Page 16 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

/> “Why would the Wizard’s armies bother to raise a hand against us?” asked Liir. “The Witch is dead, and the ruling family of the Arjikis—the house and line of Fiyero—has been obliterated.”

“Even the daughter?” asked the Princess.

Liir’s mouth dropped. “Do you mean Nor? Have you heard otherwise about her? What can you tell me of her?”

“I have capable ears,” she answered, but continued. “Can you prove the Witch is dead?”

“You want us to bring her back to life?” Liir scoffed. “You might as well kill us now, if that’s your demand.”

The Princess indicated that she wanted to stand. “It’s the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking,” she said. It took nine men to cantilever her to her feet, and then they brought her a pair of jeweled canes as thick as newel posts. She leaned forward and fixed Liir in the eye.

“You would be of no help at treaties, you boy-calf,” she said. “But you wonder what do I want of you.”

She let her mirrored shawl slip off her shoulders, and three black ivory combs clattered to the ground from her knotted hedge of thick white hair. The air grew very still, and clammy; there was a sense of Presence. The Princess closed her eyes and droned, and her hair seemed to pick at itself, and then to gather into a sleek sliding thing, and it ran off her back into a white coil on the ground. The shapeless gown of cotton geppling shifted on her hips, appeared to draw itself up into a peplum or a bustle, and then it snaked off.

Liir had never seen an unclothed woman before, old or young—only little Nor on washday, lithe in the copper tub, when she’d been a girl of four or five. The effect of a naked Princess was startling, the print of silvery hair at the groin, the pockets of flesh folding one over the other, the bosom flattened by age and gravity. Dorothy murmured “Goodness!” as if she thought she must be witnessing exactly the opposite.

If this was magic, it was still spelling time. The Princess’s nose was lengthening, uncoiling, and the skin on her cement-colored cheeks stretched and thickened epibolically. Her eyes, which had been little more than slits in the folds of her face, lost their ovoid shape, rounded into marbles. A net of fine hairs sprouted on her brow and pate, her cheeks and chin and dramatically hostile nose. And ears:—yes, they were capable and then some.

More or less like an Elephant head, though not planted on an Elephant body.

“Perhaps I ought to have given you more warning,” she said. “It seems I’ve upset the girl.” Dorothy was retching into her apron, and her dog appeared to have had a nervous fit and passed out. “I have little use for niceties at this stage in my life, though.”

Liir didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I am an Elephant,” said the Princess Nastoya. “From the Wizard’s pogroms against the Animals, I have been in hiding as a human all these long years. I’m admired by the Scrow for my longevity and what passes for my wisdom. In exchange for their protection, for a home in the Thousand Year Grasslands, I have performed my duty as a leader. But of late, young boy-thing, I am unable to shuck off my disguise with the ease I once had. Though Elephants pretend to immortality, I believe I am dying. I must not be allowed to die in this half-form. I will die as an Elephant. But I need help.”

“How can I be of service?” asked Liir. As if I could do anything, he added to himself.

“I don’t know,” said the Princess Nastoya. “I once told Elphaba Thropp that if she needed help, she was only to send word, and I would put all my resources under her command. I never thought that the reverse would happen. That the time would come for me to apply to her for her knowledge of Animals, her native skill at spells and charms. But I have started too late, I see, for your companion has murdered my only hope.”

“Dorothy was not to know,” said Liir.

“Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too.”

“It’s disgusting, actually,” whispered the Lion to the Tin Woodman. “Do you know, my stomach is turning as we speak.”

“I don’t have a talent at spells,” said Liir. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“How do you know?” asked the Princess. “Have you tried? Have you studied?”

“I’m not a good student, and furthermore I’m not much interested.”

The huge proboscis whipped up from nowhere. Her nose-digits grabbed his chin. She would crush his skull, chin-first. “Get interested,” she said. “Get interested, or get help. If you’re not to be murdered for your crimes against Elphaba—and that might yet happen—get yourself enough knowledge from someone, somewhere, to help. Was there a book, a Grimmerie? Did Elphaba have associates? I don’t care how long it takes, but come back to me. I can’t die like this. I won’t. In the end, all disguises must drop.”

“You confuse me with someone else,” he said. “Someone with competence. Someone I never met.”

“This isn’t a request,” she said. “It’s an order. I am a colleague of Elphaba’s.” She lifted her nasal limb from Liir’s chin and blew her own horn in his face. His eyes stewed in his skull, and some of the hair at the front of his scalp was raked bloodily away by the force of the blast. “If you claim to be a relation of the Witch’s, you will figure out what to do. She always could.”

“Well, not always,” Dorothy corrected her helpfully, “as is woefully apparent at this moment in time.”

“I will pay you,” concluded the Princess, apparently addressing Liir alone. “I will keep my ears to the ground for word of your abducted friend—Fiyero’s cub, Nor. Nor, was it? Come back to me with a solution and I will tell you all I’ve been able to learn in the meantime.”

Liir couldn’t speak, but he held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture even he couldn’t read. Accepting the task? Protesting his inadequacy? Whatever—it didn’t matter. The Princess was done with them. She turned her massive Elephant head, wobbling on its all-too-human spine, and a dozen Scrow rushed to hold her up. They cloaked the acreage of her buttocks, as if to protect her from a sort of ignominy that, anyway, could never have attached itself to her. Even a half-thing, trapped in a decaying spell, she was too much herself for shame to apply.

“SHE DIDN’T KEEP ONE OF US as a hostage,” said the Lion, almost delirious. “I was sure it was going to be me. But I could never have dealt with it.”

“She trusted us,” said Liir.

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