Page 187 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“I’m told that when you discovered what had happened, you fainted dead away. I thought, when I could think, ‘Well, isn’t that just like a girl.’ ”

“Not funny, Rain. Under the circumstances. How did you find out?”

Rain neither moved away nor did she come closer, and neither did Ozma Tippetarius. They stood nine feet apart on opposite margins of a sunbleached carpet. “I suppose—I don’t know—maybe I dreamed it.”

“You’re lying. You

don’t lie. Have you changed?”

“Well.” She held up her green fingers. “A little.”

Tip waited.

“Tay always liked you,” said Rain, “and Tay didn’t like men, generally.”

“Was that it?”

Rain thought. “Yes, I think that was it.”

“You’ve never even known if Tay is male or female itself, have you? Yet you claim to know how Tay can respond to me, even when a disguise is laid upon me for—for all those years I can’t remember?”

“We’re unlikely to make an acceptable ruling couple,” said Rain. “For one thing, you’re about a hundred years older than I am.”

“Well, I hide it well, don’t I.” The tone was bitter.

“You knew it all along,” said Rain.

“I didn’t. Mombey kept me apart from other children. We always shifted about every few years. I’m told most childhoods feel eternal, Rain. Mine did too. I wasn’t to know it was longer than anyone else’s. Perhaps I wasn’t smart, but grant me that. Or maybe Mombey charmed some sense of calendar out of me. It doesn’t matter. We’ve both had our childhoods filched from us, Rain. There’s that. If there’s nothing else.”

“There’s that,” Rain agreed.

They stole glances at each other, the green girl and the queen of Oz. Those forgotten called forward, against their wishes, into themselves. Rain might as well have been Elphaba at sixteen. Ozma Tippetarius had eyes the color of half-frozen water.

They could not cross the carpet to take each other in their arms. Maybe someday, but not today. More of their childhoods had to be stolen, yet, for that to happen—or maybe some of it returned to them. The charmless future would show them if, and when, and how.

Somewhere

I.

In the streets of the city they were saying that Ozma had come back. Within weeks, illustrated pamphlets in six colors became available at every vendor. One edition with bronze ink on the cover cost two farthings extra and sold out to collectors in an hour. It purported to present an entire modern history of Oz, starting with the arrival of the Wizard and the deposing of the Ozma Regent, Pastorius. The best part was a grotesquely colored section that everyone turned to first: the murder of Pastorius. Oh, the blood! Like a fountain all down the steps of the Palace of the Ozmas. Then the Wizard’s vile contract with Mombey, Pale Queen of Sorcery, to secret the child away while the Wizard set up shop to hunt for the fabled Grimmerie. For which he’d come to Oz in the first place, and over which, failing to secure it, he left, disconsolate.

In one of the final panels of that section, Mombey secretly made a pact with the Ozmists, and siphoned a zephyr or so of them for pumping up the Wizard’s balloon, to assure he could never return across the Deadly Sands. A lovely and theatrical conceit, if unsupportable by the testimony of witnesses, who wrote letters to the editor complaining about the rewriting of history. The liberties these artists take! Hacks, the lot of them.

Dorothy had her own section. Part III. They colorized her too highly and she looked like a Quadling afflicted with St. Skimble’s Rash. With her familiar, Toto, who could speak in the funny pages (arf arf !), Dorothy careered around Oz like some sort of a drunken sorceress, spilling mayhem out of her basket and kicking up her sparkly heels in musical numbers that didn’t translate particularly well on the page.

A nod was made to Elphaba and to Nessarose Thropp, and to Dorothy’s crime spree against them. However, maybe because the Emperor was about to abdicate the Throne Ministership of Oz, his portrayal was accorded a certain respect, if only for his having served as a place holder until Ozma could be released from her spell. How quickly a history of offenses can be rewritten. Yet there was some sour truth to it: Shell Thropp may have ordered the invasion of Munchkinland, but he hadn’t killed Pastorius. Nor had he imprisoned Ozma Tippetarius in a spell so deep it could keep her in a near perpetual boyhood until, through trickery played by a magic mouse (a magic mouse?) La Mombey accidentally reversed her own spell, revealing her depraved plan for world dominance. Or Oz dominance.

The extravaganza went into seven printings in a fortnight. It didn’t begin to show up wrapped around take-out fried fish for at least a month.

Little was made in print, either by the popular press or by pulpit expositories, of the material waste and psychic distress of the recent past. The dragons of Colwen Grounds, the war, the long privations, the fight for water, the death of so many on both sides of the conflict. The negotiations remained in a delicate stage. It didn’t do to allow sensibilities to become inflamed with reference to abominations too recent to be forgiven—if ever they could be forgiven.

Would Ozma come to rule? How would her legitimacy be determined since eighty-five years, give or take, had passed since her birth, but she was apparently still in her minority? Had Mombey herself not unwittingly identified the girl as Ozma—by that unsavory magicking of Tip homeward from boy to girl—the metamorphosis might have gone unremarked as any other backstreet carnival trick. (The details of the transformation were too squeamish for most citizens to imagine closely, except the depraved.) “Not Ozma!” Mombey had cried, out of her skull. Everyone present had heard her, and when Tip had been carried away for medical attention, the form of a teenage girl in a lad’s dress sartorials had escaped no one’s notice. (A number of men had trouble satisfying their wives for months in the ensuing vexation to their own makeup.)

Whether Ozma still wore the red locket on its chain—only one person knew enough to ask that question, and she would not ask it.

Hardly anyone else alive had ever seen Tip’s mother, Ozma the Bilious. No one could comment on any family resemblance the new Ozma might have to her forebears except by the fading rotogravured portraits that had remained hung, seditiously, during the reigns of the various Throne Ministers, in houses left shabby because their tenants could never afford redecoration.

And would Ozma Tippetarius accept the mantle? Did she have to? Did she have a choice?

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