“Are you going to go to the Conference? Where is it?”
“The eastern mouth of Kumbricia’s Pass. No, I’m not going.” Chistery spat. “I’m not a Bird, and I’m hardly a Monkey—more a monkey, really. Besides, my wings wouldn’t manage that distance anymore. I need a nice perch and a hot cup of cocoa before sleep, and a good private scratch in the morning, or I can’t answer for myself. It isn’t pretty.”
Liir couldn’t force Chistery to put himself in danger. He was the chief of his tribe, after all; the others had never advanced in language or understanding quite as he had. Well, he’d had Elphaba’s tutelage.
What would the Witch have done? Liir didn’t know. He pestered Chistery until the Monkey cried, “Leave me be! How would I know what she’d do?”
“She always liked you better than me,” Liir snapped at him.
“Frankly, Liir, I’d rather be cleaning the chamber pots than having this chat.” Chistery left. Liir noticed he hadn’t contradicted the assertion about the Witch’s affections. Weasely beast.
Liir started up the stairs to see if Nanny was in one of her sharper moments. But she was asleep with the port bottle nestled between her fingers, so he kept going, up and up, at last, to the rooms in the southeast tower, the suite that had been the Witch’s study, her home and her hermitage.
The place was much as he had left it a decade earlier, though furred with a cold and clammy sort of dust. The one broad bank of windows looking east was shuttered, enshrouding the chamber with shadows. Mouse droppings littered everything, but that was expected in a castle without a cat.
He had to put his weight against the bar that kept the shutters closed, but at length the thing trembled and gave way. He only opened a segment of the window, so that enough light could come in and save him from barking his shins. As it was, he stumbled over a low chest of drawers, shattering a range of baby roc wing bones that the Witch had been drawing shortly before the end.
The room was a wheel, and he imagined it spun around him, but then that was him turning, wasn’t it, turning so his eye could fall on everything at once. He had looked unsuccessfully for the Grimmerie once before. Now he was taller, and his eye better trained: perhaps he would make it out lying slumped on some shelf, or stashed on top of a cupboard.
He didn’t see it. Maybe he just didn’t want to see it, for it would only reinforce the murkiness of his origins. Elphaba had been able to read that book, to decipher its skittering language somehow, but few else had—maybe no one else. He didn’t know. He had been good at Qua’ati, but to master a foreign language of magic was another business entirely. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to tie his own shoes until he was ten.
Expecting little, he pushed aside furniture, looked under the mildewed cushions of the window seat. The wardrobe was locked, but he found a skeleton key in a chipped teacup and worried the latch open.
Inside hung a few dresses, mostly in the black that the Witch favored. There were no shelves, and no Grimmerie hidden beneath a secret floor. Just a pair of boots. He pulled them out and looked at them.
They were expensively cut and pieced, made of some supple leather that had been well treated. Where the boots had folded a bit, there were only eyelash cracks. A gentleman’s boots, Liir realized. Elphaba kept a pair of men’s boots under lock and key?
He felt inside them. One was empty. The other yielded a piece of curling paper about eight inches square. He took it to the window and flattened it on his knee so he could make it out.
A sketch of Nor. No mistake about it. The chin was all wrong, and the eyes too close together, but the joyful tilt of the head, the way the hair whipped off the brow—it could be no other. Liir could see the artist’s tentative first lines corrected by definitive cross-hatching in a kind of drypoint, with highlights of coffee-colored wash. Maybe the artist had spilled some coffee on purpose and rubbed definitions in with a finger. Elphaba?
He turned the paper over. On the back, in a crude, distinctive hand, was scrawled
Nor by Fiyero.
This is me Nor
by my father F
before he left
So Elphaba had kept it—as another token of Fiyero, maybe, something from his hand. And perhaps also because she had admired Nor a little, in her own way—to the extent Elphaba could admire any child. Nor had had spunk.
