Saint Glinda's Square

Saint Glinda's Square is a public square in the Emerald City, notable for the unionist chapel dedicated to Saint Glinda that stands within it. The square and its chapel serve as a site of unexpected reunion and clandestine refuge, where Fiyero re-encounters Elphaba after years of separation and where Elphaba later seeks sanctuary following the failed assassination attempt on Madame Morrible.

Location and Setting

Saint Glinda's Square is located in the Emerald City, a short distance from the city's elegant center. The square is dominated by a unionist chapel, which houses an oratory dedicated to Saint Glinda. The chapel's interior is described as having a nave, a lyre player, and a side door leading to a cloister garden belonging to an adjacent mauntery (a convent of maunts). The oratory itself is a tomb-like space with an archer's slit instead of a true window, lit by a pinkish sanctuary light. A smoky image of the Saint, leaning slightly to the right, adorns the space, though water damage has left great white stains on the holy garments. The chapel also features a poor box for offerings.

Reunion of Fiyero and Elphaba

On a clammy late summer evening, about three years after graduating from Shiz University, Fiyero stops at the unionist chapel in Saint Glinda's Square to pass time before meeting a fellow countryman at the opera. He is hoping to find a portrait of Saint Glinda, to light a charmwax candle in front of her likeness and think of her namesake, Glinda of the Arduennas of the Uplands. After a service ends, he approaches the lyre player in the nave to ask for directions to the saint's ikon. She directs him to the last aisle, where an oratory to Saint Glinda used to be. Locating the oratory, Fiyero finds it inhabited by a penitent whose head is bowed in prayer. He recognizes the figure as Elphaba, whom he has not seen since she disappeared from Shiz five years earlier. Elphaba, her hair looped on her head and skewered with ivory haircorkscrews, initially denies her identity, claiming Fiyero has mistaken her for someone else. When Fiyero insists, she agrees to meet him across the street at a small public fountain with benches in an hour, but only for five minutes. Fiyero, suspecting she will try to avoid him, lingers in the shadow of a pillar. After about forty minutes, a cloaked figure enters the chapel and moves, hobbling with a cane, directly to the oratory Elphaba occupies. The figure leaves again as quickly as its stiff joints will allow. Fiyero then drops an offering in the poor box and slips out through the side door into an overgrown cloister garden, where some ancient women in wheeled chairs are chortling. He lets himself out the servants' entrance into an alleyway. Three minutes later, Elphaba emerges from the same servants' entrance, confirming his suspicion that she was trying to avoid him.

Refuge and Sanctuary

On Lurlinemas Eve, after Elphaba's failed attempt to assassinate Madame Morrible in the square before the Lady's Mystique theatre, she flees in a state of profound agitation. She makes her way to the mauntery adjacent to the chapel in Saint Glinda's Square. A novice maunt, clearing away dishes after a meal, answers the convent door to find a figure crouched like a monkey in the dark corner of the stone porch. The figure is a young woman with blood on her odd green wrists and a darting look in her eyes. The novice, remembering her pastoral requirements, drags the creature inside. She rinses the blood off the woman's wrists, but the stranger recoils from the sight of water. The novice takes her to the winter salon, where the old retired maunts live out their lives. She pushes the hunted woman into a soft chair, finds a blanket, and tells her she can stop there, warm and dry and safe and quiet. The novice then leaves to attend the vigil service. In the winter salon, one of the elders, an ancient maunt named Yackle, approaches Elphaba. Yackle reaches out and touches Elphaba's hand, feeling for open wounds on the wrists. She rocks and presses Elphaba's hands between her own, murmuring, "The poor dolly is sick, the poor dolly is tired... The poor poppet is failure itself... Come my dear, lay your breast on old Mother's bosom. Old Mother Maunt will set things right." Yackle keeps Elphaba's hands tightly clutched within her own, offering a form of comfort and sanctuary.