Page 29 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“They were too big to be a lot. They took up the whole space nearly, between the lofts for straw up high and the stalls below.”

Glinda went to a table and looked at the implements. She selected a knife and a loaf of bread. She cut off the heels and a good deal of the crusts and made the loaf into a statue of a house, as well as she could. “So. It was like this?”

“Yes but turned over.” Rain reached out and upended it. “And the spider leggses all up and down here and here. But this end was more pointy.”

“Oh. Oh yes, of course. I see now.” Glinda plucked a paring knife and quickly made of the upside-down house a sort of tugboat. “Like this. And if the spider legs were knocked away, it would look like a boat.”

“Boats don’t have such pointy bottoms.”

“Some do. You’ve probably never seen a boat out of the lake, that’s all.” She put the knife down softly. “They’re building boats. They’re going to take a flotilla up the lake and attack Haugaard’s Keep by water. Of course. It makes sense.” She thought of the map she had seen, and the dotted line up the middle of Restwater. In the center of the lake the inv

aders would be beyond the reach of any local ambush brigade mounted by Zimmerstorm or Haventhur to the north, or Bigelow or Sedney to the south. Though the progress of such vessels, if they were indeed as large as Rain suggested, would be clearly visible, and allow impromptu navies up and down the lake to row out to attack them. What was Cherrystone playing at?

“You’ve done very well, Rain,” said Glinda. She hesitated a moment, and then—something she had resisted doing for years—she put her hand on Rain’s shoulder. “You deserve a reward. What would you like?”

“Do you got anything I can read?”

“Nothing suitable, I’m afraid. Besides, I hear from the General that you’re at early stages yet. But perhaps you’ll learn.”

“I’ll learn,” said Rain. “Meanwhile, if you en’t got no bookses, give me two slices of boat and some butter spread on ’em.” She twisted her hands and grinned at Glinda. It was the first time in, what, seven years.

I6.

For what was Glinda waiting? To be rescued? To have a tantrum? To be inspired to act? To warble an anthem of protest to an incredulous shoreline? She did a little crochet work, a sunny pillow with a motto. OZMA BEFORE US. She watched the thunderheads of Highsummer massing to the west, and she fled if they threatened to let loose. She studied the long lake, which curved between the foothills of the Great Kells on the far southern side and the lower slopes of the Pine Barrens on the northern. The placement of Mockbeggar on its little promontory gave her limited advantage; as the lake curved subtly to the southeast, it narrowed and disappeared between opposing banks. Same to the northwest. Due to the angle, she couldn’t glimpse Haugaard’s Keep even had she the eyes of a hawk. Unless she had the wings of a hawk too, of course.

Her household wobbled on. Systems seemed maintained not so much through stamina as through an inertia borne of fear. Nothing more came to light about Chef. Puggles did what he could with the odd breast of fallow-hen, with parsleyfruit and wristwrencher beans, with eggs and cheese and a militant sort of pastry pot pie that refused to yield to a knife. Miss Murth lived on tea and she smelled of tea and she began to resemble a tall stalk of ambulatory celery, and she trembled when she talked, which was less often than usual. What Rain ate was a mystery to Glinda, mostly.

One day when the cloudburst began earlier than usual, the girl showed up fresh from her lesson. She hunted for Os and Zs all over Glinda’s parlor, in the gnarly filigrees of preposterously carved furniture. She all but capered with the fun of it. “I know Oz, now,” she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. “Usually letters don’t hide inside each other,” she told Glinda firmly.

“No, that’s true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding, though.”

The girl turned and as if by magnetism walked directly over to the little bookshelf beside the window. She tugged the yellow book out. It might as well have been her primer. “What’s this book? I can’t read these words yet.”

“It’s called, um, The Wind Blew Away. Or something.”

“Is it about the big wind that blew Dorothy here?”

“Where did you hear about Dorothy?”

“Miss Murth told me the story.”

“Never listen to Miss Murth. She’s too old to be valid. Now put that book back.”

I must seem too old to be valid, too, thought Glinda, as Rain ignored her. The girl opened the cover and ran her hand along the page. “What’s hidden here?”

Glinda felt a chill. “What nonsense you speak. What do you mean?”

“This book. It’s like a creature. It’s alive.” She turned to Glinda. “Can you feel it? It gots a heart, almost. It’s warm. It’s purring.”

“Do you come in here and touch this book when I’m not looking?”

“No. I never seen it before. But it was sort of shimmery.”

Glinda snatched it away. She had never noticed a shimmer to the book and she didn’t see one now. But Rain was on to something. The Grimmerie had a kind of urgent low heat to it. A kind of soundless hum.

She found herself saying, nearly whispering, “What page would you like to look at?”

Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

---