Break Out
Chapter Six: Break Out
The plan was simple. So simple, in fact, that Elphaba half expected to learn that this was all a ruse to separate her from Glinda so that they could return the girl to the Emerald City. Either that or it was a trap. She hadn’t rejected that prospect, no matter how much she wanted to trust Nastoya and her band of rebels. She didn’t want to think badly of the group that she’d encountered, but her trust had already been violated roughly by the last person she would have suspected. She needed to be careful.
It was with a heavy heart that Elphaba reluctantly set off in the direction of an abandoned farmstead, where she’d been told that the Animal she was supposed to rescue was being held. Nastoya had insisted on sending two members of her tribe along with Elphaba, claiming that they were there to help, but Elphaba wasn’t so sure. If anything went wrong, or if Elphaba decided to break her word and betray them, the tribesmen would undoubtedly send word back to Nastoya, who would follow through on her word to either kill Glinda or send her back to the Emerald City where she could be used by those who wished to get to Elphaba.
Elphaba would do everything in power to prevent either prospect from becoming a reality.
The whole idea of betrayal made Elphaba’s magic want to lash out in a fit of rage. Just who did these people think she was? Did they really think that Elphaba would risk everything to save Glinda, only to leave her in the hands of this unknown faction in the middle of nowhere and then proceed to betray them when they all but said they’d kill her?
Elphaba tried pushing everything but the mission to the back of her mind, though the last image she had of Glinda, terrified and dragged away against her will on her injured foot, refused to go away. Elphaba let the image burn itself into her mind, welcoming the motivation when all she wanted was to return to the blonde’s side.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the cause; rescuing Animals from those would do them harm was something that Elphaba had found her passion for back at Shiz. Her outrage over the abrupt dismissal and rough treatment of Dr. Dillamond, and her reaction to watching that poor, terrified Lion cub as he trembled inside his little cage were proof of that. But she wasn’t ready to risk everything for an Animal she didn’t know, especially when she had so many other things to worry about.
Like getting Glinda and herself to safety.
As she followed the Vinkus natives through the cover of darkness through an open field toward the direction of the barn she’d been assured her quarry was being held in, she couldn’t help but think back to her earlier decision to land in that empty field. Why couldn’t she have flown on a little longer? Surely the two of them could have managed another hour or so in the air. She grew disappointed every time she tried to wake herself up from the nightmare she was sometimes convinced she was in the middle of, only to find herself back in this unwanted reality.
“We’re here,” one of the men whispered as he ducked down behind a large tree, motioning with his hands for Elphaba to join him. The other man had already joined him, glaring at Elphaba with enough venom that she nearly stumbled back from the vehemence of it. She caught herself, however, and quickly joined them, determined not to give them any reason to doubt her. She stood behind the second man and watched carefully as the first one pointed at the barn.
“That’s where they’re keeping her,” he pointed out unnecessarily, his deep voice full of unmasked rage, though Elphaba couldn’t tell if his anger was because of her presence or the situation. “From what we’ve been able to gather, the door is always guarded by one man in eight-hour shifts. There’s a small window, usually about two minutes, when the guards speak to each other, probably to give a debrief, leaving the door temporarily unwatched. You still have that book of yours?”
That book was the Grimmerie, and the only thing she’d been instructed to bring with her. At first Elphaba had wondered how Nastoya and her band of rebels had known about it, before remembering the proclamation that Madame Morrible had sent out to all of Oz about Elphaba’s supposedly wicked nature. Everyone knew she had the book, and she’d be expected to use it despite never wanting to touch the thing again.
If Elphaba had her way, that book would’ve ended up in a fire somewhere, burned away and destroyed so that it could no longer cause any more damage, intentional or otherwise.
