The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Of course no one asks me my opinion about other worlds,” growled Mr. Boss. “I who actually have traveled a good deal wider than some.”

  “Well?” Rain rarely addressed the dwarf. “What would you say?”

  He glowered at the girl, as if she were responsible for the Clock having suffered its rigor mortis. “Ah, what I could say, were I free to spill the beans.”

  “Don’t fill her head with nonsense,” snapped Ilianora. “It’s unkind.”

  “What about that Dorothy?” asked Rain. “En’t she from the other world?”

  “Who told you anything about her?” asked the dwarf.

  “Murthy did. When Lady Glinda was busy twisting her hair with that hot fork.”

  “I knew it,” said Brrr, shaking his natural curls.

  “Wherever she was from, Dorothy was a stooge of the Wizard,” said Ilianora. “She did his bidding, from what I heard. She killed Auntie Witch—”

  She paused. Brrr rarely heard her mention Elphaba Thropp. He knew his wife well enough to guess that the phrase Auntie Witch, rising to her own lips, had startled her. He swished his tail in his wife’s face to amuse her. She blinked at him in a noncommittal way.

  “Dorothy could have come from anywhere,” he drawled. “There’s a lot of Oz untraveled by the likes of Ozians. More outback than city centre in Oz, no? And beyond the sands, Fliaan and Ix, and other murky badlands too impossible to imagine.”

  “That’s not what Murth says,” protested Rain. “She says Dorothy was from the Other Land. You can’t get there by a cart. Just by magic.”

  “It’s a one-way ticket, honey,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me on this one.” He turned his pocket out as if looking for a chit for the return voyage: nothing.

  “Dorothy went back, though.”

  “Hah. They probably topped her and tumbled her in some hole. And made up another story. Just like they did to Ozma. People will believe anything if it’s impossible enough.”

  “Don’t,” said Brrr. “Let Rain learn the world the same way we all did.”

  “The scientific method of child rearing? Analysis by trial and terror?” The dwarf cracked his knuckles. “Move aside, Lion. I’m going for a walk. I can’t sit here and listen to you corrupt a child with the limits of logic. You’re all boobs and bobbycats.”

  He humped himself straight through the big spiderweb that Rain had been examining. Then he turned around and said, “Look, little wastrel girl. I’m on the other side. And what’s the news? It stinks over here, too.”

  The Lion whispered to his spouse, “Is he going to hold against Rain until she’s old enough to jab him one between the eyes?”

  “Who likes being cut out of the future?” she replied. “The Clock is giving no opinions—so how does he learn his way?”

  “The same as the rest of us. Dread, shame, and luck.”

  When he came back, forty minutes later, Mr. Boss had a wife in tow. His own wife. An unregenerate Munchkinlander whom Brrr believed he’d met before. The woman, like many of her kind, was compact, half as wide as she was tall, slightly bowed of leg, a face like a dented saucepan. Some sort of weed in her hands—she’d been collecting herbs, maybe. She stumped forward into the clearing with the confidence of a woodcutter.

  It took him a moment to place her. “Sister Apothecaire. As I live and breathe. I thought you’d taken a vow of chastity?”

  “I accidentally left it behind in the mauntery when you carried me off in that cart six months ago. Oh well. Whoever finds it can keep it; I’m through with it. Anyway, mind your own beeswax.”

  Ilianora turned to look. “It’s good to see you so recovered.”

  “From my fall down the stairs? Or from my life as a maunt? Never mind. Now I appreciate that you were kind to carry me and my cracked noggin away from the mauntery before the EC forces arrived. Being a Munchkinlander, I might’ve been taken hostage. As I remember, I was rather cranky at the time, though. With some relief you passed me over to a team of women wheelers on their way to the EC for a championship tournament. I stayed with them for a few weeks, as they rehearsed their moves in a farmer’s meadow northwest of here,” explained Sister Apothecaire. “After a while, I realized even sports competitions are essentially political in nature. Who needs it. Besides, as a Munchkinlander I was too short to keep up with the team. So I found an abandoned woodman’s lean-to and made do.”

  “Did you give no thought to returning to your roots in Munchkinland?” asked Ilianora. “Or repairing to the motherchapel in the Emerald City?”

