Page 96 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“Yackle was an old crone without much time left, I’d guess. But she still had talent. She gave me a few words of advice, read me the riot act about my petty filching, and told me Elphaba would have a history. Can you believe it!”

“How did she know about Elphaba?”

“Silly. I told her, of course. I told her Melena had given birth to a green daughter. I bought whatever Yackle could provide as a corrective agent to ensure the second child didn’t come out green. And she didn’t, did Nessarose. Neither did Shell. Only our Elphie. A history! Can you believe that?”

“Must be a common name.”

“Yackle, you mean? Don’t know about that. Never heard it again. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think Elphaba will have a history?”

“She does already, ninnykins! I just saw her flying up the valley as large as a cloud. Her cape went out behind her, a thousand bits in flight. Nearly touched the peaks to the left and the right. If that’s not a history, what is?”

CHISTERY SAW HIM OUT. “You’re welcome here anytime,” he said. “This is your house.”

“She always loved you best, you know,” said Liir, grinning as he laced the braces at the clasp of the Witch’s cape.

“Considering what she was like, is that a compliment or an insult?” replied the Snow Monkey. “Fly well.”

BY THE TIME THEY NEARED the Emerald City, half a month later, the Conference of the Birds was six thousand strong. They’d had to slow down as they grew larger, for fear of midair accidents, but east of the Kells the winds were less harsh. As the Conference crossed the Gillikin River, coming into sight of the smart little villages and spruce knolls and brick factories and millhouses of the rolling Gillikin tableland, its shadow grew more definite by the day.

Liir had no intention of attacking the Emerald City. The Birds were not warriors, and the Conference, or Witch Nation, wasn’t military in makeup. Liir didn’t want to see Shell, nor the Lady Glinda, assuming she had returned to take up residence in her Mennipin Square town house for the winter season.

He only wanted that they should be seen.

It was nearing evening when they approached the walls of the City from the north. The sun was sagging against a few distant scraggly clouds, heading pinkly for its rest, and then it disappeared behind the horizon. The western sky would remain glassy bright for a half hour yet.

As workers clocked off at the Palace, as the boulevards were thronged with people heading for supper, and as the indigent went to their own work of begging for coin against starvation, the Conference wheeled into place. Anyone looking north at the display of Birds, from the inn called Welcome Arms on the banks of the Gillikin, say, would read only cloud: an invasion, a plague, a disaster. The same impression struck those looking, from the northwest of the city, at the Birds swimming like an ocean away from them.

From the Emerald City, though, from every west-facing window of the Palace, the intention was unmistakable. The Conference of Birds had rehearsed to perfection. They flew in formation for viewing from the east. They were the Witch, hat and cape, skirt and broom, shadowy face tucked down against the wind, but beady-eyed bright. Liir, on his broom, followed General Kynot, whose superior navigational system gave him his location. Liir on his broom played the keen black eye of the Witch.

Was Shell there, wondered Liir, knuckles on some marble windowsill, Lord High Apostle Muscle himself, Shell Go-to-hell Thropp, First Spear, Emperor of Oz, Personal Shell of the Unnamed God? Did he lean forward and squint at the holy ghost of his remonstrating sister, and rub his eyes?

Six thousand strong, they cried in unison, hoping that the echo of their message would be heard in the darkest, most cloistered cell in Southstairs as well as the highest office in the Palace of the Emperor. “Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!”

Raising Voices

1

THE CONFERENCE HAD GROWN too large for a single speaker to address it. On the morning it disbanded, therefore, two delegates from each species met with General Kynot and his loose affiliation of ministers, which included the Wren, the Dodo, and the most aggrandizing of the Grey Geese, a gander who had appointed himself.

Liir was invited, too. He asked the birds to keep an eye out for Nor. “You go everywhere, you see everything,” he said.

“We stay clear of humans when we can,” replied the Grey Goose, “present company accepted. Pro tem.”

“It’s probably futile,”

Liir agreed. “Still.” He walked about with the drawing of Nor by Fiyero. “She used to look like this. She’s older by now, of course.”

“All people look alike to me,” murmured a Vleckmarsh.

“She’s simply beautiful,” said the blind Heron.

“Well, thanks just the same,” said Liir, tucking the paper away.

The General gave a rambling address that confused everyone, including himself. “To conclude,” he conceded, “we go on to new work. The Birds run a risk of reverting to behaviors less than helpful. Now, I don’t mean to besmirch the fine Ostriches from the Sour Sands, who because they don’t fly were not part of our Conference. But we all know what Ostriches are rumored to do when faced with a crisis. We must not retreat into our claques and clans. Wary of human settlements—yes, who wouldn’t be? Let’s not be stupid about humans. But wary of one another? A little less so, if we can manage.”

“And a little more chatter amongst us,” added Dosey the Wren. “In ways we are only beginning to understand, we are the eyes of Oz.”

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