The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “I’m not anything,” said Rain. “Yet. I’ll be a crow. Can I climb up in your tree with you? Can you teach me to fly?”

  The deranged woman finally looked at the girl. “What are you flailing at me for?”

  “No one gits me anything to read, and I got to practice my letters,” said Rain.

  Something of the teacher she had once been made the Bird Woman glare at them all, as if they’d confessed to abusing the child with castor oil. “I have a pen and a pot of ink. I shall write you your name so you know it when you see it on a writ of arrest. Get away from this lot, child. They’re headed for a cliff edge at quite the gallop.”

  “Oh, look who’s telling the future now,” scoffed the dwarf. “You going to take her off our hands?”

  “Nothing doing,” said Brrr, “if you want to keep having hands, Mr. Boss.”

  The Bird Woman was as good as her word. She wrote a number of words for Rain: the names of Brrr, and Ilianora; of Little Daffy and Mr. Boss; of Rain, too.

  “Anyone else important in your life?”

  Rain shook her head.

  “What about Lady Glinda?” asked Ilianora, but Rain showed no sign of hearing.

  The Bird Woman wrote, finally, Grayce Graeling.

  “That was me before I was a bird,” she told them. “So if they ask you if you ever met me, you can say no.”

  “Is that g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y?” said Brrr, whose spectacles were in his other weskit.

  “The orthographics have it several ways,” she said. “I vary it for reasons of disguise. Now I prefer Graeling, using both vowels, because it sounds more like a bird.”

  “They all sound the same,” said Rain. Grayce Graeling regarded Rain as if she were a conveniently placed spittoon, but she wrote out some extra words on a piece of paper so that Rain could practice reading. “Is this a magic spell?” the girl asked her.

  “Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

  “I know that,” Rain declared, sourly, grabbing the paper. “I seen some books before.”

  “Even if it’s broken, I’d keep that Clock out of sight, were I you,” warned Grayce Graeling. “The Emperor doesn’t want anyone else to have any toys. You’re courting trouble.”

  “Nosy crow. None of your business,” said Mr. Boss.

  The Bird Woman began to scale her tree. “Mind what I say. I have a friend or two in high places.” She pointed to some birds flailing against the blue, way up there.

  “Are you coming with us too?” asked Rain, who thought she’d discovered the Company’s new everyday trick, collecting lunatics. Behind Grayce Graeling, the other travelers made X-ing gestures at Rain with their hands.

  8.

  Why din’t she come along? She coulda taught us to fly,” groused Rain. “The book said us four,” said Brrr. “Remember? Four fingers, to the south?”

  “Then what about her?” Rain pointed over her shoulder at Little Daffy.

  “The book meant me too,” said Little Daffy. “I was hidden there in that spook-lady’s gesture, probably. The figure you described in the O. I was small, the thumb. You couldn’t see me in the prophecy, but I was there.”

  “The blind, the lame, the halt, the criminally berserk,” said Mr. Boss. “You have to stop somewhere or you don’t have friends, you have a nation.”

  The next day, meandering across the Disappointments, they kept looking back to make sure the Bird Woman wasn’t pacing after them. “Is them her friends?” Rain asked, over and over, of any local wren or raven, until the others stopped answering and the girl fell silent.

  They paused for supper when the heat of the day finally began to lift a little. As the adult females organized a meal, the Lion rested his sore muscles and slept quickly, deftly, for a few minutes. Then he told them, “I emerge from my snooze remembering who the Bird Woman is. Or was.”

  “Ozma herself, that’s it,” said Little Daffy. “A hundred years old but holding the line nicely. Am I right? Ya think?”

  “She was the archivist in Shiz who helped me look at Madame Morrible’s papers,” said Brrr. “A gibbertyflibbet if ever I saw one, the kind of person who enters a café with such fluster and alarm one would think she’d never been out in a public space before. Frankly, I doubt she possesses enough talent at spells to have had to bother going dotty at the Emperor’s prohibition of magic.”

