Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (12 page)

“It isn’t the Yunamata,” said Sister Doctor, and in making the remark out loud she suddenly felt certain about this for the first time; she had been dubious up until now. “They wouldn’t do such a thing. Can you be sure your people are not forgetting their traditions under the burden of sorrow they feel at your condition?”

“My people, as you call them, are not even my people,” said Princess Nastoya. “They honored me years ago and made me their princess, and even in my decay they will not allow me to abdicate. They are a nation that has elevated charity beyond what is possible even in the precincts of your religious order. If out of fealty to me they would rather be governed by a Princess who is partly a corpse, how could they raise a hand against defenseless travelers?”

“The young maunts who ventured this way were intent on conversion,” admitted Sister Doctor. “They were sent by the Emperor himself, we hear.”

“None of us admires the Emperor’s zealotry. But intention to convert is hardly a reason to kill people and defile their bodies. The murderers you seek aren’t among the Scrow. Don’t waste your time considering the matter. It is the Yunamata or it is someone else. Or something else. Perhaps they had a disease.”

“No disease makes one’s face fall off,” said Sister Apothecaire firmly.

“If you know so much, what is my disease?” said Princess Nastoya.

“We should have to examine Your Highness,” said Sister Doctor.

“Enough,” interrupted Lord Ottokos. “I won’t translate such a barbaric notion. The Princess has dismissed you. You may leave.”

But the Princess spoke over her interpreter, and he was bound to listen. He bowed his head and continued, “She says again—and she has too few words left to spend in life to say it a third time—where is the boy Liir?”

“But he is not a boy any longer. We have told you what we know.” Sister Doctor put her sleeve to her nose; in her line of work she knew the smell of putrescence all too well. “He is in a comatose state not six or eight days’ journey from here, though perhaps nearer to the Emerald City than you would like to venture.”

Lord Ottokos snapped, “We are not imbeciles. We know where his body is. You have told us. That is not the question.”

The maunts blinked at him.

“Where is he?” Lord Ottokos repeated. “Where is
he
?”

“We don’t know where he is,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Our talents are not that fine.”

Princess Nastoya shivered. Handmaidens came forward to withdraw shawls drenched with sweat and other seepage. “Let me help,” said Sister Apothecaire suddenly.

“Don’t you dare,” said Lord Ottokos.

“I do dare. What are you going to do, have me scraped? Sister Doctor, a vessel of water and some essence of citron—lemons, limoncelli, parsleyfruit, anything. And some vinegar reduced to the usual.”

Princess Nastoya began to weep then, full tears of a nasty vintage. They fell on Sister Apothecaire’s bare hands and burned them; she was not halted in her work. “What has she said just then, in that low murmur?” she asked Lord Ottokos, who stood sputtering and clutching his beard in rage and disbelief.

Finally he submitted to this dotty, disobedient woman. “She said she wishes she could be scraped,” he finally allowed.

“We can’t do that,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Vows of gentility and all that. But she can be made more comfortable. Sister Doctor, that pillow. The head. Watch the neck. What a weight upon this spine! Where
is
the dratted vinegar reduction?”

5

F
OR A MOMENT, TO REST HER HANDS,
Candle set the domingon down. The sound box thunked with a hollow expression. Its cavity was a kind of womb, she thought; how ineffable the secrets born there.

She wasn’t given to reflection herself, but she was tired. For a moment she allowed herself to remember her arrival here a month or so before. The one called Mother Yackle had been dozing on a bench in the sunlight; she’d looked up with a start at Candle’s approach. She had stretched out a wilted hand, peering with an expression canny, severe, and resigned. Resigned: that was much the way Candle had felt at that moment. Her uncle had tricked her here; he hadn’t wanted to keep her any longer. “The way you’re going, you’ll be pregnant soon enough, if you’re not already—and I can’t take a child and a child’s newborn with me on the road.” It seemed he’d bought the domingon from its maker as a way to bargain with her. Go into the mauntery for a year, and the instrument is yours. Do with it what you will, and I’ll be back to get you in good time. There’s not much left for us in our home marshes, but you’d be ruined in the north. They’d spit at you, your easy ways; they’d laugh, your little voice. Stay here, and remember me wherever I am.

