The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  He waited. He knew she was talking mostly to herself.

  “And my father? He didn’t speak about it much, but my mother told me. Once or twice he could see the past. He saw an image of his parents—Elphaba and Fiyero—together. More than once—like a vision. He thought it was just his imagination, that he was trying to invent a relationship between them, to convince himself who his forebears were. But he could see a little more than that, my mother told me. She told me about what happened just before I was born, when Liir had brought the dried faces of human beings—”

  “Don’t,” said Tip, wincing.

  “Is that any harder to consider than a dried crocodrilos?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Liir had brought them to the farm where I would soon be born. He hung them in the trees, and my mother played the domingon. He saw that they had histories, that they could speak if they were charmed to do so, and my mother laid the spell upon them to come into the present and recite the—the beauty of their lives, I guess she said. And that testimony of soundness, of themself-ness, helped lift the disguise of a human off of old Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, and she died as she had wished to go, as the Elephant she was behind her disguise.”

  “Maybe your mother’s singing—your father’s memory—called forth the lost Elphaba into you. While you were in the womb.”

  “Maybe you believe in tooth fairies? Or time dragons?”

  “So don’t you want to peer in the ball? What if you have some scrap of the talent in your eyes that your parents do? That your grandmother did?”

  “I can’t bear to see the present, if it involves my father being tortured. I can’t. I can’t bear to see the past, in case it involves him having been murdered. I can’t bear to see my mother fleeing this house of disaster. I prefer my disguise of blindness a little longer.”

  He asked in a low voice, “Can you bear to see yourself unveiled? Or me?”

  She looked abruptly at him in case he was tending sexy. But he meant it truer, deeper than that. “I don’t know,” she finally answered. “What if I do have a talent, and it is neither Liir’s nor Candle’s, but my own? What if I can see the future? I don’t think I want to know.”

  “Can you live without knowing?”

  She almost laughed. “I have lived without knowing most of my life. Isn’t that what we’re all so good at? That’s the easy part.”

  So they didn’t look in the gazing ball, either of them, Rain by conviction and Tip out of deference. Instead Tip opened the shutters on one side of the wide window. Facing east, away from the wind off Knobblehead Pike, the window showed a view of the valley they had walked up from. They could see the ruined stump of Red Windmill, and the valley where Upper Fanarra lay hidden. Through a dip in the mountainous horizon, probably harboring the track of their arrival, they could see where the plain of the Vinkus River must begin. And somewhere down there the beaver dam, with the mother-in-law of Luliaba waiting for them to return with a coracle to float her to her future.

  Before leaving, they made a halfhearted search for accoutrements of magic, but they could only picture tchotchkes from a pantomime about Sweet Lurline and Preenella, her aide-de-sorcière. What were they expecting to locate? Magic wands? They found a bristling bunch of cattails, which magically still had their fur, but that was all the magic in them. What else might they wish for? Some faded pamphlet of practical magic, to help summon up a nice flank of terch or garmot instead of endless salads? A corked vial of smelling salts that might revive the Cowardly Lion into something of his usual growly but steadfast self? They found none of that. The only magic thing they were sure of was the crystal sphere on its stand of carven dragons in the middle of the room, and that much magic was too much. They would have to make their way without it.

  In the welter of so much animal zoologics, they almost forgot Tay. They couldn’t find the otter at first, and then Tip laughed and pointed. Tay had leaped up somehow and landed on the back of the airborne crocodrilos. The green rice otter was swaying back and forth, defying gravity, having a modest little carnival ride for itself.

  “Come here, you nutcase,” said Rain, and Tay obliged.

  “It’s trying out what flying on a broom might be like,” said Tip. “You should try it someday too. If your mother returns with that broom.”

  If Chistery is right, and it’s up to me to take charge, she thought, then I have to decide what to do.

