Page 83 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Gone, when she grew up. A terrible thought. But in a way she was gone already, right now. Her form had come back to them but her spirit was balking.

Candle mourned that Rain wasn’t bothering with her much. Liir asked himself: What mother wouldn’t? But it seemed as if, instead of Liir’s and Candle’s warmth melting Rain’s resistance, it worked the other way around. The child’s aloofness was contagious. Candle and Liir were learning to weather a mutual pain separately, independently. No matter the closeness of the marriage bed, the history between them.

Maybe to distract himself from his other worries, Liir tried to fasten on his half-sister. He and Nor shared a father, presumably, though Liir had never met that distant figure, Fiyero. But Nor was also floating at some distance away from Liir. The great reunion that he’d dreamed of for years was a sham. Kidnapping, prison, escape, disappearance? You’d never know it by her self-effacing manner. She might as well just have come home after shopping for biscuits.

He didn’t want to crowd his sister any more than he wanted to crowd his daughter. He watched Nor move about with a woodenness that sometimes seemed like grace, and sometimes not. Maybe this was her normal way? He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been abducted. Back when she’d been a girl roughly the age that Rain was now.

Never confident about women, Liir scrutinized his sister—with equal parts interest, patience, and suspicion—to see in what way might she turn out to be damaged.

As if he were writing a catalog on the subject of human misery.

Another way to avoid admitting how it had settled in too close, like lice.

The opportunity to engage Nor without threatening her arose naturally enough. Every couple of weeks Liir was in the habit of descending from the mount to a wildwood garden. He collected mushrooms, fiddleheads, frostflower pods, and lettuce. It was half a morning’s hike. The next time he needed to thin the lettuce or lose it, he bundled up a few baskets, some stakes, a trowel, and he asked Nor to come along.

They strolled equably enough, chatting about the landscape and the moods of the climate. From time to time they fell into silence. A bird hopped on a blighted oak limb. A few chipmunks, at the business of growing their hoards, scampered like shadows of something overhead. The wind sawed through the thickery. You could hear the autumn inching in.

“Looks as if this has been a productive yard for generations,” said Nor, indicating the ancient stone tablets tilting at the end of the sunnier furrows.

“Behold: here lies the last person to tell the truth.”

She blinked at him.

“Sorry. Graveyard humor. But if those stones ever said anything like that, they stopped saying it long ago.”

Nor nodded. “They look like teeth. And your hermitage, or whatever it once was—it looks like a mouth too. A big open jaw swallowing the wind.”

“Swallowing the poppy trade, probably,” said Liir. Nor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the poppy trade?”

“I don’t know much. Even though we swam through the bloody sea of them.”

“Sometimes the Yunamata venture south as far as here to harvest the poppy pods. The takings are useful for their groggy rituals, and the illegitimate opiate market is always eager to barter. Your little Munchkinlander apothecaire knows all about that, I’m sure. Some of the harvest seeps through the black market for smoking in certain parlors in Shiz and the EC, I’m told.”

“You’re not an habitu?

??”

“I haven’t been into a parlor of any sort since I grew facial hair.”

Nor bent to pick the lettuce, which was near to bolting. “Situated where it is, maybe your private stronghold used to be a countinghouse for the poppy merchants. Or maybe the defense headquarters against such a trade.”

“Whoever might tell us is probably long ago buried in the lettuces. It’s all guesswork.”

“But the trade has dropped off?”

“Seems so. Certainly the EC authorities don’t approve; they’re afraid the opiates will get to the conscripted soldiers and erode morale. You didn’t see sign of anyone marking out a little meadow for harvesting?”

“Not a soul.”

They worked in companionable silence. Liir staked the stems of frostflower so they would winter over. They were best cut down in the early spring. Finished with the lettuce, Nor put her hand on the small of her back and stretched. She dropped the heap of curled green pages into her shawl, and turned her attention to some radishes, but she gave up when one after another pulled up mealy. “What next?” she asked.

Liir leaned back on his heels. “I have something to show you.” She waited. He pulled from his tunic a folded bit of paper. “I found this at Kiamo Ko. Can you bear to look at it?”

She came over to squat next to him. The browning paper, creased into softness, showed a faded drawing of a young girl. Hardly more than an infant, though with a certain crude spark in the eye. A personality. The letters in childlike hesitancy said

Nor by Fiyero.

This is me Nor

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