"Why should I keep myself so safe?" he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from being scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, Prince of the Arjikis, that they would hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness to the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?
"I love you," said Elphaba.
"So that's that then, and that's it," he answered her, and himself. "And I love you. So I promise to be careful."
Careful of us both, he thought.-From Wicked
Something bad is happening in Oz...-Wicked the Musical
"I detest this. It feels so common, so vulgar," Fabala bemoaned. She tugged at the frayed rope encircling her neck.
Fiyero shrugged and held onto the other end in a careless manner. "Its commonplace these days. Especially in the more civilized places. "
If it was possible for a she-Goat to snort and sneer, Fabala did just then. "Civilized, pah! Those devils up in Emerald City are the most ruthless, the most barbaric..." But she didn't finish her thought, too outraged to go on.
Fiyero hoped she didn't see his almost smile. She may take it the wrong way. So he tried appealing to her plight. "I know what you mean. Those Gillikenese and their high-class mentality. When I was at Shiz it was always the pointing and the 'Look, its a Winkie!'"
Fabala gave him a reproving look. "Just like a man, to make everything about himself,' she grumbled.
He cleared his throat. "I'm not making it about me," to this she interrupted with another 'Pah!' He decided to ignore it and kept talking. "Its about both of 're in this together."
She gave him another sour look. "Together, a? I don't see a rope around your neck."
"Its invisible but its there. Sarima holds the other end with an iron grip," he said quickly. Fabala snorted again and shuffled her hooves in the grasslands ran out and now there was just sand and stone and a persistant wind from the west. The wind was bitter hot and dry and pestered them with sand. The two of them took refuge under a stunted kender tree. Fiyero strung a tarp of skark skin from one low branch. It provided little shade but protected them from the sand blasts.
"A caravan would have been more prudent," Fabala said, grumbling some more.
"There are soldiers amassing in Red Windmill. A regiment of the Wizard's Army. It is my duty to my people to find out why. A caravan would take too long. "
"He fears you," the she-Goat said darkly. It went without saying who he was. She turned her emerald green eyes on him. "They call you the Hungry Tiger."
He grinned at that. "Oh, I've heard that one before. But silly nonsense. Rumors and propaganda. People are so empty-headed they'll believe anything. There is not one dignitary worth noting that doesn't embellish on his grandeur or his strengths or his prowess. Take the Wizard, for example." And he spread his hands as if that explained the matter.
"Be that as it may, there is a power in the west. The Wizard knows. He fears an uprising."
He gave her a suspicious look. "How is it that you know so much?"
She ignored the question and dropped a bombshell. "They say you are in cahoots with the Witch of the West."
He was stunned by the revelation. But then laughed at the concept. "Now that's propaganda. There is no Witch of the West, save for the Kumbrica Witch, in days of old. And that, of course, was way before my time."
"Are you so certain?" She gave him a look he couldn't decipher.
"I certainly have never seen her," he asserted.
She backtracked a bit. "Still it gives him pause. You give him pause," she elaborated.
Two days later, they crossed the Restwater and came within sight of Emerald City. At this point. Fabala became ornery. "I'll not be tied and pinned like some goat!" She planted her hooves and would not budge. "I won't have it!"
So Fiyero resigned himself to stay with her outside the city walls. A stately, Quoxwood tree spread out on their end. The two travellers sought shelter beneath it and it provided ample relief from the merciless sun.
There was little chatter among them that evening. Both were exhausted from the desert wandering. She did however sidle up next to him and place her head in his lap to sleep. She suffered him to throw an arm across her back and let him scratch her spine. Fiyero wondered about this. Most sentient Animals were usually too proud to allow themselves to be treated as a common pets. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind.
Fiyero slept like a dead thing, though the sun was still high and unrelenting. Fabala, on the other hand, was ill at ease. She fretted and stewed. She managed to sleep, but kept alert all the while, in case things went to hell. She couldn't say, just then, what had her all riled up but she knew that for whatever his shortcomings she was fond of at least this one human. The rest of them could burn as far as she was concerned.
