Page 134 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

He wouldn’t tell her much about where he’d come from or why he was hiding. He admitted he’d been wandering the country outside Shiz during the summer and had come across the military camp of St. Prowd’s boys. One afternoon he’d befriended a few of them doing an exercise in bivouac, and they’d told him about this vacated dormitory in town. It hadn’t been hard to find. He hadn’t heard Scarly or Rain come or go; the stable walls were thick with horse shawls, and the hay stacked everywhere probably served as extra insulation.

“But what have you been doing during the daytime?” asked Rain.

He cadged food from the stalls on market day, which was easy enough, he told her. But when it grew too cold for outdoor market he was having a harder time of it. For a couple of weeks he’d worked as a kitchen boy in Deckens College, but he’d been caught trying to leave the larder with brisket in his shirtsleeves and been dismissed. Pickings had grown harder as the cold deepened. He’d taken to siphoning oats out of the feedbags of carriage horses, but the mash he could make of them was pretty indigestible. When his space downstairs had been invaded by the arrival of guests for what he’d learned was called Visitation Day, he’d had no choice but to scarper up the stairs just around the turn at the landing. He’d heard Rain come in from the schoolyard side and start up the steps. He’d panicked and kept ahead of her, sprinting, arriving at the top level before she did. Without knowing it, Rain had cornered him by going right to the room he had found at the top of the stairs.

“But where are you from? Have you no home? No family? Why are you hiding?”

“Where are you from?” he countered, as if he could tell by her expression that she was as guarded as he. And while she could lie about some things, to people who didn’t figure much, she found she couldn’t lie to Tip. Neither could she break her oath to her family and put those people in jeopardy by saying anything about them. So she said nothing.

She did, however, admit that he could call her Rain.

He spent the night on the floor beside her bed, under the horse blanket.

He slept very hard. He didn’t hear her get up and turn the coals and, finding no ember willing to catch again, remove the venting pipe and close the hatch, for warmth. When she went back to bed she saw that Tay had moved from her mattress to the crook in Tip’s elbow. Just for an instant she wished she were Tay, but that seemed such utter nonsense that she threw herself back onto her bed again so hard she banged into the wall and hurt her nose. Neither Tip nor Tay stirred to ask her if she was all right.

Before breakfast bell, Scarly appeared with a tea towel covering four hot scones, and so the brief time in which it was just the two of them, just Tip and Rain—well, and Tay—was already over. Rain tried not to resent Scarly standing there with her dropped jaw. Tip sat up and made to cover himself with the blanket, but since he wasn’t undressed there wasn’t much point. “Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, “en’t you cooked yourself up a pottage of mischief somehow, and no mistake.”

Rain took the scones and handed them to Tip. “Well, now you’re ruined too, for feeding the intruder, and I’ll say so if you squeal on us, Scarly. So it’s best to keep your mouth closed until we decide what we’re going to do.”

“We?” said Scarly. “Which we is that, I wonder?”

Rain wasn’t quite sure, but it felt a nice word to say.

All too easily Scarly became a conspirator with special duties in menu augmentation. Tip was no fool. Well-cooked, plentiful if simple fare, delivered almost hot from the griddle, was more appealing than cold scraps that the rats had gotten to first. Snowy alleys and college kitchen yards had lost their lustre.

Tip settled into Rain’s room, sometimes reading there all hours if the weather was beastly, or pacing the city streets for news and exercise if the day was relatively fine. Once in a while he came back late, slipping in from the service lane through the stables. The hinges were so old that one of them had snapped, permitting a door to be angled just so, allowing to slip through any boy narrowed enough by hunger.

Once Rain asked, “What are you hunting for?”

“News, that’s all.”

“News of your family? Is that it?”

But he wouldn’t talk about his family, and neither would she. A silent compromise they’d never discussed, and usually she remembered not to raise the subject.

This time he relented, up to a point. “I want to hear about the war.”

Rain had no interest in the war. She hardly remembered the time of the dragons on Restwater, except as an imprecise excitement that she sometimes believed she was imagining. The war had been going on as long as she could recall. It wasn’t a real thing in any useful way; it was just a

condition of existence, like the forward lunge of time, and the ring of deadly sands that circled all of Oz, and the fact that cats hunted mice. “All the war news sounds made up,” she complained. “I never saw a cannon dragged through any country lane. I never heard a gunshot from the classroom window. If there was once more ample food to be had, it was before I was able to get used to it. I hardly believe that peace and war are opposites. I think to most people they’re the same thing.”

“You’ve put your finger on a huge problem, right there,” he said. “But if you’re crossing the Wend Hardings on foot, which is the only way to cross them, and if you come across a contingent of various Animals of different sizes and abilities and temperaments who, despite their natural hostilities and exhaustion, are training together to hold the line against professional soldiers—well, then.” He sighed, hardly willing to sum it up. “You see more than you’d like. Battle readiness seems a bundle of small disagreements trying to aim in a common direction against a common, larger disagreement.”

She had studied a little geographics under Madame Chortlebush. “Are you telling me you came from Munchkinland?”

“I’m not telling you anything. We’re talking about the war, and how people talk about it in Shiz.”

She tried not to pry. Too much. “How do people talk about it in Shiz?”

“You know as well as I do. You live here. You’ve lived here longer.”

“Yes, but.” Since he had given something away, inadvertent or not, she allowed the tiniest scrap of herself. “I’m not from here, either. So I’m not sure what I hear. Anyway, girls in school don’t talk about the war. They talk about their teachers and about boys.” She regarded Tip not in fondness but in appraisal. “They’d eat you alive.” At that comment he didn’t blush; he blanched. Rain hurried on. “War just seems to crest and crest until a checkmate is reached, and then it stays like that forever. Getting staler and staler. Nobody ever winning.”

“Until one side or the other manages a breakthrough strategy.”

“Like what?”

“Oh. Forcing the other side into bankruptcy. Or negotiating a pact with some useful third party, say. For instance, if Loyal Oz could persuade the trolls to switch their allegiance, the EC Messiars would be able to invade Munchkinland through the Scalps. Those trolls are pretty fearsome in battle.”

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