“You could be most careful if you left town completely.”
“You could be most careful if you told me—”
“Give over with that, cut it out. I don’t think I even want to know where you are, come to think of it. I just want you to be safe. Will you be safe? Will you stay inside, away from drunken pagan celebrations?”
“Can I go to chapel and pray for you?”
“No.” She looked so fierce that he didn’t even tease her about it again.
“Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?
“I love you,” said Elphaba.
“So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.”
Careful of us both, he thought.
h h h
So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all. She had swathed herself in long dark skirts, like some sort of a religious woman, and tucked up her hair inside a tall wide-brimmed hat with a crown like a cone. There was a dark scarf, purple and gold, wound around her neck, and pulled over her mouth, though she would need more than a scarf to mask that lovely prow of a nose. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves, a nicer type of accessory than she usually went in for, though he feared it was to allow for nimbler control of her hands. Her feet were lost in big, steel-toed boots like the kind worn by miners in the Glikkus.
If you didn’t know she was green, it would be hard to tell—in this dark afternoon, in this raking skittle of snow.
She didn’t look behind her; perhaps she didn’t care if she was being followed. Her circuit took her around some of the major squares of the city. She ducked in for a minute to the chapel of Saint Glinda next to the mauntery, the one where he had first seen her. Perhaps she was getting last-minute instructions, but she didn’t try to give him (or anyone else) the slip. She emerged in a minute or two.
Or perhaps—perish the thought—she was actually praying for guidance and strength?
She crossed the Law Courts Bridge, she wandered along the Ozma Embankment and cut diagonally through the abandoned rose gardens of the Royal Mall. The snow pestered her; she kept twining her cape the more tightly around; the silhouette of her thin, dark-stockinged legs in those huge comical boots showed up against the snowy blankness of the Oz Deer Park (now of course bereft of Deer and deer). She marched, head tucked down, past the cenotaphs and obelisks and memorial tablets to the Magnificent Dead of this escapade or that. The decades—Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love—the decades looked on and didn’t notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn’t see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.
But the Wizard must not be her aim. She must have told the truth in saying that she was too untried, and too obvious, to be selected as the Wizard’s assassin. She must be involved in a diversionary tactic, or in taking out a possible successor or high-level ally. For tonight the Wizard would be opening the antiroyalist, revisionist Exhibit of Struggle and Virtue at the People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics near the Palace. Yet at the top of the Shiz Road Elphaba struck out sideways, away from the Palace district, cutting through the small, fashionable district of Goldhaven. The homes of the filthy rich were guarded by mercenaries, and she clopped past them on the pavements, past the stableboys out sweeping the snow off the pavement with their brooms. She did not look up or down or back over her shoulder. Fiyero guessed he was the more ostentatious figure, striding in his opera cape in the snow a hundred paces behind.
At the edge of Goldhaven was perched a small bluestone jewel of a theatre, the Lady’s Mystique. In the shallow but elegant square before it, white lights and gold and green spangles hung in profusion, looped from streetlight to streetlight. Some holiday oratorio or other was scheduled—he could only read sold out on the board in front—and the doors weren’t yet opened. The crowd was gathering, some vendors sold hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses, and a crowd of self-approving youngsters amused themselves and bothered some elderly people by singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow came down on all, on the lights, the theatre, the crowds; it landed in the hot chocolate, it was churned to mush and ice on the bricks.
Bravely, foolishly—without decision or choice, it felt like—Fiyero climbed the steps of a nearby private library, to keep an eye on Elphaba, who lost herself in the crowd. Was there to be a murder in the theatre? Was there to be arson, the innocent sybarites roasted like chestnuts? Was it a single mark, an appointed victim, or was it mayhem and disaster, the more, the worse, the better?
He didn’t know if he was there to prevent what she was about to do, or to save whomever he could from the catastrophe, or to tend anyone hurt accidentally, or even maybe just to witness it, so he could know more about her. And love her or not love her, but know which of the two it was.
She was circulating through the crowd, as if trying to locate someone. He believed, incredibly, that she didn’t know he was there—was she so intent on finding the right victim, and he didn’t fill the bill? Could she not feel her lover in the same open-air square with her as the wind moved the curtains of snow?
A phalanx of Gale Forcers appeared from an alley between the theatre and a school next door. They took up their places before the bank of glass doors in front. Elphaba mounted the steps of an ancient wool market, a kind of stone gazebo. Fiyero saw that she had something under her cloak. Explosives? Some magic implement?
Did she have colleagues in the square? Were they lining themselves up one with another? The crowd kept getting thicker, as the hour for the oratorio drew near. Inside the glass doors, house management was busy lining up stanchions and stringing velvet ropes to promote a genteel entry into the hall. Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.
A carriage came around the corner of a building on the far side of the square. It couldn’t come right up to the doors of the theatre, as the crowds were too dense, but it proceeded as far as it was able. Sensing the presence of someone with authority, the crowd drew a little still. Could this be the elusive Wizard, on an unannounced visit? A coachman in a teck-fur headpiece flung the door open, and reached his hand in to assist the passenger in alighting.
Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.
Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.
He saw that Elphaba knew that this was the one she must kill; she had known this; in an instant all was dead clear. If she was caught and captured and tried, her motivation couldn’t be more wonderful—she was merely a mad student from Madame Morrible’s own Crage Hall, she carried a grudge, she never forgot. It was too perfect.
But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?
Elphaba’s cape twitched; her hand went up and down inside it, as if priming something. Madame Morrible was growling a greeting to the crowd, which, while not necessarily knowing who she was, appreciated the spectacle if not the bulk of her arrival.
The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.
But then were thrown open the front doors of the building Madame Morrible was walking past—not the t
