Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (33 page)

As they hurried away, the noise rose. The poisoned dragons were falling into fits, roaring, throwing themselves against the walls of their stables. The basilica above shook with it.

9

T
HEY DIDN’T DARE
present themselves at an inn or a hotel at that hour of the night, and all of the gates of the City were closed. After skulking about in the fog, they eventually hopped a fence in one of the City’s small private cemeteries, and found a lean-to used for wheelbarrows and digging supplies. The mist turned to a thunderous rain, sheeted with weird winter lightning. There, under the cape, they huddled for warmth, and shuddered. Just before they fell asleep, Liir murmured, “No humming, now.”

They rose before dawn. Trism had enough coin in his pocket to buy them milky tea and a few cream biscuits from the first street vendor. They argued about the best way to leave the City without detection, but their bravery had subsided. They chose Shiz Gate because the welfare of the Emerald City and the northern province of Gillikin were the most tightly entwined, and the traffic there the heaviest.

Providence provides: that’s why it’s called providence. They shambled through Shiz Gate by helping an old merchant whose wagon had suffered a split wheel on the cobbles. The sentries at Shiz Gate paid them little mind, deep in gossip of their own about the attack on the basilica the night before. Word of it was abroad already.

Once through, they abandoned the hapless old man in his search for a wheelwright, and ambled north until they came to a high road looping back. Hatless, in civilian clothes, they meandered westward, the gleaming profile of the Emerald City always at their left shoulders. The sun rose, shone for a while, and then became cloaked in cloud. By nightfall they’d reached the outskirts of Westgate. Liir wanted to keep on toward the Shale Shallows, until he could recognize one of the tracks that led southeast through the oakhair forest, between the great lakes, and back toward Apple Press Farm.

But their limbs, by now, would go no farther, so they counted up their coin. As night fell, colder than the one before, they presented themselves at the door of a ramshackle tavern and inn on the main Kellswater Road. A sign reading
WELCOME ARMS
dangled on a broken hinge from the lamppost. The Gillikin River ran close by, gurglingly, and bare willows hung over it like ghostly harps.

“Oh, there’s not much by way of rooms tonight, only two,” said the matron, a tall spindly older woman whose unkempt grey hair spilled from her bonnet. “The locals shivareed a new married couple last night, don’t you know, so the best room is a mess. I wouldn’t put my own disgusting mother in there. They’ll pay, that lot, but meanwhile I’m shy of chambers. I don’t want to give you the big room, as I often have a party arriving from the City an hour after the close of gates, don’t you know, and they pay government rates. Very nice little sinecure for a widow on her own. But up top a’that there’s a space not much used. No fireplace, mind, but I’ll gift you with extra blankets. You’re young and hot and you won’t notice.”

She rustled them a supper, buckled mutton with a side of tadmuck, stringy and dried out but warm enough to satisfy. Perhaps a bit lonely, she poured them drinks of yellow wine, and kept them company through the first bottle and the second. But then there were horses in the yard, and she stirred herself to her feet, yawning. “It’s the trade I was hoping for, so if it’s all the same to you, gentlemen, I’ll leave you to a good slumber if you please.”

They found their way. The flight of steps led only to their chamber. The small room was an architectural afterthought, the result of a failed attempt at dignity, a mansarded cap on the larger guest dormitory below. Cold, indeed. More a storage space with a feather bed in it than a chamber for guests. A tall round-topped, gabled window was set in the middle of each slanting wall.

Liir sat down, weighted with fatigue and a little tipsy, on the edge of a trunk. The thing was felted with dust. They shouldn’t have to pay a penny for this attic.

Trism left to wash in the sink on the landing. Liir stared at shadows, seeing nothing. The smell, the sight, the notion of killing dragons—and what would Elphaba have thought of that?

But he wasn’t Elphaba; most days he was barely Liir.

He’d gone to get the broom, only, so he could fly for the Birds, ambassador for them. Then they would pay him by looking for Nor—or so they said. How could he identify her? He didn’t even know what she looked like after all this time.

Then, he’d done more. He’d murdered the herd of dragons. The Birds would be able to fly free now. He wouldn’t need to fly with them or for them: he’d removed the deterrence.

Trism came back. “Asleep sitting up?” Water slicked down the blond hairs on his thighs. He didn’t smell sweet and soapy, just less sour. His green tunic, unbuttoned at the neck and released from the belted leggings, was long enough to preserve modesty and serve as a nightshirt. “I think our dame has got the custom she hoped for, by the sound of it. More bottles opening downstairs. Hope they don’t keep us awake; they’ll be sleeping right under us.”

