Page 180 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She pulled open the door of a wardrobe and removed a couple of broken umbrellas, making room so she could duck inside to hide in the event of necessity. In another piece, a huge linen press, she found a bottom drawer two feet longer than she was herself, and deep enough to sleep in. She took a pillow from yet another drawer and arranged herself a bed in case this festival of political mortification went all night and she was stuck here unable to move. On a second pillow she set the shell, for safekeeping. She even found a royal chamber pot tagged with a stamped provenance: OZMA THE BILIOUS. Well, she’d use that if she had to.

“There will be pastries at the tradesmen’s entrance in half an hour,” said Brrr. “You can be my assistant until a certain moment, then when I give the signal, you’d better make yourself scarce.”

At Brrr’s side, she hung out at the door, listening to the city come alive. Horsemen tethered their steeds to stanchions of iron; vendors showed up to sell early chestnuts, stale bread, apricots, onion tarts—mushy and a little rank. Sometimes she heard what Brrr muttered to her, a who’s who of contemporary Oz. The Lord Mayor of Shiz, here to represent all of Gillikin. A Scrow chieftain identifying himself as Shem Ottokos, to witness for some of the tribes of the Vinkus. “The Yunamata won’t cede to him rights of representation,” whispered Brrr, “but whoever knows what the Yunamata think about governance? They don’t even use hair combs.”

The delegation from the Quadling Country was late. Rain caught a lot of eye rolling. She overheard someone say, “You know the squelchyfolk.

But the Quadlings, ah, the Quadlings,

Slimy, stupid, curse-at-godlings…

They probably got lost in the big city.”

Then the advance party of the victors began to assemble—the Munchkinlanders. Most of them were squat and small, like Little Daffy. Others were more rangy, with their small breasts and big pelvises, kangaroo-folk as Rain had heard it put about at street corners.

Militia in dress habillard, ministers in robes of office, a few key generals called in from the field. Brrr wondered if General Jinjuria, who had held the terrain beyond Haugaard’s Keep for much of the past decade, would be arriving to witness, but she didn’t show up. On reflection, the Lion realized that any conquering leader who had the capacity to change her visage daily to capitalize on shifting opinions of beauty and glamour woul

d probably be less than happy to have a popular female general known as the Foill of Munchkinland descending to divert attention away from her superior.

“Time to take your hiding place,” he murmured to Rain.

She looked both ways before slipping into the shadows. Everyone was busy with pots of ink and stacks of vellum, books of legal doctrine. Arguing over seating and who took precedence over whom. It was easy to disappear in plain sight.

Once inside the forest of furniture, she scrabbled this way and that to reclaim her vantage point. Memory, which rarely came together for her, woke up a little. This was like crawling around Lady Glinda’s bedroom, back in Mockbeggar Hall, the time they’d all been crowded into a single room. Would Lady Glinda arrive to witness the historic moment? Rain craned to look. The first person to come into her line of vision, appearing a little lost, was Tip.

Rain caught her breath. It hadn’t been long since they’d seen each other, but so much had happened in the meantime—the news of her father’s having been magicked into the form of an Animal, and of his death in that form. The assault by dragons upon the storied Emerald City. So Tip seemed different, in just those few weeks. One could change that fast. What had happened to him? What had he put himself through, and for whom? For her? Or for Mombey?

The earlier anxieties metastasized now there was so much to be lost. What if Tip had only stayed at her side until they had gotten to Kiamo Ko, where they found out that both Liir and the Grimmerie had been taken into custody? Had Tip been using her to locate her father and the book for Mombey, his admitted guardian? What if the abduction of her father hadn’t yet happened? Would Tip have stolen the volume and left her that way instead of the way he did?

A cold dampness covered her skin. She’d been used. He’d been planted somehow in her cupboard to seduce her, to learn her secrets. When she’d had no more to yield, he’d left her. On the double.

She huddled behind a varnished oak column carved with volutes and wooden ivy. Tay writhed at her ankles. Rain couldn’t breathe, just looking at how Tip moved cautiously into the open arena, holding himself in a new way. Stiff. Uncertain. Stronger. More supple. Or was it less supple?

Additional impedimenta were being hauled in. Some minions with fans, in case the heat grew oppressive. Some other lackeys with braziers in case of chill. Someone set up fifteen music stands and fifteen music stools, and moments later someone else came along and ordered them taken away again. Tip circulated, his eyes at the roof level, as if he were part of the guard detail, making effort to fortify the premises. But he looked goofy doing that.

The room was coming to order. There was no chair for Tip; clearly he had no formal role here. His pacing slowed down. Luck was playing games with Rain and Tip both: he paused in the very quadrant of the large hall in which Rain had hidden herself, and he began to hunt among the furniture for someplace to lean. He moved a few feet in under the overhang, where a low desk gave him a perch. He was in the next alcove to Rain’s, and an arched opening allowed her to see him through hat racks and the legs of overturned tables.

Was he honing in on her whereabouts as he might have done at St. Prowd’s? Was she a lodestone to his compass needle, that he should pick this section of the space to loiter? More certain than ever that something was amiss, she knew she must back away. As soon as she could breathe, and before she could die. But Tay slithered in the shadows and wriggled forward to wreathe Tip’s ankles the way the lake otter had been cavorting around Rain’s own, with a teasing alertness.

Tip was magnificently composed, Rain saw. His chin never dropped to indicate he’d noticed Tay. His eyes remained trained on the lintels of the room, the struts in the ceiling, as if flying monkeys intent on attack might be lurking in the shadows. His cheeks reddened and his breathing quickened.

The ground was shifting beneath her feet, and she must leap one way or the other.

On the basis of those involuntary clues—the beauty of how his body responded—she would leap toward hope, this time, and trust he was not Mombey’s agent. If he was to give her away, let him do it now, so she would know. She couldn’t live any longer without knowing one way or the other.

Tay returned to Rain, soundlessly. A furniture warehouse seemed as natural a habitat for a rice otter as a swamp, the way that green spirit moved about it.

Rain began to wriggle her way through the maze of tight spaces. Tip folded his arms across his chest, in the manner of a man hard to please but cautiously satisfied with what he saw. He backed up against the nearest pillar. He sank his right hand in the sash of his tunic, as if looking for peanuts or a key or a handkerchief. He put his left hand around the edge of the glossy polished cylinder, and Rain caught it. She was on her knees in the shadows, behind the pillar, kissing his fingertips, moving her mouth against his soft cupped palm, which had opened to receive her chin. She grazed his fingertips again with her lips, and parted her lips to take two fingers into her mouth.

“All unauthorized service force, five minutes,” bellowed Avaric. “We will clear the hall for the dignitaries.”

Factotums, servants, attachés, and minor satraps scurried, sending dust motes to eddy into the light slanting down from a ring of clerestory windows just below the shallow dome. More gentlefolk and fiercefolk from Munchkinland arrived. Though the hall became fuller and warmer, the noise began to subdue itself. Would he be forced to leave, her Tip, or had he received clearance to stay? She tugged at his wrist: come, come. She pulled him backward into the shadows and stood to meet him face-to-face.

“I may not be seen to disappear again,” he whispered.

“They know you’re here, they know you haven’t left,” she whispered back. “Have you left? Have you left me, Tip?” But if she’d ever known anything before in her life, she knew the answer now by looking at his face. He had not left her. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go. How will you find me again?”

“But you gave me a map. Of course I’ll find you.”

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