Chapter Ten

Deep Waters

""I didn't know you called yourself a Witch, I thought that was just a nasty backfield nickname. The Witch of the East."

""Well no. I'm her sister. I suppose I'm the Witch of the West, if you will." She grinned. "In fact I didn't know she was so disliked."

--Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times

The Major's dreams that night were far from pleasant. Not that he was a man who had ever put much stock in dreams, or was easily bothered by them. He normally forgot them as soon as he woke up. But this, like the dream he had the night they thought Eroica was dead, was permeated by an unsettling sensation of reality. Mostly because it was so empty—there was no dream-like foolishness, no setting, just white mist all around him.

Slowly, two other figures emerged from the mist. One was Elphaba, she was staring at the other intently, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. When she saw him her eyes grew wide. "What are you doing here?" she demanded more than asked, turning back to the other person, another woman, before he could reply. "Nessa?"

"Relax, Fabala, he's your son, isn't he?"

"Only Father could call me that," the Witch said, but she looked hurt.

The mists were clearing rapidly, and he could see the second woman, who appeared to be sitting on some sort of golden throne. She rose from the chair with unsettling grace, stepping towards them in an odd way, her steps slow, tentative. Her feet were clad in the most gaudy and extravagant things Klaus had ever seen, and he couldn't help it when his lip curled in disgust—although Eroica would probably have loved them—they were red, for one thing, and shone and glittered brilliantly. They distracted attention from the girl's torso, at least for a few seconds. She had an extravagant shawl fastened about her shoulders, but the nearer she came the more obvious her deformity appeared—for, although slender, pretty some might have even said, like the sort of women his lecherous Chief liked to chase after—she missing both her arms.

"He is your son, isn't he, Darling Elphie?" the woman asked. "Yes, I can see it now. He shares your…glare of displeasure."

"Just say what you want to say, Nessa!" the Witch snapped.

"Why so hostile?"

"…I apologize. But I am not accustomed to having my dreams invaded by—spirits."

"You aren't 'accustomed' to sleeping at all, as far as I can tell. You've been staving off sleep as best you can since you first took that Miracle Elixir, haven't you? I've been hovering about in limbo for weeks now, waiting for an opening," the armless woman replied.

"I'm sorry," Elphaba apologized again. "I didn't realize…are you…Is everything alright?"

"It's hardly alright, since I'm dead," Nessarose replied smartly.

The Witch evidently had no response for that; she shook her head.

"Well, aren't you going to give proper introductions? Surely you haven't forgotten all your manners, living like a hermit in the Vinkus."

Elphaba was silent for a long moment, but she at last conceded. "Major, this is Nessarose, former Eminence of the East, and my younger sister. Nessie, this is Major Klaus…"

"Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach," he supplied.

She nodded to Nessarose, who looked bemused.

So what was this woman, then? His aunt? It couldn't be. Surely, not, the Major's frown deepend.

"I think I see a bit of Shell in him, too. Mother would have been pleased to see such a handsome-looking grandson. He isn't even the slightest bit green—you must have been ecstatic when he was born. I can't believe you didn't tell me. Or Father. You should have written. Or at the very least mentioned it when you visited us."

"Nessie…we don't have time for this. What do you have to tell me—us—that's so important?" Elphaba asked. "And how are you even doing this? You're dead."

"Oh that, yes, well," the younger Thropp sister said, tossing her head ever so slightly. "You remember that dear Glinda wasn't the only one who ended up studying sorcery, don't you? I told you before, that a righteous person can work miracles in the honor of the Unnamed God," she said. "It's that Mirror of yours that's helping, and the Unnamed God gives me strength, as always."

"The Mirror?" asked Elphaba, confused.

"Well, somewhat, it does have those world-bridging powers. The glass, you know, made by Turtle Heart, like the glass of these slippers, which were made in the same fashion by Papa…Alas, I don't have them anymore."

"You don't need them anymore," the Witch said, but the Major heard the catch in her voice.

"Well, don't be sore about it, I changed my will and left them to you, just as I said I would. Why, haven't you got them?"

"We don't have time to go into that, Nessa. Tell me, what is it? What could be so terrible that you've resisted death itself to tell me about it?"