He turned his head to avoid any more of that kind of thinking. The light from the window worked a glint upon a kind of bowl of glass. A ball, really. He rubbed the dust from it; it played like a bright spatter of sunlit rain as he cleaned it.
He found a low stool with five legs, each carved with its own representative foot: a dwarf, an elf, a human, a bird, and an elephant. He drew the stool close and sat down with his chin in his hands.
Lifting his chin this way and that, looking at himself slantwise. Did his chin have a sharp line to it, was his nose sloping and stabbing as Elphaba’s had been? Was his skin the color of her brother Shell’s? Whatever efforts or accidents had brought him into the world—was he worth it? And if so—worth it to whom? He was poised as a girl preparing for her first party, trying to see her own loveliness. He didn’t care for loveliness, one way or the other: but he looked for something that might stand in its stead. Something like merit. Capability.
If only she were still alive to tell him something, anything.
A cloud passed before the sun. The room shook a little, adjusting its outlines. The ball darkened and brightened again. He took it in his hands, the old thing, scratched and crazed, and cracked along several seams. It looked as if it had once been a flat bit of glass, and someone had heated it, thinned and curled and patched it into this makeshift gazing ball. A miracle it hadn’t fallen apart. The shapes within shifted as he tilted it this way and that, to try to surprise himself by a new aspect. Catch a new angle, learn a new regret. Anything.
He leaned down and breathed against it, and quickly wrote his name with his finger in the condensation. It dissolved into shapes, his reflection no longer sharp-lined, but foggy. Colored blobs like tossing petals. Then they resolved. The lines he saw were not the carved cornices of the wardrobe or the line where the ceiling met the walls. Instead he saw a skylight, and walls of old cracking plaster, and a white cat observing from the top of a crate. A man moved out of the margin of the mirror, turning his tunic inside out in his haste to remove it. He was dark and beautiful; Liir knew enough about the beauty of men to tell this. He circled an arm about a woman and drew her toward the wall, where he leaned down to kiss her. Then the man turned to open a wide double-doored window, and a flood of light that was never seen in the tower at Kiamo Ko burned into the room in the mirror. (Liir the young soldier was outside, heading for Quadling Country, daydreaming in the sun.) Their forms were indistinct in the sun flooding around them into the room. The woman pulled back, away from the window frame, and raised her arms around the man. Her face was hidden. Her arms were green.
Liir set the mirror gently down. He turned as if to say to the white cat, Hush, that’s private—but the white cat was in the mirror, of course.
Elphaba. Elphaba and Fiyero. Elphaba once upon a time, maybe not much older than Liir was now. And Fiyero, Fiyero for sure. In the light of that distant memory, captured somehow in a looking glass, one couldn’t mistake the pattern of blue diamonds that had been incised into Fiyero’s skin. Liir had envied how Nor had spoken so affectionately of her father’s blue-diamonded skin.
Liir didn’t want to see more. He was too constricted for prurience of any sort, much less this kind. But he was young and normal—too normal—so of course he had to look again. He was relieved to find that the circumference of the ball was misting up, and in any case the picture was different. It was the Witch now, the woman he had known so well—fiercer, less forgiving, more impatient, more focused. She was slapping the pages of the Grimmerie, looking for something she couldn’t find. Then she closed the book with a whomp so hard the globe almost rocked on its stand, even now, at the memory of it.
r />
She turned and raised a crooked arm in the air above her, and her mouth was open, but he could hear no sound; and the broom came rushing forward, dragging its hems across the floor. The Witch wrenched it with one strong hand and settled her rump firmly against the tied top of the brush. They rose as a single instrument and left the room through the broad window. The Great Kells—as they were a dozen or so years ago, as they were today—seemed like fans of lavender and ice in the distance, and he could make out her path for a few more seconds, trading on the currents of the wind, after an impossible prize.
HE SAID HIS good-byes to Nanny, though she seemed mercifully vacant this afternoon. “Tell ’em all to go to hell,” she advised. “And save me a good seat by the racetrack when they get there.”
