The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

“In your disguise as an Animal, where did you go?” said Candle to him. The first direct remark she’d made since he’d been abducted from the castle in the west. The absence of the guardian Lion was giving her license to speak, it seemed.

  Liir had thought about this. “The soldiers plying Mombey’s charm of bewitchment gave me a bigger choice than they thought. They believed it was a superficial charm, and perhaps in some persons it might have been. The hide of an Elephant, the guise of one. But I remembered how Princess Nastoya had lived as a human. Despite her long concealment she never stinted from embracing the fullness of a disguise, its meaning—she learned as much as she could about how to be a human while trapped inside the human’s form. Even though she wanted liberty from the disguise, in the end, so she could die an Animal. I thought perhaps she had made the wiser choice. I thought she had managed to become a human better than I, born one, had yet done. I thought I would rather die an Animal.

  “A cowardly choice, perhaps,” he admitted, but Candle had said nothing.

  “You didn’t help train the dragons to attack the city.”

  “No, I didn’t. That was Trism.”

  “I know who it must have been.”

  They looked at opposite panels in the walls of the tent.

  “In the end, Trism knew enough about dragons to do the job himself,” she said. “They never needed the Grimmerie, did they. After all that. After our ruined lives. They didn’t need you to read the book, nor Rain.”

  All the wasted time running, hiding. All the years.

  “No,” he admitted through his tears. “They only needed time—the time it took for Trism to experiment, over and over, with what he had learned from that one page of the Grimmerie torn out by Elphaba Thropp, those years ago, and given to the Wizard of Oz. Time to work it out. Once they’d gotten the book at last, they found—ha!—that Trism couldn’t read the book. They wanted me to try but I refused. It was then I must have chosen not to come back—to stay an Elephant, let the disguise kill me. Mombey was enraged. She tried to read the book, too. I don’t know how she managed the other evening, for she couldn’t crack it open when she had it in her hands.”

  “Of course I know how she managed. Rain was there. The book obeyed her, not Mombey. The book itself brought the spell forward.”

  “Rain didn’t do a thing.”

  Candle rolled her eyes. “You didn’t do a thing. No, listen to me. You didn’t do a thing to stop any of this. You didn’t open the book to try to learn how to turn the dragons against their masters. You didn’t halt the attack in which very few families in the Emerald City failed to lose a loved one. You didn’t make any effort to … to call fire down upon the dragon hordes. You didn’t move to stop an assault that pitched itself against your own daughter.”

  “I didn’t know she was here, of course.”

  “Where else would she be?”

  Liir thought of the girl thrown off the bridge at Bengda, the bridge he as a young soldier had set fire to. It was a bridge that had never stopped burning, and it never would. A child who had never stopped falling through the night, and she never would.

  He said, “I haven’t the words to answer you. The Grimmerie has brought nothing but grief to every soul who has used it. I wouldn’t use it against my kind—Loyal Ozian or Munchkinlander—even if I had ceased to be my own kind.”

  Candle said, “That is not like you, Liir. That is vile. It is inhuman.”

  “I do not claim,” he admitted, “to have made the human choice.”

  8.

  When Brrr looked into the tent flaps the next morning, Rain was sitting up in the cot. “No, don’t leave,” she said to the Cowardly Lion. “I know already.”

  He shrugged. Liir got up and went out to find some facilities to use, to shave. The weather was coming in colder and they couldn’t stay in a tent much longer, if Rain was to continue to recover. Candle, who after last night wasn’t yet talking to her husband, left too but in a separate direction. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss sat down in the sun outside with a coffee tin to share. They counted up their earnings. Little Daffy called into the tent, “When is Dorothy going to come home and regale us with tales of her night’s adventures before sacking out to sleep the morning away?”

  The Lion intended to keep private his sense of Dorothy’s hope to avoid seeing Liir. “She’s on a mission,” he replied.

  “Isn’t she always.”

  Rain said in a low voice to the Lion, “You don’t have to pretend. I know. I know it all, Brrr. I know it already.”

  He arranged himself as he thought a stone lion in front of a library might do, with dignity and a sense of starch. “Well, everything’s changed,” he said, companionably enough, as if the acrobats had evacuated the arena overnight and a troupe of fire-eating tree elves had arrived to set up instead. “Not such a big surprise. Things do roll on.”

