The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Why do I deserve such a fiend? Why is my life so plagued? Who positioned her to influence my life?”

  “There are things I don’t know, and things I do,” said the dwarf. “Who Yackle answers to, if anyone, if anything, is beyond my realm of knowledge or interest. But why you? You must know this. For you”—the dwarf spoke in a bright, offhand tone—“are neither this nor that—or shall I say both this and that? Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. Can you be so dull that you have not figured this out?”

  “Show me something,” she said. “I do not know what you mean. Show me something the world hasn’t shown me yet.”

  “For you, a pleasure.” He disappeared, and there was the sound of mechanical parts being wound up, moving against one another, the grind of lubricated gears, the slap of leather belts, the chuck-chuck of pendulums swinging. “A private audience with the Time Dragon itself.”

  At the top, a beast prowled, flexing its wings in a dance of gestures, both bidding welcome and holding at bay. The Witch stared.

  A small area halfway up was illuminated. “A three-act play,” came the voice of the dwarf, from deep within. “Act One: The Birth of Holiness.”

  Later she could not have said how she knew what it was, but what she saw, in an abbreviated pantomime, was the life of Saint Aelphaba. The good woman, the mystic and recluse, who disappeared to pray behind a waterfall. The Witch flinched to see the saint walk straight through the waterfall (a guttering spout overhead drained real water out into a hidden tray below). She waited for the tiktok saint to come out, but she didn’t come, and eventually the lights went out.

  “Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

  “Wait, the Saint didn’t emerge as the tales say she did,” said the Witch. “I want my money’s worth or not at all, please.”

  “Act Two: The Birth of Evil.”

  Lights came up on another little stage. There was a credible likeness of Colwen Grounds painted on a cardboard backdrop beyond. A figurine who was Melena kissed her parents good-bye and went off with Frex, a handsome little puppet with a short black beard and a jaunty step. They stopped in a small hut, and Frex kissed her and continued on to preach. All through the rest of the scene he was off to one side, yammering away to some peasants who were busy screwing each other on the ground before him, hacking each other to pieces and eating their sexual parts, which ran with a real gravy; you could smell the garlic and sauteed mushrooms. Melena, at home, yawned and waited, and teased her pretty hair. Along came a man whom the Witch could not identify at first. He had a small black bag and from it he extracted a green glass bottle. He gave it to Melena to drink, and when she had, she fell into his arms, either stupefied and drunk as the Witch was tonight, or liberated. It wasn’t clear. The traveler and Melena made love in the same bouncy rhythm as Frex’s parishioners. Frex started to dance to the rhythm himself. Then, when the act of love was done, the traveler pulled himself off Melena. He snapped his fingers, and a balloon with a basket beneath descended from the fly space above. The traveler got in. It was the Wizard.

  “Oh, nonsense,” said the Witch. “This is pure poppycock.”

  The lights dimmed. The voice of the dwarf sounded from inside the contraption. “Act Three,” he said. “The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked.”

  She waited, but no area was illuminated, no puppet moved.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?” he answered.

  “Where’s the end of the play?”

  He stuck his head out of a trap door and winked at her. “Who said the end was written yet?” he answered, and slammed the door shut. Another door opened, just by the Witch’s hand, and a tray slid out. Lying on it was an oval looking glass, cracked along one side, scratched on its surfaces. It looked like the glass she had had since childhood, the one she used to imagine she could see the Other Land in, back when she believed in such a thing. The last she remembered of the oval glass was in her hideaway digs in the Emerald City. Inside the glass lived reflections of a young and beautiful Fiyero, and a young and impassioned Fae. The Witch took the mirror and hid it in her apron, and wandered away.

  There was nothing in the morning papers about the death of Madame Morrible. The Witch, with a treacherous headache, decided that she could wait no longer. Either Avaric and his beastly companions would spread the rumors, or they wouldn’t. There was nothing left to be done.

