The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Don’t they always?” said Piarsody Scallop.

  All afternoon they sorted out antiquities. The better paintings could be hung over the railing of the mezzanine to grace the event. Some of the furniture could be packed drawer against door along the outside walls, under the balconies, slotted so thickly in place as to make a six-foot wooden henge. The rest of the stuff had to go.

  Brrr roared himself into the cloisters across the square and commandeered them. The motherhouse had long been under the thumb of the Emperor, unlike the cenobitic mauntery in the Shale Shallows, and the women scurried to oblige, driven nearly mad with delight at having a part to play. The mauntery afforded plenty of space along the arcades to stash a museum’s worth of antique fussiness in home decor.

  When the job was almost done, Brrr happened to back into an oak chest standing on its end. The lock sprung open and the lid popped, spilling the contents on the tiles of the mauntery floor. Included were no fewer than seven sets of jeweled shoes modeled after the famous set that Lady Glinda had given to Dorothy Gale once upon a time. The Lion threw all the shoes into the well in the center of the cloister garden. Any splash they had, they’d made a long time ago.

  2.

  For his work helping Avaric bon Tenmeadows to set up the council for peace, Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary of Traum, Gillikin, was invited to sit in attendance.

  “I’ve come up in the world,” he told the meagres under the bridge. “I’m still small fry, but I could probably sneak a few of you in if you want to get a peek at history.”

  “Busy. Sorry,” said Rain, in her new iron-hard voice.

  “We have to do something useful,” explained Candle to the Lion. “With Liir’s death—we have no choice. It’s that or die.” The Goose, under the obligations of family loyalty, bobbed his head in agreement. He had never liked either Candle or Rain, but was now something of a retainer in their broken circle.

  “As for me, I wouldn’t come within a mile of Mombey,” said Dorothy. “It was her court that convicted me of murder, remember. And even if I wanted to brandish that stupid testimonial of my character, it’s probably null and void under the new regime. By the way, Brrr, you risk being imprisoned for aiding and abetting a psychopathic criminal in her notorious escape from justice.” She batted her eyelashes.

  But the Lion had lost too much, and gained too much, to be prey to the same worries that had bewitched him most of his life. Nor gone first, and now Liir. What else could they do to him? Really?

  It was left to Avaric to plead the terms of the truce with His Sacredness who, rumor had it, was keeping comfortable in a bare cell in the prison of Southstairs. Living on water and celery, and approaching the mercy of a deeper aestheticism.

  Avaric had to work to get the Emperor’s attention. Either poor Shell’s mind had snapped or he’d ventured further toward divinity than he may have intended. “It’s a bit of a nonstarter, some conversations,” Avaric said to Brrr. “But we’ll get there. Those creepy Ozmists are lifting little by little—even the dead can’t be bothered to haunt you forever, it appears that they have other things to do—and the dragons are camped on the Plains of Kistingame outside of the Emerald City to the north. Mombey can call them in again to move matters along if the Emperor proves unwilling to focus. On some level he knows this. He and his ministers are doing what they can to set matters right.”

  “What are the preconditions of surrender?” asked Brrr.

  “That’s confidential,” said Avaric, but when the Lion pinned him down and threatened to rip off his arms with a novel dental technique, Avaric changed his mind about confidentiality.

  “No, no,” said Brrr. “I’m not interested in what the Emperor is giving up. I know what he’s giving up, and what was never really his to yield, either. What I want to know is what demands he is making of Mombey.”

  “The niceties of military surrender are new to me, but it’s my understanding His Sacredness is not in a position to make demands.”

  “Of course he is. He can refuse to yield unless Mombey offers something. And if you refuse to yield—”

  “I take your point,” said Avaric. “I think I may need that elbow in the future? Thank you. Is there something special that you’d like His Sacredness to request of La Mombey?”

  “There is indeed,” said Brrr. “I should like her to bring the corpse of Liir Thropp to the Emerald City so his family can bury him.”

