Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (51 page)

Nor told her that the Arjikis had a language of their own, though it shared a grammar with Ozish. The Scrow and the Ugubezi and Yunamata each had different language systems. The trols in the Glikkus spoke a dialect of Ozish that sounded like sneezing, and who knows what tribes in the unexplored far west of Oz might be able to demonstrate yet more cryptic tongues? Rain’s aunt had heard that an isolated clan of Draffe people lived near Kvon Altar in the arid southwest of the Vinkus. “Draffe people? Part Draffe, part human?” wondered Rain, but Nor told her there had been no successful interspecies mating as far as she knew, and the term
Draffe
probably just meant the people were gangly and thin, the way Munchkinlanders were squat and short.

Stil, Rain began to wonder about Nor and Brrr. A woman and a Lion. If they ever reunited, would they have children? Could the Grimmerie make it possible? Rain might get a kind of cousin who was part human girl and part Lion cub boy. She couldn’t quite see how it would work out, but she hoped it could happen. The Lion part might eat Iskinaary by accident. That would be fun.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Goose.

“You do not.”

He craned his neck and trained one beady eye at her. She tried not to rear backward. “Wel, you’re right,” he admitted, “but I know it isn’t nice.”

“It’s nice to me,” she told him.

Then, toward the end of the third summer at Nether How, a trapper came through, an isolated Scrow who had been drummed out of his clan for some unmentioned reason. Maybe for being antisocial. Rain colected him; he was her first Scrow. His name was Agroya. He stayed a few days and helped the grown-ups shore up a terrace wal behind which Candle was trying to establish a stand of mountain rice. In halting phrases he brought news of the world beyond Nether How.

3.

Rain didn’t count years any more than days. She hardly knew how to understand Agroya when he said it was now the fourth year into the war between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland.

He told them about the conscription of Animals in Munchkinland and how the second front of the war—the battle of the Madeleines—was faring. (Not wel for either army, a tidal sweeping of forces back and forth, with heavy loss of life on both sides.) Nor flinched at this and wondered if her husband might have been drafted to serve in the Munchkinland army.

“Brrr? Hah. He’l have slipped through
that
duty,” said Lir consolingly. “They didn’t cal him the Cowardly Lion for nothing.” Nor didn’t speak to Lir for some time after this. Maybe, thought Lir ruefuly, his half-sister had never entirely forgiven him—or his mother—for sweeping into the lives of her parents, unsettling everything, forever.

“How do you know so much about the progress of the war?” Candle asked Agroya. “Out in this wilderness, so far from the battle lines?” In his halting way he replied, “I possess little else to pay for the goods of your table. I carry news in my mind. I traffic in it. A useful coin.”

“Tel us more, then,” said Lir. “What about Lady Glinda?”

But Agroya had never heard of Glinda, which made everything else he said a little suspect. “I don’t go to cities,” he admitted. “Tribal life among the Scrow is life in grasslands. Moving, camping, moving, always. Folowing the herds.”

“Is Shem Ottokos stil the chieftain of the Scrow?” asked Lir.

Agroya spat but admitted as much. Ottokos must have been the one to exile him, Lir guessed. Then Lir regretted having asked the question, because Agroya turned and squinted at him. “So you’re Lir? The one who helped our queen through her final passage?”

Lir sat ramrod straight, unwiling to confirm his identity, and Candle picked up on his hesitation, but Agroya saw through their silence. He said, “I was in disgrace that time, in chains in a tent, but I heard what you did.”

“I never did,” interjected Nor. “This is news to me. Tel me.”

“Princess Nastoya was stuck between life and death, unable to move because of a disguise locked upon her, and together you two brought the disguise off.” Agroya pointed at Candle. “You played some stringed instrument so wel you make dead relics to sing, and you”—now he pointed to Lir—“you had a charm of remembering; you helped our Nastoya leave behind her disguise as a human, and die as an Elephant. This is legend with our people.”

“How drol,” said Nor to their guest. Ever leery of pomposity. “I hope you sel little pictures of it to passing travelers.”

“And she talked to you before she died,” said Agroya to Candle.

“Oh, did she?” said Lir to his wife. He’d been away up until the last moment. “You never mentioned this.”

