19. Chapter 19
nineteen
We organize a rendezvous.
Rye’s words to Nick replayed in my head over and over. Each time, they slammed my sternum and pierced my already thoroughly skewered heart anew.
Of course, there must be something deeper to Rye’s plan. He wouldn’t just deliver me to Langwidere in exchange for Cahal. He must have some strategy, some plot in mind.
Maybe.
I sighed as, through the crosshatched window, I scanned the snowy landscape of Winkie Country. Seated in the window’s nook, one sequestered in a small library, I’d spent the last few hours marking the progress of a snowstorm as it moved in, clouds overtaking the land and the castle, flakes as big as feathers sifting from the gray.
I’d pulled a random book from the shelves, though I’d yet to bring myself to open it. I had too much swimming through my brain.
At the forefront of my thoughts? Rye’s return. And this plan he was cooking.
Yet another plan from him that wracked my nerves. Even though, logically, it shouldn’t.
Strategically speaking, handing me over to Langwidere made no sense. Not when Rye had forfeited the heart of Oz—its capital—just to smuggle me out. Not when he had abandoned the people there to personally ensure I lived.
I clenched the book tight, gritting my teeth as well.
No wonder Rye could hardly bring himself to look at me.
After such a tremendous sacrifice, a part of him must hate me.
And yet, I still held onto the hope that some part of him might love me, too.
He’d said he couldn’t. Was that because of his station? Or because the things that had happened due to my presence in Oz, the consequences I’d brought with me, had soured him toward me?
Maybe the reason behind his refusal was as simple as this: he’d already given his heart to another.
“If it comes down to you against Slippers, I think I know who I’m betting on.”
I jumped at the voice and glanced toward Pae, who watched me from the doorway, tail swaying behind him, the swiftness of its to and froes betraying some anxiety.
“Apologies,” said the demon as he strolled in to take the seat next to me before crunching into yet another apple, this one green. He chewed and swallowed the bite. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I am trying to keep a low profile, though. Since more than a few people in this castle happen to hate me. With your stitched beau—arguably the most powerful person in Oz—topping that list.”
I frowned at the title of “beau,” a word choice that reminded me of how so many, including the demon, believed Rye and I to truly be married.
“I don’t have anything against Dorothy,” I said. A half-truth. “But even if I did, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Oz who would bet against her.”
Pae’s fangs gleamed as he grinned. “Then it looks like I’m poised to be a very rich demon.”
I rolled my eyes. Flipping through the book, I admired its illustrations, which featured scenes of the Ozian countryside and renderings of various herbs, mushrooms, and other botanical specimens.
After Rye had so brusquely left, Dorothy had ventured off after him and Nick. I’d returned to my rooms to discard my soaked clothes, bathe, and change. Since there’d been no hope that I would be able to sleep, I’d then gone wandering. Which was how I’d made my way to this corner of the castle.
“Did Nick summon you back here?” I asked when Pae didn’t reply. “Or did you return on your own?”
With things so volatile between the demon, Dorothy, and Rye, I hadn’t expected Pae to reappear this soon.
“Nick asked me, as a favor, to retrieve the bodies of the guards from the Silver Mountains,” Pae said. “And…to scout the area for more Nomes.”
I glanced down at my pale, cream-colored slippers and let his words sink in.
I’d been thinking about those poor guards. And…trying not to.
In truth, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the horrible things I’d witnessed out of my head.
I’d also been thinking about the Nomes that had killed Nick’s men and what their presence at The Silver Mountains, and in Oz, meant for the war.
The war.
No denying now thatOz truly and officially was at war once more. And after only a scant four years of peace.
Then again, part of the war had been waging behind the scenes before Langwidere’s christening invasion. The princess’s clandestine movements had begun tying Rye’s brain in knots months ago. And since Morella had hidden part of herself in the clock tower, had the last war truly ended?
After Nick and Rye had left together earlier, I had been tempted to go after them as Dorothy had. To demand to be let in on the conversation since the discussion was bound to circle so many of my current concerns. I’d thought twice about that impulse, though, since Nick had been the one to request privacy and not Rye. Probably—at least I hoped—Nick had told Rye about Morella, along with Pae’s part in her extraction. Obviously, the two kings must have discussed me.
