“You too,” said Fiyero, surprised that he meant it. “If you ever get out into the central Kells, come stay at Kiamo Ko with us. Just send word ahead, as we’re only there for half a year at a time.”
“That’s just your speed, Crope, the wild beasts of the untamed Vinkus,” said Glinda. “I think the fashion possibilities, all those leather thongs and fringe and such, they might interest you, but I can’t see you as Mister Mountain Boy.”
“No, probably not,” agreed Crope. “Unless it affords fabulous cafés every four or five blocks, I don’t think a landscape quite developed enough for human habitation.”
Fiyero shook hands with Crope and then, remembering the rumors about poor Tibbett’s deterioration, kissed him; he threw his arms around Glinda and hugged her hard. She laced her arm through his and walked him to the door.
“Do let me shake off Crope and have you back, all to myself,” she said in a low voice, her patter evaporating into seriousness. “I can’t tell you, dear Fiyero. The past seems both more mysterious and more understandable with you right here before me. I feel there are things I could yet learn. I don’t want to wallow, dear boy, never that! But we go way back.” She held his hand between hers. “Something’s going on in your life. I’m not as dumb as I act. Something good and bad at the same time. Maybe I can help.”
“You were always sweet,” he said, and motioned to the doorman to hail a hansom cab. “How I regret that I won’t meet Sir Chuffrey.”
He moved out the doorway, across the marble entrance pavement, and turned to tip his hat at her. In the doors (the doormen held them open to enhance his parting view) she was a calm, resigned woman, neither transparent nor ineffectual—even, it might have been said, a woman full of grace. “If you should see her,” said Glinda lightly, “tell her I miss her still.”
He didn’t see Glinda again. He didn’t call at the Florinthwaite Club. He didn’t stroll past the Thropp family house in Lower Mennipin Street (though he was sorely tempted). He didn’t stop a scalper to try to get one of the tickets to Sillipede’s triumphant fourth annual comeback tour. He found himself in the Chapel of Saint Glinda in Saint Glinda Square, from which he could sometimes hear the cloistered maunts next door chanting and susurrating like a swarm of bees.
When the two weeks had passed at last, and the city was worked up to a froth over Lurlinemas, he went to see Elphaba, half-expecting she would have vanished.
But there she was, stern and loving and in the midst of making a vegetable pie for him. Her precious Malky was putting his feet in the flour and making paw prints all over the room. They talked awkwardly until Malky upset the bowl of vegetable stock, and that made them both laugh.
He didn’t tell her about Glinda. How could he? Elphaba had worked so hard to keep them all at bay, and now she was engaged in the major campaign of her life, the thing she had been working toward for five years. He did not approve of anarchy (well, he knew he was in lazy doubt about everything; doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction). But even after seeing the Bear cub struck down, he had to keep an even, cautious relationship with the Power on the throne—for the sake of his tribe.
Also, Fiyero didn’t want to make Elphie’s life harder than it was. And his selfish need to be comfortable with her surmounted his need to gossip. So he didn’t tell her Nessarose and Nanny were in town either, or had been. (For all he knew, he rationalized silently, they had already moved on.)
“I wonder,” she said that night, as the stars peered through the crazy frost pattern on the skylight, “I wonder if you should get out of town before Lurlinemas Eve.”
“Is all hell going to break loose?”
“I told you, I don’t know the whole picture; I can’t know; I shouldn’t know. But maybe some hell will break loose. Maybe it would be best for you to go.”
“I’m not going and you can’t make me.”
“I’ve been taking correspondence courses in sorcery on the side, I’ll go puff and turn you into stone.”
“You mean you’ll make me hard? I’m already hard.”
“Stop. Stop.”
“Oh you wicked woman, you have bewitched me again, look, it has a mind of its own—”
“Fiyero stop. Stop. Now look, I mean it. I want to know where you’re going to be on Lurlinemas Eve. Just so I can be sure you’re not going to get hurt. Tell me.”
“You mean we won’t be together?”
“It’s a work night for me,” she said grimly. “I’ll see you the next day.”
“I’ll wait here for you.”
“No you won’t. I think we’ve covered our tracks pretty well, but there’s still a chance even at this late date that somebody could come here to intercept me. No—you stay in your club and take a bath. Take a nice long cold bath. Got it? Don’t even go out. They say it might be snowy by then anyway.”
“It’s Lurlinemas Eve! I’m not going to spend the holiday in a bathtub all alone.”
“Well, hire some company, see if I care.”
“As if you don’t.”
“Just stay away from anything social, I mean theatre or crowds, or even restaurants, please, will you promise me that?”
