Page 116 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“I suppose Elphaba must have arrived at Kiamo Ko with that broom, but I don’t know if she understood its powers. I had taken it out to a barn to clean up after our guests, and I felt it twitch in my hands, to pulse with life. Like a garter snake when you grab it, but not wriggly. It’s hard to explain. I decided to ride it like a hobbyhorse, but when I threw my leg over it, it rose in the air.”

Rain’s eye was cool and flat but her face was bright. “Don’t glamourize danger,” said Liir. “I’ve ridden it in my time, too, Rain, and it’s no carnival ride of carved wooden stallions accompanied by tinny music. I was attacked on the broom by flying dragons and I nearly lost my life.”

But the attack had brought him to the ministrations of Candle, and that had brought Rain into the world, into their lives, so he stopped complaining.

“I want to fly,” said Rain. “I want to fly, and to see.”

“You touch that broom without permission, you’ll get a walloping you never knew I was capable of,” said Liir.

“And I’ll thwack you too,” said Candle, who was so tenderhearted she didn’t set traps for the field mice that ravaged her seed stock.

They all looked overhead; they couldn’t help it. In the apex of the ceiling, above the loft, Liir had closed in a triangular space by hammering up a ceiling three boards wide. He had boxed in the broom. If you didn’t know it was there you would never guess. As for the Grimmerie, he had planned to encase it in fieldstone next to the chimney stack, adjacent the bread oven. But worries about having to flee suddenly, leaving it where it might be found, had scuttled that strategy. Thus, the Grimmerie was wrapped in an old army satchel of Liir’s and kept on top of the dish cupboard. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. Everyone was forbidden to touch it.

2.

So of course Rain wanted to get the Grimmerie. Any number of times she pulled over a stool and settled her hands on the dark blue canvas sacking. But it wasn’t worrying about punishment from her parents that stopped her. Their cautions didn’t figure. It was the memory of what had happened with the dragons on the lake. To Call Winter upon Water. And that was merely one page. What good might be done through the agency of a single powerful page? What good, and what evil?

She wasn’t afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Still, how it called her! If Candle could sometimes tell the present, if Liir had once or twice been able to tell the past, Rain felt she could tell the hunger of the Grimmerie. A hunger to be read. The book had an active desire to be cracked open and have its messages delivered. The furnace’s lust for tinder.

They rarely left her alone in the cottage, those adults. Her people? She found the concept hard to take in. At any rate, the next group

of people. More people to add to her collection of people. It seemed she would rotate through an endless set of temporary arrangements. She hadn’t forgotten the Lion, the dwarf, and the Munchkinlander herbalist lady. Or Murthy and Puggles and other warm cloudy presences without names, those who had lived belowstairs with her at Mockbeggar Hall and taken care of her scrapes and ailments.

Back then she had run about like a chipmunk, unnoticed unless she was about to trespass on some formal affair of Lady Glinda’s, in which case she’d be boxed about the ears or distracted with a boiled sweet. Here at Nether How, this scrappily forested hill hummocked up between two isolated mountain lakes, she was always under someone’s watchful eye. If the three adults had to go off somewhere, either Oziandra Rain had to traipse along or she was left under the care of Iskinaary.

“They love you because you belong to them,” he hissed at her once. “They can’t help it. But I think you’re trouble heating up on a slow flame. I’ve got my eye on you.”

“I never done nothing to you,” she replied, dropping the stone in her palm.

Sheep, companionable enough, roamed their neighborhood, keeping the ground cover cropped. Once a year the three adults managed to shear a few of them. How best to prepare the wool? There were tricks to it some traveler would eventually share, but in the meantime the family kept warm enough. None of them ate meat as a first choice, but if a lamb was found with a broken neck and it couldn’t thrive, they killed it out of mercy and Candle thanked some deity or other for its spirit and its chops. Liir and Nor wouldn’t join in the prayer. And Iskinaary refused to come to table if there was flesh upon it.

“One day I’ll break my neck, and then you’ll have a conundrum on your hands,” he told them.

“Not such a hard choice,” said Rain. “Chestnut stuffing or bread?”

“And to think your grandmother was a celebrated activist in defense of Animals. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

The lake was mad with fish, so they ate fish, which Tay caught for them. They sometimes discussed whether there was any such thing as a Fish, an opinionated cousin of the presumably nonsentient variety. Iskinaary, who liked fish as much as he disliked flesh, agreed to put his head under the water and try to speak to them. But there was no reason to suspect that Fish would speak the same language as air-breathing creatures. Since he could never manage to start a reasonable conversation among equals, the Goose always gave up and allowed himself a snack.

Still fascinated by letters and words, Rain had begun to work out languages in Oz. She collected languages, the idea of them anyway. There seemed to be a primary tongue that she had spoken since birth. For lack of another term it was called Ozish, though to a child it seemed effortless as breathing. But there were other languages. Qua’ati, of course, which she’d picked up in Qhoyre—Candle spoke it well, and Liir, haltingly. And variations of birdsong that Iskinaary seemed capable of using. Rain couldn’t tell if the language was universal among the airborne or specific to certain species, Goose subtly different from Duck or Swallow. But she was too proud to ask Iskinaary.

Nor told her that the Arjikis had a language of their own, though it shared a grammar with Ozish. The Scrow and the Ugubezi and Yunamata each had different language systems. The trolls in the Glikkus spoke a dialect of Ozish that sounded like sneezing, and who knows what tribes in the unexplored far west of Oz might be able to demonstrate yet more cryptic tongues? Rain’s aunt had heard that an isolated clan of Draffe people lived near Kvon Altar in the arid southwest of the Vinkus. “Draffe people? Part Draffe, part human?” wondered Rain, but Nor told her there had been no successful interspecies mating as far as she knew, and the term Draffe probably just meant the people were gangly and thin, the way Munchkinlanders were squat and short.

Still, Rain began to wonder about Nor and Brrr. A woman and a Lion. If they ever reunited, would they have children? Could the Grimmerie make it possible? Rain might get a kind of cousin who was part human girl and part Lion cub boy. She couldn’t quite see how it would work out, but she hoped it could happen. The Lion part might eat Iskinaary by accident. That would be fun.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Goose.

“You do not.”

He craned his neck and trained one beady eye at her. She tried not to rear backward. “Well, you’re right,” he admitted, “but I know it isn’t nice.”

“It’s nice to me,” she told him.

Then, toward the end of the third summer at Nether How, a trapper came through, an isolated Scrow who had been drummed out of his clan for some unmentioned reason. Maybe for being antisocial. Rain collected him; he was her first Scrow. His name was Agroya. He stayed a few days and helped the grown-ups shore up a terrace wall behind which Candle was trying to establish a stand of mountain rice. In halting phrases he brought news of the world beyond Nether How.

3.

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