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Dorothy turned slightly toward Glinda but kept her fearful eyes trained on Elphaba. “I thought you said she was dead!”
“That was her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. This is the Wicked Witch of the West; she’s worse than the other one was,” the blonde responded through a tight smile that failed to conceal her bitterness.
Elphaba ignored her. “Who killed my sister?” she demanded to know, though she had a bad feeling she already did, how and why too. “Who killed the Witch of the East?” Despite how things had ended between them, Elphaba could never refer to Nessarose as wicked. “Was it you?” she accused Glinda through Dorothy.
It was very difficult to actually look her ex-best friend in the eye, even moreso to hate her. So, Elphaba turned all her contempt on the otherworldly child.
Glinda did not have the same problem. Though she kept her attention mostly on Dorothy, she still found it in herself to throw pointed smirks Elphaba’s way. Until she realized she was putting another innocent in danger. Distraction having worked best at calming her adversary’s temper in the past, she asked, “Aren’t you forgetting the ruby slippers?” to great success.
Elphaba hissed something inane even to her own mind in response. She had her mother’s bottle. Her father had given her sister those jeweled shoes; they were Nessa’s. She had to have something of the other Thropps. She was the only one left. And though Glinda would never know it, not from her, it was as Elphaba said to her sister just before everything fell apart; those slippers symbolized a long overdue debt repaid and the only instance of her magic working good, to her anyway. They were proof of Elphaba’s goodness.
But Glinda reeled in the life preserver she had thrown before scrabbling green hands could be laid on it.
The Wicked Witch’s fury enabled her to whirl around and look the blonde dead in the eye, yell at her directly.
But the mean-girl Elphaba first met had returned with a vengeance. Glinda taunted her about transferring her treasure to Dorothy’s possession.
Voice hoarse and eyes bright with unshed tears, Elphaba appealed to the girl, saw her as a separate person for the first time. “Give me back my slippers! I’m the only one that knows how to use them. They’re of no use to you! Give them back to me! Give them back!” Please! she almost sobbed.
Unmoved by her old friend, new enemy’s entreaty, Glinda lobbed more barbs. Their blind shallowness cut deeply and precisely.
Power rose within the brunette and crackled in the air. Her control over her magic slipping, on the verge of causing what Fiyero would deem another commotion, she panicked and pulled back. No! I must not hurt a child or animal! She thus leaned into the role long assigned to her before flaming out of Munchkinland.