Page 51 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

That those who headed the nation could enjoy their meals in such luxury!—the men marched with firmer step. The vitality of the capital gave life to their cause.

The Seventh Spear turned a corner, continuing toward Westgate. Liir recognized the warehouse district through which he’d passed with Dorothy and her friends. The convoy paused while Commander Cherrystone negotiated some last-minute business with a wine merchant, and the soldiers were allowed to fall out of formation. Bleary from last night’s mistakes, Liir wandered to the brighter side of the street. He propped himself against the wall of an abandoned granary of some sort. Putting one heel against the wall, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to get some sun.

The warmth of the walls behind him, the pleasure of being between moments of his own history…his skittery mind indulged in a waking dream. His thoughts wandered up the cracked plaster walls of the corn-house. It was as if he were looking down at himself from the window on the second level. That’s me down there, that young soldier, anthracite-haired, trim, smart enough, having his moment of rest…How handsome a figure he managed to seem, from this vantage point: shoulders acceptably broad, the windblown hair on his scalp, the knee thrust forward. A soldier doing the work of the empire: a good guy.

Then the focus of his attentions backed up—for that fragment of an instant in which a revery implies eternity—and Liir had the sense that the young soldier at street level was out of sight again, and out of mind; and the two people who might have been looking out at him from some private aerie above had turned their attention back to each other, lovingly.

Must be the sun! Must be the beer! Filthy slutty mind he had, after all.

“Straighten out!” barked Cherrystone, and they did, and he did.

THROUGH WESTGATE, they turned to the south. The lads knew the habits of the sun enough to be able to tell that much. They marched as suited the Commander’s whim—more relaxed when in the rural outback, in parade formation when passing through villages. The companies tented at night, found the dried lentils and local celery exotic and filling, alternated hymns of patriotism to Oz with anthems of devotion to the Unnamed God, and didn’t bring out the bawdier ditties until Commander Cherrystone had retired for the night.

Fording the Gillikin River, they came to a broad sweep of pebbly waste, marked here and there by stands of scrub maple and pencilnut. Once they stopped for water at a kind of oasis, a mauntery of some sort, hoping that some novices would come scupper for them—lean down to reach the bucket, and show evidence of some lovely curve beneath their voluminous habits. But the maunts who supplied some succor were desiccated old biddies who had no curves to flaunt.

Liir waited to feel some frisson of recognition—could this have been the place where he and Elphaba originated? He couldn’t decide. Maybe one mauntery looked just like another. Certainly one maunt and the next seemed identical twins.

“If we’re going south or east again, wouldn’t the Yellow Brick Road give us better speed?” some wondered. But perhaps the Free State of Munchkinland hadn’t granted the necessary license.

Another opinion held that since most of the Yellow Brick Road leading south and east fell within the boundaries of Munchkinland, perhaps the final destination of the Seventh Spear was the mysterious west—Kumbricia’s Pass, or the Thousand Year Grasslands, or Kvon Altar—romantic locales, full of intrigue, exoticism, magic, sex. Everything over the horizon beckoned more temptingly than anything near.

Crossing into the eastern Vinkus, they continued through the oakhair forest between Kellswater and Restwater. Fording the Vinkus River, too, they paused on the escarpment of its southern bank. A dozen miles or more to the southwest, the Great Kells gave off a faint but redolent breath of balsam and fir. Nearer, scatterbirches in the lowland meadows shimmered in their new leaf, like chain mail on skeletons. Several hundred small grey birds flew by, brazenly low, singing their throats sore.

It felt as if the world itself were blessing the endeavor when Commander Cherrystone gave the signal not to head west toward Kumbricia’s Pass, the main route to the vastness of the Vinkus, but instead to the southeast. They would skirt the mountains and, rounding them, head south into Quadling Country.

The where, then, but not the why.

Why Quadling Country? When the Seventh Spear paused to make camp, the soldiers shared what they remembered about the southernmost province of Oz. Quadling Country was your basic muckland. An undifferentiated waste of bogs and badlands, once widely populated by the Squelchfolk, a marsh people known for their ruddy complexion and fishy odor. Hadn’t they mostly been eradicated when the Wizard had drained the wetlands in the hunt for swamp rubies? In the Emerald City you could see Quadling families from time to time. They were clanny, silent in public, making little effort to integrate. In the Emerald City they’d cornered the market on trash removal—all the funnier: trash hauling trash.

But the two larger cities of Qhoyre and Ovvels: surely something of them remained? The southern arm of the Yellow Brick Road ended in Qhoyre, and Ovvels was a nearly impassible distance beyond. A town built on stilts, Qhoyre. A town whose streets were silted with mud, Ovvels. No wonder the Seventh Spear’s administratio

n had obliged them to include gum-rubber boots in their packs.

WONDERFUL WEATHER, bracing light, cheery companionship. Now and then a free-held farm or some nobleman’s country estate would welcome the convoy. A whole stable of milk cows at one, and they had milk to drink, to pour in their coffee, to splash on their faces; they had milk puddings, cheese temptos, creamed curd, lake lobster bisque. Who needed that fancy dining ensemble for sale under the trees in the Emerald City? The soldiers ate like kings and nodded off under the willow fronds, sassy and satisfied.

One day Liir and a couple of pettys were sent to collect fresh water at the foot of a wooded dale. They paused to rest before starting back with the filled jugs yoked to their shoulders. Other topics of conversation having been exhausted, Liir asked his mates, Burny and Ansonby, about the place of husbandry in the development of new defensive systems for the Emerald City.

As it happened, Ansonby and Burny had both flirted briefly with defensive husbandry. Ansonby had worked in the veterinary arts, and Burny had helped copy some legal contracts with farmers outside the Emerald City.

“It’s supposed to be hush-hush, but everyone talks about it,” said Ansonby.

“Not to me,” Liir said pointedly.

“Well, then, I’m not sure it’s my place—”

“Dragons,” Burny interrupted. “Smallish flying dragons.”

“Dragons!” said Liir. “Nonsense. Aren’t dragons mythological? The great Time Dragon and all that?”

“Don’t know where the stock came from,” said Ansonby, “but let me tell you: I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes. They’re about yea big, wingspan the length of a bedspread. Vicious things, and hard to control. There’s a team been breeding them for a few years now.”

In the course of their military careers, Ansonby and Burny had both come across Minor Menacier Trism bon Cavalish. They had no opinion one way or the other, except that he was remote and a bit uppity. Good at his job, though.

“Which job is that?”

Ansonby said, “He’s a kind of—what would you call it? An animal mesmerist, I guess. He’s got a silky voice and is real calm. He can woo an agitated dragon into a sort of trance. Then he takes the dragon’s head in his palms. This is seriously risky, you know. The notched beak of a dragon can puncture the skin of your forearm, hook your vein, and unspool it out of your arm with a single jerk. I’ve seen it happen. No, I have. Really. Not to bon Cavalish though; he’s smooth. When the dragon’s purring, the dragoneer does something suggestible to the beast. I guess it’s about overriding the creature’s internal gyroscope, or navigational mechanism. Or just being persuasive and chummy with an attack beast. When he’s done, the dragon is directable by voice, at least for a while. Like a falcon with its falconer, a sheepdog with its shepherd. Go, come, round, back, stay, up, dive, lift, attack.”

“Retreat?”

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