  “On the strength of this one accusation against Mombey, the war has been called for Loyal Oz? Who did the calling, then?”

  “I have a theory, Rain,” said the Lion. “Hiding in the heart of every downtrodden commoner is where the romance of the crown lives strongest. Alarming, I know. The citizens of Oz struck with mobs and protests, days and nights of rioting, and neither army would take up weapons against them.”

  “How is Tip? Brrr, I know what happened. I’m not blind. And I think maybe I’ve always known. Just tell me—how is Tip?”

  He had to decide if she was working him to find out what little he knew himself, and had heard, or if she was confessing a knowledge beyond his. Probably the latter. For all her youth she was proving basalt at the bone.

  “Dorothy and Iskinaary have gone to reconnoiter. The Goose sent a report via that Wren. Tip is recovering nicely enough, that’s what is said on the streets. The Hall of Approval has been meeting right next door, in our own Aestheticum, to try to work out the proper course of action, but Tip isn’t attending—hasn’t the strength yet.”

  “Where is my … where is my friend?” she ventured.

  “They’ve made space in a private apartment in Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, which is somewhere on the edge of Goldhaven.”

  “With attendants, I assume. An armored guard.”

  “Well.” The Lion tried to smile. “An old chum of yours, as I understand it. A woman from Shiz named Miss Ironish. She’s been brought in from St. Prowd’s, since Madame Teastane’s staff and students all fled the city weeks ago and are sitting out the troubles comfortably on the shores at Lake Chorge. Miss Ironish claims to have known Tip in a small but honorable way. Her blameless record convinced the Emperor that she was the right one for the job.”

  “And Mombey?”

  “Ah, that’s another story. Some say she’s in Southstairs, secreted there for her own safety under cover of darkness. The Palace will neither confirm nor deny that rumor. Others say Mombey accidentally called her own past upon her as she called that of others, and too much corruption crept up in her blood, and she expired of extreme old age as she ought to have done a century ago. That’s hard to confirm or deny either, and the Palace has its reasons for keeping the matter in doubt. They don’t want to be accused by patriotic Munchkinlanders of having assassinated the Munchkinlander Eminence the minute she entered the capital.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think if she had the strength to change her visage just one last time, she became a woggle-bug and someone stepped on her in the rush to catch the latest newsfold.”

  “Or swatted her with a rolled-up newsfold.”

  He waited.

  “I learned how to read, once upon a time,” she told him. “I can read the headlines, you know.”

  “I suppose you can.”

  “The royalists will be having mighty parties.”

  “It’s too early to tell. Though the confetti factories are probably going into overnight shifts.”

  She sighed. “And my great-uncle?”

  “Well, it’s all up in the air still, isn’t it? There’s
the question of how ready to rule the new leader might be. As we know from Dorothy, age doesn’t always constitute wisdom. And people grow up on different schedules, one from the next.”

  “Has Shell abdicated the throne?”

  “It’s still unsettled whether the Palace will accept a return to the rule of monarchy. And the question of whether the monarch wants to rule. I understand there is human choice involved.”

  “I don’t know if there is,” said Rain.

  “Oh,” said the Lion. “Don’t give me that. I’m the Cowardly Lion, remember. There’s always human choice.”

  She put her face to his shoulder, her greening hand upon his paw. “All right then,” she said. “Enough grieving. Can you make arrangements for me to have an audience?”

  “I have it on the highest authority that Tip has been waiting for you to ask.”

  “Who’s authority is that high?”

  “A little Bird told me.”

  9.

  Miss Ironish opened the door of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. She shooed the guards on the stoop to one side and told them if they didn’t stop bristling their bayonets in her face she’d give them what for and no mistake. “Come in, Miss Rainary,” she said. A new sobriety had tightened her corset. She never mentioned the change in Rain’s appearance, except to mutter, “My, how you’ve grown.”

  Scarly took Rain’s umbrella and put it against a hat stand.

  “I believe you will be comfortable in the parents’ parlor,” said Miss Ironish. “Scarly will bring you a biscuit or a glass of water if you like. Please wait here and I will announce the Crown in a few moments.”

