Son of a Witch Read online

  “Did you ever notice how rain sounds like a domingon?” asked the Scarecrow.

  The Lion put his paw to his mouth: Shhhh. His grimace was anything but fearsome; he looked like an overgrown child in lion pajamas.

  Then they heard what he was hearing, and before they could do anything about it, a stone at the base of the statue of Lurlina was shifted to one side. Up from the earth poked the paw of a creature. A badger, a beaver? Something brown, whiskered, and sensible. A slope grite of some sort, larger than its valley cousin.

  “You’ve some nerve, besmirching the memory of Lurlina with your prattle,” said the Mountain Grite. His jowls made a saddlebag flapping noise as he spoke.

  “Nerve,” said the Lion. “I wish.”

  “We’re merely sheltering from the storm,” said Dorothy. “May we have your blessing to stay here?”

  The Grite bared an impressive collection of incisors and canines.

  “What business is it of yours?” said Liir. “We’re not bothering you.”

  The Grite looked around, as if assessing whether he might take them on all at once and get the better of them. Apparently not. “My digs, if you want to call it that,” he said at last, “are directly below. You’re a big heavy lot, and you’re going to collapse the walls of my lodging.”

  “A bad place to build,” said the Tin Man, for whom the teeth of a Mountain Grite weren’t much of a threat. “An insult to Lurlina, actually.”

  “Maybe, but I dig deep, and if the whole thing gives and you tumble in, you’ll starve to death down there. And the stink of your rotting corpses won’t appeal to the spirit of Lurlina, however beloved of the natural world she is said to be.”

  “The storm can’t last forever,” said Dorothy.

  The Grite came forward a little. “Quite possibly I have rabies, you know. Fair warning. I bite first and I don’t ask questions.”

  The Lion sighed and removed himself from the makeshift tent. Out there, the deluge sloped on him like a fountain coursing over a sculptured lion.

  “We’re not going to let some overgrown rodent chase us into the storm,” said Liir. “If you bite me, I’ll bite you back, and return your own rabies to you. Go away.”

  “That’s a capable awning you have.” The Grite wrinkled his face. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be. What is it?”

  “It’s a cape,” said Liir. “What business is it of yours?”

  “That’s the Witch’s cape,” said the Grite. “I don’t believe it. Where did you get it?”

  “I took it,” said Liir.

  “More fool you. She’ll have your head before nightfall.”

  “She’s dead,” said Dorothy. Smugly.

  The Grite’s eyes bulged, and he pushed his face nearer to Dorothy, who flinched and drew back from him: He wasn’t an especially handsome specimen of his family. “The Witch is dead? Can it be true?”

  They nodded, each one of them.

  “Oh, the shock of it.” The Grite clutched his paws and worried them back and forth. “The shock of it! The Witch is dead?”

  The wind itself answered in a kind of obbligato descant: The Witch is dead!

  “Get out of here,” said the Grite in a colder voice. “Go on.”

  “I thought you’d be glad,” said Dorothy.

  The retort was crisp and censorious. “We held her in considerable regard. There have always been some Animals who would have marched at her side, right to the gates of the Emerald City, had she believed in armies, had she ever given the word. You’ll find no comfort among us.”

  “She was my friend,” said Liir. “Don’t confuse us with assassins.”

  “You’re a fledgling. You could barely manage to befriend her cape, let alone the Witch herself.” To Dorothy he added, “Move along, little Miss Thug and accomplices, before I call on reinforcements to deal with you.” The Grite sniffed the raw air as if expecting to find proof of their assertions in the smell of the revised world. “The Witch is dead. It can’t be. Wait till Princess Nastoya hears. Wait until the Wizard hears.”

  He was lost to his own ruminations, and turned to look up at the statue of Lurline. “Give us guidance!” he said. “Speak, for once.”

  The storm thundered very nearby. Everyone shuddered but the Grite. “I mean, speak in a language we can understand,” he clarified. But the storm, or Lurline within its might, didn’t oblige, and indeed, moments later the worst of the downpour was done, and the thunder shunted elsewhere.

