The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  Rain bobbed a slight curtsey. She had found that when she wasn’t sure what to say, a curtsey often smoothed over the silence. But today Miss Ironish said, “That’s common of you, Miss Rainary. A curtsey in this situation is what I would expect the parlor maid to drop. Don’t sell yourself short. Your mother may not have bothered to write or call, but still, you aren’t a member of the staff. You’re of finer stock than that. Despite your bullish awkwardness, good breeding will out. And if Madame Chortlebush and Madame Shenshen are right, you’ll be able to do solid academic work one day. So don’t pander.”

  “Yes, Miss Ironish.” Rain stifled the urge to curtsey five or six times in a row.

  At dinner Rain sat near Miss Mope, with her one-legged father in his narrow oiled beard, and Miss Igilvy, whose parents were so grizzled and birdlike their daughter must have been hatched from an egg. Above the chatter of schoolgirls, the talk was of the war.

  “Fleecing us with taxes. Draining us dry,” asserted Father Mope.

  “We defend all of Oz, and yet do the godless tribes of the Vinkus contribute anything in manpower or strategic thinking? I’m merely asking,” replied Father Igilvy.

  “You wouldn’t want strategic thinking from the Yunamata. They can’t think far enough to build their houses with stone walls!”

  The laughter was brisk and quickly over. “And yet we’re defending them, too,” said Mope. “And the Scrow, and I suppose those Arjiki clans in the Great Kells. They have more savvy than some of those other Winkies.”

  “Oh yes,” said ancient Mother Igilvy, patting her daughter on the head as if she were a loaf of bread warm from the oven. “I went out to the West once, you know, and met some Arjiki royalty.”

  “You never told me that, Mother,” chirped her equally ancient husband.

  “Of course I did.”

  “How divinely fascinating,” said Mope. “Did you write up your sentiments for the papers, or retail your anecdotes to Ladies’ Clubs?”

  “Indeed. And I remember quite well telling about one castle high in the mountains. It was the place where that Witch was brought down, do you remember?”

  Rain began to chew exceedingly quietly so as not to miss a syllable.

  “The Arjiki family who had lived there had long ago been slaughtered by the Wizard’s forces, I came to understand. The place—Kirami something, Kirami Ko, I think—was crawling with flying monkeys who did their best to put on a full cream tea. I’m afraid monkeys are shambolic by nature. We were taken all over the shabby place. It was built as a waterworks, you know.”

  “Miss Rainary’s surname is Ko,” said Miss Igilvy. “Pass the gravy boat?”

  “I never knew that,” said Miss Igilvy’s father to her mother. “A waterworks. I never.”

  “Of course you did, you old phony. You sat in the front row at each and every presentation I gave.”

  “I was napping with my eyes open. Why a waterworks, so high in the mountain? Was the building put up on a river suitable for a waterwheel of some sort?”

  “No, nothing of the sort. Don’t you remember? I had bright illuminatums, surely you recall! I had painted them myself, on vellum from Plutney & Blood’s.”

  “When the house lights go low I tend to go low too.”

  “I was led to believe that a giant reservoir, a lake of sorts, might lurk underneath the mountain, deep down, and that the castle of Kirami Ko was originally intended as the housing for a great artesianal device. A screw of some sort that would sink down oh for yonks, and pull up water in the way screws can manage to do.”

  “That’s the hugest helping of nonsense I ever heard,” said Mope affably. “The Vinkus River that cascades from the heights carries all the water the Kells could possibly provide. And every drop debouches into Restwater. The notion of drilling for more water when Restwater just sits there—the Wizard or whatever Ozma initiated that plan couldn’t be so idiotic.”

  “Well, don’t rely on my memory,” said Mother Igilvy. “But perhaps it wasn’t the Wizard’s plan after all. Maybe the Arjiki tribe thought it all up so as to be self-sufficient from the Emerald City, just like those truncated Munchkinlanders.”

  “Is there any more gravy at that end?” asked Miss Igilvy.

  “I never understood how the Wicked Witch of the West was killed by a bucket of water, as the legend has it,” said Mope.

