Chapter Text
The first letters were simply meant to help Glinda sleep.
She hardly slept at all in the days and weeks after Elphaba’s death. She haunted the green marble hallways of the Emerald Palace like a ghost, pacing from one side of the palace to the other. Everything was quiet now that the Wizard was gone and Morrible had been imprisoned in Southstairs and most of the servants had been dismissed. She could no longer hear the sharp scratch of a pen against paper issuing from under the closed door of Morrible’s study, or odd banging noises coming from the Wizard’s workshop as he tried to create something new. She couldn’t even hear the maids gossiping in their parlor. Instead, she was alone with all of her thoughts and regrets.
And, most importantly, she was alone with her grief. It was like a living thing, wrapping around her chest and squeezing tight, pressing down on her until it was hard to breathe. Glinda was no stranger to the sensation of being short of breath; after all, she had been wearing corsets for most of her life. But she’d always been able to get some relief at the end of the day, when her handmaidens stripped her dress off and brushed her hair out until it lay flat and smooth down her back. But there was no escaping her grief, no running from it or hiding from it or sleeping it off. Whenever she tried to sleep she could hear Elphaba’s screams, Fiyero’s cries of pain as they pulled him away from her. She would startle awake, covered in sweat and tangled in her sheets, stifling a scream into her pillows. Then she wouldn’t be able to sleep for the rest of the night, looking out at the silent city until the sun rose in the distance.
If her handmaidens knew that she wasn’t sleeping, they didn’t say anything. They just helped her dress every morning and flawlessly applied her makeup so that no one would see the dark circles under her eyes. They brought her trays of food that they knew she wouldn’t touch, along with her morning paperwork. There was always so much paperwork. Glinda had never thought that being the ruler of Oz would include dealing with so much paperwork, but the memos were neverending. Everyone had a petition they wanted her to read or a letter they needed a response to and they didn’t seem to care that she didn’t possibly have time to read them all. But she made time, somehow, because she knew it was what Elphie would want her to do. Elphie had trusted her to do it, right before she…
Before she…
Glinda tried not to think too hard about that night at Kiamo Ko—the way Elphaba had begged her not to clear her name, the way she had pressed the Grimmerie into her hands and looked at Glinda like she really did believe that she could learn magic and become the leader Oz needed. She had looked at Glinda like no one else ever had, like she believed in her not because of who her parents were or what clothes she wore or what kinds of pretty speeches she made, but just because Glinda Upland was worthy of her trust.
But the memories of that night wouldn’t leave her. Elphaba wouldn’t leave her, and neither did the insurmountable weight that she had left on her shoulders. Glinda tried everything she could to get some sleep—switching rooms, rubbing lavender lotion on her hands, even drinking a foul tasting concoction that one of her handmaidens swore would put her to sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow (it didn’t). And even when she did manage to fall asleep sometime in the early hours of dawn, Elphaba’s screams jarred her awake.
So one night Glinda found herself sitting at the desk in her study with a blank sheet of paper in front of her, even though there were other memos she needed to read and other letters she needed to write. Dear Elphaba, she wrote, and then watched the words waver at the top of the page. She crossed them out and started over. Dearest Elphaba. It was ridiculous. Elphaba would never read her words again. But it had always been easier for Glinda to get her emotions out through the written word instead of the ones she spoke, and she found that the words came anyway, faster than she could commit them to paper.
Dearest Elphaba,
It has been almost a year since the Melting. That’s what they’re calling it now. I don’t know who first called it that—it’s such a sillified name—but there it is. They even make merchandise for it. It’s quite ridiculous. But they still expect me to make a speech. They expect me to say the same horrendible things about you, even though Melting Day is supposed to be a day of inter-Oz unity. I wish I could say otherwise. I wish I could tell them who you really were, how you weren’t really wicked at all. But I have to honor my promise to you, so instead I'll smile through the speeches and pretend that each sentence, each smile, isn’t tearing me apart.
Sometimes I think I’ll never forgive you for doing this to me. And then I remember that this is all my fault, and there’s no one else to blame, really. If I hadn’t been so selfish, so shallow, so stupid, then perhaps I could have stopped it. Perhaps I could have saved you. Now, I can’t even preserve your memory—and that’s my fault too, because I made sure there wasn't anything to preserve. I went out in silly dresses and smiled and didn’t say anything when they said those horrendible things about you, and now those horrendible words are the truth. If the truth is really what everyone agrees on, not a thing of fact.
I don’t want to celebrate. I wanted to outlaw all celebrations, actually. It seemed to go against the whole point of the inter-Ozian unity we’ve been trying to cultivate—and believe me, it hasn’t been easy. It isn’t just the Animals that people look down upon, you know. The citizens of the Emerald City look down on the Munchkins and the Munchkins look down on the Vinkans and everyone looks down on the Quadlings. But my advisors tell me that the best way to bring people together is to give them something to celebrate—like the defeat of a shared enemy. And the only thing that everyone in Oz seems to be able to agree on is the fact that they hate you.
Sometimes I try to pretend that I hate you for leaving, because it’s easier to feel hatred than grief. But I can’t pretend, even to myself. I love you too much. I love you so much that I would do anything you asked me, even leave you to die. Even not clear your name. Even if it’s slowly killing me.
Glinda scratched that line out. The grief wasn’t killing her, not really. Even when she wished it would, when the pain felt almost unbearable, she was never able to forget that she was still alive and Elphaba was not. It was stupid to compare the two. She knew what death sounded like. She knew what it looked like—
—a little girl in a blue and white gingham dress, raising a broom triumphantly in the air, an empty bucket of water rolling to a stop next to her feet.
—agonized screams, ringing in Glinda’s ears even after everything had gone so terribly, terribly silent…
Glinda started to write again.