"In a minute, Elphie, this will be my only time to ever see my nephew…You might be a little more understanding." Her scrutinizing gaze made Klaus distinctly uncomfortable, it was like being twelve years old and surrounded by the prying eyes of his extensive family again. "He's been baptized, I hope?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Tsk, tsk. I still wish you'd let me give you a proper baptismal that time you came up to Colwen Grounds—"

"Water," the Witch said, "is extremely painful to me. And I've told you before, I can't pledge allegiance to anything unnamed. Don't bring this up again."

"I won't," Nessarose said quietly. "I can't."

Elphaba appeared to have regretted her choice of words immensely. She hung her head. "I'm sorry, Nessa…" she looked up, crossed the few feet that separated her from her sister, and hugged her, kissed her, too. It was the first sign of any affection Klaus had seen the woman show, and he was momentarily taken aback.

"Is there anything I can do, Nessie? Anything to help…speed your journey? Nanny fancied you went straight to the bosom of Lurline."

The former Eminent Thropp sniffed. "Nanny always was pagan at heart," she said. "The Unnamed God will gather me to his side once it is time. Speaking of time, you're going to wake up soon, and I have things to say."

Elphaba and Klaus both nodded, and she continued. "First," she said, "If you don't have the shoes, get the shoes. They're important," and in the dream, they shone on her feet like ruby fire. "The Mirrors, also, are very important, both yours and Glinda's. You must go and see her in her Ruby Castle at once, and get it from her. Together with the shoes, the Mirrors will gain even more power. I did quite a lot of research into this before I became the Eminent Thropp, you know. I needed something to do, as you had quite effectively abandoned me," she paused for a moment, watching the Witch as though expecting another apology, and when she got none, continued in a slightly offended tone, "as I was saying, the Mirrors and the shoes, Elphie, they're keys, although I'm not sure how to use them, exactly. You were always the clever one, I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out in time."

"In time for what?" the Major asked, his eyes narrowing.

"Well, it seems as though when our Glorious Wizard overthrew the Ozma Regent it upset some kind of worldly balance. He wasn't from our world, Elphie, it's amazing what you can find out if you dig around enough. Anyways, he wasn't meant to be in our world. Shouldn't be in our world now. It's throwing the whole thing off. And it's getting worse. I began to sense the upset more and more acutely as the years went by. I thought you would know more about it, with all of your ridiculously arcane and esoteric…hobbies. That was why I wanted you to stay with me and rule by my side, but you refused."

"Don't say your death is my fault, Nessie," the Witch said, but she choked, and the expression on her face seemed to say that this was something she had thought of a great deal. "Anyways, Father said I should stay to help you organize your armies and plan—"

"That was Father's reason, not mine," she replied a bit haughtily. "Anyways, he probably didn't mention this to you because he remembered how you had scoffed at him for his belief in other worlds when you were a child. You were surprisingly cruel as a child, Elphie."

Elphaba looked stung, "he knew about this too?" she asked quietly.

Nessarose nodded and continued, "the Wizard was the first…crack to appear between our worlds. Then more and more cracks started appearing…"

"When Glinda and I used the Mirrors?" Elphaba asked. "To cross to the Other world?"

"You what?" Nessa asked, her eyes growing wide. "I—maybe. Anyways, these…cracks, so to speak, they've opened a sort of chasm between the two worlds. Big enough for things from their world to just fall through. Like a house."

"Oh, Nessa…"

"But I have something I've been meaning to ask you, too, sister," Nessarose said, "what did you see when you drank the Miracle Elixir? It's tied into all this too, somehow, as are you. You know Mother drank it when she…conceived you. And I'm not entirely certain it is of this world, either."

But the Witch looked away and would not answer her question.

"It's important!" Nessa pressed, leaning forwards with the unnatural balance that made the hairs on the back of the Major's neck stand on end. She was somehow like a snake standing on the tip of it's tail. "What scared you so badly you've been refusing to sleep these past weeks? What did you see?"

