The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “I never did,” interjected Nor. “This is news to me. Tell me.”

  “Princess Nastoya was stuck between life and death, unable to move because of a disguise locked upon her, and together you two brought the disguise off.” Agroya pointed at Candle. “You played some stringed instrument so well you make dead relics to sing, and you”—now he pointed to Liir—“you had a charm of remembering; you helped our Nastoya leave behind her disguise as a human, and die as an Elephant. This is legend with our people.”

  “How droll,” said Nor to their guest. Ever leery of pomposity. “I hope you sell little pictures of it to passing travelers.”

  “And she talked to you before she died,” said Agroya to Candle.

  “Oh, did she?” said Liir to his wife. He’d been away up until the last moment. “You never mentioned this.”

  “She awakened, as the dying sometimes do,” the visitor reminded Candle. “She told you about your child.”

  Candle, apologetically: “I was pregnant, very pregnant.”

  After sending Rain out on a fool’s errand, and Iskinaary to keep her at bay, Liir returned to the subject. “What did Nastoya say?”

  Agroya helped himself to a handful of walnut meats. “She said that she saw the promise and trouble your child will bring.”

  “Oh, that,” said Candle. “What child isn’t full of promise and trouble?”

  “Our princess said that we Scrow will watch for your child and help her if she needs help. Nastoya pledged us to this.”

  “Wasn’t that sweet,” said Candle. “And then she died.”

  “I’m no longer a full brother to my tribe,” he continued, “but in honor of my ancestors and my former queen, I must ask if your daughter needs the help we promised to give.”

  “Oh, not today, thanks,” said Candle. “How kind of you to remember.”

  The fluting formality of her voice made sense to Liir: Candle had become wary. She’d seen the danger too. “Let me get you some cakes to take on your way,” he said.

  They loaded Agroya up with as much as they could spare. Nor agreed to escort him well beyond the northern lake. As soon as they were gone, Liir asked Iskinaary to rush Rain away to the southern lake, five hundred yards to the south, ostensibly to find owl pellets to add to her collection.

  Then Liir rounded on Candle, but good. He was incensed that Princess Nastoya’s dying comments had never come up before. Candle pooh-poohed his sensitivity. “What did her comments mean anyway? Nothing that any dying old matron wouldn’t say to any pregnant young woman.”

  “The trouble that Rain would bring—did Nastoya’s mention of that decide you to leave Rain behind when you slipped away from Apple Press Farm?”

  At this Candle turned pale—in a Quadling it looked like fever—and she was unable to speak for some moments. When she regained her voice, she spoke in an unfamiliar register. Colder, acerbic. She said, “This isn’t about Rain, at its heart. Is it? You’re not even angry about what Nastoya said or not, or whether I told you before. Are you. Are you. You’re still angry about what I’ve never said about Trism.”

  “Wide of the mark,” snapped Liir. But damn her, she was right. So Candle could still see the present. Her talent had seemed submerged as they’d gotten older.

  Yes, he was cross about her never having mentioned Nastoya’s dying comments. But Candle was accurate that he was still harboring a wound about his old friend and lover, Trism. Another of the stories they didn’t rehearse in front of Rain.

  Oh, Trism.

  And it happened, all of an instant, in his mind again. Like seeing the past. This time his own.

  Trism had come to Apple Press Farm that same dreadful season, while Liir was away, while Nastoya was in the orchard trying to die, while Candle was readying to give birth. Liir had never found out exactly what happened. Hunted by EC soldiers who’d once been colleagues, beautiful Trism had either taunted Candle with the knowledge of Liir’s affection for him or, just as possibly, fallen for Candle in Liir’s absence.

  Maybe their mutual passion for Liir, their mutual worry about his safety, had brought Candle and Trism together. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. But Candle had never spoken about it, and Trism had disappeared from Liir’s life.

