Page 185 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“No,” he admitted through his tears. “They only needed time—the time it took for Trism to experiment, over and over, with what he had learned from that one page of the Grimmerie torn out by Elphaba Thropp, those years ago, and given to the Wizard of Oz. Time to work it out. Once they’d gotten the book at last, they found—ha!—that Trism couldn’t read the book. They wanted me to try but I refused. It was then I must have chosen not to come back—to stay an Elephant, let the disguise kill me. Mombey was enraged. She tried to read the book, too. I don’t know how she managed the other evening, for she couldn’t crack it open when she had it in her hands.”

“Of course I know how she managed. Rain was there. The book obeyed her, not Mombey. The book itself brought the spell forward.”

“Rain didn’t do a thing.”

Candle rolled her eyes. “You didn’t do a thing. No, listen to me. You didn’t do a thing to stop any of this. You didn’t open the book to try to learn how to turn the dragons against their masters. You didn’t halt the attack in which very few families in the Emerald City failed to lose a loved one. You didn’t make any effort to … to call fire down upon the dragon hordes. You didn’t move to stop an assault that pitched itself against your own daughter.”

“I didn’t know she was here, of course.”

“Where else would she be?”

Liir thought of the girl thrown off the bridge at Bengda, the bridge he as a young soldier had set fire to. It was a bridge that had never stopped burning, and it never would. A child who had never stopped falling through the night, and she never would.

He said, “I haven’t the words to answer you. The Grimmerie has brought nothing but grief to every soul who has used it. I wouldn’t use it against my kind—Loyal Ozian or Munchkinlander—even if

I had ceased to be my own kind.”

Candle said, “That is not like you, Liir. That is vile. It is inhuman.”

“I do not claim,” he admitted, “to have made the human choice.”

8.

When Brrr looked into the tent flaps the next morning, Rain was sitting up in the cot. “No, don’t leave,” she said to the Cowardly Lion. “I know already.”

He shrugged. Liir got up and went out to find some facilities to use, to shave. The weather was coming in colder and they couldn’t stay in a tent much longer, if Rain was to continue to recover. Candle, who after last night wasn’t yet talking to her husband, left too but in a separate direction. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss sat down in the sun outside with a coffee tin to share. They counted up their earnings. Little Daffy called into the tent, “When is Dorothy going to come home and regale us with tales of her night’s adventures before sacking out to sleep the morning away?”

The Lion intended to keep private his sense of Dorothy’s hope to avoid seeing Liir. “She’s on a mission,” he replied.

“Isn’t she always.”

Rain said in a low voice to the Lion, “You don’t have to pretend. I know. I know it all, Brrr. I know it already.”

He arranged himself as he thought a stone lion in front of a library might do, with dignity and a sense of starch. “Well, everything’s changed,” he said, companionably enough, as if the acrobats had evacuated the arena overnight and a troupe of fire-eating tree elves had arrived to set up instead. “Not such a big surprise. Things do roll on.”

“On the strength of this one accusation against Mombey, the war has been called for Loyal Oz? Who did the calling, then?”

“I have a theory, Rain,” said the Lion. “Hiding in the heart of every downtrodden commoner is where the romance of the crown lives strongest. Alarming, I know. The citizens of Oz struck with mobs and protests, days and nights of rioting, and neither army would take up weapons against them.”

“How is Tip? Brrr, I know what happened. I’m not blind. And I think maybe I’ve always known. Just tell me—how is Tip?”

He had to decide if she was working him to find out what little he knew himself, and had heard, or if she was confessing a knowledge beyond his. Probably the latter. For all her youth she was proving basalt at the bone.

“Dorothy and Iskinaary have gone to reconnoiter. The Goose sent a report via that Wren. Tip is recovering nicely enough, that’s what is said on the streets. The Hall of Approval has been meeting right next door, in our own Aestheticum, to try to work out the proper course of action, but Tip isn’t attending—hasn’t the strength yet.”

“Where is my … where is my friend?” she ventured.

“They’ve made space in a private apartment in Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, which is somewhere on the edge of Goldhaven.”

“With attendants, I assume. An armored guard.”

“Well.” The Lion tried to smile. “An old chum of yours, as I understand it. A woman from Shiz named Miss Ironish. She’s been brought in from St. Prowd’s, since Madame Teastane’s staff and students all fled the city weeks ago and are sitting out the troubles comfortably on the shores at Lake Chorge. Miss Ironish claims to have known Tip in a small but honorable way. Her blameless record convinced the Emperor that she was the right one for the job.”

“And Mombey?”

“Ah, that’s another story. Some say she’s in Southstairs, secreted there for her own safety under cover of darkness. The Palace will neither confirm nor deny that rumor. Others say Mombey accidentally called her own past upon her as she called that of others, and too much corruption crept up in her blood, and she expired of extreme old age as she ought to have done a century ago. That’s hard to confirm or deny either, and the Palace has its reasons for keeping the matter in doubt. They don’t want to be accused by patriotic Munchkinlanders of having assassinated the Munchkinlander Eminence the minute she entered the capital.”

“What do you think?”

---