“Don’t be fanciful, Elphaba; you didn’t talk to any animals.”
“Papa, I did.”
“She did, Papa. They got Nessa out of the big water,” says Shell. “I was there. They were sort of scary, and smelly.”
“Shell, don’t speak of which you know nothing. Elphaba, look what notions you’re planting in your brother’s mind. You ought to be ashamed. You were conjuring things out of panic—you only imagined that some creatures were talking to you.”
“And did they imagine that I was talking to them, too?”
“Who knows what they might imagine, if they even can.”
Elphie, impatient. “How is that any different from what I imagine you are saying to me, and I am saying to you?”
“Don’t be tricksy, Elphaba. It doesn’t suit a young woman in any circumstances, and in one with your—makeup—it can only lead to isolation and suspicion.”
“Have you met a talking Animal before? Father? I’m sure you have. And you never told us about it. A whole separate—aspect—of the known world—and it’s just there, sideways, out of our sight? Look, if you don’t believe me and you won’t believe Shell, ask Nessa. She’s not remotely tricksy. She’s too good to lie. She’ll tell you the truth.”
Frex frowns. “Nessa is resting. Recovering from her scare. I won’t trouble her by taking her deposition. She’s more fragile than you know, Elphie.”
“She’s about as fragile as an iron anvil.”
“Let’s concentrate on keeping your sister safe, shall we, and put these gossamer whimsies aside. We have work to do here, and distraction is a curse. Nanny, talk some sense into Elphaba. I can’t tolerate this kind of frotherall.”
Elphie hunches at a window, her back to her scheming relatives and complicit Nanny. Elphie has been betrayed by lies. But she’s saved from falling into tics and lather by trying to remember some instance in her past in which, on her own accord, she might have arrived at an understanding of biodiverse sentience.
She had a dream about a Monkey, once. But what is a dream?—more often aspirational than it is revelatory. Only a saint can rely on the validity of a dream. And Elphie is no saint. She nearly grasps the concept of a polter-Monkey, but it’s no more coherent in her mind than the talking animals of nursery rhymes and skipping games. She shakes her head. In so doing perhaps she dislodges the most potent of the toxins of anger that have already begun to pool in her bloodstream. She can’t hate her father; she hasn’t the time. And she can’t spare him from her life, either.
“Though I do wonder how Nessie came to fall in the pond in the first place,” says Nanny, threading a needle.