Through the rafiqi, the Elephant then said, “Daughter of the dragon, I too am under a spell. I know how it may be broken—but I choose to live as a changeling. An Elephant is a hunted thing in these times. The Scrow approve of me. They have worshipped elephants from the time before language, the time before history began. They know I am not a goddess. They know I am a beast who chooses magical incarceration as a human over the dangerous liberty of my own powerful form.
“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”
Elphie could only look, she could not speak.
“But the choice to save yourself can itself be deadly,” said the Princess Nastoya.
Elphie nodded, looked away, looked back.
“I will give you three crows as your familiars,” said the Princess. “You are in hiding as a witch now. That is your guise.” She spoke a word to the crows, and three mangy, evil-looking things came and waited nearby.
“A witch?” Elphaba said. What her father would think! “Hiding from what?”
“We have the same enemy,” replied the Princess. “We are both at risk. If you need help send the crows. If I am still alive, as an old matriarch monarch, or as a free Elephant, I’ll come to your aid.”
“Why?” asked Elphie.
“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face,” she answered.
The Princess said more. It had been years—more than a decade—since Elphie had been able to talk to an Animal. Who, Elphie asked the Princess, had enchanted her? But the Princess Nastoya wouldn’t say—in part as self-protection, for the death of the enchanter could sometimes mean the revocation of binding spells, and her curse was her safety.
“But is life worth living in the wrong form?” said Elphie.
“The interior doesn’t change,” she answered, “except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.”
“I have no interior,” said Elphaba.
“Something told those bees to kill the cook,” said the Princess Nastoya, with a glitter in her eye. Elphaba felt herself go pale.
“I didn’t!” she said. “No, it couldn’t have been me! And how did you know?”
“You did, on some level. You are a strong woman. And I can hear bees, you know. My ears are keen.”
“I would like to stay here with you,” said Elphaba. “Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That’s all I want—to do no harm.”
“By your own admission, you have a job to do,” said the Princess. She curled her trunk around Elphaba’s face, feeling its contours and truths. “Go and do it.”
“May I return to you?” asked Elphie.
But the Princess wouldn’t answer. She was tiring—she was an old old thing even for an Elephant. Her trunk went back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. Then the great nose-hand came forward and set itself with wonderful weight and precision on Elphaba’s shoulders, and curled a bit around her neck. “Listen to me, sister,” she said. “Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”
Elphaba could not answer, so shocked was she at the touch. She backed away when dismissed, her mind all but out of her.
Then the return on camels across the shuddering colors of night grass: hypnotic, vague, and distressing.
Yet there was blessing in this night. Elphaba had forgotten blessing, too—like so much else.
4
They left the Scrow encampment and the Princess Nastoya behind. The Grasstrail Train moved in a circle north, now, a wide arch.
Igo died, and was buried in a sandy mound. “Give his spirit movement and flight,” said Elphie at the ceremony.
The rafiqi admitted later that he had thought one of the guests of the command meeting with the Princess Nastoya was to be sacrificed in a ritual slaughter. It had happened before. The Princess, though coping with her dilemma, was not above a sense of revenge. It was the honesty of Pinchweed that saved him, as he was the obvious choice. Or perhaps Igo wore the prospect of his death closer to the surface than humans could see, and the Elephant took pity.
The crows were annoying; they pestered the bees, shat all over the wagon, teased Killyjoy. The Glikkun, Raraynee, stopped at a well, met her isolated widower husband-to-be, and left the Grasstrail Train. The toothless new husband already had six motherless children, and they took to Raraynee like orphaned ducklings behind a farm dog. There were only ten travelers left.
“Now we’re entering Arjiki tribal lands,” said the rafiqi.
The first Arjiki band approached a few days later. They wore nothing so splendid as what Fiyero had worn, in the way of blue markings—these were nomads, shepherds, rounding up the sheep from the western foothills of the Great Kells for their annual counting and, it seemed, sale to the East. Still, just the handsome look of them ripped Elphie’s heart into pieces. Their wildness. Their otherness. This may be a punishment to the hour of my death, she thought.
