Page 59 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

Liir sat down on a stool and held Nanny’s hand for a while. “Chistery, is there anything like sherry around?” he asked suddenly.

“Whatever hasn’t evaporated in its bottles. We don’t touch the fumey stuff,” said Chistery. That’s a bit righteous, thought Liir, and realized, too, that Chistery’s language had improved hugely. Now that everyone had stopped trying to teach him.

Chistery returned in time with a dusty bottle. It was ancient cooking brandy, and a B grade at that, but Nanny’s palate had clearly deteriorated like some of her other talents, and she sipped it happily, goofily.

After a nap that lasted only a few moments, she was awake, and more alert. Her eyes looked as they once had: less swift to track, perhaps, but no less canny.

“You’re the boy, grown up some,” she said. “Not enough, I see, but there’s time.”

“Liir,” he reminded her. He wanted to work fast while she was attending. “Nanny. Do you remember when we came here? Elphaba and I?”

She screwed up her face and settled on an answer almost at once. “I do not, Liir. Because I came later. You were already here when I got here.”

Of course. He had forgotten this. “Elphaba was your charge, wasn’t she? You were her nanny. She told you everything.”

“She hadn’t much to tell,” said Nanny. “For an interesting life, you wanted to listen to her mother. Melena. Saucy little thing, got around the parish, if you know what I mean. A trial to her husband, Frex. Now he was a good man, and like most good men, a crashing bore about it. The hours he spent trying to convert me to unionism! As if the Unnamed God wanted to take an interest in Nanny! Preposterous.”

He didn’t want to talk about religion. “I want to ask you something directly. If you know the answer, you can tell me. I’m grown up now. Was Elphaba my mother?”

“She didn’t know,” said Nanny. Her mouth took the shape of an O—O!—as if startled all over again by the ridiculous conceit. “She suffered some terrible blow, and lapsed into a dreamless sleep for months on end. Or so she said. When she came to, and was suitably convalesced, she stayed on to work for some maunts. Then she left them to come here, and they gave her you to take along. That’s all she ever knew. She supposed she could have given birth to you in a coma. It is possible. These things do happen.” She rolled her eyes.

“Why didn’t she ask about me—and her?”

“I suppose she thought the answer didn’t matter. There you were, one way or the other. It hardly signified.”

“It matters to me.”

“She was a good woman, our Elphie, but she wasn’t a saint,” said Nanny, both tartly and protectively. “Leave her her failings. Not everyone is cut out to be a warm motherly type.”

“If she thought I might be her child, wouldn’t she have mentioned the possible father?”

“She never did what another person might. You remember that. Now, I did know that fellow named Fiyero, once upon a time, and you don’t look much like him, if that’s your game. Frankly, you could more easily pass for a child of Nessarose. Elphaba’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the East as they called her behind her back. If you were Elphie’s there’d be the green skin, wouldn’t there? It’s a puzzle. Is there any more of that juice?”

He poured a small sip more. “Did you raise Nessarose, too? And their baby brother? Shell?”

“Their father, Frex, thought I was too pagan to be over involved with Nessarose. Me with my devotions to dear Lurline, our fairy mother. Frex wanted a godly child, and it was clear, with her alarming hue, that Elphaba wasn’t it. Nessarose was born a martyr—that unfortunate disability! Revolting, really—and she lived and died as a martyr. If she had even a second or two to understand that a house was about to come and sit on her head, I’m sure she died happy.”

“I never met her.”

“In the Afterlife, my boy, count on it. She’ll be waiting there to improve you some more.”

“And Shell? I’ve met Shell once or twice.”

“Oh, that lad! The high jinks of that one! He was in and out of trouble like tomorrow’s stitches in yesterday’s britches. He led poor Frex a merry chase! Shell was hopeless at school, a good-joke johnnycake, in trouble with the masters and in the skirts of the misses. And he grew to have a smart mouth for wine, they say. He used to lie to his father so well that you’d’ve sworn he was born for the stage. Of course in his line of work, later on, all that came very much in handy.”

“What work was that? Medicine?”

“Never heard it called that. I think the term is espionage. Snooping, settling scores out of the public eye, selling information, and if the tales have any truth to them, sexing up the ladies from Illswater to Ugabu.”

That made some sense, then, of Shell’s activities in Southstairs. He was ferreting out information from political prisoners and getting laid in the bargain.

“I know she’s dead,” said Nanny flatly, looking out the window. “Dead and gone. At least once a day I remember that much. You could be her son. Why don’t you just decide you are?”

“I had nothing from Elphaba but misery,” he replied. “It was a happy sort of misery, since children know no better. But she left me nothing—nothing but a broom and a cape. She left me no clues. I have no talents. I haven’t her capacity for outrage. I haven’t her capacity for magic. I haven’t her concentration.”

“You’re young yet, these things take time. I myself couldn’t cast off until I was well into my sixties, but then I could do it so enthusiastically I once fell right out of my chair.”

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