Dorothy Must Die

Chapter Eighteen

“What is wrong with that woman?” I asked Nox as he escorted me to dinner on the night of my first lesson with Glamora. He took the books she’d given me and they dematerialized into thin air—I presumed back to my room where I could study them later.

He looked at me wryly. “You got yourself beat up and you’re learning how to do magic—but you’re mad about reading a couple of books?” He laughed. “Glamora should be the easiest part of your day.” But the corner of his mouth was turned up just barely in a way that suggested he knew exactly how difficult Glinda’s twin could be.

“There’s just something about her,” I said. “Something that creeps me out.”

“She’s Glinda’s twin,” he replied. “What do you expect? Imagine having your other half turn on you, and knowing that one day you’ll have to face her in battle.”

I stopped in the hallway. Nox turned to look at me, his face aglow from the tracks of fire that lit our way from above. There was the barest hint of impatience beneath his cool surface. I picked at it like a scab.

“Gert asked me who I was, but the truth is I don’t know who any of you are. Not really. And I don’t even know one detail of this big plan that supposedly hinges on me.”

“You don’t have to know every turn of the road in order to walk down it.”

“It would help to know the destination.”

“You do—we’re taking down Dorothy.”

“You know what I mean. Can’t you drop the good soldier crap for a second and just be a person?”

He paused for a second, as if seriously considering the question. Finally, he said, “Only Mombi and Gert know the whole plan. The rest of us only know pieces. That way if someone gets caught, all isn’t lost.”

“But what if—?” The sound of Glamora clinking a glass prevented me from asking more questions.

“Some stories aren’t mine to tell,” Nox said curtly. Then, as if feeling bad, he added, “Welcome to your first official dinner with the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.” And with that, he led me into the dining room.

The dining room was formal like Glamora. But spooky, too. The table was a round piece of slate suspended in air in the center of the cave. The walls were a warm chocolate brown with real live honeysuckle flowers growing all over. The table was set with black china. Another upside-down tree was suspended over the table.

Mombi, Gert, and Glamora were already seated.

Nox nodded toward a chair and then took the one next to it. I sat down nervously.

I hadn’t had a sit-down dinner with my mom since I was twelve. Our trailer only had a foldout table that Mom had covered with tabloids and unpaid bills.

Gert mumbled a few words under her breath, and our glasses filled with red liquid. I guessed if we were old enough to fight, we were old enough to drink wine.

The plate in front of me was again piled with green goo. At least I had a reason to appreciate Glamora now. Her tea parties might be the only appetizing food I’d be getting from here on out.

“Well . . . how did our girl do?” Mombi asked, looking at me.

“She had absolutely no manners,” said Glamora crisply, all too eager to answer first. “Whatever they were teaching her on that tin farm, they should be ashamed.”

They weren’t teaching me anything. If I followed Mom’s example I wouldn’t even know how to use a fork. When she actually bothered to eat, Mom’s food of choice was Bugles right out of the bag. Or if I pushed hard enough, cereal right out of the box.

“But she has fine bone structure. Don’t you think, Nox?” Glamora continued, winking at Nox.

I swallowed a gulp of the wine, which tasted vaguely like flowers. Did Glamora actually just give me a compliment? And what was with the winking?

“Amy has great potential,” Gert jumped in.

Potential was a word that had hovered over my head for the last five or six years at school. Wasted potential. Had it followed me here?

Mombi pressed the subject. “Did she accomplish anything without your aid?”

“No, but she will,” Gert said.

Mombi sighed.

“We don’t have much time.”

“It’s just that for a girl who says so much, she does not yet know herself.”

Ouch. It sounded different when Gert said it just to me instead of saying it in front of everyone else. Plus, they were talking about me as if I weren’t sitting right in front of them.

Nox cleared his throat. Here we go, I thought. Now he has a chance to really lay into my failures.

“You can’t judge her now. She’s doing the best that she can under the circumstances.”

The wineglass slipped in my hand. I caught it, but not before a few drops spilled on the table. Nox glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. Was he seriously defending me?

Glamora erased the spill with a wave of her hand.

I looked up at Nox. It didn’t make any sense. Mombi studied him appraisingly, as if she was just as surprised as me.

“It takes most charges years to learn what we want her to do in a month,” he explained. “She isn’t even from here. What did you expect? No one can do that.” Suddenly I realized why he was being so nice. He genuinely sounded like he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of me ever being a real witch.

“You did,” Mombi countered.

“I was a kid. It’s easier.”