  By the time Liir had returned, to find the ailing Princess Nastoya and a contingent of Scrow in residence at Apple Press Farm, Trism was gone. After Liir and Candle had helped Nastoya shuck her disguise as a human being and die as an Elephant, Liir had accompanied her corpse back over the highland route known as Kumbricia’s Pass. Returning only a few days later, he’d found that Candle had fled. The new baby, hardly a day old, lay wrapped up in cloths and hidden for him to find.

  Of course Candle knew he was nearing; she knew that kind of thing. She’d left a goat so he could have milk for the child. He’d always assumed that she’d abandoned the child for fear that Trism might have been trailed by assassins in order to discover Liir’s hideaway. But now he wondered if she left infant Rain because Nastoya had said their daughter would bring promise and trouble. Candle’s apprehension of their daughter had always been different from his. Just as loving, but more stony and matter-of-fact.

  He knew what happened next. Eventually she’d made her way back to the mauntery. Word had arrived there that Trism had been beaten—well, tortured was the uglier but more honest word. Presumably Trism hadn’t been able to reveal Liir’s whereabouts because he didn’t know them. And whether Trism, the top dragon mesmerist in the arsenal of the Emerald City, had even survived … there was no way to tell.

  What had survived—maybe all that had survived of Trism—was Liir’s sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression—unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir’s heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism’s glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. To this day Liir had endured them in solitude, even as his beloved Candle sat across from him at the hearth.

  Candle herself might dream of Trism, too, with dread or with desire. Liir didn’t know. She and Liir never talked of it. She’d refused to speak of Trism when Liir, baby in arms, met up with her again. To protect Liir’s good impression of his friend?—to keep Trism’s romance of Candle to herself? You could go around and around about it, but unless Trism showed up again and filled in the blanks, Liir couldn’t know.

  Candle wasn’t telling.

  And Liir and Candle had had more urgent things to deal with than the perils of shifting affections. They had a daughter born green as bottleglass.

  Green, and with few obvious virtues. On her mother’s side, the girl was a bona fide peasant. Before she met Liir, Candle had been an itinerant Quadling, easily mattressed like all of her clan. Abandoned at the mauntery by an uncle who had wearied of her.

  On Liir’s side, Rain descended from a line, if not noble, then at least notorious. One of her ancestors had been the Eminent Thropp, de facto governor of Munchkinland before secession. Her grandmother had been the divisive Wicked Witch of the West, no less. Who knew what license or limitation descended through that bloodline?

  Liir had no reason to lord it over Candle, or anyone else. He knew himself to be anything but polished. He’d grown up without the attention of Elphaba or, most of the time, her affection. Deprived childhood, Your Honor! He hadn’t made things better for himself by going AWOL from the army under the command of Cherrystone. Another bad career move: he’d helped Trism destroy the EC’s stable of flying dragons being used to foment unrest among tribes in the west. Tally it up for us, my good man: at the time of Rain’s birth, Liir’d been no more than a ragamuffin ne’er-do-well being hunted down in case he might lead them to the Grimmerie.

  Under these circumstances, to be presented with an iridescently verdant child
even harder to hide than the famous and dangerous tome … what a lot of laughs, this life. I beg your mercy.

  By the time he’d caught up with Candle again, after a series of misadventures with the Scrow, the infant was almost too big to carry in his arms. For Rain’s own protection, he’d drawn a hood upon her face and told passersby that she was afflicted with a sensitivity to light. What had this done to a child, for all those months to hear through burlap the sounds of human voices but rarely to see the face of anyone but her worried and stupid father?

  What had he done to Rain, in order to preserve her life?

  After he’d met up again with Candle at the mauntery, they wandered the landscape. Seeking a way to keep Rain from being smothered, literally and metaphorically. They had no plans, just kept moving.

  One day, in some nameless hamlet, they’d stopped to barter for bread and milk and wine in return for doing fieldwork till sunset. On the far side of a sullen patch of finger potatoes, Candle straightened with her hand on her lower back and turned around with a cry. Set in a potato basket at the end of a hoed row, the baby was sitting up. Either she’d clawed her burlap caul off by herself or the fox at basket’s edge had pulled it away with its teeth.