But I promise that, come Melting Day, I’ll make those speeches. I’ll charm the people I need to charm. I’ll smile, even when it feels hollow. I’ll make them all love me, so that they’ll support your cause. I’ll do the right thing for you, because I love you so much that I will live for you, even when it’s the last thing I want to do.
Love always, Glinda
Glinda nearly threw the letter into the fire. It was where most of the letters she never intended to send ended up. It was a trick her grandmother had taught her when she first went off to boarding school when she was ten and the older girls kept stealing her shoes and hiding them behind the stables. Put everything you’ll never tell them into a letter you can burn. As the words burn away, let your feelings burn away too. And there was something comforting about watching the piece of paper curl in on itself, char spreading across it until it was unreadable and it collapsed into the flames. It felt like a little bit of weight had been lifted off of her shoulders.
But tonight she shut didn't burn the letter. Maybe she didn’t think she deserved the absolution of the flames, or maybe she just wanted to keep what she could of Elphaba with her—even if Elphaba would never read that letter. Either way, she placed it in the top drawer of her desk, just behind the seals that she used for her other letters, the ones that she could send.
It was soon joined by others, as her insomnia persisted and then worsened. Her nights fell into a pattern: lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours, trying to count sheep and count backwards from one hundred and do all the other things her mothers had taught her to do when she had trouble falling asleep as a child, and then invariably getting up when that didn’t work. Sometimes she wandered the palace hallways. Sometimes she found herself inside the Wizard’s abandoned workshop, all of his half finished inventions still arrayed where they were on the day he left Oz. Sometimes she wondered what the half finished machines could have done if he had finished them, what kind of potential he had been able to see within a few hunks of metal. Sometimes she found herself in the West tower, where Elphaba had left her for the first time all those years ago, and shivered in the wind that blew through the broken glass. So many workmen had offered to repair it, but she’d only allowed them to sweep away the glass pieces on the floor. Otherwise the broken window remained exactly the same as it had all those years ago, when Elphaba had smashed through it on her broom. Glinda remembered how frightened she had been that day, watching all of the guards give chase as Elphaba leapt off the parapet on a broom that couldn’t possibly protect her—and then she remembered the awe she’d felt, watching Elphaba rise above them with her cloak billowing out around her, eyes full of righteous fury.
She should have gone with her, Glinda thinks, not for the first time. Why didn’t she realize how empty her life would be without her?
And empty was precisely the right word to describe the next few years. All of the things that she’d thought would give her life meaning—public adoration, the best clothes, a position of influence second only to the Wizard himself—had ultimately left her feeling hollow. When she lay awake in her bed in the Emerald Palace, staring up at the ceiling in her apartment that had been decorated to her every specification, she’d found herself thinking back to her nights at Shiz. Or, more specifically, to Elphaba lying in the bed across from her and how they’d whispered secrets back and forth. She’d told Elphaba things she would never tell anyone else, even Fiyero. And Fiyero had been increasingly distant as the years passed, so she told him less and less. At first she’d thought he was just busy with Gale Force training and missions. Now, she knew better. At some point during those five years, perhaps even before them, he’d come to love Elphaba instead of her.
Glinda remembered how angry that had made her at first. She was supposed to have her happy ending and instead she was watching it all slip away from her. She'd been consumed by bitter rage. But now, she understood. How could anyone ever love a person who didn’t know who they were and who didn’t stand for anything at all?
Whose best friend had to die before she could care?
Invariably Glinda ended up back at her desk, where she poured her feelings onto the page. She told Elphaba about all of her counselors, who all had their own visions for the future of Oz and had to be managed like a bunch of cats tied together by their tails. She told her about the books she read whenever she had a spare moment, books about politics and economics and all the other things that were needed to run a country that she had never even considered. She told her that even though she read as much as she could, it never seemed to be enough. There was always something she didn’t know, something she was failing, someone she was disappointing. There were hints of progress, to be sure, but sometimes ruling Oz felt like a thankless slog where the only thing that kept her moving forward was the reminder that she was the only one left to safeguard Elphaba’s legacy. And if Elphaba was determined to be remembered as a Wicked Witch, then the only thing to do was create the Oz that she had always wanted.
So Glinda took the meetings, made the agreements, visited the Animals that were slowly integrating back into their communities, and then spent her nights spilling all of her thoughts to Elphaba and then shoving the letters into the back of her desk drawer, where they continued to pile up: her unspoken thoughts, her unrealized hopes, her dreams that had died long before she could ever dream them. As long as she wrote her thoughts down, she could almost pretend they were out of sight and out of mind.
At least, she could pretend long enough to catch a few hours of sleep, before she had to wake up and start the day over again.
And again.
And again.
Her mothers noticed, of course.
“Darling, have you been sleeping?” Momsie asked, tilting Glinda’s head to the right so that she could examine her under the dining room’s warm lamplight.
Glinda squirmed away from her. “I’m fine, Momsie.”
“But your cheekbones have never looked so pronounced. Don’t tell me that you can’t afford to hire a cook. You could borrow ours, if you like. He’s a genius in the kitchen.”
“Nothing’s wrong with my cook, Momsie. Nothing’s wrong at all.”
Momsie scoffed. “Darling, you can’t really expect me to believe that, can you? I’m certain that we never raised a liar. Did we, Ilora?”
Momsicle shook her head. “That’s all your uncle’s influence, Glinda.” Now it was Momsicle’s turn to examine her, one of her hands feeling Glinda’s forehead for a fever, like she was still a small child and all of her problems could be fixed with a hot water bottle and an early bedtime. Glinda wanted to lean into her embrace and let her mothers fuss over her—feed her plain soup, wrap her up in blankets, and sit by her bed and read out loud to her as she drifted off to sleep. Glinda would give anything to go back to those simpler days. If she could go to sleep one night and wake up and find Elphaba asleep in bed beside her, like the best Lurlinemas present…
But those were a little girl’s daydreams. Glinda had left most of her childhood behind the day that she and Elphaba went to the Emerald City and the last of it had shattered with Elphaba’s screams. There were some things that even magic itself couldn’t fix.
