11. Chapter 11
eleven
Another wave of nausea burbled up from the pit of me, and before I could utter the question that I finally thought I was going to be able to give voice to, I had to retch again—into the bucket Nick had provided.
More black sludge came slopping out. The sight of it there in the bottom of the newest bucket—the third so far—had me dry-heaving.
Ugh.I didn’t want Nick to see me this way.
At the same time, I was glad not to be alone—sent to my quarters to try and recover on my own. No matter how terrible I felt, it would have been far worse to cope with my long-awaited liberation alone. Bad as the sickness was, a lightness now encompassed me. And being in someone’s company, someone who understood what I had undergone, what I had, with his help, managed to survive… Well, it soothed the fear surrounding the new though welcome emptiness within.
Morella had been with me long enough that I’d nearly forgotten what it was like to just be Tip.
“It should be over soon,” Nick said from where he stood near the enormous fireplace. With his back to me, he gazed into the frolicking flames. Meanwhile, I sat on the big fuzzy carpet spread out in front of the hearth, too dizzy yet to take a chair.
Kind of him not to watch me puke. Or to toss me out on my rear for hiding the truth from him.
My stomach clutched and, without warning, out came more black bile.
More unlovely sounds echoed through the enormous chamber.
At least it was just the two of us in the big dining room. Unless Pae had to be lurking around like before, listening in on our conversation as he must have been when I’d made the half-drunken comment about his hair.
“You must have many questions,” said Nick.
I just nodded, clutching the bucket all the harder. He spared a glance back to me, catching the motion. And then he laughed.
The utterance, small and raspy, had me looking up at him.
“I’ll say I’m relieved,” he said, “that you’re not what I feared you might be.”
A second Morella he meant. Because why else would Rye seal my powers?
Though I wanted to reply, to tell him I was relieved at his relief, I only nodded a second time to convey my—well, something other than woozy wretchedness.
Would I ever be able to repay him for orchestrating my freedom? And was I free?
Morella, after all, had only been contained. Much in the same way she had been when she’d installed herself—her wraith at least—in the clock tower of the Emerald City Palace. Pae had pinned her to the statue, but how long would that dagger hold? And what would happen when she eventually sprang free again?
“Your questions,” Nick said. “I will try to guess at them while you’re… Well, Pae said you would be sick for a while.”
“You control him,” I managed, but stuffed it the moment my stomach again revolted. Out came more gunk with a slosh. How much left was there? And where was this all coming from?
“Yes and no,” said Nick. “I made a deal with Pae.”
Deal. With a demon.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Nick, “and you’re right. It’s a dangerous game—resorting to tactics used by West herself. But the difference is that I did not actually use the cap. I instead agreed not to so long as Pae negotiated with me on mutual terms. My possession of it has simply been…part of my leverage. And insurance.”
“Mmmgh.” I again emptied my stomach into the wooden bucket, though now the substance evacuating me had a clearer tone to it, smokey and thin instead of black and viscous.
“After I began to get the sense there was something more going on with you,” said Nick, “something I could not deduce through mere observation, I summoned him. Dire circumstances…and all that. After we made our deal, I instructed him to wait for you in the bell tower, to pretend to be invisible—something he has the power to accomplish naturally. I advised him as well to…provoke you with certain phrases. But then no provocation was needed. Not when his presence alone dislodged Morella from hiding.”
“You’re saying the guards could see him, too?” I asked.
“Part of my plan,” said Nick. “My test. Which you passed. Though what neither Pae nor I expected was to find that West was involved. A remnant of her. She gave him quite a shock. Me as well.”
I set the bucket on the floor and reached for the nearby mug of water. I took a long drink, the sweat on my brow finally starting to evaporate.
“Suddenly,” continued Nick, “Glinda’s bracers on your wrists made all the sense in the world. It occurred to me that Rye must have known about West. Also, he must have instructed you not to tell anyone about her. And I understand why. That was wise counsel.”
“Rye said…Glinda gave him the bracers to use against her,” I said.
“She gave me the cap to keep her from using it,” Nick replied.
“Witches are that susceptible to corruption?”
“I think it was more a show of good faith,” he said. “After the war, she was the only witch allowed in Oz. She did not want the darkest episode of Oz’s history to repeat itself. Since she remained a fellow ruler of Oz, distributing items that could quell her or assist us if she became compromised was her way of putting herself on more equal terms with us. We all agreed to keep one another in check, you see. Magic is corruptible, but so is power in any form. And no one can foresee the future but…as it turns out, Glinda was right to entrust me and Rye with our respective artifacts.”