“Dorothy did,” Glamora added.

“I can speak for myself!” I blurted. “And honestly, what do I really have to know how to do in order to be bait?” I had put it all together in my head. I was now a fugitive from the palace—and one who Dorothy had a very personal interest in. They wanted to use me to distract her. That had to be it.

“I’m right. I’m bait, aren’t I?”

Gert opened her mouth to answer—probably to say something comforting—but she stopped herself. She actually looked surprised, which was a real feat for someone who could read minds. But then I realized she wasn’t looking at me. I swiveled in my chair to follow her gaze and gasped. Standing behind me were two girls, dripping in blood.

They weren’t like any girls I had seen before. The tall one had red hair and a deep purple scar in the center of her forehead, about the size of a silver dollar and as smooth as exposed bone. The other girl had blonde hair and piercing green eyes and a small, heart-shaped mouth. But honestly it was hard to focus on that, because, while half of her face was flesh, like mine, the other half was made out of metal, the two sides bolted together with big, thick screws. Her neck was the same—divided down the center—and her left arm was metal too. I couldn’t see her legs under her pants, but I wondered if her whole body was the same way.

The two girls were leaning against one another. Or rather, the tin girl was leaning into the taller one. I couldn’t see the wounds underneath all the blood, but she looked more hurt.

Mombi was at the girls’ side in a blink. “Where? What?”

“Quadling Country. The Lion,” mumbled the tall girl with the round scar.

Mombi disappeared in a plume of smoke. Instead of helping the bloody girls, it was clear she’d gone to check out the where and the what.

Nox twitched beside me at the word Lion. He leapt to his feet, Gert quick to follow.

Nox picked the tin girl up in his arms. A smile flickered through the woozy pain on her face.

“Melindra, it’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.”

For the first time since I met him, Nox looked like he cared.

Gert’s hand glowed as she touched the girl’s arm. “Let’s get her to the spring.”

Before I knew it, the girls and Nox and Gert were gone. When I turned back to the table, Glamora leaned back in her chair and took another bite of the goo.

Being abandoned with no explanation didn’t bother me. What bothered me, suddenly, surprisingly, was how much more Nox cared about helping this other girl.

“Sit,” Glamora commanded at our next lesson, pointing to her vanity as we entered her cave. I was distracted, still irked by what had happened over dinner the night before. Those girls had shown up covered in blood and I was here to learn how to curtsy? I slouched away from her, knowing how much it would bother her. I didn’t sit. I touched her things instead. The vanity was covered with little glass figurines that looked like maybe they were once part of a really ornate chess set. I rolled a glass queen in my palms and heard a deep exhale from Glamora like she was trying to keep calm. I rolled my eyes, too. It was a small act of protest, but it registered like an earthquake for Glamora.

“Sit,” she ordered again without raising her voice, but she snatched the figurine from my hand and placed it back on the vanity. The other figures moved back into place, too, on their own. I wondered if Glamora’s real gift wasn’t etiquette but some kind of witchy OCD.

I obeyed this time, sitting on the chair but immediately twisting away from the mirror to face her. She took her hair out of its intricate bun and it fell in pretty waves well past her shoulders, framing the deep V of her purple dress and impressive cleavage. With her hair down she looked even more like her evil sister.

“I may not have Gert’s or Mombi’s gifts but I do have many things to teach you, my dear,” Glamora said.

I reached for the queen figurine again. It moved away from me.

Glamora sighed. “Showing is sometimes better than telling.”

I looked up at her as she placed her perfectly manicured hands over her face and then pulled them away like she was playing peekaboo with a toddler. I gasped. Her right cheek had a lunar-shaped hole in it—I could see her tongue. I could see her perfect white teeth.

“What happened to you?” I asked, horrified.

“Family can hurt us better than anyone.”

“Why would Glinda . . . What happened?”

“Glinda wanted to make sure that no one mistook me for her anymore. Looking exactly like your enemy can potentially be an advantage when we are on the brink of war, and she didn’t want me to have that advantage.”

Glamora didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed of it—but letting me see her scar was clearly a big deal, especially for someone so beautiful. And Glamora was still beautiful, even with her face carved up. Beautiful was in the way that she moved and spoke. Beautiful was an action as well as a description.

“Why don’t you use the spring?” I asked carefully.

Glamora ran her fingers over the scar almost lovingly. “When she faces me, I want her to face what she’s done.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen her. I’ve seen what she’s become. You don’t really think she’ll see this and beg for forgiveness, do you?”