“Is there something you’d like to tell us, Glinda?” Momsicle asked, and for a moment Glinda thought that she could somehow see right into her soul and see everything that she was hiding. Glinda thought she would be able to see just how badly Glinda’s heart was broken.
But she didn’t say anything else, so Glinda squeezed her hand and said “I’m fine, Momsicle. Don’t worry about me,” and her mother smiled like she believed her.
For the first time, Glinda realized that her parents were getting older. The roots of Momsie’s hair were lightening. Momsicle’s wrists were even more delicate than normal. They seemed smaller somehow, more fragile—and the comfort they normally provided seemed somehow diminished too. They couldn’t help her, because they hadn’t been at Kiamo Ko that day. They hadn’t seen Elphaba press the Grimmerie into her hands or push her into a closet because even when Elphaba knew that she was going to die she had always, always put Glinda first. They saw Elphaba the way everyone else did: the leering face on the torn propaganda posters, the evil counterpoint to their daughter’s goodness. They would never know the Elphie that she had.
Why hadn’t she invited Elphaba to come home with her for the winter holidays the year they were at Shiz? She had known by then, even if Elphaba hadn’t outright said it, that her relations with her father were frosty at best. And her mothers would have been thrilled to have guests. Momsie wouldn’t have needed the slightest excuse to throw a ball in Elphaba’s honor. But somehow it had never occurred to Glinda to ask Elphaba to come. There was her home life, when she was still her parents’ little Glinda, cossetted and pampered, their pride and joy. And then there was her life at Shiz, where she had coteries of friends and followers but the only one that really mattered was Elphaba.
She had known that she couldn’t fool her parents as easily as she could fool her handmaidens and advisors. She could even fool Chistery, or at least convince herself that she had; she often felt his eyes on her back, watching her carefully, like he knew as well as she did just how close to breaking she was. He’d walked in on her sobbing at Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland, after she had given her Melting Day speech there. She’d been sitting with her legs pulled up to her chest, sobbing into the mass of her tulle skirts with reckless abandon because she hadn’t thought there was anyone else to hear her. It was so rare that she was in a place where she could just cry as hard as she wanted to, without worrying about someone overhearing her, but Colwen Grounds was as quiet as a mausoleum. The governor’s house had sat abandoned since Nessarose Thropp died; no governor since had wanted to share a house with their one-time despot. So all the furniture was covered in a soft layer of dust and the halls were empty of servants as she sat on the floor and watched the dust motes twirl through the drafts of sunlight that floated through the windows.
“Are you all right, Miss Glinda?” Chistery had asked. His intonation was steady, though his voice shook. Chistery didn’t speak often, unless he was concerned, so she clearly hadn’t hidden her state as well as she'd hoped.
“I’m fine, thank you Chistery,” she had said, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her skirts. “Would you just excuse me for a moment, please? I’m nearly finished.” She continued to impress even herself with how easily the Glinda the Good mask could fall back into place when she needed it to. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you.”
Chistery hovered in the doorway for a moment, as if he wanted to say anything else. But then he thought better of it, walking back to the front door, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
She walked through Colwen Grounds, as she had done every year since the Melting. Every trace of Elphaba had been erased when Nessarose came to power, desperate to separate herself from her hated sister. There were no pictures of her on the walls, none of her clothes hanging in the cavernous wardrobes, none of her old schoolbooks piled in the storerooms with all of Nessa’s old things (and Nessa had boxes and boxes of things). Even Elphaba’s bedroom, a cramped and narrow room under the eaves but just above the library—Glinda knew she must have liked that, at least: the ease with which she could find new books to read—was no longer hers. It was a storeroom now, so choc full of miscellaneous artifacts belonging to past governors that there was no room for Glinda to stand inside. She couldn’t picture it as a bedroom for a little girl, perhaps with a bed in one corner near the window. Or had the desk gone there, to best capture the sunlight?
Every time Glinda thought she knew everything there was to know about Elphaba Thropp, something always reminded her that she would never know Elphaba fully at all. There were too many stories that Elphaba had never gotten to share, so many that Glinda had only halfheartedly listened to over a meal or while trying to study because she had thought she would have all the time in the world to hear them again and again.
Because she knew she couldn’t fool her mothers, Glinda had tried to make herself scarce. She took weeks, sometimes, to respond to their letters. She invented reasons for why she couldn’t attend family weddings or social events in Frottica that she had once enjoyed. But she couldn’t cancel Lurlinemas and her parents would never let her spend the holiday alone. So instead she had to smile through the day, until her parents went to bed and she could return to her desk and write to Elphaba.
One night she stayed up later than usual, filling sheet after sheet of paper with her thoughts. She was recalling the time they’d exchanged Lurlinemas gifts at Shiz and Fiyero had brought them both beautiful Vinkan scarves—pink for Glinda, and green for Elphaba. “Your signature colors, my ladies,” he’d said, throwing them a mock bow, a sardonic smile playing at the edge of his lips.
It hurt to think of Fiyero too. Thinking about Fiyero inevitably led to thoughts of her ruined wedding, of sitting at the empty altar and looking out at the empty chapel. It had been completely and entirely trashed; chairs had been upended, tables had been cracked in two, crepe paper streamers littered the floor, cake frosting was smeared along the walls. But Glinda had barely noticed. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way that Elphaba and Fiyero had looked at each other before they’d fled from the throne room—like they had an understanding that shut her out entirely. Perhaps they always had. Maybe they had never really loved her at all.
