Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (50 page)

At St. Prowd’s

I.

Rain didn’t count the days or the hours in a day.

She didn’t count the items in the colections she made, neither of pinecones nor grey stones. Feathers ranging from the length of a human fingernail to that of a folded umbrela, in colors from pale white to coal and al the stations between. Animal bones—antlers, a bat wing, a femur someone had whittled partway into a flute and then abandoned. It was strange and triangular on one end and no one could identify the creature it must have come from.

She cataloged clouds but didn’t count the varieties; she noticed separate weathers but didn’t taly up the sorts. She gathered a bevy of smal lake seashels like babies of her precious large one, or like its toys.

The tin cup of arrowheads was her favorite. She knew each one by heft and design, by adze stroke and lichen stain. She didn’t know how many she had.

She didn’t look as closely at family matters. The incidents, the backgrounds, the causes-and-consequences, the self-delusions presented as potted biographies. To the extent she was aware of them—her relatives—they seemed like bundled, ambulatory atmospheres. But she’d picked up the art of pretending to listen. It seemed to calm them al down, and who knows, maybe she learned something. She didn’t count the lessons, if there were any.

In two years the family had managed, among them, to build a little home. It had been hard going at the outset. Not much more than a lean-to dug into the side of a hil. More cave than cottage. When they’d survived the first winter, Nor had made her way overland to the nearest settlement—some two weeks away by foot—and come back to Nether How with a sack of square-head nails. Useful enough, but since the art of construction wasn’t one of Lir’s strengths, everyone was grateful for the help of a trio of hunters heading west to hunt skark. They’d stopped to water their horses at Five Lakes, and by the time they’d left ten days later, they had framed up a tidy cottage on the stone foundation Lir had been carting into place for a year. It remained only for him to finish it. He got the roof shingled just in time, though that second winter the house had to double as a shed. (Candle had managed to befriend a goat and some wild chickens.) He and Nor worked al winter fitting the floor and wals with planking while Candle foraged in the woods for edible roots and bark and for seedpods to begin a lakeland farm.

“What does it take to grow a farm?” Lir asked his wife once. An old joke.

“A family,” she’d answered. Not so funny, but true. They al worked, husband and wife and sister and, to the extent they could get her attention, daughter.

In the luff of the Great Kels, which loomed over them to the west, the winter was warmer than they’d expected. Snow, to be sure, but many of the storms seemed to slide overhead, holding their worst until they’d moved farther east. Or maybe the site itself was magical. Long ago on a solitary trek Lir had discovered the isolated district he caled Five Lakes. He’d had a certain vision right here, on the hummock of land where he’d now built their home. He told Candle and Nor about it one winter evening, after Rain had settled down.

That’s what they did, to see their way through the winters: tel their lives, as honestly as they could. Rain heard these tales as she heard the fire crackle. Pretty sounds, but no way to assemble them.

“It’s hard to remember for sure,” said her father through his patchy, unconvincing beard. “Maybe I’ve filed in parts of it to make more sense. But what I remember—what I think I remember—is that as I was lying on the ground in a spasm of regret, I seemed to detach from myself, to float above my restless body. I could see myself below, half awake, turning and tossing. I became aware of a movement on the side of the hil, not far from this home, though I don’t know where precisely. I saw an old man forming ghostily in the uprights of autumn saplings. He was stumbling in from somewhere, like a figure in fog taking definition as he neared. Or like the way a poaching egg goes from translucent to solid. He seemed lost, but not in that frantic manner of the very old. Just unsure of his location. He peered at the water with interest, and around at the land. But though he emerged from nowhere in a magical way, he didn’t see me, either on the ground or in the air. As he filed in, I saw he had in his arms a big book. Maybe it was the Grimmerie, but I suppose there are other big books in Oz. He nodded, as if approving where he’d washed up, and turned to the north.”

“I’ve always believed you can see the past,” said Candle. “I think he couldn’t notice you because you weren’t there yet. What you saw had happened much earlier.” Nor grunted. “I remember hearing my mother and Elphaba talking about where the Grimmerie came from. My mother said that one day an old man had come to the door of Kiamo Ko, long before Elphaba arrived, before I was born probably, and taken a bite to eat. He said the book was a great weight to carry, and with Sarima’s permission he would leave it behind. It would be colected in time. My mother put it in some attic where Auntie Witch found it years later.”

Lir replied, “That weird apprehension of witnessing something past has only come over me once or twice, and a good thing too. I don’t miss it.”

“If we live long enough,” said his half-sister, “we al end up seeing the past. That’s al we can see.”

“I can see the present,” said Candle. Perhaps her skil was related to women’s intuition, but of a steelier sort. Tonight her understanding was humble. “I can see that somebody’s little girl is only feigning sleep.

She’s listening to every word we say.”

In two years and some, Candle had learned how to be a mother. A mother to a reckless, feckless, one-off of a child—but what child isn’t?

Listening wasn’t quite what Rain was doing, but hearing—letting the sounds trickle by—wel, yes. Caught out, she sat up in her trundle cot that, daytimes, slid under her parents’ higher bedstead. “I can’t sleep tonight.”

“Too much talk of magic,” said Nor.

“Tel me about the time you flew Elphaba’s broomstick,” said Rain. She had noticed that grown-ups liked to be asked to speak.

“Pfaah, magic, a set of poison hopes,” said Nor.

Candle said, “No more talk about magic. You need your sleep, Rain. We’re going to try to rush another wild sheep into the fold tomorrow, spancel it and dock its tail, and you make the best sheepdog I have. Come now. Lay down.” But Rain wheedled and whined until the grown-ups relented. The next teling was Nor’s.