  Just let word get to the Wizard, though, said the Witch to herself. I would like to be a fly on the wall of his bunker when that happens. Let him think I killed her. Let that be how the news goes.

  9

  She returned to Munchkinland in a punishing journey, exhausting herself. She had slept so little, and her head still throbbed. But she was proud of herself. She arrived in the front yard of Boq’s cottage, and called for the family to come.

  Boq was out in the field, and one of his children had to be dispatched to fetch him. When he came running, he had an adze in one hand. “I wasn’t expecting you, it took me a minute,” he said, panting.

  “You’d have run quicker if you’d left your blade behind,” she noted.

  But he didn’t drop it. “Elphie, why have you come back?”

  “To tell you what I have done,” she said. “I thought you would like to know. I have killed Madame Morrible, and she can no longer harm anyone.”

  But Boq did not look pleased. “You took against that old woman?” he said. “Surely she was beyond the point of hurting anyone now?”

  “You’ve made the mistake that everyone makes,” said the Witch, cruelly disappointed. “Don’t you know there is no such point?”

  “You had worked to protect the Animals,” said Boq. “But you did not intend to sink to the level of those who brutalized them.”

  “I have fought fire with fire,” said the Witch, “and I ought to have done it sooner! Boq, you’ve become an equivocating fool.”

  “Children,” said Boq, “run inside and find your mother.”

  He was scared of her.

  “You’re sitting on the fence,” she said. “Here your precious Munchkinland is going to be sucked back into the folds of Royal Oz, under His Highness the Emperor Wizard. And you see what Glinda is up to, and you send that child on her way with the shoes that belong to me. You took a stand when you were young, Boq! How can you have—spoiled so!”

  “Elphie,” said Boq, “look at me. You are beside yourself. Have you been drinking? Dorothy is just a child. You may not retell this to make her into some sort of fiend!”

  Milla, alerted to the tension in the front yard, came out and stood behind Boq. She carried a kitchen knife. Whispering noisily, the children watched from the window.

  “You do not need to defend yourselves with knives and adzes,” said the Witch coldly. “I had thought you would care to know about Madame Morrible.”

  “You are shaking,” said Boq. “Look, I will put down this thing. Clearly you are upset. Nessa’s death has been hard on you. But you must get control of yourself, Elphie. Don’t take against Dorothy. She is an innocent creature. She’s all alone. I beg of you.”

  “Oh, don’t beg, don’t beg,” said the Witch, “I could not abide begging, from you, of all people!” She ground her teeth and clenched her fists. “I will promise you nothing, Boq!”

  And this time she got on her broom and flew away. Recklessly, she mounted the sides of air currents, until the ground below had lost any detail sharp enough to cause her pain.

  She was beginning to feel too long away from Kiamo Ko. Liir was an idiot, headstrong and lily-livered by turns, and Nanny sometimes forgot where she was. The Witch didn’t want to think about yesterday, the death of Madame Morrible, the accusations made by the puppet play. She could hardly be more averse to the Wiz
ard than she already was; if there was a shred of possibility to that sick idea of his having fathered her, it only made her hate him the more. She would ask Nanny about it when she got home.

  When she got home. She was thirty-eight, and just realizing what it felt like to have a sense of home. For that, Sarima, thank you, she thought. Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

  But she decided to head toward Kiamo Ko by following the Yellow Brick Road. She would make one last try for the shoes. She had nothing left to lose. If the shoes fell into the hands of the Wizard, he would use them to bolster his claim to Munchkinland. Maybe, if she tried, she could shrug her shoulders and leave Munchkinland to its own fate—but damn it, the shoes were hers.

  She finally found a peddler who had seen Dorothy. He stopped by the side of his wagon and rubbed the ears of his donkey as he discussed it with her. “She passed here a few hours ago,” he said, chewing on a carrot and sharing it with the donkey. “No, she wasn’t alone. She had a ragamuffin crew of friends with her. Bodyguards, I suspect.”

