26. Chapter 26
twenty-six
After Jack departed my rooms, citing a need to return to his own chambers to retrieve a “special text,” I bathed in the freezing bathroom (thankfully the water was warm). This time, when I dressed, instead of donning a borrowed garment, I leafed through the gowns that someone—most likely Rye—had ordered for me.
They’d been in my room, sealed within a large chest that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Though the fabrics varied from flowing gossamer to thick, fur-lined velvet, each gown spilled green skirts. Emerald, forest green, and seafoam necklines supported lace trim, intricately beaded detail, embroidery, and brocade.
Of course, no simple garment dwelled among these belles. So, I selected a deep emerald frock with long fitted sleeves, floor-length skirts, and a bodice embellished with matching beads and gold-embroidered leaves and vines.
Included in the mix of garments, there waited a beautiful carved wooden box. Within, I found a dainty tiara—one crafted from gold. Tiny diamonds chased the crown’s delicate filigreed design, which, at its apex, curled around one large pale and glowing emerald. I put the tiara on as a finishing touch because I would hear from Rye, crown connoisseur, if I neglected to don this piece.
Did I look like a princess? A queen?
It must have been Rye’s hope that I would. So, then, I would make believably fitting that mold, that image, my hope, too.
I left my chambers for an empty hall.
Nick’s castle, so different from Rye’s, had so few people populating its corridors. Likely, that had to do with the bleakness of the region, and its much slimmer population. Still, I found a pair of guards stationed at the end of the hallway, each clasping a spear, which they both switched to their opposite hands the moment I came within three feet of them.
Their movements, simultaneous, coordinated, and abrupt—not to mention noisy given their armor—had me starting with a yip.
None of the guards had done anything like this before… The suddenness of the synchronized movement made me second-guess passing beyond them.
Neither of the guards budged when I hesitated, though the one on the left flicked his eyes to me and back to staring forward again, taking note of my uncertainty.
“Forgive me for speaking out of turn, Your Majesty,” said the guard at last, his words prompting furtive and uncertain glances from his older, mustached companion. “But you should henceforth expect this response from all guards.”
“Because?” The answer struck me as obvious, but rarely in my life had assuming things done me many favors.
“Because you are the Queen of Oz,” he replied, blinking rapidly.
So, the word had become official. No doubt Rye had seen to that.
“You perform the same gesture for the king?” I probed—and then clarified. “Both the kings?”
“N-no, Your Majesty,” said the guard, the same one speaking while the other elected to hold his silence. “The shift of spears is meant to symbolize how free passage within the capitals of Oz and throughout the kingdom belongs to our sovereigns. Also, that our arms and forces defer to you and His Majesty, The Scarecrow.”
I tilted my head at this. “They don’t defer also to Emperor Nickletin?”
“N-no, Your Majesty,” the guard repeated. “The Emperor of the West is…well, the Emperor of the West. He is our ruler but then, you and His Majesty, The Scarecrow…are his.”
I remained silent at that, thoughtful. For a few reasons.
Interesting how Nick’s troops had a different protocol for different members of the royal court. Fascinating as well how this guard referred to Rye as “The Scarecrow” instead of King Rye, as those in the Emerald City did.
And this specific title for Rye returned me to my conversations with Nick, about how people in other regions of Oz referred to him as “The Tin Man.”
Nick believed—or, as he’d confessed, wanted to believe—that this peculiar title had been given to him out of endearment. Could the same be assumed about Rye’s title of “The Scarecrow?”
Or was this, instead, proof of what Jack had told me just that morning? That it was easiest out of all the others for Rye to be the central King of Oz because he was not seen…as a person.
Though I wanted to present these existential questions to this guard, or even both guards—anyone who would listen, really—I resisted.
Instead, I inclined my head to the men. “Your service to Oz is greatly appreciated. As is your loyalty to King Rye and the Emperor, Nickletin. Um. King Cahal, too.”
Was I forgetting anyone? And was that what they called Cahal?
I should stop talking. My ignorance was showing.
Offering a tight smile to the men, I moved to traverse the threshold they guarded.
