The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  In the end, Elphaba left them, drooping. “Another time,” she kept saying, “when you’re ready, when she’s ready. You see it’s essential; there’s so much grief she could be released from—and that she herself could lift, too—”

  “Good-bye for now,” they said, and the door closed behind her. The fires in the twin fireplaces mirrored back and forth across the room, and they took up positions of frustrated worthiness, at having to obey their older sister—curse her to hell.

  5

  Ice crusted the roofs, dislodged tiles, and dripped dirtily into the private chambers, the music room, the towers. Elphaba took to wearing her hat indoors to avoid the random icy dart on her scalp. The crows were mildewy around the beak and had algae between the claws. The sisters finished their novel, and collectively sighed—for life, for life!—and began to read it again, as they had done for eight years. In the fierce updraft from the valley, the snow seemed as often to be rising as falling. The children adored it.

  One glum afternoon Sarima bedecked herself in red woolen wraps and, out of boredom, went wandering through musty, disused rooms. She located a staircase in a trapezoidal, slanting shaft—perhaps this high alcove leaned against the side of the gable you couldn’t see, she wasn’t good at imagining architecture in three dimensions. She mounted the stairs anyway. At the top, through a crude grillwork, she saw a figure in the white gloom. Sarima coughed so as not to startle her.

  Elphaba was bent almost double over a huge folio laid out on a carpenter’s work bench. She turned, surprised but not very, and said, “We’ve had the same inclination, how curious.”

  “You’ve found some books, I’d completely forgotten,” said Sarima. She could read now, but not well, and books made her feel inferior. “I couldn’t tell you what they’re all about. So many words, you’d hardly think the world deserved such scrutiny.”

  “Over here is an archaic geography,” said Elphie, “and some records of usufruct pacts among various families of the Arjiki—I bet there are leaders who would be very happy to see these. Unless they’re outdated. Some texts that Fiyero had in Shiz—I recognize them too, the life sciences course of studies.”

  “And this big thing—purple pages and silver ink, how grand.”

  “I found it on the floor of this wardrobe. It seems to be a Grimmerie,” Elphie said, running her hand down a page only softly buckled with moisture. It made a pretty contrast, her hand on the vellum.

  “What is that, besides beautiful?”

  “As I understand it,” Elphie said, “a sort of encyclopedia of things numinous. Magic; and of the spirit world; and of things seen and unseen; and of things once and future. I can only make out a line here or there. Look how it scrambles itself as you watch.” She pointed to a paragraph of hand-lettered text. Sarima peered. Though her skill at reading was minimal, she gaped at what she saw. The letters floated and rearranged themselves on the page, as if enlivened. The page was changing its mind as they watched it. The letters clotted together in a big black snarl, like a mound of ants. Then Elphaba turned a page. “Here, this section is a book of beasts.” There were elegant, attenuated drawings in blood red and gold leaf, on the front and rear elevations of (it seemed) an angel, with notes in a fine hand on the aerodynamic aspects of holiness. The wings flexed up and down and the angel smiled with a saucy sort of sanctity. “And a recipe on this page. It says ‘Of apples with black skin and white flesh: to fill the stomach with greed unto Death.’”

  “I remember this book now,” Sarima said. “I do remember how it came to be here, I even put it up here myself; I had forgotten. Well, books are so easy to set aside, aren’t they?”

  Elphie looked up, her eyes leveling out under her smooth, rocklike brow. “Tell me, Sarima, please.”

  The Dowager Princess of Kiamo Ko was flustered. She went to a small window and tried to open it, but encrustations of ice prevented her. So she sat down in a flump on a packing crate and told Elphaba the story. She couldn’t remember exactly when, but it was a long time ago, when everyone was young and slim. Beloved Fiyero was still alive but he was off in the Grasslands with the tribe. Complaining of a headache, she was home in the castle all alone. The bell at the drawbridge sounded and she went to see who it was.

  “Madame Morrible,” Elphaba said. “Some Kumbric Witch or other.”