  “Oh, the poor frightened thing,” said the Witch. “Who? Munchkinlander beefcake boys, I wonder?”

  “Not exactly,” said the peddler. “There was a straw man, and a tin woodman, and a big cat who hid in the bushes when I passed—a leopard maybe, or a cougar.”

  “A man of straw?” said the Witch. “She’s awakening the figures of myth, she’s charming them to life? This must be some attractive child. Did you notice her shoes?”

  “I wanted to buy them from her.”

  “Yes! Yes, did you?”

  “Not for sale. She seemed very attached to them. They were given her by a Good Witch.”

  “Pigspittle, they were.”

  “None of my affair either way,” said the peddler. “Can I interest you in anything?”

  “An umbrella,” said the Witch. “I’ve come out without one, and it looks nasty.”

  “I remember the good old days of the drought,” said the peddler, fishing out a somewhat worn umbrella. “Ah, here’s the bumbershoot. Yours for a nickel florin.”

  “Mine for free,” said the Witch. “You wouldn’t deny a poor old woman in need, would you, my friend?”

  “Not and live to tell about it, I see,” he answered, and went on his way uncompensated.

  But as the wagon passed, the Witch heard another voice: “Of course, no one asks a beast of burden, but it’s my opinion she’s Ozma come out of the deep sleep chamber, and marching on Oz to restore herself to the throne.”

  “I hate royalists,” said the peddler, and lashed out with a crop. “I hate Animals with attitude.” But the Witch could not stop to intervene. So far she had been unable to save Nor, she had been incompetent at bargaining with the Wizard. She had been a moment too late to murder Madame Morrible—or had she been just in time? Either way, she should not try what was clearly beyond her.

  10

  The Witch trembled on the lip of an updraft. She had brought the broom higher than ever before; she was in a state of exhilaration and panic. Should she pursue Dorothy, should she snatch those shoes away—and what were her real motives? Was it to keep them out of the hands of the Wizard, just as Glinda had wanted them out of the hands of power-hungry Munchkinlanders? Or was it to snatch back some small shred of Frex’s attention, whether she had ever deserved it or not?

  Beneath the broom, clouds began to gauze the view of rock-freckled hills and patchwork meadows of melon and corn. The thin twists of vapor looked like the marks of erasure made by a schoolchild’s rubber, streaking whitely along a watercolor sketch of a landscape. What if she should just keep on, urging the broom higher, yanking it up? Would it splinter as it beat itself against the heavens?

  She could give up these efforts. She could forsake Nor. She could release Liir. She could abandon Nanny. She could surrender Dorothy. She could give up the shoes.

  But a wind came up, a shoulder of hard air leaning onto her left side. She could not force the broom against it. She was driven sideways, and down, until the Yellow Brick Road once again etched a golden thread between forests and fields. There was a storm on the horizon, slotting bars of brownish rain between lavender-gray clouds and gray-green fields. She hadn’t much time.

  Then she thought she caught sight of them below, and dove down to see. Were they stopping to rest beneath a black willow tree? If so, she could finish things up now.

  11

  By the time the storm lifted—and the Witch awoke from what she now identified as a horrible hangover—she wasn’t sure it was the same day. She wasn’t even sure she had gotten near them—could she have let them slip through her fingers like that? But whatever the case, delusion or foggy memory, the Witch didn’t dare follow them into the Emerald City. Madame Morrible had many friends in this rotten regime, and the news would have gotten through by now. There might even be search parties out for the Witch. So be it.

  Though it galled her, for the time being she had to give up on the idea of reclaiming Nessa’s shoes. She scarcely rested during the entire trip back to Kiamo Ko, except to stop and pick some berries, and nibble some nuts and sweet roots, to keep her strength up.

