IX

It was lunchtime when the skarks and the wagon began the final, difficult ascent up the slope to the castle portcullis and the gates of jasper and oak. The townspeople came out from their hovels and leaned their weight against the carriage, helping it through the ruts of mud and ice, until at last it turned in and crossed the open drawbridge. Elphaba, her curiosity as piqued as anyone else’s, stood with the Dowager Princess of the Arjikis and her sisters on a parapet above the crudely carved front doorway. The children waited in the cobblestoned yard below, all but Liir.

The leader, a grizzed young man, made the faintest mountain obeisance to Sarima. The skarks defecated sloppily on the cobbles, to the delight of the children, who had never seen skark fewmets before. Then the leader went to the cabin and opened the door, and climbed inside. They could hear his voice, raised loudly as if talking to someone hard of hearing.

They waited. The sky was a piercing blue, really almost a spring blue, and the icicles hung from the eaves in dangerous daggers, melting like mad. The sisters all sucked in their stomachs, cursing the extra piece of gingerbread, the honeyed cream in the coffee, vowing to do better. Please, sweet Lurlina, let it be a man.

The leader came out again, and proffered a hand, and he helped a figure alight from the cabin: an old, creaky-limbed figure, in sad dark skirts and a hideously out-fashioned bonnet, even from the provincial point of view.

But Elphaba was leaning forward, cleaving the air with her sharp chin and hatchet nose, and sniffing like a beast. The visitor turned and the sun struck her face.

“Good glory,” breathed Elphie. “It’s my old Nanny!” And she left the parapet to run and gather the old woman in her arms.

“Human feeling, will you look at that,” said Four, sniffily. “I wouldn’t have guessed her capable.” For Auntie Guest was all but sobbing with pleasure.

The caravan leader wouldn’t stay for a meal, but Nanny with her valises and trunks clearly did not intend to go any farther. She settled in a small musty room just below Elphaba’s, and took the endless time it takes the elderly to make her toilet. By the time she was ready to be sociable, dinner was served. A gamey old hen, more rope than flesh, lay in a thin pepper sauce on one of the good salvers. The children were dressed in their best, and allowed this once to dine in the formal hall. Nanny came in on the arm of Elphaba, and sat at her right hand. Because this was a visitor to Elphie, the sisters had kindly put Elphie’s napkin ring at the foot of the table, opposite Sarima—a place by custom left vacant, in honor of poor dead Fiyero. It was a big mistake, and they would recognize it almost immediately, as Elphaba never relinquished her advancement. But for now all was smiles and savory hospitality. The only small annoyance (besides that Nanny wasn’t a young eligible princeling looking for a bride) was that Liir still conducted his campaign of sullen disappearance. The children didn’t know where he was.

Nanny was a tired and fruity old woman, skin cracked like dried soap, hair thin and yellowy white, hands with veins as prominent as the cords around a good Arjiki goat cheese. She communicated wheezily, with lots of pauses to breathe and think, that she had heard through someone named Crope, in the Emerald City, that her old charge Elphaba had attended Tibbett in his last days at the Cloister of Saint Glinda outside the Emerald City. No one in the family had heard from Elphaba in years and years, and Nanny had decided to take it upon herself to find her. The maunts were reluctant at first, but Nanny had persisted, and then she had waited until a new caravan was ready to leave. The maunts had told her about Elphaba’s mission in Kiamo Ko, and Nanny had booked passage the following spring. And here she was.

“And of the outside world?” asked Two eagerly. Let them catch up on family gossip on their own time.

“What do you mean?” said Nanny.

“Politics, science, fashion, the arts, the driving edge!” said Two.

“Well, our redoubtable Wizard has crowned himself Emperor,” said Nanny. “Did you know that?”

They hadn’t heard. “By whose authority?” asked Five, scoffing, “And furthermore, Emperor over what?”

“There isn’t anyone who has any more authority, he said,” said Nanny calmly, “and who could argue with that? He’s in the business of handing out honors annually as it is. He just tacked on an extra one for himself. As for Emperor over what, I couldn’t say. Some people whisper that this implies expansionist aims. But where he could expand to—I couldn’t say, I just couldn’t. Into the desert? Beyond, to Quox, or Ix, or Fliaan?”

“Or does he mean to have a more tight-fisted hold on terrain he’s only loosely governed,” asked Elphaba, “like the Vinkus?” She felt a chill, like an old wound deep beneath her breastbone.

“No one is particularly happy,” said Nanny. “There is an enforced conscription now, and the Gale Force threatens to outnumber the Royal Army. One doesn’t know if there could be an internal struggle for power, and the Wizard is preparing against an eventual takeover attempt. How can one have an opinion about such things? Old and female as we are?” She smiled to include them all. The sisters and Sarima glared as youthfully as they could back at her.