Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (35 page)

Skirts rustled as the women shifted. Faint whispering, unprecedented in the chapel, sounded, like faraway wind. The Superior Maunt dropped her forehead into her fingers and breathed deeply, feeling that the world had changed utterly, and wondering how quickly she would regret this action.

In the stillness, Lady Glinda stood. Reticence not being her usual thing, she’d had about enough: and anyway, hadn’t the Superior Maunt called for a collaborative spirit? “If I may speak,” she began, in a tone that implied she knew she could not be denied, “even if the army breaks through the defenses of this mauntery, they cannot do you good women much harm. There will be no bloodshed or rape here. Not while I am in house. Make of it what you will, even though I am retired from what passed for public service, I am still seen as a friend of the government. I have the ear of every society power monger in the country. The army knows well enough they cannot abuse you while I am a witness—and they will not touch me. They daren’t.”

She added, “I am Lady Glinda,” in case some of the younger novices hadn’t cottoned on yet.

“It isn’t the girls that are wanted,” said Sister Doctor. “It is the boys.”

“Don’t underestimate what people in the throes of passion may do,” said the Superior Maunt. “Our rectitude means little to the world beyond our walls, and the commitment of our lives is as cheap as throwaway grain on unuseful margins of field. Still, Sister Doctor, you are right. The army seeks two young men, but they do not know for sure that they are here.”

Liir said, “I do not think the broom would carry two, but Trism could climb to the ramparts late at night, and fly to safety. That would leave only me, and whatever fate I have earned, I should face it by myself.”

The room grew decidedly chilly. “So the rumors of the broom are true?” said Sister Doctor. The Superior Maunt took in some breath wetly at the corners of her mouth.

Liir shrugged but couldn’t deny it. From the side, mad Mother Yackle called, “Of course the rumors are true. The broom came from this very house. I myself gave it to Sister Saint Aelphaba years ago. Am I the only one concentrating enough to know this?”

She might, an hour earlier, have been hushed, and the Superior Maunt began to speak. But Sister Doctor raised her hand and stayed the Mother Maunt’s comment, and remarked, “You’ve been quiet for a decade, Mother Yackle, but of late you’ve come back to yourself somewhat. Have you anything to add we should know?”

“I don’t talk when there’s nothing to say,” said Mother Yackle. “All I have to add is this: Elphaba should be here to see this hour.”

“You have an uncommon association with—the Witch of the West.”

“Yes, I do,” said Mother Yackle. “I seem to have been placed on the sidelines of her life, as you might say, as a witness. I’m mad as a bedbug, so no one needs to attend, but I’ve taken some measure of her power. Oh!—but she
should
be here to see this hour.”

“Mother Yackle? A guardian angel?” called Sister Apothecaire.

“Well—a guardian twitch, anyway,” replied the old woman.

Liir trembled and thought of his lack of power, once again, and of his revery within these walls. Now he remembered what he hadn’t seen before: that in the corner of the room where the green-skinned novice had sat rocking the cradle, a broom leaned against a chest of drawers.

“Are there other remarks?” asked Sister Doctor.

Shocked somewhat by the developments, the maunts muttered quietly, but no one else spoke until Sister Apothecaire stood and said, “Mother Maunt, I would like to applaud you for your courage and your wisdom.”

Tears ran suddenly from the old maunt’s eyes as her house, to a person, stood and paid their respects. Outside, the horses shied and the men started at the sudden rain of noise from the chapel windows.

T
HE BROOM, THOUGH,
wouldn’t carry Trism. In his hands it was no more than a broom. “I lack the proper spunk, it seems,” he said.

“Maybe it has lost its power,” said Liir, but in his own hand the thing leaped to life again, bucking like a colt.

“We might be able to manage a sleight of hand with only one man to hide,” said Lady Glinda. “After all, as you pointed out, they are looking for a pair of you. Perhaps Trism could be passed off as my bodyguard. It was unlike me to have ventured here without a bodyguard, after all, though I did. Sometimes I like to confound even myself,” she explained. “It isn’t difficult.”

