Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (81 page)

“I suppose you can.”

“The royalists wil be having mighty parties.”

“It’s too early to tel. Though the confetti factories are probably going into overnight shifts.”

She sighed. “And my great-uncle?”

“Wel, it’s al up in the air stil, isn’t it? There’s the question of how ready to rule the new leader might be. As we know from Dorothy, age doesn’t always constitute wisdom. And people grow up on different schedules, one from the next.”

“Has Shel abdicated the throne?”

“It’s stil unsettled whether the Palace wil accept a return to the rule of monarchy. And the question of whether the monarch wants to rule. I understand there is human choice involved.”

“I don’t know if there is,” said Rain.

“Oh,” said the Lion. “Don’t give me that. I’m the Cowardly Lion, remember. There’s always human choice.”

She put her face to his shoulder, her greening hand upon his paw. “Al right then,” she said. “Enough grieving. Can you make arrangements for me to have an audience?”

“I have it on the highest authority that Tip has been waiting for you to ask.”

“Who’s authority is that high?”

“A little Bird told me.”

9.

Miss Ironish opened the door of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. She shooed the guards on the stoop to one side and told them if they didn’t stop bristling their bayonets in her face she’d give them what for and no mistake. “Come in, Miss Rainary,” she said. A new sobriety had tightened her corset. She never mentioned the change in Rain’s appearance, except to mutter, “My, how you’ve grown.” Scarly took Rain’s umbrela and put it against a hat stand.

“I believe you wil be comfortable in the parents’ parlor,” said Miss Ironish. “Scarly wil bring you a biscuit or a glass of water if you like. Please wait here and I wil announce the Crown in a few moments.”

“I can help myself to a glass of—”

“This is hard on everyone,” said Miss Ironish sternly. “Wait.”

She left the room with a backward glance rich in opprobrium. A few moments later Scarly tiptoed in with three lemon brickums and a cheese tempto congealing upon a porcelain salver. Apparently school fare didn’t improve even for royalty.

“Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, moving out of the sight of the crowds who haunted the paving stones, the faithful who waited outside day and night, desperate to catch a glimpse of the miracle. “Oh, Miss Rainary.” She couldn’t control the gasp in her voice.

“I hope it isn’t too horrible,” said Rain, a little coldly.

“It en’t horrible,” said Scarly, and she took Rain’s hand. She could get nothing else out, though, and fled through the butler’s pantry when she heard Miss Ironish return.

“You may arise, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish, and stood back against the door as Tip came through, making every effort not to twist her hands. Miss Ironish retreated and the door closed firmly though without the sound of a click.

Rain said, “Am I to cal you Ozma?”

“You may cal me Tip,” she answered.

“I’m told that when you discovered what had happened, you fainted dead away. I thought, when I could think, ‘Wel, isn’t that just like a girl.’ ”

“Not funny, Rain. Under the circumstances. How did you find out?”

Rain neither moved away nor did she come closer, and neither did Ozma Tippetarius. They stood nine feet apart on opposite margins of a sunbleached carpet. “I suppose—I don’t know—maybe I dreamed it.”

“You’re lying. You don’t lie. Have you changed?”

“Wel.” She held up her green fingers. “A little.”

Tip waited.

“Tay always liked you,” said Rain, “and Tay didn’t like men, generaly.”

“Was that it?”

Rain thought. “Yes, I think that was it.”

“You’ve never even known if Tay is male or female itself, have you? Yet you claim to know how Tay can respond to me, even when a disguise is laid upon me for—for al those years I can’t remember?”

“We’re unlikely to make an acceptable ruling couple,” said Rain. “For one thing, you’re about a hundred years older than I am.”

“Wel, I hide it wel, don’t I.” The tone was bitter.

“You knew it al along,” said Rain.

“I didn’t. Mombey kept me apart from other children. We always shifted about every few years. I’m told most childhoods feel eternal, Rain. Mine did too. I wasn’t to know it was longer than anyone else’s.

Perhaps I wasn’t smart, but grant me that. Or maybe Mombey charmed some sense of calendar out of me. It doesn’t matter. We’ve both had our childhoods filched from us, Rain. There’s that. If there’s nothing else.”

“There’s that,” Rain agreed.

They stole glances at each other, the green girl and the queen of Oz. Those forgotten caled forward, against their wishes, into themselves. Rain might as wel have been Elphaba at sixteen. Ozma Tippetarius had eyes the color of half-frozen water.

They could not cross the carpet to take each other in their arms. Maybe someday, but not today. More of their childhoods had to be stolen, yet, for that to happen—or maybe some of it returned to them.

The charmless future would show them if, and when, and how.

Somewhere

I.

In the streets of the city they were saying that Ozma had come back. Within weeks, ilustrated pamphlets in six colors became available at every vendor. One edition with bronze ink on the cover cost two farthings extra and sold out to colectors in an hour. It purported to present an entire modern history of Oz, starting with the arrival of the Wizard and the deposing of the Ozma Regent, Pastorius. The best part was a grotesquely colored section that everyone turned to first: the murder of Pastorius. Oh, the blood! Like a fountain al down the steps of the Palace of the Ozmas. Then the Wizard’s vile contract with Mombey, Pale Queen of Sorcery, to secret the child away while the Wizard set up shop to hunt for the fabled Grimmerie. For which he’d come to Oz in the first place, and over which, failing to secure it, he left, disconsolate.

