Author's note: With this chapter Witches reaches the word count milestone of 80,000 and passes its one year posting anniversary.

The song/quote, not foreshadowing at all, no… not at all ::smiles innocently:: And see now you don’t know if I’m really foreshadowing or just messing with you ^_^

Fiyero found Elphaba, hours later, asleep with her head resting on a blank page of the book. It didn’t strike him as odd that she had fallen asleep reading, it used to happen to him all the time. Still it didn’t look like a very comfortable position and he wondered if moving her would wake her up, be shrugged, better to be woken up then to have a sore neck later. Besides he’d rather liked the shocked but pleased expression on her face when he lifted her up earlier. The feeling of being moved caused Elphaba to half wake up and mutter something.

“I’m sorry,” apologised Fiyero. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

“I said: what in Oz are you doing?”

“I thought a pillow would make a better pillow than your book,” he replied, laying her down on the bed. “Being much softer and conducive to not causing neck injuries.”

“Of course,” Elphaba agreed because it was that or burst into laughter at his complete seriousness.

“Did you find a spell in the book?”

“I found a spell to get them past the other guards,” she replied, the simple answer. “We can tell Anjeri to get them to start preparing to leave, I’m sure he’ll be able to organise the specifics. I’ll tell him where Emerald will be in a few days so he can make plans to meet with her.”

Elphaba yawned and rubbed her eyes then tried to sit up only to be stopped by Fiyero putting his hand on her shoulder.

“I have an idea!” he said in a self-mocking tone, as if such a thing could not be possible. “Why don’t I go tell Anjeri that you found the spell and you stay here and go back to sleep? You can tell him where Emerald is tomorrow.”

Elphaba was too exhausted to explain that she hadn’t actually been asleep but more in a sort of trance state trying to get sense from the Grimmerie so she just nodded and relaxed back onto the bed. She got up briefly, before Fiyero came back, and changed into her nightgown.

Galinda Upland was walking through a hallway at Shiz, carrying Elphaba’s black hat, trying to find the green girl.

“Elphie!” she said her roommate’s name happily when she finally found Elphaba in the library.

“Galinda?” exclaimed Elphaba in surprise and confusion. “You’re carrying my hat, in public.”

“You left it on my dressing table… I hope that’s not because you don’t want it anymore?”

“Of course I want it,” said Elphaba sincerely, she was very fond of the hat. “Madame sent me an invitation to afternoon tea, I needed to finish some work for her so I came down here and forgot about it. I hope no one saw it on your dressing table?”

“Goodness me, no! Wouldn’t that be embarrassing to explain! Well here, put it on.”

“Isn’t it rude to wear hats to tea?”

“Oh don’t worry about it. I’ll see you there, Madame invited me as well!”

Galinda was obviously in a hurry to get out of the library so Elphaba, smiling, took the hat and put it on.

“Thank you Galinda.”

“It looks good on you,” replied the blonde, disappearing back towards the door. Elphaba smiled again and went back to her books.

Back at Kiamo Ko Fiyero was woken up in the middle of the night by Elphaba frantically nudging him.

“Fiyero wake up.”

“I am, I am,” he protested sleepily.

“You said that three times already,” retorted Elphaba.

“I really am this time,” said Fiyero even though he didn’t recall ‘the last three times’ “What’s wrong?”

“I had an odd dream,” explained Elphaba then hastened to assure him. “But not like the other one. Look, would you do me a favour? Just light the lamp and tell me what I’m wearing.”

“That’s an odd request but certainly,” replied Fiyero, doing as she asked. When the lamp was lit he could see that she was seating on the side of the bed wearing her nightgown and her… hat?

“I thought you said Glinda had your hat?”

“She does.”

“How did it get to be on your head then?”

“She gave it back to me in that dream I just had… but it was a memory of a day at Shiz when I left it in our room and she came all the way to the library to give it back.”

