No, she thought; no, it can’t be. I have entertained that possibility eight hundred times before, and I’ve always turned away from it: no. Brrr had been right to suppose that something small would have given her former life away: a spoon, a string of celery caught in the teeth, the way clouds can look like octopus ink. Something would have caught in an earlier memory, if there had been one. But no random spark of dailiness had ever connected with any life predating the time that she woke up, born an old woman naked in a daybed.

Brrr was there before her in her mind. She couldn’t picture him exactly, but whatever she could envision was rolling his eyes and fiddling with a pen he could scarcely govern. “Why did you take such an interest in Elphaba?” he wondered aloud. “Why would the story of Elphaba and Nessarose have caught at you so?”

“You tell me,” she rattled back, in her mind, giving testimony at midnight. Or was she withholding it?

“The mentally deranged have no capacity for memory,” he said. “You’re the mad Aunt Sophelia, maybe. Lady Partra’s other daughter; Melena’s older sister; the aunt of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Shell, who is now Emperor of Oz. The real Thropp Descending.”

“Were I to believe that, I’d be guilty of delusions of grandeur,” she said, “then I would truly be mad, and if anyone could find a way to put me away even further than a crypt, they’d be correct to do so at once.”

“I’ve never heard proof that Sophelia died,” said Brrr, “and your age would just about conform, I guess, with how old she would be if she still lived.”

“That’s nuts,” she replied. “You’re insane.”

“Not I.” He smiled as he began to fade from her mind. “You, after all, are having this conversation with yourself. I’m off asleep somewhere else.”

“Damn,” she said aloud, in the cold bedchamber.

She traced it out some more-just the highlights. How she had moved about Oz, in thrall to the idea of the two Thropp sisters. She’d begun to feel anointed, if that was the word-or condemned-to the task of living on the sidelines. To the extent that she had developed genuine powers of prophecy, she had tried to read what was happening, what might happen, and to place herself in Elphaba’s way, where she could do some good.

She got a great deal wrong, of course. Infallible she was not. There she’d been at a grotty den of sexual escapades, collecting cash at the window, having read the signs that Elphaba would come by that night. She thought she could protect Elphaba from some dreadful experience. The Philosophy Club! She could remember that. The dwarf at the door, a rotten little bounder: That was where their paths had crossed for the first time. He had been dogging Elphaba’s steps, too, it seemed, though she had not been able to determine why.

He was as wrong as she was, that night. Elphaba had proved elusive, often swifter than Yackle’s powers of prediction could track. True, Elphaba’s college chums had shown up: Avaric, Boq, Fiyero. A few others. But not Elphaba or Glinda. Instead, those two best friends had ducked away that night, and gotten out from under Yackle’s distant and watchful eye-it worked back then, the eye, both eyes-and they had hightailed it to the Emerald City for their famous interview with the wonderful Wizard of Oz.