Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (8 page)

“I trust they’re being no bother. You let me know if they are.”

“I’l let
them
know if they are.” She leaned forward, taking care not to seem coquettish, which, she recognized, seemed to be her default position. “Alow me to remove the covers, wil you? Since it’s just the two of us?” She lifted the lids off the plated dinner of garmot, braised stalks of celery, and mashed spinach forced to look like a green rose. Oh, Chef could make magic out of whatever lingered in the larder. “I hope this meets with your approval, General.”

“Please; as we’re dining, I should be happy if you caled me by my first name. Traper.”

She shook her head as if she were being pestered by mosquitoes. “You make it al very confusing.
Traper
. A most irregular season! I am detained in my own home, I am forbidden anything but emergency staff, I am asked to house a garrison or a committee or a division or whatever you cal this lot—”

“We are roughly three hundred men, which in this instance means a command made up of three brigades. One of our brigades is a cavalry unit, and the other two are foot soldiers. Messiars, as we cal them.”

“And Menaciers are officers in training. I know the nomenclature. I did govern the Home Guard once, as you recal. But if what you are overseeing is a command, what makes you a General instead of a Commander?”

“Long years of service, for one. I am alowed to direct as many commands as the Emperor in the Emerald City sees fit to supply me.”

“Then you’re waiting on more commands. I see. Traper. Please, eat; it’l go cold. There’s slightly more breeze at this height than I’d anticipated.” He tucked in. “You didn’t ask me here to discuss military strategy, and anyway, it would be boorish of me to bring my work to the dinner table. Tel me about yourself.”

“Oh, General—”

“Traper.”

“Yes. Traper. You know a woman loves nothing more than to talk about herself. But you have incarcerated me here and Lady Glinda is bored to migraines with Lady Glinda. Unable to get around as she did, or to invite old friends to spend weekends hunting or playing plunge-bal or Three-Hand Snuckett. No, I asked you here to learn about you. So I insist. I’ve given you your supper, and you must sing for it. Tel me about your long years in the service, as you put it, even if you must keep as confidential your present aims and designs.” Obediently the General ventured into a loose and nonspecific accounting of various assignments through the years. However, he underestimated the degree to which Glinda had paid attention while she was Throne Minister. She had read everything she could get her hands on, and various details had stuck because of references to old friends and cronies. She knew Cherrystone was from Mistlemoor, a smal Gilikinese hamlet a few hours north of the Shiz Gate at the Emerald City. She knew the Wizard had sent Cherrystone out to Kiamo Ko when her old friend, Elphaba, had taken up residence there, and that Cherrystone had had something to do with the death or disappearance of Fiyero’s wife, Sarima, and their children, Irji and Nor. She knew he had had a hand in some nasty business in Quadling Country, where he’d been stationed for nearly a decade, and when things went hot there he was recaled to the Emerald City. A desk job for a few years, under the Emperor. But caled into field service again. His final triumph?

Before retirement with a pension? She wondered. And al the time she kept smiling like a barkeep, unassuming and unflappable.

“You have a family,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. His fork poked back and forth as if checking for poison darts hidden in the fish. “A wife and three daughters. Now mostly grown; indeed, a granddaughter at home too, who I rarely see.”

“I can’t imagine. It must be dreadful for you.”

“I’m sure it would be.” He smiled under his lowered brow. “I mean, the noise of a gabbling child and four women under one roof.”

“You don’t fool me. You miss them dreadfuly. What are their names?”

“I choose not to talk about them. It helps me not miss them as much.”

“Is that breeze causing the candle to spit wax on your plate? Thoughtless of me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Miss Murth?” Murth was sitting in an upright chair just inside the window, her hands folded in her lap. “Yes, Lady Glinda.”

“I know you aren’t spry enough to clamber out the window ledge with an oil lamp in a glass chimney. One that won’t gutter so in this updraft. Would you cal the broomgirl to do it? She is agile enough, unlike the rest of us.”

“I’m happy to oblige, Lady Glinda,” said Cherrystone. “Alow me.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it. Miss Murth?”

“I think the girl is asleep, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda waited.

“But I’l wake her.”

“How wonderful. The lamps on the escritoire. Both of them. Thank you.”

