The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  Listen to what the shell says to you.

  The grasslands were beginning to give way to sand, but in no particular hurry, she’d noticed. There would be miles of grass, as far as she could see from the height she was learning to achieve on her broom (which was not impressive). Then sands, in belts between grasslands, until the grasslands gave out. They called it the endless sands, and she saw why. They rippled in waves and crests, static on clear days, fierce and active in the darkness, shifting and reshaping themselves on a nightly basis. There was no track across sands. They rewrote their own topography endlessly.

  But then came another stretch of grassland, and beyond that, another swatch of desert. The world was not as definite as the few dots on any map would suggest.

  Almost a year after her departure, she was living for a week in a temporary hut she’d built for herself somewhere to the west of Kvon Altar in the southwestern Vinkus. She’d come down with a cough of a sort, and was afraid that perhaps she was dying and might die but forget to notice, and so keep flying forever over alternating patches of wilderness. She gathered liquor from where it beaded up on the shell every night, she licked the dew collected there. Just enough to keep herself from parching. She didn’t think she had much time left.

  She didn’t want to leave the Grimmerie lying around in the desert where some scorpion might find it and teach itself to read, as she had taught herself to read. Almost in a fever one dawn, she took the shell and nourished herself with it as best she could, and then, remembering an old life, she blew the horn once again through the broken tip.

  Even Ozmists can’t survive in the desert, she thought to herself, sinking into a sleep as the sun rose. The wind blew her lean-to apart but she was too removed from reality to notice. Through the vast sky the sun threatened to burn her green skin brown and mottled. Light wriggled behind her clenched eyelids like threads of blood.

  Around midday, delirious with thirst, she opened her eyes. She thought she saw a figure of bones standing nearby, looking down at her. He wore a coat made of greenery. Mountain pine, fir, holly, laurel. Impossible life. The skeleton looked at her. He seemed to smile. All skeletons smile. She closed her eyes and forgot about it.

  Back there.

  Disturbed in the middle of a moonless night by something unseen, a cock chortily hacked at the silence in a northern barnyard. A farmer threw a soup ladle at it, threateningly. The cock subsided.

  In the forest of Gurniname outside Wiccasand Turning, a stand of rare bone-oak trees, famous for their centuries of barrenness without decay, burst into bloom. The blossoms glowed, not white, but a rich velvety jade with lavender margins. A gourmand hunting for truffles discovered it, and for a while painters flocked to catch the mystery on canvas. But the effect was always too startling. It looked fake. Eventually most of the canvases were painted over. Patrons of art preferred their bone-oak blossoms white, or dead.

  Kellswater at dawn. A giant Tortoise emerged from a cleft between two stone plates nearly collapsed one upon the other. She’d lived eighty of her two hundred years in private meditation, prayer and fasting, and she was on the morning side of munch-ish. The history described in the pages of this and previous volumes had escaped her, and she it. Undeterred by such scathing ignorance she moved forward on fungoidal flippers, and her rust red horny beak scratched at the air. The light leaching over the horizon snagged and pulled upon ripples of water fletching the lake. Small circles as if from invisible drops of rain puckered the surface. The Tortoise remembered. She knew the commotion was the morning activity of swarmgits upon water, and that where swarmgits could skate in buggy congress of a fine morning, a hungry carp or a lake terch wouldn’t be far behind.

  And—and this Kellswater. The dead lake. But she did not comment.

  That’s the way it looked to plants and animals. Somewhere else in Oz—the province, the town doesn’t matter—a prissy and adenoidal tutor straight out of Three Queens College had taken a position to hector local schoolchildren into their letters and morals. Intending to set an early example of the mercy of discipline, he arrived in the schoolroom with a small box made of close-meshed wire. “Approach and regard,” he said to the boys and girls in his thrall. “We must be wary of the natural world, learn from its habits of violence and self-interest, and tame it so it may survive. This morning upon my hearth I found an insect of a sort never known before in Oz. I studied entomology and lepidoptery under Professor Finix at Three Queens, so I claim some wide experience with bugs. I say this is an aberration of an existing species—smaller, cannier, and more cunningly hued for camouflage. Were it allowed to breed, it could chew its way through our ‘Oz in endless leaf.’ For our own protection I have caged it in this box. It looks faintly related to the locust of the Grasslands or to the marsh fernhopper. It saws music from its legs, when it is happy. It isn’t happy now, but we will require it to learn to be happy in a cage. And so will you—”

  The youngest student, a lad who still wore double padding against accidental leakage, picked up the willow switch in the corner and cracked it upon the docent’s remonstrating finger. The other students rioted. They threw books out the window and chased the teacher into the henhouse, locking him inside. He sat most of the morning blubbering. Then the students ate all their lunch at once and left the wrappings to blow about in the schoolyard, and sang songs of loyalty to anarchy as they released the cricket from its cage.

  Not too much should be read into all this. It is the sometime nature of children to be wild. And in wildness, as a traveler from another land has reminded us, is the salvation of the world.