“I remember that… I saw her in the hallway with it, she said something about ‘Elphie was going to wear this today but she left it on her bed’ then she asked me not to tell anyone.”

“Of course,” said Elphaba smiling and taking the hat off slowly as of it was going to disappear. “I remember her saying ‘you left it on the bed’ but in this dream or whatever it was she said I left it on her dressing table and that’s where I saw it in her room at the Wizard’s palace.”

“Let me get this straight – you had a dream about Glinda giving back your hat at Shiz and when you woke up the hat was here.”

“That’s how it looks,” agreed Elphaba thoughtfully.

“How did you do that?”

“Well it wasn’t just me, Glinda had to be there as well, giving me the hat.”

“But she doesn’t have any magic power, she told me that she failed completely at sorcery class, I remember because she cried… a lot… for quite some time… all over one of my best shirts.”

“That’s because she didn’t think she could do it. Nessa told me what Madame Morrible said to her at that party, when she gave her the training wand, that her personal opinion was that Glinda didn’t have what it takes – she does, of course. She just buried it under her need to be popular and fit in with the world.”

“Wait. You’re saying that Glinda has magic, like you?”

“Not like me, no, but she does have it. If she developed it she would probably be at least the equal of Madame Morrible.”

“You never told her this?”

“At the time it was because I thought Madame Morrible was just saying that to her to make her work harder. It’s only now that I realise she was doing it to suppress her abilities. I also thought Madame would know more about the subject than I did.”

“You ‘did’, as in past tense?” he asked curiously. “I mean you know more now than you did then?”

“Of course, why did you think I was sneaking into archives? I’ve been reading books on the subject from every obscure little library I could find – most of the archivists are so lost in their world of books that I could tell them I was a witch and they would just blink and say ‘That’s nice, my dear, now which books did you want to read?’ I know because I tried it once. I told him I was a witch and I wanted some books about magic in Oz and he said those very words.”

“Do you really think of yourself as a witch? I mean there are nicer words for it.”

“I’m not nice, or conventionally beautiful, enough to be an Ozian sorceress, and there’s no way I’m going to refer to myself as a Wizard, so yes I think of myself as a witch. I’ve never been bothered by the term, just the addition of the word ‘wicked’.”

“How do you know that Glinda has this power if you’ve never seen her use it?” asked Fiyero changing the subject as the new thought occurred to him.

“The first time she stood close to me when I didn’t have my glasses on I saw it… it’s hard to describe; when I stand in front of the mirror with my glasses off, you know I can’t see things that are close to me without them, I can see my magic around me sort of like an aura. Glinda has the same thing but it’s much more subdued and very quiet, it’s not trying to do anything but be very still so she won’t realise that it’s still there.”

“So you see what you showed me downstairs the other night, whenever you look in the mirror?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“The way you talk about magic, you make it sound like it is alive.”

“Not in the Animal or human sense but it does need to ‘live’ in its way and it can be killed – repressed for so long that it disappears without a trace… almost without a trace anyway, sometimes I see people who have the faintest glimmer around them – Nessa had it, so did our mother, but I doubt either of them were aware of it.”

“What about Madame Morrible?”

Elphaba shuddered and it took a moment for her to reply.

“I only ever saw her once properly without my glasses, that day in the Wizard’s throne room, it was… grotesque. A black oily cloud with grasping tentacles, when you can see it you can feel it stretching towards you, wanting to possess any power you might give it.”

“Rather like her personality then.”

“That’s it exactly!” exclaimed Elphaba reaching across the bed and kissing him wildly. “Fiyero you’re brilliant! I’ve been trying to work that out for months!”

“Are you being serious? I mean I don’t know anything about magic…”

“That’s why you understood it, the answer is so simple!”

“Thanks,” replied Fiyero blandly

“Oh I’m sorry,” exclaimed Elphaba, immediately contrite over the slip of her tongue. “That’s not what I meant at all! I only meant that I’ve been looking for a complicated magical explanation of it.”