She tried without success to bring up the subject of the construction going on in the barns, but Cherrystone affably declared that too dul to discuss over such a fine meal. What next? He complimented the local landscape. She concurred: the lake before them in the moonlight, sheer silk spangled with diamond chunks, wasn’t it
divine
? Less cloyingly, they discussed the social makeup of the nearest vilages. “I do trust you’re paying the local farmers for al the food you’re demanding from them,” she ventured.

“We’re at war, Lady Glinda. I try to make it look as much like a picnic as I can, but you can’t have forgotten that Munchkinlanders provoked the Ozian army to invade.”

“Wel, nor have I forgotten that Oz was massing an army of invasion on the border for weeks and weeks before the Munchkinlanders made a raid against it.”

“Defensive positioning, Lady Glinda.”

“Spoiling for a fight, and the fools bit. Though had they not bit in time, you’d have come up with some other reason to invade. The Emerald City has had its eye on Restwater even since my own time in office, Traper, though I did my best to change the subject.”

“Don’t let’s talk military strategy. Do you play an instrument, Lady Glinda?”

“I have a set of musical toothpicks I must show you someday. Ah, here she is.”

Rain slung one leg over the windowsil. She was dressed in a man’s castoff nightshirt. It made her look like an urchin. Her calves were smooth and pale, the color of new cream in the moonlight. Her dark hair hadn’t seen the benefit of a comb recently. Once through the window, she turned back and took the lamps Miss Murth handed her. The light on either side of her face made her look like a visitation from some chapel story of youthful piety. She was nearly pretty, but for the dirt on her face and her cross, sleepy expression.

“Where does you want ’em,” she said, forgetting to make it sound like a question.

“Oh, how about one on the table and then one on that stone ledge between the windows,” said Glinda. “Then if Miss Murth comes at the General with a crossbow we shal spy her before any damage is done. Miss Murth has many hidden talents.”

“Lady Glinda!” hissed Murth from inside. But Cherrystone was laughing.

“Stay, little Rain,” said Glinda. “We might need something else, and you’re better at getting over window ledges than we are. You can rest with your head against the wal there.” In the lamplight, squatting with her back against the stone, the girl looked like a beggar outside a train station in the Pertha Hils, back in the day. Frottica, Wittica, Settica, Wiccasand Turning…

The light of the oil lamps glazed Cherrystone; he became a more fixed target. Glinda had reached the end of that part of the strategy she’d been able to plan ahead, and she was improvising now. But how formidable he looked. Patient, wary, courteous, buckled up inside himself. He did have utterly lovely eyes for a marauder. A sort of faded cobalt. “I sense that these are early days, Traper. Stil, I would be irresponsible to the memory of Sir Chuffrey if I didn’t ask what your ultimate intentions are toward Mockbeggar. I do hope you have no plans to raze it.”

“That wouldn’t be a decision of mine, though I think no one in the Emerald City would bother this place much. I see that it is a jewel. In these few days I’ve come to appreciate why you love it so.”

“Were I at the helm of strategy, I should think that securing Restwater as a permanent source of potable water for the Emerald City would be enough. I’m wondering, should that happen, if you intend Mockbeggar to serve as a satelite capital of the EC, and might decide to leave the rest of the Free State of Munchkinland alone? Munchkinland covers a vast territory, and though decidedly rural, it’s more evenly populated than the rest of Oz, which by comparison is either urban or hardscrabble and too remote to be habitable. The attempt to subdue al of Munchkinland would be punishing.”

“You have a good head for strategy, Lady Glinda, as befits a former Throne Minister. But you retired to seek other pleasures. Like gentlewoman farming, and flower arranging. So I shouldn’t fret about the future. What wil happen wil happen.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m too selfish to care primarily about Munchkinland. What happens to the stucco wals of Mockbeggar and to its staff also happens to me. What happens to Mockbeggar’s irises and prettibels happens to me. You think me shalow, but I have been breeding prettibels for eighteen summers now. It is my passion. I have a new variety that was even written about in our local newssheet,
Restwater Dew Tell
.” This was partly true. The gardener had been doing something with that ugly little orange flower. “Rain, can you slip into my library and find a copy of the newsfold with the article on prettibels?”

