Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (82 page)

“As if she’d come back when asked,” said Mr. Boss. “What do they think she is? A charwoman?” The accidental family—what was left of it with the death of Nor, with the departure for Nether How of a frosty Lir and an angry Candle and an eye-roling though mute Goose—was squatting in a garden flat below a shel-shocked semidetached vila off the Shiz Road in the North-town neighborhood. Rain had refused to folow her parents unless she had settled things in her own mind.

Until the circumstances righted themselves somehow, they’d resigned themselves to this dump for the winter. The rising damp gave them al headaches of a morning but tenacious ivy hid the worst of the damage to the building’s exterior plaster. The place had views on a strip of garden that hadn’t benefited from the firebombing of the dragons a few months ago. Nonetheless, Tay liked to climb on what remained of the shattered ornamental cherryfern.

“I can understand the rage for Elphaba. It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight,” said the Lion. “Didn’t Nor used to say that? Also easier on your moral comfort, for one thing, to keep waiting for redemption of one sort or another rather than work it out for yourself. Since its time hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Wel,
that’s
a matter of opinion we never asked you for,” said Dorothy, who had agreed to return to the fold after Lir had made his departure. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do my warm-ups. Right here.”

“I mean, look,” explained the Lion. “The so-caled where’s-the-Witch mania has simply displaced Ozma hunger, that’s al. No one alive can remember what it was like to live under blood royalty. Three generations have grown up without the crown—to go back to it again just like that satisfies the appetite for resolution too quickly. People
need
something to be missing. They need to crave something they don’t have.”

“It used to be Lurline, when I was growing up,” said Little Daffy. “Lurline would come back eventualy and grace us al with the spirit of better posture, or something. If the Ozma vacancy has been filed, then the people on the street need a new hunger. Why shouldn’t it be for that old witch?”

“This new hunger you’re talking about,” said the dwarf. “Better get going or we’l miss the morning rush.”

They were making quite a kiling with Little Daffy’s Munchkinlander Munchies. Once they had set aside enough capital they were planning to fund a trip back to the Sleeve of Ghastile to harvest more of the secret ingredient.

“There’s someone here at the door,” caled Mr. Boss as he and Little Daffy were leaving with their bakery wheelbarrow.

“It’l be for you, Dorothy. You go. I’ve got blisters from padding halfway across town chasing after your damn dog,” said the Lion. “It doesn’t know how to pee without dashing al the way to Burntpork.

Dorothy, if you don’t get that Toto a leash and a muzzle, I’m going to get one for you.”

“You try muzzling me and watch the nation rise against you.”

Dorothy came back. “For you, Brrr,” she said. “They asked for
Sir Brrr
.” She mimed a mean little curtsey but ruffled his mane as he went by. “Where is Rain, anyway?” she asked in general, but only a grandmother clock ticked in answer. Brrr had gone into the garden to talk to a military guard of some sort. No one else was home.

For a few days, like the other curiosity seekers who thronged the kerbstones of Great Pulman Street, Rain found herself drawn to the facade of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. A sober building made of brick, painted in a no-nonsense black flatwash and finished in white trim, it signaled with confidence the rectitude of public office. The windows at street level remained curtained. No one came and no one went except ministers, who refused to comment. Rain saw Avaric bon Tenmeadows once, with a satchel, ducking a rotten apricot lobbed at him by someone impatient for news of the Ozma. Their queen. If queen she was.

Rain’s life had been spent in hiding. Disguised with ordinariness. She now felt cursed with this glare of green upon wrists and cheeks and everywhere else—she couldn’t bear to look at herself much. But as she wandered about the streets of the Emerald City like any one of the thousand paupers hoping to filch a meal, cadge a donation from some softie, work for an hour or maybe fal in love for less, she realized that no one bothered to bother her.

She hadn’t needed to hide her whole life long. No one wanted to find her anyway.

The winter had come in mild, and the shrubbery of the Oz Deer Park remained in sufficient leaf to give her cover. She felt she blended in better than, say, the starving families of the Quadling Corner, who took the most menial jobs and for breakfast ate paper and leaves with mustard. She could walk along the Ozma Embankment, looking for her life. Wherever it might be.

