Elphaba Takes Refuge at the Mauntery

After the catastrophic failure of her assassination attempt on Madame Morrible on Lurlinemas Eve, and the subsequent murder of her lover Fiyero by the Gale Force in her own hideout, Elphaba fled through the snow-covered streets of the Emerald City. She was a hunted, blood-spattered figure, her hands stained with the violence she had witnessed and the guilt she carried. Her flight ended at the door of the Cloister of Saint Glinda, the mauntery adjacent to the chapel where Fiyero had first rediscovered her months earlier. A novice maunt, answering the bell during the Lurlinemas vigil service, found Elphaba crouched like a monkey in the dark corner of the stone porch, her green wrists bleeding, her eyes darting with terror. The novice, torn between her duty to the feast day liturgy and the demands of charity, dragged the creature inside, rinsed the blood from her wrists with a dry towel (for Elphaba recoiled from water), and deposited her in the winter salon among the elderly, retired maunts. There, in the warm, dim room filled with the sweet miasma of marginium plants, Elphaba was left to rest, the novice promising to return after midnight. But it was not the novice who first attended to her; it was one of the ancient crones, a woman named Yackle, who shuffled forward in a wheeled chair, reached out, and took Elphaba's hands. "The poor dolly is sick, the poor dolly is tired," Yackle murmured, pressing Elphaba's hands between her own, warming them. "The poor poppet is failure itself," she continued, rocking gently. "Come my dear, lay your breast on old Mother's bosom. Old Mother Maunt will set things right." Yackle could not pull Elphaba out of her dreamless, sleepless grief, but she kept her hands tightly clutched, a sepal socketing the furls of young petal, and promised, "Rest in the bosom of mad Mother Yackle. Mother Yackle will see you home." This moment of sanctuary, offered by a woman who was herself a mystery—a figure who had appeared at the edges of Elphaba's life before, as the crone Yackle who had sold Nanny the pills for Melena's second pregnancy—marked the beginning of Elphaba's long retreat from the world. She would spend seven years within the cloister, first in a deathly sleep, then in silence, then in nursing the dying, before the Superior Maunt would declare it time for her to go and atone for her mistakes, sending her forth with a broom and a basket of simples to begin the journey that would lead her to Kiamo Ko.