“I know… can I go back to sleep now?”

“Certainly. Here give me the lamp, I want to go and make some notes.”

“Elphaba, it’s the middle of the night.”

“I’ll be quiet, and it won’t take long, I promise!”

Fiyero smiled as he handed her the lamp and went back to sleep. Elphaba smiled, put on her glasses, and went to the room’s dusty dressing table; it had a wobbly stool in front of it and would do as a makeshift desk. In her bag, where the Grimmerie had been, was another book, her journal – full of her notes about different things, pens and ink, and… Nessa’s shoes. This was the first time she had looked at them since shoving them into the bag after the girl from Kansas had given them to her, she’d managed to avoid even touching them when she got the Grimmerie out earlier that day.

The jewels twinkled silver in the lamplight, Nessa had worn them whenever she could at Shiz – usually in a group of other girls her age all wearing their finery and fawning over the beautiful Governor’s daughter. Hesitantly Elphaba lifted one bare green foot and crossed it over her knee, she and Nessa had worn the same size shoes since Nessa was thirteen, she smiled softly as she remembered one particular day.

Eighteen-year-old Elphaba was in her room when Nessa burst through the door in her wheeled chair, she had little concept of personal privacy because Elphaba always left her door open for her sister, waving a box with one hand once she was in.

“Look at this Elphaba!”

Elphaba sighed inaudibly and set aside her book.

“What am I looking at Nessa?”

“My new shoes!”

For a girl who couldn’t walk Nessa was extremely fond of shoes… and clothes for that matter whereas her older sister mainly wore grey or black and didn’t really mind anyway. Nessa held out a box and opened it to reveal a pair of heeled shoes covered in dark blue velvet.

“They’re for me to wear to the party Father’s taking me to tomorrow night! Aren’t they lovely?”

“Beautiful,” agreed Elphaba, making an attempt at enthusiasm for her sister’s sake.

Naturally their father hadn’t even mentioned the party to her except to tell her that she would need to help Nessa get ready. She took the shoes reluctantly, because Nessa shoved them into her hands, and looked at them perfunctorily. To her surprise she actually looked again and stroked the soft velvety fabric that covered the tops of the shoes.

“They are quite nice.”

“You actually like them?” Nessarose was startled; this was the first time her sister had ever shown genuine interest in clothing of any kind.

“The fabric is soft,” said Elphaba with an exaggerated shrug. “Could I… could I try them on? Just for a minute?”

Nessa looked stunned then nodded enthusiastically.

“Of course you can!”

Elphaba smiled and pulled off her thick socks then replaced them with the blue shoes.

“Stand up properly,” ordered Nessa. Elphaba complied, there was no mirror in her room but she could see her feet. The shoes felt strange compared to the boots she normally wore, she felt tilted and wobbled when she tried to take a step forward.

“They feel funny,” exclaimed Elphaba wobbling her way around the room, “I feel very tall too!”

“They make your feet look positively tiny compared to those… boots you wear all the time,” complimented Nessa.

“Thank you… I think.”

“Miss Nessarose? Where are you?”

“In Elphaba’s room, Miss Jhana.”

Elphaba shot a quick look at her sister then tried to hurry back to her chair to pull the shoes off just as the governess entered the room.

“What on earth are you doing, Miss Elphaba?”

“Taking Nessa’s shoes off.”

“I can see that, why were you wearing them in the first place?”

“I wanted to see how they looked on her,” answered Nessa imperiously; one of the few times she ever stood up for Elphaba to anyone.

“I see,” said the woman though she obviously didn’t. Blushing furiously Elphaba finally managed to wrench off the shoes and drop them back onto Nessa’s lap.

“I’ll be back later.” She muttered and disappeared out of the room.

Wearily Elphaba lifted up her glasses and rubbed her eyes, a flash of light on the shoes caught her attention and she looked at them without replacing her glasses, to her surprise they glowed ruby red with magic.