Chistery saw him out. “You’ve no need to take this on yourself,” he repeated.
“She would,” he said.
“You aren’t her; you can’t be, and shouldn’t try.”
“Try to be her, or try to be me? There is a difference. Of course there is. But I’ve got the broom now, haven’t I? So who else should do it?”
Chistery shrugged.
“If the Princess of the Swans was presiding over a Conference of the Birds, so that the flying creatures of the world could share what they knew about the trouble ahead, you know who would be there. She would. She flew on a broom. She qualified. So I’ll go in her stead. I may not have her blood, but I have her broom. I’m all there is.”
“Go with the winds,” said Chistery. “Shall I save supper?”
Liir put on Fiyero’s boots. Hadn’t he earned them?
Or perhaps not. He took them off again and replaced them in the wardrobe. But he did take the drawing of Nor, and fold it up, and tuck it in an inside pocket of the cape, from where it could not blow away.
He climbed to the windowsill in her old study and threw himself out, trusting that the broom would remember its mission. His eyes closed against the fall, and the crows sheltering under the eaves screeched in shock and terror. The broom stumbled and pitched, rolled and yawed, but Liir kept his boots kicked firmly in the straw and his hands iron-tight around the pole. When after the first few seconds he had not yet whumped into the side of Knobblehead Pike, he opened one eye.
The landscape was a broken thing from this high up. The mountains looked like mud, swept into ridges and painted white and brown and grey and green. Thin flat lines of polished silver: rivers threading along the valley floors. Almost as far as the eye could see, the Kells curved north. The horizon beyond them was white as sugar crystal where the sun made some fun of its own.
To the south, Kumbricia’s Pass was out of sight, hidden by the shoulders of mountains between, but it wouldn’t be hard to find from this height.
He wheeled about, vaguely southward, leaving Kiamo Ko for the second time in his life. He didn’t look back, for the whipping black cape would interfere with his view anyway. To the east, invisible still, the Emerald City, and all that went on there. To the south, a flat plate of greenish brown. Maybe Kellswater in the distance already? That would put Nether How beneath him, and the five lakes west of the Vinkus River. He hadn’t the nerve to look down, however; looking out and across was just barely tolerable.
He saw the first sign of the moon, and the weird hump of a snout it had. The jackal moon, Nanny had told him; she’d hoped to get another jackal moon in her long life. There it was, his first, or the first he could remember anyway. It lay on the horizon to the southeast like a dog with its nose on the threshold, barely obeying the instruction to stay outside. It had a cold and a personal look to it.
The wind played tricks in his ears: now a soughing like the breath of a man in distress, now an indistinct glissando almost as of fingers on purely tuned strings. From here one could see nothing of the works of man in the world, and it was the more beautiful for it: how odd, then, that the wind should still sound like human music. Or was it that human music sounded more like the wind than people could possibly know?
On his right, coming over the Kells from the west, three or four clots of dark matter, indistinct because of the light and the wispy streakiness of the skies. He paid the flotsam no mind until a skein of cloud parted and they were nearer. Larger than he’d guessed; now he could see they were still rather far off. But gaining in speed; and gaining on him, slicing toward him in a wide curvet like hounds let loose on the side of a meadow, and he the fox already moving broadly down its middle.
He used the force of his thumbs to press the wood of the broom pole down, and as if possessed of a mind, or as if it had become part of his own body, the broom obliged, and he lost altitude in a hurry. The larger creatures would have a hard time adjusting their speed and height, he thought, and he was right; they were less nimble. But the air below was thicker with the water vapor and breath of forest. What they’d lost in maneuverability, the hunting birds made up in greater weight; they plunged toward him.
Farther, and he dropped farther still, each time catching some small advantage, to lose it within a few minutes. The four birds now penned him in the air: two keeping slightly forward and below, one coming on his left. Above—he could feel it with his peripheral judgment rather than see it—the final one. And closing in fast, to judge by the pair of shadows that he could see racing along the flatlands below: his shadow and his pursuer’s.
