Page 143 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She didn’t answer, but when they came to a crossroads where a st

one gave several choices—a boon, this moonlit night!—the fifth of five choices said simply THE WEST. That road looked the most desperate, and she struck out along that one, though the striking was slowing down some, and eventually they stopped to sleep a little. They burrowed under a hedgerow, mightily irritating some birds and some sort of family reunion of mice. Was it only a dream that they were talking to her? “If you’re headed for the Kells, you’ve chosen well enough. But once you reach the Gillikin River follow it to your left until the mountains come in sight. You will have crossed into the Vinkus by then, and be near enough to ask directions to Kiamo Ko.”

She woke before Tip did. His hand was on her breast, and he slept with his mouth open. Tay dozed greenly between them, closer to both than they could dare be to each other. She hadn’t heard Tip breathing in his sleep for what seemed like such a long time. She began to cry for no reason she could name. Tay stirred and licked Rain’s tears off her face with its sandpaper tongue.

Once there had been a mouseskin in a field. It had been on her finger. She had wanted to be a mouse. She had wanted to be something other than what she was. She had had so many chances, and she had passed so many of them by.

I must have become what Madame Chortlebush calls a teenmonster, crying for nothing, and feeling my life is over. She warned us about this, thought Rain.

“Wake up, it’s not morning but it’s light enough to walk,” she said to Tip, but she didn’t move, for she didn’t want his hand to slip away an instant sooner than it needed to.

He woke and shuddered and seemed not to notice he had been touching her. He shuffled to the other side of the hedge and let loose a long confident stream of pee, standing up. She turned her head away and softly smiled to herself, and couldn’t say why.

The road grew rougher, less traveled; and while there were farmers about, with carts and animals, no one paid the young walkers much mind. Well, Rain hardly looked like a St. Prowd’s girl, having slept in her best dress, which was never very good to start with. And Tip had left behind the penitential uniform that Miss Ironish had insisted he wear. They looked like brother and sister traipsing along, since they were too young still to be—to be anything else.

She tried to make small talk, as they called it, but it was too small for Tip, and she soon gave up. Tay capered after them almost as a dog might, and sometimes allowed itself to be carried on the shoulders of one or the other. They bought the cheapest food at any crossroad farmstand they passed, always taking care to follow signs for THE WEST, which by late in the day had begun to be called GILLIKIN R. With an attempt at good humor Tip referenced the map once or twice, but its markings were archaic, and Rain was happier when he put it away.

“Why aren’t you heading toward your own home?” Rain asked once.

“Why aren’t you minding your own business?” he replied.

So they walked, and ate, and sang a little bit—that was neutral enough—and slept again. Longer this time, for they had spent a whole day on shank’s mare. The next day Rain had blisters and the friends had to slow down. The day after that Tip had grown his own blisters, worse than hers, and they paused on the banks of a river they had found. They didn’t know if it was the Gillikin already or a tributary, but if they turned left at the water’s edge and kept walking west, they would either see the great mountains sooner or later on the horizon, or they would see their river merge with a larger one. That is, assuming the mice in the hedgerow were correct. But how could mice know where Rain wanted to go?

A series of bluffs and strands ran down to the water’s edge, which was frantic with fish life and seemed some sort of bird paradise as well. Tay dove away from them for the water, and for a moment Rain thought she might have lost her rice otter forever, but after a half hour’s frolic Tay returned, its hair slicked back and some sort of weed in its teeth, a very happy look on its face.

Rain and Tip found a kind of cave with a little ledge in front of it, almost a front porch with a river view. A single room, not too deep, nothing scary asleep inside but for a few bats in the ceiling. What could be better? Tay brought them some fish, and Tip, who’d come equipped with a flintstone, struck up a small fire. Whatever fish it was, he baked it wrapped in whatever greens. It was the best meal Rain had ever eaten.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she was suddenly sitting bolt awake. The bats were screeching in pitches too high to hear; they were saying something like “Oh!” and “No!” and “Blow!” Tip was gone, and Tay was asleep in some richly enviable dream. Rain leapt to her feet, her senses as alert as an animal’s, and cried out, not even in words.

The fire had gone down and she stepped in the embers in her haste, because she had heard Tip moan, perhaps. She fell to her hands and knees and looked over the edge of the bluff. Tip lay six or eight feet below, on his chest.

She remembered someone called Zackers, but not what or where about him. “Tip?” she called.

The moon was lowering at this hour but there was enough light still for her to see an animal of some sort, an overgrown grite perhaps, and a partner or mate behind it, growling and tensing to jump.

She reached for the first thing her hand fell upon, the shell, and she almost threw it, but something stopped her. “Blow!” said the bats. She put the broken tip to her lips and puffed up her cheeks and forced air through the aperture as if it were a trumpetina.

The sound screeched like ogre’s fingernails on an ogre’s slate, and any remaining bats in the cave fled the premises permanently. But so did the grites. Then Rain slithered down to crouch beside Tip and check to see how hurt he was.

Not very, it turned out. He wouldn’t admit until the next morning that he had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee off the edge of their cliffporch, and misjudged. So, maybe not so hot to be a boy, thought Rain, but she didn’t say so.

She remembered the Clock crashing down a slope the time her forgotten companions had come across the Ivory Tiger in the poppy fields. That earthquake. And the other time, when the Clock slid off into Kellswater, up to its gills in fatal water. Now Tip himself was hurt from a fall. To aim high—to risk the prospect—well, there was no assurance of safety. Ever. As the world turned, it kept sloping itself into new treacheries. To live at all meant to risk falling at every step.

He couldn’t walk just yet; his ankle or his shin was bruised. He could hardly name the location of the pain, and Rain couldn’t tell. She wished Little Daffy were here. “A day’s rest won’t hurt,” she said.

“You are in such a hurry, can’t stop to help relieve an unmilked cow. So you should go on without me,” he taunted her.

She didn’t reply, just went scavenging for breakfast.

Later. “You saved my life, you know. Those overgrown grites were a nasty branch of the grite family. They were all ready to jump. I couldn’t have fended them off for long, or gotten away. After all this, to be eaten by beasts in the wild! A certain mythic justice, probably, but no fun for me.”

“After all this?” said Rain. And now, since she had saved his life, he more or less had to tell her something. Otherwise he’d have died and she wouldn’t even have known a thing about him, really.

“I know you were a fairly useless butler to Miss Ironish,” she declared.

“A studied ineffectuality,” he protested. “Kept me from being pestered for ever more boring chores.”

This is what he told her. He had come to Shiz from Munchkinland a year or so before he had met her in St. Prowd’s. He was an orphan but had escaped from the house of the person who had both raised him and imprisoned him. “A single woman,” said Tip. “A powerful and important woman, who had dozens of minions at her beck and call. I never knew why she paid attention to me, but she kept me closest of all, under her eye and in her chambers. I couldn’t bear it. All the time the ministers of war came and went, and I had to crouch on a stool behind her formal chair.”

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