33. Chapter 33
thirty-three
“Oh,” said Pae, hands going to his hips, “this is bad.”
“What are you doing here?” I rasped at Dorothy, who stood soaked in the center of the enormous, Turkish-style bath. Since Pae hadn’t pulled her straight out from the mirror as he had me, Dorothy had ended up in the water.
“What am I doing here?” she railed back. “What are you doing here? What are any of us doing here? Have you lost your blond brain?”
“Make the portal again,” said Pae. “Slippers cannot be here.”
“I told you not to call me that,” snarled Dorothy, wading to the stairs leading up out of the bath.
“I can’t send her back,” I said, my nerves tangling with this latest twist. “She’ll get Rye involved.”
“Rye was already involved!” railed Dorothy as she stepped streaming from the pool. “In case you forgot—which apparently you did—Rye told you not to do this!”
“I’m not willing to leave Sebastian’s rescue to chance.”
“You’re risking everything!”
“You would, too,” I said. “If it were Rye here and not Sebastian, you would do the same. You wouldn’t let someone else go in for you. You wouldn’t wait. You’d know better.”
At this, Dorothy snapped her mouth shut. She set her jaw. And glared.
I lifted my chin, a dare for her to refute what I’d just said.
“Do you even have a plan?” she asked instead.
“Of course, she has a plan,” answered Pae, folding his arms. “A terrible, awful plan, but a plan nonetheless.”
“If you really thought it was terrible,” I said, crossing to him, “you never would have come with me.”
“That is untrue,” countered Pae. “The ante just happened to be worth it in this instance.”
“Ante?” asked Dorothy. “Tip, what did you promise him?”
“Not the time,” I said. “We’re here to get Sebastian. To do that, I need to locate him. To locate him, I need you both to be quiet.”
Instead of waiting for a response from either of them, I shut my eyes and stilled my mind—at least as best I could. Like I had when I’d gone searching through the ether of my imagination for Pae, I swam and dove through the nothing, soaring past sparks and flickers of light. Unfamiliar stars studding a canvas of nothing.
Where, though, was Sebastian’s light? His essence?
I veered left, then right. I rose high and sank deep. But I couldn’t find him.
Sebastian.
A flare seared the void, ruby in hue—like the jump of a bonfire fed new fuel.
I opened my eyes again. “He’s here, but I can’t see where.”
“Probably because of interference from the wards,” said Dorothy.
“The wards didn’t stop us from talking before,” I said.
“Maybe it’s because he’s not asleep,” said Pae, leading us both to look in his direction. He shrugged. “I wasn’t when you went poking around for me.”
So, if Sebastian wasn’t asleep, there would be no communication with him. Maybe he’d felt me searching for him. But he couldn’t tell us where he was. Which meant…
“We have no choice but to split up,” said Pae, speaking my thoughts aloud. “At least, I have to split. My tricks aren’t as helpful if I’ve got two queens in tow.”
I flicked a glance to Dorothy, who frowned. Pae had called us both queens, which I knew from my discussion with Pae was literally true in both our instances, even if Dorothy didn’t know how she qualified.
“Perhaps the two of you should stay here,” Pae offered after another beat. “Wait for me.”
“We’ll enter the passageway system,” I said. “While you do your sweep, Dorothy and I will go to check Sebastian’s former quarters. He might still be there.”
“We’ll have to get back here to get out,” said Dorothy. “Or else find another body of water.”
“The moment one of us finds Sebastian,” I said, “we get in contact. Pae, I can find you. Can you find me?”
“I can always find Dorothy,” he said, his tone dropping. “Aside from that, she knows how to call me. So, maybe this little surprise threesome will work out in our favor. I suppose we’ll see.”
I started to say something else, to suggest he try searching the dungeons first, just in case Sebastian had been transported there, but Pae didn’t stick around to chat. Instead, he went invisible. A portal opened—one that led to the courtyard below, and then it vanished as well, leaving Dorothy and me on our own.
For a long time, the two of us stood there staring at the place where Pae’s portal had blipped in and out of existence. And then, finally, Dorothy turned to me.
I braced myself for a lecture. But that’s not what I got.
“He’s…never said my name before,” Dorothy murmured, her expression shocking me since tears glinted in her eyes. I blinked at her, taken aback as she wiped at them furiously. “Is this what he feels when I say his?”