But she reluctantly pulled it out of her satchel anyway, her fingers twitching with the need to put it back. She’d somehow managed to find and use the glamour spell without any consequences, or at least none that she knew about, but how long could that last? She was untrained in magic such as this, only familiar with the feats of small magic she either unleashed accidentally on her own, or at the hands of Madame Morrible’s gentle coaxing. Just the thought of her old tutor and her subtle manipulations sent her mind whirling to a dark place she didn’t want to go. Tightening her grip on the Grimmerie, she focused back on the task at hand.
“Ervic and I will create a distraction,” the first Vinkian went on, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “When we do, you’ll go in, use your magic spell book and find a way to get Nuur out. Then we meet back here where, hopefully, no one will be the wiser. You do that, Greenie, and your little friend goes free. Any questions?”
Yeah. Where can you go to get stuffed? But she kept that snide comment to herself, settling for shaking her head instead.
The man nodded once, then turned to his friend and began to sneak in the direction of the barn, leaving Elphaba behind.
She could run for it. She could turn back and go the way they came, use the Grimmerie to get Glinda back and fly away to take their chances somewhere else. Let Nastoya and her flock find a way to rescue their captured friend. This wasn’t Elphaba’s fight.
Except, in a way, it was. Morrible had been right when she’d said that Elphaba had mutilated the Monkeys. It may not have been intentional, and the Wizard may have orchestrated that disgustifying display, but in the end Elphaba had been the one to say the words and put the spell into action. She’d spend the rest of her life trying to atone for it, and this could be a start. If she turned her back on an Animal in need, despite initially being coerced into doing it, how would that make her any different from the Wizard?
Her mind made up, Elphaba took a deep breath and crept in the opposite direction from where the two Vinkian men had gone, keeping her sights set on the barn ahead.
It was larger than she’d initially thought, with a triangular roof and two small windows to the side of the building from where the door stood guarded. Another smaller window had been carved out on the upper part of the barn, indicating that there was an upper level inside. She prayed that her quarry, whoever it was, had not been stashed up there. The plan hinged on a quick getaway. Elphaba had no idea what kind of Animal they were rescuing, but if it was one that couldn’t run well, it would not bode well if they were caught.
The grass in the field had dimmed by the time Elphaba reached a small tree closest to the barn. She took a moment to rest and stretched out her legs, holding the Grimmerie close to her chest as she chanced a peek around the tree for a glimpse of her two companions.
She found them huddled near the opposite side of the barn, crouched in a tall part of the field where the grass was high enough to keep them covered from a casual view. The two men watched her and gave her a subtle nod to indicate that they were ready to put the next part of their plan into action, then fled further into the open field.
Elphaba steeled herself for whatever the Vinkians had in mind, closing her eyes just as a small explosion sounded off in the distance. She snapped her eyes back open a moment later and peered back around the tree and watched as the man guarding the barn door snapped his head in that direction before gazing around in concern, indecision plain in his rapidly shifting eyes.
The next explosion, this one closer than the first, must’ve made up his mind, because the man ran off to investigate, leaving the barn door unguarded.
Instead of going for the barn door, however, Elphaba hurried to the window on the side and quickly peered inside. She needed to know if how many more people from this unknown faction were inside. Her two companions had not given her that information, which she half-expected to mean she was about to walk into a trap.
Elhaba was barely able to make out anything through the dirty window. She vaguely saw the outlines of a few stalls and some equipment, but everything else was a blur.
Taking a chance, Elphaba tightened her hold on the Grimmerie and snuck around to the barn door, taking a deep breath before hurrying inside before the guard had a chance to return.
Closing it behind her, Elphaba braced herself for an attack of some sort, but everything was silent. Looking around the dimly lit barn, Elphaba saw two rows of unused stalls, the doors of which were open. She’d half-expected to find a pack of Animals waiting for her to be rescued, but the barn was empty. Bales of hay were stacked along one wall, with pitchforks and other mucking equipment on the other side. The barn itself smelled like days-old manure and stale hay, as though the owners had either left in a hurry or couldn’t be bothered to pick the mess up.