“They say you grew the roses,” blurted the second mustached guard, the words flying out of his mouth the instant I entered the doorway—as if he feared he’d never get another chance to speak to me candidly again. And perhaps, depending on who was with me when next we encountered one another, he wouldn’t.
Something about my aloneness, and my unfamiliarity regarding their customs, the rules surrounding their positions, and the politics of Oz, had emboldened them both.
But then, there wasn’t any harm in engaging with them, was there?
“You mean the roses climbing the castle?” I asked.
“The same,” replied the mustached guard.
How to answer? If I said “yes,” I could be fairly sure I wasn’t lying. If I told the absolute truth and said, “I think so,” I’d risk appearing weak. I didn’t want to do that. Not when these men, and Oz in general, needed a show of strength from the country’s leaders.
Of which, I was now one.
Imposter, my mind whispered. Something Morella would have said to me if she’d still been here, if she’d thought for even one moment that I was embracing my role as queen. As Ozma.
I ignored the whispered doubt.
“I did summon the roses,” I said. Because Jack had to be right about the vines and the flowers—that they’d come from me.
“Is it true as well,” ventured the other guard, “that you retrieved Dorothy from her world?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s been said that you melted a Nome,” blurted Mustache Guard, “turned him molten without so much as touching him.”
Wait. What?The only one who had been present, awake, and alive for the Nome fiasco had been—
“And the King,” said the other guard. “It is said that you retrieved his soul from the beyond. That you summoned his spirit back from the dead.”
“Um.” I frowned, my nerves twining suddenly tight. “Well. That’s not—”
“Necromancy is the work of a dark witch,” came a somber voice from the other side of the doorway.
I stiffened in time with the guards, who snapped to attention, forms rigid, eyes no longer trained on me but focused straight ahead.
Nick, who’d been loitering in the shadowed hall ahead of me, shifted out of the gloom and drew nearer to the door’s frame.
“Don’t be hard on them,” I said. Because wasn’t it my fault for interacting with them?
“They overstep their bounds,” came Nick’s gravelly, reproving, and mask-muffled reply. “It’s behavior unbecoming of any legionnaire of Oz.”
“Well,” I said, “at the same time, their questions tell us just how out of hand the rumors have gotten.”
“As rumors are wont to do,” replied Nick, his tone still reproving.
I’d met the ill-tempered version of Nick well before I’d encountered the congenial heartfelt one. I much preferred the Nick who had, quite literally, bared his heart to me that night in his snowy, moonlit chambers. Best to try to steer him toward that version of himself.
“Answering the questions of your men has provided clarity to me, too.” I went to Nick and looped my arm through his frigid metal one. “I like to know what stories are going around about me. So that I’m better prepared to correct misconceptions.”
“I think both you and my guards have more pressing things to attend to than frivolous inquisitions.”
This, Nick said over his shoulder, calling the words out to his guards in an ominous tone of displeasure even as I led him away, down the corridor toward the stairs that would take us to the first floor.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” I said, hoping to distract him. “I want to talk to you. Can we go outside like we did before?”
“You’ll freeze in that dress,” said Nick.
“Not if you lend me your cloak.”
Even with Nick’s heavy cloak swathed snugly around me, the cold of the snow-laden castle grounds penetrated, the wind stabbing through the heavy fleece-lined fabric.
“I warned you,” grumbled Nick even as we walked on.
I still had his arm, wrapped now in both of mine, though no warmth could be won from his metal frame. Could he sense my shivering?
“I didn’t want to talk to you inside the castle,” I said. “There are ears everywhere. A statement you just proved by popping up like that out of nowhere.”
“I was on my way to fetch you,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that’s popping up out of nowhere. Also, you shouldn’t be conversing with the guards.”
“Why not?” I challenged. “They’re people just the same as us. And they’re curious about me. Oz’s history with witches isn’t good. Wouldn’t you be curious, not to mention afraid, if you were them? I’m a very powerful stranger.”
“You should let them continue to assume that. Let them learn the truth without your input.”
“You’re afraid they’re going to find out that I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said through jittering teeth.
“For mercy’s sake, Tip,” grunted Nick as he veered right, steering me down a winding set of steps carved into the rockface. I hurried along with him, shuddering as he led us down to the unsealed entrance to a cave. “You’re going to catch your death out here and when you do, I won’t be held responsible.”