It wasn’t housed on a top floor of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, that much was certain.

Perhaps, she thought, she would go up to Shiz. If they would have her. She was a year early but Miss Ironish had concluded that, against al odds, Rain was clever. Perhaps she could have a private tutor for a year to prepare. She didn’t quite qualify as a legacy student, as her grandmother had never matriculated. But those were mere details. Miss Ironish could arrange it.

Tay scampered after Rain but she felt the creature was suffering from the lack of a campaign. Maybe she would take it back to Quadling Country and release it to its companions. Male or female, it could find what company it might. Perhaps she owed the rice otter that much.

She was circling around the ramparts of Southstairs Prison, slowly heading for home, or what passed for home, when she stopped to let a carriage go by. Two smal children of the Vinkus—Arjikis, she thought, in those leggings—were splashing in the gutters. “A lion could beat a dragon any day,” said one, speaking pidgin Ozish. “Could not,” said the other. “Brrr could,” protested the first, “now he’s in charge.” That was how Rain learned that Tip had accepted the institutional role of the Ozma only provisionaly, on a condition of deferred elevation. Tip had finalized a military settlement for peace by proposing for elevation to Throne Minister, as her regent, the Lord Low Plenipotentiary from Traum, Gilikin. None other than Sir Brrr. The Cowardly Lion as he once had been known. When Ozma reached her maturity, she would reconsider whether to rule.

Wel wel, thought Rain, Tip had only a handful of days in which to ascertain the Lion’s strengths. And al he had done during that period folowing Nor’s death was to grieve. Is that, in the end—that capacity to hurt—the most essential ingredient for a ruler?

In a ceremony of surpassing simplicity, Sheltergod Thropp, His Sacredness, turned over the accoutrements of power to the Cowardly Lion. Shel handed over two keys, a few folded documents, some receipts for personal items that had gone missing during his term in office, and one or two crowns. He wasn’t sure which was more legitimate, so Brrr had them placed on a wooden hat rack in his dressing room where they wouldn’t pester his mane. He hated to have his waves flattened now that he could afford to have them done again.

“You’l stay for the formal investiture?” the Lion asked Shel.

“I don’t believe so, if you don’t mind.”

“We are recaling Lady Glinda from Munchkinland.”

“I never cared much for Glinda. No, I’l just tootle along if it’s al the same to you.”

“But where wil you go? Private life could afford little by way of satisfaction to one of your, um, background.”

The former Emperor said, “There was a story my old Nanny used to tel me at darktime. A fisherman and his fishwife lived by the side of the mythical sea that shows up in so many old tales. The fisherman caught a great thumping carp, al covered in golden scales. The Fish spoke—fish can talk in stories, you know—and in return for being thrown back into the sea, it promised to give the man a wish. The man couldn’t think of much to wish for—a ladle for his wife, maybe—but when he got home that night and she had a ladle, she hit him with it for having such low self-esteem as to request only a kitchen implement.

Go back, she said, and ask for something better. I want a cottage, not this bucket of seaweed we sleep in. A cottage with real glass windows, and roses round the dovecote.”

“Indeed,” said the Lion, who had always felt skittish about stories and anyway had a country to begin running.

“You can imagine how it goes. She kept sending him back over and over. The Fish was obliging. Whatever the fishwife wanted, the fishwife got. And it was never enough. In succession, she required to be a duchess, to have a castle, to be a queen, to have a palace, to be an empress and have an empire. Why the man didn’t throw
her
into the sea, I don’t know. Stories don’t make much sense sometimes.”

“He must have loved her.”

“Eventualy, in the teeth of a horrible storm, lightning and thunders from al sides, she demanded to be made like the Unnamed God itself. Quaking for his life, the fisherman crawled to the sea and made the petition. The golden Fish said, ‘Just go back, she’s got what she wished for.’ And when he went back home—”

“She wore the golden sun on her brow and the silver moon on her fanny,” guessed the Lion.

“She was sitting in the bucket of seaweed again.”

“She overreached herself,” said the Lion. “Ah, morals.”

“Or did she?” said Shel. “Perhaps the most godly thing is to be poor, after al, to give up trappings and influence.”

