Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (16 page)

Glinda almost replied,
My what?
but she caught herself. “Goodness, what with entertaining myself through cookery education, I have hardly a moment to check on them. There are some over there in the weeds. Aren’t they special.”

“You cook as if by magic,” he said.

“Don’t I wish.” She reached for the wine, a rather smoothly turned-over mountain antimerguese imported from the Ugubezi. “I picked up al my best recipes through my sisters in séance.”

“You’re joking.”

She smiled over her shoulder. A rol of evening thunder unsettled itself some distance away. She made slow work of pouring the wine, and her whisper was so low she could hardly hear herself. “Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta,” she muttered.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Reciting ingredients in my head, that’s how I train myself. How
do
you manage to teach my girl anything? She’s too silent to rattle off her alphabet.”
Traversa psammyad, unicular artica articasta
. She circled her palm over the pale wine in the goblet. Had she ever learned anything from Miss Grayling back in Shiz?

Cherrystone mused aloud. “I wonder why the girl wants to learn to read. A domestic won’t have any prospects. Particularly as she has no family. Is that what I understand?” She squared her shoulders.
Traversa psammyad…

A little ice forming a coin on the surface of the wine. She swirled faster. The ice packed itself into a white lump, split in two. Two white lumps a little larger than lumps of sugar.

“Your wine, sir.” She handed it to him as if she were the domestic. She was so proud of herself she was glowing. Cherrystone misread the expression.

“Either you’ve slipped a love potion in here, or you’ve poisoned it.”

“Neither. And to show you, I’l sip myself. To your health.” Scandalously she took a sip of the newly chiled wine. Heavenly. She returned him the glass and she lowered her gaze to her plate. The food was heinous, mushy and parched by turns. But the ice was perfect. She had learned to cook.

At the end of the meal, most of the crawberry fool having been abandonded in its dishes, Cherrystone escorted her through the rose garden and around the corner of the south porch. There they discovered Puggles in a broken heap on the gravel. He seemed to be dead.

I9.

But he wasn’t dead. After Zackers and a few others had carried him into the reception room, where men on cots had leapt up to provide him a bed, Glinda saw that he was stil breathing. “You have a physician among your men,” she said to Cherrystone. “If not, there’s a doctor in Haventhur who wil come to Mockbeggar, assuming you promise her safe passage here and back again. Though I hardly know if I can rely on your word.”

“I assure you, Lady Glinda, whatever happened wil prove to have been an accident.” In front of his men he returned to formality in addressing her. But she hardly cared about that now. She put her hand on Puggles’s forehead as if feeling a servant were part of her routine. She had no idea what to think about how his forehead felt, though. It felt like a parsnip, which until this week she had never felt, either.

She refused an escort upstairs and took her leave of Cherrystone without ceremony. The evening had ended badly—horribly, for poor Puggles—but not without some smal reward. She had used a spel to draw winter upon the water. A baby step, to be sure. But that wine had been nicely chiled by her work.

Her step hastened as she realized that if men had been in her private chambers rearranging her furniture, someone might have removed the books from her shelves. Luckily, soldiers seemed uninterested in books. The little library had been lifted intact and instaled in her bedroom.

Miss Murth and Rain were huddled together on a settee. Miss Murth’s face had been wet but was now dry as if permanently. Her grim strength had an aspect of fleckstone about it.

“This is a furniture warehouse,” said Glinda. One could get about the room by climbing on top of the wardrobe, dressers, chairs. A cat would love this room, leap up and never descend again. But there was hardly enough floor space to do her daily kick-ups to keep her bottom pert. “We can’t live like this. Murthy, what happened?”

“You weren’t gone half an hour, Lady Glinda, before they beefed their way through the door. General’s orders, they said. They locked us in this room til they’d cleared out. Puggles tried to stop them, but they’d have none of it. There were almost a dozen of them, and al young men, showing no respect for a man of his age. They took him up the stairs to the parapet to get him out of the way. I don’t know what happened next. They told me he broke away and fel over the balustrade. Dreadful liars, the lot of them. What wil become of us?”

“You wil have to sleep on the settee. Rain, can you settle down?”