  “Oh, I’ve worked that out,” said Mother Igilvy. “I have concluded the bucket must have been filled to the brim with several gallons of Kellswater. It’s a drearily lifeless and poisonous liquor, you know. Everyone says so.”

  “But what would she be doing with a bucket of Kellswater at the ready?” asked Mope.

  “Dear husband, you eat any more popovers and gravy and you’ll rip a stitch. My good sir, the Witch obviously had stashed away a dousing of Kellswater as a prophylactic against an attacker. But it was used against her by that Doromeo.”

  “Dorothy,” said Miss Igilvy firmly.

  “Did you hear she has come back, and has been put on trial in Munchkinland? Condemned to death,” said Mope.

  “The Munchkinlanders are a cruel, cruel people,” said Mother Igilvy with satisfaction. “They deserve the pummeling we’re giving them.”

  “Perhaps not quite the pummeling we advertise,” said Mope in a quieter voice. “Miss Plumbago, what do you hear from your grandfather, that distinguished General Cherrystone?”

  Rain swiveled her head; she couldn’t help it. Miss Plumbago was General Cherrystone’s granddaughter? How—how enwreathed life could manage to be. But just then Proctor Clapp got up to address the diners, and Father Igilvy fell asleep before the popovers and gravy were even removed from the table.

  Rain knew they had been talking about Kiamo Ko, about her own grandmother, Elphaba Thropp. It made her feel dizzy. Hiding in plain sight. As soon as Proctor Clapp had finished, Rain excused herself, though no one noticed, and headed back to her room across the yard. The stables were filled with horses of the visitors, and out in the back street the ostlers and chauffeurs were having a smoke around a brazier and rubbing their hands to keep warm. She liked the sound of that commotion, she liked the smell of the horses. And the rising heat of their bodies warmed the annex right up to her room. She changed her clothes and took Tay in her arms and lay back on her bed, knowing she would not sleep easily tonight. Not with pictures in her head of some murdered Dorothy, some murdered grandmother, some castle she had never seen with a cellar shaped like a shaft and a giant screw plunging down, down, down, into the heart of the earth. And then she heard a noise as of someone coming through her wardrobe. It did not sound like a ghost, so she got up to see what it was.

  12.

  In the pearl-blue gloom of midnight she couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy. But Tay was usually skittish and aggressive around boys, she’d noticed, and now it seemed only calm and alert, not hostile. “Miss bon Schirm?” ventured Rain, naming one of the taller girls. “Did your parents fail to come on Visitation Day too?”

  But it wasn’t Miss bon Schirm.

  “You scared me half to death. Come out of there.”

  A boy emerged. Three, four inches taller than Rain, though his hair was raked every which way, and maybe if it were properly combed he’d be closer to her height. The face was wary, urgent, perhaps clever—it was hard to tell in this light, and besides, Rain didn’t trust her estimations of people’s characters. Yet. She wondered, in fact, if she ever would. Perhaps now was a good time to start. Was he about to strike her?

  But there was Tay, attentive, curious, but hardly rearing to attack. A pretty good barometer.

  “What were you doing in there?”

  He held out the large shiny shell she had carried with her from nearly as far back as she could remember. “What is this?”

  “Mine.” She took it from him. His hands were shaking a little. “Did you come here to steal my things?”

  “No. Of course not. You haven’t got much.”

  “So I’m told. Are you go
ing to hurt me?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You hid in my cupboard and were going to jump out.”

  “When I heard you coming up I hurried in there. I was waiting until you went to sleep, and then I was going to slip away. I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “But what were you doing here in the first place?”

  “Looking for something to eat.”

  Rain shrugged. “Nothing to eat here. Pretty obviously. Unless you like books.” She took a closer look. “Are you very hungry? Are you starving? You don’t look in the pink of health.”

  “I’m not stuffed and groaning, that’s for certain. My stomach rumbles like caves collapsing.”

  She bit her lip and thought she should probably feel his forehead, but she didn’t care for touching people. “Are you ill?”