“Did Rye know about the cap?”
“No,” said Nick. “Glinda wanted it that way. I did not relish keeping a secret from him, but he takes issue with all things related to West and her sister, East. And the cap wasn’t something that could be destroyed or safely hidden. It had to be guarded for obvious reasons.”
“Pae is in love with West,” I said. “I…think.”
“Pae had no qualms about sealing her,” said Nick. “He gave no argument when I proposed it. But it’s also obvious that West’s current vessel, the statue that is, is a short-term fix.”
So. There was my answer to that.
“Don’t tell me she’ll come back for me,” I said, nausea again tickling my guts.
“I don’t know,” said Nick. “A question for Pae, perhaps, who better understands these darker matters.”
“Do you trust him to tell the truth?”
“I don’t,” said Nick. “But…I do have something to dissuade him from being too mischievous. Besides, whatever happened between Pae and West, I can read enough into my conversations with the demon to grasp it had not ended well.”
My own interactions with Pae had brought me to the same conclusion.
“You said…you made a deal with Pae,” I ventured, nursing the water more readily now, so far keeping the liquid down. “What did he want in return for sealing Morella?”
“The crown Rye was wearing,” said Nick. “And why not? Rye has at least fifty of them.”
I smiled because hadn’t Rye always been wearing a different one?
“He always looked so good in them, too,” I said, peering up at Nick as he turned around to face me, the firelight reflected in those dark goggles again, the flames throwing his shadow long across the stone floor.
“You wouldn’t think him the vain sort,” said Nick.
“And he’s not really,” I agreed, “but…he always had to look just so. Always, he cared so much about—”
“Public perception,” Nick said through another raspy laugh—an unusual sound coming from him.
I laughed, too, my abdominal muscles sore from so much retching.
“The crown,” I said after several lingering beats of quiet, “was that really all Pae wanted?”
“For now,” said Nick, “but our deal has a few working parts to it. Installments if you will. The last part doesn’t happen until we have Dorothy back. You are still willing to try to reach her, are you not?”
“We need Rye,” I said. “And Cahal. We need everyone back. Dorothy is the only one who can help.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We will start with Dorothy. And go from there.”
I nodded. Then quietness returned, filled only by the crackling of the fire.
“Nick, I don’t know how to thank you,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” he said as he strode past me, walking away toward the doors. “Or…you soon will.”
He exited the dining hall after that, leaving me alone.
For a moment, anxiety squeezed my chest, but then, as I returned my gaze to the flickering flames, their warmth burning my cheeks in a pleasant way, my uneasiness began to abate and, bit by bit, loosen its hold on me.
Alone.For the first time in so long, I was finally truly all by myself.
No ghost in my shadow, no fiend in my head. No hands around my throat. No looming threat of catastrophe—which would be meted out by my own hands—hanging over my too-full head.
Morella. She was gone.
Shutting my eyes, I basked in the bliss of it, soaking in this moment of peace, of respite, bought by someone who had, perhaps, I wanted to believe, become my friend at last.
And right then…was there anything in the world I needed more desperately?
Dressed all in black, the same way he’d been that first day I’d met him, his head adorned with that silver spiked crown, Rye watched me through the streams of falling snow, those blue eyes the only scrap of color to be had.
Flesh and blood instead of cloth and bone, he stood stock still, his scarred face expressionless, his drawn sword held at his side.
It could have been day as well as night, what with the light hazy and muddied by the curtains of white. I didn’t care about what time it was, though—where we happened to be or how we’d gotten here. I only cared about reaching him.
My boots crunched in the drifts. Except, every step I took toward him only generated more distance.
“Rye,” I called to him. His expression didn’t change, and he didn’t blink—almost as if he wasn’t really himself, but a statue. Another statue.
High above, Grip cawed and flapped. The bird circled, shouting on and on like he was trying to warn Rye about something. About me?
“Rye!” I called again, and those eyes jumped to life, though they were the only part of him that did. They locked onto me as if I’d just awakened him in the dream with me.
I rushed forward, boots crunching faster. Yet Rye kept sliding back, the snowy expanse between us extending. The threat of never reaching him drove me to run harder, and I charged on as if the distance was something I could break beyond or outpace.