“If the men who hold us under siege recognize Trism from the barracks at the Emerald City, he will be put under arrest,” said Sister Doctor.

“Well, I used to be good at makeovers,” said Glinda. “And I could do magic with a blush brush. He’s got big shoulders for a maunt, but he’s pretty enough, and a little peroxide on the facial hair, which is so conveniently blond—” She tossed her own curls. “Well, I never travel without it.”

“I think not,” said Trism in a steely voice.

“Then we’ll have to take the chance we can pass you off as my servant,” said Lady Glinda. “Liir will leave tonight, on the broom, and tomorrow morning I shall ride out with Trism at my side, and make no explanation. If you choose then to open your doors to the soldiers, they will find nothing untoward here. I shall wait outside your gate as an obvious witness until their search is completed. If they are that hungry for blood, they will not dally here but rush on elsewhere.”

“But where will you go?” the Superior Maunt asked Trism. By now they had retired to her office, and she was sagging against the worn leather of her chair.

Liir looked at Trism. As much as could pass between them in a look, without words, passed: and another moment of possibility crashed and burned.

“If Trism can get through, he should try to find Apple Press Farm,” said Liir. “He might smuggle Candle to safety elsewhere. The Emperor’s soldiers are headed vaguely in that direction, and the site has been discovered and ripped up by thugs and vandals at least once already. It seems to have been used as a clandestine press for the printing of antigovernment propaganda.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt modestly, “so I’ve been told.”

“For you, I would try to find that farm,” said Trism. “And I will take the scraped faces, that they not be found here when the army does its ransack.”

“As for me,” continued Liir, “I’ve learned something from you.” He looked at the Superior Maunt, who was tending to nod. “I promised to try to complete an exercise, and I did this much: I helped rid the skies of the dragons that were attacking travelers and causing fear and suspicion among the outlying tribes. I will finish my work before anything else happens. I should let the Conference of the Birds know that, for now, they are free to gather, to fly, to conduct their lives without that undue threat. With the help of the Witch’s broom, and unimpeded by dragon-fings, I can manage that shortly.

“Beyond that,” he said, “I have other scores to settle. I set out years ago to find Nor, a girl with whom I spent some childhood years.”

“But, Liir,” said Sister Doctor, “the Princess Nastoya is expecting your return.”

Liir started. “I had assumed she’d have died long ago.”

“She’s been trying to die, and trying not to die, a complicated set of intentions,” said Sister Doctor. “She mentioned you, Liir.”

“I don’t know what I can do for her. I do not have Elphaba’s skills, neither by inheritance nor by training.”

They sat silently as he worried it out. “In the choice of what to do next, I’m troubled. On the one hand, you say the Princess Nastoya is old and suffering and wants to die.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt wearily. “I know the feeling.”

“On the other hand, Nor is young and has a life ahead of her, and perhaps it is a greater good to help her first, if I can.”

They waited; the wind soughed a little in the chimney.

“I will return to Princess Nastoya,” he told them. “I know I won’t be able to help her to sever her human disguise from her Elephant nature. I’m not a person of talents. But if I can give her the loyalty of friendship, I’ll do that.”

“You would help an ancient crone over a disappeared girl?” said Sister Doctor. Her sense of medical ethics flared.

“Young Nor found her own way out of Southstairs,” said Liir. “Whatever else has been done to her body or her mind, she clearly has spirit and cunning. I shall have to trust that her youth will continue to protect her. And maybe she doesn’t need my help now—though I won’t rest until I know it for sure. Meanwhile, Sister Doctor, you say that the Princess Nastoya has asked for me. Ten years ago I made a promise to try to help; I owe her my apologies if nothing else. And if I can report conclusively to the Scrow that it was not the Yunamata who were scraping the faces of solitary travelers, I may be able to help effect a treaty of faith between the two peoples.”