Her words shoved a knife between my ribs. Sympathy poured through me. By “he,” she meant Pae.
“He…told me what happened,” I admitted.
She unleased a short, ironic—and bitter—laugh. “I get the sense that Rye must tell you everything.”
I frowned and tilted my head at her. “Rye didn’t tell me about the poppies,” I said in a whisper. “Pae did.”
Dorothy’s eyes flicked up to me with shock.
“Pae doesn’t like what the bond has done to him any more than you do,” I said. “And Morella tricked him out of the blood.”
“Surely you’re not defending him,” she snarled between gritted teeth. “I don’t know what he told you, but he lies. And maybe he’s helping us right now, helping you, but that will change.”
She brushed past me, moving to and then through the doorway that led into my old bedroom. I followed on her heels. And maybe I should have chosen that moment to shut up about Pae, but his use of Dorothy’s name, and the corresponding reaction it had stirred in Dorothy, presented a unique opportunity. Had that been Pae’s plan? Maybe.
“It doesn’t make sense to think he did it on purpose,” I said. “Gave Morella his blood with the intention of poisoning you. It just makes it more convenient to hate him.”
Dorothy wheeled on me, her soaked hair, loosed from its usual braid, flipping forward over one shoulder. Reddened eyes beamed hate and a warning for me to back off. To back down.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “And you have no idea what it’s like. Having that…thing swimming in my veins.”
“Morella lived inside me,” I reminded her. I tapped the side of my head. “In my skull. My skin. My heart… I do know something about what it’s like.”
“This is different,” she hissed. “It’s like…I belong to him.”
“You don’t think the same is true for him in reverse?”
“You are defending him,” she said with a scoff of disgust. “A demon. You have allied yourself with a demon.”
“Morella controlled him,” I told her. “Just like she controlled me.”
“So you have sympathy for him,” she said. “But you weren’t there before. You didn’t see. He enjoyed the things he did. He killed innocent people. How do you think the people of Oz are going to react when they find out Ozma has awarded Pae Woot a kingship? Or have you thought that far ahead. Something about this plan makes me think you haven’t.”
“I gave Pae only a promise,” I countered, “that I would be his ally if he would be mine.”
“And apparently you trust him more than you do Rye.”
“That’s not true,” I snapped.
“It is true! Or else you wouldn’t be here.”
I chose that moment to whirl away and head to the wall Rye had entered through the night he’d come to get me. The last time I’d tried the secret passageway had been that night Sebastian had stolen into the palace on his misguided rescue trip. Rye had barred it so that I couldn’t leave. I hadn’t had as much control over my powers then as I did now, though.
“Why are you here anyway?” Dorothy pressed. “With that creature.”
“You already know why,” I said, hands scaling the smooth plaster, fingers skimming the delicate molding for the mechanism that would open the door and reveal our way out of here. The switch gave easily, but the door stuck and refused to budge. Which meant the way must still be barred.
I zoned in on the other side of the door mentally and found boards crisscrossing the exit.
“I know you’re not really married,” Dorothy said.
At this, I froze. Then I shut my eyes. Several seconds elapsed before I could bring myself to open them again.
So, Rye had told her the truth. Of course, he would. This was Dorothy after all.
“Don’t tell Pae,” I whispered. “Despite what you clearly assume, I don’t trust him fully. At least not well enough to believe he wouldn’t use that knowledge to his advantage somehow.”
“Actually,” Dorothy said after a beat, her voice smaller than before, less infused with that particular brand of ire she always seemed to reserve for me. “I…didn’t know. Not for sure. Not until now. But…I suspected.”
I pivoted toward her, scowling. “You’re saying he didn’t tell you?”
“There’s a lot he’s not telling me right now,” she admitted, a catch in her voice. Perhaps she was still dealing with her interaction with Pae. Or maybe, possibly, she was trying to cope with Rye’s aloofness, which I’d begun to gather was not an attribute of the Rye she had known before. At least not when it came to her.
“We had a secret, Rye and I,” she said, her words winding me up, wrenching tight the panic in my core. “No one knew…we were engaged.”
At this, my mouth fell open and my knees almost buckled.
“Were?” I pressed, continuing to gape at her even while my heart ran off with my coherency.
“He…broke it off with me,” she hurried to say, eyes flicking down to the carpet. “Because, of course, he’s married already. He broke his promise. He didn’t wait. He said…he said he couldn’t. Because he needed the alliance.”