  “Mombey has murdered Liir Thropp?”

  “Apparently. Well, it stands to reason. If the EC didn’t kidnap Liir from Kiamo Ko, Mombey’s men did. That must be how she managed to marshal the violence of those dragons. She got to him first after all. And to the Grimmerie.”

  “If you had done what the court asked of you—find us the Grimmerie—Munchkinland would be suing Loyal Oz for peace instead of the other way around.”

  “What His Sacredness is demanding in exchange for signing the treaty of surrender,” said the Cowardly Lion, “is Liir’s earthy remains. Are you sure you’re getting all this?”

  That evening, the Lion told his companions—including Rain and Candle—that he’d negotiated the release of Liir’s corpse. Although what kind of achievement, really, did it count as? The dead are no less dead whether buried at home or abroad.

  Around the brazier they’d set up underneath the struts of the bridge, they talked about Liir. Thirty or forty homeless citizens of the Emerald City listened as they shared stories of the Emperor’s nephew. Dorothy had known Liir for too short a time, back when he was fourteen or so. “I don’t remember much about him. I think he was sweet on me for a while. But in the end I probably wasn’t his type. Seems my lot in life.”

  Her eyes tracked the dirty hem of her dress. She’d carried a torch for him from the age of ten, thought Brrr. Poor thing.

  Candle said, “I saw Kynot this afternoon. He has been very kind to me. I told him we hoped to have a pyre to burn the body, if the corpse hasn’t corrupted so fully it has had to be burned already, or been buried in Munchkinland. The Eagle is calling veterans of the Conference of the Birds to attend as an honor guard.”

  Rain said, “I’m not sure I want to be there. Am I required?”

  Her mother said, “When have we required anything of you, Rain? Except to survive? You do as you see fit.”

  The girl sat hollowly in the light of the fire until the fire slumped, and then she did too. The Lion tried to offer comfort, but she would have none of it. All night she lay on the ground shivering, and would take no blanket, as if trying to learn in advance what chill of the grave might be visited upon her father. Tay squirreled into her arms, half a comfort.

  Three days later, a caparisoned and hooded cart was escorted by mounted guard through Munchkin Mousehole, the southern gate of the city, and through the Oz Deer Park and along the Ozma Embankment to Saint Glinda’s Square. In lieu of Candle, who had decided her place was at the side of her living daughter and not her dead husband, the Lion stood to receive Liir’s Black Elephant corpse.

  In a silence broken only by the rush of the wings of pigeons as they pivoted about city skies now safe again, His Sacredness the Emperor of Oz emerged through some secret egress from Southstairs. The prison governor, Chyde, carried the Ozma scepter and Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows, the crown.

  Mombey waited on the steps of the Aestheticum. In keeping with the gravity of the day she displayed herself as aquiline of nose, cheeks of pale ice. Her straight tresses, colored steel, almost violet, were looped and fixed in place with constellations of emerald set in mettanite.

  It took Brrr a moment to realize that the attendant at her side was Tip.

  3.

  Walking back to where his friends were camping under one end of the bridge, the Cowardly Lion didn’t know if he should mention the presence of Tip. With the arrival of her father’s corpse and the need to attend to her mother, Rain already had so much on her mind. To say nothing of the work she’d taken on this week, to attend to the needy. Why that selfless
labor, Brrr had no idea; Rain had hardly ever seemed conscious, before, of the sores of others—indeed, of her own sores, either. The Lion wondered if Rain’s summoning the Ozmists to help had put her in a position of noticing both what those ghost-bits had done, and what they couldn’t do.

  So many burdens on her young back. She might not be able to tolerate the return of her friend Tip, for whom her affection had been no secret except, perhaps, to herself.

  In any case, Tip would guess that Rain might be in the city as well. What else had he expected her to do after he set out to find her father and the Grimmerie? It wasn’t hard algebraics. He’d be looking for Rain here, if he wanted to find her.

  But if he didn’t want to find her, was it doing her any good to help her find him?