  The Grite continued. “I have no reason to give comfort to mine enemy, but there you are. You may be villainous, but you are young, some of you, and perhaps might learn to repent. I’m told that Wizardic battalions are encamped on the banks of the Vinkus River. Find the Wizard’s forces and they will protect you. That’s my advice to you.”

  “The Wizard’s armies will protect us?” snapped Liir. “The Wizard of Oz is a menace!”

  “Of course he is. A despot, a suzerain, call it what you will. The boss. And you’ve abetted him in his campaign to wipe out the western resistance. This news will travel fast, my friends.” Every time he said the word friends, it sounded less friendly. “But take protection where you can. When the word of the death of Elphaba Thropp spreads through these hills, you’ll have a very difficult time of it. I won’t answer for what happens next. You’ve heard my advice. Heed it.”

  “I’m not giving myself up to any corps of the Wizard’s army,” said Liir. “If there are forces down the eastern side, we’ll keep to our plan to veer west, and take our chances through Kumbricia’s Pass. It’ll be a longer route but a safer one.”

  “Perhaps we’d better get going,” said Dorothy, nervously.

  “You had better go on,” agreed the Mountain Grite. “I won’t join a posse against you, but nor will I lie to my friends about what I’ve learned here today. The clouds are passing over. If you’ve intended to take the hairpin track down the western slope of Knobblehead Pike, you’ve overshot. You’ll have to back up. You won’t reach the river valley before dark. Shelter under a black willow; you’ll find a stand of them where the track levels out and circles a bit of highland swamp. You’ll be safe there.”

  “Thank you,” said Dorothy earnestly.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Liir. “Thank him for what?”

  “You,” said the Grite to the Lion, “are a turncoat. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’d be especially wary if I were you. Animals don’t take lightly to traitors. If you were more of a Lion, you’d know that.”

  “I did nothing!” said the Lion. “I was locked in the kitchen!” His tail twitched eight or ten times.

  THE GRITE KEPT HIS WORD and ratted on them. Before the travelers had finished washing the next morning, a scouting party of Scrow appeared at the edge of the black willow grove. Riding bareback and nearly naked on their purple-white steeds, they looked like wild centaurs in the mist. Without a word but with considerable glower the Scrow contingent circled the grove. There, the travelers were kept loosely penned. Attempts to negotiate were fruitless; they had no language in common.

  The languages of Oz. Liir had never thought about them. The father tongue had always seemed universal; even Dorothy spoke without peculiar inflections or special difficulty. True, the dialect of the mountain clans, the Arjikis, was characterized by the growling of syllables halfway down the throat—but the difference had made little impression on Liir. He could still understand the Arjikis.

  So why would the isolated Mountain Grite speak the common tongue with clarity and effect, while the Scrow clung to a language only they understood?

  Right up to the end, the Witch had kept trying to teach the winged monkeys to speak, as if to be able to testify might save their lives someday. So much bound up in language…The language of spells themselves—spells, of all things! A way to order sounds to make things shift, reveal what is hidden, conceal what isn’t…

  He wished he had a skill for language. He wished he could spell magic as, with effort and increasing cont
rol, Elphaba had learned to do. He would bind the Scrow frozen, and he and his companions would walk away safely. But this was beyond him—like everything else.

  The Scrow scouts tossed the travelers hanks of repugnant dried meat and smoked corn. It was clear Dorothy and company were to wait here. A day and a half later, the leader of the Scrow arrived, traveling in a slow-moving caravansary that with considerable care negotiated the path to this low-lying western ridge of Knobblehead Pike.

  The party included a translator, so Liir found himself requesting an audience with the Highness behind the shabby drapes of the palanquin. He wasn’t skilled at bargaining. “The only thing I request is that we, uh, hurry,” he said. “My friend Dorothy wants to get safely to the Emerald City; she has an appointment with the Wizard. Then she intends to travel abroad somewhere.”

  And I with her, he thought to add, but didn’t. Would she have me? And if not—what else am I going to do?

  The translator was an old, gnarled Scrow gentleman who, despite his tribal appurtenances, had been trained in the university environs of Shiz. “Very well,” he said. “I don’t see why we should dally. It is in all of our interests, after all. Give her Highness a chance to compose herself, and we shall let you know when she’s ready.”