Ratty brocaded drapes, dating from no later than the days of the Ozma Regent, hung thickly on either side of the windows. Liir regarded the four separate glimpses of night: night north, south, east, and west.

“Come to bed,” said Trism. “It’s freezing.”

Liir didn’t answer.

“Come on. Why not?”

“The moonlight,” he said at last. “It’s so—seeing.”

“Well, I’m not going to go to sleep until you lie down. Do you think I’m going to turn my back so you can stick a knife in me? I remember that line:
he will pay for his offenses
.”

“That was theatrical.” Liir shuddered. “It’s the moon, I guess,” he said.

Trism got up and moved across the floor, huffing in irritation. “Paranoia. Very attractive. No one can see in windows this high, Liir. But we’ll block the moon for you, then.” The sills of the windows were three feet from the floor, and the columnar bulk of the heavy drapes rose six feet higher than that. Trism said, “Move, you,” and nudged Liir off the trunk, which he dragged to the first window. From there Trism climbed to the windowsill, his clean bare feet pawing in the grit and dust for purchase.

He reached up. The curtains hadn’t been shifted in decades, and they resisted. He grunted. The light of the moon fell on his ear tips, his lifting shoulders as his fingers just grazed the center of the curtain rod and walked their way east and west toward the edges of the drapes.

“Oh, company,” he said. “Those horses in the yard—five of them. They’ve got the Emperor’s caparisons. This is a soldiers’ sleepery.”

“Welcome Arms. I suppose it figures.” Liir came up behind to look. As Trism stretched, the shirttail lifted above his shapely rear. Liir reached out and settled his hands there, to support Trism should he fall, for the ledge was shallow and Trism’s balance precarious. Trism made a sound in his throat.

He managed to dislodge the first volute of brocade an inch or two, and a colony of blue moths, the size of penny blossoms just going by, issued forth and settled upon them both. A thousand pinches without fingers.

The brocade shifted some more. The drapes were cut from an old tapestry design. Once pink and yellow and rose, it was now the color of dirt and ash, but the ravaged faces of society charmers still peered out through threaded expressions. Moths are the death of brocade potentates and hostesses, pavilions and rose arbors and islands in some impossible sea. Moths eat such faces alive. The faces of living humans they merely explore, and the peninsulas of their forearms, and the promontories of their breastbones, and the shallows of their tympanic chests, which when heard close up thunder too loudly for moths to notice.

“Right,” whispered Trism hoarsely.

“Come on,” Liir answered. “We have to be quiet. Maybe these soldiers aren’t looking for us. Maybe she’s too drunk to remember we’re here. There’s no way out, anyway. Not till they’re asleep, at least.”

“We could jump out the window into the river.”

“Too late for that; we’ve already jumped. Anyway, I’m going to jump you now. Come on, to bed. It’s just the next part of history, right? If we’re going to be found, we might as well be found out.”

10

D
ESPITE THEIR EXHAUSTION,
they hardly slept. They clung to each other, making the least possible noise, and when it got too much to bear they buried their faces in pillows. Spent, at least briefly, they dozed, and Liir’s last thought was: sleeping with the talent. A dragon mesmerist, of all things—what magic a body is—all that you couldn’t know about the world packed up tightly in the flesh lying on your breast.

All the things Ansonby and Burny had known about—not about girls, but about people—how they felt when they were closer than clothes could ever be. How secret, still: how still, and secret. But a connection nonetheless, dared and decided: a new way of knowing, new burning letters falling through the air—and the words that could be spelled weren’t all disastrous.

At last, in the deadest part of the night, they crept back into their clothes and braved the staircase. From the larder they nicked a hock of ham, and from the pasture by the river’s edge they nicked two horses. Trism’s way with dragons, it seemed, had suggested to him a language for comforting horses, too.

They led the horses away by the river’s edge, where the noise of the water would afford the best cover. A mile out, Trism showed Liir how to climb into the saddle. Liir had never ridden before. “I’m not sure tonight’s the best night for this lesson,” he said. “Ow.”

“It’s the next part of history. Now, where are we going?”

“Are we going together?”

“We seem to be. For now, anyway.”

Liir shrugged. “We’ve got to cross the Gillikin River and keep Kellswater on our right. South through the oakhair forest.” As far as Apple Press Farm, he thought, but he didn’t want to say that yet.

