17. Chapter 17
seventeen
“Stay here,” commanded Rye as he waded past me. I turned as he brushed by, and for an instant, out of habit, I remained rooted.
But then, as he climbed from the waters and onto the rocks, his form thinning as it reverted to its scarecrow state, sodden clothes hanging loose once more, I spurred myself to go after him.
Rye did not look back as he ducked out of the cave. So he did not see me scrambling onto the rock ledge overhanging the pool. When I reached the narrow opening, I hesitated, stalled by the horrific sight of one of the guards splayed on his back, his head crushed to a pulp.
Rye claimed the fallen soldier’s sword just in time to dart out of the path of an enormous battle axe, which rained down from nowhere, controlled by a massive arm made of…rock?
“Nomes!” cried the remaining guardsman who rushed to Rye’s side, his own sword brandished.
Nomes?
Rye had mentioned them before, shortly after he’d discovered Morella’s presence within me. She and Rye had discussed these beings who dwelled in another kingdom outside of Oz—one that, like Ev, existed on the other side of the Deadly Desert. A dominion bordering Langwidere’s.
Morella had proposed that the Nome King was working with Langwidere and that the two foreign dignitaries had joined forces in their plan to overtake Oz. This surprise attack suggested Morella had been right.
How, though, had the Nomes found us? How could they have caught wind we’d be here?
This couldn’t be a chance encounter. Not unless the Nomes had already infiltrated and invaded this region, taking over similarly to how Langwidere had won the Emerald City.
“Look out!” I shrieked as a second hulking form approached Rye and the guardsman from behind, a spiked cudgel raised in one craggy fist.
Over eight feet tall, the creature had limbs as thick as small tree trunks, each chorded with bulging rock muscles.
Rye shoved the guard to the dirt and took the blow—one that smashed his bones with a sickening crunch, blasted him off his feet, and sent him flying like a ragdoll into the nearby rockface.
“Rye!” I burst out of the cave, rushing toward where he lay.
No, no, no!Not when I’d justgotten him back.
While the remaining guard rolled out of the way of the second Nome’s crushing steps, the other massive stone creature intercepted me, his melon-sized hand snagging me by the wrist. He hauled me up and off my feet, leaving me to dangle in his grasp.
My shoulder screamed with pain as I peered up at the towering being, stunned into stillness by a pair of white-glowing eyes embedded in a colossal but humanlike face with a square jaw, pointed stone nose, and flat stone teeth. Like his comrade, he wore a wide leather belt and, below that, a studded leather battle kilt. More thick leather straps crisscrossed his otherwise bare chest, its defined muscles composed as well of jagged rock.
The remaining guardsman shouted as the other Nome snatched him up.
“I think this is the witch,” said the creature that held me, his rumbling bolder-on-bolder voice like that of thunder.
“All the more reason to smash her quick,” snarled the second gravelly voice as he slung the guard against the mountainside like a child discarding a toy. The sickening double crunch that sounded—first with impact, and then when the guard landed—told me the man could not have survived.
That’s when my mind stopped. That’s when I stopped.
The carnage and death, the kneejerk violence, and the abrupt overhaul of circumstances derailed my thoughts—my capacity to think or react.
Morella.Of all people, why did I wish she was here?
At that moment, if I could have had her back, I might have welcomed her in. She would have known what to do. She wouldn’t be blanking like this. She would—
“The Princess wants the witch queen alive,” snarled Axe Nome—the one who held me.
“The Princess isn’t who we answer to,” replied Cudgel Nome as he stalked toward me, heavy feet shaking the earth, leaving imprints in the dry dirt, “and King Roquat didn’t say nothing about not killing no witch.”
Zppt.
“Her name is Tippetarius,” spoke a voice I’d come to associate with that electric zap that signaled Pae’s sudden appearances and disappearances. “And, unfortunately for you two, I am under strict orders to keep her thoroughly un-smashed.”
Dully, I glanced up. From his crouched perch on Cudgel Nome’s shoulder, the demon stared back, his expression tight with worry. Yet determination glinted in those luminous yellow eyes. And something about that stirred me from my terror—the shock I had unwittingly allowed to overtake me.
As it turned out, I wasn’t alone.
More than that, I wasn’t Morella. As Pae had said, I was Tip.
What would Tip do? And what did it take to step into a lost princess’s found shoes?