  She called a council that evening, after Nanny had gone to bed. Of the flying monkeys only Chistery sat in. Brrr was cajoled and then browbeaten to leave his larder, and the Munchkinlander and the dwarf bestirred themselves to climb onto the edge of a sideboard so they could see better. Rain took one side of the circular table, Tip opposite her. Dorothy and Iskinaary perched on stools, completing the round. Eight of them.

  Tay played with a dust mouse under the big table. A broom only goes so far.

  They seemed a small and enervated group, too wasted in strength to mount much of a campaign. That couldn’t matter. There was no one else, even if all they did was think.

  “We can’t stay here like this,” Rain said. “Not for the threat to us—the threat is everywhere now. We can’t stay because to stay is to let more of the worse things happen. To stay is to give up.”

  “We have given up,” said Mr. Boss, linking hands with Little Daffy.

  “We haven’t. Have we?” asked his wife. “Well, we’ve given up the Clock, yes, there’s that. But we haven’t given up on each other.”

  “That’s the point,” said Rain. “We haven’t given up on my father, surely? Or defending one side or the other against a fiercer attack than has yet been seen?”

  “Wait a minute. Which side are you intending to defend?” asked Little Daffy, waving her bonnet for attention.

  “Either side,” said Rain.

  “That’s insane. You’re insane,” said Mr. Boss. “She’s insane,” he told his wife.

  “Listen to her a moment,” said Brrr, from his lethargy.

  Rain spoke as slowly as she could, working her way like a tightrope artist across her thoughts, feeling them an instant before walking the words out. “Mr. Boss. You never showed any allegiance either to Loyal Oz or to Munchkinland. What difference does it matter to you who we defend?”

  “If I showed no allegiance to either, why defend either?” he shot back. “Waste of effort. I showed loyalty to the Clock, because my job was to keep it in tiktokety trim as a house and harbor for the Grimmerie.”

  “And the Clock is drowned, so that burden is lifted from you. Meanwhile the book is stolen and about to do damage, serious damage, by whatever faction nabbed it. Isn’t that part of your job?”

  “I quit. I was to mind the book when it was handed to me, to keep it safe. But my employer scarpered on me, leaving me holding the goods. Anyway, I gave the book to Liir. His problem now.”

  “But that’s my point. The book isn’t safe. It’s on the loose, in the wrong hands—whosever hands it is in are the wrong hands. We can’t excuse ourselves from the need to stop it harming anyone—on either side—the damage could be immense.”

  “After you finish St. Prowd’s,” said Chistery, “go to law school.”

  “There won’t be a St. Prowd’s if Mombey has the book and can torture my father into decoding it for her. If he’s able. Or maybe being so powerful Mombey can decipher some of it herself.”

  “You could read it,” said Tip to Rain. “You told me.”

  “Yes, well,” said Rain, “I was only learning to read back then. Not having a history of other writing to complicate me, I managed. Lucky guesses.”

  “It’s in her blood,” said Chistery, pointing at Rain. “Elphaba could read it at once, I’m told. She used it to help give me language.”

  “You’re right about one thing,” said the dwarf to Rain. “I never took up with political or religious clans. Never cared to. But I suppose since my wife is a Munchkinlander and our children will be part Munchkin—”

&nb
sp; “Not to spring any surprises on you, darling, but I’m so far beyond the changes that I’m more of a dwarf than you are,” said Little Daffy.

  “Our symbolic children,” he said to her. “The children of your hometown in Center Munch. You’ve professed a love for your besmirched land. You’ve persuaded me to join you wherever you are. If you’re on that side, so I am.”

  “I love you too, ducks. Though what Munchkinland has become, a shame. A bloody shame.”

  The Lion turned his head this way and that as if not quite believing what he heard. The dwarf and Little Daffy were holding hands.

  Tip said, “Well, I’ve been all over Loyal Oz and renegade Munchkinland, and it seems to me that no people own the land they live on. The land owns them. The land feeds them by growing them their wheat and such, in the Corn Basket of Munchkinland, or growing them their meadows for the grazing of livestock, in the agricultural patches of Gillikin. Or growing them their emeralds in the mines in the Glikkus, or their windswept pampas or steppes in the wide grasslands west of here, which I’ve never seen, but which support the horse cultures of the Scrow and other tribes.”

