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 . . .”
“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.”
“And it is clear in Sarima’s mind what happened,” said Two. “Glinda
was—for all I know still is—married to a wealthy older gentleman named Sir Chuffrey. He must have suspected something, and had her followed, and found out what was going on. Then he had some thugs kill the bastard. I mean poor Fiyero. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“It’s entirely plausible,” Elphie said slowly. “But is there any proof?”
“No proof at all,” said Four. “If there were, family honor would have required a retributive murder of Sir Chuffrey. But he may still be in robust good health. No, it’s only a theory, but it’s what Sarima believes.”
“Clings to,” said Six.
“And why not,” said Five.
“It’s her prerogative,” said Three.
“Everything’s her prerogative,” said Two sadly. “Besides, think of it. If your husband were murdered, wouldn’t it be easier to bear if you thought he deserved it, even just a little?”
“No,” Elphie said, “I don’t think it would.”
“Neither do we,” admitted Two, “but we think that’s what she thinks.”
“And you?” Elphie asked, studying the pattern in the carpet, the blood red lozenges, the thorny margins, the beasts and acanthus leaves and rose medallions. “What do you think?”
“We hardly can be expected to subscribe to a unanimous opinion,” said Two, but she barreled ahead anyway. “It seems reasonable to suppose that unbeknownst to us, Fiyero had gotten involved in some political enterprise in the Emerald City.”
“A stay that was to be a month became four,” said Four.
“Had he political—sensibilities?” said Elphaba.
“He was the Prince of the Arjikis,” Five reminded them all. “He had connections—responsibilities—allegiances—who of us could guess at them? It was his duty to have opinions on things we shouldn’t need to know about.”
“Was he sympathetic to the Wizard?” said Elphie.
“Are you saying was he involved in any of those campaigns? Those—pogroms? First the Quadlings, then the Animals?” said Three. “You look surprised that we should know about these things. Do you think we’re so very removed from the rest of Oz?”
“We are removed,” said Two. “But we listen to talk. We like to feed travelers when they come to stop. We know life can be rotten out there.”
“The Wizard is a despot,” said Four.
“Our home is our castle,” said Five at the same time. “Some removal from all this is healthy. We retain our moral fiber, unsullied.”
They all smirked, simultaneously.
“But do you think Fiyero had an opinion about the Wizard?” Elphaba asked again, pressing with some urgency.
“He kept his own counsel,” snapped Two. “For the sake of sweet Lurline, dear Auntie, he was a prince and a man!—and we were nothing but his younger, dependent sisters-in-law! Do you think he would confide in us? He could have been a high-level crony of the Wizard for all we know! He surely would’ve had liaisons with the Palace, he was a prince. Even if only of our small tribe. What he did with those liaisons—how are we to say? But we don’t think he died as the victim of a jealous husband. Maybe we’re sheltered, but we don’t. We think he got caught in the crossfire of some fringe struggle. Or he was found out in the act of betrayal of one excitable group or other. He was a handsome man,” said Two, “and none of us would deny it, then or now. But he was intense and private and we doubt he’d have loosened up enough to have an affair.” By the smallest gesture—a sucking in of her abdomen and a squaring of her shoulders—Two betrayed the foundation of her position: How could he have succumbed to this Glinda’s charms if he had been able to resist his own sisters-in-law?
“But,” Elphie asked in a small voice, “do you really think he was a spy for someone?”
“Why was his body never found?” said Two. “If it had been a jealous rage, his body needn’t have been removed. Perhaps he hadn’t died yet. Perhaps he was taken to be tortured. No, in our limited experience, we think that this smacks of treachery of a political stripe, not a romantic one.”
“I—” said Elphaba.
“You’re pale, dear. Six, please, a beaker of water—”
“No,” said Elphaba. “It’s just so—one never thought at the time—I never. Shall I tell you what little I know of it? And perhaps you can mention it to Sarima.” She began to pace. “I saw Fiyero—”
But, at the oddest possible moment, family solidarity kicked in. “Dear Auntie Guest,” said Two, in a responsible tone, “we are under the strictest orders from our sister not to allow you to tire yourself by chatting about Fiyero and the sad circumstances of his death.” Clearly Two had to work to get this out, as the appetite to hear what Elphaba had to say was huge. Stomachs were rumbling for the meat of it. But propriety won out, or fear of Sarima’s wrath if she were to find out. “No,” said Two again, “no, I’m afraid we mustn’t express undue interest. We may not listen and we will not tell Sarima what we hear.”
