Novel quoting

[green_as_sin]

I sat down and typed up many, many quotes from the sequel to Wicked, which is called Son of a Witch. I will do a quote post from Wicked as well, but I was in the middle of rereading SoaW when I started writing things down, so... that's why it is getting posted first. ^^; So this is partly reference for me (because a whole lot of new stuff is revealed about Elphaba in it) but it also has quotes I really like, and some interesting stuff, etc. Some people have also asked me my opinion on the sequel, so this should give them more of an idea of what it is like.

The novels are very interesting, sometimes a bit twisted, sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful... they fascinate me, pretty much. This particular one is focused on Liir, who is thought to be Elphaba's son, and his reflections on her. It's got him growing from a boy who considers himself useless and insignificant to realizing the effect someone can actually have on the world without knowing it. There's also boys sleeping with boys, girls sleeping with boys, and a whole lot of introspection. But Wicked has that too, haha.

Told you I'd make full use of my canon. ♥



"He was with Elphaba?"
"Now you remember, I see you do."
"The Wicked Witch of the West..."
"As some called her." The Superior Maunt sniffed. "Not I. Her name here was Sister Saint Aelphaba, but I seldom called her anything. She was more or less under a vow of silence - her own. She needed no addressing."

The Witch - so called - had lived at the cloistered mauntery a decade and a half ago. One couldn't forget that - to the Superior Maunt's knowledge, no one else in Oz had ever been born with skin as green as new lilac leaves. But Elphaba had kept herself to herself, accepting without complaint such assignments as were meted out. She'd lived there for, what, five, six, seven years? And then, the Superior Maunt had hired Oatsie Manglehand to escort the close-lipped novice back into the civilian world. The small boy had tagged along, neither warmly included nor shooed away.
Elphaba had gone. Off to Kiamo Ko, to stew in her own private penance. The Superior Maunt occasionally listened to testimonies of sin confessed by her sisters, but during her tenure as a maunt, Elphaba had never petitioned for an audience. Of this the Superior Maunt was quite sure. Though the nature of Elphaba's sins had been of great interest to the under-entertained sorority, Elphaba had never obliged.

"I had just arrived about the time Elphaba was setting out," said Sister Doctor. "I remember Elphaba Thropp a little. I didn't care for her. Her moods and silences seemed hostile rather than holy."

The girl couldn't control her shock, so it took Liir a while to understand what she was blubbering about. The Witch was gone. His earliest memory, his bete noire, his Auntie, his jail-keeper, his sage friend - his mother, others had said, but there'd been no proof of that, and she'd never answered the question when he'd asked her.
Dead, dead and gone, and after her own inspection, Nanny wouldn't let him up the parapet to see. "The sight would turn the holy blind," she murmured, "so it's a good thing I'm an old sinner. And you, you're just a young fool. Forget it, Liir."

Perhaps he just didn't have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap of something: for Elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off - well, it didn't seem right.
She whipped up in his mind, the first brutal memory as sudden and insistent as a bee sting. She was yelling at him. "The Wizard's soldiers kidnapped the whole family and left you behind? Because you were useless? And you followed after them anyway, and they still managed to elude you? Are you useless?" Even then he had known that she was less angry at him than frightened at what had befallen the other residents of the castle while she was away. Even then he had known she was relieved he'd been spared by virtue of being insignificant. Even then he'd smarted at the rebuke of the term. Useless.

He thought of the Grimmerie, that perplexing book of magic. He had never been able to read it. Wherever the Witch had put it last, he let it be. No matter. No Flying Monkey would be able to gibber a spell out of it, and Nanny's eyesight was too poor to decipher its odd scrambling text. It would be too heavy to carry, anyway.
Books have their own life, he thought. Let it take care of itself.

The horizon was frosted with a greenish smear, as if ranks of campfires from distant tribes had divined the news already and were burning a homage to Elphaba before the sun could set on the day of her death.
He could smell her in the collar of the cape, and he wept for the first time.

