V

She knew that she couldn’t afford the time to mount a full-scale chase against this Dorothy. Glinda ought to be hiring accomplices to track those shoes down; it was the least she could do, with her money and her connections. Still, the Witch stopped here and there along the Yellow Brick Road, and asked those taking an afternoon tipple at a roadside public house if they had seen a foreign girl in blue and white checks, walking with a small dog. There was some animated discussion as the patrons of the pub struggled to decide whether the green Witch intended the child harm—apparently the child had that rare skill of enchanting strangers—but when they had satisfied themselves that no harm was likely, they responded. Dorothy had come through a few days ago, and it was said that she had spent the night with someone a mile or two down the road, before continuing on. “The well-kept house with the yellow domed roof,” they said, “and the minaret-chimney. You can’t miss it.”

The Witch found it, and she found Boq on a bench in the yard, dandling a baby on his knee.

“You!” he said. “I know why you’re here! Milla, look, who’s here, come quickly! It’s Miss Elphaba, from Crage Hall! In the flesh!”

Milla came, a couple of naked children clutching her apron strings. Flushed from laundry, she lifted her straggling hair out of her eyes and said, “Oh my, and we forgot to dress in our finery today. Look who’s come to laugh at us in our rustic state.”

“Isn’t she something!” said Boq fondly.

Milla had kept her figure, though there were four or five offspring in evidence, and no doubt more out of sight. Boq had gone barrel-chested, and his fine spiky hair had grown prematurely silver, giving him a dignity he had never had as an undergraduate. “We heard about your sister’s death, Elphie,” he said, “and we sent our condolences to your father. We didn’t know where you were. We heard you had come here following Nessie’s ascension to governor of Munchkinland, but we didn’t know where you went back to when you left. It’s good to see you again.”

The sourness that she had felt over Glinda’s betrayal was ameliorated by Boq’s common courtesy and direct speech. She had always liked him, for his passion and for his sense. “You are a sight, you are,” she said.

“Rikla, get up off that stool and let our guest have a seat,” said Milla to one of the children. “And Yellowgage, run to Uncle’s and borrow some rice and onions and yogurt. Hurry now, so I can start a meal.”

“I won’t be staying, Milla, I’m in a hurry,” said the Witch. “Yellowgage, don’t bother. I’d love to spend some time, and catch up on all your news, but I’m trying to locate this girl stranger, who passed by here, someone said, and stayed a night or two.”

Boq shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, she did that, Elphie. What do you want with her?”

“I want my sister’s shoes. They belong to me.”

Boq seemed as surprised as Glinda had. “You weren’t ever into fancy trappings like society shoes,” he said.

“Yes, well, perhaps I’m about to make my belated debut in Emerald City society at last, and have a coming-out ball.” But she was being tart with Boq, and didn’t want that. “It’s a personal matter, Boq; I want the shoes. My father made them and they’re mine now, and Glinda gave them to this girl without my permission. And woe betide Munchkinland if they fall into the Wizard’s hands. What is she like, this Dorothy?”

“We adored her,” he said. “Plain and straightforward as mustard seed. She shouldn’t have any problems, although it’s a long walk for a child, from here to the Emerald City. But all who see her are bound to help her, I’d say. We sat up till the moon rose, chatting about her home, and Oz, and what she might expect on the road. She hasn’t traveled widely before this.”

“How charming,” said the Witch. “How novel for her.”

“Are you brewing one of your campaigns?” said Milla suddenly, cannily. “You know, Elphie, when you didn’t come back from the Emerald City with Glinda that time, everyone said you’d gone mad, and had become an assassin.”

“People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

“You’re not wicked,” said Boq.

“How do you know? It’s been so long,” said the Witch, but she smiled at him.

Boq returned the smile, warmly. “Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

“Like Nessarose,” said Milla meanly, but she was telling the truth, too, and they all nodded.

The Witch took one of Boq’s children on her knee and clucked at it absentmindedly. She liked children no more than she ever had, but years of dealing with monkeys had given her an insight into the infant mentality she had never grasped before. The baby cooed and wet itself with pleasure. The Witch handed it back quickly before the wet could soak through her skirt.

“Regardless of the shoes,” said the Witch, “do you think a child like that should be sent unarmed straight into the jaws of the Wizard? Has she been told what a monster he is?”