The further into the barn she went, the more confused Elphaba became. Why would people take shifts guarding an empty, unused barn? There had to be something she was missing, otherwise why go to all this trouble?
Elphaba resisted the urge to find a spell in the Grimmerie, though the temptation was almost too great to pass up. A revealing spell might come in handy so she could sense who might’ve been in the barn with her, or another glamour spell to make her appear as though she were someone else, but she quickly dismissed those ideas, mostly not wanting to take the time to flip through the ancient spell book. She already felt rushed, and by the time she figured out what she was missing, the guard would likely return, and escape would be that much harder.
It wasn’t until she passed the row of stalls that she saw the small, winding staircase that would no doubt lead to the second level of the barn. Her heart quickened at the sight, though she was careful to keep her steps as soft as possible as she approached the rickety-looking staircase. It looked old, with shards of wood jutting out at all angles along the handrail. She half-expected that one wrong step would send her plunging back down to the ground and found herself wishing she had her broomstick.
But she didn’t, and this was all she had. Her gut told her that whatever she was looking for would be found on the second level, so she gripped the Grimmerie in one hand and used the other to hold on to the railing as tightly as she could, her heavy boots creaking each step as she slowly ascended.
When she approached the top level, Elphaba slowed her gait and swept her gaze around, not wanting to be caught off guard by any members of this unknown faction that might’ve heard or noticed her entrance. The thought that her presence had been known this entire time, and she was walking into a trap nagged persistently in her mind, but it was too late to do anything about it now. If she tried to flee, they’d only follow her, and if she returned to the Vinkians without the Animal they wanted her to rescue, there was no doubt in her mind that they would follow through on their threat and kill Glinda. She didn’t think that Nastoya was the type to bluff.
Her first impression was that the second level was just as empty as the first. There were no people ready to swarm her or threaten her. There were no Animals in need of rescuing. She didn’t see any piece of furniture that might indicate that someone dwelled within this barn, and they were simply away for the moment. Could the Vinkians have received false intel? Elphaba stepped fully onto the second level without meeting anyone, and the urge to leave had never been greater.
Elphaba decided to look around anyway, wanting to be as thorough as possible before she left empty-handed. Glinda’s life depended on it. Maybe the captive Animal was being kept quiet somehow or was otherwise unable to announce themselves. With how rare magic was, she didn’t think it would be a spell making them incapable of speaking, but whatever was going on with the Animals in Oz was spreading, so she wasn’t going to put anything past these unknown enemies who had yet to make an appearance.
There was even less to see up here than there was down below. Elphaba only saw a small assortment of spare bits of farming equipment, as well as a shattered lantern, some rope, and bags of food that were clearly meant for Animals or animals.
Perking up with interest, Elphaba inspected the bags of food, finding them half-full. The food looked fresh, and there were no layers of dust or decay along the bags themselves. The food was the first sign of someone potentially staying here that she’d seen so far. Maybe the Vinkians were on to something, but if they were, then where was her quarry?
She received her answer a moment later, when the barn doors were suddenly thrown open with a loud creak, revealing two large men, each of them pulling something along on a thick piece of rope. The effort was clearly costing them, because even from her vantage point from the floor above, Elphaba could see beads of sweat glistening on their brows, their faces red and their breathing heavy and labored from their efforts.
When Elphaba saw what the men were dragging inside the barn by the rope, her stomach clenched even as a small kernel of hope swelled in her gut.
At first glance, Elphaba assumed the Animal to be a Lion, but as the men dragged their prisoner further into the barn by the thick rope attached to its neck, she realized that the Animal was a Lioness. She had no mane, her face and coat a pale golden color. She growled with every step she was forced to take inside the barn, snarling dangerously whenever one of her captors got too close. Two other men brought up the rear, leaving four in total with the Lion, the last two quickly pushing the barn door closed before rushing to the closest empty stall, which the men holding the rope were dragging the Lion toward by her neck.
