Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (57 page)

She remembered that the stables were ful of guest horses. She told Tay to stay put while she hustled into a waist-length wool coat and hurried down both flights of stairs. The horses in their stals nickered and wheezed, and shuffled at the sound of her, and she was glad for their noise and warmth. Various coachmen stil lingered, smoking cheap tobacco roled in old newsprint, and husbanding pints of ale that Proctor Clapp had sneaked out to them when his sister wasn’t looking. The ale had made the men joly. They chattered on as Rain went quickly through the few satchels that had been lobbed into the shadows just inside the stable doors.

“
My
lady, she’s a right dab of codswalop, she is. She pays me but a penny farthing for the trip from Plaid Acres to Shiz, and then she’s late for the school supper because she’s got to stop and buy new gowns in that fancified silk depot over to Pennikin Lane!”

A smal quarter of cheese. Better than nothing.

“My lady’s got yours beat in the mud with a beetroot up her arse. Mine’s so cheap she thinks I don’t merit the privacy of a loo with a closed door, so she stops before any town center at the last possible shrine to Lurlina and makes me take a dump behind it! Says it saves her a fee and helps stamp out paganism at the same time.” Oooh, a hunk of bread. Pretty hard, but maybe if she held it over her candle?

“The old gov’nor en’t so bad. He’s a secret royalist, though. He prays for the Emperor every night like he’s told to do—he prays that the Emperor passes away peaceful in his sleep, and that some miracle return the Ozma line to the throne. He was born under an Ozma and he wants to die under one, he says. I tels him to his face, he’s gonna die under a lake narwhal, the missus keep putting on the pounds like she’s doing.”

“You don’t say that, you buggery liar!”

“I says it in my heart, like a prayer.”

A lot of laughter outside. In the last satchel, a trove—a mince pie, almost fresh by the smel of it, and two carrots and an apple, probably for the horse, and a smal porcelain flagon of something liquid. She nicked it al, neat as Handy Mandy, and a rather nicely woven pink blanket that was thrown over a mare, and she scurried up the stairs. No one heard her. One of the ostlers was saying, “Give over some of that Baum’s Liquid Hoof Dressing, my pretty piebald is sorer than sandpaper on a sow’s behind.”

The intruder couldn’t wake, no matter how gently or roughly she rocked his shoulder. He couldn’t sample her terrific haul. It would be more stale in the morning. Damn. But she put the pink horse’s blanket on him, over the coverlet, and to keep herself warm she dressed herself in as many layers as she could. Thanks to Miss Ironish her wardrobe was fuler than it had been. She was grateful for the stiff wool stockings and the promenading cape.

Round about midnight a brawl started among the carriage attendants. Maybe someone had discovered his flask was missing. She didn’t mind. She sat with Tay in her lap—Tay kept her warm too—and maybe she dozed and maybe she didn’t, but after a while the morning came anyway.

He looked more bruised in the morning, but perhaps that was just the coloration of another ethnic group in Oz that Rain hadn’t previously colected. He sat up and said, “If I was ful I would need the privy,” and she answered, “Wel, eat up some of this and sooner or later.” She gave him a carrot that he chomped at quicker than a horse might. Then he folowed it down with a sip from the flagon, which made him wince, and then a long gulp, which made him blush scarlet and pass out again.

Breakfast bel. If she didn’t show up someone might come looking—it had happened before. She didn’t bother to straighten her clothes or change them, as there was no time. She grabbed Scarly’s slate and scratched on it
DO NOT LEAVE
, and she propped it up against her chair leg so he would see it if he woke. “Don’t let him go, Tay,” she told the otter, who normaly spent the day in the room anyway, under restrictions of the siblings Clapp.

After breakfast. “Your attire, Miss Rainary,” said Madame Chortlebush.

“There was a new leak in the annex,” said Rain. “I shal have to use free period to launder my other gowns.”

Later, Madame Chortlebush said, “I do not believe you are minding the lesson as you ought, Miss Rainary. Are you distraught because your mother couldn’t see her way to attending Visitation Day?” Rain opened her mouth. Then she thought, I am quietly lying to my teacher by pretending nothing is wrong. And I lied about my clothes without even thinking about it. So what’s the difference if I lie upon careful consideration?

