At this very moment in time, Glinda Arduenna was exactly thirty-six years, eight months, twelve days, six hours and seventeen minutes old. The Pie-maker had come bearing a gift of apple and sweet maple. As he came walked towards her with this marvelous confection, she gave him a look of longing that had absolutely nothing to do with pie. But again, this was not their story...
Trism cursed his luck and his blind stupidity in trusting the girl. Called herself Trot, said she was from the Island of Jinx. She ransacked the room, robbed him and his partner while they slept and vanished into the night.
So he had gone to the Giddy Pixie, royally pissed off and rightly so, to confront her, only to find out that there was no girl on their bill called Trot and never had been. What's more even the description was unfamilar to employees and patrons alike.
He proceeded to drink himself back into oblivion.
Meanwhile, the girl who was not called Trot fled the village of Froticca, her purse considerably heavier.
Once she decided she was safely outside the village walls, Nor sat down and began to count her spoils. It wasn't much but it would buy her a warm bed and food in her belly for a few days.
She lay back in the grass and daydreamed. What if she really had been from Jinx? Those strange folk with their exotic features and exotic lives. Or perhaps from the land of Ix, where there were untold wonders? Or even, dare she say it, the strangest of all, that land called Kansas that the mysterious and powerful creature that called herself Dorothy hailed from?
Her thoughts wound to that subject. What sort of being was Dorothy? Her mind rationalized that some of the tale had been embellished as these things tend to be. But the facts remained. Dorothy had destroyed two witches and overthrown the wizard nearly by herself. Maybe the proverbial old wives gathered in a huddle by the window were correct. That she was, in fact, Lurline herself, returned to save Oz from tyranny.
If so, where was she now?
It was just like a diety to show up with pomp and circumstance, but then when you really needed them...
She dozed there by the roadside until pony-drawn wagon ambled by. She came immediatly awake. "Hey," she called to them.
The man at the reigns looked like the seedy sort but he was of the well-dressed variety. Low-men in yellow coats, she mused with a disgusted shudder. But he wasn't wearing yellow, more of a kind of blue. The concept was the same.
She tried to look as needy as possible as she rushed to meet him.
He gave her a look of barely disguised lust as his eyes roved her figure. "Where you headed," he drawled. His accent was horribly Gillikinese. It put her in mind of that dreadful Glinda.
"Where ever the road takes me," she said, trying to play coy.
"I have business in Traum," he told her.
"That's as good a place as any," she said, hoping in the back.
He chuckled and patted the empty space next to him. "No sense in you being in the back like some dead weight. Sit here, next to me, as a Queen rightly should."
She complied. She'd worry about it later if he tried anything with her. She could let him know real quick that she was no cheap road-side slut. She would let her knife do the talking for her.
"I'm Trot," she told him.
"Cap'n Bill," he said, simply. He coughed magnificently, spraying phelgm and spit all over the poor pony. Or Pony, as it soon was to make apparent.
"Shut your damn trap. No one ever told you to cover your mouth you miserable maggot," the Pony said viscously.
"And you never heard that Animals should be seen and not heard. I'll pull out your tongue for you. Turn you into glue," Cap'n Bill snapped back. He coughed again, setting the Pony off in a tirade of profanity.
Nor bit her lip and tried to make the most of the trip.
Crows over head. Vicious, nasty Beasts. Taunting her.
"That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house," one of them cawed. Raucous laughter rang out among them.
Elphaba snatched up the first thing that she touched and leapt to her feet. She threw it at them. They flew up a few feet but settled back into the same branches.
Fiyero watched her with a slightly amused expression. She glowered at him. "Did you hear what they said? About my sister?"
"Damn Crows, I hate them too, but then you already knew that. Not that it matters anyway." The second he said it he realized how it sounded. He nearly hit himself for her. Before Elphaba blew up at him he quickly added, "Not that Nessa's death was unimportant, I mean. The damn cretins! No death should be mocked."
Yackle could be seen in the distance, engaged in some odd ritual. Candle had watched her for sometime but was now on her way back.
Fiyero hummed a tune to himself.
"What's that," Elphaba said. It sounded vaguely familar.
"Oh, it's just something one of my nursemaids sang to me when I was a baby."
She gave him a funny look. "I thought you grew up in the grasslands with your tribe."
"I did grow up there. But until I was about five, I think, my mother kept me at Kiamo Ko. My father more or less kidnapped me one night after that birthday. If you can call it a kidnapping. Everyone involved knew it would happen and had the details all planned out. My mother and all her staff. Of course I had know idea."
"I love your voice. Sing it to me."
He made a face. "It's a silly little nursery rhyme."
"Yero," she said in a voice that let him not to argue anymore.
He sighed but did it anyway. "I could while away the hours, conferrin' with the flowers…Consultin' with the rain..."
Candle came closer watching him.
"Oh, I could tell you why the ocean's near the shore…I would not be just a nothin' my head all full of stuffin'/My heart all full of pain/I would dance and be merry, life would be a ding-a-derry/If I only had a brain." He finished, flushing a bit, although with his dark skin it wasn't noticeable.
The girl smiled at the nonsense lyrics. She too, began to hum the tone but hardly had the nerve or the voice to join in.
"You're right it is silly," Elphaba said, her voice a little too harsh. She mentally kicked herself, and said more gently, "But some how with you singing it..."
But this only made him more irritated. He got up and left them. She watched him go, feeling irritated herself. Why all of a sudden was he so easily offended, she wondered. It made her feel both concerned and angry.
Author's note: Trot and Cap'n Bill are characters from Baum's original vision, for those who don't know. The song is of course from the 1939 movie, this being the second time I've used it in a fic for this site. For slash fanatics I'm trying to think of how lovers Trism and Liir will hook up in this alternate universe, though it may not happen in this fic. And yet another allusion to the infamous Pie-Maker...sorry couldn't resist. The amazing and beautiful Kristen Chenoweth shined in both canons, did she not?