Page 6 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“Oh, dubious, very dubious,” said Sister Doctor.

“There is the green tone to his bruises,” Sister Apothecaire reminded them.

“I blush when I’m embarrassed, Sister Apothecaire; this does not relate me to the radish,” said the Superior Maunt. “Well, we’ll have to ask around. Most of the older sisters who might have remembered Elphaba are dead now, and the others are in their second childhood. But Sister Cook, if she hasn’t been guzzling the cooking sherry—or perhaps if she has—she will know something. She always slips food to the children loitering in the kitchen yard, and she may remember where the boy came from.

“Meanwhile”—and the good woman rose, to signal that the meeting was done—“we will do our best with Liir, whether he be witch’s spawn or the reject of a gypsy mother. It hardly matters on one’s deathbed from whom one has been born, does it? The world is the womb now, and the Afterlife waits for one to be born into it.”

She turned rheumy eyes on Oatsie Manglehand. The wagoneer could see that the Superior Maunt was waiting, hopefully, for her own deliverance from this world and delivery unto the next. Oatsie accepted the old woman’s cool hands on her forehead, knowing the gesture was intended as a blessing, a forgiveness…perhaps a farewell.

“The wind is high,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “If we leave now and find the water level low enough at the near ford, we’ll make the far bank of the Gillikin by nightfall.”

“The Unnamed God speed your progress,” murmured the Superior Maunt, though her eyes had shunted inward, as if already on to the next problem. Indeed, she was. Before Oatsie had finished tying the strings of her boots, she heard the Superior Maunt say to her colleagues, “Now you must help me on the stairs, ladies, for I will go to visit our invalid.”

“She’s a tough old bird,” muttered Oatsie to Nubb.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Nubb. “Don’t want to stay under any roofs that house a son of a witch, even if it’s holy roofs.”

5

THE MAUNTERY, the oldest bits of which dated back several hundred years, was conventionally arranged around a courtyard. The vernacular of austere Merthic style—flattened stone columns, bricked quoins devoid of plaster or wash—was indicative of the speed with which defensible households had needed to be raised.

Up far too many stairs, the surgery included an office crammed into a closet, where Sister Doctor kept her notes and manuals. In a storage space under some eaves, Sister Apothecaire filled oaken cabinets with her unguents and restoratives, purgatives and negatives. (Small, as many Munchkins still were, she could work upright in a space too cramped for her colleague to stand upright in, so she got the private office. Endless grousing over this.)

The surgery also gave onto two largish dormitories. The right-hand chamber served the poor and ill of the domain. The left chamber was reserved for ailing maunts. Through here, behind a stout door, loomed an odd-shaped space, the finial of a corner tower. Inside, therefore, it was a round room, with narrow slitted windows looking in three directions.

The room had no true walls or ceiling, just sloping rafters that met at the top of the conical space. A bedbound patient could stare up and see how the roof planking traversed the ribs. There were bats, but they were cleaner than most of the patients, so they were let be.

It’s like nothing so much as being inside a witch’s hat, thought the Superior Maunt as she paused to catch her breath. Then she pushed aside the curtain and entered.

Liir—if it was he, and she was rather certain it was—was laid upon the high bed more like a corpse than an invalid. “He’s been given no pillow?” asked the Superior Maunt in something of a whisper.

“The neck.”

“I see.” Well, there wasn’t much to see, really. His braced limbs were swathed in wide strips of gauze, his chest bound, his head undressed, and that dark hair cleaned with oil and herbs. His eyes, behind slits in the bandage, were closed. The lashes were long and feathery. “He has not been torrefied, has he? You have tucked him up like a victim of burns.”

“The skin needs tending for the sores, so we cannot fully immobilize him.”

I suspect not, thought the Superior Maunt.

Her eyes weren’t what they had been. She leaned forward and looked closely at the seams where Liir’s upper and lower eyelids met.

Then she lifted his left hand and studied his nails. His skin was clammy, like the rind of a valley-skark cheese. The fingernails were crazed.

“Pull back his loincloth.”

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire exchanged glances and did as they were bade.

The Superior Maunt had had little reason to become an expert in the male anatomy, but she showed no sign of pleasure or revulsion. She gently shifted the member this way and that, and lifted the testicles. “I ought to have brought my reading spectacles,” she murmured.

She needed help straightening up. “Very well, do him up again,” she said. Her maunts obliged.

“Sister Doctor,” said the Superior Maunt. “Sister Apothecaire. I will not have you loosen his bindings to show me the bruises you report. I rely on your perspicacity. However I make note here, and will do so formally in the Log of the House, that I observe no sign of greenness in his skin. I will tolerate no murmur belowstairs that we are harboring any sort of—aberration. If you have been indiscreet enough to propose such to your sisters, correct the damage at once. Is this understood?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and turned back to the body.

It was hard to take the measure of a man who displayed the flaccid composure of a corpse. No brow is noble when it is dead: It has no need to be. This lad seemed about as close to death as one could be and still harbor hope of recovery, yet the sense she had about him was neither tranquil nor restive.

He was a young man, with youth’s agreeable form: That much was apparent despite the bandages. The young suffer and die, too, and sometimes it is merciful, she thought. Then she was filled with an unseemly glee and selfishness that she had lived a long odd life of her own, and it wasn’t over yet. She was in better shape than this poor benighted kid.

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