Maguire, Gregory - Wicked Years 01 - Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years Book 1) by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire [Maguire, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

4

A few weeks later, when the children were having snowball battles, and Sarima was concocting some medicinal toddy in the kitchen, Elphie left her room at last and skulked down the stairs and knocked on the door of the sisters’ parlor.

They didn’t like it, but they felt obliged to welcome her. The silver tray with bottles of hard liquor, the precious crystal carried on donkey all the way from Dixxi House in Gillikin, the prettiest and red-richest of native carpets on the floor, the luxury of fireplaces at both sides of the room, each blazing merrily—well, they would have toned it down some had they had any warning. As it was, Four hid in the sofa cushions the leather volume from which she had been reading aloud, a racy history of a poor young woman beset by an abundance of handsome suitors. It had been a gift from Fiyero once, the best gift he had ever sent the sisters—also the only one.

“Would you like some lemon barley water?” said Six, ever the servant until the day she died, unless by luck everyone else died sooner.

“Yes, all right,” Elphaba said.

“Do take a seat—this seat here, you’ll find it most comfy.”

Elphie didn’t look as if she wanted to be comfy, but she sat there anyway, stiff and uneasy in that quilted cocoon of a room.

She took the tiniest sip possible from her drink, as if suspecting hellebore.

“I suppose I need to apologize for that flurry over Chistery,” she said. “I know I am your guest here at Kiamo Ko. I just flew off the handle.”

“Well, you did just that,” started Five, but the others said, “Oh, think nothing of it, we all have days like that, in fact for us it usually happens on the same day, it’s been that way for years . . .”

“It’s very taxing,” Elphie said with some effort. “I spent many years under a vow of silence, and I haven’t always learned how—loud—it is permissible to get. Besides that, this is a foreign culture, in a way.”

“We Arjikis have always been proud of being able to speak to any other citizen in Oz,” said Two. “We are as equally at home with the ragged vagabond Scrow to our south as with the elite in the Emerald City to our east.” Not that they’d ever been out of the Vinkus.

“A little nibble?” said Three, bringing out a tin of marzipan fruits.

“No,” Elphie said, “but I wonder what you could tell me of your sister’s particular sadness.”

They sat poised, tempted, and suspicious.

“I enjoy my chats with her in the Solar,” said Elphie, “but whenever the talk gets around to her departed husband—whom as you may realize I myself knew—she is unwilling to discuss a thing.”

“Oh, well, it was so sad,” said Two.

“A tragedy,” said Three.

“For her,” said Four.

“For us,” said Five.

“Auntie Guest, take a little orange liqueur in your lemon barley,” said Six, “it comes from the balmy slopes of the Lesser Kells and is quite a luxury.”

“Well, just a drop,” said Elphie, but didn’t sip it.

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