you hear me? And how did he get out of my room anyway? I was in the Solar with your sister.”
“Oh,” said Nor, remembering, “oh, Auntie, I’m sorry. It was us.”
“You?” She turned and looked at Nor as if for the first time, and Nor didn’t like it much. She shrank back against the door of the cold cellar. “What were you skulking about in my room for?” said Elphie.
“Some paper,” said Nor faintly, and in a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble, said, “I made some paintings for everybody, do you want to see, come here.”
Chistery in her arms, Elphaba followed them into the drafty hall, where the wind under the front door was making the papers flutter against the carved stone. The sisters came too, a safe distance behind.
Elphie got very quiet. “This is my paper,” she said. “I didn’t say you could use it. Look, it has words on the back. Do you know what words are?”
“Of course I do, do you think I am slow?” responded Nor sassily.
“You leave my papers alone,” said Elphaba. She and Chistery then flew up the steps, and the door to the tower slammed behind them.
“Who wants to help roll out the gingerbread?” said Two, relieved that skulls hadn’t been knocked together. “And this hall looks very pretty, chickadees, I’m sure Preenella and Lurline will be impressed tonight.” The children went back into the kitchen and made gingerbread people, and crows, and monkeys, and dogs, but they couldn’t do bees, they were too small. When Irji and Manek came in, dumping snowy greens on the slate floor, they helped at the gingerbread shapes too, but they made naughty shapes that they wouldn’t show the younger children, and they kept gobbling up the raw dough and laughing hysterically at it, which made everyone else testy.
In the morning the children awoke and ran downstairs to see if Lurline and Preenella had been there. Sure enough, there was a brown wicker basket with a green and gold ribbon on it (a basket and a ribbon that Sarima’s children had seen many years in a row), and in it were three small colored boxes, each one with an orange, a puppet, a small sack of marbles, and a gingerbread mouse.
“Where’s mine?” said Liir.
“Don’t see one with your name on it,” said Irji. “Look: Irji. Manek. Nor. Guess Preenella left it for you at your old house. Where did you used to live?”
“I don’t know,” said Liir, and started to cry.
“Here, you can have the tail of my mouse, just the tail,” said
Nor kindly. “First you have to say, May I please have the tail of your mouse?”
“May I please have the tail of your mouse,” said Liir, though his words were almost unintelligible.
“And I promise to obey you.”
Liir mumbled on. The exchange was eventually completed. From shame, Liir didn’t mention the oversight. Sarima and the sisters never took it in.
Elphaba didn’t show her face all day, but she sent down a message that Lurlinemas Eve and Lurlinemas always made her ill, and she was taking a few days in solitary comfort, and she wanted to be disturbed neither with meals, nor visitors, nor noise of any kind.
So while Sarima took herself off to her private chapel to remember her dear husband on this holy day, the sisters and the children all sang carols as loudly as they could.
4
A few weeks later, when the children were having snowball battles, and Sarima was concocting some medicinal toddy in the kitchen, Elphie left her room at last and skulked down the stairs and knocked on the door of the sisters’ parlor.
They didn’t like it, but they felt obliged to welcome her. The silver tray with bottles of hard liquor, the precious crystal carried on donkey all the way from Dixxi House in Gillikin, the prettiest and red-richest of native carpets on the floor, the luxury of fireplaces at both sides of the room, each blazing merrily—well, they would have toned it down some had they had any warning. As it was, Four hid in the sofa cushions the leather volume from which she had been reading aloud, a racy history of a poor young woman beset by an abundance of handsome suitors. It had been a gift from Fiyero once, the best gift he had ever sent the sisters—also the only one.
“Would you like some lemon barley water?” said Six, ever the servant until the day she died, unless by luck everyone else died sooner.
“Yes, all right,” Elphaba said.
“Do take a seat—this seat here, you’ll find it most comfy.”
Elphie didn’t look as if she wanted to be comfy, but she sat there anyway, stiff and uneasy in that quilted cocoon of a room.
She took the tiniest sip possible from her drink, as if suspecting hellebore.
“I suppose I need to apologize for that flurry over Chistery,” she said. “I know I am your guest here at Kiamo Ko. I just flew off the handle.”
“Well, you did just that,” started Five, but the others said, “Oh, think nothing of it, we all have days like that, in fact for us it usually happens on the same day, it’s been that way for years . . .”
