23. Chapter 23
twenty-three
After the episode on the cliff, Rye had to carry me back to the castle. The enormous expenditure of magic had weakened me, and the resulting dizziness had also remained, leaving me unbalanced.
As we departed from the summertime circle cast by the blast that had broken the bracers, Rye’s human form fell away, and he became his scarecrow self yet again. Almost as if the magic I’d spent had soaked into the terrain. A clue that I could focus my magic on a physical area and not just an object. Or, in Rye’s case, a person.
I remained silent as Rye carried me, my bravery to ask him about us receding along with the strength of my powers—of my mind, which I’d also pushed to its limits. Still, I couldn’t help looping my arms around his shoulders, resting my cheek against his chest.
Rye once again failed to return my affection, but he didn’t seem to mind it either.
After delivering me to one of the high-backed chairs in the dining hall of Nick’s castle, he departed to retrieve the mysterious messenger from the Emerald City.
While I waited, I stared into the flames that danced in the hearth.
Disconnected and dulled by fatigue, my mind floated and flipped through my most recent memories—the extraction of Morella, meeting Dorothy, reviving Rye in the spring, allying with Pae.
Battling with the King of Oz.
Freeing myself from the bracers…
Drained, I examined my arms, which still bore faint imprints from the cuffs. Somewhere along the way, I’d become accustomed to their tightness, heaviness, and pressure. How much lighter did I feel now without them? How much freer?
Sebastian, too, flitted through my thoughts as the warmth of the fire gradually thawed my frozen limbs and the numbness coating the shock of everything; my powers exploding like that, the way I’d struck this land of ice and winter with a patch of summertime that had persisted even as Rye and I had left its perimeter.
If I could do that—create an oasis in a winter wasteland—and if I could destroy Nomes, if I could open portals to other worlds, if I could change my surroundings… If I could do these things, I could also go to retrieve Sebastian.
He had come for me, hadn’t he? Left everything behind and risked all.
Even if Rye had only been trying to goad me, he’d still been right about that part of what he’d said. Sebastian wouldn’t be here in Oz if not for me.
To reach Sebastian, I would have to come up with a plan. I would have to share that plan with Rye, too. And Rye—he would have to respect my decision. He would have to agree. This wasn’t a job I was willing to delegate. Not with Sebastian’s life on the line.
Whoever this person was who had traveled from the Emerald City to Nick’s quadrant of Oz, this figure who had helped Cahal from inside the palace—they had to be the one who had shared the information of Sebastian with Rye. But…who could it be?
Who on our side could have gained access to the Emerald City Palace after the siege and survived such a perilous infiltration? Who had managed to free Cahal before escaping the city to head to the bleak and wintery West?
I had my answer when a scruffy, red-headed man flumped into the seat across from mine.
“Piss snow, it’s cold as iceberg pits here,” he snipped. “Don’t see how you can stand it.”
“Tavish!”
My spine shot straight, hands gripping the armrests, eyes bugging with disbelief.
“Tip,” he grunted. Then he frowned. “Oh, pardon me.”
As I blinked at him, rocked by his sudden appearance, unable to comprehend his presence, Tavish pushed onto his feet again and delivered a curtsy—one similar to the bob he’d given me the first night I’d met the cook in the kitchen of his Emerald City tavern, TheTrash Can.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Tavish’s tavern had been playing host to a carnival act—one performed by three people from my world. My friends; Sebastian, Ginger, and her fiancé, Andre.
Rye had been the one to introduce me to Tavish, who was known throughout the Emerald City and beyond for his cooking. Though Tavish possessed the same rugged, roguish, and somewhat rumpled appearance as before, his frame had grown leaner since last I’d seen him, his face a touch more weathered.
Speechless, I rose.
The last time I’d seen, or rather heard Rye’s cooking teacher and friend, the tavern owner had been berating Rye while helping the king to smuggle me out of the fallen Emerald City.
It had been one of Tavish’s horses that Rye had borrowed to achieve the escape. At the time, I’d only been half-conscious, fading in and out since Rye had drugged me.
