted. “Begging your pardon. I’m not representing Ozma.”
She waited until she could govern her quavering voice. “I see. Then am I under arrest?”
“Only socially. Do you want an escort?”
“Are you offering to be my boyfriend?”
He blushed. “No, miss, and no offense intended. I merely meant to suggest if you didn’t care to travel alone at night—there’s some young ladies who wouldn’t dare, you see—I was offering my services, I mean the services of my regiment. Miss.”
“Well, I’m not one who is troubled by being out at night,” said Rain, and took down the address. She had accepted no invitation to dance at any of the installation balls that were mounted all over the city. With whom would she dance? Her grandmother’s old broom?
She walked to the assignation more or less impervious to the explosions of colored lights that scratched themselves against the black sky over standing sections of the Palace of the People. She thought she could hear Dorothy leading a sing-along at the Lady’s Mystique, but that couldn’t be right. Now that the official business was over, Dorothy would be at the Lion’s side. Must be one of those entertainers who impersonated her. Rain moved herself along.
Crossing a bridge over one of the nicer city canals, Rain paused for a moment to look at the pyrotechnics reflected in the water. The fireworks were like great colored spiders. For an instant she saw the Emerald City under attack again, this time by monstrous insects. But Mombey was in custody now, and her bloodhound spiders no longer hunting for Rain or the Grimmerie. The past was the past. Rain had to get out of here. She was going mad.
At first she didn’t recognize the man who answered the door. Neither did he twig in to who Rain was until they had said their good evenings to each other. Their voices cued them both. Then she fell into his arms in a way she had never fallen into her father’s. Puggles said, “To think I lived to see this day! You are a sight for sore eyes.”
“No, I make eyes sore. Tell the truth!”
But they laughed, and she had not laughed—well, she hadn’t laughed much in her life at all. Had she.
“So this is Lady Glinda’s house? Why didn’t they just tell me?”
“She doesn’t want her circumstances to be widely known,” said Puggles. “It’s a temporary posting, you see. She can’t be bothered to become engaged in the skeltery-heltery of social callers. Not under these conditions.”
“May I ask what conditions you’re being cagy about?”
“I’ll leave it to her to tell you herself. She’s awaiting you in the front parlor. Can you see yourself up? The double doors on the right. I can’t do the stairs as well as I ought.”
She was halfway up but turned and called lightly to him, “Puggles? What happened to Murthy?”
He shook his head and made some obscure pious gesture that country folk persisted in making, against all odds.
Lady Glinda sat in warm lamplight with a throw rug upon her knees.
“I should have thought you’d be kicking up your heels at the prime event,” said Rain, coming in as if she’d just gone to pick up a pack of perguenays at the local newsagent.
“Oh, I’ve long since gotten over the taste for fuss, though I was obscenely pleased to be extended an invitation.”
“A former Throne Minister of Oz, no less, taking a quiet night at home, and on such a night. You surprise me.”
“Come here, my dear, and stop remonstrating. Let me look at you.”
Lady Glinda’s voice was still warm, but a little frail, and a tremor pestered the stem of her neck so her chin dove and rose in the tiniest of hummingbird flutters. She hadn’t lost her taste for pearls, and the at-home tiara was vintage Glinda, though it looked as if it had gotten sat upon more than once. So too the spectacles that fell on a loop from Lady Glinda’s neck. She’d been reading. Who knew.
Glinda put the pince-nez to her face. “So it’s true. Oh, my darling, it’s true.”
“That I’ve gone native?”
Glinda nodded and patted the sofa next to her. “I had to accept it on faith, you know—that you were Liir’s daughter. By the time I met you the concealing spell had already been cast. You could have been any other urchin child brought for protection to a big house and left there by a loving and canny parent who didn’t know how to care for a child.”
Rain said, “They dropped me off like laundry, didn’t they? To be washed and dried and cared for? By a stranger.”
“Now don’t be like that, child. They were under extraordinary pressures. We all were, back then. Some of us still are.”
“Tell me about it.”
“They did the best they could. Besides, I was hardly a stranger. I had known your grandmother. We were like this.” She twinned her second and third fingers together as if they might strangle each other.
“All that I might have had of them,” said Rain. “Access to my mother’s instincts for the present, for knowing the truth of what was happening now, here. Access to my father’s occasional capacity to read the past, to tell it. And what did I get in exchange?”
“You lived,” said Glinda simply. “You survived. I won’t say in style, for I can see that doesn’t mean a whole lot to you.”
“I lived alone,” said Rain. “Until General Cherrystone came to Mockbeggar Hall and put you under house arrest, I had the run of the kitchen yard and the run of the backstairs workrooms and the ledge at the edge of the lake from which to jump into the water. There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s. I can’t repair that.”
“The history of a nation was happening around you. Children don’t often notice this, but it happens, most years, to be true. For you no less than some, but no more, either. Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That’s called growing up, Rain.”
“My first memories are of mice, and fish, and a frog in the mud,” said Rain.
“Is that anyone’s fault?” replied Glinda. “And is that so terrible, after all?”
“No one has to be so alone.” She gritted her teeth. “I pushed my hand in the pocket of ice and pulled up a little golden fish, and saw how alone it was. It was the first family I had, you know.”
Glinda sighed. “Your hand was bare. The fish flopped upon it, I suppose? Tickled some, maybe?”
“Yes. Just about my earliest memory, I think.”
“Who do you think was holding your mittens while you pawed about to rescue the fish?”
Rain looked at her lap.
“Who do you think put the fish back in the water so it could swim to its own kind when the sun went down?”
The spectacles slid off Glinda’s lap into a pile of knitting on the floor.
“Who do you think walked you back across the weir and handed you over for a bath to warm you up?”
Rain said, “And you didn’t even know if I was really Elphaba’s granddaughter.”
“And I didn’t know if you were Elphaba’s granddaughter.”
