The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  A packet in brown paper, done up in string, slid out of the sack after the book. Rain opened it. A medal that said COURAGE on it. Brrr making fun of himself? The ribbon was of ivory silk with a silver thread. No doubt he’d supervised the design. She turned it over. Oooh, fancy, a bit of engraving. RAIN, it said. WHO KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME PAST, PRESENT & TO COME.

  The matinal hour suited her now. Ever since the day Dorothy had made it out of Oz—safely, one hoped, though if ever a girl was trouble prone it was La Gale of Kansas—Rain found that she preferred to walk the streets as night was shifting toward dawn. Perhaps at that hour a native greenness in the atmosphere hovers below the registration of our easily blinded eyes.

  In any case, before dawn one weekday she put Tay in Toto’s old basket and left it on the doorstep of Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. “For Tip” said her own note, “from Rain. For as long as Tay allows.” Tay hadn’t fussed at being left on Tip’s doorstep. It was as if the rice otter knew where Tip was, and who Tip was, and what job it had to do. A small job of comfort, if green comfort was possible. Half a comfort. Who could say.

  She walked to Nether How in total silence.

  The next year, when the Grasstrail Train came through and delivered one of those color supplements to the gang at Kiamo Ko, Chistery borrowed Nanny’s glasses and read every panel out loud to her.

  “Oh my,” said Nanny, and “Read that bit again, will you,” and “Mercy!”

  “And that’s that,” said Chistery when he was through.

  “A load of hogswallop,” said Nanny, “but affecting in its way. Is she coming back, do you think?”

  “Elphaba?” said Chistery. “Now, Nanny.”

  “No, Rain, I mean,” said Nanny. “Really, monkeyboy. I’m not moronic. She wouldn’t care to stay around in the Emerald City. Do you think she’s coming back here to live? This is her castle, after all. And something tells me she has that old book that has caused so much trouble.”

  Chistery was humbled by the correction. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no clue about Rain’s future. I thought you were asking if Elphaba was coming back.”

  “The very idea,” said Nanny, removing the hard-boiled egg from its shell and settling down to eat the shell. “Besides,” she said a few moments later, “Elphaba’s already come back. I saw her last week on the stairs.” But Chistery was clattering the cutlery. Having gone hard of hearing, he didn’t take this in.

  Candle and Liir lasted another year or so in the house at Nether How, but in the end, Candle decided to leave her husband. Rain wept and thought it was her fault. She shouldn’t have come back; she shouldn’t have brought her endless ache to infect the rooms of the cottage of her parents. She should be the one to go.

  But Candle insisted she herself needed to light out until she could come to some understanding about how she could have been persuaded, all those years ago, to give their daughter’s childhood away to someone else. She and Liir had never fought again, but nor had they spoken like lovers or even friends. It was time.

  “My childhood was never yours to have, and anyway, you gave it to me the best way you could,” said Rain, sniffling. She’d come to believe this.

  “Liir was frightened for his life, so he was frightened for yours,” said Candle of Liir. “When you were born green, he choked, and hid you away. I let it happen. That’s how it seems to me now, Little Green. Maybe I’ll learn to forgive him, or to forgive myself. Maybe I’ll come back then. I can only see the present, not the future.”

  After she was gone, Liir said, “I’m to blame for more than everything. And if I mention, Rain, that Candle left you first—when you were a newborn—it was for a good reason. To save you. She knew who you were. She had that touch. She knew you’d survive, and she left you for me to find. She had that confidence in you and that instinct to protect you too. Maybe what she’s doing now—for you, for me—is no less kind. Though we can’t see it yet. She does see the present, remember.” He tried to disguise a wince. “I can vouch for that. On some level, as an Elephant, I was dead to her—that’s probably why she couldn’t see the present, see me as still alive.”

  “Do you think she’s gone off to find the famous Trism? Now that you located him after all these years?” Rain couldn’t help herself; it was easier to hurt someone else than to plumb her own griefs.

