Page 50 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“Well,” said Trism. “I’m not seeing you home, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I am thinking no such thing. Though that coach would have been useful right now.”

“I wouldn’t take the loan of a boot from the likes of him. Bounder. I’ll hail a cab or a street chair for you.”

They walked to the front of the pub. Scrumpet Square was bright with torchlight. While Trism hailed a driver, and the cab was being brought round, Liir trained his eyes on some scraps of graffiti written with drippy paint on a public wall. He tried to bring them into focus as a way to sober up. In four different hands, applied at four different opportunities, to judge by the aging of the text, the wall read

ELPHIE LIVES!

OZMA LIVES!

THE WIZARD LIVES!

And then

EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.

Trism dumped him in the cab and paid for it, and gave the driver directions. Then Trism disappeared back into the pub before Liir could even thank him. So Liir settled back against the moldy cushions.

Everyone lives but us.

Nor was somewhere in Shiz. Shiz. Where was that?

He would find her. He should find her. He should leap from the cab right now and go find her. He tried to sit up, but the world beyond the isinglass windows was unsettled and rolled about as if on the backs of a school of earthquakes. When he was deposited at the barracks, his feet found their way to his bunk while his head tried not to hurt, and also tried to remember what was so important.

HE WAS HALFWAY PACKED next morning when he recalled Shell’s comment about Nor. Through the sawteeth of his headache he grappled with the question. What to do? Packing, he paused over the cap

e—leave it behind, leave all the past filed in its pleats? He didn’t want to deal with that decision now, while his head hurt. Easier to pack the old thing. Easier to bind the broom’s head in a cloth so it would look less womanly, and tie the thing to the satchel laces. Postpone chucking these things out for good. Any minute now inspiration would strike. An idea would form, and as if by magic the courage to follow that idea would flare up. If only his head wouldn’t pound so!

Now’s a good time for an idea, he said, as he joined his mates in formation to receive orders.

Commander Cherrystone had not been informed about his own new assignment, it appeared, until that very dawn; he arrived at the head of the transport column with an unpinned collar and crumbs in his trim, silvering beard. His expression was thunder. He delivered his instructions in a throttled tone. No one dared ask a question. When the chaplain arrived, Commander Cherrystone didn’t join in the public atonements delivered under open skies to the Unnamed God, in exchange for the success of their mission. Whatever it might turn out to be.

“We leave in an hour,” said the Commander.

So, oh, what next? If only he had more oomph this morning! Or if he had a place to rest his head till the screech of today calmed down.

He finished clearing his trunk. Unlike all the other men, he had no private books, no mezzotints of family grandees, no clutches of letters from admonitory father or teary mother or whispery girl back home. He was bereft of the more traditional impedimenta, and determined to be proud of it.

He waited in the yard beside the basilica. What did he take of his mock parents? If Fiyero had been his dad, really, Liir had got nothing from him but a possible half-sister. No model of comportment, no word of wisdom, no wallet fattened with funds, no blessing.

If Elphaba had been his mother, he got something more—that much was sure. But what? She had acted to pervert fate, to interrupt and bludgeon history into shape—to topple the wonderful Wizard of Oz, no less—and what good had it gotten her? She was fierce and futile at everything she attempted. What kind of a lesson was that?

She hadn’t talked to him much. Only in a cast-off manner. One lunchtime she’d seethed, more to herself than to him; “It isn’t whether you do it well or ill, it’s that you do it all,” she’d said, dumping her attempt at poached eggs on the floor and hurrying back to the books and charms in her tower. That was her legacy, and it didn’t add up to much.

So perhaps he should consider the absence of good advice a kind of direction from the universe: Follow where you are led, and take it from there. Maybe fate intends to lead you to Nor. It’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it?

It was easier to be passive, easier on his brain anyway. His cohorts gathered for departure while he congratulated himself for sorting this out.

And it was indisputably thrilling to fall into formation to the punch of snare drums. The men squared their shoulders and became Men. The wind obliged by whipping the banners and emblems: it was all so glorious and immediate.

The four departing companies of the Home Guard were now colloquially named the Seventh Spear, after some magic weapon in a children’s fable that Liir had never heard told. The convoy marched in formation through the smell of sweet morning loaves, as Emerald City shopkeepers were unshuttering their windows and washing down the paving stones.

What a joy there was in movement! Liir hadn’t realized how petty he’d become, worrying daily about the gloss on his boots, the snap in his retort. The Guard’s culture had trained him into thinking that a well-brushed smile and a groomed chin were somehow vital to the preservation of the nation.

He saw the Emerald City—perhaps for the last time?—as if for the first. And how fitting it seemed that the Seventh Spear was shafting its way through the capital toward Westgate, the portal through which Liir had first made his approach. They marched past the polished half-domes and buttresses of the Wizard’s Palace—still called that, even now. The sun came out and glazed the marble; one could hardly look at it. A giant broody hen. From this angle, a distance north: the grimmer spectacle of Southstairs, lurking behind the hunched shoulders of its walls.

Everywhere else—on this boulevard, anyway—the allure of healthy commerce. Cafés catering, at this hour, to merchants on their way to their warehouses. Stalls of books, pottery, feathery remnants to adorn hats and hems. A display, arrayed under a bentlebranch arbor, of several dozen tribal carpets imported from the Vinkus, suggesting that the West was trading with the capital these days. And floral silks from Gillikinese artisans, sprays of lavender and lime, to upholster furniture in better parlors. One merchant had hung an entire chandelier, chase-worked mettanite with crystal pendants, from the bicep of a healthy oak, and he had arranged below it a dining area for eighteen—table, chairs, Dixxi House porcelain settings and silver service, with linen napkins folded to look like swans, one at each place setting.

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