They had tea brought in by a parlor maid. Glinda showed Rain her collection of bubbles on ormolu stands. “Don’t talk to me about the present,” said Glinda. “I know something about what is going on. Tell me what you’ve done. Where you’ve been since you left Mockbeggar all those years ago.”
Rain obliged with brevity. Glinda paid only scant attention, taking up her knitting and counting stitches under her breath. When Rain began to talk about the Chancel of the Ladyfish above the Sleeve of Ghastille, though, Glinda began to listen more closely. “Describe that place to me,” she said. “I love architecture, you know. It’s one of my passions. Always was.”
Rain did the best she could—the low stumped pillars, the altarpiece built lengthwise into the wall, the view from the height. The figure of the fishy goddess or whatever it was. “I never could do mythology,” admitted Glinda. “The Great Morphologies of vin Tessarine totally defeated me back at Shiz. I cheated on the final, but don’t tell anyone or they’ll revoke my grade, which wasn’t very high even with the cheating.”
“I don’t do mythology either,” said Rain.
“It’s the building I’m interested in,” said Lady Glinda. “The way you describe it sited on that slope. I’ve always paid attention to the temples of Lurline—so many small and insignificant Lurline sightings were claimed in the Pertha Hills of my childhood. The dales are positively crusty with chapels. You can’t ride the hounds without breaking your mount’s leg at least once a season on some sacred stone omphalos overgrown with ivy. But what you describe doesn’t sound Lurlinist to me, or if it is, it represents a watery variation of the myth of our sky-goddess and avatrice.”
“The great stone woman was maternal and stern and supplied with a fishtail. Beyond that I can’t say; I don’t remember the details. I had just met up with my parents for the first time in memory and frankly I was distracted by the inconvenience of them.”
“Well, if I had to venture an opinion at a meeting of the Crowned Heads’ Book Discussion Group and Jug Band, I’d guess your parents stumbled upon the remnants of a temple built for quite a different purpose than the consolidation of religious feeling. It sounds more like a business center to me. Commerce always builds fancier temples than faith does.”
“A fishmongery in the highlands?” Rain laughed. “You ought to have studied for that test a little harder.”
“Well, if you go up to Shiz, you study for me, now, will you? Learn from my mistakes.” Glinda laughed too. “Rain, what will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do good, though, will you?” She blinked brightly at the green girl. “If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?”
“I don’t know what good I could do.”
“None of us does. That doesn’t let us off the hook.”
“What will you do?” asked Rain challengingly.
Glinda sighed. “Haven’t you heard?”
Rain shook her head.
“I am being sent to Southstairs. I go tomorrow.”
“What for? That’s impossible!”
“It’s not impossible and now don’t you go upsetting yourself or you’ll upset me. It’s quite right and proper that I pay for my mistakes. When I was at Mockbeggar Hall I unleashed the power of the Grimmerie against those dragons, and the dragons were indirectly under the supervision of Shell Thropp. I attacked the armed forces of the Throne Minister of Oz, Rain. That’s just about treason. I can be pardoned, but not quickly. Haste would not be seemly. The Lion, if he’s to rule wisely and deserve the trust of the citizens of Oz, must be seen to have no favorites. Including me. Justice demands no less. I am a former Throne Minister but I’m not above making mistakes. I leave in the morning.” She laughed. “I had been hoping to finish this little bed-jacket before I went, but I think I’m going to have to have the carriage stop at Brickle Lane on the way to Southstairs so I can pick up something ready-made. I don’t want to arrive looking less than my best.”
“But it’s outrageous. Southstairs! If you go, I should go too.”
“You were a child, dear. Not responsible. If you persist in objecting, you’re a child still.” She put out her hand so Rain could help her stand. “I mustn’t keep you, dear. And I have much to attend to myself. I just so wanted to know if it was true, and now I know. Maybe Elphaba will come back one day, or maybe she won’t, but in the meantime I have known you. That will see me through, I do believe.”
Elphaba is not coming back, thought Rain, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Not to an old fool like Glinda.
“Oh, Rain,” said Glinda, when the girl was almost out the door. “One more thing. About Tip. You may think that a story should have a happy ending—”
“Whoever told me stories?” asked Rain. “I’m not looking for happiness. But I’m not looking for an ending either.” She wouldn’t talk about Tip to Glinda. She just waggled her green fingers and slipped away.
It wasn’t hard for Rain to get the attention of the Cowardly Lion, though it was difficult to get a private moment. He was surrounded by staff.
“I want architects from the planning council all over that dome, do you hear me. Extra buttressing against tremors. Talk to some professor of aesthetics about the designs if you must, but I want to approve them. I don’t care which college, pull a straw from a broom and make a wish. Tell the Glikkun contingent they can go to hell. No, don’t tell them that; give them some chits for supper and have them come back after dark. Pursley, have you the list? I want a delegate sent to the town of Tenniken to see if you can find any contemporaries who knew a soldier named Jemmsy. Died in the Great Gillikin Forest thirty odd years ago, a member of the Wizard’s army. Don’t ask me why, just do it. I’m issuing a new line of medals for courage, and his relatives deserve a whole bunch of them. They can flog them in the streets for all I care.”
Rain almost grinned. The rogue Lion as a functionary of the government.
“Was Rain here? Where is she? There you are, my dear. Have you come to advise me about the Glikkuns? They’ve refused to be party to the peace we brokered with Munchkinlanders and a nasty little situation is brewing up in the Scalps. Sakkali Oafish, the troll chieftain, wants nothing to do with me. The harridan. We go back a ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to get the Nome King involved. Common cause among the trollfolk. It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement. And what about the Munchkinlander problem? They’re not cooperating with my proposal of extension of health benefits to the Animals who served in their army. Can we be shocked, do you think?”
“You look in clover, Brrr. If not particularly rested.”
“It’s the weskit, isn’t it? A Rampini original. How do you like the curls?”
She shook her head.
