Page 77 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Candle dropped to her knees, so Liir dropped too. Candle clapped three times. The girl looked at Candle with mild curiosity, maybe aversion. Candle clapped again, twice, and this time their daughter clapped back. Once. Feebly. It was a start.

“Oziandra Osqa’ami,” said Candle.

“Commonly called Rain,” remarked the dwarf, to whom no one had been paying attention. “And as we old ones remember from those decades of the Great Drought, Rain rarely comes when she’s called. Even when she’s called by the name she knows. Rain.”

“Oziandra Rain,” said Candle.

“Child,” said Liir. He didn’t know the significance of that Quadling clapping. He just lifted his hands, palms out, as he might to a sniffing hound or a hurt wolf-cub. Safe, open. No stone, no knife.

The dwarf cuffed Rain on the crown of her head. “Go to them, bratling, or we’ll never get a bite to eat. After all that poppy-dust in the nostrils I’m stranded on the famished side of peckish.” So Rain stepped forward, out of everyone’s shadows—out of the shadows of the last eight years. And Liir looked at her.

In the sloping light of evening Liir couldn’t tell if he was noting a condition of facial structure or an expression. Or was it a lack of expression? The girl’s eyes seemed cloaked. She had Candle’s high cheekbones and hazelnut jaw, but she was urchin-thin and dusty as a rebel. She held a translucent porcelain something tucked into an elbow. A shell, he saw. Far the largest shell he’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re nice but that’s nicer,” he said, pointing at it. “May I see it?”

“You’re taking liberties before you have a license,” observed the dwarf, but the Munchkinlander dame cuffed him good and proper. Then the small square couple followed Nor into the keep. Even Brrr started to pad away, but the girl whimpered, so the Lion sat down halfway. He set to grooming himself with a desultory air.

“It’s awfully pretty,” Liir said of the shell. His heart was beating as if he were in a court of law—a court of recriminations and, maybe, pardons. “Can you hear anything in it?” He inched forward on his knees, only a scosh.

The girl put the thing up to her ear and listened. Then she turned away to ramble after her companions through the shattered archway of the porch and into the open-roofed ruin of the building. The verdant creature—perhaps an otter?—scampered after her. Candle’s face had fallen but her weeping remained silent, at least for now.

“I think that went pretty well,” said the Lion.

“Is the child all right?” asked Liir. His eyes followed her as she crossed a patch of gloaming light, the sort that gilds every feature at the last minute. She looked normal as a copper farthing. Not a sign of green in her skin, not at this hour, not in this sunset attention. “Is she all right, do you think?”

“Begging pardon, it’s been a long day. It’s been a long year,” said Brrr, “and believe me, I’m no expert. But I’d say she’s right as rain.”

2.

Liir caught Candle’s hand as they hurried up the sandy steps to their sanctuary. “She’ll need to adjust,” he said. “We have to give her time.”

“We’ve given her all those years. I have no more moments to spare.”

Their daughter had gone ahead wispily, surlily perhaps. Liir tried to see this hideout anew, as if through Rain’s eyes, realizing that he had no notion of what she’d ever seen before. Stowed away in Lady Glinda’s entourage as she’d been. And who knows what else she’d witnessed on the road.

The place where he and Candle had washed up—how improbable it seemed. Perched high over the pass that led from the Sleeve of Ghastille toward central Oz. A nameless hill, so far as they knew—in sillier moods Liir sometimes referred to it as Mountain Objection. Travelers watching their footing below would have no reason to lift their eyes; in any case, the spot was camouflaged by overgrowth.

The place may have been established as a guard keep or a pilgrim’s destination. But when Liir and Candle had found it—they were hunting for a cave in which to hunker down, out of sight—it’d been abandoned for decades. Longer, maybe. For some community of cliff dwellers time out of mind, this outpost had been home. Home, or maybe an inn for passersby, for the underground warren was supplied with small cells and the remains of bedsteads and mattresses.

The ruin aboveground, through which Liir and Candle now walked, looked designed for some public function. At this stage in its collapse, the wall facing southwest was gone. The pavers of the great formal floor lay open to the sky. All that was left of the outside wall were the stumps of a line of columns. Like a lower jaw full of bad teeth. Ivory, grey, eroded. The opposite wall, hugging the hill that rose behind it, featured columns leading to the ribs of a missing roof and a dais of some sort.

In the few unionist chapels Liir had ever bothered to visit, the lectern had always stood at the far end of a rectangle, opposite the vestibule and porch. Here totemic sculptures and a sort of throne were inset against the hill wall, in the long side of the box, rather than tucked into the far apse. The carvings between the intact columns faced the broken columns and the sky and valley beyond, as if visitors on giant birds might swoop in for an audience.

Now he and Candle caught up with Rain. She’d paused at the altarpiece or whatever it was, and there she stood, tracing her hands over the surface.

At first Liir was puzzled. After an initial glance at the graven images, years ago, he’d ignored them except as hooks for bleeding a wild lamb or muttock, ledges for drying berries and onions. But Rain had set her pink shell in a niche, just so. The supports of the ledge were carved like shells too. He’d never noticed.

The shelf capped a panel of carved marble. Like a blind person, Rain was feeling the sculpture with a curiosity and openness she hadn’t shown to her mother or father.

A type of fish-woman, perhaps a lake mermaid of some sort. Her lower half tapered into a scaley tale and fins. From each of her hips flared a pair of spinnerets. Her arms and breasts were naked. Her face, set in profile against a dial or plate of some sort, gave the effect of a head on a coin. Liir didn’t know who she was—maybe some fishy variant of Lurline, maybe the invention of a bored unionist monk with a chisel and an appetite for breasts. But the creature looked in equal measure both beneficent and ferocious.

Rain’s hands touching the stern blank eye, the weatherworn stone breasts, the imbrications of those stony scales—his daughter made Liir see that the carving had character. He hadn’t noticed.

Still so much to see, so much to take in, and he was thirty or there-abouts—halfway through his life, assuming the Emperor’s assassins didn’t find him out at last and cut his life short.

Candle couldn’t hold back any longer. She wrenched away from Liir and moved forward to kneel beside Rain. He could see the similar shapes of their skulls, but the girl’s shoulders were tight, as if wound onto her spinal column like a wing nut, whereas Candle had tended toward a sexy fullness of form the past few years.

“I like this one,” said Candle in her soft, bruised voice. Her hand reached out to touch a star-shaped protrusion humping along with others in a welter of runes. For all Liir knew, this row of roughs was only the pattern-block of an anonymous instructor of ancient carving. He didn’t care. He had an aversion to magic, implied or actual.

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