And Yackle had taken years to pick up the trail again. Elphaba had gone underground, a kind of freedom fighter with questionable ethics. She had been damned slippery-who would have thought a green-skinned girl could make herself so invisible? It had taken the best of Yackle’s talents to track her down again. But find her she did, after several years, and this time her reading had been more accurate. She could see that Elphaba would turn to the mauntery (though not why, not that she would arrive with the blood of Fiyero on her wrists); and Yackle had presented herself at the door of the establishment earlier, to be there, to be ready when Elphaba arrived: and so she had been.

Yackle had kept her own counsel, nodding in her blankets like a gaga grandmother, but she’d watched. She’d slipped a hand to Elphaba, a set of gnarled fingers in the green palm, as if she were looking for help up some stairs: She had tried to squeeze strength and courage through that wordless communiqué. Who is to say it didn’t help somewhat?

Had Yackle known what she was doing when she gave Elphaba the broom?

She could no longer remember.

Then, when the time was right, Sister Elphie had left for the West, to the mountaintop seat of the Tigelaars, the ruling Arjiki family. For all her life an upstart, the grit in the eye that makes it water, Elphaba had hoped to become a hermit. Hoped for forgiveness from Fiyero’s widow, hoped for solace from the mountain loneliness.

But the dwarf had come back into the picture, and had delivered to Elphaba an old looking glass she had had in childhood. Elphaba had reheated the glass and modeled it into a globe-turning a mirror into an eye-and who knows what she had been able to see in its depths. The girl was talented.

Talented enough to sidestep everything except, in the end, her own death.

Though perhaps, like Yackle, death was what she had wanted the most.

Yackle groaned. The notion of being Aunt Sophelia, loopy Aunt Sophelia: curse that the idea had roosted in her! Now she’d have to disprove it to her own satisfaction. Still, it made some mad kind of sense: Why else had she spent these weird extended decades of old age stepping around the skirts of someone else’s life? She had never known where the compulsion had come from. Perhaps something as simple as blood.

The house ticked, neither in sympathy nor in accusation.

When you can’t die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Yackle couldn’t see the dawn, but she could hear in the brush of movement, the wind against roofing tiles, and in the swell of birdsong that light was rising. She was tired without exhaustion, or exhausted without weariness-it was hard to put into words.

Still, she asked herself: If I am not mad Aunt Sophelia Thropp, and never was, then who put me here? Who had enough influence to knock me into a somewhat human figure in a world of more fully human creatures as well as Animal figures-and bystanding dwarves? And prophetic clocks?