The Lost Princess of Oz: The Ozma Chronicles Book 2

1. Chapter 1

one

The king of Oz was dying. Given that he was a scarecrow—a being with neither heart nor blood—that should have been impossible.

Since coming here, though, from the rural and rambling hills of Kentucky to the rich and magic-imbued realm of Oz, I’d learned that this strange province made many things—both the miraculous and the terrible—quite possible indeed.

And this latest twist of misfortune? Well, this one was entirelymy fault.

“Rye,” I whispered.

The king sat with his spine pressed against an enormous tree, his long and too-thin legs stretched out in front of him, an arm slung over his stomach. His face, made of gray cloth which bore scar-like stitching, held no expression. That itself wasn’t unusual, but the way his lids drooped over those cold, glass-like eyes that blazed the exact hue of the icy and cloudless sky above was abnormal.

“Rye,” I said again, and this time, his lids fluttered open, but not without effort.

“I’m awake,” he said.

I knelt next to him in the snow, swathed now in his cloak as well as mine since the need to stay warm was not an issue for him. Still, combined, the garments were not enough to fend off the freezing west winds that zipped through the dense forest we’d been navigating on horseback.

I tried not to shiver. I didn’t want Rye to know I was struggling. Not when the more immediate issue at hand was his rapid descent into this…state.

“We can’t stay here,” I said, even though making camp for the night was exactly what I wished we could do. Especially since the darkness had begun to ease in from the corners of the forest, tinting the horizon molten even while flurries rushed down from above.

More than that, because we had nothing to make a suitable camp with, I yearned to find the nearest township or house and to warm myself by a hearth while I tended to Rye.

Well, while I tried to tend to him.

But Rye and I couldn’t afford for anyone outside of the person we currently sought to know where we were. Not since the Emerald City, the imperial capital of Oz, had been overtaken by the army of a foreign enemy—Princess Langwidere, ruler of the neighboring Kingdom of Ev.

While it was unlikely that her forces had yet moved this far out from the Emerald City, which stood at the center of Oz’s four territories, I had no doubt she’d dispatched spies and trackers to hunt us down. She had to suspect we’d escaped, especially after her failed attempt to take my head.

The carnage. It had all transpired two—now nearly three—days ago.

Rye and I crossed into Winkie Country, Oz’s western quadrant, only just today. We were headed in the direction of The Woodsman’s domain, King Nickletin’s castle, formerly the stronghold of the slain Wicked Witch of the West.

“Rye, we must go. I have to get you to safety. You’re still the king.”

Surprising me, he smiled at this. Which made me tilt my head at him, and scowl. When it came to Rye, smiles were rare. Even the smallest kind, like the one he wore now.

“You’re laughing at me,” I accused. “You think I’m incapable of looking after you. I might not be your first choice of a guard, but I’m the only one you have.”

His smile fell, eyes cutting away. “In truth, I’m touched by such a show of loyalty when none is owed. There’s also a certain amount of irony in our situation made all the more precious because it is lost on you.”

I glared at him as those glassy eyes refocused on me through the screen of falling snow, which had begun to pick up pace, the flakes growing fat as the darkness deepened. “You’re starting not to make sense.”

“I’m not delirious,” he assured me. “Not yet. But I may be soon. And you’re right about the need to press on.”

He threw his eyes wide as they almost slid closed without his awareness. Something that confirmed my darkest fear. He was getting close to fading out completely—dropping into unconsciousness. And then what would I do?

Snow began to catch in his dark, coarse, and feather-like hair. It accumulated on his shoulders and along the lines of his arms and legs.

If he stayed here long enough, he’d be buried.

That thought had something inside me bucking in fear, and I extended my hand to him.

“I’ll rise in another moment,” he said.

“If you pass out, I will lift you on my own.”

Rye’s expression darkened as if my words had somehow stoked his characteristic stoicism. He cast his gaze around the silent clearing, no doubt searching for signs of assassins. Far above us, his crow, Grip—a familiar Rye could see through—circled us in silence, scanning as well for threats.

