D: L&L - Part 44 | Scarecrow: The Memory War

The path was fraught, but not with peril — with silence. Silence and recriminations.

You remember it wrong.

I didn’t answer. Just walked on without any indication I could hear his words, staring up at the way sunlight bled out through gaps in the trees. Outside, the world had kept spinning. Inside, everything in me had come unstitched. I’d only told Dot part of the story. The battle. The losses. The centaurs -- is that what she’d called them? The end of my reign, but not how it ended.

“It was my birthday,” I said aloud. “One of them, anyway.”

Dot didn’t respond. She was in her own world perhaps, a few yards ahead, her boots marking time between the YBR tracks that ran through a stand of amber Diedo trees. We had hours of walking — days even — to the Emerald City, and no sign of the train, which by my calculations should have arrived at our little abandoned outstation not long ago. Cobb was nothing, if not punctual.

“I couldn’t remember my human birthday, so I picked the day I became Scarecrow,” I went on to no one in particular. Except him. He was always there now, peeking into my soul from dark corners, where I harbored things I didn’t want to see. “Seemed poetic at the time. All of Oz came to Emerald City that year. The grand court. Delegates. Spies. Liars. Even Glinda sent a card. Wrote me a poem. A real masterpiece.”

I closed my eyes and recited it from memory, because of course I could.

“Tik-tok, look at the clock,

Better put on my birthday frock.

Tik-tok, man of the year

Is another year closer to death, I fear.

How-now, a bloodied dead cow

Is roasting on fires with fishes and sow.

Caw-caw, the crows made of straw

Will burn with the beasts, according to Law.”

“She signed it ‘Love, Glinda.’ And then wrote, ‘Dear Fiyero.’”

And you didn’t even know.

I gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “True. But then I read the back of the card and began to suspect that something was missing. A part of me that I didn’t even realize had been there.”

Oh, Fiyero, my fickle flame,
Where did you go, and what is your name?
They stuffed you with straw and crowned you with shame,
Now all that you ruled is a child’s cruel game.

Fiyero hovered in the corner of my mind, arms folded. “How long had she known?”

I ignored him.

“The Lion came. Nick, too. The three of us. The triumvirate. We drank too much, as usual. I thought I was patching things up. I was wrong.” 

The memories were jagged things, crawling up from the cellar where I’d buried them. Nowhere Dot could see them. Just little pieces of straw and paper with writing on them. I could pluck them out if I wished to forget forever, but…

“The Lion was already in her pocket. I’d heard rumors, of course, but seeing it play out in real time? That’s something else. He took a shine to a serving girl halfway through the feast, rutted her right there in front of everyone. She bled, kept working. That’s what it was like then. You bled and kept working.”

I shook my head.

“Nick... Nick was losing it. Ranting, pacing. His heart—it didn’t make him human. It made him haunted. And then Glinda arrived. Right after dessert.”

What did she say?

“You know. You knew. You must have known, see it happen, felt it somewhere in the darkness where you hid.” I smiled without humor. “She said, ‘Scarecrow, I have come to pay my respects to you, our wonderful Emperor of Oz.’ Then she told me I was done.”

Just like that.

“That’s what I believed for years. She called the Lion to her side. He gutted one of my guards like a fish. The TikToks sliced the rest apart with saw-blade arms. She told her tin soldiers to drag me to the gate and dump me like spoiled meat. And they did.”

No. It wasn’t like that at all. I was watching.

I turned and looked behind me, then up at the sky, wondering where Turlo was. The tracks ran on endlessly over a hill in the distance. Behind us, they sank down into a valley of corn, a single trail of black smoke rising lazily over the horizon. Not a cloud in the sky, but the heat beating down from the sun. The amber trees glinted like glass, the leaves tinkling in the breeze.

“It was on a day like this.”

No, it wasn’t. It was raining. A storm over the city. The rain dropped like stones on the glass ceiling, threatening to break through and drown the festivities.

Fiyero stepped forward in my mind, just enough to cast a shadow.

“She came to me there in the midst of the party, bringing gifts and joy and her cold brand of mirth, until she had me ripped from my seat and thrown out right there in front of the court. The last I saw of them, they were bending the knee as she pushed a piece of my birthday cake into her dark smile.”

Glinda. Alone. No army. No pink smoke. No little metal men that night. Just you sitting alone in our chambers wondering what had become of your friends. Don’t you remember?

