Wicked

“She’s a despot. A dangerous tyrant,” said the Lion with conviction.

[...] “I hear she’s a champion of home rule for the so-called Winkies.”

“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

He wasn’t talking to her so much as practicing his tirade against the coming spectacle of violence and magic. There was a side to Frex that verged on despair; unlike most men, he was able to channel it to benefit his life’s work.

“But I remember once when a tinker with a funny accent gave me a draft of some heady brew from a green glass bottle. And I had rare expansive dreams, Nanny, of the Other World—cities of glass and smoke—noise and color—I tried to remember.”

“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”

She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart.

But there was more than one way to be smart.

Animals should be seen and not heard.

She struggled with unnamed conflicts within her. Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad—oh—dangerous. [...] Galinda always felt as if she couldn’t see the whole picture.

“And the drought, after a few promising reprieves, continues unabated. The Animals are recalled to the lands of their ancestors, a ploy to give the farmers a sense of control over something anyway. It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”

“We were talking about your childhood,” said Glinda.

“[...] You can’t divorce your particulars from politics.”

“You ask yourselves: [...] How may my talents flourish? How, my dears, how may I help my Oz?”

Elphaba’s foot twisted, caught the edge of a side table, and a cup and saucer fell to the floor and smashed.

“If not immoral, then what word can I use to imply wrong?” said Elphaba.

“Try mysterious and then relax a little. The thing is, my green girlie, it is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders, and why we exist.”

He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.

“I was a tool. My dear father used me [...] he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can—they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me.”

“I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

She was right. He didn’t understand.

“One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”

“And there the wicked old Witch stayed, for a good long time.”

“Did she ever come out?” asked Nor, doing her line from an almost hypnagogic state.

“Not yet,” said Sarima, kissing and biting her daughter on the wrist, which made them both giggle, and then lights out.

“You want to throw down your burden, throw it down at my feet, or across my shoulders. You want perhaps to weep a little, to say good-bye, and then to leave. And when you leave here you will walk right out of the world.”

Nanny reported that Nessarose had grown to be far cleverer than anyone anticipated. She kept her cards close to her chest and issued vague statements about the revolutionary cause, statements that could be read several ways, depending on the audience.

[...] Nanny began to attend to Liir’s needs more lovingly than she did the needs of Nor and Irji. Elphaba registered it with shame, for she also saw how willingly Liir responded to Nanny’s attention.

“But Nessa now thinks she needs no one, to help her stand or help her govern. She listens less than ever. In some ways I think those shoes are dangerous.”

Perhaps Nessie was right. And yet here they were, a dozen years later, two Witches, in a manner of speaking. And Glinda a sorceress for the public good. It was enough to make Elphie go back to Kiamo Ko and burn that Grimmerie, and burn the broom too, for that matter.

For when she chose to remember her youth at all, she could scarcely dredge up an ounce of recollection about that daring meeting with the Wizard. She could recall far more clearly how she and Elphie had shared a bed on the road to the Emerald City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

“I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”

“People who claim they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

But she sat up half the night and lit a candle in a window, for reasons she couldn’t articulate. The moon passed overhead in its path from the Vinkus, and she felt its accusatory spotlight, and moved back from the tall windows.