“I was looking for you, too, sort of—you just saw me first,” Liir answered. “It might have been the other way round. Anyway, what does it matter? Here we are. Together a moment longer, anyway.”
After a while, Trism managed to say, “Are you sure you can fly in this condition?”
“What condition is that? I’ve been in this condition my whole life,” Liir answered. “It’s the only condition I know. Bitter love, loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”
They kissed each other a final time, and Liir mounted the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, and felt it rise beneath him. He did not look back at where Trism stood. He had few talents, did Liir, and while flying a broom was one of them, he wasn’t practiced enough to risk breaking his neck.
His other talent, though, was a distillation of memory into something rich and urgent. He guessed, in the hours or years remaining to him, he would remember the effect of Trism clearly, without corruption, as a secret pulse held in a pocket somewhere behind the heart.
The exact look of Trism, though, the scent and heft of him, the feel of him, would probably decay into imprecision, a shadowy form, unseen but imagined. Hardly distinguishable from an extra chimney in a valley formed by pantiled roofs of a mauntery.
The Eye of the Witch
1
FLYING AT NIGHT.
He kept low at first, scarcely twice the height of the highest trees. The winds tunneling beneath the cloud cover were ill-tempered, as if out to tumble him. Below, the oakhair forest twitched in the winter gale, looking like the pelt of a great beast lumbering along for midnight rendezvous with sex or supper.
Then the clouds thinned, and the air grew colder still. He remembered more of the attack by dragons than he wanted to—it kicked up a sick feeling. He couldn’t manage much more height than he’d achieved so far. Still, with a quick flip of his head left, right, he could make out the southernmost cove of Kellswater and the bay where the Vinkus River debouched into Restwater. From this vantage both lakes looked hard and dead as slate.
He crossed the dark line drawn by the Vinkus River. Now he was halfway to Kumbricia’s Pass, which meant that Apple Press Farm was somewhere below. How was Candle faring? He thought of pulling down and seeing.
You could, he said to himself. Now you needn’t worry about scaring her, for if you show up in the middle of the night, she’ll be ready: she’ll have divined the present and sensed your approach, and prepared the tea for your arrival. And the blankets, and the fire, and the bed, though you’re not ready yet to go to her bed again, even chastely.
But no, no, he continued—no. What if she was with someone else? Or what if she’d left? Or what if Commander Cherrystone recognized Trism and arrested him, and tortured him into revealing Liir’s hiding place—and thence discovered Candle? And kidnapped her—as he had done Nor all those years ago!—as a kind of reprisal against the slaughter of the dragon contingent, the ruin of the basilica?
Liir was learning to think in terms of consequence. He gave due credit to the strategies and devices of the Emperor. In any case, though, concern for Candle would distract Liir from completing his mission, as he had promised her to do. Let Trism get there safely and see to her needs, if he could, if he would. Time enough for me to show my sorry face and find out what’s going to happen next.
For now, he would finish what he’d started: at least this much.
He might have caught sight of the farmhouse roof winking, or he might be miles and miles off. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He kept his eyes trained on the foothills of the Great Kells, which from this height were already beginning to swell, less an actual shape than a shift in the grade of shadow.
The wind strengthened as it rushed down the eastern slopes of Oz’s mountainy spine. He lost speed, and it took more effort to keep the broom on course. Like riding a horse in a raging river, he imagined, now that he had some experience of horseback riding under his belt, as it were. Finally he had to come down to earth entirely, from exhaustion. He found a shepherd’s summer lean-to, abandoned for the season, and stretched out underneath the cape and fell promptly asleep, the broom between his arms and along his chin like the boniest of lovers.
2
AT DAWN, THE WINDS RELENTED, and the mountains burned in pinkish light. He finished the small meal provided by Sister Apothecaire and pressed on.
