Page 190 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She walked to the assignation more or less impervious to the explosions of colored lights that scratched themselves against the black sky over standing sections of the Palace of the People. She thought she could hear Dorothy leading a sing-along at the Lady’s Mystique, but that couldn’t be right. Now that the official business was over, Dorothy would be at the Lion’s side. Must be one of those entertainers who impersonated her. Rain moved herself along.

Crossing a bridge over one of the nicer city canals, Rain paused for a moment to look at the pyrotechnics reflected in the water. The fireworks were like great colored spiders. For an instant she saw the Emerald City under attack again, this time by monstrous insects. But Mombey was in custody now, and her bloodhound spiders no longer hunting for Rain or the Grimmerie. The past was the past. Rain had to get out of here. She was going mad.

At first she didn’t recognize the man who answered the door. Neither did he twig in to who Rain was until they had said their good evenings to each other. Their voices cued them both. Then she fell into his arms in a way she had never fallen into her father’s. Puggles said, “To think I lived to see this day! You are a sight for sore eyes.”

“No, I make eyes sore. Tell the truth!”

But they laughed, and she had not laughed—well, she hadn’t laughed much in her life at all. Had she.

“So this is Lady Glinda’s house? Why didn’t they just tell me?”

“She doesn’t want her circumstances to be widely known,” said Puggles. “It’s a temporary posting, you see. She can’t be bothered to become engaged in the skeltery-heltery of social callers. Not under these conditions.”

“May I ask what conditions you’re being cagy about?”

“I’ll leave it to her to tell you herself. She’s awaiting you in the front parlor. Can you see yourself up? The double doors on the right. I can’t do the stairs as well as I ought.”

She was halfway up but turned and called lightly to him, “Puggles? What happened to Murthy?”

He shook his head and made some obscure pious gesture that country folk persisted in making, against all odds.

Lady Glinda sat in warm lamplight with a throw rug upon her knees.

“I should have thought you’d be kicking up your heels at the prime event,” said Rain, coming in as if she’d just gone to pick up a pack of perguenays at the local newsagent.

“Oh, I’ve long since gotten over the taste for fuss, though I was obscenely pleased to be extended an invitation.”

“A former Throne Minister of Oz, no less, taking a quiet night at home, and on such a night. You surprise me.”

“Come here, my dear, and stop remonstrating. Let me look at you.”

Lady Glinda’s voice was still warm, but a little frail, and a tremor pestered the stem of her neck so her chin dove and rose in the tiniest of hummingbird flutters. She hadn’t lost her taste for pearls, and the at-home tiara was vintage Glinda, though it looked as if it had gotten sat upon more than once. So too the spectacles that fell on a loop from Lady Glinda’s neck. She’d been reading. Who knew.

Glinda put the pince-nez to her face. “So it’s true. Oh, my darling, it’s true.”

“That I’ve gone native?”

Glinda nodded and patted the sofa next to her. “I had to accept it on faith, you know—that you were Liir’s daughter. By the time I met you the concealing spell had already been cast. You could have been any other urchin child brought for protection to a big house and left there by a loving and canny parent who didn’t know how to care for a child.”

Rain said, “They dropped me off like laundry, didn’t they? To be washed and dried and cared for? By a stranger.”

“Now don’t be like that, child. They were under extraordinary pressures. We all were, back then. Some of us still are.”

“Tell me about it.”

“They did the best they could. Besides, I was hardly a stranger. I had known your grandmother. We were like this.” She twinned her second and third fingers together as if they might strangle each other.

“All that I might have had of them,” said Rain. “Access to my mother’s instincts for the present, for knowing the truth of what was happening now, here. Access to my father’s occasional capacity to read the past, to tell it. And what did I get in exchange?”

“You lived,” said Glinda simply. “You survived. I won’t say in style, for I can see that doesn’t mean a whole lot to you.”

“I lived alone,” said Rain. “Until General Cherrystone came to Mockbeggar Hall and put you under house arrest, I had the run of the kitchen yard and the run of the backstairs workrooms and the ledge at the edge of the lake from which to jump into the water. There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s. I can’t repair that.”

“The history of a nation was happening around you. Children don’t often notice this, but it happens, most years, to be true. For you no less than some, but no more, either. Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That’s called growing up, Rain.”

“My first memories are of mice, and fish, and a frog in the mud,” said Rain.

“Is that anyone’s fault?” replied Glinda. “And is that so terrible, after all?”

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