The Grasstrail Train by now was down to only two wagons: in one, the rafiqi, Oatsie, Liir the boy, Pinchweed the entrepreneur, and a Gillikinese mechanic named Kowpp. In the other, Elphie herself, and the bees, the crows, and Killyjoy. Already she had, it seemed, been accepted as a witch. It was not an entirely unlikable disguise.
Kiamo Ko was just a week away.
The Grasstrail Train turned eastward, into the steel gray passes of the steep Great Kells. Winter was almost here, and the last travelers were grateful that the snows had held off. Oatsie intended to stop the winter in an Arjiki camp some twenty miles on. In the spring she would head back to the Emerald City, making the northern route through Ugabu, and the Pertha Hills of Gillikin. Elphie thought of sending a note to Glinda, if after all these years she was still there—but, being unable to decide yes, she decided no.
“Tomorrow,” said Oatsie, “we’ll see Kiamo Ko. The mountain stronghold of the ruling clan of the Arjikis. Are you ready, Sister Elphie?”
She was teasing, and Elphie didn’t like it. “I am no longer a sister, I am a witch,” she said, and tried to think poisonous thoughts at Oatsie. But Oatsie was a stronger person than the cook, apparently, for she just laughed and went on her way.
The Grasstrail Train stopped on the side of a small tarn. The others said its water was refreshing, though icy cold; Elphie didn’t know or care about that. But in the middle was an island—a tiny thing, the size of a mattress, sprouting one leafless tree like an umbrella that has lost its fabric.
Before Elphaba could quite make it out—the evening light came early at this time of year, and even earlier in the mountains—Killyjoy had plunged feverishly into the water, and splashed and swum his way to the island, intent on some small movement or interesting scent he had picked up. He ferreted in the sedge, and then clamped his teeth—the most wolflike of his features—gently around the skull of a small beast in the grass.
Elphie couldn’t see but it looked like a baby.
Oatsie screamed, Liir quivered like a blob of jelly, Killyjoy released his grip, but only to get a further hold; he was drooling over the scalp of the thing he had caught.
There was no way to go through the water—that would be death—
But her feet went out anyway—
They hit the water hard, the water hit hard back—
The water turned to ice as she ran—foot by foot of ice under foot by foot of hurry. A silvering plate formed instantly, cantilevering forward, making a cold safe bridge to the island—
Where Killyjoy could be scolded, and the baby saved, though she hadn’t dared hope she could be in time. She pried Killyjoy’s jaws apart, and scooped up the thing. It shivered in terror and the cold. Its bright black eyes were alert and watching, ready to upbraid or condemn or love, same as any capable adult thing.
The others were surprised to see it, as surpri
sed as they’d been to see the ice form, perhaps by some magic spell left on the tarn from some passing wizard or witch. It was a small monkey—of the variety called the snow monkey. A baby abandoned by its mother and its tribe, or maybe separated by accident?
It didn’t think much of Killyjoy but it liked the warmth of the wagon.
They pitched their camp halfway up the perilous slope to Kiamo Ko. The castle rose in steep black angles out of black rock. Elphie could see it perched above them like an eagle with folded wings; its conical-roofed towers, its battlements and bartizans, its portcullis and arrow-slit windows—they all belied its original intention as the head of a waterworks. Below it wound a powerful tributary of the Vinkus River on which the Ozma Regent once had meant to build a dam and channel water into the center of Oz—back when the droughts were their most threatening. Fiyero’s father had taken this stronghold by siege and storm and made it the seat of the Arjiki princes, before dying and leaving the clan leadership to his only son, if Elphaba remembered rightly.