Kumbricia’s Pass was defined by a color of evergreen specific to the suspended gorge that widened apronlike as it dropped toward the Vinkus River plain. How foreboding the uprights of the cliffs on either side—how much more fortress the landscape provided than Liir had been aware. No wonder the Yunamata, the Scrow, and the Arjiki had never knuckled under to the industrial strength of Gillikin or the military might of the Emerald City. And no wonder the dragons had been an important development—they would have had to work to flap their way along this wind-chased passage, but they would have managed. If the dragon population had expanded, and a whole fleet of them had become available for maneuvers, they could have rained destruction even upon the distant populations of the widespread Vinkus.
And might yet, Liir knew. The strategic knowledge that had developed those dragons into weapons wouldn’t have been lost because Trism defected or the basilica collapsed. If nothing else happened, it was only a matter of time before another Trism came along to do the bidding of his superiors and raise up perhaps an even mightier army.
Yet today had dawned, and tomorrow could not be foreseen. No magician in the world had yet mastered the art of prophecy, so far as Liir knew. Not a single venerable bishop with his channels to the divine, nor any tiktok mechanism of subtle apprehension, nor even the best-taught sorcerer with the keenest of inner eyes, had ever accurately foretold so much as whether the rain would hold off for the picnic. It was Time Yet to Come that possessed the strongest force of all, a magic mightier than the Kells themselves, a magic greener than all of green Oz. Inscrutable, terrifying, and exhilarating at once.
HE FOUND HE COULD NOT FLY above Kumbricia’s Pass. His broom bucked to one side or another, as he’d heard a horse instructed to cross a risky bridge might do. He didn’t know whether this was mere exhaustion, a flagging of his will, or some sort of wizardic or magnetic obstruction he didn’t understand. He allowed himself to drop, by a series of long, scalloped declines, till at last he found landfall in a clearing, and continued his voyage by foot.
It took time to locate the spot where he had been interviewed by General Kynot, the crusty old Cliff Eagle—the island in the hanging tarn. The place seemed deserted. He could see nothing but random feathers and the inevitable mess of droppings. Maybe they’d moved on to a cleaner lobby somewhere.
On foot he continued west, losing track of time. One of the drawbacks of flying on the broom was that his nose became frozen, and the air at a certain height, while clean of grit, was also curiously scentless. Kumbricia’s Pass, by contrast, was a festival of odors.
In the nest of the cape, he settled for an afternoon nap and didn’t wake up until dawn…and he wasn’t even sure it was dawn of the next day, or some day further on.
Nonetheless, he was rested at last, rested in a deep way, and better able to spy winter berries in the thickets, and chichonga pods, and the occasional scatter of walnuts on the ground. Dozens of streams leapt from either side of the great gorge and crisscrossed, occasionally islanding the floor of the pass into hillocks. He didn’t go thirsty. He felt that the longer he pressed on, the stronger he became.
At last Kumbricia’s Pass made its final abrupt turn before opening out above the beautiful bleak expanse, as far as the eye could see, of the rolling prairie known as the Thousand Year Grasslands. In the shallow caves and along the ledges of the westward face of the Kells, nearly deafened by the constant wind, Liir met up with what remained of the Conference of the Birds.
Their numbers had dwindled in the short time since Liir had left Kumbricia’
s Pass. When General Kynot spied Liir standing there—so much for the vigilance of their sentries!—he lop-winged over and indicated, with a strict jerk of his head, that they should retreat into the gorge for a bit of a chin-wag.
A few Birds saw the General’s intentions, and braved the buffeting winds to join the colloquy. Several dozen gathered, including the Wren named Dosey, who cued in the blind, hobbledy Heron.
“We see you’ve reclaimed your broom,” began the General without formality. “I’m to understand it is not functioning as a vehicle for flight anymore, or you wouldn’t have come on foot. And you would have come sooner.”
“I came as quickly as I could,” said Liir. “What’s happened?”
“We’ve lost half our number,” said the General, “or near to it. The Yunamata rushed us, and since we were scared to take high wing, we were caught in a series of nets and traps they’d erected across a narrow part of the Pass. Scarcely a one of us hasn’t lost companion or kin.”
