Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (36 page)

The Lion hadn’t expected to meet up with the lad ever again. Now it was—what?—fifteen or twenty years later. The boy-turned-man stil projected something imprecise. But his back was strong and his love for Candle was tender, and he regarded Rain as a jewel so precious he couldn’t touch her. That was Rain’s fault, to set herself like that, but it was her father’s fault too, to accept her terms.
I
never would, thought Brrr, with the smugness of the perfect parent, or dog handler, or litigator.

One day during a thaw, when Candle mentioned a hankering for a hare to roast, Lir braved the slippery paths to check his traps. The Lion decided to go along. They al but slid into the carcass of the decrepit Clock, its open stage gaping. They looked over the wrecked set. Snow upon falen buildings.

“It’s acting out the death of a civilization,” said the Lion.

Lir peered with interest. “It looks like an earthquake. Growing up in the Great Kels, I saw my share. Those slides of scree when the mountains shake their shoulders. The circular felt tents of the Arjiki nomads colapse, and the herders just put them up again.”

“Mr. Boss imagines the magician of the Grimmerie went to be a hermit in some cave in the Great Kels and an earthquake slammed boulders over the entrance. He’s either dead or trapped for good. Though I think if he’s that magnificent a wizard he could magick open a mountain.”

“Yes, Elphaba mentioned hearing about a magician in the outback. Before her time. Like everyone else, he’s no doubt waiting for his cue to return in Oz’s bleakest hour, et cetera.” They stroled around the corner of the Clock, looking for a way into its secrets, and for a way into each other’s. He never cals her his mother, thought the Lion. Only
Elphaba.

He never comments on Elphaba, thought Lir. What did the Lion realy think of her? Lunatic recluse or dangerous insurrectionist? Or mad scientist lady making flying monkeys with magic stitchery?

But who cares what Brrr thought, when Elphaba was dead and gone, dead and gone. “What time does it tel?” asked Lir.

“It’s not a real Clock. The time on it is fixed. It’s always a minute short of midnight.” They poked through the broken drawers and cracked shutters. Spools of orange thread, scissors, pots of evil glop whose drips obscured their handwritten labels. “Did the dwarf used to sit up al night preparing for the next day’s revelations?” asked Lir.

“No. The magic of it was beyond the dwarf. He was only the custodian.”

“Not the custodian of much, now. It would make useful firewood this winter.”

“I think he’d kil you before he’d let you tear it apart.”

“I cal that an unhealthy affection for the theater.” Lir swalowed. “Speaking of affections, healthy or otherwise, do you think there’s any chance you’re going to release my daughter into our care?” The Lion gave him a sharp look. “We brought her here, didn’t we?”

“Oh, yes. And al due gratitude. Medals for courage, bravocatories on the bugle. Al that. But it’s been several months now, and Candle frets that Rain continues to sleep in your room. You’ve planted yourself like a big furry hedge between a daughter and her parents.”

“I don’t tel her where to sleep. Neither do I tel her what to say or think or feel.”

“Candle wil go mad if Rain doesn’t open up to us some.”

“You can’t be surprised. There was always going to be some colateral damage. Don’t be disingenuous. I mean, you
did
let her go, after al. What kind of parents would do that?” Lir’s eyes were agate hard and dry. “I believe you’ve never been a father. So you don’t understand. Any parent whose child was in danger would do the same.”

“I know what
justification
means. Believe me. Had a fair amount of time nursing wounds of my own and trying out different explanations for al my behavior. In the end, you know what? I’m the only one responsible for what I chose to do.”

Lir sat on a boulder and kicked at some snow.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” said the Lion. “You had your reasons. Just don’t go accusing me of, I don’t know, whatever you might cal it.”

“Alienation of affections.”

Brrr observed how readily the phrase came to his old friend’s lips. The Lion growled low, warningly.

Lir relented. Head sunk in his hands, he began to tel the Lion the story of Rain’s birth nearly a decade ago. He and a friend had been trapped in a siege at a mauntery in the Shale Shalows—

“I know. Your bucko companion. Trism bon Cavalish,” supplied Brrr. Lir’s head whipped up. “I was doing some state work for the EC before I got mixed up with the crew of the Clock,” admitted the Lion. “An old maunt named Yackle told me about your handsome sweetheart.”