  “Bollocks. Natural geography may be hospitable—or not—but human history claims geography,” argued the Lion. “Love for nature is a hobby for the mentally unfit. History trumps geography. And thus you can’t blame the Munchkinlanders for defending themselves, however cruel it makes them.”

  Dorothy hadn’t spoken so far. She drummed one hand on the tabletop and put the other hand on her hip. None of them of course had ever seen the Auntie Em about whom she complained, but Rain guessed that Dorothy looked quite a bit like old Auntie Em right about now.

  “I’ve seen a fair amount of Oz, too, you know,” she said, “and as far as I’m concerned loving any part of it without loving the whole thing is a load of fresh ripe hooey. Not that I’m especially enamored of any of Oz on this trip, mind you. But I have a treasury of song in my heart and I can summon up affection for anything with just a little concentration. Would you like me to sing?”

  “No,” they all said.

  “Too bad,” she replied, and stood up.

  She got out about four lines.

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain…

  Little Daffy was already in tears. Mr. Boss was rolling his eyes heavenward and plugging his ears. Iskinaary murmured to Rain, “What rainbow is she from?”

  “Let her go on,” said Tip, who had no authority here, but they obeyed him as a matter of courtesy. He was a guest, after all.

  America! America!

  God shed his grace on thee,

  And crown thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  “There’s that sea thing again, it makes me want to heave,” said Brrr.

  “Good is always crowned, isn’t it?” said Little Daffy. “The argument for royalty.”

  “What’s amerika? Part of that game the beauty boys used to play, shamerika?” asked Mr. Boss.

  “It’s another name for Kansas,” said Dorothy.

  “I thought you hated Kansas,” said the Goose.

  “Let me have my say, if you’re ready for it. Or I’ll sing the next verse.”

  “We’re ready, we’re ready.”

  “Everyone has a right to love the land that gives them the things they need to live,” said Dorothy. “It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think, now I’ve seen a bit more of America and a lot more of Oz, that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful, too. That’s what the song says. That’s why I sang it. You can’t see the shining sea from the purple mountains—”

  “I should hope not,” said the Lion. “You’d just cave.”

  Rain said, “I don’t know about the mountain and sea business. But I suppose we’re saying something of the same thing. It’s more important to try to stop what may be about to happen, whichever way it goes—because it’s all worthwhile to someone. The beaver dam is worth something to the beavers, the—the shell to the lake creature that built it—the roost to the hen, the swamp to the marshstalker. Nether How to my father.”

  “And this place to me,” said Chistery, “though Kiamo Ko could do with a bit more in the way of central heating.”

  “Are we going to decide what to do, though?” asked Rain. “That’s why we’ve come here to sit together for a few moments.”

  Iskinaary said, “Well, Chistery is too old to fly anyplace.”

  “Speak for yourself,” replied the flying monkey, but admitted he had obligations to Nanny that would keep him from leaving his highland home.

  “Are we to break up into groups? One to the Emerald City, one to Colwen Grounds, and try to intercept the Grimmerie somehow?” asked Iskinaary. “I’m sorry, Rain, but I’m not quite getting your drift.”

  “I don’t have a plan yet. We’re working on it together.”

  “I am not going back to Munchkinland, thank you very much,” said Dorothy. “Don’t forget there’s an order of execution on my head.”

  “My countryfolk were beastly to you,” agreed Little Daffy. “But don’t be harsh on them, dear. They’re under so much stress, invaded by Loyal Oz. Now, as to schemes. Personally, I have precious little interest in ever visiting the Emerald City again. Who would ever give me the time of day there, if the sons of the EC and Gillikin are dying in battle against my countrymen?”