That kind of remembering was another skill, but now she was attending someone else, and her uncle meant little to her.

Candle took Liir’s hand in her own. A clamminess. Was his color fading? Or was it just that the sun was setting, and the jackal moon was rising later than it had? The shadows lengthened and browned. By comparison his skin was bleached like an old, sun-whitened bone.

She took up her instrument again and leaned the edge of the minor bridge right on the edge of his bed. Her fingers running into the treble range, they danced in contrapuntal jiggery at the top register, not six inches from his right ear.

Where
was
he?

L
ADY
G
LINDA SAID TO
L
IIR,
“I can tell you have no intention of leaving that charred broomstick behind, but if you try to walk into a public space carrying it over your shoulder like a blunderbuss you’ll be taken for a fool, or at any rate noticed. I think what you are after is something a little more like camouflage.”

She paused to regard herself in a convenient looking glass in the stairwell. Adjusting her everyday tiara, she conceded, “It must be said that camouflage is not an effect I have ever strived to master. Still, we’ll do what we can.”

Liir followed her down the marble steps of the central staircase. The place had gone quiet. “Goodness, everyone takes off for a smoke the minute my back is turned,” she said. “Where are the kitchens, anyway? Through here?”

She stumbled into a cloakroom, and then opened the door to a closet where two of the belowstairs staff were involved in recreational exercises. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and shut the door, and then locked it. “Eventually they’ll have to thump to be released, and one of them is bound to be cheating. Heaps of fun. But where’s the kitchen?”

“Have you just moved here?” asked Liir.

“Don’t be silly. Lord Chuffrey had this place long before we married. But I don’t cook for myself, if that’s what you mean. Nothing other than the toast that I mentioned earlier, and that’s done in the breakfast hall. Ah, here we are.”

A half-flight of stone steps descended into a cavernous whitewashed kitchen. A dozen members of the staff were sitting about the table so deep in conversation that they didn’t hear her coming. “Lady Glinda,” said a bootblack, and they all leaped up with guilty looks.

“Glad to be recognized in my own home,” said Glinda. “I hate to interrupt what are probably well-intentioned plans to kill us all in our beds, but if you don’t mind? A minor request for whichever of you has just a moment to spare?”

They melted away, all but the housekeeper and the houseboy.

“He’s about the same size as the bootblack,” said Glinda, pointing to Liir. “Suit him up in House of Chuffrey colors and find some decent shoes, and get him a leather satchel on a sling. You know, that long cylindrical thingy that Lord Chuffrey’s guests use to carry their arrows when they go hunting in the country. That ought to accommodate the filthy old broom, I think.”

“Asking your pardon, Lady Glinda,” said the houseboy. “We’ve no such satchels on the town premises. They’re all down to Mockbeggar Hall.”

“Do I have to think of everything? Haven’t we friends? Haven’t we neighbors to borrow from? Aren’t there shops still serving the public? Need I go tramping to the marketplace myself with a sack of coins between my teeth?”

The houseboy fled. The housekeeper pursed her lips editorially.

“Don’t speak. Don’t. It’s only a temporary appointment,” said Lady Glinda. “Just for the day, in fact. Now feed up this boy; he hasn’t had a square meal for weeks, I can tell. And when he’s equipped as I require, return him to the Yellow Parlor.”

Lady Glinda climbed the stairs, muttering “Kitchens!” in disbelief, leaving Liir behind.

“Well, peel off those beggar’s weeds and wash in the cauldron room, just there; I won’t have you staining her fancyfart’s good livery with your dirty limbs,” said the housekeeper. “I’ll put out some food, and you be grateful for it, for it’s out of our own downstairs supply, and we don’t take kindly to ravenous upstarts here in Lord Chuffrey’s establishment.”

“W
HERE ARE WE GOING?”
He peered out the window of the carriage.

“Put your head back. Servants don’t gawp out of carriage windows.”

How odd to be five feet higher than the street. It was not an experience to which he was accustomed. The carriage lurched under arched spans of stone, stopped for a squadron of uniformed cavalry on display, sidelined along a merchants’ parade, and picked up speed along Dirt Boulevard. Cleared of its village of indigents, the roadway showed signs of its original elegance, though its parallel rows of trees were in bad shape. It looked as if the grounds were being used for military drills.

