Free Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 by Son of a Witch Page A

want, Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?
    A father.
    The Wizard couldn’t give him a father or a mother, but maybe he could give him some news of Nor. Now that the Princess Nastoya had awakened a hope that Nor might still be alive. Or maybe the Wizard had gotten hold of the missing Grimmerie, somehow. With it, Liir might figure out how to help the Princess shuck off her disguise. In any event, even to approach someone as mighty as the wonderful Wizard of Oz would be, for Liir, both a novelty and an accomplishment: he was hardly more than spinster spawn, and had seen little of the world of men.
    “Well, come if you’re coming; we’re off,” said Dorothy, so Liir hid the Witch’s cape beneath an ornamental flowerpot in a corner of the deserted café where they had been sitting, and went with them.
    Dorothy’s strategy for getting the attention of the proper officials at the Palace doors was simple. “I’m Dorothy,” she said, “you know. The Dorothy.”
    The guards gawked. Ministers were summoned, and arrangements made for an interview almost at once. “You’re not allowed,” said the Secretary of Audiences to Liir. “You aren’t part of the original contract.”
    “But I’m here to ask the Wizard for help,” said Liir.
    “Piss off.”
    Dorothy shrugged, grinned too broadly, and straightened her apron. “Don’t fret, Liir. We shouldn’t be more than an hour. All we have to do is show up, and I’m sure the Wizard will grant our requests. We’ll meet back at that café tonight and decide what to do to celebrate before I leave.”
    “Are you sure you want to leave?” asked Liir.
    “Of course I’m leaving,” she snapped. “This is my exit interview. Why do you think I put myself through this indignity? I didn’t ask to kill the Witch, but having done it, I’m going to collect my reward if I can possibly manage it.”
    He bit his lip. “Then may I come with you?”
    “You wouldn’t feel at home in Kansas. Few do. Besides, you’re supposed to be un-bewitching that old freak elephant noggin. Are my pigtails even?”
    She kissed him in a bruisingly incidental manner. Full of stupid trust, she turned and hurried after her friends. The ceremonial doors banged behind them.
    Liir went back to the café. Using up almost all the coin he had, he waited with mounting horror and then failing hopes. She never returned. He never saw her again.
    She hadn’t been much, that Dorothy. Priggish, in a way, proud of her wide-eyed charity. Her kindness, at first magnificent, had come to seem a bit—well, cheap. After all, she’d also oiled the Tin Woodman, and soothed the timorous Lion, and discussed differences between the gold and silver standards of foreign currency with the Scarecrow, who seemed for all his brainlessness to be following the whole discussion. She’d cuddled that rank little dog of hers. In light of all that, her solicitousness to Liir seemed nothing more than the Next Good Deed.
    Nonetheless, she had been brave, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the Vinkus, all the way back. When the bells began to toll throughout the City, and Liir finally worked up the nerve to ask someone why, Dorothy wasn’t mentioned at all. “The Wizard is deposed,” they said. “The Wicked Witch is dead, but the Wizard is deposed anyway. Some other good witch has been hired to oversee Oz in the interim.”
    “Dorothy?” he asked. “What about Dorothy?”
    “Dorothy who?” they replied. The cult of Dorothy had yet to take hold.
     
    O NCE, YEARS BACK, in one of the barns at Kiamo Ko, Liir had been horsing about with Nor and her brothers. The children of Fiyero and his wife, Sarima, were high-tempered, and they had persuaded Liir to sit on one end of a timber that they intended to pivot out over a pile of hay below. He could jump to his safety! It would be fun, they said. And so it would have been, had not one of them—Manek, probably—leaped off the balanced end before Liir was fully