“Is it hubris to aim for such a large reward?” asked Sister Doctor.

“No,” said the Superior Maunt, her eyes now closed.

“No,” said Liir. “The Superior Maunt has shown me that tonight. If we share what we know, we may have a fighting chance. This house, as a sanctuary, may survive. The country, and its peoples, may survive.”

“The country,” said the Superior Maunt. Her mind was sliding sleepward. “Oh, indeed yes, the country of the Unnamed God…”

“The country of Oz, be what it may,” said Liir.

In a semblance of a toast to hope, they raised imaginary glasses of champagne, as the Superior Maunt began to snore.

S
OMETIME LATER THAN MIDNIGHT,
Sister Apothecaire showed Liir and Trism to an attic. A window gave out conveniently to a place where two matching peaks of roof on either side sloped together to form a valley between them. Corbelling protected this section of roof from the view of people on the ground.

Sister Apothecaire said, “Sister Doctor mentioned your intentions to me, Liir. I’m glad to have the chance to add what Sister Doctor forgot about. The Princess gave us a message to give you—but of course you had disappeared by the time we got back. She said something about Nor and the word on the street about her. I don’t recall precisely, but she has something to say to you.”

Liir reached inside the Witch’s cape. In the interior pocket, he felt for the folded-up drawing of Nor by her father. He winced at the memory of the childish writing—the chunky downstrokes, the blocky uncials.
Nor by Fiyero
.

Sister Apothecaire wrapped Liir’s cape the more tightly around his chest to make sure it wouldn’t flap and draw undue attention as he tried to make his escape. She tucked extra loaves of bread and a parcel of nuts into his lapels, and bade him Ozspeed. Then she retreated to give them privacy for their good-byes.

“Neither of us may make it, you know,” said Trism. “Before noon tomorrow we may both be dead.”

“It’s been good to be alive, then,” said Liir. “I mean, after a fashion.”

“I’m afraid I got you into this,” said Trism. “I saw you on the ball pitch and thought I would take my revenge on you. I didn’t mean this much revenge—either that you should die, or that we should part like this.”

“I was looking for you, too, sort of—you just saw me first,” Liir answered. “It might have been the other way round. Anyway, what does it matter? Here we are. Together a moment longer, anyway.”

After a while, Trism managed to say, “Are you sure you can fly in this condition?”

“What condition is that? I’ve been in this condition my whole life,” Liir answered. “It’s the only condition I know. Bitter love, loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”

They kissed each other a final time, and Liir mounted the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, and felt it rise beneath him. He did not look back at where Trism stood. He had few talents, did Liir, and while flying a broom was one of them, he wasn’t practiced enough to risk breaking his neck.

His other talent, though, was a distillation of memory into something rich and urgent. He guessed, in the hours or years remaining to him, he would remember the effect of Trism clearly, without corruption, as a secret pulse held in a pocket somewhere behind the heart.

The exact look of Trism, though, the scent and heft of him, the feel of him, would probably decay into imprecision, a shadowy form, unseen but imagined. Hardly distinguishable from an extra chimney in a valley formed by pantiled roofs of a mauntery.

1

F
LYING AT NIGHT.

He kept low at first, scarcely twice the height of the highest trees. The winds tunneling beneath the cloud cover were ill-tempered, as if out to tumble him. Below, the oakhair forest twitched in the winter gale, looking like the pelt of a great beast lumbering along for midnight rendezvous with sex or supper.

Then the clouds thinned, and the air grew colder still. He remembered more of the attack by dragons than he wanted to—it kicked up a sick feeling. He couldn’t manage much more height than he’d achieved so far. Still, with a quick flip of his head left, right, he could make out the southernmost cove of Kellswater and the bay where the Vinkus River debouched into Restwater. From this vantage both lakes looked hard and dead as slate.

He crossed the dark line drawn by the Vinkus River. Now he was halfway to Kumbricia’s Pass, which meant that Apple Press Farm was somewhere below. How was Candle faring? He thought of pulling down and seeing.

