Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (35 page)

She couldn’t think of Lir as her father, she couldn’t.

Lir looked at her with sudden sharpness. “What do you mean, the burning words?”

She shrugged at that and she would have wandered off to make a point about how free of him she was. But there was the book. He was sitting on it. She wanted to see where he would put it. In case.

Was he stil waiting for her to speak?

She couldn’t force a remark any more than she could force a smile, any more than she’d been able to force herself to read before she’d been taught the rubrics. She waited, squatting on her haunches, casting sideways looks at the Grimmerie in case it began to leak language out onto the stones.

“You want to read the burning words,” prompted Lir.

“Don’t you?”

He blinked. Another language she didn’t get, how people blink. How they make their eyes go wet. “Where do you find the burning words?” he asked her.

She thought of the armada scorching the ice. Something was being speled out there; fire moved in such a way, and smoke issued from fire, as if to hide what was being speled inside the heat. Oh, but al that was too fussy a thought. She took up a bug that didn’t mind the chily air and studied it on her forefinger instead.

She could tel this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out. She only saw charred letters in a lake. The alphabetic remains of ships.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Lir.

She thought and thought about that. She felt her calves begin to ache; she felt the tickle of the bug’s legs against her fingers. Someday, presumably, she wouldn’t have these legs or these fingers, but the legs and fingers of someone who stood as tal as this man could. She twisted in her thinking, trying to be honest since she didn’t believe she could be smart, and she gave the answer to the insect rather than to the man who claimed to be her father. She wouldn’t think of Lir as her father.

What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”

6.

Gone, when she grew up. A terrible thought. But in a way she was gone already, right now. Her form had come back to them but her spirit was balking.

Candle mourned that Rain wasn’t bothering with her much. Lir asked himself: What mother wouldn’t? But it seemed as if, instead of Lir’s and Candle’s warmth melting Rain’s resistance, it worked the other way around. The child’s aloofness was contagious. Candle and Lir were learning to weather a mutual pain separately, independently. No matter the closeness of the marriage bed, the history between them.

Maybe to distract himself from his other worries, Lir tried to fasten on his half-sister. He and Nor shared a father, presumably, though Lir had never met that distant figure, Fiyero. But Nor was also floating at some distance away from Lir. The great reunion that he’d dreamed of for years was a sham. Kidnapping, prison, escape, disappearance? You’d never know it by her self-effacing manner. She might as wel just have come home after shopping for biscuits.

He didn’t want to crowd his sister any more than he wanted to crowd his daughter. He watched Nor move about with a woodenness that sometimes seemed like grace, and sometimes not. Maybe this was her normal way? He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been abducted. Back when she’d been a girl roughly the age that Rain was now.

Never confident about women, Lir scrutinized his sister—with equal parts interest, patience, and suspicion—to see in what way might she turn out to be damaged.

As if he were writing a catalog on the subject of human misery.

Another way to avoid admitting how it had settled in too close, like lice.

The opportunity to engage Nor without threatening her arose naturaly enough. Every couple of weeks Lir was in the habit of descending from the mount to a wildwood garden. He colected mushrooms, fiddleheads, frostflower pods, and lettuce. It was half a morning’s hike. The next time he needed to thin the lettuce or lose it, he bundled up a few baskets, some stakes, a trowel, and he asked Nor to come along.

They stroled equably enough, chatting about the landscape and the moods of the climate. From time to time they fel into silence. A bird hopped on a blighted oak limb. A few chipmunks, at the business of growing their hoards, scampered like shadows of something overhead. The wind sawed through the thickery. You could hear the autumn inching in.

“Looks as if this has been a productive yard for generations,” said Nor, indicating the ancient stone tablets tilting at the end of the sunnier furrows.

“Behold: here lies the last person to tel the truth.”

She blinked at him.

“Sorry. Graveyard humor. But if those stones ever said anything like that, they stopped saying it long ago.”

Nor nodded. “They look like teeth. And your hermitage, or whatever it once was—it looks like a mouth too. A big open jaw swalowing the wind.”

“Swalowing the poppy trade, probably,” said Lir. Nor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the poppy trade?”