It struck me now how Rye must have told Tavish where he was going when he fled with me—a telltale sign that Rye held much trust for Tavish. Perhaps even as much trust as he held for Nick.
Closing the distance between myself and Tavish, I flung my arms around him and pulled him into a squeeze.
“Oof,” he grunted. “Watch it, I just ate a whole Winkie Hen. Braised in butter and stock and garnished with lemon and jewel fruit. Yes, I made it because no one in this rotted tooth of a castle knows how to cook. Except for maybe Rye, if he hasn’t forgotten everything I taught him while trying not to die.”
“I thought you might have been killed,” I said.
“Rye tried to get me to leave with you two that night,” he said. “But I couldn’t just up and desert my whole life. Rather die than start over again. Good thing I stayed in the city, though, eh? Otherwise, there’d likely be a dead lion and that mangy maned bum owes me money.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. Pulling back from him, I clasped him by the shoulders, searching his eyes for a clue as to how he’d gotten out of the besieged city, let alone into the Emerald City Palace to help Cahal. “I know you must have used the tunnels to sneak into the palace. But—”
“Dog spit,” scoffed Tavish. “It wasn’t my idea to go in that great glowing eyesore of a castle.”
I blinked into his bottle-green eyes, more confused than ever.
When The Wizard had built the Emerald City Palace, he’d included a network of interlocking secret passageways that wove through the palace and beneath it. One of those underground offshoots led to Tavish’s tavern, which was how Rye and Tavish had first met—when Rye, who did not need to sleep, had gone wandering one night.
“Told Rye to leave me out of all these political matters,” said Tavish. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’m not a soldier. But…I met a fine one. Though it scared the living tater dung out of me the night I came in to find him sitting at that table in the tavern’s kitchen—seeing as he didn’t have no head. Not that having a head makes him any less petrifying. He could write, though. And did he have a story to tell.”
I tilted my head at Tavish, trying to sort through his odd way of speaking and to keep up.
But then a slender shadow fell over me, and someone extended a flower my way. A large yellow one, its petals drooping but still attached—as if the bloom had traveled far and had lost some of its freshness along the way.
More arresting than the flower itself, though—the sunflower—was the hand that offered it to me. Someone had carved several digits of that hand from light wood, fusing them with joints at every place any normal hand had them. Some parts of the hand had been fashioned from dark, wood too, though—the hue of bitter chocolate. It was that hand that now commanded my full attention.
This hand. It couldn’t belong to…
He had died. Right before my eyes. His pumpkin head smashed to bits.
But then. The head he had lost that night the city had fallen to Langwidere—it had not been the one I had carved for him back in Kentucky that same day I’d come to Oz. The head that had been smashed by Langwidere herself had been a different pumpkin, one with a far more vicious countenance that Jack had carved for himself. And Tavish had just said that this person, this “soldier,” had appeared headless in his tavern.
Jack knew where some of the entrances to the secret passageways in the palace were because he’d been there when Rye had accessed them to come get me. And that day Cahal had come to the Emerald City against Rye’s command, the day of our false wedding—a wedding that even the lion had believed to be real—hadn’t Cahal knocked Jack’s head free? He had. And Jack’s body had remained animated. It had even chased after its own fallen pumpkin head.
Langwidere had smashed part of Jack’s body as well as his head. But these mismatched fingers… Nick must have replaced them since he had been the one to design and build Jack’s body.
With all these possibilities swimming in my head, I couldn’t bring myself to look up at the figure beside me—the impossibly tall figure that truly could only be one person. One being.
“Mom?” came that voice I never thought I would ever hear again.
To steady myself, I placed my hand over the one offering me the flower, and that hand provided support. Support that I needed as my eyes trailed up his darkly clad form to his face—the very same I had carved that day in Mombi’s tent before I’d ever known about Oz. Before I’d ever known I’d been staring into the round hollow eyes of a chimera who would soon become one of my dearest friends.
“Jack,” I said, the tightness in my throat squeezing all voice from the word, the name.
Jack’s expression never changed. Something about the magic in him, though, a magic that had sprung from me without my even knowing it, allowed me a peek into his emotions.