The dream began to fade, the mists were slipping away, their bodies wavered and felt stretched thin. The Major saw Nessarose crane her neck back, looking around them in distress. "Elphie, please, I haven't got any more time! Tell me! When you drank the Miracle Elixir, what did you see?"

Elphaba's face was drawn tight, her mouth curled into a grimace. She still would not look at either of them, and the shadow of the brim of her black hat hid her eyes. "Water," she said quietly, in a low voice. "Deep…water."

0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo0o0

Major Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach regarded the worn wooden broom with a look of unmitigated revulsion. He didn't like it. He didn't like that the Witch seemed to think it could fly, and that given the winged monkeys and dimension-crossing Mirrors and ghost-infested dreams it probably could. It defied his previous conceptions of the universe and it did so in a totally undignified, childish, and stupid way. Witches and flying broomsticks. What was this, a children's fantasy story? His brow creased in frustration and disgust.

Also, he would have murdered for a cigarette.

Elphaba sat across from him at the small wooden table in the kitchen of Kiamo Ko. Neither of them had felt like sitting in the dining room, where Liir, Nanny, Glinda, or Eroica would have wanted to join them. They each seemed to feel the unsettling importance of Nessa's dream. Yet neither of them was going to start the conversation. Elphaba stared at nothing in particular, a long uneven crack in the old stone wall, and the Major glowered at the broom, since it seemed to represent just about everything he loathed about this world.

"It could be used for firewood," he said at last.

She glanced at the broom and then resumed staring at the wall. "I've thought of that, but it was a gift from Sister Bursar."

"A nun?" he asked, surprised despite himself.

"We call them maunts here," the Witch said. "they live in convents and help the poor."

"Nuns," he repeated, nodding. Well, at least keeping the old broom, no matter how distasteful it was, made some sense, then. You couldn't just throw away something given to you by nuns.

"There was a brief period when I could not take care of myself, and I went to live with them," she told him. He was surprised, as she hadn't said anything else even remotely relating to her past to him before, but he nodded.

"Nuns are good," he said, after a minute.

She nodded. "It was beside the Church of Saint Glinda," she said.

Saint Glinda? He thought, and remembered the saint or angel in the stained glass window he had seen once back on Earth, that had reminded him so unsettlingly of Eroica.

Neither of them said anything else for a very long time.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo0o0

"I didn't love Fiyero," she told herself again, alone in her tower, Chistrey loyally at her side. She'd been telling herself that for several days now, and she had to keep telling herself. But it must have been true, she'd let them take him, after all. The Gale Force. All for her rebel cause. And what had that come to? Nothing. She shook her head in disgust, staring out over the dark rolling plains of the Vinkus.

"I'm the Witch, Chistrey. I'm evil now, I'm wicked, so I can hardly love anybody, isn't that right?" she stood and crossed the room to where the useless Mirror was.

Nessarose had told her that she needed both Mirrors and the shoes. She'd been trying to get the damn shoes for weeks, and she was hardly able to just get on her broom and fly to Glinda's castle in—where was it? Frottica? The Pertha Hills? Somewhere North… No, she shook her head, clearing her thoughts, she couldn't leave to fetch Glinda's Mirror with her assassins on the way, and Kiamo Ko full of people who depended on her…not to return and find them all taken from her…not again.

She turned back to the Mirror, the longer she stared at it, the clearer the vision became, again, of the girl Dorothy and her three unusual protectors. The Lion, the Tinman, and the Scarecrow. She watched the Scarecrow then, giving him, the one she could not place, the one she did not know, her undivided attention. It couldn't really be an animated pile of rags and hay, could it? No, it must be a disguise. Some sort of disguise. But who would wear a disguise to travel with the girl everyone in Oz seemed so damn taken with? To come to her…to come to the Vinkus…

I didn't love Fiyero…she thought.

Her hand raised the glass and the vision vanished.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo0o0

"It won't be much longer before these…assassins reach us," the Major said. He stood in the spacious drawing room of Kiamo Ko, which no one had used in years before Glinda and Dorian had become quite taken with the artistic tapestries and colourful divans it contained. "I know they don't sound like much of a threat," he said, he had already related to the Glorias everything Liir had told him. The group of them, even old Nanny, were seated on the comfortable chairs around him, listening, "but we shouldn't make the mistake of underestimating them. I don't have any bullets left in my Magnum—"

"Major!" Eroica exclaimed. "Surely you weren't thinking of shooting a little girl!"

