Elphaba Crows Attack

She wheeled about her room, whipping pages of the Grimmerie back and forth. She recited a spell, did it wrong, did it again, and then turned and tried to apply it to the crows. Though the original three crows had long since fallen stiffly from the top of the door frame, there were plenty of others in residence still, rather inbred and silly, but suggestible in a stupid, moblike way.

'Go,' she said. 'Look with your eyes more closely than I can, pull the mask off the Scarecrow so we can know who he is. Get them for me. Peck out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion. And three of you, go on ahead to the old Princess Nastoya, out there in the Thousand Year Grasslands, for the time is coming when we will be reunited, all of us. With the help of the Grimmerie, the Wizard may topple at last!'

'I never know what you're talking about anymore,' said Liir. 'You can't blind them!'

'Oh, watch me,' snarled the Witch. The crows blew away in a black cloud and dropped like buckshot through the sky, down the jagged precipices, until they came to the travelers.

'A pretty sunset, is there?' said Nanny, coming up to the Witch's room in one of her rare forays, Chistery as always providing service.

'She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!'

'What?'

'She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!'

'Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.'

'Will you lunatics hush up?' The Witch was twitching as if with a nervous disorder; her elbows flapped, as if she were a crow herself. She gave out a long howl when she found them in the glass.

'What, what, let me see,' said Liir, grabbing the thing. He explained to Nanny, because the Witch was almost beyond speech by now. 'Well, I guess the Scarecrow knows how to scare crows, all right.'

'Why, what's he done?'

'They're not coming back, that's all I'll say,' said Liir, glancing at the Witch.

- Wicked, Book 5