The witch of maracoor, p.19
The Witch of Maracoor, page 19
“I know, I know, I missed you too,” said Rain, chucking him under the chin. “Settle down now. Yes, you can come onto the settee.” She pulled herself upright and put her feet on the floor. Gardius took up the rest of the seat, which remanded Ozma to the upholstered lady’s chair flanked by an occasional table and the baby carriage. Ozma set the lidded basket in the baby carriage so Gardius wouldn’t knock it over with his wagging tail.
Stalling, no way to start. How do you write your own life. “What’s the show?” asked Rain finally, flicking a wrist at the decor.
“I caught a glimpse of a playbill tacked up backstage. It’s called The Revenge of Charity, or something.”
“Charity probably being the name of the heroine.”
“That’s all the virtue they ever credit us with.”
The us, the us in that sentence: right away. Ozma staking her presence in simpatico with Rain, on the side of the female leads. The Tip in Ozma seemed in deep denial, maybe atrophied, maybe dissolved. Rain winced through a surge of grief, trying to keep it from showing. “Why are we here?” asked Rain. “I mean, not in this sorry hard life, but here in an empty hall all alone?”
Ozma turned her face to think how to answer. Glancing offstage, as it were. Giving Rain a chance to study her sharp profile. Rain etched the image with her fingertip into her opposite palm, to remember it feelingly if this was the last time.
“You know that there’s opposition to my ascendance to the throne,” Ozma said. Rain shrugged, not wanting to admit she hadn’t stopped to collect the latest on the street. Ozma looked as if the Tip in her remembered how Rain could be. “You’ll have sidestepped news of current events, I bet. But it’s easy enough to understand. After the rush of celebration at my return from that sarcophagus of an endless boyhood, the usual suspects who trade in discord got together.”
“Right away, I don’t know what you mean. What usual suspects?”
“The cronies who supported Shell Thropp, the self-styled Emperor Apostle. Old Shell. Your great-uncle and our former Throne Minister. He may have fled into deep retirement as he promised, or be scheming a comeback. But his supporters—the barons and the princes of the factories, the men who benefited—they are appalled to have an Animal at the head of government. They find it insulting. A certain Lord Avaric bon Tenmeadows especially. They began to float the notion that I was an imposter. That old Mombey could never have bewitched an infant Ozma into a decades-long spell of childhood. The improbability of such events gave the grunts and groaners a platform on which to raise objection. Meanwhile Mombey has gone abroad and is unavailable for questioning. And I wasn’t ready to put down an insurrection; I’m still not ready. I need political training and I need to grow up, too. To get used to this otherworldly status called womanhood. So I’ve gone into soft seclusion. And after a foiled attempt on my life, into deep hiding. All with the Regent Throne Minister’s secret approval.”
“Are you sure that old Brrr hasn’t himself become power-mad? That his complicity with your plan isn’t his own veiled grab for the throne of Oz? Might he have engineered a false attack on you to legitimize putting you into seclusion?”
“Oh, you’re so cynical for one so young.”
“I’m the same age as you—” But Ozma held up a finger and Rain backed off. Of course. Ozma had six or seven decades on Rain, even if it had been a somewhat catatonic, spell-bound life.
“Listen, Rain. Don’t be a ninny. Of course Brrr is loyal and devoted. What Cowardly Lion wouldn’t rather be back in Shiz, peddling antiques or writing sardonic sketches to perform in undergraduate common rooms? He keeps to his post out of regard for me, mostly. And because he thinks the revanchists who preferred your great-uncle Shell as Throne Minister would quickly install another puppet they could prop up and manipulate. Shell was good for the very rich in this city and in Gillikin, you know. Not so much for the working Animals and humans and the trodden and despondent.”
“So—we’re here because—?”
“When Brrr was slipped a note from Scarly that said you’d come back to the capital, he got word to me. We arranged that you’d be escorted to a safe zone.”
“You’re living here.”
“Oh, no. I can’t tell you where I stay. It would put you in danger to know. Not to mention me.”