  Dorothy said, “We don’t think much of crowned heads where I come from. Who is this Highness?” The interpreter left without answering.

  “How rude,” said Dorothy. “Well, who is she, this Highness? Might it be the Ozma everybody goes on about?”

  Liir explained. “The last Ozma disappeared many years ago, kidnapped as a young girl when the Wizard came to power. Nanny believed the child had been bewitched in a trance, never to grow older by a day until the moment she was released from the charm, like a fairy-tale princess. Then she would rise up and smash the mighty in their comfort, and return the monarchy to its rightful place. But Auntie Witch always pooh-poohed that. She said the child had probably been murdered long ago. The remains of the Ozma Tippetarius would be found deep in the bone bins of the Palace, along with her ancestors, if anyone were allowed to look there.”

  “I believe in Ozma,” said the Scarecrow staunchly.

  Mindless fool, thought Liir, but said nothing more.

  The court of the Scrow didn’t keep them waiting for long. When the sun had reached its zenith, attendants unrolled a green carpet with a puckered selvage. Shapeless pillows, sour with mildew, were placed about. “Stand until her Highness is seated,” the translator said, arranging in a kind of lattice pattern the remaining hairs on his pale domed head. “Then you may be seated, too.”

  She was helped out of her compartment by six retainers. Her muscles were of little use in holding up her bulk, and her large, sagging face twisted into seams of overlapping skin. She grimaced at the pain of every step. An old woman, a monolith of an ancient Scrow matron, easily the size of all her retainers standing together. Like a queen bee among drones.

  Her face was scored with green and purple smudges, some sort of ceremonial marking. The waft of vetiver and lily water, pleasant enough, couldn’t entirely disguise an animal odor.

  “Princess Nastoya,” said the translator in comprehensible Ozish, “may I present Dorothy Gale, of parts unknown, and her companions, a Lion, a Scarecrow, a gentleman clad in Tin, and the boy about whom you’ve been told.” He then repeated the lines in Scrow, to indicate how he would go on.

  “How do you do?” said Dorothy, curtseying.

  Princess Nastoya was lowered to the ground so she could regard them while reclining on her side. Her spine was preternaturally long, as if she possessed extra vertebrae. The servants propped her knees on a yellow cushion, and her elbow on another, and they arranged a small mountain of cushions behind her so she wouldn’t roll backward.

  The interpreter began a flowery biography, but the Princess cut him off. Her voice was low, tympanic, as if her nasal passages were large enough for the storage of melons.

  “I am sore with disbelief,” she said, the interpreter translating. “I had only known that the Witch sent out Crows to call for help. Before they could reach me, they were attacked and their flesh devoured by a posse of nocturnal rocs.”

  “How do you know about the Crows?” asked Liir. “If they were eaten by rocs?”

  “Nocturnal rocs are mute beasts,” said the Princess, “but the attack was witnessed by a Grey Eagle who keeps an eye on a certain district for me. He drove the rocs away from one Crow, who managed to pass on the message of the Witch’s embattlement before dying. The Eagle delivered the message to me as I was closing a convocation with some of the southern Arjiki clans.”

  “The Witch ought to have been told about that,” said Liir. “She considered herself an honorary Arjiki, sort of.”

  “I won’t be lectured on strategy or protocol,” replied the Princess. “In any case, I did invite her. But I never knew if my invitation got through. I was told that she was distracted with grief over the death of her sister.”

  “She was…unsteady…at the end,” admitted Liir. “I’m not sure how much she could have done for you, or if she would have bothered. In truth, she was kind of a hermit. She kept to herself.” Even when it came to me, he remembered.

  “I’d have put the case forcefully to her, had I gotten her attention,” asserted the Princess. “She was no fool. She saw that when the breadbasket of Munchkinland was ruinously taxed by the Emerald City’s chancellors, it had to break away and form a Free State. If pressed, we here in the west will do no less than that ourselves. My attempts to build an allegiance with the Yunamata have come to naught, and the Arjikis can enjoy their own insularity, obstinate slope dwellers!—but we Scrow will not stand by and let our Grasslands be plundered. The Wizard is amassing an army on the eastern slope of the Kells. I know how he works, you whippet.”

