Page 43 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She stretched out her left arm, Rain her right. They delivered the spell to bring winter upon the water.

It was unclear whether it was working at first, for the strong wind continued to blow, the sails to billow and flap, audible even at this distance. Glinda held her breath and trained her gaze on the foothills of the Great Kells. It seemed as if the masts were making slower progress against them. Slower, slower still. Then the masts shivered and creaked, and one of them split because the soldiers-turned-sailors didn’t yet know their progress had stopped, that the sails had needed to be brought about or cut.

The four boats and the six dragons were pinned in an island of ice that had come up from the water below and congealed around webbed feet and submerged hulls. The dragons were enraged and crashing their wings. Shrieking.

“They sound like you, Mum,” said Rain.

“We haven’t time to watch them drown, or burn their way loose, or turn around to catch us. We’re cooked any way you look at it. Let’s go.”

22.

Safe enough to set one of the barns on fire, one that stood away from the house. And anyway, it had been more or less eviscerated; she saw that the soldiers had appropriated a good many of the posts and beams from the hayloft. A security measure, bringing the structure down, she could say. The clouds of black smoke would alarm residents of Haventhur and Bigelow and the rest, and ready them for whatever punishment Cherrystone and the forces of the Emerald City might still manage to loose against them.

Glinda had never saddled up a carriage, but Rain had spent her childhood in the barns. While the girl wasn’t big enough to handle the tackle, she knew what was needed, and she could demonstrate how it hooked and snaggled together. In the time it would have taken them to walk to Zimmerstorm on their hands and knees, Glinda had readied the lightest of carriages. So they set out along the coast road, heading west—away from the wreckage on the water.

As it happened, they didn’t need to go very far. Four miles out—away from the burning barn, the ships frozen in the summer lake, the panicked and furious dragons, and General Cherrystone—waited the Lion and that high-strung veiled woman with the pretty white hair. She was pacing and he was lolling, but when the Lion saw the carriage he drew himself to his hind legs and smoothed his mane.

“How did you know I would come here?” asked Glinda.

“You forget for whom we work,” said the woman. “The Clock tells us things that may happen. Not what should happen, mind, or what will happen. But what might.”

“Anything might happen,” said Glinda.

“The secret of why prophecy is so popular,” agreed the woman. “Good for business.”

“I brought you back the book,” said Glinda. “It’s too fussy for me to have. I thought so the first time I had it, and I think so again.”

The Lion said, “We’ll take it. You’re safer without it now, in case there are reprisals. But from the hill where the Clock is hidden—we have a good view of the lake. We saw what you were able to do with the Grimmerie. You used it well.” He grinned at her. “Nice piece of work, sister.”

Glinda remembered the play. “Have the sailing Menaciers all drowned?”

“It’s not over yet,” said the woman. “But they saw the Clock’s performance, and the fear of their own drowning will undo them usefully. You’ve pinched exactly the right nerve. The alarm has been given, and the dragons have been slowed or made ill.”

“A dragon with a head cold. Nasty thought.”

“You never knew a dragon to live in an icy realm, did you? Cold is perishing pain to them, one hears tell.”

Glinda took the Grimmerie from where it had lain like an old farmer’s manual on the floor of the carriage. It had shed its disguise while they clattered on the road, and it looked like itself. Perhaps a bit more tattered. Could a book that old continue to age?

“You’ve done a great service,” said the Lion, taking it from her. “Some wouldn’t have thought you capable.”

“Well, I learned to cook. At my age,” she told him. “What’s next? Arts therapy? Anyway, I’ve had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases on down any road. Come, Rain. A quick good-bye, and off you go.”

“Good-bye,” said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman.

“Not to them,” said Glinda. “To me.”

She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. “Mum?”

“He was too interested in you,” she said in as bland a voice as she could manage. “It’s become too dangerous. You are better off with them.”

“We don’t have those instructions from Mr. Boss,” said the Lion. He growled low in the back of his throat.

“Mr. Boss is not the only one who gives instructions,” she told him. “I am a Throne Minister Emerita. As I remember it, Sir Brrr, I am the one who conferred a Namory upon you. Many years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, pussying about with his l

apel. “Very nice and all that, but Lady Glinda.”

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