  In the coolness of the evening—that evening or the next, maybe—Rain came around enough to find—she must be hallucinating—that her face was shaded from the setting sun by an umbrella.

  “Very nice,” she said, admiring her psychosis.

  “I’d hoped you appreciated it,” said a familiar voice. Iskinaary peered out from behind the upturned bowl of the fabric.

  “Are you the angel of death? Goodness, you scared me enough in life, you’re not going to accompany me across the divide, are you?”

  “Very funny. Have a cracker.” With his bill he secured a hard round biscuit from a little satchel slung over his neck. “Don’t worry, it’s not one of Little Daffy’s Curious Cupcakes.”

  “I should be glad for one of those right about now. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been following behind you for the better part of a year. Your father sent me to look for you when you didn’t come back after that hard winter in the grasslands, and I heard you’d continued on. I’ve been waiting out of sight, a few miles back, for several months. Not wanting to be presumptuous.”

  “Oh, a little presumption is welcome now and then.”

  “You’re dehydrated. Let me take that shell and fly to find some freshwater somewhere.”

  “There’s no water here.”

  “You don’t know where to look.”

  Iskinaary, if it was really he and not some irritating mirage, allowed himself to be fixed with the shell in a kind of sling, and went off for a while. When he came back, the basin of the shell slopped over with freshwater. Rain drank so quickly that she vomited most of it back up again. He didn’t mind. He got her more, and she kept the second portion down more neatly.

  In the morning, or the morning after that, she felt better again. “You carried that umbrella all the way from Nether How?”

  “I used it too, on certain nights. My feathers are thinning and the drainage isn’t what it used to be.” Yes, Iskinaary was an old Goose.

  “You never liked me,” she said.

  “I don’t like you now. But I am your father’s familiar, so let’s put personal feelings aside. We have a ways to go, I’ll warrant.”

  “I don’t know how far I’m going to get.”

  “I don’t know either.” He smiled at her or winced, it was hard to tell the difference in any Goose, and particularly in Iskinaary. “But I think we are not very far from
the edge.”

  “The edge,” she said.

  “Where you are going.”

  “You don’t know where I am going.”

  “Not ultimately.”

  They considered this stalemate a while, and then Iskinaary relented. “Your father wasn’t much of a witch, was he?”

  “He wasn’t much of a father either.”

  “But he was pretty good as a Bird, when he flew with Kynot and the Conference. He learned a little bit. He didn’t learn enough.”

  She waited.

  “The Birds have always known,” said Iskinaary. “At least, some have. But Birds, and birds, keep to themselves usually. They flock with their kind. It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them. Your father conducted one such campaign, in those dark days when the dragons first threatened Oz, threatened the skies for all the Birds, and the earth for all crawling creatures. Liir flew with us on his broom, as you fly now. He might have learned more from us, but he was young, and Birds, well, they don’t volunteer much. It’s not in their nature. They are neutral, and possessed of a certain appealing reticence.”

  “Some of them,” admitted Rain. “Not you.”

  “So,” Iskinaary continued, “we’ve known. We have always known, or anyway we’ve heard rumors. We could have told you what we’d heard. I could have told you. Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”

  “Is everything all right back there in Oz?”

  “I’ve not followed along all these months to gossip.” He seemed angry. “I’m trying to tell you to keep going.”

  “Well, all right then. But if I’m right, I go alone.”

  “You make the rules for the ground. I’ll make the rules for the air.”

  She launched herself and didn’t look behind to see if he was following. She knew he was, the rolled-up umbrella in his claws. It would be kinder if she were to carry it, but she wasn’t ready to be kind.

  That night, among scratchy grass, she slept and dreamed of Tip. She didn’t know if it was Tip or Ozma, really; it was that kind of a dream that made her furious with need and regret and hope all at once. She awoke in the dark, clammy in a cold sweat even though it would be a warm day, she could tell. A sort of fog, as from Restwater, hung over the sedge.

  She said to herself, Did my father send Iskinaary after me because a message had arrived at last?

  But she wouldn’t ask the Goose for fear of the answer, either way it might be spoken. She wasn’t ready to know.

  She found a place to squat, and after that she broke her fast with Iskinaary. More dry biscuits. Delicious. The wind, the world of shadows. The taunting stars strung on their invisible threads across the glowing velvet black. They didn’t speak—not girl, not Goose, not stars.

  Near dawn, she strode through the grass to the top of the near slope, to see if the air would clear, if she could catch a glimpse of the next stretch.

  Beyond the slope, at bluff’s edge, the ground dropped away in a returning curve, a bevel carved out by a stronger breeze. The air felt stronger, brusquer, colder, more filled with tang, almost a strange kind of vinegar in the wind.

  She kept going, down that slope and up the curve of the next. The wind possessed bluster and noise she’d never heard at ground level before. Ever.

  The fog had oriented itself into a composite of colored scarves through which the sun from behind her was beginning to seethe, gilding the unnatural hills.

