“You would be of no help at treaties, you boy-calf,” she said. “But you wonder whatdo I want of you.”

She let her mirrored shawl slip off her shoulders, and three black ivory combs clattered to the ground from her knotted hedge of thick white hair. The air grew very still, and clammy; there was a sense of Presence. The Princess closed her eyes and droned, and her hair seemed to pick at itself, and then to gather into a sleek sliding thing, and it ran off her back into a white coil on the ground. The shapeless gown of cotton geppling shifted on her hips, appeared to draw itself up into a peplum or a bustle, and then it snaked off.

Liir had never seen an unclothed woman before, old or young—only little Nor on washday, lithe in the copper tub, when she’d been a girl of four or five. The effect of a naked Princess was startling, the print of silvery hair at the groin, the pockets of flesh folding one over the other, the bosom flattened by age and gravity. Dorothy murmured

“Goodness!” as if she thought she must be witnessing exactly the opposite.

If this was magic, it was still spelling time. The Princess’s nose was lengthening, uncoiling, and the skin on her cement-colored cheeks stretched and thickened epibolically. Her eyes, which had been little more than slits in the folds of her face, lost their ovoid shape, rounded into marbles. A net of fine hairs sprouted on her brow and pate, her cheeks and chin and dramatically hostile nose. And ears:—yes, they were capable and then some.

More or less like an Elephant head, though not planted on an Elephant body.

“Perhaps I ought to have given you more warning,” she said. “It seems I’ve upset the girl.” Dorothy was retching into her apron, and her dog appeared to have had a nervous fit and passed out. “I have little use for niceties at this stage in my life, though.” Liir didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I am an Elephant,” said the Princess Nastoya. “From the Wizard’s pogroms against the Animals, I have been in hiding as a human all these long years. I’m admired by the Scrow for my longevity and what passes for my wisdom. In exchange for their protection, for a home in the Thousand Year Grasslands, I have performed my duty as a leader. But of late, young boy-thing, I am unable to shuck off my disguise with the ease I once had.

Though Elephants pretend to immortality, I believe I am dying. I must not be allowed to die in this half-form. I will die as an Elephant. But I need help.”

“How can I be of service?” asked Liir. As if I could do anything, he added to himself.

“I don’t know,” said the Princess Nastoya. “I once told Elphaba Thropp that if she needed help, she was only to send word, and I would put all my resources under her command. I never thought that the reverse would happen. That the time would come for me to apply to her for her knowledge of Animals, her native skill at spells and charms.