“I can’t imagine. It must be dreadful for you.”

“I’m sure it would be.” He smiled under his lowered brow. “I mean, the noise of a gabbling child and four women under one roof.”

“You don’t fool me. You miss them dreadfuly. What are their names?”

“I choose not to talk about them. It helps me not miss them as much.”

“Is that breeze causing the candle to spit wax on your plate? Thoughtless of me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Miss Murth?” Murth was sitting in an upright chair just inside the window, her hands folded in her lap. “Yes, Lady Glinda.”

“I know you aren’t spry enough to clamber out the window ledge with an oil lamp in a glass chimney. One that won’t gutter so in this updraft. Would you cal the broomgirl to do it? She is agile enough, unlike the rest of us.”

“I’m happy to oblige, Lady Glinda,” said Cherrystone. “Alow me.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it. Miss Murth?”

“I think the girl is asleep, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda waited.

“But I’l wake her.”

“How wonderful. The lamps on the escritoire. Both of them. Thank you.”

She tried without success to bring up the subject of the construction going on in the barns, but Cherrystone affably declared that too dul to discuss over such a fine meal. What next? He complimented the local landscape. She concurred: the lake before them in the moonlight, sheer silk spangled with diamond chunks, wasn’t it divine? Less cloyingly, they discussed the social makeup of the nearest vilages. “I do trust you’re paying the local farmers for al the food you’re demanding from them,” she ventured.

“We’re at war, Lady Glinda. I try to make it look as much like a picnic as I can, but you can’t have forgotten that Munchkinlanders provoked the Ozian army to invade.”

“Wel, nor have I forgotten that Oz was massing an army of invasion on the border for weeks and weeks before the Munchkinlanders made a raid against it.”

“Defensive positioning, Lady Glinda.”

“Spoiling for a fight, and the fools bit. Though had they not bit in time, you’d have come up with some other reason to invade. The Emerald City has had its eye on Restwater even since my own time in office, Traper, though I did my best to change the subject.”

“Don’t let’s talk military strategy. Do you play an instrument, Lady Glinda?”

“I have a set of musical toothpicks I must show you someday. Ah, here she is.”

Rain slung one leg over the windowsil. She was dressed in a man’s castoff nightshirt. It made her look like an urchin. Her calves were smooth and pale, the color of new cream in the moonlight. Her dark hair hadn’t seen the benefit of a comb recently. Once through the window, she turned back and took the lamps Miss Murth handed her. The light on either side of her face made her look like a visitation from some chapel story of youthful piety. She was nearly pretty, but for the dirt on her face and her cross, sleepy expression.