“I would say,” said the girl, straightening up, gritting her teeth, “I would say to you: Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!”
The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?
She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what? A fragment of the brush of the broom fluttered off, and lit on her skirt, and there was a run of flames in her lap, eating up the dryest tinder in the Vinkus. “Oh, will this nightmare never end,” screamed Dorothy, and she grabbed at a bucket for collecting rainwater that, in the sudden flare-up of light, had come into view. She said, “I will save you!” and she hurled the water at the Witch.
An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?
The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.
A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.
They become others; they become Nanny in her prime, tart and officious; and Ama Clutch and Ama Vimp and the other Amas, lumped together now in a maternal blur. They become Boq, sweet and lithe and earnest, as yet unbowed; and Crope and Tibbett in their funny, campy anxiety to be liked; and Avaric in his superiority. And Glinda in her gowns, waiting to be good enough to deserve what she gets.
And the ones whose stories are over: Manek and Madame Morrible and Doctor Dillamond and most of all Fiyero, whose blue diamonds are the blues of water and of sulfurous fire both. And the ones whose stories are curiously unfinished—was it to be like this?—the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, whose help could not arrive in time; and Liir, the mysterious foundling boy, pushing out of his pea pod. Sarima, who in her loving welcome and sisterliness would not forgive, and Sarima’s sisters and children and future and past . . .
And the ones who fell to the Wizard, including Killyjoy and the other resident creatures; and behind them the Wizard himself, a failure until he exiled himself from his own land; and behind him Yackle, whoever she was, if anyone, and the anonymous Adepts, if they existed, and the dwarf, who had no name to share.
And the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.
The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.
18
Oz stretched out from Kiamo Ko a good several hundred miles to the west and north, and even farther to the east and south. On the night the Wicked Witch of the West died, anyone with the eyes to see so well could have looked out from the parapet. Westward, the moon was rising over the Thousand Year Grasslands. Though the peaceful Yunamata refused to join them, the Arjiki clans and the Scrow were meeting to consider a pact of alliance, given the Wizard’s armies massing up in Kumbricia’s Pass. The Arjiki chieftain and the Princess Nastoya agreed to send a delegation to the Witch of the West, and ask for guidance and support. As they toasted her and wished her well, not an hour after her death, the messenger crows Elphaba had dispatched for help were swooped upon by nocturnal rocs and devoured.
The moon ran silver up and down the sides of the Great Kells, and silver shadows settled in the valleys of the Lesser Kells. The scorpions of the Sour Sands came out to sting, the skark of the Thursk Desert mated in their nests. At the Kvon Altar practitioners of a sect so obscure that it had no name made their nightly oblations for the souls of the dead, assuming, as most do, that the dead had had souls.
The Quadling Country, a wasteland of mud and frogs, rotted quietly all night, except for an incident in Qhoyre. A Crocodile entered a nursery and chewed up a small baby. The Animal was destroyed, and both corpses were burned, with loud wailing and anger.
In Gillikin, the banks turned over their money to keep it fresh and vibrant, the factories turned over their wares, the merchants turned over their wives, the students in Shiz turned over intellectual propositions, and the tiktok labor force met secretly, in what had used to be the Philosophy Club, to hear the freed and grieving Grommetik talk class revolution. Lady Glinda had a bad night, a night of shakes and regret and pain; she guessed it was the early signs of gout from her rich diet. But she sat up half the night and lit a candle in a window, for reasons she couldn’t articulate. The moon passed overhead in its path from the Vinkus, and she felt its accusatory spotlight, and moved back from the tall windows.
Across the low ridge of hills known as the Madeleines, into the Corn Basket, looking into the windows of Colwen Grounds, the moon continued its journey. Frex was asleep, dreaming of Turtle Heart and yes, of Melena, his beautiful Melena, making him breakfast on the day he went in to preach against the evil clock. Melena was a froth of beauty, huge as a world, spinning him courage, daring, love. Frex hardly stirred when Shell tiptoed in, back from some clandestine rendezvous, and came to sit by the side of his bed. Shell wasn’t sure he noticed, he wasn’t sure his father really woke up. “What I never could understand was the teeth,” mumbled Frex, “why the teeth?”
“Who knows why?” said Shell fondly, not understanding the dreamy murmur.
The moon on the Emerald City? It couldn’t be seen; lights too b
right, energy too high, spirits too wired. No one looked for it. In a room, surprisingly bare and simple for one so powerful and elevated, the sleepless Wizard of Oz wiped his brow, and wondered how long his luck would hold out. He had been wondering the same thing for forty years, and he had hoped that luck would begin to seem habitual, deserved. But he could hear the very mice chewing away at the foundations of his Palace. The arrival of that Dorothy Gale, from Kansas, was a summons, he knew it; he knew it when he saw her face. There was no point in searching after the Grimmerie any longer. His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.
He had sent Dorothy, locked in those shoes as she was, to kill the Witch. He had sent a girl in to do a man’s job. If the Witch was the victor—well, that was the troublesome girl out of the way, then. Perversely, though, in a fatherly way, he half hoped Dorothy would get through her trials all right.
It became a celebrated event, the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was hailed as political assassination or a juicy murder. Dorothy’s description of what had happened was deemed self-delusion, at best, or a bald-faced lie. Murder or mercy killing or accident, in an indirect way it helped rid the country of its dictator.
Dorothy, more stunned than ever, made her way back to the Emerald City with the Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and Liir. There Dorothy had her second famous audience with the Wizard. Perhaps he again tried to pry the slippers off her for his own purposes, and perhaps Dorothy outwitted him, spurred by the Witch’s warnings. At any rate, she presented him with something from the Witch’s house to prove that she had been there. The broom had been burnt beyond recognition, and the Grimmerie had seemed too cumbersome to carry, so she brought the green glass bottle that said miracle eli- on the paper glued to the front.
It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived—a hot-air balloon—just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.
A lot of nonsense has been circulated about how Dorothy left Oz. There are some who say that she never did; they say as they said of Ozma before her that she is in hiding, in disguise, patient as a maiden, waiting to come back and show herself again. Others insist she flew up into the sky like a saint ascending to the Other Land, waving her apron giddily and clutching that damn fool dog.
Liir disappeared into the sea of humanity in the Emerald City, to hunt for his half-sister, Nor. He was not heard of again for some time.
Whatever may have happened to the original shoes, everyone remembered them as beautiful, even stunning. Well-fashioned name-brand imitations were always available and never went out of style for very long. The shoes or their replicas, with their suggestion of residual magic, cropped up at so many public ceremonies that, like the relics of saints, they began to multiply to fill the need.
And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is—alas, or perhaps thank mercy—no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.
“And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time.”
“And did she ever come out?”
