10. Rabbit Hole

"The Wizard will see you now."

On the far side of the anteroom, Melena startles and straightens, eyes torn from the watercolour map spread across the opposite wall. She takes in the figure of the guard and wonders how long he has been propping open the door to the office, his face set in irritation, his jacket woven in the gilded green style of the Gale Force. The impatient sweep of his hand into the liminal space ahead makes his opinion of her obvious: she is not worth his time.

"His Ozness has granted you twenty minutes," he says, punctuating it with an implicit for reasons unknown. "I suggest you use it wisely."

Melena nods curtly, for it is all she can muster as she strains against the full-body reluctance that drags at her bones like a current. It swirls around her ankles and swishes higher and higher, catching her hem, flowing eastward into Colwen Grounds, where Nessa believes that her mother is visiting family in the next county. Melena drives her nails into her palm and wishes she had something to clutch, some talisman, so that there could be more than a brief sting to ward off the memory of their parting. ("Have the doctor examine you while you're there," Nessa said. "You haven't looked well in months.")

"Audiences are typically held in the throne room," the guard says, interrupting, "but His Ozness has chosen to make an exception. Munchkinland is one of his chief concerns."

"How fortunate for me."

A glare ensues, and this time Melena is equal to the challenge. The guard asks, "Do you find this to be a joking matter?"

Of course, she thinks, though she doesn't jeopardize her act by saying so. For the time being, she is Cordelia Hane, a no-nonsense Munchkin envoy whose estrangement from the concept of the joke has served Melena well at every port of entry. There were near misses, naturally, when her party was halted and inspected at the gate, when the Captain was unavailable to clear her at the palace doors, when the Wizard had to shuffle three appointments and a dinner party to squeeze her in, but there was no denying Cordelia. Her will was iron and her documents authentic as they come – swiped directly off Nessa's desk and ornamented with a myriad of forged signatures. Now, as earnestly as Melena longs to shuck off the rigid shell of this character, she is terrified that the resolve that saw her through the day's trials will peel away with it.

"Twenty minutes," the guard repeats, and the current tightens again, causing Melena to twist in reverse just as she crosses under the frame. She feels Cordelia and Melena merge and her lips part to dismiss the guard or beg him to stay, to free her from this choice that she's made, though he is gone and the air stagnated in his midst.

She rests a hand over her ribs, as if to hold them in place, to steady the beat of butterfly wings against her insides, and turns to face the only man who's ever made her uneasy. She boarded the carriage in Munchkinland with the singular goal of pleading her daughter's case to him and never once thought it possible that she would make it this far: he at his desk, she on the threshold, and only two decades and a strip of sunlight lying between them.

He looks the same.

Different, but the same.

A thrill pulls her nerves taut as harp strings.

He glances up, then down, then up again, blinking, and she can tell by the way his demeanour slips in and out of astonishment that she has his full attention. Her footing falters, too, as her premeditated strategies slide out from under her, and all at once they are caught up in searching, engrossed in the strange business of spotting the child in the parent. She sees Elphaba's dark hair – mostly gone to grey – and wiry build. He sees Elphaba's eyes and jawline. A moment passes, and then they see each other.

"Your Ozness," Melena says first.

"Melena Thropp," he replies, motioning her to the seat across from him. She spies a hungry flicker in his green eyes and wonders if she's been involved with him this entire time, or never at all. "I've heard your father is ailing," he says. "You have my sympathy."

Melena sits. "I haven't been particularly fond of my father these past twenty-five years. He sold me into marriage, after all."

"Hmm."

"Though I suppose it could have been worse. He could have sold me into infamy."

The Wizard's hand stalls halfway through the note that he has taken up. He slides back into his seat and Melena is glad to have his eyes again, though the laughter in them is acutely annoying. "And here I was thinking this was a pleasure visit," he says.

"I'm here to discuss the recent developments in Munchkinland," she says. "There needs to be intervention. It's verging on collapse. The crop output is—"

"Who's to blame for that? Control your daughter."

"Oh, that's rich."

"What would you have me do? My people have no way in, yours have no way out."

Melena has seen Nessa draft policy after extreme policy without the slightest show of remorse, countering Boq's accusations with deafness and carrying on as if nothing is wrong. They sit down to breakfast each morning and behave as though the room has not been rife with whispers just moments before, that the staff does not fall strangely silent when they pass, and that the day's defiant acts have not been quelled by the time the sun falls on the western side of the manor. They will not address the fact that Boq has taken to wearing the livery of the servants in solidarity with his kin, or the fact that he chased Melena down the corridor and begged her to do the same, or that a badly aimed truncheon caught the head of a tradesman crossing into Gillikin and killed him instantly.

At a different post along the Munchkin border, Melena will forsake Cordelia's deathly glare and assume a new personality, because it is safer to lie than to appeal to Nessa's mercy. She will be Lana Farin, an inconsequential Gillikinese aristocrat with deep pockets, who is selling her property in Munchkinland so as to forestall the threat that the Glikkun tribes pose to her investment. (Did you know they scalp their victims? Scalping. Can you imagine? In this day and age?) She will smile and prattle and bat her lashes and all the while be risking her life.

In this moment, however, she is Melena Thropp – whoever that is – and she says, "What have you done in these situations in the past?"

