9. Chapter 9
nine
The world drug after me, trailing one instant behind as Nick and I headed out the castle’s front doors. Delayed, my surroundings couldn’t quite keep up with me, no matter how gingerly I walked. And though my feet met with the ground solidly enough, there existed the faintest illusion that the stone had become pliant.
Normally, because Mombi drank so often and so heavily, I wasn’t keen on intoxication. But something about the effects of the flamebrew made me giggle.
Though not new to drink, I had never been this inebriated in my life. On rare occasions, I’d shared a beer, mead, or some wine with Sebastian. And I’d had whiskey once or twice when Bauble the clown, one of my friends from the carnival, had enlisted me to toast some accomplishment or to celebrate extra earnings.
So, I’d been tipsy before. Tipsy but never soused.
For Mombi, though, this had been her reality—how she’d seen most of the world most of the time. This state…it certainly did dull the pain.
At the thought of Mombi, my giddiness died. Because Mombi was now in Oz, too. Sebastian had revealed as much when he’d described to me how he’d come to be in Oz, how he, Ginger, and Mr. Beaufort had tracked down Mombi, who had the key I’d lost. The key to Oz. Didn’t this mean a reunion with my former guardian was now inevitable?
“And what if I don’t want to see that old bat again?” I asked no one, borrowing Ginger’s insult.
“Old bat?” asked Nick.
I sighed as we walked, the snow careening down on us both, the screen it made further blurring the already indistinct world.
“Sssorry,” I said. “My thoughts took off without me. I was thinking of someone better off left in the past. Even if she might yet be lurking in my future.”
“A topic you wish to discuss?” asked Nick. “Or avoid.”
“Avoid, I think,” I said. “I’m not ready. Even if I’m not afraid of her anymore.” I drew a breath, then shouted my next words into our surroundings, a plume of white escaping my lips. “Did you hear that? I’m not afraid of you anymore!”
My words echoed off to nowhere, and to no one.
Then again, with my powers being as unwieldy as they were, perhaps my message would reach the cantankerous soothsayer. Wherever she was…
“You’re well-oiled it seems,” Nick observed.
“Haha!” I all but screamed at him, slapping him on one cloaked metal shoulder.
Ouch.
Nick offered me that cold and shielded glance as I shook the smarting from my gloved fingers. Despite the sting, I kept giggling. Because, considering he was the one who happened to be made of metal, his observation was funny. Even funnier because he hadn’t meant it as a joke and because he didn’t seem to think the moment was as comical as I did.
Or maybe, like he’d observed, I was drunk.
“It’sss your fffault,” I slurred. “You told me to drink aaall of it.”
The reams of snow rushing from the sky quickened their pace. The flakes lighted soft on my lashes and piled onto the tops of Nick’s goggles and his shoulders, sticking to him better than they did to me due to his lack of body heat.
Speaking of his being metal, could he truly beall metal?
Once again, I caught myself trying to unravel the mystery of what animated him. He wasn’t like Rye, and he wasn’t like Jack. He had a different air to him. A different sort of magic holding him together.
“I did encourage you to imbibe the entirety of your mug,” he replied as we marched on, feet crunching in the drifts as we wound down the same trail Rye and I had climbed days before. “But you downed it rather fast.”
“I was nervous.”
“I make you nervous,” he observed.
“Everything in Oz makes me nervous. It’s not personal.”
“Things between you and Rye, though,” he said, “they seem personal.”
I clamped my mouth shut and wavered. Nick paused, one of those metal arms drifting toward me as if he thought I might need steadying.
“Rye is an ogre.” The words leaped from my lips before they’d even fully formed in my head. Certainly, I hadn’t given them permission to come out that way—or at all.
“He can be,” said Nick, “when he needs to be.”
“Psshhh,” I said, misting the air with a faint spray of spittle. “Problem is, he thinks he needs to be one all the time.”
“So…he has never been tender with you?”
I side-eyed him and scowled.
“Ooooookay. I know what this is.” I poked him in the chest, finger meeting frozen and ungiving iron. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you? Got me nice and saturated so that you could wring out of me what you want to know about me and Rye.”
“And what about you and Rye?” he asked, not even bothering to deny this had been his plot.
“What about us!” I called out into our surroundings, and the words ricocheted through the ice-sleeved limbs of the barren black trees and back again.
“Are you in love with him?”
I stopped—and took a long cold and shuddering breath, one that froze my lungs, but not in an unpleasant way. The air, frigid as it was, helped to combat the heat from the flamebrew still coursing through me—a heat that wanted to bring tears to my eyes.
“Why do you ask?” I turned to face him. “Especially when…it must be obvious.”
“He does not feel the same,” said Nick.
I tilted my head at him because it hadn’t been a question.