  The dwarf lit his pipe and drew on it, releasing an odor of cherry tobacco cut with heart-of-waxroot. “Never underestimate the capacity of a magician to go dotty. Occupational hazard.”

  “Maybe news has gotten out somehow. News that the Grimmerie has emerged from hiding. Makes me nervous, this impounding of sorcerers’ tools. If the Emperor has lowered a moratorium on items of magic, on the practicing of spells—if Shell has called for a surrender of instruments and such—perhaps he’s trying to coax the Grimmerie in by default.”

  “Or make its presence in a barren landscape glow and shriek, so he can find it more easily,” said Mr. Boss. “I take your point. Our instruction to move south may prove to have been sound. We’ll keep going.

  “But not tonight,” he said to Rain, who hopped up and was ready to run ahead. She was happy with her scrap of paper. Ilianora had shown her how to fold it into a paper missile, and Rain had spent the afternoon launching it and chasing it, finding it and trying to read it, launching it and chasing it again. “Settle down, you ragamunchkin. There’s no moon this time of month, so no night travel. We’ll take our rest in the cool and move again in the morning.”

  “Read me what’s on the back,” Rain asked of Ilianora.

  Brrr watched his common-trust wife unfold the chevron of paper. The Bird Woman’s handwriting was on one side, but the other side had print upon it. It was a page ripped from a book. A normal book. Without its own shifting editorial policy toward each specific audience.

  “What do you know,” said Ilianora. “A scrap of an old tale. One of the fabliaux, one of the long-ago tales. They tell them at harvest festivals and bedtimes. This is one of the stories of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, and her bosom companion, Preenella.”

  “One of them?”

  “Oh, there are dozens. I think.” She squinted; the light from the fire wasn’t strong. “I think this is the one where they meet what’s-his-name.”

  Brrr felt uncomfortable when confronted with the lore of childhood. It always made him want to sass someone, or fart like a pricklehog. He knew why: as a cub, he’d never had someone to tell him stories of Lurline, Preenella, and Skellybones Fur-Cloak, or whatever his name was. Not, Brrr supposed, that he’d missed much. While Ilianora tried to remember the full tale—the page apparently only gave some segment of the narrative—Brrr watched Rain attend, with yawns and solemn fierce eyes. She probably hasn’t had much of a childhood either, he thought. But there was still time. She was a fledgling.

  By the time Ilianora was done, the fire had died down, and the dwarf and his Munchkin wife had cozied off for privacy. Rain took herself a few feet into the dark, to have a last pee. Ilianora murmured to Brrr, “What did you think of my storytelling?”

  The Lion whispered, “Did you make that up?”

  She nodded, shyly. “Most of it. Not the characters—not the famous ones, Lurline and Preenella and old Skellybones. But the rest.”

  He looked in Rain’s direction, out of caution. “You have a knack.”

  She laughed. “You weren’t listening, were you?”

  “It took me back,” he said, and that was true enough.

  Rain returned and settled down, pulling the hemp-wool blanket to her chin. This beastly hot summer wouldn’t last forever, said the night; perhaps the stars will turn into snowflakes and fall before dawn. It happens one night or another, eclipsing another summer night of youth. Snow on
the blooms.

  A few bugs beezled along, chirring their wings and sounding their sirens. An owl made a remark from miles off, but no one replied, except Rain, who murmured, “Lion?”

  For some reason he loved, loved when she called him Lion. Loved it. When she avoided reminding him he was Brrr, the creature with the sad history of being known as Cowardly—Cowardly his professional name, just about—but chose to say simply: Lion. His head reared back a few inches (these days his eyes didn’t always like the distance they had to take to focus on someone speaking). “What do you want, girl?”

  “Is Lurline real in the world? And those others?”

  It was almost a question about the sleep-world, he thought; she’d drifted far enough along. Still, he loved her too much to lie to her. What did one say? He tried to catch Ilianora’s eye for help, but she had put on her veil and was in her own distance.

  He would lower his voice in case, as he paused, she’d already slipped off to sleep. But when he said, “Well? What do you think?” she murmured something he couldn’t quite hear. He thought she might have said, “I can wait to find out.” Then again, she may have said something else.

