But I have started too late, I see, for your companion has murdered my only hope.”

“Dorothy was not to know,” said Liir.

“Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too.”

“It’s disgusting, actually,” whispered the Lion to the Tin Woodman. “Do you know, my stomach is turning as we speak.”

“I don’t have a talent at spells,” said Liir. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“How do you know?” asked the Princess. “Have you tried? Have you studied?”

“I’m not a good student, and furthermore I’m not much interested.” The huge proboscis whipped up from nowhere. Her nose-digits grabbed his chin. She would crush his skull, chin-first. “Get interested,” she said. “Get interested, or get help. If you’re not to be murdered for your crimes against Elphaba—and that might yet happen—

get yourself enough knowledge from someone, somewhere, to help. Was there a book, a Grimmerie? Did Elphaba have associates? I don’t care how long it takes, but come back to me. I can’t die like this. I won’t. In the end, all disguises must drop.”

“You confuse me with someone else,” he said. “Someone with competence. Someone I never met.”

“This isn’t a request,” she said. “It’s an order. I am a colleague of Elphaba’s.” She lifted her nasal limb from Liir’s chin and blew her own horn in his face. His eyes stewed in his skull, and some of the hair at the front of his scalp was raked bloodily away by the force of the blast. “If you claim to be a relation of the Witch’s, you will figure out what to do.

She always could.”

“Well, not always,” Dorothy corrected her helpfully, “as is woefully apparent at this moment in time.”

“I will pay you,” concluded the Princess, apparently addressing Liir alone. “I will keep my ears to the ground for word of your abducted friend—Fiyero’s cub, Nor. Nor, was it?

Come back to me with a solution and I will tell you all I’ve been able to learn in the meantime.”

Liir couldn’t speak, but he held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture even he couldn’t read. Accepting the task? Protesting his inadequacy? Whatever—it didn’t matter. The Princess was done with them. She turned her massive Elephant head, wobbling on its all-too-human spine, and a dozen Scrow rushed to hold her up. They cloaked the acreage of her buttocks, as if to protect her from a sort of ignominy that, anyway, could never have attached itself to her. Even a half-thing, trapped in a decaying spell, she was too much herself for shame to apply.

“SHE DIDN’T KEEP ONE OF USas a hostage,” said the Lion, almost delirious. “I was sure it was going to be me. But I could never have dealt with it.”

“She trusted us,” said Liir.

They settled into a pattern of traipsing day after day, under skies of broken cloud and brittle light. To avoid the Wizardic armies, they kept to the western base of the Great Kells. In places the upright thrusts of the mountains rose from the grassland floor as cleanly as the front of a corncrib meets a level floor: one could almost mark with a pencil where the plain stopped and the slope began.