“I was afraid so, but I’ve gotten used to them. It keeps the mane out of my eyes without my having to resort to a hairband. Now, about the color? I was silvering prematurely, but is this look a bit rancid?”
“You’re expecting Muhlama H’aekeem to come find you here, now you’re single again and, oh, by the way, the king of the forest. Ha!”
“Ha,” he agreed, brought down a bit. “She hated authority. Did everything in her power to avoid it. She didn’t come to the installation nor send a card. When did the noble old concept of tribute go out of style? Well, maybe when my term limit has expired, she’ll show up again.” He began to comb out his whiskers with his claws, worrying in advance.
“Brrr. Pay attention. You can’t seriously be intending to put Lady Glinda in Southstairs prison?”
The assistants bustled, but more quietly, so they could eavesdrop. He roared them out of the room, but then told Rain she had understood the matter perfectly correctly. He hoped it would not be for long. Glinda would be given every courtesy possible under the circumstances, but liberty was costly, and she would have to pay. “It’s for the good of the nation, Rain,” he said. “I shall haul her up again just the first moment that my advisors recommend it safe to the polity to do so.”
Mister Mikko, the Ape, came to the door with a few statements needing signatures, but Brrr sent him packing. “So glad to be able to put him on payroll. I owe him. Now what are we going to do about Dorothy?” he asked Rain.
“Don’t look at me,” said Rain “You’re the Ozma Regent now.”
“She hangs around the Emerald City any longer, she’ll become a demagogue,” said the Lion. “Either that, or a parody of herself. Like the rest of us.”
“What does she want?”
“Well, I believe she wants to go home. Again. Doesn’t she?”
“Last I heard. She’s not insane, you know. I’d want to leave too.”
“But I haven’t got any ideas,” said Brrr. “I’m the leader now; I don’t have time to think.”
“We could always try the Grimmerie,” said Rain.
“Mister Mikko, bring the book from the treasury,” roared Brrr. “I do so love having my whims indulged in,” he admitted to Rain. “How about some chocolates?”
“You’ll suffer again, Brrr. No elevation is eternal.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m just trying to have fun while it lasts.”
So, thought Rain, an Animal as Throne Minister of Oz. After all this time. Whatever would Elphaba think of that?
Dorothy’s departure from Oz was arranged so hastily that Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were absent—out of town, engaged in their harvesting expedition in the Sleeve of Ghastille. They didn’t get to say farewell, or anything saltier.
Before dawn, Brrr escaped his royal guards and commandeered a hansom cab so he could make his good-byes to Dorothy in person. He met Rain and Mister Mikko in the insalubrious courtyard of a private atelier in the Lower Quarter, a back-neighborhood place Mister Mikko had located where they might attract less attention. Mister Mikko commandeered the book. An elderly chatelaine, Miss Pfanee, opened the gate to the few who had gathered. She curtseyed low when she saw the Cowardly Lion among the delegation. His presence had not been advertised. But when she caught sight of Rain gleaming green in the predawn gaslight, she gasped and fled and didn’t come back.
Amid the wheelbarrows and compost and some rangy geraniums put out to die but refusing, so far, Rain settled on an old blanket and touched the Grimmerie for the first time since the pine barrens above Mockbeggar Hall.
Mister Mikko stood on one side, almost asleep from the strain of his new responsibilities. Dorothy knelt at the other, Toto gnawing the edge of one of her heels. Rain pulled back the cover. The book flew open to a blank page—at least it began blank.
They didn’t know the word for a watermark, but a faint green huzzle of light seemed to radiate from the page—so dimly at first that they thought it a refraction cast by a drop of water balanced upon a nearby leaf. A zigzag—a Z escaped from the O, thought Rain. The edges of the image were blurred, as if they were made of the smallest bits of paper, the kind of airy nothings that fly in the light when the pages of a book are turned. Ozmists of the page, perhaps.
“It’s almost Elphaba, isn’t it,” said Dorothy tearily.
“Nonsense,” said Mister Mikko, who had taught Elphaba Thropp in the good old days, back at Shiz. “It’s nothing at all like Elphaba. It’s the soul of a deceased bookworm, nothing more. Let’s get this over with.”
“She’s not coming back,” said Dorothy, “and I’m not either.”
Rain flipped through the pages, which were docile enough under her touch. On the Extermination of Pests. No! Dorothy was a hot ticket, but hardly a pest. To Call Winter upon Water. There it had all begun, for Rain: the beginning of a coherent memory of her own life, not just a collection of incidents. For Tomfoolery, Its Eradication or Amplification. Please.
Was there a spell To Make the Heart Whole, Regardless?
She better be careful before she mischiefed herself—or Ozma—into disaster.
She laughed when she saw the next page. Gone with the Wind. Well, Dorothy had arrived via a mighty big windstorm the first time, no? Maybe it was time to call it up again.
“Are you ready?” she asked Dorothy.
“Next time I want a holiday,” said Dorothy, “I’m going to try overseas. The Levant, maybe. Or the Riviera. Or the Argentine pampas. Over the great ocean to meet the China people. All this gadding about Oz has confirmed in me a taste for travel.”
“Overseas. Please.” Rain looked up from where she was bent over the book. She knew herself well; she wasn’t the type to mouth pithy sentiments suitable for crocheting. All she could think of to say was, “Dorothy, next time? Take out some travel insurance.”
“Right. And I’m going to choose my fortune cookie a little more carefully next time too. Now listen. Rain.” Ever tit for tat with Dorothy. “Before it’s too late? Don’t give up on Tip. I mean Ozma. There’s so much ahead for you still. I wish—”
“Don’t wish,” said Rain, “don’t start. Wishing only…”
“And about your grandmother,” said Dorothy. “I don’t know if—”
“I don’t want to talk, I have work to do.”
“I just mean,” said Dorothy, smiling painfully, “there’s no need for her to come back. I mean, look. Here you are.”