He glared at the Earl in annoyance. "Don't be a fool, Eroica. She has three…men, so to speak, with her, who may be violent. They were sent to kill the Witch, and maybe her allies…which would be us. We should be prepared for—"

"No," Elphaba's voice said suddenly from the doorway. She entered the drawing room with a sort of glazed half-aware look in her eyes, and hazily regarded them all, shaking her head. "No, don't you see? Don't you realize? He's coming back—he's coming back to me! He didn't know how to sneak back into the Vinkus, he's their king, after all, this is his castle—"

"What?" the Major asked, "the owner of this castle—"

"It's Fiyero!" she breathed, and Glinda jumped to her feet, covering her mouth with her hands. "He's coming back to me. He's in disguise, as a Scarecrow, but it's him—"

"No!" Glinda shouted. "Elphie that's impossible, Fiyero's dead!"

The Witch's eyes turned cold and hard again, she glared at her. "No, he's coming back to me, you'll see. There will be no fighting them!" she said, turning to them all. "They'll be my guests here!"

"No," the Major said, stepping up next to Glinda, "Lady Gloria—for once—is right. That's madness!"

"Silence! I won't hear anymore of this!" she yelled, turning to them with a look that was half-madness in itself, a wild sort of fantastical desperation that caused even Klaus to take a step backwards as she passed them in a flurry of black skirts. "I'll send Killyjoy down into the valley to greet them, and he'll bring them back here—"

"Elphie, no, you're not thinking straight!" Glinda cried.

But the Witch would hear no more of their protests, and calling loudly for Killyjoy, she stalked out of the room, as strangely and as abruptly as she had come in. Glinda and the Major exchanged equally alarmed looks. "This isn't good," Glinda whispered, tugging at one of her curls nervously.

"Who was Fiyero?" Eroica asked.

"Oh, oh, Fiyero—" Glinda laughed a little nervously, turning to where Dorian was reclining on one of the divans. "Fiyero was a prince from—from here. I guess this was his castle. He went to school with us, at Shiz, and was a friend of ours…I didn't see him after we graduated, except for once when I was shopping for Lurlinemas with Crope…but, never mind about that…"

"Yes, but what does he have to do with Elphaba?" Eroica asked, and the Major nodded.

"You're not telling us everything,"

"Oh," she laughed again, nervously, "I suppose I'm not. There is something else. I only just—just learned it myself, you see. It seems Elphaba had an affair with Fiyero when she was living underground in the Emerald City, years ago. I—I think he must have been Liir's father."

"What?" said Liir, whom they had all forgotten was still in the room. "That's what the goldfish in the well told me, but—"

"Yes, yes, that's very nice, dear," Glinda said in a nervous, flighty manner, shooing him away.

The Major frowned. "So he was her lover—"

Glinda nodded, "But the Wizard's soldiers got rid of him, you know, for being involved with Elphie. She was a member of the resistance movement, back then, I think."

"So she's blamed herself for it, and now she's made it up that he's coming back to her, to give her absolution?" Eroica said. They both turned and looked at him. The Major frowned. Glinda shrugged. Nanny asked where the tea was.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo0o0

Over the next week, nothing would persuade Elphaba from her increasingly frantic belief that the mysterious Scarecrow that traveled with Dorothy and her friends was none other than her late lover, Fiyero, in disguise. She would hear no talk of planning to attack them, and seemed to have forgotten entirely about the fact that Dorothy and company were coming to the Vinkus with the intention of murdering her. She appeared to have forgotten entirely the dream with Nessarose as well, and her dead sister's dire warnings about the fabric of space and time. The Major found himself annoyed at her sudden lack of reason and her distraction. She was developing nervous habits, her elbows twitched when she walked, and she had given up sleeping all together.