“Well, don’t tell me then.” Rain wrinkled her mouth for the first time. Attempting a smile, managing maybe a wince, at best. She thought it likely that she merely looked deranged. “The Lady’s Mystique. Am I being obvious if I say this is a bit stagey?”
“I suppose it is over the top. But the theater is dark today, and it was the best we could think up at short notice. Look, I haven’t much time. The place is surrounded by my plainclothes guards. Tell me why you’ve come back.”
That was Tip in Ozma, certainly? More direct than Rain could have been. Or maybe Ozma had learned bluntness from Tip and she was now direct, as befits the head of a nation. Even if as yet uncrowned. “Tell me, Rain.”
“I had to see you again,” said Rain simply. “I went away to get away from you. I suffered amnesia by crashing into a—well, never mind—and now I wonder if that amnesia was partly willful. I didn’t want to face you if you couldn’t face me. I couldn’t live in the world with you, or without you either. So I went out of the world, as far as I could go. Then I realized, I suppose, that I had no choice. If we were going to part, it had to be our own decision, together. An active choosing. Not forced upon us by magic spells dissolving or by the needs of state protocol. I came back to do this the right way.”
“Well,” said Ozma. “You’ve changed in two years. I see that.”
“You mean besides the green?”
She flicked her fingers at that. “Makeup could do that if it wanted. That first year, when I was out and about the city more, I saw Elphabas going to fancy-dress balls three or four times a season. The ones I liked best were the rather beefy ones.”
“You still have an eye for the ladies.”
“Our situation is not to be mocked.” She drew herself up; now she was both Tip and Ozma, decisive, inclined to correct and to be correct. “You have changed. You are harder.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“Change is neither good nor bad; it matters how the change is used in the wicked world.” Putting her hands together in her lap, Ozma lowered her chin so her eyes looked out from under the manicured brows. Her high-buttoned collars couldn’t disguise a certain embonpoint. “I suspect you’re more guarded. Probably more capable. And me? How do you find me?”
“That’s a girly question and I’ve never been a girly girl.”
“Well, for most of my life, neither was I.”
They laughed at that, a genuine laugh—a tickling, stitch-ripping, time-shattering laugh. Nervous, self-conscious, but also a relief.
When she could catch her breath to continue, Rain said, “I mean, I was never good at asking myself questions about how I felt. Maybe because, like you, I was brought up in the disguise of a camouflage skin. I figured out that it was safer to leave all that stuff alone. I was skating on nerves and moxie, I was running my whole life. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask how I felt about anything. Even about you,” she finished with a dry little gasp. “Tip.”
“I’m not Tip,” said Ozma in the smallest of voices, though in this room a spider up in the gods could have heard that.
“No part of you is left of the Tip that loved me?”
“The part of me that loves you wasn’t dissolved when my disguise fell away,” said Ozma.
Rain let Gardius lick the salt off her cheeks. When she could manage it, she muttered, “I don’t know what to do with any of this. I don’t know what country I live in or what life or what world. Why couldn’t you have told me two years ago?”
“Told you what I didn’t myself get yet? I was just waking up. From my own amnesia, a walking amnesia. Is amnesia just another term for the cluelessness of adolescence? Which we’re barely out of, Rain. Besides, I didn’t know—I don’t know—what my—affection— could mean to you—other than sorrow and frustration and, I suppose, maybe an invitation to madness.”
“Oh, I’m better than that,” said Rain. “I can be utterly mad on my own coin, I don’t need a prompt from you. I’m a witch now, do you get that? I mean, I pretend to be, but I suppose after a while the pretense drops away.”
“Could you pretend to love me, then?” asked Ozma.
Rain shuddered. “I don’t know. Couldn’t we—somehow—maybe with the aid of the Grimmerie, which I can now read somewhat, and have accidentally kept safe from harm—couldn’t we find a way to regress ourselves back to being boy Tip and thin colorless Rain?”
“If I understand what you mean,” said Ozma softly, “this is the regression. Our truer selves. The others were the disguises. They can’t hold.” She stood up. “Do you think a knitting needle would puncture the hide of that scale-bound doggie?”
“No. And don’t you dare. Whatever for—?”
“I would strongly like to persuade him to get off the chesterfield.”
