Page 102 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

I always wanted to go to university at Shiz, as some of my friends would do, but boys like me weren’t allowed.

I believed in the Unnamed God and accepted the mission set me because God would take care of everything: the Emperor said so.

I once took off all my clothes and rolled in a field of ferns, and had an experience I never told anyone about.

I was at the ceremony in Center Munch when the cyclone dropped the house on Nessarose, and I saw it with my own eyes, but I lost my ribbon on the way home.

I loved how milk tastes, and the way hills go blue with cloud markings, and my baby sister, her hair black as a beetle brush.

I loved it when I was alive.

I loved it when I was alive, too.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget that we loved it when we were alive.

LIIR HEARD SOMETHING from each hoop. Every face sang as Candle provided accompaniment. The bud-notched trees shook with the force of their voices, though there were no tongues, and little enough left of lips, and no wind to pass through the aperture and turn their mouths into flutes.

/> Reminded of human life, the corporeal part of Princess Nastoya melted into the snow. All that was left of her human disguise shook off—a spin of charcoal smoke, smudged in the air like incense. It stood, finding its feet, before it dispersed, and the voices fell silent.

There was nothing left on the blanket but a massive She-Elephant. The Scrow all closed their eyes and began to weep. Her eyes opened and her head rolled back. Her eyes met Liir’s for an instant. Her neck snapped.

No Place Like It

AFTER AN HOUR, Lord Ottokos indicated that a surgeon should come forward with a saw. The small bowl-stomached woman went to work at the Elephant’s right tusk and removed it in just a few minutes. Then she sawed an inch of disc off the wider end. The tusk being hollow at the wide end, the disc formed a ring with an aperture several fingers wide. The surgeon fitted this on the point of the other end of the tusk, and handed the relic to Ottokos.

He bowed and accepted it. In turn he fastened it to the staff he had prepared. When finished, the staff was a six-foot stake crowned by an arched prong of Elephant tusk, an ivory smile without a face around it.

“I will lead under the influence of Nastoya,” he said in a quiet voice, and this calmed the Scrow from their weeping.

What influence is that, thought Liir; a shard of bone, a makeshift totem?

That, and memory. Maybe all the influence needed.

THE SCROW HAD lived so long under the leadership of Princess Nastoya that they hardly knew what to do when she was gone. With effort, everyone tugging at once, they managed to get her body onto the cart that had brought Candle and Liir to Apple Press Farm. Then they began the long trudge back to their tribal homeland. They would burn her on a pyre when they arrived, and the scraped faces besides, and not a moment too soon. Nastoya had never smelled very fine while alive, and now she was a health hazard as well.

Lord Ottokos insisted Liir should accompany them through Kumbricia’s Pass in case the Scrow delegation met up with the Yunamata, and trouble flared. “It’s the last thing you can do for Princess Nastoya, finishing the task she asked of you back when the Witch first died,” he said. “See her bones to safety, anyway.”

Liir decided to leave the broom and the cape behind. He wouldn’t fly while in the company of the Scrow, and after departing from them, he mightn’t be able to fly back, anyway. Kumbricia’s Pass had been resistant to his flying above it.

After packing the hooped faces alongside Nastoya’s carcass, Liir bade Candle and Iskinaary a quick good-bye. “Mind each other,” he said. “Iskinaary, keep watch.”

“I can watch over myself,” said Candle. “You forget I can read the present.”

“Can you read what is in my heart?” he asked. If so, tell me what it is, he continued to himself. Tell me, so I can tell you back.

Candle held his hands but wouldn’t meet his eyes. Perhaps, the nearer the baby was to birth, the more she despaired of ever having said it was his. Would he ever be able to map any part of her mystery?

He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.

THERE PROVED LITTLE DRAMA on the high ground. One evening the Yunamata materialized out of nothing, naked as Birds, painted in tribal markings. They approached the corpse of Princess Nastoya, carrying the lighted roots of hagtooth bush that they used in their own funeral rites. They sang, and melted away again in rather unseemly haste.

At the final gorge, where the Conference of the Birds had departed for its circuit around western Oz, Liir said a quick and perfunctory good-bye to Lord Shem, Prince Ottokos, and turned home with a heavy heart.

The accomplishments of the last six months had been irrelevant, he decided, for all but Nastoya. Was that the only accomplishment that mattered?—that somehow you not bungle your own death? Everything else that had happened in his short adult life had been frothy and meaningless, ultimately. Passionate, yes—yes, that, indeed. Passionately felt, but without shapeliness or worthy outcome.

The dragons were dead: some people were still walking about, ignorant of how their tired lives might otherwise have ended up with a scraping. That much was good. Stack that up against the cursed lives of those Quadlings who daily had to remember their own dead, lost at the burning of the bridge at Bengda. The bit of thatch falling, a letter in the air, flaming and drowning.

And doubtless there were still disconsolate prisoners in Southstairs, and misguided soldiers in barracks, and those abject poor who had survived the cleaning out of Dirt Boulevard. And that kid named Tip, whose granny had probably sold him already for a better brand of cow, a broom, a new pot for the hearth.

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