Page 42 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

IN SOME MORE HUMBLE QUARTERS of Oz, gossip had long held that Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West, had been born a wise soul, already formed, somehow conscious. Why else the mouthful of sharp choppers, not so much baby pearls as python’s teeth, which some folk insisted she’d sported at birth? She came into the world with advance knowledge of its corruption, and in the womb she had prepared for it as best she could, by growing those teeth.

That was what was said, anyway.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.

The governesses of the monied classes often held that a child ought to be kept from witnessing cruelty and ugliness, the better to preserve some ounce of innocence. Rural grannies and spinster aunts—like the Nanny who had helped raise Elphaba—neither mollied nor coddled. They believed it was better for a child to know what befalls a chicken when the feast of Lurlinemas rolls around. Better to learn—from a distance—the tricks perpetrated on the weak, the distractible, the unlucky.

Both pedagogical stances, however, relied on a common assumption. Growth and change were viewed as a reaction to conditions met. One might as easily argue, however, that it is the world’s obligation to respond to children. By force of personality, by dint of their vicious beauty and untamed ways, children tromp into the world ready to disfigure it. Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself—that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring. Elphaba, with her sympathies far more substantial than her luck, had at least wrestled with the questions. She’d shoved, and barked, and made herself a right nuisance.

By contrast, the Quadling girl, Candle, was an interpreter savant, translating the text of a world whose fundamental nature she hadn’t yet grasped, and maybe never would. Did the difference between an Elphaba and a Candle come down merely to a question of focal depth: the big picture versus the little picture?

For his part, Liir had not been a bright child. Even on the edge of puberty he had given little thought to the paradoxes of his existence. He had imagined himself to be more like Chistery, the chief Snow Monkey, than like Nor and her brothers, Irji and Manek. Chistery had a slipsy-doodle sense of language, but he tended toward steadiness. He did his chores without complaining or forgetting, and asked for nothing beyond his basic needs. Even at fourteen, Liir hadn’t been much more demanding than Chistery.

But Liir remembered that Nor had addressed the stars, had sung harmony with mountain streams, had loved all creatures whether their initial letters were written Great or small—Animal or animal. She was nuts as a nut tree in a nut forest, of course: that was what he had thought without realizing he was thinking anything at all. That silly Nor was a creature apart. Not just as a girl—though that, too, of course—but as a fragment of human possibility. She had had a sympathetic imagination, and Liir?—he could barely count.

Children often define themselves in relation to their parents: emulating them or working hard as possible to avoid resembling them in any way. Since the identity of both his parents was in doubt, Liir couldn’t see himself as taking after anyone for sure. Certainly not Elphaba. In her final months, stooped, crabbed, scrabbling from desk to podium to window ledge, she was more like a quivering scorpion than a woman. At rest her fingers tended to curl up like a claw, or like the petals of a flower gone a bit blowsy: her hand was always out, always open, ready to take what found its way there and seize it. Not at all like Liir, who cowered.

Among the human kind, thought even the most jaded and bitter of Animals, there are many ways to be wrong, but there are only a relatively few ways to be young. In their generous apprehension of the world, for their insatiable appetite for the world, the young are to be forgiven.

SOMEWHERE IN THE SULFUROUS UPDRAFT above the great maw of Southstairs, Liir was born out of a dark vile womb and thrown into the night. He came into himself perched on a broomstick dozens of yards above the highest watchtower. Here was a cushion of wind, billowing him almost onto his side, causing his shins to tighten automatically against each other, his arms instinctively to wrap the broomstick harder. It was Liir and wind and height and stars, it was alone and alone and alone; the understandings were distinct and differentiated, and then suddenly annealed by a process he couldn’t name. Maybe fear of heights! His Liirness applied, suddenly, applied to himself and no one else.

He didn’t know what Liirness might mean, and he was sorry Elphaba wasn’t around to raise a mocking eyebrow and sling a caustic remark. He might have been hurt by her sly digs, but he could have relished that hurt, too—he saw now. Survived it? Transformed it.

A hurting Liir was a real Liir.

However he’d come to be here—settling on an unstable bolster of thermal, learning to slide up the banister of the night—there was no else doing it but Liir.

The Emerald City gaped at him, but it didn’t understand what it saw. He was just a touch of ash from a hearty fire, a scrap of tinder tossed in the winds. Winds that were damned strong; they snatched at the hem of his cape and unrolled it off his shoulders until it trailed behind him, a stain.

For his part, he saw the City the way few others had. Well, Elphaba must have! And anyone lucky enough to harness a Pfenix, that rare creature. The view was like a model of a city made with an impossibly deft hand—hundreds and hundreds of buildings, grand and humble, glazed with tile and black with soot. A city built on a gentle rise, he could now see: long slicing boulevards and curving promenades, a honeycomb of streets and canals, parks and squares, a thousand mews, ten thousand alleys, a hundred thousand windows blinking bronzely. A glowing organ, like the illuminated heart of Oz itself pushed through the flesh of the land, pulsing with its own life, tricked out with monuments, defaced with the graffiti of broken trees, the Palace of the Wizard a cancer upon the landscape, the dead center of it all.

In his grief at having missed a chance to save Nor, and his shock of the unanticipated flight, and the confusion about what to do next, he was more successively Liir with every breath.

He circled the Emerald City, afraid if he landed he would return to being slightly dead. How could anyone live without flying?

SO THE BOYHOOD of Liir began—began in a new way, as if all that had gone before had happened to someone else.

But it seemed amazing to him that he’d had the courage to set out cross-country with that Dorothy. Was it courage? Perhaps it had only been sheer ignorance of the breadth and treachery of the world.

The broom brought him to ground on the cobblestoned quay near one of the smaller canals. The wind was strong, so itinerants were huddled face-front around brazier fires made of scrap wood and boards ripped from fences. No one saw him land.

Bravado was not what he felt; but he felt something, and that was rare enough. A cold sense of thrill: absorbing the news of Nor’s escape, her being alive. Wounded, cursed, embattled—alive nonetheless.

He walked for a while along the quay but realized it was colder there, and ducked into an alley. The broom on his shoulder bounced as he walked and looked for a place to doss down. It bounced harder, as if thwacking him with congratulations, but this was silly: he was walking with a spring in his st

ep.

After a while he just jumped, six, eight times in a row, in glee, like a kid playing Hoptoad Hoptoad Call My Hoptoad. He’d look a right idiot to anyone peering out a window, but he didn’t care.

A GOOD NIGHT’S sleep under a rubble of marketplace hay neither dampened his spirits nor inspired him with a plan. Eventually he made it back to Lady Glinda’s town house in Mennipin Square. Perhaps she could arrange another meeting with Commander Cherrystone, who might be able to find out what had happened when Nor had had herself secreted upstairs. Or maybe Lady Glinda had an opening for a bootblack or a son.

The houseboy who had first talked to Liir reported that Lady Glinda had repaired to Mockbeggar Hall, the Chuffrey country pile near Restwater, there to do good works among the rural poor. It pleased her to dispense largesse from time to time. It calmed her nerves and made her happier with her marriage. She’d brought her cabinet with her, hoping that some grouse hunting of a sunny afternoon would breed camaraderie and unity of purpose, or if not, that one or two of the more difficult ministers might be shot accidentally in a convenient hunting accident. More than one kind of grouse needs bringing down!

That was how the houseboy put it, anyway—with high knowingness. No, there was no way to say when Her Ladyship might return. In her absence, the household was investing in a pack of howling Bratweilers, which as a breed was not known for its docile disposition. And take off that suit of livery, by the by, lest the house of Chuffrey be besmirched by whatever smut you’re about to get up to.

---