  They weren’t hills of earth.

  The world’s edge was water; water as far as the eye could see; water from the scalloped strand out to the horizon. There was no end to it. The noise wasn’t the sound of wind, after all, but of moving water that made endless avalanche against the sand, punching and pulling back. Foundries of spume and spit, and salt stinging her eyes. Thrashes of weight from side to side, streaked laterally with zinc; mettanite; emerald; lamb’s wool; turquoise. The great weeping rim of the world.

  She didn’t wait for the Goose. She slung her leg over the broom and launched at once. A new technique for flying would be needed against this force. Later in the day, if she lasted, she might glance back and find that the Goose had anticipated her departure and was steadily keeping pace a mile or more behind. She trusted that this would be true.

  She would make no plan but this: to move out into the world as a Bird might, and to perch on the edge of everything that could be known. She would circle herself with water below and with sky above. She would wait until there was no stink of Oz, no breath of it, no sight of it on any horizon no matter how high she climbed. And then she would let go of the book, let it plunge into the mythical sea.

  Live life without grasping for the magic of it.

  Turn back, and find out what that was like; or turn forward, and learn something new.

  A mile above anything known, the Girl balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the sea itself, flung up by the turbulent air and sent wheeling away.

  FINIS

  About that country there’s not much left to say.

  Blue sun, far off, a watery vein

  in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself

  unremarkable: familiar ruins

  littered with standing stones our people

  had lost the ability to decipher.

  How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish

  umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,

  and the effervescent stars, strange currents

  tugged at our thoughts like tapestries

  unraveling into war. All spring

  the nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.

  The rats had abandoned the temples.

  My mind was a voyage hungering to happen.

  —Todd Hearon, “Atlantis”

  … we must learn to live a secondary life in an unmarked world.

  —Ron MacLean, “Duck Variations”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, one and all, to the many friends and colleagues who helped one way or the other in the work of getting Out of Oz out on paper.

  —Douglas Smith, artist, for the splendid jacket and case, section art, and maps

  —David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, for their close reading and helpful remarks

  —William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, for the same

  —Cassie Jones, Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, and other fine people at HarperCollins: Rich Aquan, Ben Bruton, Jessica Deputato, Tavia Kowalchuk, Shawn Nicholls, Lisa Stokes, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Chelsey Emmelhainz, and Lorie Young

  —the producers and creators and performers of Wicked the musical, at home and around the world, whose good cheer has become a constant background melody in my life

  —Scott Glorioso, Lori Shelly, and Elizabeth Williams in the GM office, for managing crises from technological to overnight posting to accounting, but perhaps especially to Emily Prabhaker, for helping me compose an index and synopsis to the first three books of The Wicked Years, which was an invaluable map and guide as I drove the complicated story to its complicated conclusion

  —Todd Hearon and Ron MacLean, for permission to quote from their work at the novel’s close

  —Andy and the next generation of Maguire Newmans, for all the life that cannot be found in the pages of novels

  Coda

  Before you close the cover of the present volume, and allow the writer to sink back into its pages, living both through and beside his characters, let’s grab a last look from the promontory. The next eyes to glance over our horizon will see something else. Something new, prompting a separate issue to propose and explore.

  Oz before sunrise. The ancient predawn light makes of the earth below a mystery, and of all those anonymous lives more m
ysteries still. The tired stars winking out, the smear of cloud dividing the midnight from pale marigold dawn. The sheet of the heavens holds the stage a moment longer, eclipsing earthbound dramas of tedium, resurrection, and despair; of individual aspiration and sacrifice; of national effort and disgrace. A welcome amnesia, our capacity to sleep, to be lost in the dark. Today will shine its spotlights to shame and to honor us soon enough. But all in good time, my pretty. We can wait.

  Oz at sunrise. What one makes out, from any height, are the outlines. The steel-cut peaks of the Great Kells, the pudding hills of the Madeleines. The textured outcroppings of Shiz, Bright Lettins, the Emerald City. Ignore the few pixilated dots of gold in the black (early risers—those with ailing relatives, or scholars late at their books, nothing more than that). We see little of human industry and ambition to chart at this hour. This is a roughed-out landscape only coming into life. A map done in smudged pencil, a first draft. Much to be filled in when light arrives. But thank you, Mr. Baum, for leaving the map where I could find it.

  Watching the world wake up, dress itself in the dark, take on its daily guise, reminds me of how we fathom human character when we encounter someone at a distance, at a gallop, in the shadows. We get no more than a quick glance at the man on the street, the child in the woods, the witch at the well, the Lion among us. Our initial impression, most often, has to serve.

  Still, that first crude glimpse, a clutch of raw hypotheses that can never be soundly clinched or dismissed, is often all we get before we must choose whether to lean forward or to avert our eyes. Slim evidence indeed, but put together with mere hints and echoes of what we have once read, we risk cherishing one another. Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

  To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.