25. Chapter 25
twenty-five
I awoke inside a cage, my breath a puff of white in the cold.
With a gasp, I flittered my eyes open, scanning the cocoon of green, thorn-ridden vines that intertwined and interlaced in a net above and around me.
Flat on my back, tucked under a heavy quilt, I stared up through the mesh of leafy vines studded with ruby roses—all in various stages of unfurling. Above me, through this net, dwelled the cold stone ceiling of my room in Nick’s castle. Beneath me—softness and blankets.
I curled my fingers into the linins of my boat bed, which someone must have laid me in, and blinked rapidly. I tried also to make sense of the room’s frigidness, and this rose-vine pen I’d been wound in. Turning my head to the right, I marked the path of the climbers, which had crept through the slim window, the panes of which they’d nudged open.
Frost laced the glass but did not touch the flowers. Which had somehow bloomed in the dead of winter…
“What?” I murmured, turning my head left to spy through the grid of vines an orange pumpkin. A pumpkin head.
“Jack!” I called, resisting the urge to sit up since doing so would skewer me with thorns.
The vines wound Jack, too, pinning him to the carved wooden chair he sat on, one stationed directly next to the closed door. Except yellow roses instead of red dotted the vines that twined his frame, lashing him to his chair, thorns digging into his clothes.
“Jack,” I whispered, my breath speeding up, more small puffs of white leaving my lips.
“It’s okay, Mom,” said Jack.
It’s okay? This, whatever was happening, had happened, was most certainly not okay. And neither was I. Neither, it seemed, was he.
“Wh-what happened?” I asked, my lungs aching with every inhale, sore from exhaustion and a night of deep sleep in a frigid chamber.
With care, I propped myself up on my elbows, angling to try and see Jack more clearly through the prickly web encasing both me and my bed.
“You fell asleep on my shoulder,” Jack answered, his voice calm. Too calm. “So, I picked you up and carried you up the stairs and into this room—your room. I put you in your bed and covered you over so you wouldn’t get cold. Tavish says it’s cold here. He got burns on his hands on the way here. Burns from the cold. I didn’t know the cold could burn.”
I tilted my head at him—as much as I could—and shifted onto my side.
“I mean the roses,” I said. “What happened with these vines and the roses? Where did they come from?”
“Oh,” said Jack. “They crept in through the window while you slept. They crawled over to me and wrapped me up like this. Then they wandered over to you and braided themselves together while they grew.”
“Are you all right? The thorns. They’re sharp.”
Not only that, but one of the rose vines had curled its way into his mouth and out one of his eyes, popping a huge gold-toned rose the same hue as Jack’s sunflowers.
“I’m fine, Mom,” he said, like he didn’t care a wit he’d been bound up, his thin arms pinned to his sides, his chest and shoulders roped with toothy, flower-dotted bindings.
“Who did this?” I asked. “Is it Langwidere? Did…she find us?”
Jack turned his head my way, the vines that banded him creaking with strain. Then Jack tilted his head at me, that bright yellow rose absurdly resembling an eye.
“Mom,” he said, “you did this.”
“Me?” I swiped a few stray curls out of my eyes. “I didn’t.”
Even as I spoke these last two words, doubt crept in. Because I very well could have done this. Hadn’t I inadvertently triggered the stained-glass windows in the bell-tower chamber to animate? Hadn’t I, without meaning to, transformed Rye to flesh when the two of us were dancing at our wedding reception? Hadn’t I just had a conversation with Sebastian without trying to connect with him?
But…that didn’t explain how.
“How do you know this was me?” I asked.
“I can feel it,” he replied. “The vines, they feel like you. They…they feel like me, too.”
I blinked at that. And tried not to let my fear grow.
I needed to get out of this cage of flowers. I needed to get to Jack. So that I could face him dead on and peer into those eyes that, somehow, even in their emptiness, carried so much intelligence.
Shifting again, I searched my clothes for my blade, Sebastian’s, but of course it wasn’t there. I’d left it back in the Emerald City—embedded in Langwidere’s side. Unfortunately, the blow I’d landed hadn’t been a fatal one.
Next time, my attack would be more targeted.
