3. Chapter 3
three
I had expected the north tower to be freezing. As frigid and unforgiving as my host.
It wasn’t.
Seated on a large round rug right in front of a crackling fire, nestled in a veritable vat of firs, I stared into the flames and tried not to assume the worst had happened. Again.
I also wrangled with Rye’s final words before he’d gone unconscious. His mysterious claim that he’d found “her.” Ozma…
That name. Before this day, I’d heard it spoken only a handful of times.
From what I’d gathered, Ozma had been a princess of Oz, the sole daughter of the land’s founders and first rulers. She’d disappeared years ago, though—seventeen years ago if I remembered correctly.
Most thought her dead, slain by some masked minion of the Wicked Witch of the East. Some claimed, however—even hoped—that she’d been whisked away to somewhere safe and secret. That hope had gone cold for most as the years wore on, and the princess failed to resurface.
Today, a commemorative fountain known as the Ozma Fountain stood in the center of a square just outside the Emerald City Palace. Atop its basin, the statue of a young girl glided over misty waters, her gown flowing around her, a delicate crown on her head.
The Wizard had commissioned and erected the fountain a dozen years ago in honor of the lost princess’s twelfth birthday. If my math was correct, Ozma would have turned twenty-four this year.
That was if she’d lived. But even Rye had balked at the notion that she had.
Over and over again, I tried to decipher Rye’s meaning, to determine what had made him think he’d found Ozma. Nothing added up. Something that confirmed my fear that he truly had become delusional. Even if, right up to that moment, so far as I’d been able to tell, he’d been in his right mind.
I sighed, shoulders slumping. Because there’d be no unraveling this latest mystery without Rye. Or maybe Nick knew something? Couldn’t say I was looking forward to a conversation with him.... My welcome here had been anything but warm.
About the size of Mombi’s fortune-telling tent, the circular room that now contained me had one barred window, the sill of which gathered snow.
Shortly after I’d been deposited in the room, Grip had appeared between the bars. After assessing my situation and concluding he could do nothing to assist me, the bird had flitted off. Probably, he went to be with Rye—a place I preferred him to be since I could not be with the king.
Aside from the rug, the tower held no furnishings. No portraits or landscapes adorned the walls, either. Large enough to swallow me whole if it had been a mouth, the fireplace held plenty of wood. Someone had stacked more nearby, ensuring my light and warmth would die out only if I let it.
Though I had also expected to starve as well as freeze, I didn’t.
Around an hour into my interment within the highest point of Nick’s castle, another set of guards had arrived with a piping meal of roasted poultry, freshly baked bread, and some kind of steamed tubers.
I’d eaten everything, not caring a wit if any of it had been tainted. At the same time, I’d not really tasted much. Then again, having become accustomed to Rye’s cooking, perhaps I’d simply been ruined for all other food.
Another hour passed, and just when my lids began to droop and grow too heavy for me to force open, the clanging of iron keys sounded from behind me.
I twisted to peer toward the door as it opened. And I had to gulp when the figure that emerged from the gloom revealed itself to be none other than Nikletin—The Woodsman.
He towered over me, an automaton draped in black. The dark lenses of his goggles flashed with a reflection of the fire, as though it was the devil himself who resided behind that mouthless metal mask.
He entered alone, metal boots clanking heavily against the stone floor.
Fear filled me to the brim, as real and raw as it had been the first time I’d met Cahal, the king of the Mount Tskien region and a lion. And maybe this figure terrified me even more than Cahal. Though…I couldn’t yet say why.
Perhaps it was because he had no eyes I could see, and therefore no soul I could search.
Or maybe my fear stemmed simply from meeting Nick just after failing Rye—his closest friend.
The king shut the door behind him. A clear signal that he was not afraid of me.
I kept my silence, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t. Instead, he examined me before turning away and going to peer out the window.
I scowled into the fire, determined not to give him any additional ammunition to assume terrible things about me. At the same time and despite my trepidation, my heart burned for news of Rye.
“Please tell me he’s not dead,” I said at last when I couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“If my friend was dead, so too would you be.”
I blinked and swallowed hard.