  “The motherhouse? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve been co-opted by the Emperor’s religious diktats for years. I’m not bowing to fix the sandal of the Emperor Apostle, no sirree. I may be short but I’m not that short. As to Munchkinland, I don’t have many relatives left in Center Munch. They were all ruined by the effects of that twister that passed through when I was a child. The one that carried that little fiend of the winds, Dorothy. So I’m an orphan spinster apostate, and this morning I woke up all alone, until I met Mr. Boss, who has improved my prospects.”

  “I have no intention of improving anyone’s prospects,” said the dwarf, “my own included. That’s why I married you. Someone to share a similarly sour outlook, or even degrade it some. This lot is entirely too rosy now. They’re going to break into song any moment. They’ve even taken on a child to raise.”

  “Ha,” said Ilianora. “No one raises that girl. We’re escorting her to safety. That’s all.”

  At this Rain looked neither right nor left. She just kept studying the bole of a tree in which a squirrel might live, or an owl, or a chipmunk. Something secret, animal, magical. Unrelated.

  “The curse of parenthood. As if the world can be safe.” The dwarf almost smiled at his traveling companions. “Anyway, you all can come back to our little hovel-in-the-hellebore and we’ll serve you an omelet. Her specialty is plover’s eggs and scallions.”

  “It was all I was ever able to find,” confessed Sister Apothecaire. “I’m neither a hunter nor a gatherer, it seems. I’m more of a pantry parasite. Though I can bake a captivating muffin, given the right ingredients.”

  They accepted the invitation. “Congratulations,” said Brrr to the dwarf as they walked along. “If I had a cigar, I’d give it to you to smoke in honor of your impending nuptial experience.”

  “Oh, we’ve already consummated our union,” he replied.

  Brrr raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m a dwarf on a lonely road and I’ve been giving my life to this fool contraption as if there was something in it for me. She’s a Munchkinlander maunt who has been celibate since before her first milk tooth came in. Put it this way: we were ready.”

  Well, thought the Lion. Bested at that game, too. By a dwarf, no less.

  They approached the cottage in the woods, a ragged-roofed thing covered in old oakhair leaves. “Are you going to stay here?” asked Brrr. “Taking up the life of a retired husband? Collecting scallions instead of being bishop of the book, dragoman of the dragon?”

  “Of course not. After a hundred years of service, or whatever it’s been—it’s felt that long anyway—I want to see this escapade to its natural end. Wifey can wait for me or come along, makes no difference to me. Ours is not a very strong marriage. Still, I love her, in my way.”

  Mr. Boss grinned at his four-square bride. “What’s your name before you became Sister Apothecaire?”

  She squinted, and put a finger to her lips. “I forget. In faith classes, they called me Little Daffodil.”

  “Little Daffy. I like it. Well, come on, Little Daffy; let’s break out the best linen and tap a keg of springwater for our guests. It’s a wedding party, after all.”

  Rain was skeptical about the newcomer. Her hard little face was like an old rye loaf left out in the sun. But in general the girl didn’t care for people, so her specific apprehensions of Little Daffy came and went, uncataloged, evanescent.

  Brrr murmured to Ilianora, “Maybe this is our opportun
ity to peel off. Who would have guessed it? After all this time, our confirmed bachelor takes a wife.”

  “Perhaps, the Clock being somnolent, he needed something else to nag him, and a wife serves that function handily,” said Ilianora, coming as close as she ever did to joking. Still, there was something to it.

  After a slap-up supper Mr. Boss readied himself to get back on the road. Little Daffy went inside to tie on a fresh apron. Brrr admitted to being dubious about taking on another liability.

  “You saddled us with a child, and you’re second-guessing me about picking up a wife?” The dwarf raised his fists at the Lion. “I’ve had it with you. Come on. Last one standing. It’s time to settle this.”

  “I merely mean that your ladyfriend should be told about the danger we’re in,” said Brrr. He wasn’t going to fight a dwarf. He had no chance against that pipsqueak barbarian.

