7
The Witch had waited fifteen years, but her timing was off by five minutes. So the temptation to go back and dismember Grommetik was intense. But the Witch resisted. She didn’t care if she was sentenced and executed for the battery of Madame Morrible’s corpse, but she didn’t want to be caught because of vengeance against a machine.
She took a meal at a café and glanced at the tabloids. Then she wandered in the shopping district. Never one for frippery, she was intensely bored, but she wanted to hear them talking about the death of Madame Morrible. She was waiting for the reviews, as it were. And she would never come back to Shiz, she suspected, nor to any other city. This was her last chance to see Loyal Oz in action.
As the afternoon wore on, however, she began to worry. What if there was a cover-up? What if the current Head, to avoid scandal, hushed up the news of the assault? Especially a crime against one so close to the Emperor? The Witch began to fret that she would be denied the credit for her deed. She racked her brains for someone to confess to, someone who would be sure to rush to the authorities. What about Crope, or Shenshen, or Pfannee? Or, for that matter, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, nasty Avaric?
The town house of the Margreave was set out in the deer park at the edge of Shiz. It was late afternoon by the time she reached the Emperor’s Green, as it was now called. Private residences were dotted about the expanse, each protected by its own security force, high walls lined with broken glass bottles, fierce dogs. The Witch had a way with dogs and high walls didn’t bother her. She welcomed herself over the wall onto a terrace, where a maid tending a floxflower bed had a conniption and resigned on the spot. The Witch found Avaric in his study, signing some documents with a huge plumed pen, and sipping some honey-colored whiskey in a crystal glass. “I said that I won’t come out for cocktails, you’re on your own, can’t you listen?” he began, but then he saw who it was.
“However did you get in here without being announced?” he said. “I know you. Don’t I?”
“Of course you do, Avaric. I’m the green girl of Crage Hall.”
“Oh yes. What was your name?”
“My name was Elphaba.”
He lit a lamp—the afternoon was darkening, or perhaps clouding over now—and they looked at each other. “Have a seat, then. I suppose if society forces itself in one’s study door, one has no further right to deny it. A drink?”
“A wee one.”
Alone
of them all, he, who had been too handsome to believe, had grown better looking. He wore his hair swept back; it was rich and full, the color of polished nickel, and he clearly had the benefit of a life of exercise and rest, for his figure was strong and slim, his bearing erect, his color good. Those born with advantages know how to capitalize on them, observed the Witch, after her first sip.
“To what do I owe this honor?” he said, seating himself across from her with a freshened drink in his own hands. “Or is the whole world playing reprises today?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I had a walk at noon,” he said, “in the park, with my bodyguards, as usual. And I came across a carnival entertainment set up there. It opens tomorrow, I think, and the park will be mobbed with clever students, household servants and factory workers, and with greasy gabbling families from Little Glikkus. There were the usual cast of children caught up in the allure of a good circus act, mostly teenage boys helping out, no doubt having run away from tiresome families and small provincial towns. But the guy in charge was a bloody little dwarf.”
“Bloody, how do you mean?” asked the Witch.
“I mean offensive, pardon my slang. We’ve all seen dwarves before, that’s not the point. It’s just that I had seen this very dwarf before. I recognized him from years ago.”
“Fancy that.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have thought anything more of it, but then you show up this afternoon from more or less the same zone of memory. Weren’t you there, yourself? Didn’t you go with us to the Philosophy Club that night, we got so drunk, and they had that charmed-sex thing, and that effeminate Tibbett got so wasted and lost his mind and just about everything else when that Tiger . . . ? You were there, surely.”
“I don’t think I was.”
“Weren’t you? Boq was, squiggly little Boq, and Pfannee, and Fiyero, I think, and some others. Don’t you remember? There was that hag who called herself Yackle, and the dwarf, and they let us in, and they were so creepy? Anyway, doesn’t matter—it’s just—”
“Not Yackle,” said the Witch. She dropped her drink. “This is insanity, my ears are having delusions. Everyone is right, I’m paranoid. No, Avaric, I refuse to admit you could remember someone’s name for twenty years like that.”
“She was a balding gypsy woman with a wig, and sort of chestnut-colored eyes, in thick with this dwarf. I don’t know what he was called. Why shouldn’t I remember it?”
“You didn’t remember my name.”
“You didn’t scare me half as much. In fact you never scared me.” He laughed. “I was probably pretty nasty to you. I was an asshole back then.”
“You still are.”
“Well, practice makes perfect, and more than once I’ve been called a perfect asshole.”
“I came by to tell you that I killed Madame Morrible today,” said the Witch. She was so proud of the phrase; it seemed less false when said aloud. Maybe it was true. “I killed her. I wanted someone who would be believed to know about it.”
“Oh, why ever did you do that?”