  “You know,” said Liir, “when I met your mother at the mauntery of Saint Glinda’s in the Shale Shallows, everyone called her Candle. Candle Osqa’ami. She did herself. But I think that was a mispronunciation from the Qua’ati. Her name is nearer to Cantle. It means ‘a part of a thing.’ A segment, portion. Sometimes something that has broken off, a shard. A potsherd. A cantle of a statue, of a shell.”

  “Stop talking about it. Either she’ll come back or she won’t.”

  “You know, I’ve heard only a shell with a broken tip can make any music.”

  Iskinaary said, “I was thinking quail eggs for supper? Or a nice lake trout.” Neither father nor daughter answered him. Rain went out to the front yard and looked at the hills. There was nothing to collect anymore that had meaning, nothing to count or to count on. She walked anyway, dropping fistfuls of nothing, trying to empty herself out of herself.

  They buried the Grimmerie on the slope of Nether How, as close as Liir could remember to the spot where he’d seen it emerging in the arms of that ancient magician. They marked the spot by staking Elphaba’s broom into the ground, thinking it would last the winter. In the spring they would haul some stones to mark the spot permanently.

  When they returned in the spring, though, the broom had taken root and was starting to sprout virgin green, so they left it where it was as marker indeed.

  Another year passed. No word came from Tip. Rain didn’t want to hear news from the Emerald City or, indeed, from anywhere in Oz. She took to wandering the hills around the Five Lakes, and she ventured farther and farther upslope into the Great Kells. Though she had applied by mail and been admitted into Shiz University, she never accepted the position or the bursary and she let the matter slide.

  The world seemed slowly to unpopulate, the winds to speak to her in subtle and aggressive tones that she couldn’t understand.

  Then one day in spring, when the afternoon had a summery clamminess to it though the mountain slopes were only starting to leaf out, she thought again about the shell that had summoned the Ozmists and, perhaps, helped trick La Mombey into giving away the location of the hidden Ozma Tippetarius. The Ozmists had only spoken of appetite for the current day, which was for them the future. One day Rain would be dead too, though she would still be curious about the future. She would be among the Ozmists herself no doubt, eager to know about the children of Ozma Tippetarius, if any could ever be born. The appetite to know ever further what might happen—it was an endless appetite, wasn’t it? The story wants to go on and on. She couldn’t fault the Ozmists for the permanence of their affection for life, even in death. Half dead herself, she felt that affection too, though it had no focus, no object upon which to address itself.

  She took up the shell she’d stolen from Chalotin, that old Quadling seer without feet. She didn’t blow it. She felt the broken tip of it—the breakage that allows it to sing. She remembered someone once saying something like “Listen to what it says to you.”

  She put it to her ear. That same spectacular hush, the presence of expectation, the sound of expectation. A cantle of nothing whole.

  She could make no words out, of course. She had tried for years and had never heard so much as a syllable. She laid it back upon the table. The Goose, who had gone rather silent the last year, eyed her balefully. “Well?” snapped Iskinaary. “Anyone leave a message for you?”

  His question provoked the answer. What was it saying to her? Nothing in words—she’d been listening to the wrong thing. It didn’t speak to her through its hush. It spoke to her through its presence.

  It was saying to her: I exist, so what does that say to you?
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  Liir took no interest in the buried Grimmerie. Instead he negotiated with a tinker to hunt out and eventually deliver to the cottage at Nether How a set of eighty pages of blank paper. Then Liir spent most of the month of Lurlinetide binding them with glue and string into a codex of sorts. After some sloppy experimentation, he managed to accumulate a pot of lampblack by scraping the soot from the chimneys of the oil lamps and grinding it with resin and the char of burnt bark. Iskinaary donated a quill, and Liir sat down to write. It seemed to make him happy while he was waiting for—well, whatever he was waiting for.

  “What are you doing?” His industry made her cross.

  He looked up as if from a long distance away. His eyes were green; she’d never noticed that.

  “I’m writing a treatise, maybe. A letter, anyway. To send to—to Brrr. And Ozma.”

  She was insulted already. He was barging into her life, trying to make it better. It was less trouble to be abandoned. “About?”

