Dorothy asked perfunctory questions, but she was more interested in making sure they didn’t lose their way. How wouldhe know if they went off course, he asked her—it had been seven or eight years since he’d come from the mauntery with Elphaba, and he’d never left the neighborhood of Kiamo Ko in all the time since. Dorothy had much more recent experience of the greater landscape.

“Yes, well, those Flying Monkeys carried me the last bit,” she said nervously, “and I can’t claim to have had my wits about me enough to have taken note of landmarks. Still, we’re going downslope, and that’s got to be right.”

“Everything is downslope of Kiamo Ko,” Liir told her.

“I like your confidence,” she said. “Tell me about yourself, then.” He suspected his memories of young childhood were like anyone else’s: imprecise, suggestible, and largely devoid of emotion. He didn’t recall defining moments—maybe there weren’t any—but he did remember the sensation of things. The shafts of light slanting through the mullioned windows high up in the gallery, pinning silent maunts to their silent shadows on the stone floor. The smell of asparagus cream soup, a little maple syrup drizzled on top. The smell of snow in the air. Liir had been attached to Elphaba, somehow, he remembered that: he’d been allowed to play with his broken wooden ducky in the same room where she sat and spun wool.

“Was she your mother?” asked Dorothy. “I’m terribly sorry to have killed her if she was.

I mean I’m sorry anyway, but more so if you were related.” The girl’s directness was puzzling, and Liir wasn’t used to it. The Witch had never hidden her emotions, but nor had she explained them, and in many ways living with her had been like sharing an apartment with an ill-tempered house pet.

He tried to be honest, but there was so much he didn’t know. “I started out with her,” he said. “How, as a toddler, I came to be among the maunts, I can’t say. No one has ever told me, and the Witch wouldn’t talk about it. I remember other women from those times, Sister Cupboard and Sister Orchard, and some of the more playful ones, the novices, who kept their own names, Sister Saint Grayce, and Sister Linnet. But when it came time for Elphaba to leave, they wrapped up my small packet of clothes, too, and I was lifted up to a seat on a wagon, and we joined a party that went through the Kells, stopping here and there until we got to Kiamo Ko.”

“It’s awfully out of the way,” said Dorothy, looking around at the unpeopled slopes of pine and potterpine, and the slides of scree, and the scraggles of mountain lavender going to seed.

“She wanted to be out of the way. And besides, it’s where Fiyero had lived.”

“Your father?”

Liir was as doubtful of his paternity as he was of his maternity. “He had meant something to her, to the Witch,” he pointed out. “But what, I don’t know. I never met him. Can you imagine the Witch would sit down and pour out her heart to me?”