  “Easy,” said Liir to Candle, “easy. I haven’t known foxes to be vicious.”

  “Clearly,” remarked the Fox, training his eyes on the green child, “you haven’t taken into account what recreational foxhunting by hounds and human brutes does to a Fox’s native sense of cordiality.”

  “The light, please, it hurts her eyes,” began Liir.

  “The dark hurts her far more.” The Fox sat down to look at the child, and the child looked back unblinkingly. Liir and Candle inched forward, gripping each other’s hands. “I never met that green firebrand out in the west, that one with the broom, but I heard tell of her. And I imagine she looked like this.”

  “I suspect so,” said Candle, honestly enough. “I never met her either.”

  “Your kit will have fights on her hands,” said the Fox. “I suppose you’re suitably traumatized over that.”

  “Oh, very,” said Liir, “and then some.”

  The Fox laughed. “I like her. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.”

  “She’s seen very few creatures other than us,” said Candle.

  “And I thought it was my native charm. Some consider me rather good-looking, but I’ll leave my social life out of it. She might benefit from a little protective coloring. Have you thought of that?”

  Liir had, but Shem Ottokos of the Scrow hadn’t managed the job.

  “You know what I mean? The green frog in the algae, the striped chipmunk upon the striped stone? But put a green frog in the middle of a snowy meadow and you don’t have a green frog for very long. I’m thinking you’ll want to afford this child a little protection.”

  “We’d be less than sensible if we didn’t,” said Liir.

  The Fox sat for a long time without speaking. His eyes and the eyes of the girl—almost a toddler now, had they let her toddle—didn’t break their hold. Finally the Fox said, “I believe I can offer advice.”

  “What do you have in mind?” asked Candle.

  “Though you’re correct that while she’s a child she needs the most protection, in your panic you’re just about killing her. Daily. Now, I happen to know a Serpent with a talent for sorcery. I’ve seen him do wonders with a poor albino hedgehog who begged abjectly enough…”

  Liir and Candle walked a few steps away to discuss the proposal while the Fox kept a watch on Rain. The idea of a Serpent seemed alarming, and the whole concept of disguise could get dicey when it backfired—hadn’t they seen Princess Nastoya struggle at trying to shuck her disguise off? But the child was suffocating in her life, no doubt about that. And anyway, Candle and Liir together had managed to bring the human disguise off Nastoya when the time was right. Liir hadn’t inherited any of his mother’s talent at sorcery, but he did possess that occasional capacity for deep memory. And Candle could cast a certain charm of knowing with the practice of her music—she had done it for Liir and for Nastoya alike. So between them, Candle and Liir had the goods to help their child reveal herself when the time was right. Didn’t they? No small authority in the matter, being her parents.

  So they had the Fox engage the Serpent, and the Serpent came at once.

  They began to regret their decision when he arrived, for the Serpent looked menacing to them. But as he himself pointed out, what oily emerald Serpent doesn’t seem menacing to human eyes? The very argument for cloaking Rain’s green skin.

  “I believe in certain laboratories they call it protective chromatization,” said the Serpent, each syllable sliding out with an almost slatternly emphasis. “You are wise to consider it, but she’ll need more help than camouflage. A very sluggy caterpillar can dress itself up as a butterfly, but that does it little good if the transformation occurs in a glade locked tight with the webs of poisonous spiders.”

  “All due deference, and so on,” Liir said, “we’re only asking for the charm, if you care to give it. We’ll figure out on our own how to raise her safely.”

  “Perhaps you’re right to resist my counsel. I am among those fathers who sometimes eat the eggs in the nest. I’ll restrict myself to the question of disguise and leave you to fail with your daughter on your own schedule.”

