42. Chapter 42
forty-two
I found Sebastian waiting for me at the base of the stairs leading up to Nick’s chambers—the site of the castle’s last mirror.
I’d sent him a note earlier via a guard, asking him to meet me here. I’d made it clear in the note as well that I would be sending him home. To Florida, if I could manage, since that’s where the carnival, our “home” would likely be. His father had to be beside himself with worry, and all the rest of our friends, too.
He sat on the steps, and he only looked up when I drifted into view.
“Tippetarius.” His use of my full name and the flat way he spoke it squeezed the blood from my heart.
“Sebastian.”
A smile touched his lips at my response. But it wasn’t the genuine kind he used to wear. This one felt cool, affected—a poor mask for his true feelings about this moment and our status. Which was…what?
We were friends still, certainly. Weren’t we?
He drew in a breath. Held it, then spoke again. “Do you remember the time I found you hiding in Mombi’s trunk?”
I blushed, embarrassed. Of course, I remembered. I’d been so frightened of her. And I’d grown so tired of stealing for her.
“That was back when she made me dress like a boy,” I said, forcing my own smile, which didn’t want to stick either. “So I could run around the crowds without being questioned. You and I would sneak off and use some of the money I stole for ice cream.”
“That day,” he said with a slow blink. “You were so terrified she would be the one to find you. But when I was the one to open that trunk, you sat up and flung your arms around my shoulders. You hugged me so tight, and I promised you I’d always look out for you. I hope you know, the things I’ve done… Up to this point, I’ve been doing them because I have been trying my hardest to keep that promise.”
“I’m not angry,” I told him, which had become the truth. “And…I believe you.”
I did. After a day away from him, I’d been able to gather my thoughts. I’d been able to put myself in his shoes, too. Though I wouldn’t have made the same decisions he had, I also couldn’t judge him for making them. I hadn’t been there in that dire situation—a single person trying to survive in a viper’s den. And hadn’t I left him there? To fend for himself?
What could I say about his choices?
“You truly are going to send me home?” he asked. “After everything, you’re really prepared to do that?”
“I have to,” I told him, lifting my chin.
“I could stay,” he pressed. “I could go with you. I hope you know I would follow you anywhere, Tip. I’ve always loved you. It’s why I came to Oz. It’s why I’ve done everything I’ve done up to this point. There’s so much you don’t know about what happened in the city. And I want to tell you everything. But…I can only do that if you agree to let me stay. In Oz.”
“I can’t make you do anything, Sebastian,” I reminded him gently.
At last, he stood. “But you want me to go back. Back to the carnival.”
“This isn’t your fight,” I said, repeating what I’d tried to tell him since the moment he’d found me in the Emerald City Palace after coming to Oz, since the moment we’d been reunited here, in this strange and beautiful world.
“But it is,” he argued.
He must mean that he felt the fight was his because it was mine. Of course, what else could he be tying this sense of responsibility to?
I straightened, tightening my hands into fists at my sides. “I am never going back. I can’t. I meant to tell you that before, but so much happened.”
“Because you’re the lost princess,” he muttered. “Ozma.”
I tilted my head at him, uncertain of how he’d received this bit of intel. Pae had told the demons, but no one else knew—not even Tavish. Just those in our circle. Perhaps, though, Jack had told him.
“It makes sense,” said Sebastian with a one-shouldered shrug, his words shocking me.
“You believe it?” I asked. An odd stance for him to take without proof. This was Sebastian after all. Always, since we’d been children, he’d remained a skeptic of all things not proven.
“Yeah,” Sebastian said. “I do.”
“You needed less evidence than Rye,” I murmured, almost hating to bring Rye’s name into our conversation.
“The Scarecrow doesn’t know everything,” he said. Again, came that smile, the one that failed to reach his eyes.
“Did you find something out about me?” I asked him. “While in the city?”
“Not about you.” He turned away, climbing the steps.
I frowned after him, my concern growing, doubling. Lifting the hem of my skirts, I scaled the stairs after him, winding around to the top.
Frigid air accosted us both, flowing in through the open wound in the splintered ceiling. Snow poured in with the stark white sunlight.
Nick wasn’t here. No one was. I’d told everyone I wanted to say goodbye to Sebastian on my own. There was so much unsaid between us, and a lot of private things I wanted to be able to discuss with him. And, yes, to confess.
“Come here,” said Sebastian as he drew to a halt in front of the mirror.
I obliged, drifting to stand next to him.
