“He’d have been a child twenty years ago, an infant,” said Oatsie. “I never took an infant from a mauntery.”

“Perhaps not an infant. But you took him just the same. He traveled with a disagreeable novice who served for several years in the hospice. You were conveying them to the castle stronghold of the Arjikis. Kiamo Ko.”

“He was with Elphaba?”

“Now you remember, I see you do.”

“The Wicked Witch of the West…”

“As some called her.” The Superior Maunt sniffed. “Not I. Her name here was Sister Saint Aelphaba, but I seldom called her anything. She was more or less under a vow of silence—her own. She needed no addressing.”

“You recognize him from youth to now?” said Oatsie. “You’ve seen him since?”

“No. But I do not forget a face.”

Oatsie raised her eyebrows.

“I have seen so few faces,” explained the Superior Maunt. “We will not talk now. I must have Sister Doctor here to look the boy over.”

“Whatwas his name?”

The Superior Maunt vanished without answering.

By nightfall, as Oatsie’s clients finished their nightcaps, the next generation of rumors was launched. The man-child was the Emperor’s confessor. He was a brigand trafficking in the sex trade. He spoke in the voice of a Loon. Except for a single rib, the man-child had broken every bone in his body.

Many of the rumors were contradictory, which in the aggregate made them all more amusing.

3

IT WAS A HARD TIME.It had been a hard time, in Oz, for some time (for all time, said world-weary students). The Superior Maunt, too tired for colloquy, removed herself to her chambers and settled in a rocker. Amid trappings more severe than what her younger colleagues could tolerate, she rocked a little and thought, as coherently as she could. (It was a habit of hers, to forestall the onset of vagueness, that she review a strand of history from time to time.)

The Witch—so-called—had lived at the cloistered mauntery a decade and a half ago.

One couldn’t forgetthat —to the Superior Maunt’s knowledge, no one else in Oz had ever been born with skin as green as new lilac leaves. But Elphaba had kept herself to herself, accepting without complaint such assignments as were meted out. She’d lived there for, what, five, six, seven years? And then, the Superior Maunt had hired Oatsie Manglehand to escort the close-lipped novice back into the civilian world. The small boy had tagged along, neither warmly included nor shooed away.

What had his name been, and where had he come from? An urchin left behind by one of the gypsy bands that scavenged for petty mushrooms among the roots of oakhair trees?

The Superior Maunt couldn’t remember the lad’s provenance. Someone younger would know.

Elphaba had gone. Off to Kiamo Ko, there to stew in her own private penance. The Superior Maunt occasionally listened to testimonies of sin confessed by her sisters, but during her tenure as a maunt, Elphaba had never petitioned for an audience. Of this the Superior Maunt was quite sure. Though the nature of Elphaba’s sins had been of great interest to the under-entertained sorority, Elphaba had never obliged.