Page 188 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Furthermore, would Munchkinland accept her as a ruler of a reunited Oz? No stalwart Munchkinlander could forget the crunchy little fact that the Ozma clan was Gillikinese. But it was Mombey who’d brought Ozma Tippetarius back to the throne from Munchkinland, which gave the rebel nation a stake. Before a month had passed some began, quietly, to call Mombey the savior of the nation. Without an Ozma to pull the warring factions together, the fighting might have gone on a good deal longer.

It was said that at Haugaard’s Keep, on Restwater, when they learned what a mess things had gotten to in the Emerald City, General Traper Cherrystone called a ceasefire and invited the Foill of Munchkinland into the Keep to discuss an end to the hostilities. No one was quite sure what happened next. The only witness was a tree elf named Jibbidee, and he wasn’t talking. In the Oak Parlor of the Florinthwaite Club, bruited about over a third glass of port, thank you, retired military officers whispered the rumors. Loyal Oz’s General Cherrystone had proposed to General Jinjuria that together they decline to accept the nonsense about the return of Ozma to the Emerald City, join forces, and rule as a military tribunal over Restwater themselves, setting up a protectorate over the access rights to the great lake. Jinjuria was said to have refused, whereupon Cherrystone shot her, and then took his own life.

The legal standing and even location of Lady Glinda Chuffrey of Mockbeggar Hall remained unknown.

So, too, the confused reputation of the Wicked Witch of the West. But in the rush of sentimental and even patriotic fervor that greeted the unexpected return of Ozma Tippetarius, word began to circulate that the great spell cast by La Mombey, to call the lost forward, had done more than stay Liir Thropp from his death and reveal the green skin of his daughter, Rain. It had done more than sabotage Mombey’s own plan to keep Ozma Tippetarius young, hidden, dumb, and male for another hundred or two hundred years. Mombey’s application of the spell from the Grimmerie, they said, had also inadvertently summoned Elphaba Thropp from—well, from wherever it was she had gone.

“As if she’d come back when asked,” said Mr. Boss. “What do they think she is? A charwoman?” The accidental family—what was left of it with the death of Nor, with the departure for Nether How of a frosty Liir and an angry Candle and an eye-rolling though mute Goose—was squatting in a garden flat below a shell-shocked semidetached villa off the Shiz Road in the North-town neighborhood. Rain had refused to follow her parents unless she had settled things in her own mind.

Until the circumstances righted themselves somehow, they’d resigned themselves to this dump for the winter. The rising damp gave them all headaches of a morning but tenacious ivy hid the worst of the damage to the building’s exterior plaster. The place had views on a strip of garden that hadn’t benefited from the firebombing of the dragons a few months ago. Nonetheless, Tay liked to climb on what remained of the shattered ornamental cherryfern.

“I can understand the rage for Elphaba. It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight,” said the Lion. “Didn’t Nor used to say that? Also easier on your moral comfort, for one thing, to keep waiting for redemption of one sort or another rather than work it out for yourself. Since its time hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Well, that’s a matter of opinion we never asked you for,” said Dorothy, who had agreed to return to the fold after Liir had made his departure. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do my warm-ups. Right here.”

“I mean, look,” explained the Lion. “The so-called where’s-the-Witch mania has simply displaced Ozma hunger, that’s all. No one alive can remember what it was like to live under blood royalty. Three generations have grown up without the crown—to go back to it again just like that satisfies th

e appetite for resolution too quickly. People need something to be missing. They need to crave something they don’t have.”

“It used to be Lurline, when I was growing up,” said Little Daffy. “Lurline would come back eventually and grace us all with the spirit of better posture, or something. If the Ozma vacancy has been filled, then the people on the street need a new hunger. Why shouldn’t it be for that old witch?”

“This new hunger you’re talking about,” said the dwarf. “Better get going or we’ll miss the morning rush.”

They were making quite a killing with Little Daffy’s Munchkinlander Munchies. Once they had set aside enough capital they were planning to fund a trip back to the Sleeve of Ghastille to harvest more of the secret ingredient.

“There’s someone here at the door,” called Mr. Boss as he and Little Daffy were leaving with their bakery wheelbarrow.

