Son of a Witch characters

Also known as Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West

Appears from the start

The green-skinned woman Oz remembers as the Wicked Witch of the West, dead before this book begins. She spent her last years shut up in the mountain castle of Kiamo Ko, and she died there when a girl from another world threw water on her. She never acknowledged Liir as her son and never denied it either. Her cloak, her broom, her reputation and her enemies are all he has to start from.

First appears in chapter 3

A young man of about fifteen, raised in the mountain fastness of Kiamo Ko in the household of the woman Oz calls the Wicked Witch of the West. Nobody will tell him plainly whether she was his mother, and he has no idea who his father might be; the question shapes everything he does. Uncertain, easily overlooked, and painfully aware that he has no standing anywhere, he leaves the castle after her death carrying her cloak and her broom, with no plan beyond finding the one person from that household he still hopes is alive. The novel alternates between his years of drifting through a changing Oz and a later moment when he is carried, broken and unconscious, into a rural convent.

First appears in chapter 4

A young Quadling woman newly delivered to the Cloister of Saint Glinda, set apart from the other maunts by her silence: she has almost no Ozish and does not speak to those around her. She plays a stringed instrument called a domingon, and she is set to sit with the dying stranger in the infirmary on the theory that music may reach him where medicine cannot. She is said to have a gift for sensing the present moment, rather than the past or the future.

First appears in chapter 4

The elderly head of the Cloister of Saint Glinda, a rural convent that takes in the sick, the unwanted and the inconvenient. Practical, dry and unsentimental after decades of governing difficult women, she decides how the house will treat its anonymous, half-dead guest, and she asks considerably fewer questions about him than her infirmarians would like.

First appears in chapter 4

A Munchkinlander maunt who compounds the cloister's medicines. Curious, talkative and quick to theorize, she takes charge of the broken stranger's care alongside Sister Doctor, with whom she argues about everything from his injuries to his origins.

First appears in chapter 4

The cloister's physician, a maunt of considerable self-regard who considers herself the house's authority on anything clinical. She works with, and constantly against, Sister Apothecaire over the unconscious patient in the infirmary.

First appears in chapter 5

An impossibly old woman living out her last years among the maunts, nearly blind and generally treated by the house as a harmless lunatic. She takes an unsettling interest in the stranger in the infirmary and speaks as though she has been waiting for him, hinting at a knowledge of the dead Witch's family that she will not explain.

First appears in chapter 5

The daughter of the Vinkus prince Fiyero and his wife Sarima, and Liir's childhood companion at Kiamo Ko. Years before this book opens, soldiers of the Emerald City carried off the women and children of that household. Nor is the one person from it Liir believes may still be living, and finding her is the errand that sends him out into Oz.

First appears in chapter 5

A blunt, well-meaning girl from another world who arrives at Kiamo Ko with three companions and leaves it with the Witch dead behind her. She is baffled rather than triumphant about what has happened, and she lets Liir attach himself to her party for the journey east to the Emerald City.

First appears in chapter 5

The ancient nurse who served the Witch's family for three generations and is left rattling around Kiamo Ko once the household collapses. Her memory drifts, and what she can be persuaded to say about Liir's origins is by turns tantalizing and useless.

First appears in chapter 5

The most articulate of the winged monkeys the Witch kept at Kiamo Ko, taught to speak after a fashion and left behind with the rest of the castle's household. He is fonder of Liir than anyone else in Oz is.

First appears in chapter 5

The princess of the Scrow, a nomadic people of the western grasslands, who is in truth an Elephant held by an old spell in human shape. Age is wearing the disguise thin and she can neither keep it nor shed it. Meeting Liir on the road, she recognizes what he is connected to and asks him, when the time comes, to help her die as herself.

First appears in chapter 6

The dead Witch's younger brother, a charming and unscrupulous operator who moves in and out of the prison beneath the Emerald City as though he owned it, trading favors, contraband and information. He is the nearest thing to family Liir meets in the city, and he is helpful exactly as far as it suits him.

First appears in chapter 6

The straw man who walked to the Emerald City with Dorothy and is installed on the throne after the Wizard's departure, an arrangement that convinces nobody for long. Whether the figure sitting on the throne is even the same one who made that journey is a question people in the city have learned not to ask aloud.

First appears in chapter 7

A capable, courteous officer of the Emerald City forces who takes an interest in the unattached young man loitering around the barracks and finds him a place in the service. His good manners survive, undisturbed, the things he orders his soldiers to do.

First appears in chapter 12

A young officer of the Emerald City forces, good-looking and highly strung, whose duty is the care and training of the government's most closely guarded weapon. He and Liir recognize something in each other, and what he knows about his own work has begun to sicken him.