Difficult to interpret that response. Best to do as they seemed to here in “Rome,” assume the worst, and figure he meant he’d have had me killed.
“How do you know that he lives?” I asked.
“I extracted the arrow and he bled.”
Despite the heat wafting off the hearth, an odd and soothing coolness spread through me with this information, flooding my veins with an almost drugging relief. My head swam and my heart thrummed—the muscle still in pain. But I was no longer in danger of drowning in my sorrow, the sea level of which had, with this news, dropped a life-saving inch.
“Is he going to be all right?”
“That,” replied Nick, still facing the window, “remains to be seen. The arrow was laced with a poison known as grave-rot. A potent though slow-spreading concoction that robs its victim of everything but life, transforming them into a conscious corpse. As the name suggests, the victim begins to rot from the inside out. The toxin only kills its target when something vital, at last, putrefies. Typically, if a friend is near, he will spare his comrade such turmoil by slicing his throat or piercing his heart.”
My face drained. “You’re saying he’s doomed?”
“Rye is a special case for obvious reasons,” said Nick. “In short, his survival depends on whether the poison has spread. In his current state, it’s difficult to tell. It is an odd sign, though, that he’s unconscious. Should he become fully human again, however, there would be no stopping it.”
“There’s no antidote?”
“None other than a complete reversion of his status.”
He meant that Rye would need to become fully scarecrow once again.
“How did you know he became fully human?” I asked.
“Rye spoke of you to me,” he revealed, “and he told me what you could do. Besides that, it made the most sense that he’d have been attacked while in a vulnerable state.”
Goodness. Rye told him I could make him human. That also meant that they’d talked about me on more than one occasion. I wasn’t sure how or when, but I didn’t doubt Nick’s words that they had.
“I want to see him,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. In this moment, aside from wishing I could reverse time, it was the only desire I had.
“I have answered your questions,” he said, “and now, you will answer mine.”
Again, I held my tongue. Because, well, that wasn’t a no.
“First and foremost,” he said, at last pivoting to face me, that shielded yet blazing gaze finding me once more, “I want to know how you tricked Rye, the most intelligent person I have met and likely will ever know, into believing you to be the lost princess of Oz.”
I gaped at him outright, my mouth dry, my mind absent of words.
“Speak,” he commanded. “Your answer determines much.”
I shook my head. “I’m not,” I said. “And Rye…he never said that about me. You’ve got it all wrong. What he said about the princess, Ozma, shocked me as much as it must have you. I had no idea he believed she was alive. Let alone that he knew where she was.”
This perhaps wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. Then again, maybe he thought I was lying. Whatever the case, he remained silent for several long moments, that stare boring into me, threatening to ignite me, incinerate me.
Finally, he spoke again.
“Those bracers you’re wearing,” he said, “why did Rye shackle you with them?”
I opened my mouth to answer but stalled when a hissing voice buzzed my left eardrum.
“Stop,” said the voice. “Don’t tell him about me. Or he will kill you.”
Morella. At her command, I shut my mouth and locked my jaw.
It wasn’t so much that I was obeying her. But Rye had known fully about Morella’s possession of me and had not told Nick about her when he’d had the chance. Instead, the words he had deemed imperative to deliver to his friend had surrounded…Ozma.
And now, for reasons that eluded me, Nick was assuming Rye had been referring to me.
Because of the bracers? I couldn’t be sure.
“You knew before you laid eyes on me that I was a witch,” I told him. “Rye told you about the alliance he’d wanted to form with our marriage.”
“So, you are his wife?”
“N-No,” I said, a sadness I couldn’t hide tinting the word. “The engagement, the wedding, everything was…fake. It was a secret between us and two others.” Three, counting Morella. “He did not want to tell you or Cahal of that plan or the threat from Langwidere for fear you would leave your own territories vulnerable to come to his aid.”
Surely, Rye would not mind my divulging everything else I knew outside of Morella. If Rye had told Sebastian, a virtual stranger to him, everything about the brewing threat of Langwidere, then surely, if he were able, he’d tell Nick as much as well.
“You’re saying your entire relationship was staged,” he guessed, but not like this surprised him.
“He thought it would hold Langwidere at bay,” I said, “if she thought he had a true witch and a queen of another land as his ally.”