My heart sank with this disclosure. In its place, though, a new revelation bubbled up.
Two, actually.
The first was that Rye had maintained his lie to Dorothy, letting her believe our marriage was legitimate. Which meant he truly thought the fa?ade was that important.
The second revelation?
“That’s why Rye wanted so badly for The Wizard to restore him,” I whispered, my own eyes brimming. “So that you two could be together.”
“I think that was his initial thought,” she replied. “See, he wanted me to be queen when the question of who would rule came up. All the people wanted me to take the throne, too. I think, in a way, they wanted me to replace the princess they’d lost. But…I had to go home. I had to. I meant to come back. I swore to him I would. Even without knowing if, when, or how I ever could. And I gave him that ring as my promise.”
I blinked, and the tears fell. “You love him.”
“God, I do,” she said, her voice thin and leeched of sound.
“And he loves you,” I said, my tone going cold. My fingers cold too as I used them to wipe the tears away.
“He did,” she admitted. “Before. After he and I had gone through so much.”
“He’s only breaking it off with you because of Oz,” I said, shaking my head. “Not because of me.”
“I want to believe you,” she said. “But I think…I think he was telling me the truth.”
“Truth?” I asked, peeking up at her again. “What truth? He lied to you about being married to me.”
“I asked him if he was in love with you,” said Dorothy. “If he loved you at all.”
I sucked in a breath and held it, waiting for whatever she would say next. But Dorothy only shrugged and stepped toward me. Moving past me, she went to the wall I’d had no luck with and immediately found the same release mechanism I’d already tried.
She blinked and, frowning, stepped back to find the way barred.
“These were my old rooms, too,” she whispered. “So I know what you’re trying to do. But the door’s stuck.”
“Rye locked me in,” I murmured, prompting her to snap her head my way, eyes wide. Now it was my turn to shrug. “He threatened me. And he must have known I would try to leave on my own.”
“What do you mean he threatened you?” she asked.
I placed my hands against the panel and again concentrated, tracing the boards with my mind’s eye to find the nails, which I pushed out of the boards with my thoughts. They pinged on the stone flooring, and then the boards rattled after them, their clattering muffled by the barrier of the wall.
“My friends snuck into the palace to get me,” I explained as I lowered my hands to my sides again. “And Rye must have been sure I would leave with them, abandoning him to deal with Langwidere on his own. He was desperate.”
Rye had been desperate. About Langwidere, yes. But perhaps about Sebastian, too, who had kissed me earlier that same night. That had been the kiss that Rye, through the filter of Grip’s enchanted eye, had witnessed.
“He’s not the same as he used to be,” observed Dorothy. “Then again, I guess I’m not, either.”
Silence pulsed between us. I waited in the hope she wouldn’t make me ask my next question, but she never spoke again, so I had to.
“You’re not going to tell me what he said. Are you? When you asked him if he loved me.”
Dorothy glanced away, to the panel, sadness underscoring her eyes, hollowing them out in a way that made me realize she’d done her fair share of crying over The Scarecrow, too.
“He didn’t answer me,” she said. “He wouldn’t. But then…that was my answer.”
She turned away then, pushing through the panel and heading into the darkness of the passageway, which enveloped her, transforming her into a shadow.
I hesitated, peering after her with a strange and twisted hope. Strange because I’d been right to think there’d been something between Rye and Dorothy. Twisted because of how glad I was that, whatever that something was, Rye had not chosen to pursue it.
Maybe he still would. Maybe he still wanted to.
But for the first time since Dorothy’s arrival, maybe even since the first time I’d kissed Rye, I could believe that maybe, deep down, he truly did love me back.
“Are you coming?” asked Dorothy from the passage, her disembodied voice echoing in the dark. “I know we need to find Sebastian. But since we’re here, I need to get something from Rye’s rooms.”
“Rye’s rooms?”
“Rye has a book,” she said. “On demons and dark magic.”
“That’s going to help with the Ozma problem?”
“No,” she whispered. “Hopefully, it’s going to help me. With mine…”
Again, I frowned, but I pressed forward, and then into the passageway.
Being in the belly of the beast, so to speak, we didn’t exactly have time to waste. And Sebastian’s life was on the line. Technically, all our lives were on the line. But Dorothy’s soul was, too. And if Dorothy was on board to help me save my best friend, then I could be on board to help save Rye’s.