I shifted again, searching the prickly barrier for a weak point. There wasn’t one.
“I can’t get out.” Panic snuck into my voice, which prompted Jack to move. With a swift jerk, one of his arms burst free of the thick vines, which gave easily. As if, for him, they’d been but straw.
My breath caught when Jack stood, unleashing his sword—the one Rye had given him—in the same motion. The vines slid away from him as he moved toward me, and I fell back, giving him room before he thrust his blade into the thicket of my prison.
He sliced upward with an easy motion, wielding the sword in a way too practiced for someone who hadn’t had their body for more than a few weeks. Someone who had been so innocent in those first days…
I sat up as he yanked back the vines, heedless of the thorns that could not puncture him. Then he sheathed his blade and motioned for me to rise.
I sat up and then stood on the bed. Next, I gasped with surprise when Jack took me by the waist and lifted me with ease out of the nest of vines—as if I was the one who most closely resembled a marionette.
After setting me on my feet, he released me.
For a moment, despite my shock over the vines—my unconscious creation of them—all I could do was stare into his shirt, memorize the buttons that climbed to his collar.
I smoothed the wrinkles with one hand, tutting over the small holes the thorns had ripped.
“It’s…still hard to believe you’re back,” I told him, swallowing against the lump in my throat.
“I never went away,” he said. “Not really. I just…changed.”
And he kept changing, too. Was he even the same as he’d been yesterday?
I pressed my palm flat to Jack’s chest, wishing I understood him better. Grasped how he worked, and what held him together.
My magic animated him, had given him life, but what did that mean? And what good were my powers if I still didn’t fully understand how they worked, or how to wield them?
Sure, I could make images in windows move. I could also grow roses in my sleep. I could connect with people I loved through dreams and visions. I could make portals.
But…could I save Oz?
Stepping away from Jack, I moved to the window, which the vines had kicked ajar in order to wend their way in. As a result, freezing air had overtaken the room. Goosebumps cropped up along my arms. I wrapped them around me as I sidled up to the frosted glass and peered out—and down.
Far below, the vines vanished into the thick silver mist, their buds fringed in frost and dusted by the snow. But…the greenery had to have been born from the earth. And something in me must have called to them—beckoned them. But why?
I’d been wrapped in a cage, and Jack had been lashed to that chair.
Did that mean some part of me felt the need to protect myself—and keep Jack stationary?
Was that a bad thing. Or a good thing?
“Mom,” Jack said, that soft voice beckoning to me.
“Mm?” I glanced back to Jack who again radiated that same uncertainty from yesterday. That distant, childlike fear that I could forget him, or even that I might have been glad to be rid of him.
“I wanted to say sorry,” he said. “But…I couldn’t until now. Because I didn’t want to talk about why in front of anyone else.”
I angled toward him, confused. “Sorry for what?”
“For telling Rye your secret,” he said, his voice low, soft. Too soft.
“You mean…for telling him about Morella,” I said.
Jack did not like Rye. Perhaps he even hated The Scarecrow. He hadn’t been shy about admitting as much to me before. Or even telling Rye himself. But as Morella’s influence over me began to grow, Jack had concluded that he—we—needed help. And that Rye was the only one he could trust who might be able to do anything about West.
Jack had been right about that. Horribly right.
Because Jack’s confidential confession to Rye was what had led the king to bind me with the bracers.
Jack still didn’t know how Rye had gotten me into the bracers. He didn’t know Rye had seduced me into a compromising position. Perhaps, though, by now, he suspected.
No matter what, if Jack hadn’t done what he’d done, if he hadn’t told Rye about West, the witch likely would have taken me over by now, as she’d threatened and promised to do time and again. So, as angry as I had been at both him and Rye, I had no right to be.
At least, not anymore…
“I’m not mad,” I said at last, the words sticking in my throat. Not because I didn’t mean them but…because I did. “I’m not mad about anything anymore. I’m just glad you’re alive.”
“You were mad,” Jack said. “And I got mad, too.”
“You got mad at me because I hid from you.”
“I got mad because I felt alone.”
To that, I didn’t reply. I stayed silent instead because, surely, he had more to say about that. This pain of his aloneness. I’d guessed at its presence, but I hadn’t understood that wound. Not fully.