“Iam asking,” Nick clarified. And there it was—a flash of emotion. A hurried sense of dismay on his part, as if he’d realized too late, or perhaps just in time, that his words had upset me. A flare of evidence that…he cared. Maybe about my feelings. Or, possibly, about something else.
“Rye cares for Oz,” I said, my throat clenching tight, squeezing the voice from my words.
“Rye has become what his role has called for him to become,” Nick said. “He may seem cold, but he is not heartless. Doubtless, you know that.”
I hitched, my distress shot through with sudden gratitude. Because here was someone asking after me—and willing to listen.
“I want to believe he—I want to think that I…” I trailed off, unable to put into words what I wanted. When I couldn’t articulate the particulars of my yearning, the silence dragged on, broken only by the quiet ssssss of the falling snow.
Studying my boots, I tried to keep my mind from running off, galloping in the direction of the past and all those moments I’d shared with Rye. Yes, there had been tender ones among them. But only half so many as brutal ones.
“You long for him to return your affection,” he said. “The way the flowers pine for the gaze of the sun, their faces ever seeking its rays. And in his absence, you are left to wilt.”
A small smile touched my lips. Because that was a pretty way of putting it.
“You sound like a poet,” I said.
“I am a poet,” he admitted. “Iron in body, but flesh and blood in spirit, my clockwork heart a house for a soul whose yearning for beauty knows no bounds.”
More lovely words. And such a surprising side to him. Before now, he’d been so austere. Even more so than Rye. Perhaps that had been because, in so many ways, Nick had to conform to his own royal role, too.
I parted my lips to ask about the clockwork comment. Admittedly, I was curious regarding what made him, well, tick. But perhaps the flamebrew had made me too comfortable in his presence. Maybe I would still ask him. Just…not yet.
“Before leaving the Emerald City,” I said, “Rye said… Well, he said something about not being able to return my love. I still don’t know what he meant.”
“Interesting,” said Nick. “And frustratingly cryptic.”
“Like I said,” I replied through a commiserating laugh. “Ogre.”
“Your hope in this situation,” said Nick, his voice quiet now, “well, it has become my hope, too.”
I glanced up at him, befuddled. Was this an odd thing for him to say? I was too soppy—with both drink and emotion—to tell. Brushing past me, walking ahead through the falling screen of white, he gave me no opportunity to ask what he meant.
I spurred myself forward, fighting the urge to ask for clarification, for an explanation. That impulse died the moment he turned to head through a narrow passageway carved through the rockface—one that led to a circular stone clearing, a manmade platform chiseled out of the natural rock. And at the center of this platform? A pair of statues standing on a plinth.
The familiarness of one made me gasp.
Nick moved ahead of me, down the snow-laden squeeze and onto the enormous courtyard.
I followed, hands trailing the stone on either side of me as I went until I stepped onto the large circular platform that played host to the statues.
Behind them and below the platform’s drop-off, a forest of snow-draped evergreens and naked trees with twisty, skeletal limbs stretched on to the hazy horizon. Nick walked through the falling snow, toward the edge of the circle where he stopped to place a metal hand on the rough stone railing that encompassed the platform.
I drifted toward the statues, face numb from cold and from drink, drawing near enough to stand in the shadow of the life-sized figures.
The taller one, I had no trouble identifying.
Whoever had liberated her image from the stone had done so with skill, capturing Morella’s stoic beauty as well as her go-to expression of impassive contempt. She even wore her pointed hat, her immobile garments flowing out from her as though stirred by the brisk wind. In one iron-fisted hand, she gripped the handle of a broom.
The second statue stood back-to-back with the first, and I had to round the connected structure to view this figure’s face.
Slightly shorter than Morella’s statue, this effigy had long straight hair and a pensive and more reserved expression. While Morella looked down upon the observer, this statue, who must have been Eulalie, Morella’s sister—the Wicked Witch of the East—stared up at the leaden, cloud-laden sky.
Snow pooled on the wide brim of Morella’s hat, atop the younger woman’s head, and on their shoulders. It dusted the drapes of their clothing, too.
I wound around the pair once, and only after getting my awe-struck fill of them did I finally allow my gaze to fall to the plaque at their feet. Stooping, I cleared the layers of snow, eyes chasing the words as they appeared.
In memory of the witches of the East and West.
May their deeds and demises remind us always how
evil is never born but cultivated, its roots fed by cruelty
and watered by contempt.
Mouth open, I blinked wide at the words, then back up at the statues.
“Rye despises it,” said Nick. “Even went so far as to order it torn down.”
“You didn’t do as he said,” I observed. In other words, he disobeyed orders from the king.
“Not so,” Nick corrected. “I told him his people would have to come undo the labor mine had completed if he wanted it so. After that, he never mentioned it again.”
