“Why should she need a guardian?” The Lion’s voice was cold. “Some of us didn’t get any guardians at all.”

“And you would recommend that, based on your own experience?”

“I suppose she is special,” he said venomously. “History belongs to her, right? The next Munchkinlander Eminence in her minority? Prophecies tremble on her little shoulders? What did you say of Elphaba, that time you took a swig of the joy juice and had your first vision? Something like This child belongs to history, was it? Good and ill hangs in the balance, right? So she must be protected at all costs, right? She’ll save us all, just like little dead Ozma? The little darling? Right?”

Yackle could not take umbrage at his tone. She understood the rage masked as sarcasm. She rubbed her shoulder blades as if they were too heavy for her own spine. When she answered, her old lips quivered.

“It’s not that she is special,” said Yackle. “It’s not that she is chosen. It’s that she is ours. That’s all.”

He knew what the possessive pronoun meant. She is the one who is here, special or no. Whether to be glorified by history or abandoned by fate-to be accident’s victim or to be prophecy’s chosen child: It makes no difference. She’s the innocent on board. That was all. It came down to no more than that.

“They go to war, back and forth,” said Yackle. “The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is not a field, a lake, a city, an industry, but a child.

“The child would be nine,” said Yackle in a softer voice, almost to herself. “A nice age for a child.

“That is,” she continued, “I have always assumed it might be. I myself was never nine. As you know. Still, it sounds a pleasant age.”

Brrr thought that none of his ages had been particularly pleasant. Still, at this remove, he wouldn’t have relinquished a moment of any of them.

“There, there,” he said. “Don’t get soppy on us. I’ve said I would listen, and I have listened. I’ve heard what you said. I didn’t write it down. I’ve put it”he tapped his chest“right here.”

The glass cat turned its head so quickly that the light winked from its ear tips. Brrr was rising from his chair and then dropping to his knees, awful creaking in his joints. He was curling up on the floor at the feet of the trembling old harridan. She was weeping into the edge of her shroud. He was purring, and rubbing his head against her ankles.

5

A KNOCK AT the door. Brrr sprang to a more dignified position at the arrival of Sister Apothecaire. “You must forgive me,” she said in tones that brooked no dispute in the matter. “Sister Hermit, walled up in the cenobitic tower, has broken her silence to drop down a message in a basket. An army vaster than she knows how to describe is fording the Gillikin River west of here.”