Rain glanced around herself miserably. The Lion and Dorothy were gazing at her with watery grins. She wanted to throw a potted geranium at each one of them. “I’m going to send you on your way before you feed me any more of your nonsense,” she barked.
Dorothy then turned to Brrr. “I used to like the Scarecrow best,” she began.
He gruffed at her, “So did I. Now are you ready to take some advice from a Cowardly Lion? Make your way safely home. With our royal blessing. But when you get there, don’t surrender, Dorothy. Never surrender.”
“You didn’t, did you,” replied Dorothy. “Local Lion Makes Good. Well, first thing I’m going to do when I get back is find out what happened to Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, bless ’em. And if San Francisco is in as much of a mess as the Emerald City, well, I’ve learned something from Little Daffy about setting a bone. I’ll pitch in. Singing all the way, of course.” She was making fun of herself to settle her nerves. “We might’ve made a nice duo, Brrr, but courage called you elsewhere.” They didn’t speak again, but it took them a few moments to pull out of each other’s grip.
Rain began to intone the spell. A small local windstorm kicked up from the cobbles. For a moment it looked like the Ozmists, once again, but it was grittier. An updraft lifted Dorothy in the air as if she were flying high in the elevator she’d never stopped describing to anyone who would listen. All that was left of Toto, as Dorothy snatched him up, was a little pointed turd, which Mister Mikko kicked into the compost. No one had time to say goodbye to the dog. The basket in which Toto had traveled was left behind on the ground, rocking in the force of their disappearance.
Still, Tip remained in Madame Teastane’s. Maybe, thought Rain, Tip is only waiting until the right moment to steal away. And then what? And then what? Crack open the Grimmerie and—and what? We’d do what? Steal from the truth and lock each other in disguises again? That could do no good.
But weeks went by, and then months. No message arrived.
When to stay any longer would be to accept paralysis as permanent, Rain readied to make her departure from the Emerald City. Once the warm weather settled in she would leave by foot. Alone. She sent word to the Cowardly Lion. He replied by messenger. Perhaps he’d experienced one too many good-byes. As casually as sharing a loaf of bread, Brrr deeded Rain the Grimmerie in its blue sack. “You’re the only one who can use it,” he wrote. “It’s too dangerous to have in town. I don’t want to know what you do with it, just don’t bring it back to me. Love, Brrr.”
A packet in brown paper, done up in string, slid out of the sack after the book. Rain opened it. A medal that said COURAGE on it. Brrr making fun of himself? The ribbon was of ivory silk with a silver thread. No doubt he’d supervised the design. She turned it over. Oooh, fancy, a bit of engraving. RAIN, it said. WHO KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME PAST, PRESENT & TO COME.
The matinal hour suited her now. Ever since the day Dorothy had made it out of Oz—safely, one hoped, though if ever a girl was trouble prone it was La Gale of Kansas—Rain found that she preferred to walk the streets as night was shifting toward dawn. Perhaps at that hour a native greenness in the atmosphere hovers below the registration of our easily blinded eyes.
In any case, before dawn one weekday she put Tay in Toto’s old basket and left it on the doorstep of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. “For Tip” said her own note, “from Rain. For as long as Tay allows.” Tay hadn’t fussed at being left on Tip’s doorstep. It was as if the rice otter knew where Tip was, and who Tip was, and what job it had to do. A small job of comfort, if green comfort was possible. Half a comfort. Who could say.
She walked to Nether How in total silence.
The next year, when the Grasstrail Train came through and delivered one of those color supplements to the gang at Kiamo Ko, Chistery borrowed Nanny’s glasses and read every panel out loud to her.
“Oh my,” said Nanny, and “Read that bit again, will you,” and “Mercy!”
“And that’s that,” said Chistery when he was through.
“A load of hogswallop,” said Nanny, “but affecting in its way. Is she coming back, do you think?”
“Elphaba?” said Chistery. “Now, Nanny.”
“No, Rain, I mean,” said Nanny. “Really, monkeyboy. I’m not moronic. She wouldn’t care to stay around in the Emerald City. Do you think she’s coming back here to live? This is her castle, after all. And something tells me she has that old book that has caused so much trouble.”
Chistery was humbled by the correction. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no clue about Rain’s future. I thought you were asking if Elphaba was coming back.”
“The very idea,” said Nanny, removing the hard-boiled egg from its shell and settling down to eat the shell. “Besides,” she said a few moments later, “Elphaba’s already come back. I saw her last week on the stairs.” But Chistery was clattering the cutlery. Having gone hard of hearing, he didn’t take this in.
Candle and Liir lasted another year or so in the house at Nether How, but in the end, Candle decided to leave her husband. Rain wept and thought it was her fault. She shouldn’t have come back; she shouldn’t have brought her endless ache to infect the rooms of the cottage of her parents. She should be the one to go.
But Candle insisted she herself needed to light out until she could come to some understanding about how she could have been persuaded, all those years ago, to give their daughter’s childhood away to someone else. She and Liir had never fought again, but nor had they spoken like lovers or even friends. It was time.
“My childhood was never yours to have, and anyway, you gave it to me the best way you could,” said Rain, sniffling. She’d come to believe this.
“Liir was frightened for his life, so he was frightened for yours,” said Candle of Liir. “When you were born green, he choked, and hid you away. I let it happen. That’s how it seems to me now, Little Green. Maybe I’ll learn to forgive him, or to forgive myself. Maybe I’ll come back then. I can only see the present, not the future.”
After she was gone, Liir said, “I’m to blame for more than everything. And if I mention, Rain, that Candle left you first—when you were a newborn—it was for a good reason. To save you. She knew who you were. She had that touch. She knew you’d survive, and she left you for me to find. She had that confidence in you and that instinct to protect you too. Maybe what she’s doing now—for you, for me—is no less kind. Though we can’t see it yet. She does see the present, remember.” He tried to disguise a wince. “I can vouch for that. On some level, as an Elephant, I was dead to her—that’s probably why she couldn’t see the present, see me as still alive.”