In one of the final panels of that section, Mombey secretly made a pact with the Ozmists, and siphoned a zephyr or so of them for pumping up the Wizard’s baloon, to assure he could never return across the Deadly Sands. A lovely and theatrical conceit, if unsupportable by the testimony of witnesses, who wrote letters to the editor complaining about the rewriting of history. The liberties these artists take! Hacks, the lot of them.

Dorothy had her own section. Part III. They colorized her too highly and she looked like a Quadling afflicted with St. Skimble’s Rash. With her familiar, Toto, who could speak in the funny pages (
arf arf
!), Dorothy careered around Oz like some sort of a drunken sorceress, spiling mayhem out of her basket and kicking up her sparkly heels in musical numbers that didn’t translate particularly wel on the page.

A nod was made to Elphaba and to Nessarose Thropp, and to Dorothy’s crime spree against them. However, maybe because the Emperor was about to abdicate the Throne Ministership of Oz, his portrayal was accorded a certain respect, if only for his having served as a place holder until Ozma could be released from her spel. How quickly a history of offenses can be rewritten. Yet there was some sour truth to it: Shel Thropp may have ordered the invasion of Munchkinland, but
he
hadn’t kiled Pastorius. Nor had he imprisoned Ozma Tippetarius in a spel so deep it could keep her in a near perpetual boyhood until, through trickery played by a magic mouse (a magic
mouse
?) La Mombey accidentaly reversed her own spel, revealing her depraved plan for world dominance. Or Oz dominance.

The extravaganza went into seven printings in a fortnight. It didn’t begin to show up wrapped around take-out fried fish for at least a month.

Little was made in print, either by the popular press or by pulpit expositories, of the material waste and psychic distress of the recent past. The dragons of Colwen Grounds, the war, the long privations, the fight for water, the death of so many on both sides of the conflict. The negotiations remained in a delicate stage. It didn’t do to alow sensibilities to become inflamed with reference to abominations too recent to be forgiven—if ever they could be forgiven.

Would
Ozma come to rule? How would her legitimacy be determined since eighty-five years, give or take, had passed since her birth, but she was apparently stil in her minority? Had Mombey herself not unwittingly identified the girl as Ozma—by that unsavory magicking of Tip homeward from boy to girl—the metamorphosis might have gone unremarked as any other backstreet carnival trick. (The details of the transformation were too squeamish for most citizens to imagine closely, except the depraved.) “Not Ozma!” Mombey had cried, out of her skul. Everyone present had heard her, and when Tip had been carried away for medical attention, the form of a teenage girl in a lad’s dress sartorials had escaped no one’s notice. (A number of men had trouble satisfying their wives for months in the ensuing vexation to their own makeup.)

Whether Ozma stil wore the red locket on its chain—only one person knew enough to ask that question, and she would not ask it.

Hardly anyone else alive had ever seen Tip’s mother, Ozma the Bilious. No one could comment on any family resemblance the new Ozma might have to her forebears except by the fading rotogravured portraits that had remained hung, seditiously, during the reigns of the various Throne Ministers, in houses left shabby because their tenants could never afford redecoration.

And would Ozma Tippetarius accept the mantle? Did she have to? Did she have a choice?

Furthermore, would Munchkinland accept
her
as a ruler of a reunited Oz? No stalwart Munchkinlander could forget the crunchy little fact that the Ozma clan was Gilikinese. But it was Mombey who’d brought Ozma Tippetarius back to the throne from Munchkinland, which gave the rebel nation a stake. Before a month had passed some began, quietly, to cal Mombey the savior of the nation. Without an Ozma to pul the warring factions together, the fighting might have gone on a good deal longer.

It was said that at Haugaard’s Keep, on Restwater, when they learned what a mess things had gotten to in the Emerald City, General Traper Cherrystone caled a ceasefire and invited the Foil of Munchkinland into the Keep to discuss an end to the hostilities. No one was quite sure what happened next. The only witness was a tree elf named Jibbidee, and he wasn’t talking. In the Oak Parlor of the Florinthwaite Club, bruited about over a third glass of port, thank you, retired military officers whispered the rumors. Loyal Oz’s General Cherrystone had proposed to General Jinjuria that together they decline to accept the nonsense about the return of Ozma to the Emerald City, join forces, and rule as a military tribunal over Restwater themselves, setting up a protectorate over the access rights to the great lake.

Jinjuria was said to have refused, whereupon Cherrystone shot her, and then took his own life.

The legal standing and even location of Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hal remained unknown.

So, too, the confused reputation of the Wicked Witch of the West. But in the rush of sentimental and even patriotic fervor that greeted the unexpected return of Ozma Tippetarius, word began to circulate that the great spel cast by La Mombey, to cal the lost forward, had done more than stay Lir Thropp from his death and reveal the green skin of his daughter, Rain. It had done more than sabotage Mombey’s own plan to keep Ozma Tippetarius young, hidden, dumb, and male for another hundred or two hundred years. Mombey’s application of the spel from the Grimmerie, they said, had also inadvertently summoned Elphaba Thropp from—wel, from wherever it was she had gone.