Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (12 page)

Glinda reared back. “What license have you to take their names to me!”

She replied, “The right of the wounded, for whom propriety is a luxury. I beg you. In their names. Take the book.”

“Listen to Missy Flitter-foot of the Prairies,” said Mr. Boss to Glinda. “Before they tear us limb from limb.”

The Lion shook his mane. “Ilianora. Gentlemen. Mr. Boss. They’re beginning to marshal their forces. I can hear them coming.” She didn’t know why she took the Grimmerie from the dwarf, but Brrr was already settling himself between the shafts of the Clock, and the lads in tunics were putting shoulders to the carriage. The one they caled Ilianora drew her veil down upon her forehead. “If they catch us up, and tear the Clock apart with their fingers, they won’t find its heart,” she said to Glinda, and put two dusky fingers upon Glinda’s pale hand. “Much depends on you now.” Then she turned, a corkscrew twist of white sleeves and ripples, and hurried after the Clock as it passed through the gates of the forecourt and into the dark, heading not toward Zimmerstorm and the Munchkin strongholds, but west along the road leading toward Loyal Oz.

The dwarf was walking away backward, hissing at Glinda. “We won’t go far. Into a tuck between low hils in the Pine Barrens. Just until we’re sure everything is copacetic.”

“You have no reason to look after me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. We want to make sure the book doesn’t come to harm.” Then on his bandy legs he stumped to catch up with his companions.

She was alone for a moment, alone with the Grimmerie in the guttering light of lanterns. It weighed against her breast and clavicle like the child she had never had. It was nearly warm to touch. It
was
warm to touch. The tooled binding seemed to relax in her hold.

Nonsense.

She flung herself inside and up the grand staircase. She was huffing by the time she reached the top, and she could hear soldiers returning to their posts in the banquet hal and the reception rooms. She heard the crystal chink of stopper against bottleneck; brandy was being decanted. Disagreements about the Clock’s presentation were being aired. She achieved her private suite, however, without molestation.

A single candle glowed in a sconce. Miss Murth sat ramrod straight, looking directly ahead. The girl was on the floor, her head in Miss Murth’s lap. Murth was stroking her hair.

“You fool. You should be abed. I can manage my own nightgown,” snapped Glinda.

“The girl couldn’t sleep and I didn’t dare let her wander about alone.”

“So where did the two of you wander to? The ramparts?”

Miss Murth pursed her lip. “The girl was curious. But I did not care for the entertainment. It did not seem suitable.”

“Suitable for whom? I’m disappointed in you both. Take yourselves off somewhere else to sulk. I didn’t write the script. Go on, I’m in no mood to talk.” Miss Murth arose. She didn’t glance at the Grimmerie, which Glinda felt was glowing against her bosom like a red-hot breastplate. “You wil bring us to ruin, Lady Glinda,” she said in a low voice. “Come along, girl.”

The sleepy child stood and yawned. As much to herself as to Glinda or Murth, she murmured, “My favorite was the Lion.”
I2.

Whatever happened, Glinda was pretty sure she wouldn’t be subject to a midnight inquisition, so she just stuffed the Grimmerie under her pilow. Then she humped herself into bed and blew her own candle out, and failed to sleep til nearly dawn.

What to do about the book? Cherrystone had already scoured her apartments, but he was no fool. He might work out that the performance of such a seditious little one-act was a diversionary tactic. That some transaction had occurred in the forecourt. He could come storming in here at dawn and tear the place apart. What to do? Where to turn?

And why was she the point person? Was it simply too obvious for words—that she was known to be more capricious than clever? That no one would think to look for an instrument of parlous magic in her presence? That she was a sily, dispensable figure whose moment had passed? She couldn’t dispute any of this. And she stil couldn’t sleep.

Her thoughts returned to Elphaba Thropp. It was more than fifteen years since they had parted ways. What an uncommon friendship they had had—not quite fulfiling. Yet nothing had ever taken its place.

Years later, when that boy Lir had shown up at Glinda’s house in the Emerald City, she had known him at once for Elphaba’s son, though he seemed in some doubt on that matter. (Children.) He had had Elphaba’s broom, after al, and her cape. More to the point, he had had her
look:
that look both haunted and thereby abstract, but at the same time focused. A look like a spark on a dry winter’s day, that staticky crackle and flash that leaps across the air from finger to the iron housing of the servant’s bel.

