The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  She pulled out a chair so hard it scraped the parquetry. “Miss Murth tells me you’ve dismissed Chef. You have no right to meddle with my people.”

  “You’ve brought this upon yourself, Lady Glinda, by your endorsement of that provocative display last night.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m not an impresario. This was no command performance. I didn’t know what entertainment that troupe was going to provide. I merely invited them. You welcomed the notion, yourself. Furthermore I have no idea what you mean by provocative. I thought the repertoire slight, coarse, and pointless.”

  “I’m afraid there have had to be repercussions.”

  “Are you setting me up as a collaborationist of some sort? That’s nonsense. I have retired to the country to write my memoirs.”

  “And to learn to cook. I know. How is it going?”

  “How am I to learn without Chef?”

  “I’m sure, like your chambermaid learning to read, you’ve picked up some basics. It’s merely a matter of putting them together.”

  “Cherrystone. This is intolerable. I want Chef reinstated at once.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. For one thing…” He paused, putting his hands flat on the tabletop, spreading them apart, as if smoothing a bedsheet, then bringing them together so their thumbs touched. “For one thing, he’s in no condition to take up cooking at the moment.”

  Glinda gaped. “You—you—”

  “He met with an accident.”

  “I thought you dismissed him.”

  “I did. I dismissed him. And then somehow he walked into Restwater without removing his heavy clothes, and he seemed to drown. Not unlike the set piece that concluded the little performance you so enjoyed last night, though without the involvement of any tiktok dragon.”

  She stood. “I don’t believe it. A man who teaches a child to read doesn’t turn around and condemn an innocent man to death. You’re lying. I want him back.”

  “The subject is closed. But in any instance, I’m afraid I am moving more men into the house. I’m going to require the use of the chambers on the piano level and in the servants’ quarters, both backstairs and up top. You’ll have to ask your people to clear out.”

  “Impossible. Where will they sleep?”

  “You have room in your private apartment. I will have my men move bedding and cots into one of your salons.”

  “Are you insane? Traper? I can’t have Puggles in my apartments. He is my butler. A man!”

  “You were married for some time, Lady Glinda. Surely you know how to close the door against ill-timed attentions. That’s a skill every wife learns.”

  She was badly frightened. She needed to find out if Chef was really drowned. Ig, his name. Ig Baernaeraenaesis. “The time has come for me to ask how long you intend to loiter in my home, General.”

  “That, my dear, is privileged information. Private Zackers!” he called suddenly. Zackers came through the swinging pantry door. “Some sparkling cider-tea for Lady Glinda, and one for me.”

  “I will tell you this,” she said. “You may not release another member of my staff. You may have nothing to do with any of them beyond your lessons with the girl. If anyone is to be dismissed from now on, I’ll make the decision and I’ll alert you by note. Is that clear?”

  “Surely you’ll stay for a glass of refreshment? Zackers isn’t Chef, of course, but he’s learning his way around the larder, much as you are.”

  She didn’t reply, but swept away. In her rooms, she wept momentarily, feeling foolish. She rang for Murth and asked her to find out more about Chef, but neither Murth nor Puggles was allowed outside of the house anymore. “I didn’t hear ‘drowned,’ ” insisted Miss Murth. “I only heard ‘let go.’ But he couldn’t swim.”

  After lunch the Menaciers began moving soldiers’ trunks and sleeping rolls into the gilt-ceilinged guest chambers. Zackers oversaw the setting up of cots in Glinda’s retiring parlor. Three of them, one for Puggles, one for Murth, one for Rain. “I can’t sleep in the same room as Puggles,” begged Miss Murth. “I am an unmarried woman.”

  Glinda didn’t answer. She told Puggles to find Rain. Glinda would see her at once, in the privacy of her boudoir.

  13.

  I need something of you, Rain,” said Glinda.

  The girl didn’t answer. She doesn’t speak often, noted Glinda, not for the first time. Maybe learning to read will change that.

  “We are being asked to keep from walking about in the gardens for a while,” she said. “But you’re young and can run and dash about, and no one much notices. Can you find out something for me?”

  Rain looked up sideways at her mistress. Despite years of Glinda’s watching her own diet and performing knee-bends in the privacy of her chambers, she suddenly felt fat. Fat and squat and old. And she feared she smelled of caramelized carrots. But enough about me, she said to herself, and shook her curls, which were due for a bleaching in a solution of lemon juice and extract of milkflower. Later. Concentrate.

  “Are you up for this, Rain?”

