The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  She had never seen the city of Shiz from anywhere but gutter level, as her own window in the annex looked onto the cloistered schoolyard with its ivied walls. This high up, she saw a confusion of roofs in the bright cold glare of a winter noontime. Gables and domes—that was St. Florix, surely?—and crenellations, were they, and clock towers. And stone steeples. And scholars’ towers poking from the colleges. “That dark one with the pointy windows is Three Queens Library,” said the boy. “And do you see the one with the gold escutcheons high up, under the gutters? That’s the Doddery at Crage Hall, I think.”

  “It’s like a field planted with toys.” She couldn’t stop her voice from sounding breathy and girly, but, hell, it was beautiful.

  “And the weather vanes. You can make out the nearer ones. I see a werewolf over there. Can you see it?”

  “The one on the little pointy bit of roof?”

  “No, that’s a Queen Ant, for some reason. To the left, above the mansard roof with the pattern in the tiles.”

  “It looks more like a were-pig than a werewolf.”

  He laughed at that, which made her feel they were standing too close. But there was no choice if they wanted to survey Shiz from this height; the hatch was only so wide. Their shoulders were touching, and the only warm thing. The wind was fierce. “Look, a goose,” he told her.

  “Iskinaary,” she said, before she could stop herself.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Quadling word for goose.” There, another lie. She was getting good at it.

  The bells in one of the nearby towers rang the half. “I better pretend to be organizing my clothes or I’ll catch it, but good,” she said. She was reluctant to leave the airy world above Shiz, the spires and slopes and ravines topping the city’s close-built architecture. But she risked being tossed out of St. Prowd’s altogether if she was discovered this deep in the breaking of rules.

  He descended after she did, replacing the hatch. Her room suddenly felt musty. Small. Inappropriate for entertaining a visitor. He seemed too close, now that they had touched shoulders. “Get me down my dresses, will you, I have to press one of them and look more presentable for afternoon classes.”

  He handed her a gravely ugly frock, the color of mushy peas, a single broad ribbon sewn down the left thigh panel its only decoration. She had never thought about clothes and their decoration before. She had never thought about thinking about it, either. She was under a spell of multiple reflections and it felt too much for her. “Isn’t there anything nicer?” she snapped, as if she were a Pertha Hills dame in a high street establishment, and he the clerk.

  “I don’t care about clothes,” he said, which was something of a relief. “How about this green one?”

  “With the pucker in the bib? That one? It’ll do. Hand it here.”

  She grabbed her change of clothes. She didn’t have time to do much but flatten out the skirts with her hand and twist the ties so they lay straight. She tried to think of what to say to him to make sure he stayed. She pulled the wrinkled garment she had slept in over her head. She’d already tossed it to the floor when she heard him gasp. She turned to him, questioningly, in nothing but her smalls and the red heart locket. He said, “Please—I’ll wait in the hall if you like.”

  “Why?”

  He couldn’t find a word for it, and finally blurted, “Courtesy, I guess.” By then she’d already slipped the replacement over her head and was wriggling her arms into its scratchy sleeves. “Never mind,” he said when she emerged looking at him in total bewilderment.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are, and why you’re here?”

  “You can call me Tip. I suppose. I’m guessing you haven’t reported me to the governors of this establishment?”

  “I haven’t said anything to any of the girls or the teachers, if that’s what you mean. But why shouldn’t I?”

  “I’m keeping out of sight, if I can.”

  “Well, I hope no one saw your stupid head popping out of St. Prowd’s roof just now.”

  “No one but cinder pigeons, I bet.”

  “Look. I only have a few more moments, and then I’m away again until dinnertime. I’ll try to bring you back some real food if I can manage. But you have to tell me—”

  “Actually I don’t have to tell you anything. And I don’t need your food. Though I’m glad you are nice enough not to have ratted on me. I’ll be gone by the time you get back, and I won’t steal anything, I promise, not even that shiny shell you have. Cor, but that’s a bit of wonderful.”

