The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “No place like it,” said Brrr. “Don’t be withering, it’s not becoming.”

  Rain didn’t get it. She asked Mr. Boss and his wife what they thought, but they seemed not to be taking the full measure of the tragedy. They slept a lot. Maybe scaling a mountain this steep was harder on their little legs than on Brrr’s or Dorothy’s.

  Of Dorothy, Rain was dubious. The foreigner seemed spooked to be here in the Witch’s castle; she didn’t like to be left alone. At first Rain was afraid that Dorothy was going to make a play for Tip, and it would be the Scarly thing all over again, but Dorothy seemed oblivious to Tip’s sweetness. “I just keep thinking about Toto,” she said. “I wonder if he’s still hunting for me somewhere, out in this blasted hideous world you cretins inhabit.”

  “You’ve gone sassy, you have,” said Mr. Boss.

  “Being convicted of double murder and condemned to death has helped erode some of my native midwestern taciturnity.”

  “I think your little dog probably met up with some great big dog,” said Mr. Boss, “who is a lot more fun to hang out with than you.”

  “How dare you make fun of me in my distress. I’d like to find a pack of those great big dogs and introduce them to your behind.”

  “They’re doing this for your benefit, you know,” said Brrr to Rain, but she wasn’t sure she believed him.

  She walked with Tip out of the castle again, in the direction from which they’d approached. Away from the smoldering embers. She cried, but turned her head away from his shoulder, not wanting to shame herself that much. Tip knew better than to ask why she was crying. It wasn’t really the death of her aunt, or the splintered lives her parents were living in defense of her, who had never asked to be defended. It was the whole pitfall of it, the stress and mercilessness of incident. She felt she was living on a stage controlled by tiktok machinery, and the Time Dragon dreaming her life was prone to nightmares.

  Tip seemed to know all this without saying a word. He was the only article of faith that stood between her and the edge of the cliff, which looked eager to buckle if only she gave it half a chance.

  She didn’t sleep much, in the small room to which the senior flying monkey had showed her. Tay crowded her pillow, shivering. Apparently the rice otter didn’t take to mountain air. Tip slept nearby, but apart, on a pallet outside her door. She could hear his breathing when he finally fell off to sleep. That was the first comfort afforded her since they’d arrived.

  In the morning, she was all business. “Who is that old woman at the window?” she asked Iskinaary.

  “Her name is Cattery Spunge, but she’s called Nanny,” said the Goose. “She’s already passed through her second childhood and she’s in her second adolescence now, and has decided to be sprightly again after spending a generation in bed.”

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “She raised your grandmother Elphaba, and she lived here with Liir until he was about fourteen. She’s been retired for about forty-five years but she’s considering looking for a new position as governess or possibly manager of a granary or something.”

  “Hello, Nanny,” said Rain, approaching her.

  The woman turned and put down her bowl of frumenty. Rain had never seen anyone so old. Her cheeks and neck were wrinkled like a piece of vellum scrunched and only partly reopened. “Elphie?” said Nanny.

  “No. My name is Rain.”

  The old woman said, “My cataracts are puddings. I’d like to dig them out with sugar tongs. My, but you do look like Elphaba. Are you sure?”

  “I just arrived.”

  “Well, I’ve been expecting you for a long time.”

  Rain wasn’t certain that she had convinced Nanny who she was, but she decided it didn’t matter. “You are the only one who knew Nor when she was a child.”

  “Yes, that I did.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was the first one to ride the broom, you know. Elphaba told me. She was bright and peppy and full of beans.”

  “But how could she ride that broom? She didn’t have an ounce of magic in her.”

  “I’d have said so too. But who is to say that magic follows our expectations. Give me your hand, child.”

  “Are you going to read my palm?”

  “With my eyes? I can’t even see your fingers, let alone your lifelines. No, I just want to warm up my own hands. The young have so much fire in them.”

  “Do you have any idea where my father might be?”

  “Oh, my dear, Frex went off to the Quadling lands to bring faith to the noble heathen, don’t you know.”