“That won’t be necessary,” Rye said. “But I’ll need you to help me rise.”

“I will,” I replied, my offered hand detouring to his collar, “but…not before I have a look at your shoulder.”

His scowl became a glower, and he pressed a gloved hand to his shoulder, the site of his wound and the source of his pain. “That won’t do any good.”

For some reason, he didn’t want me investigating the bloodied entry point of the arrow he’d taken there when the two of us had been in the ballroom, dancing in celebration of our “wedding.”

We hadn’t been married. The whole thing had been a ruse. Our entire engagement had been part of a plan to thwart Langwidere. That plan hadn’t worked. Another threat had gotten in the way.

Also, there’d been the feelings that had complicated everything. Genuine feelings.

Mine. For Rye.

“You know very well what would help us,” I said, “but you refuse to perform that task. And if you won’t bend on that, then you must on this.”

Rye set his features and stared forward. Stubborn as ever, he kept his hand pressed to his shoulder.

“If I removed even one of the bracers I placed on you,” he said, “it would obliterate any chance we’d arrive at our destination. I would die for certain. You would become a permanent prisoner in your own body. Oz would be rendered a carcass for two vultures to fight over.”

Before Oz had fallen to Langwidere, Rye had done something rash. Something that I hadn’t seen coming.

He’d sealed my powers. Powers that I’d only just begun to learn how to wield in this world that had awakened them.

Substantial powers.

Witch powers.

He’d sealed them for good reason since a mishap in the clock tower of the Emerald City Palace had unleashed a shard of the soul of the dead Wicked Witch of the West. That shard had invaded me, embedded itself within me.

I’d since learned how that shard, sentient, intelligent, and wrathful, was called a wraith. Also, that it—she—had every intention of taking possession of both my body and my powers as soon as she could.

Embedded with one large and smooth ruby each, the bracers did a sound job of locking my powers inside of me and, consequently, disabling them from being used by either me or Morella.

But…the binding of my powers had also prevented me from stopping Langwidere.

Rye’s move to constrict my powers had been a truly desperate one, too, since my capacity for sorcery had also been the one thing Rye had been depending on to save his kingdom from Langwidere. And now Rye, the only one capable of freeing me from the bracers since he had been the one to place them, might soon be lost as well.

Seemed to me that, in trying to rescue his kingdom, he was also smothering it.

But then, I didn’t have the same understanding that he did of his fiercest enemy, the Wicked Witch of the West. Having come to know her, at least somewhat, I had a hard time believing she would destroy everything in her wake just to reap her revenge and take over this land, no matter what she said. Then again, I had a bad habit of looking for the best in everyone. Also, I had not been through whatever ordeal had led Rye and his friends, Cahal, Nickletin, and Dorothy, to assassinate West in the first place.

Whatever the case, it was clear Rye wasn’t going to budge on the bracers—that he would die first. Which was why my hands now pried at the buttons of his coat.

“I told you, nothing can be done,” he said.

“Hush.”

“Tip, don’t.”

I ignored his plea and unfastened the first several silver buttons. Because maybe he was wrong that I wouldn’t be able to help him. After all, I was the reason he’d become wounded like this in the first place. He’d only become vulnerable because of my powers. Which meant there was a possibility, even if slim, that I could, despite the bracers, access those powers again.

“What if I can do something?” I asked him. “Like before?”

Rye and I had been dancing in the ballroom during the wedding reception, feigning that all was well and that I was the legitimate new queen of Oz.

“You can and you will…do something,” he said. “But your efforts are wasted on me.”

“They are still my efforts to waste. So hold still.”

While I’d been lost in our waltz and in those frozen eyes of his, I’d somehow tapped into a part of my powers—my soul—that had allowed me to transcend the bracers. The rubies embedded in the silver had turned emerald, and Rye had become his former self again—the flesh and blood man he’d been before being cursed into his current form.

That hadn’t been the first time I’d transformed Rye into flesh and blood.

