Tale as Old as Time
In Which They Meet a Catastrophe
Four days had passed. Boq and Glinda were still lost, with no sign of getting un-lost in the near future. They were still heading east but they hadn't seen a trace of civilization since they'd left the wrecked carriage and they'd both lost count of how many times the forest had shifted after five. The increasing hopelessness of their situation was taking its toll. Glinda's mood had only deteriorated, and Boq's initial cheery façade was disappearing at an alarming rate. They were nearly always at each other's throats.
"You know, for being the man who hiked all over Oz with a foreign girl, you're not much a traveler," Glinda snapped icily at her companion, who was once again mulling over the map.
'You know, for being such a Good Witch you certainly know how to turn into a hag,' Boq thought darkly but didn't dare say it out loud.
They'd stopped at a river's edge to let the horses rest and eat and drink while Glinda had lunch of her own. The emergency bags had a weeks worth of non-perishable food. It tasted horrible of course, but it was something.
"Well back in the day, I could follow a road and get somewhere. This wandering-through-the-trees plan is ridiculous."
"Oh? What do you suggest then?" Glinda asked, spreading her arms wide.
"You could use your bubble to at least see where we are."
"I'm sick of telling you that won't work," Glinda hissed.
"You used it to get out of the carriage," The Tinman pointed out.
"That was going up and down five feet. It's an entirely different matter to maneuver through and out of trees that are sixty feet tall."
Boq sighed and then turned back to the map, looking again for any clue as to where they were.
"Stop looking at the Oz-forsaken map!"
"It's better than nothing."
"No! It's not, it's really not, which is the problem!"
"I don't see you coming up with any brilliant ideas to save us Your Goodness."
"Maybe it's the company."
"Somehow I doubt it. You've never been a real genius so to speak."
"Says the man who got himself turned into Tin," Glinda said viciously.
"You don't know what you're talking about!" Boq roared, finally losing his temper. "You know, really it was your fault in the first place."
"My fault?" She yelled back in disbelief.
"Yes! It was your fault, you selfish little witch!"
Glinda gasped and stepped back from the Tinman, completely oblivious as to how he could possibly pin his predicament on her. She was Glinda the Good for Oz's sake. And she'd certainly been everything but selfish since Elphaba's death.
"You're the one who got me involved with those sisters," he spat. "All because you could bear the thought of one dance with a shy munchkin boy when there was a prince to be hadMiss Guh-linda!"
Glinda's confusion slid into horror as she put the pieces together at last.
"Boq?" She whispered the name with revulsion. The disgust she'd harbored for him since he'd helped to orchestrate the Witch-hunt deepened to something more hateful.
"Where's your handsome prince now Miss Galinda? Where's the munchkin boy?" He asked condescendingly, thinking she was finally seeing his point. "I see now I shouldn't wasted my time with you. You obviously haven't grown up since college, you still manipulate and bend the truth and use people. Only now you do it with a wand and a smile. What possessed me to work as hard as I could to keep you safe and win your love is beyond me. Elphaba had nothing on you, but then again she was probably a victim of the lies you spread! I don't know why I never saw it!"
"How dare you?" She shrieked, surprising him with the force of her voice.
It was Boq's turn to back down, while a few feet away the horses had perked their heads up at Glinda's yelling, ignoring their meal to see what the fuss was about.
"How dare you do what you did to her and then speak about her that way?" Glinda demanded, launching a tirade she'd been longing to have since the Tinman had joined the ranks of her guard. "She never did anything to you! In fact, in the time you knew her she was nothing if not kind to you. For some reason you made her sister happy and Elphaba had nothing but respect and gratitude towards you because of that."
"She turned me to Tin!" Boq retorted angrily. "Her sister tried to steal my heart! I think that constitutes 'doing something to me' don't you?"
"What in Oz are you talking about?" Glinda cried, again genuinely confused, but still livid with the man who seemed to be one more person to betray her.
"At Colwen Grounds," Boq explained impatiently, as if he were telling the story to a particularly slow child. "The day of your 'engagement' ball. I was leaving to…I was leaving. Nessa had her sister's wretched spell book and she tried to magick me into falling in love with her. It didn't work instead it shrank my heart. So Elphaba turned me to Tin. If her sister couldn't have me then no one would!"