His mood—it had stayed sour even as we’d left the castle through a side entrance and traced a path across the snowy walkways. As much as he was pretending to be angry at me, he couldn’t fool me.
He ducked into the cave and, still attached to him, I followed, my glowing green ring at once illuminating the space, casting its eerie luminescence along the craggy, black-rock interior.
Surprisingly, the channel of the cave provided some warmth. Comparative warmth. At least the freezing winds could not chill us in here. Or, rather me, since the icy gales of the West didn’t affect Nick.
The tunnel widened as we went, at last opening into a chamber, one filled with shelves stocked with old jars and bottles of various shapes, sizes, and colors. A low-backed throne-like chair occupied one corner along with a workshop counter. A stool, probably meant to help the cave’s artisan reach the higher shelves, kept itself company near the workshop counter.
Nick took the lone chair, which creaked under his weight.
Instead of seizing the stool and seating myself, I marveled at the shelves, some of which had been carved into the stone. Wooden shelves scaled the walls, too. All supported a myriad of dust-covered elixirs, poultices, and potions.
“What is this place?” I asked, drawing his cloak around me more tightly. Even if the cold had abated, the winds howled at the cave’s opening, their moans echoing through the green-tinted gloom, giving me a different sort of chill. And our surroundings… Didn’t they exude Morella’s influence?
“This was one of West’s storerooms,” Nick answered. “She stowed potions imbued with magic in here. My best guess as to why is that she needed her concoctions to stay at a certain temperature. Or else their contents were too dangerous to hoard within her fortress.”
My eyes popped as I scanned the bottles again. “These are all still full.”
Dusty glass bottles and jars of varying hues and opaqueness all betrayed the shadows of liquid and solid contents alike. And were those freeze-dried eyeballs peering at me from over the lip of one high shelf?
“After West’s death,” explained Nick, “Glinda traveled here to neutralize the remaining elements of darker magic. While the contents of these jars might have once been lethal, or worse, their powers have since been nullified. That said, if you find yourself suffering a thirst, I would resist any temptation to imbibe.”
I allowed a small smile, though it fell away quickly.
“When Glinda made that visit,” I said, “was that also when she gave you…the cap?”
“Just so,” he replied. “She’d come from the Emerald City, where we’d all been just a few weeks prior for Rye’s coronation. I’d only been here, serving as emperor, for a few days. Glinda blessed the castle, though she refused to step foot inside. I have to ask, though. Is there a reason you inquire about the cap specifically?”
There was.
“Does it allow you to tell if Pae is around?”
“You ask because you fear he is present? Listening in?”
“Isn’t that a valid fear?”
“It is,” he allowed, “but, I believe, erroneous. While the cap does not allow me to detect his presence—at least as far as I know since I’ve never directly used it—I have forbidden him from eavesdropping on my conversations.”
“You trust he won’t?”
“I trust little when it comes to Pae,” Nick admitted. “But…I do not believe he would risk our alliance to spy. Not at this juncture. All the same, I know he is not present, because I just left him in the ballroom.”
“The…ballroom?”
Another chamber I hadn’t been aware existed in Nick’s castle. It struck me as odd, too, that West would ever need a ballroom. Then again, perhaps the castle had belonged to some other sovereign before her.
“Pae is there with Rye,” said Nick.
Oh, God.
“Your chimera, Jack, is there as well,” he added.
My pulse doubled in pace, flooding my previously frozen veins with the sudden heat of panic. “What are they all doing there?”
“Sparring.”
“Sparring?”
My heart started to hammer, pounding my sternum as if hoping to send a signal to my brain, one meant to drive me out of this cave and back in the direction of Nick’s castle. But then, whatever damage I feared would occur certainly would already be wrought by the time I reached this ballroom. If it hadn’t already.
“Relax,” said Nick. “There are rules in place. Pae will follow them. Rye will as well. And, actually, I was on my way to retrieve you to escort you there per your chimera’s request.”
“Jack wanted me there?”
“Rye, too,” said Nick.
I shook my head. “Why?”