I wondered if she was hoping that there was some part of her that still did. That was hoping Glinda would see the scar and be sorry. I knew a little about hoping for that—and I knew a lot about being disappointed.

Glamora laughed, a big bell of a laugh that went up so high that I felt like I needed to cover my ears.

“There is no more room for forgiveness. Not for me. I want the scar to be the last thing she sees before I end her.”

Glamora’s eyes studied mine, waiting for some kind of reaction.

“She didn’t kill you,” I said slowly. “She was clearly close enough to do that. But she didn’t kill you.”

“When you’re a witch and a twin, you’re connected. I used to be able to see what she was doing, I could feel when she was in pain. But since she did this, I don’t feel her anymore. I don’t see her anymore. There’s a chance that if the knife went all the way through me, then it would go all the way through her as well. Killing me could very well end her own life.”

“But isn’t that true for you, too? If you go after her, you could kill yourself.”

“That’s the difference between us. I wouldn’t hesitate if the outcome was ridding the world of her evil.”

I stared at Glamora as she touched her cheek and the scar disappeared, and she looked perfect and whole once again.

When I first saw Glamora just a few days ago, I thought she was the scariest thing in the world because I had thought she was Glinda. But now that I’d seen the real Glamora, I wondered if maybe she was scarier than Glinda after all.

“Now let’s get started, shall we?” She put her hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around to face the mirror. There were only two mirrors back home in the trailer. The broken one in our tiny bathroom and the one over my ten-million-year-old dresser that was warped and had a kind of fun-house quality that made my face appear even narrower than usual. I spent as little time as possible looking into either one of them.

This mirror was different. Or maybe I was.

I caught my breath. There was something tough in my eyes. Tougher than before if that was even possible. The pink was washing out of my hair, giving way to dirty blonde.

Cheap hair dye.

“Very pretty,” Glamora said, looking at me without an ounce of irony or fake sincerity.

I tried to get out of the chair, but she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down.

“Very pretty,” she repeated with the same certainty as Gert when she’d asked me who I really was. Like she wanted to make sure I believed her. Like she somehow knew that no one had actually called me that in my entire sixteen years.

Since I got here, Glamora had been judging my every move based on some crazy standard of etiquette. So the kind words threw me.

“What’s underneath is everything, Amy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enhance it. Beauty has its own kind of magic. And the appearance of something can have power, too.”

She tossed her own hair, and it changed from deep auburn to pale lavender. Then back again.

She touched my hair.

“What will it be?”

“You don’t like the pink?”

“When I first saw you, Amy Gumm, your hair was the thing that gave me hope for you. For all of us.”

“Seriously?”

Glamora scrunched up her perfect nose as if hair color were something too sacred to make light of.

“When Dorothy landed here in that precious gingham number I knew she was trouble.”

“You knew Dorothy when she first arrived?”

“Back then I was where my sister was. That is, until she found her place at Dorothy’s side. No one else sensed it, I don’t think—but I did. Something about that much sweetness didn’t feel right. But you, you didn’t have an ounce of sweetness and that hair was just the exclamation point.”

“Thank you?” I said. “I think.”

“It is a compliment. I’d take a million Mombis over one Dorothy. I don’t know about your tin farm, but here, sugar can be a poison.” She fluffed out my hair with her hands, as if shaking off the Dorothy cloud that passed over her face.

“I want to keep it. I like the pink,” I said, more brightly than I usually said anything.

Glamora’s fingers passed through my hair, adjusting the color—first blue, then green, then back to pink—a better pink—with depth of color and shine that my hair had never had even when it was its natural color, the dirtiest of blondes. Now it was just north of cotton-candy pink. I remembered rinsing out my hair in the sink of the trailer just a few days and a tornado ago. I had thought that changing my hair would change something about my gray little life. And now? Now I had the perfect shade of pink and more change than I knew what to do with.

She blinked and my cheeks were rosier. Again and my lips were a deep red gloss. And again and a delicate pattern of green and gray shadow made half-moons over my eyes. And again and my lashes seemed to grow a quarter of an inch. One more time and glitter showered from above me.

Glitter made me think of Madison. Sparkling like a damn disco ball in the hallway back at school—

But then I saw that Glamora’s glitter was nothing like Madison’s. It knew exactly where to go—highlighting just above my cheekbones, my eyelids. Dusting my clavicle and shoulder blades. Complementing what she did with the makeup. Not like blush but like something more natural. Or rather, supernatural.