  The castle had not been burned down. The Wizard’s reconnaissance army was still camped at its outpost near Red Windmill in a state of bored readiness. Nanny was busy crocheting a pretty casket cover for her own funeral, and making guest lists. Most of the guests were already in the Other Land, presuming that for Nanny there was an Other Land. “How nice it would be to see Ama Clutch again, I quite agree,” shouted the Witch, giving Nanny’s shoulders a squeeze. “I always liked her. She had more character than that simpering Glinda.”

  “You were devoted to Glinda, you were,” said Nanny. “Everyone knew it.”

  “Well, no more,” said the Witch. “The traitor.”

  “You smell of blood, go wash up,” said Nanny. “Is it your time?”

  “I never wash, you know that. Where’s Liir?”

  “Who?”

  “Liir.”

  “Oh, around somewhere.” She smiled. “Look in the fishwell!”

  By now an old family joke.

  “What new nonsense is this?” said the Witch, finding Liir in the music room.

  “They were right all along,” he said. “Look what I finally caught, after all these years.”

  It was the golden carp that had long haunted the fishwell. “Oh, I admit that it was dead and I brought it up with the bucket, not a hook or a net. But even so. Do you think we’ll ever be able to tell them we finally caught it?”

  All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.

  “We can only hope so,” she said. She wondered, faintly, if it was

  immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked? “Everything else was all right while I was gone?”

  “Just fine,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re back.”

  She grunted, and went to greet Chistery and the chattering kin.

  In her room she hung the old glass with a cord and a nail, and kept from looking at it. She had the horrible feeling that she would see Dorothy, and she didn’t want to see her again. The child reminded her of someone. It was that unquestioning directness, that gaze unblinkered by shame. She was as natural as a raccoon—or a fern—or a comet. The Witch thought: Is it Nor? Is it that Dorothy reminds me of how Nor was at this age?

  But back then the Witch had not cared for Nor, not really, even though her face had been a small, velvet reworking of Fiyero’s. Except for Nessarose, and Shell, the Witch had never warmed to the glowing promise of children. She had always felt more alone in this regard than in her color.

  No—and now her glanc
e did fall on the tired old looking glass, despite her intentions. She thought: the Witch with her mirror. Who do we ever see but ourselves, and that’s the curse—Dorothy reminds me of myself, at that age, whatever it is . . .

  . . . The time in Ovvels. There is the green girl, shy, gawky, and humiliated. To avoid the pain of damp feet, splashing around in clammy leggings made of swampcalf hide and waterproof boots. Mama, pregnant with Shell, huge as a barge. Mama praying nonstop for months that she might at last bring a healthy child into the world. Mama dumping the bottles of liquor and the pinlobble leaves into the mud.

  Nanny tends to little Nessa, papoosing her around in the daily hunt for charfish, needle flowers, and broad bean vines. Nessa can see but she cannot touch: what a curse for a child! (No wonder she believed in things she couldn’t see—nothing is provable by touch.) For his atonement, Papa takes the green girl with him on an expedition to the relatives of Turtle Heart, a many-branched family living in a nest of huts and walkways suspended in a grove of broad, rotting suppletrees. The Quadlings, who are more comfortable on their haunches, duck their heads. The smell of raw fish in their homes, on their skin. They are frightened of the unionist minister, finding them out in their squalid hamlet. I have no firm memory of individuals, but for one old matriarch, toothless and proud.

  The Quadlings come up, after a period of shyness, not to the minister but to me, the green girl. She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she, impenetrably mysterious and dense—she stands as Dorothy stood, some inborn courage making her spine straight, her eyes unblinking. Her shoulders back, her hands at her side. Submissive to the stroke of their fingers on her face. Unflinching in the cause of missionary work.

  Papa asks forgiveness for the death of Turtle Heart, maybe some five years earlier. He says it is his fault. He and his wife had both fallen in love with the Quadling glassblower. What can I give you to make up for it, he says. Elphaba the girl thinks he is mad, she thinks they are not listening, they are mesmerized by her weirdness. Please forgive me, he says.