"She just turned her toy into a cripple," Frex said, pointing at the ruined bridling.
"She is herself pleased at the half things," Turtle Heart said. "I think. The little girl to play with the broken pieces better."
Frex didn't quite get it, but nodded. He knew that months away from the human voice made him clumsy at first. The boy from the inn, who had climbed Griffon's Head to deliver Nanny's request to be picked up at Stonespar End, had obviously thought Frex a wild man, grunting and unkempt. Frex had had to quote a little of the Ozlad to indicate some sort of humanity-"Land of green abandon, land of endless leaf"-it was all that would come to him.
"Why can't she break it?" asked Frex.
"Because I do not to make it to be broken," answered Turtle Heart. But he smiled at Frex, not aggressively. And Elphaba wandered around with the shiny glass as if it were a toy, catching shadows, reflections, lights on its imperfect surface, almost as if she were playing.
"Where are you going?" asked Frex, just as Turtle Heart was saying, "Where are you from?"
"I'm a Munchkinlander," said Frex.
"I to think all Munchkins to be shorter than I or you."
"The peasants, the farmers, yes," Frex said, "but anyone with bloodlines worth tracing married into height somewhere along the way. And you? You're from Quadling Country."
"Yes," said the Quadling. His reddish hair had been washed and was drying into an airy nimbus. Frex was glad to see Melena so generous as to offer a passerby water to bathe in. Perhaps she was adjusting to country life after all. Because, mercy, a Quadling ranked about as low on the
social ladder as it was possible to get and still be human.
"But I to understand," said the Quadling. "Ovvels is a small world. Until I to leave, I am not to know of hills, one beyond the other and from the spiny backbones a world so wide around. The blurry far away to hurt my eyes, for I cannot to make it seen. Please sir to describe the world you know."
Frex picked up a stick In the soil he drew an egg on its side. "What they taught me in lessons," he said. "Inside the circle is Oz. Make an he did so, through the oval-"and roughly speaking, you have a pie in four sections. The top Is Gillikin Full of cities and universities and theatres, civilized life, they say. And industry." He moved clockwise. "East, is Munchkinland, where we are now. Farmland, the bread basket of Oz, except down in the mountainous south-these strokes, in the district of Wend Hardings, are the hills you're climbing." He bumped and squiggled. "Directly south of the center of Oz is Quadling Country. Badlands, I'm
told–marshy, useless, infested with bugs and feverish airs." Turtle Heart looked puzzled at this, but nodded. "Then west, what they call Winkie Country. Don't know much about that except it's dry and unpopulated."
"And around?" said Turtle Heart.
"Sandstone deserts north and west, fleckstone desert east and south. They used to say the desert sands were deadly poison; that's just standard propaganda. Keeps invaders from Ev and Quox from trying to get in. Munchkinland is rich and desirable farming territory, and Gillikin's not bad either. In the Glikkus, up here"-he scratched lines in the northeast, on the border between Gillikin and Munchkinland-"are the emerald mines and the famous Glikkus canals. I gather there's a dispute whether the Glikkus is Munchkinlander or Gillikinese, but I have no opinion on that."
Turtle Heart moved his hands over the drawing in the dirt, flexing his palms, as if he were reading the map from above. "But here?" he said. "What is here?"
Frex wondered if he meant the air above Oz. "The realm of the Unnamed God?" he said. "The Other Land? Are you a unionist?"
"Turtle Heart is glassblower," said Turtle Heart.
