Page 101 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“He said I should go with him, for protection: that it is what you would want me to do.”

Liir was stunned. “Why didn’t you do it, then?”

“I trusted you,” she said, a little abrasively, “how do I know whether to trust another soldier? He could have been abducting me to kill me and my child. He could have been lying. He could have been doing it to hurt you. Though now I see he meant more to you than I reckoned.”

What he heard mostly was her possessive pronoun: my child. Not ours.

“And he didn’t stay,” said Liir, in a voice nearly as small as hers.

“No, he didn’t,” she answered. “Generally, people don’t. They come, they go. He left. The Scrow came. For all I know your Commander Cherrystone will be here in time for tea, and Mother Yackle for the washing up.”

5

THE SCROW RETINUE carried the Princess into the orchard and set her down on a blanket. She was grey; her legs had swollen like bolsters, her scalp was nearly bald. She’d lost her eyebrows and her eyelashes, which gave her sightless eyes a horrible eggy look. Her chin bristled with enough hair to wipe farm boots clean.

Liir could hardly put this collaboration of bones and muscles and foul odors together with his childhood memories of meeting Nastoya the day or two after Elphaba had died. He didn’t try. The Princess was beyond language, groaning and leaning into a screw of physical pain that seemed to implicate the entire orchard. He could never apologize for having abandoned his promise to her for so long. Neither could she speak whatever message she’d had for him. It was too late now.

Lord Ottokos retained his composure. He spoke to her about every shift of limb and placement of pillow. Unsuccessfully he tried to dribble some water into her mouth, but even at this late moment he was afraid he might drown her before she could be divided from her disguise. She would have to go to her death, if this worked, thirsty.

She was prostrate on the ground, her head rolled back, giving her chin some prominence for perhaps the first time in a decade.

“We’re ready,” said Ottokos. He stood with a gnarled old staff, a bit of sourwood into which iron thorns had been pounded. It looked like a mace of some sort, a scepter, and Lord Ottokos was ready to assume the leadership of the tribe.

Liir nodded at Candle, who had come equipped with an old milking stool. She sat down clumsily. Her legs went wide, but there wasn’t enough lap on which to hold her instrument. She had to balance it on an overturned washtub. Still, she looked at Princess Nastoya with a complicated expression, and presently she began to play.

The others in the company had not been invited, but they lined the edge of the orchard, knuckles locked, a Scrow position of reverence. The Goose stood near Liir, a foot or two back, both deferential and significant. It wasn’t clear if he was Liir’s familiar, or if Liir was his interpreter.

Candle began by dissecting chords and distending them into arpeggios. She chose the lighter modalities at first, but quickly shifted into more subtle variations. The Princess was uncomfortable on the ground, and her blankets were already getting soaked in the snow.

“To grow a death,” murmured Liir, holding Candle’s shoulders, “you must plant a life.”

She shook him off. He began to walk the perimeter of the orchard, trying to see from different angles. Was there something more he could do? He should be doing? Candle was hard at work, and no doubt Princess Nastoya was doing her own, but was more help needed, in this mission of nothing but mercy?

One stretch of the orchard. Another.

“Liir,” whispered Candle as he neared her. “I am very uncomfortable here. It is not like six months ago. I can’t keep this up for long.”

She rotated the instrument a quarter turn and splayed her fingers, cocking them laterally, and she flat-struck the alto quarter, trying a sprigged quadrille, a dance of spring.

The third side of the orchard. Iskinaary wandered over as if at an evening reception honoring the recent work of a well-regarded painter. “You might try concentrating on the past,” he said.

“I don’t know her past,” said Liir. “I don’t know a thing about it, except that she knew Elphaba.”

“I don’t mean her past,” said Iskinaary. “She knows her own past well enough, somewhere in there. I mean the others. Even in death, we are a society, after all.”

Liir turned and looked at the Scrow, standing a distance away, but then he saw what Iskinaary meant. It wasn’t anything the living could do—it was the human dead who were best equipped to call the human disguise off Nastoya. They could beckon it forward, if Candle could play the scraped faces to sing.

But the playing was her talent, and the singing was theirs—it was his job to listen. To witness their histories, and cherish them in memory, his only talent. He had looked into the Witch’s crystal ball, after all, and had seen her past, even if it had nothing to do with him. He had stumbled upon his own reveries without benefit of any gazing globe. Maybe his only job was to listen. That much he could do.

6

I WAS THE FOURTH OF FIVE CHILDREN, and I loved the way sun warmed stone. Just before lunch, on the flagstones of the terrace, I used to dance barefoot with my mother for she loved it too.

I was happy enough in my marriage, and happier still when I was widowed, though happiness seems incidental to a good life.

I never wanted to take the cane my father gave me, and I picked it up and broke his nose with it, and he laughed so hard he fell into the well.

I made things with colored threads, little birds and such.

---