“That part of the story is over.” Lir went on to tel how he’d escaped the mauntery by broom. Flying by night above Cherrystone’s forces. Leaving Trism to make his way by land, if he could, to the secret haunt where Candle, pregnant with Rain, was waiting for Lir. By the time Lir arrived six weeks later, after the Conference of the Birds, Candle admitted to him that Trism had indeed shown up. Briefly. But she wouldn’t say what had happened.
Something
had happened. Affection, lust, attack, revulsion, envy—she never clarified it, and Lir had stopped asking. Husbands manage their silences like stock portfolios.

He’d left again, to escort the corpse of a dead princess toward an elephants’ graveyard. By the time he’d returned, Candle had given birth to Rain just as Cherrystone’s men had sniffed out Apple Press Farm.

They were closing in, but Candle had slipped the noose, hoping to draw them off the scent of her child and of Lir. She had left the infant for Lir to discover. It had worked.

“How had the forces found the place you’d been hidden?” asked the Lion.

“They must have used Trism, one way or the other. Maybe they tracked him there. Or after he left, they caught him and beat the information out of him. Either way, he betrayed us, and betrayed our daughter. Intentionaly or through stupidity. Neither excuse is forgivable.”

“What happened then?”

The Messiars from the EC had intercepted Candle. Turned out she’d been cradling and crooning to a bundle of washing, not a child. Thinking her simple, they’d let her go. Some advantages to being a filthy Quadling! Candle had taken herself to the mauntery to rest up from the unhealed bleeding that had folowed childbirth. Not knowing any of this yet, Lir had headed west, into the wilderness, with the child in his arms. He’d folowed the Vinkus tribe from which he’d recently parted.

“I know the Scrow,” pointed out the Lion. “With their elephant chief, Princess Nastoya. I was with you the day you met them, on our way back from kiling the Witch at Kiamo Ko.”

“Even
you’ve
bought into the propaganda? You were
there
.” Lir spat. “You didn’t kil any witch! You and I were locked in the sculery.”

“Figure of speech. We were talking about the Scrow.”

Relenting, Lir continued. Through his years of tending the dying Princess, the new chieftain, a felow named Shem Ottokos, had learned something about the magic of disguises. Lir had meant to apply to the Scrow for sanctuary, and Ottokos had agreed to extend it. But only if Rain could be suitably hidden so as to bring no trouble to the Scrow or to herself should she ever be found.

“Hidden how?” asked the Lion.

“You haven’t understood? You’ve been traipsing around with my daughter for who knows how long, and you’re that clueless?”

“I know she walks a bit askew from the rest of us,” said Brrr, as gently as he could. He knew what he knew, by now, but wanted to hear it spoken.

“She was born green,” said Lir. “That’s like being born with a bul’seye painted on your forehead. Ottokos did his best, but he couldn’t manage the spel to conceal her stamp of bloodline. Iskinaary, who kept a watch on the comings and goings around the Scrow camp, spotted a caravansary approaching with some EC personnel. So I lit out with the child in the opposite direction—by now Rain was about a year old, maybe—and I circled overland back toward Apple Press Farm. Back toward Munchkinland. I didn’t realy know where to go, where we could be safe—”

“Welcome to Oz, where nowhere is safe,” said the Lion.

“I stopped at the mauntery in the Shale Shalows and was reunited with Candle. We were beside ourselves with fear for our green Rain. We were young. I mean, I was twenty-four, roughly, but a young twenty-four. A stupid twenty-four. We set out without a destination, just to keep moving. A chance encounter with—with a snake charmer on the road—it provided us our only hope, and we arranged to have Rain disguised as a pale human of uncertain lineage. Then, as we approached Munchkinland’s border, I thought of Lady Glinda, who had helped me several times before. We presented ourselves at Mockbeggar Hal, and Lady Glinda deigned to see me. She took a good look at Rain, and persuaded us that the safest place to hide the girl would be in her own household. Among the staff. So hidden that Rain herself wouldn’t know about her origins, and couldn’t give herself away.”

So that was how it had happened. Lady Glinda, the protector of Elphaba’s granddaughter. Wel, it sort of figured.

“That was the best thing to do for a young child, I suppose.” The Lion’s tone was supercilious; he could hear it himself, and couldn’t help it.

“Hey. She’s stil alive,” said Lir. “It’s almost ten years later, and she’s stil alive. Candle was apprehended and let go, and I’ve been an outlaw since I was a teen, but Rain—Rain was safe.” The Lion said, “They were never looking for her. They wanted the Grimmerie. They stil want it. The highest secrets of magic that Oz has ever held are contained in that wretched book. They couldn’t care a twig about a stupid angry little girl. And you made her that way, by giving her up. You squandered her childhood.”