“If you could be more specific I could be more careful.”
“You could be most careful if you left town completely.”
“You could be most careful if you told me—”
“Give over with that, cut it out. I don’t think I even want to know where you are, come to think of it. I just want you to be safe. Will you be safe? Will you stay inside, away from drunken pagan celebrations?”
“Can I go to chapel and pray for you?”
“No.” She looked so fierce that he didn’t even tease her about it again.
“Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?
“I love you,” said Elphaba.
“So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.”
Careful of us both, he thought.
So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all. She had swathed herself in long dark skirts, like some sort of a religious woman, and tucked up her hair inside a tall wide-brimmed hat with a crown like a cone. There was a dark scarf, purple and gold, wound around her neck, and pulled over her mouth, though she would need more than a scarf to mask that lovely prow of a nose. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves, a nicer type of accessory than she usually went in for, though he feared it was to allow for nimbler control of her hands. Her feet were lost in big, steel-toed boots like the kind worn by miners in the Glikkus.
If you didn’t know she was green, it would be hard to tell—in this dark afternoon, in this raking skittle of snow.
She didn’t look behind her; perhaps she didn’t care if she was being followed. Her circuit took her around some of the major squares of the city. She ducked in for a minute to the chapel of Saint Glinda next to the mauntery, the one where he had first seen her. Perhaps she was getting last-minute instructions, but she didn’t try to give him (or anyone else) the slip. She emerged in a minute or two.
Or perhaps—perish the thought—she was actually praying for guidance and strength?
She crossed the Law Courts Bridge, she wandered along the Ozma Embankment and cut diagonally through the abandoned rose gardens of the Royal Mall. The snow pestered her; she kept twining her cape the more tightly around; the
silhouette of her thin, dark-stockinged legs in those huge comical boots showed up against the snowy blankness of the Oz Deer Park (now of course bereft of Deer and deer). She marched, head tucked down, past the cenotaphs and obelisks and memorial tablets to the Magnificent Dead of this escapade or that. The decades—Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love—the decades looked on and didn’t notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn’t see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.
But the Wizard must not be her aim. She must have told the truth in saying that she was too untried, and too obvious, to be selected as the Wizard’s assassin. She must be involved in a diversionary tactic, or in taking out a possible successor or high-level ally. For tonight the Wizard would be opening the antiroyalist, revisionist Exhibit of Struggle and Virtue at the People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics near the Palace. Yet at the top of the Shiz Road Elphaba struck out sideways, away from the Palace district, cutting through the small, fashionable district of Goldhaven. The homes of the filthy rich were guarded by mercenaries, and she clopped past them on the pavements, past the stableboys out sweeping the snow off the pavement with their brooms. She did not look up or down or back over her shoulder. Fiyero guessed he was the more ostentatious figure, striding in his opera cape in the snow a hundred paces behind.
At the edge of Goldhaven was perched a small bluestone jewel of a theatre, the Lady’s Mystique. In the shallow but elegant square before it, white lights and gold and green spangles hung in profusion, looped from streetlight to streetlight. Some holiday oratorio or other was scheduled—he could only read SOLD OUT on the board in front—and the doors weren’t yet opened. The crowd was gathering, some vendors sold hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses, and a crowd of self-approving youngsters amused themselves and bothered some elderly people by singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow came down on all, on the lights, the theatre, the crowds; it landed in the hot chocolate, it was churned to mush and ice on the bricks.
Bravely, foolishly—without decision or choice, it felt like—Fiyero climbed the steps of a nearby private library, to keep an eye on Elphaba, who lost herself in the crowd. Was there to be a murder in the theatre? Was there to be arson, the innocent sybarites roasted like chestnuts? Was it a single mark, an appointed victim, or was it mayhem and disaster, the more, the worse, the better?
He didn’t know if he was there to prevent what she was about to do, or to save whomever he could from the catastrophe, or to tend anyone hurt accidentally, or even maybe just to witness it, so he could know more about her. And love her or not love her, but know which of the two it was.
She was circulating through the crowd, as if trying to locate someone. He believed, incredibly, that she didn’t know he was there—was she so intent on finding the right victim, and he didn’t fill the bill? Could she not feel her lover in the same open-air square with her as the wind moved the curtains of snow?
A phalanx of Gale Forcers appeared from an alley between the theatre and a school next door. They took up their places before the bank of glass doors in front. Elphaba mounted the steps of an ancient wool market, a kind of stone gazebo. Fiyero saw that she had something under her cloak. Explosives? Some magic implement?