  “About. About, I guess—power. About governance. About the birds of no like feather who flew together, to make up the Conference of the Birds. About the maunts who decided to govern themselves by committee rather than by obedience to a superior. About Ozmists and their need to listen to the future as well as to the past. I haven’t gotten it straight in my head yet.”

  “You’re angling for a court position? As advisor to the Throne Minister?”

  “I’m only angling to question the rationale of a court and a throne. The justice of it.”

  “Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.”

  “Except, maybe, to think.” He went back to work.

  Rain thought he was too young to be so meditative, and his patience made her impatient.

  To escape the sound of his thoughts scratching along, she stayed out in cold weather and worked on building a fieldstone wall around the asparagus patch. She remembered the polished chunk in the Chancel of the Ladyfish, with that tiny inscribed creature that seemed as much feather as horse. Maybe one day she would set out on a walkabout across Oz by herself and collect that stone. Inanimate objects were somewhat less bother than people.

  She was pausing from her labors late one morning, wiping sweat from her brow despite the rime on the grass and the shelves of ice cantilevering from the shores of the lakes, when she saw a twitch of movement near the broom-tree. Ever wary of some fiend or sorcerer coming by and sniffing out the Grimmerie somehow, she moved closer to check. In the shadows of the tree she startled a serpent of sorts, who proved Serpentine when he reared up, flared his striped lapels, and addressed her.

  “You don’t need to apply that heavy stone to me,” said the Snake. “I mean you no harm.”

  She shifted it to her hip. “I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong place to digest your breakfast. That tree is off bounds to you. It’s a memorial garden of sorts.”

  “I’m no fool. I know what lies in this grave.”

  Rain didn’t think he was being impertinent, but she had long ago lost the gift of a catholic sympathy. She’d grown up too much. “You’d better move along.”

  “I recognize you, I think. I believe I may have helped your parents degreenify you. I see the spell wore off at last. Most do.” He leaned closer on one of his several dozen snake-hips. “You’re doing all right, then? You made it?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t give interviews, Mr. Serpent.”

  With alacrity he wound himself around the stem of the tree to get a little more height, and then dropped his head from a branch so he could be closer to her. His eyes were acid yellow, not unkind. “Quite wise. I don’t either. I find it does the likes of me no good. Everyone twists your words so.”

  “Are you ready to move along?”

  “Are you? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m merely a concerned citizen of Oz. Also I am a venerable if not downright ancient Serpent, and as such I suffer the affection for the young that afflicts the elderly. I can tell what you hoard buried beneath this tree, Miss Oziandra Rainary Ko Osqa’ami Thropp. And as I keep my ear to the ground—little joke, that—I know something of what you’ve been through. What I can’t guess is why you don’t use the tools at your disposal to do something about it. And put down that granite cudgel while I’m talking to you. It’s distracting and not at all polite.”

  She put the boulder down but kept her hands and her heart clenched.

  “I’m merely saying. You have the richest bloodlines for magic in all of Oz. You have the strongest instrument for change this land has ever seen. And you have your own need to answer to. There is Tip, turned into Ozma. You could turn, too. You could be Rain, or you could be—well, I won’t name you. But you could name yourself. Why do you resist?”

  “I think you’d better go.”

  “If I see no future for my own offspring, I eat them,” said the Serpent. “If I didn’t eat you when I was introduced to you as an infant, why would I sink my venomous fangs into you now? You’ve done much good. You’ve helped complete Elphaba’s work, and in a way your father’s work, too. Don’t you deserve a reward? Oh come now, don’t look at me like that. What I’m bringing up is a morally neutral proposition. You think it is purer to be one gender or the other? That it makes a difference? I know—no one listens to a Serpent. And I’ll move along now, as promised. But think about it.”

  He passed through the grass. When she looked closer, she saw he’d left his skin behind. A green sheath. It could be made into a scabbard for a dirk. Before going back to the asparagus, she put her finger in the skin and tried to feel the magic of being a Serpent.

  She asked her father for permission to leave.

