The green grass beneath her turned from green to brown to black charred dirt. It was as if someone had taken a torch to it.
Nox placed his palms on Gert’s chest and bit his lip in concentration. Blue sparks glittered at his fingertips but immediately petered out.
“Come on,” I muttered, willing his magic to work. He did it again, and again nothing.
Suddenly Gert’s arm shot up and she grabbed my wrist, clenching tight. Her lips began to move—she was mumbling something under her breath. At first it sounded like she was speaking a different language, but when her lips stopped moving, I was able to understand her words in my mind.
It was an incantation. “North, South, East, West, wind, fire, sun, earth, protect her and keep her. Protect her and keep her.”
Now I was crying. “Gert,” I managed to say. “Please. I need you.”
Nox was ignoring us, still trying desperately to use his magic to bring her back from the brink.
“Come close, dear,” Gert gasped. Her face was once again the warm, kind face I’d first seen when I’d woken up in the caves, frightened and alone. I saw the witch—Good or Wicked, it didn’t matter anymore—who had comforted me and fed me, who had helped me find my magic. I leaned in over her.
She tilted her head up and kissed me on my brow. I felt warmth wash over me. It started where her lips met my forehead and bloomed all over, until my skin was somehow coated in Gert’s kiss.
“Gert, no . . . ,” I gasped. What had she done? She needed every bit of strength to hold on. Whatever she had given me, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want a good-bye.
“This will keep you safe,” Gert said.
“You have to do something,” I croaked at Nox, tears streaming down my cheeks. He had finally given up and sat back, and had silently watched Gert bestow her kiss upon me. “Please. Save her. Use your magic. You have to.”
Nox shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said, looking away.
Gert looked up at me. “It has to be you, child. You have to do it,” she said weakly.
“Do what?” I asked, somehow believing that as long as I held on to her gaze then she would hold on to me.
“You have to kill Dorothy, Amy.”
I woke up the next morning feeling spent and disoriented, my mind a jumble of hazy images that appeared one by one in my head like pages in a horrible picture book.
The burning village. The eerie scene in the forest. Nox’s determined face as he fought back an onslaught of beasts.
I felt like I was being plunged naked into a frigid pool as the rest of it came back to me. The Lion’s gaping, bloody maw; Gert’s tender kiss and the strange way I’d felt the life slip out of her as I’d held her in my arms. Her body dead on the ground.
In the enchanted softness of my bed, I tried to tell myself that it hadn’t really happened—that it had all been a dream. It was only when I felt a tingling on my forehead, in the exact spot where Gert had kissed me, that I knew it had all been real.
At that stinging realization, I jolted instantly out of bed and took a shaky step forward, followed by another and another then another until I was in the center of the room, where I stopped in a state of paralyzed panic. I had no idea what to do with myself.
I couldn’t go back to bed. I couldn’t leave. So I just stood there, trying to will the memories out of my head. I didn’t want to think either. But thinking was the only thing I could do.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that. It could have been a minute and it could have been an hour, but I was still standing in that same position when a ghostly, luminous butterfly came floating through the wall and hovered in front of me. I accepted its entrance without surprise or curiosity. It was like I had been expecting it.
“Find me,” the butterfly said, speaking somehow in Glamora’s voice, and I nodded and began to get dressed.
I made my way through the Order’s tunnels with a numb and heavy feeling. With every step I took, I felt the weight of what had happened yesterday bearing down on me.
The door to Glamora’s room was ajar, and I pushed it open without thinking about it, only to freeze abruptly when I saw the witch’s reflection in the ornate, gilt-framed mirror of her vanity.
She was crying.
Not just crying. Her entire body was shaking with grief as she hunched over the table in a contortion of pain. She looked so small and powerless—so unlike herself—that half of me wanted to turn and leave her while the other half wanted to rush over and comfort her. I did neither. Instead, I just watched, unable to move, unable to say anything, knowing that she would never want me to see her like this.
Her fiery hair, always so perfectly coiffed, was frizzy and disheveled; a single strap of her elegant silk nightgown drooped across her shoulder. Her face was tired and worn, etched now in a map of sags and wrinkles and that scar on her cheek that she usually kept hidden. She looked like she had aged twenty years in one day. It was hard to believe it was her at all.
But even in this bedraggled and unfamiliar state, Glamora was still Glamora. The liquid pooling in the corners of her eyes was glittering and crystalline, and each tear that rolled down her cheeks and tumbled from her chin made a small plinking noise as it landed on the vanity. Looking closely, I saw that the surface was strewn with a messy scattering of them—tiny, teardrop jewels that just kept on coming.
Glamora was crying diamonds.
Suddenly she seemed to sense me watching her and she looked up. I felt embarrassed to be caught, and embarrassed for her, but I didn’t look away. In that moment, I owed her the dignity of an unwavering gaze. It was the least I could do.
“Amy,” she said, sitting up straight and tugging the strap of her gown up to a more decorous position. “Come in.”
As Glamora spoke, her hair rearranged itself into a sleek chignon. The lines on her face melted away, leaving her as youthful and refreshed-looking as I’d ever seen her. Every trace of vulnerability was gone now. Now she was cool and unreadable.
