Page 60 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“I think you know if you’re different,” he ventured. “I think you know if you’re gifted. How could you not?”

“You know if you feel set apart,” said Nanny, “but who doesn’t feel that? Maybe we’re all gifted. We just don’t know it.”

“Does no good to have a useless gift.”

“Have you tried? Have you even tried to read from her book of spells? From what I remember, Elphaba had to learn. She did go to school, you know. She was a scholarship girl at Shiz.”

“Chistery’s learned to talk well,” he said, after a while.

“My point exactly,” she said, draining her glass. “He had to try for years, and it suddenly clicked.”

He walked around the room. The windows were shuttered against the early autumn gale—how well he remembered the way it blew up the valleys, sometimes forcing the snow back up into the clouds that had dropped it. “You have a good life?”

“I have had a good life,” she corrected him. “Chistery comes from time to time, and the filthy peasants bring their filthy food, which I’m expected to eat as my part in community relations. I do as I’m bade.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not in a dog’s age. Not since that Dorothy. And you and the others. Did Dorothy ever stop whimpering so? She’ll grow up to require the convent, mark my words. Or a husband with a good strong backhand. Her fanny wants spanking badly.”

“Dorothy came back?”

“She did?” Nanny’s clarity was ebbing.

“If I go up to Elphaba’s room,” said Liir carefully, “and if I find something of hers, may I take it?”

“What, you’re looking for precisely what?”

“A book, maybe.”

“Not that big thick thing she was always poring through?”

“Yes.”

“Much good it would do you even if she would let it out of her sight. She could hardly ever get those recipes to work. I remember once she was trying to work a spell on a pigeon she’d caught. She was trying to teach it to be a homing pigeon. She let it loose from her window. It zipped away from her as fast as it could, but when she called ‘Come back now,’ the thing turned and dived like a suicidal lover, and impaled itself on the weather vane.” The old woman sighed. “Actually it was kind of funny.”

“I’ll leave you for a while, Nanny, and I’ll come back. I promise.”

“I never cared for pigeons except in pies. Poor little Nor, though, was heartbroken.”

“Nor,” said Liir cautiously.

“The little girl who used to live here. You remember. With the others.” But Nanny grew vague now and she could be made to say no more about Fiyero’s three children.

“What if I find that book?” asked Liir. “If no one has taken it away, may I have it?”

“You’ll have to ask Elphaba.”

“If she’s not there to ask?”

“Where would she be?” said Nanny. “Where would she be? Where is she? Elphie!” she suddenly bellowed. “Why don’t you come when I call you? After all I did for you all my life, and your slut of a mother before you! Elphie!”

Chistery came flying from the corner of the room where he had been folding a basket of laundry. He made shooing hands to Liir, who backed out of the room, shaken.

LIIR SPENT THE FIRST few weeks helping put Kiamo Ko to rights. He reminded the monkeys about sanitation, first and foremost. Under his help, the monkeys set to work closing up windows that had blown open, and repairing the roof when the wind didn’t imperil them. Liir began to weed the forecourt of its convocation of trees, sad as he did so, for even in their autumnal twiggery they provided some semblance of company. But then he decided to prune and thin rather than remove the trees entirely. Under its ivy and moss and tiny domesticated forest, the place might as well succumb to green. It seemed a suitable memorial for Elphaba Thropp.

He couldn’t bring himself to go up to her tower rooms, though. He was afraid he might throw himself from the highest window if the grief took him unawares, like a demon lover.

He visited Nanny and made her conditions comfortable and more sanitary. In a sideboard in the dining room he found a magnifying glass and some dusty old novels written decades ago. The Curse of the Admirable Frock was one; A Lady among Heathen, another. “Trash,” decided Nanny at once and set to reading them with gusto. It turned out she had not forgotten the skill; it was merely her eyes giving her trouble, and the lens helped.

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