“It’s very taxing,” Elphie said with some effort. “I spent many years under a vow of silence, and I haven’t always learned how—loud—it is permissible to get. Besides that, this is a foreign culture, in a way.”
“We Arjikis have always been proud of being able to speak to any other citizen in Oz,” said Two. “We are as equally at home with the ragged vagabond Scrow to our south as with the elite in the Emerald City to our east.” Not that they’d ever been out of the Vinkus.
“A little nibble?” said Three, bringing out a tin of marzipan fruits.
“No,” Elphie said, “but I wonder what you could tell me of your sister’s particular sadness.”
They sat poised, tempted, and suspicious.
“I enjoy my chats with her in the Solar,” said Elphie, “but whenever the talk gets around to her departed husband—whom as you may realize I myself knew—she is unwilling to discuss a thing.”
“Oh, well, it was so sad,” said Two.
“A tragedy,” said Three.
“For her,” said Four.
“For us,” said Five.
“Auntie Guest, take a little orange liqueur in your lemon barley,” said Six, “it comes from the balmy slopes of the Lesser Kells and is quite a luxury.”
“Well, just a drop,” said Elphie, but didn’t sip it. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward and said, “Please tell me how she learned of Fiyero’s death.”
There was a silence. The sisters avoided casting glances at one another, busying themselves with the pleats of their skirts. After a pause, it was Two who said, “That sad day. It stings in the memory still.”
The others adjusted themselves in their seats, turning slightly toward her. Elphaba blinked twice, looking like one of her own crows.
Two told the tale, without sentiment or drama. One of Fiyero’s business colleagues, an Arjiki trader, had come through the mountain pass at the first spring thaw, on the back of a mountain skark. He asked to meet with Sarima and insisted her sisters be around to support her at his woeful news. He told them how, on Lurlinemas, he had received at his club an anonymous message that Fiyero had been murdered. There was an address in a disreputable area—not even a residential neighborhood. The clansman hired a couple of brutes and broke down the door of the warehouse. Inside was a small apartment hidden upstairs, a place of assignation, obviously. (The clansman reported this without flinching, perhaps as a power-mongering maneuver.) There was evidence of struggle and massive quantities of blood, so thick in places that it was still tacky. The body had been removed, and it was never recovered.
Elphaba only nodded, grimly, at this recounting.
“For a year,” continued Two, “our dear distraught Sarima refused to believe he was really dead. We would not have been surprised at a ransom note. But by the following Lurlinemas, when no further word about it had arrived, we had to accept the inevitable. Besides, the clan had gone on as long as it could with an ad hoc collaborative leadership; they demanded a single chief, and one was put forward, and he’s served well. When Irji comes of age he may claim the rights of progenitorship, if he’s bold enough; he is not yet bold at all. Manek is the more obvious candidate, but he’s only second in line.”
“And what does Sarima believe happened?” said Elphie. “And you? All of you?”
Now that the grimmest part of the story had been told, the other sisters felt they could chime in. It emerged that Sarima had for some years suspected Fiyero of having an affair with an old college chum named Glinda, a Gillikinese girl of legendary beauty.
“Legendary?” Elphie said.
“He told us all how charming she was, how self-effacing, what grace and sparkle—”
“Is it all that likely he’d gush on and on about a woman he was committing adultery with?”
“Men,” said Two, “are, as we all know, both cruel and cunning. What better ruse than to admit fervently and often that he admired her? Sarima had no grounds on which to accuse him of slyness and deception. He never stopped being attentive to her—”
“In his cold, morose, withdrawn, embittered fashion,” interjected Three.
“Hardly the thing one reads about in novels,” said Four.
“If one read novels,” said Five.
“Which we don’t,” said Six, closing her lips over a marzipan pear.
“And so Sarima believes her husband was carrying on with this—this—”
“This dazzler,” said Two. “You must have known her, didn’t you go to Shiz?”
“I knew her a bit,” Elphie said, her mouth forgetting to shut itself. She was having a hard time keeping up with the multiple narrators. “I haven’t seen her in years.”