You could, he said to himself. Now you needn’t worry about scaring her, for if you show up in the middle of the night, she’ll be ready: she’ll have divined the present and sensed your approach, and prepared the tea for your arrival. And the blankets, and the fire, and the bed, though you’re not ready yet to go to her bed again, even chastely.

But no, no, he continued—no. What if she was with someone else? Or what if she’d left? Or what if Commander Cherrystone recognized Trism and arrested him, and tortured him into revealing Liir’s hiding place—and thence discovered Candle? And kidnapped
her
—as he had done Nor all those years ago!—as a kind of reprisal against the slaughter of the dragon contingent, the ruin of the basilica?

Liir was learning to think in terms of consequence. He gave due credit to the strategies and devices of the Emperor. In any case, though, concern for Candle would distract Liir from completing his mission, as he had promised her to do. Let Trism get there safely and see to her needs, if he could, if he would. Time enough for me to show my sorry face and find out what’s going to happen next.

For now, he would finish what he’d started: at least this much.

He might have caught sight of the farmhouse roof winking, or he might be miles and miles off. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He kept his eyes trained on the foothills of the Great Kells, which from this height were already beginning to swell, less an actual shape than a shift in the grade of shadow.

The wind strengthened as it rushed down the eastern slopes of Oz’s mountainy spine. He lost speed, and it took more effort to keep the broom on course. Like riding a horse in a raging river, he imagined, now that he had some experience of horseback riding under his belt, as it were. Finally he had to come down to earth entirely, from exhaustion. He found a shepherd’s summer lean-to, abandoned for the season, and stretched out underneath the cape and fell promptly asleep, the broom between his arms and along his chin like the boniest of lovers.

2

A
T DAWN, THE WINDS RELENTED,
and the mountains burned in pinkish light. He finished the small meal provided by Sister Apothecaire and pressed on.

Kumbricia’s Pass was defined by a color of evergreen specific to the suspended gorge that widened apronlike as it dropped toward the Vinkus River plain. How foreboding the uprights of the cliffs on either side—how much more fortress the landscape provided than Liir had been aware. No wonder the Yunamata, the Scrow, and the Arjiki had never knuckled under to the industrial strength of Gillikin or the military might of the Emerald City. And no wonder the dragons had been an important development—they would have had to work to flap their way along this wind-chased passage, but they would have managed. If the dragon population had expanded, and a whole fleet of them had become available for maneuvers, they could have rained destruction even upon the distant populations of the widespread Vinkus.

And might yet, Liir knew. The strategic knowledge that had developed those dragons into weapons wouldn’t have been lost because Trism defected or the basilica collapsed. If nothing else happened, it was only a matter of time before another Trism came along to do the bidding of his superiors and raise up perhaps an even mightier army.

Yet today had dawned, and tomorrow could not be foreseen. No magician in the world had yet mastered the art of prophecy, so far as Liir knew. Not a single venerable bishop with his channels to the divine, nor any tiktok mechanism of subtle apprehension, nor even the best-taught sorcerer with the keenest of inner eyes, had ever accurately foretold so much as whether the rain would hold off for the picnic. It was Time Yet to Come that possessed the strongest force of all, a magic mightier than the Kells themselves, a magic greener than all of green Oz. Inscrutable, terrifying, and exhilarating at once.

H
E FOUND HE COULD NOT FLY
above Kumbricia’s Pass. His broom bucked to one side or another, as he’d heard a horse instructed to cross a risky bridge might do. He didn’t know whether this was mere exhaustion, a flagging of his will, or some sort of wizardic or magnetic obstruction he didn’t understand. He allowed himself to drop, by a series of long, scalloped declines, till at last he found landfall in a clearing, and continued his voyage by foot.

It took time to locate the spot where he had been interviewed by General Kynot, the crusty old Cliff Eagle—the island in the hanging tarn. The place seemed deserted. He could see nothing but random feathers and the inevitable mess of droppings. Maybe they’d moved on to a cleaner lobby somewhere.

