Page 68 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“It’s very clear you haven’t traveled the world,” she chided him, almost lovingly. “Be safe, as safe as you can, dear Liir: and be brave.”

“Are we a couple?” he asked, bravely enough.

“We are one and one,” she said. “In Quadling thinking, one plus one doesn’t equal a single unit of two. One plus one equals both.”

For a long time, turning back, he could see the soft curl of smoke hovering over where Apple Press Farm must stand in its encroaching forest. The fire’s breath hung like a question mark above the place that she had planted herself, already, to wait for his return.

The Conference of the Birds

1

WHILE THE TREK FROM the farmstead in the woods to the start of Kumbricia’s Pass was short, comparatively speaking, every step he took bit at his bones and taxed his joints in a way that none of the long forays across country had seemed to do before.

Well, he was older. Hardly old yet—twenty-three, was he, or twenty-four? Something like that. Not old enough to feel like an adult, really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless.

So he took care. Any little scatter of stones might shift beneath his weight, any patch of grass might prove more slippery than it ought. He latched his eyes to the ground. Confidence and stamina returned all too slowly.

But return they did. Eventually he was walking two hours at a stretch before pausing to rest. He fixed his gaze to the horizon and willed himself forward by setting himself serial destinations. That tallest blue pine, that nubble of grasses in the upland meadow, that outcrop of granite. Before long, the prospect grew grander, as the Kells swam into clearer focus, and the steep cut between them said KUMBRICIA’S PASS: enter if you dare.

He remembered his childhood journey with Oatsie Manglehand and the Grasstrail Train, and how the travelers had traded tales. Fierce Kumbricia, the witch from the oldest tales of Oz! Kumbricia was so ancient a figure of lore that she seemed freed from the limitations of any particular moral position. She was not exactly the demon crone from hell, intent on the destruction of mortal souls, nor was she the nodding grand-tit of the world, providing succor in times of trial. Or perhaps, more truly said, she was both. One plus one equals both. Like the most insouciant and playful of earthquakes, collapsing villages and crushing populations, Kumbricia’s actions followed her own secret intentions. To a human, what might look like luck one minute was disaster the next, but what meant luck to Kumbricia, or disaster either? In the stories she was fierce, amoral, wholly herself. Unvanquishable and incorrigible.

And unknowable, really.

Like the Unnamed God, when you came right down to it.

Occasionally, Nanny had singsonged, as a nursery ditty, something probably derived from the Oziad or some other baroque history-legend.

Kumbricia stirs the pot, and licks the ladle,

Sets the table, pours a glass of tears.

Waits beside the ominous vacant cradle.

Waiting still. She can wait for years.

Yes, just like the Unnamed God.

2

THE CLIFFS OPENED BEFORE him and then closed behind him, for the track into Kumbricia’s Pass took several quick turns along the valley floor before it began to rise. The ground breathed different vapors here, and the season was delayed: the browning leaves of the trees hadn’t fallen yet. Not enough wind could wend through to tear them away.

The brightness of the sky was shattered into glazed mosaic bits by the fretwork of branches and foliage. This high-slung canyon went on for days, didn’t it?—wasn’t that his recollection? Until it opened on the western slope of the Kells, and the Thousand Year Grasslands spread out as broad as the imaginary sea from children’s stories? How would he ever find traces of a convocation of Birds in this secret haven?

But a good place to gather, he had to concede. The mountains served as ramparts, and the ravine was helpfully overgrown. Here the Yunamata made their home most of the year. And here Elphaba and Liir had picked out their way all those ages ago, pressing on toward Kiamo Ko and the hope for sanctuary.

He had all the time for rumination he needed—and then some. What had he understood, then, of Elphaba’s drive? Her need? The force that pushed her around? Precious little. But he remembered the day she had saved the infant Snow Monkey, who would become Chistery. Her native—talent? power? skill at con

centration?—or maybe, merely, compassion?—had caused a small lake to ice over so she half walked, half slid across it to collect the abandoned, fretting monkey baby.

That’s what his memory said. The very ice formed under her heels. The world conformed itself to suit her needs. But how could this possibly be true? Perhaps it was the unreliability of memory, the romanticking tendencies of childhood, that made Liir remember it this way. The lake went ice. The baby monkey was saved. Maybe, really, she’d waded. Or maybe the lake was already iced over.

Maybe all that really mattered, as to her power, was that she saved the baby monkey.

At the shores of a small tarn, he paused, and became aware of a new variety of silence. It was the sound of everything holding its breath.

At the farther side of the tarn was a small island. A spinney of knot-branch trees grew in the center of the island, their five or six tree trunks so close as to resemble the uprights of a series of doors, all leading to the same interior space among the trunks, some dozen feet in diameter. The trees held what was left of the Conference of the Birds, and the Birds were holding their breath.

He stood, not ready to call out, for he didn’t want them to scatter. But they were aware of him, he was sure. How many hundred pairs of eyes blinked or unblinked at him from those ring-coiled leaves? They neither approached him in sortie nor twittered in fright. Perhaps, he guessed, they were stupid with fear.

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