Page 155 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Rain said, “I don’t know about the mountain and sea business. But I suppose we’re saying something of the same thing. It’s more important to try to stop what may be about to happen, whichever way it goes—because it’s all worthwhile to someone. The beaver dam is worth something to the beavers, the—the shell to the lake creature that built it—the roost to the hen, the swamp to the marshstalker. Nether How to my father.”

“And this place to me,” said Chistery, “though Kiamo Ko could do with a bit more in the way of central heating.”

“Are we going to decide what to do, though?” asked Rain. “That’s why we’ve come here to sit together for a few moments.”

Iskinaary said, “Well, Chistery is too old to fly anyplace.”

“Speak for yourself,” replied the flying monkey, but admitted he had obligations to Nanny that would keep him from leaving his highland home.

“Are we to break up into groups? One to the Emerald City, one to Colwen Grounds, and try to intercept the Grimmerie somehow?” asked Iskinaary. “I’m sorry, Rain, but I’m not quite getting your drift.”

“I don’t have a plan yet. We’re working on it together.”

“I am not going back to Munchkinland, thank you very much,” said Dorothy. “Don’t forget there’s an order of execution on my head.”

“My countryfolk were beastly to you,” agreed Little Daffy. “But don’t be harsh on them, dear. They’re under so much stress, invaded by Loyal Oz. Now, as to schemes. Personally, I have precious little interest in ever visiting the Emerald City again. Who would ever give me the time of day there, if the sons of the EC and Gillikin are dying in battle against my countrymen?”

“Against the Animals,” corrected the Lion. “But point taken. Sentiment is fine over a round table, but once you decide to come down from this high peak, you have to make a choice one way or the other. That’s the human condition.

“I know,” he added. “And I’m a Lion. Same difference.”

“We’ll sleep on it,” said Rain.

Once again she was asleep and then she heard a voice, but she could hardly tell what it was saying. She half-woke, and rolled over in the moonlight to see if there was a mole, or maybe a goldfish come up from the fishwell in the basements. The only thing she saw was the iridescent shell, its usual gleam even brighter against the gloom of a mountain night in late summer.

She picked her way over Tip, careful not to disturb him, and hardly knowing what she intended, she retraced the steps she’d taken earlier in the day and walked up the stairs to Elphaba’s chamber.

Snaggle-toothed autumn was loping in. A jackal moon was assembling its features in the sky. Rain had heard that the constellation appeared only once in a generation or so. It didn’t last long, but while it lasted, peasants and mill laborers alike considered it a time of peril and possibility.

Without Tip to watch her, she had a different kind of courage. She creaked open the shutters of the Witch’s great window, both sides, and the moon stepped through spiderweb fretwork into the chamber.

A patter at her heels made her turn. Tay had appeared from nowhere. It must have sensed her moving at night. She smiled at it—and almost could have sworn it smiled back. Though a creature of the wild has no smile we can recognize.

“Look in the glass,” said Tay.

“You can’t talk,” she said, not alarmed; she realized she was sleep-walking.

“I know,” said Tay. “I’m sorry. Look in the glass.”

Because this was not a nightmare, and because a calm had lit upon her, she wasn’t scared to look. She rubbed the surface of the globe and huffed upon it to make it shiny. The moonlight helped, one sphere to another. Tay leapt to the table and entwined, almost snakelike, around the carved legs of the stand.

The initial sense was of flatness—more like peering through a porthole than into a fishbowl. She remembered staring at a page in the Grimmerie once, when a glassy circlet had shown an unidentified figure gesturing at her. Trying to make a landfall of some message or other. She left that memory behind, and leaned closer.

At first she saw nothing, just shifting smudges. Clouds seen from below the surface of a lake, as if you were a fish. Or it might be clouds seen from above, she thought, if you were a kind of creature who wasn’t tethered by gravity to the time and place in which you were born, and if you could approach from anywhere, see anything.

The mothy batting pulled apart, like the spun sugarbrittle sold at Scandal Day. She began to focus.

It took a moment to realize she was examining something of what Dorothy had been warbling about. The mountains of Oz stood up first—not as in a map, flattened out and drawn, but built up in miniature, as if in pastry-dough. From a great distance mountains show earliest; they are the first face of a world. She could see Oz the way Dorothy had said to see it in a song, all at once: Mount Runcible to the north, poking up like a king-hill, uncrowded and pompous; and the Great Kells in their scimitar curve, bending to the left and then angling to the right, toward the south, softening. She could see that the Quadling Kells and the Wend Hardings were just smaller cousins of the Great Kells, and that the Madeleines and the Cloth Hills were second cousins who had moved out of town to get a little room. And the Scalps, up in the Glikkus, were the high bishops of the whole affair, in their emerald crowns, although of course she couldn’t see the emeralds.

The picture shifted. An angle of moonlight picked up the silver that shines on water, and then she could see the eight or ten queenly lakes of Oz drawn out as neatly as Madame Chortlebush could have done on a map. The long silvered leaf of Restwater at the center, the birthing pool of all of Oz; and bootblack deadly Kellswater not far off. Spottily, here and there, the turquoise lakes that depended on mountain runoff for their bounty: Lake Chorge in Gillikin, Mossmere and Illswater in Munchkinland, and a shifting lake in the Thousand Year Grasslands at the far west of the Kells. The moving lake that she’d heard came and went at its own choice, drawing thousands of prairie beasts like magnets back and forth to its iron will.

Another shift of the snout of the jackal moon, pointing out the forests of Oz. A lot of Oz was woods, from the snarl of northern wilderness, the Great Gillikin Forest, to virtually every slope and vale in regions mountainous or gentle. And see, the rustling abundance of the eastern Corn Basket, a neatly governed patchwork cousin to the wild grasses of the west. Look how the marshes of Quadling Country are the damp wet footing for the tall pines of the Great Gillikin Forest fifteen hundred miles to the north.

She peered for the slopes below Kiamo Ko, to see if the Five Lakes around Nether How came to view. Reluctantly, like shy fish, they winked up at her. But this was a dream, and like all dreams it had some conditions. One of them is that she couldn’t push for more than it would give. She couldn’t screw her focus tighter, or by force of desire pull the world into greater resolution. Though she thought she could even find the kindly hillock of Nether How itself, she couldn’t make it any clearer. She couldn’t see the house. She couldn’t see her mother. She just couldn’t see her mother.

Neither could she see anyone, she realized, not human or Animal or animal. From the height of an angel, there seemed to be no sign of occupation of this vast textured complexity. Not even a city—not even the Emerald City, which she might have expected to spy blooming in the center of Oz like a big throbbing bee stinging the living organism, or sucking the bloom of its sweetness.

Then, even in her dreaminess, her mind remembered the map she and Tip had found in the shop in Shiz on that rainy afternoon. She remembered the story of Tip and his trip to Ev, out of Oz across the deadly sands, and of the stamp of the shell on the left edge of the map, beyond the Outer Vinkus. She rose on tiptoe to see beyond the sands north of Mount Runcible, and south of Quadling Country. She torqued her face to try to peer beyond the sands west of the Thousand Year Grasslands. But the jackal moon wouldn’t loan its light through the glass at so oblique an angle. She could only see what it would show her.

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