  “My father,” she said. “I’m talking about Liir. Liir Ko.”

  “Liir Thropp, you mean,” she said. “Elphaba’s boy. When the soldiers came and kidnapped the family, and little Nor among them, Elphaba was out somewhere. Shopping, or raising mayhem. Or conducting lessons in sedition. I don’t want to talk about that part. Liir followed them and got kidnapped too, but then they let him go because they didn’t know who he was. They thought he was a kitchen boy. Well, he always was grubby, I’ll give them that. They’d have saved themselves a lot of bother if they’d kept him when they had him.”

  “That was then,” she said. “What about this time? Did you hear them arrive, did they say anything that would give you a clue about where they were taking him?”

  “I’ve always been a very sound sleeper. It’s my best talent.” She took out a few teeth and cleaned them with her thumb, and then reinserted them. “Popcorn kernels, you know; the old gums can’t take it anymore.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Nanny, “that there is nothing more I would like right now than to tell you what you want to know. But I can’t. So the next best thing I would like is to have a nap in this sunlight. I feel the winter chill something fierce, you know. If when I wake I find I’ve remembered anything further, I’ll call for you. What did you say your name was?”

  “Rain.”

  “I don’t think so.” She squinted at the bright summer sun. “Snow, perhaps, or hail; it’s too cold for rain at this time of year.” She pulled a tippet about her shoulders and almost immediately began to snore.

  Rain continued her circuit, stopping to press Iskinaary for his opinions. “Why didn’t you go with him? You’re supposed to be his familiar, aren’t you?”

  “Only a witch has a familiar, and he’s not a witch.”

  “That’s no answer, and you know it.”

  Iskinaary refused to budge on the matter, but Rain pestered. “It doesn’t make sense. You’ve always stayed by his side. You could have followed him from a height and seen where he was being taken. I can’t believe you failed him at this point in your long friendship, if that’s what you call it.”

  She goaded him further until finally he hissed, “If you must know, I wanted to go with him, but he yelled at me to stay behind and take care of Candle. So I followed his word though it broke my heart.”

  “You’re a big fat liar. You didn’t follow his word at all, or you’d be traveling with my mother down to Nether How, to get that broom. You broke your promise to him. You are as cowardly as the Lion.”

  “I resent that,” called the Lion, who wasn’t listening although certain phrases do carry.

  “Save it for the magistrate.” Iskinaary drew himself up to his full height. His cheeks were sunken in a way they had not been before, but his eye was steely menace still. “Candle told me to stay here because you were likely to show up. She has that talent. She sensed your approaching.”

  “And so she left,” said Rain, without mercy, for what mercy had her mother ever shown her? “A talent for lighting out just when I show up. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “She wanted to protect you. She said you were more important than she was.”

  “I doubt you believe that,” said Rain.

  “I never said I believe it.”

  The senior flying monkey, Rain learned, was called Chistery. He was
so stooped that his chin nearly touched his knees. He was devoted to Nanny and agreed with her that Rain had something of Elphaba about her. “Frankly, when I first saw you, I thought you were Elphaba returning.”

  “As I understand it, Elphaba was green.”

  “So I’ve heard. But flying monkeys are color-blind, so I wasn’t going by your pallor. You do have something of Elphaba about you. I can’t quite name what it is.”

  “The talent of being in the wrong place almost all the time?”

  “Maybe, Rain, a feeling for magic. Have you ever tried it?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Or maybe it’s your air of disdain. Elphaba was strong in that department.”

  Perhaps to distract the disconsolate group, Dorothy told Rain and Tip about her day in court. The subject of her trial and her conviction bore heavily on her. At lunch one day, Dorothy turned to Nanny and said, “You were present, Nanny. You were here when Elphaba disappeared. The day her skirts went up in flames and I threw the bucket of water on her. I ran weeping away when I saw her disappear, but you came rushing up the stairs as I went down.”

  “Oh yes, I used to have very good knees. An attractive domestic, according to certain opinions posted anonymously to me.”

  “What did you see when you got there? You never would say. You came down the turret stairs and locked the door, and said she was dead, but whatever happened? I don’t remember a funeral such as the one we had for Nor.”