  “Look, I’ll just go. I’m sorry for this rude surprise. I didn’t know anyone was living in this building.”

  She was putting it together as best she could. “But you were hiding from someone.”

  “Just putting the shell farther back on its shelf. For safety,” he said, reaching his hand. She didn’t give the shell back.

  “Oh, that’s thoughtful. Do you ever break into anyone’s room and just, oh, knit? Or nip into someone’s house and just polish the wainscoting? You aren’t making any sense.”

  “You’re uncommonly calm. I’m glad for that. If you had screamed I would have gotten in terrible trouble. I’ll leave now. If you don’t say a word about this I will be a little bit safer.”

  Tay inched forward and sniffed at the boy’s very wet boots, which were open at the toe and heel and, now Rain thought of it, smelled dreadful. Then Tay wreathed itself around the boy’s ankle for a moment and looked up at Rain. She made herself do the improbable and reached out and put her palm to his forehead.

  “Am I hot?”

  She considered the answer to that, but while she had known how to be quiet her whole life, she had never quite learned how to lie. “I don’t know. I never felt someone’s forehead before.”

  “Feeling your own doesn’t work. You can’t feel yourself sick.”

  “Is that true?” She tried it. She just felt like herself. But what did herself feel like? She had never thought to ask.

  “Do you know what yourself feels like?” she asked him.

  “Oh, now that’s the question,” he replied, and buckled at the knees.

  “I didn’t intend such a powerful question,” she commented. Then she realized he had passed out on the coverlet that she and Scarly sometimes huddled under.

  She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing. She wasn’t allowed to leave her room after ninth bell, not until morning bell except to visit the privy. And there was nothing useful in the privy.

  She remembered that the stables were full of guest horses. She told Tay to stay put while she hustled into a waist-length wool coat and hurried down both flights of stairs. The horses in their stalls nickered and wheezed, and shuffled at the sound of her, and she was glad for their noise and warmth. Various coachmen still lingered, smoking cheap tobacco rolled in old newsprint, and husbanding pints of ale that Proctor Clapp had sneaked out to them when his sister wasn’t looking. The ale had made the men jolly. They chattered on as Rain went quickly through the few satchels that had been lobbed into the shadows just inside the stable doors.

  “My lady, she’s a right dab of codswallop, she is. She pays me but a penny farthing for the trip from Plaid Acres to Shiz, and then she’s late for the school supper because she’s got to stop and buy new gowns in that fancified silk depot over to Pennikin Lane!”

  A small quarter of cheese. Better than nothing.

  “My lady’s got yours beat in the mud with a beetroot up her arse. Mine’s so cheap she thinks I don’t merit the privacy of a loo with a closed door, so she stops before any town center at the last possible shrine to Lurlina and makes me take a dump behind it! Says it saves her a fee and helps stamp out paganism at the same time.”

  Oooh, a hunk of bread. Pretty hard, but maybe if she held it over her candle?

  “The old gov’nor en’t so bad. He’s a secret royalist, though. He prays for the Emperor every night like he’s told to do—he prays that the Emperor passes away peaceful in his sleep, and that some miracle return the Ozma line to the throne. He was born under an Ozma and he wants to die under one, he says. I tells him to his face, he’s gonna die under a lake narwhal, the missus keep putting on the pounds like she’s doing.”

  “You don’t say that, you buggery liar!”

  “I says it in my heart, like a prayer.”

  A lot of laughter outside. In the last satchel, a trove—a mince pie, almost fresh by the smell of it, and two carrots and an apple, probably for the horse, and a small porcelain flagon of something liquid. She nicked it all, neat as Handy Mandy, and a rather nicely woven pink blanket that was thrown over a mare, and she scurried up the stairs. No one heard her. One of the ostlers was saying, “Give over some of that Baum’s Liquid Hoof Dressing, my pretty piebald is sorer than sandpaper on a sow’s behind.”

  The intruder couldn’t wake, no matter how gently or roughly she rocked his shoulder. He couldn’t sample her terrific haul. It would be more stale in the morning. Damn. But she put the pink horse’s blanket on him, over the coverlet, and to keep herself warm she dressed herself in as many layers as she could. Thanks to Miss Ironish her wardrobe was fuller than it had been. She was grateful for the stiff wool stockings and the promenading cape.