How odd, she thought. I didn’t expect the spell to last after…

She dropped her foot back to the floor; suddenly she was no longer interested in trying on the shoes. Who knew what the spell would do to someone who could already walk?

She pushed the shoes away across the dressing table, with far less reluctance now, then picked up a pen and the book she called her journal. With the clarity that came of being awake and alone in the middle of the night she recognised the book for what it really was, an attempt at doing something that was “normal”. Until she told Fiyero about remembering her own birth she had been quite successful in pretending that she needed, like anyone else might, to write things down to remember them.

And it’s not as though I ever expected anyone else to read what I’ve written so I don’t even have that excuse. So I’ll stop writing in it right now, it’s not necessary and I have other things to think about. Like how Chistery was able to find me today and how the magic stayed in the shoes.

Elphaba laid her pen down on the book and looked thoughtfully at the innocent seeming silver shoes.

I wonder what magic you still hold… She took off her glasses and studied the, now red, shoes. I wonder if I can make you tell me?

She took the Grimmerie out of her bag and laid an open hand on the cover.

“I need a spell for defining the effects of magic already cast.” She spoke quietly, so as not to wake Fiyero up, the book obliged by flipping itself open to a blank page.

“Oh I love you too.” She muttered sarcastically. “Rotten book, a lot of use you’ve been lately anyway!”

She carefully put the book down and picked up the shoes again. Some instinct told her that there was a reason she couldn’t put them on, if only she could see what it was!

I thought I was enchanting the shoes just for Nessa, to make her walk, but what if the spell did something else? That’s why the magic is still there… because they’ll work for anyone… no not anyone, but someone… well I’m glad I managed to establish the fact that they’ll do something for someone! There must be some clue about this!

She looked at the shoes again and sighed, the problem would nag at her until she found the solution but it seemed the answer wasn’t going to be found tonight.

Glinda - The Emerald City

Glinda awoke with a start, fully expecting to find herself standing in a hallway at Shiz, and sighed with relief when she realised she’d been dreaming.

But what a strange dream to have! She mused as she fell asleep again. It wasn’t until the next morning that she realised the hat was gone...

A loud scream of shock had the guards using their emergency key and running down the hallway to Lady Glinda’s room. Glinda, trembling in her frilly blue nightgown and taking deep gasping breaths, met them halfway.

“Someone has been in my room!”

The guards, well trained, sprang into action. Two of them accompanied Glinda to a sitting room near her apartments while the other two drew their weapons and went to search for the intruder. While they were searching Glinda’s attendants were summoned to the sitting room bringing with them a shawl (for modesty as well as to ward off the chill in the air) and hot tea.

“There’s nobody there, Lady Glinda,” reported the guard. “Can you tell me if anything was taken?”

“A worthless item from my dressing table,” replied Glinda in a surprisingly stern tone. “I am more concerned by the fact that the thief was able to enter my private chambers when the only unlocked entrance was my balcony window, which has previously been declared unreachable. In fact one might say the only way to get in there would be to fly.”

“If anyone was in there they are gone now but I will, of course, report this to the Deputy Captain who will, I am certain, speak very firmly with the sentries assigned to the roof.”

“That will do nicely, thank you, I will return to my room now ladies. Miss Rané I would be most grateful if you would speak to Madame Morrible’s assistant and arrange for me to see her as soon as possible. Miss Hanna if you would bring my schedule for the day after I am dressed please. Miss Adriana please bring this morning’s dress to my bathing room.”

Several public appearances later Glinda was relaxing in her room for a little while before a formal lunch with an Ambassador when Madame Morrible’s personal servant came to tell her that an appointment had been cancelled and she could speak to Madame now if it was convenient otherwise Madame was busy until the day after tomorrow. Glinda calculated quickly and decided she had just enough time to speak to the Press Secretary before luncheon.