“Langwidere,” Nick repeated. “You said she is responsible for the fall of the Emerald City?”
“She…infiltrated the palace and, since my powers had been sealed, I…couldn’t stop her.”
“And we’re back to the bracers,” he said.
Which was true enough. Damn.
“Tell him you couldn’t control your powers,” urged Morella. “Tell him Rye locked you into them because he feared you would hurt yourself or others.”
I couldn’t tell Nick that. I couldn’t lie to him. Lies and masked truths had been what had gotten me here. Instead, what I needed to do was trust Rye. Even though Rye had proven himself again and again to be untrustworthy, at least with what I had thought was best, he had stopped at nothing to liberate me from his fallen city. He had sacrificed everything to get me out. And to bring me here, to Nick.
Still, I could see how keeping Morella a secret was also in my best interests. At least until Rye could be awakened again.
“Rye had his reasons for placing the bracers,” I said, “but if you want to know why, you’ll have to ask him when he awakens.”
“If he awakens,” corrected Nick.
“When,” I insisted.
Silence filled the room, swelling in the space between us.
“If you are not Princess Ozma,” he said at last, “then to whom was he referring?”
“I told you,” I said, “that was the first I’ve heard him speak of the princess.”
Perhaps the reason Rye hadn’t told me anything about his discovery of the princess and her whereabouts had everything to do with Morella’s constant presence—her attachment to me. Of course, he wouldn’t want Morella to know about Ozma. Now though, his abandonment of the Emerald City made a bit more sense. Though, then again, perhaps not, since I couldn’t see Rye letting the capital fall like that even if he thought the rightful ruler was still out there.
Unless, whispered a voice in the back of my head, he thoughtthat rightful ruler happened to be you.
I gasped.
“What?” demanded Nick. “What is it?”
I shook my head because too much was unfolding in my memory too fast.
Starting with the man who visited Mombi’s tent. The man, Mr. Diggs, who had given me that solid gold key that had brought me here to Oz. The man who had also claimed to know so much about me. The man who had also claimed that I was someone other than the nobody I had always been.
Then there was the cryptic and half-coded discussion between Rye and Morella about fairy tales.
And Rye. Oh, God.
What had he said to me in his rooms that night he’d placed the bracers on me? That night he’d kissed me that way. Like he feared—or maybe knew—he would not get a chance to do so again.
I should marry you in earnest. On the surface, that would seem to solve everything.
A hand lept to cover my mouth.
Rye had thought I was the princess. But…that made no sense.
At nineteen, I wasn’t old enough.
“I’m not old enough,” I blurted to Nick as if he’d somehow been privy to my thoughts.
“You didn’t seem so,” he agreed, a statement that suggested he’d already gone down this pathway in his own mind. Of course, Rye’s claim that he’d found Ozma would have made Nick want to do the calculations surrounding me.
So how had Rye arrived at such an absurd conclusion? I couldn’t say. I could only recognize that, for whatever reason, he had.
“He really did think I was her,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes. Because of what that meant.
Rye hadn’t been trying to get me out of the Emerald City because he’d been trying to protect his one and only witch. Not because he thought of me as someone who could eventually help restore him to power but because he’d wanted to preserve the life of the person that he assumed to be the true ruler.
And those words about marrying me in earnest. Despite his later assessment that he had “no true feelings” for me, didn’t they suggest that…he did?
“Oh, God, Rye,” I whispered, the tears falling.
Whyhadn’t he told me any of this?
And why, if the math had no hope of working out, would he conclude something so ludicrous?
“You really didn’t know he thought this,” said Nick.
Again, I shook my head because words had become impossible.
All I could see was Rye taking those arrows.
That was what he’d done from the moment I’d met him until now.
At first, he’d taken all the metaphorical arrows for Oz. Then he’d taken real ones for me. Me who, without my knowing, he’d come to prize even higher than his kingdom. Because, in a sense, he’d thought I was Oz.
“Where did you come from, Tip?” asked Nick, his tone softer than before, as if my sudden show of emotion might have tripped some switch of sympathy within him. “And how on earth did you end up in Oz?”