Where had all the itinerants gone? “Where
are
we going?”

“To the Palace,” Glinda said. “Where you’ll keep your head down and your mouth closed. Are you scared?”

It seemed too personal a question for a woman to ask a boy. Perhaps she realized this. She continued, “I was, the first time I came here. It was with Elphaba. We were older than you are now, but only by a few years. And in many ways we were more naive. Well, I was, anyway. And I was terrified. The wonderful Wizard of Oz! My stomach just about dissolved in its own acids.”

“What happened?”

“What happened?” She turned the question to herself, examining it. “History happened, I suppose. We saw the Wizard, and we parted ways—Elphaba went underground, as it were, and…in time, I hugged the limelight.” She sighed. “With the best of intentions, and with limited success.”

“And now?” he said, not because he was interested, but because he didn’t want any more attention on himself.

“Now, I hold the key,” she said. “Now, for the time being, I am intended to stand in for the mighty on their thrones. It’s all I’m good for.”

“Are the mighty deserving of thrones?”

“That’s an Elphaba question, and out of your youthful pouting mouth it sounds preposterous. Like most of her superior cavils, it has no easy answer. How could I know?”

She sighed. “Sit
back,
I said. Yes, I’m nervous. You’ll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they’re wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good. Perhaps being jittery helps me pay closer attention. You know, I didn’t want the hard work of government. They all say I need to clean house. Clean house! That presumes I’ve cleaned a house before. I say, hey, what are the servants for? Decoration?”

She was speaking to herself, in a way, but she was also trying to cheer him up. He turned his head, confused by her kindness, and busied himself from watching, at an acceptable angle, as the buildings nearer the Palace hove into view. One mammoth ministry was strapped with bas-relief marble panels depicting various historic Ozmas in characteristic poses. They looked at once venerable and ludicrous, and the pigeons of the Emerald City paid them no high compliment.

“But why are we going to the Wizard’s Palace?”

“The people’s Palace, now,” said Glinda derisively. “Though what the people are going to do with their own palace I have no earthly idea.” She chewed on a nail. “There’s a clandestine entrance to Southstairs from the Palace. Of course there had to be, a means of instantly spiriting away any treasonous Palace upstart sniffed out in the court. Though the common criminal condemned to serve time is more publicly lowered in a cage into the pit that drops down inside those bulwarky ramparts. You see, it’s mostly underground, Southstairs. It’s the most impregnable prison in Oz. Nobody who goes in via the cage comes out that way.”

“How do they come out?”

“In pine coffins.”

S
HE DABBED A SACHET
doused with oil of clove and root-of-persimmon behind her ears. By the time the door to her carriage was opened by a staff member of the Palace, Lady Glinda had become more regal. Her chin went up, a jeweled scepter was provided for her right hand. Her eye flashed with a steeliness Liir had not noted earlier.

“Lady Glinda,” they murmured. She deigned to supply the briefest of nods, as an indication that she was not deaf, and walked by.

Liir followed in something closer to terror than he had ever experienced before. He expected to be rushed away and beaten before he could even begin to protest. But Lady Glinda’s penumbra of influence extended eight feet behind her, it seemed, for his progress was unquestioned, and he gained the threshold of the Palace without anyone’s objecting.

The place was a maze, and he lost his bearings almost at once. Accompanied by a Palace flunky, Glinda and Liir swept up grand staircases, along arched corridors, past ceremonial chambers and receiving parlors. Another staircase or two, another corridor or three, and at length they traversed a long dingy room, where dozens of staff members were perched on high stools above ledgers. They splashed ink in their nervous abjection, though not on Glinda in her celestial blue gown.

Behind a wall with an interior window, the better for supervising workers, stood an office with a desk and some chairs. An elegant man absorbed in a newssheet was tipped back on the hind legs of his chair, his ceremonial boots propped on the desk and his saber stuck in the soil of a potted fern. “Commander,” said Lady Glinda, “we’re here. Show some respect, or pretend to anyway.”