“What can I do for you, Glinda my dear?” asked Morrible, her tone so convincing that Glinda believed she was actually pleased to see her. In a way she was, if only because it might help her find out what the magical surge she had felt the night before was.

“I need to tell you about something that happened last night,” confided Glinda, very relieved to drop her mask of confidence and let someone she trusted know that something was wrong. “When I encountered Elphaba in Munchkinland she left her hat behind and I kept it. To be honest I don’t even know why it I did, stupid sentimentality I suppose since I did give it to her in the first place. Anyway I’ve been keeping it on my dressing table and when I woke up this morning it was gone but that isn’t all that happened. Last night I dreamed about something that happened at Shiz: Elphaba had left the hat on her bed and I took it to her. Only, in the dream, I said ‘you left it on my dressing table’ and that’s where it was in my room until last night! Do you think Elphaba cast a spell on me?”

It certainly sounds that way,” agreed Madame Morrible, after listening in careful silence to Glinda’s explanation. “I detected magic last night that was not mine and I do not know of any other magic users in the vicinity of this City. But never fear, my dear, if all she wanted was the hat then I don’t think she will be coming back again especially now that we know she has been here.”

“Thank you, Madame, I feel so much better now. Would you excuse me? The Wizard has asked me to take lunch with the Gillikinese Ambassador; he’s my cousin you know.”

“Of course. Thank you for bringing last night’s events to my attention. If anything else like this happens you must tell me immediately. I will leave instructions with my assistant and servants so you only need tell them that it is urgent and you will be allowed to see me.”

“I sincerely hope it never becomes necessary but if it does I shall do as you ask.”

Madame Morgana Morrible, as she had been known for a number of years, sat impatiently through the rest of her unfortunately necessary appointments then informed her assistant she would be unavailable until the next morning unless it was a dire emergency. Returning to her private apartments, a set of rooms easily as luxurious as those inhabited by Glinda, she dismissed her maids for the night and locked the door – adding magical wards for extra security.

No one could be allowed to see the near magical transformation that was about to take place.

First she removed the heavy makeup, a middle class Gillikinese fashion she had started herself some years ago. Next she removed her elaborate gown – she also chose clothes that she could unlace without assistance. Finally she used just a pinch of magic to straighten out her hair to its proper length and return it to its proper ‘Gillikinese Golden’ (as it was called) colour. She put a dressing gown over her undergarments and took a moment to stand in front of the full-length mirror. It was so rare that she had time to appreciate her inner self.

Belhara, a Gillikinese woman in her thirties with the attractiveness that came (if one was lucky) after that short-lived beauty of the teens and early twenties.

Time to see what my dear little Miss Elphaba was up to last night, she decided, after taking a reasonable amount of time to reacquaint herself with Belhara’s features. She opened a door so heavily spell warded that no one who had been invited to her apartments could see it much less think about opening it to see what was inside.

The room behind the door was the place where she kept her most personal possessions and items of magical value including every spellbook she had been able to buy or steal as part of her plan to make sure that no one could gain as much magical power and knowledge as she possessed – a plan that hadn’t worked out quite as she had hoped when it came to the Grimmerie. She also kept her own notes on different types of magic as well as her personal journals in the room, it was the only way she could be sure they would never be read by anyone else.

The final item worth mentioning in the room was on a large flat table and had taken her years (not to mention the power of half a dozen potential Sorceresses) to create. It was a scale map of Oz but it didn’t show towns or cities or even geological features such as mountains and rivers, this very special map showed – to those who could see it – all of the magic being used in Oz. Despite having a goal in mind she followed her usual procedure of checking for changes in the low level background magic that had permeated Oz for not even she knew how long.

Quadling country was soaked in the reddish-greenish glow of Quadling magic. Early in her studies she had looked into the possibility of using it as an energy source for herself but found that their plant-growing and dream-making magics were too specific to be of use to her, and she suspected the ‘dreams’ more likely to have been induced by eating plants they shouldn’t than the use of any magic.

