The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “And the baby?” said Rain, thinking of the Arjiki baby in the papoose.

  “You really have wandered a far foreign strand, haven’t you? Old crones and cronies cherish the legend that the baby is nestled in some cradle underground, waiting to reemerge in Oz’s darkest hour. The second coming of Ozma, they call it. Since the first coming was a bit of a blunder.”

  “Well, that’s old folks. What about anyone else?”

  “The Wizard of Oz wasn’t known for sentimentality. Anyone who could send that Dorothy and her minions out to slaughter your grandmother in her retirement castle would just as easily have ground up a little of that rat poison into the baby’s formula and let the infant have her fatal teat. Poor mite.”

  “Hey, watch your mouth. One of those so-called minions is Brrr, my defender.”

  “I’m your defender now,” he told her.

  “And I’m yours,” she sallied back at him. “So I’m advising you, as your counsel, to watch your mouth before I hit you.”

  They were only teasing, but Tay became upset at the tone of their voices, and chattered in a scolding, magpie way. So they softened their tones, and held hands to pull each other up over the rocky way.

  3.

  They came into the hamlet of Red Windmill when the sun had just set. The mountains were dark cutouts above them, while the sky to the west retained its paleness, as if it rose so high it became scarce of air. One of the shepherds in the village could speak enough Ozish to tell them that the castle of Kiamo Ko was only a short distance along, but the climb was difficult at any hour and impossible by dark. Rain and Tip could be there in time for morning coffee, though, if they set out at sunrise.

  Finally—because she could distract herself no longer with interviewing Tip on all subjects that came to mind—Rain had to think about what they might find. The village translator wouldn’t understand the questions she asked, perhaps on purpose. He said it would be safe for Rain to go and see for herself. Now good night, and leave the cups from the mint tea on the small carpet outside the door.

  Tip was gentle and held her through the night, as her panic grew and then subsided. Surely Candle and Liir were there, and safe. Maybe the theft of the Grimmerie was only a rumor designed to strike fear and confusion into the military opposition. Or maybe her parents had fled, and left a note for her. Or fled and left no note at all, and there would be nothing but a hatchet on the floor and dark patches where the blood had dried to char.

  Or maybe Candle and Liir—my parents, practice that!—would be waiting, a fork luncheon slapped out upon some sideboard, like St. Prowd’s on Visitation Day. After all, Candle had been able to see the present, somehow. Maybe Candle knew that her daughter was restless tonight in the village below the castle walls of Kiamo Ko.

  Maybe her mother knew she was sleeping with her arms around Tip. Maybe she knew that Rain had finally understood that the one missing detail in the lectures about Butter and Eggs is that the basic effects become more gratifying the more clothes you remove.

  She didn’t know if she slept. She must have. She must have dreamed that a little white rat poked its head out of the sack of millet in the corner of the storeroom where she and Tip had been made comfortable, and that the white rat had said, “Everything changes you, and you change everything.” But she must be awake now, for Tip was saying “And you’re going to dawdle, today of all days?”

  She gulped a spoonful of some hot tea made of roasted straw and scarab chitin, and couldn’t wait any longer. She curtseyed as Scarly had used to do, back in that lost life when Scarly had been her only friend. Then Rain and Tip hurried out of Red Windmill, past the decrepit mill that stood sun-bleached of red and any other color and, since devoid now of sails, neutered in the buffeting winds. The travelers began the final ascent on a track wide enough for a cart, though only a pair of skark could have the strength to pull a cart up a slope this severe.

  A condensation on the weeds of a local skip, a damp glisten upon the sunny side of boulders. Melted sugar on cobbles. Rain and Tip couldn’t speak to each other even if they wanted, the climb that arduous. They scrabbled around the brutal finials of standing stones lurking at a corner of the mountain, and then Kiamo Ko loomed above them. It wasn’t at the peak of Knobblehead Pike, not even close, but it crowned its own calf of hill with an air of mold and decay one could smell from here.