Not Tip me. But…Ozma me.
“You didn’t have to do that, did you?” I said to Pae. “Retrieve the guards.”
“Little danger in the task for me,” he said with a shrug. “There weren’t any more Nomes to report on. And Tin Head asked nicely. Aside from that, no one’s ordering me around and, so long as it doesn’t get to that again, I can play nice.”
He snapped another bite of his apple and a smile tugged at one corner of my mouth when he scratched the top of his head with the tip of his tail.
There was something about the demon that, well…I liked.
Maybe it was dangerous to hold even a modicum of affinity for Pae. No one else seemed to. Least of all, as Pae himself had already observed, Rye.
“I’m guessing Metal Man told Stitch Face about the details of my bargain with him,” said Pae. “Which hopefully means I don’t have to keep playing Dodge the Blade with Scare Brain. I’m fast. Faster than him. But…he moves just quick enough, you know?”
I did know. Rye moved like lightning. His thoughts sparked even faster.
In too many instances, they’d zipped miles ahead of mine.
Thus…these bracers.
Leaving the book open in my lap, I lifted my arms and turned my wrists this way and that. The cold silver glinted orange and yellow, catching hues from the sconces lining the stone walls. The firelight made the rubies burn as well.
“It’s a wonder, isn’t it?” asked Pae. “What you accomplished despite those cuffs.”
I snuck a glance at him. “Nick told you about the bracers?”
“I wouldn’t have attempted pulling Morella out of you if not for that armor,” he admitted. “I’ll gamble—and roll high while I’m at it. But suicide isn’t on my to-do list. Interesting, though, that you could tap into your powers even if she couldn’t with them on.”
“Like you said…I didn’t really know how I did what I did back there.”
“You have Fairy blood.” Pae gestured at me with the apple. “A lot. More than Morella.”
I turned my head his way, blinking. Questions lept to my lips, but I sifted through them for the ones that wouldn’t give too much away. Ultimately, that led me to discard them all. No one had made an announcement, after all, about my ties to Ozma. That was still a secret. And Pae wasn’t someone I wanted to figure out my identity. Yet…
“You seemed surprised at what I did to the Nomes,” I observed instead.
“Surprised?” Pae scoffed. “Tipa-totaler, you disassembled them with green fire.”
“Morella never did anything like that?” I asked. “And…you know you can just call me Tip.”
“Tip is too simple a name for someone like you,” he said, though almost more to himself.
Funny how he used observations to sidestep questions too.
My turn.
“Rye hates you,” I said. “Enough to show it. That’s a lot.”
Pae cringed but covered it quickly with a smile. “That obvious, huh?”
I almost laughed.
“Scare Brain hates me even more than Slippers does,” Pae admitted. “But only because of what happened to her.”
“What did you do to her, Pae?” I asked. “And why do you call her that?”
“I didn’t do anything to her.” He pivoted toward me on the bench, gesturing to himself with the hand holding the apple.
I leveled him with a skeptical glare. I might have been naive when it came to Oz, its inhabitants, my powers, and magic in general, but one thing I’d had too much experience with was tricksters. Mombi and Pae might not have been cut from the same cloth per se, but their tactics looked enough alike that I couldn’t help but compare their characters.
“It was the poppies,” he said, his expression sobering. “Morella poisoned them and bewitched one, which she infused with an extra ingredient. One contributed by…me.”
“Which was?” I’d known before this confession that Morella had poisoned the poppies. Pae’s involvement didn’t surprise me. But Rye’s hate for Pae seemed to run even deeper than his hate for Morella. Which again alluded to some personal injury having been dealt. A deeply personal injury. But Pae had already said Rye hated him because of some horribleness that had befallen Dorothy.
Pae drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“Morella bewitched one of the poppies to have thorns, and she infused those with demon’s blood,” he said. “Mine.”
I tilted my head at him. “And what does demon’s blood do to someone like Dorothy?”