“I was about your age, Rain,” said Nor, “and living at Kiamo Ko, a castle way north of here. Elphaba had come to live with us already, along with your father, who was younger than I.”

“I stil am,” said Lir.

“I suppose Elphaba must have arrived at Kiamo Ko with that broom, but I don’t know if she understood its powers. I had taken it out to a barn to clean up after our guests, and I felt it twitch in my hands, to pulse with life. Like a garter snake when you grab it, but not wriggly. It’s hard to explain. I decided to ride it like a hobbyhorse, but when I threw my leg over it, it rose in the air.” Rain’s eye was cool and flat but her face was bright. “Don’t glamourize danger,” said Lir. “I’ve ridden it in my time, too, Rain, and it’s no carnival ride of carved wooden stalions accompanied by tinny music. I was attacked on the broom by flying dragons and I nearly lost my life.”

But the attack had brought him to the ministrations of Candle, and
that
had brought Rain into the world, into their lives, so he stopped complaining.

“I want to fly,” said Rain. “I want to fly, and to see.”

“You touch that broom without permission, you’l get a waloping you never knew I was capable of,” said Lir.

“And I’l thwack you too,” said Candle, who was so tenderhearted she didn’t set traps for the field mice that ravaged her seed stock.

They al looked overhead; they couldn’t help it. In the apex of the ceiling, above the loft, Lir had closed in a triangular space by hammering up a ceiling three boards wide. He had boxed in the broom. If you didn’t know it was there you would never guess. As for the Grimmerie, he had planned to encase it in fieldstone next to the chimney stack, adjacent the bread oven. But worries about having to flee suddenly, leaving it where it might be found, had scuttled that strategy. Thus, the Grimmerie was wrapped in an old army satchel of Lir’s and kept on top of the dish cupboard. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. Everyone was forbidden to touch it.

2.

So of course Rain wanted to get the Grimmerie. Any number of times she puled over a stool and settled her hands on the dark blue canvas sacking. But it wasn’t worrying about punishment from her parents that stopped her. Their cautions didn’t figure. It was the memory of what had happened with the dragons on the lake.
To Call Winter upon Water
. And that was merely one page. What good might be done through the agency of a single powerful page? What good, and what evil?

She wasn’t afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tel the difference.

Stil, how it caled her! If Candle could sometimes tel the present, if Lir had once or twice been able to tel the past, Rain felt she could tel the hunger of the Grimmerie. A hunger to be read. The book had an active desire to be cracked open and have its messages delivered. The furnace’s lust for tinder.

They rarely left her alone in the cottage, those adults.
Her
people? She found the concept hard to take in. At any rate, the next group of people. More people to add to her colection of people. It seemed she would rotate through an endless set of temporary arrangements. She hadn’t forgotten the Lion, the dwarf, and the Munchkinlander herbalist lady. Or Murthy and Puggles and other warm cloudy presences without names, those who had lived belowstairs with her at Mockbeggar Hal and taken care of her scrapes and ailments.

Back then she had run about like a chipmunk, unnoticed unless she was about to trespass on some formal affair of Lady Glinda’s, in which case she’d be boxed about the ears or distracted with a boiled sweet. Here at Nether How, this scrappily forested hil hummocked up between two isolated mountain lakes, she was always under someone’s watchful eye. If the three adults had to go off somewhere, either Oziandra Rain had to traipse along or she was left under the care of Iskinaary.

“They love you because you belong to them,” he hissed at her once. “They can’t help it. But I think you’re trouble heating up on a slow flame. I’ve got my eye on you.”

“I never done nothing to you,” she replied, dropping the stone in her palm.

Sheep, companionable enough, roamed their neighborhood, keeping the ground cover cropped. Once a year the three adults managed to shear a few of them. How best to prepare the wool? There were tricks to it some traveler would eventualy share, but in the meantime the family kept warm enough. None of them ate meat as a first choice, but if a lamb was found with a broken neck and it couldn’t thrive, they kiled it out of mercy and Candle thanked some deity or other for its spirit and its chops. Lir and Nor wouldn’t join in the prayer. And Iskinaary refused to come to table if there was flesh upon it.

“One day I’l break my neck, and then you’l have a conundrum on your hands,” he told them.

“Not such a hard choice,” said Rain. “Chestnut stuffing or bread?”

“And to think your grandmother was a celebrated activist in defense of Animals. You should be ashamed of yourself.” The lake was mad with fish, so they ate fish, which Tay caught for them. They sometimes discussed whether there was any such thing as a Fish, an opinionated cousin of the presumably nonsentient variety.

Iskinaary, who liked fish as much as he disliked flesh, agreed to put his head under the water and try to speak to them. But there was no reason to suspect that Fish would speak the same language as air-breathing creatures. Since he could never manage to start a reasonable conversation among equals, the Goose always gave up and alowed himself a snack.

Stil fascinated by letters and words, Rain had begun to work out languages in Oz. She colected languages, the idea of them anyway. There seemed to be a primary tongue that she had spoken since birth.

For lack of another term it was caled Ozish, though to a child it seemed effortless as breathing. But there were other languages. Qua’ati, of course, which she’d picked up in Qhoyre—Candle spoke it wel, and Lir, haltingly. And variations of birdsong that Iskinaary seemed capable of using. Rain couldn’t tel if the language was universal among the airborne or specific to certain species, Goose subtly different from Duck or Swalow. But she was too proud to ask Iskinaary.