  In time, she would probably know the answer more richly than he ever would. The thought afforded him comfort, and on that he rested all night.

  9.

  The Kells began to loom up before them. The Lion said, “I’m not going to drag this caboose up the sides of those bluffs. Get yourself another workhorse, Mr. Boss. The book’s advice seemed to suggest we go south.”

  “To get around them, we’ll have to head a little east, then,” said the dwarf. “It’ll take us into the southeast margins of Munchkinland, but we’ll meet up with the lower branch of the Yellow Brick Road eventually and then we can plunge to the south.”

  “When precisely will we have gone south enough?” asked Ilianora. “Or are we now wandering to take in the views?”

  “We’re putting as much distance as we can between us and the menace of the Emperor,” said the dwarf. “The EC never cared for Quadling Country except for the swamp rubies. And the taxes, when they could be collected. But given a war with Munchkinland, they’ll be letting the Quadling muckfolk lie fallow. A brief holiday from imperial oppression. We’ll be safer there. Can hide like pinworms in a sow’s bowels, like the book told us.”

  Rain said, “The book didn’t suggest anything.”

  They looked at her.

  “It was the person in the book,” she explained. “And en’t it possible she weren’t saying ‘go south’ but only ‘get back’? Like, um, ‘get back from this book, it’s too dangerous?’ ”

  “Oh, the Clock already told us who’s dangerous,” said Mr. Boss. “Keep your mouth shut. What makes you think you can read better than we can?”

  They settled into a better pace, but a certain germ of doubt attended their progress.

  As the weather finally cooled off, Rain was working on her letters. Little by little she figured out how to form them into words. She wrote comments by placing broken twigs on the ground. RAIN HERE. And TODAY. And WHO. And SORRY. She made words with pebbles on the beds of streams, big words that someone with an eye for stony language might see one day. WATER RISE she wrote, and WATER FALL. Rather expressing the obvious, thought Brrr, but he was as proud of her as if she’d been translating Ugabumish or inventing river charms.

  The occasional farmstead gave way to the occasional hamlet, with its own chapel and grange, its antiquated shrines to Lurlina, its stables and inns and the unexpected tearoom. They passed farmers and tinkers on the rutted tracks. By stature they were Munchkins (“Munchkinoid,” suggested the dwarf, who was one to talk), but they seemed equable and not especially xenophobic. Little Daffy splinted someone’s shabby forearm, dosed someone with rickets, and pulled a tooth from the wobbly head of an old crone. Everyone nearly gagged, but the grandmammy smiled with a bloody gap the size of an orange when the job was done, and she invited them home for tooth soup. An offer they declined.

  News of the troubles to the north was thin. One farmer asserted that the whole lake of Restwater had fallen to the invaders. “Any word of Lady Glinda?” asked Brrr.

  The man was startled. “Haven’t heard of her since the turtles’ anniversary swim meet. Is she still alive?”

  “Well, that’s what I was wondering.”

  “Scratch my behind with a bear claw. I got no possible idea if it’s so or no. Why would she be dead? Other than, you know, death?”

  On they trudged. The month being Yellowtime, their hours rounded golden, when the sun was out. But hours can’t dawdle—they only seem to. The leaves began to fall and the branches to show their arteries against the clouds.

  Finally they reached the Yellow Brick Road. It was ill tended, here; the occasional blown tree or stream overrunning its banks made passage slow. The stretch was clearly untraveled. That night they camped in a copse of white birches whose peeling bark revealed eyes that seemed to be trying to memorize them.

  “Can trees see?” asked Rain.

  “Some say the trees are houses of spirits,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, stupid people say it, but even so.”

  “I don’t mean tree-spirits,” said Rain. “I mean the trees. Can they see us?”

  “They weep leaves upon the world every autumn,” said Little Daffy. “Proof enough they know damn well what’s going on around here.”

  After Rain’s eyes had closed and her breathing softened, Brrr intoned to Ilianora, “Do you think everything is right with our Rain?”

