XVII

She pushed Dorothy ahead of her into the tower room, and locked the door behind her. The long period of sleeplessness was making her head spin. “What have you come for,” she said to the girl. “I know why you have tramped all the way from the Emerald City—but go on, tell me to my face! Have you come to murder me, as the rumors say—or do you carry a message from the Wizard, maybe? Is he now willing to bargain the book for Nor? The magic for the child? Tell me! Or—I know—he has instructed you to steal my book! Is it that!”

But the girl only backed away, looking left and right, for an escape. There was no way out except the window, and that was a deadly fall.

“Tell me,” said the Witch.

“I am all alone in a strange land, don’t make me do this,” said the girl.

“You came to kill me and then to steal the Grimmerie!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“First give me the shoes,” said the Witch, “for they’re mine. Then we’ll talk.”

“I can’t, they won’t come off,” said the girl, “I think that Glinda put a spell on them. I’ve been trying to get them off for days. My socks are so sweaty, it’s not to be believed.”

“Give them me!” snarled the Witch. “If you go back to the Wizard with them, you’ll be playing right into his hands!”

“No, look, they’re stuck!” shouted the girl. She kicked at one heel with the other toe. “Look, see, I’m trying, I’m trying, they won’t come off, honest, promise! I tried to give them to the Wizard when he demanded them, but they wouldn’t come off! There’s something the matter with them, they’re too tight or something! Or maybe I’m growing.”

“You have no right to those shoes,” said the Witch. She circled. The girl backed away, stumbling over furniture, knocking over the beehive, and stepping on the queen bee, who had emerged from the fragments.

“Everything I have, every little thing I have, dies when you come across it,” said the Witch. “There’s Liir down below, ready to throw me over for the sake of a single kiss. My beasts are dead, my sister is dead, you strew death in your path, and you’re just a girl! You remind me of Nor! She thought the world was magic, and look what happened to her!”

“What, what happened?” said Dorothy, pitiably playing for time.

“She found out just how magic it was, she was kidnapped, and lives her miserable life as a political prisoner!”

“But so have you kidnapped me, and I asked for none of it, nothing. You must have mercy.”

The Witch came near and grabbed the girl by the wrist. “Why do you want to murder me,” she said. “Can you really believe the Wizard will do as he says? He doesn’t know what truth means, so he does not even know how he lies! And I did not kidnap you, you fool! You came here of your own accord, to murder me!”

“I didn’t come to murder anyone,” said the girl, shrinking back.

“Are you the Adept?” said the Witch suddenly. “Aha! Are you the Third Adept? Is that it? Nessarose, Glinda and you? Did Madame Morrible conscript you for service to the hidden power? You work in collusion: my sister’s shoes, my friend’s charm, and your innocent strength. Admit it, admit you’re the Adept! Admit it!”

“I’m not adept, I’m adopted,” said the girl. “I’m sure not adept at anything, can’t you tell that?”

“You’re my soul come scavenging for me, I can feel it,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have a soul; with a soul there is everlastingness, and life has tortured me enough.”

The Witch pulled Dorothy back to the corridor, and stuck the end of her broom in a torch fire. Nanny was hobbling up the stairs leaning on Chistery, who had some dishes of pudding on a tray. “I locked the whole lot of them in the kitchen until they stop their roughhousing,” Nanny was muttering. “Such a hubbub, such a racket, such a wild rumpus, Nanny won’t have it, Nanny is too old. They’re all beasts.”

Below, in the dusty recesses of Kiamo Ko, the dog barked once or twice, the Lion roared and pounded against the kitchen door, and Liir shrieked, “Dorothy, we’re coming!” But the Witch turned and shot out her foot, and toppled Nanny over. The old woman rolled and slid, oohing and woohing, down the stairs, Chistery chasing after her in consternation. The kitchen door had burst its hinges, and the Lion and Liir came tumbling out, falling over the big heap of Nanny at the foot of the stairs. “Up, you, up,” shouted the Witch, “I’ll have done with you before you have done with me!”

Dorothy had wrenched herself free and dashed up the corkscrew stairs of the tower ahead of the Witch. There was only one exit, and that was to the parapet. The Witch followed in good speed, needing to finish the deed before the Lion and Liir arrived. She would get the shoes, she would take the Grimmerie, she would abandon Liir and Nor, and disappear into the wilderness. She would burn the book and the shoes, and then she would bury herself.

Dorothy was a dark shape, huddled over, retching on the stones.

“You haven’t answered my question,” said the Witch, poking the torch up high, releasing spectres and ghosts among the shadows of the castellations. “You’ve come hunting me down, and I want to know. Why will you murder me?”

The Witch slammed the door behind her and locked it. All the better.

The girl could only gasp.

“You think they’re not telling stories about you all over Oz? You think I don’t know the Wizard sent you here to bring back proof that I was dead?”

“Oh, that,” said Dorothy, “that is true, but that’s not why I came!”

“You can’t possibly be a competent liar, not with that face!” The Witch held the broom up at an angle. “Tell me the truth, and when you’ve finished, then I’ll kill you, for in times like these, my little one, you must kill before you are killed.”

“I couldn’t kill you,” said the girl, weeping. “I was horror-struck to have killed your sister. How could I kill you too?”

“Very charming,” said the Witch, “very nice, very touching. Then why did you come here?”

“Yes, the Wizard said to murder you,” Dorothy said, “but I never intended to, and that’s not why I came!”

The Witch held the burning broom even higher, closer, to look in the girl’s face.

“When they said … when they said that it was your sister, and that we had to come here … it was like a prison sentence, and I never wanted to … but I thought, well, I would come, and my friends would come with me to help … and I would come … and I would say …”

“Say what,” cried the Witch, on the edge.

“I would say,” said the girl, straightening up, gritting her teeth, “I would say to you: Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!”

The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what? A fragment of the brush of the broom fluttered off, and lit on her skirt, and there was a run of flames in her lap, eating up the dryest tinder in the Vinkus. “Oh, will this nightmare never end,” screamed Dorothy, and she grabbed at a bucket for collecting rainwater that, in the sudden flare-up of light, had come into view. She said, “I will save you!” and she hurled the water at the Witch.

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.

They become others; they become Nanny in her prime, tart and officious; and Ama Clutch and Ama Vimp and the other Amas, lumped together now in a maternal blur. They become Boq, sweet and lithe and earnest, as yet unbowed; and Crope and Tibbett in their funny, campy anxiety to be liked; and Avaric in his superiority. And Glinda in her gowns, waiting to be good enough to deserve what she gets.

And the ones whose stories are over: Manek and Madame Morrible and Doctor Dillamond and most of all Fiyero, whose blue diamonds are the blues of water and of sulfurous fire both. And the ones whose stories are curiously unfinished—was it to be like this?—the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, whose help could not arrive in time; and Liir, the mysterious foundling boy, pushing out of his pea pod. Sarima, who in her loving welcome and sisterliness would not forgive, and Sarima’s sisters and children and future and past …

And the ones who fell to the Wizard, including Killyjoy and the other resident creatures; and behind them the Wizard himself, a failure until he exiled himself from his own land; and behind him Yackle, whoever she was, if anyone, and the anonymous Adepts, if they existed, and the dwarf, who had no name to share.

And the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.