The Witch had never hidden her emotions, but nor had she explained them, and in many ways living with her had been like sharing an apartment with an ill-tempered house pet.

"Oh, the shock of it." The Grite clutched his paws and worried them back and forth. "The shock of it! The Witch is dead?"
The wind itself answered in a king of obbligato descant: The Witch is dead!
"Get out of here," said the Grite in a colder voice. "Go on."
"I thought you'd be glad," said Dorothy.
The retort was crisp and censorious. "We held her in considerable regard. There have always been some Animals who would have marched at her side, right to the gates of the Emerald City, had she believed in armies, had she ever given the word. You'll find no comfort among us."
"She was my friend," said Liir. "Don't confuse us with assassins."
"You're a fledgling. You could barely manage to befriend her cape, let alone the Witch herself." To Dorothy he added, "Move along, little Miss Thug and accomplices, before I call on reinforcements to deal with you."

"You," said the Grite to the Lion, "are a turncoat. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I'd be especially wary if I were you. Animals don't take lightly to traitors. If you were more of a Lion, you'd know that."
"I did nothing!" said the Lion. "I was locked in the kitchen!"

The Princess groaned. "She might have been a help! But it is too late. I hear through the report of a Mountain Grite that the peculiar woman is dead. Elphaba."
The interpreter pronounced it wrong. "EL-phaba," said Liir.
"Is the murderer here among us?" asked the Princess.
"It was an accident," said Dorothy. "I didn't mean it." She put the end of one of her pigtails into her mouth and chewed it.
"The deceased was a curious creature," said the Princess. "I only met her once, but she impressed me with her stamina. She did not seem the type to die."

"I don't know," said the Princess Nastoya. "I once told Elphaba Thropp that if she needed help, she was only to send word, and I would put all my resources under her command. I never thought that the reverse would happen. That the time would come for me to apply to her for her knowledge of Animals, her native skill at spells and charms. But I have started too late, I see, for your companion has murdered my only hope."
"Dorothy was not to know," said Liir.
"Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too."

"You confuse me with someone else," he said. "Someone with competence. Someone I never met."
"This isn't a request," she said. "It's an order. I am a colleague of Elphaba's. If you claim to be a relation of the Witch's, you will figure out what to do. She always could."
"Well, not always," Dorothy corrected her helpfully. "As is woefully apparent at this moment in time."

To Liir, it wasn't a question of how many days or weeks it took to reach the Emerald City, but how many hours a day he had to trudge before he could sink back into a safe sleep again. Not sleep, something richer: blissful annihilation. So he could forget the sideways throb of his heart kicking: You. You. You. He kept the thought of Elphaba there, unwillingly; it pressed painfully against membranes so interior he had never known their existence before. I hated you. You left me. So I hate you more than I used to.

Elphaba, thought Liir. Elphaba, he felt. Elphaba. The world without you.
How am I to manage?

She hadn’t been much, that Dorothy. Priggish, in a way, proud of her wide-eyed charity. Her kindness, at first magnificent, had come to seem a bit - well, cheap. After all, she’d also oiled the Tin Woodman, and soothed the timorous Lion, and discussed differences between the gold and silver standards of foreign currency with the Scarecrow, who seemed for all his brainlessness to be following the whole discussion. She’d cuddled that rank little dog of hers. In light of all that, her solicitousness to Liir seemed nothing more than the Next Good Deed.

“You’re younger than I,” said Liir.
“I was born old,” said the Scarecrow. “That’s how I was made.”
“I don’t know how I was made,” said the boy. “That’s part of my problem.”

“I miss Dorothy,” he said.
The Scarecrow replied, “It’s the Witch you miss, isn’t it?”
“I hated her too much to miss her.”
“That’s what you think.”
“You think your own thoughts, and leave me mine.” He was outraged at the presumption. “What did you know of the Witch? Auntie Witch? Elphaba Thropp? She was my… she was my witch!”