"Frankly, I've never had a rival of this calibre before – or at all, if I'm honest." The Wizard folds one fist into the other and cracks his knuckles. "She's bold, your girl. I'll give her that."

"She's reckless," Melena says.

"Is that so? I wonder how she happened upon that trait." He perches his elbows on the desk, arching closer, and his gaze roams over her like a touch. "It didn't come from her father, I'm sure."

Melena ignores this, to the best of her ability. "She's ripped up centuries of roots. There isn't one thing that's not been undone."

"The man could've tripped over a spine in the street, he'd have had no idea what it was."

"This is hardly the time to be drawing that sort of comparison," Melena says. "A comparison, might I add, that invokes a man who has been dead for over two years."

He refutes this with a smile that is partly playful, partly predatory, and her own spine makes itself known as a chill originates at the nape of her neck and wriggles its way down.

She says, "Would it be at all possible to—"

"Over twenty years ago, I assumed this position." For the love of Oz, Melena thinks, predicting from his conversational tone that what is to follow will be too far gone to circle back to her point. "Young man that I was," he says, "I believed – rather foolishly, in hindsight – that only the formative years of my reign would require me to squander my time trying to understand your family. I would meet old Frexspar for our biannual luncheons, shake his hand, and think, 'this man will die and that will be the end of it.' Now Nessarose is tearing up my breadbasket, and you're here, and I must admit that I am as preoccupied with the Thropp clan as I was back then."

"As is usually the case, with the thorns in one's ass."

Mischief sparkles in his eyes. "I like to be liked, and Frex didn't like me."

"At the risk of being indelicate, Your Ozness," Melena says, "it may have had something to do with the day you broke into his home and violated his wife."

"I seem to recall finding a door or two unlocked."

Melena dislikes this turn. She avoids his eyes and curls her toes, because she will not allow herself to squirm in a more discernible way. Nor will she dignify his comment by parrying. Instead, her gaze glides over the books packed into the shelves behind him and she grounds herself in the varying colours of the spines. In the thought of Elphaba in this very seat, with this very view, assessing the title and thickness of her next reading project.

"I'm here to discuss Munchkin affairs," Melena says.

He grins. "Isn't that what I've been doing?"

"If the last census is to be believed, the state comprises over a quarter of the population under your care," she says. "And that's not including the people that are fed by the cultivation of the land by said population."

"All of whom you've prioritized above your loyalty to your daughter."

"Perhaps."

He laughs. "Could it be possible? You're a worse mother than you were a wife. Then again, I suppose I've known that for rather a while."

Melena grits her teeth and resists the urge to seize his pen and bury it between his eyes. The Rise and Decline of the Vinkun Nomads, she reads. Dynasties of the Middle Ages. An Alternate Civilization: The History of Quadling Country. She imagines the notes in the margins, the dog-eared corners, and the forgotten leaflets tucked between the pages. Elphaba's history.

She says, "Are you telling me there's nothing to be done?"

"That depends."

"On?"

"What's her next move?" he asks. "What is she planning?"

"You have more ears in those sessions than I do."

He waits.

Melena relents. "I've heard tales of secession."

"So it's true."

She detects an undercurrent of interest, despite his grim tone, and follows with her eyes as he leaves his chair and paces the length of the study. "So it's true," he mutters again, and she can tell that he is hardly containing himself, because this is the excuse he has been waiting on. This is how he'll wage his war under a righteous banner; he'll free the Munchkins, gaining their support, and unite them in a different servitude. If he has Munchkinland, he has everything, she thinks, and yet she'd parcel Munchkinland into a hatbox and slap a frilled bow onto the crown for the narrowest opening from which to extract Nessa with minimal scathing.

Elphaba would understand.

(Wouldn't she?)

"Tell me honestly." The striding makes Melena feel restive. She wants him seated across from her once more. "Is there a way for this to end peacefully?"

This stalls him in the foreground of the window, so that the light of the cloudless day catches his outline and spills his shadow across the floor. He says, "Well, how willing is she to concede?"

"How willing are you to concede?"

A glint of impatience in his eyes, and then he softens. "It's too far gone, Melena."

"You can't just—"

"You asked for the truth," he says, and she feels her idea of him fragmenting. All along she's pictured him smaller, quieter, a man who slips through cracks, and before her is a man who hasn't had to compromise in ages. "I've consulted all manner of people on this," he says. "I don't sleep at night, because I can sense the tough decisions around the corner. I can't leave things as they are, but I can't rectify them without violence. There's nothing I can do."

"That's hardly the case." Melena's hands grip the arm of her chair, fingertips reddening, knuckles white, because she is unravelling. "I know precisely what you do here; I've seen it all my life. You sit here and you move us like pawns and you declare things like it's too far gone. That there's no reasoning with the enemy. You created the enemy, Oscar. For years, you gathered bits and pieces off the ground, until you thought you had enough to cobble up an enemy, and when it wasn't, you gave the imaginary faction a figurehead from your own circle so you'd come out the victim."

The shift happens before Melena can restrain herself. She says, "If she's so powerful, why is she in hiding? Why isn't every entrance guarded? It was harder for me to get off my own daughter's estate than into yours." And then there are tears, in her eyes, in her voice, and she begrudges this with every fibre that she isn't pouring into berating him. "Your safety isn't at stake, your image is. She's a threat to this…this myth, and you're putting her through hell for it."