“Aside from permanently binding her spirit to mine?” he asked. “It sent her soul to the Under Realm when she nearly died. And so, while the poisoned poppies were meant to kill her, my blood… Well, that was meant to damn her.”
“Hell?” I asked. “You sent Dorothy to hell?”
“Mmm,” mused Pae, “that precise wording leaves room for debate.”
I shook my head at him, desperate to grasp the particulars. “You said the poison bound you to her. I don’t understand.”
“The poppy with the thorns seized and wound Dorothy, just as Morella intended. And, to this day, my blood swims in her veins.”
“The spring waters didn’t fully heal her?” I asked.
“The spring brims with Fairy magic,” replied Pae. “Its waters pulled out the poison. But demon blood… Well, it fuses with the blood of anyone who takes it internally. Accepting it is, in most circumstances, an agreed-upon rite. In this instance, however, both affected parties were…tricked.”
“Morella used the golden cap to compel you to give her your blood?”
“The cap’s powers are great, but it does have limits. My blood is mine to give.”
I let that bit of information ripen within me for several moments before pressing for more. Pae had already revealed so much to me. Perhaps he would tell me everything and perhaps not. No matter what, I’d do well to recognize that we’d embarked on sensitive territory.
“Morella told you she wanted your blood for herself,” I ventured. “She told you she wanted to form a bond with you.”
“I thought she loved me,” said Pae. “Even when she used the cap to force me to do things I hated, I wanted to forgive her because I thought she… Taking my blood would have fused her soul to mine. Death for her—the thing that, for a time, I feared most—would no longer have been a barrier to our union. Worst case scenario, we could be together in the Under Realm. Which…isn’t hell so much as it is…nowhere. Another world. A different dimension. A place outside of time and space. A catchall for lost souls like mine. Like hers…”
A new fissure snicked through my heart—this one for Pae.
From what I was gathering, the exchange of his blood had, for him, amounted to something of a…marriage. He had given that part of himself to Morella as a means of ensuring he would always be linked with her—no matter what.
After her betrayal, he must have wondered if Morella had ever cared for him at all. Or if she’d simply been grooming him and leading him on, using his emotions against him and exploiting his devotion to achieve her goals.
I knew how he felt. At least by a little. Morella had used me too. Tried to…
“Dorothy is still beholden to this bond?” I pressed, just to be certain. “And you are, too?”
“It’s part of her now,” replied Pae. “I…am part of her. And she, me.”
Those long and tension-filled stares between them when they’d first been reunited suddenly made much more sense.
“Earlier,” I said, “before you opened the portal to The Silver Mountains, you said you would be incapable of betraying her.”
“I could not now destroy Slippers without also destroying myself,” he said. “And to answer your earlier question, I call her Slippers because using her name is too personal. And I am already desperate for distance from her. Something I’m sure she pines for every day of her life as well. Because she feels me, too. Even from her own world—a realm I can’t reach because I’ve never been summoned there. But the die is cast. And we are linked. And that is why she hates me. It’s also why Rye longs for my head.”
“Killing you would solve the issue?”
“Killing me sends me back to the Under World. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nick could summon me back with the cap. Dorothy could summon me back with just my name. And perhaps that fuels the fire of Rye’s rage. That I’m not as punishable as he’d like.”
“Does…Nick know about this bond between you and Dorothy?”
“Rye knows. Dorothy knows. Morella knows. And now you know.”
I stilled, clutching the book still open in my lap. For every bit of light that Pae’s words brought to the overall situation, they also carried a swath of deeper darkness. That said, everything with Pae was starting to make a touch more sense now. Doubtless Nick would never have sent Dorothy through that portal with Pae if he’d known the truth about the blood bond. That didn’t explain, though, how Rye knew about it. Unless…
“Dorothy told Rye about how you two are linked?” I asked.
“He found out when he took Dorothy to the spring,” whispered Pae. “By that time, Dorothy’s soul had already been in the Under Realm. With her teetering that close to death, her spirit, tainted by my blood, didn’t have anywhere else to go. And so, I felt the reconnection when her soul rejoined her body after the spring waters pulled the poison. Mainly because the Fairy magic that entered her bloodstream flared in mine as well. While the pain was mild for her, it was excruciating for me. But the spring. Its waters do more than just heal, as I suspect you already know.”