  “No, it was no madame. It was an elderly man in a tunic and leggings, with a cloak badly in need of attention by a seamstress. He said he was a sorcerer, but perhaps he was just mad. He asked for a meal and a bath, which he got, and then he said he wanted to pay by giving me this book. I told him with a castle to run I didn’t have much time for frivolity, reading and such. He said never mind.”

  Sarima drew her robes about her, and traced a pattern in the cold dust on a nearby stack of codexes. “He told me a fabulous tale and persuaded me to take this thing from him. He said that it was a book of knowledge, and that it belonged in another world, but it wasn’t safe there. So he had brought it here—where it could be hidden and out of harm’s way.”

  “What a load of tripe,” said Elphie. “If it came from another world I shouldn’t be able to read any of it. And I can make out a little.”

  “Even if it’s as magic as he says?” said Sarima. “But you know, I believed him. He said there was more congress between worlds than anyone would credit, that our world has attributes of his, and his of ours, a kind of leakage effect, or an infection maybe. He had a long fringy white-and-gray beard, and a very kind and abstracted manner, and he smelled of garlic and sour cream.”

  “Indisputable proof of other-worldliness—”

  “Don’t mock me,” said Sarima blandly, “you’ve asked me, so I’m telling you. He said it was too powerful to be destroyed, but too threatening—to that other place—to be preserved. So he made a magic trip or something and came here.”

  “Kiamo Ko called to him and he couldn’t resist her attractions—”

  “He said we were isolated, and a stronghold,” said Sarima, “and I couldn’t disagree! And what did it mean to me to take another book? We just lugged it up here, and put it with the rest. I don’t even know if I told anyone about it. Then he blessed me and left. He walked with an oakthorn staff over the Locklimb Trail.”

  “Can you really say you thought the man who brought this here was a sorcerer?” said Elphie. “And that this book comes from—another world? Do you even believe in other worlds?”

  “I find it a great effort to believe in this one,” said Sarima, “yet it seems to be here, so why should I trust my skepticism about other worlds? Don’t you believe?”

  “I tried to, as a child,” said Elphie. “I made an effort. The mothy, gormless, indistinct sunrise of salvation world—the Other Land—I couldn’t get it, I couldn’t focus. Now I just think it’s our own lives that are hidden from us. The mystery—who is that person in the mirror—that’s shocking and unfathomable enough for me.”

  “Well he was a very nice sorcerer, or madman, or whatever.”

  “Maybe it was some agent loyal to the Ozma Regent,” said Elphie. “Secreting some ancient Lurlinist tract here. Anticipating a revival of royalism, a Palace coup, worried about the kidnapped, sleep-charmed Ozma Tippetarius, coming in disguise to hide this document far away, but still retrievable. . . .”

  “You are full of conspiracy theories,” said Sarima. “I’ve noticed that about you. This was an elderly gentleman, very elderly. And he spoke with an accent. He surely was a wandering magician from some other place. And hasn’t he been right? The thing has sat here, forgotten, for what, ten years or more already.”

  “May I take it and look at it?”

  “I don’t care. He never said not to read it,” said Sarima. “At the time I perhaps couldn’t read at all—I forget. But look at that beautiful angel there! Do you really mean to say you don’t believe in the Other Land? In an afterlife?”

  “Just what we need.” Elphaba snorted as she picked up the tome. “A post Vale-of-Tears Vale-of-Tears.
”

  6

  One morning, after Six had tried and given up once again at some sort of lessons for the children, Irji suggested an indoor game of hide-and-seek. They drew straws and Nor lost, so she hid her eyes and counted. When she got bored with waiting she called out “One hundred!” and looked about.

  She tagged Liir first. Though he liked to disappear alone for hours at a time, he was bad at hiding when it was required of him. So they hunted together for the older boys, and found Irji in Sarima’s Solar, crouching behind the velvet ruffles suspended from the perch of a stuffed gryphon.

  But Manek, the best at hiding, couldn’t be found. Not in the kitchen, the music room, the towers. Running out of ideas, the children even dared to go down into the musty basement.

  “There’s tunnels from here all the way to hell,” said Irji.

  “Where? Why?” said Nor, and Liir echoed.