His feet still first, then his arms, then his face freezes into the same pensive frown that she loves so much in Elphaba. "You've seen her recently, then?"

Melena says nothing.

"And you haven't had a day of rest since," he surmises, reading her silence. His expression is pitying. "She's good at survival, you know."

Disbelief drives a scoffing noise from Melena's throat. "You expect me to believe that? She grew up in a palace."

"She evades us at every turn."

"She's green."

"I suppose flying is the key to it."

"What of her glasses? Can she see without them?"

"She mostly needed them for reading," he says. "She likes to put layers between herself and the world. Always has."

Again, Melena says nothing. There is nothing to say.

The deadlock wears on him and he resumes pacing. "She's visited you," he mutters, to himself. "This is good. Better than I thought. If you can facilitate her capture—"

Melena rears back. "Her capture?"

"She trusts you," he says. "God knows why, but that's the impression I've gotten." When he realizes just how stricken Melena is by the prospect, he approaches until he is standing above her. He runs his fingers over an unbound strand of hair that hangs in her peripheral vision and tucks it into place, saying, "You can't protect her from herself."

"Maybe not, but I can certainly protect her from you."

"She doesn't need to be protected from me."

"No," Melena says, pulling away, "it's those you've recruited to your side. Suppose I turn her in and she's brought to Morrible – what then?"

He says, "I'll ensure she's brought to me."

"I want her brought to Glinda."

"These are not negotiable terms."

"Then don't pretend it's a collaborative effort," she snaps, slumping, just making out the way he brushes her shoulder as he retreats into his seat. He wraps his hand around his pen and lowers it into the inkwell and she contributes nothing else, because she is exhausted, so exhausted, and the extent of it is what has led her here, groveling for a certainty that he can't provide.

What now? she thinks.

The Wizard tests the pen against a scrap. Hapless circles spiral out of the nub. "It seems to me that you should be conducting yourself with greater wariness."

Melena scowls. "Of?"

"The fact that she spent a summer in Munchkinland and was a traitor by autumn," he says, in a formal tone that she finds unnerving. "The fact that she's apparently sought refuge in Colwen Grounds. It reeks of collusion, Melena."

"It was collusion, Your Ozness," Melena says. "I allowed her to have pie before her vegetables and to stay awake past sundown. Have my cell prepared."

"This is a serious issue."

Melena hates to admit that she is baffled again; that she doesn't follow the ploy. All these versions of him and not a single one to put faith in. "Must we rehash the part of this discussion when I raised the issue of Munchkinland and your response was to assert your superiority over a dead man?"

His voice emerges with a hostile undertone. "People have been detained for far less than you've done here today."

"You say that as if it wasn't your doing."

"How willing do you think Nessarose will be to trade her traitor sister for her traitor mother?"

"Now I'm truly surprised that Frex didn't like—"

There is scarcely space for a heartbeat between the rap of the guard's knuckles and the click of the knob turning. The door breaks like a seal and they are thrown into a flurry of movement, whirling towards the intruding presence as if caught somehow. The pair of frauds that they are.

"Twenty minutes have elapsed, Your Ozness," the guard says.

The change is immediate. "Thank you, Giles," the Wizard replies, on his feet, bidding the man to wait on the other side. He peers at the door until it is shut and does not relax. "I believe that will be all then."

"I'm not finished," Melena snarls.

"But you are dismissed."

Melena internalizes the order with neutrality, but protests anyway, starting, "You'd really…" and then trailing off, accepting as it hits that she was never meant to accomplish anything here. Not with the Oz letterheads and the plaques and the stark plane of the desk to tie him to his stance. "Until next time, I suppose," she says, dipping her head and taking her leave, all the while formulating her next move. She is not through with him yet.

"Have a care, Lady Thropp," he says, scrawling notes. "Times are trying." At the door, she glances over, sewing the press and crinkle of disappointment into her mask of stoicism. He meets her eyes, taunting, and her plan finalizes. She bows her head again.

In the anteroom, the guard surveys her suspiciously, and Melena reprises the haughty tilt of her chin. "I hardly think it my place," she says, "but His Ozness has instructed me to inform you that he wishes to be escorted to his dinner."

The guard's eyes narrow. "By me?"

No, by the bench, Melena thinks, ducking her face and adjusting a pin in her hair while her patience evens. The guard's fingers flex and bunch and range towards the door. "And you're to see yourself out?" he says.

"Naturally." Melena affects a sympathetic mien. "His Ozness seemed as though he needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Munchkinland is one of his chief concerns, after all." The guard's hand encloses the knob anyway, and she continues, "I remember when His Ozness would hold monthly functions in this palace…I suppose this was before your time. Being a member of Munchkinland's most esteemed trading guild, I was one of the few to be invited on multiple occasions." She shakes her head, as if reminiscing. "I'll never forget the poor fool who made the mistake of overstepping his bounds. It was my first encounter with magic, you see." Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his fist unclench and drop to his side. "I don't use the word explosive frequently, or lightly, but…"

The guard detaches from the door altogether, puffing out his chest, as if dignified, though he can barely keep from gaping. He realizes himself and clears his throat, scrambling for a shred of authority. "It would be foolish of you to try anything," he says. "As soon as His Ozness is safely conveyed to his guests, I will be alerting my superiors to your presence. Should you fail to reach the gate, the premises will be searched. You will be found and you will be apprehended."

