Page 184 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Go away. What you couldn’t see when she was in disguise you can’t see now. All human forms are disguises. And you claim to be sacred? You know nothing but the shell of people, nothing. Go away.”

Liir sat up in the gloom and spoke for the first time, across the insensate body of his daughter. “Go away,” he agreed. “She has nothing for you.”

“She holds both the future and the past,” said Shell, wringing his hands.

“No more than the rest of us,” said Liir, and pitched a shoe at His Sacredness.

Near dawn, Dorothy came by the tent, exhausted from a night of revelry. Liir was asleep inside and she said again that she didn’t want to bother him. She joined Brrr, who was still sitting guard outside. “Something’s got to give,” she said. “I can’t go on like this. Here, I brought a flagon of freshwater. They’re saying that Mombey has been taken into custody.”

“Oh, they’ll say a lot, won’t they,” said the Lion huskily. “Get to the point. What are they saying about that Tip?”

“Not much.”

“Can you find out a little more?”

“Are you asking me to be a spy?” Dorothy smiled wanly. “Look, Brrr. I’ll do what I can. A lot of the Quadling army has removed itself to the Plains of Kistingame, along with the dragons. I can go sniff around there.”

“Dorothy, you think pretty highly of yourself, but even you risk trouble traipsing among an army of angry soldiers. You watch yourself. They came to conquer, and they feel themselves tricked into surrender. They’ll take it out on you.”

“Toto’s a little nipper. He’ll see me safe.”

“He’s dead asleep in your basket.”

Iskinaary emerged from the tent, shaking his head. He’d been keeping vigil too. “I’ll go with you, Dorothy. And I’ll bet General Kynot can send us a couple of Falcons.”

“Father Goose,” said Brrr.

“Don’t start,” said Iskinaary.

“The truth is,” said Dorothy, “I’d rather have something useful to do than sit here and wait.” She twisted her hands together looking, Brrr guessed, perhaps a little bit like that Auntie Em. He remembered his theory that the young Dorothy may once have had a crush on the Witch’s boy. Liir was solidly middle-aged while she was only now becoming marriageable. She’d come back to Oz too late, to a man who got away by growing up faster than she could. She’s had to put up with an awful lot, our Miss Dorothy, thought the Cowardly Lion. Meeting up with Liir if she doesn’t have to is one adventure I can see she’d rather avoid.

“Send word if you find anything out about Tip,” said Brrr fondly. “And while I don’t make the plans for this group, I’m guessing that as soon as Liir and Rain are well enough to be moved, the family will want to evacuate this tent and get out of the City. We can work out details later.”

On the sixth day, Little Daffy sat back on her heels and said to the Lion, “Come, you, we’re going to the Corn Exchange to try to scare up some flour wholesale so I can bake something and open up a little commercial concern of my own.”

“You can manage without me,” said Brrr.

“You heard me,” said the Munchkinlander. “With everything still in flux I never know if the good people of the Emerald City are going to set their dogs upon a humble Munchkin farm woman plying her trade.” She meant what she said. Certainly the Lion would prove a more useful defense than her dwarfish husband. But Brrr realized that she too was ready to let the Thropp family alone for a few hours, to come to what peace they might. And Dorothy thought the Lion should take himself out of the picture too.

Liir and Candle alone in the tent, Rain as catatonic upon the pallet as her father had been in his cart. Liir thought, I’ve given to her all the worst of my traits. If I had lost the will to live, for a time, how could I hope that she might be stronger? I’ve shared nothing with my daughter but my fear of inconsequence, that which has plagued me from my first days.

“In your disguise as an Animal, where did you go?” said Candle to him. The first direct remark she’d made since he’d been abducted from the castle in the west. The absence of the guardian Lion was giving her license to speak, it seemed.

Liir had thought about this. “The soldiers plying Mombey’s charm of bewitchment gave me a bigger choice than they thought. They believed it was a superficial charm, and perhaps in some persons it might have been. The hide of an Elephant, the guise of one. But I remembered how Princess Nastoya had lived as a human. Despite her long concealment she never stinted from embracing the fullness of a disguise, its meaning—she learned as much as she could about how to be a human while trapped inside the human’s form. Even though she wanted liberty from the disguise, in the end, so she could die an Animal. I thought perhaps she had made the wiser choice. I thought she had managed to become a human better than I, born one, had yet done. I thought I would rather die an Animal.

“A cowardly choice, perhaps,” he admitted, but Candle had said nothing.

“You didn’t help train the dragons to attack the city.”

“No, I didn’t. That was Trism.”

“I know who it must have been.”

They looked at opposite panels in the walls of the tent.

“In the end, Trism knew enough about dragons to do the job himself,” she said. “They never needed the Grimmerie, did they. After all that. After our ruined lives. They didn’t need you to read the book, nor Rain.”

All the wasted time running, hiding. All the years.

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