Page 28 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“He teaches me good enough,” said the girl. “I knows a passel of letters now.”

Glinda pursed her lips. She didn’t believe in putting children in danger, nor of frightening them overmuch. “He’s permitted to teach you no more than letters,” she finally said. “If he tries to teach you anything else, you come let me know. Is that understood?”

The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaller, but more honest.

“That’ll do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

“He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

I4.

While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squall of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spell that would send Cherrystone and his men packing. After all, if she could use a spell to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spells. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spells therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t really make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

She replaced the book on the shelf. What had she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so well through that concealing spell that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventually Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubiousness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

I5.

Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shell kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift scullery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

“Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg rolled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shell quite efficiently.

“I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?”

Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

“I’m sure you found a way.”

“I waited till the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

Glinda waited.

Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”

“It’s hard to say what I saw. It was upsy-wrongedy houses, sort of like.”

“I see,” said Glinda, though she did not.

“Like the houses in Zimmerstorm, but on their heads.”

“Were the upsy-wrongedy roofs made of blue tile, as in Zimmerstorm?”

“No. Strokes of wood all hammered close together, going like this.” Rain pushed her hands away from her belly as if describing a long melon in the air.

“Wouldn’t the upsy-wrongedy houses fall over if they were trying to balance on their narrow roofbeams?”

“They all had leggses. Like spiders, sort of. Wooden leggses.”

“How many of these houses?”

“You din’t tell me to counts ’em.”

“A lot?”

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