Page 36 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

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But he wasn’t dead. After Zackers and a few others had carried him into the reception room, where men on cots had leapt up to provide him a bed, Glinda saw that he was still breathing. “You have a physician among your men,” she said to Cherrystone. “If not, there’s a doctor in Haventhur who will come to Mockbeggar, assuming you promise her safe passage here and back again. Though I hardly know if I can rely on your word.”

“I assure you, Lady Glinda, whatever happened will prove to have been an accident.” In front of his men he returned to formality in addressing her. But she hardly cared about that now. She put her hand on Puggles’s forehead as if feeling a servant were part of her routine. She had no idea what to think about how his forehead felt, though. It felt like a parsnip, which until this week she had never felt, either.

She refused an escort upstairs and took her leave of Cherrystone without ceremony. The evening had ended badly—horribly, for poor Puggles—but not without some small reward. She had used a spell to draw winter upon the water. A baby step, to be sure. But that wine had been nicely chilled by her work.

Her step hastened as she realized that if men had been in her private chambers rearranging her furniture, someone might have removed the books from her shelves. Luckily, soldiers seemed uninterested in books. The little library had been lifted intact and installed in her bedroom.

Miss Murth and Rain were huddled together on a settee. Miss Murth’s face had been wet but was now dry as if permanently. Her grim strength had an aspect of fleckstone about it.

“This is a furniture warehouse,” said Glinda. One could get about the room by climbing on top of the wardrobe, dressers, chairs. A cat would love this room, leap up and never descend again. But there was hardly enough floor space to do her daily kick-ups to keep her bottom pert. “We can’t live like this. Murthy, what happened?”

“You weren’t gone half an hour, Lady Glinda, before they beefed their way through the door. General’s orders, they said. They locked us in this room till they’d cleared out. Puggles tried to stop them, but they’d have none of it. There were almost a dozen of them, and all young men, showing no respect for a man of his age. They took him up the stairs to the parapet to get him out of the way. I don’t know what happened next. They told me he broke away and fell over the balustrade. Dreadful liars, the lot of them. What will become of us?”

“You will have to sleep on the settee. Rain, can you settle down?”

But Rain had become a cat. She had climbed up a chest of drawers and crossed on top of the escritoire and scrabbled aboard the wardrobe. “I can sleep up here!” she crowed. For her, this was fun. Well, Glinda thought, perhaps it felt to her like having a family. Which is less fun than is generally acknowledged in the popular press.

“You’ll do no such thing. Get down from there. You’ll be the next one to bash your skull.”

Murth fussed. “Oh, Mum, is that what happened to Puggles?”

“He’s alive, at least he was when I left him. I don’t know his condition. I think they’re sending for Dame Doctor Vutters.”

Rain said, “Did your supper get all et up?”

“How kind of you to remember.” Under the circumstances, Glinda was touched. “It was as well received as I might have hoped for.”

Murth set her straight. “She means, is there any left. We didn’t get a meal, what with the invasion of the furniture snatchers.”

“I’ll see to it at once.” The queen of the kitchen now, she sallied forth from her room. But in her large salon she was stopped by four soldiers in dress habillard. They carried rapiers, ceremonial but sharp. None of them was Zackers.

“Curfew, Lady Glinda,” said one. “Apologies from the General.”

“But I’m peckish. I’m off to collect myself a little pick-me-up.”

“We’re here to be of service.”

“Nonsense. What, are you going to remove the night soil as well? Sing us to sleep if we have a bad dream? Boys. Out of my way.”

“Orders, Lady Glinda. We’ll dispatch to the commissary for what you need. Will bread and cheese do?”

“Rye brisks. And milk. I have a child, don’t you know.” And how odd to make that statement. “I have a lady companion as well. So a bottle of savorsuckle brandy while you’re at it.”

Returning to her room, she felt defeated. When the door closed behind her, Rain and Miss Murth glanced up with eyes like sunken puddings. (For the rest of Glinda’s life, would everything look like spoiled food? A sad commentary.) She had nothing to say. But thunder outside the house, nearer this time, said it for her. “Let’s open the curtains and raise a window. The air is stuffy in here with the three of us. At least two of us ought to have bathed more recently, had we known we’d be lodging together.”

She directed Miss Murth to the sash, and in doing so realized that they’d been crowded into a room with windows that looked only in one direction—east. Glinda had always preferred sleeping in a room served by the sunrise, but now that she was exiled from other chambers, she had no view of the front gardens, and none of Restwater except the distances toward Haugaard’s Keep. A flotilla sailing in from the Gillikin River and western Restwater could be approaching the boathouses and she’d never see them till they passed—or arrived.

“Thunder, but no sign of rain,” said Miss Murth. “The night is cloudless.”

“This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.

“Get in your nightdress,” snapped Glinda.

“It’s in my trunk. Up in the attics, where I sleeps.”

“You’ll have to borrow something of mine. Miss Murth, find her a camisole. Something.”

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