“Where are the kitchens, anyway? Through here?”
She stumbled into a cloakroom, and then opened the door to a closet where two of the belowstairs staff were involved in recreational activities. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and shut the door, then locked it. “Eventually they’ll have to thump to be released, and one of them is bound to be cheating. Heaps of fun. But where’s the kitchen?”
“Have you just moved here?” asked Liir.
“Don’t be silly. Lord Chuffrey had this house long before we married. But I don’t cook for myself, if that’s what you mean. Nothing other than the toast I mentioned earlier, and that’s done in the breakfast hall. Ah, here we are.”
A half-flight of stone steps descended into a cavernous whitewashed kitchen. A dozen members of the staff were sitting about the table so deep in conversation that they didn’t hear her coming. “Lady Glinda,” said a bootblack, and they all leaped up with guilty looks.
“Glad to be recognized in my own home,” said Glinda. “I hate to interrupt what are probably well-intentioned plans to kill us all in our beds, but if you don’t mind?”

“What happened?”
“What happened?” She turned the question to herself, examining it. “History happened, I suppose. We saw the Wizard, and we parted ways - Elphaba went underground, as it were, and… in time, I hugged the limelight.” She sighed. “With the best of intentions, and with limited success.”
“And now?” he said, not because he was interested, but because he didn’t want any more attention on himself.
“Now, I hold the key,” she said. “Now, for the time being, I am intended to stand in for the mighty on their thrones. It’s all I’m good for.”
“Are the mighty deserving of thrones?”
“That’s an Elphaba question, and out of your youthful pouting mouth it sounds preposterous. Like most of her superior cavils, it has no easy answer. How could I know?”

“Oh, oh,” she managed, “I don’t know that I’ll see you again… and you remind me so of her.”
“I haven’t Elphaba’s talent,” said Liir simply. “I’m not worth mourning, believe me.”
“Her power was only part of it,” said Glinda. “She was brave, and so are you.”
“Bravery can be learned,” he said, trying to be consoling.
“Bravery can be stupid,” said Commander Cherrystone. “Believe me.”

He didn't know what Liirness might mean, and he was sorry Elphaba wasn't around to raise a mocking eyebrow and sling a caustic remark. He might have been hurt by her sly digs, but he could have relished that hurt, too - he saw now. Survived it? Transformed it.

In some more humble quarters of Oz, gossip had long held that Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West, had been born a wise soul, already formed, somehow conscious. Why else the mouthful of sharp choppers, not so much baby pearls as python’s teeth, which some folk insisted she’d sported at birth? She came into the world with advance knowledge of its corruption, and in the womb she had prepared for it as best she could, by growing those teeth.
That’s what was said, anyway.

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring. Elphaba, with her sympathies far more substantial than her luck, had at least wrestled with the questions. She’d shoved, and barked, and made herself a right nuisance.

What Liir discovered, rather, was that merely by hanging around in the company of Elphaba he had picked up - something. Not power, not intuition, which she seemed to have down to her very eyelash. Not understanding. But something else - a good ear, anyway. Would he could find a way to perform a spell! That was the ultimate competence with language, a skill Elphaba had had in spades, and that she used rarely and reluctantly. What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled… some imprecision clarified, some name Named… and some change managed.

The army thrived on its regulae. Precision, obedience, and rightness of thinking. Had Elphaba possessed any of those virtues? When she’d been sloppy with emotion, vivid with rage or grief - which was most of the time - she hadn’t kept to a schedule. Coffee at midnight, waking up the others by slamming the larder door looking for cream! Lunch at sunset, bread crumbs on the harpsiclavier keys. Pelting through the gates of the castle, in any weather, at any hour, no matter if Liir had just laid out a couple of coddled eggs for her. Studying the night through, getting excited, reading things from that - that book of hers - out loud, to hear how they went, how they sounded. Waking Chistery on his perch at the top of the wardrobe. Impetuous and selfish, totally selfish. How had he not seen it?
She was obedient - yes - to herself. Though what good had that done her - or anyone else? So far as he could remember - and he spent some wakeful nights examining his recollections carefully - she had rarely asked anything of Liir except that he keep himself safe.
And certainly she’d never asked him to be obedient. How was one to learn obedience unless one was thwacked into line?
Still, he reminded himself stiffly, to be kind. What did Elphaba know of child rearing? When he listened to his companions gossiping about their mothers - those cozy, pincushiony mamas, who never cuffed a child without a follow-up cuddle - he knew that nothing about Elphaba smacked of the maternal. Maybe this was all the proof he needed that she wasn’t his mother, couldn’t have been. She had had lots of power, in her own way, but she had no more motherly instincts than a berserk rhino.
Even a berserk rhino can bear a child, his deeper voice reminded him, till he told it to shut up.