  In the end it was Dorothy who decided the Cowardly Lion on the matter. The Lion had walked her to a clutch of broken pipes protruding from the back of a collapsed Spangletown whorehouse. The dripping pipes were set high enough in the wall that larger creatures could wash without too much crouching, and since Dorothy still had a tendency to croon given half a chance, the Lion stood guard over her virtue, her modesty, and her critics while Dorothy sponged herself and performed a musical set for unbelieving rats and such harlots as hadn’t yet fled the district.

  On the way back, Dorothy said, “I’ve been wondering what to make of myself here in the Emerald City.” The Lion, his mind on Rain, didn’t take in what she meant at first. “I mean,” continued Dorothy, “there seems no particular campaign to ship me out of Oz the way there was the first time. Everyone’s so distracted, and who can blame them? So I’ve been wondering if I should just go into some line of work, and settle down here. Back a ways we passed an old sandwich board advertising the eighteenth annual comeback tour of Sillipede at the Spangletown Cabaret. Did you see it? Do you think I might look her up, if she’s still alive, and maybe get some professional advice? I could perform on the boards, you know, and put a few pennies together.”

  The Lion shook his head and heard his wattles wuffle. “What are you on about, Dorothy? We’re witnessing an historic change in government, not hosting a jobs fair for immigrants. A little perspective, if you please.”

  “You’re not going to stick by me forever. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow haven’t been popping up like vaudeville headliners to welcome me with a song-and-dance upon my return to Oz. Do you think I haven’t noticed? Life goes on, Brrr. We move on. I have so few choices, really, if I can’t get myself back home. Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end—you go out far enough in the direction of—somewhere—and you realize that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.”

  “I never use that word.”

  “Neutered? Sorry.”

  “No. I never say home.” And Brrr realized it was true, and that Dorothy was right, too. We don’t get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there’s no place remotely like home.

  “We’ll get you back to purple waves of grain and amber plain, somehow,” said Brrr, though he had no ideas at the moment. What was he going to do? Go fish those knock-off slippers from the well in the mauntery motherhouse and make a mockery of Dorothy’s own fond memories of enchanted travel?

  They were almost back to the bridge. A mile away some strafed building was finally collapsing. The clouds of dust, even at this hour, evoked the haunting by Ozmists and made those who dozed nearest death to tremble at the sight. “We don’t get too many chances, do we?” said Dorothy. “I’ve had more than my share, even while buildings fall around me on a regular basis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think we—as individuals—have much choice in our affairs, after all. Despite any fond hope for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I haven’t been able to avoid Oz or to get out of Oz. I’m just a pawn. I didn’t ask to be born an orphan, or to be taken on by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. I didn’t ask to annoy everyone with my soapy character. It wasn’t my idea that an earthquake should punish San Francisco the week I arrived. We really can’t do much about our given circumstances, can we? We may have free will but it isn’t, in the end, very free. I might as easily have been born in China.”

  The Lion purred in agreement, though it was a wise, consoling purr. “Limited range. We get relatively few chances to make good.”

  “Still.” Dorothy’s eyes were unnaturally bright, even for her. “I suppose if we don’t even have bootstraps with which to pull ourselves up, we had better become highway robbers and steal some off someone who has extra.”

  “Dorothy,” said the Cowardly Lion, “did anyone ever tell you that you are a piece of work?”

  She wasn’t listening. She was staring at a small scrap of caninity barreling with businesslike dispatch along the road, away from the thud of the collapsing architecture. His nose was to the gutter and his tail wagging ferociously as if he, for one, had never doubted the nature of home or the adequate play of his own personal free will. “Toto!” cried Dorothy.

  So that was home, then, thought the Lion, as the dog catapulted into Dorothy’s bosom. That’s as good as it gets. I have no right to deprive Rain of the possibility of reunion with Tip because I fear it might not satisfy her. Let her take her chances and make that decision herself.

  “Rain,” he said before they turned in for the night, “let me tell you what I saw today.”

  4.

