Page 59 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“One of them?”

“Oh, there are dozens. I think.” She squinted; the light from the fire wasn’t strong. “I think this is the one where they meet what’s-his-name.”

Brrr felt uncomfortable when confronted with the lore of childhood. It always made him want to sass someone, or fart like a pricklehog. He knew why: as a cub, he’d never had someone to tell him stories of Lurline, Preenella, and Skellybones Fur-Cloak, or whatever his name was. Not, Brrr supposed, that he’d missed much. While Ilianora tried to remember the full tale—the page apparently only gave some segment of the narrative—Brrr watched Rain attend, with yawns and solemn fierce eyes. She probably hasn’t had much of a childhood either, he thought. But there was still time. She was a fledgling.

By the time Ilianora was done, the fire had died down, and the dwarf and his Munchkin wife had cozied off for privacy. Rain took herself a few feet into the dark, to have a last pee. Ilianora murmured to Brrr, “What did you think of my storytelling?”

The Lion whispered, “Did you make that up?”

She nodded, shyly. “Most of it. Not the characters—not the famous ones, Lurline and Preenella and old Skellybones. But the rest.”

He looked in Rain’s direction, out of caution. “You have a knack.”

She laughed. “You weren’t listening, were you?”

“It took me back,” he said, and that was true enough.

Rain returned and settled down, pulling the hemp-wool blanket to her chin. This beastly hot summer wouldn’t last forever, said the night; perhaps the stars will turn into snowflakes and fall before dawn. It happens one night or another, eclipsing another summer night of youth. Snow on the blooms.

A few bugs beezled along, chirring their wings and sounding their sirens. An owl made a remark from miles off, but no one replied, except Rain, who murmured, “Lion?”

For some reason he loved, loved when she called him Lion. Loved it. When she avoided reminding him he was Brrr, the creature with the sad history of being known as Cowardly—Cowardly his professional name, just about—but chose to say simply: Lion. His head reared back a few inches (these days his eyes didn’t always like the distance they had to take to focus on someone speaking). “What do you want, girl?”

“Is Lurline real in the world? And those others?”

It was almost a question about the sleep-world, he thought; she’d drifted far enough along. Still, he loved her too much to lie to her. What did one say? He tried to catch Ilianora’s eye for help, but she had put on her veil and was in her own distance.

He would lower his voice in case, as he paused, she’d already slipped off to sleep. But when he said, “Well? What do you think?” she murmured something he couldn’t quite hear. He thought she might have said, “I can wait to find out.” Then again, she may have said something else.

In time, she would probably know the answer more richly than he ever would. The thought afforded him comfort, and on that he rested all night.

9.

The Kells began to loom up before them. The Lion said, “I’m not going to drag this caboose up the sides of those bluffs. Get yourself another workhorse, Mr. Boss. The book’s advice seemed to suggest we go south.”

“To get around them, we’ll have to head a little east, then,” said the dwarf. “It’ll take us into the southeast margins of Munchkinland, but we’ll meet up with the lower branch of the Yellow Brick Road eventually and then we can plunge to the south.”

“When precisely will we have gone south enough?” asked Ilianora. “Or are we now wandering to take in the views?”

“We’re putting as much distance as we can between us and the menace of the Emperor,” said the dwarf. “The EC never cared for Quadling Country except for the swamp rubies. And the taxes, when they could be collected. But given a war with Munchkinland, they’ll be letting the Quadling muckfolk lie fallow. A brief holiday from imperial oppression. We’ll be safer there. Can hide like pinworms in a sow’s bowels, like the book told us.”

Rain said, “The book didn’t suggest anything.”

They looked at her.

“It was the person in the book,” she explained. “And en’t it possible she weren’t saying ‘go south’ but only ‘get back’? Like, um, ‘get back from this book, it’s too dangerous?’ ”

“Oh, the Clock already told us who’s dangerous,” said Mr. Boss. “Keep your mouth shut. What makes you think you can read better than we can?”

They settled into a better pace, but a certain germ of doubt attended their progress.

As the weather

finally cooled off, Rain was working on her letters. Little by little she figured out how to form them into words. She wrote comments by placing broken twigs on the ground. RAIN HERE. And TODAY. And WHO. And SORRY. She made words with pebbles on the beds of streams, big words that someone with an eye for stony language might see one day. WATER RISE she wrote, and WATER FALL. Rather expressing the obvious, thought Brrr, but he was as proud of her as if she’d been translating Ugabumish or inventing river charms.

The occasional farmstead gave way to the occasional hamlet, with its own chapel and grange, its antiquated shrines to Lurlina, its stables and inns and the unexpected tearoom. They passed farmers and tinkers on the rutted tracks. By stature they were Munchkins (“Munchkinoid,” suggested the dwarf, who was one to talk), but they seemed equable and not especially xenophobic. Little Daffy splinted someone’s shabby forearm, dosed someone with rickets, and pulled a tooth from the wobbly head of an old crone. Everyone nearly gagged, but the grandmammy smiled with a bloody gap the size of an orange when the job was done, and she invited them home for tooth soup. An offer they declined.

News of the troubles to the north was thin. One farmer asserted that the whole lake of Restwater had fallen to the invaders. “Any word of Lady Glinda?” asked Brrr.

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