“Why?” said Rain. “We’re not who we were. It’s a play, a theater piece, a fakery. Suitable for this pretend parlor, maybe, but not for real. We’d be approaching each other under false pretenses. We can’t make-believe at this kind of thing.”
Ozma tilted her head and peered at Rain, trying to work something out. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to for eighteen months or so, but it’s been a tumble of sorts, hasn’t it? You have the look of a much-traveled ambassador.”
“My old friend,” said Rain, “you have no idea. There and back again, just about.”
“But it’s brought you here. Can’t you picture what we had, and wonder if it is available somehow still? Something like love was involved, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Don’t be dry and waspish. Ozma, while I was abroad—”
“Oh, abroad. My. An unappointed ambassador of the Palace, I presume?”
“You might say. But listen: I came across a concept called ephrarxis. If I understand it correctly, it means a nostalgia for something that might have been but never was. I take it to be a kind of sickness, frankly. Something that dissuades you from living in the present because the impossible other-history is so alluring.”
“I have never heard of ephrarxis, but fear of its poisonous effect on healthy life seems to argue for me, not against me. Life as it really is, here, not as we imagined it earlier. Rain, there was a moment when you were pale and I was Tip, and we had never embraced anyone before, much less each other, but we took the risk. We—we clung. And first our world opened and then it broke. You survived whatever it is you went away to do, and you came back. And now you’re unwilling to be held? You survived wars and famine and giant mosquitoes and boring little drinks parties, flew to the ends of the earth, and back, and now you’re scared? How is this any different from when we braved our first contact? You’re a new person and so am I. We’re a little wiser and perhaps ought to be a little fiercer. What’s the worst that can happen? That we’re not right for each other? Isn’t that what you came back to find out?”
Rain shoved Gardius to the carpet. Ozma moved over and sat down and took Rain in her arms. “When you first kissed Tip,” she said, “you didn’t know what that would be like. You didn’t know you’d come to adore him. You’re in the same moment now. Give us a go, will you?”
“When you first kissed Rain,” began Rain, but, at that second, she didn’t finish her thought.
Nothing was conclusive. Probably nothing could ever be conclusive. It was just where they were, now. It was intermission, in between Act One and Act Next. They had to make a plan, to buy themselves time. A day, or two, or three, till they were sure, till they could think, till they could come back to earth and breathe without panting. However long that would take.
Not a lifetime; they weren’t thinking beyond the cast of their week. The local time, the time in which they were still together, before they broke apart. Whenever that would be—they couldn’t read any cards about that.
“But I’ve told you,” said Ozma, “the building is surrounded at the entrances by armed security forces dressed as laborers and locals. They’re putting up a new bill on the marquee that they’ll take down again as soon as I safely leave. A lot of effort for an hour’s audience with you, but couldn’t be helped. My personal team of guards has eyes everywhere. Under instructions from the Regent Throne Minister and his privy council, and with my blessing. The opposition leader, Lord Avaric, would choke on his own mustache in joy if I were apprehended by his goons. We have to take exquisite care.”
“I’m a witch,” said Rain. “I might not be much good at it, but I can rustle up a disguise.”
“I’ve sent my attendants outside. So we’re the only people in the building,” said Ozma. “We can’t leave like bored theatergoers waking up in their seats a day after the house lights were extinguished. But if we could . . .” She undid the remaining buttons of her snug plum waistcoat, which Rain had started on already. Underneath, the rest of a man’s shirt. And when she hitched up her hems, she revealed a pair of men’s black afternoon trousers. “My butler’s. He doesn’t know I borrowed them.”
“You’re the witch, now. Precisely what did you come prepared for, Ozma?”
“Whatever I found.”
The princess picked up her basket as she and Rain went to rummage around backstage. They came upon a wardrobe and dressing room hung with dusty costuming. A stiff gentleman’s hat that could settle and center upon Ozma’s chignon. She hung her plum dress upon a hook. “Unless you want to try it on?” she asked Rain.
“Haven’t got that far yet,” said Rain. “I’ll just take this greasy beggar’s shawl. More my style, the last few years.”