Elphaba could only watch, her stomach in knots as the men dragged the Lioness roughly toward the stall, kicking her whenever she dragged her large paws and cursing whenever she tried taking a bite from them, though even if she’d somehow managed to get close enough, she wouldn’t have been able to do much with the large muzzle locked around her snout.
“Take it easy!” one of the men holding the rope snapped as he chanced a kick at one of the Animal’s front legs. “You damn cat!”
This earned another growl from the Lioness, who tried in vain to dig her claws into the barn’s floor. Elphaba could see the intelligence in the Animal’s orange-brown eyes, as well as the promise of future retribution. Elphaba ducked down below the banister as she crept as close as she dared to the small gathering, hoping to hear as much as she could, though it was clear from the men’s angry, subdued voices that she wasn’t going to learn anything useful.
“…Must’ve been some of the local kids again…”
“…Another false alarm…”
“…Should just kill the thing already…”
Elphaba bit her lip, her grip around the Grimmerie tight enough to send stabs of pain in her palms, but she ignored it as she got closer to the men, who’d finally managed to drag the Lioness into the stall, quickly slamming and locking the stall door shut behind them.
They didn’t bother removing the rope around her neck or the muzzle around her snout.
“Why are we keeping that thing around again?”
“Because he said so,” one of others replied impatiently as he brushed his hands along his dirty shirt, wincing from the contact. “Pulling that damn rope is rubbing me raw!”
His words didn’t garner much sympathy from his companions, all of whom merely grunted in annoyance as they began to spread out in the barn. Elphaba quickly shot to her feet and glanced around quickly for a place to hide.
Finding a large box tucked into a nearby corner, Elphaba hurried to crouch behind it just as two of the men emerged from the staircase and went their separate ways.
To her alarm, one of them began walking in her direction.
Elphaba ignored the pounding of her heart as she flung open the Grimmerie and frantically flipped through the pages for a spell that could help her. Levitation wouldn’t work. Glamour wouldn’t work because they clearly weren’t expecting anyone else. All it would do was hide her green skin.
She was about to flip to another page, but the symbols on the page she’d just opened to gave her pause. The words were too unfamiliar yet for her to make out, even though the strange and secret language became a little easier to read each time she opened the book. The spell seemed simple enough, the words written in the same tongue as the others she’d attempted so far, but the illustrations were new.
An outstretched hand, drawn so that the viewer looked at from the side, its palm open wide, was etched above the spell with an illustration of a faceless person falling backward, away from the open hand. From what she gathered, it looked like a simple repellant spell, but her brief experience with the Grimmerie so far led her to believe that none of the spells waiting within were simple.
But Elphaba was out of time and had no other choice.
Mumbling the words to the spell under her breath as quickly as she could, committing the incantation to memory, she glanced up to see where the unknown men had gone, surprised to find that the two who had come upstairs had reconvened and were standing together by the railing, looking down at the ground floor of the barn.
Knowing she wouldn’t get another opportunity like this, Elphaba cautiously stepped out from her hiding place and slowly approached the men as quietly as she could, the words of the spell still fresh in her mind. They danced on the tip of her tongue, itching to be cast out and released. Elphaba could taste the power behind the incantation; her entire body was practically buzzing from it.
She stopped when she was a couple feet away from the men, who hadn’t looked up or noticed her approach. Both men looked down and appeared to be speaking to the others on the ground floor, though Elphaba was buzzing with too much power to make out what they were saying. She didn’t really care. The only thing that mattered was getting herself and the Lioness to safety so that she could get back to Glinda.
Nothing else mattered.
Elphaba drew in a large, deep breath, raised her hand in the way that the illustration had depicted, then muttered the words to the incantation as quickly and clearly as she could.
‘Gyorsan lezuhan ne mozogjon.’
She repeated the words as quickly as she could, hardly noticing the way the two men had spun around and reached for the concealed daggers they’d had stored at the belts of their pants. Elphaba didn’t move as they stormed angrily in her direction, brandishing the daggers threateningly.
