“I’m not that stupidly male, Elphaba.”
“Yes you are”—she laughed, but lovingly—“come on.”
It was daylight, the wind roared and even shook the floorboards. The cold sky above the glass was a rare pinkish blue. She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands—as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her way.
The collapse of her reticence frightened him more than anything else.
He took some coconut oil and warmed it between his palms, and slid his hands like leathery velvet animals on her small, responding breasts. The nipples stood, the color flushed. He was already fully dressed, but recklessly he pressed himself against her mildly resisting form. One hand slid down her back; she arched against him, moaning. But perhaps, this time, not from need?
Still his hand moved down onto her buttocks, felt between her cheeks, beyond, felt the place one muscle pulled in crookedly, endearingly, felt the very faintest etching of hair beginning its crosshatch shadows, its swirl toward vortex. He worked his intelligent hand, reading the signs of her resistance.
“I have four companions,” she said suddenly, wrenching away in a motion soft enough not to disengage but to discourage. “Oh heart, I have four comrades; they don’t know who our cell leader is, it’s all done in the dark, with a masking spell to shadow the voice and distort the features. If I knew more, the Gale Force could catch me and torture it out of me, don’t you see?”
“What is your object?” he breathed, kissing her, loosening his trousers again, as if this were the first time, his tongue tracing the twisting funnel of her ear.
“Kill the Wizard,” she answered, looping her legs around him. “I am not the arrowhead, I am not the dart, I am just the shaft, the quiver—” She cupped more oil in her hand and as they slid and fell into the light, she made him bright and anguished with oil, took him deeper in than ever before.
“Even after all this time, you could be an agent for the Palace,” she said later.
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m good.”
h h h
A little snow fell one week, then some more the next. The feast of Lurlinemas drew nearer. The unionist chapels, having appropriated and transformed the most visible parts of the old pagan beliefs, hung themselves shamelessly in green and gold, set out green candles and golden gongs and greenberry wreaths and gilded fruit. Along Merchant Row, shops outdid themselves (and the churches) in decor, with displays of fashionable clothes, and useless and expensive trinkets. In display windows, papier-mâché figures evoked the good Fairy Queen Lurline in her winged chariot, and her assistant, the minor fairy Preenella, who strewed gift-wrapped delights from her capacious magic basket.
He asked himself, again and again, if he was in love with Elphaba.
He also asked himself why he was so late coming to this question, after two months of a passionate affair; and if he knew what the words even meant; and if it mattered.
He chose more gifts for the kids and for sulky Sarima, that well-fed malcontent, that monster. He missed her a little; his feelings for Elphaba seemed not to vie with those for Sarima, but to complement them. No two women could be more unlike. Elphaba demonstrated the proud independence of Arjiki mountain women that Sarima, married so young, had never developed. And Elphie wasn’t just a different (not to say novel) provincial type—she seemed an advance on the gender, she seemed a different species sometimes. He caught himself with a mammoth erection just remembering that last time, and he had to hide himself behind some ladies’ scarves in a shop until it subsided.
He bought three, four, six scarves for Sarima, who didn’t wear scarves. He bought six scarves for Elphaba, who did.
The shop girl, a dull Munchkinlander midget who had to stand on a chair to reach the till, said over his shoulder, “Just in a minute, ma’am.” He turned to make room at the counter for the other customer.
“But Master Fiyero!” cried Glinda.
“Miss Glinda,” he said, flabbergasted. “What a surprise.”
“A dozen scarves,” she said. “Look, Crope, look who’s here!”
And there was Crope, a little jowly though he couldn’t be twenty-five yet, could he?—looking guiltily up from a display of feathery, plumy things.
“We must have tea,” said Glinda, “we must. Come now. Pay the nice little lady and off we fly.” In her voluminous skirts she rustled like a corps of ballerinas.
He hadn’t remembered her quite so giddy; maybe this was married life. He slid a glance at Crope, who was rolling his eyes behind her back.
“Just you put this on Sir Chuffrey’s account, and this, and this,” Glinda said, mounding things on the counter, “and have them sent along to our rooms in the Florinthwaite Club. I’ll need them for dining so have someone run over with them right now if you would. How dear. So kind. Ta ta. Boys, come along.”
She gripped Fiyero with a pinching hand and steered him away; Crope followed like a lapdog. The Florinthwaite Club was only a street or two over and they could easily have carried the purchases back themselves. Glinda capered and clattered down the grand staircase into the Oak Parlor, making enough noise so that every female resident looked up in a rewarding sort of disapproval.
“Now, you, Crope, there, so you can be Mother and pour when we’ve ordered, and dear Fiyero, you here, right next to me, that is if you’re not too married.”
They ordered tea; Glinda got used to him a bit and began to calm down.
“But really, who would have thought it?” she said, picking up a biscuit and putting it down again, about eight times in a row. “We were the great and the good at Shiz, really. Look at you, Fiyero—you’re a prince, aren’t you? Do we call you Your Highness? I never could. And you’re still married to that little child?”
“She’s grown up now, and we have a family,” Fiyero told her warily. “Three children.”