“Look.” He nodded to the mirror, our images reflected within the gold-framed glass. “This could still be.”
“This?” I asked him.
“It looks like a portrait, doesn’t it?” he asked. “We do.”
“Sebastian…”
“You really love him, don’t you?” he asked. “You said you did.”
My head jerked his way, and I peered up at him. “We haven’t talked about Rye yet.”
“I heard you talking to him this morning,” he said. “I heard everything. I know about Rye marching toward the city. I know that you’ll be meeting him soon. I know about the demons—that they’ve pledged to you.”
“You couldn’t have been there,” I snapped. “I would have seen you. Did Pae—?”
“I saw you kiss The Scarecrow. Like you two really were married. You have everyone fooled, you know. But not me. You can’t fool me, Tip. I know you too well.”
“I was never trying to fool you,” I said, shaking my head, rocked by this revelation, that Sebastian had somehow been present for my conversation with Pae and then Rye. “We aren’t married. But…”
I trailed off, uncertain of how to continue. This conversation. I’d known it would be painful, but this wasn’t how I’d expected it to unfold, either. I’d been prepared for his skepticism and even his fury. I had not been prepared to learn he’d spied on me.
“How did you get into the dining hall?” I demanded. “Where were you hiding?”
“Go on, Tip,” he said, ignoring me, nodding toward the mirror. “Send me home.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” I said.
“The mirror,” he pressed, an edge to his voice. “I’ll go home. No more questions asked. I swear it. Send me now.”
“I can’t stand the thought of your being angry with me like this,” I argued. “You won’t even listen.”
“You won’t listen,” he seethed, veering on me. “And you have no idea what I’ve been through. You don’t know what I did. All because I thought I was fighting for you. For us. But Langwidere was right. You’d already forgotten me. And now I know why.”
“Langwidere?” I challenged. “Sebastian, she—”
“Will be highly interested in finding out who you really are, by the way,” Sebastian said as he approached the mirror, which he pressed a palm to. “In fact, I’d wager she’ll find it almost as interesting as all your plans. Almost as interesting as the answer to the question of who I really am.”
I gaped at him, stunned when, under his touch, the mirror transformed, becoming a window to a narrow and dimly lit hallway lined on either side by glass cabinets, each harboring a head.
“Sebastian,” I said, breathless, “what…what are you doing?”
“What you wanted,” he said, his voice taking on a dark edge as all the heads beyond the glass opened their eyes wide. “Sending myself where you wanted me to be. In other words, home.”
I launched forward to stop him but instead collided with a ruby bubble-like forcefield that sent me careening backward. The shield—it was just like the one I’d unwittingly created when Rye had attacked me. Just like that bubble, Sebastian’s flared into being the moment I made contact. It also flashed out of sight again as I landed on the floor, sent sprawling by the impact.
“I heard you through the broken mirror shards,” he said. “The ones scattered all around in the dining hall.” He held up his free hand and, in a flash of crimson fire, he produced one of his throwing knives, the tip balanced on his fingertips. “Blades are mirrors, too, and mirrors, for me, can be windows just as well as they can be doorways. You taught me that.”
Sebastian gritted his teeth, and with a glower, he sent the blade careening toward me. It missed—as he must have meant it to—the blade embedding itself in the floor beside one of my splayed hands.
“Sebastian,” I murmured, destroyed by the hate swirling in his eyes, “what’s happening?”
“I loved you,” Sebastian snapped. “And some part of me still does. Which is why I’m letting you go. Next time we meet, though, we will be enemies—through and through.”
I shook my head at him, willing this to be some horrible dream, an awful nightmare that would end at any second.
“We could have had it all together,” he said. “Oz could have been ours.”
“What are you saying?” I murmured. “How are you able to do this? Who are you?”
“Apparently,” he said, “someone who has as much claim to the throne, or even more, as you.”
“Sssssebastian,” the heads on the other side of the mirror began to whisper, all of them calling to him, hissing his name as if summoning him.
“Glinda had a son, Tip,” he said, tears falling free to slip down his cheeks—though his expression refused to betray any emotion beyond disdain. “Did you know?”
He shrugged, and then, as he slid through the mirror, into the hall of crowned heads, he called after me.
“I didn’t either,” he said, more tears spilling. “At least…not until recently. Tell me, though, is it true what they say about scarecrows…and fire?”
“No!” I shrieked, pushing myself up from the floor and flying to the glass.