“What gives you the right of superiority? So you walked her home from school. Kudos. We’re grateful, or haven’t we mentioned it? But note that she is alive to be walked, Sir Brrr.” Lir had a capacity for cold rage, Brrr observed, just like Elphaba’s own. But Brrr hadn’t come here to be woodshedded. “How alive, exactly? She’s more like an otter in human shape than she is like a girl.

Look, I mean, realy. Lady
Glinda
? She couldn’t raise a child. She couldn’t raise an asparagus fern.”

“Wel, you can yield Rain back to us and give us a second chance. Stop circling about her with your big furry mane, keeping her chained to your heel.”

“She’s been abandoned one time too many,” snapped Brrr. “Listen, I don’t mutter about you behind your back. And I don’t lock any doors. She can walk your way any time she wants. She’s a child and she’l come to trust who she can, in her own good time. I don’t have anything to do with that. But I’m not leaving her alone with you here til she’s ready.” They were al but shouting at each other. They stood en garde, panting, though their concern for the child’s welfare was mutual. “You’ve been so thoughtful,” said Lir, seething. “Hauling Rain off with the Grimmerie. When the Emperor of Oz has been seeking it on and off al these years.
That’s
a realy secure situation for a child?”

“Don’t think the irony hasn’t escaped me. With the Emperor caling in al magical totems. Isolating us for easier location. You think I’ve enjoyed becoming a sitting duck just to tend to your daughter?” Lir was nonplussed. The book was a huge part of the problem. “How much longer can the Grimmerie be kept out of the Emperor’s hands, especialy now that its charmed vault has come to its untimely end?”

Brrr shrugged. At least Lir’s tone was more moderate. The Lion paced around the fourth corner of the Clock. Lir folowed. They looked up at the clock face just as a smal bird, a Wren, came pock-pocking down out of the sky. She landed without the mildest sense of alarm upon the dragon’s snout. The man and the Lion looked up at it, and their jaws dropped, for several reasons.

The Lion was agog because the clock face, which had read one minute to midnight since the first moment he’d seen the Clock two years earlier, now read midnight.

“We meet again,” said the Wren to the Lion; it was the humble bird who had warned them to flee the Emperor’s soldiers on the Yelow Brick Road.

As for Lir, he didn’t dare believe he recognized the bird. Wrens, after al, look rather alike, at least to human eyes. But as the Wren spoke, Lir knew her to be Dosey, whom he’d last seen a decade ago after the Conference of the Birds had swum the skies over the Emerald City crying
Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!

Dosey said, “Mercy fritters, but I’ve been winging your way for a week! Begging pardon, gents, but your Goose just told me you were having a bit of a chinwag down this way. I thought you’d want to hear what I have to say. The message comes direct from General Kynot. I translate from High Eagle. ‘Apparently a few months ago, the impossible happened. She’s back.’ ”

“She’s back?” said Lir.

“Elphaba?” said the Lion, his blood hurrying at once, so he could get himself out of the way.

“If you please, sir, not Elphaba. Dorothy,” replied the Wren. “Dorothy Gale.”

8.

At the Chancel of the Ladyfish, the dwarf snarled at Lir and the Lion. “I don’t believe in Dorothy. Wasn’t that al a ruse? Some tricky business to divert the crowd while the Wizard was being turfed out of the Palace?”

“She was real enough to me,” said Lir.

“And to me,” said the Lion. “Haven’t I got the emotional scars to prove it?”

“Assuming a Dorothy,” ventured Nor, “I doubt she’s back. Her supposed return sounds like just another variation on the theme of the legendary Ozma. ‘Beautiful heroine disappears, but she’l return in our darkest hour, amen.’ Hah. That sort of bluff only postpones and displaces our need to reform. Listen: nobody ever comes back to save us. We’re on our own.”

“Dorothy wasn’t as beautiful as al that,” said the Lion, “so I doubt she’d be convincing as everyone’s favorite martyr mounting a comeback tour. I bet it isn’t her. Probably some out-of-work male escort doing a send-up. In our modern times nobody can tel the difference anymore.”

“Let’s assume it
is
Dorothy,” said Lir. “For the sake of conversation. Once upon a time I almost had a crush on her, after al. How did she get back? What’s she doing here? Where is she?”