The jewels on the table caught the light, and I couldn’t help but glance over at them. There was something about seeing them lying there in their scattered little pile that chilled me. What kind of person is so hard on the inside that she cries diamonds?
Glamora noticed me staring. Somehow she knew what I was thinking, and she shook her head ruefully. “Magic loves change,” she said with a sigh. “Do enough of it and it will warp you in strange ways. It’s the first law of enchantment. Use it to change the outside and after a while the inside changes, too. So I traded my tears for beauty. Well, it could be worse, couldn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “It could.” But I wasn’t so sure.
“If you think I’m bad, you should see what comes out when my sister cries,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. But then she clapped her hands, signaling that it was time to change the subject and get down to business.
“Now then,” she said. “We suffered a great loss yesterday. An unimaginable loss. As you know.”
I waited for her to go on. “What you may not know,” she continued, “is that Gert was by far the most accomplished magic user in the resistance. More powerful than me or Mombi; more powerful than any of the witches in the Order’s other cells. Perhaps the only person in Oz whose power could rival my sister’s. They didn’t make her the Good Witch of the North for nothing, you know.” She rolled her eyes and sighed, momentarily recalling some old rivalry before moving along.
“Without Gert, we no longer have the power to reliably hide ourselves from Glinda and Dorothy. They will be looking, and it’s now only a matter of time before they find us. As a result, we have decided to move our plans forward earlier than expected.” She folded her hands primly in her lap.
“Good,” I said.
Glamora gave me a careful once-over. “Do you understand what that means?”
I was pretty sure I did, but I took a second before I answered, just to let it sink in. “Yes,” I finally said,
sitting up straight and squaring my jaw in resolution. “It means it’s time for me to do what I came here to do.” As I said the words out loud, the numbness inside me seemed to let up. Not a lot, but enough that I actually felt something other than a dull and aching emptiness.
Mostly anger. Cold and burning anger at the same time.
“Are you sure you know what you’re agreeing to?” Glamora asked.
I didn’t know why she cared.
“I understand,” I said, tossing my hair defiantly. “It’s time for me to kill Dorothy.”
Glamora nodded, satisfied. “I wish more than anything that I could do it myself,” she said. “But it has to be you. There’s no other way.”
At first I thought she meant it to be something like an apology, but then I noticed the way her shoulders had tensed up in a barely concealed combination of rage and regret, and I realized that she was actually envious of me. That, to her, it was a privilege.
Well, maybe it was.
With that, the witch stood and ran her hand along her nightgown. It rippled like water and resolved itself into a more presentable outfit for the day: a tailored tweed suit in a somber mauve shade, cut primly to the knee.
“No matter what the occasion, we must present the proper face to the world,” she said, sounding like she was speaking more to herself than to me. “Now, come. We have to have a talk with Mombi. You’ll be leaving for the palace today.”
Mombi had showed up a second too late; a second after I’d laid Gert’s lifeless body onto the ground. At just the second when it didn’t do us any good.
She’d come swooping in through the trees in a swirl of purple light, fists clenched and eyes blazing, ready to fight, but when she saw me and Nox, she stopped in midflight and hung in the air. A look of sick understanding passed across her face. She landed with a thump before kneeling and placing a hand to the side of Gert’s face.
“There was a child . . .” She stopped to collect herself. I had never imagined that Mombi could seem so human. “I couldn’t leave her. I thought Gert would be able to handle it on her own. I thought . . .”
She betrayed no emotion after that. Instead, she bowed her head and began a solemn chant.
I somehow knew instinctively that this wasn’t a spell to bring Gert back to life. There are some things that no amount of magic can accomplish, and this was one of them. This was a ritual to lay Gert to rest.
Mombi’s muttered words were unintelligible and ancient-sounding, with a wandering melody buried somewhere deep below their surface. The chant sounded like one of those weird songs you sometimes hear flipping through dials on an old radio only to pause on a station that barely comes in, the tune so far away that it’s hard to tell if it’s even a tune at all or if it’s just static.
The old witch passed her hands up and down along Gert’s body as she sang, and as she did, Gert began to melt into a pulsing, flickering puddle of mystical electricity that slowly seeped its way into the earth.
Whatever magic Gert still had left in her, she had given it back to Oz now.
Then Gert was gone without a trace, like she had never been there at all.
But she had been there. She had sacrificed herself to save us. No, forget that. She had done so much more. Even if I had never quite been able to figure out—never really been able to tell where the Good ended and the Wicked began for her—I had known, by the end, that she had believed in me. Not just as the one who would be able to defeat Dorothy, but as Amy Gumm.
None of us spoke as we joined hands and shot up through the trees and into the air. There was nothing to say. This time I didn’t bother looking at the ground as we soared over Oz. I had seen enough for one day.
Mombi had disappeared as soon as we were back in the caves.
Nox took me by the hand and walked me back to my room. He pressed a gentle hand to my shoulder. I opened the door and stepped inside, not looking back.
That was yesterday. Now it was today.
Glamora and I found Mombi in the war room, seated at the table across from a girl I’d never seen before. She looked terrified. Her shoulders heaved silently as she cradled her face in her palms.
