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

by Gregory Maguire

Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her capable?

“But maybe there’s something to what you say,” said Elphaba. “I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”

Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity.”

Animals should be seen and not heard.

“For the sister, I hear, is eventually coming up to Shiz,” concluded Madame Morrible a few minutes later, as if silence had not intervened, and several tasty biscuits, “because there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And that, I understand, would be dreadful. You would not like it. The sister being as she is. Undoubtedly spending much time in Miss Elphaba’s room, being tended to.” She smiled wanly. A puff of powdery aroma came forward from the flank of her neck, almost as if Madame Morrible could somehow dispense a pleasant personal odor at will. “The sister being as she is.” Madame Morrible tutted and wagged her head back and forth as she saw Galinda to the door. “Miserable, really, but I suppose we shall all pull together and cope. That is sorority, isn’t it?” The Head grasped her shawl and put a gentle hand on Galinda’s shoulder. Galinda shivered, and was sure Madame Morrible felt it, knew it, but the Head never registered a sign of it. “But then, my use of sorority—how ironic. Too witty. Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” She squeezed Galinda’s shoulder blade as if it were a bicycle handle, almost harder than was proper for a woman to do. “We can only hope—ha ha—that the sister comes with some veils of her own! But that’s a year yet. Meanwhile we have time. Think about sorcery, would you? Do. Now good-bye, my pet, and fresh dreams.” Galinda walked back to her room slowly, wondering ...

Miss Elphaba, you are an isolate, and even in my binding spell you sit there stewing in scorn of every word I say. This is evidence of great internal power and force of will, something I deeply respect even when marshaled against me. You have shown no sign of interest in sorcery and I don’t claim you have any natural aptitude. But your splendid lone-wolf spit and spirit can be harnessed, oh yes it can, and you needn’t live a life of unfulfilled rage.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Avaric, putting one foot this way and the other that, as if he were as flexible as a man of straw.

“Boq, Glinda, Elphie, come on,” Avaric called from the window. “Where’s your nerve?”

“Boq, think about this,” Elphaba urged. “I always think, I never feel, I never live,” he moaned. “Can’t I live once in a while? Just once?

Boq had never seen an elf, even though he knew there was a colony of them not far from Rush Margins. “How weird,” he said, inching forward. They looked like hairless monkeys, naked but for little red caps, and without any appreciable sex characteristics. They were as green as sin.

Take her broom and remember: obedience and mystery.

“I’m Liir,”

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.

“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism—like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice . . . Was the Wizard a charlatan, a fraud, a despot of merely human power and failure? Did he control the Adepts—Nessarose and Glinda, and an unnamed third, for it surely wasn’t Elphie—or was it only put to him by Madame Morrible that he did, to assuage his obvious ego, his appetite for the semblance of power? And Madame Morrible? And Yackle? Was there any connection? Were they the same person, were they harsh divinities, avatars of a power of darkness, were they poisonous flitches struck from the evil body of the Kumbric Witch? Or were they—singly, or together—old Kumbricia herself, or such as could be presumed to have survived from the heroic age of mythology into these crabbed, cramped, modern days? Did they govern the Wizard, jerk him about like a marionette?

Who is in thrall to whom?

Nanny took some while to calm down. She rummaged through her bag for some smelling salts, pulling out enough little bottles and satchels to set up her own apothecary business. There were blue glass vials, clear pillboxes, snakeskin envelopes of powders and pills, and a beautiful green glass bottle that had an old torn label on it, MIRACLE ELI-.

“What’s the difference between a shooting star and a falling house?” “One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches.”

The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.

She lay awake at the edge of a field of barley. The moon rose, huge as it sometimes is when first breaking over the horizon. It backlit a stake with a crossbar, standing as if awaiting a body to crucify, or a scarecrow to hang.

“There was a straw man, and a tin woodman, and a big cat who hid in the bushes when I passed—a leopard maybe, or a cougar.” “A man of straw?” said the Witch. “She’s awakening the figures of myth, she’s charming them to life? This must be some attractive child. Did you notice her shoes?” “I wanted to buy them from her.” “Yes! Yes, did you?” “Not for sale. She seemed very attached to them. They were given her by a Good Witch.”

She could surrender Dorothy. She could give up the shoes.

“The dispatch soldier said that the guests asked the Wizard to grant them some wishes. The Scarecrow asked for a brain, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman asked for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion asked for courage.” “And I suppose Dorothy asked for a shoe horn?” “Dorothy asked to be sent home.” “I hope she gets her wish. And?” But Liir got coy. “Oh come on, I’m too old to be put off my supper by gossip,” she snapped. Liir looked flushed with guilty pleasure. “The soldiers said that the Wizard had rejected the odd requests.” “And you’re so very surprised?” “The Wizard told Dorothy that he would grant them their wishes—when they had—when they had—” “You haven’t stuttered in years. Don’t start again, or I’ll beat you.” “Dorothy and her friends have to come here and kill you,” he finished. “The soldiers said it’s because you murdered an old lady in Shiz, a famous old lady, and you’re an assassin. Also you’re crazy, they said.”

Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir. “Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?” Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.

She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight? If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she? They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence. She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow. She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.

She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other effect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.” It would take brains to think up such a plan. She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would ...

Sometimes the only light was in our mother’s eyes, and that was always enough.

“Life is the most wonderful of all fairy tales.”

My most recent book for adults is Hiddensee, subtitled A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker. It is about the life of the toymaker known as Godfather Drosselmeier. In my telling, Drosselmeier suffered a trauma in his boyhood; his father took him out to the woods to kill him with an axe. The lad survived, but ever after he was lopsided, awkward; his life was untenable. He didn’t fit in anywhere. He fell in love only twice and both times it ended badly. He never married, never had children. He did nothing but make toys. What sort of a contribution to the universe is that? And yet, when his goddaughter Klara was in distress, it was he in his undiagnosed weakness who carved the Nutcracker. It was he in his frailty who made her a plywood fairyland in which she could dance her toys on Christmas Eve. He was both bruised enough and attentive enough to be able to help. And he died not knowing what he had done for her, really. But he had given her the map, if you will: the map to the sacred forest.