Liir trained his eyes on some scraps of graffiti written with drippy paint on a public wall. He tried to bring them into focus as a way to sober up. In four different hands, applied at four different opportunities, to judge by the aging of the text, the wall read

ELPHIE LIVES!

OZMA LIVES!

THE WIZARD LIVES!

And then

EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.

If Elphaba had been his mother, he got something more - that much was sure. But what? She had acted to pervert fate, to interrupt and bludgeon history into shape - to topple the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, no less - and what good had it gotten her? She was fierce and futile at everything she attempted. What kind of a lesson was that?

“I want to ask you something directly. If you know the answer, you can tell me. I’m grown up now. Was Elphaba my mother?”
“She didn’t know,” said Nanny. Her mouth took the shape of an O - O! - as if startled all over again by the ridiculous conceit. “She suffered some terrible blow, and lapsed into a dreamless sleep for months on end. Or so she said. When she came to, and was suitably convalesced, she stayed on to work for some maunts. Then she left them to come here, and they gave her you to take along. That’s all she ever knew. She supposed she could have given birth to you in a coma. It is possible. These things do happen.” She rolled her eyes.
“Why didn’t she ask about me - and her?”
“I suppose she thought the answer didn’t matter. There you were, one way or the other. It hardly signified.”
“It matters to me.”
“She was a good woman, our Elphie, but she wasn’t a saint,” said Nanny, both tartly and protectively. “Leave her her failings. Not everyone is cut out to be a warm motherly type.”
“If she thought I might be her child, wouldn’t she have mentioned the possible father?”
“She never did what another person might. You remember that.”

If only she were still alive to tell him something, anything.

“Are we a couple?” he asked, bravely enough.
“We are one and one,” she said. “In Quadling thinking, one plus one doesn’t equal a single unit of two. One plus one equals both.”

What had he understood, then, of Elphaba’s drive? Her need? The force that pushed her around? Precious little. But he remembered the day she saved the infant Snow Monkey, who would become Chistery. Her native - talent? power? skill at concentration? - or maybe, merely, compassion? - had caused a small lake to ice over so she half walked, half slid across it to collect the abandoned, fretting monkey baby.
That’s what his memory said. The very ice formed under her heels. The world conformed itself to suit her needs. But how could this possibly be true? Perhaps it was the unreliability of memory, the romanticking tendencies of childhood, that made Liir remember it this way. The lake went ice. The baby monkey was saved. Maybe, really, she’d waded. Or maybe the lake was already iced over.
Maybe all that really mattered, as to her power, was that she saved the baby monkey.

“You young things take everything so seriously. But you don’t remember the bad old days of the Wizard. The drought. How we lived back then. How we laughed! Ha. A lark. And hardly anyone stood up to him. Only one fool witch from the hinterlands. And we all know what happens to witches.”
Someone hissed.

“He grew up in the thick of it, though, didn’t he? He’d had those two powerful sisters; next to them he must have always felt like shredded cabbage.”
“Are we talking about the same Shell? Come on!”
“Come on yourself. Suppose everyone in your family was thought to be wicked. Even were called Wicked, almost as a title -“
But they were, thought Liir; it was my family, too, or as good as.

They came to a newsstand shuttered up for the night. ELPHABA LIVES was scratched in char on the boards. “They think they own her,” Liir said, suddenly disgusted. “The Witch would be foaming at the mouth. She was a flaming recluse and a crank.” Even the handwriting had an intimate, proprietary look to it somehow.