“I know the answer to that as well as I know the answer as to why I am here in this cave with you.”
I frowned and fidgeted. “I… After yesterday, I wanted to talk to you. In private.”
“That much is clear,” he said with an uncharacteristic get-on-with-it wave of his hand. “However, let me warn you, if you dragged us both out here to inquire about Rye, I can only say that you’ll have better luck asking him. I don’t have the answers for yesterday.”
He meant Dorothy’s outburst. Of course, it must have been on his mind all morning as well.
I glanced down to the cave floor, adorned with a beaten, threadbare rug. Then I peered back up to Nick. “I came out here to ask about you.”
“Me?” He gave a short laugh as if the idea struck him as absurd. Or, maybe, because it discomforted him. Perhaps both.
“How long?” I asked, collecting the stool. After setting it down beside Nick, I seated myself, hands folded in my lap.
“How long what?” he barked.
“How long have you loved Dorothy?”
The cave got silent. And Nick grew still. I held my breath, unwilling to move an inch, not even to breathe. Because, with that one question, I might have already destroyed the friendship I’d built up with Nick. An uncanny friendship that had sustained me in this desolate realm and during a bleak time. A friendship that had also, I grew more certain by the day…saved my life.
“Please, tell me,” he said at last, that muffled voice hushed almost to silence, “that my feelings are not so obvious as that.”
I gave him another smile, this one more strained, though just as short-lived as my last. Then I set a hand on his wrist and squeezed.
Maybe he could feel the gesture, or maybe he couldn’t. He saw it. And perhaps that helped him to feel it on the inside, if nowhere else.
“I only know how you feel about her,” I said, “because…I’ve come to know you.”
“Rye knows me, too,” Nick said. “So does Dorothy.”
I shrugged. “They didn’t hear you singing. They weren’t there when you gave me that riddle that I only just solved last night. About how, after you learned how I felt about Rye, you said you would make my hope your hope. They didn’t notice you last night, either. How you looked after her when she left because they were too focused on themselves.”
“I wear a mask.”
And still, I’d been able to read him.
“They don’t know, Nick,” I assured him. “Just me. And I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“Not even Rye?”
“Especially not Rye.”
I withdrew my hand, winding it and my other up in the folds of his cloak before stuffing them both into my lap again. I hadn’t meant to make him uncomfortable. At the same time, I had to call things as I saw them. Hadn’t he done the same before siphoning the truth out of me regarding my feelings for Rye? By uncovering the truth—my truth—he’d become nothing short of my touchstone in this wintery world. The least I could do was return that favor. Perhaps it was the only favor Nick had done me that I could return.
“I didn’t love her before,” said Nick. “When she was here. She was too young.”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“I was too old for her,” Nick replied. “I didn’t see her that way. At least, I didn’t realize how I truly felt...until she left.”
“You fell in love with her after she was gone,” I observed.
“I mourned her after she was gone,” he replied. “And I fretted over her. Pondered endlessly over what had really transpired between her and Rye. Asking him was out of the question. He would have guessed why I asked. Aside from that, I could not love her. I would not bring another disaster of the heart upon myself. Or her. And, so long as she remained out of reach, so long as I believed I would never see her again, I could avoid loving her.”
“Is that what you told yourself?” I asked, my voice a dry drone in the cave.
Nick went silent again. Perhaps because, in the same way that he had sniffed me out regarding my feelings for Rye, I had sniffed him out regarding his for Dorothy.
Love, I’d learned, wasn’t something you could choose.
I’d tried to choose. I thought I had chosen.
I’d thought I’d known what love was.
In many ways I had. In many more…I had not.
“Yes,” Nick said at last. “I suppose that was what I’d told myself all this time. At least until you showed up and admitted to me that you cared for my friend. That you loved him. That seemed…to change everything. Because suddenly there existed the possibility that he might love you, too. Then and only then did I allow myself to begin to admit the truth.”
That was a more honest answer than his previous one. But I couldn’t begrudge Nick for lying. Not when he’d been lying to himself as much as he had been to me, or anyone else for that matter.
“Did you know?” I asked after several beats. “That Dorothy had promised Rye she would come back?”
