Page 82 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“If you don’t take it, sir,” said the dwarf, “I shall give it to your daughter.”

So Liir had no choice. A moment that comes, sooner or later, to all parents.

5.

Rain saw Liir carry the Grimmerie into the chancel. She was uneasy about the great book now she knew that Lady Glinda had gotten into trouble by reading it. Yet Rain still felt the book’s subtle allure. Her mouth watered. She was eager not to do magic but to read. She’d had too little reading. What few things that General Cherrystone had taught her were languishing in her head, pollywogs that could never grow up into frogs.

“What you going to do with that?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“I don’t think this is a good thing for you to look at. It’s powerful stuff, from all I’ve heard.”

“I’m powerful stuff.”

He grinned and shook his head. Without having words to express it, Rain knew that a smile tends to avert or disguise the natural tension that pools around people trying to be in the same place at once. But Liir’s smile would have no effect on her. She would see to that. “Where you going to stow it?”

“I don’t know. No place seems safe enough.”

“I’ll hold it for you.”

“That would be like giving you a boa constrictor for a pet. No father would do that.”

“You’re not my father.” The words just slipped out—they weren’t antagonistic, just commentary.

“Actually, I am. Though I surely can see how you might doubt it.” As if he was afraid the book would open up of its own accord, he set it on the ground and sat on it. She hoped it would bite him on his behind. “If you could look in this book, what would you be looking for?”

“Words,” she said, cannily, honestly.

“Which ones? Magic ones?”

She didn’t feel like saying that all words were magic, though she thought so. But she wasn’t skilled at indirection. She was more arrow than hummingbird. “I want to read the burning words,” she said at last.

She couldn’t think of Liir as her father, she couldn’t.

Liir looked at her with sudden sharpness. “What do you mean, the burning words?”

She shrugged at that and she would have wandered off to make a point about how free of him she was. But there was the book. He was sitting on it. She wanted to see where he would put it. In case.

Was he still waiting for her to speak?

She couldn’t force a remark any more than she could force a smile, any more than she’d been able to force herself to read before she’d been taught the rubrics. She waited, squatting on her haunches, casting sideways looks at the Grimmerie in case it began to leak language out onto the stones.

“You want to read the burning words,” prompted Liir.

“Don’t you?”

He blinked. Another language she didn’t get, how people blink. How they make their eyes go wet. “Where do you find the burning words?” he asked her.

She thought of the armada scorching the ice. Something was being spelled out there; fire moved in such a way, and smoke issued from fire, as if to hide what was being spelled inside the heat. Oh, but all that was too fussy a thought. She took up a bug that didn’t mind the chilly air and studied it on her forefinger instead.

She could tell this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out. She only saw charred letters in a lake. The alphabetic remains of ships.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Liir.

She thought and thought about that. She felt her calves begin to ache; she felt the tickle of the bug’s legs against her fingers. Someday, presumably, she wouldn’t have these legs or these fingers, but the legs and fingers of someone who stood as tall as this man could. She twisted in her thinking, trying to be honest since she didn’t believe she could be smart, and she gave the answer to the insect rather than to the man who claimed to be her father. She wouldn’t think of Liir as her father.

What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”

6.

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