  She raised an eyebrow, meaning, In what context do you ask?

  “I’ve known few human children. That Dorothy Gale just about completes the list. So I have no premise on which to worry. But doesn’t Rain seem—well—odd? Perhaps she is a girl severed from too much.”

  Ilianora shut her eyes. “She’s young even for her age, that’s all. She still lives in the magical universe. She’ll outgrow it, to the tune of pain and suffering. We all do. Don’t worry so much. Look at how she touches the trees tonight, as if they had spirits she knew about and we didn’t. That’s not weird; that’s what being a child is. I was such a girl, when I was alive.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Oh, I’m alive enough now.” Her eyes opened, and they were filled with whatever passed for love in that woman. “I am alive. But I’m not that girl. I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago. I see her life like an illustrated weekly story I read long ago, and it is pictures of that that I carry in my head. Her life in Kiamo Ko. Her life with her father, long ago—that famous Fiyero Tigelaar, prince of the Arjikis. Her life with her mother, Sarima, and her father’s erstwhile lover, Elphaba Thropp. It’s a child’s story in my head, no more real than Preenella and the skeleton hermit in the everlasting cloak of pine boughs. I’m not sad; don’t shift; leave me be. We were talking about Rain.”

  For her sake, he returned to the earlier subject. “I don’t fault her interest in the natural world. What I notice is her … her distance from us.”

  “She’s here curled up against your haunches. To get her any closer you’d have to swallow her whole.”

  “You know what I mean. She seems to float in a life next to ours, but with limited contact.”

  Ilianora sighed. “We agreed to take her to safety, not to perfect her. What would you have us do? Sing rounds? Practice our sums as we march?”

  “I don’t know stories. Maybe you could tell her more? I wish we could get through a little more. She loves us, perhaps, but from too great a distance.”

  “She’ll have to cross the distance herself. Trust me on that, Brrr. I know about it. Either she’ll choose to visit us when there is enough of her present to visit, or day by day she’ll learn to survive without needing what you need and I need.”

  “I think it’s called a knot in the psyche.”

  “It’s called grief so deep that she can’t see it as such. Maybe she never will. Ma
ybe that would be a blessing for her in the long run. If she can’t learn to love us, would that keep us from loving her? Brrr?”

  Never, he thought. Never. He didn’t have to mouth the word to his wife; she knew what he meant by the way he tucked his chin over the crown of Rain’s head.

  10.

  A day of mixed clouds and sudden fiercenesses of light. Breezy but warm, and aromatic, both spicy-rank and spicy-balm. The road passed through open meadows interspersed with dense patches of black starsnaps and spruces, where clusters of wild pearlfruit glistened in caves of foliage. Rain paid no attention to the clacking of nonsense rhyme that Ilianora had taken up. Rain heard it but didn’t hear it.

  Little Ferny Shuttlefoot

  Made a mutton pasty.

  Sliced it quick and gulped it quick

  And perished rather hasty.

  and

  Reginald Mouch sat on a couch.

  A ladybug bit him and he said ouch.

  It smiled at him. He started to laugh

  And bit that ladybug back. In half.

  “What’s up with you today, all this mayhem?” said Mr. Boss to Ilianora. “Awful passel of nastiness in children’s rhymes. Toughens up the little simpletons, I guess.”

  “A lot of biting too,” said the Lion, showing his teeth. He was proud that Ilianora was taking up the challenge to force-feed childhood lore to Rain.

  “I remember a counting-out rhyme,” said Little Daffy, and proved it.

  One Munchkinlander went out for a stroll,

  Two girls from Gillikin danced with a troll.

  Three little Glikkun girls chewed on their pinkies.

  Four little Winkie boys showed us their winkies.

  Five Ugabumish girls started their blood.

  Six little Quadlings went home to eat mud.

  Now who wins the prize for being most pretty?

  The girl from the Emerald, Emerald City.

  One Ozma, two Ozma, three Ozma.

  “And on until you miss a step,” said Little Daffy.

  “Which you rarely do,” said the dwarf.