“Oh, don’t beg, don’t beg,” said the Witch, “I could not abide begging, from you, of all people!” She ground her teeth and clenched her fists. “I will promise you nothing, Boq!”
And this time she got on her broom and flew away. Recklessly, she mounted the sides of air currents, until the ground below had lost any detail sharp enough to cause her pain.
She was beginning to feel too long away from Kiamo Ko. Liir was an idiot, headstrong and lily-livered by turns, and Nanny sometimes forgot where she was. The Witch didn’t want to think about yesterday, the death of Madame Morrible, the accusations made by the puppet play. She could hardly be more averse to the Wizard than she already was; if there was a shred of possibility to that sick idea of his having fathered her, it only made her hate him the more. She would ask Nanny about it when she got home.
When she got home. She was thirty-eight, and just realizing what it felt like to have a sense of home. For that, Sarima, thank you, she thought. Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.
But she decided to head toward Kiamo Ko by following the Yellow Brick Road. She would make one last try for the shoes. She had nothing left to lose. If the shoes fell into the hands of the Wizard, he would use them to bolster his claim to Munchkinland. Maybe, if she tried, she could shrug her shoulders and leave Munchkinland to its own fate—but damn it, the shoes were hers.
She finally found a peddler who had seen Dorothy. He stopped by the side of his wagon and rubbed the ears of his donkey as he discussed it with her. “She passed here a few hours ago,” he said, chewing on a carrot and sharing it with the donkey. “No, she wasn’t alone. She had a ragamuffin crew of friends with her. Bodyguards, I suspect.”
“Oh, the poor frightened thing,” said the Witch. “Who? Munchkinlander beefcake boys, I wonder?”
“Not exactly,” said the peddler. “There was a straw man, and a tin woodman, and a big cat who hid in the bushes when I passed—a leopard maybe, or a cougar.”
“A man of straw?” said the Witch. “She’s awakening the figures of myth, she’s charming them to life? This must be some attractive child. Did you notice her shoes?”
“I wanted to buy them from her.”
“Yes! Yes, did you?”
“Not for sale. She seemed very attached to them. They were given her by a Good Witch.”
“Pigspittle, they were.”
“None of my affair either way,” said the peddler. “Can I interest you in anything?”
“An umbrella,” said the Witch. “I’ve come out without one, and it looks nasty.”
“I remember the good old days of the drought,” said the peddler, fishing out a somewhat worn umbrella. “Ah, here’s the bumbershoot. Yours for a nickel florin.”
“Mine for free,” said the Witch. “You wouldn’t deny a poor old woman in need, would you, my friend?”
“Not and live to tell about it, I see,” he answered, and went on his way uncompensated.
But as the wagon passed, the Witch heard another voice: “Of course, no one asks a beast of burden, but it’s my opinion she’s Ozma come out of the deep sleep chamber, and marching on Oz to restore herself to the throne.”
“I hate royalists,” said the peddler, and lashed out with a crop. “I hate Animals with attitude.” But the Witch could not stop to intervene. So far she had been unable to save Nor, she had been incompetent at bargaining with the Wizard. She had been a moment too late to murder Madame Morrible—or had she been just in time? Either way, she should not try what was clearly beyond her.
10
The Witch trembled on the lip of an updraft. She had brought the broom higher than ever before; she was in a state of exhilaration and panic. Should she pursue Dorothy, should she snatch those shoes away—and what were her real motives? Was it to keep them out of the hands of the Wizard, just as Glinda had wanted them out of the hands of power-hungry Munchkinlanders? Or was it to snatch back some small shred of Frex’s attention, whether she had ever deserved it or not?
Beneath the broom, clouds began to gauze the view of rock-freckled hills and patchwork meadows of melon and corn. The thin twists of vapor looked like the marks of erasure made by a schoolchild’s rubber, streaking whitely along a watercolor sketch of a landscape. What if she should just keep on, urging the broom higher, yanking it up? Would it splinter as it beat itself against the heavens?
She could give up these efforts. She could forsake Nor. She could release Liir. She could abandon Nanny. She could surrender Dorothy. She could give up the shoes.
But a wind came up, a shoulder of hard air leaning onto her left side. She could not force the broom against it. She was driven sideways, and down, until the Yellow Brick Road once again etched a golden thread between forests and fields. There was a storm on the horizon, slotting bars of brownish rain between lavender-gray clouds and gray-green fields. She hadn’t much time.
Then she thought she caught sight of them below, and dove down to see. Were they stopping to rest beneath a black willow tree? If so, she could finish things up now.
11
By the time the storm lifted—and the Witch awoke from what she now identified as a horrible hangover—she wasn’t sure it was the same day. She wasn’t even sure she had gotten near them—could she have let them slip through her fingers like that? But whatever the case, delusion or foggy memory, the Witch didn’t dare follow them into the Emerald City. Madame Morrible had many friends in this rotten regime, and the news would have gotten through by now. There might even be search parties out for the Witch. So be it.
Though it galled her, for the time being she had to give up on
the idea of reclaiming Nessa’s shoes. She scarcely rested during the entire trip back to Kiamo Ko, except to stop and pick some berries, and nibble some nuts and sweet roots, to keep her strength up.