They remained cautiously silent in her presence, as she spoke more and more of her belief that Fiyero was returning to her, and when she retreated to her tower, they discussed defensive strategies and the Major instructed Liir to show their group all of the passageways, corridors and alcoves of the castle-fortress. They found nothing of much use in the armory, which had presumably already been raided by the Wizard's soldiers when they had taken the castle's original inhabitants. The Major sighed. They had no weapons, not one of them made a competent soldier, and there were certainly no tanks. Not to mention the lack of cigarettes. He drummed his fingers against the worn tabletop irritably.

"Major?" Eroica came up behind him.

"What do you want?"

"She's sent the dogs out again, you know. To greet them,"

"She's been doing that everyday," Klaus growled.

"I know but, today, well—" the Earl frowned. "Today they haven't come back and—"

A scream rang through the halls and corridors of Kiamo Ko. It was not a shriek of terror, but a blood-curdling cry of rage, anger and fury so intense that Eroica jumped, and the Major looked above them in alarm, but of course only the cold stone ceiling met his gaze. The Witch screamed again, and something crashed loudly, smashing against the floor above them.

"What's going on?" the Earl asked.

The Major was already half-way to the door. They met Glinda and Liir in the hallway, both looked pale and shaken. "What is it?" the Major demanded. "What's going on?"

"It's Dorothy and her friends," Glinda said in a whisper. "They're at the town of Red Windmill. Elphie's been watching through a spyglass from the tower—they've killed Killyjoy—"

He pushed roughly passed Glinda and headed for the tower's spiral staircase, the others following close behind him. At the top, in her cluttered work room, the Witch was screaming. She threw the spyglass to Liir, shouting. "Look! Look what they've done! They've killed your dog!"

Klaus snatched the spyglass out of Liir's hands and raised it to his eye. It a took a moment for him to find them, scanning the horizon, but then he found the town of Red Windmill, and saw the strange group—and the shocking mass of carnage that surrounded them. A young girl was cowering beside a trembling lion and a scarecrow while a tall man who seemed to be made entirely of tin limbs towered over them, swinging a giant axe that sliced brutally through the Witch's wolves. Killyjoy and the other dogs lay strewn in a bloody pile around them.

He lowered the spyglass and looked to his mother. The Witch was spinning around, as though unsure what to do. In a mad fury she raced to her table and grabbed the Grimmerie, flipping wildly through the pages.

Suddenly, she shoved the book in front of him, pointing to the page. "Read it! Now!" she demanded.

He glared at her for a moment, but took the book and read out the words, they made no sense to him, short clipped parts of words, he thought, not English, but not any other language he could place. The Witch however, nodded, she turned and looked up at the hordes of black crows that rested in the rafters and in the window slots of the her tower. There were more than Klaus remembered noticing before, rustling their wings and looking at their mistress with black, empty eyes.

"I've been playing the part of the Witch," she said, "I might as well actually perform a spell, if I can." She pointed a finger at them shakily, her breath trembling, and repeated the sounds he had read for her. She repeated them again, her voice rising, and the crows squawked and fluttered. Beside him, Eroica shifted a little closer, but he ignored it for the moment, turning to Elphaba in disbelief.

"What are you doing?" Glinda cried.

But the Witch was beyond listening to them, she pointed to the windows and screamed at the birds, "Go! Go you stupid inbred things and tear the mask off that damned Scarecrow once and for all! Gouge out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion! Make them suffer!"

"No!" Liir cried, "You can't hurt Dorothy!"

"Just watch me!" she snarled at him, knocking him out of her way as she marched back to the window.

The Major stared after her with a horrified expression, and grabbed her arm tightly. "No. Stop this!"

But the crows were already taking to the air, screeching as they soared in a thick black cloud from the spiraling dark tower of Kiamo Ko. The Witch smiled and the look was so unpleasant and horrible that anyone else would have immediately released his hold on her, but not Iron Klaus. "Harming the girl isn't going to do any good," he told her.

"What?" she said bitterly, "don't tell me you've fallen in love with the little farm twit too, like everyone else in Oz. She dropped a house on my sister, stole my shoes, and killed my dog," the Witch turned her face back to the window, "I for one, have had enough of her."

To be Continued in Chapter Eleven: Drinking Mysterious Things from Strange Bottles is Probably Not a Good Idea