  “Against the Animals,” corrected the Lion. “But point taken. Sentiment is fine over a round table, but once you decide to come down from this high peak, you have to make a choice one way or the other. That’s the human condition.

  “I know,” he added. “And I’m a Lion. Same difference.”

  “We’ll sleep on it,” said Rain.

  Once again she was asleep and then she heard a voice, but she could hardly tell what it was saying. She half-woke, and rolled over in the moonlight to see if there was a mole, or maybe a goldfish come up from the fishwell in the basements. The only thing she saw was the iridescent shell, its usual gleam even brighter against the gloom of a mountain night in late summer.

  She picked her way over Tip, careful not to disturb him, and hardly knowing what she intended, she retraced the steps she’d taken earlier in the day and walked up the stairs to Elphaba’s chamber.

  Snaggle-toothed autumn was loping in. A jackal moon was assembling its features in the sky. Rain had heard that the constellation appeared only once in a generation or so. It didn’t last long, but while it lasted, peasants and mill laborers alike considered it a time of peril and possibility.

  Without Tip to watch her, she had a different kind of courage. She creaked open the shutters of the Witch’s great window, both sides, and the moon stepped through spiderweb fretwork into the chamber.

  A patter at her heels made her turn. Tay had appeared from nowhere. It must have sensed her moving at night. She smiled at it—and almost could have sworn it smiled back. Though a creature of the wild has no smile we can recognize.

  “Look in the glass,” said Tay.

  “You can’t talk,” she said, not alarmed; she realized she was sleep-walking.

  “I know,” said Tay. “I’m sorry. Look in the glass.”

  Because this was not a nightmare, and because a calm had lit upon her, she wasn’t scared to look. She rubbed the surface of the globe and huffed upon it to make it shiny. The moonlight helped, one sphere to another. Tay leapt to the table and entwined, almost snakelike, around the carved legs of the stand.

  The initial sense was of flatness—more like peering through a porthole than into a fishbowl. She remembered staring at a page in the Grimmerie once, when a glassy circlet had shown an unidentified figure gesturing at her. Trying to make a landfall of some message or other. She left that memory behind, and leaned clo
ser.

  At first she saw nothing, just shifting smudges. Clouds seen from below the surface of a lake, as if you were a fish. Or it might be clouds seen from above, she thought, if you were a kind of creature who wasn’t tethered by gravity to the time and place in which you were born, and if you could approach from anywhere, see anything.

  The mothy batting pulled apart, like the spun sugarbrittle sold at Scandal Day. She began to focus.

  It took a moment to realize she was examining something of what Dorothy had been warbling about. The mountains of Oz stood up first—not as in a map, flattened out and drawn, but built up in miniature, as if in pastry-dough. From a great distance mountains show earliest; they are the first face of a world. She could see Oz the way Dorothy had said to see it in a song, all at once: Mount Runcible to the north, poking up like a king-hill, uncrowded and pompous; and the Great Kells in their scimitar curve, bending to the left and then angling to the right, toward the south, softening. She could see that the Quadling Kells and the Wend Hardings were just smaller cousins of the Great Kells, and that the Madeleines and the Cloth Hills were second cousins who had moved out of town to get a little room. And the Scalps, up in the Glikkus, were the high bishops of the whole affair, in their emerald crowns, although of course she couldn’t see the emeralds.

  The picture shifted. An angle of moonlight picked up the silver that shines on water, and then she could see the eight or ten queenly lakes of Oz drawn out as neatly as Madame Chortlebush could have done on a map. The long silvered leaf of Restwater at the center, the birthing pool of all of Oz; and bootblack deadly Kellswater not far off. Spottily, here and there, the turquoise lakes that depended on mountain runoff for their bounty: Lake Chorge in Gillikin, Mossmere and Illswater in Munchkinland, and a shifting lake in the Thousand Year Grasslands at the far west of the Kells. The moving lake that she’d heard came and went at its own choice, drawing thousands of prairie beasts like magnets back and forth to its iron will.