And thinking about Fiyero always led to the cornfield, to the kiss of cold metal against her forehead and then soldiers’ hands on her, dragging her away while she begged them not to hurt him, even though she knew that they would. She’d tried to throw herself in between them, as if that would be enough to persuade them to hurt her instead of him, and the soldiers had dragged her away like she was nothing at all. But she could see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that she was the one who should have suffered. She was the one who’d been so absorbed in her own life, her own dream come true, that she hadn’t noticed what was going on around her. She hadn’t noticed the Animals in cages, the Animals losing the ability to speak. Or if she had, she’d somehow justified it to herself. It couldn’t be as bad as Elphaba thought. The Wizard and Morrible were eccentric, but they weren’t evil. If Glinda just played along, if she kept everyone happy, then she would be able to fix everything. Then Elphaba would come back. Then she wouldn’t have…
Glinda doesn’t deserve to be here, she thought, in her glorious suite in her glorious palace. Elphaba should be the one fixing things. But she wasn’t here anymore. Glinda was the only one left.
A soft knock on the door practically made Glinda jump out of her chair. “I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Momsicle said. Her voice seemed strange in Glinda’s bedroom, the one that was both her sanctuary and her prison. No one was allowed inside, except for her handmaidens when they came to dress her in the mornings and undress her at night and even they knew not to touch anything. They knew not to go into her closet, to not disturb any of the papers on her desk, or the stacks of paper that were beginning to pile up on the window seat and the floor because there were just too many of them to read. There were too many people and Animals in Oz that needed her help, too many people that she was failing.
But Glinda hadn’t really expected anything different, had she? She hadn’t been able to save Elphaba, or Fiyero. What had made her think she’d be able to save Oz?
“It’s all right, Momsicle. You’re never disturbing me. You know that.” Glinda shoved her letter under a petition from Munchkinland. “How can I help you?”
Momsicle walked over to her, picking her way around the stacks of paperwork. She rested her fingertips against Glinda’s cheek, her eyes searching hers for something that Glinda couldn’t name. “I wasn’t expecting you to still be up this late at night.” She glanced at the papers strewn across the desk. “Surely all of this can wait? At least until morning?”
“I’m afraid it can’t.” She looked at a group of memos from merchants in Gillikin that she had tried to read earlier that evening, until the words began to blur together in front of her eyes, but there were so many dense business terms that she couldn't understand. “A group of Gillikinese businessmen is visiting me tomorrow and I have to be prepared.”
“But this is all so much, Glinda.” Momsicle glanced around at the piles of papers. “When do you rest? When do you do something you actually enjoy?”
“I told you that I’m fine. I enjoy what I do.”
“You used to like to play tennis and go shopping and draw and paint and go to parties....Oz, Glinda. When's the last time you went shopping? You know, they just opened a new shopping arcade on Pastoria Street and—”
Glinda felt her cheeks heat when she thought about the stupid girl she’d been once, whose head had been full of nothing but clothes and the need to impress Madame Morrible. “I have plenty of things, Momsicle. I don’t need to go shopping. And anyway, most of the merchants bring their wares here when they want me to buy something.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d left the Emerald Palace for something that wasn’t a business engagement.
Momsicle was quiet for a long moment. But she didn’t need to say anything; Glinda could feel her disapproval. Or maybe it was just concern. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. “Surely you could hire another secretary or two to help you with the paperwork.”
“I like doing everything myself.” Glinda had seen how little ruling the Wizard did, how Madame Morrible made almost every major decision. She had resolved not to be like that. No one else knew Elphaba as well as she did. No one else would understand how to best protect her legacy.
“But darling, you can’t possibly do it all yourself.”
“Well I’ve been managing just fine, haven’t I?”
She waited for Momsicle to call her bluff, to tell her that she was too thin or the bags under eyes were unbecoming, but Momsicle didn’t say anything. She didn’t leave either. The silence stretched out between them, heavy with the weight of everything they chose to leave unsaid. Glinda nearly told her everything. In that moment she suddenly wanted nothing more than to cry in her mother’s arms, like she was still a child angry that her dress had gotten torn or her pony was refusing to go where she led her.
But then she remembered her promise to Elphaba. She’d promised not to clear her name, not to anyone. And if she told Momsicle, then Momsicle was sure to tell Momsie—and though Momsie had many, many wonderful qualities, the ability to keep a secret was not one of them.
Instead she found herself asking something entirely unexpected. “Momsicle, how did you know you were in love with Momsie?”
Momsicle thought for a moment. “It…came up over me, I suppose. I didn’t realize it at first. I just thought we were the very best of friends. Your mother and I were very close the entire time we were at Shiz. We took most of the same classes, we studied together in the library at the same times, we moved in the same social circles. But neither of us ever dated any of the eligible young men that were always sniffing around us—and believe me, we could have had our pick of them. But we stayed single up until graduation day, because none of the men—whether they were kind or smart or rich—ever felt right. And then I realized that I didn’t want to marry anyone else. I didn’t need a man in my life to make me feel complete. I just needed her. Thank Oz she felt the same way. And we’ve been inseparable ever since.” Silence stretched out between them. “Glinda? Is everything all right?”
It came up over me. I just thought we were the very best of friends. I didn’t need a man in my life to make me feel complete.
Fiyero had been kind and handsome and brave, but he had never felt right for her. She could admit that now, at nearly two years’ remove from her disastrous wedding. They probably would have been happy together, eventually, but she would never have fallen in love with him and he certainly wouldn’t have fallen in love with her. The rest of her life would have felt like those few years at the Emerald Palace, playing at being in love: holding his hand, kissing him, gazing up at him adoringly because that was what everyone expected her to do. Glinda hadn’t been able to understand what was wrong with her. Any one of her friends would have killed to be in her position, but she had still wanted more. And worst of all, she couldn’t even articulate to herself what it was that she really wanted.
Maybe now she could.
“I…I think I might not like men,” she managed to say, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “At least, not the way I’m supposed to.”