Grip came down, fluttering around me, and then at me, talons bared, beak open. The creature beat me into retreat the same way he had the day he’d sent me backpedaling from the Deadly Desert, which I’d almost rushed into. Unbeknownst to me, Grip had been protecting me at the time, operating on Rye’s orders.
But why was he trying to keep me away from Rye?
The bird cawed again and flitted off, feathers flying. Lowering my arms, I found that Rye had vanished.
The snow fell and the trees loomed, darkness pervaded all. Rye existed nowhere. But then I spun to find him standing behind me, both of his eyes milk white instead of just one.
Previously, whenever Rye wanted to connect with Grip, he would blink, his eye would go white, and through that eye, he could view whatever the bird saw.
“Rye,” I whispered, the word snatched from my mouth by the silencing cold.
He didn’t answer but, grabbing me by the hair, he forced me to my knees in the snow.
Next, the silver tip of his sword came to rest against my sternum.
“Long live the king,” he said in a dark voice that didn’t belong to him—and drove his blade into me.
I awoke with a scream, sitting straight up in the boat bed to face a darkened room, the embers in the hearth all but dead. And now, gratitude for that lantern that hung from its curled bow and its lone flickering flame surged through me.
Especially since there was no one there to bear witness to my fear.
Even if Morella had been a nightmare in her own right, I had experienced compassion from those treacherous hands as well as malice. She wasn’t here now. Though I couldn’t say I missed her, I did miss Jack. Especially in this moment when this stark cold room and the snowy nothing outside the windows amplified my aloneness. And my anxiety.
The dream, it had to just be a conglomeration of all the horrors I’d recently endured. Though it occurred to me as the wind moaned low, battering the castle walls, that this had been the first time I had dreamed of something pertaining to me since before Morella had seeded herself in my spirit.
The memory of that blank stare in Rye’s blank eyes encouraged yesterday’s nausea to revisit me. I shoved it down by climbing out of bed.
There was only one way I could think of to expel that dark and terrifying vision of Rye from my head. I needed to go to him.
Wrapping myself in my cloak, I went to the door and let myself out into the vacant and frigid hall.
The cold imbued in the stones stung my feet, but I didn’t feel like turning back to get my shoes. Especially not when the sting against my soles helped to anchor me in reality.
On I walked, past troops of closed doorways, down the corridor until I reached the end of the hall and the threshold of the stairs that would take me down to the base of the bell tower.
Something halted me, though.
A man’s voice…singing.
I paused, turning my head toward a separate set of steps in a tight channel that wound up.
At first, the lyrics drifted to me muddled, though the voice itself flowed beautifully; mellow and even, low but with a gorgeous timbre.
The voice was one I thought I knew. But then, who else could it belong to?
For a moment, I remained torn between continuing on my original path, making my way down to where Rye rested…or venturing upward, toward that song.
“What befell the yellow road?
That wound on and on
Toward the city of emeralds
Lost in a dream long gone.
Where once her steps tread
Silver as the falling rain,
The snow tumbles on and coats
a heart, a beast, a brain…”
Those lyrics, haunting and beautiful as the voice that spun them, won me over. Right along with my curiosity.
With one final glance in the direction where Rye waited, and would wait, I moved to take the ascending steps.
“Hard to tell witch from witch
When East ’twas bad as West
But then, true North has always been
Within this bloodless breast.”
Nearing the top of the steps, I slowed my climb, easing into a cold far fiercer than the one I’d faced in either my rooms or the hall. But that probably had something to do with the fact that the enormous chamber waiting at the steps’ summit happened to be missing part of its roof.
“Tell her night never left
When she took the sun away.
It’s just another reason
Why she couldn’t stay.”
Flurries filtered down through the large tear in the ceiling, dusting the barren floorboards. Pausing on the final step, I leaned forward, peering around the corner, toward that voice.
“Which way is what, though?
And where did the girl go?
Back to Kansas tripping
And that is all we—”
Seated on a stool, the silver buttons of his high-collared military-style frock coat undone, Nick had the metal plate covering his chest open. Nearby, the helmet-like mask I had come to know as his face sat on a desk.
And since he had his back to me, I might have still been able to save face, to duck back down the stairs before either of us met the gaze of the other.
But Nick sat in front of an enormous gilt-framed and freestanding mirror. One that, in addition to allowing him to spy me with his true eyes, revealed to mine…everything.