She did her best to ignore them as she continued to repeat the words, the buzzing of power surrounding her as it had done back at the Emerald Palace when she’d performed the levitation spell on Chistery and the rest of the Monkey guard. She felt as though she were in a kind of trance that she could not pull out from. The power of the Grimmerie held her in its grasp, keeping her locked in its hold, the words flowing from her lips as confidently and gracefully as though they’d always been meant to be there.
It wasn’t until she pushed out with her open fist in the direction of the two men that anything happened. Her would-be assailants stumbled as though she’d just punched them, flinching, and then she watched in quickly growing horror as they clutched desperately at their chests and began gasping and choking, fighting to suck in as much air as they could, their faces turning an alarming shade of dark blue.
Elphaba stopped chanting, the power slipping away from her even as the effects of her spell lingered dangerously in the air. She didn’t lower her hand, watching as the men clawed at their chests, practically ripping through the fabric of their shirts, before they stopped as suddenly as they’d started just a few seconds ago, collapsing to the ground.
“Hey!”
Elphaba spun in the direction of the unexpected voice, her upraised arm flinging in the direction of the two men who had joined her on the second level, no doubt to investigate the cause of the disturbance that had distracted their comrades.
There was no time to stop her involuntary reaction, and soon the other two men began clawing at their chests and gasping for air as well. Elphaba could only watch, stunned, at the chaos she had caused, wanting to do something but unable to think clearly.
Elphaba found herself frozen as the other two men joined the others on the floor, leaving her standing alone amid the bodies who had been living, breathing people only moments ago. Her shock kept her in place, even as the fearful whining of the caged Lioness down below reminded her of her mission and why she was even there in the first place.
Remembering what—and who –was waiting for her at the end of this, Elphaba jolted herself back into action and raced down the stairs toward the female Lion, who was pawing at the lock of her enclosure desperately. Surprisingly, she stopped at Elphaba’s approach, her orange-brown eyes glaring into the green girl’s knowingly.
Elphaba’s presence was not a surprise.
She quickly stuffed the Grimmerie back into her satchel, wanting nothing more to do with it, then began to fumble with the stall door’s lock. It took a few tries, mostly due to the violent trembling in her shaking green fingers, but eventually she got the stall door open. The Lioness all but jumped out, racing around the barn so quickly and with enough purpose that Elphaba expected her to crash right through the thin walls of the old barn.
But the Lioness merely circled back to her, growling softly as she shook her small snout and flicked her gaze down at the muzzle locked around it, the implication clear.
Elphaba pulled the muzzle off, and the Lioness opened her mouth wide, stretching out her jaw to reveal to rows of sharp, predatory teeth that looked ready to kill. She thought of the bodies on the second level but pushed that thought away as quickly as it had come. As awful as the men were for keeping an Animal caged against her will, they didn’t deserve to be the Lion’s dinner.
No one deserved that fate.
“Hmmm, that’s better,” the Lioness rumbled, her voice deep enough that Elphaba felt the vibrations through the floorboards. “Now, let’s get out of here before the others return.”
“Others?” Elphaba blanched, thinking about the deaths of the Lioness’s captors piled on the floor above. She was in no mood to repeat that awful spell. “There are more of them?”
“Yes, and we need to hurry. They’ll be expecting to change shifts soon, and once they discover the others dead, they’ll be on the warpath.”
Elphaba nodded, the incantation to the spell she’d just cast replaying repeatedly in her mind, as though they wanted to remind her that they were available should they be needed. She swallowed heavily as she followed the Lioness to the barn doors, opening them for the Animal, who ran through with all the zeal of someone who’d been caged for quite some time and was now relishing her freedom.
In some ways, Elphaba could relate.
The unexpected motion startled the small man standing guard by the doors, who’d only just managed to jump aside to avoid getting trampled. He choked out a startled cry, but he didn’t manage to do much else before one of Elphaba’s companions came out of nowhere and raised the weapon in his hand, bringing it down heavily on top of the guard’s head.