  Round about midnight a brawl started among the carriage attendants. Maybe someone had discovered his flask was missing. She didn’t mind. She sat with Tay in her lap—Tay kept her warm too—and maybe she dozed and maybe she didn’t, but after a while the morning came anyway.

  He looked more bruised in the morning, but perhaps that was just the coloration of another ethnic group in Oz that Rain hadn’t previously collected. He sat up and said, “If I was full I would need the privy,” and she answered, “Well, eat up some of this and sooner or later.” She gave him a carrot that he chomped at quicker than a horse might. Then he followed it down with a sip from the flagon, which made him wince, and then a long gulp, which made him blush scarlet and pass out again.

  Breakfast bell. If she didn’t show up someone might come looking—it had happened before. She didn’t bother to straighten her clothes or change them, as there was no time. She grabbed Scarly’s slate and scratched on it DO NOT LEAVE, and she propped it up against her chair leg so he would see it if he woke. “Don’t let him go, Tay,” she told the otter, who normally spent the day in the room anyway, under restrictions of the siblings Clapp.

  After breakfast. “Your attire, Miss Rainary,” said Madame Chortlebush.

  “There was a new leak in the annex,” said Rain. “I shall have to use free period to launder my other gowns.”

  Later, Madame Chortlebush said, “I do not believe you are minding the lesson as you ought, Miss Rainary. Are you distraught because your mother couldn’t see her way to attending Visitation Day?”

  Rain opened her mouth. Then she thought, I am quietly lying to my teacher by pretending nothing is wrong. And I lied about my clothes without even thinking about it. So what’s the difference if I lie upon careful consideration?

  She didn’t know if there was a difference but she had to answer the question. “Yes,” she said to her teacher. As she spoke she realized that accidentally she was telling the truth. Effortlessly, she had learned to miss people a little bit. She didn’t know her Auntie Nor very well, but without saying it in so many words to herself, she had hoped to be surprised by a visit from her pretend mother anyway.

  Oh well, she thought. I have a boy in my room, and none of the other girls have that.

  “Come here. You need a good squeeze,” said Madame Chortlebush, who rather liked to give good squeezes.

  “I think my frock is too wrinkled already,” said Rain, but her teacher wouldn’t relent, so Rain succumbed. The
n at her desk she tried harder at her sums so as to throw off suspicion and not give the game away.

  Because she had planted the story of ruined clothes in the morning, at luncheon she was released from the chore of healthful stretching in the basement game room, it being too cold to promenade. She plowed across the new snow in the yard and entered the annex. The last of the carriages had left after breakfast. The building felt quiet. All too quiet, in fact.

  She hurried up the stairs, two at a time, ripping the hem in her skirt when her heel caught upon it, but she couldn’t stop.

  Tay was at the desk in the window in usual fashion, taking what warmth there was. The horse blanket was folded up and laid upon Rain’s bed. At first she thought the boy was gone. Then she saw that he had found the ladder in the hallway and had propped it up in the alcove where she kept her clothes, which now really were rucked up and unpresentable. In the ceiling of the alcove, which she had never seen before because that corner was so dark, he had found a hatch of some sort, a trapdoor. And he had lifted the hinged hatch about a foot, and was standing on the ladder in a pool of unearthly light that had never before come into any room she had occupied. He looked magical. The light made his scruffy mousy curls seem pale and almost translucent. His arms were plump and hard.

  She could tell he wasn’t looking into the schoolyard, but in the other direction. He wouldn’t have seen her coming. She didn’t want to frighten him and cause him to fall. She walked up softly and put her hand on his calf, to announce her presence. Startled, he nearly kicked her teeth out. She should have guessed. A fellow citizen of Oz who didn’t like to be touched.

  “You nearly scared the knickers off me,” he said.

  “Scootch over, I’m coming up,” she replied. He inched to one side, and there was just enough room for her to fit her feet on the rungs and join him.