Boq looked uncomfortable. “Well, Elphie, I don’t like speaking ill of the Wizard. I’m afraid there are too many pitchers with big ears in this community, and you never know who is on what side. Between you and me, I hope Nessa’s death will result in some sort of a sensible government, but if we are overrun with an invading army in two months I wouldn’t want it bruited about that I’d been bad-mouthing the invaders. And there are rumors of reunification.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re hoping for that,” she said, “not you too.”

“I’m not hoping for anything, except for peace and quiet,” he said. “I have enough trouble getting crops out of these rocky fields. That’s what I was in Shiz to learn, do you remember?—agriculture. I’ve put the best of my efforts into our small holdings, and we only manage to eke out a living.”

But he looked rather proud about it, and so did Milla.

“And I guess you have a couple of Cows in your barn,” said the Witch.

“Oh, you’re testy. Of course we don’t. Do you think I could forget what we worked for—you and Crope and Tibbett and I? It was the high point of a very quiet life.”

“You didn’t have to have a quiet life, Boq,” said the Witch.

“Don’t be superior. I didn’t say I was sorry for it, neither the excitement of a righteous campaign nor the relief of a family and a farm. Did we ever do any good back then?”

“If nothing else,” said the Witch, “we helped Doctor Dillamond. He was very much alone in his work, you know. And the philosophical basis for the resistance grew out of his pioneering hypotheses. His findings outlived him; they still do.” She did not mention her own experiments with the winged monkeys. Her practical applications were directly derived from Doctor Dillamond’s theories.

“We had no idea we were at the end of a golden age,” Boq said, sighing. “When’s the last time you saw an Animal in the professions?”

“Ah, don’t get me started,” the Witch said. She couldn’t stay seated.

“Do you remember, you hoarded those notes of Dillamond’s. You never really let me know what they were all about. Did you make any use of them?”

“I learned enough from his research to keep questioning,” said the Witch, but she felt bombastic, and wanted to stop talking. It made her feel too sad, too desperate. Milla saw this, and with a brusque charity declared, “Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we’re the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we’re in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”

“The Wizard doesn’t,” said the Witch.

“Well, Madame Morrible does,” said Milla. “Or so Shenshen told me in her last letter.”

“Oh?” said the Witch.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Boq. “Though from her bed of pain Madame Morrible continues to advise our Emperor Wizard on policy matters about education. I’m surprised that Glinda didn’t send Dorothy to Shiz to study with Madame Morrible. Instead she directed her to the Emerald City.”

The Witch could not picture Dorothy, but for a moment she saw the stooped figure of Nor. She saw a crowd of girls like Nor, in chains and yokes, drifting around Madame Morrible the way those schoolgirls had, all those years ago.

“Elphie, sit down again, you don’t look well,” said Boq. “This is a hard time for you. You didn’t get along well with Nessarose, I seem to remember.”

But the Witch didn’t want to think of her sister. “It’s a rather ugly name, Dorothy,” she said. “Don’t you think?” She sat back down heavily, and Boq relaxed on a stool a few feet away.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Actually we had a chat about it. She said that the King of her homeland was a man named Theodore. Her teacher explained that the name meant Gift of God, and that this was a sign that he was ordained to be King or Prime Minister. Dorothy remarked that Dorothy was a sort of backward Theodore, but the teacher looked it up and said no, Dorothy meant Goddess of Gifts.”

“Well, I know what she can give me,” said the Witch. “She can give me my shoes. Are you trying to say that you think she was a gift of God, or that she is some sort of queen or goddess? Boq, you used not to go in for superstition.”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m having a conversation on word derivations,” he answered calmly. “Let others more enlightened than I ferret out the hidden meanings of life. But I do think it interesting that her name so resembles the name of her king.”

Milla said, “Well, I think she’s a holy little girl, ordinary and sanctified just as any child is, no more no less. Yellowgage, get your paws off that lemon tart, I can see you from here, or I’ll whip you from now to eternity. The Dorothy child reminded me of what Ozma might have been like, or might yet be like, if she ever comes out of the deep sleep she’s supposed to be enchanted into.”

“She sounds like a little fright,” said the Witch. “Ozma, Dorothy—all this talk about savior children. I have always detested it.”

