Page 131 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Mine.” She took it from him. His hands were shaking a little. “Did you come here to steal my things?”

“No. Of course not. You haven’t got much.”

“So I’m told. Are you going to hurt me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You hid in my cupboard and were going to jump out.”

“When I heard you coming up I hurried in there. I was waiting until you went to sleep, and then I was going to slip away. I didn’t want to scare you.”

“But what were you doing here in the first place?”

“Looking for something to eat.”

Rain shrugged. “Nothing to eat here. Pretty obviously. Unless you like books.” She took a closer look. “Are you very hungry? Are you starving? You don’t look in the pink of health.”

“I’m not stuffed and groaning, that’s for certain. My stomach rumbles like caves collapsing.”

She bit her lip and thought she should probably feel his forehead, but she didn’t care for touching people. “Are you ill?”

“Look, I’ll just go. I’m sorry for this rude surprise. I didn’t know anyone was living in this building.”

She was putting it together as best she could. “But you were hiding from someone.”

“Just putting the shell farther back on its shelf. For safety,” he said, reaching his hand. She didn’t give the shell back.

“Oh, that’s thoughtful. Do you ever break into anyone’s room and just, oh, knit? Or nip into someone’s house and just polish the wainscoting? You aren’t making any sense.”

“You’re uncommonly calm. I’m glad for that. If you had screamed I would have gotten in terrible trouble. I’ll leave now. If you don’t say a word about this I will be a little bit safer.”

Tay inched forward and sniffed at the boy’s very wet boots, which were open at the toe and heel and, now Rain thought of it, smelled dreadful. Then Tay wreathed itself around the boy’s ankle for a moment and looked up at Rain. She made herself do the improbable and reached out and put her palm to his forehead.

“Am I hot?”

She considered the answer to that, but while she had known how to be quiet her whole life, she had never quite learned how to lie. “I don’t know. I never felt someone’s forehead before.”

“Feeling your own doesn’t work. You can’t feel yourself sick.”

“Is that true?” She tried it. She just felt like herself. But what did herself feel like? She had never thought to ask.

“Do you know what yourself feels like?” she asked him.

“Oh, now that’s the question,” he replied, and buckled at the knees.

“I didn’t intend such a powerful question,” she commented. Then she realized he had passed out on the coverlet that she and Scarly sometimes huddled under.

She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing. S

he wasn’t allowed to leave her room after ninth bell, not until morning bell except to visit the privy. And there was nothing useful in the privy.

She remembered that the stables were full of guest horses. She told Tay to stay put while she hustled into a waist-length wool coat and hurried down both flights of stairs. The horses in their stalls nickered and wheezed, and shuffled at the sound of her, and she was glad for their noise and warmth. Various coachmen still lingered, smoking cheap tobacco rolled in old newsprint, and husbanding pints of ale that Proctor Clapp had sneaked out to them when his sister wasn’t looking. The ale had made the men jolly. They chattered on as Rain went quickly through the few satchels that had been lobbed into the shadows just inside the stable doors.

“My lady, she’s a right dab of codswallop, she is. She pays me but a penny farthing for the trip from Plaid Acres to Shiz, and then she’s late for the school supper because she’s got to stop and buy new gowns in that fancified silk depot over to Pennikin Lane!”

A small quarter of cheese. Better than nothing.

“My lady’s got yours beat in the mud with a beetroot up her arse. Mine’s so cheap she thinks I don’t merit the privacy of a loo with a closed door, so she stops before any town center at the last possible shrine to Lurlina and makes me take a dump behind it! Says it saves her a fee and helps stamp out paganism at the same time.”

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