  A moat of sorts, dry now, and a drawbridge of sorts, permanently down. Not much by way of defenses, if anyone could get this far, thought Rain. All of the timbers but two had rotted into the moat’s ravine, so Tip and Rain held hands and balanced each other like street performers as they trod across the breach and tiptoed into the castle courtyard through gates of iron oak and jasper warped permanently open.

  Four flying monkeys stood in some sort of ceremonial arrangement, two on each side. Lances crossed to make a triangular passage underneath. “I thought they were figures of myth,” whispered Tip. Other flying monkeys were less elegantly disported about the sloping cobbled yard leading past sheds, stables, gardemangers, collapsed greenhouses, and ornamental stone pergolas. Beyond loomed the central castle keep and its several wings and dependences.

  A broad flight of outdoor steps led to a door opened to the light and air, and the sound of horrible singing filtered out from some room deep inside.

  “You’ll have to hurry, they’ve begun already,” said one of the monkeys, lowering his rip-edged staff to scratch his behind.

  Rain and Tip walked up the steps to the front door, neither hurrying nor dawdling, as if they knew they were expected, as if they knew themselves what to expect. The entrance hall was huge and barren, almost a second courtyard, roofed with a groined ceiling. A steep staircase without benefit of balustrade rose against several of the walls of the irregularly shaped space. The music drew Rain and Tip along the ground level though, farther in. Through three or four successive chambers, each a few steps above the previous one. As if the castle itself had continued climbing the hill before deciding to rest.

  The chambers were sparsely furnished, if at all; a rickety spindle here, an occasional table with a broken clock upon it. But the baseboards were lined with wildflowers stuffed in every conceivable receptacle: milk jugs and butter churns, washing buckets and chamber pots, tin pails and rubber boots.

  They paused at the last door, and then went into a room more like a chapel than anything else, because the narrow tall windows were filled with colored glass set in lead fretwork. Two dozen congregants turned at the sound of their arrival. Neither Candle nor Liir was among them. The first one to speak was the Lion. No, not speech—but a howl such as Rain had never heard before and hoped never to hear again.

  He paced toward Rain and looked her forehead to foot as if he was worried he was conjuring her up. His mane was in disarray, his spectacles blotched with tears. Transfigured by distress, and Rain was a little frightened of him. She said softly, “I en’t grown up that much, have I? It’s Rain, Brrr.” Then she was running her hands through his mane, and he nuzzling her hip, smearing her tunic with damp. He only wept, and she said, “It’s Rain, it’s Rain,” and looked over his great trembling head at Tip and shrugged her shoulders to say, What? What did you expect, a fanfare? Then she noticed the coffin in its shadows on a bier made of sawhorses.

  After the fuss over their arrival had died down, the Goose had to continue with the ceremony of funerary rites. Rain sat them out, feeling incapable of taking up the study of new grief. Tip, in her stead, who ought to have been freed of strong emotion in this matter, attended and witnessed and wept on Rain’s behalf. Some older girl was singing a song that made no sense at all.

  Nor was dead, Auntie Nor. She was dead and laid to rest in a coffin milled from starsnap pine. She was dead and never to walk again, never again to sit up and in that affectless manner look around at the treacherous world and its chaotically foolish citizens. She was dead and had stopped steaming and had begun to reek, and the flowers on the coffin were meant to cancel as much of
the smell as possible. She was dead of grief, or dead of pain, or dead by the unsweet accident of coincidence. She was dead from pitching off a cliff just as Tip had done, though she didn’t fall six feet but sixty. The fatal tumble, thought Rain. It was always about to happen to someone. Ilianora Tigelaar was dead now and would be dead tomorrow and all the tomorrows too numberless to name. All that was best of her had been carried away in Lurline’s golden chariot, and the leftovers needed to be hurried off somewhere before the mourners succumbed to retching from the odor.

  By lunchtime the pyre had begun to consume the coffin, by evening the coffin had been burned to ash. No one looked at what remained. The flying monkeys would sit watch all night to make sure the ice griffons didn’t come down to snatch charred bones to crack in their wicked beaks. The monkeys were used to this, practicing the same rituals when the day of final flight arrived for one of their own. They considered it an honor to stand guard. Tip brought them cups of lemonade but kept his eyes trained away from the bonfire that hissled in the orchard beyond the castle walls.

