The Gale Forcer raised his voice. He had a truncheon in a thong loop at his waist. The cub hid behind the father, and the mother could be seen to growl.
Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile? Or are there relatives inside who will be tortured if you make a break for freedom?
It was all speculation; Fiyero couldn’t tell the dynamics of the situation, but he was riveted. He realized his hand was open, palm up against the glass of the window. Below, because the Bears had not stood to join the lineup, the soldier raised his cudgel and it came down on the skull of
the cub. Fiyero’s body jerked, he spilled his drink and the cup broke, porcelain shards on the buttery herringbone-laid oak flooring.
The manager appeared from behind a green baize door and tutted, and twitched the drapes closed, but not before Fiyero had seen one last thing. Recoiling as if he had never hunted and killed in the Thousand Year Grasslands, he averted his eyes and they wheeled upward, where he glimpsed the pale blond coins of faces—two or three dozen schoolchildren in the upper windows of the school, staring down with fascination and open mouths at the scene in their playing field.
“They have no concern for neighbors who have a business to run, bills to pay, and loved ones to feed,” snapped the manager. “You don’t need to see those antics as you enjoy your coffee, sir.”
“The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.”
“Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”
Fiyero didn’t take a replacement cup of cherry chocolate. There were racking cries from the mother Bear, and then a silence in the world outside the heavy damask drapes. Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?
He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn’t name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare to risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him. He held Elphie the tighter, trying to communicate a deeper passion without speaking it.
He noticed, too, that when she was agitated she was the more liberal in her lovemaking. He began to be able to tell when she was going to say “Not till next week.” She seemed more abandoned, more salacious, perhaps as a cleansing exercise before disappearing for a few days. One morning, as he was stealing some of the cat’s milk for his coffee, she rubbed some oil on her skin, wincing with sensitivity, and said over her shoulder of soft green marble, “A fortnight, my dear. My pet, as my father used to say. I need a fortnight of privacy now.”
He had a sudden pang, a premonition, that she was going to leave him. It was a way for her to get two weeks’ head start. “No!” he said. “That’s not on, Fae-Fae. It’s not all right, it’s too long.”
“We need it.” She expanded: “Not you and I, I mean the other we. Obviously I can’t tell you what we’re about, but the last plans for the autumn campaign are falling into place. There’s going to be an episode—I can’t say more—and I must be available to the network at all times.”
“A coup?” he said. “An assassination? A bomb? A kidnapping? What? Just the nature of it, not the specifics, what?”
“Not only can I not tell you,” she said, “I don’t even know. I’ll be told only my small part, and I’ll do it. I only know it’s a complicated maneuver with a lot of interlocking pieces.”
“Are you the dart?” he said. “Are you the knife? The fuse?”
She said (though he wasn’t convinced): “My dearie, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad. It’s all too expected. Security guards watch me like owls on a mouse. My very presence provokes alarm and heightened vigilance. No, no, the part I’ll play will be a handmaiden’s part, a little assistance in the shadows.”
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“You’re selfish,” she said, “and you’re a coward. I love you, my sweet, but your protests about this are wrongheaded. You just want to preserve my insignificant life, you don’t even have a moral feeling about whether I’m doing right or wrong. Not that I want you to, not that I care what you think about it. But I only observe, your objections are
of the weakest sort. Now this isn’t something to be argued. Two weeks from tonight, come back.”
“Will the—the action—be completed by then? Who decides?”
“I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who decides, so don’t ask me.”
“Fae—” Suddenly he didn’t like her code name anymore. “Elphaba. Do you really not know who is pulling the strings that make you move? How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Wizard?”
“You are a novice at this, for all your status as a tribal prince!” she said. “Why shouldn’t I know if I was being a pawn of the Wizard? I could tell when I was being manipulated by that harridan, Madame Morrible. I learned something about prevarication and straight talking back at Crage Hall. Give me the credit for having spent some years at this, Fiyero.”
“You can’t tell me for sure who is or isn’t the boss.”
“Papa didn’t know the name of his Unnamed God,” she said, rising and rubbing oil on her stomach and between her legs, but modestly turning her back to him. “It never is the who, is it? It’s always the why.”
“How do you hear? How do they tell you what to do?”
“Look, you know I can’t say.”
“I know you can.”
She turned. “Oil my breasts, will you.”