They inspected the basement for possible secret exits that the security forces might not know about. Nothing. “We haven’t much time,” said Ozma. “My people won’t think me to be in danger as long as the perimeters of the theater aren’t breached, but they will be coming to collect me shortly. I told them an hour. If we want to escape their notice and buy ourselves some time to—to—”
“To stop faffing about? Upstairs, then.”
With Gardius behind them, sniffing at the remains of theater mice, they climbed wooden staircases to where roustabouts made magic happen in their own way. Up here, through angled glass, light fell upon dingy flats and flies suspended till needed in the limelights. A yellow brick road, a boarding school dormitory, a throne room. Rain passed them by. “I suppose the skylights are also guarded?”
“Yes. The roof is staffed with its own detail.” But Ozma grinned at Rain.
“What?”
“I was remembering our escape from St. Prowd’s through a skylight.”
“You’re right. We’re practiced at this.” Saying we at this point was in itself a new country to Rain, as unexplored as Maracoor had been. Sweet Oz, was it possible she was blushing?
They arrived at a warren of small rooms halfway down the stairs on the far side of the stage. The water closet was rank and fetid—no useful window. Then a staff lunchroom. An iron stove, probably for keeping cast and crew alive during winter performances, was capped with an exhaust pipe. It fed itself through a hole sealed over with a square of wood. A vertical trapdoor hammered shut. Flush in the brick wall, no purchase. No prying it away. “This will lead outside, it has to,” said Rain. “It’s where the smoke goes.”
“A spell would come in handy now,” said Ozma.
“You be the Queen of Bossiness, I’ll be the witch? Is that it? Gardius,” said Rain. “We are in need of your help.”
The dwarf dragon paced forward and studied the two young women quizzically. Rain spoke to him with her hands on his cheeks, and then turned his head to the wooden hatch in the brick. Gardius emitted a small stream of flame, thin as a child’s chalk. “He’s going to burn the place down, not a good plan,” said Ozma. “Stop him.”
“He knows what he’s doing,” said Rain. “Even if I don’t.”
The creature kept up the jet of gold until the board had a blackened side, like toast too near the flame. When enough of it had smoked through, Rain and Ozma used a stove poker to pry the rest away. A moldy old patch job, it splintered apart. They broke it into fragments and shoved them in the stove. The light of outside—it was late afternoon—gave them their first daylight view of each other. Ozma was a pearl against a pearly sky; and Rain felt freshened as spring growth.
Sections of the stovepipe outside the building rose above the rooftop. It was affixed to the exterior walls by a series of iron rings. While it listed dreadfully after Gardius’s labors, it hadn’t collapsed into the alley. The noise would have drawn attention to their efforts. Ozma scrabbled to the top of the cold stove and peered over the edge of the makeshift sill. “We’re in luck,” she said.
“For the first time in our lives,” said Rain.
“No, second. The first was meeting each other at St. Prowd’s. From which we fled thanks to the skylight, the roofs, the shadows. As you remember. We’ve got this down cold. Climb up, there’s room. I’ll squinch over. Look, I think in order to jury-rig this venting apparatus here, ironmongers had to pound a few prongs of iron into the mortar between the bricks. See? From the alley below. So they could get up here. Then there was no reason to take the posts down, because the wall was sealed, and anyway one day the stovepipe might need repairing.” She craned and looked skyward. “The footholds don’t continue to the roof. So I don’t think the security detail will have considered this a possible escape route even if they noticed it. Though they ought to have noticed it. What are we paying them for?”
“Shut up,” said Rain. “Can we get out this way?”
Ozma jumped to the floor and glanced around. A clipboard and a cast list, and a pencil attached on a string. She turned the paper over and scrawled. Ozma leaves willingly in her own custody, unimperiled. She will communicate in time. She made a mark that Rain guessed must be a signature scrawl, meaning by Ozma’s hand attesting. She hung the clipboard on a nail next to the opening they’d kicked out of the wall. Couldn’t be missed. “For Brrr, so he doesn’t have Lord Avaric arrested for kidnapping. Though Avaric is guilty of other sedition. Shall we?” As if about to enter a ballroom for a state occasion.