On foot he continued west, losing track of time. One of the drawbacks of flying on the broom was that his nose became frozen, and the air at a certain height, while clean of grit, was also curiously scentless. Kumbricia’s Pass, by contrast, was a festival of odors.

In the nest of the cape, he settled for an afternoon nap and didn’t wake up until dawn…and he wasn’t even sure it was dawn of the next day, or some day further on.

Nonetheless, he was rested at last, rested in a deep way, and better able to spy winter berries in the thickets, and chichonga pods, and the occasional scatter of walnuts on the ground. Dozens of streams leapt from either side of the great gorge and crisscrossed, occasionally islanding the floor of the pass into hillocks. He didn’t go thirsty. He felt that the longer he pressed on, the stronger he became.

At last Kumbricia’s Pass made its final abrupt turn before opening out above the beautiful bleak expanse, as far as the eye could see, of the rolling prairie known as the Thousand Year Grasslands. In the shallow caves and along the ledges of the westward face of the Kells, nearly deafened by the constant wind, Liir met up with what remained of the Conference of the Birds.

Their numbers had dwindled in the short time since Liir had left Kumbricia’s Pass. When General Kynot spied Liir standing there—so much for the vigilance of their sentries!—he lop-winged over and indicated, with a strict jerk of his head, that they should retreat into the gorge for a bit of a chin-wag.

A few Birds saw the General’s intentions, and braved the buffeting winds to join the colloquy. Several dozen gathered, including the Wren named Dosey, who cued in the blind, hobbledy Heron.

“We see you’ve reclaimed your broom,” began the General without formality. “I’m to understand it is not functioning as a vehicle for flight anymore, or you wouldn’t have come on foot. And you would have come sooner.”

“I came as quickly as I could,” said Liir. “What’s happened?”

“We’ve lost half our number,” said the General, “or near to it. The Yunamata rushed us, and since we were scared to take high wing, we were caught in a series of nets and traps they’d erected across a narrow part of the Pass. Scarcely a one of us hasn’t lost companion or kin.”

“That’s not like them,” said Liir. “Or not like their reputation. They’re a peaceable people.”

The General glared at Liir. “We’ve had to leave the Pass, lest it happen again. We’re cornered against the sky up here, on display to preying dragons, and without adequate supply of grubs and worms.”

Liir said, “I’m sorry about the Yunamata attack. That’s the Emperor’s strategy—to keep his foes busy nipping at one another. That has to stop. There’s no way to survive without our making peace among ourselves.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” shrilled the Wren to Liir, and the General was too dispirited to bother correcting her terminology. “One population can’t make peace with another by force.”

“There are possibilities,” said Liir. “The time of the dragons is done, at least for now. You can fly again.
We
can fly again. And before the next threat might come, we have to maneuver ourselves into…a coalition. No, not that: a nation.”

“Which nation is that?” snapped the General.

“Witch nation!” tittered a Dodo. “I likes that, I do.”

“You called a Conference about the raiding skirmishes of dragons,” Liir reminded them. “The dragon fleet has been destroyed. But those dragons were a tribe, too: ill-used, malevolent, raised up to strike out, imprisoned by their training. It gave me no joy to poison a dragon, even one that has attacked and killed your kind and mine. Yet the moment is here to fly again. Not just home, not just yet: but fly into the storm. The Emperor has already sent out a guard to hunt me down, and he and his ilk will hardknuckle anyone who gets in his way. No one in the Emerald City can stand up to him, for he claims the divine right of the elect—not elected by people, but by the Unnamed God. Who can dispute that? We are all elect, for here we are, and we must fly for our lives. We must show ourselves to be a company. He sent dragons to scare the skies: we will fly ourselves as a flag right back at him.”