“She awakened, as the dying sometimes do,” the visitor reminded Candle. “She told you about your child.”

Candle, apologeticaly: “I was pregnant, very pregnant.”

After sending Rain out on a fool’s errand, and Iskinaary to keep her at bay, Lir returned to the subject. “What did Nastoya say?” Agroya helped himself to a handful of walnut meats. “She said that she saw the promise and trouble your child wil bring.”

“Oh, that,” said Candle. “What child isn’t ful of promise and trouble?”

“Our princess said that we Scrow wil watch for your child and help her if she needs help. Nastoya pledged us to this.”

“Wasn’t that sweet,” said Candle. “And then she died.”

“I’m no longer a ful brother to my tribe,” he continued, “but in honor of my ancestors and my former queen, I must ask if your daughter needs the help we promised to give.”

“Oh, not today, thanks,” said Candle. “How kind of you to remember.”

The fluting formality of her voice made sense to Lir: Candle had become wary. She’d seen the danger too. “Let me get you some cakes to take on your way,” he said.

They loaded Agroya up with as much as they could spare. Nor agreed to escort him wel beyond the northern lake. As soon as they were gone, Lir asked Iskinaary to rush Rain away to the southern lake, five hundred yards to the south, ostensibly to find owl pelets to add to her colection.

Then Lir rounded on Candle, but good. He was incensed that Princess Nastoya’s dying comments had never come up before. Candle pooh-poohed his sensitivity. “What did her comments mean anyway?

Nothing that any dying old matron wouldn’t say to any pregnant young woman.”

“The trouble that Rain would bring—did Nastoya’s mention of that decide you to leave Rain behind when you slipped away from Apple Press Farm?” At this Candle turned pale—in a Quadling it looked like fever—and she was unable to speak for some moments. When she regained her voice, she spoke in an unfamiliar register. Colder, acerbic. She said,

“This isn’t about Rain, at its heart. Is it? You’re not even angry about what Nastoya said or not, or whether I told you before. Are you. Are you. You’re stil angry about what I’ve never said about Trism.”

“Wide of the mark,” snapped Lir. But damn her, she was right. So Candle could stil see the present. Her talent had seemed submerged as they’d gotten older.

Yes, he was cross about her never having mentioned Nastoya’s dying comments. But Candle was accurate that he was stil harboring a wound about his old friend and lover, Trism. Another of the stories they didn’t rehearse in front of Rain.

Oh, Trism.

And it happened, al of an instant, in his mind again. Like seeing the past. This time his own.

Trism had come to Apple Press Farm that same dreadful season, while Lir was away, while Nastoya was in the orchard trying to die, while Candle was readying to give birth. Lir had never found out exactly what happened. Hunted by EC soldiers who’d once been coleagues, beautiful Trism had either taunted Candle with the knowledge of Lir’s affection for him or, just as possibly, falen for Candle in Lir’s absence.

Maybe their mutual passion for Lir, their mutual worry about his safety, had brought Candle and Trism together. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. But Candle had never spoken about it, and Trism had disappeared from Lir’s life.

By the time Lir had returned, to find the ailing Princess Nastoya and a contingent of Scrow in residence at Apple Press Farm, Trism was gone. After Lir and Candle had helped Nastoya shuck her disguise as a human being and die as an Elephant, Lir had accompanied her corpse back over the highland route known as Kumbricia’s Pass. Returning only a few days later, he’d found that Candle had fled. The new baby, hardly a day old, lay wrapped up in cloths and hidden for him to find.

Of course Candle knew he was nearing; she knew that kind of thing. She’d left a goat so he could have milk for the child. He’d always assumed that she’d abandoned the child for fear that Trism might have been trailed by assassins in order to discover Lir’s hideaway. But now he wondered if she left infant Rain because Nastoya had said their daughter would bring promise and trouble. Candle’s apprehension of their daughter had always been different from his. Just as loving, but more stony and matter-of-fact.

He knew what happened next. Eventualy she’d made her way back to the mauntery. Word had arrived there that Trism had been beaten—wel, tortured was the uglier but more honest word. Presumably Trism hadn’t been able to reveal Lir’s whereabouts because he didn’t know them. And whether Trism, the top dragon mesmerist in the arsenal of the Emerald City, had even survived … there was no way to tel.