“That’s not like them,” said Liir. “Or not like their reputation. They’re a peaceable people.”
The General glared at Liir. “We’ve had to leave the Pass, lest it happen again. We’re cornered against the sky up here, on display to preying dragons, and without adequate supply of grubs and worms.”
Liir said, “I’m sorry about the Yunamata attack. That’s the Emperor’s strategy—to keep his foes busy nipping at one another. That has to stop. There’s no way to survive without our making peace among ourselves.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” shrilled the Wren to Liir, and the General was too dispirited to bother correcting her terminology. “One population can’t make peace with another by force.”
“There are possibilities,” said Liir. “The time of the dragons is done, at least for now. You can fly again. We can fly again. And before the next threat might come, we have to maneuver ourselves into…a coalition. No, not that: a nation.”
“Which nation is that?” snapped the General.
“Witch nation!” tittered a Dodo. “I likes that, I do.”
“You called a Conference about the raiding skirmishes of dragons,” Liir reminded them. “The dragon fleet has been destroyed. But those dragons were a tribe, too: ill-used, malevolent, raised up to strike out, imprisoned by their training. It gave me no joy to poison a dragon, even one that has attacked and killed your kind and mine. Yet the moment is here to fly again. Not just home, not just yet: but fly into the storm. The Emperor has already sent out a guard to hunt me down, and he and his ilk will hardknuckle anyone who gets in his way. No one in the Emerald City can stand up to him, for he claims the divine right of the elect—not elected by people, but by the Unnamed God. Who can dispute that? We are all elect, for here we are, and we must fly for our lives. We must show ourselves to be a company. He sent dragons to scare the skies: we will fly ourselves as a flag right back at him.”
General Kynot pretended to peck at his chest for vermin. When he raised his head, his eyes were dry again. “It is not easy to trust the wisdom of a human person,” he admitted. “Like so many humans, you could be lying. Leading us into a trap. Promising us freedom, and tricking us into an ambush of yet more dragons. Yet we have so few choices but to trust. After all, you are the son of the Witch.”
“Don’t base your decision on a false premise,” said Liir. “I will never know for sure who my parents were. And even if I did, the son of a witch can be as wrong as anyone else. Let us fly because you are persuaded we should, not because I say so.”
“I vote yes,” said Dosey.
“So do I,” said the Heron, “though I can’t fly anymore, of course.”
“I didn’t call for a vote,” said Kynot.
“That’s why I voted,” Dosey replied.
“Witch nation! Witch nation!” said the Dodo.
THEY LAUNCHED AT NOON, maybe ninety Birds, swooping westward into the buffeting winds that ran the span of the prairie to build up enough strength to crash against the Kells.
The venture almost scattered them at once. The Wrens tumbled like husks of dried pinlobble; the Ducks shat themselves silly; the Night Rocs couldn’t see in the widest daylight Oz had to offer, and nearly brained themselves by wheeling backward into the peaks.
Liir was giddy and vertiginous. The broom shot out over a rocky sward, so low that he could make out the surprised expressions of wild highland goats. Another instant and he was fifteen times higher than the highest tower of Kiamo Ko, and a silver river winked in the sunlight below him, narrow as a bootlace.
Just fighting to stay together took the better part of an afternoon. When they finally reached air space beyond the forested foothills, above the nearest start of the endless grassland, where the power of the wind diminished, they settled to rest and feed and count their number. Four of their ninety had been lost in the first descent out of Kumbricia’s Pass.
But there were grassland grubs and beetles, and the backwash of mountain rills to splash in, so they made their first encampment.
IT TOOK A FEW DAYS of rehearsal for the Night Rocs to learn how to maneuver by daylight, but the Grasslands were forgiving. After hours of uninhibited flight, with no dragons approaching, the Birds grew braver and flew in a looser formation.
For the time being they avoided other populations, though far below them they delighted in the spectacle of wild tsebra wheeling and cantering in their winter migration toward the south, a flurry of black and white markings against the brown ground, an alphabet in the act of writing the story of tsebra migration. Or notes, singing a mythic history.