Momsicle sat down next to her, clasping Glinda’s hand in hers. “And what way is that, darling?”
“I’m not sure I want to marry a man and have his children.” In fact, the very idea of marrying a man repulsed her. She wasn’t sure if it had to do with the idea of being a housewife or just the idea of being happy again, in a world where Elphaba wasn’t able to.
“Well that’s perfectly all right. You don’t have to marry one if you don’t want to,” Momsicle said quickly. “You know we just want you to be happy, darling. And if that means loving a woman, that’s just fine by us.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t think I want to love anyone.”
She watched Momsicle’s eyes blink open and closed, as if she was sure that she’d heard incorrectly. “Anyone at all? But you’ve always been so loving. Remember how you used to sleep with all of your stuffed animals piled in bed with you so that none of them would feel left out?”
Glinda bit her lip. “I was a child then.”
“Or that poor girl at school that you took under your wing? Oz, you wrote us reams and reams of letters about her—” Glinda flinched and Momsicle must have remembered exactly who that poor girl had turned into because she stopped talking. “All I’m saying is that you’re a little bit young to be swearing off love forever.”
“I’m old enough to know myself.” And Glinda knew she couldn’t take another loss like Elphaba’s. Losing Elphaba had destroyed her. Losing someone else would shatter what was left. “I’m busy. Quite simply, there’s no room in my life for love now. And perhaps that’s for the best.”
“Why do you say that?” Momsicle asked.
“I don’t want to lose anyone else,” Glinda said. She stared at the drawer that held her letters to Elphaba. There were piles and piles of them now, tied with pink ribbons and crammed into every inch of available space. The drawer was nearly filled; she was going to have to clear out another one.
Momsicle squeezed her hand. “Anyone else? Darling, is there something you haven’t told us?”
But Glinda didn’t say anything. She just stared out the window, over the Emerald City and towards Munchkinland, where she could see the sky in the distance beginning to turn the first gray light of dawn. Morning was coming—another morning without Elphaba, another day to spend nursing a broken heart. She forced herself to smile. “Look. It’s tomorrow.”
The door to her study scraped open and Boq barged in without asking. He was holding a tray of food and a pitcher of the lavender lemonade that Glinda used to like, back when she still cared about what things tasted like. Now food was simply an inconvenience, something that took her away from her memos and her books and her promise to Elphaba. Sometimes she was so absorbed in her work that she forgot about it entirely.
After two and a half years she felt like she was finally making progress. The number of incidents involving bigotry against Animals had been on a steady downturn in the last two years. The initiatives she’d put in place to make it easier for Ozians to travel to other kingdoms so they could meet their fellow countrymen—not just Quadlings or Vinkans or Munchkins or Gillikinese, but Ozians, for better and for worse—were becoming increasingly popular. And undergirding everything Glinda had made sure that the problems people had been complaining about since she was a child—high food prices and doctors’ bills, the prohibitive cause of tuition at Shiz, the unavailability of quality childcare and affordable housing—were addressed too. She remembered an impassioned rant that Elphaba had gone on one night at Shiz, pacing from one side of their suite to the other. If people’s basic needs weren’t meant, she’d said, how could they ever reach their true potential? How could a scientist cure a disease if he was struggling to feed his family? How was a brilliant composer supposed to make music if he was working eighteen hours a day seven days a week to afford rent? How could a single mother with a head for numbers ever solve a theorem no one had ever cracked if she had to look after her six children with no relief because she couldn’t afford to hire a nanny? “Just think about how much potential is wasted just because people aren’t being taken care of,” she’d said, and even though Glinda hadn’t really understood what she meant and hadn’t really cared because she had always gotten everything she needed and more besides, she had admired how the firelight had reflected off of Elphaba’s cheeks and made her eyes seem sharp and clear.
Beautiful, she might have thought then if she’d had the words to. But no, that realization had occurred to her far too late, when it couldn’t possibly make a difference.
Boq set the tray in the middle of her desk and Glinda quickly moved her papers away, biting her lip so she wouldn’t snap at him. “You missed lunch, Glinda. Again.” She heard the note of disapproval, or maybe concern, in his tone.
“Thank you, Boq.” She didn’t look up at him, hoping he would take the hint and go away. She had learned what Boq had gone through in Munchkinland and understood why he blamed Elphaba for his…somewhat rusty state, but no matter how helpful he was now it didn't change the fact that he had whipped a mob into action against Elphaba. He still hated Elphaba now, and he hated Nessa even more bitterly, so Glinda didn’t even have the consolation of reminiscing about their days at Shiz with him.
But Boq didn’t leave. She could feel his eyes on her back, could hear the creaks his metallic skin made as he shifted from foot to foot. “Glinda? Maybe it isn’t my place, but—”
“You’re right. It isn’t,” she said, signing a declaration that would codify regular working hours in Munchkinland. No more working until midnight during the harvest.
Usually that was enough to send him scurrying away, but today Boq seemed determined to hold his ground. She heard him draw in a breath, like he was gathering his courage. “I’m worried about you, Glinda. We all are: Chistery, Brrr, your handmaidens—”
“Don’t bring my handmaidens into this. And I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine, really. There’s no need to worry about me—and there’s certainly no reason to barge into my office during work hours.” She’d given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed whenever her office door was closed, unless there was a true emergency. And the limitations of her own frail and fallible body certainly wasn't an emergency.
But Boq still wasn’t cowed. Glinda rolled her eyes and wished he’d picked a more convenient time to suddenly find his courage. She had to make sure the declaration made it to the Munchkinland ambassador before the end of the day, so he could bring it back to Munchkinland with him over the weekend. “You haven’t been sleeping. You barely eat. You nearly fainted at the orphanage yesterday—”
The memory was enough to make Glinda grit her teeth, remembering all those smiling children looking at her, remembering how bright the sun had felt on her face, how the ringing had started in her ears and she’d barely managed to catch herself against the wall before her vision went dark and fuzzy. She thought she’d managed to cover it well. “I didn’t faint.”
