Page 78 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Me too,” said Rain, “but this better.” She chose from a protected cubby a small freestanding stone Liir had never noticed. He neared to look over her shoulder. About the size of a breviary, the display side was polished smooth as milk pudding. In it was carved something impossibly small and delicate. Liir couldn’t imagine the human hand that might manage such particularity, nor the instrument that such a hand might use. A relief of a vaguely animal-shaped creature. A sort of snouted feather, a legless head of a pony erect on a curved spine or tail. An inch high, no more. “What is it?” asked Rain.

“I don’t know,” said Candle.

“Pure fancy, I suspect,” said Liir, trying out the pedagogical function of fatherliness. “Nothing living can stand upright without at least two legs.”

“A tree can. What’s this?” The girl pointed to another shape carved into the lintel, a protrusion too peculiar for Liir to compare to anything else.

“An accident of the artist’s adze? Or maybe it was once something remarkable, but wind and rain took away its character over time. So now it’s just a mystery.”

“Wind and rain?”

“They blow from the west, clear cross the hall, or from the south. Sometimes—once a year—a storm with tiny teeth of salty sand, which rub at these carvings.”

“I never knowed of storms that could change off the face of a creature.” Rain looked surprised at the idea of the ravage of the world. “How many storms was it?”

“Hundreds of years of storms,” Candle answered her. “More years than I could count. We’ve only been here a handful of years, and the damage was done when we arrived. Nothing’s changed since we got here, but the sand comes and settles. I brush it off with feathers when the great wind subsides.”

Rain made her fingers like feathers, brushing, brushing. “What is this place?”

“It’s your home,” said Candle, and extended her hand to touch Rain’s hand—to cover it as Rain had covered the star shape.

This was a venture too bold. “I got no home,” said Rain, and pulled away and walked into the dark doorway that led to the stairs and the catacomb apartments in which Candle and Liir had hid, and lived, through the time it had taken seven rainstorms to deposit seven skins of sand upon the evaporating stone.

3.

Just before they’d met Muhlama yesterday, Ilianora had cried out to the Lion that Rain had no fear. Rain had heard this, and she knew it was wrong. She had plenty of fear, all right. For instance, she didn’t trust these two new people in their hilltop hideaway. The man was possessed by something aggravated, something

with the intensity of hornets. He tried to disguise it, but she could see. The woman was no calmer, even though she looked like a Quadling, and Rain’s exposure to Quadlings in Ovvels had led her to consider them kindly and placid. Up till now.

I’ll have no part of this, she thought, though she knew she had little choice.

She found Brrr downstairs, pacing in and out of stone doorways, checking out the lodgings. “Time was I might have expected the sheets turned down and a chocolate bourbonette placed upon the pillow,” he said. “But since there are no sheets or pillows, I suppose hoping for a chocolate bourbonette is a waste of energy. Rain, where should we sleep?”

“Far away from here.”

“Tiss toss, somebody’s cross. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“En’t nothing under my skin but my underskin.” She threw herself down on the floor, purposefully hard so she could bang her coccyx and try out a cuss. Tay twisted its head at her, confused.

Brrr had learned enough not to take the bait. He said nothing.

“How long are we here? When are we going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t yet really understand where we’ve arrived. Shall we go help with food, and see what we can learn?”

“I can’t learn anything.”

Brrr decided to consider morbid self-loathing something of an advance in the consolidation of Rain’s character. “Well, if you’re enjoying a little hissy-mood, why don’t you come along and find more to disapprove of upstairs?”

“You can leave me here to die.” She stretched out on her back and put an arm over her head. She made an unconvincing corpse, though Brrr knew that with enough practice—sixty, seventy years on—she’d get it right.

“Well, I’m going to sleep here. I think this room is kind of cozy. I like how a little natural light comes in through that slit. I bet you can see stars on a cloudless night, inching by.” She didn’t look. “But while there’s work to be done for supper, it’s cowardly to shirk down here. So now I’m going above. You can do as you like.”

“I know that.”

He had to suppress a smile. A vexed Rain was slightly more coherent: there was more of her on display. He knew she’d follow eventually.

Back outside, in a summer kitchen beyond the nave of the sacred fishy lady, Liir and Candle were scrubbing some turnips. A rusty kettle hanging on a hook bubbled, a rich onion broth. Ilianora—Brrr couldn’t yet think of her as Nor, which was how Liir addressed her—was mashing carrots with a pestle. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were collecting from the compartments of the Clock anything that might be of use. Scissors, forks, banged-up pewter plates. Dried herbs. Candle’s eyes went wide and delighted at the sight of oregano and pumperfleck.

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