A true witch’s.
Cudgel Nome swatted at his shoulder—at Pae—who, in a feline-like leap, sprang onto my captor, Axe Nome.
“Drop the Tipsy,” grunted Pae as he locked his arms around the stone man’s thick and rocky neck.
Axe Nome growled, releasing me so that he could seize the demon.
Incredibly, I landed on my feet, but just as I backpedaled out of the path of Axe Nome’s stomping, Cudgel Nome rushed me, weapon raised, rock face scowling, blunt teeth grinding.
The earth shook beneath his feet—and mine, but I held steady.
I lifted my palm to him and dove deep in search of my powers—the only weapon or method of defense I possessed since Pae had resorted to zipping in and out of sight to keep Axe Nome distracted.
Though I wanted to spare a glance to Rye, to see if he might have risen, I didn’t dare. And it was the thought that Rye might again be gone, this time for good, that summoned from within me a familiar sensation—one I’d experienced only once before in the throne room of the Emerald City Palace that day I’d met Rye—when he’d threatened to have Jack smashed. Fire had erupted from me then and, in this moment, it did again, issuing not from my extended hand but once more as it had done before, from the earth beneath my feet.
The flames—flaring the same eerie and luminous green of the spring waters—raced in a thread to meet with the feet of my attacker.
“Gar!” shouted Cudgel Nome as the fire danced up—and into him, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared by diving between the crevices of his form. Then my fire was no more.
I kept my hand up, blinking rapidly at my failure.
Behind me, Pae grunted and snarled, and Axe Nome’s feet pounded the dirt. Sounds that told me the demon currently had his own problems. Just when I resolved to run, though, Cudgel Nome jolted, his glowing white eyes widening with shock.
His mouth fell open to reveal a separate glow emanating from within—luminous green like the fire.
That glow crawled up and into those eyes, overtaking their whiteness. Then cracks began to snick into being, the thin wandering fissures bleeding more of that glowing green, which brightened with intensity.
“Wha’d you do, witch?” snarled Cudgel Nome, who only just managed to enunciate the final word before his stone jaw, unhinging, toppled free of his head to land at his feet.
A horrible wail escaped him next—a low siren of pain and fear—as the rest of his figure began to follow suit, parts of him dropping and sliding off in mini avalanches as the green light continued to dissolve whatever force had held him together in the first place.
His shoulder collapsed next, landing hard enough to shake the ground since it carried his arm and that cudgel with it. His head tipped backward then and dropped free like a loosened boulder from a mountainside. The light in his eyes snapped out the moment his skull met the dirt, sending chunks of earth flying.
The headless Nome’s knees then buckled. His legs crumbled as the trunk of his body tipped forward.
Only when he landed with a thunderous boom, his form rupturing into a pile of glowing rocks, did I lower my hand. As I did, the luminosity emanating from within the rubble at last died.
My task complete, I swung around to find Pae dangling by the neck from the outstretched fist of the other Nome—Axe Nome, whose innards had now caught the green glow as well.
The fire—it must have spread to both of them.
“Noooo,” groaned the Nome as the same process of collapse took place but more rapidly.
The rocky hand holding Pae opened. The demon, gaping at me, dropped lithely onto his feet. An instant later, however, he sprang to one side to avoid being crushed by the same arm that had held him when, freed from its anchoring, the limb came crashing down.
“Nooooooo,” bellowed the Nome as he dropped his axe and, in a pitiful show, scrambled to pick up the fallen appendage. His attempt to reattach his arm only hurried the fracturing of the other since the weight of the first arm tore the second from its joint. Both limbs crumpled, collapsing into a heap of loose stones. The Nome’s legs went next, then his torso.
“Witch!” bellowed the stone creature before his head rolled off, down the mound that had once been his body, and then across the dirt, his glowing eyes snuffing the moment his skull came to a halt at my feet.
Blinking, I glanced up from it to Pae who huffed and puffed nearby, hands braced on his knees, eyes wide on me.
“Well,” he wheezed, “now I know why Morella was so upset when I evicted her.”
I frowned. Did his comment mean that Morella, with all her power, had never similarly defeated her enemies?
“We’ve got to scat.” The demon sprinted to my side, still out of breath from his tussle. “There’s bound to be more rock heads, and you’re green enough—pun halfway intended—that I’m not willing to bet you can repeat what you just did on command.”
