Page 166 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“We’ll find our way out tomorrow,” said Dorothy. “I think there’s some song about that. There ought to be.”

The next morning they woke up even more lost. A bank of fog canted from the warmish earth into the chilling air, rather thicker than what they might have expected at this time of year. It wasn’t only visibility that gave out, but also sound. Stifled. A clammy tightness seemed to filter through the lower branches, as if the air was congested. Any leaves much above head level dissolved into a pale ruddy glow.

“You stay close to me, Tay,” said Rain.

“Shall we sing to keep up our nerve?” asked Dorothy. No one bothered to reply.

Then Brrr paused and said, “I know what this is. Or I think I do.”

He had spoken so seldom recently that they were all surprised. They waited for him to continue.

“I saw this once before, this trick of atmospherics. When I was hardly more than a cub. I think this is the Ozmists. But what are they doing so far south? We can’t have wandered off course so badly that we missed Shiz and entered the Great Gillikin Forest? That’s where they live, as I

understood it.”

“Not a chance,” said Mr. Boss, who of them all had traveled the widest in Oz, and for the longest time. “We’d’ve had to cross the rail line to the Pertha Hills, and we never did. So we’re still west of the forest and west of Shiz. Though whether we’re heading south still or have veered some other way I can’t say in this swamp of wet tissues. Anyhow, I never heard of any Ozmists. Who are they? The essence of royalists gone to ground, literally, and their appetite for the crown seeping up?”

Brrr spoke with more urgency than he’d shown for weeks. From this new danger, a new capacity for governance. “Listen. If something comes over us—everyone—listen carefully. You must not ask them any questions if you don’t have something to tell them in return.”

“But Ozmists,” demanded Rain. “We don’t know about them.”

“They’re particles of ghosts, I think,” hurried the Lion, “ghosts who can’t congeal into anything like the individuals they once were. Fragments of rotted leaves in a puddle never coalesce into living leaves again. Listen, once I saw a friend lose his way in life by forgetting to give them news. You see, the Ozmists exist—it’s not living, but it is existing, I guess—for their future. Their future, which is our present. They hunger to learn what they couldn’t know in life—and they might answer a question if we chose to ask it. But our question can’t be about now, for they are dead and don’t know now. Now is what they’re hungry for. Our question must be about something in the past that they might have knowledge of—this is important, pay attention! Or you’ll pay too steep a price.”

They heard the tremor in his voice; it was their old Lion, forceful and worried for them, herding them together. They gathered into a circle, and even as he spoke a cloud of sparks seemed to shimmer with its own fulguration, an orgy of lightning bugs packed into a space the size of a stable.

“Hang on,” said Brrr. His voice sounded far away to them though he was right there; they were all right there.

They hung more than stood in a void not like the world. For a while they couldn’t see their feet or paws or hands, just their profiles, like dolmens rendered flat and brooding by soft weather.

Then the Ozmists greeted their audience, just as the Lion remembered it, in one voice, though indistinctly. The way a single head can have a thousand overlapping shadowy profiles if a thousand candles are placed about it. Barter, chuntered the Ozmists.

The companions waited for Brrr to answer for them. Would he have the courage? It took a moment. Or a week.

“I know about barter,” replied Brrr. “What do you want to know?”

Is Ozma returned to the throne of Oz?

“She is not,” said the Lion.

“Not as far as we know,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, we haven’t had news of the Emerald City”—she heard the Lion fake a cough and she amended her statement in time—“not the Emerald City, of course; but we know that Munchkinland is fighting strong to remain independent, holding the line at Haugaard’s Keep, holding the line at the Madeleines, keeping faith with the Glikkuns to the north, and sweeping the poison sand off their thresholds at the desert back door.”

The Ozmists seemed to take a few moments to absorb this considerable punch of news. Where is Ozma? they answered.

“It’s our turn to ask a question,” said Brrr. Rain tugged at his mane to quiet him, but he wouldn’t be silenced. “Where is Nor?”

“No, Brrr, don’t,” whispered Mr. Boss. “Don’t do that.” But the question had been asked.

The Lion waited as the lights spiraled, not unlike the waltz of corpuscles that sometimes trickle across the surface of the eye.

“Where is Nor?” asked Brrr again, more firmly still. “I know how this works. I’ve been here before. We’ve answered your question. Now you answer ours. You can’t hold out on us.”

There is nothing of Nor here, came the reply.

“She isn’t dead? But of course she’s dead,” murmured Little Daffy.

We consist only of the appetites that would not die, the Ozmists churned. There was nothing of her left that wanted to know more. This is how it is with some deaths. We know little more about where her spirit is than we know about the lives of the living. We are caught in the middle by our lust for answers. We are the part of Oz’s past that cannot give up its hope for the present. That is all.

“Since you ask about Ozma,” said Rain, “then it follows that she isn’t there with you. But perhaps Ozma, like Nor, has passed into nothingness. She was only an infant when she was killed. She could have no appetite for the present; she was too young to know the difference between past and present and time to come.”

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