But Rain had become a cat. She had climbed up a chest of drawers and crossed on top of the escritoire and scrabbled aboard the wardrobe. “I can sleep up here!” she crowed. For her, this was fun. Wel, Glinda thought, perhaps it felt to her like having a family. Which is less fun than is generaly acknowledged in the popular press.

“You’l do no such thing. Get down from there. You’l be the next one to bash your skul.”

Murth fussed. “Oh, Mum, is that what happened to Puggles?”

“He’s alive, at least he was when I left him. I don’t know his condition. I think they’re sending for Dame Doctor Vutters.” Rain said, “Did your supper get al et up?”

“How kind of you to remember.” Under the circumstances, Glinda was touched. “It was as wel received as I might have hoped for.” Murth set her straight. “She means, is there any left. We didn’t get a meal, what with the invasion of the furniture snatchers.”

“I’l see to it at once.” The queen of the kitchen now, she salied forth from her room. But in her large salon she was stopped by four soldiers in dress habilard. They carried rapiers, ceremonial but sharp.

None of them was Zackers.

“Curfew, Lady Glinda,” said one. “Apologies from the General.”

“But I’m peckish. I’m off to colect myself a little pick-me-up.”

“We’re here to be of service.”

“Nonsense. What, are you going to remove the night soil as wel? Sing us to sleep if we have a bad dream? Boys. Out of my way.”

“Orders, Lady Glinda. We’l dispatch to the commissary for what you need. Wil bread and cheese do?”

“Rye brisks. And milk. I have a child, don’t you know.” And how odd to make that statement. “I have a lady companion as wel. So a bottle of savorsuckle brandy while you’re at it.” Returning to her room, she felt defeated. When the door closed behind her, Rain and Miss Murth glanced up with eyes like sunken puddings. (For the rest of Glinda’s life, would everything look like spoiled food? A sad commentary.) She had nothing to say. But thunder outside the house, nearer this time, said it for her. “Let’s open the curtains and raise a window. The air is stuffy in here with the three of us. At least two of us ought to have bathed more recently, had we known we’d be lodging together.”

She directed Miss Murth to the sash, and in doing so realized that they’d been crowded into a room with windows that looked only in one direction—east. Glinda had always preferred sleeping in a room served by the sunrise, but now that she was exiled from other chambers, she had no view of the front gardens, and none of Restwater except the distances toward Haugaard’s Keep. A flotila sailing in from the Gilikin River and western Restwater could be approaching the boathouses and she’d never see them til they passed—or arrived.

“Thunder, but no sign of rain,” said Miss Murth. “The night is cloudless.”

“This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.

“Get in your nightdress,” snapped Glinda.

“It’s in my trunk. Up in the attics, where I sleeps.”

“You’l have to borrow something of mine. Miss Murth, find her a camisole. Something.”

After a light supper that was rather like a picnic—they al sat on Glinda’s bed and got crumbs everywhere—they made their good nights and Miss Murth blew out the candle.

“Miss Murth. Are there evening prayers for a child?”

“Lady Glinda,” said Murthy through the dark, “you never assigned me the task of raising this child. Give her whatever childhood prayers you remember. My own prayers are private ones.”

“I know, you’re praying for my immediate death, by my own hand, food poisoning myself. Very wel. Rain, here is what we said in the Pertha Hils, when my mother would tuck me in.” The memory, like ice forming, was slow to arrive. In the end, Glinda said,

Sweet and sure the lilacs bloom,

And the heather, and the broom.

Every mouse and mole rejoices

When the sparrows raise their voices.

“That’s not a prayer, that’s a nursery rhyme, and you’ve got it al wrong,” snapped Murthy.

“God bless us, every one. Except you,” said Glinda.

20.

The weather remained clear but stifling. Glinda and Miss Murth were alowed to sit in the parlor daily and play cards in the presence of four armed men. Rain was caled once or twice for her lessons.

“Can you read enough to find out what’s happening?” Glinda whispered before Rain left. “Snoop a bit?”

Rain roled her eyes and didn’t answer.

On the third night of the intolerable situation, Rain waited until lights were out. Then she interrupted Glinda’s continuing attempt at devotional doggerel by saying, “The teaching man was caled away while we was doing our letter writing and no one else was in the room. Somefin was happening so I creeped to the door and then snucked out. I went round by the barns. No one saw me.”

“Entirely too dangerous. Don’t do that again or I’l slap you. What did you see?”