“Do you think she’s gone off to find the famous Trism? Now that you located him after all these years?” Rain couldn’t help herself; it was easier to hurt someone else than to plumb her own griefs.
“You know,” said Liir, “when I met your mother at the mauntery of Saint Glinda’s in the Shale Shallows, everyone called her Candle. Candle Osqa’ami. She did herself. But I think that was a mispronunciation from the Qua’ati. Her name is nearer to Cantle. It means ‘a part of a thing.’ A segment, portion. Sometimes something that has broken off, a shard. A potsherd. A cantle of a statue, of a shell.”
“Stop talking about it. Either she’ll come back or she won’t.”
“You know, I’ve heard only a shell with a broken tip can make any music.”
Iskinaary said, “I was thinking quail eggs for supper? Or a nice lake trout.” Neither father nor daughter answered him. Rain went out to the front yard and looked at the hills. There was nothing to collect anymore that had meaning, nothing to count or to count on. She walked anyway, dropping fistfuls of nothing, trying to empty herself out of herself.
They buried the Grimmerie on the slope of Nether How, as close as Liir could remember to the spot where he’d seen it emerging in the arms of that ancient magician. They marked the spot by staking Elphaba’s broom into the ground, thinking it would last the winter. In the spring they would haul some stones to mark the spot permanently.
When they returned in the spring, though, the broom had taken root and was starting to sprout virgin green, so they left it where it was as marker indeed.
Another year passed. No word came from Tip. Rain didn’t want to hear news from the Emerald City or, indeed, from anywhere in Oz. She took to wandering the hills around the Five Lakes, and she ventured farther and farther upslope into the Great Kells. Though she had applied by mail and been admitted into Shiz University, she never accepted the position or the bursary and she let the matter slide.
The world seemed slowly to unpopulate, the winds to speak to her in subtle and aggressive tones that she couldn’t understand.
Then one day in spring, when the afternoon had a summery clamminess to it though the mountain slopes were only starting to leaf out, she thought again about the shell that had summoned the Ozmists and, perhaps, helped trick La Mombey into giving away the location of the hidden Ozma Tippetarius. The Ozmists had only spoken of appetite for the current day, which was for them the future. One day Rain would be dead too, though she would still be curious about the future. She would be among the Ozmists herself no doubt, eager to know about the children of Ozma Tippetarius, if any could ever be born. The appetite to know ever further what might happen—it was an endless appetite, wasn’t it? The story wants to go on and on. She couldn’t fault the Ozmists for the permanence of their affection for life, even in death. Half dead herself, she felt that affection too, though it had no focus, no object upon which to address itself.
She took up the shell she’d stolen from Chalotin, that old Quadling seer without feet. She didn’t blow it. She felt the broken tip of it—the breakage that allows it to sing. She remembered someone once saying something like “Listen to what it says to you.”
She put it to her ear. That same spectacular hush, the presence of expectation, the sound of expectation. A cantle of nothing whole.
She could make no words out, of course. She had tried for years and had never heard so much as a syllable. She laid it back upon the table. The Goose, who had gone rather silent the last year, eyed her balefully. “Well?” snapped Iskinaary. “Anyone leave a message for you?”
His question provoked the answer. What was it saying to her? Nothing in words—she’d been listening to the wrong thing. It didn’t speak to her through its hush. It spoke to her through its presence.
It was saying to her: I exist, so what does that say to you?
Liir took no interest in the buried Grimmerie. Instead he negotiated with a tinker to hunt out and eventually deliver to the cottage at Nether How a set of eighty pages of blank paper. Then Liir spent most of the month of Lurlinetide binding them with glue and string into a codex of sorts. After some sloppy experimentation, he managed to accumulate a pot of lampblack by scraping the soot from the chimneys of the oil lamps and grinding it with resin and the char of burnt bark. Iskinaary donated a quill, and Liir sat down to write. It seemed to make him happy while he was waiting for—well, whatever he was waiting for.
“What are you doing?” His industry made her cross.
He looked up as if from a long distance away. His eyes were green; she’d never noticed that.
“I’m writing a treatise, maybe. A letter, anyway. To send to—to Brrr. And Ozma.”
She was insulted already. He was barging into her life, trying to make it better. It was less trouble to be abandoned. “About?”
“About. About, I guess—power. About governance. About the birds of no like feather who flew together, to make up the Conference of the Birds. About the maunts who decided to govern themselves by committee rather than by obedience to a superior. About Ozmists and their need to listen to the future as well as to the past. I haven’t gotten it straight in my head yet.”
“You’re angling for a court position? As advisor to the Throne Minister?”
“I’m only angling to question the rationale of a court and a throne. The justice of it.”
“Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.”
“Except, maybe, to think.” He went back to work.
Rain thought he was too young to be so meditative, and his patience made her impatient.
To escape the sound of his thoughts scratching along, she stayed out in cold weather and worked on building a fieldstone wall around the asparagus patch. She remembered the polished chunk in the Chancel of the Ladyfish, with that tiny inscribed creature that seemed as much feather as horse. Maybe one day she would set out on a walkabout across Oz by herself and collect that stone. Inanimate objects were somewhat less bother than people.
She was pausing from her labors late one morning, wiping sweat from her brow despite the rime on the grass and the shelves of ice cantilevering from the shores of the lakes, when she saw a twitch of movement near the broom-tree. Ever wary of some fiend or sorcerer coming by and sniffing out the Grimmerie somehow, she moved closer to check. In the shadows of the tree she startled a serpent of sorts, who proved Serpentine when he reared up, flared his striped lapels, and addressed her.
“You don’t need to apply that heavy stone to me,” said the Snake. “I mean you no harm.”
She shifted it to her hip. “I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong place to digest your breakfast. That tree is off bounds to you. It’s a memorial garden of sorts.”
“I’m no fool. I know what lies in this grave.”
