The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Mombey as she used to look in the old days,” whispered Tip. “I never expected to see her like this again.”

  On a small black iron plate Mombey lit four coals. Into the throats of a trio of bottles of sarsaparilla or something she had plunged the feathers of a peacock. She set two keys down in a definitive way. “The Key of Material Disposition,” she said fatuously, “and the Key to Everything Else.” She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  Rain and Tip dressed each other slowly so as not to allow a single rustle of garment. Their fingers lingering over ties, traced skin underneath the clothes as far as hands could reach. Tip sucked every button on the back of Rain’s simple shift. Rain lifted the chain off her neck and put it around Tip’s, where the red locket dropped behind the breastplate of his dress habillards. At last, decent, having returned to each other the disguise of their clothes, they stood, holding their hands together, all four of them knotted.

  Rain couldn’t help feel that lying with Tip had brought her father back to life, a little, just as Liir’s lying with Candle had brought her to life, once upon a time. It was a sentiment only, but it suffused her.

  Candle arrived with her domingon. Next to the sorceress Candle looked like the evening nurse. She didn’t bow or make other obeisance. She merely sat on the floor and put her domingon into her lap.

  She’ll be a good help, thought Rain. She’d had experience drawing the human disguise off Princess Nastoya, just before I was born. Seeing the present: she can see what of Liir might still remain alive.

  And she knows I’m here, thought Rain; she’s like that. But she’s protecting me with her silence.

  Workers swung open the double doors of the loading dock and dragged the cart inside. It almost didn’t clear the lintel. Upon it lay the gently steaming form of the Black Elephant. Rain’s father, if word was to be believed. Alive somewhere, somehow, inside.

  “Smoke and mirrors, don’t nobody ever tell ’em nothing?” snorted Mombey. Her voice had lost its toney veneer; she sounded like a common hill witch taking a holiday in town. “Everyone sit down, and do as I say. This will take a little concentration. I had a nice supper but it’s been quite a week and I want to make sure we get this right the first time. Are the doors barred? Light the candles, those ones there.”

  The Lion nodded. Avaric and the Emperor took their places on the simple bench. Rain and Tip shuddered in the shadows. The Elephant, in this musty failing light, looked like a giant delivery of coal. Tay sat on the closed eyes of the stone knight. Upon her domingon, Candle struck up a tonic plangetive.

  Herbs were brought out, and a magical powder of some sort. Maybe it was just a localized pyrotechnical conceit, for drama. The vapor was scented now of violets, now of a camphorous licorice.

  Rain leaned against Tip’s shoulder. Everything was about to change once again. Her father would awaken. He was no longer a threat to Mombey now that the Grimmerie had been impounded. As the final condition of his uncle’s surrender, he would be liberated. Rain’s family would be reunited. A normalcy that Rain had never known might be waiting to punish them all.

  But what would happen to Tip in all this? Mombey’s chosen boy? Would there be a place to which Rain and Tip might slip away, far from the Palace of the People, far from the clasping arms of parents who had never, could never get enough of holding their arrogantly independent daughter?

  But they had made her so.

  Twenty fingers intertwined, pulling, twisting, pushing back. Make me hurt, thought Rain, while I can feel something, in case I die during this and fail to feel anything again.

  “It’s a stubborn enough spell,” muttered Mombey, and she began to refresh some aspects of it, picking up a little way back for momentum.

  “Perhaps he’s already a bit deader than I figured,” she apologized a half an hour later. “I trust this isn’t going to present an insurmountable problem to His Sacredness.”

  “Call me Shell,” said the Emperor.

  “Liir is a quiet sort, but he’s never been much of a team player,” observed Brrr.

  “Now you tell me,” complained Mombey, and started once again.

  Another twenty minutes and she began to get alarmed. “I’m getting interference,” she complained. “Something is not right. I don’t believe this lad has the nuggets needed to block me. My power is honed over a hundred years.” She turned one of the keys at an angle to the other, then put it back the way it had been before.

  “He’s the son of a witch,” said the Cowardly Lion. “Elphaba Thropp. Don’t forget that.”