“You had these statues built?” That was the part that shocked me the most.
“History is a fickle and murky shade,” Nick said. “In time, it warps and melts from memory. Worse, after those who remember are gone, it bends to the wills of those who hold the pen of recording. Words are powerful, but so are symbols. Combined, they hold the authority to move and remind us. And the witches. It is my hope that they are two figures that Oz shall never forget.”
“Rye thought you were honoring them,” I guessed.
“He knew I was humanizing them,” he corrected.
My heart gave one extra hard pound as if his words had touched a shard of my being that agreed with his motives and this gesture but was simultaneously ashamed to do so.
But Nick had a point. The words on the plaque did, too.
Had Nick authored them? He must have.
Unable to help myself, I rounded the statues again, ill-ease burning through the effects of the flamebrew. Because it could be no coincidence he’d brought me to this memorial.
“Nick,” I said, “why did you want me to see—”
I stopped with a jolt and a yelp at finding Morella standing just behind her statue self, eyes sparking with rage, her form tremoring from the dangerous emotion, which threatened to devour her.
And that meant she was moments away from seeking to devour me—seize control.
“They dare?” she asked the air—herself. “They…dare…”
I backed away, but Morella dove at me. I shrieked as she plunged into my chest, her darkness filling me, coursing through me, and overtaking my sluggish limbs, her sharp mind swimming and merging with my drink-addled one.
They are the criminals. They stole this land from us! Before them, The Wizard ripped Oz from the descendants of the Fae.
Morella’s furious words sizzled through my head, her hatred searing my brain.
We’ll kill him for this!
Oh, God. I gripped my hair, trying to clamp down on my body, my powers—lock them in place as best as I could before Morella could seize either or both and do something horrible with them.
“Wraith of Morella Morgana,” came a voice to my left, one that had my head jerking in that direction, even though I had not been the one to initiate the motion.
Pae?
Where had he come from? And what was he doing here?
The demon fixed me with those luminescent eyes as he walked the circumference of the circle, an arm out behind him, two fingers extended. And on his head, lopsided—Rye’s crown.
“I bind you to this platform,” Pae said, “I confine you to this stage constructed by the hands of others but forged by deeds that are yours.”
“You,” said Morella, her voice a guttural growl in the back of my throat. “I will destroy you for this.”
Pae’s scowl deepened as he continued on his walk, a pale purple line of light following in his wake, its rays shooting up from the stone. And I had to gasp as he passed Nick, whose goggled eyes followed the demon—as if able to see him.
“I confine you to my circle,” continued Pae in a monotone chant, “and I challenge your foothold on the soul of Tip…ah… Tipper—”
“Tippetarius,” droned Nick from outside the circle, which Pae finished drawing with a flourish, sealing himself into the gate of light along with me, Morella, and the statues.
“Tippetarius,” repeated Pae, that shining yellow gaze growing predatorial as he tilted his chin down.
“You cannot seal me,” Morella snarled, the words a hiss through my own lips. “I still own you.”
“You never owned me!” snapped Pae, rage crossing his features before the emotion flitted away, replaced by that nonchalance he’d displayed in the bell tower. “You just…borrowed me for a while. Which, admittedly, was fun until, well…until it wasn’t.”
“Don’t like the statues, do you?” called Nick as he strode around the circle, hands clasped at his back, metal feet simultaneously clanking against the stone and crunching in the snow. “I had a hunch they would draw you out of hiding. You always had an aversion to the truth.”
“Yooou fucking juuunk pile,” snarled Morella with my mouth. But the words…they came slurred. “I will melt you down, fassshion your worthless gutsss into weapons, and use them to ssslay your friendsss.”
“Elaborate,” remarked Nick, “if not inventive.”
“Tipilicious,” said Pae, and I turned my head his way again, though this time, I had difficulty telling if the motion had been mine, or Morella’s. “I need you to fight her. Hard as you ever have. And fair warning.” He cracked his knuckles and, with a quick tilt of his head, his neck as well. “It’s about to get personal again.”
“Do not scuff my Tip,” droned Nick from his side of the circle.
“She is mine!”roared Morella with my voice.
Pae bared his teeth—and sprang for me, tail lashing behind him.
I bellowed at him, the rawest anger I’d ever experienced exploding up from my core as he slammed a hand into my sternum, driving me back and into the statues, pinning me against them.
“By the way, Ella,” said Pae, his breath cool on my cheek as he pressed harder against my sternum, almost to the point of cracking my ribs, “you were just like this when you had the cap. Making me do things I didn’t want to do.”
“You don’t have to do this,” said Morella, gasping for our breath, fastening our hands around Pae’s wrist.
“Oh. You should know better than anyone,” snarled Pae, “that I do.”
And then, with a roar, he drove his hand into me.