Son of a Witch

SON OF A WITCH

A NOVEL

Gregory Maguire

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS ARE DUE to the team at ReganBooks, starting with Judith Regan and including Cassie Jones, Paul Olsewski, and Jennifer Suitor.

Thank you to David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss for commenting on early drafts ofSon of a Witch .

Thank you to Haven Kimmel and to Eve Ensler, for encouraging words sent at precisely the right moment.

Thank you to Harriet Barlow, Ben Strader, and the company of Blue Mountain Center, New York.

Thank you, again, to Andy Newman, for defending the ramparts as usual, and to Lori Shelly, for able assistance at every wicked little thing.

A DF Books NERD's Release

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GREGORY MAGUIREis the bestselling author ofSon of a Witch ,Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister ,Lost ,Mirror Mirror , andWicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West , the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has lectured on art and culture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the DeCordova Museum as well as at conferences at home and abroad. An occasional reviewer for theNew York Times Book Review , he lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

ALSO BY GREGORY MAGUIRE

Wicked

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Lost

Mirror Mirror

Copyright

SON OF A WITCH. Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Maguire. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maguire, Gregory.

Son of a witch : a novel / Gregory Maguire.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-054893-2 (cloth)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

L. FRANK BAUM’S second Oz novel,The Marvelous Land of Oz(1904), was dedicated to the actors David C. Montgomery and Fred A. Stone, who performed the roles of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in the first theatrical version ofThe Wizard of Oz.

In that spirit,Son of a Witch is dedicated to the cast and creative team of the musicalWicked, which opened on Broadway in October 2003—the night before Halloween.

To Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz, foremost and first, for their vision; to Wayne Cilento, Susan Hilferty, Eugene Lee, Joe Mantello, Stephen Oremus, Kenneth Posner, and Marc Platt and his associates, for bringing visions to life; and, among all the capable cast, most especially to Kristin Chenoweth (Galinda/Glinda), Joel Grey (The Wizard), and Idina Menzel (Elphaba), for bringing life to visions.

IHAVE NO FEARthat the poetry of democratic peoples will be found timid or that it will stick too close to the earth.