Page 157 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She put it to her ear for the thousandth time and tried to make out a sound beyond the hush. It was fruitless, as usual, after such a noisy night of cryptic dream messages. She fell asleep that way, and when the shell dropped from her cheek an hour later and another fragment of its tip snipped off, she didn’t even hear it.

In the morning there was a note from Tip on the table, pinned in place under the shell.

La Mombey may not be the one to have taken the Grimmerie, and your father. Then again, she might be. I will find out. I know we can’t bring Dorothy back to Munchkinland. I am the only one who can get in safely. Mombey will punish me but not torment me—though I am not her son, I am her only family. She will forgive me and I will learn what is to be learned.

Don’t worry about my leaving by night. The jackal moon has lit up the path like torches. I will be safe.

And I will come back to you.

Love, Tip

6.

They had beaten him at first, chained him naked and whipped him in the hot sunlight filtering through the canopy of a dunderhead pine. Riverines of blood drained down his calves and made carmine socks over his heels and arches. The dripping resin from sap stung in his wounds. They weren’t as merciless as they might have been. When he loosed his bowels upon his calves they realized that they’d gone too far, and then someone had the sloppy job of cleaning him up because he couldn’t move his spine. They were gentler after that. Apparently they didn’t want him to die en route.

They were careful to conceal their destination.

Five of them. Men of few words, quick movements, each one of them athletically taut—sleek and trained. Professional abductors. Once they reached the base of the Kells they slaughtered the skark, for target practice as far as Liir could tell, or to alarm him. They continued on horseback. Liir had never been much of a rider; with his hands tied behind his back he was in constant danger of falling off and being dragged to death. Clever, one of them figured out a way to harness Liir’s shoulders loosely to the horse’s bridle, so he would have to fall forward if he blacked out from loss of blood.

“Just waiting to bleed, weren’t you,” was the only phrase he heard at first. “Just saving it up for us to wring it out of you. Some are like that.” But the speaker was hushed, perhaps so as not to give away an accent of origin.

They avoided farmsteads. If they had to venture into villages they waited until dusk, when they stuffed Liir’s mouth with rags and hooded his head so he couldn’t see where they were going. But in the open country, night or day, they left his head bare, and he could tell they were continuing east, picking their way into Gillikin. But how far? If to the Emerald City, they’d need to turn south soon enough. If all the way to Munchkinland, sooner or later they’d meet up with the battle lines of the soldiers of Loyal Oz. They’d have to find a way to break through somehow. Any chance to escape would come in a moment of panic and confusion.

But his kidnappers were seasoned soldiers.

Not any older than Liir was, but hardened in a different way. How can I feel that I belong to a different species, he wondered, not for the first time in his life.

He could intuit no chink of friendship, imagine no possibility of cozening up to his captors. They steeled themselves against that. They didn’t drink. They didn’t joke with one another, even. Most of their days were spent in silence.

Though he’d never been one to consider weeping a weakness, Liir didn’t weep. The contusion on his brow from when he had slipped and fallen against a boulder, unable to stop himself because of his yoked arms—that was a badge of honor. The ache in his thighs from riding, the split lip from that mailed hand across his face—he could taste the blood two or three times a day, as the wound kept reopening with the jolting in the saddle—he treasured these, in a way. Tokens, medallions of his love for his daughter. If the soldiers had him, they might soften their hunt for her. His job since the day Rain had been born had been to keep her as safe as he could.

In some ways, though, he wasn’t functioning well. He couldn’t eat much because of his lip, not to mention the lost teeth in the back. (They’d pulled a couple for fun, to see if he would read the Grimmerie for them, and

there had been so much pus and pain he couldn’t talk for two days. At least the sacrificed teeth were in the back, so if he ever had to bite a hand he could at least try. And he still had his beautiful smile, ha-ha.)

His grip on now and then began to soften. The heat brought on mild slips of focus. At times he thought he was being captured by Cherrystone’s men, following that time he’d been stationed in Quadling Country, in Qhoyre. After he’d helped torch the bridge at Bengda, with Ansonby and Burny and the other fellows. After he’d seen the Quadling parents, their own backs sporting wings of fire, slinging their daughter into the water, hoping she might clear the burning oil on the river, hoping she might survive somehow. He wept for that little girl now. He would never know if she had made it, or if he had succeeded in fulfilling his military mission and murdering her and her parents. He deserved to be caught at last, though Cherrystone would be clapping him on the back, rum chap, for a campaign carried out successfully. Liir would make Prime Menacier if he could be forgiven for skedaddling.

Daughters. The girl should have been able to fly above the flaming waters. But who could teach daughters to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.

He once thought he was crossing the Disappointments on horseback, Trism on a mount just behind him. It was dawn, a rimefrost was on the ground, but however Liir twisted, he couldn’t catch sight of his lover.

Other times Liir thought he’d reached the sanctuary of Nether How. The men on horseback around him seemed to shimmer and disappear, and the horses too, and Liir, the scourge of Oz, was continuing alone, on foot. He wanted to sleep against a hill, he wanted to fall into the falling leaves. To melt away the soil as he might melt away a snowbank. To sink into a grave he had burned for himself. But as he lay there in the dappled grass among the sheep droppings, he began to elevate out of his body—maybe he was dying—and he saw an old codger materialize in the trees and look about with a curious or perhaps a guilty expression. He carried the Grimmerie with him. He consulted the book for a moment, closed it decisively, and headed north.

This time Liir shouted out, “You have no right to plant that danger here! Take it back! We don’t want it!”

But the horsemen reemerged and cuffed him silent. He was on a horse, being taken somewhere by men to whom he’d never been properly introduced.

He noticed the jackal moon, sooner or later, and remembered the last time he’d seen it. That was just before he met Candle and fell in love with her, before he met Trism and fell in love with him. The jackal moon was no friend to love. Fall under its spell and look what happens. Your wife never forgives you for giving her a child who must be hidden to survive. Your boyfriend never returns. You have your life, that scrappy thing you keep dragging after you as long as you can. Less visible than the weightless shadow you also drag but oh, so much heavier. You have your hopes for your daughter. You have little else.

Except the damn book.

He turned his head from the jackal moon, unwilling to meet its eye. Cutting it in society. You’ve already had your truck with me. I’m not going to scombre in the snowdrifts for you like a poodle. Look elsewhere, jackal. Hunt up some other jerk. I want no more love and no more regret than the investments I’ve already made.

It was a better day. Maybe more protein in the diet, or his blood was slowly replenishing itself. He was more alert. He realized that by now they must have passed any turnoff to the Emerald City. They’d been weeks on the road, no? They were approaching a range of low hills spiked with the scorched trunks of scrub pine. Maybe torched to reduce coverage for snipers. The Madeleines, probably. So he worked it out. They were coming up near the border between Gillikin and Munchkinland, where the second army of the Emerald City was said to be in fierce hostilities with an Animal contingent roped up by the Munchkinlanders. Though he could read no sign of activity at the moment. Were they going to try to make a run for it, cross the breach of wasteland?

Or maybe hostilities had been concluded, miraculously. It could happen. Wars stop eventually, don’t they? If not in our own lifetimes, surely peace hies into sight for our children?

Around midafternoon on a day of dry, hurrying winds that whipped the first leaves of autumn around the horses’ hooves, the captors stopped. An outcropping of feldspar trusset, sparkling with mica, big enough to be a landmark.

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