“I will not,” said Liir.
“He’s a good boy,” said Nanny, “but not as good as Nessarose. Oh, sorrowful day! Liir, I’ll take my tea in my room, I can’t sit and talk to you as if nothing’s happened.” She hauled herself to her feet, leaning on Chistery’s head. (Chistery was devoted to her.) “You know, darling,” she said to the Witch, “I don’t think the boy is old enough to see to my needs. What if the castle is attacked again? Remember what happened the last time you went away.” She made a small, accusatory moue.
“Nanny, the Arjiki militia guard this place day and night. The Wizard’s army is well housed in the town of Red Windmill down below. They have no intention of leaving that safe haven and risking decimation in these mountain passes—not after what they did. That was their skirmish, that was their campaign. Now they’re just watchdogs. They staff the outpost to report signs of an invasion or trouble from the mountain clans. You know that. You have nothing to fear.”
“I’m too old to be taken in chains like poor Sarima and her family,” Nanny said. “And how could you rescue me, if you couldn’t get them back?”
“I’m still working on that,” said the Witch into Nanny’s left ear.
“Seven years. You’re very stubborn. It’s my opinion they’re all moldering in a common grave, these seven long years. Liir, you have to thank Lurlina that you weren’t among them.”
“I tried to rescue them,” said Liir stubbornly, who had rewritten the escapade in his own mind to give himself a more heroic role. It was not longing for the companionship of soldiers, he told himself, no, it was a courageous effort to save the family! In fact, Commander Cherrystone out of kindness had had Liir tied up and left him in a sack in someone’s barn, to prevent their having to incarcerate him with the others. The Commander had not realized Liir was a bastard son of Fiyero, for Liir himself didn’t know it.
“Yes well, that’s a good boy.” Nanny was now distracted from the sad news, drifting back to the tragedy she remembered more viscerally. “Of course I did everything I could, but Nanny was an old woman even then. Elphie, do you think they’re dead?”
“I could find out nothing,” said the Witch for the ten thousandth time. “If they were spirited to the Emerald City or if they were murdered, I could not tell. You know this, Nanny. I bribed people. I spied around. I hired agents to follow every lead. I wrote to the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow for advice. I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure.”
“It was my failure, I’m sure,” said Nanny peacefully; they all knew she didn’t think so for a minute. “I should have been younger and more vigorous. I’d have given that Commander Cherrystone a piece of my mind! And now Sarima is gone, gone, and her sisters too. I suppose it’s none of our fault, really,” she concluded disingenuously, scowling at the Witch. “You had someplace to go, so you went; who can criticize you for that?”
But the image of Sarima in chains, Sarima as a decaying corpse, still withholding from the Witch her forgiveness for Fiyero’s death—it pained her like water. “Give up, you old harridan,” said the Witch, “must my own household whip me so? Go have your tea, you fiend.”
The Witch sat down at last and thought of Nessarose, and what might come. The Witch had tried to stay removed from the affairs of the political world, but she knew a change of leadership in Munchkinland could throw things out of balance—maybe to a positive effect. She felt a guilty lightness at the death of her sister.
She made a list of things to bring with her to the memorial service. Foremost was a page of the Grimmerie. In her chamber she pored over the huge musty tome, and finally she ripped out an especially cryptic page. Its letters still continued to contort beneath her eyes, sometimes scrambling and unscrambling as she looked, as if they were formed by a colony of ants. Whenever she gazed at the book, meaning might emerge on a page that a day earlier had been illegible chicken scratches; and meaning sometimes disappeared as she stared. She would ask her father, who with his holy eyes would see the truth better.
3
Colwen Grounds was draped in black swags and purple bunting. When the Witch arrived, she was greeted by a one-man less-than-welcoming committee, a bearded Munchkinlander named Nipp, who seemed to be concierge, janitor, and acting Prime Minister. “Your lineage no longer allows you any particular liberties in Munchkinland,” she was told. “With the death of Nessarose, the honorific of Eminence is at last abolished.” The Witch didn’t much care, but she wasn’t inclined to accept a unilateral dictum without a retort. She answered, “It is abolished when I accept that it is abolished.” Not that the honorific had been used much in recent years; according to the occasional rambling letter from Frex, Nessarose had begun to be amused by the slur of “Wicked Witch of the East,” and had considered it a public penance worthy of a person with such high moral standing. She even took to referring to herself as such.
Nipp showed her to her room. “I don’t need much,” said the Wicked Witch of the West (as, in contrast, she allowed herself to be called, at least by these Munchkinlander upstarts). “A bed for a couple of days, and I’d like to see my father and attend the service. I’ll collect a few things, and be off soon. Now, do you know if our brother, Shell, will be here?”
“Shell has disappeared again,” said Nipp. “He left his regards. There is a mission he is undertaking in the Glikkus, it can’t wait. Some of us think he is defecting, worried about a change in government here now that the tyrant is dead. As well he might,” he added coldly. “Have you fresh towels?”
“I don’t use them,” said the Witch, “it’s all right. Go away now.” She was very tired, and sad.
At sixty-three, Frex was even balder, and his beard whiter, than he had been last time. His shoulders hunched in, as if trying to meet each other, his head sank into a natural cavity made by a deteriorating spine and neck. He sat covered by a blanket on the verandah. “And who is this,” he said when the Witch came up and sat next to him. She realized his sight had nearly gone for good.
“It’s your other daughter, Papa,” she said, “the one that’s left.”
“Fabala,?
?? he said, “what will I do without my pretty Nessarose? How will I live without my pet?”
She held his hand until he fell asleep, and wiped his face though his tears burned her skin.
The liberated Munchkinlanders were destroying the house. The Witch had no use for frippery, but it seemed a shame to waste a property this way. Desecration was so shortsighted; didn’t they know that, however they now decided to live, Colwen Grounds could be their parliament building?
She spent time with her father, but they didn’t speak much. One morning, when he was more alert and energetic than usual, he asked her if she really was a witch. “Oh well, what’s a witch? Who has ever trusted language in this family?” she replied. “Father, will you look at something for me? Will you tell me what you see?” She withdrew from an inner pocket the page from the Grimmerie and she unfolded it like a large napkin on his lap. He ran his hands over it, as if he could pick up meaning through his fingertips, and then held it near, peering and squinting.
“What do you see?” she asked. “Can you tell me the nature of this writing? Is it for good or for ill?”
“The markings are crisp enough, and large. I ought to be able to make it out.” He turned it upside down. “But little Fabala, I can’t read this alphabet. It is in a foreign tongue. Can you?”
“Well, sometimes I seem to be able to, but the talent is fleeting,” said the Witch. “I don’t know if it’s my eyes or if it’s the manuscript that’s being tricky.”
“You always had strong eyes,” said her father. “Even as a toddler you could see things no one else could.”
“Hah,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