She didn’t know if there was a difference but she had to answer the question. “Yes,” she said to her teacher. As she spoke she realized that accidentaly she was teling the truth. Effortlessly, she had learned to miss people a little bit. She didn’t know her Auntie Nor very wel, but without saying it in so many words to herself, she had hoped to be surprised by a visit from her pretend mother anyway.

Oh wel, she thought. I have a boy in my room, and none of the other girls have
that.

“Come here. You need a good squeeze,” said Madame Chortlebush, who rather liked to give good squeezes.

“I think my frock is too wrinkled already,” said Rain, but her teacher wouldn’t relent, so Rain succumbed. Then at her desk she tried harder at her sums so as to throw off suspicion and not give the game away.

Because she had planted the story of ruined clothes in the morning, at luncheon she was released from the chore of healthful stretching in the basement game room, it being too cold to promenade. She plowed across the new snow in the yard and entered the annex. The last of the carriages had left after breakfast. The building felt quiet. Al too quiet, in fact.

She hurried up the stairs, two at a time, ripping the hem in her skirt when her heel caught upon it, but she couldn’t stop.

Tay was at the desk in the window in usual fashion, taking what warmth there was. The horse blanket was folded up and laid upon Rain’s bed. At first she thought the boy was gone. Then she saw that he had found the ladder in the halway and had propped it up in the alcove where she kept her clothes, which now realy
were
rucked up and unpresentable. In the ceiling of the alcove, which she had never seen before because that corner was so dark, he had found a hatch of some sort, a trapdoor. And he had lifted the hinged hatch about a foot, and was standing on the ladder in a pool of unearthly light that had never before come into any room she had occupied. He looked magical. The light made his scruffy mousy curls seem pale and almost translucent. His arms were plump and hard.

She could tel he wasn’t looking into the schoolyard, but in the other direction. He wouldn’t have seen her coming. She didn’t want to frighten him and cause him to fal. She walked up softly and put her hand on his calf, to announce her presence. Startled, he nearly kicked her teeth out. She should have guessed. A felow citizen of Oz who didn’t like to be touched.

“You nearly scared the knickers off me,” he said.

“Scootch over, I’m coming up,” she replied. He inched to one side, and there was just enough room for her to fit her feet on the rungs and join him.

She had never seen the city of Shiz from anywhere but gutter level, as her own window in the annex looked onto the cloistered schoolyard with its ivied wals. This high up, she saw a confusion of roofs in the bright cold glare of a winter noontime. Gables and domes—that was St. Florix, surely?—and crenelations, were they, and clock towers. And stone steeples. And scholars’ towers poking from the coleges.

“That dark one with the pointy windows is Three Queens Library,” said the boy. “And do you see the one with the gold escutcheons high up, under the gutters? That’s the Doddery at Crage Hal, I think.”

“It’s like a field planted with toys.” She couldn’t stop her voice from sounding breathy and girly, but, hel, it was beautiful.

“And the weather vanes. You can make out the nearer ones. I see a were-wolf over there. Can you see it?”

“The one on the little pointy bit of roof?”

“No, that’s a Queen Ant, for some reason. To the left, above the mansard roof with the pattern in the tiles.”

“It looks more like a were-pig than a were-wolf.”

He laughed at that, which made her feel they were standing too close. But there was no choice if they wanted to survey Shiz from this height; the hatch was only so wide. Their shoulders were touching, and the only warm thing. The wind was fierce. “Look, a goose,” he told her.

“Iskinaary,” she said, before she could stop herself.

“What’s that?”

“The Quadling word for
goose
.” There, another lie. She was getting good at it.

The bels in one of the nearby towers rang the half. “I better pretend to be organizing my clothes or I’l catch it, but good,” she said. She was reluctant to leave the airy world above Shiz, the spires and slopes and ravines topping the city’s close-built architecture. But she risked being tossed out of St. Prowd’s altogether if she was discovered this deep in the breaking of rules.

He descended after she did, replacing the hatch. Her room suddenly felt musty. Smal. Inappropriate for entertaining a visitor. He seemed too close, now that they had touched shoulders. “Get me down my dresses, wil you, I have to press one of them and look more presentable for afternoon classes.”