“You know what it is?” said Boq, thinking carefully. “Since we’re talking about the old days, it comes back to me … I wonder if you remember that medieval painting I once found in the library at Three Queens? The one with the female figure cradling the beast? There was a sort of tenderness and awfulness in that painting. Well, there’s something in Dorothy that reminds me of that unnamed figure. You might even call it the Unnamed Goddess—is that sacrilegious or what? Dorothy has this sweet charity toward her dog, a pretty dreadful little beast. And whiffy? You wouldn’t believe how repugnant. Once she swooped the dog up in her arms and bent over it, crooning to it, in just the same pose as that medieval figure. Dorothy is a child, but she has a heaviness of bearing like an adult, and a gravity you don’t often find in the young. It’s very becoming. Elphie, I was charmed by her, to tell you the truth.” He cracked a couple of walnuts and eastern macarands, and passed them around. “I am sure you will be, too.”

“I would like to avoid her at all costs, at the sound of it,” said the Witch. “The last thing I’m in a mood for these days is to be charmed by juvenile purity. But I insist on recovering my property.”

“The shoes are very magic, are they?” said Milla. “Or is it just symbolic?”

“How do I even know?” said the Witch. “I haven’t ever put them on. But if I could get them and they could walk me out of this parlous life, I wouldn’t be sorry.”

“Anyway, everyone blamed the shoes for Nessa’s tyranny. I think it’s good of Glinda to have gotten them out of Munchkinland. The child is smuggling them abroad without even knowing it.”

“Glinda has sent the girl to the Emerald City,” said the Witch pointedly. “If the Wizard gets hold of them, it’ll be a license to march into Munchkinland. And you’re fools to sit on the fence as if it makes no difference whether he does or not.”

“You’ll stay for something, at least some tea,” said Milla soothingly. “Look, I’ve had Clarinda make a fresh pot, and we’ve saffron cream. Remember the saffron cream party after Ama Clutch’s funeral?”

The Witch breathed heavily for a moment; there was a pain in her esophagus. She did not like to remember those trying times. And Glinda had known full well that Madame Morrible was behind the death of Ama Clutch. Now as Lady Glinda she was part of the same ruling class. It was hideous. And Dorothy, whatever her origins, was still only a child, and they were using her to help rid Munchkinland of those damned totemic shoes. Or to get the shoes to the Wizard. Just as Madame Morrible had used her students as Adepts.

“I can’t stop here chattering like an idiot,” she cried, startling them, spilling the bowl of nuts to the ground. “Didn’t we waste enough time talking ourselves to death in school?” She grabbed for her broom and her hat.

Boq looked startled and almost fell backward off his seat. “Well, Elphie, why are you taking offense—?”

She was beyond answering. She whirled in a small cyclone of black skirts and scarves, and ran out to the road.

She hurried on foot along the Yellow Brick Road, hardly realizing that a plan was forming in her mind. But she was thinking so hard that for a while she completely forgot she was carrying her broom, and it was only when she paused to rest, and leaned on it, that she remembered it.

Boq, Glinda, even her father, Frex: how disappointing they all seemed now. Had these folks deteriorated in virtue since their youth, or had she been too naive then to see them for what they were? She felt disgusted with people, and longed to be home. She was too out of sorts to seek lodging in an inn or a public house. It was warm enough to stay outside and rest.

She lay awake at the edge of a field of barley. The moon rose, huge as it sometimes is when first breaking over the horizon. It backlit a stake with a crossbar, standing as if awaiting a body to crucify, or a scarecrow to hang.

Why hadn’t she joined forces with Nessarose, and raised armies against the Wizard? Old family resentments had gotten in the way.

Nessarose had asked for help in governing Munchkinland, and the Witch had denied her request. Instead the Witch had gone back to Kiamo Ko these seven years. She had squandered the chance to merge forces with her sister.

Virtually every campaign she’d set out for herself had ended in failure.

She squirmed in the light of the moon, and at midnight, tortured by the thoughts of Nessa’s death—the physical fact of being squished like a bug finally taking on some imaginative shape in the Witch’s fantasies—she arose, and took a new path. Dorothy would no doubt follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, and someone as exotic as she could be easily located anywhere along the route. The Witch would go and try to accomplish the task set out for herself fifteen years ago. Madame Morrible still waited to be killed.