I collided with it just as the image of the hall of heads went dark, leaving me to battle and glare into the wild and beseeching eyes of my own reflection.
“Sebastian!” I screeched. Pressing my palms flat to the glass, I willed the surface to return his picture to me, to return him to me.
“Stop her,” barked a low voice. Nick.
“Tip! No!” Dorothy.
They must have heard me shouting. They must have been nearby. They must have sensed what I couldn’t. Or maybe Dorothy had told Nick all she knew about Sebastian. Something I hadn’t been able to do but should have.
Someone caught me around the waist and hauled me back.
“No!” I collapsed to my knees. And then, when she joined me on the floor, I fell into the arms of Dorothy Gale, who hugged me tightly. Perhaps she hoped to comfort me. Perhaps her embrace was also out of a need to keep me from opening that portal back up—the one leading to the Emerald City Palace, a place I would undoubtedly not survive infiltrating again.
“Sebastian,” I moaned as Nick approached the mirror.
Of course, he smashed it. It only took one blow of his metal hand, too, for the portal to be obliterated.
A low keen arose in the back of my throat, and turning my head, I buried my face against Dorothy’s shoulder.
“Tip,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” I sobbed. “She’s twisted him. She’s turned him against me.”
Was that true? Or had I turned Sebastian against me?
“Diggs,” said Dorothy, speaking to Nick.
“It has to be,” Nick answered. “Obviously, he was telling the truth about Glinda.”
I hitched as Dorothy pulled me into her, the pain of Sebastian’s betrayal poisoning my capacity to reason. To think.
Still, I had enough of my mind present to arrive at the same conclusion they had.
If Glinda was Sebastian’s mother, then The Wizard…must be his father.
That’s what he’d meant about having a claim to the throne.
About going “home.”
His heritage had allowed him to change the mirror. To spy on me through the broken shards of the other.
Sebastian had Fairy blood, too.
Glinda’s.
All this time, he’d been an Ozian too. Half at least.
“Rye,” I said, pulling free of Dorothy to take her by the shoulders. “He knows about Rye. You heard him say he’d tell Langwidere everything.”
Also, the crimson flame Sebastian had produced resembled my magic too closely. And that element, a witch’s fire—didn’t it stand as the only thing that could destroy Rye in his scarecrow form? “I have to get to Rye now. I have to warn him.”
“We’ll go,” said Dorothy, pulling me to my feet as she drew to her own.
“I am coming with you,” said Nick.
“You have to stay here,” said Dorothy. “The mirrors are shattered, but Sebastian knows the castle layout. There may still be an insider here, too. Winkie Country won’t be able to withstand an attack. Not without you here to warn the people and prepare them.”
“You cannot go unaccompanied,” he argued.
“Jack,” I said. “He’s as good a fighter as Rye.”
“And we can call Pae.”
Nick didn’t like it. Disapproval washed off him in waves. But of course, he must know we needed to go.
Before Rye’s troops could be intercepted. Before Sebastian could unravel everything.
And since Rye had been returned to scarecrow form and wouldn’t sleep, there would be no opportunity to contact him through a dream.
“Go now,” said Nick. “He can’t have gotten far yet.”
I launched to my feet and even as tears still coursed down my face, I rushed headlong down the winding steps with Dorothy on my heels.
I found Jack already at the base of the stairs.
“Something terrible has happened,” he said. “I felt it.”
With one wooden finger, he touched the place on his chest where his heart would have been. Where his heart was. For, even if he didn’t have a physical one, he certainly possessed one.
“We have to go,” I told him. “We have to find Rye. Now.”
“Where’s Sebastian?” he asked, looking up the stairs as Nick descended them.
“Come.” I took his hand, threading my fingers through his. “I’ll explain on the way.”
A promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. Not when I hardly understood all that had just transpired myself.
My world. It had been torn to shreds yet again.
Like that mirror Nick had just shattered, I could never hope to piece it together again. Not from this newest and bleakest point.
Perhaps, though, if I was lucky, I could save enough of the scattered shards to build a new image.
One that could still include Sebastian.
Because even though we were setting out to get to Rye, I had to believe that Sebastian, no matter who he was or what he’d done—would do from here—was still reachable, too.
I had to have that hope.
Without it, I would shatter too.
And with me, Oz.
Thank you for reading The Lost Princess of Oz. If you enjoyed this novel, I hope you”ll consider pre-ordering the next installment, The Ozma Chronicles Book 3: The Three Queens of Oz