Page 19 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

She hadn’t been much, that Dorothy. Priggish, in a way, proud of her wide-eyed charity. Her kindness, at first magnificent, had come to seem a bit—well, cheap. After all, she’d also oiled the Tin Woodman, and soothed the timorous Lion, and discussed differences between the gold and silver standards of foreign currency with the Scarecrow, who seemed for all his brainlessness to be following the whole discussion. She’d cuddled that rank little dog of hers. In light of all that, her solicitousness to Liir seemed nothing more than the Next Good Deed.

Nonetheless, she had been brave, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the Vinkus, all the way back. When the bells began to toll throughout the City, and Liir finally worked up the nerve to ask someone why, Dorothy wasn’t mentioned

at all. “The Wizard is deposed,” they said. “The Wicked Witch is dead, but the Wizard is deposed anyway. Some other good witch has been hired to oversee Oz in the interim.”

“Dorothy?” he asked. “What about Dorothy?”

“Dorothy who?” they replied. The cult of Dorothy had yet to take hold.

ONCE, YEARS BACK, in one of the barns at Kiamo Ko, Liir had been horsing about with Nor and her brothers. The children of Fiyero and his wife, Sarima, were high-tempered, and they had persuaded Liir to sit on one end of a timber that they intended to pivot out over a pile of hay below. He could jump to his safety! It would be fun, they said. And so it would have been, had not one of them—Manek, probably—leaped off the balanced end before Liir was fully positioned. Afraid of smashing himself on the stone floor of the barn, Liir had lurched to safety across the edge of a cart. The falling beam failed to kill him.

However, he knocked the wind out of his chest, and for a minute or two he was unable to breathe. He could feel his lungs kicking, and his heart kicking back, but he thought he was dying. The faces of Irji and Nor peered down over the edge of the loft at him. Lying on his back, stretching in vain to open his windpipe, he looked up at their faces contorting with laughter and mild concern.

What Liir remembered, in as near to extremis as he had experienced in his short life, was how embroidered these last few impressions of the world seemed. How the light breaking over the crowns of Irji’s and Nor’s heads seemed shaped like segments of overlapping fins, tying the bright expressions of his friends to the rafters, the cobwebs, the knotholes, the looped ropes, the stray feathers. All of a piece, all of a piece, he thought: why did I never see it before, and now I will die and never see it again.

Then he didn’t die, but lived. His breath punched itself back into place, and he wailed and his torso hurt and everything splintered into disjointed elements. As angry as he felt at Manek for making him the butt of a well-planned prank, he was distressed at the loss of his fine moment of apprehension: The world belonged together like this. The pieces related to each other. There was no contradiction, deepest down. Complexity, yes, but not contradiction. Only connection.

Now, hunched beneath the doorway of a shuttered butchery in the Emerald City, with Dorothy so newly met, and just as quickly vanished, he remembered the incident in the barn at Kiamo Ko. There is no resolving a good mess, he thought. Every breath one takes is a waking up into disjointedness, over and over.

He rocked hard enough to build plum-colored bruises on his shoulders. They hurt when he prodded them, and he prodded them to make them hurt.

He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. By day and night he meandered like the other bits of human trash that drifted up and down the boulevards. Filching from merchants, begging for pennies, relieving themselves in public without concern for decency or hygiene.

Nightly he returned to the café, in case his sense of dread had been for naught, and Dorothy might still make good on her promise and come back for him, at least to say good-bye. A lucky thing, too, for on the fifth day Liir was turning over newspapers looking for scrag-ends of butter pastry when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned, half expecting that the café owner had summoned the police as he’d been threatening. Instead, Liir found the Scarecrow.

“You’re still here,” said the Scarecrow. “Somehow, I thought you would be.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone, you know that.” The Scarecrow sighed. “You knew she would go. She was a Visitor, not of our kind; that kind can’t stay, you know.”

“How do you know? Maybe you just need to invite them.”

The Scarecrow affected a superior attitude, and that was his only answer. “A lot is going to change in a very short time,” he said. “I hope it’s for the best, but it could get ugly in the interim. I thought it smartest to let you know. If I were you I would get out of town.”

“No one wants me,” said Liir, scoffing. “No one cares to come looking for me! No one knows who I am, not even myself. Do you mean that because someone tittered that the Witch was my mother, I’m in danger?”

“I don’t mean that,” said the Scarecrow. “I don’t know if anyone here knows or cares whether the Witch had children, or who they might be. I just mean there’s talk of a cleanup of this neighborhood.” He straightened up—he’d been limping, an odd thing for a Scarecrow—and cast his clumsy gloved hand down Dirt Boulevard, where the denizens of the evening were in their cups. A small crowd had gathered around a couple of half-naked teens making dirty right there on the ground. The tatterdemalions were pelting them with bits of food and egging them on. Elsewhere, bottles emptied of their beer smashed on paving stones. A baby cried piteously.

“What is happening?” said Liir.

“The Wizard has left, and Dorothy is gone, and Lady Glinda Chuffrey, née Arduenna of the Uplands, has been importuned to supervise a government until something more permanent can be arranged.”

“Glinda! I heard of her. The Witch used to talk about her sometimes. Well, she’ll do some good, won’t she?”

“Doing good, cleaning house, takes a mighty strong broom,” said the Scarecrow. “Speaking of which…”

The Scarecrow looked this way and that. The kids on the ground, wheezing and humping in their throes of lust, had secured the crowd’s full attention. The Scarecrow reached into his waistband and, hand over hand, drew out a stake. No, a pole—the handle of the broom. The Witch’s broom. Aha. Hence the limp.

He gave it to Liir. “No one wanted it,” he said. “No one needed it for anything. It served its purpose and was going to be thrown out.”

Liir accepted it with resignation; one more thing to carry back to the home he no longer had. “What do you mean, things are going to get ugly? Seems to me they’re pretty ugly around here already.”

“Well, I mean, for the ceremony of Glinda’s elevation, they’ll have to relocate the urban poor. For one thing. Glinda’s quite tidy and likes things just so.”

“You seem to know a lot all of a sudden. The brains are working?”

“There’s talk that Lady Glinda will eventually yield, and put a wise Scarecrow on the throne,” the Scarecrow said, pride—or derision—making his voice sound odd. “After she cleans up the Wizard’s affairs. And there are those who think that the charmed child Ozma will be located in some cave almost at once, now that the Wizard’s gone. Sounds cynical and desperate to me, but what do I know of government? I’ve had more access to information the last few days than the rest of my life put together.”

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