Page 112 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Counsel Bailey,” said Lord Nipp. “Have you anything to add?”

The Owl had come to court in native dress, which is to say naked. This was a risky gambit, Brrr thought, but who knows? It set him apart from the Munchkinlander prosecutor, who had returned to her stool and was blowing her nose with sentiment and force. Temper Bailey flew to a perch provided him halfway between the jury and Dorothy, who was sitting upright, back ramrod straight, eyes open too wide.

“I assert that my client, Miss Dorothy Gale from abroad somewhere, must be innocent of the charges of murder and assassination,” said Temper Bailey. “For one thing, while it is true that her arrival coincided with the death of Nessarose Thropp, there’s no way to prove that Nessarose didn’t look up into the heavens at the sight of a small house lurching through the clouds and have a heart attack from terror, falling down dead on the platform just before the house of Dorothy landed. I took advantage of our unscheduled recess to fly to Center Munch and search the coronor’s records. While Nessarose was conclusively determined to be dead, the cause of death is not mentioned.”

“Well, I doubt coroners are trained to identify the cause of every possible fatality in this universe,” said Lord Nipp. “Cause of death: Collapse of Real Estate? Please. Point dismissed.”

“Nonetheless, we must deal with the facts legally as we find them,” said Temper Bailey. “In any case, if we accept Counsel Fegg’s conclusion that Dorothy Gale is an unreliable witness to her own actions, we must also therefore strike from the record Dorothy’s observation that the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba Thropp, actually died.”

“Preposterous,” said Dame Fegg. “All of Oz knows that she died at the hands of this witch.”

“If you please, I am not a witch,” said Dorothy. She mimed tying a bonnet under her chin “I’ve been trying to make this point for some time, but you people here never seem to put on your listening caps.”

“I propose to the jury,” said Temper Bailey, “that of the charges brought against the defendant, we must strike them both off the chart of crimes.”

“Wait; we can get the coroner in here to testify what he saw,” said Lord Nipp.

“The coroner is dead, my Lord. So all we have are his records. May I close by saying that we’ve heard no conclusive evidence that the defendant committed the crimes with which she is charged? Here in loyal Munchkinland, even as we struggled against the encroachments of the Emerald City barbarians to our west, we must remember that what we are defending is not only the golden treasury of our arable fields and our native customs. We are defending our own honor, too. And we will not convict someone for whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” snapped Dame Fegg. “I suppose as a coda you’re going to propose that due to the contradiction in time schemes, that the defendant before us is not even the actual Dorothy Gale who was here eighteen years ago, but an impostor?”

“Oh, I’m me, all right,” said Dorothy earnestly.

“I haven’t given you the floor,” said Lord Nipp.

“Oh, but Your Reasonableness, may I have a word? Please?”

Brrr could see that Nipp was inclined to say no, but the crowd wanted to hear Dorothy speak. They rhubarbed away in an insistent manner. Maybe the magistrate was stuck between his formal obligations and his own curiosity. If so, his curiosity won. He waved her forward.

Dorothy stood up for the first time. She towered over the Munchkinlanders, even Lord Nipp on his stool. “When I first came to Oz however many years ago we count it, I was merely ten,” she said. “I don’t know if in Munchkinland a child of ten can be convicted of murder, but I believe in fairness, and I think you do too. When the twister lifted my house from its foundations, and I went whirling off in the skies, I was as helpless as a flea on the hide of a dog. I knew nothing of Munchkinland or anything about Oz, and I don’t see how I can be convicted of murder of a Wicked Witch whose presence I wasn’t even aware of until her corpse was pointed out to me by Lady Glinda.”

This was, perhaps, not a sound association for Dorothy to make, thought Brrr; Lady Glinda seemed to be persona non grata both in Loyal Oz and in Munchkinland. You couldn’t win.

“I’ve been fed newspapers in my jail cell—and a very comfortable jail cell it is, I might add. I have seen this trial referred to over and over as ‘The Judgment of Dorothy.’ With all due respect to my estimable hosts, today I would like to interpret that phrase as ‘Dorothy’s Judgment on the Matter.’ And so before you deliver your verdict, dear honorable jury and magistrate, I would like to deliver mine.”

“Entirely out of order,” said Nipp, sorry he’d let this cat out of the bag, but the crowd was straining to hear what Dorothy would say next.

“When I first came to Oz as an untraveled farmgirl,” she went on, “everything seemed magical to me. It took some getting used to, the presence of witches and wizards, and talking Animals, to say nothing of a Scarecrow who could walk and a man hammered with tin. It made Kansas look very tame. When I got home a few months later, thanks to the magic shoes that had caused so many problems, everything appeared pale by comparison. I thought maybe I’d somehow made the whole thing up. But then Uncle Henry and Auntie Em showed me a whole new house with a real indoor washroom instead of an outhouse, bought with insurance, and I hadn’t made that up. Plumbing is uniquely persuasive. So I decided my trip to Oz had been real, even if no one in Kansas believed in you.”

She looked at them. “Yes. No one believed in Munchkinland. They thought I was being fanciful or perhaps tetched in the head. But I never stopped believing in you. I never stopped believing in the Yellow Brick Road, and the Emerald City, and that frightening old humbug, the Wizard of Oz.”

She paused. She wasn’t quite as good as Dame Fegg, thought Brrr, but she had strengths of her own. “Here I stand now, before the very people I pledged never to forget, only to be accused by them of murders I didn’t intend to commit. I’m older now, as we’ve discussed. And I’ve traveled a little bit since I was ten. Uncle Henry took me by train all across the great mountains in my land to the city by the bay—to San Francisco—and for all that I have seen, the Rocky Mountains that, no offense intended, rival the magnificent Scalps in stature and purity—the great fertile plains of Nebraska—the ocean beyond the bay—I haven’t seen anything that could deflect my memories of Munchkinland and Oz. Not yet, not ever. My judgment of you is that you are a kind people and a fair people, and you will do what is right. You will make for me more memories of charity and justice that I can carry home, if I can ever reckon how to manage the return trip.”

She curtseyed at Lord Nipp and again at Dame Fegg, and then she curtseyed a third time, not to the jury but to the crowd in Neale House. A small spattering of applause, quickly repressed.

“Mmm, she’s good,” murmured Mr. Boss. “This should be rich.”

“I shall liberate the jury to its deliberations,” began Nipp, but then Dame Fegg stood up.

“There is a matter I meant to follow and I have just remembered,” she said. “May I be allowed to ask a question?” Nipp nodded. “I wonder if Miss Dorothy could describe for those of us who know nothing about Sanfran Tsitsko, or however it is said, the sea you mentioned once or twice. What sea is this?”

“Oh, goodness,” said Dorothy. “It’s called the Pacific Ocean. It is as wide as the sky, and as broad.”

“Poetic license is inadmissible in court,” said Dame Fegg. “Nothing could be as wide as the sky. The sky goes to both sides of us, you see, whereas a landscape to be viewed can only go in one direction.”

“You’re right, in a manner of speaking,” said Dorothy, “but you see, this sea is so broad that you can’t view the other side. It’s said to stretch as far as Asia, and to take many, many days to cross by boat. Once you are out in a sailing vessel or a steamer, you lose sight of the land, of California and all, and there’s nothing around you but water. The sea is as wide as the sky, exactly so, for the water, I am told, s

tretches under you and the sky above, in precisely identical proportions…”

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