What would Lir do, were he handed the Grimmerie? What would Elphaba?

She drifted to sleep at last as the summer dawn began. Birds insisted on their dim pointless melodies. She didn’t believe she dreamed of Elphaba; she didn’t have the kind of aggravated imagination that loitered in dreams. Maybe she dreamed of a door opening, and Elphaba coming back from the Afterlife. To settle Glinda’s consternation; to save her. Or maybe this wasn’t a dream, just a foundational longing.

Stil, when she rose to a clamor of soldiers practicing in formation outside, she found that she had an inkling about what to do. Like a bit of advice from Elphaba, in her dream! But that was fanciful.

Miss Murth was drawing the bath. “I fear a slight headache,” caled Glinda. “I wil do without tea until later. Leave me alone.”

“Very good, Mum,” said Miss Murth in a voice of superiority and disdain. She slammed the door on the way out.

Glinda approached the wardrobe and removed the Grimmerie. She sat it on a towel on her dressing table. The volume was as long as her forearm and almost as wide, covered in green morocco and gussied up with semiprecious stones and silvergilt. No title upon its spine. The pages were rough cut, she could see, and when she ran her finger across the deckle edges she believed she felt a curious charge. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t fuly awake yet.

She opened the book. This is to say, she prised up the cover and a certain portion of pages. The book wouldn’t alow her to select any old page. It seemed to know what she was looking for, and sure enough, she found it. The facing page was blank, but the inscribed page read, in majuscule so ornate as to look like lace,
On Concealment
.

A knock on the door. Without thinking Glinda murmured, “Come in.” Murth approached with tea on a tray. “I said I would wait,” said Glinda.

“But it’s noon, Mum,” said Miss Murth. “And you haven’t taken your bath yet? It’l be glacial cold by now.”

“Leave the tea,” said Glinda, frightened. She hadn’t felt more than a minute go by as she was trying to scrutinize the spel. Apparently she had lost a morning.

“I have news, Lady Glinda,” said Miss Murth.

“Later,” said Glinda, flustered. “I mean it, Murth. I’l ring for you presently. Good-bye.”

Miss Murth departed. Glinda was almost there. She had to concentrate.

She stood. Her back was sore from hunching over. She had been studying this one page for several hours! Mercy. Had she learned to concentrate at last? Perhaps she was ready to take some correspondence classes in, oh, table goosebal. Or poem writing. Or the foreign service.

She put the fingers of both hands spread out upon the tabletop—that seemed to be part of it, to stabilize herself. It was almost as if the book wanted her to succeed, wanted to be concealed; there was a sort of sharpening of focus upon each word as she spoke it, though she scarcely knew what the words meant. “Debooey geekum, eska skadily sloggi,” she recited. “Gungula vexus, vexanda talib en prochinka chorr.” She didn’t think herself at al convincing, but the book didn’t seem to notice.

She reached the last sylables—and the book shuddered and jumped, as if someone had kicked the table from beneath. She put one knuckle between her teeth to keep herself from shrieking in surprise.

Success! Or sabotage. Anyway, something. Something was happening.

The Grimmerie began to change shape. She couldn’t have said how. It was shrinking and growing at the same time, and the balsam-needle color of its spine seemed to be burning off. The book flexed and retracted. It took several moments before it returned to seeming lifeless, like most books. It was thick and square and yelow—the size, shape, and color of a bad cake. A kind of papery cover, a shiny scarf cut to order, was folded into the front and back boards and jacketed around the spine of the volume.

Glinda picked up the Grimmerie and shook it. It made no sound except the riffling of pages, which fluttered in a respectably bookish way. There was no warmth or life in it. She studied the cover as if she were Cherrystone looking for the Grimmerie. The author’s name was uninteligible gibberish. Big squarish letters above it, though, which must indicate the book’s title, said
Gone with the Wind
.

She humped it into a shelf next to her favorite books,
A Girl’s First Guide
to Coquettery
and
The Little Mercenary: A Novel of Manners
. It looked quite at home. It certainly didn’t look like the Grimmerie.

She rang for tea. She was famished.

