Page 17 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“About our tenure here, I can make no comment. But I’ve had a grand time helping my daughters learn to read, when I was home on leave, and my granddaughter too. I can make of your stupid little maid a capable reader of simple texts in a month or two. By Summersend, anyway, if we’re here that long. It’s a deal.”

She raised her glass; the edges chinked to seal the wager.

“But you must have a challenge of your own,” he said. “I shall dare you to … oh, what is it you can’t do? Is there anything?”

She hoped he wouldn’t say generate a new strain of prettibell. “I’ve always had Chef, of one name or another,” she said. “I suppose I could enter into the fun of it and learn to prepare a meal on my own.”

“It’s a deal,” he said, and the glasses chinked again. “But really?” he added, as he stood to go. “Even in childhood you had a chef?”

“Mumsy was an Upland,” she said, as if that explained it.

“But didn’t you linger in kitchens and pick things up, as all small children do? Even I did that.”

“I don’t recall much of my childhood,” she told him. “It’s been such a full rich life ever since, I haven’t felt the need to dwell on that simpler time. Life, with whatever it has brought—university one decade, the Throne Ministry of Oz the next. The cultivation of roses and prettibells one year, house arrest another—well, daily life has always seemed distracting enough. Childhood? It’s a myth.”

“Good night, Lady Glinda. And thank you for a very pleasant evening. I shall send for your chambergirl in the next day or two.”

It was late. She dismissed Miss Murth and the girl, but not before thanking Rain for her help. Then Glinda prepared herself for bed. She didn’t need to check with the little mirror to see herself smiling. She believed she had won the hand.

Though as she settled herself upon the pillows, she found herself thinking about childhood. Had she meant what she had said? Had her own childhood really evaporated as thoroughly as all that? Or had she merely forgotten to pay it any attention once she’d left it behind and headed off to school in Shiz?

8.

The third, and as far as she could figure, the last of her early memories. Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentially?

Probably they are not.

Still, this was a memory of autumn. Either it was actual autumn or she was dressing her few memories in contrasting colors, the better to render them distinctive.

Apple trees? Yes, apples. An orchard hugging a slope. Hesitating in its ascent, the incline leveled off several times—built up manually, to accommodate carts, or

maybe the hill just preferred itself like that. This was her only memory to begin with the setting first, and with her entering the place, rather than with herself central as a maypole and the situation emanating from her.

She was wandering about the contorted trunks, trees twisted in their growth by a constant upsweep of wind from the valley. (So there must have been a valley. What lay below? A house? A village? A river? Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail?)

Windfalls jeweled the grass, the colors of russet, burgundy, limeberry, freckled yellow. Fruit hung in the boughs like Lurlinemas ornaments. Leaves twitched as if signaling to one another: she approaches.

Around a certain tree she came upon a wounded bird humped in the grass like an overturned spindle. At first she thought it had bruised its head in an accident, twisted its neck. She had never seen a side-beak merin before.

The eye above the treacherous beak stared at her. She felt herself being pulled into the bird’s gaze, sacrificing her own centrality for a moment. She felt she was being seen and understood by the merin.

The merin is a waterbird, distant cousin to the duck and the swan, though devoid of both the duck’s work ethic and the swan’s narcissism. The unusual bill swivels sideways to filch morsels from other birds. When not in use the beak, on a double-hinged jaw, can swing and tuck backward into creamy neck feathers so that in flight the merin resembles a coat-knob with wings. This merin, the color of a stag-head beetle, didn’t store its beak in its ruff. It merely looked at her and opened its mouth as if to speak.

She hadn’t yet known that some creatures can speak. She did not learn it now—at least not through evidence. But she could tell by the serrated stroke of remark, by the waterfowl’s stuttery smoker’s vowels, that the merin had something specific to say.

She tried to lift the bird but it wouldn’t let her. The subsequent scratches on her forearms, chalk marks at first, slowly beaded up. Crimson stitches on an ivory bolster.

She said, “You’re hurt, but hurting me back won’t help you any.”

It humped itself a few inches away, as much by willpower as by mortal strength, and regarded her with need and fury.

“If I can’t pick you up and take you—”

But where would she have taken it? To some house, some village, some river?

She rolled an apple at it in case it liked apples. The merin knocked it away savagely.

Then—so why did she remember any of this?—she took care of it. She didn’t remember how, just that she did. She found a way to feed it for a while until it had gathered its strength.

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