“But you could have.” Boq raised his hands slightly, as if in surrender. “I’m not trying to criticize you.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“I’m just asking you to remember how important you are to the rest of Oz. Where would we be without Glinda the Good? Look at how much you’ve already managed to accomplish.”
She wanted to tell him that the ideas weren’t really hers at all. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t someone to idolize. If anything, she was a monster. She’d gotten her best friend killed. But if it had ever been possible for Boq to be someone that she could confide in, those days were long gone. He didn’t know Elphaba, not really. When he looked at Glinda, he saw the same person that everyone else did.
Only Glinda knew that she couldn’t be the hero they needed her to be.
After Boq left she picked at the food, but she couldn’t keep down much more than a few bites. She shoved the tray to the side and went back to the documents, ignoring the headache that was starting to build at the back of her head. She didn’t have time to go and lie down, not when the paperwork was still mounting in front of her.
She shook her head to clear it, ignoring the dark spots that danced at the edge of her vision. There was still so much to do, and so little time.
//
I think I loved you the way I was meant to love Fiyero.
Glinda stared at the words for a moment, admiring how the black ink stood out against the light pink paper. For a moment she thought about scratching the sentence out, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to. They were the truth, as honest as Glinda had ever let herself be. She’d known that she had loved Elphaba, of course, but she hadn’t allowed herself to consider just how.
She hadn’t really let herself think about the night of the Ozdust, when she’d worn that beautiful dress the color of a sunset that she had picked out earlier in the afternoon while shopping in town with ShenShen. “Oh. My Oz,” ShenShen had gasped when Glinda tried the dress on and twirled in front of the mirror, watching with satisfaction as the skirt fanned out around her. “You have to buy it. That dress was made for you.”
“Do you really think so?” Glinda had asked, pretending to appraise her reflection. She knew she looked beautiful, of course. She knew she was going to buy it and wear it to impress Fiyero, because she knew it made her slim waist look even more shapely and highlighted the perfect symmetry of her bosom. But she liked making a show of false modesty, knowing that her friends would hurry to reassure her.
And sure enough, ShenShen did. “Of course I do. You’re going to be the most beautiful girl in that room and we all know it.” There wasn’t even a trace of jealousy in her voice. It was like she thought that she and Glinda were in altogether separate categories and therefore couldn’t be compared: Glinda was like a star in the night sky, beautiful but remote. People had treated her that way for as long as Glinda could remember. But as much as she was flattered by the attention, being a star sometimes felt…isolating. When people looked at her, Glinda sometimes wondered if they could really see past her beautifully coiffed hair and her perfectly made up face. And then she wondered why she cared. Why would she want friendship when she could have adoration? It was easy to be liked, but very few people were truly adored.
Except Elphaba Thropp didn’t want to be friends with her and certainly didn’t adore her, and yet Glinda couldn’t stop thinking about her. As she stood in front of the mirror and looked at that beautiful dress, she closed her eyes and imagined hands taking it off of her—slipping the buttons and hooks free of their casings, fingertips skating across the smooth skin of her back, breath ghosting across the back of her neck. But the fingertips were slim and tapered, not broad and square like Fiyero’s. The hands were lighter than his, gentler than his. The hands were…
Green?
She wrenched her eyes open, the dressing room suddenly feeling too small and too hot and too close, her breath coming in uneven pants. ShenShen had made a fuss, of course—she’d helped Glinda sit down on the little settee in the corner while she bolted at full speed to the bakery across the street to acquire a pastry, because she listened to Pfannee and Pfannee believed there was nothing that a little sugar to the blood couldn’t fix—but Glinda hardly noticed. Her cheeks were hot to the touch and she couldn’t understand why she suddenly wanted her roommate that she absolutely, positively detested to take off her dress and…what? Kiss her? Glinda almost laughed like a lunatic right there in the store. The very idea was laughable.
Except it wasn’t, anymore.
I dream about kissing you sometimes, Glinda wrote. Those dreams were almost worse than the dreams where she relived the Melting in excruciating detail and woke with Elphaba’s screams ringing in her ears. At least there was some relief in waking up then, just for a moment, until she remembered that what she’d dreamed wasn’t a nightmare at all. She awoke from the other dreams with tears in her eyes. Sometimes she dreamed they were in her bed at Shiz, other times in her bed in the Emerald City, holding each other so tightly that it was hard to tell where one body ended and another began. She remembered how soft Elphie’s skin was between her hands, and how soft her lips were too. She tasted of forest and open skies full of stars and a kind of freedom that Glinda had never felt in her entire life. Sometimes her hands wandered lower, beneath the hem of Glinda’s dress, and Glinda had felt an ecstasy that she had never imagined existed—
And then she woke up with tears streaming down her cheeks, as if her body had known before her mind did that the dreams were just that: visions or hallucinations, meant to drive her mad.
It changed nothing to know that she had been in love with Elphaba Thropp because Elphaba was still dead, but it also changed everything. It made the ground under her feet less steady. Sometimes all she could do was lie in her bed, weighted down by the enormity of what she had lost, and wondering how she could have not realized it—at least until one of her handmaidens knocked on her door and reminded her that there was someone to meet or somewhere to go or someone to talk to and then she had to reply that she would be right out in an appropriately sparkling tone, or else they would worry and call the doctor. They might call the doctor anyway.
