“You had nothing to do with it?”

She paused.

“Don’t lie to me, don’t lie to me,” he roared. “Why bother? The whole world lies! Don’t you do it, too!”

“I helped her a little,” said Yackle. How odd to feel capable of being shaken. Maybe she was dying! Her spirits lifted at once. “Yes, I helped her, why not? I didn’t know if Liir was Elphaba’s son, but he might have been; I could see that. I remembered him from childhood. So I introduced a little romance into the therapeutic situation. Oh, Candle, that weird duck: She was a honey, but a mystery, too.”

“As who isn’t,” he said.

“As who isn’t,” she agreed. “So I took it upon myself to stand guard upon the tower room where she was helping him cling to life, in all the ways that a young woman can and will.”

“Ways?” The Lion was all ears. His whiskers trembled.

“Don’t be prurient, you old goat.”

“You said it. You mean it, too; I can tell.”

She had said it; it had slipped out. Time for damage control. “Yes,” she continued. “I had never enjoyed the benefit of a good leg-over. I thought she might. I thought he might. He looked rather scathingly virginal to me. Call it, what term do they use-call it transference. Call it divine sublimation. Call it a metaphor. I locked them in together and let their natures run their course.”

“And what happened?”

“I am a cupid of sorts,” she said, “but I’m not a peeping lecher. History will decide what happened, not you or I.”

“But what did happen? I mean, whether they screwed around or not-what happened next?”

“What happened is they left the mauntery under cover of dark. As you would have been wise to do yourself last night.”

“Where did they go?”

She paused a while and then said, “This is all old business. I suppose it can’t hurt anyone to say.”

“Who are you protecting,” he rushed in, “and why?”

Ah, but that was it, wasn’t it? She admired him for catching her drift. She answered his earlier question, though. “The maunts had once kept a little printing press off the grounds. A sideline to the religious life: producing pamphlets that opposed the warmongering of the Emperor. Rather by accident, the press had been discovered by the Emperor’s men, who more or less destroyed it. But they never traced the sedition to here. The press was housed some little distance, a day’s journey or so from here. I loaded the couple up on a donkey-poor Liir was just barely alive-and I sent them on their way without confiding in my sisters. I thought that was the end of them.”

“You did.” He said it flatly, intending to be as neutral as plaster. Keep going, old lady.

“Yes, but then some short time later-weeks, I think, a few months at the most-Liir returned to the mauntery a final time. He and a soldier of the EC, a minor Menacier named Trism bon Cavalish, had torched the stables of the flying dragons and fled from the Emerald City. It was a case of political action-espionage-I don’t know what you’d call it. But a force of the Emerald City under a Commander Cherrystone gave hot pursuit, and arrived at these walls just shortly after the lads did. This was before I went blind-oh, nine years ago, perhaps? And Liir therefore was perhaps twenty, his companion several years older.”