  Ilianora said, “Listen, you louts, I’ll just lay out the details and let Little Daffy decide for herself.” She called Little Daffy from the cottage and made short work of it. “One. We’re probably wanted for aiding in the sabotage of the Emperor’s fleet of ships on Restwater. Two. They’ll guess we have the Grimmerie with us, since the damage done was substantial. Three. The Clock is broken, and we can’t rely on its advice. Four, the Grimmerie won’t open for us anymore, once it gave us its advice to go south. So we’re on our own.”

  “South?” That was the only part that made Little Daffy blink. “The mud people? Munchkinlanders don’t venture into the clammy zone. Offends our sense of rectitude, both moral and hygienic. Why not west? I know some decent Scrowfolk who would hide us a while.”

  “The advice was south,” said Brrr, “and that’s where we’re headed.”

  “The advice was also to keep miles away from wretched girl-children,” interrupted Mr. Boss, “so this enterprise already starts off on a bad footing.”

  “I’m going south, with the Clock or without it,” said Brrr, “so if you want to stay with the Clock and you want me to pull it for you, the matter’s settled. Little Daffy, join us or not, but make up your mind now.”

  6.

  The Munchkin woman decided in favor of adventure, to see if her marriage would hold. Before she left the woodcutter’s shed, she buried a spoon in the soil beside the doorsill. She explained: an old Munchkinlander custom before travel was undertaken. If you ever make it home, there’ll be something to eat with, even if the only thing left to eat is dirt.

  “Lady Glinda could cook dirt,” said Rain.

  Highsummer turned into Goldmonth, though Brrr insisted that up north the season was known as Tattersummer, for the fringing of the leaves by insects. Little Daffy countered that in Munchkinland these late summer days were called Harvest Helltime, as farmers struggled to get crops in before thunderstorms or the occasional dustbillow. “Munchkinland is losing acres of good soil to the desert every year,” she clucked. “If the EC really intends to polka on down and set up housekeeping, they’ll need a good broom.”

  Rain listened to pictures more than people. Spoons in the ground, thunderstorms, dustbillows. The use of a good broom. The complexity of the world’s menace was daunting, but perhaps she’d learn to read it as she had learned her letters. First step of reading, after all, is looking.

  Eight-foot spiderwebs toward the southern edge of the oakhair forest. The Lion squealed whenever he stumbled into them, but Rain loved them. If she found them before they were battered by her companions, she looked through them, to see what she could see.

  It was, indeed, like peering through a window. From one side, she was a human-ish enough girl looking in to the spider world. She saw spiders with short eyelashy legs and spiders with thoraxes like lozenges. Spider-mites with bodies so small you couldn’t even make them out, but who sported legs that could span a skillet.

  Hello, little capery-leg. And how do you do today?

  What Rain didn’t see, and she kept looking, was groups of spiders. Did spiders have attachments? Other than to their webs? She watched each silvery gumdrop sink on its strings, but when the spider climbed back up, nobody else was ever home. Any guests who blundered into their threaded nets became supper, which seemed unsociable.

  Spiders had nerve, and speed, and art of a sort, but they had no friends. They didn’t go get married just like that.

  From the other side of the web, being a spider, Rain peered back at the humans, to see in pictures what she could see.

  For instance. The dwarf had called Ilianora “daughter” one time too many, so Little Daffy wondered if the veiled woman actually was his child. Ilianora was miffed. “Mr. Boss? Are you joking? My father was a prince, for all the good it did him.”

  Everything looked like something. So what did this look like now? Mr. Boss looked like he’d been stung by a flying scorpion. His lips were blown out and bitten back.

  Little Daffy looked suddenly ravished with interest by her fingernails.

  As a spider, Rain thought Mr. Boss and Little Daffy looked like tiny little matching grandparents, sour as mutual crab apples. They looked like they were playing at living. Or was this living? Rain wasn’t sure. She stayed out of the dwarf’s way as much as she could.

  She heard Brrr and Ilianora talk quietly, out of range of the dwarf and the Munchkin, but not out of the range of a spider’s attention. Ilianora proposed that, given the Clock’s new reticence, being married was a legitimate diversion for a dwarf at loose ends. Surely?