  It was easy enough for Rain to hear the bare structure of the incidents that had led to her aunt’s death, but it was hard to understand them. Iskinaary filled her in with what he knew.

  The raid had occurred before dawn some eight, ten weeks earlier. The Lion and his companions hadn’t yet arrived in Kiamo Ko—they were still a couple of weeks out. They might have made the difference. Even a cowardly Lion can throw his weight around sometimes. As it was, panicked monkeys launched themselves airborne, shrieking. Liir had been manhandled out of his bed, and the nearby Grimmerie snatched up and satcheled. He’d been identified as Liir Ko, only child of Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West who had once lived as a hermit in this very place. He’d been hog-tied and roped over the flanks of a mountain skark, and the five men in black hoods and gloves rode off with him. They hadn’t been Arjikis. If they were Munchkinlanders, they were among the taller type who couldn’t be distinguished from Gillikinese by height. Maybe they were abductors hired by La Mombey. No one could venture a guess.

  Though Candle had screamed to be taken too, the dawn intruders had tossed her aside. They had no interest in her. They thought her weak in the mind. Probably a Quadling woman held no interest for them. Candle had bundled herself in goatskin boots and raced after them on foot, and though her pursuit proved fanciful and vain, she kept at it for a few days.

  Upon returning, she had pleaded with Nor to break the pledge under which she’d been bound—bound by Liir and Candle themselves—to conceal from them where Nor had hidden Rain. Originally they hadn’t wanted to know, for fear that just such an ambush might happen at last, and that Liir or Candle might reveal their daughter’s whereabouts if they were beaten to the margins of death for it. Liir had made Nor promise never to tell them. Never.

  Rain could work out Nor’s motives in resisting Candle’s entreaties. Back at the crossroads between Nether How and St. Prowd’s, Nor wouldn’t have been hard persuaded to carry out the task laid upon her. She had understood. She who’d been kidnapped about the age Rain had been when entering St. Prowd’s—she who’d tried to live with the knowledge that her own mother, her aunts, her full-blood brother had all been slaughtered by Commander Cherrystone, as he was then—she who’d been incarcerated in Southstairs Prison deep in the bowels below the Emerald City—she understood full well what crimes mortals might commit in the name of some advantage or other. She had promised not to reveal Rain’s whereabouts until the girl would have reached the age of maturity.

  No matter how Candle railed and wept, Iskinaary continued, Nor couldn’t go back on her word. She reminded Candle that if Liir’s abductors killed him in their attempt to get him to decode the deadly book for them, they would need Rain even more desperately. They would hunt for her even more diligently. They would stop at nothing. Nor knew such men. She had sewn herself up with a rough needle and a coarse thread soaked in vinegar. She afforded the world no child of her loins to maim and abuse, and she wouldn’t let Rain escape from her womb, either.

  The Lion took up the story.

  After his long absence from his wife, he’d arrived at Kiamo Ko from Munchkinland in time to see that the reunion was for naught. Under the relentless pleading and hectoring of Candle, Nor had gone mad, said Brrr, his paws in his mane and his back sore from the heaving of his sobs. His wife’s fragile hold on anything like hope had given out. She took to wandering out of the castle to avoid Candle’s weeping rages, to avoid the Lion’s own overtures and condolences. Whether Nor slipped or whether she threw herself, unable to bear the unreadable future, no one could venture a sound opinion.

  Maybe the mountain merely shuddered, as it had been doing for some time now. With a kind of mercy only the wild world knows, maybe the hillside had buckled, no longer willing to give fair purchase to a soul in such torment. The tremors that had begun with the great quake—the one that had toppled the east wing, where Sarima had once held her apartments—had continued reverberating on and off ever since. The residents of Kiamo Ko had almost become used to them.

