Page 57 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“A four-horned cow gives quality milk, useful for certain recipes,” said the woman.

The boy said, “You could sell me to this soldier, and then you could ride the cow home yourself.”

“I wouldn’t dream of selling a boy as useless as you,” she answered, “the good burghers of Gillikin would have my license for passing on damaged goods. Keep your mouth shut, Tip, or you’ll regret it.”

“I don’t buy children,” said Liir. He looked the boy in the eye. “I can’t save anyone. You have to save yourself.”

Tip bit his lower lip, keeping his mouth shut, but his eyes stayed trained on Liir’s. The rebuke seemed to Liir to say: You have to save yourself? And what proof of that are you, soldier?

“Although if you were to offer that besom of yours,” said the woman, “I suppose I might risk my professional reputation. It’s a handsome item.”

Liir passed on without replying. A mile or two later, he stopped to tighten his bootlace, and in looking back he saw that the woman, the cow, and the child had veered a bit northward across some meadows. The best route to the Emerald City, and Gillikin beyond, led between Kellswater and Restwater, through the oakhair forest, so now he could guess he wasn’t far from Kumbricia’s Pass. This proved to be true.

High summer, then, on the banks of the Vinkus River. He bathed in it. The mosquito plague was behind him now, kept away by a steady breeze sweeping down off the flanks of the Great Kells, which like transparent slices of melon were beginning to hover insubstantially to his left. The Vinkus River ran broad and shallow here, and icy cold even in the hottest sun, for it was fed by a thousand rills cascading down the piney slopes of the mountains.

Still, no animals. No herds of dancing mountain ponies, no turtles spending a decade or two in the middle of the path, very few birds even, and those too far away to identify. It was as if he gave off such a stink that the animal world was retracting from him as he moved north and west.

One evening he tried to cut his own hair, for it was falling in his eyes. His army-issue knife had become blunt from peeling porcupine root, and his efforts to sharpen it on a stone had come to nothing. He made a pig’s breakfast of the haircut, finally dropping the knife and pulling at his hair, yanking it out by the roots till his scalp bled into his eyes. He thought the blood might refresh his broken tear ducts, and for an instant he imagined something like relief—relief—but it did not come. He dried his face and tied his hair back, and endured the sweat and damp of a heavy burden of hair.

The mountains, nearer now, loomed as a kind of oppressive company, their aroma of granite and balsam unmistakable, unlike anything else, and as unconsoling as anything else. Their million years of lifting their own heads was just a million years, nothing more than that. The summer was going, the sun was sinking earlier, he caught the tang of a fox one day on the wind, and felt the bite of an appetite—to see a fox. A simple fox darting past, out on its own business. He saw no fox.

The world seemed punitive in its beauty and reserve. Sometimes, thought Liir—his first thought in weeks and weeks—sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It’s so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

THEN HE CAME to a place where the Vinkus ran by a series of small lakes—none more than a mile or two long, and all of them narrow. Clearly they’d been formed by the same compulsion of landscape, for there was a family feel to them. The water was fresh and moving, and though he could see no fish, Liir imagined there were schools out of sight. Larches and birches and the thin growth known as pillwood made a pinkish fringe on the far shores. For the first time since leaving Qhoyre, Liir aborted his slow tromp north. He took a day to look around, for the landscape seemed obscurely pleasing, and he wasn’t used to being pleased anymore.

The middle of five lakes was more fan-shaped than the others, and from the pinched point to the south it opened up to a wide vista of low hills—basket-of-eggs country—that caught the light and made patterns of shadow, one hill to the next. He explored the lake’s southern shore and found there a smoothly rounded hill not much larger than a pasture or two, overgrown with pillwood trees, and slashed through with horizontal outcroppings of granite or trusset, he couldn’t tell which.

The grass beneath the trees was evenly cropped, and pelleted with droppings, so some ruminant herd loitered nearby, keeping the sward neat. This gave the place a domestic look.

Liir sat down with his back to a tree and looked out over the water, which was lipped by the wind coming south, and striped with light catching on the wave tips.

It could make a home, he thought; pretty enough to tolerate, and no one around. The beyond of beyond. Nether How, he named it, how being a useful old word for hill. And how pompous that is, to name a place just because you rested your own nether how there for a while!

But he closed his eyes and drifted into a sort of waking dream, as he’d done once or twice before. He saw himself sitting there, almost nodding off, more of a man than when he had started out, but still lost, like most young men, and more lost than most. With no sense of a trade, no native skill except to make mistakes, no one to learn from, no one to trust, and no innate virtue upon which to rely…and no way to see the future.

He rose to the height of the leaves of the pillwood trees, which were beginning to turn amber, a first hint of autumn. He saw himself below, the ill-cut hair—what a botched job!—and the knees, and the feet turned out as if planted there. If he could just stop breathing, he’d become part of Nether How; sink capably into the grass. When his offensive spirit had left his body, the mountain sheep or the lakeland skark or whatever animal fed here would eventually overcome its fear, and nibble the grass right up to his limbs, keeping it shorn around him.

Then his attention turned to another figure, distantly apprehended though near enough. It was a man in a cloak of purple-rose velveteen, holding a staff and a book of some sort. He was emerging in the air as one seen coming through a fog. He seemed to be off balance at first, and tested the ground with his staff until he found his feet. Setting his funny hat straight on his brow, he pulled at his eyebrows as if they bothered him, and he began to look around himself. Liir imagined he was speaking, but there was no sound, just the apparition of a funny old man, sober and crazed at once, making his way along the brow of Nether How.

The old man passed close by the body of dozing Liir, down below—the Liir-shade in the tree branches saw it. The old man, maybe a scholar of some sort, paused as if curious, and looked at the tree against which Liir was leaning. Then he looked up into its branches. But his eyes could not focus on Liir at rest, nor Liir aloft, and he shrugged and began to make his way down the hill.

A good way to avoid company, if I want to avoid it, thought Liir, as his spirit began once again to settle down into his body, or—put another way—as his little dreamlet ended and the sorrier sense of the world, even this pretty corner of it, flooded back in.

He had left Nether How and was well along the lake’s rightmost flank, continuing north, when he remembered the revery and saw something in it he hadn’t noticed at the time. He had recognized the book that the old fellow was hauling about with him. It was the Grimmerie, the book that the Witch—that Elphaba—had used as her book of spells.

HE HAD LOOKED for the Grimmerie once, hadn’t he? But that was before he’d set out from Kiamo Ko with Dorothy. And met up with that old she-Elephant, Princess Noserag or something. Who had promised to try to help find Nor, or to share what she could learn.

Proud and confident as only the truly stupid can be, he’d set out to find Nor on his own. Smart move, Liir, he said to himself. Good one, that. Just look at where you got to by keeping your own counsel.

Well, that was something, though. At least he

was talking to himself—instead of giving himself the cold shoulder.

IT TOOK TWO MORE months to finish the journey. He was in no hurry.

Once, as he rejoined the Vinkus River, he spotted a single stag. It stood alert in the middle of a long line of mature beech trees that ran the crest of a ridge, half-lit by an effect of late afternoon sun and cloud. Knee-deep in dried grass, the stag watched him as he passed. It did not flinch or flee. Nor did it attack him.

AT LAST, something familiar: the small settlements that clung to the slopes of the Kells. Arjiki villages, some with names, some not. Fanarra, and Upper Fanarra, and Pumpernickel Rock, and Red Windmill. It was late fall, early winter; the flocks were down from the heights, noisy in their fold; the summer cording was done, and skeins of dyed skark yarn were knotted and hung out to dry on pegs. The smell of vinegar used to set the dye tightened the skin in his nostrils.

---