Glamora and I each took a seat.
“This is Astrid,” Mombi said. The girl rocked back and forth, not looking up. “Until last night, Astrid was a servant in the palace. Today, she has been given the opportunity to join our cause. Astrid, meet Amy.”
“Hi,” I said, not quite understanding where this was going.
“If all goes well, Astrid will be returned unharmed to the palace when our mission is complete.” Mombi cast a meaningful, ominous look in Astrid’s direction. “If she chooses to make a nuisance of herself, things will not be so pleasant for her.”
If all goes well. Then I got it. Astrid hadn’t decided to join the Order. She hadn’t been rescued from a burning village. She had been kidnapped. That was why she looked so scared.
A chill shot down my spine as I remembered that things were never easy around here. Good and evil were always changing places with each other.
For the first time, Astrid looked up at me. Her eyes were big and pleading, pooled with tears. Her chin trembled as she looked desperately at me, like she was hoping I’d be the one to save her. But I was out of pity. She would have to choose her own fate, just like the rest of us.
I looked back to Mombi. “Tell me what I need to do,” I said.
A satisfied smile crept across her withered face.
“Well, you need to become her, naturally.”
I leaned back in my seat, knowing that with witches, it only tangled things up when you asked too many questions. It was easier to just wait for them to explain themselves.
Mombi proved true to form. “Today you will assume Astrid’s identity and take on her job as a servant in Dorothy’s court. You will infiltrate the palace and ingratiate yourself with the princess. You will learn her habits and her hatreds. You will learn when she goes to bed and when she wakes up in the morning, her fears and her weaknesses and her secret prides and sorrows. In the guise of little miss Astrid here, you will learn everything there is to learn, and you will relay it back to us. Then, when the time is right, you will strike.”
At this, Astrid let out an anguished, choked squeal.
“She looks nothing like me,” I said. “How am I going to impersonate her?”
Mombi sprung to her feet, reached into her cloak, and pulled out a dagger. In one sudden motion, before the poor girl even knew what was happening, Mombi had grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked.
Astrid’s head jerked backward. She yelped again, and when she saw Mombi raise her knife into the air, the yelp became a scream.
The blade flashed through the air. I held my breath.
But instead of slicing the maid’s throat open like I’d anticipated, Mombi simply lopped off a large hank of her white-blonde hair.
“Now,” Mombi said. “Go ahead and say your name four times.”
Astrid sat there, frozen. “Say it!” Mombi screamed, so loudly that even Glamora jumped in her chair.
“A-Astrid,” the girl stammered uncertainly.
“No stuttering!” Mombi said sternly.
Astrid gulped. “Astrid, Astrid . . . Astrid,” she finally managed to spit out.
Mombi smiled. “Good girl,” she said, and she began to crush the hair up into a tight ball before gesturing to me to come forward.
“Here,” she said, thrusting it out. Reluctantly, I took it from her.
“What do I do with it?” I asked, holding it up.
“Eat it,” she said.
“Eat it?”
“Eat it.”
I looked over at Glamora, who nodded calmly.
Seriously? Avenging Gert meant eating some other girl’s disgusting hair?
Trying not to grimace, I shoved every bit of it into my mouth. To my surprise, it crunched when I bit down, and then, after a few more chews, it melted onto my tongue like cotton candy. Well, not just like cotton
candy. It still tasted like hair. But at least it went down easy.
Then nothing happened.
I gave Mombi a quizzical look. “It didn’t . . . ,” I said.
“It will take effect slowly,” she replied. “Now come on. Let’s give these two some private time while we wait for the spell to work. Glamora’s quite a skilled interrogator, you know.”
She laughed when she registered my look of surprise. “Everyone always assumes I’m the one who does the dirty work around here,” she said. “Little do they know, I’m the nice one. Looks aren’t everything, you know.” She beckoned impatiently from the doorway.
I had to force myself not to look over my shoulder as I left.
“What’s she going to do to her?” I asked Mombi nervously when we were outside.
Mombi waved a hand. “Oh,” she said. “Nothing much. You know how it goes. The maid always has the most valuable information. And the maid always cracks under pressure.”
Nox was waiting for us in the training room. He still seemed shaken from yesterday, but I could tell he was trying to cover it up.
“Your job is simple for now,” he said. The scrying pool rippled, and a map appeared. This time, it wasn’t a map of Oz. I studied it for a minute and realized it was of the palace. “Astrid is a servant, but she’s at the bottom of the food chain—she doesn’t spend much time with Dorothy. Change that. Get close to the princess. Listen to her. Find out her habits, her routines. Find out when she’s vulnerable and what she’s vulnerable to. You’ll only have one chance to hit her. And we want you walking out of there alive.”
“How long do I have before I kill her?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that for now,” Mombi cut in. “A spider weaves her web slowly and carefully. A witch—well, a witch is like a spider. At least, this witch is.”
“So you don’t want me to kill her?”
“Don’t you worry. You’ll get your chance to be Wicked. But I’ll let Nox explain all that.”
Nox waited a beat and then began rattling off instructions.
Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise Page 19