There was nothing to lose by an attempt to buck sideways and zigzag; with luck two of the dedicated missiles might collide, and each one knock the other unconscious. But the broom didn’t seem responsive enough. A small amount of jerking up and kicking back made little difference. The farther the drop, the slower the broom’s response: the more resistance put up by the moods of the climate.
Now above the horizon the jackal moon was staring. It had risen as Liir had descended, and their relative positions were reversed. It was the head of a predator on the crouch, and he was the prey trying lucklessly to make it to a mouse hole of one sort or another.
The first attack was of talons, so Liir thought, eagles? Massive eagles—and the second attack was by a tooth or a beak, which might have meant anything. It ripped off the cape as if calmly unknotting it. Then Liir turned to beat at the creature with his arms, since encounter was inevitable, and he came face-to-face with a flying dragon. Roughly the size of a horse, with wings of black and gold, and a venomous eye of gold shot through with black where red should be.
The other dragon neared, and the two of them made their nab neatly, tossing Liir between them as his clothes shredded and his voice raveled. Then, having worried him at last from the broom, they let him fall, and retired with their spoils.
The Emperor Apostle
One Plus One Equals Both
1
HE HAD HAD EVERY INTENTION TO DIE, and music had forbidden it. He’d been netted by melody not so much beguiling as nagging. That’s what he thought, when he could think about it. Though it was another few hours or days (he couldn’t count either) before even this much came clear to him.
What he remembered from before his fall from the sky was imprecise at best, and its emotional character muted. Panic over the sight of a girl being slung from a burning bridge…disgust at realizing what Shell had been up to in those cells at Southstairs. Consolation at seeing a stag at the far side of a field in early autumn. Panic, disgust, consolation—cheap souvenirs from a holiday. Emotions were portable and obvious: small savories of a life, suitable for kicking his mood upswing or down as the moment required. False, somehow.
But he and his memories alike had awakened into a new capacity of pain and grief. He had awakened to find himself alive again, damn it. Couldn’t he even fall from a great height and expect the comfort of a quick death? Need Feckless Liir march on yet again?
Though marching was hardly what he was doing, in literal terms, as he tossed, and kicked the sour blankets in this abandoned mill building or industrial outpost, wherever it was she had taken him.
The girl was named Candle, she said. She spoke t
o him colloquially in Qua’ati.
She brought him water from a well outside. He could hear the squeak of the pulley as the bucket went down, came back. She brought him nuts and moss apples, which gave him a stentorian diarrhea at first, but cleaned him out and started him up again, and before long he was able to sit up. Then get up and piss in a pail. Then walk to the window and rub a shaky hand against the dirt on the glass, and circle a clean space with his palm, and look out.
His resting room was off the kitchen of a small compound: a few stone domestic buildings connected to dependences built at right angles to one another. In the yard he saw the laundry cart to which Candle and that ferociously old maunt had dragged him. Now the donkey was unhitched and was grazing nearby in an overgrown orchard, braying opinions about nothing in particular. Within a couple of days, out on her scouting adventures, Candle had come up with a hen, too, and once the hen grew familiar with her new home, there were eggs in the morning.
“Is it a farmhold?” he asked her.
“It was once,” she said in her half-a-voice. “Old apple trees in the woods, and dozens of barrels in a shed. I think it had been a cidery. But it seems to have been fitted out for industry of some sort since. I’ve found a…a heap of machinery standing in the high main barn. It’s been hacked with sledgehammers and I can’t guess what job it was meant to perform. When you can get around better, you can tell me what you think.”
Beyond the orchards and a few overgrown pastures, as far as he could tell, they were surrounded by a forest. By day it was the color of a hundred fawns, every afternoon brighter as more leaves fell and the light sank nearer to the ground. By night, owls hooted, and in the ceaseless wind the branches made sounds like coughing.