If I were appointed to generate change in Elphaba’s life, who had generated the change in mine? The legendary source of evil amongst us, that old she-demon, the Kumbric Witch? Or the grand, dim, fusty, decayed deity, goddess of creation, Lurlina Herself? Or the Unnamed God, more sober because more secretive? (And did unnamed mean un-nameable or “once named but name revoked”? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was that proof of, besides obduracy?)

Who gave Lurlina or any other deity her power?

The very children, maybe, who were now hearing the story of Elphaba only as the cautionary fable of the Wicked Witch of the West-her rise and fall-and believing it? Cutting their schoolyard morals to conform to the cheap lessons of a propagandized biography?

She couldn’t know. Her head hurt to try to imagine. The closest she came to sleep these days was a kind of slipping sideways into a vision, and this is what she saw: The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.

Everything was not merely relative, it was-how to put it?-relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.

3

A MILE OR two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. “The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way,” decided the sergeant-at-hand. “Lads, look sharp; they’ve stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we’re not careful we’ll rub noses with them.”

“We’ll blow them to kingdom come!” cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn’t bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.

“Heave now, heave,” called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.

The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.

But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn’t want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.