In the mirror, I saw Nox appear in the mouth of the cave. I hadn’t seen him since yesterday, when he’d disappeared with the injured girl.

“Is she . . . ?” I asked, turning to face him.

Nox’s mouth opened but nothing came out as he stared at me.

Glamora giggled.

Nox found his voice.

“She’s doing fine,” he said with a cough. “The wounds were deep, but she’s strong.”

Glamora’s eyes lit up on Nox. “What wonderful timing you have. Doesn’t she look beautiful?” She winked, but I couldn’t tell if it was at Nox or at me.

Soon after Nox’s arrival Glamora had declared we were done for the day so Nox walked me back to my room—but that could have been because my room was on the way to his room.

I wondered what Nox’s room looked like. He probably slept on the floor or some austere stone slab like the one back in my cell in the Emerald City.

Nox didn’t comment on my makeover.

“What happened to them?” I asked Nox as we walked. “What was that scar in the middle of her forehead from? Why did the other one—why is she . . . did the Lion do that to her?” I thought of the girl’s bloody, half-tin face and shuddered.

Nox shook his head. “Melindra’s been half tin for a long time. She is one of the few people to escape from the Scarecrow’s labs.”

“The Scarecrow did that to her?” I’d seen him in the throne room. But he had looked pretty harmless compared to the Tin Woodman.

He nodded and continued. “Annabel’s a Horner. Was a Horner—from Quadling Country. Their horns contained powerful magic. Dorothy offered large rewards for them. There aren’t any Horners anymore.”

I tried to picture a unicorn horn in the center of Annabel’s pretty forehead. Magical or not, having something growing out of my forehead was not something that would have gone over well where I came from. But when I imagined someone trying to chop it off, I shuddered. Ollie’s wings, Melindra’s arm and face, Annabel’s horn—the body part count was rising every time I learned anything new about this place.

“They’re just kids,” I said slowly. “They should be going to school. They should be doing normal kid stuff like having fun and torturing girls like me.”

Nox shook his head like the idea of kids being kids had never even been a possibility for any of them. He sighed and looked at me like I didn’t understand anything. “When Dorothy rolls through a town, she takes the adults—the people who can work. Some of them go to work for Glinda in the magic mines, or for Dorothy in the palace. Some of them get brought to the Scarecrow to be his toys.”

“His toys?”

“He got it in his big brain to ‘help’ Dorothy. Finding ways to extract magic. Helping the Tin Woodman build a better army. But in his spare time he experiments.”

While I digested this he went back to Dorothy. “Sometimes she’ll take some of the kids, too, but most of them get left behind.”

“So you guys scoop them up and put them to work for you instead.”

It sounded like an accusation, like I was judging them. And maybe I was.

Nox nodded.

“Is that really any better?” I asked.

He just shrugged. “It was for me,” he said. “I was one of them. It was Mombi who found me. My parents were dead. I was almost dead myself. It was Mombi who taught me magic—taught me everything I know now. She taught me to be a person again. If it wasn’t for her . . . ,” he trailed off.

I tried to imagine Nox as a little boy, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him being carefree or vulnerable or innocent. I tried to imagine Mombi rescuing a little boy, taking him in, and being a mother to him. That was even harder to imagine.

“And as repayment she made you fight?”

“Dorothy took everything from me. Dorothy took everything from those kids back there. I choose to fight,” he said fiercely.

Sometimes it felt like we were in the middle of some argument that I had already lost. He was just so sure of everything. But what if he was sure about something that was more wrong than right? I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything until we got to the opening of my cave. I dragged my fingers through my freshly colored hair and mumbled a good night.

“I liked it before.”

“What?” I asked, turning back to him.

“That face.”

“My face?” He liked my face before? Was this a setup for some kind of insult?

“Don’t get me wrong, Glamora’s magic is effective. But it’s almost a shame to see it change. I haven’t seen one with so much written there—every thought right there on the surface. It’s a rare thing in a place like this.” For the first time I didn’t think that he was trying to hurt me. Maybe he spoke only one language. The truth, and nothing but. It had stung like hell, but it made what he was saying now sound all the more real. In a place like this, that little bit of truth might be a compass in an upside-down world.

“But I suppose Glamora’s thinking ahead. If you’re going to fight Dorothy, you need to build a wall instead of a window.”

“Is that what you did?”

He shrugged noncommittally.

“I don’t think mine was ever a window.” His chin jutted up the tiniest bit further into the air, like he was rising above something.

I wanted to know what. But he was already walking away.