He can't be more than Nessa's age, Melena thinks. She wonders how offended he would be if she sought confirmation.

He says, "End of the corridor. Take a left. Through the doors, you'll find another guard and he will conduct you to the entrance." His lips purse into a smug line. It draws her attention to the peach fuzz coating his chin. "I trust that isn't too complicated?"

"You're a delight, Giles," Melena says, dredging a smile. "I so hope we meet again." Though it would likely be over a dead body.

She turns to flee and her gaze lands square in the centre of the map, where the four states cluster, each one funnelling its colour into Oz's glowing green nucleus. The Vinkus, a lifeless grey at the fringes. Munchkinland, a sickly yellow. Gillikin, the pink of an old scar. It is alarming, this arrangement, now that she regards it with less passivity, and she recalls with certainty that Ozmatown did not have this effect, but she cannot sustain the visual as she creeps down the corridor that links the official wing to the audience chambers.

Instead, she summons the plan of the palace, imagining her position in relation to the ballroom, the dining halls, the guards' quarters, but an era has come and gone since her last visit and she must rely on chance. She veers right and peers around corners, measuring the weight she puts behind each step, regulating the air that seeps in and out of her lungs until she stands before a stairwell and hesitates and musters her courage and starts up the passage. The steps are worn and creaky, dim as anything, so she guides herself with a firm grip along the railing and then its absence, and finds herself deposited on a landing. From there, her bearings flood in.

She does not stray into Elphaba's room – intact or not, she wants nothing to do with the ghosts that reside there. She does, however, mortify a maid when she hazards a request for the Wizard's chambers, inciting no more and no less than a quivering finger jabbed vaguely towards the furthest doorway.

It hangs ajar, and Melena slips through without making contact, but she pauses just inside and marvels at how ordinary the furnishings are. Sturdy but plain. Functional. She sizes up the nondescript chests and the bare walls and is, quite frankly, affronted by the lack of superfluity, until she happens closer to the window and squints into the rosy sunset. People crawl over the city like ants. They dot the streets, the benches, the igniting panes of the shops and the apartments above them, retreating with the day as the sun slides into the horizon and the dying beams sprawl across the green rooftops. Melena takes in all the lights, all the lives, and it amazes her that a man with only a foreign penny to his name won himself a view of this rarity. She looks and looks and looks and then she can't, because the pit in her stomach migrates to her chest and the current catches again and she is bowled over by a wave of insignificance.

The world is large, so large, and seething with people who go about their lives knowing so little. They toil and deteriorate and die without realizing that they are specks to those who make their decisions, or that the witches they're taught to fear are just girls. Little girls. Hapless and stubborn and all too determined to find out how deep this grave goes. Elphaba, twenty-two as of a month ago, supposedly involved in the skirmish in Traum, supposedly nicked by a bullet, supposedly freeing cagefuls of Animals sold to the Gale Force by a fraudulent comrade. Nessa, ever-distant, embedded in her study, in her mess, mooning over a boy who doesn't reciprocate and orchestrating a secession that could very well litter the fields of Munchkinland with corpses.

Melena stands over the entirety of the Emerald City and she fears for their health and their minds and their hearts, but mostly she fears that one day she won't have to be afraid and all she can do is wait for that day to begin, as it will, like any other does. She will rise and dress and sit down to breakfast and the porter will serve her the headline that proclaims –

There is a stack of books on the bedside table; the only personal touch for miles. Melena flicks on a lamp and drops into the nook formed by the legs of the table and the bedframe, dragging them down one by one and barrelling into the text with no preamble.

My father's family name being Pirrip, she reads, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Melena smiles, charmed somehow, though the words rattle about her mind and ultimately disappear into some chasm, meaning nothing. She closes the book and tries the next one.

Well, Prince, she reads, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the infamies and atrocities of this Antichrist (upon my word, I believe he is), I don't know you in future, you are no longer my friend, no longer my faithful slave, as you say.

Genoa, Melena thinks dubiously, Lucca, Bonaparte, Antichrist. Again, the names float listlessly, and then dwindle, and she extracts no interpretation before they are gone. She closes the book and tries the next one.

I have wandered the face of Oz, she reads, stooping and stretching to converse with Animals of all lands and climes, and my travels have left me with one conclusion, and that is that the notion of home, as it were, is a concept born of human insecurity. An illusion, and a potent one at that. Melena's heart swells at the memory this evokes and she skims past the dense treatises, lingering over the notes in the margins, their familiar slant, the inception of the ideas that Elphaba would one day impart from her perch in the library – and yet Melena closes the book and tries the next one.

She flips the final cover and beholds three-year-old Elphaba's sloppy signature: the backwards B, the imprints left on the first page by the pressure of the unskilled hand wielding the pen. She rakes her eyes over the first line – Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do – and once more the words echo distantly into some part of her from which there is no recovering them. It returns to her; the feeling that one day she will step into the world and no one will see her, that she will scream and flail and cry out, and it will not matter, because there will be nothing to contain the fragments of the person she used to be.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice.