"Would you listen to yourself?" Glinda snarled disgustedly. "That was Nessa's fault not Elphaba's! There's no way to reverse a spell, what Nessa did would have killed you. She saved your life! And in return you helped to take away hers."
Boq looked shocked at her furious revelation.
"She took my heart…" he tried protest. "The only thing I had left was my ability to love and she took it away."
The icy anger Glinda had been directing at him since the fiasco that was the trip to Ev began turned white hot and contempt flashed in her eyes as tears of rage pooled in them.
"You don't need a heart to love. You need a soul, and as corrupted as it is you have one of those, because the Wicked Witch of the West did what she could to save it!"
"Oh, and you know so much about hearts and love!"
"What's that supposed to mean?" She snapped.
"You know what they call you behind your back Miss Galinda?" He asked contemptuously. "The 'Ice Princess', the 'Frigid Witch of the North'. Everyone loves you. But those closest to you say you don't know how to love. Who would have thought you of all people would turn into a distant workaholic?"
Something that strongly resembled hurt flitted across Glinda's expression but as quickly as it came she smothered it with anger.
"Well I'm sorry that running an entire country keeps me a little busy."
"It's more than that," Boq said a little sadly. "You're afraid of what would happen if you let yourself love a person instead of a group. We're quite a pair you and I. The Tinman without a heart and the Witch who froze hers."
"We are not a pair," she spat, refusing to let him get to her even though he'd hit the nail on the head. "We are nothing. You are despicable! I don't think we have anything more to say to one another. Goodbye Boq."
She marched over to her horse and swung up.
"I hope you fall in a creek," she said over her shoulder.
She galloped away, leaving Boq gaping in her wake.
"Glinda wait!" He yelled after her.
But she had already disappeared through the foliage.
She would probably dishonorably discharge him the instant they were back in Oz. But at the moment it was unwise for them to separate, despite being at the top of each other's hit lists. And whether she wanted anything to do with him or not.
Boq swore loudly and stormed over to his horse. She was after all Glinda the Good. And whether or not she hated him was beside the point. He had a duty, and besides that he couldn't live with himself if anything happened to her.
It took a while to find a rock large enough to aid him in climbing onto his horse. He cursed his inflexible frame the entire time but was eventually able to race after the 'Good' Witch.
Hours later Glinda finally pulled her horse to a stop at the edge of a cropping of huge rocks. Night had already fallen and she'd been riding in the dark for quite some time, fueled by her rage and the desire to run as far and fast as she could from…everything.
The Boq she'd known had never been particularly insightful but he'd managed to pinpoint her own traitorous feelings and use them against her. All at once the things she'd been forcing herself to ignore she was suddenly faced with.
It all went back to Elphaba. And the day in the Emerald City that had changed the course of history. She'd spent two years trying to erase the wreckage a single choice had caused. She could give Animals and Munchkins their rights; she could restore order to a broken government, peace to an anger-ridden people, beauty to a ruined country. But she could never change the fact that it might not have happened if she'd chosen differently that day. She could never erase the deaths; never erase the scar it left on her soul.
She could put the blame on others' shoulders; to that end Morrible was taken care of and the Wizard was banished. She could hate people. She'd done that too. But at the end of the day it wasn't the Tinman or Morrible or the Wizard or the gullible mob Glinda the Good blamed and hated for the death of her best friend.
It was herself.
And though Boq couldn't possibly know that he'd dredged all of that up for her, she hated him for that too.
She was crying now. Two years of anger and pain, that she'd bottled up to hide behind a bubbly façade and squash with obsession for her duty to her people, streamed down her cheeks. On top of it she was even more lost than before. She hadn't paid any attention to direction since she'd left Boq far behind. The craggy rocks that circled about her were far taller than she was, even when seated on her gigantic horse. They blocked out all the light, she couldn't even see the stars through the trees anymore.