I’d done so days before our false wedding. In his chambers.

That had been the first night he’d kissed me.

It had also been the night he’d pressed me into his bed. It was during that encounter when I’d been so distracted by his touch, so lulled by his caresses, that he had locked my wrists into these cuffs.

His treachery complete, he’d taken the next moments to deny having any true feelings for me. He’d confessed to seducing me simply to seal my powers, thereby cutting off West’s avenue to seize me and rise a second time.

In the ballroom, though, when I’d overridden the influence of the bracers to make him human again, unwittingly in that instance, Langwidere—or one of her henchmen—had spied their chance and had struck, piercing Rye’s shoulder with a poison-tipped arrow.

The shock of the attack had disrupted my impromptu spell, returning him to his more invincible scarecrow state, which had saved him from the arrows that had followed.

After that, chaos descended on the palace and Langwidere’s troops began to invade from within, piling through the mirrors that, by way of Glinda’s stolen magic, the princess had transformed into portals.

Soon after that, Rye kissed me again.

That time, by all appearances, he’d done so only to drug me. To render me unconscious so that I would stop fighting him. I’d wanted to go back for Sebastian, my best friend. But Rye, determined to drag me out of the castle and carry me away from the fallen Emerald City, wouldn’t have it. For the second time, he used my feelings for him against me.

His words, though. They’d stuck with me.

It’s true I cannot love you back, but by God, Tip, I will be worthy of yours.

I peeled back the collar of his dark gray coat to reveal more pale gray cloth “skin.” This membrane, if it could be called that, was thin, coarse, and pliant. It conformed to his collarbones, proving that he did, at least, possess a skeleton.

“You insist on taking my dignity out of revenge,” he accused through a growl, his jaw setting.

“Dignity?” I almost laughed. “Someone truly dignified would never have done what you did to me.”

I didn’t really mean these words. Mostly, my hope was to distract him from what I was doing since my invasion seemed to bother him so much.

“I beg to differ,” he replied through clenched teeth as I nudged his hand aside and drew back the bloodied material to expose his shoulder—the roundish area where his cloth skin became true flesh. The area seemed to be frozen this way by the arrowhead and broken shaft still embedded within. “My actions, all of them—yes, even the wretched ones—have been made in an effort to preserve your life.”

“My life.” I examined the gory wound that defied explanation. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. At what point did my life start to matter to you more than Oz?”

From the moment I’d met Rye, his actions and words had made it clear how he cared about two things above all else. Dorothy Gale, the girl from Kansas whom I had only heard about in stories, and Oz.

But since Dorothy was gone, since she had left Oz for her home, for Kansas, all Rye had lived for had been his kingdom and his people. Everything he did—or didn’t do—was, in his mind, for the sole benefit of Oz. That was, until something changed.

Something that I’d come to realize (even if I didn’t know why) had everything to do with…me.

“I’ve already told you,” Rye said. “Your powers. They make you the last hope of Oz.”

“And yet that can’t be true,” I countered. “Or…not entirely. Or else, why seal them away? Why change your mind about killing me over West’s possession of me?”

Moments after I’d accidentally freed Morella’s wraith and the surviving shard of her spirit had taken hold of me, the king of Oz had held a dagger to my ribs. He’d nearly ended my life that morning. For reasons I understood—both then and now.

“That,” Rye said, looking away. “You’ll hold that against me, too? On this, I will set you straight. Because I’m in enough pain.”

I blinked, eyes flicking up from the wound to him. Still, he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“I couldn’t have hurt you, Tip,” he said. “Not then or ever. Oz could have fallen at that moment, and it still would have been my fault. Not yours. I failed you in the clock tower. But…I won’t again. I swear it.”

Failed me, he’d said. I touched his cheek and, at last, that cool gaze returned to me, still pleading. And resolute, too. Like he meant every word.

Maybe the pain he’d spoken of had made him more honest than he’d been in the past.

If I was being honest with myself, I would have to admit that I understood why he refused to unseal my powers. What I didn’t get was when and how I had become so important to him.