  “The times were different, the standards were different, and I was on my own. After all these years you can’t hold me to lapses in decorum. Who are you, anyway? Are you a tax collector, asking all these nosy questions? I tithed to my eyeteeth and anyway I never earned a penny. I never stole that golden garter. Melena gave it me. Everything I did, I did for love of Melena Thropp, my lovely Melena with the powdery skin and the lavender nosegays. Sue me.”

  “I’m Dorothy,” said Dorothy. Her voice was taking on a peevish edge. “Dorothy Gale, from Kansas.”

  “Oooh she’s smart,” said Nanny to the rest of the table. “Wants us to know her name and address so when we read it in the columns we’ll go oooh la la. I’m not impressed. Pass the port.”

  Little Daffy handed down a pitcher of well water and poured it for Nanny. She took a big gulp of it and said, “Yum, smackers,” and fell asleep in her chair. Chistery came around to wipe her lips and to wheel her away, which wasn’t easy, since his chin hardly came up to the seat of her chair. But his long arms, crooked with bone spurs, could still reach up to the chair’s handles, so off they went.

  “But what happened to Elphaba?” asked Rain. Perhaps cruelly, she added, “Look, we know what happened to Nor. We saw it. What happened to the Witch?”

  The Lion left the table without asking to be excused, uncommon rudeness for him, but no one blamed him.

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it,” said Dorothy. “What really happened to the Witch?”

  After her first reunion with the Lion, Rain noticed that he was keeping to himself. He had taken to sleeping in the very larder, Chistery whispered, that old Nanny had locked Liir and the Lion in when the Witch was hounding Dorothy up the stairs to her tower, and thence to the parapet over the gorge. “If I had only lived up to my name,” Rain heard the Lion mutter once, to himself or maybe to Tay, who was hunting for something along the baseboards under the flour bins.

  “What do you mean?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “If I’d been as cowardly as they called me, ever since the Massacre at Traum, I’d never have accompanied that foreign agitatrix, Dorothy, out this way. The first time, I mean. I’d have gone on to a long and sorry life as the confirmed bachelor I was really cut out to be.”

  Meaning, Rain supposed, what? That he regretted the consequences caused by the death of the Witch? That he regretted having fallen in love with Nor, a human woman? Could he really wish that he hadn’t ever met her, to avoid this suffering now? Rain knew herself to be young, untried by any suffering that really counted. (Rain was still alive, after all, and though her parents were dispersed and endangered, she wasn’t stretched out upon a stone floor with her chin in her paws.) But even were something to happen to Tip, she thought, she couldn’t imagine wishing she had never met him.

  Maybe she just didn’t know Tip well enough yet. Maybe you have to earn the kind of grief that the Lion was exhibiting. Though privately, and perhaps this was callous of her, she also wondered if Brrr was putting it on just a bit thick.

  Still, he had the benefit of knowing what Kiamo Ko had been like with his common-law wife in the next room, for a few days anyway, of fatal reunion, and now—where was she? Where was she really? Where did the dead go?

  Where had Elphaba gone?

  5.

  It took Rain two or three days to realize that Chistery and the other flying monkeys were deferring to her, as if she were the owner of the castle now. “I’m not Elphaba,” she reminded Chistery, after he came down from Nanny’s room where he had been discreetly changing her bedding.

  “Don’t I know it,” he told her, but nicely.

  “And I’m not my father.”

  “You’re quite a bit like your father, you know.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know him at all.”

  “See, that’s what he always said about his mother too. Disavowal of family resemblances; it’s a family trait.”

  “Chistery,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

  “Rain,” he answered, “don’t you see? It’s up to you.”

  “I’m a child, for the love of Ozma!”

  “And I’m a flying monkey. I wasn’t born either to fly or to talk, but your grandmother Elphaba brought both capacities out of me. I am the patriarch in a line of creatures that wouldn’t exist without your family’s interference. Now I can’t fly from here to the washtub, but I will use my tongue to give you my mind. You have to figure out on your own how to use your talents.”