The small luggage was packed, the bees hummed (their melodies ever more amusing as she listened, week by week), Killyjoy was still sulking over being denied the kill, the crows sensed that a change was coming and wouldn’t eat dinner. The monkey, who was called Chistery because of the sound he made, chittered and chattered now that he was warm and safe.
Around the campfire good-byes were spoken, a few toasts, even a few regrets. The sky was blacker than it had been before: perhaps it was the contrast of the whiteness of snowy peaks all around. Liir showed up with a parcel of clothing and some sort of musical instrument, and said good-byes too.
“Oh, so you’re stopping here, are you?” said Elphie.
“Yes,” he said, “with you.”
“With the crows, with the monkey, with the bees, with the dog, and with the Witch?” she said. “With me?”
“Where else can I go?” he asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered.
“I can take care of the dog,” he said calmly. “I can collect the honey for you.”
“It makes no difference to me,” she said.
“All right,” he said, and so Liir prepared to enter his father’s house.
The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko
3
Sarima,” said her youngest sister, “wake up. Naptime’s over. We have a houseguest at supper, and I need to know if we have to kill a hen. There are so few left, and what we give the traveler we miss all winter in eggs . . . What do you think?”
The Dowager Princess of the Arjikis groaned. “Details, details,” she said, “can’t I train you to figure out anything for yourself?”
“Very well,” snapped the sister, “I shall decide, and then you can go without your morning egg when we’re one short.”
“Oh Six, don’t mind me,” said Sarima, “it’s just that I’m scarcely awake. Who is it? Some patriarch with bad breath, who plans to bore us with tales of the hunting he did fifty years ago? Why do we allow it?”
“It’s a woman—more or less,” said Six.
“Now that’s uncalled for,” said Sarima, sitting up. “We are none of us the blushing nymphs we once were, Six.” From across the room she saw herself reflected in the wardrobe glass: pale as milk pudding, her still pretty face nestled in the puddles of fat that fell according to the laws of gravity. “Just because you’re the youngest, Six, and can still locate your waist, there’s no need to be unkind.”
Six pouted. “Well, it’s just a woman, then: so chicken or no? Tell me now so Four can hack off its head and get to plucking, or we won’t eat before midnight.”
“We’ll have fruit and cheese and bread and fish. Is there fish in the fishwell, I suppose?” Yes, there was. Six turned to go, but remembered to say, “I brought you a glass of sweet tea, it’s there on your vanity.”
“Bless you. Now tell me, without sarcasm if you please, what’s our guest like, really?”
“Green as sin, thin and crooked, older than any of us. Dressed in black like an old maunt—but not all that old. I’d guess about, oh, thirty, thirty-two? She won’t give her name.”
“Green? How divine,” said Sarima.
“Divine isn’t the word that comes to mind,” said Six.
“You don’t mean green with jealousy—you mean actually green?”
“Maybe it’s from jealousy, I could not say, but she is surely green. Genuine grass green.”
“Oh la. Well, I’ll wear white tonight so as not to clash. Is she alone?”
“She came in with the caravan we saw down in the valley yesterday. She stopped here with a little company of beasts—a wolfdog, a hive of bees, a youth, some crows, and a baby monkey.”
“What’ll she do with all of them in the mountains in winter?”
“Ask her yourself.” Six wrinkled her nose. “She made me shudder.”
“Half-set gelatin makes you shudder. When’s dinner tonight?”
“Seven chimes and a half. She turns my stomach.”