“I don’t know much. Even though we swam through the bloody sea of them.”

“Sometimes the Yunamata venture south as far as here to harvest the poppy pods. The takings are useful for their groggy rituals, and the ilegitimate opiate market is always eager to barter. Your little Munchkinlander apothecaire knows al about that, I’m sure. Some of the harvest seeps through the black market for smoking in certain parlors in Shiz and the EC, I’m told.”

“You’re not an habitué?”

“I haven’t been into a parlor of any sort since I grew facial hair.”

Nor bent to pick the lettuce, which was near to bolting. “Situated where it is, maybe your private stronghold used to be a countinghouse for the poppy merchants. Or maybe the defense headquarters against such a trade.”

“Whoever might tel us is probably long ago buried in the lettuces. It’s al guesswork.”

“But the trade has dropped off?”

“Seems so. Certainly the EC authorities don’t approve; they’re afraid the opiates wil get to the conscripted soldiers and erode morale. You didn’t see sign of anyone marking out a little meadow for harvesting?”

“Not a soul.”

They worked in companionable silence. Lir staked the stems of frostflower so they would winter over. They were best cut down in the early spring. Finished with the lettuce, Nor put her hand on the smal of her back and stretched. She dropped the heap of curled green pages into her shawl, and turned her attention to some radishes, but she gave up when one after another puled up mealy. “What next?” she asked.

Lir leaned back on his heels. “I have something to show you.” She waited. He puled from his tunic a folded bit of paper. “I found this at Kiamo Ko. Can you bear to look at it?” She came over to squat next to him. The browning paper, creased into softness, showed a faded drawing of a young girl. Hardly more than an infant, though with a certain crude spark in the eye. A personality. The letters in childlike hesitancy said

Nor by Fiyero.

This is me Nor

by my father F

before he left

It took her a half an hour to compose herself. Lir left his arm slung around her as if around the shoulder of a drinking mate—not too close. Not imprisoning. Just there. When she was ready, she tapped the page twice with a forefinger and said, “I found that drawing before you did. It was in the Witch’s room at the castle. My father had drawn me for his mistress, and she had kept it. She who seemed impervious to sentimentality had kept it al those years. When I came across it—I must have been rooting through her room one day, bored, as children wil be—I wrote the caption and put the page back where it was, so the Witch would know she could keep the paper but she couldn’t keep my father from me, not in my memory.”

“How much do you remember about those times? With your mother and brothers and me and the Witch? And those other aunts of yours? Back in Kiamo Ko?”

“I was hardly a teenager when I was abducted,” she said. “And so of course I remember almost al of it. Or I thought I did. But I’d forgotten this.”

“Do you remember they took me too?—but Cherrystone decided I wasn’t worth the labor of hauling overland? He left me tied up in a sack and hanging from a tree. I had to gnaw through the burlap, which took the better part of a day … then I fel twelve feet and almost kiled myself. And by the time I came around, you were gone. You were al gone. I made my way home to the castle and waited for the Witch to come back—she was in Munchkinland, I think. That was just when her sister, Nessarose, orchestrated the Munchkinlander schism, and they seceded from Loyal Oz.” He’d been talking too fast. He slowed down. “What happened to you when they took you?”

“What I do remember I don’t want to talk about.” She’d been with her mother and her older brother, Irji. And those aunts. Gruesome. Maybe Nor was right: maybe Lir didn’t realy want to know. After al.

Nor had been the only one to survive.

“Do you know that I talked my way into Southstairs Prison to find you?” he asked her. “After the Wizard abdicated and Lady Glinda came to be Throne Minister? My guide was none other than Shel Thropp. Shel Thropp, the Witch’s brother. My uncle, though I didn’t know it yet. A cad of the first order, and now he’s the Emperor.”

“We’ve just learned he’s divine. Being related to him, does that make you a saint?”

Lir bowed his head, though not in piety. “When I finaly got into the prison, you had just escaped from Southstairs. A few days earlier. I was that close to finding you. They said you’d hidden yourself between the corpses of some Horned Hogs and been carried out in a pudding of putrescent Animal flesh.” He tried to laugh. “
Really?
”

“I don’t care to think about it.” The way she spoke told Lir it was al too true.

