Page 62 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

by my father F

before he left

So Elphaba had kept it—as another token of Fiyero, maybe, something from his hand. And perhaps also because she had admired Nor a little, in her own way—to the extent Elphaba could admire any child. Nor had had spunk.

He turned his head to avoid any more of that kind of thinking. The light from the window worked a glint upon a kind of bowl of glass. A ball, really. He rubbed the dust from it; it played like a bright spatter of sunlit rain as he cleaned it.

He found a low stool with five legs, each carved with its own representative foot: a dwarf, an elf, a human, a bird, and an elephant. He drew the stool close and sat down with his chin in his hands.

Lifting his chin this way and that, looking at himself slantwise. Did his chin have a sharp line to it, was his nose sloping and stabbing as Elphaba’s had been? Was his skin the color of her brother Shell’s? Whatever efforts or accidents had brought him into the world—was he worth it? And if so—worth it to whom? He was poised as a girl preparing for her first party, trying to see her own loveliness. He didn’t care for loveliness, one way or the other: but he looked for something that might stand in its stead. Something like merit. Capability.

If only she were still alive to tell him something, anything.

A cloud passed before the sun. The room shook a little, adjusting its outlines. The ball darkened and brightened again. He took it in his hands, the old thing, scratched and crazed, and cracked along several seams. It looked as if it had once been a flat bit of glass, and someone had heated it, thinned and curled and patched it into this makeshift gazing ball. A miracle it hadn’t fallen apart. The shapes within shifted as he tilted it this way and that, to try to surprise himself by a new aspect. Catch a new angle, learn a new regret. Anything.

He leaned down and breathed against it, and quickly wrote his name with his finger in the condensation. It dissolved into shapes, his reflection no longer sharp-lined, but foggy. Colored blobs like tossing petals. Then they resolved. The lines he saw were not the carved cornices of the wardrobe or the line where the ceiling met the walls. Instead he saw a skylight, and walls of old cracking plaster, and a white cat observing from the top of a crate. A man moved out of the margin of the mirror, turning his tunic inside out in his haste to remove it. He was dark and beautiful; Liir knew enough about the beauty of men to tell this. He circled an arm about a woman and drew her toward the wall, where he leaned down to kiss her. Then the man turned to open a wide double-doored window, and a flood of light that was never seen in the tower at Kiamo Ko burned into the room in the mirror. (Liir the young soldier was outside, heading for Quadling Country, daydreaming in the sun.) Their forms were indistinct in the sun flooding around them into the room. The woman pulled back, away from the window frame, and raised her arms around the man. Her face was hidden. Her arms were green.

Liir set the mirror gently down. He turned as if to say to the white cat, Hush, that’s private—but the white cat was in the mirror, of course.

Elphaba. Elphaba and Fiyero. Elphaba once upon a time, maybe not much older than Liir was now. And Fiyero, Fiyero for sure. In the light of that distant memory, captured somehow in a looking glass, one couldn’t mistake the pattern of blue diamonds that had been incised into Fiyero’s skin. Liir had envied how Nor had spoken so affectionately of her father’s blue-diamonded skin.

Liir didn’t want to see more. He was too constricted for prurience of any sort, much less this kind. But he was young and normal—too normal—so of course he had to look again. He was relieved to find that the circumference of the ball was misting up, and in any case the picture was different. It was the Witch now, the woman he had known so well—fiercer, less forgiving, more impatient, more focused. She was slapping the pages of the Grimmerie, looking for something she couldn’t find. Then she closed the book with a whomp so hard the globe almost rocked on its stand, even now, at the memory of it.

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She turned and raised a crooked arm in the air above her, and her mouth was open, but he could hear no sound; and the broom came rushing forward, dragging its hems across the floor. The Witch wrenched it with one strong hand and settled her rump firmly against the tied top of the brush. They rose as a single instrument and left the room through the broad window. The Great Kells—as they were a dozen or so years ago, as they were today—seemed like fans of lavender and ice in the distance, and he could make out her path for a few more seconds, trading on the currents of the wind, after an impossible prize.

HE SAID HIS good-byes to Nanny, though she seemed mercifully vacant this afternoon. “Tell ’em all to go to hell,” she advised. “And save me a good seat by the racetrack when they get there.”

Chistery saw him out. “You’ve no need to take this on yourself,” he repeated.

“She would,” he said.

“You aren’t her; you can’t be, and shouldn’t try.”

“Try to be her, or try to be me? There is a difference. Of course there is. But I’ve got the broom now, haven’t I? So who else should do it?”

Chistery shrugged.

“If the Princess of the Swans was presiding over a Conference of the Birds, so that the flying creatures of the world could share what they knew about the trouble ahead, you know who would be there. She would. She flew on a broom. She qualified. So I’ll go in her stead. I may not have her blood, but I have her broom. I’m all there is.”

“Go with the winds,” said Chistery. “Shall I save supper?”

Liir put on Fiyero’s boots. Hadn’t he earned them?

Or perhaps not. He took them off again and replaced them in the wardrobe. But he did take the drawing of Nor, and fold it up, and tuck it in an inside pocket of the cape, from where it could not blow away.

He climbed to the windowsill in her old study and threw himself out, trusting that the broom would remember its mission. His eyes closed against the fall, and the crows sheltering under the eaves screeched in shock and terror. The broom stumbled and pitched, rolled and yawed, but Liir kept his boots kicked firmly in the straw and his hands iron-tight around the pole. When after the first few seconds he had not yet whumped into the side of Knobblehead Pike, he opened one eye.

The landscape was a broken thing from this high up. The mountains looked like mud, swept into ridges and painted white and brown and grey and green. Thin flat lines of polished silver: rivers threading along the valley floors. Almost as far as the eye could see, the Kells curved north. The horizon beyond them was white as sugar crystal where the sun made some fun of its own.

To the south, Kumbricia’s Pass was out of sight, hidden by the shoulders of mountains between, but it wouldn’t be hard to find from this height.

He wheeled about, vaguely southward, leaving Kiamo Ko for the second time in his life. He didn’t look back, for the whipping black cape would interfere with his view anyway. To the east, invisible still, the Emerald City, and all that went on there. To the south, a flat plate of greenish brown. Maybe Kellswater in the distance already? That would put Nether How beneath him, and the five lakes west of the Vinkus River. He hadn’t the nerve to look down, however; looking out and across was just barely tolerable.

He saw the first sign of the moon, and the weird hump of a snout it had. The jackal moon, Nanny had told him; she’d hoped to get another jackal moon in her long life. There it was, his first, or the first he could remember anyway. It lay on the horizon to the southeast like a dog with its nose on the threshold, barely obeying the instruction to stay outside. It had a cold and a personal look to it.

The wind played tricks in his ears: now a soughing like the breath of a man in distress, now an indistinct glissando almost as of fingers on purely tuned strings. From here one could see nothing of the works of man in the world, and it was the more beautiful for it: how odd, then, that the wind should still sound like human music. Or was it that human music sounded more like the wind than people could possibly know?

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