  The girl shrugged. Her hair was dirty and her calves were dirty, but prettying the child up wouldn’t do her any good, Glinda thought. She was safer looking a little revolting. That snarled cloud of unbrushed brown hair! “What do you want me to lookit?” Rain finally said.

  “I want you to find out what they are building in the barns. Can you do that?”

  Rain shrugged again. “They’re always hammering inside there, and the doors are shut.”

  “You’re small. You can stick to the shadows.” Glinda fixed the girl with as fierce a glare as she could manage. “Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You better try, or I might have to cancel your reading lessons.”

  The girl looked up sharply, more keenly than before. “Not that, Mum.”

  “I trust the General is treating you well?”

  “He teaches me good enough,” said the girl. “I knows a passel of letters now.”

  Glinda pursed her lips. She didn’t believe in putting children in danger, nor of frightening them overmuch. “He’s permitted to teach you no more than letters,” she finally said. “If he tries to teach you anything else, you come let me know. Is that understood?”

  The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaller, but more honest.

  “That’ll do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

  “He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

  14.

  While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squall of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spell that would send Cherrystone and his men packing. After all, if she could use a spell to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

  But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spells. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spells therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t really make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

  She replaced the book on the shelf. What had she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so well through that concealing spell that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventually Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubious
ness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

  15.

  Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shell kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift scullery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

  “Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg rolled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shell quite efficiently.

  “I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

  Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?”

  Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

  “I’m sure you found a way.”

  “I waited till the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

  Glinda waited.

  Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”

  “It’s hard to say what I saw. It was upsy-wrongedy houses, sort of like.”

  “I see,” said Glinda, though she did not.

  “Like the houses in Zimmerstorm, but on their heads.”

  “Were the upsy-wrongedy roofs made of blue tile, as in Zimmerstorm?”

  “No. Strokes of wood all hammered close together, going like this.” Rain pushed her hands away from her belly as if describing a long melon in the air.

  “Wouldn’t the upsy-wrongedy houses fall over if they were trying to balance on their narrow roofbeams?”

  “They all had leggses. Like spiders, sort of. Wooden leggses.”

  “How many of these houses?”

  “You din’t tell me to counts ’em.”

  “A lot?”

  “They were too big to be a lot. They took up the whole space nearly, between the lofts for straw up high and the stalls below.”

  Glinda went to a table and looked at the implements. She selected a knife and a loaf of bread. She cut off the heels and a good deal of the crusts and made the loaf into a statue of a house, as well as she could. “So. It was like this?”

  “Yes but turned over.” Rain reached out and upended it. “And the spider leggses all up and down here and here. But this end was more pointy.”

  “Oh. Oh yes, of course. I see now.” Glinda plucked a paring knife and quickly made of the upside-down house a sort of tugboat. “Like this. And if the spider legs were knocked away, it would look like a boat.”

  “Boats don’t have such pointy bottoms.”

  “Some do. You’ve probably never seen a boat out of the lake, that’s all.” She put the knife down softly. “They’re building boats. They’re going to take a flotilla up the lake and attack Haugaard’s Keep by water. Of course. It makes sense.” She thought of the map she had seen, and the dotted line up the middle of Restwater. In the center of the lake the invaders would be beyond the reach of any local ambush brigade mounted by Zimmerstorm or Haventhur to the north, or Bigelow or Sedney to the south. Though the progress of such vessels, if they were indeed as large as Rain suggested, would be clearly visible, and allow impromptu navies up and down the lake to row out to attack them. What was Cherrystone playing at?

  “You’ve done very well, Rain,” said Glinda. She hesitated a moment, and then—something she had resisted doing for years—she put her hand on Rain’s shoulder. “You deserve a reward. What would you like?”

  “Do you got anything I can read?”

  “Nothing suitable, I’m afraid. Besides, I hear from the General that you’re at early stages yet. But perhaps you’ll learn.”

  “I’ll learn,” said Rain. “Meanwhile, if you en’t got no bookses, give me two slices of boat and some butter spread on ’em.” She twisted her hands and grinned at Glinda. It was the first time in, what, seven years.

  16.