  “Never met the bitch,” murmured Mombey. She began to be lost in chanting. Her hands elevated, swanning about, making patterns of the smoke that issued from the scorching coals.

  “I’m losing him,” she called out suddenly. “He can’t hold out against me. It’s not remotely possible. Let me try the book. Tip. Tip?”

  Had she looked, had she noticed that Tip had wandered off into the shadows, perhaps she’d have paused. Secured the premises, sniffed Rain out as the disturbance skewing the results of her spell, sent the girl packing. The evening might have resolved in favor of a mundane result rather than as a manifestation of history’s aggressive atropism. But Mombey was tired and off her mettle. She didn’t look up. She just held out her hand and called him again, and Tip slipped from the shadows and came forward. He picked up the Grimmerie from a plant stand and he set it upon her bony palm.

  She put it down and expertly, without hesitation, opened it and flipped its pages. A mighty witch, La Mombey, and further empowered by her victory. The Grimmerie could no longer hold its secrets from her. The pages rattled with a noise like silver chains, like ropes of rain through gutters of carven bone.

  “To Call the Lost Forward,” she murmured, “I know I saw you in here. Don’t you betray me, after all I’ve been through to get you and use you.”

  She was talking to herself now, but every syllable quivered in the air. “I’d’ve stayed a common witch but for hearing about you from the foreigner. A humbug if ever I stumbled over one. I can use this book better than he might’ve done. Obey me!”

  She found the spell and turned it upon the air so swiftly that Rain gasped. The cold memory of trying, with Lady Glinda, to call winter upon the water, back in the days when Rain herself had hardly materialized yet. In remembering how difficult that spell had been to cast, yet how natural, Rain felt it all over again. As if she too were being acted upon by the strength of the spell Mombey was casting. As if the spell the old sorceress was invoking was calling Rain’s own past forward, reminding the girl of what it had meant to begin to read. The memory quickened, of how she awoke to life under the charm of the Grimmerie. She felt full of a salty disgust, an objection deep in the blood. She had done nothing but wing through her shallow days on earth like a shadow of something else, something only windborne, without initiative, without merit or aim. Her ears hurt.

  “I’ve called the lost forward, damn it,” shouted the harridan. “You can’t resist me—I won’t have it. I’m stronger than you, Liir Thropp! You’ll come forward when I order you to!”

  Watching Liir struggle to resist the spell, Tip had fallen on his hands and knees behind Mombey. She didn’t notice. Maybe Tip was stricken in sympathy by something like the throes with which Rain herself felt throttled. Her skin burned leprous, her hearing raged.

  “You won’t die as an Elephant, damn it. Don’t you dare. You haven’t the willpower!” cried Mombey.

  “Liir!” cried Candle. “Don’t! Don’t go!”

  The pain squeezed Rain at her sides, to hold her back, but she wouldn’t be held. She burst out of the hiding place. Putting the shell to her lips, she added its long plaint to the thrum and pall of the domingon accompaniment. Candle’s eyes were closed against her own tears. She couldn’t have been surprised by her daughter’s clarion voluntary; Candle didn’t lose a note in her own playing.

  The shell made a gravelly tone like that of a low horn in the fog banks of a summer morni
ng on Restwater. Some tug leaving harbor to begin its day of taxiing sheep and goods and day-trippers across the lake.

  Almost at once the floorboards in the great hall creaked. For a final time the last of the Ozmists seeped forth, a thousand individual fissures of steam. They clouded the room with a powdery warm presence, a fragrance. They turned, to Brrr’s astounded eyes, a different shade of white—at first lavender, he thought, but then a kind of silvery green. As if under the spell Mombey had cast they too remembered their particular origins, origins not in spirit but in spirit’s organic counterparts.

  Tip rolled on the floor with a thud. Before her, Rain saw him go over. She was caught between twisting toward him and turning to her father, whose Elephant form was beginning to stir for the first time. In sympathy, was it, Rain’s own skin thrilled and stung, the bridge of her nose to the roots of her hair. Her fingertips and armpits and thighs all at once, as if the Ozmists were conveying some sort of airborne desiccant, a powder of ammonia or lye to vex her.