“It’ll be for you, Dorothy. You go. I’ve got blisters from padding halfway across town chasing after your damn dog,” said the Lion. “It doesn’t know how to pee without dashing all the way to Burntpork. Dorothy, if you don’t get that Toto a leash and a muzzle, I’m going to get one for you.”

“You try muzzling me and watch the nation rise against you.”

Dorothy came back. “For you, Brrr,” she said. “They asked for Sir Brrr.” She mimed a mean little curtsey but ruffled his mane as he went by. “Where is Rain, anyway?” she asked in general, but only a grandmother clock ticked in answer. Brrr had gone into the garden to talk to a military guard of some sort. No one else was home.

For a few days, like the other curiosity seekers who thronged the kerbstones of Great Pullman Street, Rain found herself drawn to the facade of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. A sober building made of brick, painted in a no-nonsense black flatwash and finished in white trim, it signaled with confidence the rectitude of public office. The windows at street level remained curtained. No one came and no one went except ministers, who refused to comment. Rain saw Avaric bon Tenmeadows once, with a satchel, ducking a rotten apricot lobbed at him by someone impatient for news of the Ozma. Their queen. If queen she was.

Rain’s life had been spent in hiding. Disguised with ordinariness. She now felt cursed with this glare of green upon wrists and cheeks and everywhere else—she couldn’t bear to look at herself much. But as she wandered about the streets of the Emerald City like any one of the thousand paupers hoping to filch a meal, cadge a donation from some softie, work for an hour or maybe fall in love for less, she realized that no one bothered to bother her.

She hadn’t needed to hide her whole life long. No one wanted to find her anyway.

The winter had come in mild, and the shrubbery of the Oz Deer Park remained in sufficient leaf to give her cover. She felt she blended in better than, say, the starving families of the Quadling Corner, who took the most menial jobs and for breakfast ate paper and leaves with mustard. She could walk along the Ozma Embankment, looking for her life. Wherever it might be.

It wasn’t housed on a top floor of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary, that much was certain.

Perhaps, she thought, she would go up to Shiz. If they would have her. She was a year early but Miss Ironish had concluded that, against all odds, Rain was clever. Perhaps she could have a private tutor for a year to prepare. She didn’t quite qualify as a legacy student, as her grandmother had never matriculated. But those were mere details. Miss Ironish could arrange it.

Tay scampered after Rain but she felt the creature was suffering from the lack of a campaign. Maybe she would take it back to Quadling Country and release it to its companions. Male or female, it could find what company it might. Perhaps she owed the rice otter that much.

She was circling around the ramparts of Southstairs Prison, slowly heading for home, or what passed for home, when she stopped to let a carriage go by. Two small children of the Vinkus—Arjikis, she thought, in those leggings—were splashing in the gutters. “A lion could beat a dragon any day,” said one, speaking pidgin Ozish. “Could not,” said the other. “Brrr could,” protested the first, “now he’s in charge.”

That was how Rain learned that Tip had accepted the institutional role of the Ozma only provisionally, on a condition of deferred elevation. Tip had finalized a military settlement for peace by proposing for elevation to Throne Minister, as her regent, the Lord Low Plenipotentiary from Traum, Gillikin. None other than Sir Brrr. The Cowardly Lion as he once had been known. When Ozma reached her maturity, she would reconsider whether to rule.

Well well, thought Rain, Tip had only a handful of days in which to ascertain the Lion’s strengths. And all he had done during that period following Nor’s death was to grieve. Is that, in the end—that capacity to hurt—the most essential ingredient for a ruler?

In a ceremony of surpassing simplicity, Sheltergod Thropp, His Sacredness, turned over the accoutrements of power to the Cowardly Lion. Shell handed over two keys, a few folded documents, some receipts for personal items that had gone missing during his term in office, and one or two crowns. He wasn’t sure which was more legitimate, so Brrr had them placed on a wooden hat rack in his dressing room where they wouldn’t pester his mane. He hated to have his waves flattened now that he could afford to have them done again.

“You’ll stay for the formal investiture?” the Lion asked Shell.

“I don’t believe so, if you don’t mind.”

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