Out of Oz characters

Also known as the Wicked Witch of the West

Appears from the start

The green-skinned woman remembered across Oz as the Wicked Witch of the West, long dead when this book opens. Her book of magic, the Grimmerie, her broom and her surviving descendants are still being hunted by both governments now fighting over Oz, which is why her family cannot live openly.

First appears in chapter 2

The girl from another world, older now, whose two previous visits to Oz left two dead Witches behind her. A natural disaster in her own country pitches her back into Oz for a third time, still cheerfully certain of her own innocence and still, to most Ozians, the most notorious foreigner alive.

First appears in chapter 4

A green-skinned girl of about nine or ten, working as a scullery maid in a great Munchkinland house under a name that is not hers. She has been passed from hand to hand since infancy and told almost nothing about where she came from. Watchful, largely silent, and far more interested in water and weather than in people, she is the descendant of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the adults who know it have agreed that she is safer not knowing.

First appears in chapter 4

Lady Glinda, once the most celebrated woman in Oz and briefly its Throne Minister, now a widow of enormous wealth and dwindling influence, keeping to her late husband's Munchkinland estate while the country falls apart around her. Vain, and shrewder than she allows anyone to see, she is hosting an occupying army in her own house under the polite fiction that they are guests.

First appears in chapter 4

The courteous, capable officer of Loyal Oz who billets his men on Lady Glinda's estate and behaves throughout as a guest rather than an occupier. He has commanded in this manner before, and his manners have never once prevented him from carrying out an order.

First appears in chapter 4

Lady Glinda's lady's maid, elderly, rigidly proper, and made frantic by the presence of soldiers in the house. Her devotion to her mistress's dignity outlasts every practical reason for it.

First appears in chapter 26

The Cowardly Lion, no longer in anybody's employ since he defaulted on the Emperor's commission, travelling with the Clock of the Time Dragon company. Protective, anxious and habitually pessimistic, he has spent the years since guarding the Witch's book of magic and the people connected to it.

First appears in chapter 26

The foul-tempered dwarf who owns the Clock of the Time Dragon, a travelling prophetic theatre he insists is older than Oz and that he serves rather than commands. He decides where the company goes by consulting the Clock, and he is rarely willing to explain himself to anyone.

First appears in chapter 26

A Munchkinlander formerly of the Cloister of Saint Glinda, who walked out of the convent to travel with the Clock company and married its dwarf. She keeps the party fed and dosed out of a considerable knowledge of what grows beside the road.

First appears in chapter 26

A veiled, withdrawn woman travelling with the Clock company, born Nor in the Vinkus household of Kiamo Ko and carried off from it as a child by Emerald City soldiers. What was done to her in the years that followed left her unable to be touched, and she has built a life out of keeping her distance from everyone, including those who love her.

First appears in chapter 49

The Witch's presumed son, now a grown man living hidden in the countryside and wanting nothing to do with Oz's politics. He has spent ten years keeping his daughter's existence secret, which has meant not raising her, and he has no idea how to be her father now that she has been brought to him.

First appears in chapter 49

A Quadling woman with a gift for sensing the present moment, Liir's partner and Rain's mother, who plays a stringed instrument called a domingon. She gave her daughter away in infancy to keep her alive, a decision she has never explained to the girl's satisfaction.

First appears in chapter 61

The Eminence of Munchkinland, the sorceress who governs the seceded province and prosecutes its war against Loyal Oz. A shape-shifter of formidable skill and equally formidable vanity, she is a great deal older and better established than her sudden public prominence suggests.

First appears in chapter 72

A quick, restless boy at the boarding school where Rain is hidden, raised by a guardian he speaks of with unease and glad of any distance he can get from her. He is the first person Rain chooses for herself, and the two of them become inseparable.

First appears in chapter 72

A kitchen servant at the boarding school, roughly Rain's age, with no illusions about her position and no intention of complaining about it. She is one of the few people who treats the strange new girl as entirely ordinary.

Also known as The Emperor Apostle

First appears in chapter 89

The ruler of Loyal Oz and the dead Witch's younger brother, who governs as a living saint and has made a state religion of himself. He has spent years hunting the Grimmerie and the last of his own family, with no evident curiosity about which of them he is related to.