Page 90 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Come near for a kiss, come near for a cluck,

I’ll climb aboard and blindly—

until they all told him to shut up.

Liir and Candle had made the trip through the passes north of the Sleeve of Ghastille so long ago that they hardly recognized the way back. Six, seven years ago, was it? And at a different time of year. Now, as the ragged travelers abandoned their hideaway, a cold wind gripped and pulled at their cloaks and manes and shawls. Liir looked back, squinting, at where the Chancel of the Ladyfish tucked itself against the slope. He nudged Candle to see. It was hidden to view, even though they knew where it was.

Mr. Boss insisted he wasn’t going to take the Clock into Munchkinland again. He didn’t trust those squirrely little people, except of course his wife. Who knew if General Cherrystone had put out a bulletin of arrest on the basis of the Clock’s having predicted some disaster involving the dragons in Restwater? The dwarf would rather take his chances in Loyal Oz, he said.

So the companions turned their heads west, toward the Disappointments and the oakhair forest. Maybe they were postponing the moment they would have to separate. That moment would come, soon enough, near one of the great lakes or the other. No one was certain about relative distances across the terrain, but in Oz you tended to show up where you needed to get, sooner or later.

The little detour, the loop west, would be their coda, at least for the time being. Who knew how much time they had left together? (Who ever knows?) Without naming it as such, they all felt the tug of their imminent separation. At least, all the adults did. What Rain thought, or Tay, or for that matter the Time Dragon hunched in paralysis up there, couldn’t be guessed at.

They lurched through upland meadows and past escarpments of scrappy trees, through lowland growths of protected firs, along streambeds partially glazed with ice. The warm snap had returned to the air a sense of the rot of pine needles and mud, but the air eddied with the sourness of ice, too.

They were walking into a trap.

Or they were walking home at last.

They didn’t know—who does?—where they were going.

But the world was specifically magnificent this week, in this place. Behold the diseased forest east of the Great Kells, called by some the Disappointments. Largely unpopulated due to barren soil—only scrub could grow in the wind off the Kells, and only tenacious and bitter farmers bothered to hang on. The few unpainted homesteads were scrappy, the sheds for the farmer’s goats identical to those for the farmer’s children. The companions avoided human settlements as they could, preferring to pitch camp amidst the deer droppings and rabbit tracks in the scrapey woods.

A rainstorm blew in then and parked over their heads. Their passage slowed down due to the mud, and they couldn’t build a fire. The little girl shivered but didn’t complain. Four or five days in, they came to a dolmen on which someone had painted destinations. One side was scrawled with VINKUS RIVER FORD, TO THE WEST, with an arrow pointing left. The other side read MUNCHKINLAND AND RESTWATER LAKE. Brrr was for turning east, but Liir stopped him.

“We’re not more than a day or two from Apple Press Farm in the other direction,” he told them. “Where Rain was born. We still have two months before Dorothy can travel down from the Glikkus to be put on trial. Let’s take a couple of days at the farm. At the least, we’ll have a roof over our heads. We can dry out. Warm up the child. Maybe something survived in the root garden after all these years.”

“I didn’t pack for a nostalgia tour,” said Mr. Boss, but Liir insisted. Candle agreed that they might enjoy a night or two with a fire in a hearth before proceeding cross-country toward Munchkinland. Since it was only a brief interruption of their progress, the company turned about, keeping the Great Kells to their left. The massed fortress of basalt and evergreen and snow looked inhospitable but breathtaking.

That night the rain let up for a spell. The company took turns singing around a campfire and telling stories. Nor told the tale of the Four Improbable Handshakes. Candle sang in Qua’ati, something long and inexpressibly boring, though everyone smiled and swayed as if entranced. (Except Rain.) Iskinaary barracked a raft of Goose begats, and Mr. Boss finally riled himself out of his somnolence to provide a few short poems of questionable virtue.

A certain young scholar of Shiz

Right before a philosophy quiz

Guzzled splits of champagne

So that he could declaim

“I drink, and therefore I is.”

And

A sweet cultivated young Winkie

Could do civilized things with her pinkie

Which excited young men

Who cried, “Do me again!”

Though the pinkie emerged somewhat stinky.

“That’ll do,” said Nor, Candle, and Little Daffy, all at once.

Even Liir, without a whole lot of confidence in his tone, tried to dredge up some scrap of song he had sung when he was in the service. He could only get a bit of the one called, he thought, “The Return of His Excellency Ojo.”

Sing O! for the warrior phantom phaeton

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