  She didn’t know what to think about Tip arriving with Mombey. Rain needed to see him first before talking to him, to make sure that in returning to Mombey he hadn’t betrayed Rain somehow, been party to her father’s death. Maybe he’d been a secret envoy of Munchkinland all along.

  After all—that coincidence—that he should have come to be hiding in her wardrobe! They’d talked about it, laughed and loved it. She was much older now, and it seemed suspicious.

  “I’ll install you in the Aestheticum,” Brrr told her. “There are a dozen places to hide among the legs of all that compacted furniture. You can watch and decide what to do as you like. If you’re quiet enough, you will witness history.”

  “I’ve witnessed enough history,” said Rain. “But I can be quiet. That’s one of my strengths, remember.”

  She got ready to go with Brrr the next morning. Early, before dawn. The wind off the canals was disturbing ash and dirt from where it had settled overnight, gritting the air for the day. Candle got up too and silently helped Rain dress—not that Rain needed help. Mother and daughter fussing with a face flannel, apron strings, getting in each other’s way. A few feet off, Dorothy snored softly, Toto in her arms. The light in the sky a system of beveled intensities, pale, less pale. Candle said, “I don’t want you to make the wrong choice, Rain.”

  Rain didn’t look at her. “How do you know what choices I have?”

  “I don’t. But I know… I know you are going to select among what possibilities are offered you. Every parent knows this, and I know it as well as any.”

  “No matter how far from me you have lived.”

  “No matter.” Candle brushed her daughter’s hair. “We’ve lived apart, but I see what you know today, and that you don’t know everything. Rain, don’t…” She paused.

  “Don’t make the mistake I made?” Rain heard her own voice, low and mean. Rain was the result of Candle’s mistake. Or maybe the mistake itself. No doubt about that.

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” said Candle. “Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn’t be a choice—just policy. What I mean is—” She turned her attention to Tay, who was now awake and grooming itself. “I mean, don’t sleep with the boy.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve already had my sleep for tonight.” Larky-snarky. Such kindness as Rain might have wakened with had evaporated. The daw
n began to steep in the limbs of the pummeled trees. In the company of the Lion and the rice otter she took her leave, and without turning around she waved her hand over her shoulder at her mother’s farewell.

  Dawn over the Aestheticum. A mawkish pink. Word had apparently gotten out among the Birds. The silhouette of the shallow dome, its granite ribs and quoins picked out a pale yellow, was punctuated with sentinels of Birds. The old Eagle, Kynot, saw the Lion and the girl approach, and he swooped down to meet them with a guard of three or four.

  “It’s not quite the original gang,” said General Kynot. “Birds don’t tend to live as long as humans. But respectable enough, to see our companion off.”

  “Lurline love-a-chickadee, but you’ve grown,” said a Wren to Rain. “You remembers me? Doesn’t you, sweet? Quadling margin lands, when you was traveling with that Clock? It’s Dosey, begging your pardon, miss.”

  Brrr glanced at Rain. Her face was blank. She who had always had more time for Animals was eager to see her human. “We can’t stop to chat about the old times,” said the Lion. “We must get in before the girl is spotted here.”

  “We’ll be up top,” said the Eagle. “If you need us, roar for us, Lion. We’ll break through the high windows if we can.”

  Brrr pawed out the keys to the Aestheticum. Since he and Rain were the first to arrive, he gave her a quick tour. “This platform here, with the single schoolroom bench—the Emperor will come in and sit upon that. Opposite, a platform of exactly the same height but, notice, covered with that rather rare Varquisohn carpet, is where La Mombey will sit. Her throne is actually a stage prop from a community theater production of The King of Squirreltown’s Daughter, but I don’t think Mombey will object. Her ministers will be here, see, and here. While the Emperor’s staff and emissaries of the counties will be installed behind that velvet rope. Do you think the jeweled beeswax candles are a little over the top? Yes, I think they are.” He plucked out the emeralds, pursed his lips, and then put them back in.