  For what was Glinda waiting? To be rescued? To have a tantrum? To be inspired to act? To warble an anthem of protest to an incredulous shoreline? She did a little crochet work, a sunny pillow with a motto. OZMA BEFORE US. She watched the thunderheads of Highsummer massing to the west, and she fled if they threatened to let loose. She studied the long lake, which curved between the foothills of the Great Kells on the far southern side and the lower slopes of the Pine Barrens on the northern. The placement of Mockbeggar on its little promontory gave her limited advantage; as the lake curved subtly to the southeast, it narrowed and disappeared between opposing banks. Same to the northwest. Due to the angle, she couldn’t glimpse Haugaard’s Keep even had she the eyes of a hawk. Unless she had the wings of a hawk too, of course.

  Her household wobbled on. Systems seemed maintained not so much through stamina as through an inertia borne of fear. Nothing more came to light about Chef. Puggles did what he could with the odd breast of fallowhen, with parsleyfruit and wristwrencher beans, with eggs and cheese and a militant sort of pastry pot pie that refused to yield to a knife. Miss Murth lived on tea and she smelled of tea and she began to resemble a tall stalk of ambulatory celery, and she trembled when she talked, which was less often than usual. What Rain ate was a mystery to Glinda, mostly.

  One day when the cloudburst began earlier than usual, the girl showed up fresh from her lesson. She hunted for Os and Zs all over Glinda’s parlor, in the gnarly filigrees of preposterously carved furniture. She all but capered with the fun of it. “I know Oz, now,” she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. “Usually letters don’t hide inside each other,” she told Glinda firmly.

  “No, that’s true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding, though.”

  The girl turned and as if by magnetism walked directly over to the little bookshelf beside the window. She tugged the yellow book out. It might as well have been her primer. “What’s this book? I can’t read these words yet.”

  “It’s called, um, The Wind Blew Away. Or something.”

  “Is it about the big wind that blew Dorothy here?”

  “Where did you hear about Dorothy?”

  “Miss Murth told me the story.”

  “Never listen to Miss Murth. She’s too old to be valid. Now put that book back.”

  I must seem too old to be valid, too, thought Glinda, as Rain ignored her. The girl opened the cover and ran her hand along the page. “What’s hidden here?”

  Glinda felt a chill. “What nonsense you speak. What do you mean?”

  “This book. It’s like a creature. It’s alive.” She turned to Glinda. “Can you feel it? It gots a heart, almost. It’s warm. It’s purring.”

  “Do you come in here and touch this book when I’m not looking?”

  “No. I never seen it before. But it was sort of shimmery.”

  Glinda snatched it away. She had never noticed a shimmer to the book and she didn’t see one now. But Rain was on to something. The Grimmerie had a kind of urgent low heat to it. A kind of soundless hum.

  She found herself saying, nearly whispering, “What page would you like to look at?”

  Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

  The thunder made a menacing comment, but it was comfortably distant. Rain turned to a page about two-thirds through.

  “You can’t read this. Can you?”

  Rain peered. “Everything’s hitched up and kicking.”

 
“Yes yes, but can you read it?”

  Rain shook her head. “Can you?”

  How mortifying. Glinda looked. A heading of some sort was squeezing like a bellows; at full extension it seemed to suggest To Call Winter upon Water.

  “It’s about dressing warmly enough. Sort of,” she said. She slapped the book closed. “Why did you open to that page?”

  Rain murmured, “I was remembering something once. About a goldfish.”

  Suddenly Glinda was tired of Rain. Tired, and a little scared of her. “Would you run tell Miss Murth it’s time for my tea? And no touching this book unless I ask you to. Do you understand?”

  Rain was out the door, on to the next thing in her stunted little life. “Sure,” she called, disingenuously no doubt.

  Glinda carried the volume to her escritoire. She opened it again, but now she couldn’t even fan the pages. The book fell open to the page it preferred. To Call Winter upon Water. How had Rain called this spell up out of the book?

  I chose to be the patron of arts festivals over dabbling in the science of charms, she thought. But there’s no help for it now. I am stuck here with a book of magic that won’t let me go.

  She read a little bit of the charm, as best she could, and then sat back, exhausted. Thought about the Grimmerie, and its wily ways. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into Rain’s capacity to hone in on the tome. She was learning to read, after all. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page—but then the world is the same way, isn’t it? The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

  How does anyone learn to read? she thought. How did I?

  By the time Miss Murth arrived with tea, Glinda had worked through a good deal of the spell, though she didn’t understand its possible uses. She closed the volume gently, drawing no attention to it, in case Miss Murth was in one of her beaky prowly moods. But Murth had other things on her mind. “The storm has moved on toward Sedney,” she said, “and the General has called for the barn doors to be open. They are breaking down the front of two of the barns, Mum. They are bringing out the boats.”