Page 182 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Now? Dreadfully inconvenient. But very well. You’ll have to clear the hall.” Mombey waved her hand.

“You’ll need his wife. It’s only right and proper,” said the Cowardly Lion, and he sent for Candle.

“People, I want this finished,” said La Mombey. “If I’m to do what I can to return this Liir to his human form—hoping he doesn’t go and die on us in the operation—I’ll need to freshen up.”

The room never completely emptied. Underlings hastened about, scribes made copies by hand for an orgy of signatures. Rain and Tip remained in the shadows, warm from their romancing, thrillingly shy of garments. Learning every inch of each other’s forms using every measure at their disposal.

By evening most of the dignitaries had left. Under orders of the ascending Throne Minister of Oz, the great Varquisohn carpet had been shifted to the center of the vast concourse. Upon it waited some implements of her trade.

Only a dozen or two witnesses remained when La Mombey emerged from behind a screen. Brrr thought she was displaying a latent tendency to slumming. She returned not as a goddess in wings of hammered gold but as the Crone of a Thousand Years, almost Kumbricia-like in her hobbledyhoyness. Her skirts were patched, and a bonnet sat on her head large enough to house a pair of alley cats. Rain, peering from her hideout, found Mombey smaller and more humble than expected—almost dumpy. Her shoulders were stooped as if she’d suffered rickets in childhood, and her chins seemed doughy and marmy. Around her shoulders she wore a woven shawl whose warp looked like dead ivy and whose weft was made of broken twigs.

“Mombey as she used to look in the old days,” whispered Tip. “I never expected to see her like this again.”

On a small black iron plate Mombey lit four coals. Into the throats of a trio of bottles of sarsaparilla or something she had plunged the feathers of a peacock. She set two keys down in a definitive way. “The Key of Material Disposition,” she said fatuously, “and the Key to Everything Else.” She seemed to be enjoying herself.

Rain and Tip dressed each other slowly so as not to allow a single rustle of garment. Their fingers lingering over ties, traced skin underneath the clothes as far as hands could reach. Tip sucked every button on the back of Rain’s simple shift. Rain lifted the chain off her neck and put it around Tip’s, where the red locket dropped behind the breastplate of his dress habillards. At last, decent, having returned to each other the disguise of their clothes, they stood, holding their hands together, all four of them knotted.

Rain couldn’t help feel that lying with Tip had brought her father back to life, a little, just as Liir’s lying with Candle had brought her to life, once upon a time. It was a sentiment only, but it suffused her.

Candle arrived with her domingon. Next to the sorceress Candle looked like the evening nurse. She didn’t bow or make other obeisance. She merely sat on the floor and put her domingon into her lap.

She’ll be a good help, thought Rain. She’d had experience drawing the human disguise off Princess Nastoya, just before I was born. Seeing the present: she can see what of Liir might still remain alive.

And she knows I’m here, thought Rain; she’s like that. But she’s protecting me with her silence.

Workers swung open the double doors of the loading dock and dragged the cart inside. It almost didn’t clear the lintel. Upon it lay the gently steaming form of the Black Elephant. Rain’s father, if word was to be believed. Alive somewhere, somehow, inside.

“Smoke and mirrors, don’t nobody ever tell ’em nothing?” snorted Mombey. Her voice had lost its toney veneer; she sounded like a common hill witch taking a holiday in town. “Everyone sit down, and do as I say. This will take a little concentration. I had a nice supper but it’s been quite a week and I want to make sure we get this right the first time. Are the doors barred? Light the candles, those ones there.”

The Lion nodded. Avaric and the Emperor took their places on the simple bench. Rain and Tip shuddered in the shadows. The Elephant, in this musty failing light, looked like a giant delivery of coal. Tay sat on the closed eyes of the stone knight. Upon her domingon, Candle struck up a tonic plangetive.

Herbs were brought out, and a magical powder of some sort. Maybe it was just a localized pyrotechnical conceit, for drama. The vapor was scented now of violets, now of a camphorous licorice.

Rain leaned against Tip’s shoulder. Everything was about to change once again. Her father would awaken. He was no longer a threat to Mombey now that the Grimmerie had been impounded. As the final condition of his uncle’s surrender, he would be liberated. Rain’s family would be reunited. A normalcy that Rain had never known might be waiting to punish them all.

But what would happen to Tip in all this? Mombey’s chosen boy? Would there be a place to which Rain and Tip

might slip away, far from the Palace of the People, far from the clasping arms of parents who had never, could never get enough of holding their arrogantly independent daughter?

But they had made her so.

Twenty fingers intertwined, pulling, twisting, pushing back. Make me hurt, thought Rain, while I can feel something, in case I die during this and fail to feel anything again.

“It’s a stubborn enough spell,” muttered Mombey, and she began to refresh some aspects of it, picking up a little way back for momentum.

“Perhaps he’s already a bit deader than I figured,” she apologized a half an hour later. “I trust this isn’t going to present an insurmountable problem to His Sacredness.”

“Call me Shell,” said the Emperor.

“Liir is a quiet sort, but he’s never been much of a team player,” observed Brrr.

“Now you tell me,” complained Mombey, and started once again.

Another twenty minutes and she began to get alarmed. “I’m getting interference,” she complained. “Something is not right. I don’t believe this lad has the nuggets needed to block me. My power is honed over a hundred years.” She turned one of the keys at an angle to the other, then put it back the way it had been before.

“He’s the son of a witch,” said the Cowardly Lion. “Elphaba Thropp. Don’t forget that.”

“Never met the bitch,” murmured Mombey. She began to be lost in chanting. Her hands elevated, swanning about, making patterns of the smoke that issued from the scorching coals.

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