Page 142 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“I don’t know which city is more deserving of attack,” said Rain. “Maybe because Shiz is the college town of Oz, Munchkinlanders feel it would be a more terrible blow to crush it. Or maybe they intend to, like, practice their new technique of assault here? And frighten the EC into submission? So Loyal Oz might sue for peace? To preserve the palace and the administration buildings from devastation?”

“Govern yourself. Panic is a folly, Miss Rainary. I’m impressed though by your colorful language.”

“I don’t care. I just want you to know that the threat is real, and you should do everything you can to protect yourself, your teachers, Cook, the maids, the girls. It is your duty.”

“I will not be told my duty by a student.” Eyes blazing, Miss Ironish stood up. “I will not honor you by asking you on what basis you draw your conclusions. You are criminally impertinent. I shall consider your punishment. Miss Rainary, you are dismissed.”

Rain stood there, wringing her hands.

“Get out of my study, I said.”

That night Miss Ironish saw to it that the wonky stable door, which Tip had foolishly repaired as part of his chores, was bolted tightly. Then she locked the door to the annex, sealing Rain inside. “I may open the door in time for your breakfast, such as it is these days,” shrilled Miss Ironish through the door, “or I may not. Think upon your disgrace, Miss Rainary.”

Rain wasn’t sharply surprised, once the lights had gone out all over the school, to hear footsteps on the stairs. Tip arrived with a small satchel of clothes on his back.

“I saw her storming about like a maniac,” he said. “Muttering your name. And since you said you were leaving, I hid downstairs before she locked you in. I know mere locks won’t hold you.”

“I hardly know how I am going to get out,” said Rain, though she had packed a few clothes herself, and some rolls she had smuggled from dinner. She left behind the single rock, the feather, the acorn, the arrowhead. She had packed the large pink shell, though.

“Isn’t it obvious how you’re going to leave?”

It wasn’t, until he pointed a finger skyward.

He went up the ladder first. Remembering the time their shoulders had grazed, she waited until he had clambered out of the hatch. She lifted Tay through, and then followed. She had never looked over the roofs of Shiz at night. It was beautiful, but less distinct than she might have imagined. Maybe people were darkening their windows or conserving their oil, as month by month the prices of staples had continued to rise. She could make out the famous dome of St. Florix most easily, a dark perfect mound against a velvet sky that, as it rose, became pinned in place with frozen stars.

“Up is easy,” whispered Tip. “Down is tricky.” But they made it quickly enough across the leads, monkeying themselves groundward via rain gutters and downspouts and old dead ivy whose thick espaliered limbs had never been carved away from the back of the stables.

Once at the street level, Rain said, “Which way are you going?”

He answered, without catching her eye, “Which way are you going?”

Rain hesitated, then pointed west.

“Then I’m going that way too.”

I7.

She argued furiously with him for half the night. She didn’t need a chaperone. She wasn’t scared to be on her own anymore. In fact, she said, she’d never been scared to be on her own.

He countered by saying that since he hadn’t applied for a job at St. Prowd’s he didn’t have to apply for permission to leave. He happened to be walking on the road from Shiz at the same hour and in the same direction she was going. What was wrong with that?

Often she sunk into black silences. She wasn’t used to arguing. She’d lived in her own world so much, she’d never had to apologize for it, nor explain. So a traveling partner her own age—even one she liked when she wasn’t arguing with him—was going to be a burden of sorts.

“You know,” she said, “if I have gotten older since we met, so have you. And while you might be young enough not to have been called up to service during this round of inductions, if you stand still in a public place like Shiz you’ll be old enough to be fingered the next time, certainly.”

“You’re certain about a lot of things of which you have no notion.”

“Explain,” she said. “Prove me wrong, then.”

But he changed the subject. “Where are you going? Off to find your mother?”

“In a matter of speaking,” she said, for she hadn’t entirely lost her habit of reticence, even though St. Prowd’s, and indeed the bricked walls of Shiz, were now several hours behind them.

The moon had risen. Tonight it looked without character. Just a disc cut out of paper and fastened with sticky string to the sky. A smell of arugula and basil pushed up from small cottage farms sunk a few feet below the high road. The wind was rousing but warm. No one was about except anonymous animals scrabbling in the hedgerows. Once they heard the low of a pained cow that some unreliable farmhand had forgotten to milk. Tip was unhappy about that cow and wanted to scurry off to help her, and Rain said, “Go ahead, do that good deed, but I must keep on the road as long as my legs will carry me,” so he left the cow in her misery and kept pace with Rain.

Gillikin west of Shiz.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

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