  Mombey had come to a more perfervid attention. Her hat had fallen back off her head, revealing a scalp nearly as bald as a dragon’s egg. “What have you done!” she cried to Rain. She crawled and lurched halfway up, on one knee, as if she couldn’t rise fast enough and would have chosen to hurtle across the room to punch Rain down, if only she had maintained a more strapping form. One with more flexible joints. “What are you doing here? Where have you come from? No one gave you clearance. I never called you back!”

  6.

  The Elephant was rolling. Liir was rolling. The huge vertebrae were creaking as loudly as Ugabumish castenettas. The trunk swayed; the hooves scraped at the air and great swaths of black black hair, like handfuls of scorched grass, sifted through the gloom to the cart and the floor. The Elephant trumpeted, though whether it was a death throes or a calibration of mortal triumph, the Cowardly Lion couldn’t say. He didn’t bother to try. He was half scared to death himself.

  Only the Emperor seemed unfazed. Still on his knees after all this time, still placid. He put his hands together and then he lifted back the collar of his great robe. It fell away from his neck, halfway down his arms, but stopped there. The Emperor opened his eyes and said, “Liir—Elphaba’s boy. I never knew you.”

  As far as the Lion could tell, the noise was neither Animal nor human. The Elephant rose on his back feet, tremblingly, as if he might tumble upon La Mombey and flatten her. The Ozmists around him went iridescent emerald, like light striking a thousand whirring beetles in flight, gold and emerald, emerald and gold, the colors of Lurlinemas, the colors of pine pollen in champagne sunlight. In the dusk outside, the air was filled with the clattering of the wings of the honor guard of Birds, circling the dome, crying “Liir lives! Liir lives!”

  “An ambush!” shrieked La Mombey. “A coup!” Her few guards had fallen to the floor, panicked and paralyzed, the way Tip also seemed to be, twisted, tilted onto his side, his hands between his legs. A seizure of some sort. The Elephant lifted onto one foot. His tusks fell away and his hide fell away. The bruised naked man lurked there, revealed, smaller than a newborn Elephant. Shaking off disguise, called forcefully back to live some while longer, whether he wanted to or not.

  Outside, the Birds heard La Mombey shriek and swooped down upon the cordon militaire she had set around the building—the linked limbs of spider-thugs. Every Bird settled on a target. Even Dosey the Wren was able to wrestle one spider from its partners, heft it aloft, and when she had gone as high as her wings would carry her, drop her cargo to squish against the dome of the Aestheticum.

  Rain heard the pelting of the dome. She cried out to her father even as she hurried toward Tip, but the scraping pain across every inch of her form tightened into a net that drew the air from her lungs, and she fell.

  7.

  Rain didn’t come around for seven days. In the meanwhile, the events of that evening having been deemed confidential, all of the Emerald City talked of nothing else.

  In the light of the revelation of Mombey’s perfidy, Loyal Oz’s suit for peace had been postponed. Emissaries of both armies picked up their staffs and swords again, just in case. They didn’t hold them for long, however. After a decade, war has a way of getting old. Soldiers from opposing contingents shared their bread and settled down over portable game boards. Some of the battalions entered into singing competitions organized by Dorothy, who in the fray was turning into a kind of mad mistress of ceremonies, a mascot of both sides. “What can I tell you?” she said to her friends, shrugging. “War is lunacy.”

  After Liir had recovered enough human muscle tone to be able to collapse upon the Varquisohn, Candle and Brrr brought him into a tent that had been readied for him just outside the doors of the Aestheticum. Little Daffy, having stocked up with unguents and palliatives of every strength and nastiness, whether useful or bogus, was waiting there. She went to work again on the patient whom she had first met as a young man attacked by dragons. Liir, young Liir, dropped out of the sky, bereft of possibility. All these years later she remembered his form, and she did her work well, slapping Mr. Boss on the wrist when he tried to help with too forceful a forearm. Her husband’s quiver of talents didn’t seem to include much of a bedside manner.

  Candle had Rain brought in, too. She kept the lights low all night. On adjacent pallets father and daughter struggled for health, struggled against different resistances. Avaric scuttled to the edge of the tent, but Brrr wouldn’t let him enter. “This is no business of yours,” he said.

