Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)

by Gregory Maguire

Fiyero turned back to look at Elphaba. Her face struggled with disbelief. The children were in the way of whatever she was supposed to do. They were a small unruly mob, chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him/her, grabbing for presents. The children were the accidental context—noisy, innocent daughters of tycoons, despots, and butcher generals.

Madame Morrible pushed on, like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, devil come what may, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him.

fire caught, then flared, and the shadows detached themselves and moved as shadows will, but these shadows moved fast, across the room, at him before he could register what they were. Except that there were three, or four, or five, and they were wearing black clothes, and black char on their faces, and their heads were wrapped in colored scarves like the ones he had bought for Elphaba, for Sarima. On the shoulder of one he saw the glint of a gilded epaulet: a senior member of the Gale Force. There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat then scarpered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.

miasma

A highly unpleasant smell or vapor

expiation.

Atonement for sins

aegis

Protection, backing, or support

There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.

“To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”

Elphie had come to think, back in Shiz, that as women wore cologne, men wore proofs: to secure their own sense of themselves, and thus to be attractive. But surely evil was beyond proof, just as the Kumbric Witch was beyond the grasp of knowable history?

Such silly things, children—and so embarrassing—because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”

“But the choice to save yourself can itself be deadly,” said the Princess Nastoya. Elphie nodded, looked away, looked back. “I will give you three crows as your familiars,” said the Princess. “You are in hiding as a witch now. That is your guise.” She spoke a word to the crows, and three mangy, evil-looking things came and waited nearby. “A witch?” Elphaba said. What her father would think! “Hiding from what?”

“We have the same enemy,” replied the Princess. “We are both at risk. If you need help send the crows. If I am still alive, as an old matriarch monarch, or as a free Elephant, I’ll come to your aid.” “Why?” asked Elphie.

“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your f...

The Princess said more. It had been years—more than a decade—since Elphie had been able to talk to an Animal. Who, Elphie asked the Princess, had enchanted her? But the Princess Nastoya wouldn’t say—in part as self-protection, for the death of the enchanter could sometimes mean the revocation of binding spells, and her curse was her safety. “But is life worth living in the wrong form?” said Elphie. “The interior doesn’t change,” she answered, “except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.” “I have no interior,” said Elphaba. “Something told those bees to kill the cook,” said the Princess Nastoya, with a glitter in her eye. Elphaba felt herself go pale. “I didn’t!” she said. “No, it couldn’t have been me! And how did you know?” “You did, on some level. You are a strong woman. And I can hear bees, you know. My ears are keen.” “I would like to stay here with you,” said Elphaba. “Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That’s all I want—to do no harm.” “By your own admission, you have a job to do,” said the Princess. She curled her trunk around...

“I think that’s shameful, even if it’s just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil,” said Elphaba. “Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It’s shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.”

“Don’t,” Sarima said. “For one thing, that’s where Fiyero is waiting for me. And you know it.” Elphaba’s jaw dropped. When she least expected it, Sarima always seemed ready to rush in with a surprise attack. “In the afterlife?” said Elphie. “Oh, what you do take against,” said Sarima. “I pity the community of the afterlife when they’re asked to welcome you in. What a sour apple you always are.”

“There is something inherently good about children,” said Sarima decidedly, warming to the subject. “You know that little Ozma, who all those years ago was deposed by the Wizard? They say that she is off someplace, frozen in a cave—perhaps even in the Kells, for all I know. She’s preserved in her childhood innocence because the Wizard hasn’t the courage to kill her. One day she’ll come back to rule Oz, and she’ll be the best and wisest sovereign we ever had, because of the wisdom of youth.”

“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?”

harridan,”

Strict, bossy, belligerant old woman

belvederes

Summer house or garden structure affording a grand view

“Oh yes,” said Glinda in a false calm, surveying the Witch up and down, “and they would make the perfect accessory for that glass-of-fashion outfit you have on. Come on, Elphie, since when have you cared about shoes, of all things? Look at those army boots you have on!” “Whether I’d wear them or not is none of your concern. You can’t go handing out a person’s effects like that, what right had you? Papa reshaped those shoes from skills he learned from Turtle Heart. You’ve stuck your fancy wand in where it wasn’t wanted!” “I’ll remind you,” said Glinda,

People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

parlous

Full of danger; precarious

and at midnight, tortured by the thoughts of Nessa’s death—the physical fact of being squished like

No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst—there is always choice.

I stick with my suggestion,” said Avaric. “Evil isn’t doing bad things, it’s feeling bad about them afterward. There’s no absolute value to behavior.

“I’m drunk and disorderly,” she said, “and I cannot take any more riddles. I killed someone today, I can kill you too.” “You didn’t kill her, she was already dead,” said the dwarf calmly. “And you can’t kill me, for I’m immortal. But you try very hard at life, and so I will tell you this. I am the guardian of the book, and I was brought to this dreaded, forsaken land to watch over the book’s history, to keep it from getting back to where it comes from. I am not good, I am not bad; but I am locked here, condemned to a deathless life to guard the book. I don’t care what happens to you or anyone else, but I protect the book: that is my charge.”

“The book?” She was struggling to understand; she felt drunker the more she heard. “What you call the Grimmerie. It has other names—no matter.”

“You work with Yackle.” “We sometimes have the same intentions, and we sometimes do not. Her interest seems to be different from mine.” “Who is she? What is her interest? Why do you hover at the edges of my life?” “In the world I come from, there are guardian angels,” said the dwarf, “but so far as I can work it out, she is an opposite number, and her concern is you.” “Why do I deserve such a fiend? Why is my life so plagued? Who positioned her to influence my life?” “There are things I don’t know, and things I do,” said the dwarf. “Who Yackle answers to, if anyone, if anything, is beyond my realm of knowledge or interest. But why you? You must know this. For you”—the dwarf spoke in a bright, offhand tone—“are neither this nor that—or shall I say both this and that? Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. Can you be so dull that you have not figured this out?”

Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”

“You’re my soul come scavenging for me, I can feel it,” said the Witch. “I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have a soul; with a soul there is everlastingness, and life has tortured me enough.”

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won? The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation. A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.

At the Kvon Altar practitioners of a sect so obscure that it had no name made their nightly oblations for the souls of the dead, assuming, as most do, that the dead had had souls.

In a room, surprisingly bare and simple for one so powerful and elevated, the sleepless Wizard of Oz wiped his brow, and wondered how long his luck would hold out. He had been wondering the same thing for forty years, and he had hoped that luck would begin to seem habitual, deserved. But he could hear the very mice chewing away at the foundations of his Palace. The arrival of that Dorothy Gale, from Kansas, was a summons, he knew it; he knew it when he saw her face. There was no point in searching after the Grimmerie any longer. His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

It became a celebrated event, the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was hailed as political assassination or a juicy murder. Dorothy’s description of what had happened was deemed self-delusion, at best, or a bald-faced lie. Murder or mercy killing or accident, in an indirect way it helped rid the country of its dictator.

Perhaps he again tried to pry the slippers off her for his own purposes, and perhaps Dorothy outwitted him, spurred by the Witch’s warnings. At any rate, she presented him with something from the Witch’s house to prove that she had been there. The broom had been burnt beyond recognition, and the Grimmerie had seemed too cumbersome to carry, so she brought the green glass bottle that said MIRACLE ELI- on the paper glued to the front. It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived—a hot-air balloon—just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is—alas, or perhaps thank mercy—no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice. “And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time.” “And did she ever come out?” “Not yet.”