“I don’t know these parts, but if we’re crossing the river, let’s not wait for a bridge. We’ll ford it here where we can, and confound the soldiers if they come looking for their rides.”

The moon was nearly down, but there was enough light for the horses to pick their way safely across the water. They gained the far bank, which rose to a prominence. Looking back, the fellows could see the Welcome Arms they’d abandoned. From here, with its smaller second story, it looked like a lopsided old boot.

“The Boot of the Apostle,” said Liir.

“The Apostle only wears sandals, to judge by the graphics advertising that exhibit. That Apostle Muscle exhibit.”

They rode till dawn, though at a safely slow pace, keeping to well-worn tracks. Gradually the sky lightened, cheerless and without bold character, the look of molasses dissolving in milk. They hoped a wind would arise to shift the scratchy snow and cloak their tracks, but it didn’t.

By the time they could see their own breath in the cold dawn, they had reached the edge of the Shale Shallows. They could begin to move faster. They were now apparent to each other again, though in the daylight it was harder to meet one another’s eyes. They didn’t talk much.

1

S
ISTER
A
POTHECAIRE WAS
drying her hair with a towel when Sister Doctor rushed into the ablutory. “He’s back,” she said.

Sister Apothecaire did not need to ask who
he
was. “With the girl?”

“No. With a boy. Well, a young man, I mean.”

“Do up my veil snap, will you, Sister? I’m
hurrying
.”

Along the stairs, they met Sister Cook. “Famished the both, malnourished the one, perhaps, though I’m not a doctor, being only the cook,” she reported. “They’re both deeply into their third helping of sausage and beans. The Superior Maunt is waiting in her chamber.”

Indeed she was. Her hands were composed upon her lap, and her eyes closed in prayer. “Forgive me, sisters,” she said when they came forward. “Obligation before devotion, I know. Won’t you sit down?”

“We hear that Liir is back,” said Sister Doctor. “We should like the chance to see him.”

“To inspect him. To meet with him.”

The Superior Maunt raised her eyebrows. Sister Apothecaire blushed. “I merely meant that it would be useful in our professional practice to know what the cause of his peculiar ailments actually was. Likewise we are quite in the dark as to the treatment Candle applied that helped him to recover so.”

“Of course,” said the Superior Maunt. “And I’m eager to know as well. But I have other responsibilities this morning. The unexpected arrivals are breaking their fast in the refectory, I believe, but I have made an appointment to counsel our other guest in the small chapel. I don’t believe I should break my appointment with her. So you will conduct the interview jointly and report to me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She dismissed them, but then called after, “Sisters.”

They turned.

“In women of your age and station, it is unseemly to pelt so. The young men will not have left.”

“Pardon us,” said Sister Doctor. “But of course the last time we hoped to find him, he
had
left.”

“He hasn’t asked as much yet, but I believe he’s requesting sanctuary,” said the Superior Maunt. “I’m afraid he won’t be leaving very soon. You have time. Practice continence in your expression of enthusiasm.”

“Yes. Indeed. Quite.”

“You may go.”

They stood there. “Go!” repeated the Superior Maunt wearily.

She closed her eyes again, but this time not in prayer. The new winter was approaching. Another winter in the mauntery of Saint Glinda. Fires that would not warm her papery skin. Fruit that would grow mealy in the larder. Increased agitation among the maunts, for when there was less work in the gardens there was more gossip and bitchery in the sewing compound. There would be new leaks to repair, and ague would knock a few of the old ones into the grave. She wondered if it would be her turn.

She couldn’t hope for this. She didn’t hope for it. But the rewards of the winter season seemed richer in her childhood memories, back before she had these tiresome women to govern—the silly affectations of Lurlinemas, which even professed maunts in their strictness remembered with pleasure—the spectacle of sunlight staining birch shadows into the snow like laundry blueing—the way snow fell up as well as down, if the wind had its way—of course, the way birds returned, stitching the spring back into place by virtue of melody.

It was the gardens of her girlhood she remembered most, the earliest blossoms. Jonquils and fillarettes and snowdrops, perfect as the Dixxi House porcelain bibelots that had adorned her mother’s dressing table. She had not seen a fillarette in years, except in her mind. How sweet it was to regard!

She prayed for strength to last the winter out. These days, though, she rarely got into the fourth line of a beloved old epiphody before her mind skipped back through some pasture or garden walk of her youth.