“So.” The Lion was trying to steer this interview to a close. “You’re going to take up teling stories to children during Library Hour?” Shel clasped his hands. Only now did the Lion notice they were mottled and trembling. Shel had his sister Elphaba’s long nose, and a drip was forming just below the tip. High sentiment, or an aggrieved immune system? “There are rumors of caves in the Great Kels—as far as Kiamo Ko, even farther. Hermits go there to live, to hide, to die. Sometimes earthquakes come and bury them in their homes. I should be prepared for that, don’t you think?”

The Lion didn’t reply. He was learning to hold his opinion to himself. For a few years, until Ozma was ready, he was no more or less than Oz itself. Oz didn’t have opinions. It had presence.

Plans for the instalation of Brrr as Throne Minister would have involved Rain, but she couldn’t bear to be close to Ozma in some public setting. Ozma—Tip—Ozma (but which one?) had the greatest power in the country, and could send for Rain at any hour of any day, for a private audience, and Rain would have come. But that message never arrived. So the thought of accepting a formal invitation to sit in a formal chair for hours a few feet away from the young monarch-in-waiting gave Rain a feeling in her chest as if her very heart was somehow suffocating in there.

But she had no heart, she’d given it away.

Her accidental family never mentioned the matter. They protested, too robustly to be convincing, that they would much rather stay home with her. They preferred cards. But when the afternoon of the Lion’s elevation arrived, a scrappy sense of jubilation broke through anyway. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss celebrated by whooping it up like a couple of teenagers, drinking too much whiskey-sweet from a hip flask.

Dorothy sat in the garden even though the air had turned chily. When the time came near for the actual coronation, the four of them changed their minds, linked arms—wel, Little Daffy and Mr. Boss linked arms and, at a different altitude, so did Rain and Dorothy—and they hurried through the streets to stand at the back of the crowd and watch from afar. Both the hal and the piazza in front were hung with banners of Ozian emerald, but they were interspersed with standards of red and gold. The Lion’s chosen colors, perhaps. They tended to mute the patriotism of the event in a way Rain admired.

The music was atrocious, though, and way too loud.

Just before Rain slipped out of the proceedings a guard colared her and said, “
There
you are. You’re requested in a reception room in Mennipin Square this evening.” Her heart skipped up some stairs. “Surely you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Not bloody likely.” He grinned at her. “You don’t exactly pass, you know.”

She supposed she didn’t. “I don’t want to meet Ozma in some chaperoned chamber—” she began.

He interrupted. “Begging your pardon. I’m not representing Ozma.”

She waited until she could govern her quavering voice. “I see. Then am I under arrest?”

“Only socialy. Do you want an escort?”

“Are you offering to be my boyfriend?”

He blushed. “No, miss, and no offense intended. I merely meant to suggest if you didn’t care to travel alone at night—there’s some young ladies who wouldn’t dare, you see—I was offering my services, I mean the services of my regiment. Miss.”

“Wel, I’m not one who is troubled by being out at night,” said Rain, and took down the address. She had accepted no invitation to dance at any of the instalation bals that were mounted al over the city.

With whom would she dance? Her grandmother’s old broom?

She walked to the assignation more or less impervious to the explosions of colored lights that scratched themselves against the black sky over standing sections of the Palace of the People. She thought she could hear Dorothy leading a sing-along at the Lady’s Mystique, but that couldn’t be right. Now that the official business was over, Dorothy would be at the Lion’s side. Must be one of those entertainers who impersonated her. Rain moved herself along.

Crossing a bridge over one of the nicer city canals, Rain paused for a moment to look at the pyrotechnics reflected in the water. The fireworks were like great colored spiders. For an instant she saw the Emerald City under attack again, this time by monstrous insects. But Mombey was in custody now, and her bloodhound spiders no longer hunting for Rain or the Grimmerie. The past was the past. Rain had to get out of here. She was going mad.

At first she didn’t recognize the man who answered the door. Neither did he twig in to who Rain was until they had said their good evenings to each other. Their voices cued them both. Then she fel into his arms in a way she had never falen into her father’s. Puggles said, “To think I lived to see this day! You are a sight for sore eyes.”