Page 65 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

I3.

The Quadling’s terror at spiders that only Rain had seen made the adults more squeamish than ever. Rain, however, experienced a sort of gingery buckling sensation inside. People couldn’t see the spiders and they couldn’t see inside of her—they hadn’t been able to figure out that she’d been telling the truth.

An apprenhension of isolation—that sudden realization of the privacy of one’s most crucial experiences—usually happens first when a child is much younger than Rain was now. The sensation is often alarming. Alone as a goose in a gale, as the saying has it. Rain felt anything but alarmed, though. The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

They heard her singing that night, a rhyme of her own devising.

Spidery spiders in the wood

No one knows you very good.

No one can and no one should.

I4.

The deeper they penetrated into Quadling homelands, the more signs they saw of Quadling activity. Rushes laid out on the margins of the Yellow Brick Road to dry in the sun. Donkey dung and human feces. A broken harness for a water buffalo. Meanwhile, no alarums of horse hooves sounded behind them. The Yellow Brick Road south of Gillikin and Munchkinland might be Slaughter Alley, but not for a band of irregulars accompanied by a child with evident Quadling blood.

They made sure to keep Rain front and center, on the Clock’s most prominent seat. No one much believed in the spidery figments, but neither did they believe in taking chances with Quadling poison-tipped arrows.

“I’d like to know what our intention is, when we arrive in Qhoyre,” Ilianora said as they made an evening meal of poached garmot and swamp tomato. They sat right in the middle of the road, their cooking fire banked up upon the brick. “We’re about to have obeyed the advice mimed out of the Grimmerie. We’ll have stuck together and gotten south. But what next? And why? We’re going to take a flat there? Start a plantantion to harvest mildew? Set up a circus? Learn Qua’ati?”

“Tut tut, my little Minxy-Mouth of the Marshgrass.” The dwarf fingered out a fishbone. Marriage had eased his nerves somewhat. “No one knows where home is until it’s too late to escape it. We’ll know what to do when we know what to do.”

“Qhoyre can’t be anyone’s home,” argued Ilianora. “Otherwise so many Quadlings wouldn’t have migrated into the northern cities.”

“What is the world after Qhoyre?” asked Rain, who seldom listened to their discussions.

Mr. Boss shrugged. “The Road peters out, as I understand it, but Quadling Country squelches on.”

“Oh, even Quadling Country ends, eventually,” said Little Daffy. “At least according to the lessons in map reading we got in petty nursery. The province meets up with the ring of desert that surrounds all of Oz.”

“But what’s after the desert?” asked Rain.

“More desert,” said the Munchkinlander. “Oz is it, sweetheart.”

“To hear Ozians speak, other places don’t exist,” said Mr. Boss. “There’s no place to the north, like Quox, for instance, except as a supply of fine brandy and the source of a certain plummy accent. Ev, to the south over the sands, doesn’t really exist—it wouldn’t dare. But oh, we do like our Ev tobacco if a shipment gets through.”

Rain scowled. She didn’t understand irony. The dwarf, more respectful of Rain now that she was their de facto rafiqi, took pity and explained. “Oz isn’t surrounded by sands. It’s enislanded in its own self-importance.”

“Hey, Oz is bigger than Ev or Quox or Fliaan,” said Brrr in mock effrontery. “Those dinky sinkholes are hickabilly city-states founded by desert tribespeople.”

“Who cares what’s outside of Oz?” agreed the dwarf. “No one goes there. Oz loves itself enough not to care about provincial outposts.”

“But after the deserts?” said Rain.

“Ah, the innocent stupidity of kids,” said the dwarf. “You might as well ask what is behind the stars, for all we’ll ever know. The sands aren’t deadly, that’s just the public relations put out by edge communities. Not that I’m proposing we keep dropping south to become nomads in bed linens. The deserts aren’t hospitable. It’s where dragons come from, for one thing.”

“She wants to know where we’re headed, that’s all,” said Ilianora. “I’m with her on this.”

“Headed to tomorrow. Equally impossible to tell what’s on the other side of that, but we’ll find out when we get there,” said the dwarf. “Everyone, stop your beefing. You’re giving me cramps.”

The tomorrows began to blur. In a climate that seemed to know nothing but one season of growth, maturity, decay, all happening simultaneously, perpetually, even time seemed to lose its coherence. The company grew quieter but their unhappinesses didn’t subside. The cost of wandering without a named destination was proving steep.

Eventually the Yellow Brick Road petered out—brick by brick, almost—but the tramped track remained wide enough to accommodate the Clock of the Time Dragon. The signs of human enterprise grew more numerous. The companions began to spot Quadlings in trees, in flatboats, even on the mud-rutted road. The natives gave the company of the Clock a wide berth but a respectful one. Brrr observed that Quadlings, the butt of ethnic smears all over Oz, seemed in their own homeland to be more capable of courtesy to strangers than Munchkinlanders or Gillikinese.

Ilianora put her veil back upon her brow despite the steamy everlastingness of jungle summer.

There was no good way to avoid Qhoyre. The provincial capital had colonized all the dry land making up the isthmus-among-the-reeds upon which it squatted. And squatted was the word. Brrr, who had lived in the Emerald City and in Shiz, knew capital cities to be places of pomp and self-approval. Qhoyre looked mostly like a collection of hangars for the drying of rice. Indeed, Brrr reasoned, that was probably how the city began.

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