A mix of happiness and sadness wafted off him, swirling around me, through me. Fear existed, too. Or maybe worry was a better word. His concern… It circled my unborn reaction to his presence, his return.
“Jack,” I said again. “My Jack.”
“I know you thought I got smashed,” he said. “I did get smashed. But…not all of me.”
Tears rushed free without forewarning. They fell down my cheeks as I searched those giant circular holes that served as his eyes.
“My other head,” he said, “this head, was still up in my room. In the back of the closet where I stored it when I got mad at you.”
So. Jack had been angry with me. Over Morella or Rye. Both.
“This head is where my mind went when my second head got smashed,” Jack explained. “All I could see in the closet was darkness. But when I concentrated, I could also see from my body. As if I’d been put back together again. Even though I was broken, I could still get up. But…I knew better than to leave the secret passageways. Someone would see me. So, I went straight to the place Rye told me to go if trouble ever got real bad. And trouble… Well, you know it got bad.”
“Bad” scarcely covered it. Things had gone to literal hell. They had done so shortly before Jack had died. When I believed he had.
Now he was back. Himself. Here. Mine.
“Jack.” I tightened my hand around his. “Are you really real?”
I looked away finally, toward the entrance of the dining hall, which I now found populated by several figures. Rye, Dorothy, Nick…
Guards had gathered in the room, too, since they had taken to accompanying Dorothy.
Everyone stared at me. And I…could only look back up at Jack.
“Tavish and I snuck back into the palace the way I’d left,” said Jack, continuing with his tale. “Then, after he got my head, we returned to the passageways. We navigated to the dungeons and freed Cahal.”
“Shaved a couple of years off in the meantime,” grumbled Tavish as he reclaimed his chair. “Not that I expect to have many more now that there’s a war. Another war.”
“Mom,” said Jack, extending the wilted flower to me, the movement seeming to insist I take it. Or perhaps Jack was confused over why I had yet to accept it. “Did…did I do good, Mom?”I took the flower, which straightened at my touch, its stem strengthening as its petals became rejuvenated, their yellow brightening in hue.
Hello, yellow.
“Yes, Jack,” I managed as I moved in to wrap my arms around his narrow middle and press my face into his shirt. “You did wonderful. Better than wonderful. I…”
“I did my best,” he said, one of those wooden hands coming to rest on my upper back.
More tears. They soaked into Jack’s clothes, so I turned my head to rest my cheek against his wooden chest. Blinking, still halfway unwilling to believe this could be real—that Jack could be real—I caught sight of Rye, who stared straight into me with those still-haunted eyes.
“Jack’s efforts to free Cahal have made him a war hero,” Rye said, his voice echoing in the cavernous room. “Tavish, too.”
“Tavish isn’t nothing!” the tavern owner barked back at Rye through cupped hands.
“They’re both to be honored,” Rye said.
“Awwww, grout curds,” groaned Tavish. “I don’t want it! Everything I want is back in the Emerald City. The place where I can’t never show my mug again thanks to you and your queen. And what did I say, Tip? I told you not to marry the damn scarecrow.”
“Marry?” The word burst from Dorothy, loud enough to echo through the chamber as she hurried several steps into the room, her widened eyes flying from Rye to me and back again.“You’re married?”
So, Rye hadn’t told her about the wedding. Or that it had been fake. Confusingly, Nick hadn’t told her, either. With so many other unwitting people in the room, though, and Pae’s listening ears and prying eyes never far off, I dared not set her straight. Especially when Rye—when Oz—needed our union, at least for the time being, to appear legitimate.
I flicked a panicked glance to Nick, who stared into Dorothy. Was it my imagination, or was his metal frame more rigid than normal? Could a metal man show tension? Feel it?
And this abrupt reaction from Dorothy. What did it say about her and Rye?
“You got married?” Dorothy asked, her voice shrinking, her face draining of color.
“I should have told you yesterday that I’d wed,” Rye said, a knife sliding into my heart at the cool way he spoke to her. Strangely enough, the pain it delivered was for Dorothy, who had missed so much in her absence. On top of that, Rye had just lied to her.
