Page 120 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Liir and Candle didn’t quite make up. Some fights between couples don’t so much roil to a climax as settle somehow in an unnegotiated standoff. Neither “affable truce” nor “benefit-of-the-doubt stalemate” quite describes it. Liir and Candle kept to their tasks and to their promises, spoken and unspoken, to each other. They doubted that Rain ever noticed the formalizing silence that threatened to codify as policy between them.

Nor and Iskinaary, not ones to make common cause, fell to discussing the change in the household mood. They weren’t privy to the unspoken complaints. But something needed to be done.

Eventually the Goose thought up an idea, and Nor proposed it: they might pack up some bedrolls before the summer came to a close and make the trek partway up the nearest of the Great Kells where they could harvest a stash of wild ruby tomatoes. Dried, they lasted a year, and augmented any cold winter dish with a flavor of summer.

The family set out. It wasn’t a successful trip, too cold and blustery for so early in the fall. When they arrived at the trove they found some mountain greedyguts had already ravaged the plot. They came home sore, weary, empty-handed, and quieter than before. Iskinaary and Nor, walking behind, shrugged at each other. Well, we tried.

Rain of course seemed to notice nothing, just kept on. She was collecting acorns and hazelnuts. They rattled in her pockets when she skipped ahead.

The family returned to Nether How at the Five Lakes, to the sentry house, as they called it, because from the front door they could see the nearest northerly lake and from the opposite door they could glimpse the southern one. They found that their home had been ransacked in their absence. They figured Agroya as the culprit. Probably he’d circled back after Nor had said good-bye to him. He’d hung out on one of the hills above the lake, waiting for a day when the lack of smoke from a breakfast fire announced the absence of tenants. Four pewter spoons that Little Daffy and Mr. Boss had given them were missing, and a sack of flour and another of salt. Liir’s best skinning knife, and his only razor.

The broom was still incarcerated in the ceiling, they assumed, since they saw no sign of boards having been prised off and replaced. Candle’s domingon hung on the wall. Half out of its sack, the Grimmerie lay on the table in full view. It must not have appealed to the thief.

Still, whether or not the Grimmerie had been recognized, someone knew it was there. It could be described for someone else to identify. Someone knew that Rain was there. More had been stolen from them than spoons and a razor, flour and salt.

4.

Why does the day with the brightest blue sky come tagged with a hint of foreboding? Maybe it’s only the ordinary knowledge of transience—all comes to dust, to rot, to rust, to the moth. That sort of thing. Or maybe it’s that beauty itself is invisible to mortal eyes unless it’s accompanied by some sickly sweet eschatological stink.

The uneasiness they felt after the discovery of the Grimmerie by some stranger only grew by the day. Whoever had looked at it may have know

n what it was but been scared to take it. Or may have seen something uncanny in it, and fled. If the thief was Agroya—well, as he’d told them, he trafficked in news. The word was out, or would be soon. Too soon.

Iskinaary took it upon himself to do some reconnaissance work. Loyal as he was to Liir, he had a healthy respect for his own neck, too. He didn’t want to end up as a platter of Goose-breast unless there were no alternatives.

He came winging back in the middle of a spectacular afternoon. Rain was collecting milkweed pods from a scrap of meadow near the north lake. The women were cording wool. Liir heard Iskinaary clear his throat in the southern dooryard, and he came out into the light, into the aroma of piney resin. Sunlight steeping on dropped brown needles.

At the Goose’s expression, Liir said, “Let me guess. You saw a bug who had lost a leg in battle, and you know the end times have arrived.”

“Don’t make fun of me till you hear what I have to say,” snapped Iskinaary, trying to catch his breath. “All right then. About ten miles to the south of First Lake, I came upon a band of trolls—Glikkuns, I suppose—who had made common cause with an extended family of tree elves.”

Liir raised an eyebrow.

“I know, it sounds preposterous. Neither Glikkuns nor elves like society other than their own. The Glikkuns are suspicious of all talking Animals and wouldn’t speak to me, but elves chatter inanely. They told me what they were doing.”

“Coming here to rape and pillage, I presume.”

“No. And of course I didn’t let on there was a homestead here. But I heard that some of the trolls are becoming unhappy over the alliance they made with La Mombey and the Munchkinlanders. They’re beginning to think their ruler, Sakkali Oafish, was hasty, and that the Glikkus will become a plunderpot of Munchkinland much as Munchkinland felt itself to be a plunderpot of the EC. Ripe for despoiling and primed for heavy taxation, et cetera. And of course the emeralds in the Scalps, controlled by the trolls for time out of mind, would go far toward helping Munchkinland pay for the armies they’ve been maintaining. So this breakaway band of trolls wants none of it. They’re scouting out other mining possibilities in the Vinkus.”

“I doubt they’ll find much here,” said Liir, “but then, a stone looks pretty much like a rock to me. Maybe we’ve been harvesting potatoes in fields of gold nuggets, and I never noticed.”

“You’re missing the point. Trolls with elves? Listen—”

“I agree, an unlikely alliance. I only ever met one elf, a sort of gibbertyflibbet named Jibbidee. I don’t suppose he was among them?”

“I didn’t ask for their identification papers. Will you listen? The elves said that the second front of the war—the one opened up in the Madeleines—has disturbed their natural habitat. The Animal army of the Munchkinlanders has been particularly destructive. So some of the elves are looking west to see if it’s safe to settle around here. They’re traveling with the Glikkuns because you can always trust a troll in a fight.”

“What’s in it for the Glikkuns?”

“Nothing more than food, it seems. The Glikkuns are cow people; if they’re not down in their emerald mines they’re tending their cattle. They don’t know how to make anything to eat except for cheese and curds and yogurt. Foraging in the forest is beyond their ken, and it’s what tree elves do best. And all elves love to cook. I’d have thought this was common knowledge.”

“I never got any formal schooling,” said Liir. “But whether elves are natural gourmands hardly seems something for you to be gabbling about, all out of breath. Do you want some water?”

“I heard a troll addressing one of the elves as I was getting ready to leave. He said a heavy bounty had been put upon the discovery of a certain book of magic lost a few years back but almost certain to be hidden, uncorrupted, somewhere in the outback of Oz. A magic book might extend the variety of their menus. He was only joking, I think, but if marginalized populations like itinerant elves and disaffected Glikkuns know to be on the lookout for a book like the Grimmerie, I would say our recent kindness to that Scrow robber, Agroya, was a mistake.”

Liir was inclined to discount anything overheard between Glikkuns and tree elves. Still, he had to agree that the hemorrhaging of public funds due to the cost of this unwinnable war could only revive the fervor to find the Grimmerie. A fervor both parties would share. The book could supply a crucial advantage to whichever side got access to its unparalleled supply of spells. “I hope you don’t think we need to pack up and become traveling musicians or something like that,” said Liir. “I’ve come to consider Nether How a blissful place. Relatively speaking.”

“You’re not listening, are you. Your enemies have finally added it up. The tree elves and Glikkuns know that the book is expected to be found with a green-skinned girl the age of Rain. The powers that be remember the Conference of the Birds a decade ago, in which you and I both flew, cawing out ‘Elphaba lives!’ over the Emerald City. Only they don’t read it as political theater anymore. They think it was prophecy. Or that’s what they say. Maybe when your honey boy Trism was set upon by the Emperor’s soldiers, they beat out of him word of the green-skinned daughter.”

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