  “I can help myself to a glass of—”

  “This is hard on everyone,” said Miss Ironish sternly. “Wait.”

  She left the room with a backward glance rich in opprobrium. A few moments later Scarly tiptoed in with three lemon brickums and a cheese tempto congealing upon a porcelain salver. Apparently school fare didn’t improve even for royalty.

  “Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, moving out of the sight of the crowds who haunted the paving stones, the faithful who waited outside day and night, desperate to catch a glimpse of the miracle. “Oh, Miss Rainary.” She couldn’t control the gasp in her voice.

  “I hope it isn’t too horrible,” said Rain, a little coldly.

  “It en’t horrible,” said Scarly, and she took Rain’s hand. She could get nothing else out, though, and fled through the butler’s pantry when she heard Miss Ironish return.

  “You may arise, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish, and stood back against the door as Tip came through, making every effort not to twist her hands. Miss Ironish retreated and the door closed firmly though without the sound of a click.

  Rain said, “Am I to call you Ozma?”

  “You may call me Tip,” she answered.

  “I’m told that when you discovered what had happened, you fainted dead away. I thought, when I could think, ‘Well, isn’t that just like a girl.’ ”

  “Not funny, Rain. Under the circumstances. How did you find out?”

  Rain neither moved away nor did she come closer, and neither did Ozma Tippetarius. They stood nine feet apart on opposite margins of a sun-bleached carpet. “I suppose—I don’t know—maybe I dreamed it.”

  “You’re lying. You don’t lie. Have you changed?”

  “Well.” She held up her green fingers. “A little.”

  Tip waited.

  “Tay always liked you,” said Rain, “and Tay didn’t like men, generally.”

  “Was that it?”

  Rain thought. “Yes, I think that was it.”

  “You’ve never even known if Tay is male or female itself, have you? Yet you claim to know how Tay can respond to me, even when a disguise is laid upon me for—for all those years I can’t remember?”

  “We’re unlikely to make an acceptable ruling couple,” said Rain. “For one thing, you’re about a hundred years older than I am.”

  “Well, I hide it well, don’t I.” The tone was bitter.

  “You knew it all along,” said Rain.

  “I didn’t. Mombey kept me apart from other children. We always shifted about every few years. I’m told most childhoods feel eternal, Rain. Mine did too. I wasn’t to know it was longer than anyone else’s. Perhaps I wasn’t smart, but grant me that. Or maybe Mombey charmed some sense of calendar out of me. It doesn’t matter. We’ve both had our childhoods filched from us, Rain. There’s that. If there’s nothing else.”

  “There’s that,” Rain agreed.

  They stole glances at each other, the green girl and the queen of Oz. Those forgotten called forward, against their wishes, into themselves. Rain might as well have been Elphaba at sixteen. Ozma Tippetarius had eyes the color of half-frozen water.

  They could not cross the carpet to take each other in their arms. Maybe someday, but not today. More of their childhoods had to be stolen, yet, for that to happen—or maybe some of it returned to them. The charmless future would show them if, and when, and how.

  Somewhere

  1.

  In the streets of the city they were saying that Ozma had come back. Within weeks, illustrated pamphlets in six colors became available at every vendor. One edition with bronze ink on the cover cost two farthings extra and sold out to collectors in an hour. It purported to present an entire modern history of Oz, starting with the arrival of the Wizard and the deposing of the Ozma Regent, Pastorius. The best part was a grotesquely colored section that everyone turned to first: the murder of Pastorius. Oh, the blood! Like a fountain all down the steps of the Palace of the Ozmas. Then the Wizard’s vile contract with Mombey, Pale Queen of Sorcery, to secret the child away while the Wizard set up shop to hunt for the fabled Grimmerie. For which he’d come to Oz in the first place, and over which, failing to secure it, he left, disconsolate.

  In one of the final panels of that section, Mombey secretly made a pact with the Ozmists, and siphoned a zephyr or so of them for pumping up the Wizard’s balloon, to assure he could never return across the Deadly Sands. A lovely and theatrical conceit, if unsupportable by the testimony of witnesses, who wrote letters to the editor complaining about the rewriting of history. The liberties these artists take! Hacks, the lot of them.