  They discussed for a time where Rain might most safely be brought up. Candle, though paler than some, had the Quadling ruddiness. At best Quadlings were second-class citizens in the Emerald City, when they bothered to try to settle there. Winkies from any tribe were considered barbarians. And Liir, despite his Vinkus father and his green-skinned mother, had skin color that betrayed Elphaba’s Munchkinlander ancestry, an easily pocked and sunburnt pinky-cream. So the sheer fact of population figures—Gillikinese and Munchkinlanders far outnumbering other ethnicities and races in Oz—meant that the choice for Rain was clear. If she could be pale, she’d have a wider range of places to hide without being noticed.

  The Fox sat with Liir and Candle in the stifling sun, as the distance wavered with heat and insects. He reassured them the Serpent was a good sort. A short way off, under a tree heavy with persimmons, the Serpent writhed around Rain. Sometimes he rose erect on his ribs, hissing; sometimes he wreathed around her on the ground. Still hissing.

  When he was done, they saw he’d shed his own skin too. He was now the color of library paste, like a worm unused to sunlight. “Call it sympathy,” he told them, when they gaped. “Call it catharsis. When one of us changes, we are all changed.”

  And so was Rain changed. An ugly, ordinary, safely bleached child sleeping in her wraps, unaware of what had gone on, but comfortable in the nest of crushed grass and the pulp of overripe fruit through which the Serpent had slithered.

  Neither Fox nor Serpent would take payment, nor would they tell their names. “She has a future you don’t like, you’d seek us out and sue us,” said the Fox. “There are no guarantees so there is no fee. We help because you needed help. The transaction is done.”

  “I will wrinkle myself back toward green,” said the Serpent, “but unless I am mistaken your daughter will find herself set for some time to come. Remember what I said about the butterfly, though, and consider how you can best protect your tadpole. She is still green inside, and if she is related to the Witch they will be looking for her. No child can thrive if it is predestined to be a pariah. I think of this sometimes, consolingly, when I’m about to gobble my own unborn young.”

  “You could save them yourself,” said Candle, a little late. “Why don’t you change their colors?”

  “I see you take my point,” he said. “A young serpent, even if she wears a coat done up like wrapping paper at Lurlinemas, can never pass as anything but a serpent.”

  With that the Fox and the Serpent left them. Three days later, for no good reason, the family was stopped on the road by a drunk and disorderly band of Munchkinlander militants. Released after questioning, Liir and Cand
le were spooked enough to feel the truth of the Serpent’s words. They were all still targets, no matter how disguised. Liir had flown against the Emperor of Oz recently enough to be tagged as an enemy of the state. If he had made it so easily into Munchkinland, so could the Emperor’s agents. For the baby’s safety, then, because Mockbeggar Hall was not far off, they decided that Liir should approach Lady Glinda and ask her to raise Elphaba’s granddaughter until such time as it might be safe for her to emerge.

  All this behind them. Family stories never told. The long years of hiding out without their daughter at the abandoned chapel in the hills above the Sleeve of Ghastille. Hoping perhaps the Emperor might be successful at confiscating that bloody Grimmerie and so lift part of the reason for their going to ground. Hoping that Rain was growing up happy and blameless. Learning to live without her, their primary satisfaction being to speculate on her safety.

  Then, with Rain’s unexpected arrival in the company of the Cowardly Lion, the dwarf and his Munchkinlander mistress, Liir and Candle had taken up the welcome and exhausting job of worrying about their daughter more specifically but not more daily than they’d been doing already. And the resentments that they’d been able to ignore at the birth of their daughter, twelve years ago, began to seem current again. Maybe even to hurt more, this time.

  “The promise and trouble your child will bring.” Nastoya had said that to Candle, and she’d never told Liir. About that, about Trism—about herself, deep down. A cold scorch Liir felt in his gut.

  In Nether How, now, standing at the table. Unable to sit down. Looking away from Candle to hold from quivering with anger.

  As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.

  The pall clouded the household like smoke due to a blocked flue.