Rain didn’t think he was being impertinent, but she had long ago lost the gift of a catholic sympathy. She’d grown up too much. “You’d better move along.”
“I recognize you, I think. I believe I may have helped your parents degreenify you. I see the spell wore off at last. Most do.” He leaned closer on one of his several dozen snake-hips. “You’re doing all right, then? You made it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t give interviews, Mr. Serpent.”
With alacrity he wound himself around the stem of the tree to get a little more height, and then dropped his head from a branch so he could be closer to her. His eyes were acid yellow, not unkind. “Quite wise. I don’t either. I find it does the likes of me no good. Everyone twists your words so.”
“Are you ready to move along?”
“Are you? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m merely a concerned citizen of Oz. Also I am a venerable if not downright ancient Serpent, and as such I suffer the affection for the young that afflicts the elderly. I can tell what you hoard buried beneath this tree, Miss Oziandra Rainary Ko Osqa’ami Thropp. And as I keep my ear to the ground—little joke, that—I know something of what you’ve been through. What I can’t guess is why you don’t use the tools at your disposal to do something about it. And put down that granite cudgel while I’m talking to you. It’s distracting and not at all polite.”
She put the boulder down but kept her hands and her heart clenched.
“I’m merely saying. You have the richest bloodlines for magic in all of Oz. You have the strongest instrument for change this land has ever seen. And you have your own need to answer to. There is Tip, turned into Ozma. You could turn, too. You could be Rain, or you could be—well, I won’t name you. But you could name yourself. Why do you resist?”
“I think you’d better go.”
“If I see no future for my own offspring, I eat them,” said the Serpent. “If I didn’t eat you when I was introduced to you as an infant, why would I sink my venomous fangs into you now? You’ve done much good. You’ve helped complete Elphaba’s work, and in a way your father’s work, too. Don’t you deserve a reward? Oh come now, don’t look at me like that. What I’m bringing up is a morally neutral proposition. You think it is purer to be one gender or the other? That it makes a difference? I know—no one listens to a Serpent. And I’ll move along now, as promised. But think about it.”
He passed through the grass. When she looked closer, she saw he’d left his skin behind. A green sheath. It could be made into a scabbard for a dirk. Before going back to the asparagus, she put her finger in the skin and tried to feel the magic of being a Serpent.
She asked her father for permission to leave.
“As if you need my permission,” he said calmly, with a clumsy attempt at cheer. “But what shall I say if someone comes looking for you with a message from Ozma?”
“There’s no chance of that.”
“Rain,” he said softly, “anyone who spent the better part of a century being prepubescent is going to need some time to figure out how to be grown up. It could happen.”
“Yes. And Candle might come back. And Trism too.”
He wasn’t hurt. “I leave the front door unlocked for one of them and the back door unlocked for the other. They know where I am. I’ve cherished them both, Rain, and I do still. Whoever they are. I love both Trism and Candle. It isn’t impossible for you to love both Tip and Ozma.”
“What’s impossible,” she said, “is to know the truth inside someone else’s heart if they don’t tell you.”
He agreed with that. “Well, I love you. Just in case you ever wondered. And don’t forget that I’ve spent some brief time of my life as an Elephant. They say Elephants never forget, and as I live and breathe, I’m telling you that this is true of humans no less than Elephants. Now, listen. I’m being serious, my desperate sweetheart. What about if a message arrives for you? Where shall I say you’ve gone?”
She threw an arm about airily. “Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.”
2.
In her cell, Glinda woke up with a start. The lumbago was more punishing than the incarceration, but a sense of spring had filtered all the way down the open canyon roof of Southstairs, and she caught a whiff of freshness, of arrogant possibility. Her glasses had broken a year ago. She didn’t need them anymore, not really. She knew who was turning the door handle of her cell. She called her name sleepily, and added, “You wicked thing. You’ve taken your own sweet time, of course.”
3.
Elphaba’s broom, planted at Nether How and fed by the magic of the Grimmerie buried beneath it, had grown into a tree of brooms. Enough to supply a small coven of witches. Too much to say that the breeze soughing through them all was, well, bewitching? On a spring day of high winds, Rain broke off a broom from the treasury tree of them.
But she waited until her father was deeply asleep one night, and Iskinaary collapsed in front of the stove like a Goose brought down by buckshot, snoring. She took her father’s spade over her shoulder and went back to the tree of brooms. She said softly, “Okay, Nanny, I’m following in your footsteps,” and she dug up the Grimmerie. Stole it. She left the spade below the tree so her father would know what she’d done. Then she wrapped the fierce book in an oilcloth and strapped the satchel upon her back. She began by walking west across the Kells, which took her several months. She didn’t look back, not once, to see if Tip was following her.
By the autumn it was too cold to go on, and she spent the winter with a breakaway tribe of the Scrow, none of whom had ever heard of Elphaba Thropp or Ozma Tippetarius and who seemed unconcerned about Rain’s skin color or, indeed, her solitary pilgrimage through the Thousand Year Grasslands. Rain taught herself a bit of Scrow and tried to tell the story of Dorothy, to amuse the clan on the long tent-bound evenings when the icy winds howled, but one of the grandmothers bit her on the wrist, a sign to stop. So she stopped.
She brought out the shell once or twice, to Animals who had learned some Ozish, to itinerants the following spring who had wandered too far to the west and were happy to get directions back to civilization. They nodded about it, unconcerned, unsurprised. One rather lumpy sand creature with an irritable disposition wouldn’t talk to her at all but pointed west, west. Farther west. And then dug itself into the sand and wouldn’t come out for any pleading at all.
She saw a clutch of dragon eggs in the sand once, and let them be.
Though the thought of them made her sling her leg over the broom for the first time. If she was going to hell in a handbasket, maybe she could fly there faster, get it over with.