Did she have colleagues in the square? Were they lining themselves up one with another? The crowd kept getting thicker, as the hour for the oratorio drew near. Inside the glass doors, house management was busy lining up stanchions and stringing velvet ropes to promote a genteel entry into the hall. Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.
A carriage came around the corner of a building on the far side of the square. It couldn’t come right up to the doors of the theatre, as the crowds were too dense, but it proceeded as far as it was able. Sensing the presence of someone with authority, the crowd drew a little still. Could this be the elusive Wizard, on an unannounced visit? A coachman in a teck-fur headpiece flung the door open, and reached his hand in to assist the passenger in alighting.
Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.
Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.
He saw that Elphaba knew that this was the one she must kill; she had known this; in an instant all was dead clear. If she was caught and captured and tried, her motivation couldn’t be more wonderful—she was merely a mad student from Madame Morrible’s own Crage Hall, she carried a grudge, she never forgot. It was too perfect.
But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?
Elphaba’s cape twitched; her hand went up and down inside it, as if priming something. Madame Morrible was growling a greeting to the crowd, which, while not necessarily knowing who she was, appreciated the spectacle if not the bulk of her arrival.
The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.
But then were thrown open the front doors of the building Madame Morrible was walking past—not the theatre, but the adjacent school, Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. Out the doors swarmed a cluster, a little upper-class mob of schoolgirls. What were they doing in school on a Lurlinemas Eve? Fiyero caught Elphaba looking wildly surprised. The girls were six or seven, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity, spooned into furry muffs and tucked into furry scarves and tipped into boots with furry edges. They were laughing and singing, raucous and rough as the elite adults they would become, and in their midst was a pantomime player, someone being the Fairy Preenella. It was a man, as the convention had it, a man done up in silly clownlike makeup, and mock bouncing bosom, and a wig and extravagant skirts, and a straw hat, and a huge basket with trinkets and treasures spilling out. “Oh la, socie-tee,” he fluted at Madame Morrible, “even Fairy Preenella can have a present for the Lucky Pedestrian.”
For a moment Fiyero thought the man in drag was going to pull out a knife and kill Madame Morrible right in front of the children. But no, espionage was organized but not that organized—this was a real accident, a disruption. They hadn’t figured on there being a school occasion this evening, nor on a screaming flock of schoolgirls greedily tugging at an actor in skirts and falsetto.
Fiyero turned back to look at Elphaba. Her face struggled with disbelief. The children were in the way of whatever she was supposed to do. They were a small unruly mob, chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him/her, grabbing for presents. The children were the accidental context—noisy, innocent daughters of tycoons, despots, and butcher generals.
He could see Elphaba working, he could see her hands fighting with each other, to do it anyway, to keep from doing it—whatever it was.
Madame Morrible pushed on, like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, devil come what may, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him.
The audience filed into the theatre. The children shrieked their song in the street, awash with greed and joy. The carriage that had brought Madame Morrible around was able to draw up in front of the theatre and start its long wait for her to com
e out again. Fiyero paused, unsure, in case there was a backup plan, in case Elphaba had something else up her sleeve, in case the theatre exploded.
Then he began to worry that, in the few minutes of losing sight of her, Elphaba had been rounded up by the Gale Force. Could they have whisked her out of sight that fast? What should he do if she became one of the disappeared?
At a clip, he headed back across town. Mercifully he found a waiting cab, and he had the cab drive him directly to the street of warehouses adjacent to the military garrison in the city’s ninth district.
In a state of profound agitation he arrived back at Elphaba’s little eyrie atop the corn exchange. As he climbed the stairs, his bowels turned suddenly to water, and it was only with effort he managed to make it to the chamber pot. His insides slopped noisily, wetly out, and he held his perspiring face in his hands. The cat was perched atop the wardrobe, glaring down at him. Voided, washed down, and at least loosely done up again, he tried to coax Malky with a bowl of milk. She would have none of it.
He found a couple of dried crackers, and ate them miserably, and then pulled on the chain to open the skylight, to help air the room. A couple of plops of snow fell in and sat there not melting, it was that cold in the damn place. He went to build up a fire, pulled open the iron door of the stove.
The fire caught, then flared, and the shadows detached themselves and moved as shadows will, but these shadows moved fast, across the room, at him before he could register what they were. Except that there were three, or four, or five, and they were wearing black clothes, and black char on their faces, and their heads were wrapped in colored scarves like the ones he had bought for Elphaba, for Sarima. On the shoulder of one he saw the glint of a gilded epaulet: a senior member of the Gale Force. There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat then scarpered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 26