Like the junior maunts sent out on a mission by the toadies helming the motherchapel in the Emerald City. Those sycophantic biddies! They’d cluck themselves to death if their Emperor asked it. Their emissaries, those innocent young things, had stopped here at the Cloister of Saint Glinda for nourishment and cheer. Where were their faces now, wondered the Superior Maunt. She hoped she’d never see them again, neither in her dreams nor in a parcel in the delivery of post.

She was drifting off to sleep in her rocker. She arose, groaning at the pain in her joints, and tried to pull her shutters tight. One of them stuck and had to stay as it was. She’d meant to have it seen to this afternoon, but with the arrival of the caravan, she’d forgotten.

She visited the toilet reserved for her private use, and dressed in her rough gown for the night. When she settled herself on her horsehair mattress, she hoped she would drift off quickly. It had been a taxing day.

The jackal moon looked in her window at her. The Superior Maunt turned her head so as not to meet its eye, a folk custom with which she’d been raised seven, eight decades earlier, and never shaken.

Her mind went briefly to those days in the Pertha Hills of Gillikin, days sharper and more wonderful in memory than what she could apprehend of current life. The taste of pearlfruit leaves! The water on her father’s wagon roof when the rains came. The rains came so much more often in her youth. The snow smelled of things. Everything smelled.

Wonderfully or not, it was wonderful that they smelled. Now her nose hardly worked at all.

She said a prayer or two.

Liir. That was his name. Liir.

She prayed to remember it when the time came for her to wake up.

4

THE NEXT MORNING,before Oatsie Manglehand gathered her band together for the final push to the Emerald City, she took Nubb to a small plain parlor. There they met with the Superior Maunt, Sister Doctor, and Sister Apothecaire.

When the Superior Maunt sat down, the others sat. Since she abstained from morning tea, the others abstained.

“If we are to help this boy, we must share what we know,” began the Superior Maunt.

“I’ve picked up all sorts of hearsay. A report from Sister Doctor, if you please.” Sister Doctor, a beefy woman with questionable credentials but proven expertise in diagnosis, wasn’t sanguine about the prospects for the invalid. “He appears to have suffered little from exposure, so he will have been left for dead only shortly before you found him.”

Oatsie didn’t speak to this. She didn’t want to begin by contradicting a professional woman, even if she thought Sister Doctor had to be wrong.

Sister Doctor pressed on. “He is a shattered man, quite literally. It isn’t mine to guess how he came to be so wounded, but his state is like nothing I’ve ever seen. One of his legs is broken in multiple places; both his wrists are sprained. One of his shoulder blades is cracked. Many of his ribs. Four of his fingers. Three of the bones in his left foot. Not a single bone punctured the skin, however. And, apparently, no blood loss.” Not unless the blood ran off in the rain squall, thought Oatsie, but kept still.