Page 60 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

The man was startled. “Haven’t heard of her since the turtles’ anniversary swim meet. Is she still alive?”

“Well, that’s what I was wondering.”

“Scratch my behind with a bear claw. I got no possible idea if it’s so or no. Why would she be dead? Other than, you know, death?”

On they trudged. The month being Yellowtime, their hours rounded golden, when the sun was out. But hours can’t dawdle—they only seem to. The leaves began to fall and the branches to show their arteries against the clouds.

Finally they reached the Yellow Brick Road. It was ill tended, here; the occasional blown tree or stream overrunning its banks made passage slow. The stretch was clearly untraveled. That night they camped in a copse of white birches whose peeling bark revealed eyes that seemed to be trying to memorize them.

“Can trees see?” asked Rain.

“Some say the trees are houses of spirits,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, stupid people say it, but even so.”

“I don’t mean tree-spirits,” said Rain. “I mean the trees. Can they see us?”

“They weep leaves upon the world every autumn,” said Little Daffy. “Proof enough they know damn well what’s going on around here.”

After Rain’s eyes had closed and her breathing softened, Brrr intoned to Ilianora, “Do you think everything is right with our Rain?”

She raised an eyebrow, meaning, In what context do you ask?

“I’ve known few human children. That Dorothy Gale just about completes the list. So I have no premise on which to worry. But doesn’t Rain seem—well—odd? Perhaps she is a girl severed from too much.”

Ilianora shut her eyes. “She’s young even for her age, that’s all. She still lives in the magical universe. She’ll outgrow it, to the tune of pain and suffering. We all do. Don’t worry so much. Look at how she touches the trees tonight, as if they had spirits she knew about and we didn’t. That’s not weird; that’s what being a child is. I was such a girl, when I was alive.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Oh, I’m alive enough now.” Her eyes opened, and they were filled with whatever passed for love in that woman. “I am alive. But I’m not that girl. I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago. I see her life like an illustrated weekly story I read long ago, and it is pictures of that that I carry in my head. Her life in Kiamo Ko. Her life with her father, long ago—that famous Fiyero Tigelaar, prince of the Arjikis. Her life with her mother, Sarima, and her father’s erstwhile lover, Elphaba Thropp. It’s a child’s story in my head, no more real than Preenella and the skeleton hermit in the everlasting cloak of pine boughs. I’m not sad; don’t shift; leave me be. We were talking about Rain.”

For her sake, he returned to the earlier subject. “I don’t fault her interest in the natural world. What I notice is her … her distance from us.”

“She’s here curled up against your haunches. To get her any closer you’d have to swallow her whole.”

“You know what I mean. She seems to float in a life next to ours, but with limited contact.”

Ilianora sighed. “We agreed to take her to safety, not to perfect her. What would you have us do? Sing rounds? Practice our sums as we march?”

“I don’t know stories. Maybe you could tell her more? I wish we could get through a little more. She loves us, perhaps, but from too great a distance.”

“She’ll have to cross the distance herself. Trust me on that, Brrr. I know about it. Either she’ll choose to visit us when there is enough of her present to visit, or day by day she’ll learn to survive without needing what you need and I need.”

“I think it’s called a knot in the psyche.”

“It’s called grief so deep that she can’t see it as such. Maybe she never will. Maybe that would be a blessing for her in the long run. If she can’t learn to love us, would that keep us from loving her? Brrr?”

Never, he thought. Never. He didn’t have to mouth the word to his wife; she knew what he meant by the way he tucked his chin over the crown of Rain’s head.

I0.

A day of mixed clouds and sudden fiercenesses of light. Breezy but warm, and aromatic, both spicy-rank and spicy-balm. The road passed through open meadows interspersed with dense patches of black starsnaps and spruces, where clusters of wild pearlfruit glistened in caves of foliage. Rain paid no attention to the clacking of nonsense rhyme that Ilianora had taken up. Rain heard it but didn’t hear it.

Little Ferny Shuttlefoot

Made a mutton pasty.

Sliced it quick and gulped it quick

And perished rather hasty.

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