I could still see her—the smell of sugar and spice and everything nice. The gleam of cold teeth behind a warm smile. “She said I looked ‘empty.’ And I told her I didn’t know why.” I licked my lips. Dry as parchment. “That’s when she gave it to me. The card. The missing piece that unraveled…”

The straw that bound your memories, the words that flowed like ice water…the rest of the poem. A poem of remembrance and betrayal. You remember it now.

“I do.”

Oh, Fiyero, my fickle flame,
Where did you go, and what is your name?
They stuffed you with straw and crowned you with shame,
Now all that you ruled is a child’s cruel game.

You danced with the green one, thought you were wise,
But love made you blind to betrayal and spies.
I watched as your memory turned into lies,
And smiled as the fire went out in your eyes.

But don’t be afraid—it’s not truly the end,
When you burn, Fiyero, the world will bend.
Ashes remember what kings forget—
And I’ve not forgiven, nor forgotten. Not yet.

“What was it?”

You know what. Or who. Her. You forgot her.

The name cut deeper than any blade. I took a deep breath, feeling the shudder down to my boots, and for the first time in an age, I allowed myself to think of her. And I crumbled, the rough hewn rocks of the railway digging into my knees where I fell, a wail ripping from my lips and fading away in the warm summer breeze. Her. I’d forgotten.

She made you forget when you became Scarecrow. Took it all—her face, her voice, her fire. You thought you’d never loved anything. Just a mind with no past. But Glinda gave it all back. All at once. Gave you back me. My fire. My face. My voice. And hers.

And then what happened.

I knew. I knew. The vats of wine. My head submerged, soaked through, buzzing with the heady remedy that let me forget the things I couldn’t unremember. The things I never wanted to know, or never knew, or… I dug my fingers into my biceps, like it could anchor me. The afternoon sun was blazing, but inside my straw was icing over. His words were like daggers, deep pricks into my soul.

I’d tried so hard to forget again.

Flashes. Forest. Laughter. Promises. Fire. And then—. You helped kill her. You helped Dorothy kill her. Didn’t even remember her name at the time. Just did what you were told. But you didn’t know. And when you did, what did you do?

I bowed my head.

“And Glinda made sure I’d remember it forever.” With the card. The spell. The flood of memories that sent me shrieking out of the room and down the hallway. I could see it now, feel the visceral agony spreading like fire, as if I was burning from the inside out. And then it was gone. I was gone.

There was a long silence, until a mocking jay clattered by, sweeping around and then up into the tree branches. I blinked, that moment frozen in my mind as the world around me rushed back into being. I looked up and Dot was still walking in the distance, the heat rising from the tracks in waves. What would she say if I told her what I’d done? 

You fled the palace, slinking away through the secret passages like a rat, and I watched you go. Avoiding the main boulevard, the stables, the main gates, no officers snapping to attention, no looks of bewilderment as you passed by. Just a little straw man, drowning in sorrow and a sky made of tears. Then, over the hill and down into the poppy fields, where we laid down and stared at the roiling clouds.

The path bent slightly north. Dot had gone on. Maybe she’d seen my fall, heard my wail, or maybe it was all in my head. Maybe she just knew not to interrupt a scarecrow unraveling. I didn’t move for a long while, just knelt there on the YBR line like a lost parcel, remembering the feeling of her fingers in mine. Elphaba. My Elphaba.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t have the glands for it. But I would’ve, if I could.

“I thought they cast me out,” I said at last, “but I walked out. I walked out because I couldn’t bear it. Not the crown. Not the court. Not the lies. And not what I did to her.”

You didn’t fall in that banquet hall. You fell in your chambers. You fell in my arms.

I shook my head. “Then why do I still see blood? Why do I still smell sawdust and iron and cake and—”

Because you’ve rewritten it. Because it hurts less that way. Because betrayal feels cleaner when someone else does the cutting.

I looked at my hands. At the seams where the straw poked through. “I can’t go back.”

But you have to.

Dot turned then, as if she’d finally realized I wasn’t behind her. She shielded her eyes from the glare and called out, “You coming?” She was right there, not more than a few yards away, looking at me.

I nodded slowly and looked down at my feet. I wasn’t kneeling on the tracks. I was standing there, staring at my hands. “Yeah,” I said and took a tentative step. Then another. And with each one, the truth clung to me like smoke. I didn’t fall when the TikToks dragged me out. I didn’t fall when the Lion turned. I didn’t fall when Glinda smiled. I didn’t fall there on the tracks.

I fell when I remembered.

And now that I remembered everything—I wasn’t going to stop falling until I reached her.