  “Don’t go. You’re not well.”

  “What are you, an infant doctor?”

  “I have a cousin who is an apothecaire and I picked up a few things. You’re liable to frostbite in this weather, or the racking congestibles.”

  “That sounds serious.” He was mocking her.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Really. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. You owe me that much. I risked getting discovered as a thief last night to find you food and drink.”

  “Plenty powerful lemon barley you provided, too. All right. I’ll stay till you get back, but I’m not promising much beyond that.” He picked up the book that Scarly had been struggling through. “The Were-pig of Dirstan Straw,” he read. “Oh, that’s where you got the were-pig from.”

  “Of course. You get everything from books.”

  13.

  His name was Tip; she knew that much, and knowing his name saw her through the rest of the endless day. She managed to brush past Scarly in the buttery and whisper for an extra few rolls to sneak to her room, which was forbidden under pain of expulsion. The maid contrived to deposit a tea towel with rolls and even a beet-and-ham pasty into Rain’s lap. Scarly’s faintly raised eyebrow made Rain feel cheap somehow. Still, she couldn’t risk giving Tip’s presence away to the maid. In the interest of keeping her position secure, Scarly might feel more beholden to her employers than Rain felt to her teachers.

  After dinner and prayers she returned to find that Tip had spent the afternoon taking apart a small iron stove he’d found in some boys’ dormitory below. Piece by piece he had hauled it upstairs and reassembled it. “It kept me warm, all those steps,” he said. “And there’s a handsome little stash of coal in the cellar beyond the stable doors, too, so you can be set for a while.” For the venting of smoke he’d jerry-rigged a snake of cylindrical tin piping up through the hatch, which was now open three inches. The cold air flooding in defeated the effect of the warming fire. But the atmosphere was improved, anyway. He was proud of his work.

  He wouldn’t tell her much about where he’d come from or why he was hiding. He admitted he’d been wandering the country outside Shiz during the summer and had come across the military camp of St. Prowd’s boys. One afternoon he’d befriended a few of them doing an exercise in bivouac, and they’d told him about this vacated dormitory in town. It hadn’t been hard to find. He hadn’t heard Scarly or Rain come or go; the stable walls were thick with horse shawls, and the hay stacked everywhere probably served as extra insulation.

  “But what have you been doing during the daytime?” asked Rain.

  He cadged food from the stalls on market day, which was easy enough, he told her. But when it grew too cold for outdoor market he was having a harder time of it. For a couple of weeks he’d worked as a kitchen boy in Deckens College, but he’d been caught trying to leave the larder with brisket in his shirtsleeves and been dismissed. Pickings had grown harder as the cold deepened. He’d taken to siphoning oats out of the feedbags of carriage horses, but the mash he could make of them was pretty indigestible. When his space downstairs had been invaded by the arrival of guests for what he’d learned was called Visitation Day, he’d had no choice but to scarper up the stairs just around the turn at the landing. He’d heard Rain come in from the schoolyard side and start up the steps. He’d panicked and kept ahead of her, sprinting, arriving at the top level before she did. Without knowing it, Rain had cornered him by going right to
the room he had found at the top of the stairs.

  “But where are you from? Have you no home? No family? Why are you hiding?”

  “Where are you from?” he countered, as if he could tell by her expression that she was as guarded as he. And while she could lie about some things, to people who didn’t figure much, she found she couldn’t lie to Tip. Neither could she break her oath to her family and put those people in jeopardy by saying anything about them. So she said nothing.

  She did, however, admit that he could call her Rain.

  He spent the night on the floor beside her bed, under the horse blanket.

  He slept very hard. He didn’t hear her get up and turn the coals and, finding no ember willing to catch again, remove the venting pipe and close the hatch, for warmth. When she went back to bed she saw that Tay had moved from her mattress to the crook in Tip’s elbow. Just for an instant she wished she were Tay, but that seemed such utter nonsense that she threw herself back onto her bed again so hard she banged into the wall and hurt her nose. Neither Tip nor Tay stirred to ask her if she was all right.

