Page 53 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

The Munchkin woman decided in favor of adventure, to see if her marriage would hold. Before she left the woodcutter’s shed, she buried a spoon in the soil beside the doorsill. She explained: an old Munchkinlander custom before travel was undertaken. If you ever make it home, there’ll be something to eat with, even if the only thing left to eat is dirt.

“Lady Glinda could cook dirt,” said Rain.

Highsummer turned into Goldmonth, though Brrr insisted that up north the season was known as Tattersummer, for the fringing of the leaves by insects. Little Daffy countered that in Munchkinland these late summer days were called Harvest Helltime, as farmers struggled to get crops in before thunderstorms or the occasional dustbillow. “Munchkinland is losing acres of good soil to the desert every year,” she clucked. “If the EC really intends to polka on down and set up housekeeping, they’ll need a good broom.”

Rain listened to pictures more than people. Spoons in the ground, thunderstorms, dustbillo

ws. The use of a good broom. The complexity of the world’s menace was daunting, but perhaps she’d learn to read it as she had learned her letters. First step of reading, after all, is looking.

Eight-foot spiderwebs toward the southern edge of the oakhair forest. The Lion squealed whenever he stumbled into them, but Rain loved them. If she found them before they were battered by her companions, she looked through them, to see what she could see.

It was, indeed, like peering through a window. From one side, she was a human-ish enough girl looking in to the spider world. She saw spiders with short eyelashy legs and spiders with thoraxes like lozenges. Spider-mites with bodies so small you couldn’t even make them out, but who sported legs that could span a skillet.

Hello, little capery-leg. And how do you do today?

What Rain didn’t see, and she kept looking, was groups of spiders. Did spiders have attachments? Other than to their webs? She watched each silvery gumdrop sink on its strings, but when the spider climbed back up, nobody else was ever home. Any guests who blundered into their threaded nets became supper, which seemed unsociable.

Spiders had nerve, and speed, and art of a sort, but they had no friends. They didn’t go get married just like that.

From the other side of the web, being a spider, Rain peered back at the humans, to see in pictures what she could see.

For instance. The dwarf had called Ilianora “daughter” one time too many, so Little Daffy wondered if the veiled woman actually was his child. Ilianora was miffed. “Mr. Boss? Are you joking? My father was a prince, for all the good it did him.”

Everything looked like something. So what did this look like now? Mr. Boss looked like he’d been stung by a flying scorpion. His lips were blown out and bitten back.

Little Daffy looked suddenly ravished with interest by her fingernails.

As a spider, Rain thought Mr. Boss and Little Daffy looked like tiny little matching grandparents, sour as mutual crab apples. They looked like they were playing at living. Or was this living? Rain wasn’t sure. She stayed out of the dwarf’s way as much as she could.

She heard Brrr and Ilianora talk quietly, out of range of the dwarf and the Munchkin, but not out of the range of a spider’s attention. Ilianora proposed that, given the Clock’s new reticence, being married was a legitimate diversion for a dwarf at loose ends. Surely?

“That attitude toward marriage makes of our union a slight mockery, don’t you think?” Brrr purred Ilianora up the side of her neck. “Anyway, they’re at it like a tomcat and the parish whore. Every night. It’s embarrassing.”

“He’s got to do something. He’s not the type to take up knitting by a fireside, is he?”

Rain turned her head. The dwarf was pitching a penknife into a tree trunk at forty feet. His face was sweaty, his raveling beard in need of a shampoo. He didn’t look as if he would favor doing piecework.

“At least he’s stopped fussing so much over Rain,” continued Ilianora. “The book’s told us what to do—stick together, head south—but not why. You and I aren’t captives, though. If you have any other ambitions once we ditch the Grimmerie somewhere safe, spell them out.”

Do I care what they do? wondered Rain, and couldn’t think of an answer.

“I can’t go back to the Emerald City unless I’m willing to hand over the Grimmerie to them,” said Brrr. “Otherwise I’ll be thrown in Southstairs, and it won’t be pretty. You’ve told me how unpretty it would be, in no uncertain terms.”

“I don’t want to talk about Southstairs.” Ilianora’s face turned a shade of stubbornness no spider had ever seen before. “I was asking you about your ambitions. No interest in your companions on the Yellow Brick Road? That Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman?”

“The Scarecrow has all but disappeared. I suppose straw succumbs to mold and weevils. And last I heard, the Tin Woodman is still a labor agitator in Shiz. Wish he could organize our mechanical conscience here. Fat chance of that. Really, that Matter of Dorothy was a sorry passage, let me tell you. In a generally sorry life.”

“Mine hardly prettier. After prison, to slip from doing resistance work into writing fanciful stories for a while. The dilettante’s gavotte, I think one would call it.”

Rain saw their faces screw up more complicated, pancakes trying to become soufflés. Faces bloated, contorted, deflated, endlessly in disguise. Tiresome but curious.

“That General Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall?” Brrr spoke in a softer voice; he didn’t know spiders have good hearing. “Cherrystone was the one who kidnapped you when you weren’t that much older than Rain is now. He didn’t recognize you all grown up, I know. But do you feel—in that vault of your heart—the yearning for vengeance?”

Ilianora held her tongue for what seemed to Rain like a couple of years, but finally she spoke. “We took a risk walking into Mockbeggar Hall carrying the Grimmerie right under Cherrystone’s nose. I believed Mr. Boss when he said the book was only on temporary loan to Lady Glinda. Getting it safely out of there, away from Cherrystone’s hands, seemed the more crucial objective. If the day arrives when I’m ready to take vengeance on him for slaughter—of my family—well, I suspect I’ll know it. It’ll come clear to me, privately, all in good time.”

Secret knowledge, thought Rain. My head hurts.

“As for now,” continued Ilianora, “let history have its way: I’m only a bystander. A dandelion, a spider, nothing more.”

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