  She pouted at him. “That sounds like the motto of every improving sermon made by any teacher at St. Prowd’s. You could lecture there.”

  “Don’t mock me. How could I decide for you what should be done next? I’ve lived fifty years on this estate and I’m not trained at situational analysis.”

  He handed her the sheets and nodded with his chin toward where she should bring them. “Child of woe,” he added, “don’t you see? You’re in charge now. Nor is dead and the Lion is incapacitated. Liir is gone and Candle is gone and dear old Nanny is feeling fitter than usual but she’s not ready yet to lead a cavalry charge. Tip seems sensible enough but he’s not family. And the little people seem to think they’ve come to a holiday resort.” He snorted. “They could make up their own bed of a morning, in my humble.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired too.”

  “I’m sure you are. Get over it. There’s work to be done.”

  “May I go up to what used to be the Witch’s room?”

  “I told you. It’s your castle now. You can go where you want.”

  So after lunch, Tip and Rain, with Tay at their heels, followed Chistery’s directions and found the staircase leading up to what used to be the Witch’s room, at the top of the curving stairs in the southeast tower.

  The flying monkeys, who lived mostly in the outbuildings but took care of basic housekeeping, had by all appearances done little more than dust in here once or twice a year. The room looked as if it were being kept as a kind of installation of a Witch’s offices, or possibly a memorial chamber to bring faint tears to any pilgrims able to brave the journey. Though so far no one had ever shown up.

  The room was broad and circular, wide enough in circumference to hold a dance competition if the furniture were cleared out. In the center of the room the floor was level, but on several sides, up a few steps, a sort of mezzanine or gallery stretched, lowest underneath the room’s one great east-facing window, higher on the other side. Perhaps originally this had been an armory, and these stone flats
designed for the laying out of lances. Clearly, Elphaba had used the chamber to study arcana derived from her twin interests in natural history and matters numinous.

  A huge stupa of a beehive collapsing in on itself—it must have held five thousand bees. (What a song they sang; they must have driven the Witch mad, thought Rain.) A deceased crocodrilos pickled in brine still hung on chains from a rafter. Some wag, maybe a monkey, had put game dice in its eye sockets, so it peered out at Rain and Tip with a pair of singletons. A flat file revealed sixty or seventy bat skeletons, all different. On a stiff board they found a full mouth of wolf’s teeth, uppers and lowers, laced in by wire and labeled from front to back in a script that had faded illegible. Several umbrellas had been left opened to dry, and had dried well enough by now that their fabric had given way, leaving only ribs and tatters. On one umbrella, spiders had built webs between every one of the struts. It was creepy and wonderful at once, and reminded Rain of her thirst for a spiderworld, long ago.

  The great window was like a web through which to peer at Oz.

  Collections, thought Rain. My shell belongs here.

  Maybe Chistery is right. Maybe I do have something of my grandmother in me. For as long ago as I can remember, I’ve listened better to the animals than to any person. Though I have no magic in me, and I cannot tell what they are saying.

  “Here’s a ball of glass, somewhat mirrored, I think,” said Tip, rubbing dust off with a rag. It stood on a table in the center of the room. “I doubt it’s an ornamental gazing ball. She doesn’t seem to have gone in for interior decoration of that sort.”

  “I’m not sure I want to look at it,” said Rain. “I’ve never liked looking at myself.”

  “That makes two of us. But we’ve come to see what is here. Don’t you think we should try?”

  She moved around the room, learning things with her fingers and her nose as much as with her eyes. He waited, slumped against a stand-up desk, arms folded.

  Rain scowled, not at him but in the act of walking her thoughts along. “Both my parents have their own weirdness—maybe that’s what drew them together. My mother can see the present, she said. I thought she meant she could tell when I was about to snitch a scone from the larder at Nether How. But what mother can’t tell that? Now I think she meant something else. She had—she has—some capacity to understand the present. It probably only affects those she loves or cares about. She could tell, if my father was away hunting for a week, that he was almost home. Is that just intuition, or is it a special kind of seeing?”