Draffes, their long tawny necks swaying, saluted them in their high-pitched voices. Liir couldn’t hear them, but Kynot said that evening that sentient Draffes were living among draffes, in apparent harmony.
A small band of Vleckmarshes flew up to greet the flying Conference (Kynot would not allow the Birds to call themselves Witch Nation, despite the Dodo’s pleading). At the sight of Liir on the broomstick, the Vleckmarshes made common cause with the travelers, and flew alongside.
Then a bounty of Angel Swans, who usually kept to themselves out of pride for the whiteness of their mien, gave wing. So too a noisy clot of Grey Geese, who were wintering together on the banks of a nameless broad winter lake that appeared and disappeared in different places every year, they said.
The Conference flew in waves, the bigger birds working harder, providing a breakfront against the wind, the smaller birds in the slipstream, and lower, in case of attack by air. It was Dosey who spotted the tents of the Scrow, arrayed in the usual geometric precision against the trackless blanket of earth.
Liir did not want to approach the camp, not yet. But General Kynot, agreeing to serve as an emissary, dove out of formation and whipped around the camp until he could decide which tent belonged to the Princess Nastoya.
That night, the Conference having settled under a shelter of windthorn hedge, Kynot reported to Liir.
“I found one who could speak to me, an old scholar named Shem Ottokos,” said the General. “I told him you were abroad, but he said he didn’t need me to tell him that. He had been able to make you out with his naked eye, because the cape unfurls so blackly against the scrim of the evening. He had the tent lifted for his queen to see, and though she is mostly blind now, she said she could make you out against the sky. He thinks it was the clot of the Conference she was seeing, its whole mass. She wants to see you, said Ottokos. She has something to tell you. Whether you can help her or not.”
“If she agreed to meet me later, she can tell me then,” said Liir. “Did she?”
“The Scrow rarely travel during this time of year, and they haven’t settled any peace with the Yunamata. Ottokos does not know if he can convince the tribal elders to pull up camp and brave Kumbricia’s Pass. He doesn’t know how to talk to his people about this. But I explained about the extermination of the dragons. Perhaps Ottokos will be persuasive.”
“If Princess Nastoya still has time, we have time,” said Liir.
“It is her time that we need to read, not ours.”
NORTHWARD, BEATING AGAINST THE ICY WINTER gusts known in some circles as the Farts of Kumbricia; northward and northward, and the Thousand Year Grasslands went white under drifts of frost. The snow was lipped and patterned by the wind into shapes like the imbricated scales on a fish. Now out of sight of the Kells, now back; now joined by a throng of Snow Geese, five hundred strong, now by a mystic Pale Crane, her partner, and her senile though quite energetic mother.
At last, because the smaller Birds feared freezing to death, and the food stock grew scarce, the Conference wheeled eastward. Kynot had a notion that they could most safely cross the Kells again at the point where the Arjikis had built their mountain villages. If nothing else, there would be the chance of a barn in which to roost, or a bonfire around which to warm themselves. It was rough work, though. Once more suffering the churning of wind against the hard breast of the Kells, the Conference sought a lower altitude, which took more time but afforded quicker shelter should a storm come up.
The weather was with them, at least. Day after day the sky was peerless blue, if pinion-quaking cold. Under snow squalls or rain clouds the Conference would have fumbled. But they always had the chance to move on: this kept the smaller birds brave.
They came at last to the highland valleys and white wastes of the Arjiki stronghold of Kiamo Ko. Liir did not care to alight there, but the nights were drawing in earlier and earlier, and he had no choice but to see it as a blessing.
His rump sore, and almost unable to uncurl his spine from the arched position in which he flew, he landed on the cobbles of the courtyard with 220 of the smaller Birds, while the larger ones waited formally outside for an invitation. The monkeys shrieked, though whether it was out of terror or welcome, Liir couldn’t tell. Chistery met him at the top of the steps to the main hall.
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