Son of a Witch recap

About fifteen and nobody's acknowledged son, Liir leaves Kiamo Ko after the Witch's death carrying her cloak and her broom, with one errand: to find Nor, the girl taken from that household by Emerald City soldiers. The search takes him to the Emerald City, down into the prison of Southstairs, where he meets the Witch's brother Shell, and at last into the Emperor's own forces, which carry him south to take part in the destruction of a Quadling village. Drifting afterwards, he investigates a wave of killings in which the dead are found with their faces scraped away, calls a great conference of birds to map them, and traces them to a secret stable of war dragons. With the dragonmaster Trism, who has come to hate his own work, he burns the stables, and is brought down out of the sky in flight. Broken and nameless, he is nursed back by a silent Quadling girl called Candle at a rural cloister. Recovered, he frees the dying Elephant princess Nastoya from the spell holding her in human shape, learns that the Emperor Apostle now ruling Oz is Shell, and comes home to find that Candle has borne and hidden his daughter, a girl with green skin.

Previously, in Wicked: Elphaba Thropp, born green and set apart from everyone around her, grew from a fiercely serious student into a political dissident against the Wizard who ruled Oz and against his persecution of the land's intelligent, speaking Animals. After the death of the Vinkus prince Fiyero, she withdrew to Kiamo Ko, the mountain castle belonging to his family, taking with her a boy named Liir whose origins she never explained to anyone, including him. Living there among Fiyero's widow and children, the household's ancient Nanny and a troop of winged monkeys, she acquired the reputation Oz remembers: the Wicked Witch of the West. Emerald City soldiers eventually carried off the women and children of that household, among them Fiyero's daughter Nor. Elphaba's sister Nessarose, who ruled Munchkinland, was killed by a falling farmhouse, and the girl who had arrived in it, Dorothy, came on to Kiamo Ko and threw water on Elphaba, who died. Left behind were her cloak, her broom, a book of magic, and Liir: a boy of about fifteen who has never been told whether the Witch was his mother, and who has no one to ask.

Maunts travelling through the mountains find a young man lying broken in the road, apparently fallen from a great height, and carry him back to the Cloister of Saint Glinda, a rural convent. He is unconscious, unnamed and not expected to live. The Superior Maunt has him put in the infirmary, where Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire disagree about everything concerning him, and sets a newly arrived Quadling girl called Candle to sit with him and play her instrument, on the chance that music will reach what medicine cannot. From here the novel turns back to the years since the Witch's death at Kiamo Ko, when a boy named Liir was left in an emptying castle with the Witch's Nanny, her winged monkeys, her cloak and her broom, and no idea who he was.

Liir leaves Kiamo Ko with Dorothy and her companions and travels east across the Vinkus. On the way the party is taken up by the Scrow, whose princess, Nastoya, is an Elephant trapped by an old spell in human shape; she recognizes Liir's connection to the dead Witch and asks him to come to her when she can no longer hold the disguise, so that she may die as herself. In the Emerald City the Wizard has abandoned the throne, the Scarecrow has been installed on it, and Dorothy departs. Alone and qualified for nothing, Liir sets himself a single task: to find Nor, the girl from the household at Kiamo Ko who was taken away by soldiers years earlier. Her trail leads him down into Southstairs, the enormous prison sunk beneath the city, where he meets Shell, the dead Witch's brother, who trades there in favors and contraband. Liir finds proof that Nor was held in the prison and proof that she got out of it, but he does not find her.

Unable to follow Nor further and with nowhere else to be, Liir drifts into the Emerald City's forces, where a courteous officer named Cherrystone finds him a place. He is fed, uniformed and given a function for the first time in his life, and the service takes him south into Quadling Country on a campaign the men are told is a policing action. What he takes part in there is the destruction of a village and its people, and he comes out of it complicit, unable to argue that he was only following orders. The country he is serving has meanwhile changed shape again: the Scarecrow's reign gives way to an Emperor who governs as a religious figure, styling himself the Emperor Apostle, whose ministry and armies tighten steadily across Oz. Liir leaves the service and keeps moving. In the later thread, at the cloister, the broken man in the infirmary begins to show signs of coming back.

Reports spread of attacks out of the sky in which people and Animals are found dead with their faces scraped away, and no authority in Oz will say what is doing it. Liir, who has the Witch's broom and can fly it after a fashion, sets out to find out for himself. He calls a great assembly of birds, who come in from every quarter of Oz and give him, between them, an account of the country that no government would supply: where the attacks have fallen, and where the things that make them come from. It is the first undertaking Liir manages on his own, and the birds treat him as somebody worth answering.

Following what the birds told him, Liir traces the attacks to their source. The Emperor's forces have been breeding and training dragons in secret, keeping them underground and flying them out at night against the regime's enemies. The officer responsible for them is a young dragonmaster named Trism bon Cavalish, who has come to loathe his own work. The two become lovers, and together they destroy the stables and the dragons in them. It is an act neither of them can be forgiven for, and it puts the whole apparatus of the state on their trail.

Hunted after the destruction of the dragon stables, Liir and Trism are separated in flight, and Liir is brought down out of the sky. The broken man the maunts found in the road is Liir himself, and the two halves of the novel meet. Under Candle's care in the infirmary he slowly returns to himself, and she conceives a child by him in the course of that half-conscious recovery. When soldiers begin taking an interest in the cloister, the Superior Maunt sends the two of them away to a disused farm belonging to the house, where they live quietly and Candle's pregnancy advances. Yackle, the impossibly old woman the maunts keep and ignore, goes on behaving as though Liir's arrival is the event she has spent her whole unaccountable life waiting for.

Liir keeps the promise he made on the road years earlier and goes to Princess Nastoya, whose disguise is failing and who can neither hold her human shape nor shed it. With help, he undoes what is binding her, and she dies as the Elephant she was. He also begins using what he has instead of hiding from it, sending word through the birds so that news travels across Oz faster than the Emperor's ministry can suppress it. The Emperor Apostle, it emerges, is Shell, the dead Witch's brother and the man Liir dealt with in Southstairs, now ruling Oz as a living saint. Liir returns to the farm to find that Candle has given birth alone and hidden the baby to keep her out of the government's reach: a daughter, born with green skin. Nothing in the book confirms outright that Elphaba was Liir's mother, but the child is the strongest evidence anyone has yet had, and she inherits, unasked, everything that goes with the name.

Liir survives the fall that opened the novel, is nursed back to health at the Cloister of Saint Glinda, and finally acts on his own account. He goes to Princess Nastoya, whose spell-held human shape is failing, and helps release her so that she dies as the Elephant she was, among her own people. He puts the birds to work carrying news across a country whose government rules by controlling what people are allowed to know. The identity of that government's head is settled: the Emperor Apostle, who governs Oz as a living saint, is Shell, the dead Witch's brother, the man Liir dealt with in Southstairs. Nor is still not found, though the evidence is that she got out of the prison alive; Trism, separated from Liir after they burned the dragon stables, is likewise unaccounted for. Liir returns to the farm where he left Candle and finds that she has given birth alone and put the baby out of reach of anyone hunting the Witch's line. The child is a girl, and she is green. The book never states outright that Elphaba was Liir's mother, but the daughter settles the question as far as the rest of Oz will care: the line continues, the Emperor of Oz is the child's great-uncle, and everything owed to and against the Witch's name now attaches to an infant. Liir ends the book with a family at last, and hunted for it.