  “I shouldn’t have left her in order to rescue Dorothy,” Brrr muttered in a voice Rain had to strain to hear. “We took our sweet months on a switchback journey in case we were being followed—we went to the Chancel of the Ladyfish first, to see if your kin had returned there, or had left word under the stone with the question-mark horse. When we found nothing, we decided to come here, hoping to find Candle and Liir. It was his boyhood home, after all. In any event, we thought this castle might be a safe hole to hide Dorothy in. But I never guessed Ilianora would come back here too. The very site of her childhood trauma, the abduction and the murders—and now it happens all over again. No wonder she couldn’t bear it.”

  At the death of Nor a few days earlier, Brrr continued, Candle had been unable to contain herself. She had bundled some nuts and sandwiches in a cloth and said good-bye to the travelers who had arrived shortly after Liir’s abduction—Brrr, and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, with that big horsey farmgirl in tow. Candle had left on foot. She intended to go to Nether How and tear the ceiling apart with her fingernails, if she had to. She would pull down the witch’s broom if it hadn’t already been found and stolen by the same brigands who had stolen her husband. She would climb to the top of the house and jump off. She would teach herself to fly on that broom or die. She would dare the broom to fail her.

  She would find Liir before he went farther from her than he’d already drifted.

  Rain and Tip might almost have passed Candle on the trail, Iskinaary implied, but the Quadling woman was traveling by night.

  Impossible, said Rain’s face, now knowing the pitilessness of the landscape.

  No, it was true, assured the Goose. Candle had the benefit of a lamp-lark that she had charmed with her music and petitioned to accompany her. “A lamp-lark can shine like a small beacon in the night if it’s singing to a mate. Trust our Candle to play her domingon to sound like something of which the lamp-lark approved.” Candle also took an uncharacteristically tame mountain goat who would allow a saddle on her.

  The Arjiki period of mourning for Nor had begun while Candle’s mount was passing out of sight. It was over now, just as Brrr and Little Daffy and Mr. Boss finished filling Rain and Tip in on the news.

  The girl they called Dorothy sat a little way off on a milking stool, listening gravely, wrinkling her nose at the stench of roasted death stealing in on the updraft. An old woman nobody had yet introduced to Rain sat next to her.

  4.

  So her father was gone, who knew where. Her mother was equally gone. Her aunt Nor was gone even further. The small family that Rain had inherited late in her childhood was scattered. As a social unit families have only a limited tenure, though it’s the rare soul who comprehends this while still a child. Rain was that soul.

  All that was left to her was the Lion.

  More than Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, the Lion stood for Rain. For her, beside her. His great line
d face had turned to her finally, as if it had taken effort to slough off grief and register who Rain really was.

  This upright young woman able to look him in the eye—what a sharply direct look it was, too. Loving and unflinching, the native opposite of how she had seemed several years ago. Living with her parents, then boarding at school, Brrr now learned, had straightened her out. Life had given her language. He was impressed and a little intimidated—but from the distance that a new grief imposes.

  While all Rain could see, looking back at the Lion both fondly and clinically, was a creature sodden with sorrow. Shocked, and barked at into something nearing old age. His very whiskers trembled with palsy.

  Tip tried to help her take measure of their situation, their resources. Laughably pregnable, this castle of Kiamo Ko. No place to stay if Rain wanted to be safe. How had Candle and Liir ever thought they could protect themselves here? Brrr, who hadn’t seen Liir since parting from him in the Disappointments and turning toward Munchkinland to rescue Dorothy, couldn’t answer. “I told you, it was his home, once upon a time,” the Lion insisted. “He grew up here. The first time I ever saw him was in this very courtyard, when the Witch’s flying monkeys had carried Dorothy and me up the slopes and dumped us onto the cobbles. You know, my left rear ankle has never been the same. I’ve always had to favor it.”

  Rain could tell, even in his bereavement, that the Cowardly Lion was trying to encourage her, to cheer her up. It didn’t help. Perhaps one day she would look back and it would help then.

  She was growing up, to be able to conceive of a “one day” and a “looking back.”

  “But that it was his home? So what?” Rain had no sentimentality about places. “His home is built on the edge of a chasm during earthquake season, and he feels safe so he stays there? Because it’s, it’s home?”