“That weren’t no thunder we hear at nights. It’s dragons in the dairy barns up the slope.”

Glinda sat straight up in the dark.

“It’s true. They got dragons for them boats I think. I heard Cherrystone yeling at someone for treating one of ’em beasties wrong. The lad got his foot crushed and they had to cut it off. Dame Doctor Vutters is living there now, like us. In the shed with the mattocks and grub hoes and stuff. It’s her surgery.”

“Dragons!” Miss Murth sounded as if she would have wept had she been less desiccated. “Lurline preserve us!”

“They’re big as houses,” said the girl, “and they glint gold even in the shadows. But they stink and they spit and strike out like catses.” She pounced a forearm and made the cry of a shrike.

Glinda plumped her pilows up in the dark. “It’s beginning to make sense. Why we’ve been crowded into a room that faces only east. And why they burned down the fields around here. They don’t want news of the dragons getting out to the Munchkinlanders.”

“And why Cherrystone was so angry after that puppet show, with the dragon in the lake!” said Murth excitedly.

“I thought you weren’t watching. You were supposed to be minding the girl.”

“We peeked. So put us in prison.”

“We’re already there.” Glinda bit her lip. “I assume they’re flying dragons—I’ve never seen a dragon, so I don’t know if there are other varieties. Do they have wings, Rain?”

“Like great sloppy tents. When they stretches ’em, they goes to the ceilings of the barns! They disturb the pigeons, who poop on ’em. Then they eats the pigeons.”

“Perhaps this makes sense of the vessel designs as wel,” added Murth. “Those stumpy masts, and the odd twin prows. They may not be entirely sailboats, but boats to be puled by dragons in harness. The dragon may slot between the double-breasted prow.”

“How ingenious.”

Glinda knew she had to get to the Grimmerie again, but she didn’t dare do it with Miss Murth hovering about. Rain was taciturn to the world, but Miss Murth might gabble if cornered. “Rain,” said Glinda, “I think we’d better cancel your reading lessons now. The point has been made. You are not incapable of learning your letters.” Rain’s mouth made an
O
. “But I’m nearly reading, real reading! Cherrystone keeps bringing me old papers and training me up on them, and I’m getting the hang of it.” It was as if the ice Glinda could form in a glass of wine had begun to cloud the blood in her veins. “What pages are those?”

“I can’t say. Old magicks, I think, but I can’t get ’em yet.”

So he knew who she was. Pure peril now and no mistake.

“Not another word,” said Glinda, “it’s sleepytime. If you blather any more I shal subject you to more nursery verses.” The room fel silent, and soon Murth was snoring, and Rain’s breath had silenced to below the level of hearing. But Glinda did not sleep.

The next day she requested an audience with Cherrystone. He didn’t reply until late in the day, and said he’d be up to see her at sunset. Through the intermediary, she asked for permission to alow Rain and Miss Murth to take the air in the herb garden—which she knew was sufficiently hidden from both barns and lakeside not to alarm the Menaciers—so that she and Cherrystone could have some privacy in her room. This he alowed, said his emissary.

He arrived on time, looking more worn than before.

“You’ve finaly beaten my resistance,” she told him. “Here I am, General, entertaining you in al but the very bed in which I sleep.”

“I apologize for the inconvenience.” He had grown more courtly and more distant. “How may I be of service?”

“I need to know about Puggles.”

He looked confused.

“Po Understar. Puggles. My butler.”

“Oh, yes. Wel, he is hanging on. He’s recovered consciousness, somewhat, but not his language.”

“What does Dame Doctor Vutters say?”

“A broken spine.”

And to think he might have left with the others had she not required a butler.

“General, I would like to talk with the doctor, and to see the patient.”

“I’ve dismissed the doctor. She’s done al that can be done, she says.”

“Where is Puggles?”

“He’s been made a chamber in a closet under one of the staircases.”

Glinda stood and began to walk toward the door. Cherrystone stood and said, “I can’t alow this.”

“Then stop me forcibly. You ought to enjoy that.” She brushed past him, angry, alert, sensitized to her earlobes and toes. He didn’t touch her.

She swept past the Menaciers in the next room with their rapiers raised. “Gentlemen,” she said. Behind her, Cherrystone must be signaling that she be alowed to pass.