Important enough that he’d sacrificed everything he had striven to protect to smuggle me out of his castle and the fallen Emerald City.

Despite his words just now, this dedication, (or was it strategy?)—it couldn’t be for love.

At least…I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was.

Rye might have lied about not caring for me, but he must have meant what he’d said when he’d claimed he could not return the love I’d already confessed I had for him.

Did the reason tie into his motivation to abandon the Emerald City to whisk me away from danger? Had his actions been driven by something more than my powers?

They must have been. Because, if nothing else, Rye was practical.

Always, he did what he did with reason.

Always, he did what he did with Oz and its people foremost in his mind.

So, while his actions might not have been about the two of us, they certainly had to have been about me.

“What are you doing?” he asked as I began to feel around the wound, trying to gauge how difficult—and painful—it might be to try and remove the arrow. It seemed, though, that the poisoned-tipped head, the cause of the rapid fading of Rye’s strength, was buried too deep.

By the time I carved it out of him—if I was able to find the stomach to do so—he might be…

“We need help,” I told him.

“We need Nick.”

I sighed, not liking this answer or this option. But I wasn’t foolish enough to think Rye was going to remove my bonds so that I could attempt to use my powers to undo the damage. Though I’d tried, I still wasn’t able to tap into my powers the same way I had in the ballroom, bypassing the bracers.

So, until I could, what other choice did we have but to follow Rye’s latest plan and head to the nearest stronghold? The domain of his friend and fellow ruler.

“I’ll help you onto the horse,” I said. “This time, though, you’ll have to hold on to me so that I can ride us there as fast as possible.”

“You don’t know where you’re going.”

“I can steer a horse in the direction you tell me.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“You’ll have to,” I snapped, my patience thinning. “You could barely hold onto the reigns before we stopped here.”

“The rest has rejuvenated me.”

“Your pride,” I told him as I helped draw him unsteadily to his feet again, “I will have that now as well as your dignity. Insist on keeping it, and you risk passing out while riding. Then what? I’ll have to throw you over the horse saddle like a sack of potatoes and depend on Morella to guide me.”

Morella.The witch who was still inside of me.

She’d gone silent after that first night of traveling, but I wasn’t naive enough to believe even for one second that she hadn’t been listening and watching everything since.

“Do you even know how to ride?” scoffed Rye.

I opened my mouth to say something scathing. After all, I had been raised in a carnival, a world that required long and constant travel. I’d ridden many a wagon and horse alike. An elephant once, too.

Though I’d spent most of the time Rye and I had known one another wearing some elaborate gown or another, I hadn’t arrived in his throne room like that. I wasn’t a spoiled or pampered heiress.

Rye knew that about me.

So that must just mean that his words in this moment were more about him. A reflection of how difficult he found it to become so weak. Dependent for once upon someone other than himself.

So I held my silence all the way back to the horse, which Rye managed to climb aboard without help. The toll this took on him became evident, however, when he began to weave in the saddle.

I made quick work of climbing after him, taking his former position at the front of the saddle.

“Lean against my back,” I ordered as I took the reins. “Take my waist and hold on.”

At first, he did not obey. But then, just when I expected an argument, his meager weight fell against my spine. He looped an arm around my waist, too.

Satisfied, I nudged the horse into motion, and with a grunt and a snort of steamy air, the gelding trotted between the snow-dusted trees.

I spoke, choosing my words with care—wanting to get them out now before we entered into the gallop that would make it hard for Rye to hear.

Or…before he finally did pass out on me.

“If you think I would change my mind about you because of what lies beneath your clothes or because you cannot, in your current state, protect me, then you don’t know me at all.”

“It appears, though,” he said after a beat, his voice weaker than before, “as if you know me.”

“I do now,” I admitted as the horse climbed onto the icy main road, which thankfully remained clear of travelers.

“Well,” said Rye in a whisper as I spurred the horse into a canter, “at least that makes one of us.”