and their corpses burned, just as Sarima’s must have been.
One night Liir came back from a visit to the barracks. He was teary and inarticulate, and she tried not to care about it, but was too curious to let it go. Finally he told her. One of the soldiers had proposed to his fellows that when Dorothy and friends arrive, the friends be killed and Dorothy be tied up for a little amusement among the lonely, randy men.
“Oh, men will have their fantasies,” said the Witch, but she was troubled.
What had made Liir cry was that his friends had reported the soldier’s remarks to their superior. The soldier had been stripped and castrated, and nailed to the windmill. His body rotated in circles as the vultures came and tried to peck at his entrails. He still wasn’t even dead.
“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.” But she was struck at the vehemence of the Commander’s response against one of his own. So Dorothy might well be alive still, and was apparently under orders of protection from the highest military offices in the land.
Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir.
“Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?”
Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.
She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight?
If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she?
They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence.
She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow.
She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.
She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other effect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.”
It would take brains to think up such a plan.
She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would be able to find them, and lead them home rejoicing.
And though she tried not to sleep, on occasion she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.
15
There was a day, in the first gusts of autumn, that the banners and standards of the camp below were shifted and bugles blew tinnily up the slopes to the castle. By this the Witch guessed that the troupe had arrived in Red Windmill, and were being given a royal welcome. “They’ve come so far, they won’t wait now,” she said. “Go, Killyjoy, go find them and show them the quickest way here.”
She loosed the senior dog, and so strong were his exhortations that the entire pack of his kin went racing along with him, howling with joy and frantic to do their duty.
“Nanny,” cried the Witch, “put on a clean petticoat and change your apron, we’ll have company by nightfall!”
But the dogs didn’t come back, all afternoon and into the gloaming, and the Witch could see why. With a telescopic eye in a cylindrical casing—invented by the Witch along the lines of Doctor Dillamond’s discovery about opposing lenses—she followed a shock of carnage. Dorothy and the Lion trembled with the Scarecrow beyond while the Tin Woodman struck the heads of her beasts one after the other with his axe. Killyjoy and his wolfy relations lay scattered like dead soldiers on a field of retreat.
The Witch danced with rage, and summoned Liir. “Your dog is dead, look what they did!” she cried. “Look and make sure that I didn’t only imagine it!”
“Well, I didn’t like that dog very much anymore,” said Liir. “He had a good long life, anyway.” He concurred, tremblingly, but then trained the glass on the slope again.
“You fool, that Dorothy is not for messing with!” she cried, slapping the instrument out of his hand.
“You’re awfully on edge for someone about to have company,” he said sullenly.
“They are supposed to be coming to kill me, if you remember,” she said, although she had forgotten that, as she had forgotten her desire for the shoes until she saw them again in the glass. The Wizard had not demanded them of Dorothy! Why not? What fresh campaign of intrigue was this?
She wheeled about her room, whipping pages of the Grimmerie back and forth. She recited a spell, did it wrong, did it again, and then turned and tried to apply it to the crows. Though the original three crows had long since fallen stiffly from the top of the door frame, there were plenty of others in residence still, rather inbred and silly, but suggestible in a stupid, moblike way.
“Go,” she said. “Look with your eyes more closely than I can, pull the mask off the Scarecrow so we can know who he is. Get them for me. Peck out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion. And three of you, go on ahead to the old Princess Nastoya, out there in the Thousand Year Grasslands, for the time is coming when we will be reunited, all of us. With the help of the Grimmerie, the Wizard may topple at last!”
“I never know what you’re talking about anymore,” said Liir. “You can’t blind them!”