“You know the Emperor,” he said. “None other than Shell, Elphaba’s younger brother.”
“Wouldn’t she be surprised to know her brother had succeeded the Wizard!” She looked rueful.
“Surprised,” said Liir. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Well, yes. She’d be outraged. Piety as the new political aphrodisiac. I suppose that’s what you mean.”
He shrugged. “What someone would feel after she’s dead - that notion means little to me. She doesn’t feel. All that’s left of her - shades and echoes, fading by the hour.”
Glinda closed her breviary with a little slap. She hadn’t been attending closely to her devotions anyway. “That pesky slogan you see scrawled everywhere is right. She does live, you know. She does.”
Liir snapped at her. “I have no truck with that kind of sentiment. All butchers and simpletons ‘live’ in that sense.
Glinda raised her chin. “No, Liir. She lives. People sing of her. You wouldn’t guess it, being you - but they do. There’s a musical noise around her name; there are things people remember, and pass on.”
“People can pass on lies and hopes as well as shards of memory.”
“You refuse to be consoled, don’t you? Well, that’s as much proof as I could ever need that you’re kin to her. She was the same way. The very same way.”

“You’ve been quiet for a decade, Mother Yackle, but of late you’ve come back to yourself somewhat. Have you anything to add we should know?”
“I don’t talk when there’s nothing to say,” said Mother Yackle. “All I have to add is this: Elphaba should be here to see this hour.”
“You have an uncommon association with - the Witch of the West.”
“Yes, I do,” said Mother Yackle. “I seem to have been placed on the sidelines of her life, as you might say, as a witness. I’m mad as a bedbug, so no one needs to attend, but I’ve taken some measure of her power. Oh! - but she should be here to see this hour.”
“Mother Yackle? A guardian angel?” called Sister Apothecaire.
“Well - a guardian twitch, anyway,” replied the old woman.
Liir trembled and thought of his lack of power, once again, and of his revery within these walls. Now he remembered what he hadn’t seen before: that in the corner of the room where the green-skinned novice had sat rocking the cradle, a broom leaned against a chest of drawers.

“Do you think Elphaba will have a history?”
“She does already, ninnykins! I just saw her flying up the valley as large as a cloud. Her cape went out behind her, a thousand bits in flight. Nearly touched the peaks to the left and the right. If that’s not a history, what is?”

Six thousand strong, they cried in unison, hoping that the echo of their message would be heard in the darkest, most cloistered cell in Southstairs as well as the highest office in the Palace of the Emperor. “Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives! Elphaba lives!”

In succession, Liir thought half a dozen crises. She knows I loved him. That I love him. That he loves me? That he loves her?
That she loves him?
What was this verb love anyway, that could work in any direction?

“Your wife is very kind, even in her heavy condition, and your husband seemed equally kind.”
“She is not my wife, and I have no husband,” said Liir. “Indeed, I have no talent except the idea for this. And I do not know if it will work.”

I was the fourth of five children, and I loved the way sun warmed stone. Just before lunch, on the flagstones of the terrace, I used to dance barefoot with my mother for she loved it too.
I was happy enough in my marriage and happier still when I was widowed, though happiness seems incidental to a good life.
I never wanted to take the cane my father gave me, and I picked it up and broke his nose with it, and he laughed so hard he fell into the well.
I made things with colored threads, little birds and such.
I always wanted to go to university at Shiz, as some of my friends would do, but boys like me weren’t allowed.
I believed in the Unnamed God and accepted the mission set me because God would take care of everything: the Emperor said so.
I once took off all my clothes and rolled in a field of ferns, and had an experience I never told anyone about.
I was at the ceremony in Center Munch when the cyclone dropped the house on Nessarose, and I saw it with my own eyes, but I lost my ribbon on the way home.
I loved how milk tastes, and the way hills go blue with cloud markings, and my baby sister, her hair black as a beetle brush.
I loved it when I was alive.
I loved it when I was alive, too.
Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget that we loved it when we were alive.