When the dawn crept into Elphaba and Azure's cell, she was at last asleep, slumped in a chair next to her son's cradle. Her hair fell in front of her face like a stringy curtain, her forehead resting in her long green hands. She looked exhausted and haggard, her breathing rough and ragged.

Only when Azure began to cry did Elphaba awake. She fed him first, and as he sucked he stroked her chest tenderly with his tiny fingers, caressing her. When the infant was full he turned his head away from her nipple and nuzzled his forehead in the soft skin between her breasts, mewling. She laughed at the sensation, startling herself—it had been so long since she laughed.

Elphaba bathed Azure in warm water—he gurgled happily, loving the feeling of wet on his naked body—and managed to keep her own fingers dry. When he was clean, she wrapped him a cloth and he lay in his cradle, cooing, while she cleaned herself, standing in the shadows. Elphaba rubbed shining oil on her deep green skin, between her legs, thinking of Fiyero and the nights in the Emerald City.

Well-oiled and dressed in long, billowing black skirts, Elphaba took Azure to the offices of the Superior Maunt. When she strapped him to her back with a strip of cloth, he began to flail and beat his tiny fists against her neck to be released, wailing pitifully. He calmed quickly when she held him in her arms, pressing him to her bosom and crooning into his hair, and Elphaba felt a surge of relief and happiness.

The Superior Maunt greeted Elphaba and her son at the door. She was an elderly woman, with wispy gray hair and thick creases of age at her mouth and eyes, dressed in a long black headscarf and a thin, simple gray shift. The maunt watched Elphaba warily as the green woman stalked into her chambers, the infant lying still in the crook of her arm.

"Miss Elphaba. A guest in our mauntery for over a year now, and this is the first time I've met you. And your son. What do you call him—?" The Superior Maunt shut the door gently behind them and waited for a response, but Elphaba said nothing. She sat in a chair in the far corner of the large, airy room, and stroked Azure's cheek with the back of her long green hand.

"There is no rule of silence here, Miss Elphaba. I'd love to know his name, he's a beautiful child."

The green woman seemed to struggle for a moment before finally willing herself to speak. "Azure," she whispered, forcefully. "I call him Azure."

"After his father, no doubt," the Superior Maunt said, kindly. It was tradition in the Emerald City to name sons for their fathers, and tradition was rarely broken.

Elphaba did not answer. Instead, she raised her head and looked the maunt fiercely in the eye. "I have to leave. That's why I came here," she said, her voice no longer a whisper. "I—I can't live here anymore, I can't let Azure—" she bowed her head again and softly touched her son's closed fist, unable to finish.

"Where will you go?" The Superior Maunt's brow was knit in concern.

Head still bent, Elphaba murmured, "I don't know. Away."

They sat in silence. The green woman stared, transfixed, into the eyes of the baby lying on her breast, and the Superior Maunt watched them, with a mixture of—was it jealousy?—on her worn face.

Finally, she spoke. "Oz is a cruel, cold place for a lonely mother and child, Miss Elphaba. You

have a home here, you and—and Azure."

Elphaba's reply was cold. "I don't have a home anywhere," she said, emotionless. "Neither

does my son."

"We can care for him," the elder woman coaxed. "We can feed him, clothe him—more than

you will be able to do once you've left us. If you stay here, you'll have food, religion, guidance—"

Elphaba shook her head, her face twisted unpleasantly, and looked at the floor. "I tried to give him up," she said, holding back tears, trying to convince herself. "I—I tried to leave him. I told myself I wouldn't look at him, I'd—I'd leave him before I could get attached."

The Superior Maunt's face melted into concern and fear. "And then…"

"And then I heard him cry, for me—" Elphaba's face was wet with tears. "I couldn't. I can't leave him here, I can't let him grow up here," she said, and then her voice became a forced whisper. "I love him so much."

The Superior Maunt reached tenderly towards Elphaba, to touch the young woman's clenched green fist. Elphaba made a strangling noise and drew away, wiping her cheeks, her face contorted in pain. "If you love him, Elphaba—" the elderly woman whispered.

The green woman grimaced at the sound of her name and gritted her teeth, biting back a surge of unbidden emotion.

"Tomorrow," she said, her voice strained. "Tomorrow we'll leave."

"It's snowing outside," the maunt said, imploringly.

Elphaba only shushed Azure, who was fussing softly after being rudely awoken, and did not look the other woman in the eye. She left the Superior Maunt's chambers without another word.

Later that afternoon, as she mopped the floors of the sloping chapel room with Azure strapped to her back, she considered her options. She could seek out Frex, in the swampy marshlands of Quadling Country—but she could not let Azure relive her cruel, lonely childhood in the foul-smelling bogs of a forgotten slum-land. She could return to her apartment over the corn exchange in the Emerald City—but Fiyero's blood, and his memory, still lived there. She could not face the idea of returning.

Just then, Azure awoke from his deep slumber with a small wail, and Elphaba set her mop down and unstrapped him from her back. She undid the cords of her black cloak, shed it, and lay it in folds on the floor. With a piece of string and a few barter tokens from her pocket, Elphaba made a mobile to amuse Azure while she finished her cleaning, and watched smilingly as he lay on his back and batted at the dangling coins with tiny fists.

The bells in the old stone tower tolled to call the maunts to their devotions. Elphaba looked silently through the archway that led into the courtyard where the religious women were communing, a faraway look in her eyes. The murmuring of prayer and the swells of song wafted into the chapel as more and more black-clad women bowed their heads and knelt on the flagstones of the square.

By the time the maunts had deserted the courtyard to return to their duties, Azure had calmed, lying limply on his cloth and watching the makeshift mobile swing and glitter in the golden light of the chapel. Elphaba watched him lovingly, and somehow still in pain—as if, after all she had been through, they came hand in hand: love and pain, pain and love. Or were they one in the same?

When the floors of the chapel shone with wax and wet, Elphaba fed Azure on a bench in the courtyard. The boy's tiny hands stroked the tender skin of Elphaba's breast as he sucked, in the way Fiyero had done in the wake of a heated night of lovemaking. Everything about her son reminded Elphaba of her lost lover: the way he blinked his big blue eyes at her; the way he slept with his feet tucked underneath him, curled in a U shape; the way Azure's dusting of hair was the same deep brown as Fiyero's had been.

Azure was perfect, and that was what frightened her: could her son, who was so beautiful—so flawless—ever love somebody as ugly and scarred and broken as she was? In her tortured dreams at night—if she slept at all—Elphaba saw Azure leave her, for somebody like Glinda; she saw him hate her for her ugliness, inside and out.

She held him tightly to her breast, feeling his light caress against her skin, never wanting to let go.