He handed her a gravely ugly frock, the color of mushy peas, a single broad ribbon sewn down the left thigh panel its only decoration. She had never thought about clothes and their decoration before. She had never thought about thinking about it, either. She was under a spel of multiple reflections and it felt too much for her. “Isn’t there anything nicer?” she snapped, as if she were a Pertha Hils dame in a high street establishment, and he the clerk.

“I don’t care about clothes,” he said, which was something of a relief. “How about this green one?”

“With the pucker in the bib? That one? It’l do. Hand it here.”

She grabbed her change of clothes. She didn’t have time to do much but flatten out the skirts with her hand and twist the ties so they lay straight. She tried to think of what to say to him to make sure he stayed. She puled the wrinkled garment she had slept in over her head. She’d already tossed it to the floor when she heard him gasp. She turned to him, questioningly, in nothing but her smals and the red heart locket. He said, “Please—I’l wait in the hal if you like.”

“Why?”

He couldn’t find a word for it, and finaly blurted, “Courtesy, I guess.” By then she’d already slipped the replacement over her head and was wriggling her arms into its scratchy sleeves. “Never mind,” he said when she emerged looking at him in total bewilderment.

“Are you going to tel me who you are, and why you’re here?”

“You can cal me Tip. I suppose. I’m guessing you haven’t reported me to the governors of this establishment?”

“I haven’t said anything to any of the girls or the teachers, if that’s what you mean. But why shouldn’t I?”

“I’m keeping out of sight, if I can.”

“Wel, I hope no one saw your stupid head popping out of St. Prowd’s roof just now.”

“No one but cinder pigeons, I bet.”

“Look. I only have a few more moments, and then I’m away again until dinnertime. I’l try to bring you back some real food if I can manage. But you have to tel me—”

“Actualy I don’t have to tel you anything. And I don’t need your food. Though I’m glad you are nice enough not to have ratted on me. I’l be gone by the time you get back, and I won’t steal anything, I promise, not even that shiny shel you have. Cor, but that’s a bit of wonderful.”

“Don’t go. You’re not wel.”

“What are you, an infant doctor?”

“I have a cousin who is an apothecaire and I picked up a few things. You’re liable to frostbite in this weather, or the racking congestibles.”

“That sounds serious.” He was mocking her.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Realy. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. You owe me that much. I risked getting discovered as a thief last night to find you food and drink.”

“Plenty powerful lemon barley you provided, too. Al right. I’l stay til you get back, but I’m not promising much beyond that.” He picked up the book that Scarly had been struggling through. “
The Were-pig
of Dirstan Straw
,” he read. “Oh, that’s where you got the were-pig from.”

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

13.

His name was Tip; she knew that much, and knowing his name saw her through the rest of the endless day. She managed to brush past Scarly in the buttery and whisper for an extra few rols to sneak to her room, which was forbidden under pain of expulsion. The maid contrived to deposit a tea towel with rols and even a beet-and-ham pasty into Rain’s lap. Scarly’s faintly raised eyebrow made Rain feel cheap somehow. Stil, she couldn’t risk giving Tip’s presence away to the maid. In the interest of keeping her position secure, Scarly might feel more beholden to her employers than Rain felt to her teachers.

After dinner and prayers she returned to find that Tip had spent the afternoon taking apart a smal iron stove he’d found in some boys’ dormitory below. Piece by piece he had hauled it upstairs and reassembled it. “It kept me warm, al those steps,” he said. “And there’s a handsome little stash of coal in the celar beyond the stable doors, too, so you can be set for a while.” For the venting of smoke he’d jerry-rigged a snake of cylindrical tin piping up through the hatch, which was now open three inches. The cold air flooding in defeated the effect of the warming fire. But the atmosphere was improved, anyway.

He was proud of his work.

He wouldn’t tel her much about where he’d come from or why he was hiding. He admitted he’d been wandering the country outside Shiz during the summer and had come across the military camp of St.

Prowd’s boys. One afternoon he’d befriended a few of them doing an exercise in bivouac, and they’d told him about this vacated dormitory in town. It hadn’t been hard to find. He hadn’t heard Scarly or Rain come or go; the stable wals were thick with horse shawls, and the hay stacked everywhere probably served as extra insulation.

“But what have you been doing during the daytime?” asked Rain.