Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 by Son of a Witch Page B

voice was low, tympanic, as if her nasal passages were large enough for the storage of melons.
    “I am sore with disbelief,” she said, the interpreter translating. “I had only known that the Witch sent out Crows to call for help. Before they could reach me, they were attacked and their flesh devoured by a posse of nocturnal rocs.”
    “How do you know about the Crows?” asked Liir. “If they were eaten by rocs?”
    “Nocturnal rocs are mute beasts,” said the Princess, “but the attack was witnessed by a Grey Eagle who keeps an eye on a certain district for me. He drove the rocs away from one Crow, who managed to pass on the message of the Witch’s embattlement before dying. The Eagle delivered the message to me as I was closing a convocation with some of the southern Arjiki clans.”
    “The Witch ought to have been told about that,” said Liir. “She considered herself an honorary Arjiki, sort of.”
    “I won’t be lectured on strategy or protocol,” replied the Princess. “In any case, I did invite her. But I never knew if my invitation got through. I was told that she was distracted with grief over the death of her sister.”
    “She was…unsteady…at the end,” admitted Liir. “I’m not sure how much she could have done for you, or if she would have bothered. In truth, she was kind of a hermit. She kept to herself.” Even when it came to me, he remembered.
    “I’d have put the case forcefully to her, had I gotten her attention,” asserted the Princess. “She was no fool. She saw that when the breadbasket of Munchkinland was ruinously taxed by the Emerald City’s chancellors, it had to break away and form a Free State. If pressed, we here in the west will do no less than that ourselves. My attempts to build an allegiance with the Yunamata have come to naught, and the Arjikis can enjoy their own insularity, obstinate slope dwellers!—but we Scrow will not stand by and let our Grasslands be plundered. The Wizard is amassing an army on the eastern slope of the Kells. I know how he works, you whippet.”
    The Princess groaned. “She might have been a help! But it is too late. I hear through the report of a Mountain Grite that the peculiar woman is dead. Elphaba.”
    The interpreter pronounced it wrong. “EL-phaba,” said Liir.
    “Is the murderer here among us?” asked the Princess.
    “It was an accident,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t mean it.” She put the end of one of her pigtails into her mouth and chewed it.
    “The deceased was a curious creature,” said the Princess. “I only met her once, but she impressed me with her stamina. She did not seem the type to die.”
    “Who does?” said Dorothy.
    “Speak for yourself,” muttered the Lion. “I die a little bit every day, especially if there are unfriendly faces in the room.”
    Through her factotum, the Princess continued her message. “You are in grave danger. Not least from me. Murder and theft of the Witch’s belongings, the way I see it, but even worse: doing so in collusion with the Wizard.”
    Liir protested, sputtering. “Not in collusion with the Wizard!”
    “Well, the Wizard of Oz did ask me to kill her,” admitted Dorothy. “No use crying over that spilt milk. He did, and I won’t lie about it. But I didn’t intend to do it. I just wanted her forgiveness for the accidental death of her sister. And then there was the bucket of water. And how was I to know? I mean, we don’t have witches back home in Kansas. We wouldn’t hear of it.”
    “You’ve got it all wrong,” interrupted Liir. “Listen, Princess Nastoya, please. I lived with the Witch all my life. There’s no question of theft. I am the next of kin.”
    “How so?”
    He couldn’t answer. The Princess pressed her point.
    “Can you prove it?”
    He shrugged. His skin was neither green, like Elphaba’s, nor musky ocher, like Fiyero’s children and widow. Liir was rather pasty, in fact; not a convincing specimen of anything, when you got right down