She feels it daily, at night, in the morning, in the wake of every exchange. She felt it like a pressure on her chest, so great it thrust her outside of herself and locked the door behind, stranding her in the wasteland of her own indecision. Half a continent later and too many lies to tabulate and she has stumbled this far, chasing this mirage, though she can anticipate almost nothing of his intentions, or his history, or his personality.

"I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly," Alice replied very politely, "for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is confusing."

The thud of approaching footsteps hacks through her meditation and Melena's head snaps up. She can't tell whether her heart is closer to starting or stopping, only that she experiences a simultaneous surge of disgust and relief when Oscar appears in the doorway.

I make myself so ill, she thinks.

He flashes her a roguish smile that sends her insides to fluttering again. "Now, when a member of my staff waylaid me after my dinner and informed me that there was a strange woman sequestered in my chambers, I almost didn't believe her," he says. "'Chestnut hair and dark eyes,' she told me. 'A little on the petite side.' As if I couldn't guess by your temerity alone."

"Good evening to you, too," Melena says.

He shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over a chair. "Can I at least offer you something to eat?"

"No, I'm quite content." She casts a glance at the book in her lap, as if she was engrossed in a private conversation, then overturns the cover and displays the title for him. "It's a strange story," she says. "I've just met the Cheshire Cat."

Nostalgia flits across his face. The spark that dances in his eyes draws his smile in with it, and all at once it is genuine. "You see, a dog growls when it's angry and wags its tail when it's pleased," he recites. "Now, I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad." He extends his hand and she accepts gratefully, her legs stiff from being crammed under her for so long.

"What was her attachment to this book?" Melena asks.

He runs his fingers down her forearm, curling them around her wrist. "Three chapters every night, from the day she could understand the words, and in no time she was reading it to me."

"I can't make sense of it."

"No one can." His thumb pries her fist open. "That's the point." He draws her palm towards his lips.

Melena slides from his grasp. She restores the book to the table, aligning it with the others, but her knees knock into the bed and she is suddenly winded by his proximity. Frex aside, she's never had to face up to the same man twice – not with twenty years and two nearly consecutive pregnancies in between, or this gnawing feeling of dread for what's to come. She has had ample time to fall apart and not nearly enough to prepare. Nothing terrifies her like intimacy.

She looks at him as he is now, open and expectant and maybe even a little hurt, and abruptly asks, "How old are you?"

"Old."

"A number would be preferable."

He seems puzzled by her insistence and then laughs. "Fifty-one," he says. "And you?"

"Forty-three." It's strange to hear aloud; these days she often wakes feeling as though she's been alive too long. She taps Alice in Wonderland with one finger. "And you're from here…from Alice's realm."

"More or less."

She prompts, "What is it called? Where you're from?"

"Kansas," he says.

Melena watches his brows knit as he rolls out the name like a ball and chain, and she has the sense that he's told her this before. There's a quality to it that might just be familiarity. "What is it like?" she asks.

"Sparse," he says. "Dusty."

The last traces of humour dissipate and she detects the void with a sad smile. She harbours the same disdain for Munchkinland and yet she knows that her veins and her limbs are bound up in it like so many roots – or at least she thinks so. An illusion, and a potent one at that. She says, "And is that what led to Elphaba's abilities? The event that brought you here?"

Ignoring her, he crosses the room and produces a bottle of wine and two glasses from a drawer, setting them on the round table by the window. "I must say, I just spent two hours listening to that bastard from Kvon go on about his prize horses and I am in no mood for an interrogation."

"But that's why, isn't it?"

He shakes his head, impressed and frustrated in equal measures, and then gives way. "It's been suggested that the mixing of our constitutions – you being Munchkin, me being American – led to the powers." He digs the cork from the mouth of the bottle, twists it out, and flicks it onto the table. "A child of both worlds – or some such nonsense."

"A child of both worlds," Melena repeats, tinging his scorn with fascination. "But then—"

"Stop there," he says. "It's my turn." The gulping sounds of liquid sloshing into glasses. He does not look up. "Did she seem well?"

Melena hasn't decided whether she owes him a lie or not before the truth comes galloping out. "She had a fever, and a limp," she says. "I suspect it was a sprain."

"And…mentally?"

"She seemed to be coping well, considering."

Oscar trades her an inscrutable glance. "She's always been stronger than she has any right to be." He beckons Melena with a nod and passes over the wine, appraising her as she approaches. How does he manage this trick – making his eyes feel like hands? He says, "You know, you're less vapid than I remember."

"And you're even more of a gentleman," she retorts, assuming her glass, coating the rim with her lips before she looks too closely and sees the imprint of someone else's smile.

"Truly, though, it was a pleasure to parlay with someone who could hold their own. Your Ozness from you is like a slap in the face." He smirks, briefly, and then frowns, and this time his probing is not nearly as invasive. "You're alike, the two of you. In so many ways."

Melena is seized by a hunger for the specifics, for the blood and bones and skin of that conclusion, but she is diverted when he draws a chair and sits and begins rolling his sleeves. He folds the cuffs until they hug his elbows, and she becomes uncomfortably aware of all the grueling hours she spent with Frex, at meals, in the parlour, on the road, and how he never once granted her an action half as casual. Trying not to stare, she clears her throat and says, "You don't have many guards about. The Captain – he's been absent since I arrived."