What
had
survived—maybe al that had survived of Trism—was Lir’s sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smel of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression—unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Lir’s heart like a ful suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habilards maybe, holow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism’s glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. To this day Lir had endured them in solitude, even as his beloved Candle sat across from him at the hearth.

Candle herself might dream of Trism, too, with dread or with desire. Lir didn’t know. She and Lir never talked of it. She’d refused to speak of Trism when Lir, baby in arms, met up with her again. To protect Lir’s good impression of his friend?—to keep Trism’s romance of Candle to herself? You could go around and around about it, but unless Trism showed up again and filed in the blanks, Lir couldn’t know.

Candle wasn’t teling.

And Lir and Candle had had more urgent things to deal with than the perils of shifting affections. They had a daughter born green as bottleglass.

Green, and with few obvious virtues. On her mother’s side, the girl was a bona fide peasant. Before she met Lir, Candle had been an itinerant Quadling, easily mattressed like al of her clan. Abandoned at the mauntery by an uncle who had wearied of her.

On Lir’s side, Rain descended from a line, if not noble, then at least notorious. One of her ancestors had been the Eminent Thropp, de facto governor of Munchkinland before secession. Her grandmother had been the divisive Wicked Witch of the West, no less. Who knew what license or limitation descended through that bloodline?

Lir had no reason to lord it over Candle, or anyone else. He knew himself to be anything but polished. He’d grown up without the attention of Elphaba or, most of the time, her affection.
Deprived
childhood, Your Honor!
He hadn’t made things better for himself by going AWOL from the army under the command of Cherrystone. Another bad career move: he’d helped Trism destroy the EC’s stable of flying dragons being used to foment unrest among tribes in the west.
Tally it up for us, my good man:
at the time of Rain’s birth, Lir’d been no more than a ragamuffin ne’er-do-wel being hunted down in case he might lead them to the Grimmerie.

Under these circumstances, to be presented with an iridescently verdant child even harder to hide than the famous and dangerous tome … what a lot of laughs, this life.
I beg your mercy.

By the time he’d caught up with Candle again, after a series of misadventures with the Scrow, the infant was almost too big to carry in his arms. For Rain’s own protection, he’d drawn a hood upon her face and told passersby that she was afflicted with a sensitivity to light. What had this done to a child, for al those months to hear through burlap the sounds of human voices but rarely to see the face of anyone but her worried and stupid father?

What had he done to Rain, in order to preserve her life?

After he’d met up again with Candle at the mauntery, they wandered the landscape. Seeking a way to keep Rain from being smothered, literaly and metaphoricaly. They had no plans, just kept moving.

One day, in some nameless hamlet, they’d stopped to barter for bread and milk and wine in return for doing fieldwork til sunset. On the far side of a sulen patch of finger potatoes, Candle straightened with her hand on her lower back and turned around with a cry. Set in a potato basket at the end of a hoed row, the baby was sitting up. Either she’d clawed her burlap caul off by herself or the fox at basket’s edge had puled it away with its teeth.

“Easy,” said Lir to Candle, “easy. I haven’t known foxes to be vicious.”

“Clearly,” remarked the Fox, training his eyes on the green child, “you haven’t taken into account what recreational foxhunting by hounds and human brutes does to a Fox’s native sense of cordiality.”

“The light, please, it hurts her eyes,” began Lir.

“The dark hurts her far more.” The Fox sat down to look at the child, and the child looked back unblinkingly. Lir and Candle inched forward, gripping each other’s hands. “I never met that green firebrand out in the west, that one with the broom, but I heard tel of her. And I imagine she looked like this.”

“I suspect so,” said Candle, honestly enough. “I never met her either.”

“Your kit wil have fights on her hands,” said the Fox. “I suppose you’re suitably traumatized over that.”

“Oh, very,” said Lir, “and then some.”

The Fox laughed. “I like her. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.”

“She’s seen very few creatures other than us,” said Candle.

“And I thought it was my native charm. Some consider me rather good-looking, but I’l leave my social life out of it. She might benefit from a little protective coloring. Have you thought of that?” Lir had, but Shem Ottokos of the Scrow hadn’t managed the job.