General Kynot pretended to peck at his chest for vermin. When he raised his head, his eyes were dry again. “It is not easy to trust the wisdom of a human person,” he admitted. “Like so many humans, you could be lying. Leading us into a trap. Promising us freedom, and tricking us into an ambush of yet more dragons. Yet we have so few choices but to trust. After all, you are the son of the Witch.”

“Don’t base your decision on a false premise,” said Liir. “I will never know for sure who my parents were. And even if I did, the son of a witch can be as wrong as anyone else. Let us fly because you are persuaded we should, not because I say so.”

“I vote yes,” said Dosey.

“So do I,” said the Heron, “though I can’t fly anymore, of course.”

“I didn’t
call
for a vote,” said Kynot.

“That’s why I voted,” Dosey replied.

“Witch nation! Witch nation!” said the Dodo.

T
HEY LAUNCHED AT NOON,
maybe ninety Birds, swooping westward into the buffeting winds that ran the span of the prairie to build up enough strength to crash against the Kells.

The venture almost scattered them at once. The Wrens tumbled like husks of dried pinlobble; the Ducks shat themselves silly; the Night Rocs couldn’t see in the widest daylight Oz had to offer, and nearly brained themselves by wheeling backward into the peaks.

Liir was giddy and vertiginous. The broom shot out over a rocky sward, so low that he could make out the surprised expressions of wild highland goats. Another instant and he was fifteen times higher than the highest tower of Kiamo Ko, and a silver river winked in the sunlight below him, narrow as a bootlace.

Just fighting to stay together took the better part of an afternoon. When they finally reached air space beyond the forested foothills, above the nearest start of the endless grassland, where the power of the wind diminished, they settled to rest and feed and count their number. Four of their ninety had been lost in the first descent out of Kumbricia’s Pass.

But there were grassland grubs and beetles, and the backwash of mountain rills to splash in, so they made their first encampment.

I
T TOOK A FEW DAYS
of rehearsal for the Night Rocs to learn how to maneuver by daylight, but the Grasslands were forgiving. After hours of uninhibited flight, with no dragons approaching, the Birds grew braver and flew in a looser formation.

For the time being they avoided other populations, though far below them they delighted in the spectacle of wild tsebra wheeling and cantering in their winter migration toward the south, a flurry of black and white markings against the brown ground, an alphabet in the act of writing the story of tsebra migration. Or notes, singing a mythic history.

Draffes, their long tawny necks swaying, saluted them in their high-pitched voices. Liir couldn’t hear them, but Kynot said that evening that sentient Draffes were living among draffes, in apparent harmony.

A small band of Vleckmarshes flew up to greet the flying Conference (Kynot would not allow the Birds to call themselves Witch Nation, despite the Dodo’s pleading). At the sight of Liir on the broomstick, the Vleckmarshes made common cause with the travelers, and flew alongside.

Then a bounty of Angel Swans, who usually kept to themselves out of pride for the whiteness of their mien, gave wing. So too a noisy clot of Grey Geese, who were wintering together on the banks of a nameless broad winter lake that appeared and disappeared in different places every year, they said.

The Conference flew in waves, the bigger birds working harder, providing a breakfront against the wind, the smaller birds in the slipstream, and lower, in case of attack by air. It was Dosey who spotted the tents of the Scrow, arrayed in the usual geometric precision against the trackless blanket of earth.

Liir did not want to approach the camp, not yet. But General Kynot, agreeing to serve as an emissary, dove out of formation and whipped around the camp until he could decide which tent belonged to the Princess Nastoya.

That night, the Conference having settled under a shelter of windthorn hedge, Kynot reported to Liir.

“I found one who could speak to me, an old scholar named Shem Ottokos,” said the General. “I told him you were abroad, but he said he didn’t need me to tell him that. He had been able to make you out with his naked eye, because the cape unfurls so blackly against the scrim of the evening. He had the tent lifted for his queen to see, and though she is mostly blind now, she said she could make you out against the sky. He thinks it was the clot of the Conference she was seeing, its whole mass. She wants to see you, said Ottokos. She has something to tell you. Whether you can help her or not.”