“Forget the details,” said the Witch tartly. “I just mean, Glinda, is it possible we could be living our entire adult lives under someone’s spell? How could we tell if we were the pawns of someone’s darker game? I know, I know, I can see it in your face: Elphie, you’re sniffing conspiracy theories again. But you were there. You heard what I heard. How do you know your life hasn’t been pulled by the strings of some malign magic?”
“Well, I pray a lot,” said Glinda, “not terribly genuinely, I admit, but I try. I think the Unnamed God would have mercy on me and give me the benefit of the doubt, and release me from a spell if I had accidentally fallen under one. Don’t you? Or are you still so atheistic?”
“I have always felt like a pawn,” said the Witch. “My skin color’s been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life’s work of my own, I haven’t found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.”
“I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”
“Well, I wonder,” said the Witch.
They walked on. Graffiti was splattered on the sides of the granite plinths of statues. now the shoe’s on the other foot. Glinda tchtched. “Animal husbandry?” she said.
They crossed a little bridge. Bluebirds twinkled music above them like a sentimental entertainment.
“I sent this Dorothy, this girl, on to the Emerald City,” said Glinda. “I told her I’d never seen the Wizard—well, I had to lie, don’t look at me like that; if I told her the truth about him she would never have left here. I told her to ask him to send her home. With his reconnaissance spies all over Oz, and no doubt elsewhere, he has heard of Kansas, I’m sure. Nobody else has.”
“That was a cruel thing to do,” said the Witch.
“She’s such a harmless child, no one should take her seriously,” said Glinda carelessly. “If the Munchkinlanders started rallying around her, reunification might be a more bloody affair than we all hope.”
“So you hope for reunification?” muttered the Witch, disgusted. “You support it?”
“Besides,” Glinda went on blithely, “having some motherly instinct somewhere inside this pushed-up bosom of mine, I gave her Nessa’s shoes as a sort of protection.”
“You what?” The Witch whirled and faced Glinda. For a moment she was dumb with rage, but o
nly for a moment. “Not only does she come whomping out of the sky and stepping her big clumsy house all over my sister, but she gets the shoes too? Glinda, those shoes weren’t yours to give away! My father made them for her! And furthermore, Nessa promised I could have them when she died!”
“Oh yes,” said Glinda in a false calm, surveying the Witch up and down, “and they would make the perfect accessory for that glass-of-fashion outfit you have on. Come on, Elphie, since when have you cared about shoes, of all things? Look at those army boots you have on!”
“Whether I’d wear them or not is none of your concern. You can’t go handing out a person’s effects like that, what right had you? Papa reshaped those shoes from skills he learned from Turtle Heart. You’ve stuck your fancy wand in where it wasn’t wanted!”
“I’ll remind you,” said Glinda, “that those shoes were coming apart until I had them resoled, and I laced them through with a special binding spell of my own. Neither your father nor you did that much for her. Elphie, I stood by her when you abandoned her in Shiz. As you abandoned me. You did, don’t deny it, stop those lightning bolt looks at me, I won’t have it. I became her surrogate sister. And as an old friend I gave her the power to stand upright by herself through those shoes, and if I made a mistake I’m sorry, Elphie, but I still feel they were more mine to give away than yours.”
“Well, I want them back,” said the Witch.
“Oh, put it behind you, will you, they’re only shoes,” said Glinda, “you’re behaving as if they’re holy relics. They were shoes, and a bit out of style, truth be told. Let the girl have them. She has nothing else.”
“Look how the people here thought of them,” said the Witch; she pointed to a stable on which was scrawled, in broad red letters, walk all over you you old witch.
“Please, give it a rest,” said Glinda, “I have such a headache coming on.”
“Where is she?” said the Witch. “If you won’t retrieve them, I’ll get them myself.”
“If I’d known you wanted them,” said Glinda, trying to make things all right, “I’d have saved them for you. But you have to see, Elphie, the shoes couldn’t stay here. The ignorant pagan Munchkinlanders—Lurlinists all, once you scratch the skin—they had put too much credit in those silly shoes. I mean, a magic sword I could understand, but shoes? Please. I had to get them out of Munchkinland.”
“You are working in collusion with the Wizard to render Munchkinland ready for annexation,” said the Witch. “You have no agenda of charity, Glinda. At least don’t fool yourself. Or are you really under some rusty spell of Madame Morrible, after all this time?”
“I won’t have you snapping at me,” said Glinda. “The girl has left, she’s been on the road for a week now, she headed west. I tell you, she’s only a timid child, and means no harm. She’d be distressed to know she’d taken something you wanted. There is no power in them for you, Elphie.”
The Witch said, “Glinda, if those shoes fall into the hands of the Wizard, he’ll use them somehow in a maneuver to reannex Munchkinland. By now they have too much significance to Munchkinlanders. The Wizard mustn’t have those shoes!”
Glinda reached out and touched the Witch’s elbow. “They won’t make your father love you any better,” she said.
The Witch pulled back. They stood glaring at each other. They had too much common history to come apart over a pair of shoes, yet the shoes were planted between them, a grotesque icon of their differences. Neither one could retreat, or move forward. It was silly, and they were stuck, and someone needed to break the spell. But all the Witch could do was insist, “I want those shoes.”
4
At the memorial service, Glinda and Sir Chuffrey perched in the balcony reserved for dignitaries and ambassadors. The Wizard sent a representative, resplendent in his dress reds with the emerald cross marking quadrants on his chest, a crew of bodyguards at attention all around him. The Witch sat below, and did not meet Glinda’s eyes. Frex wept until he brought on an attack of asthma, and the Witch helped him out a side door, where he could catch his breath.