The man collapsed to the ground in a similar way as the others back in the barn. Elphaba tried not to remember the way their bodies had fallen, as though they were puppets whose strings had been unexpectedly cut loose.
She shuddered at the memory and did her best not to look at this man’s unconscious form. She needed to believe that he’d only been knocked out.
“Nuur!” One of the Vinkians ran to the Lioness and began stroking the fur on top of her head in the first display of open affection that Elphaba had seen so far. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” the Lioness purred softly, leaning into the touch. “Though I’d appreciate it if you could remove the rope around my neck.”
The man quickly complied, and Elphaba watched as the other man joined his friends, nodding to the Lioness as though he were greeting a long-lost friend.
“We should head back,” the second man, Ervic, said after a minute of the three friends becoming reacquainted. Elphaba was glad that he’d been the one to suggest it, because she wanted nothing more in that moment than to return to Glinda but was unsure how her companions would react to the suggestion if she’d been the one who’d made it. She needed to reassure herself that her friend was safe. She wanted—needed –to put as much distance between this horrible day and herself as she could.
She also desperately needed to forget what she was capable of with the Grimmerie in her hands.
“Have you had any sign of him yet?” Nuur asked her friends as they began jogging back in the direction of the village they’d come from earlier, Elphaba trailing behind, feeling like a forgotten shadow.
“No,” the first man replied, regret laced in his words. “But we’ll keep looking. I promise. We won’t give up until we find him.”
A small, pained growl escaped from the back of the Lioness’s throat, but otherwise she made no reply.
Elphaba couldn’t contain her curiosity and, needing to distract herself from the awful deed she’d committed back at the barn, she asked warily, “Find who?”
Her three companions turned back to face her, looking as though they’d forgotten all about her. The men turned back around as they continued on their way, ignoring her, but Nuur considered her for another moment before she replied softly, “My son. My little cub. The Wizard’s cronies snatched him away before he was old enough to be separated, and we’ve been looking for him ever since.”
Elphaba fell silent, not knowing how to respond. Would she be expected to help these people find this missing Animal as well? Her heart went out to the Lioness for her loss, but Elphaba’s priority had to be getting Glinda and herself to safety. She could worry about the cause after that.
But then a memory filtered in from the back of her brain, of a day when she’d watched a professor she liked and respected very much dragged out of his classroom like a common criminal. She remembered the horrible, mustached man who’d replaced him that same day, who’d insisted they take notes on a lesson about cages that had nothing to do with history.
But most of all, she remembered the cart that he’d wheeled in with him, revealing a tiny cage that contained a small, terrified little Lion cub.
Her heart sank as realization and understanding set in. None of this could be a coincidence.
“Was he…was he put in a cage?” Elphaba managed to choke out, visions of the Lion as he trembled in response to Nikidik banging on the bars of his cage playing out in her vision. Her fear that the Lion would grow up caged and unable to speak had spurred her into action. Taking him into the fields of the nearby forest with Fiyero as they brought him to safety had calmed her enough that she’d never thought back on that day (or at least hadn’t thought about the cub). But now…
“Yes!” Nuur replied, hope and desperation entwined together in her deep voice as she suddenly spun around on her paws and dug her penetrating gaze into Elphaba’s wilting one. “Do you know of him? Have you seen him?”
Elphaba didn’t dare turn away from the desperate mother as she swallowed and forced herself to reply. “He…he was brought to Shiz. I was in the class when he…” she trailed off, unable to relay the awful story of her introduction to the Lioness’s son back to Nurr, who looked ready to take on the entirety of the Emerald City all by herself if it meant getting her cub back. She simply didn’t have the heart to bring that bad news to bear, especially after the traumatizing events of the rescue she’d just undertaken.
“Well,” Elphaba went on shakily, “to make a long story short, I saved him. I released him into the forest.”
She didn’t miss the way the Lioness’s expression darkened, or the soft growl emanating from the back of her throat.