She had been seeing a lot of the doctor in the past few weeks. He was a kind man with a brown mustache and muddy green eyes, even if he asked too many questions about what she was eating and how much she was sleeping and what kinds of medications she took for her headaches, which seemed near omnipresent now. She never invited him to see her; she just found him standing in her sitting room with his neat black bag of doctor instruments clutched in his hands and a couple of handmaidens offering him tea, looking sheepish. “I’m fine,” she told him again and again. She ate enough. She slept when she could get it. She most certainly did not get up in the middle of the night and fill drawers with letters to a dead woman. That would be unspeakably unprofessional of her. She responded to all of his no doubt well meaning suggestions with a noncommittal smile and promised to listen to his advice, even though she knew she wouldn’t. There simply wasn’t time for it.
The letters from her parents had also become more frequent and insistent. They had begun to drop in unannounced, asking her to go shopping with them or to let them introduce her to a very nice girl from an old Gilikinese family. She wondered if one of her handmaidens or her advisors had invited them to visit, perhaps thinking that she would listen to her family if she woudlnt' listen to any of them. Momsie and Momsicle didn’t comment on her appearance but Glinda could practically feel the weight of their concern, stealing all of the air from the room and suffocating her. Even though she reassured them over and over again that she was fine, she knew they didn’t believe her. At some point she had lost the ability to lie to them. But that was fine; all that mattered was that she was still able to pretend to the people of Oz.
Glinda had always been a stellar actress.
On the worst nights, when even writing until her hand cramped wasn’t enough to quiet her racing brain, Glinda laid the Grimmerie on her lap and stared at it until her head ached, waiting for the runes to resolve themselves into an order that made sense. She could feel the magic in the book in the way she hadn’t been able to a few years ago when Elphaba had given it to her; she could feel it humming in her lap, giving off a warm heat like a purring cat. Occasionally she could make out a few words here and there, sometimes entire phrases when she recognized the same symbols in the same order, but she didn’t have the fluency for reading magic Elphaba did. She carefully copied each symbol into a notebook, translating it into Ozian when she could, slowly building up a library of words and phrases. It was exhausting, laborious work. It made her head hurt and her eyes ache and sometimes it all felt so utterly useless. Sometimes she raged at Elphaba behind her closed bedroom doors for giving her a task they both knew she couldn’t complete. She had never been good at Sorcery and they both knew it. But Elphaba had been so certain that she could do it, and Glinda couldn’t let her down. So she turned her attention to the next row of symbols, ignoring the headache brewing in the back of her head.
It took her nearly two years to translate one spell. It was a healing spell, of sorts. In case of last resort, it read, and she thought about Boq’s shrinking heart and his metal body. So the spell itself was useless, but she had a foundation that made translating the next spell easier. She could recognize most of the individual runes now, so it was easier to push them together to form words.
Whenever she got so frustrated that she just wanted to throw the stupid book into the fireplace, she imagined Elphaba was sitting beside her, urging her to breathe and try again, like she had at Shiz when Glinda had spent hours staring at her Sorcery textbook wondering what was wrong with her, why she was unable to cast the simplest of spells. If she closed her eyes she could still imagine Elphaba’s warm hand resting in the middle of her back. “You’ll get it sometime. I know you will,” she’d said, like she believed in her fully even though Madame Morrible thought she was hopeless and even Glinda was beginning to wonder if she could ever be a sorceress at all.
Sometimes I think I see you, in the morning when I first wake up, Glinda wrote that night, in yet another one of her fruitless letters. Sometimes I think I see you standing on the balcony, and I go to let you in until I remember. I wish you would haunt me, Elphie. I wish you would give me some sign that there’s something more after this and you aren’t just…gone. Those mornings were the worst, feeling the cold of the stone soak through her feet, her hand clenched around the door handle, her eyes scanning the darkness for a hint of green. I have to believe that I’ll see you again. It’s the only thing that makes this all worth it.
Ruling Oz was hard, and it seemed to get a little harder every day, even as political events calmed. Her body seemed to rebel against the idea of ruling. It became harder to keep food down, harder to get out of bed and drag herself over to her vanity and paper over the bags under her eyes and smile for her handmaidens. Sleep became more elusive than ever and she spent her nights writing letters that she would never send.
I love you, Elphaba Thropp, she wrote at the end of every letter. Present, not past tense, because nothing could change her love for Elphaba. Not even death.
Occasionally her handmaidens tried to introduce her to other women, beautiful women with skin as dark as ebony or eyes that shifted colors like the sea or long, lithe limbs that could dance for hours and sharp white teeth. They were all gorgeous, but Glinda never felt anything for them except a dull absence of feeling. She should want to love them, she knew. But they weren’t Elphaba. They didn’t have her smile or her laugh, and they didn’t go off on the tangents that Elphaba did. So Glinda always sent them on their way at the end of the night, thanking them for visiting but letting them know that a repeat meeting wouldn’t be required. She was resigned to a loveless future, because it was what she deserved.
She grew so used to pretending that she was okay, both to herself and everyone else, that it came as a bit of a shock when she wasn’t. It was the fourth annual Melting Day, nearing five years without Elphaba. She had gone to Munchkinland to make a speech as she always did, and the weather was hot and sunny the way it always was. The roar of the crowd felt distant and faraway as Glinda mounted the makeshift stage, watching the crowds cheer for her. “Fellow Ozians,” she said, plastering a smile in place. Her mind was elsewhere, already thinking ahead to the coming night that she would spend alone in her room, nursing one of the bottles of fine wine that the Wizard had left in the palace cellars. “Today we celebrate the anniversary of the melting of our great enemy and the years of peace that her death ushered in…”
Her vision blurred. She placed a hand on the podium to steady herself and blinked dark spots out of her eyes.
She felt the Mayor place his hand on her wrist to steady her. “Miss Glinda, are you all right?” he asked. His skin was soft with age and had the consistency of crepe paper, like the crepe paper that dangled from windows and walls and bell towers to celebrate the death of the woman she had loved and lost.