Fear set in, taking priority over her tempestuous emotions –not shoving them aside once more, merely becoming more prominent. The dark settled around her and she could hear her horse nicker nervously, the sound like every other magnified by fear. She was acutely aware that she was probably the most vulnerable thing in the woods at that moment. It wasn't a comforting awareness.
If only there were light.
As if in answer to her wish a flash of light split the sky and lit the rocks and trees with blinding brightness. A loud burst of thunder followed soon after.
It was all Glinda could do to hold back the whimper that nearly escaped her throat. Another flash and a crack of thunder spooked her horse and it shied suddenly away from the cliffs around it. Glinda clung desperately to its thick mane as rain began to fall in heavy drops around them.
Glinda screamed and the huge horse bucked again, nearly throwing her mercilessly into the rocks.
"Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!" She cried, but her voice was to shrill to have the desired affect on the horse.
Another flash of light crackled around them, this time illuminating a flash of another kind higher on top of the rocks. But it was too brief for Glinda to tell if it was her imagination or not. She managed to get her horse to stop bucking, but he still pranced about as she tried to hold on and see through the dark and the rain at the same time.
A low hiss startled both woman and horse around, so they once again faced the ominous rocks that loomed over them. Lightning lit the area again and this time Glinda caught sight of their company. Perched over her head on a ledge of rock was the biggest cat she'd ever seen. And it was rather irked at their presence.
The cat snarled again as the time between lightning flashes grew shorter. It rocked back on its haunches and roared before springing to a lower ledge. Startled by the force of the noise, Glinda lost her grip on her horse and tumbled backwards as it reared again. She hit the wet ground roughly and looked up to see her mount running for dear life in the opposite direction.
Another growl snapped her attention back to the feline predator poised above her.
Knowing that running would be futile, Glinda scooted away from the rocks, hoping she could slip beneath the roots of a tree, or into a hollow log, or under a rock ledge before the big cat caught her. All the while she tried to bring to mind a spell, any spell at all, that would help. But in her panic her mind went blank.
The thunder bellowed and the cat pounced. Leaping from its perch to the ground in one graceful and impossibly fast motion. Glinda's eyes widened and she brought her muddied hands over her head in one last frantic attempt to protect herself as the cat sprang toward her.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and hoped that whatever happened would be quick and as painless as possible. She fully expected to feel claws scraping at her innards and a crushing, toothy mouth descend on her. She didn't expect the gleam of metal that came and the sick thud of a blade meeting flesh.
The cat screeched in pain and dodged away from Boq's axe. Vexed now, and determined to have its prey, the cat leapt at Glinda again. Another flash of metal came, followed by another ripping thud, followed by another outraged, pain-ridden squeal.
The cat paced off; limping badly to one side from the wounds it had received. Boq let it go, knowing that it wouldn't be back, even if it did survive the lacerations he'd given it.
He lowered the axe and squinted down to Glinda who was curled up on the ground, crying from fright, and breathing heavily.
The rain beat down on them both, ushering Glinda to get control of herself and do something. She pushed herself wearily up.
"C'mon we need to get out of here," she called to Boq through the downpour.
When he didn't move and continued to stare at the spot where she'd lain she grew more impatient.
"Boq! We need to move!"
Rain continued to pelt the motionless Tinman and Glinda realized what had happened.
He'd rusted over.
"I hope you fall in a creek."
The angry words echoed through her mind.
He'd risked water to save her after that? The rain was worse than a creek.
She reached a hand out to brush the rain uselessly from his face. Hoping he could tell her what to do. Not even his gaze shifted, even his eyes were immobilized by rust.
The blur of the trees around her shifted her thoughts from the deteriorating Tin statue before her.
The forest was shifting again.
Glinda looked around for their horses with wild eyes. Hers was long gone, but Boq's was caught in bush. She raced over to it, untangling the reins and leading it back in a reckless race against time.
The blur of the trees worsened, and the ground rumbled beneath her feet as she hauled the horse to where Boq stood. With one hand she held tight to the reins, she linked her other arm through Boq's, knowing if they stood together, they'd end up in the same part of the forest at least.
The blur worsened and with a great shake, the forest moved.
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