Page 195 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

It was saying to her: I exist, so what does that say to you?

Liir took no interest in the buried Grimmerie. Instead he negotiated with a tinker to hunt out and eventually deliver to the cottage at Nether How a set of eighty pages of blank paper. Then Liir spent most of the month of Lurlinetide binding them with glue and string into a codex of sorts. After some sloppy experimentation, he managed to accumulate a pot of lampblack by scraping the soot from the chimneys of the oil lamps and grinding it with resin and the char of burnt bark. Iskinaary donated a quill, and Liir sat down to write. It seemed to make him happy while he was waiting for—well, whatever he was waiting for.

“What are you doing?” His industry made her cross.

He looked up as if from a long distance away. His eyes were green; she’d never noticed that.

“I’m writing a treatise, maybe. A letter, anyway. To send to—to Brrr. And Ozma.”

She was insulted already. He was barging into her life, trying to make it better. It was less trouble to be abandoned. “About?”

“About. About, I guess—power. About governance. About the birds of no like feather who flew together, to make up the Conference of the Birds. About the maunts who decided to govern themselves by committee rather than by obedience to a superior. About Ozmists and their need to listen to the future as well as to the past. I haven’t gotten it straight in my head yet.”

“You’re angling for a court position? As advisor to the Throne Minister?”

“I’m only angling to question the rationale of a court and a throne. The justice of it.”

“Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.”

“Except, maybe, to think.” He went back to work.

Rain thought he was too young to be so meditative, and his patience made her impatient.

To escape the sound of his thoughts scratching along, she stayed out in cold weather and worked on building a fieldstone wall around the asparagus patch. She remembered the polished chunk in the Chancel of the Ladyfish, with that tiny inscribed creature that seemed as much feather as horse. Maybe one day she would set out on a walkabout across Oz by herself and collect that stone. Inanimate objects were somewhat less bother than people.

She was pausing from her labors late one morning, wiping sweat from her brow despite the rime on the grass and the shelves of ice cantilevering from the shores of the lakes, when she saw a twitch of movement near the broom-tree. Ever wary of some fiend or sorcerer coming by and sniffing out the Grimmerie somehow, she moved closer to check. In the shadows of the tree she startled a serpent of sorts, who proved Serpentine when he reared up, flared his striped lapels, and addressed her.

“You don’t need to apply that heavy stone to me,” said the Snake. “I mean you no harm.”

She shifted it to her hip. “I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong place to digest your breakfast. That tree is off bounds to you. It’s a memorial garden of sorts.”

 

; “I’m no fool. I know what lies in this grave.”

Rain didn’t think he was being impertinent, but she had long ago lost the gift of a catholic sympathy. She’d grown up too much. “You’d better move along.”

“I recognize you, I think. I believe I may have helped your parents degreenify you. I see the spell wore off at last. Most do.” He leaned closer on one of his several dozen snake-hips. “You’re doing all right, then? You made it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t give interviews, Mr. Serpent.”

With alacrity he wound himself around the stem of the tree to get a little more height, and then dropped his head from a branch so he could be closer to her. His eyes were acid yellow, not unkind. “Quite wise. I don’t either. I find it does the likes of me no good. Everyone twists your words so.”

“Are you ready to move along?”

“Are you? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m merely a concerned citizen of Oz. Also I am a venerable if not downright ancient Serpent, and as such I suffer the affection for the young that afflicts the elderly. I can tell what you hoard buried beneath this tree, Miss Oziandra Rainary Ko Osqa’ami Thropp. And as I keep my ear to the ground—little joke, that—I know something of what you’ve been through. What I can’t guess is why you don’t use the tools at your disposal to do something about it. And put down that granite cudgel while I’m talking to you. It’s distracting and not at all polite.”

She put the boulder down but kept her hands and her heart clenched.

“I’m merely saying. You have the richest bloodlines for magic in all of Oz. You have the strongest instrument for change this land has ever seen. And you have your own need to answer to. There is Tip, turned into Ozma. You could turn, too. You could be Rain, or you could be—well, I won’t name you. But you could name yourself. Why do you resist?”

“I think you’d better go.”

“If I see no future for my own offspring, I eat them,” said the Serpent. “If I didn’t eat you when I was introduced to you as an infant, why would I sink my venomous fangs into you now? You’ve done much good. You’ve helped complete Elphaba’s work, and in a way your father’s work, too. Don’t you deserve a reward? Oh come now, don’t look at me like that. What I’m bringing up is a morally neutral proposition. You think it is purer to be one gender or the other? That it makes a difference? I know—no one listens to a Serpent. And I’ll move along now, as promised. But think about it.”

He passed through the grass. When she looked closer, she saw he’d left his skin behind. A green sheath. It could be made into a scabbard for a dirk. Before going back to the asparagus, she put her finger in the skin and tried to feel the magic of being a Serpent.

She asked her father for permission to leave.

---