"Oh, Oz, oh, fuck," Elphaba said. Fiyero felt it was a pretty accurate summation of the situation. Elphaba didn't give him a moment to voice his thoughts, however; she stalked towards the building seemingly without a passing thought for the danger.
"Elphaba!" He grabbed her cloak and pulled her back. "Are you insane? They could still be in there!"
"They aren't," she said without explanation. "No one is. Except- oh, Oz!" she pulled away from him and broke into a run, disappearing through the door before he had even begun to follow.
"Elphaba? Elphaba, what's wrong? Where are you?" Fiyero called uselessly as he came into the front hall. She was nowhere in sight, but at least she had been right: whoever had been there and broken down the door was gone. They were alone.
He heard Elphaba's voice rise in a curse from the back of the house and he dashed toward the sound.
He found her in what must have served as Moya's or Lysia's bedroom, standing in front of an open armoire.
Holding a baby.
…
She had a look of absolute puzzlement on her face, combined with one of unmitigated rage. It made for quite a funny picture: The now completely green woman stood in a light blue dress, her long black hair growing more disheveled by the second, holding a child as if it were a bomb as it attempted to grasp at her hair.
"Fiyero," she said, "There's someone you didn't meet this morning."
He waited, his mouth wide enough for a fist to fit through without so much as grazing his teeth.
"This," she said, holding the child out even further from her body, "is Galwan. Lysia's son."
Fiyero hurried across the room to her, suspending his shock, and took the little boy in his arms. The child was about two, fairy-blond, and chubby; altogether a typical toddler. Elphaba, relieved of the child, buried her face in her hands and collapsed onto the bed, then jumped up again a mere moment later, panic written in her eyes.
"Leilana?" she called, "Flann? Are you here? Are you-" she heard a meow issue from the kitchen and she ran inside, followed quickly by Fiyero and Galwan. Raven ran over to her and twined herself between Elphaba's calves, her mews growing more and more urgent. Elphaba scooped her up almost absently.
"Shit," she said, tears threatening in her voice. "Shit."
"Fae, what is it, what's wrong?" Fiyero didn't understand why the presence of her cat had nearly reduced her to tears. As usual, he couldn't follow her gigantic leaps in logic, guided by her intuition.
"Raven's here," she said. "Leilana and Flann aren't. Idiots. They didn't do what they were supposed to, they didn't pretend they couldn't…that they weren't…"
"That they weren't what?"
She looked at him with watery tears making her hazel eyes luminous.
"Animals," she said. "They didn't pretend that they couldn't speak."
She cursed again. Raven and Galwan stared at her with looks of equal perplexity. The boy began to cry, and the cat scampered away into a corner at the unfamiliar sound. "He'll kill them," she said, pacing, "or worse. Damn, damn, damn it. Moya and Lysia could've gotten out of it, but now that Flann and Leilana are in it, they won't. Those two are illegal by virtue of their existence, and by revealing it they've fucked us all!"
"As if you wouldn't have done the same," Fiyero said quietly. She whirled to look at him, her eyes far away. She had clearly forgotten that he and Galwan were in the room, quite possibly that they existed at all.
"What do you mean?" There was desperation cloaked in the folds of her voice, the need to cling tenuously to a thread of reality.
"Sacrificing pragmaticism and self-interest for integrity is practically the definition of you," Fiyero said. She glared at him.
"That was a choice that concerned my life and my life alone."
"What about Glinda?" he asked. "What about me?"
"What about you, you're here, aren't you?" She gave him another look, firm and mildly rebuking. "And your life wasn't at stake."
"At stake, what a funny expression." The look deepened into a fierce glare. "Sorry."
"It isn't funny. It isn't funny at all. What do you think is going to happen to them now?" She buried her face in her hands. "Back to the old barbarianism. Witches and their familiars." Her voice turned sharp and sarcastic, biting as the serrated edge of a knife. "Endowed with the ability to speak by evil sorcery, how else could it have happened?" There was more than mere sarcasm, there was a fierce and painful bitterness lurking in her tone now. "How else could something so aberrant, so against the natural order of things, occur?"
He recognized, of course, the shift in what she really meant. He would have been a fool not to. He set Galwan on the floor and approached her with caution worthy of a cornered tiger.
"Elphie, Elphie," he said, wrapping her in his arms. He whispered her name the way he had the night he described the burning to her. She pulled away and collapsed onto a chair, her hair falling loose and concealing her face.
"We'll have to go after them," she murmured quietly, and he knew better than to so much as think a doubt.