Glinda's trip to the mountains lasts longer than she'd planned. She stays another two weeks, until she finally feels clean enough to return to the Emerald City and start cleaning it. She escapes the presence of her guards and the messengers who bring her news from the City and take back her orders, every day in the afternoon, and swims in the frigid mountain lake, relishing the feeling of conquering the water. And every evening, just before twilight, she takes her bubble and rises as high as she can stand, and looks west. She never sees anything but rolling green grasslands and sheep. Or Sheep.
Once she goes and asks one. Well, not right out, of course. She just asks if it's ever seen her, if she's ever been through this way. The sheep only stares back, mute or else giving a convincing show of it.
She does have to go back of course, because one thing she knows for certain is that Elphaba won't come back until everything is fixed. Until the Animals are living free of fear and the people can trust their government and they've finally built a cell strong enough that she won't keep dreaming about Morrible escaping someday. And then she thinks, maybe Elphaba won't come back until really everything is back the way it should be. Until the Wizard's Palace and his city of green, which is quickly becoming known as the color of lies and deceit among the people of Oz, are both gone. Until the newspapers are unshackled and start printing the truth, until all the prisoners have been given new trials and most released. She cries one morning over her tea when she realizes how long it will likely take before there are Animals on the faculty at Shiz again. Somehow she thinks this will be important.
She doesn't really start to despair, however, until the night she wakes from a tangled, confused dream with tears in her eyes, convinced suddenly that Elphaba won't ever come back until Glinda can figure out how to reverse spells. So that the poor monkeys could be fixed - Glinda claims in public that no one can find them, but of course they're still living out at Kiamo Ko, an abandoned, orphaned menagerie - and so that Boq wouldn't hate Elphaba anymore. Maybe if he forgave her, Nessa could be properly buried. Then Elphaba would come back.
Glinda knows two things for sure: one is that Morrible lies, but the other is that she can't read the Grimmerie well enough yet to start undoing Elphaba's inadvertent damage. She also knows she can't wait anymore. It's been three months now; one since she realized Elphaba couldn't, couldn't really be dead. It's been too long.
In the morning she goes to Munchkinland, for the first time since the little girl landed.
From the air she can see the differences already, though she doesn't know how to interpret them. The herds on the hills seem smaller, thinner, fewer. Some of the farmhouses are run down, more than she remembers, but three months seems too short a time for them to have fallen into such disrepair. The road is nearly overgrown with grass, its yellow barely glinting through the green.
She lands where she landed last time, just outside a central square. Although she'd heard tell, it's difficult for her to see, and her throat closes in quiet horror.
The house is still here. There's a fence around it, better maintained than half the houses she can see, and an ornate plaque declaring that here is where the Good Witch Dorothy set Munchkinland free. It makes no mention of how this was accomplished; presumably everyone knows. Or maybe they don't want to remember her name. Or they find her title too terrifying to be displayed to their children.
There's a humped mound overgrown with grass and sunflowers that appears to be growing out of the side of the house. That's where they heaped earth over whatever of Nessa might still have been visible. The irreverence makes her clutch at her stomach, but her grand ideas of a proper burial seem less grand here, where she can imagine what would have to be done. How the house would have to be moved off of what's left of Nessa, where she's been lying for months.
What's clear, at any rate, is that Elphaba hasn't been here.
It's not so much the voice behind her that makes her turn in trepidation - the voice is changed from what it once was, not so recognizable - as the quiet clanking. His name is on her lips before she's even seen him. "Boq."
His jerky nod is as shamed, as angry, as every time since she finally figured out his origin, his true identity. He told her the story, but he hates her for knowing it. She can tell. "Glinda," he returns. "We haven't seen you here since the Wizard left."
"Since before that," she replies softly. Behind him stretches the long expanse of a late-autumn cornfield, the crops stripped, the stalks beaten down by early storms. Soon they'll be ripped up and the ground plowed over - the ground where, despite her sending three separate search parties, they have never been able to find Fiyero's body. Her certain knowledge that he must have died there has done little to assuage her guilt, or her grief, without some way of apologizing to him. Even if Elphaba is alive, she's still responsible for him, as much as for Nessa.
"Why have you come now?"
She waves a hand around the square, indicating the brightly painted houses with their slightly shabby front yards and their sagging porches. "To see how things are going. How your rule is progressing." She almost trips over the words, but she thinks he doesn't notice.
"We don't have the resources we should," he says. "In controlling the country so thoroughly she didn't leave the people with much memory of how to manage things for themselves. But they'll learn."
"She?" It's a stupid question, but she wants him to say it.
"The Witch," he fairly spits, with remarkable force considering his lack of a human tongue.
Glinda offers him a sad, empty smile. "Which one? The one whose name you pretended to forget, or the one you pretended never to have known?"
If his rigid face could have fallen, it would have. "They both deserved everything they got," he says, harsh and low. Glinda thinks Dorothy wouldn't have recognized this voice, not from the kindly Tin Man she'd prattled on about. "Between them they trapped me in this living hell and then you left me to sort out her mistakes here."
"I was under the impression that you wanted to rule." Privately she's beginning to think of leaving him in his living hell, even if she ever does figure out how to reverse it. Surely Elphaba would understand.