  Later, well beyond midnight, the Emperor of Oz arrived, on his own. In the middle of the night, without a guard or an escort, without even a dog on a leash. The Lion stood up stiffly and emitted a low warning rumble, but Shell was family, like it or not, so the Lion had to let him pass.

  “She is not your concern,” said Candle quietly to Shell.

  “She is God’s great-niece,” said His Sacredness. “She is my older sister’s granddaughter. I can see that now.”

  “Go away. What you couldn’t see when she was in disguise you can’t see now. All human forms are disguises. And you claim to be sacred? You know nothing but the shell of people, nothing. Go away.”

  Liir sat up in the gloom and spoke for the first time, across the insensate body of his daughter. “Go away,” he agreed. “She has nothing for you.”

  “She holds both the future and the past,” said Shell, wringing his hands.

  “No more than the rest of us,” said Liir, and pitched a shoe at His Sacredness.

  Near dawn, Dorothy came by the tent, exhausted from a night of revelry. Liir was asleep inside and she said again that she didn’t want to bother him. She joined Brrr, who was still sitting guard outside. “Something’s got to give,” she said. “I can’t go on like this. Here, I brought a flagon of freshwater. They’re saying that Mombey has been taken into custody.”

  “Oh, they’ll say a lot, won’t they,” said the Lion huskily. “Get to the point. What are they saying about that Tip?”

  “Not much.”

  “Can you find out a little more?”

  “Are you asking me to be a spy?” Dorothy smiled wanly. “Look, Brrr. I’ll do what I can. A lot of the Quadling army has removed itself to the Plains of Kistingame, along with the dragons. I can go sniff around there.”

  “Dorothy, you think pretty highly of yourself, but even you risk trouble traipsing among an army of angry soldiers. You watch yourself. They came to conquer, and they feel themselves tricked into surrender. They’ll take it out on you.”

  “Toto’s a little nipper. He’ll see me safe.”

  “He’s dead asleep in your basket.”

  Iskinaary emerged from the tent, shaking his head. He’d been keeping vigil too. “I’ll go with you, Dorothy. And I’ll bet General Kynot can send us a couple of Falcons.”

  “Father Goose,” said Brrr.

  “Don’t start,” said Iskinaary.

  “The truth is,” said Dorothy, “I’d rather have something useful to do tha
n sit here and wait.” She twisted her hands together looking, Brrr guessed, perhaps a little bit like that Auntie Em. He remembered his theory that the young Dorothy may once have had a crush on the Witch’s boy. Liir was solidly middle-aged while she was only now becoming marriageable. She’d come back to Oz too late, to a man who got away by growing up faster than she could. She’s had to put up with an awful lot, our Miss Dorothy, thought the Cowardly Lion. Meeting up with Liir if she doesn’t have to is one adventure I can see she’d rather avoid.

  “Send word if you find anything out about Tip,” said Brrr fondly. “And while I don’t make the plans for this group, I’m guessing that as soon as Liir and Rain are well enough to be moved, the family will want to evacuate this tent and get out of the City. We can work out details later.”

  On the sixth day, Little Daffy sat back on her heels and said to the Lion, “Come, you, we’re going to the Corn Exchange to try to scare up some flour wholesale so I can bake something and open up a little commercial concern of my own.”

  “You can manage without me,” said Brrr.

  “You heard me,” said the Munchkinlander. “With everything still in flux I never know if the good people of the Emerald City are going to set their dogs upon a humble Munchkin farm woman plying her trade.” She meant what she said. Certainly the Lion would prove a more useful defense than her dwarfish husband. But Brrr realized that she too was ready to let the Thropp family alone for a few hours, to come to what peace they might. And Dorothy thought the Lion should take himself out of the picture too.

  Liir and Candle alone in the tent, Rain as catatonic upon the pallet as her father had been in his cart. Liir thought, I’ve given to her all the worst of my traits. If I had lost the will to live, for a time, how could I hope that she might be stronger? I’ve shared nothing with my daughter but my fear of inconsequence, that which has plagued me from my first days.