  Before breakfast bell, Scarly appeared with a tea towel covering four hot scones, and so the brief time in which it was just the two of them, just Tip and Rain—well, and Tay—was already over. Rain tried not to resent Scarly standing there with her dropped jaw. Tip sat up and made to cover himself with the blanket, but since he wasn’t undressed there wasn’t much point. “Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, “en’t you cooked yourself up a pottage of mischief somehow, and no mistake.”

  Rain took the scones and handed them to Tip. “Well, now you’re ruined too, for feeding the intruder, and I’ll say so if you squeal on us, Scarly. So it’s best to keep your mouth closed until we decide what we’re going to do.”

  “We?” said Scarly. “Which we is that, I wonder?”

  Rain wasn’t quite sure, but it felt a nice word to say.

  All too easily Scarly became a conspirator with special duties in menu augmentation. Tip was no fool. Well-cooked, plentiful if simple fare, delivered almost hot from the griddle, was more appealing than cold scraps that the rats had gotten to first. Snowy alleys and college kitchen yards had lost their lustre.

  Tip settled into Rain’s room, sometimes reading there all hours if the weather was beastly, or pacing the city streets for news and exercise if the day was relatively fine. Once in a while he came back late, slipping in from the service lane through the stables. The hinges were so old that one of them had snapped, permitting a door to be angled just so, allowing to slip through any boy narrowed enough by hunger.

  Once Rain asked, “What are you hunting for?”

  “News, that’s all.”

  “News of your family? Is that it?”

  But he wouldn’t talk about his family, and neither would she. A silent compromise they’d never discussed, and usually she remembered not to raise the subject.

  This time he relented, up to a point. “I want to hear about the war.”

  Rain had no interest in the war. She hardly remembered the time of the dragons on Restwater, except as an imprecise excitement that she sometimes believed she was imagining. The war had been going on as long as she could recall. It wasn’t a real thing in any useful way; it was just a condition of existence, like the forward lunge of time, and the ring of deadly sands that circled all of Oz, and the fact that cats hunted mice. “All the war news sounds made up,” she complained. “I never saw a cannon dragged through any country lane. I never heard a gunshot from the classroom window. If there was once more ample food to be had, it was before I was able to get used to it. I hardly believe that peace and war are opposites. I think to most people they’re the same thing.”

  “You’ve put your finger on a huge problem, right there,” he said. “But if you’re crossing the Wend Hardings on foot, which is the only way to cross them, and if you come across a contingent of various Animals of different sizes and abilities and temperaments who, despite their natural hostilities and exhaustion, are training together to hold the line against professional soldiers—well, then.” He sighed, hardly willing to sum it up. “You see more than you’d like. Battle readiness seems a bundle of small disagreements trying to aim in a common direction against a common, larger disagreement.”

  She had studied a little geographics under Madame Chortlebush. “Are you telling me you came from Munchkinland?”

  “I’m not telling you anything. We’re talking about the war, and how people talk about it in Shiz.”

  She tried not to pry. Too much. “How do people talk about it in Shiz?”

  “You know as well as I do. You live here. You’ve lived here longer.”

  “Yes, but.” Since he had given something away, inadvertent or not, she allowed the tiniest scrap of herself. “I’m not from here, either. So I’m not sure what I hear. Anyway, girls in school don’t talk about the war. They talk about their teachers and about boys.” She regarded Tip not in fondness but in appraisal. “They’d eat you alive.” At that comment he didn’t blush; he blanched. Rain hurried on. “War just seems to crest and crest until a checkmate is reached, and then it stays like that forever. Getting staler and staler. Nobody ever winning.”

  “Until one side or the other manages a breakthrough strategy.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh. Forcing the other side into bankruptcy. Or negotiating a pact with some useful third party, say. For instance, if Loyal Oz could persuade the trolls to switch their allegiance, the EC Messiars would be able to invade Munchkinland through the Scalps. Those trolls are pretty fearsome in battle.”