“I’m quite all right, thank you.” She blinked hard, and the blobs of color finally resolved themselves into concrete objects. “It is such a pleasure to be here today with all of you to celebrate…” There was a pain in her gut, low and sharp. It made her gasp and stagger forward. There were screams in the crowd.
There were more hands around her now, steadying her, hands on her shoulders and elbows guiding her to the ground. Their voices had faded into a low hum in her ear and they ignored her when she told them that she was fine and really didn’t need their help at all—or maybe she didn’t actually say that, and just thought she did. She just wanted to get through the speech so that she could go back to the Emerald Palace and forget, just for a few moments, maybe drink herself into a sleep that would last longer than a few hours. But her mouth wasn’t working, her words falling on deaf ears. The sky spun above her in dizzying loops and pain stabbed her stomach again, so hard that she cried out. She could feel the hard ground underneath her and for one wild moment she thought about all the dirt that would collect on the skirt of her dress and how hard her handmaidens would have to work to get it out.
As darkness began to settle over her, the last thing she saw was Chistery’s heterochromatic eyes as he came to squat beside her, holding her hand. “It will be all right,” he said haltingly.
“Thank you, Chistery,” she whispered, even though she hoped she wouldn’t be. It was as if her body itself knew that she had given all she could, but she had simply never been designed to live in a world without Elphaba Thropp. Perhaps the years of grief had finally caught up to her.
Maybe the weight could fall off her shoulder now. I’m sorry, Elphaba, she whispered, or thought she did. I wish I could do more.
But Glinda knew, better than anyone else did, that she had always been weak. Why had she thought that anything would change now?
Miss Glinda’s room was quiet as Chistery opened the heavy double doors. The room had been a flurry of activity earlier as handmaidens and doctors and relatives all crowded around the massive pink and white bed, but now it was late—the very darkest hour of the night—and everyone else had finally trickled away. Even the square in front of the palace, which had been crowded with people, was empty now. The handmaidens had finally convinced Miss Glinda’s parents to rest for the night, in an adjoining room where they would be able to hear her if she woke up or cried out for them. They had rushed to their daughter’s side as soon as word of her collapse had reached them. They had arrived early in the morning and Miss Glinda hadn’t stirred, just as she hadn’t stirred for the past day. Chistery remembered how they had dropped to her knees at her side, stroking her hair and squeezing her hands and murmuring “My baby,” so often that the words had lost their meaning.
The doctors had gone to run more tests, though Chistery knew they wouldn’t find any evidence for what he already knew to be true. Miss Glinda, the ruler of Oz, who had so much thrust onto her shoulders at such a young age, was dying from a broken heart. And they had all known for years that this was coming, but they hadn’t done anything to stop it.
As Oz grew stronger and its people became more peaceful, she seemed to grow weaker and weaker until her decline had become impossible to ignore and even then Miss Glinda had refused to listen, insisting that she was fine, insisting that there was always more to do. And they had let her, even though anyone could see that she was hurting. Now she lay curled under the sheets like a discarded doll, shivering though the night was warm, her skin nearly as pale as her duvet. He could see how the bones in her shoulders had become more pronounced, and he felt a stab of anger at himself for letting things get this far. He had known for years that Miss Glinda was mourning Miss Elphaba, just as he had suspected that Miss Elphaba had never truly died.
Now, it was time to prove his suspicion right.
He opened the Grimmerie, which lay discarded on Miss Glinda’s desk amid all the commotion. Please help her, he thought, though he knew it was a long shot. He had seen Miss Elphaba use the Grimmerie to try to save Prince Fiyero, but he knew he didn’t have any magic himself—just worry for the woman who lay in the bed on the other side of the room and held the fate of Oz on her shoulders. The pages were filled with row after row of incomprehensible runes, but he continued to flip forward until he reached a page near the back of the book that showed a map of Oz—and the lands outside of it. There were the golden Shifting Sands that separated Oz from the other kingdoms: Ev and Ix and the Nome kingdom and others that Chistery had never learned to name. There were the swamps of Quadling Country and the mountains of Gillikin and the grasslands of the Vinkus and the flower fields of Munchkinland.
And there was a red dot, just on the other side of the great desert, beaming as bright as a beacon. Chistery ran a fingertip over the book’s old and worn pages. Miss Elphaba, he thought, memorizing the route and then shutting the book. He would find Miss Elphaba and tell her that Miss Glinda needed her. Surely Miss Elphaba would know how to save her.
He was just turning to leave, planning to collect a knapsack full of provisions for the journey and be on his way by dawn, when he saw a piece of paper half sticking out of one of Miss Glinda’s desk drawers. He went to push it back into the drawer, in case the document was sensitive, but it wouldn’t give. He tried to open the drawer, but it appeared to be stuck. It only opened with a solid yank—and then more pieces of paper flew out at him, falling around him like snow.
No, not just pieces of paper. They were bundles of letters, tied with neat pink ribbons. The drawer was full of them, and so was the drawer next to it. Dearest Elphaba, read the first one, and so did the second one, and so did every bundle that Chistery could get his hands on. He recognized Miss Glinda’s neat handwriting from the documents that he often brought for her to sign. The bundles of letters were dated. He rummaged back in the desk until he found the earliest: nearly three years earlier, almost a year after the Wicked Witch of the West disappeared forever.
For a moment he just knelt in the middle of the floor with the letters spread out around him like a carpet composed of grief and despair, wondering how he could ever have let things get this bad.
Then he straightened up, gathering as many letters into his arms as he possibly could. He would return with a box, and a second one if he needed to. He would take as many letters with him as he could to convince Miss Elphaba to return. She might have thought that Oz was better off without her, but Miss Glinda certainly wasn’t.
And even though Chistery didn’t know anything about magic, he sensed that Miss Elphaba was the only one who could save Miss Glinda, the only one who could keep her heart from shattering altogether. If it wasn’t already too late.