Magic. Glinda was mining magic, pulling it out of the soil as if she was just digging a well. It was everywhere—it was in the land itself.
I struggled to stay awake in Glinda’s carriage, but my body had other ideas, and I passed out again as soon as it moved forward. I had no idea how much time had passed when Glinda shook me impatiently and I snapped back to consciousness. My muscles still ached, but the rest had done me a little good; the headache had subsided, and my vision was much clearer. “Look sharp, you lazy girl,” she said. “We’re almost to the palace, and I won’t have you setting a bad example.”
I’d heard about the Summer Palace, Glinda’s famous home, but I’d never seen it with my own eyes. It was nearly a full day’s journey from the Emerald City, and Glinda’s domain wasn’t exactly a hot vacation destination. Outside the carriage, the countryside was remote and desolate. Lonely-looking blue hills, barren and rocky, surrounded us, and the trees were twisted and thorny. Here and there, huge craters dotted the landscape, and I wondered if she’d already tried out her magic-mining experiments closer to home. We were approaching a huge, sparkling pink gate, made out of some stone that refracted the setting sun’s light and sent it in dazzling sparks across the desolate, rocky ground. Beyond the gate, candy-cotton-pink towers stabbed upward to dizzying heights. As soon as Glinda’s entourage was within the castle walls, the gate swung shut. Like it or not, I was home.
Glinda’s palace was as pink on the inside as it was on the outside. The walls were coated with a textured pink paint that looked as though someone had smeared sugar over everything. Chandeliers, crusted with pale pink gems, hung from the high ceilings. Pink-framed mirrors reflected the pink light, and everywhere hung pink-hued portraits of Glinda in an endless series of pink ball gowns. Waist-high pink vases held huge bouquets of pink flowers, which released little puffs of sickly-sweet perfumed pink smoke into the air at regular intervals. I tried not to gag as a waft of scent hit me, leaving a faint pink smear like a slug’s trail on my uniform. Glinda, who didn’t seem to walk if she could help it, floated ahead of me, gesturing me to follow her down the pink-floored main hall of the palace. “I have the perfect place for you, Jellia,” she singsonged as I trotted after her, wincing at my still-sore muscles. “We’ll start you in the kitchen.”
“I’m trained as a lady’s maid, Your Eminence,” I panted as I hurried after her.
“Too good to start out at the bottom, are we?” she cooed.
“It’s not that, Your Eminence, it’s just that I thought—” She whipped around in midair, her ball gown swirling, and stared down at me.
“In my palace, you don’t think, Jellia,” she said. “Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” I said.
She smiled. Despite her pretty face, the expression made her look like a shark. “That’s more like it, Jellia. And don’t think I won’t be keeping an eye on you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Eminence.” In a puff of pink glitter, she vanished. I stood blinking in the hallway, uncertain what to do next, when a tall, lean boy about my age with thick dark hair rounded a corner and stopped in front of me. He was one of the best-looking people I’d ever seen; I was very happy to see that he wasn’t pink.
“You’re the new girl,” he said, his curt demeanor at odds with his charming looks.
“Yes,” I said, and curtsied for good measure. He snorted.
“Save it for Glinda,” he said. “I’m here to help you stay alive.”
FIVE
I was taken aback by his bluntness, but after what I’d been through on my way to the palace, I was grateful that someone was finally being level with me. “I’m Nox,” he said, stalking away from me. I realized I was supposed to follow, and hurried after him. “I oversee the kitchen, where you’ll be stationed for the time being until Glinda . . .” He paused, and a look of pity crossed his face for a second before he returned to stern indifference. “Until Glinda promotes you.”
“Promotes?” I asked as we walked. The maze of pink corridors was hopelessly disorienting; I couldn’t imagine ever being able to get my bearings.
“She has a habit of it,” he said, his tone discouraging further questions.
“What happens to people she promotes?” I persisted.
“To be honest? I’m not sure you want to know.”
“Oh,” I said, and was quiet for a moment. “I’m only here for the summer. I work in the palace in the Emerald City, normally.”
“I know,” he said.
“You seem to know a lot about me.”