She kept herself going by remembering the clues. The great salty marshes of Quadling Country. The huge stone wall upon which paintings of colored fish were refreshed annually, though no such fish ever existed in any lake or river of Oz. The way the berm of Ovvels was built like a quay. The image of a shell stamped in the margins on the left-hand side of a map of Oz. The way that Lady Glinda had deciphered the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a market center of some sort. Something more than a temple, more like the seat of an empire. An empire ruled by a goddess with the tail of a fish.
Listen to what the shell says to you.
The grasslands were beginning to give way to sand, but in no particular hurry, she’d noticed. There would be miles of grass, as far as she could see from the height she was learning to achieve on her broom (which was not impressive). Then sands, in belts between grasslands, until the grasslands gave out. They called it the endless sands, and she saw why. They rippled in waves and crests, static on clear days, fierce and active in the darkness, shifting and reshaping themselves on a nightly basis. There was no track across sands. They rewrote their own topography endlessly.
But then came another stretch of grassland, and beyond that, another swatch of desert. The world was not as definite as the few dots on any map would suggest.
Almost a year after her departure, she was living for a week in a temporary hut she’d built for herself somewhere to the west of Kvon Altar in the southwestern Vinkus. She’d come down with a cough of a sort, and was afraid that perhaps she was dying and might die but forget to notice, and so keep flying forever over alternating patches of wilderness. She gathered liquor from where it beaded up on the shell every night, she licked the dew collected there. Just enough to keep herself from parching. She didn’t think she had much time left.
She didn’t want to leave the Grimmerie lying around in the desert where some scorpion might find it and teach itself to read, as she had taught herself to read. Almost in a fever one dawn, she took the shell and nourished herself with it as best she could, and then, remembering an old life, she blew the horn once again through the broken tip.
Even Ozmists can’t survive in the desert, she thought to herself, sinking into a sleep as the sun rose. The wind blew her lean-to apart but she was too removed from reality to notice. Through the vast sky the sun threatened to burn her green skin brown and mottled. Light wriggled behind her clenched eyelids like threads of blood.
Around midday, delirious with thirst, she opened her eyes. She thought she saw a figure of bones standing nearby, looking down at her. He wore a coat made of greenery. Mountain pine, fir, holly, laurel. Impossible life. The skeleton looked at her. He seemed to smile. All skeletons smile. She closed her eyes and forgot about it.
Back there.
Disturbed in the middle of a moonless night by something unseen, a cock chortily hacked at the silence in a northern barnyard. A farmer threw a soup ladle at it, threateningly. The cock subsided.
In the forest of Gurniname outside Wiccasand Turning, a stand of rare bone-oak trees, famous for their centuries of barrenness without decay, burst into bloom. The blossoms glowed, not white, but a rich velvety jade with lavender margins. A gourmand hunting for truffles discovered it, and for a while painters flocked to catch the mystery on canvas. But the effect was always too startling. It looked fake. Eventually most of the canvases were painted over. Patrons of art preferred their bone-oak blossoms white, or dead.
Kellswater at dawn. A giant Tortoise emerged from a cleft between two stone plates nearly collapsed one upon the other. She’d lived eighty of her two hundred years in private meditation, prayer and fasting, and she was on the morning side of munch-ish. The history described in the pages of this and previous volumes had escaped her, and she it. Undeterred by such scathing ignorance she moved forward on fungoidal flippers, and her rust red horny beak scratched at the air. The light leaching over the horizon snagged and pulled upon ripples of water fletching the lake. Small circles as if from invisible drops of rain puckered the surface. The Tortoise remembered. She knew the commotion was the morning activity of swarmgits upon water, and that where swarmgits could skate in buggy congress of a fine morning, a hungry carp or a lake terch wouldn’t be far behind.
And—and this Kellswater. The dead lake. But she did not comment.
That’s the way it looked to plants and animals. Somewhere else in Oz—the province, the town doesn’t matter—a prissy and adenoidal tutor straight out of Three Queens College had taken a position to hector local schoolchildren into their letters and morals. Intending to set an early example of the mercy of discipline, he arrived in the schoolroom with a small box made of close-meshed wire. “Approach and regard,” he said to the boys and girls in his thrall. “We must be wary of the natural world, learn from its habits of violence and self-interest, and tame it so it may survive. This morning upon my hearth I found an insect of a sort never known before in Oz. I studied entomology and lepidoptery under Professor Finix at Three Queens, so I claim some wide experience with bugs. I say this is an aberration of an existing species—smaller, cannier, and more cunningly hued for camouflage. Were it allowed to breed, it could chew its way through our ‘Oz in endless leaf.’ For our own protection I have caged it in this box. It looks faintly related to the locust of the Grasslands or to the marsh fernhopper. It saws music from its legs, when it is happy. It isn’t happy now, but we will require it to learn to be happy in a cage. And so will you—”
The youngest student, a lad who still wore double padding against accidental leakage, picked up the willow switch in the corner and cracked it upon the docent’s remonstrating finger. The other students rioted. They threw books out the window and chased the teacher into the henhouse, locking him inside. He sat most of the morning blubbering. Then the students ate all their lunch at once and left the wrappings to blow about in the schoolyard, and sang songs of loyalty to anarchy as they released the cricket from its cage.
Not too much should be read into all this. It is the sometime nature of children to be wild. And in wildness, as a traveler from another land has reminded us, is the salvation of the world.
In the coolness of the evening—that evening or the next, maybe—Rain came around enough to find—she must be hallucinating—that her face was shaded from the setting sun by an umbrella.
“Very nice,” she said, admiring her psychosis.
“I’d hoped you appreciated it,” said a familiar voice. Iskinaary peered out from behind the upturned bowl of the fabric.
“Are you the angel of death? Goodness, you scared me enough in life, you’re not going to accompany me across the divide, are you?”
“Very funny. Have a cracker.” With his bill he secured a hard round biscuit from a little satchel slung over his neck. “Don’t worry, it’s not one of Little Daffy’s Curious Cupcakes.”