  The Princess groaned. “She might have been a help! But it is too late. I hear through the report of a Mountain Grite that the peculiar woman is dead. Elphaba.”

  The interpreter pronounced it wrong. “EL-phaba,” said Liir.

  “Is the murderer here among us?” asked the Princess.

  “It was an accident,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t mean it.” She put the end of one of her pigtails into her mouth and chewed it.

  “The deceased was a curious creature,” said the Princess. “I only met her once, but she impressed me with her stamina. She did not seem the type to die.”

  “Who does?” said Dorothy.

  “Speak for yourself,” muttered the Lion. “I die a little bit every day, especially if there are unfriendly faces in the room.”

  Through her factotum, the Princess continued her message. “You are in grave danger. Not least from me. Murder and theft of the Witch’s belongings, the way I see it, but even worse: doing so in collusion with the Wizard.”

  Liir protested, sputtering. “Not in collusion with the Wizard!”

  “Well, the Wizard of Oz did ask me to kill her,” admitted Dorothy. “No use crying over that spilt milk. He did, and I won’t lie about it. But I didn’t intend to do it. I just wanted her forgiveness for the accidental death of her sister. And then there was the bucket of water. And how was I to know? I mean, we don’t have witches back home in Kansas. We wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” interrupted Liir. “Listen, Princess Nastoya, please. I lived with the Witch all my life. There’s no question of theft. I am the next of kin.”

  “How so?”

  He couldn’t answer. The Princess pressed her point.

  “Can you prove it?”

  He shrugged. His skin was neither green, like Elphaba’s, nor musky ocher, like Fiyero’s children and widow. Liir was rather pasty, in fact; not a convincing specimen of anything, when you got right down to it.

  “It is no matter,” said the Princess. “I would not kill you. Oh no, I would not. But others might, and I wonder if I could prevent them. We have no sway with the Arjikis, as the collapse of my recent campaign shows.”

/>   “Why would the Wizard’s armies bother to raise a hand against us?” asked Liir. “The Witch is dead, and the ruling family of the Arjikis—the house and line of Fiyero—has been obliterated.”

  “Even the daughter?” asked the Princess.

  Liir’s mouth dropped. “Do you mean Nor? Have you heard otherwise about her? What can you tell me of her?”

  “I have capable ears,” she answered, but continued. “Can you prove the Witch is dead?”

  “You want us to bring her back to life?” Liir scoffed. “You might as well kill us now, if that’s your demand.”

  The Princess indicated that she wanted to stand. “It’s the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking,” she said. It took nine men to cantilever her to her feet, and then they brought her a pair of jeweled canes as thick as newel posts. She leaned forward and fixed Liir in the eye.

  “You would be of no help at treaties, you boy-calf,” she said. “But you wonder what do I want of you.”

  She let her mirrored shawl slip off her shoulders, and three black ivory combs clattered to the ground from her knotted hedge of thick white hair. The air grew very still, and clammy; there was a sense of Presence. The Princess closed her eyes and droned, and her hair seemed to pick at itself, and then to gather into a sleek sliding thing, and it ran off her back into a white coil on the ground. The shapeless gown of cotton geppling shifted on her hips, appeared to draw itself up into a peplum or a bustle, and then it snaked off.

  Liir had never seen an unclothed woman before, old or young—only little Nor on washday, lithe in the copper tub, when she’d been a girl of four or five. The effect of a naked Princess was startling, the print of silvery hair at the groin, the pockets of flesh folding one over the other, the bosom flattened by age and gravity. Dorothy murmured “Goodness!” as if she thought she must be witnessing exactly the opposite.

  If this was magic, it was still spelling time. The Princess’s nose was lengthening, uncoiling, and the skin on her cement-colored cheeks stretched and thickened epibolically. Her eyes, which had been little more than slits in the folds of her face, lost their ovoid shape, rounded into marbles. A net of fine hairs sprouted on her brow and pate, her cheeks and chin and dramatically hostile nose. And ears:—yes, they were capable and then some.