I had not been immune to his lies. He’d nearly destroyed me with them a scant hour ago. But he’d had reasons for uttering those lies. Rye reasons, yes, but reasons all the same.
Dorothy looked just as shattered as I must have earlier when Rye had claimed to hate me.
And didn’t I remember too keenly how I had felt that evening back in my world when, while in the big top with Sebastian and Ginger, I’d been certain those two were engaged?
That was back when I’d thought I’d loved Sebastian. I had loved him, and I still loved him. But I also hadn’t known what love truly was. I hadn’t known Rye…
Still, at that moment in the big top, under the low lights of the kerosene lamps, my face must have looked like Dorothy’s did now. Stricken, disbelieving, and, more distantly…horrified.
“I told you I would come back,” she said to him. “I told you.”
With that utterance, I at long last had my answer regarding how Dorothy felt about Rye. Who, true to character when faced with someone’s rawest emotions, didn’t say anything.
Dorothy turned and hurried out of the room, brushing past Nick who peered after her.
Silence claimed the dining hall.
The subject of everyone’s attention now, Rye hesitated. And then he followed in Dorothy’s footsteps, leaving me, Tavish, Nick, Jack, and the smattering of guards to peer after him.
No doubt the guards would have this story circulated through all of Winkie Country by sundown, which was only a few hours off. The rumors of a love triangle could not now be stopped. Hopefully, though, Rye would tell Dorothy the truth about us in secret.
What else will he tell her in secret?
Unbidden, the question swirled up to stall my heart, which had taken enough of a beating that day.
I didn’t want Dorothy to love Rye. And it would kill me to learn that Rye loved her.
More than either of those things, I didn’t want to stand in the way if Dorothy happened to be the reason Rye had told me he could not return my love. If he could not give his heart because…someone already possessed it.
“Mom,” said Jack, drawing my attention back to him and this moment. One that was supposed to be filled with joy. And it was.
Peering up at Jack, my Jack, my soldier, I brushed a hand along his orange cheek.
“Mom,” he said, his voice dropping low, nearly to a whisper. “There’s something—”
“I’ve done it, now,” muttered Tavish bleakly, “haven’t I? Brought women trouble to my friend who, like me, has troubles enough.”
“Rye can handle himself in any situation,” I told Tavish. “And she was bound to find out soon. Before the night was out, I’m sure.”
The way I spoke these words reminded me of the way Rye spoke sometimes. Coldly, matter-of-factly, and without inflection. The ease with which I’d affected this persona—that of someone in power, someone with secrets to hide because holding those secrets close helped to keep people alive—disturbed me.
I didn’t like reminding myself of Rye. Or falling into this understanding of what it meant to have a level of responsibility close to his. Of understanding that darker side of him a little more… So, I fussed over Jack’s clothes, smoothing his rumpled black shirt, adjusting the lapels of his long, dark blue traveler’s cloak, garments he must have picked out for himself somewhere along the way.
Did that mean Oz and its people had been kind to him even though he was a chimera, a creature Ozians had grown to fear due to their ties to witches? I hoped so.
“Mom,” said Jack, his hands taking mine, “Sebastian is still at the palace. I—”
“Rye told me,” I assured him, taking that hand and pressing its wooden knuckles to my cheek. “You couldn’t get to him. Just Cahal.” Was that why Jack was so worried over whether I would be glad to see him? “Jack, it’s okay. I understand.”
“No, Mom. I need to tell you something. I tried to get to him but…” He hesitated and, leaning down, he brought that jagged mouth closer to my ear. “I didn’t tell Rye this part,” he whispered, “but…Sebastian… He wouldn’t come with me.”
I blinked several times, my mind knitting and reknitting the words together, trying to make them make sense.
“Rye said he wasn’t hurt,” I replied, keeping my voice low as well. “Did you run out of time? Did someone spot you?”
“No, Mom,” Jack said, frustration entering his tone. Because there was something I wasn’t getting. Something I wasn’t picking up on. Something Jack obviously wanted me to piece together myself so that he wouldn’t have to say it. But then. He did.
“Mom. He said he wanted…to stay.”