  “That attitude toward marriage makes of our union a slight mockery, don’t you think?” Brrr purred Ilianora up the side of her neck. “Anyway, they’re at it like a tomcat and the parish whore. Every night. It’s embarrassing.”

  “He’s got to do something. He’s not the type to take up knitting by a fireside, is he?”

  Rain turned her head. The dwarf was pitching a penknife into a tree trunk at forty feet. His face was sweaty, his raveling beard in need of a shampoo. He didn’t look as if he would favor doing piecework.

  “At least he’s stopped fussing so much over Rain,” continued Ilianora. “The book’s told us what to do—stick together, head south—but not why. You and I aren’t captives, though. If you have any other ambitions once we ditch the Grimmerie somewhere safe, spell them out.”

  Do I care what they do? wondered Rain, and couldn’t think of an answer.

  “I can’t go back to the Emerald City unless I’m willing to hand over the Grimmerie to them,” said Brrr. “Otherwise I’ll be thrown in Southstairs, and it won’t be pretty. You’ve told me how unpretty it would be, in no uncertain terms.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Southstairs.” Ilianora’s face turned a shade of stubbornness no spider had ever seen before. “I was asking you about your ambitions. No interest in your companions on the Yellow Brick Road? That Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman?”

  “The Scarecrow has all but disappeared. I suppose straw succumbs to mold and weevils. And last I heard, the Tin Woodman is still a labor agitator in Shiz. Wish he could organize our mechanical conscience here. Fat chance of that. Really, that Matter of Dorothy was a sorry passage, let me tell you. In a generally sorry life.”

  “Mine hardly prettier. After prison, to slip from doing resistance work into writing fanciful stories for a while. The dilettante’s gavotte, I think one would call it.”

  Rain saw their faces screw up more complicated, pancakes trying to become soufflés. Faces bloated, contorted, deflated, endlessly in disguise. Tiresome but curious.

  “That General Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall?” Brrr spoke in a softer voice; he didn’t know spiders have good hearing. “Cherrystone was the one who kidnapped you when you weren’t that much older than Rain is now. He didn’t recognize you all grown up, I know. But do you feel—in that vault of your heart—the yearning for vengeance?”

  Ilianora held her tongue for what seemed to Rain like a couple of years, but finally she spoke. “We took a risk walking into Mockbeggar Hall carrying the Grimmerie right under Cherrystone’s nose.
I believed Mr. Boss when he said the book was only on temporary loan to Lady Glinda. Getting it safely out of there, away from Cherrystone’s hands, seemed the more crucial objective. If the day arrives when I’m ready to take vengeance on him for slaughter—of my family—well, I suspect I’ll know it. It’ll come clear to me, privately, all in good time.”

  Secret knowledge, thought Rain. My head hurts.

  “As for now,” continued Ilianora, “let history have its way: I’m only a bystander. A dandelion, a spider, nothing more.”

  “We aren’t aimless. We have a goal,” the Lion reminded her. “We’re keeping the Grimmerie out of the hands of the Emperor of Oz. We’re heading south, as the book advised. And, incidentally, whether Mr. Boss likes it or not, we’re rescuing the girl.”

  At this they both looked up at her, and Rain found the spiderweb too thin between them. It had become a gunsight that focused her in its crosshairs. Their look of affection was brazen. To break the spell of their myopia, to divert them, she brayed, “I want to keep reading but we got no books. You write stories? Write me some words I can practice on.”

  “I don’t write anymore,” said Ilianora in one of those voices. “Ask someone else.”

  “Who’s to ask?” Rain felt fussed and hot. “The world en’t gonna write nothing for me. No words in the clouds. No printed page among these dead leaves. Can a spider write letters in a web?”

  “What nonsense,” said the dwarf from his distance, pitching his knife through the web a few feet above her head, severing a prominent girder so it collapsed like shucked stockings. “That would be some spider.”

  7.

  They didn’t dawdle but they moved without haste. The Lion had concluded that attention must still be centered upon the battle for Restwater, since goons with guns hadn’t shown up yet. A few days on, as they entered the hardscrabble terrain known as the Disappointments, they spotted the next oddkin, the latest of Oz’s free-range lunatiktoks. “It was ever thus,” the dwarf averred.