“I don’t follow,” said the Superior Maunt.

“The body had to have been lying there for longer than Sister Doctor suggests. I would have seen the marauders in retreat. There was no place for them to hide. There is no tree cover. You know how bright a night it was; I could see for miles.”

“Puzzling indeed.”

“Do you use magic in your ministrations?”

“Oatsie Manglehand,” said the Superior Maunt tiredly, “we are a sorority of unionist maunts. Such a question.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with old, bowed fingers. Over her venerable figure, Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire both nodded silently to Oatsie:Yes. We do. What little we’re capable of. When we need to .

The Superior Maunt continued. “Before resting for the night, I recalled his name. The boy was named Liir. He left the mauntery with Sister Saint Aelphaba—well, Elphaba, I suppose; she never professed her vows. Do you remember the boy at all, Sister Doctor?”

“I had just arrived about the time Elphaba was setting out,” said Sister Doctor. “I remember Elphaba Thropp a little. I didn’t care for her. Her moods and silences seemed hostile rather than holy. Of the many urchins who are abandoned around here, however, I remember even less. Children don’t interest me unless they are gravely ill. Was he gravely ill?”

“He is now,” said the Superior Maunt. “And somewhere, if his mind is still able to dream, he is still a child in there, I presume.”

“Very sentimental indeed, Mother Maunt,” said Sister Doctor.

“I do remember him, now you give his name,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “Not well, of course. In the better years I make three or four separate runs, and we’re talking twelve, fifteen, eighteen years ago? I have packed more than a few children onto heaps of worldly goods, and buried some by the side of the track as well. But he was a quiet lad, unsure of himself. He shadowed Elphaba as if she were his mother. Was she his mother?”

“Oh, dubious, very dubious,” said Sister Doctor.

“There is the green tone to his bruises,” Sister Apothecaire reminded them.

“I blush when I’m embarrassed, Sister Apothecaire; this does not relate me to the radish,” said the Superior Maunt. “Well, we’ll have to ask around. Most of the older sisters who might have remembered Elphaba are dead now, and the others are in their second childhood. But Sister Cook, if she hasn’t been guzzling the cooking sherry—or perhaps if she has—she will know something. She always slips food to the children loitering in the kitchen yard, and she may remember where the boy came from.

“Meanwhile”—and the good woman rose, to signal that the meeting was done—“we will do our best with Liir, whether he be witch’s spawn or the reject of a gypsy mother. It hardly matters on one’s deathbed from whom one has been born, does it? The world is the womb now, and the Afterlife waits for one to be born into it.” She turned rheumy eyes on Oatsie Manglehand. The wagoneer could see that the Superior Maunt was waiting, hopefully, for her own deliverance from this world and delivery unto the next. Oatsie accepted the old woman’s cool hands on her forehead, knowing the gesture was intended as a blessing, a forgiveness…perhaps a farewell.