She didn’t bother looking North, the only person with any power that had come out of there in decades was Glinda and she had been incredibly easy to convince that she had no talent for sorcery.

West were the same sparks that represented the tribal shamans and so called sorceresses who were no more than shamans themselves and had no real power outside their outmoded rituals.

East there was only that odd patch that had appeared some thirteen years ago and a fading patch of Quadling reddish-green that had first appeared when the Governor's son took a half Quadling girl for his wife, she theorised that the mother had grown a garden there and it had stayed alive until the death of the youngest daughter.

Finally she made a small gesture, there was nothing magical about that it was just a visualisation technique, and removed a filtering spell she’d put over her map on the very first day that Elphaba Thropp had come to Shiz University. It seemed a sensible precaution after she had used a variation of a scrying spell to ‘see’ the girl's power after the event and nearly been blinded by the sudden flare of magic.

It was nothing short of miraculous that the girl had lived to her twenties without killing herself or someone else with her uncontrolled powers.

It was even more surprising that Elphaba, being too powerful even for someone with Morrible’s vast magical experience to control, had survived Madame Morrible’s “training” long enough to become the irritation she had. It simply amazed her that someone could be so intelligent and yet so naïve, though she supposed it had to do with the girl’s sheltered upbringing.

Enough of this prevarication, I want to see where the girl has been and what she has done.

Though she had little talent for scrying into the future, seeing what had happened in the recent past and what was happening at present was another of her ‘special talents’, one that had come in very useful for keeping track of Elphaba Thropp over the last four years. She would like, if she had the opportunity, to see the look on the girl’s face when she realised that Morrible could have captured her at any time and that her freedom was purely the whim of the older sorceress.

Concentrating her attention on the map of the present she quickly found the steady glow of Elphaba’s magic in the Western mountains, though somewhat farther north than usual. Frowning slightly she unrolled her normal map of Oz, drawn to the same scale as the magical map, to find the exact location.

“Well, well,” she said, with a small laugh when she found it. “Kiamo Ko, the Prince’s castle, not the first place I’d think to look for Miss Elphaba Thropp of Munchkinland. I must find out what sort of spell she used on him, it would certainly come in handy to have a spell that would make people go completely against their own nature – much quicker than changing public opinion by rumour and misinformation.”

It didn’t occur to her for a moment that Fiyero had left Glinda of his own free will, she hadn’t only been so sympathetic to keep on Glinda’s good side, she genuinely believed what she had told the blonde girl about Fiyero being bewitched by Elphaba – though she was surprised that the friendship between the two women hadn’t been as strong as she thought it to be.

Still, she thought on that subject. Better to have overestimated the strength of their friendship and planned accordingly than to have underestimated it.

“So there is Miss Elphaba in the mountains with her stolen Prince, now let me see what she was doing last night.”

The result was not at all what she expected. Elphaba didn’t move from the castle but had reached out magically in response to a similar reaching out from Glinda?

“That should not be possible!” she muttered angrily and cursed. The spells she was using on Glinda should have stopped any magic use, conscious or unconscious, on Glinda’s part.

“Of course,” she mused, smiling slightly as she calmed down and thought things through. “Such a connection might lend itself to being exploited…if one could find some way to initiate or intercept such a connection. The fact that Glinda doesn’t know what she did last night, that is a mystery… or is it?”

As she thought about it she remembered there had been times, very few, when she had seen Glinda watching her and it seemed like it was a different person looking out of the eyes of the familiar blonde girl. That definitely pointed towards subconscious magic use and the need to shield the city after she had put her new plan into motion, it simply wouldn’t do to have anyone else influencing the peoples beloved Glinda the Good.

Checking the time she saw that it was not even sunset yet, plenty of time for her to prepare a spell for that night.