"Don't you read the papers?" He waves her into the opposite chair, and she is surprised to find that she is still standing. "The engagement ball is in two days."

Melena lets out an unapologetic ha. "What poor woman has taken it upon herself to marry you?"

"Curb your jealousy, darling. The ball is for Glinda and Fiyero." At this, her cheeks flush and she grimaces, provoking him into a bout of laughter. Finally, he explains, "While Glinda hangs fairy lights and finalizes seating arrangements, our good Captain has been hand-picking his best men to ensure the safety of the guests."

Oscar sips deeply, and then adds, "His concern is that such a large gathering will attract a strike."

"From Elphaba?"

He snorts. "Who else?"

"That's absurd." Melena's voice gets louder than she means it to be, and far too accusatory. "You've stooped this low, poisoning her friends against her?"

"I've done no such thing. They've chosen to capitalize on the circumstances."

Before she means to, Melena aligns this with the impression she has of the couple; the mental image she's wrung from the press coverage that clouds their outings. Glinda: young and glowing, swathed in colourful layers and ever-cheery, presiding over an ocean of adoring sycophants. Elphaba, meanwhile, can only be glimpsed in imaginary snapshots, dress rotting on her body and face blurred, in the act of fleeing. This disparity is not lost on Melena.

"I've met Glinda," she says anyway, for the sake of arguing. "Granted, she was Galinda at the time, but I know she's better than that. She's good."

"Good?" he says. "Not objectively. But she's damn good at what she does." He looks almost remorseful as he sees her delusion crumble. "And Fiyero – let the boy have his fun. He's only trying to distract himself from the reality of the situation."

Melena says, "The reality of the situation is that Elphaba has no business attacking a fortress. Certainly not when her father and her friends are within."

"The reality of the situation is that he's been cornered." Oscar's face indicates nothing, but his tone tilts towards the challenge buried within. "You women tend to make our choices for us. No warning. No time for adjustment." Melena laughs derisively and his eyes bore into her. "You're explaining your defense tactics one moment, and then you're engaged. You finally free yourself from your family, and then you're a father."

Melena puts no stock in this claim. She's been nursing her grudges for too long. "Glinda is an exception," she says. "I don't recall being given a choice when my father had me primped like a doll and wedged into Frex's circle until it would have been indecent for him to reject the match. Or after Nessarose was born, when a council of twenty men encouraged him to dump me on the side of the Yellow Brick Road and remarry." She falters, tripping into a queasy sort of awe of her past. "We corner you or you ruin us. As I think is plainly evident here."

"You could have left," he says. "I wouldn't have turned you away. That choice was yours."

"All I chose was a clean break, and you pulled me back in."

"You chose to stay." His fingers circle the stem of the glass, tightening. "You chose to stay, and he kept you like a pet. That one you can't pin on me."

"And you would have kept me as…what? Your mistress? Divorcees can't remarry in the Unionist church unless there's also been an annulment."

"I'm not a Unionist," he says stubbornly.

Melena waits.

"As a partner," he says.

This perturbs her more than she is willing to show. Melena swirls the wine around her glass, higher and higher, and then watches the red cascade seep back into its pool. "I couldn't leave," she says.

"Why not?"

She sighs. "There's nothing natural about this city. I'd miss the birds. The trees."

"The roses?"

Melena looks up and it's all there for him to see. She opens her mouth to say – but she doesn't know what to say. He's right.

He purses his lips and splays his fingers over the arm of the chair. His voice is soft. "I've thought about it quite often, you know. I've imagined all sorts of lives for us." Melena, curious, doesn't impede him as he begins, "First and foremost, that divorce for you."

"On what grounds?"

"Adultery, I think," he says. "It would be tricky – there's no incriminating correspondence. But with a green toddler shaking the foundations of buildings and levitating objects five times her weight, it wouldn't be difficult to play the 'child of both worlds' card." He shrugs. "Worst case scenario: it falls through and we resort to a duel."

"The better of the two options, I feel."

He continues, "And then an official celebration to present us. Some kind of public joining."

"I believe that's called a wedding," she says, "if not an orgy."

"Small difference, really." He smiles, infectiously, and Melena almost releases herself into the fantasy, even when he sobers and searches her face and springs the final proposition. "And in time, a family. Elphaba, of course, and two or three more."

Melena has no rejoinder for this one. She guards her reaction closely, knowing to her very core that she could have had two or three or fifteen by him and none of them would have been Nessa.

"You should've stayed," he concludes.

"Perhaps you should've stayed," she says faintly, but with enough meaning to restore them to what was. Her chest constricts as the question materializes, but she voices it anyway, "When did Elphaba begin asking about her mother?"

He ponders. "Three, the first time. Four – not long after that debut on her birthday – when she requested details."

"And what did you tell her?"

"Dead." The blow is struck quickly and with precision. Melena still can't help but wince. "It seemed the kindest route." He pours out another glass for both of them. "Does that bother you?"

"Yes, but I suspected as much." Melena drinks heartily and then trails her thumb down the stem. "She keeps that bottle with her."