"I wanted to help my own people." He gives her a sullen glare. "I loved you once. If I still could -"
"A heart is just an organ, Boq," she says wearily. "It can't love for you. If you had no feelings you wouldn't want to help your people, and you certainly wouldn't be so upset with me."
He stares back at her silently.
"If you had ever loved me in the first place . . ." She blinks away unexpected tears, hoping he hasn't seen them. "You wouldn't have done such wicked things."
"Do you take her side?"
"She doesn't have a side to take anymore, Boq, or have you forgotten?" She glances over at the gruesome shrine and thinks maybe she doesn't have to fix everything, maybe he deserves to do this. "I beg one thing of you, in memory of our school days."
He almost laughs. "What's that?"
She nods toward the tilted farmhouse. "Clear this away. Bury Nessa. Leave a sign if you must, but deal with her like a human being."
He does laugh, now, at her poor choice of words. "Like she and her sister did for me?"
Glinda's face hardens. "Then consider it an order to the ruler of Munchkinland. This is a site of historic importance to all of Oz, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Emerald City. Furthermore, to leave a dead body unburied is unsanitary. Do it yourself, don't do it yourself, but get it done." She picks up her skirts in her hands and heads for the edge of the cornfield.
"Where are you going?"
"To pay my respects," she snaps back.
"She died right here."
"Not to her."
A swarm of ladybugs covers the ground, feasting out of season on the invisible insects that cover the rotting cornstalks, as she sweeps between the rows. The flowing red surge looks uncomfortably like blood, and she turns away, stopping only when she runs straight into a scarecrow someone has forgotten to take down. She blinks when she realizes it's not someone's scarecrow, it's that scarecrow, and he's bowing to her. "I'm sorry," she says hastily. "I wasn't looking."
"Miss Glinda." His eyes are cool, if such a thing were possible for a scarecrow. "What are you doing so far off the path?"
"I was . . ." She takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the sweet-sick smell of rot. "I wanted to visit this place, I - lost something here."
"Lost something?"
"Someone. I lost someone." She nods, decisively. "Two someones, really, when you think about it."
"Do you see them?" He's pointing down at the ladybug flood with a canvas finger.
"Yes," she says, averting her eyes from the sight. "Why are there so many?"
He shrugs. "Magic?"
Something about his innocent expression makes her laugh, though it feels uncomfortable. "You believe we have any magic, still?"
". . . I'm a living scarecrow."
She throws up both her hands. "Logic! Who knew?"
The canvas around his eyes crinkles in a near-perfect imitation of human laughter. "You remind me of someone."
"Really? Who?"
For a moment he seems about to answer, but then he gives her that same thoughtless smile. "I guess I don't remember."
She squints at the ladybug brigade, now climbing up one of the stalks that remains standing. Their color dyes it crimson in the morning sun. "Magic ladybugs?"
"There's lots of things we don't understand. Maybe someone here likes them. Or liked them." His eyes scan the sky above her - no, off in the distance - as if he's looking for something. Suddenly he says, "It's safe for you to go home now."
She takes a step back from him, although she's more confused than alarmed. "It wasn't before?"
His smile is still blank, but now it seems almost calculated. "I only give the message," he says. "Go home. You're doing well enough."
"Is that the message, then?"
"It's all the message." He's ducking away before she can stop him, blending in with the waving, sagging stalks. She's not sure she would want to follow him anyway; her skin is crawling and there's a storm on the way.
The sky is gray and windy by the time she reaches the Emerald City. She enters her apartments cautiously, but no one is there and nothing seems out of place. A momentary rush of panic sends her diving for the hidden compartment of the wardrobe where she hides the Grimmerie, but it's still there, unharmed. In her sigh of relief she almost doesn't notice that it's lying on its front. After her study sessions, or after those times in the middle of the night when she creeps to the wardrobe and huddles there with the book in her lap, she always places it reverently in the compartment the same way - face up, perfectly straight, with its ancient title facing her. It's been moved.
She casts the book carelessly aside and stands up, legs shaking, smoothing her dress. "Elphaba?" she calls to the empty room, her voice trembling. "Elphaba, no one else would know to look for it." She pauses, licking her lips, but nothing answers her but silence. She gives one last try, voice small and desperate. "Elphie?" She knows it's no use; somehow the scarecrow knew, knew that someone dangerous was at the Palace. Well, of course Elphaba isn't dangerous, but he had no way of knowing that. She's gone, she must be, or he wouldn't have told Glinda it was safe.
Glinda rushes to the window, but she already knows it's much too late to see anything. After a while of scanning the sky she returns to the foot of the wardrobe and pulls the Grimmerie into her lap, understanding now that Elphaba was looking for something.
The book falls open on its own to a spell Glinda hasn't looked at before, to a page marked with what appears to be a dried reed, from the western grasslands, perhaps. The words swim in front of her eyes and they're slow to resolve themselves into any kind of sense, but she realizes what she's been given even before she reads the words. It's a spell to unlock change, to turn cycles on themselves, to undo what's already been done. It exists after all. And she's certain now that Elphaba was here, Elphaba came to find it for her.
Or perhaps there's something Elphaba wants to undo.
Glinda carries the book over to the window and sits down in the light to study the spell. She'll start with the monkeys, she thinks. Boq can wait.