“Dorothy promised us all she would come back,” said Nick. “Of course, we wondered if such a thing would be possible. But…I doknow she promised Rye something else. That ring he wears. The one so similar to yours. Before she left for home, for Kansas, Dorothy brought me the stone that now dwells in that ring’s setting. She asked me to fashion the token for Rye. And she asked specifically for a ring.”
My breath caught. I peered down at my hand, to the ring that Nick, on Rye’s orders, had made for me. The one that matched Rye’s.
I curled my hand into an angry fist while my thoughts took flight, winging one way and then the other before returning with revelations. In the cave of The Silver Spring, hadn’t it been Rye’s ring that had stirred him out of his trance? That signifier—it had symbolized Dorothy to him. Not me.
“I wanted all this time to believe the ring was a symbol of close friendship,” said Nick. “There could be no denying, after all, that something special existed between Rye and Dorothy. Their kinship possesses an almost…otherworldly essence.”
I shut my eyes, pain pouring through me, because his words resonated with my own observations. Even before I’d ever met Dorothy, the place she held in Rye’s heart, not to mention in the hearts of the people of Oz, had been palpable. Her importance, her influence, her absence—it had permeated everything.
Almost as if she, Dorothy Gale, was the true lost Princess of Oz.
And who was Ozma next to her?
A fable, a myth…a tragedy.
“When Rye asked me to make your ring,” said Nick, “one to match his, I confess I experienced a thrill of hope. My hope was that Rye loved you and that you were worthy of that love. A futile hope though since, at the time, I did not think I would see Dorothy again.”
Another smile teased at my lips. This one wanted to stick. Because if Nick had not thought I was worthy of Rye’s love, would he have ever said that line about my hope—the hope that Rye and I would be together—was also his?
“No one,” I observed, “seems to know quite what’s going on between them. But after yesterday, it’s obvious now that they were not just friends.”
Nick curled one hand into a rueful fist. “That appears to be the case,” he said. “Though I must admit, my hope for the opposite wasn’t as big as yours because, well… Frankly, I am not so eligible as you. Truly, as a man fashioned from metal, a man who, it could be argued, is more dead than alive, I fear am not eligible at all.”
My heart ached for him. “You may be made of metal, but isn’t Rye made of cloth?”
“Rye, you have proven, can be mended.”
“Rye needs no mending,” I said. “And neither do you.”
I rose and went to stand behind him. Leaning down, I laced my arms around his neck and squeezed, pressing my warm cheek to his cold smooth one.
“You are a good man, Nick,” I told him. “Clockwork or not, your heart is beautiful. And any woman would be lucky to possess it.”
“You don’t mean this,” he said, his voice breaking. “You aim to assuage my pain with kindness.”
I released him and pulled back, touching his cheek, left icy by this climate. “I would never try to assuage your pain. Not in this matter. Because…don’t I know well enough that it can’t be?”
He gave a short laugh, the ironic sort that carried no real humor in it.
“One of us is going to have to get to the bottom of those two,” Nick said. “Before we’re both driven mad.”
“Shall we draw lots?” I asked.
Again, he laughed, a more genuine chortle this time, though still laced with a hint of bitterness.
“I dare not tell Dorothy how I feel,” said Nick. “Especially not if there exists the chance… Well, I hesitate for many reasons. Too many to name. But my main concern surrounds the possibility that, without either of us knowing, Rye and Dorothy have been, or perhaps even still are…engaged.”
Engaged?
Why had that thought never occurred to me?
My own engagement to Rye had been fake. As fake as our marriage. When Rye had proposed a false union between us, he’d done so without a second thought regarding whether real feelings would ever become involved. The prospect of such a development had been far from my own mind, too. So, in striking his bargain with me, it couldn’t be said that Rye had betrayed any previous agreement with another. With Dorothy.
“You really think…they might have been engaged?” I asked, eyes flicking Nick’s way with reluctance.
“She gave him a ring, Tip.”
“Yes,” I said, “but…what did he give her?”
Beats of nothingness passed in which only the wind cried, its somber whine like that of a lost soul.
“That,” Nick said at last, after an eon of silence, “truly is a question for Rye.”