  Dorothy had her own section. Part III. They colorized her too highly and she looked like a Quadling afflicted with St. Skimble’s Rash. With her familiar, Toto, who could speak in the funny pages (arf arf !), Dorothy careered around Oz like some sort of a drunken sorceress, spilling mayhem out of her basket and kicking up her sparkly heels in musical numbers that didn’t translate particularly well on the page.

  A nod was made to Elphaba and to Nessarose Thropp, and to Dorothy’s crime spree against them. However, maybe because the Emperor was about to abdicate the Throne Ministership of Oz, his portrayal was accorded a certain respect, if only for his having served as a place holder until Ozma could be released from her spell. How quickly a history of offenses can be rewritten. Yet there was some sour truth to it: Shell Thropp may have ordered the invasion of Munchkinland, but he hadn’t killed Pastorius. Nor had he imprisoned Ozma Tippetarius in a spell so deep it could keep her in a near perpetual boyhood until, through trickery played by a magic mouse (a magic mouse?) La Mombey accidentally reversed her own spell, revealing her depraved plan for world dominance. Or Oz dominance.

  The extravaganza went into seven printings in a fortnight. It didn’t begin to show up wrapped around take-out fried fish for at least a month.

  Little was made in print, either by the popular press or by pulpit expositories, of the material waste and psychic distress of the recent past. The dragons of Colwen Grounds, the war, the long privations, the fight for water, the death of so many on both sides of the conflict. The negotiations remained in a delicate stage. It didn’t do to allow sensibilities to become inflamed with reference to abominations too recent to be forgiven—if ever they could be forgiven.

  Would Ozma come to rule? How would her le
gitimacy be determined since eighty-five years, give or take, had passed since her birth, but she was apparently still in her minority? Had Mombey herself not unwittingly identified the girl as Ozma—by that unsavory magicking of Tip homeward from boy to girl—the metamorphosis might have gone unremarked as any other backstreet carnival trick. (The details of the transformation were too squeamish for most citizens to imagine closely, except the depraved.) “Not Ozma!” Mombey had cried, out of her skull. Everyone present had heard her, and when Tip had been carried away for medical attention, the form of a teenage girl in a lad’s dress sartorials had escaped no one’s notice. (A number of men had trouble satisfying their wives for months in the ensuing vexation to their own makeup.)

  Whether Ozma still wore the red locket on its chain—only one person knew enough to ask that question, and she would not ask it.

  Hardly anyone else alive had ever seen Tip’s mother, Ozma the Bilious. No one could comment on any family resemblance the new Ozma might have to her forebears except by the fading rotogravured portraits that had remained hung, seditiously, during the reigns of the various Throne Ministers, in houses left shabby because their tenants could never afford redecoration.

  And would Ozma Tippetarius accept the mantle? Did she have to? Did she have a choice?

  Furthermore, would Munchkinland accept her as a ruler of a reunited Oz? No stalwart Munchkinlander could forget the crunchy little fact that the Ozma clan was Gillikinese. But it was Mombey who’d brought Ozma Tippetarius back to the throne from Munchkinland, which gave the rebel nation a stake. Before a month had passed some began, quietly, to call Mombey the savior of the nation. Without an Ozma to pull the warring factions together, the fighting might have gone on a good deal longer.

  It was said that at Haugaard’s Keep, on Restwater, when they learned what a mess things had gotten to in the Emerald City, General Traper Cherrystone called a ceasefire and invited the Foill of Munchkinland into the Keep to discuss an end to the hostilities. No one was quite sure what happened next. The only witness was a tree elf named Jibbidee, and he wasn’t talking. In the Oak Parlor of the Florinthwaite Club, bruited about over a third glass of port, thank you, retired military officers whispered the rumors. Loyal Oz’s General Cherrystone had proposed to General Jinjuria that together they decline to accept the nonsense about the return of Ozma to the Emerald City, join forces, and rule as a military tribunal over Restwater themselves, setting up a protectorate over the access rights to the great lake. Jinjuria was said to have refused, whereupon Cherrystone shot her, and then took his own life.