Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (13 page)

“Surely you’l stay for a glass of refreshment? Zackers isn’t Chef, of course, but he’s learning his way around the larder, much as you are.” She didn’t reply, but swept away. In her rooms, she wept momentarily, feeling foolish. She rang for Murth and asked her to find out more about Chef, but neither Murth nor Puggles was alowed outside of the house anymore. “I didn’t hear ‘drowned,’ ” insisted Miss Murth. “I only heard ‘let go.’ But he couldn’t swim.”

After lunch the Menaciers began moving soldiers’ trunks and sleeping rols into the gilt-ceilinged guest chambers. Zackers oversaw the setting up of cots in Glinda’s retiring parlor. Three of them, one for Puggles, one for Murth, one for Rain. “I can’t sleep in the same room as Puggles,” begged Miss Murth. “I am an unmarried woman.” Glinda didn’t answer. She told Puggles to find Rain. Glinda would see her at once, in the privacy of her boudoir.

I3.

Ineed something of you, Rain,” said Glinda.

The girl didn’t answer. She doesn’t speak often, noted Glinda, not for the first time. Maybe learning to read wil change that.

“We are being asked to keep from walking about in the gardens for a while,” she said. “But you’re young and can run and dash about, and no one much notices. Can you find out something for me?” Rain looked up sideways at her mistress. Despite years of Glinda’s watching her own diet and performing knee-bends in the privacy of her chambers, she suddenly felt fat. Fat and squat and old. And she feared she smeled of caramelized carrots. But enough about me, she said to herself, and shook her curls, which were due for a bleaching in a solution of lemon juice and extract of milkflower. Later.

Concentrate
.

“Are you up for this, Rain?”

The girl shrugged. Her hair was dirty and her calves were dirty, but prettying the child up wouldn’t do her any good, Glinda thought. She was safer looking a little revolting. That snarled cloud of unbrushed brown hair! “What do you want me to lookit?” Rain finaly said.

“I want you to find out what they are building in the barns. Can you do that?”

Rain shrugged again. “They’re always hammering inside there, and the doors are shut.”

“You’re smal. You can stick to the shadows.” Glinda fixed the girl with as fierce a glare as she could manage. “Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better try, or I might have to cancel your reading lessons.”

The girl looked up sharply, more keenly than before. “Not that, Mum.”

“I trust the General is treating you wel?”

“He teaches me good enough,” said the girl. “I knows a passel of letters now.”

Glinda pursed her lips. She didn’t believe in putting children in danger, nor of frightening them overmuch. “He’s permitted to teach you no more than letters,” she finaly said. “If he tries to teach you anything else, you come let me know. Is that understood?”

The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders.
“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaler, but more honest.

“That’l do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

“He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

I4.

While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squal of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spel that would send Cherrystone and his men packing.

After al, if she could use a spel to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spels. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spels therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t realy make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

She replaced the book on the shelf. What
had
she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so wel through that concealing spel that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventualy Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubiousness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

I5.

Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shel kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift sculery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

“Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg roled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shel quite efficiently.

“I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?” Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

“I’m sure you found a way.”

“I waited til the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

Glinda waited.

Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”

“It’s hard to say what I saw. It was upsy-wrongedy houses, sort of like.”

“I see,” said Glinda, though she did not.

“Like the houses in Zimmerstorm, but on their heads.”

“Were the upsy-wrongedy roofs made of blue tile, as in Zimmerstorm?”

“No. Strokes of wood al hammered close together, going like this.” Rain pushed her hands away from her bely as if describing a long melon in the air.

“Wouldn’t the upsy-wrongedy houses fal over if they were trying to balance on their narrow roofbeams?”

“They al had leggses. Like spiders, sort of. Wooden leggses.”

“How many of these houses?”

“You din’t tel me to counts ’em.”

“A lot?”

“They were too big to be a lot. They took up the whole space nearly, between the lofts for straw up high and the stals below.” Glinda went to a table and looked at the implements. She selected a knife and a loaf of bread. She cut off the heels and a good deal of the crusts and made the loaf into a statue of a house, as wel as she could. “So. It was like this?”

“Yes but turned over.” Rain reached out and upended it. “And the spider leggses al up and down here and here. But this end was more pointy.”

“Oh. Oh yes, of course. I see now.” Glinda plucked a paring knife and quickly made of the upside-down house a sort of tugboat. “Like this. And if the spider legs were knocked away, it would look like a boat.”

“Boats don’t have such pointy bottoms.”

“Some do. You’ve probably never seen a boat out of the lake, that’s al.” She put the knife down softly. “They’re building boats. They’re going to take a flotila up the lake and attack Haugaard’s Keep by water. Of course. It makes sense.” She thought of the map she had seen, and the dotted line up the middle of Restwater. In the center of the lake the invaders would be beyond the reach of any local ambush brigade mounted by Zimmerstorm or Haventhur to the north, or Bigelow or Sedney to the south. Though the progress of such vessels, if they were indeed as large as Rain suggested, would be clearly visible, and alow impromptu navies up and down the lake to row out to attack them. What was Cherrystone playing at?