Six left, having run out of expressions of disgust, and Sarima had her tea in bed until her bladder complained. Six had banked up the fire and drawn the curtains, but Sarima pulled them back to look down into the courtyard. Kiamo Ko boasted corner turrets and towers, built on massive circular salients thrusting upward from the stone of the mountain itself. After the Arjiki clan had wrested the building from the waterworks commission, they had added toothy crenellations for defense. Despite the reworkings, the plan of the house was still simple. It was built in the general shape of a U, a central hall with two long narrow wings thrusting forward around a steeply pitched yard. When it rained, the water churned over the cobbles, and slipped out under the carved gates of iron oak and jasper panels, past the sickly cluster of village houses nestled up against the castle’s outside walls. At this hour the courtyard was charcoal gray. Cold and filthy with scraps of hay and bits of leaf flying in the wind. There was a light in the old cobbler’s shed, and smoke spinning from the chimney that badly wanted repointing—like everything else in this decaying manse. Sarima was glad the guest hadn’t been shown into the house proper. As Dowager Princess of the Arjikis, she enjoyed the privilege of welcoming a traveler into the private chambers of Kiamo Ko.
After bathing, she dressed in a white shift with white piping, and put on the beautiful torque that had arrived, like a message from the Other Land, from her dear departed husband several months after the Incident. Out of habit Sarima shed a few tears admiring herself within the flat embrace of its jeweled, segmented collar. If it was too dressy for this itinerant, Sarima could always drape a napkin over it. But she would still know it was there. Even before her tears had dried she was humming, looking forward to the novelty of a guest.
She peeped in on the children before going down. They were jumpy; strangers always did that to them. Irji and Manek, twelve and eleven, were almost old enough to want to bust out of this nest of venomous doves. Irji was soft and cried a lot, but Manek was a little bantam, always had been. If she let them go off to the Grasslands with the clan, in the summer migration, they both might have their throats slit—there were too many clansmen to claim leadership for themselves or their sons. So Sarima had kept her boys near.
Her daughter, Nor, long-legged and thumb-sucking at nine years old, still needed a lap to crawl into before going to sleep. Dressed for the meal, Sarima was inclined to forbid it, but relented. Nor had a delicate lisp and she said wunning in the wain for running in the rain. She befriended stones and candles and blades of grass that grew against all logic in the cracks of the coping stones around the windows. She sighed and rubbed her face against the torque and said, “There’s a boy too, Mama. We played with him in the mill yard.”
“What’s he like? Is he green too?”
“Nah. He’s all right. He’s a big baby—fat and strong, and Manek was throwing stones at him to see how far they would bounce off him. He let him do it. Maybe if you’re so fat it doesn’t hurt?”
“I doubt it. Wh
at’s his name?”
“Liir. Isn’t that a queer name?”
“It sounds foreign. And his mother?”
“I don’t know her name and I don’t think she’s his mother. He wouldn’t say when we asked. Irji said he must be a bastard. Liir said he didn’t care. He’s nice.” She moved her right thumb to her mouth, and with her left hand felt the cloth of Sarima’s gown just below the torque, until she found a nipple, and she ran her thumb over it lovingly as if it were a small pet. “Manek made him pull down his trousers so we could make sure his thing wasn’t green.”
Sarima disapproved—on the grounds of hospitality if nothing else—but was compelled to ask, “And what did you see?”
“Oh well you know.” Nor turned her head into her mother’s neck, and then sneezed from the powder with which Sarima kept her chins from chafing. “Stupid-looking boy’s thing. Smaller than Manek and Irji. But not green. I was so bored I didn’t look much.”
“Neither would I. That was very rude.”
“I didn’t make him do it. Manek did!”
“Well, no more of that. Now let’s have a story before sleeping. I’ve got to go down soon, so a short one. What do you want to hear, my little one?”
“I want to hear the story of the Witch and the fox babies.”
With less drama than usual Sarima rattled through the tale of how the three fox babies were kidnapped and caged and fed to fatness, in preparation for a cheese-and-foxling casserole, and how the Witch went to get fire from the sun to cook them. But when the Witch came back to her cave, exhausted and in possession of father flame, the foxlings outwitted her by singing a lullaby to make her sleep. When the Witch’s arm fell, the flame from the sun burned the door off the cage, and out the foxlings ran. Then they howled down old mother moon to come and stand as an unmovable door in the entrance of the cave. Sarima ended with the traditional back-and-forth. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 29