Page 84 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

by my father F

before he left

It took her a half an hour to compose herself. Liir left his arm slung around her as if around the shoulder of a drinking mate—not too close. Not imprisoning. Just there. When she was ready, she tapped the page twice with a forefinger and said, “I found that drawing before you did. It was in the Witch’s room at the castle. My father had drawn me for his mistress, and she had kept it. She who seemed impervious to sentimentality had kept it all those years. When I came across it—I must have been rooting through her room one day, bored, as children will be—I wrote the caption and put the page back where it was, so the Witch would know she could keep the paper but she couldn’t keep my father from me, not in my memory.”

“How much do you remember about those times? With your mother and brothers and me and the Witch? And those other aunts of yours? Back in Kiamo Ko?”

“I was hardly a teenager when I was abducted,” she said. “And so of course I remember almost all of it. Or I thought I did. But I’d forgotten this.”

“Do you remember they took me too?—but Cherrystone decided I wasn’t worth the labor of hauling overland? He left me tied up in a sack and hanging from a tree. I had to gnaw through the burlap, which took the better part of a day … then I fell twelve feet and almost killed myself. And by the time I came around, you were gone. You were all gone. I made my way home to the castle and waited for the Witch to come back—she was in Munchkinland, I think. That was just when her sister, Nessarose, orchestrated the Munchkinlander schism, and they seceded from Loyal Oz.” He’d been talking too fast. He slowed down. “What happened to you when they took you?”

“What I do remember I don’t want to talk about.” She’d been with her mother and her older brother, Irji. And those aunts. Gruesome. Maybe Nor was right: maybe Liir didn’t really want to know. After all. Nor had been the only one to survive.

“Do you know that I talked my way into Southstairs Prison to find you?” he asked her. “After the Wizard abdicated and Lady Glinda came to be Throne Minister? My guide was none other than Shell Thropp. Shell Thropp, the Witch’s brother. My uncle, though I didn’t know it yet. A cad of the first order, and now he’s the Emperor.”

“We’ve just learned he’s divine. Being related to him, does that make you a saint?”

Liir bowed his head, though not in piety. “When I finally got into the prison, you had just escaped from Southstairs. A few days earlier. I was that close to finding you. They said you’d hidden yourself between the corpses of some Horned Hogs and been carried out in a pudding of putrescent Animal flesh.” He tried to laugh. “Really?”

“I don’t care to think about it.” The way she spoke told Liir it was all too true.

“It sounds as if you were so close to Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall. Didn’t you want to take revenge on him? After all, at the Wizard’s instructions he abducted and murdered your family. Or had them murdered. Much later, once I went AWOL from the service of the Emerald City Messiars, he began to have me hunted too. He attacked the mauntery called Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows because we were said to be there. He—”

“We? You and Candle?”

“Me and Trism. My bosom companion. We’d torched the stable of flying dragons that were being used to terrify the Scrow and the Yunamata, so Cherrystone was out for our blood. And when Cherrystone caught up with Trism at last he probably beat the bloody hell out of him. Listen, at Mockbeggar Hall, didn’t you want to put a stiletto through Cherrystone’s throat? I would have. Wanted to, at least.”

She went back to the lettuces and began to arrange them in ranks of size, as if that mattered. Her voice was flat and unconcerned when she spoke again. “I’ve spent all my adult life either fighting the excesses of the Emerald City hegemony or trying not to fret myself into paralysis. One can only do what one can do, Liir. Today I can harvest a little lettuce. Tonight you and your wife and your child and my unlikely husband and your Goose and my colleagues, Mr. Boss and Little Daffy, will have some lettuce to eat. One day perhaps I will not find lettuce in my hands, but a knife. Maybe General Cherrystone will have come to eat lettuce but will dine on the blade that cuts the lettuce. If I only think about that, I can think about nothing else, and then I might as well lie down under these stones and join the others who can’t think anymore, either.”

In a steely but warm voice, she added, “I might ask the same of you, Liir. Cherrystone’s zeal to find you, because you might lead him to the Grimmerie, has broken you apart from your own daughter no less fiercely than I was broken apart from my mother—and from my father. From our father. You might’ve spent these years of your strong youth hunting him down.”

“I might’ve done,” he agreed. “But if I’d been unsuccessful, Rain would’ve had no father to come home to, sooner or later. A fate we fatherless understand, you and I.”

“We do,” she said. “We understand lettuces, and we understand that. We don’t understand Cherrystone. But we don’t need to. Maybe.”

They walked back to the hostel slowly, without talking, that final maybe like a heavy boulder slung between them, on a yoke laid across both their backs.

7.

About the darkness recently apparent in his wife’s eyes, the Lion was puzzled. He knew Ilianora hadn’t been prepared to find her brother. She hadn’t been looking for Liir. Maybe having found him, then, had slapped awake an old buried ache for others who’d been slaughtered.

This was a sore that Brrr couldn’t lick clean no matter how he tried. Maybe if Rain had taken to Nor … maybe his wife would have softened a little more … but no. Rain never took to anyone.

Except, a little bit, to him. Which was damn awkward under the circumstances. With her parents and her aunt moping around for scraps of attention. The girl wasn’t capable though. Or she just wasn’t interested in them.

What were they all waiting for in this Chancel of the Ladyfish, as Highsummer turned to Harvest’our, and Harvest’our gave way to Masque? Were they all glued to Rain, as if she might give them a sign? Were the companions of the Clock to linger indefinitely? The question became moot when the snow blew in, and they were more or less ice-bound. They were no longer quite guests, these months along. But neither were they at home.

The Lion listened as Liir and Candle talked to each other in the coded abbreviations that couples develop. He couldn’t make much of Candle—a cipher, that one. But he remembered Liir from ages ago, that time when Brrr had arrived, with Dorothy and the shambolic others, at the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The flying monkeys! They’d given him the creeps. The loopy old Nanny who had nonetheless seemed the sanest of the lot. The mysterious way Dorothy had vanquished the Witch while the Lion and Liir were trapped in a larder. Then the beginning of their long journey back to the Emerald City.

All the time Liir had been the least of them, a stringy, cave-chested marionette of a kid. The thinnest fleck of hair on the upper lip, the cracking voice, the sidelong glances at Dorothy, as if he couldn’t believe his luck but still didn’t know if it was good luck or bad.

The Lion hadn’t expected to meet up with the lad ever again. Now it was—what?—fifteen or twenty years later. The boy-turned-man still projected something imprecise. But his back was strong and his love for Candle was tender, and he regarded Rain as a jewel so precious he couldn’t touch her. That was Rain’s fault, to set herself like that, but it was her father’s fault too, to accept her terms. I never would, thought Brrr, with the smugness of the perfect parent, or dog handler, or litigator.

One day during a thaw, when Candle mentioned a hankering for a hare to roast, Liir braved the slippery paths to check his traps. The Lion decided to go along. They all but slid into the carcass of the decrepit Clock, its open stage gaping. They looked over the wrecked set. Snow upon fallen buildings.

“It’s acting out the death of a civilization,” said the Lion.

Liir peered with interest. “It looks like an earthquake. Growing up in the Great Kells, I saw my share. Those slides of scree when the mountains shake their shoulders. The circular felt tents of the Arjiki nomads collapse, and the herders just put them up again.”

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