"Slept with it under her pillow from the time I gave it to her."

Melena meets his eyes and then looks away. "Has she mentioned me?"

"You, as in…?"

"As in her friend's mother."

He places his hand on the table, flat. Melena wants to clutch it between both of hers, but she can't bring herself to close the gap. "She thinks very highly of you," he says, frowning. He falls still and then his eyes narrow, as if to capture her in a different light. "I have an instinct for people. It's gotten me far. But you – you baffle me. You left that baby in my throne room and I thought you must be the most unfeeling woman in Oz. Eighteen years later, she tells me Melena Thropp arranged for her to room with the governor's girl, and I couldn't figure out what you were playing at. But you weren't playing at anything, were you? You're fond of her."

Melena fails to lift her shield in time. He reads her better than he believes he does – it's what makes her feel so bare – and there's nowhere to stow the surge of guilt that picks her up and sends her plummeting.

The freefall must be evident on her face, for he immediately cushions the landing. "Don't look so terrified," he says. "She's been winning people over for years."

"She's been losing people for years," Melena says.

They lapse into a strained silence and Melena thinks she can hear her nerves thrumming, buzzing with the need to rise, to run, or at least to fidget, but she keeps her body limp until he rallies.

Almost bitterly, he raises his glass and says, "To the mess we didn't know we made."

"To Elphaba."

The vessels chime and withdraw to their mouths and Melena observes him over the rim, handsome and lean and older, but not significantly so, and it is the closest and furthest she's been from someone in a long while. She says, "What were those early years like? How long was it before you warmed to her?"

He refills their glasses again. "It seemed like an eternity at the time, but it couldn't have been more than—" he deliberates, "—no more than a year. As long as it took for her to recognize me." He smiles, recollecting. The father in him, Melena thinks. "There were all these decisions: Do I raise her myself? How do I debut her? What story do I peddle so there's no doubt she's mine? Is she mine? I didn't make much of an effort to be around her in those first months, but then one day she recognized me and her eyes lit up and she squirmed like anything to get upright and that was the point, I found, when she ceased to be green and was merely Elphaba."

Melena blinks. She has nothing to offer him; she is so destitute. I love you, Mummy, Nessa said, with the unchecked conviction of a child, and for days Melena would feel as though she could conquer anything. It has been so long since then.

"Can I ask you something?" he says. "Why? When you stole into my throne room that day, what was your motive?"

"I wanted control," Melena says slowly.

"How so?"

She is careful with her reply. If she opens her mouth too wide, chunks of her innermost self will fall out. "My husband was scandalized. He told me she was stillborn and sent her away with the midwife. Bringing her here was the only closure available to me."

"That bastard."

He lays his hand closer to hers and still she doesn't move. It is like describing the actions of a character in a novel, though she is dimly aware of the guilt, the anger that still burns, all the nothing she's packed in to temper it over the years. "While he was dying, I waited for him to mention it," she says. "I didn't need repentance – or even an apology. I wanted to know that it I wasn't the only one involved in the whole thing. I wanted to hear that it happened, and that he was a participant." Her voice is lifeless. "He didn't say anything. He just died."

"Good riddance."

"You shouldn't malign the dead," she chides.

"Yes, but good riddance anyway."

He slides his fingers through the spaces between hers. Melena's eyes dart to his face and then drop to their hands. She says, "I've been out of my mind since this began. How do you bear it?"

"I don't," he says, and for some reason she doesn't push him. He traces the blue vein down her forearm and then back up, lingering where it forks at the heel of her palm. It doesn't seem like part of her: pallid and immobile. He says, "I meant what I said earlier – though maybe not so malevolently. You ought to be more careful. Morrible's on the prowl, and I can only keep her off your scent for so long. Elphaba and Nessarose are the only threats to her power."

"Her power?"

"She's bound to stumble on the link eventually and use one against the other. If you come along and she can nab them both in one go, do you think she'll hesitate?"

Melena fights the revulsion that tugs at her gut; her stomach churning the ghost of a meagre lunch and half a bottle of wine. Her brows knit. "Why don't you let her in on it, then?"

"I won't betray you."

He almost sounds solemn. Melena laughs and says, "How chivalrous. You protect me for years and yet you send a specialized force after your own daughter." Her hand disentangles from his and pulls away, as if repelled. "And not just trackers. You've sent hunters."

"My daughter absconded with a powerful artifact that took centuries to uncover," he says.

This comes as a surprise to Melena. She thinks of the tome that Elphaba carried with her; the force it gave off and the shifting figures within. Details of Elphaba's crimes riddle the papers and yet this has never prompted as much as a passing mention.

"What good is a powerful artifact to a man without powers?" she says.

"As good as his powerful allies."

"What ally would have been more powerful than Elphaba?"

The list wells. Morrible, he might say, or Glinda, or any of the fanatics he's collected over the years, but they both know that a thousand of them wouldn't be half as valuable or devoted to him as Elphaba was. Instead, he argues, "She spends her days aiding my political enemies."

"Political enemies?" Melena says loudly. "They're citizens. They were studying and working and marrying in Oz while you were still nothing. They were tutors and midwives and—"

"My hand was forced."

"She'll die."

