Page 58 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

The Arjikis regarded his progress along Knobblehead Pike without comment. If some of them recognized him, they didn’t let on. It had been almost a decade since he’d left with Dorothy. Everything had changed within him—he’d broken out of his shell to find himself wanting—but the Arjikis looked stolid and eternal.

He recognized none of them, either.

As he walked the last mile, looking up, the old waterworks towered high from the strong thighs of the mountain. It loomed overhead with impossible perspective, and the clouds above it whipped by so quickly that, as he stood with his head thrown back, he became dizzy. To see it again!—the old pile, once the family home of the prince of the Arjikis, then the castle refuge of the Wicked Witch of the West. Kiamo Ko.

Its stones were streaked with the water from snow melting off the battlements. (Harsh weather sometimes hit the higher mountains as early as Summersend.) Its roofs looked to be in a serious state of disrepair. Crows shot from the eaves, and an oriel window seemed to have collapsed, leaving a gaping maw, but smoke was issuing from a chimney, so someone was in residence.

He hadn’t spoken a word since meeting the woman on the road, the crone with the four-horned cow and the child. He wasn’t sure he could still talk.

The bartizans were deserted, the ceremonial drawbridge of the central gate was up, but the gatehouse door was wide open, and snow drifted within. Security wasn’t the top concern of whoever lived here now.

He gripped the broom in his hand, and tightened the Witch’s cape around him—he’d worn it several weeks now, glad to have carted it all these seasons, as it was helpful against the chill. Mercy, mercy, he thought, I’m home from the wars, whatever that means. He climbed the steep steps to the gatehouse and went in to the primary courtyard.

At first he saw no change at all; but he was looking through the eyes of memory, and those eyes were blurred with tears. She might have come back here, he thought at last. Have I been hoping this all along, step by step—is this hope what has kept me from dying? If Nor really had survived her abduction, she might have made her way back here as I have. She might even now be slapping a meat pasty into a hot oven and turning at the sound of my foot on the cobbles.

Then he wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. The place had gone from rack to ruin, and some of the hard edges of its utilitarian design had become softened by neglect. The cobbles were covered in dried leaves, and a dozen or more saplings like party guests stood here and there, human size or even a little taller, twitching their thin limbs in excitement at a new arrival. A shutter banged overhead. Ivy clawed up the side of the chapel. Several windows were broken and more young trees leaned out.

It was silent but not still; everything rustled almost without sound. He could have heard a baby cry in its sleep down in a cradle in Red Windmill, had some baby needed to cry just then.

He turned about slowly, his arms open, pivoting on one heel. Allowed a torrent of emotion to batter him from within.

When he finished his revolution, the monkeys were there under the trees, on the outside steps, peering out through the yellowing foliage in the windows. They had come from nowhere while his eyes were misted. Some of them trembled and held their wingtips; a couple shat themselves. This breed had never taken to personal hygiene with any conviction.

“Liir?” said the nearest one. He had to walk with his knuckles on the ground; had the years of living with heavy wings curved his spine? Or was it merely age?

“Chistery,” said Liir, cautiously; he wasn’t sure. But Chistery’s face had broken into a grin at being recognized.

He came up and took Liir’s hand and kissed it with gummy affection.

“Don’t do that, don’t,” said Liir. He and Chistery then walked hand in hand through the warped door into the ominous, plain, high-ceilinged staircase hall, just as they had done fifteen, eighteen years ago, when for the first time they’d arrived together at the castle with Elphaba Thropp.

IT DIDN’T TAKE HIM LONG to figure out that Nor wasn’t there. The sudden lurch of thought about her, though, crackled almost aurally through his apprehensions of Kiamo Ko. It was as if he could just about hear her childish squeals and pattering feet.

Still, he couldn’t indulge in moodiness even if he wanted. For one thing, the skanky stench of monkey ordure cut through the complicated memories of childhood. He had to watch where he stepped. Public health hazard.

He was hardly surprised to find Nanny still alive. She’d be in her ninetieth year now, or more? Surely. Her olfactory senses had long fled her, so she seemed unbothered by the fumes, and her own bedding and day gown were in a less-than-pristine condition. Sitting bolt upright in bed with a bonnet on her head and a beaded purse clutched between her hands, she greeted him without much surprise, as if he’d only been down in the kitchen this past decade, getting himself a cup of milk.

“It’s hizzie, it’s whosie, yourself in all your glory, if you can call it that,” she said, and offered her cheek, which had sunk dramatically into a hollow of greying crinkles.

“Hello, Nanny. I’ve come to visit you,” said Liir.

“Some does and some doesn’t.”

“It’s Liir.”

“Of course it is, dear. Of course.” She sat up a little straighter and looked at him. Then she picked up an ear trumpet from her bedside table and shook it. A ham sandwich fell out, the worse for wear. She regarded it with disapproval and took a healthy bite. She put the trumpet back against her head. “Who is the whosie?”

“Liir,” he said, “do you remember? The boy with Elphaba?”

“Now that’s one as never visits. Up in her tower. Too much studying and you’ll chase the boys away, I always said. But she had a mind of her own. Are you going up there? Tell her to show some respect to her elders and bitters.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I thought you might be Grim Death, but it’s only the haircut.”

“Liir, it is. Liir.”

“Yes, and whatever happened to the boy? He was a funny noodley one. It took him forever to get trained, as I recall. Still, he’d fit right in now.” She rolled her eyes at Chistery, who stood fondly by with his hands folded. “He never writes, you know. That’s all right, though, as I can’t read anymore.”

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