Son of a Witch

by Gregory Maguire

  Liir decided to leave the broom and the cape behind. He wouldn’t fly while in the company of the Scrow, and after departing from them, he mightn’t be able to fly back, anyway. Kumbricia’s Pass had been resistant to his flying above it.

  After packing the hooped faces alongside Nastoya’s carcass, Liir bade Candle and Iskinaary a quick good-bye. “Mind each other,” he said. “Iskinaary, keep watch.”

  “I can watch over myself,” said Candle. “You forget I can read the present.”

  “Can you read what is in my heart?” he asked. If so, tell me what it is, he continued to himself. Tell me, so I can tell you back.

  Candle held his hands but wouldn’t meet his eyes. Perhaps, the nearer the baby was to birth, the more she despaired of ever having said it was his. Would he ever be able to map any part of her mystery?

  He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.

  THERE PROVED LITTLE DRAMA on the high ground. One evening the Yunamata materialized out of nothing, naked as Birds, painted in tribal markings. They approached the corpse of Princess Nastoya, carrying the lighted roots of hagtooth bush that they used in their own funeral rites. They sang, and melted away again in rather unseemly haste.

  At the final gorge, where the Conference of the Birds had departed for its circuit around western Oz, Liir said a quick and perfunctory good-bye to Lord Shem, Prince Ottokos, and turned home with a heavy heart.

  The accomplishments of the last six months had been irrelevant, he decided, for all but Nastoya. Was that the only accomplishment that mattered?—that somehow you not bungle your own death? Everything else that had happened in his short adult life had been frothy and meaningless, ultimately. Passionate, yes—yes, that, indeed. Passionately felt, but without shapeliness or worthy outcome.

  The dragons were dead: some people were still walking about, ignorant of how their tired lives might otherwise have ended up with a scraping. That much was good. Stack that up against the cursed lives of those Quadlings who daily had to remember their own dead, lost at the burning of the bridge at Bengda. The bit of thatch falling, a letter in the air, flaming and drowning.

  And doubtless there were still disconsolate prisoners in Southstairs, and misguided soldiers in barracks, and those abject poor who had survived the cleaning out of Dirt Boulevard. And that kid named Tip, whose granny had probably sold him already for a better brand of cow, a broom, a new pot for the hearth.

  To be sure, the airborne Conference of the Birds—a great show, if nothing else. But what did it mean? Where did it get anyone? For all Liir knew, that juvenile spectacle would give the Emperor better leverage to draft additional soldiers, to tax for newer weapons, to dictate for more control over the crown city of Oz. A flying witch made out of birds! In another generation that would have been called pleasure faithism: as if spectacle itself could convince one of anything.

  Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?

  The great force of evil? Shell, Emperor Quake-in-your-Boots, naming himself the Spear of the Unnamed God? Or the next despot, or the one after that?

  The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

  Remembering Princess Nastoya, he thought: Sever us from our disguises. Then he flinched, almost in disgust: was that a prayer?

  How he wished the Elephant Princess had been able to deliver whatever message that Sister Apothecaire had advertised she had for him. Another slim hope dashed, so many slim hopes waiting to rise in its wake.

  A message about Nor, and the word on the street. Could Princess Nastoya, with her massive ears, actually have learned Nor’s whereabouts? Surely she’d have found a way to tell him?

  Nor, lovely Nor, wherever she was. He didn’t know where, he might never know, except she was in his memory—like everyone else. There, and drawn on the piece of paper secreted into the inner pocket of the Witch’s cape. He saw it in his mind’s eye, clear as day, the drawing, the coffee-colored wash suggesting the gleaming highlights of preadolescent, perfect skin, the letters written in Nor’s peculiar, crabbed printing.

  It was as if the burning letter had spelled something, suddenly, just before it was quenched in black water. The thought came like a spasm, and he harvested it before it disappeared. He unpacked the Princess Nastoya’s promised gift.

  The word on the street. Elphaba Lives!

  Nor’s handwriting.

  WHEN HE GOT BACK to the farm a little after dusk, perhaps a week later, he knew at once that it was deserted. One knows those things about an old farmstead. Iskinaary was gone, and the donkey, and the hens had scattered. For a minute he wondered if Trism had come back for Candle, and now—angry at Liir for his quizzical ways, or herself taken with handsome Trism—she’d changed her mind, and cast her lot with him.

  Or perhaps Trism’s warning had been accurate, and Commander Cherrystone and his band had found Apple Press Farm at last. Found a way to avenge the slaughter of the dragons.

  It mattered, and would matter more tomorrow. For now, he was alone, as before. As usual. It was a condition he’d need to get used to, or to tolerate never getting used to—not exactly the same thing, more’s the pity.

  He walked through the house. Her domingon was gone, which suggested deliberation, but the dishes were unwiped, still crusty with porridge, which suggested haste. Had she taken the broom? No, there it was, put up on the mantelpiece out of harm’s way.

  He built up a small fire in the kitchen to take the edge off the chill. There was precious little with which to make a meal. As he stood trying to think, though, he heard a barracking in the boggy land some way south of the farm. Thrashing through underbrush, he found the goat hidden in thickets, tied to a tree, sorely in need of milking, and cross as blazes.

  He led it back to the barn, and milked it in the shadows of the broken press, glad he had learned one skill at least.

  Then, in the dark corner of the stair hall where they left the trash for tipping into the dump beyond the orchard, he nearly tripped over the Witch’s cape. He picked it up to shake it out and hang it on a hook, and the lump of dead matter rolled off the hem into the corner.