  “They’re hidden. I don’t know where. But everybody says so. Ask Six. I think because this used to be a waterworks headquarters—it did. Hell burns so hot they need water, and the devils tunneled up to here.”

  Nor said, “Look, Liir, here’s the fishwell.”

  In the center of a low-vaulted room, damp with moisture beaded up on its stone walls, stood a low well with a wooden lid. There was a simple device with a chain and a stone for shifting the lid sideways. It was child’s play to uncover the shaft.

  “Down there,” said Irji, “is where we get the fish we eat. Nobody knows if there’s a whole lake down there or if it’s bottomless, or if you can go down right to hell.” He moved the rushlight about, and there was a round of black water shining back a reflection, in chips and circles of chilly white light.

  “Six says there’s a gold carp in there,” said Nor. “She saw it once. Biggest old thing, she thought it was a floating brass kettle bobbing to the surface, and then it turned and looked at her.”

  “Maybe it was a brass kettle,” said Liir.

  “Kettles don’t have eyes,” said Nor.

  “Anyway, Manek’s not here,” said Irji. “Is he?” He called, “Hello, Manek,” and the echo rolled and dissolved in the wet dark.

  “Maybe Manek went down to hell in one of those tunnels,” said Liir.

  Irji swung the lid back on the fishwell. “But you’re it, Nor, I’m not going to look down here anymore.”

  They gave themselves the creeps, and raced back upstairs. Four yelled at them for making too much noise.

  Nor found Manek at last on the stairs outside the door to Auntie Guest’s rooms. “Shhh,” he said as they came near, and Nor tapped him anyway, saying, “You’re out.”

  “Shhh,” he said again, more urgently.

  They took turns looking through the crack in the weathered grain of the door.

  Auntie had her finger in a book, and she was mumbling things to herself, sounding them out this way and that. On the dresser next to her squatted Chistery, in an uneasy, obedient silence.

  “What’s happening?” said Nor.

  “She’s trying to teach him to talk,” said Manek.

  “Let me look,” said Liir.

  “Say spirit,” said Auntie in a kind voice. “Say spirit. Spirit. Spirit.”

  Chistery twisted his mouth to one side, as if considering it.

  “There is no difference,” said Auntie to herself, or maybe to Chistery. “The strands are the same, the skeins are the same; the rock remembers; the water has memory; the air has a past for which it can be held accountable; the flame renews itself like a pfenix. What is an animal, but made of rock and water and fire and ether! Remember how to speak, Chistery. You are animal, but Animal is your cousin, damn you. Say spirit.”

  Chistery picked a nit off his chest and ate it.

  “Spirit,” sang Auntie, “there is spirit, I know it. Spirit!”

  “Spit,” said Chistery, or something like it.

  Irji shoved Manek aside and the children almost fell through the door trying to see Auntie laugh and dance and sing. She picked up Chistery and hugged him, and said, “Spirit, oh spirit, Chistery! There is spirit! Say spirit!”

  “Spit, spit, spit,” said Chistery, unimpressed with himself. “Spite.”

  But Killyjoy woke from a nap at the sound of a new voice.

  “Spirit,” said Auntie.

  “Speared,” said Chistery patiently. “Spared. Spored. Sput sput sput. Spat spate spit, speed spurt spot.”

  “Spirit,” said Auntie, “oh, my Chistery, we’ll find ourselves a link with Doctor Dillamond’s old work yet! There is a universal design among us all, could we get in deeply enough to see! Everything is not in vain! Spirit, my friend, spirit!”

  “Sport,” said Chistery.

  The children couldn’t stop laughing. They clattered down the stairs and fell into the dormitory, and giggled into the bedclothes.

  They didn’t mention what they saw to Sarima or the sisters. They were afraid Auntie would be stopped, and they all wanted Chistery to learn enough language so that he could play with them.