  “Why don’t they then? It sounds pretty basic.”

  “Because the trolls under Sakkali Oafish have a deep-seated grudge against Loyal Oz dating back to a rout of Glikkuns called the Massacre at Traum, which happened north of here. They wouldn’t unite with the Emerald City if there were only one troll left alive. They’re proud like that.”

  “So if that strategy won’t work, what else might?”

  “Maybe the Emperor will die, and the pressure to continue this endless war will lift.”

  “Isn’t the Emperor divine? He can’t die.”

  “I suppose time will tell. Or one side will discover a new weapon that’s stronger than what their enemy has.”

  “Like what kind of weapon?” said Rain, as innocently as she could.

  “Beats me. A great big cannon that can shoot a thousand arrows all at the same time? A poison someone can sneak into the food rations of the army cooks? An important book of magic spells that contains secrets no one has managed to unlock yet?”

  “None of them sounds very likely,” said Rain.

  “Who knows. The word in Shiz, since you asked, is about all these things.”

  “And the word in Munchkinland?”

  “Some of those same ideas. Being hoped for, anyway.”

  She saw a chink. “But what are the other ideas in Munchkinland, that you don’t hear in Shiz?”

  Maybe because he wouldn’t answer questions about his family, he felt obliged to answer her now. “Flying dragons would be a good idea. They were used once before by the EC, but in an attack by anarchists the Emerald City lost their stable of dragons and their expertise.”

  “Dragons in Munchkinland. Imagine.”

  “Few have heard of such a thing. And I’m not saying there are. Just that a lot depends on the fact that there might be. One day.”

  “Are you a spy? Aren’t you a bit young to be a spy!”

  “We’re all spies when we’re young, aren’t we?” She didn’t think he was being evasive. She knew what he meant. She agreed with him.

  “Tell me what you find out, when you find out anything of interest,” she said. “Promise me that, Tip.”

  “Spies never make promises,” he said, but now he was teasing her.

  14.

  He wasn’t going to stay there forever. That much was clear. Rain just didn’t understand what conditions would prompt his departure.

>   She lay awake at night sometimes when Tip was asleep, out of sight, his head on the floor a foot below her head. She could hear him breathing, a faint whine in his nose that never sounded when he spoke. A distilled aroma of sour raspberries on his breath, even from this short but crucial distance. She was becoming aware of the distance between human creatures at the same time she was becoming aware of their capacity to be entwined sympathetically. Perhaps, she thought, this is perhaps how it usually goes, but since she’d never been given to reflection, it seemed as if everything was breaking anew upon her at once.

  Tip’s interests in current events made her listen more carefully to what the teachers said when they thought the girls were learning off rubrics of spelling or rehearsing acceptable dinner party remarks in their heads.

  “Cutting the salary again, according to the magnificent Gadfry,” murmured Madame Shenshen to Madame Ginspoil one day in study hall.

  “We shall be living on bread and water like the miserable armies,” replied Madame Ginspoil, helping herself to a pink marzipan pig secreted in her beaded purse. Rain thought: Armies. Miserable. Bread and water. She would tell Tip.

  “It’ll be better though in the spring, which isn’t far off,” said Madame Shenshen. “Everyone says there will be a new push to bring down that General Jinjuria.”

  “She seems a right smart tartlet, to hold our army at bay all this time. If she’s captured, she can be dragged here and made to tutor stupid young girls,” seethed Madame Ginspoil. “Quite the suitable punishment. She can live on bread and water for what she has cost Loyal Oz in comforts.”

  “The cost of war is in human lives, you mean, surely.”

  “Oh, bother, of course, that. It goes without saying. But I have chilblains, what with the reduction of coal allotments for our quarters. Chilblains, I tell you. I have refused to knit balaclavas for the troops this year. If they can’t win the stupid war after all this time, they’ll have no comfort from me. Miss Rainary, are you eavesdropping upon your elders and betters?”