Page 91 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Carrying Ojo over the mountain

His saturnine sword was the scimitar moon

Soon, thundered Ojo, vengeance soon!

This went on too long and no one could tell what Ojo was trying to achieve, and Liir said that was pretty much standard operating procedure for the military. But then Little Daffy recalled something from her own childhood.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

“How does it go now?” She tried again.

Jack, Jack, Pumpkinhead

Woke to life in a pumpkin bed

Made his breakfast of pumpkin bread

Fell and squashed his pumpkin head

Went to the farmer and the farmer said

Pumpkins smash but can’t be dead

Plant your brains in the pumpkin bed

Grow yourself a brand-new head.

That’s what he said he said he said

’Cause the farmer liked his pumpkin bread.

Rain admired that one and clapped her hands.

“That’s a nursery ditty from a soundly agrarian society,” said the Lion, “no doubt about it.”

“Do you have a song to sing?” Candle asked of Rain.

“I knew about a fish once that was locked in a apple-shaped room in the ice. But I don’t know what happened to it.”

They waited in case she might remember; they waited with that affectionate and bothersome patience with which elders heap expectation on the shoulders of the young. When Rain spoke again, though, she seemed not to be aware of their appetite for anything more about the fish. She said, “I don’t know what happens to us.” She said it as a question.

“Oh well,” said Candle. “None of us knows that.”

“What happens to us is a joke, and don’t pretend otherwise,” said the dwarf.

“What happens to us is sleep,” said Liir firmly. “Time to go have a pee, Rain. I’ll walk you a little way out.”

Tay didn’t let Rain go anywhere without scampering after her, no matter how asleep it had seemed to be. It woke itself up when Rain moved, and it followed Rain and her father to a blind of scattercoin, where Liir turned his head just far enough to simulate modesty, but not far enough to allow Rain to escape his peripheral vision.

They wandered about for three more days, slogging through mud and sluicing through rain that sometimes preferred to be snow. Between low tired hills, through unnamed valleys formed by streams threading down from the Kells for ten thousand years. “You ought to know if we’re closing in on the farm,” said Liir to Candle as they blundered along shallow slopes. Their ankles all ached from the slant. “You can see the present.”

“This isn’t the present anymore,” said Candle. “Apple Press Farm is in our past now, and one hill looks much the same as another.”

Finally they discovered the right arrangment of

slopes and dips, and they began to drive down ancient agricultural tracks kept clear by animal passage. They came upon a tapering winter meadow. A thwart-hipped woman with a basket and a set of rusting loppers was moving about the weird beautiful verdant green glowing wetly in the thin snow and the thinning rain.

“As I live and breathe,” said Little Daffy.

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