In the end, Elphaba left them, drooping. “Another time,” she kept saying, “when you’re ready, when she’s ready. You see it’s essential; there’s so much grief she could be released from—and that she herself could lift, too—”
“Good-bye for now,” they said, and the door closed behind her. The fires in the twin fireplaces mirrored back and forth across the room, and they took up positions of frustrated worthiness, at having to obey their older sister—curse her to hell.
5
Ice crusted the roofs, dislodged tiles, and dripped dirtily into the private chambers, the music room, the towers. Elphaba took to wearing her hat indoors to avoid the random icy dart on her scalp. The crows were mildewy around the beak and had algae between the claws. The sisters finished their novel, and collectively sighed—for life, for life!—and began to read it again, as they had done for eight years. In the fierce updraft from the valley, the snow seemed as often to be rising as falling. The children adored it.
One glum afternoon Sarima bedecked herself in red woolen wraps and, out of boredom, went wandering through musty, disused rooms. She located a staircase in a trapezoidal, slanting shaft—perhaps this high alcove leaned against the side of the gable you couldn’t see, she wasn’t good at imagining architecture in three dimensions. She mounted the stairs anyway. At the top, through a crude grillwork, she saw a figure in the white gloom. Sarima coughed so as not to startle her.
Elphaba was bent almost double over a huge folio laid out on a carpenter’s work bench. She turned, surprised but not very, and said, “We’ve had the same inclination, how curious.”
“You’ve found some books, I’d completely forgotten,” said Sarima. She could read now, but not well, and books made her feel inferior. “I couldn’t tell you what they’re all about. So many words, you’d hardly think the world deserved such scrutiny.”
“Over here is an archaic geography,” said Elphie, “and some records of usufruct pacts among various families of the Arjiki—I bet there are leaders who would be very happy to see these. Unless they’re outdated. Some texts that Fiyero had in Shiz—I recognize them too, the life sciences course of studies.”
“And this big thing—purple pages and silver ink, how grand.”
“I found it on the floor of this wardrobe. It seems to be a Grimmerie,” Elphie said, running her hand down a page only softly buckled with moisture. It made a pretty contrast, her hand on the vellum.
“What is that, besides beautiful?”
“As I understand it,” Elphie said, “a sort of encyclopedia of things numinous. Magic; and of the spirit world; and of things seen and unseen; and of things once and future. I can only make out a line here or there. Look how it scrambles itself as you watch.” She pointed to a paragraph of hand-lettered text. Sarima peered. Though her skill at reading was minimal, she gaped at what she saw. The letters floated and rearranged themselves on the page, as if enlivened. The page was changing its mind as they watched it. The letters clotted together in a big black snarl, like a mound of ants. Then Elphaba turned a page. “Here, this sec
tion is a book of beasts.” There were elegant, attenuated drawings in blood red and gold leaf, on the front and rear elevations of (it seemed) an angel, with notes in a fine hand on the aerodynamic aspects of holiness. The wings flexed up and down and the angel smiled with a saucy sort of sanctity. “And a recipe on this page. It says ‘Of apples with black skin and white flesh: to fill the stomach with greed unto Death.’”
“I remember this book now,” Sarima said. “I do remember how it came to be here, I even put it up here myself; I had forgotten. Well, books are so easy to set aside, aren’t they?”
Elphie looked up, her eyes leveling out under her smooth, rocklike brow. “Tell me, Sarima, please.”
The Dowager Princess of Kiamo Ko was flustered. She went to a small window and tried to open it, but encrustations of ice prevented her. So she sat down in a flump on a packing crate and told Elphaba the story. She couldn’t remember exactly when, but it was a long time ago, when everyone was young and slim. Beloved Fiyero was still alive but he was off in the Grasslands with the tribe. Complaining of a headache, she was home in the castle all alone. The bell at the drawbridge sounded and she went to see who it was.
“Madame Morrible,” Elphaba said. “Some Kumbric Witch or other.”
“No, it was no madame. It was an elderly man in a tunic and leggings, with a cloak badly in need of attention by a seamstress. He said he was a sorcerer, but perhaps he was just mad. He asked for a meal and a bath, which he got, and then he said he wanted to pay by giving me this book. I told him with a castle to run I didn’t have much time for frivolity, reading and such. He said never mind.”
Sarima drew her robes about her, and traced a pattern in the cold dust on a nearby stack of codexes. “He told me a fabulous tale and persuaded me to take this thing from him. He said that it was a book of knowledge, and that it belonged in another world, but it wasn’t safe there. So he had brought it here—where it could be hidden and out of harm’s way.”