Page 10 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

There was nothing for them to do but obey. Walking slightly in advance of them, the Superior Maunt couldn’t help but smile faintly to herself. The medical women were good, solid folk. They were merely curious, curious as hell, like the rest of the House. And whatever was troubling Liir, inside or out, he would recover or decline more comfortably without being smothered by the attentions of middle-aged maunts.

The Superior Maunt paused to catch her breath. Stairs were the devil. Her two colleagues respectfully froze in place while she wheezed. The willpower of women, she thought. These two, and me besides. I make the awful choice to put them in danger. If anyone can manage the task at hand, they will. Keep them safe, she prayed.

But why do I even have to put my dear sisters in jeopardy? Because my colleagues in the motherchapel dare to send young innocent missionaries into the wild—without so much as a guide. No Oatsie Manglehand for them—just faith, innocence, and courage born of stupidity. Damn the Emerald City for leaning down upon us all. Damn those—those bath mats in the motherhouse, for yielding to the influence of the government!

She didn’t utter a private apology for the oath. She felt she’d earned the right to swear internally, now and then. When it was warranted.

8

CANDLE HARDLY GLANCED at Liir. She sat on a rush-seated chair and rubbed the calloused pads of her right fingers over the upper strings. A faint harmonic vibration buzzed in the lower strings, almost inaudible—a sensation in the air more than a sound.

The light heaved in its uncertain tides, as clouds too thin to see washed across the sky. The room chilled slightly.

Candle let her fingers wander up the frets. She was a skilled musician, more skilled even than the kitchen sisters knew—skilled, and talented besides. This domingon was missing a vital part, and couldn’t peal or chide or keen as she would like to require of it. Still, to keep her fingers alert, from the domingon’s double necks Candle drew dull incomplete sentences. They had no power to comfort; this she knew. But she would tease the lengthy imponderable sounds out into the air anyway. She had seen the Red Pfenix in the sky. So it was her playing that had called him down, was it? She could do it again, and more besides.

Abroad

1

THE DOMINGON PLAYED ON. Unheard by Liir in his state, it had its effect nonetheless.

HE WAS LIVING IN THE CASTLE called Kiamo Ko at the time, but he wasn’t present at the death of the Witch.

The Witch had locked him in the kitchen with Nanny and that jittery Lion. Showing surprising resourcefulness for one so dotty, Nanny had driven the handle of a one-egg iron skillet into the rotten wood of the doorjamb. Getting the idea, Liir and the Lion gouged at the hinges until the door fell heavily inward.

Chistery, the Witch’s Snow Monkey, had skittered ahead of them up the stairs to the Witch’s tower-top chambers. But Dorothy was already coming down, her face glutinous with tears, the badly burned broom stinking in her hands. “She’s gone,” sobbed the girl, and Liir’s heart had gone out to her—whose wouldn’t? He’d sat on the step and snaked his arm around her shoulders. He was fourteen. First attraction is awkward under any circumstances, he supposed, but this was extreme. It wasn’t as if he’d ever seen people being tender. And she was a saint from the Other Land, for pity’s sake.

The girl couldn’t control her shock, so it took Liir a while to understand what she was blubbering about. The Witch was gone. His earliest memory, his bête noire, his Auntie, his jail-keeper, his sage friend—his mother, the others had said, but there’d been no proof of that, and she’d never answered the question when he’d asked her.

Dead, dead and gone, and after her own inspection, Nanny wouldn’t let him up to the parapet to see. “The sight would turn the holy blind,” she murmured, “so it’s a good thing I’m an old sinner. And you, you’re just a young fool. Forget it, Liir.” She pocketed the key and began to warble in an unfamiliar mode, some dirge from her backwater childhood. “Sweet Lurlina, mother of mercy, shroud of the murdered, shawl of the missing…”

Nanny’s pagan pieties were somehow unconvincing. But on what basis could he say that? He’d left the unionist mauntery too young to absorb any of the tenets of faith that supported the cloistered way of life. From the distance of a skeptical adolescent, unionism seemed like a thicket of contradictions. Charity to all, but intolerance toward the heathen. Poverty ennobles, but the Bishops had to be richer than everyone else. The Unnamed God made the good world, imprisoning the rebellious human being within it, and taunting humankind with tinderbox sexuality that must be guarded against at all costs.

Lurlinism was no more sensible, to judge by how Nanny spoke of it. Random episodes of mildly erotic dalliance, as Lurlina effectively wooed Oz into being. Privately he thought it was downright stupid, though, being prettier, it was also easier to remember.

Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap of something: for Elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off—well, it didn’t seem right.

She whipped up in his mind, the first brutal memory as sudden and insistent as a bee sting. She was yelling at him. “The Wizard’s soldiers kidnapped the whole family and left you behind? Because you were useless? And you followed after them anyway, and they still managed to elude you? Are you useless?” Even then he had known she was less angry at him than frightened at what had befallen the other residents of the castle while she was away. Even then he had known she was relieved he’d been spared by virtue of being insignificant. Even then he’d smarted at the rebuke of the term. Useless.

“I’ll take the broom,” said Liir at last. “She can be buried with it.”

“I need it, to prove she’s dead,” said Dorothy. “What else would do?”

“I’ll carry it for you then,” he said.

“You’re coming with me?”

He looked around. The courtyard of the castle was more silent than he’d ever seen it. The Witch’s crows were dead, her wolves, her bees. The winged monkeys were huddled on top of the woodshed, paralyzed with grief. With the Arjiki villagers in the settlement of Red Windmill down the slope, or scattered in cottages on the leeward side of the mountain, Liir had had little contact.

So there was nothing to keep him in Kiamo Ko but Nanny. And old as she was, she would soon lapse into her usual fog of deafness and abstraction. In a week she would forget that the Witch had died. Besides, even in her best days she’d never known where Liir had come from. Neither had she seemed to care. So it was no hardship to leave her.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Yes. And I’ll carry the broom.”

It was too late to leave now, so they busied themselves instead. Liir fed the monkeys. Dorothy tried to make a meal for Nanny, who wept and said she wasn’t hungry and then ate all her portion and the Lion’s besides.

After washing up, Dorothy settled cozily in the crook of the Lion’s neck, as much to calm him as to take comfort herself. Liir climbed to the Witch’s room and looked about. Already it was as if she had never lived there.

He thought of the Grimmerie, that perplexing book of magic. He had never been able to read it. Wherever the Witch had put it last, he let it be. No matter. No Flying Monkey would be able to gibber a spell out of it, and Nanny’s eyesight was too poor to decipher its odd scrambling text. It would be too heavy to carry, anyway.

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