“It sounds as if you were so close to Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hal. Didn’t you want to take revenge on him? After al, at the Wizard’s instructions he abducted and murdered your family. Or had them murdered. Much later, once I went AWOL from the service of the Emerald City Messiars, he began to have me hunted too. He attacked the mauntery caled Saint Glinda in the Shale Shalows because we were said to be there. He—”

“We? You and Candle?”

“Me and Trism. My bosom companion. We’d torched the stable of flying dragons that were being used to terrify the Scrow and the Yunamata, so Cherrystone was out for our blood. And when Cherrystone caught up with Trism at last he probably beat the bloody hel out of him. Listen, at Mockbeggar Hal, didn’t you want to put a stiletto through Cherrystone’s throat? I would have. Wanted to, at least.” She went back to the lettuces and began to arrange them in ranks of size, as if that mattered. Her voice was flat and unconcerned when she spoke again. “I’ve spent al my adult life either fighting the excesses of the Emerald City hegemony or trying not to fret myself into paralysis. One can only do what one can do, Lir. Today I can harvest a little lettuce. Tonight you and your wife and your child and my unlikely husband and your Goose and my coleagues, Mr. Boss and Little Daffy, wil have some lettuce to eat. One day perhaps I wil not find lettuce in my hands, but a knife. Maybe General Cherrystone wil have come to eat lettuce but wil dine on the blade that cuts the lettuce. If I only think about that, I can think about nothing else, and then I might as wel lie down under these stones and join the others who can’t think anymore, either.”

In a steely but warm voice, she added, “I might ask the same of you, Lir. Cherrystone’s zeal to find you, because you might lead him to the Grimmerie, has broken you apart from your own daughter no less fiercely than I was broken apart from my mother—and from my father. From our father. You might’ve spent these years of
your
strong youth hunting him down.”

“I might’ve done,” he agreed. “But if I’d been unsuccessful, Rain would’ve had no father to come home to, sooner or later. A fate we fatherless understand, you and I.”

“We do,” she said. “We understand lettuces, and we understand that. We don’t understand Cherrystone. But we don’t need to. Maybe.” They walked back to the hostel slowly, without talking, that final
maybe
like a heavy boulder slung between them, on a yoke laid across both their backs.

7.

About the darkness recently apparent in his wife’s eyes, the Lion was puzzled. He knew Ilianora hadn’t been prepared to find her brother. She hadn’t been looking for Lir. Maybe having found him, then, had slapped awake an old buried ache for others who’d been slaughtered.

This was a sore that Brrr couldn’t lick clean no matter how he tried. Maybe if Rain had taken to Nor … maybe his wife would have softened a little more … but no. Rain never took to anyone.

Except, a little bit, to him. Which was damn awkward under the circumstances. With her parents and her aunt moping around for scraps of attention. The girl wasn’t capable though. Or she just wasn’t interested in them.

What were they al waiting for in this Chancel of the Ladyfish, as Highsummer turned to Harvest’our, and Harvest’our gave way to Masque? Were they al glued to Rain, as if she might give them a sign?

Were the companions of the Clock to linger indefinitely? The question became moot when the snow blew in, and they were more or less ice-bound. They were no longer quite guests, these months along. But neither were they at home.

The Lion listened as Lir and Candle talked to each other in the coded abbreviations that couples develop. He couldn’t make much of Candle—a cipher, that one. But he remembered Lir from ages ago, that time when Brrr had arrived, with Dorothy and the shambolic others, at the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The flying monkeys! They’d given him the creeps. The loopy old Nanny who had nonetheless seemed the sanest of the lot. The mysterious way Dorothy had vanquished the Witch while the Lion and Lir were trapped in a larder. Then the beginning of their long journey back to the Emerald City.

Al the time Lir had been the least of them, a stringy, cave-chested marionette of a kid. The thinnest fleck of hair on the upper lip, the cracking voice, the sidelong glances at Dorothy, as if he couldn’t believe his luck but stil didn’t know if it was good luck or bad.