Tea arrived with bad news. Miss Murth looked at her balefuly. Chef had been dismissed. Forcibly. “No,” said Glinda.

“While you were busy reading your
book
,” replied Miss Murth with spite.

“Where are the others? Rain? Puggles?”

“Rain is off at her reading lesson with the General. Puggles is trying to stake tomatoes upon the roof. Chef left him with several pages of instructions before he was carted away.” Glinda dressed in haste and hurried downstairs, but she cast a last look at the bookshelf before she did.
Gone with the Wind
sat smugly in its place. What a good title for a hidden book, she thought. The Grimmerie has a sense of humor.

Any sense of accomplishment she felt at the successful completion of a spel soon evaporated in the granite presence of General Cherrystone. She paused at the door to the library, where Rain was sitting at a table, her bare legs swinging and her finger tracing letters in the polen that had sifted through the windows and settled yelowly on the tabletop. Where the
hell
is that maid, thought Glinda madly, before remembering, of course, that the maid had gone wherever Chef had been sent.

Cherrystone lifted a finger to his lips. She fel silent but quivering at the doorway.

“That was decent work today, my little scholar,” he told the girl. “You’re becoming very good at your standing-up letters. Next time we’l begin on the letters shaped like circles, or parts of circles. Don’t forget to practice.”

The child fled so fast that her dirty little soles flicked themselves at Glinda. Oh, standards, she thought. Then she puled herself together.

“I have a bone to pick with you,” she said.

“Lady Glinda.” He didn’t rise as she came into the room. The absolute nerve of him! Leaving her standing as if she were a … a servant.

She puled out a chair so hard it scraped the parquetry. “Miss Murth tels me you’ve dismissed Chef. You have no right to meddle with my people.”

“You’ve brought this upon yourself, Lady Glinda, by your endorsement of that provocative display last night.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not an impresario. This was no command performance. I didn’t know what entertainment that troupe was going to provide. I merely invited them. You welcomed the notion, yourself.

Furthermore I have no idea what you mean by provocative. I thought the repertoire slight, coarse, and pointless.”

“I’m afraid there have had to be repercussions.”

“Are you setting me up as a colaborationist of some sort? That’s nonsense. I have retired to the country to write my memoirs.”

“And to learn to cook. I know. How is it going?”

“How am I to learn without Chef?”

“I’m sure, like your chambermaid learning to read, you’ve picked up some basics. It’s merely a matter of putting them together.”

“Cherrystone. This is intolerable. I want Chef reinstated at once.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. For one thing…” He paused, putting his hands flat on the tabletop, spreading them apart, as if smoothing a bedsheet, then bringing them together so their thumbs touched. “For one thing, he’s in no condition to take up cooking at the moment.”

Glinda gaped. “You—you—”

“He met with an accident.”

“I thought you dismissed him.”

“I did. I dismissed him. And then somehow he walked into Restwater without removing his heavy clothes, and he seemed to drown. Not unlike the set piece that concluded the little performance you so enjoyed last night, though without the involvement of any tiktok dragon.”

She stood. “I don’t believe it. A man who teaches a child to read doesn’t turn around and condemn an innocent man to death. You’re lying. I want him back.”

“The subject is closed. But in any instance, I’m afraid I am moving more men into the house. I’m going to require the use of the chambers on the piano level and in the servants’ quarters, both backstairs and up top. You’l have to ask your people to clear out.”

“Impossible. Where wil they sleep?”

“You have room in your private apartment. I wil have my men move bedding and cots into one of your salons.”

“Are you insane? Traper? I can’t have Puggles in my apartments. He is my butler. A man!”

“You were married for some time, Lady Glinda. Surely you know how to close the door against il-timed attentions. That’s a skil every wife learns.” She was badly frightened. She needed to find out if Chef was realy drowned. Ig, his name. Ig Baernaeraenaesis. “The time has come for me to ask how long you intend to loiter in my home, General.”

“That, my dear, is privileged information. Private Zackers!” he caled suddenly. Zackers came through the swinging pantry door. “Some sparkling cider-tea for Lady Glinda, and one for me.”

“I wil tel you this,” she said. “You may not release another member of my staff. You may have nothing to do with any of them beyond your lessons with the girl. If anyone is to be dismissed from now on, I’l make the decision and I’l alert you by note. Is that clear?”