Attend, she barked at herself, and stood with difficulty. The cold was already at work in her joints. She creaked as she readied herself for the morning conversation. Noting the raggedness of the face flannel with which she wiped her brow, she hoped that the mauntery’s guest might have come to propose a sizeable donation. Or even a little one. But this was beyond what the Superior Maunt thought it was proper to pray for, so she didn’t spend her prayer in that direction.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery, she said to herself, not for the first time. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That’s what
makes
it mystery.

T
HE FELLOWS WERE NEARLY KEELING OVER
into their coffee cups. “You’ve had no sleep, you’ve been riding all night,” said Sister Doctor, disapprovingly. “It’s a dangerous track at best, and foolhardy to venture upon if you don’t know your way. Have you come from the Emerald City?”

“We’ve been round and about,” said Liir.

Sister Doctor explained that she and Sister Apothecaire had briefly tended to Liir when he’d been brought in by Oatsie Manglehand, the captain of the Grasstrail Train. “Have you any recollection of that?” she pressed.

“I know very little about anything,” he said. “I’m useless, pretty much.”

“Any more cheese, d’you think?” asked Trism, draining his noggin of ale.

“You were here for weeks, I’m afraid,” Sister Doctor remarked to Liir. “Without the ministrations of our community you should certainly have died.”

“Perish the thought. I’m alive, for what it’s worth.”

“What Sister Doctor is trying to ascertain, in her skittery way, is how Candle did it,” interrupted Sister Apothecaire. “She was mute as a lilac, and seemed not overly canny. Yet she managed a miracle with you.”

“Professional curiosity requires us to ask how,” inserted Sister Doctor.

“Professional jealousy requires it, too,” admitted Sister Apothecaire.

“I don’t know.” The boy had a private look. “In any event, I wasn’t consulted.”

“Oh, she leached him, she took a lancet and bled him, she sucked his poison out, and a good thing, too,” said a biddy on a bench nearby. They hadn’t noticed her there.

“Why, Mother Yackle!” bellowed Sister Doctor in a matronizing manner. “Aren’t you the chatty one today!” She shared a wrinkled expression with Sister Apothecaire. The dotty old thing. Ought to be in the solarium with the other silly dears.

“She’s got a good instinct, that Candle,” said Yackle. “The oafs are pleasant enough to bed, in their way, but it takes a daughter of Lurlina to draw out the milk only boys can make…”

“Shame and scandal on the house,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Gentleboys, forgive her. You know, their minds wander at that age, and the sense of propriety wobbles ferociously.”

Liir turned to look at the woman. Her veil was pulled forward, but the splayed nostrils of her long rude nose showed. “Are you the one who directed us to the farm in the overgrown orchard?” he said.

“She never!” said Sister Apothecaire. “Liir, she’s yesterday’s potatoes, and mashed at that. Don’t pay her any mind.”

In a low voice, almost masculine in gruffness, Mother Yackle replied slowly, “I mind
my own business
.”

“Of course you do,” said Sister Doctor.

“But if I were you, I’d send those soldiers’ horses packing,” continued Mother Yackle. “You don’t want them found on the premises, I’d warrant.”

Liir shrugged, then nodded.

“Look,” said Sister Doctor, “this isn’t the place to talk. Finish up, lads; we need to have a heart-to-heart.”

But Trism had fallen asleep against the back of his chair, and Liir’s eyelids were lowering as they watched. There was nothing for the maunts to do but show them to the cots in the guest quarters, and find blankets, and retreat.

2

L
IIR, NEARLY ASLEEP,
tossed his body back and forth on the lumpy straw of the bedding. It was as if he had been here before.

Well, he had, but in a feeble enough way. In childhood he’d been more aware of the hems of Elphaba’s skirts, of the food in the wooden bowls. An awful lot of oatmeal mush. And more recently, he’d been broken and mindless, wandering his past in a feverish state. Even the night he and Candle had left the mauntery, and she had helped him move, as good as carried him on her back down the stairs, nearly, the halls had been dark. He’d collapsed into the donkey cart and slipped almost immediately into a real sleep, a sleep of fatigue and not one of voyage.

That was his first apprehension of Candle, he remembered. A slip of a thing with the strength and willpower of a pack horse. She’d been mostly naked, and Mother Yackle had thrown a cloak over her shoulders. Here in the mauntery again, Liir tried to lean into that recent memory, the way he had learned to steep himself in other memories. Maybe there was something yet to be understood about whether he’d actually slept with her, impregnated her…even more, whether and in what ways he might love her.

