Page 58 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Rain shook her head.

“What about Lady Glinda?” asked Ilianora, but Rain showed no sign of hearing.

The Bird Woman wrote, finally, Grayce Graeling.

“That was me before I was a bird,” she told them. “So if they ask you if you ever met me, you can say no.”

“Is that g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y?” said Brrr, whose spectacles were in his other weskit.

“The orthographics have it several ways,” she said. “I vary it for reasons of disguise. Now I prefer Graeling, using both vowels, because it sounds more like a bird.”

“They all sound the same,” said Rain. Grayce Graeling regarded Rain as if she were a conveniently placed spittoon, but she wrote out some extra words on a piece of paper so that Rain could practice reading. “Is this a magic spell?” the girl asked her.

“Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

“I know that,” Rain declared, sourly, grabbing the paper. “I seen some books before.”

“Even if it’s broken, I’d keep that Clock out of sight, were I you,” warned Grayce Graeling. “The Emperor doesn’t want anyone else to have any toys. You’re courting trouble.”

“Nosy crow. None of your business,” said Mr. Boss.

The Bird Woman began to scale her tree. “Mind what I say. I have a friend or two in high places.” She pointed to some birds flailing against the blue, way up there.

“Are you coming with us too?” asked Rain, who thought she’d discovered the Company’s new everyday trick, collecting lunatics. Behind Grayce Graeling, the other travelers made X-ing gestures at Rain with their ha

nds.

8.

Why din’t she come along? She coulda taught us to fly,” groused Rain. “The book said us four,” said Brrr. “Remember? Four fingers, to the south?”

“Then what about her?” Rain pointed over her shoulder at Little Daffy.

“The book meant me too,” said Little Daffy. “I was hidden there in that spook-lady’s gesture, probably. The figure you described in the O. I was small, the thumb. You couldn’t see me in the prophecy, but I was there.”

“The blind, the lame, the halt, the criminally berserk,” said Mr. Boss. “You have to stop somewhere or you don’t have friends, you have a nation.”

The next day, meandering across the Disappointments, they kept looking back to make sure the Bird Woman wasn’t pacing after them. “Is them her friends?” Rain asked, over and over, of any local wren or raven, until the others stopped answering and the girl fell silent.

They paused for supper when the heat of the day finally began to lift a little. As the adult females organized a meal, the Lion rested his sore muscles and slept quickly, deftly, for a few minutes. Then he told them, “I emerge from my snooze remembering who the Bird Woman is. Or was.”

“Ozma herself, that’s it,” said Little Daffy. “A hundred years old but holding the line nicely. Am I right? Ya think?”

“She was the archivist in Shiz who helped me look at Madame Morrible’s papers,” said Brrr. “A gibbertyflibbet if ever I saw one, the kind of person who enters a café with such fluster and alarm one would think she’d never been out in a public space before. Frankly, I doubt she possesses enough talent at spells to have had to bother going dotty at the Emperor’s prohibition of magic.”

The dwarf lit his pipe and drew on it, releasing an odor of cherry tobacco cut with heart-of-waxroot. “Never underestimate the capacity of a magician to go dotty. Occupational hazard.”

“Maybe news has gotten out somehow. News that the Grimmerie has emerged from hiding. Makes me nervous, this impounding of sorcerers’ tools. If the Emperor has lowered a moratorium on items of magic, on the practicing of spells—if Shell has called for a surrender of instruments and such—perhaps he’s trying to coax the Grimmerie in by default.”

“Or make its presence in a barren landscape glow and shriek, so he can find it more easily,” said Mr. Boss. “I take your point. Our instruction to move south may prove to have been sound. We’ll keep going.

“But not tonight,” he said to Rain, who hopped up and was ready to run ahead. She was happy with her scrap of paper. Ilianora had shown her how to fold it into a paper missile, and Rain had spent the afternoon launching it and chasing it, finding it and trying to read it, launching it and chasing it again. “Settle down, you ragamunchkin. There’s no moon this time of month, so no night travel. We’ll take our rest in the cool and move again in the morning.”

“Read me what’s on the back,” Rain asked of Ilianora.

Brrr watched his common-trust wife unfold the chevron of paper. The Bird Woman’s handwriting was on one side, but the other side had print upon it. It was a page ripped from a book. A normal book. Without its own shifting editorial policy toward each specific audience.

“What do you know,” said Ilianora. “A scrap of an old tale. One of the fabliaux, one of the long-ago tales. They tell them at harvest festivals and bedtimes. This is one of the stories of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, and her bosom companion, Preenella.”

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