Oooh, a hunk of bread. Pretty hard, but maybe if she held it over her candle?

“The old gov’nor en’t so bad. He’s a secret royalist, though. He prays for the Emperor every night like he’s told to do—he prays that the Emperor passes away peaceful in his sleep, and that some miracle return the Ozma line to the throne. He was born under an Ozma and he wants to die under one, he says. I tells him to his face, he’s gonna die under a lake narwhal, the missus keep putting on the pounds like she’s doing.”

“You don’t say that, you buggery liar!”

“I says it in my heart, like a prayer.”

A lot of laughter outside. In the last satchel, a trove—a mince pie, almost fresh by the smell of it, and two carrots and an apple, probably for the horse, and a small porcelain flagon of something liquid. She nicked it all, neat as Handy Mandy, and a rather nicely woven pink blanket that was thrown over a mare, and she scurried up the stairs. No one heard her. One of the ostlers was saying, “Give over some of that Baum’s Liquid Hoof Dressing, my pretty piebald is sorer than sandpaper on a sow’s behind.”

The intruder couldn’t wake, no matter how gently or roughly she rocked his shoulder. He couldn’t sample her terrific haul. It would be more stale in the morning. Damn. But she put the pink horse’s blanket on him, over the coverlet, and to keep herself warm she dressed herself in as many layers as she could. Thanks to Miss Ironish her wardrobe was fuller than it had been. She was grateful for the stiff wool stockings and the promenading cape.

Round about midnight a brawl started among the carriage attendants. Maybe someone had discovered his flask was missing. She didn’t mind. She sat with Tay in her lap—Tay kept her warm too—and maybe she dozed and maybe she didn’t, but after a while the morning came anyway.

He looked more bruised in the morning, but perhaps that was just the coloration of another ethnic group in Oz that Rain hadn’t previously collected. He sat up and said, “If I was full I would need the privy,” and she answered, “Well, eat up some of this and sooner or later.” She gave him a carrot that he chomped at quicker than a horse might. Then he followed it down with a sip from the flagon, which made him wince, and then a long gulp, which made him blush scarlet and pass out again.

Breakfast bell. If she didn’t show up someone might come looking—it had happened before. She didn’t bother to straighten her clothes or change them, as there was no time. She grabbed Scarly’s slate and scratched on it DO NOT LEAVE, and she propped it up against her chair leg so he would see it if he woke. “Don’t let him go, Tay,” she told the otter, who normally spent the day in the room anyway, under restrictions of the siblings Clapp.

After breakfast. “Your attire, Miss Rainary,” said Madame Chortlebush.

“There was a new leak in the annex,” said Rain. “I shall have to use free period to launder my other gowns.”

Later, Madame Chortlebush said, “I do not believe you are minding the lesson as you ought, Miss Rainary. Are you distraught because your mother couldn’t see her way to attending Visitation Day?”

Rain opened her mouth. Then she thought, I am quietly lying to my teacher by pretending nothing is wrong. And I lied about my clothes without even thinking about it. So what’s the difference if I lie upon careful consideration?

She didn’t know if there was a difference but she had to answer the question. “Yes,” she said to her teacher. As she spoke she realized that accidentally she was telling the truth. Effortlessly, she had learned to miss people a little bit. She didn’t know her Auntie Nor very well, but without saying it in so many words to herself, she had hoped to be surprised by a visit from her pretend mother anyway.

Oh well, she thought. I have a boy in my room, and none of the other girls have that.

“Come here. You need a good squeeze,” said Madame Chortlebush, who rather liked to give good squeezes.

“I think my frock is too wrinkled already,” said Rain, but her teacher wouldn’t relent, so Rain succumbed. Then at her desk she tried harder at her sums so as to throw off suspicion and not give the game away.

Because she had planted the story of ruined clothes in the morning, at luncheon she was released from the chore of healthful stretching in the basement game room, it being too cold to promenade. She plowed across the new snow in the yard and entered the annex. The last of the carriages had left after breakfast. The building felt quiet. All too quiet, in fact.

She hurried up the stairs, two at a time, ripping the hem in her skirt when her heel caught upon it, but she couldn’t stop.

Tay was at the desk in the window in usual fashion, taking what warmth there was. The horse blanket was folded up and laid upon Rain’s bed. At first she thought the boy was gone. Then she saw that he had found the ladder in the hallway and had propped it up in the alcove where she kept her clothes, which now really were rucked up and unpresentable. In the ceiling of the alcove, which she had never seen before because that corner was so dark, he had found a hatch of some sort, a trapdoor. And he had lifted the hinged hatch about a foot, and was standing on the ladder in a pool of unearthly light that had never before come into any room she had occupied. He looked magical. The light made his scruffy mousy curls seem pale and almost translucent. His arms were plump and hard.

She could tell he wasn’t looking into the schoolyard, but in the other direction. He wouldn’t have seen her coming. She didn’t want to frighten him and cause him to fall. She walked up softly and put her hand on his calf, to announce her presence. Startled, he nearly kicked her teeth out. She should have guessed. A fellow citizen of Oz who didn’t like to be touched.

“You nearly scared the knickers off me,” he said.

“Scootch over, I’m coming up,” she replied. He inched to one side, and there was just enough room for her to fit her feet on the rungs and join him.

She had never seen the city of Shiz from anywhere but gutter level, as her own window in the annex looked onto the cloistered schoolyard with its ivied walls. This high up, she saw a confusion of roofs in the bright cold glare of a winter noontime. Gables and domes—that was St. Florix, surely?—and crenellations, were they, and clock towers. And stone steeples. And scholars’ towers poking from the colleges. “That dark one with the pointy windows is Three Queens Library,” said the boy. “And do you see the one with the gold escutcheons high up, under the gutters? That’s the Doddery at Crage Hall, I think.”

“It’s like a field planted with toys.” She couldn’t stop her voice from sounding breathy and girly, but, hell, it was beautiful.

“And the weather vanes. You can make out the nearer ones. I see a were-wolf over there. Can you see it?”

“The one on the little pointy bit of roof?”

“No, that’s a Queen Ant, for some reason. To the left, above the mansard roof with the pattern in the tiles.”

“It looks more like a were-pig than a were-wolf.”

He laughed at that, which made her feel they were standing too close. But there was no choice if they wanted to survey Shiz from this height; the hatch was only so wide. Their shoulders were touching, and the only warm thing. The wind was fierce. “Look, a goose,” he told her.