  “As if you need my permission,” he said calmly, with a clumsy attempt at cheer. “But what shall I say if someone comes looking for you with a message from Ozma?”

  “There’s no chance of that.”

  “Rain,” he said softly, “anyone who spent the better part of a century being prepubescent is going to need some time to figure out how to be grown up. It could happen.”

  “Yes. And Candle might come back. And Trism too.”

  He wasn’t hurt. “I leave the front door unlocked for one of them and the back door unlocked for the other. They know where I am. I’ve cherished them both, Rain, and I do still. Whoever they are. I love both Trism and Candle. It isn’t impossible for you to love both Tip and Ozma.”

  “What’s impossible,” she said, “is to know the truth inside someone else’s heart if they don’t tell you.”

  He agreed with that. “Well, I love you. Just in case you ever wondered. And don’t forget that I’ve spent some brief time of my life as an Elephant. They say Elephants never forget, and as I live and breathe, I’m telling you that this is true of humans no less than Elephants. Now, listen. I’m being serious, my desperate sweetheart. What about if a message arrives for you? Where shall I say you’ve gone?”

  She threw an arm about airily. “Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.”

  2.

  In her cell, Glinda woke up with a start. The lumbago was more punishing than the incarceration, but a sense of spring had filtered all the way down the open canyon roof of Southstairs, and she caught a whiff of freshness, of arrogant possibility. Her glasses had broken a year ago. She didn’t need them anymore, not really. She knew who was turning the door handle of her cell. She called her name sleepily, and added, “You wicked thing. You’ve taken your own sweet time, of course.”

  3.

  Elphaba’s broom, planted at Nether How and fed by the magic of the Grimmerie buried beneath it, had grown into a tree of brooms. Enough to supply a small coven of witches. Too much to say that the breeze soughing through them all was, well, bewitching? On a spring day of high winds, Rain broke off a broom from the treasury tree of them.

  But she waited until her father was deeply asleep one night, and Iskinaary collapsed in front of the stove like a Goose brought down by buckshot, snoring. She took her father’s spade over her shoulder and went back to the tre
e of brooms. She said softly, “Okay, Nanny, I’m following in your footsteps,” and she dug up the Grimmerie. Stole it. She left the spade below the tree so her father would know what she’d done. Then she wrapped the fierce book in an oilcloth and strapped the satchel upon her back. She began by walking west across the Kells, which took her several months. She didn’t look back, not once, to see if Tip was following her.

  By the autumn it was too cold to go on, and she spent the winter with a breakaway tribe of the Scrow, none of whom had ever heard of Elphaba Thropp or Ozma Tippetarius and who seemed unconcerned about Rain’s skin color or, indeed, her solitary pilgrimage through the Thousand Year Grasslands. Rain taught herself a bit of Scrow and tried to tell the story of Dorothy, to amuse the clan on the long tent-bound evenings when the icy winds howled, but one of the grandmothers bit her on the wrist, a sign to stop. So she stopped.

  She brought out the shell once or twice, to Animals who had learned some Ozish, to itinerants the following spring who had wandered too far to the west and were happy to get directions back to civilization. They nodded about it, unconcerned, unsurprised. One rather lumpy sand creature with an irritable disposition wouldn’t talk to her at all but pointed west, west. Farther west. And then dug itself into the sand and wouldn’t come out for any pleading at all.

  She saw a clutch of dragon eggs in the sand once, and let them be.

  Though the thought of them made her sling her leg over the broom for the first time. If she was going to hell in a handbasket, maybe she could fly there faster, get it over with.

  She kept herself going by remembering the clues. The great salty marshes of Quadling Country. The huge stone wall upon which paintings of colored fish were refreshed annually, though no such fish ever existed in any lake or river of Oz. The way the berm of Ovvels was built like a quay. The image of a shell stamped in the margins on the left-hand side of a map of Oz. The way that Lady Glinda had deciphered the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a market center of some sort. Something more than a temple, more like the seat of an empire. An empire ruled by a goddess with the tail of a fish.