“You’ve done very wel, Rain,” said Glinda. She hesitated a moment, and then—something she had resisted doing for years—she put her hand on Rain’s shoulder. “You deserve a reward. What would you like?”

“Do you got anything I can read?”

“Nothing suitable, I’m afraid. Besides, I hear from the General that you’re at early stages yet. But perhaps you’l learn.”

“I’l learn,” said Rain. “Meanwhile, if you en’t got no bookses, give me two slices of boat and some butter spread on ’em.” She twisted her hands and grinned at Glinda. It was the first time in, what, seven years.

I6.

For what was Glinda waiting? To be rescued? To have a tantrum? To be inspired to act? To warble an anthem of protest to an incredulous shoreline? She did a little crochet work, a sunny pilow with a motto.

OZMA BEFORE US
. She watched the thunderheads of Highsummer massing to the west, and she fled if they threatened to let loose. She studied the long lake, which curved between the foothils of the Great Kels on the far southern side and the lower slopes of the Pine Barrens on the northern. The placement of Mockbeggar on its little promontory gave her limited advantage; as the lake curved subtly to the southeast, it narrowed and disappeared between opposing banks. Same to the northwest. Due to the angle, she couldn’t glimpse Haugaard’s Keep even had she the eyes of a hawk. Unless she had the wings of a hawk too, of course.

Her household wobbled on. Systems seemed maintained not so much through stamina as through an inertia borne of fear. Nothing more came to light about Chef. Puggles did what he could with the odd breast of falow-hen, with parsleyfruit and wristwrencher beans, with eggs and cheese and a militant sort of pastry pot pie that refused to yield to a knife. Miss Murth lived on tea and she smeled of tea and she began to resemble a tal stalk of ambulatory celery, and she trembled when she talked, which was less often than usual. What Rain ate was a mystery to Glinda, mostly.

One day when the cloudburst began earlier than usual, the girl showed up fresh from her lesson. She hunted for
O
s and
Z
s al over Glinda’s parlor, in the gnarly filigrees of preposterously carved furniture. She al but capered with the fun of it. “I know
Oz
, now,” she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a
Z
circled with an
O
. “Usualy letters don’t hide inside each other,” she told Glinda firmly.

“No, that’s true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding, though.”

The girl turned and as if by magnetism walked directly over to the little bookshelf beside the window. She tugged the yelow book out. It might as wel have been her primer. “What’s this book? I can’t read these words yet.”

“It’s caled, um,
The Wind Blew Away
. Or something.”

“Is it about the big wind that blew Dorothy here?”

“Where did you hear about Dorothy?”

“Miss Murth told me the story.”

“Never listen to Miss Murth. She’s too old to be valid. Now put that book back.”

I must seem too old to be valid, too, thought Glinda, as Rain ignored her. The girl opened the cover and ran her hand along the page. “What’s hidden here?” Glinda felt a chil. “What nonsense you speak. What do you mean?”

“This book. It’s like a creature. It’s alive.” She turned to Glinda. “Can you feel it? It gots a heart, almost. It’s warm. It’s purring.”

“Do you come in here and touch this book when I’m not looking?”

“No. I never seen it before. But it was sort of shimmery.”

Glinda snatched it away. She had never noticed a shimmer to the book and she didn’t see one now. But Rain was on to something. The Grimmerie had a kind of urgent low heat to it. A kind of soundless hum.

She found herself saying, nearly whispering, “What page would you like to look at?”

Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

The thunder made a menacing comment, but it was comfortably distant. Rain turned to a page about two-thirds through.

“You can’t read this. Can you?”

Rain peered. “Everything’s hitched up and kicking.”

“Yes yes, but can you read it?”

Rain shook her head. “Can you?”

How mortifying. Glinda looked. A heading of some sort was squeezing like a belows; at ful extension it seemed to suggest
To Call Winter upon Water
.

“It’s about dressing warmly enough. Sort of,” she said. She slapped the book closed. “Why did you open to that page?” Rain murmured, “I was remembering something once. About a goldfish.”

Suddenly Glinda was tired of Rain. Tired, and a little scared of her. “Would you run tel Miss Murth it’s time for my tea? And no touching this book unless I ask you to. Do you understand?” Rain was out the door, on to the next thing in her stunted little life. “Sure,” she caled, disingenuously no doubt.

Glinda carried the volume to her escritoire. She opened it again, but now she couldn’t even fan the pages. The book fel open to the page it preferred.
To Call Winter upon Water
. How had Rain caled this spel up out of the book?

I chose to be the patron of arts festivals over dabbling in the science of charms, she thought. But there’s no help for it now. I am stuck here with a book of magic that won’t let me go.

She read a little bit of the charm, as best she could, and then sat back, exhausted. Thought about the Grimmerie, and its wily ways. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into Rain’s capacity to hone in on the tome. She
was
learning to read, after al. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page—but then the world is the same way, isn’t it? The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.