Before Jack’s head had been smashed by Langwidere—his second head at least—I’d noted a change in him. Another change—bigger in a way than all the others. He’d become withdrawn, silent, brooding. His former innocence and wondering nature had suffered a fracture. Jack’s psyche in general had suffered one—no doubt due to all he’d observed. And to how powerless he, a new being, must have felt through most of it.
“I got mad at Rye,” he confessed. “More than anyone else.”
My heart gave an extra hard, extra painful thump with these words. Because it hurt to learn Jack funneled his darker emotions into the man I’d fallen in love with.
“I know I can’t ask you not to be mad at him,” I said, making my way back to Jack.
“I still don’t like him,” said Jack. “But I’m not mad at him anymore. And now… Now the only reason I don’t like him is because I understand him.”
Once again, I searched his face for another small clue, another tiny peek, into his emotions.
Calm acceptance, if not peace, radiated from him. In low doses, yes, but serenity was present, nonetheless. And that told me he was telling the truth.
“I never understood why he did the things he did until I got split in two,” said Jack.
“You mean…after your head got smashed and your consciousness returned to this head?”
“My consciousness got split, too,” Jack explained. “Because I was both my head and my body. I could control both, I could be both, but neither of those two parts of me was truly me without the other.”
I gave a small nod to signal that I was following and gestured for him to continue.
“Rye is like that,” said Jack. “But in reverse.”
“Reverse?”
“Rye is put together. He is together always. His head and his body are more together than anyone else’s, too. Because there’s nothing there to separate them. He never separates because he can’t. And that must be why they made him king.”
I’d kept up with his reasoning until now. Now, though, I had questions.
“By saying ‘always together,’ you’re speaking figuratively?”
It boggled my mind to think Jack had evolved to this level of mental capacity in such a brief period. In those first days, he’d been like a toddler. Now, Jack had become something close to a young man. A highly intelligent one.
“Literally, too,” said Jack. “He is figuratively always together because he is single-minded, and never allows anyone or anything close enough to divide him. Literally speaking, he is always together because he is a scarecrow. Because it is his scarecrow form that allows him to stay together always. Nothing can separate him from himself because he can’t die. And no one tries to get too close because, one, he is the king and, two, he is not a person.”
“He is a person,” I argued.
“He was,” replied Jack, his voice gentle, as if breaking some hard truth to me.
“He is still,” I replied, gripping his shirt.
“He can be,” Jack allowed, wooden knuckles brushing my cheek.
I frowned, peering down at Jack’s boots. “What are you trying to tell me, Jack? What are you really trying to tell me?”
“I just want you to know that I’m not mad at Rye anymore,” Jack said. “Really. Because I now understand he did all the things he did because he was together when he did them. I had to do things when I was together, too. Things I didn’t want to do. Things I didn’t realize I’d done for the same reasons Rye had done the things he had. At least, I hadn’t realized this until I wasn’t together anymore, and couldn’t do what I needed to. Not until I got myself together again. Also, because I know you don’t want me to be mad at him. Because…I know you love him.”
I shut my eyes.
Did Jack know I loved Rye because it was painfully obvious to anyone who spent any amount of time around me? Or did Jack know because he was part of me?
Jack caught my chin in his fingers and tilted my head up to him. “Don’t be sad, Mom. He loves you, too.”
“What?” I asked, breathless as I clawed at Jack’s wrist, bringing his hand into mine. “How do you know that?”
“He came to check on you last night,” he said, “after I brought you here. He told me not to tell you he stopped by but that just proves the point.”
Rye came to check on me? “He was worried about me?” I asked.
“What I mean to say is that I know he loves you because he is not together anymore.”
I blinked, wide-eyed and horrified. Hope blended with that terrible emotion, too, the curdling mixture of opposites churning my stomach.
Because didn’t I already know Jack was right about that? Something inside of Rye had unraveled since The Silver Mountain Spring. His heart perhaps.
The question was, who had it unraveled for? Me. Or Dorothy Gale…
“Also,” said Jack, “there’s another reason I know. But…I can’t tell you about that one. That one I must show you.”