I met his gaze, my eyes searching those suddenly too-serious yellow ones.
“It reactivates latent magic,” Pae explained. “The remnants of dormant spells and hexes. Dorothy had not been subject to any spells. But Rye…”
“Oh my God,” I whispered, “he attacked her.”
Thatwas why Rye had asked if he had hurt me. Not because Dorothy had been the one to react violently upon coming to in those waters but because he had.
“You didn’t warn me about that,” I snapped. “She didn’t warn me!”
“Dorothy doesn’t remember what happened in the spring. I ate that memory.”
“You ate the memory?” How did that work?
“And I didn’t tell you that tidbit because, frankly, I wanted to see how things would play out. No offense.”
Thiswas why I shouldn’t like Pae. He was playing this part for his own gain. He’d also admitted to being in love with Morella. Who was to say he didn’t still aspire to free her wraith? He’d been the one to seal her in that statue. How easy would it be for him to unseal her?
“Rye could have killed me,” I said.
He nearly had.
“Yes,” said Pae. “And those Nomes should have killed you. But…they didn’t. And neither did Rye.”
My mind replayed that moment in the spring when Rye’s actions had flipped from violent to…the opposite. But then I banished the images that surfaced, mostly so that Pae wouldn’t see me blush.
Pae had said the spring reactivated latent magic. So, while Rye’s violent reaction was likely tied to Eulalie, who had to have been the beautiful white-haired girl, Rye’s other reaction must have had something to do with my magic. While that explained why he had not transformed back into his scarecrow self the moment we physically parted, Pae’s explanations didn’t answer why Rye had kissed me—touched me—that way. Like he’d been operating from base need. Like I was his cure…and not the spring’s enchanted waters.
“If Rye attacked Dorothy,” I said, “how did she survive?”
“I possessed her.”
“You…?”
“I could sense the danger,” said Pae. “Through Dorothy, I could sense the attack as it was happening. I didn’t want Slippers to die. Not because I like her, mind you. But because I’m not ready to have a soul—least of all hers—tied to mine for eternity.”
“Which…suggests you think there’s a way to undo what has been done,” I said.
“Well.” Pae tilted his head one way and then the other as if considering. “There’s no method that I know of. But then, I never thought I’d see another witch in Oz. And certainly not one as powerful as you.”
“Are you saying you think I could do something about the bond?” I asked.
“Stranger things have been happening as of late,” he muttered before taking another bite of his apple.
I let that sit. And I mulled it over, weighing the prospect. I wasn’t supposed to be able to return Rye to his human form after all, and I wasn’t supposed to be able to access my powers with these braces on, either. So, perhaps I could figure out a way to sever the link between Pae and Dorothy.
There was no way I would dare promise such a thing. But…I could promise to try. Perhaps when I understood their situation and the magic behind it thoroughly enough. Not to mention my own magic…
“You can possess Dorothy,” I said. “Any time you like?”
“Ehhh,” said Pae, squinting. “She was weak enough in the spring that it took no great effort on my part to win control. I only stayed long enough to snap the scarecrow out of his trance. When he came to, I told him what he’d nearly done. If you want to get technical about it, I actually think he hates me more for that than for the bond.”
“You don’t mean for stopping him.”
“For waking him up to the fact he needed to be stopped. And that he’d almost harmed his…well, whatever Dorothy was to him. Is to him.”
“You can’t tell?”
“Not anymore.”
I opened my mouth to ask more about that, to dig for the truth behind Dorothy and Rye, but I stopped myself. Because the person I needed to ask about that was Rye. Asking anyone else would simply complicate an already complex situation. Perhaps, though, Pae could shed light on Rye’s violent reaction itself.
“What…did Eulalie do to Rye?” I asked. “What was the magic that was reactivated in him?”
Pae blinked slowly. “The blackest kind I know of. But Eulalie is dead. And her magic died with her.”