Now—a thousand difficult lonely miles away from Trism, who snored a yard to the east—Liir turned over, facing the wall. Candle was a cipher to him, sweet and elusive, and the memory was frail. There was nothing more he could unpack from it, nothing useful. To distract himself, in his heart and memory he walked about and examined the hull of the mauntery, doing a kind of spectral surveillance.

The place betrayed its origins as a gardkeep. It was a fortified house, here on a slight wooded rise, an oasis of trees in the Shale Shallows. The ground floor had no windows, and the front door was reinforced with iron bracing. Behind, the kitchen looked out on a greasy moat crossed by a simple drawbridge. The vegetable plots and cow barn were beyond.

The mauntery would afford little protection in a siege. The place was tall and, at this stage in its history, unsecurable for very long. In any effort to gain unlawful access, a modern police force might be slowed, but it wouldn’t be stayed.

Still, at least a few cows could be swept into the parlor, and hay stacked up under the stairs. The fruits of the harvest crowded the shelves and larders, and the garde-manger was bulbous with blood sausage, dried muttock, and nine varieties of salami, to say nothing of cheeses. There was a mushroom cellar and a bin of desiccated fish fragments. And plenty of wine, and that wonderful rarity in a rural establishment, an indoor well.

In his dreams he checked the cupboards for rifles, he blew through each room to look for wardrobes that could be pushed against windows. He did not see the Superior Maunt asking questions of her esteemed guest about the payout schedule of a proposed beneficial annuity. He didn’t see Mother Yackle nodding in her own morning nap in the sunlight. He didn’t see nor overhear Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire squabbling gently in their shared cubicle about how they ought to proceed. The rooms were empty of novices, maunts, guests, spiders, mice, bedbugs, and any presence of the Unnamed God that he could determine.

What he saw, in the topmost room where he had lain, was a figure on a rush-bottomed chair, sitting away from the light, twisting her hands. Her dark hair was looped up on her head with no regard for neatness or propriety, just to get it out of the way. Her eyes were closed, but he didn’t think she could be praying. He didn’t know what she was doing. At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn’t look into it; he couldn’t. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a little push, and because of its rounded bottom, the basket rocked for a time. Then the green foot would appear again, and start the rocking over.

H
E WOKE WITH A START.
It was sharp noon, and the house smelled of warm leek-and-cabbage eggery for lunch. Trism was still asleep, his hair rucked back against the pillow. The sound of cantering horse hoofs grew louder. Liir wanted to kiss Trism awake, but had the notion that the time for that was already over.

He did it anyway. Trism groaned, and made room, and after a while said, “We don’t do this sort of thing in our circle.”

Did he mean his class at St. Prowd’s? His family? The Home Guard? Didn’t matter. Liir replied, “Well, your circle seems to have widened, hasn’t it.”

“Or shrunk,” said Trism, reaching for his boots.

3

“T
HEY’RE LOOKING FOR TWO
men,” said Sister Doctor.

“Indeed,” said the Superior Maunt.

“One is said to have kidnapped the other.”

“Our guests appear to be on a more familiar footing than hostage and abductor, don’t you think?”

“Well—yes.”

“So tell the soldiers we haven’t seen the men they’re seeking, and bid them good day.”

“The thing is,” said Sister Doctor, “they’re said to be quite dangerous, these fellows. In an act of desecration, they imploded the Emerald City basilica of the Emperor by causing combustible dragons to—combust.”

“How dreadful. I don’t think our two look very dangerous, though. Underfed, if you ask me, and perhaps undecided in their emotions, but not dangerous.”

Sister Doctor came back. “I’ve been told that one of the two they’re seeking is named Liir.”

“I see. Well, tell them he’s not here.”

“Mother Maunt. I question your—propriety. Is that not a lie?”

“Well, if one of the two that they seek is named Liir, one is
not
named Liir. So answer in reference to that one, and say he’s not here.”

“That is devious, Mother Maunt.”

“I’m old and muddled. Put it down to that, if you must comfort yourself,” she replied sharply. “But I’m still in charge, Sister, so do as I say.”

Sister Doctor came back a third time. “They are more explicit. The Commander says that they are seeking Liir Thropp, the son of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“As I live and breathe, Sister Doctor! You extend more respect for my authority than is useful. Need I come up with every rejoinder? Are you never to think for yourself? To the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been conclusively determined that Liir is the son of the witch. So, again, since we cannot answer for certain that the person they seek is here, they must conduct their searches elsewhere. Give them my blessing and tell them to hurry, or do I have to come and do it myself?”