Melena's blood goes cold as the truth torrents out. She's never admitted it this bluntly, but she does not regret doing so now. They're circling back to the road that led nowhere; they will argue until the navy sky is clear again and nothing will change. "She'll slip up, Oscar," she says quietly, "and she'll be killed for it. There are so many ways. You think of them too." Her hands meet and pull and twist each other. "It will be a bullet from one of your men. Or she'll take a bad fall. She'll approach a feral Animal without realizing. Dehydration. Exhaustion. Disease. She won't stop until it happens."

She has ended up, somehow, on her feet. They carry her in no particular direction. "There's no end to this unless you make one," she says. "You need to reverse the Banns and re-assimilate the Animals or—"

"I'm handling it, Melena," he says.

"You're handling nothing! You're handling engagement balls and dinner parties!"

He slides onto the edge of his chair and reaches out, but she evades his grasp. "There's a plan in place," he says with finality, trying to calm her. "She's bound to return at some point. I intend to make her an offer she can't refuse."

"I don't buy that for a moment."

"Why not?"

She says, "They're just words to you. They don't mean anything. Just like you've told me, just like that interview—"

"What interview?"

Melena whirls to face him. "I'll speak to Nessarose," she says. "I'll put Elphaba under the protection of her sister and Munchkinland will champion her cause."

"You'd start a war for the sake of one girl?" he says, aghast, and the enormity of it descends on her like a deluge.

She says, "You wouldn't?"

"You'll be—"

"Traitors by autumn. Why not pre-empt Morrible?"

It catches up to her then; in half a second, fatigue twines around her ankles and yanks her into her seat. She stares unseeingly out the window, as he rises and treads the room and says, "That's the opposite of what you want." His tone is calculating. "The influx of Animal refugees will be too much of a strain. How will Munchkinland react? You'll be stretching their resources and their trust; you'll have a revolt on your hands – in addition to the action I'd be forced to take against you."

Melena brings her arms onto the table, hands cupping elbows, forehead drooping towards the surface. "If the Munchkins hate you, they'll forget what Nessa's done to them."

"It doesn't work that way, love," he says gently. "They'll rally behind whoever makes them the best offer. Right now, that's anyone else."

"Then I don't…" Melena's vision blurs. Her voice hitches and the world doubles and falls away. "It's ending. I know it's ending, and there's nothing I can do."

He is by her side and she feels his hands on her shoulders, gathering her hair from her temples. This is your fault, she thinks, her face falling onto her arms, her body shaking. She waits for him to call it a bluff and he doesn't, because she looks up midway and she is undone. Her sobs are real; real and furious and strangely comical, so she laughs and Oscar regards her with confusion, even as he pulls her up and draws her into his chest. He brushes his lips against hers and then kisses her in earnest, but with a tenderness that surprises both of them. It's almost as if they're a united front.

"You're a callous woman, Melena," he says, "but not as callous as you—"

She kisses him this time, and harder.

He pushes her away and spins her towards the window and then pulls her back into him, his lips working over her ear as his hands pull at the buttons, sliding the fabric off her shoulders and around her hips. She feels the familiar ache uncoil in her midriff and moans. There's no deluding herself anymore – she wants an anchor, she wants reassurance, she wants none of that, she wants to bury herself in his arms and mold her body to his and feel like Alice again.

They hit the bed and join, and come apart, and he kisses the rampant pulse in her wrist and the crease between her brows. He slides his hand up the underside of her thigh and touches her so that the ache builds and builds and bursts and hurls her headlong into another crying spell, and by the time she has no tears left to her she can't be sure if she is lodged in a dream or a nightmare.

The daze ebbs in fits and starts that wrench her back into reality with no small amount of violence, and each time it seems that he is there to draw her closer, stroking her damp forehead as she cries again, as she dozes again, as she runs her fingertips over his ribs and caresses the spot where she'd slide a knife in if she had one. She kisses his face, all over, and clings to him, curling her arms and legs under his so that they are one knot of eight limbs.

He says, "Stay another night."

She wakes alone.

Sunlight presses softly against her eyelids and she reaches for him, but her fingers close forlornly around air and slide back to her over the barren folds of the sheets. Her clothing is laid out across the foot of the bed, the pins that have fallen from her hair arranged in a neat row by the empty glasses on the table. She dresses quickly, donning her hood and sneaking out a servant door, the book that she seizes from the table tucked tightly into the crook of her arm as she merges with a boisterous crowd of tourists.

The city gleams with dew and pulses with noise. Melena makes it as far as the first bench beyond the gates and fixes her eyes on the cobblestones by her shoes, too dizzy to tolerate the sight of people. They bustle by as if their bustling matters, with shopping bags and hat boxes, with pocket watches and briefcases, with their own agendas and no attention to spare.

You have no idea, she wants to say to them.

She only keels over and brings her hands to her face, concentrating.

In a few hours, she will be posing as Lana Farin from Gillikin. She will wheedle her way through the border and then she will return to Colwen Grounds and lie about her father's condition. Eventually, Elphaba will turn up and Melena will lie again, but she does not know how she will manage this, for she looks inside of herself and everything is awry. Maybe it is because she has not eaten in sixteen hours, or because she has mended nothing, or because she is heartsick and ashamed and too small for her own skin, but she sits perfectly still and all the while she is falling, falling, falling.