Page 175 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Tay came and led us here,” said Brrr. And there was Tay, hanging back, green as a goblin’s hoard, whiskering now up to Rain’s ankles.

Rain told the Lion she didn’t believe her father was in the EC; the attack coming from the east must prove he and the book had been abducted by the Munchkinlanders.

“So we’ll go there,” said the Lion. “No?”

“Not yet. There’s too much to do here.”

The Lion didn’t reply at first. Then he said, “Well, tell me what to do.”

“I have no plan. Never did. But if Munchkinland is winning this war, their army will enter the city before long. W

e’ll wait and greet them when they come. If the Grimmerie is important enough to La Mombey, she’ll bring it with her, and she’ll bring my father with it.”

“Any day we wait might be a day she takes his life,” said Brrr.

“Any day we wait might be—” began Rain, but she was fully awake now. Dorothy was rousing from under a greasy tarpaulin of some sort, yawning. The first work beckoned—finding breakfast for those children living under the steps on the far side of the bridge. So Rain’s reticence kicked in. “Where’s Little Daffy? And Mr. Boss?”

“They’ve come forward, despite their apprehensions. She’s liberating decoctions from ruined apothecaries and administering them as best she can. And she’s bossing Mr. Boss around to help her. We’ll meet up with them later, if we survive the day.”

“We’ll survive this day,” said Rain, grinning. “The Ozmists are strengthening daily, don’t you think?” It was true. As the day advanced, the mist thickened. It made travel difficult but also safer in some ways, and the sound of attacks from dragons was limited to ever more circumscribed neighborhoods.

On the fourth day Candle arrived by broom, accompanied by Iskinaary and the venerable old Eagle named Kynot. She found Rain at the edge of the Ozma Fountain, rinsing the sores on what was left of the legs of a teenage pickpocket. Rain hardly looked at her, just handed her mother a roll of bandage and explained what needed to be done. Only in the evening, when Candle crowded under the bridge with Dorothy, Rain, the others, did the daughter learn what the mother had done. But Candle brought out her news slowly, cautiously.

“I remembered that Nor could learn to fly the broom as a young woman,” said Candle, lying on stones, her eyes closed and one palm over her forehead, the other palm tucked into Rain’s two hands. “I thought: maybe the ability to fly isn’t given just to the young or to the talented, but to the needy, too. In any event, if I couldn’t fly on the broom, I thought you might. I found the thing and I mastered it. Well, let me be honest. I didn’t master the art of flying, but I managed it.”

“You managed,” murmured Rain, apprehending the feel of her mother’s palm but almost asleep herself. “How did you know how to find me?”

Candle said, “But that’s the intuition. The seeing the present. You may have it too, someday, if you don’t have it yet.”

“I can’t see my own toenails,” said Rain. “Too tired.”

“Tomorrow we’ll start in Quadling Quarter,” said Little Daffy to Mr. Boss. “There’s a nasty rash flushing up on the hindquarters of the squelchyfolk that I don’t like the look of one bit. We’ll boil up some unguent in that copper laundry tub you nicked from the kitchen yard of Fancy-Pantsie House or whatever it was called.”

“Never marry a dominatrix,” said Mr. Boss, and he rolled over to snore himself silly.

“Have you heard what has happened to your father?” whispered Candle, once everyone else had gone silent.

Rain tried to find in herself some capacity for knowing the present. All she could know of the present was exhaustion. “I have not,” she admitted.

Her mother sat up. “Ready yourself, Rain.”

“I’m never ready for this,” she replied. “But tell me.”

Candle spoke carefully, drawing each phrase from her mouth like a rounded stone she could set down in a line, barely touching the next. “An old friend. Saw your father. Bewitched into a foreign corpus. And die on a cart. That Eagle named Kynot. He broke with the habit. Of Birds. To stay aloof. He sent out word. To let me know. For Liir had been an honorary Bird once. Before you were born.”

“What can Eagles know?” whispered the haunted child.

“Liir was born a bastard. He flew as a Bird. As an Elephant he was hauled across the border into Munchkinland. He has died inside that skin. I’m afraid this is so, dear Rain. I cannot see it otherwise.”

Rain wept a little. The tears were hard as ice. Dorothy sat up, eyes closed. Her shoulders shook just a moment, and then she sleep-hummed a tune of mourning or condolence, something that seemed to provide her some comfort. Perhaps for once her melody comforted the others, too. Though Rain didn’t expect to sleep, she drifted off holding her mother’s hands, dreaming of her father’s hands.

The shreds and selvage of a life, her own or her father’s—she couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

Iskinaary kept a vigil by the bridge, his eye for Liir dry.

By the fifth day there was nothing left for the dragons to attack but the great dome of the Palace of the Emperor. It alone rose above the bank of Ozmists that had saved the City of Emeralds from annihilation. As the sole final target of the dragons, the dome suffered tremendous damage, though not as much damage as the pickpocket, the proctor, the laundress or the nursery orphan. It never collapsed upon the palace, but it remained scarred and defiant in the fog of history.

Midday, the dragons were called off. Almost immediately the Ozmists began to thin, but not to disperse. At dusk on the fifth day, La Mombey entered the Emerald City triumphant. A pack of nearly visible spider-thugs on their furry scrabbling stems surrounded her gilded sledge, which ran along the drifts of silted ash as neatly as if they were drifts of snow.

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