“Rye,” I whispered, peering back to where the king had fallen.
He’d vanished from where he’d lain, though, and a quick scan of my surroundings showed only shining silver rocks and the gray rubble of the Nomes.
But a whistle of metal through the air and a curse from Pae had me whipping back in the demon’s direction.
Rye, upright and restored, stood opposite Pae, sword still extended from the strike he’d made, expression fixed in a concentrated glower while Pae rebounded from the backflip that had likely saved the demon from losing his own head.
“How did I know this was going to happen?” grumbled the demon, who had just enough time to trace a portal in the air before Rye lashed at him again, the scarecrow’s movements precise, lightning-fast—deadly.
Pae darted out of reach of the flashing weapon, but it said something about Rye’s prowess that the blows missed the demon by mere seconds and inches.
“Rye, stop!” I shouted. But, of course, he didn’t.
“Appreciate the effort, Tips,” grunted Pae as he ran at me pell-mell. I didn’t even get a chance to brace myself before the demon caught me around the waist. Next, he slung me into—and through—the portal, which then zapped shut.
A dog yapped.
Backpedaling, I fell against something hard and cold. Something with arms that caught me.
Stained glass windows surrounded me, their images dancing with vivid color.
“Tip.”
The voice belonged to the person—the metal being—who now held me steady.
Nick.
Before I’d even known what had happened, Pae had sent me back to Winkie Country—to Nick and his snowy castle.
But that meant the demon was still in Gillikin Country, locked in battle with Rye who didn’t know Pae was—at least for the moment—working with us. On our side.
“Someone’s got to stop them,” I said between labored breaths.
“Rye made it then,” said Nick, his voice rumbling through me since I’d let myself slump against him. “Tell me he did.”
“I saw him before the portal closed,” answered Dorothy, her words breathless and full of relief. “Fighting with Pae.”
“Tip, what happened?” asked Nick.
“Nomes,” I said. “They came from nowhere. Two of them. I don’t know how they found us. Rye said the spring was hidden.”
Even while I spoke, I kept searching the air I’d been transported through. But the space remained empty—void. Would Rye kill Pae? Or would Pae abandon Rye? If he hadn’t already. Had they been ambushed by more Nomes?
“What of my men?” asked Nick.
“The Nomes killed the guards,” I said, “and nearly me and Pae. Rye was crushed but he…”
I trailed off because, obviously, Rye had been able to come back from his latest injuries. And hadn’t he once told me one of the reasons he never wanted to return to his human form was because this form, his scarecrow form, afforded him near invincibility?
“The path to the spring is warded by magic,” said Dorothy. “I found the cave this time because I remembered where the opening was. But Rye said he’d had to barter for the location. Someone had to have told the Nomes about the spring. Though that still doesn’t explain how they got there or how—”
“They’d known to look there in the first place,” finished Nick.
I started to speak, to command Nick to use the golden cap to call Pae back so that the demon would appear in another portal. That way, I could go in and get Rye. But then, with a sharp zap, another portal opened—this time from behind us, out in the hall.
Pae came barreling through, pushing Rye who landed hard on the stone floor, pinned beneath the demon who must have rushed him after aiming him toward the portal he’d made.
“King me!” growled Pae through a fanged grin before leaping to his feet, producing Rye’s stolen crown from nowhere, and popping it onto his head. “Oh wait.” He folded his arms. “Metal Mouth already did.”
I tore out into the hall as the guards flanking the door to the bell tower entrance brandished their spears at Pae.
“Stand down,” commanded Nick as he hurried through as well. While the guards heeded, Rye did not.
Sword still in hand, Rye kicked onto his feet and spun on Pae, unleashing a flurry of attacks, sword spinning, its silver glinting. Again and again, the demon skittered out of reach of that slinging, flashing blade. A smile teased at one corner of his mouth while Rye’s wrath consumed him.
“Pae, leave!” roared Nick even as Dorothy broke toward the fray at a run.
I almost called out to her—went after her to stop her, but too many things happened at once.
Pae vanished with a final, agile dodge. Rye swept his blade through the air where the demon had been, and Dorothy snagged Rye by his free arm.
Caught in the throes of his rage—infuriated even more by the sudden departure of his opponent—Rye veered on Dorothy and, grabbing her, he shoved her against a nearby wall, his sword raised and held to her throat.