After the service, the Wizard’s emissary approached the Witch. He said, “You have been invited to an audience with the Wizard. He is traveling by special diplomatic immunity, via a Pfenix, to offer his condolences to the family this evening. You will be prepared to meet him at Colwen Grounds this evening.”
“He can’t come here!” said the Witch. “He wouldn’t dare!”
“Those who now make the decisions think otherwise,” said the emissary. “Be that as it may, he comes under cover of darkness, and only to speak to you and your family.”
“My father is not up to receiving the Wizard,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it.”
“He will see you, then,” said the emissary. “He insists. He has questions of a diplomatic nature to put to you. But you are not to make this visit public, or it could go very hard on your father and your brother. And on you,” he added, as if that were not already evident.
She considered how she might use this command audience to her own advantage: Sarima, the safety of Frex, the fate of Fiyero. “I agree,” she concluded. “I will meet him.” And, despite herself, she was glad for a moment that Nessarose’s magicked shoes were safely out of the vicinity.
As the vesper bells rang, the Witch was summoned from her room by a Munchkinlander maid. “You will have to submit to a search,” said the Wizard’s emissary, meeting her in an antechamber. “You must understand the protocol here.”
She concentrated on her fury as she was probed and prodded by the officers who ringed the waiting area. “What is this?” they said when they found the page of the Grimmerie in her pocket.
“Oh that,” she said, thinking fast. “His Highness will want to see that.”
“You can bring nothing in with you,” they told her, and they took the page from her.
“By my bloodlines, I can reinstate the office of the Eminent Thropp tonight and have your leader arrested,” she called after them. “Do not tell me what I can and cannot do in this house.”
They paid her no mind and ushered her into a small chamber, bare but for a couple of upholstered chairs set upon a flowery carpet. Along the baseboards, dust mice rolled in the draft.
“His Highness, the Emperor Wizard of Oz,” said an attendant, and withdrew. For a minute the Witch sat alone. Then the Wizard walked into the room.
He was without disguise, a plain-looking older man wearing a high-collared shirt and a greatcoat, with a watch and fob hanging from a waistcoat pocket. His head was pink and mottled, and tufts of hair stuck out above his ears. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down, motioning the Witch to sit, too. She did not sit.
“How do you do,” he said.
“What do you want with me,” she answered.
“There are two things,” he said. “There is what I had come here to say to you, and then there is the matter of what you bring to my attention.”
“You talk to me,” she said, “for I have nothing to say to you.”
“There is no point in beating around the bush,” he said. “I would like to know your intentions about your position as the last Eminence.”
“Had I any intention,” she said, “it would be none of your business.”
“Ah, alas, it is my business, for reunification is under way,” said the Wizard, “even as we speak. I understand that Lady Glinda, bless her well-meaning foolishness, has sensibly evacuated both the unfortunate girl and the totemic shoes from the district, which should make annexation less troublesome. I should like to have those shoes in my possession, to prevent their giving you ideas. So you see, I need to know your intentions in the matter. You were not, I take it, in warm sympathy with your sister’s style of religious tyranny, but I hope you do not intend to set up shop here. If you do, we must strike a little bargain—something I was never able to do with your sister.”
“There is little for me here,” said the Witch, “and I am not suited to govern anyone,
not even myself, it seems.”
“Besides, there’s the small matter of the army at—is it Red Wind-mill?—the town below Kiamo Ko.”
“So that’s why they’ve been there all these years,” said the Witch.
“To keep you in check,” he said. “An expense, but there you are.”
“To spite you, I should reclaim the title of Eminence,” said the Witch. “But I care little for these foolish people. What the Munchkinlanders do now is of no interest to me. As long as my father is left unharmed. If that is all—”
“There is the other matter,” he said. His manner became more lively. “You brought a page with you. I wonder where you got it?”
“That is mine and your people have no right to it.”
“What I want is to know where you got it, and where I can find the rest.”