“I should be glad for one of those right about now. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been following behind you for the better part of a year. Your father sent me to look for you when you didn’t come back after that hard winter in the grasslands, and I heard you’d continued on. I’ve been waiting out of sight, a few miles back, for several months. Not wanting to be presumptuous.”
“Oh, a little presumption is welcome now and then.”
“You’re dehydrated. Let me take that shell and fly to find some freshwater somewhere.”
“There’s no water here.”
“You don’t know where to look.”
Iskinaary, if it was really he and not some irritating mirage, allowed himself to be fixed with the shell in a kind of sling, and went off for a while. When he came back, the basin of the shell slopped over with freshwater. Rain drank so quickly that she vomited most of it back up again. He didn’t mind. He got her more, and she kept the second portion down more neatly.
In the morning, or the morning after that, she felt better again. “You carried that umbrella all the way from Nether How?”
“I used it too, on certain nights. My feathers are thinning and the drainage isn’t what it used to be.” Yes, Iskinaary was an old Goose.
“You never liked me,” she said.
“I don’t like you now. But I am your father’s familiar, so let’s put personal feelings aside. We have a ways to go, I’ll warrant.”
“I don’t know how far I’m going to get.”
“I don’t know either.” He smiled at her or winced, it was hard to tell the difference in any Goose, and particularly in Iskinaary. “But I think we are not very far from the edge.”
“The edge,” she said.
“Where you are going.”
“You don’t know where I am going.”
“Not ultimately.”
They considered this stalemate a while, and then Iskinaary relented. “Your father wasn’t much of a witch, was he?”
“He wasn’t much of a father either.”
“But he was pretty good as a Bird, when he flew with Kynot and the Conference. He learned a little bit. He didn’t learn enough.”
She waited.
“The Birds have always known,” said Iskinaary. “At least, some have. But Birds, and birds, keep to themselves usually. They flock with their kind. It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them. Your father conducted one such campaign, in those dark days when the dragons first threatened Oz, threatened the skies for all the Birds, and the earth for all crawling creatures. Liir flew with us on his broom, as you fly now. He might have learned more from us, but he was young, and Birds, well, they don’t volunteer much. It’s not in their nature. They are neutral, and possessed of a certain appealing reticence.”
“Some of them,” admitted Rain. “Not you.”
“So,” Iskinaary continued, “we’ve known. We have always known, or anyway we’ve heard rumors. We could have told you what we’d heard. I could have told you. Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”
“Is everything all right back there in Oz?”
“I’ve not followed along all these months to gossip.” He seemed angry. “I’m trying to tell you to keep going.”
“Well, all right then. But if I’m right, I go alone.”
“You make the rules for the ground. I’ll make the rules for the air.”
She launched herself and didn’t look behind to see if he was following. She knew he was, the rolled-up umbrella in his claws. It would be kinder if she were to carry it, but she wasn’t ready to be kind.
That night, among scratchy grass, she slept and dreamed of Tip. She didn’t know if it was Tip or Ozma, really; it was that kind of a dream that made her furious with need and regret and hope all at once. She awoke in the dark, clammy in a cold sweat even though it would be a warm day, she could tell. A sort of fog, as from Restwater, hung over the sedge.
She said to herself, Did my father send Iskinaary after me because a message had arrived at last?
But she wouldn’t ask the Goose for fear of the answer, either way it might be spoken. She wasn’t ready to know.
She found a place to squat, and after that she broke her fast with Iskinaary. More dry biscuits. Delicious. The wind, the world of shadows. The taunting stars strung on their invisible threads across the glowing velvet black. They didn’t speak—not girl, not Goose, not stars.
Near dawn, she strode through the grass to the top of the near slope, to see if the air would clear, if she could catch a glimpse of the next stretch.
Beyond the slope, at bluff’s edge, the ground dropped away in a returning curve, a bevel carved out by a stronger breeze. The air felt stronger, brusquer, colder, more filled with tang, almost a strange kind of vinegar in the wind.
She kept going, down that slope and up the curve of the next. The wind possessed bluster and noise she’d never heard at ground level before. Ever.
The fog had oriented itself into a composite of colored scarves through which the sun from behind her was beginning to seethe, gilding the unnatural hills.
They weren’t hills of earth.
The world’s edge was water; water as far as the eye could see; water from the scalloped strand out to the horizon. There was no end to it. The noise wasn’t the sound of wind, after all, but of moving water that made endless avalanche against the sand, punching and pulling back. Foundries of spume and spit, and salt stinging her eyes. Thrashes of weight from side to side, streaked laterally with zinc; mettanite; emerald; lamb’s wool; turquoise. The great weeping rim of the world.
She didn’t wait for the Goose. She slung her leg over the broom and launched at once. A new technique for flying would be needed against this force. Later in the day, if she lasted, she might glance back and find that the Goose had anticipated her departure and was steadily keeping pace a mile or more behind. She trusted that this would be true.
She would make no plan but this: to move out into the world as a Bird might, and to perch on the edge of everything that could be known. She would circle herself with water below and with sky above. She would wait until there was no stink of Oz, no breath of it, no sight of it on any horizon no matter how high she climbed. And then she would let go of the book, let it plunge into the mythical sea.
Live life without grasping for the magic of it.
Turn back, and find out what that was like; or turn forward, and learn something new.
A mile above anything known, the Girl balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the sea itself, flung up by the turbulent air and sent wheeling away.
FINIS
About that country there’s not much left to say.
Blue sun, far off, a watery vein
in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself
unremarkable: familiar ruins
littered with standing stones our people
had lost the ability to decipher.
How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish
umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,
and the effervescent stars, strange currents
tugged at our thoughts like tapestries
unraveling into war. All spring
the nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.
The rats had abandoned the temples.
My mind was a voyage hungering to happen.
—Todd Hearon, “Atlantis”
… we must learn to live a secondary life in an unmarked world.
—Ron MacLean, “Duck Variations”