  Oh, oh oh oh. So this was it. The baby had come, come early, he guessed; he didn’t know all that much about the calendar as it pertained to babies. It must have come too soon, and it had been dead on arrival, or it had died at once. And Candle had been alone, poor thing—alone but for that vainglorious Goose. How misguided that Liir should have felt the need to honor the corpse of Nastoya and leave Candle to face a possible childbirth or a stillbirth alone, with only a silly Goose to hiss for help.

  He had hauled the dead carcass of an Elephant across the mountains on a cart; he had tried to hear the testimonies of people who had had their faces scraped. He had murdered dragons and people. He could bear to touch the small corpse of a human child.

  So he picked it up. He held it at a distance. Tears started, though why? He hadn’t believed this was his child, and there was no new reason to believe it now. It was just another child, just another inevitable fatality, the next crude accident of the world, and not the last.

  He maneuvered its cold form closer. Cold, though not icy; this death had to have just happened. Had the scraped faces sung the fetus to a death, as they’d sung Princess Nastoya?

  Maybe the child had been born dead this very morning, as he was making his approach. And a rosy morning it had been, the sun strengthening, and the inane involuntary return of a green blush to the skin of the world. He had even sung a bit of his own. Not his usual way!—he’d yodeled some nonsense syllables, thinking: Maybe i
t will be all right. Maybe Candle. Maybe Trism. Maybe something will work.

  The form was cold. Was it a normal infant size, or smaller? He didn’t know human infants. He nestled it against his neck, and thought he felt its mouth move.

  Gingerly he stepped from the stair hall into the kitchen. Was it warming up? Or was it just his own heat he felt, reflecting back at him?

  In the feeble light of the new fire, he moved it again, shifted it to rest along his forearm. It was a pretty corpse, and now he could see it had been a girl. Its umbilical cord was an unholy mess. Maybe Iskinaary had helped to sever it. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  The corpse twitched and cried, and stretched a little. He wrapped it from stem to stern, forehead to toes, making sure its dab of a nose had access to air. Then he carried it closer to the fire, in case corpses liked to be a little warm before they were fed milk.

  Elphaba had kept a basket rocking at her feet, once: a basket was just the thing. Was there an old onion basket somewhere in the keeping-room belowstairs? He’d find a basket.

  He found a basket.

  He fed her by dripping goat’s milk through a cheesecloth into her pursing mouth. She took the false sucket well enough. She had Candle’s Quadling face, already: those beautiful rhomboids that made such splendid cheekbones.

  Of course Candle would flee, if she’d given birth to a child and thought it had died. Imagine the panic. Of course she would. Maybe she’d go back to the mauntery, as the Superior Maunt had suspected she would. At least for a time: to recover herself. What an ordeal she’d had. The lonely pregnancy, the lonely delivery, and then—whatever it was that had happened with Trism. And all of Liir’s absences. Of course she would flee.

  She might come back. She might.

  He sat with the infant most of the night. For a while he spread out the cape and even managed to sleep a little—he kept her in the basket, though, so he wouldn’t roll over onto her by accident and crush her.

  In the first black wash of dawn, he woke up comforted with a different thought. Candle could see the present. Perhaps she’d known he was almost home. What if she had fled—what if a guard of Commander Cherrystone’s battalion had indeed found the farm, and she’d led them away, diverted their attention? Drawn them off scent? The mother bird pretends to have a broken wing, to lead predators away from her nestlings in the grass. Candle had as much instinct as a mother bird.

  So she knew that Liir would be back in time to rescue the girl, give it a burial if needed, feed it if not. She’d hid the goat for him to find.

  She wasn’t leading danger away from him, but from the baby. She could take care of herself; they didn’t want her, after all. But she was relying on Liir to save her baby, whether he believed it was his or not.

  Imagining that, anyway, helped him open his eyes.

  There was heavy rain in the morning. The light was greyish and mossy with the low clouds. He had to concede that the baby wasn’t a corpse, really. She was alive. Maybe she’d been born stone cold. But she was alive now.

  Still smeared with her birth blood, and the watery beginning of her little feces. He took her to the doorway and held her up in the warm rain. She cleaned up green.

  A LITTLE PATIENCE, and we shall see the reign of

  witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people,

  recovering their true spirit, restore their government

  to its true principles.

  —Thomas Jefferson, 1798

  From Wicked

  THEY CONDUCTED THEIR LOVE AFFAIR in the room above the abandoned corn echange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

  ONE EVENING THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fraglity of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?

  But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

  MY MOTHER was a westerne woman

  And learned in gramarye

  —K. Estmere, 1470,

  collected in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS ARE DUE to the team at ReganBooks, starting with Judith Regan and including Cassie Jones, Paul Olsewski, and Jennifer Suitor.

  Thank you to David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss for commenting on early drafts of Son of a Witch.

  Thank you to Haven Kimmel and to Eve Ensler, for encouraging words sent at precisely the right moment.

  Thank you to Harriet Barlow, Ben Strader, and the company of Blue Mountain Center, New York.

  Thank you, again, to Andy Newman, for defending the ramparts as usual, and to Lori Shelly, for able assistance at every wicked little thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GREGORY MAGUIRE is the bestselling author of Son of a Witch, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, Mirror Mirror, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has lectured on art and culture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the DeCordova Museum as well as at conferences at home and abroad. An occasional reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, he lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY GREGORY MAGUIRE

  Wicked

  Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

  Lost

  Mirror Mirror

  Copyright

  SON OF A WITCH. Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Maguire. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition September 2005 ISBN 9780061752513

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maguire, Gregory.

  Son of a witch : a novel / Gregory Maguire.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-054893-2 (cloth)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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