“Morella said the death of a witch meant her magic couldn’t be undone.”
“And yet,” murmured Pae, “the word around the kingdom is that you undid it. Temporarily, perhaps. And only partially. But still.”
I pressed my lips into a line. The demon glanced my way, then toward the ceiling.
I started to speak, to tell him I would help him if I could, but Mombi flittered through my mind. When she used to read tarot cards for carnival patrons, she would always hold back on information, keeping hostage the one thing her enquirer wanted to know more than anything. She’d hold that information hostage, releasing it only in return for what she wanted—more money.
I could use the same tactic now. Or my own version of it. A shrewd version, rather than a malicious one. Because Pae’s loyalty didn’t belong to us. Perhaps, though, I could earn it.
“Dorothy entered the spring again earlier,” I said, keeping my expression impassive as I shifted the subject, trying to do and say the things a real queen might in my situation. “Yet you weren’t in pain this time.”
“Just because you didn’t see me in pain,” said Pae, “doesn’t mean that I wasn’t. Thankfully, though, she didn’t have any open wounds this round. Which made the episode tolerable.”
More tricks. More hiding. More covert agendas.
“You’re telling me this in case there’s something I can do,” I said.
“And also…so that you will understand why I am hated. And because it is important for you to know that I am soul-bound to a woman whom I do not love. That, by the way, is pain.”
Again, my anger toward him abated. I didn’t understand what Pae—and Dorothy—were suffering because of this bond. Nor could I. I could, however, comprehend the gravity of their plight. And now, didn’t I see why Pae had sealed and bound Morella’s spirit? Even if that had been painful too, he had done it. For his own reasons as well as Nick’s.
I still didn’t believe the demon wouldn’t one day—perhaps one day soon—undo the binding, but that didn’t mean I didn’t believe he truly was in pain.
“Rye thinks you poisoned Dorothy with your blood on purpose,” I said in a whisper. “And you think I can convince him otherwise. Is that, by chance, another hope you harbor?”
Because there must be some deeper reason behind this confession.
“I don’t care what he thinks,” Pae replied. “I don’t care what Dorothy thinks, either. Nor Nick. Though, I’m certain it would likely be disastrous if he found out about the bond. For everyone involved.”
“Because Nick has extended to you a certain amount of trust?”
“Because he wouldn’t believe my side of the story if he found out. Or even if I told him the truth. You believe me, though, don’t you, Tip?”
I did believe him. Because I knew Morella in a way frighteningly familiar to the way he did. We’d both been chained and beholden to her, though in different capacities.
“Still,” I said, “I can’t fight the feeling you want me to have this information for a very specific reason.”
“Your instincts serve you well,” replied Pae. “I am telling you all this for a reason, though I hesitate to label that reason as “specific.” The reason, the true reason I’m telling you any of this is because, at this stage in the game, you’re the only one who strikes me as having any true power.”
“You and I are already allies,” I replied. Because it was too dangerous to argue, acknowledge, or even mentally entertain the claim he’d just made. Rye was the King of Oz. Nick was the King of Winkie Country. And Pae, self-proclaimed or not, was the king of the demons.
“If you count yourself my ally,” said Pae, “then I count you as mine. But you must see how, for me at least, that makes only one.”
That I did open my mouth to argue. I stopped myself, though, because he did make a point. Rye despised Pae and technically held the power to remove the title bestowed upon him by Nick. Dorothy held sway with both Rye and Nick—not to mention the entire populace of Oz. And Nick? Nick had a golden cap. Perhaps he didn’t use its powers directly. At the same time, he had no qualms about holding those powers over Pae’s head.
“Also,” said Pae, the odd tone in his voice—one that suggested he hadn’t yet divulged all he’d come to say—shaking me from my thoughts. “I think it’s important for someone to know that, well… Circumstances being what they are…”
He trailed off, glowing yellow eyes flitting once again to the ceiling, to me, then back to the ceiling.
“Well,” he said, “if I’m the king of the demons of Oz—which I am—then, technically speaking, because she is bonded to me through blood, that makes Dorothy more or less... Um. Well. The queen?”