  One windless day, when it seemed they must get out of Kiamo Ko or expire of boredom, Sarima had the idea that they go skating on a nearby pond. The sisters agreed, and dug out the rusting skates Fiyero had brought back from the Emerald City. The sisters baked caramel sweets and prepared flasks of cocoa, and even decorated themselves with green and gold ribbons, as if it were a second Lurlinemas. Sarima adorned herself in a brown velvet robe with fur tippets, the children put on extra trousers and tunics, and even Elphaba came along, in a thick cloak of purple brocade and heavy Arjiki goatskin boots, and mittens, carrying her broom. Chistery lugged along a basket of dried apricots. The sisters in sensible men’s tribal overcoats, belted and latched, drew up the rear.

  The villagers had cleared the snow off the center of the pond. It was a ballroom dance floor of silver plate, engraved with the flourishes of a thousand arabesques, mounded round with pillows and bolsters of snow to provide a safe repose for skaters who forget how to brake or turn. In the fierce sunlight, the mountains looked razor sharp against the blue; great snowy egrets and ice griffons wheeled high above. The ice rink was already noisy with screaming urchins and lurching adolescents (taking every opportunity to tumble and heap each other cozily in suggestive positions). Their elders moved more slowly, processionally around the ice. The crowd fell silent as the household of Kiamo Ko approached, but, children being children, the silence didn’t last for long.

  Sarima ventured out onto the ice, her sisters in a knot around her with linked arms. Being largish, Sarima was nervous of falling, nor were her ankles strong. But before long she had remembered how things went—this foot, then that, long languorous strides—and the uneasy meeting of social classes was accomplished. Elphaba looked like one of her crows: knees out, elbows flailing, rags flapping, gloved hands raking for balance.

  After the adults had had enough excitement (but the children were only still warming up) Sarima and the sisters and Elphie collapsed on some bearskins that the citizenry had spread out for them.

  “In the summer,” said Sarima, “we have a huge bonfire and slaughter some pigs, before the men descend to the plains, or the boys ascend to the slopes to guard the sheep and the goats. They all come into the castle for a chew of pork and a few tankards of ale. And of course, any time there’s a mountain lion or a particularly nasty bear, we let them into the keep until the beast is killed or wanders away.” She smiled with noblesse oblige in an abbreviated way, off into the middle distance, though the locals were ignoring the castle folk by now. “Auntie dear, you looked quite the sight in that robe, and poking along with that broom.”

  “Liir says it’s a magic broom,” said Nor, who had run up to throw a handful of granular snowflakes into her mother’s face. Elphaba turned her head quickly and tugged her collar up to avoid ricocheting snow spray. Nor laughed unkindly in a beautiful phrase like a woodwind, and scampered away.

  “So tell us how your broom came to be magic,” said Sarima.

  “I nev
er said it was magic. I got it from an elderly maunt named Mother Yackle. She took me under her wing, when she was alert enough, and gave me—well, guidance, I suppose you’d call it.”

  “Guidance,” said Sarima.

  “The old maunt said the broom would be my link to my destiny,” said Elphie. “I assume she meant that my destiny was domestic. Not magic.”

  “Join the sisterhood.” Sarima yawned.

  “I never knew if Mother Yackle was completely mad or a wise, prophetic old hen,” said Elphie, but the others weren’t listening, so she lapsed into silence.

  After a while Nor came flinging herself into her mother’s lap again. “Tell me a story, Mama,” she said. “Those boys are nasty.”

  “Boys are vexing creatures,” agreed her mother. “Sometimes. Shall I tell you the story of when you were born?”

  “No, not that,” said Nor, yawning. “A real story. Tell me about the Witch and the fox babies again.”

  Sarima protested, knowing full well that the children considered Auntie Guest a witch. But Nor was stubborn and Sarima relented, and told the tale. Elphaba listened. Her father had taught her moral precepts, had lectured her about responsibility; Nanny had gossiped; Nessarose had whined. But no one had told stories to her when she was young. She pulled herself forward a little so she could hear over the noise of the crowd.

  Sarima recited the tale with little dramatic involvement, but even so, Elphaba felt a twinge when she heard the conclusion. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

  “Did she ever come out?” recited Nor, eyes gleaming with the fun of the ritual.

  “Not yet,” answered Sarima, and leaned forward, pretending to bite Nor on the neck. Nor squealed and jiggled herself away, and ran to rejoin the boys.