“Punishment for your wicked ways, you two-faced hedonists,” Nanny said.
The ground sloped toward the still, receded margin of the lake. First at their feet, then at their waists and higher, the beached dock rose, like a bridge to nowhere, ending in air.
Beneath the dock in the dry shadows there were eyes.
“Oh, sweet Lurline,” whispered Nanny.
Elphaba was sitting under the dock with the looking glass that Turtle Heart had made. She held it in two hands, and stared at it with one eye closed. She peered, she squinted; her open eye was distant and hollow.
Reflection from the starlight off the water, thought Frex, hoped Frex, but he knew the bright vacant eye was not lit by starlight.
“Horrors,” murmured Elphaba.
Turtle Heart tumbled to his knees. “She sees him coming,”
he said thickly, “she sees him to come; he is to come from the air; is arriving. A balloon from the sky, the color of a bubble of blood: a huge crimson globe, a ruby globe: he falls from the sky. The Regent is fallen. The House of Ozma is fallen. The Clock was right. A minute to judgment.”
He fell over, almost into Elphaba’s small lap. She didn’t seem to notice him. Behind her was a low growl. There was a beast, a felltop tiger, or some strange hybrid of tiger and dragon, with glowing orangey eyes. Elphaba was sitting in its folded forearms as if on a throne.
“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”
Galinda
I
Wittica, Settica, Wiccasand Turning, Red Sand, Dixxi House, change at Dixxi House for Shiz; stay aboard this coach for all points East; Tenniken, Brox Hall, and all destinations to Traum”—the conductor paused to catch his breath—“next stop Wittica, Wittica next!”
Galinda clutched her parcel of clothes to her breast. The old goat who sprawled on the seat across from her was missing the Wittica stop. She was glad that trains made passengers sleepy. She didn’t want to keep avoiding his eye. At the last minute before she was to board the train, her minder, Ama Clutch, had stepped on a rusty nail and, terrified of the frozen-face syndrome, had begged permission to go to the nearest surgery for medicines and calming spells. “I can surely get myself to Shiz alone,” Galinda had said coldly, “don’t bother with me, Ama Clutch.” And Ama Clutch hadn’t. Galinda hoped that Ama Clutch would suffer a little frozenness of jaw before being well enough to show up in Shiz and chaperone Galinda through whatever was to come.
Her own chin was set, she believed, to imply a worldly boredom with train travel. In fact she had never been more than a day’s carriage ride away from her family home in the little market town of Frottica. The railway line, laid down a decade ago, had meant that old dairy farms were being cut up for country estates for the merchants and manufacturers of Shiz. But Galinda’s family continued to prefer rural Gillikin, with its fox haunts, its dripping dells, its secluded ancient pagan temples to Lurline. To them, Shiz was a distant urban threat, and even the convenience of rail transportation hadn’t tempted them to risk all its complications, curiosities, and evil ways.
Galinda didn’t see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet. The sway of her head made her creamy ringlets swing, catching the light, like so many jostling stacks of coins. Her lips were perfect, as pouted as an opening maya flower, and colored as brilliantly red. Her green traveling gown with its inset panels of ochre musset suggested wealth, while the black shawl draping just so about the shoulders was a nod to her academic inclinations. She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart.
But there was more than one way to be smart.
She was seventeen. The whole town of Frottica had seen her off. The first girl from the Pertha Hills to be accepted at Shiz! She had written well in the entrance exams, a meditation on Learning Ethics from the Natural World. (“Do Flowers Regret Being Plucked for a Bouquet? Do the Rains Practice Abstinence? Can Animals Really Choose to Be Good? Or: A Moral Philosophy of Springtime.”) She had quoted excessively from the Oziad, and her rapturous prose had captivated the board of examiners. A three-year fellowship to Crage Hall. It wasn’t one of the better colleges—those were still closed to female students. But it was Shiz University.
Her companion in the compartment, waking up when the conductor came back through, stretched his heels as he yawned. “Would you be so kind as to reach my ticket, it’s in the overhead,” he said. Galinda stood and found the ticket, aware that the bearded old thing was eyeing her comely figure. “Here you are,” she said, and he answered, “Not to me, dearie, to the conductor. Without opposable thumbs, I have no hope of managing such a tiny piece of cardboard.”
The conductor punched the ticket, and said, “You’re the rare beast that can afford to travel first class.”
“Oh,” said the goat, “I object to the term beast. But the laws still allow my traveling in first class, I presume?”
“Money’s money,” said the conductor, without ill will, punching Galinda’s ticket and returning it to her.
“No, money’s not money,” said the goat, “not when my ticket cost double what the young lady’s did. In this case, money is a visa. I happen to have it.”
“Going up to Shiz, are you?” said the conductor to Galinda, ignoring the goat’s remark. “I can tell by that academic shawl.”
“Oh well, it’s something to do,” said Galinda. She didn’t care to talk to conductors. But when he continued along down the carriage, Galinda found that she liked even less the baleful look that the goat was giving her.
“Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked.
“I have already learned not to speak to strangers.”
“Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.”
“I am disinclined to know you.”
