Page 118 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

he regained her voice, she spoke in an unfamiliar register. Colder, acerbic. She said, “This isn’t about Rain, at its heart. Is it? You’re not even angry about what Nastoya said or not, or whether I told you before. Are you. Are you. You’re still angry about what I’ve never said about Trism.”

“Wide of the mark,” snapped Liir. But damn her, she was right. So Candle could still see the present. Her talent had seemed submerged as they’d gotten older.

Yes, he was cross about her never having mentioned Nastoya’s dying comments. But Candle was accurate that he was still harboring a wound about his old friend and lover, Trism. Another of the stories they didn’t rehearse in front of Rain.

Oh, Trism.

And it happened, all of an instant, in his mind again. Like seeing the past. This time his own.

Trism had come to Apple Press Farm that same dreadful season, while Liir was away, while Nastoya was in the orchard trying to die, while Candle was readying to give birth. Liir had never found out exactly what happened. Hunted by EC soldiers who’d once been colleagues, beautiful Trism had either taunted Candle with the knowledge of Liir’s affection for him or, just as possibly, fallen for Candle in Liir’s absence.

Maybe their mutual passion for Liir, their mutual worry about his safety, had brought Candle and Trism together. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. But Candle had never spoken about it, and Trism had disappeared from Liir’s life.

By the time Liir had returned, to find the ailing Princess Nastoya and a contingent of Scrow in residence at Apple Press Farm, Trism was gone. After Liir and Candle had helped Nastoya shuck her disguise as a human being and die as an Elephant, Liir had accompanied her corpse back over the highland route known as Kumbricia’s Pass. Returning only a few days later, he’d found that Candle had fled. The new baby, hardly a day old, lay wrapped up in cloths and hidden for him to find.

Of course Candle knew he was nearing; she knew that kind of thing. She’d left a goat so he could have milk for the child. He’d always assumed that she’d abandoned the child for fear that Trism might have been trailed by assassins in order to discover Liir’s hideaway. But now he wondered if she left infant Rain because Nastoya had said their daughter would bring promise and trouble. Candle’s apprehension of their daughter had always been different from his. Just as loving, but more stony and matter-of-fact.

He knew what happened next. Eventually she’d made her way back to the mauntery. Word had arrived there that Trism had been beaten—well, tortured was the uglier but more honest word. Presumably Trism hadn’t been able to reveal Liir’s whereabouts because he didn’t know them. And whether Trism, the top dragon mesmerist in the arsenal of the Emerald City, had even survived … there was no way to tell.

What had survived—maybe all that had survived of Trism—was Liir’s sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression—unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir’s heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism’s glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. To this day Liir had endured them in solitude, even as his beloved Candle sat across from him at the hearth.

Candle herself might dream of Trism, too, with dread or with desire. Liir didn’t know. She and Liir never talked of it. She’d refused to speak of Trism when Liir, baby in arms, met up with her again. To protect Liir’s good impression of his friend?—to keep Trism’s romance of Candle to herself? You could go around and around about it, but unless Trism showed up again and filled in the blanks, Liir couldn’t know.

Candle wasn’t telling.

And Liir and Candle had had more urgent things to deal with than the perils of shifting affections. They had a daughter born green as bottleglass.

Green, and with few obvious virtues. On her mother’s side, the girl was a bona fide peasant. Before she met Liir, Candle had been an itinerant Quadling, easily mattressed like all of her clan. Abandoned at the mauntery by an uncle who had wearied of her.

On Liir’s side, Rain descended from a line, if not noble, then at least notorious. One of her ancestors had been the Eminent Thropp, de facto governor of Munchkinland before secession. Her grandmother had been the divisive Wicked Witch of the West, no less. Who knew what license or limitation descended through that bloodline?

Liir had no reason to lord it over Candle, or anyone else. He knew himself to be anything but polished. He’d grown up without the attention of Elphaba or, most of the time, her affection. Deprived childhood, Your Honor! He hadn’t made things better for himself by going AWOL from the army under the command of Cherrystone. Another bad career move: he’d helped Trism destroy the EC’s stable of flying dragons being used to foment unrest among tribes in the west. Tally it up for us, my good man: at the time of Rain’s birth, Liir’d been no more than a ragamuffin ne’er-do-well being hunted down in case he might lead them to the Grimmerie.

Under these circumstances, to be presented with an iridescently verdant child even harder to hide than the famous and dangerous tome … what a lot of laughs, this life. I beg your mercy.

By the time he’d caught up with Candle again, after a series of misadventures with the Scrow, the infant was almost too big to carry in his arms. For Rain’s own protection, he’d drawn a hood upon her face and told passersby that she was afflicted with a sensitivity to light. What had this done to a child, for all those months to hear through burlap the sounds of human voices but rarely to see the face of anyone but her worried and stupid father?

What had he done to Rain, in order to preserve her life?

After he’d met up again with Candle at the mauntery, they wandered the landscape. Seeking a way to keep Rain from being smothered, literally and metaphorically. They had no plans, just kept moving.

One day, in some nameless hamlet, they’d stopped to barter for bread and milk and wine in return for doing fieldwork till sunset. On the far side of a sullen patch of finger potatoes, Candle straightened with her hand on her lower back and turned around with a cry. Set in a potato basket at the end of a hoed row, the baby was sitting up. Either she’d clawed her burlap caul off by herself or the fox at basket’s edge had pulled it away with its teeth.

“Easy,” said Liir to Candle, “easy. I haven’t known foxes to be vicious.”

“Clearly,” remarked the Fox, training his eyes on the green child, “you haven’t taken into account what recreational foxhunting by hounds and human brutes does to a Fox’s native sense of cordiality.”

“The light, please, it hurts her eyes,” began Liir.

“The dark hurts her far more.” The Fox sat down to look at the child, and the child looked back unblinkingly. Liir and Candle inched forward, gripping each other’s hands. “I never met that green firebrand out in the west, that one with the broom, but I heard tell of her. And I imagine she looked like this.”

“I suspect so,” said Candle, honestly enough. “I never met her either.”

“Your kit will have fights on her hands,” said the Fox. “I suppose you’re suitably traumatized over that.”

“Oh, very,” said Liir, “and then some.”

The Fox laughed. “I like her. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.”

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