The girl said, “I don’t know how to find it.”

“It is a printed journal. It wil say ‘Prettibels Galore’ in the headline, or something like that. Get up when I speak to you.” She stood, but shrugged. “I don’t know how to read, Mum.”

“I can find it,” caled Miss Murth.

“She’l do it,” said Glinda tartly. “Child, there is an engraving on the page just under the masthead. You do know what a prettibel looks like, don’t you? A blossom like a kind of grubby little chewed sock?” Cherrystone was laughing. “They
are
your passion. You speak with the sour affection of the convert.”

“Do as I say, Rain.” Glinda felt herself flushing and hoped it didn’t show in the lamplight. “I tel you, Traper, you abuse my ability to entertain when you reduce me to such a staff.”

“Your prettibels wil likely suffer this year,” he admitted. “Sorry about that. Where are they in the garden, so we can avoid them?” He almost had her there. “I can’t discuss it any longer. It’s too vexing to think of them in extremis. There’s a dormant polder of them out beyond the little vilage of Zimmerstorm. Won’t you alow Puggles to escort me to check on them?” There was no such polder. But if she could get out for a day on a false pretense, she might gain a better sense of what was going on.

“It may be possible. Depending.”

Rain clambered back over the sil with several papers. “Not sure which one you want, so here is the lot.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore. I’ve become distressed by the thought of them. You may return these.”

“No, wait,” said Cherrystone. He took several papers from Rain and studied the headlines. Then he turned the front page so the girl could see it and said, “Do you know your letters?”

“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Never had none to teach me, sir.”

“Your mother doesn’t know how to read?”

“If you remember, Cherrystone,” said Glinda, “you required me to dismiss almost everyone.”

“You kept a girl from leaving with her mother?”

“Wel. Actualy, the child is an orphan. I look after her out of charity. Don’t pick your fingernails, Rain.”

“But you don’t teach her the alphabet.” Cherrystone sounded incredulous.

“I can’t do everything. I have prettibels to propagate. Until recently I didn’t know this girl by name, so how could I know if she could read or not? Perhaps it’s time for the cheese board. Rain, clear the plates.”

“I’l take them through,” caled Miss Murth, stifling a shadowed yawn.

“My granddaughter is learning her letters,” said the General. “Letters are a kind of magic, Rain. Coming together, they spel words, and words then are a kind of spel, too.”

“She doesn’t want to learn to read. She wants to carry those plates to the window. Leave her be, Traper.” But Glinda was now on this. Could she play the hand? She’d never been good at bluffing when the local gentry came by for a couple of rubbers of Three-Hand Snuckett.

She picked up one of the papers and pretended to look at it for the article on prettibels, and then she moved the paper up close until it almost touched her lips. A little blind, to buy her some time, while Cherrystone asked the girl, “What does this letter look like? This thing?”

Rain said, “It looks like a stick for finding water with.”

“Doesn’t it just. It is caled
Y
.”

“Why?”

“Indeed.”

“Too too touching,” said Glinda, “but I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. Our broomgirl is thicker than mud on the moor. Now, Rain, unless you want to annoy me, leave the General alone. He is a busy man and he needs his cheese.”

“I have the board,” caled Miss Murth through the lace, which was now swaying in a stiffer wind off the lake. “A nice Arjiki goat-cheese and a Munchkinlander corriale, and an aged Zimmersweet made with the ash layer. Though one corner may be the wrong color of mold; it’s hard to tel in this light.”

“Would you like to learn to read, Rain?” asked Cherrystone.

“Do you specialize in impossible tasks?” interrupted Glinda. “You might as wel ask a rural Munchkin-wife if she would like to brush the teeth of a mature draffe. The little scold can’t reach and she
won’t
reach no matter how many lessons in growing taler you squander upon her.”

“My granddaughter is seven and she can read,” said Cherrystone. “How old are you, Rain?”

“Now you’re impertinent. Rain, go with Miss Murth.” The girl shrugged and slung one leg over the windowsil. Straddling it, her hair falen back about her neck, she reviewed the diners on the roof of the porch. Looking at the girl’s curious expression, with a certain thril Glinda thought: she’s learning to read already. Letters are only the half of it.