“Your reputation precedes you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t slow down. “Glinda’s not the only one who’s kept an eye on you. It’s my job to know what happens in the palace.”
“I thought you just said you worked in the kitchen.”
“Among other things.” With this cryptic answer, he pushed open a pink-paneled door at the end of yet another pink hallway, and I followed him into what was obviously the palace kitchen. A bank of ovens took up most of one wall; next to them, pink pots bubbled on a huge pink stove. But the rest of the room was mercifully ordinary; the long counter that stretched the length of the kitchen was just plain old wood, the floors were gray stone, and the walls were painted a clean white. “Glinda doesn’t come in here,” Nox said, as if to explain the color scheme. Three Munchkin cooks bustled back and forth in front of the stove, and a bedraggled girl who looked about ten was washing dishes in the kitchen’s huge sink. Nox didn’t introduce me, and none of them looked up as we came into the room. “Glinda only eats pink food—mostly cake, which is why there are so many ovens,” Nox said. “She likes strawberry ice cream, too. If she wants something that isn’t ordinarily pink, we have to enchant it. Just hope you don’t get stuck on cleanup after bubble gum fondue night.”
“Bubble gum fondue?” He was kidding, right? But his expression was serious, and based on his demeanor so far, it didn’t seem like he kidded anyone about much of anything.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know how they do things in the Emerald City, but if you want to survive here you’d better not let Glinda overhear you say anything she might find unflattering. And she has ears everywhere in the palace.” He looked meaningfully at the cooks.
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
He took a tiny pink bird covered with pink rhinestones out of his pocket and fastened it to my apron with a little pink clip. “Don’t ever take this off, even when you go to sleep. She’ll know, believe me. This is how she summons you when she needs you. It’ll direct you to wherever she is in the palace.” As if on cue, the bird let out an earsplitting blast of noise, and I jumped about a foot in the air. Nox didn’t even flinch. “Jellia!” Glinda’s voice, tinny and compressed, shrieked across the kitchen. “Bring me a strawberry sundae!”
Nox crossed the kitchen to a tall freezer, which he opened to reveal a row of strawberry sundaes, already prepared. “When she wants something, she wants it right away. We make her favorite dishes ahead of time so she doesn’t have to wait.” He took a pink platter and a pink vase down from a shelf, filled the vase with pink roses from another cooler, set a sundae and the flowers on the platter, and handed the platter to me. “Good luck,” Nox said. “I’ll see you back here when you’re done.”
I’d hoped I would get some time to rest after my ordeal in the field, but clearly that wasn’t going to be the case. I did a mental self-assessment; I was still sore, but I’d manage. The bird pin barked directions at me as I hurried back through the palace corridors and up spiraling flights of pink stairs. Finally, I found myself at a set of pink double doors. I knocked lightly, and the doors swung open.
SIX
Glinda’s personal chambers looked as though a pink marshmallow had gotten into a losing fight with a cotton candy machine. The walls were a lighter version of the ever-present shade of the palace, and the floors were carpeted with thick patterned rugs piled on top of each other, i
n some places inches thick. Heavy pink velvet drapes hung on either side of the big picture windows, which let in a view of the surrounding countryside through rose-tinted glass. A huge, pink-canopied bed dominated one corner of the room, where Glinda lounged against a raft of immense, ruffled pink pillows. She had let her hair down and her soft curls framed her heart-shaped face. She looked almost vulnerable, and surprisingly young—despite what she had put me through, I found myself wondering what she was really like when she wasn’t busy being a manipulative, magic-stealing monster. She had to be pretty desperate for friends, if Dorothy was the closest thing she had to someone to hang out with.
“That took you long enough, Jellia,” she said sweetly. “You may bring the tray over here.”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” I said, trying not to trip on the carpets as I crossed the room.
“How are you finding the palace, Jellia?” she asked as she took the tray from me and settled it on her lap. Was she serious? I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. Her face was serene. She was serious.
“It’s as lovely as you are, Your Eminence,” I said cautiously.
She smiled. “You are very clever, aren’t you, Jellia? Tell me honestly—were you happy working for Dorothy?”
I kept my eyes on the floor. We were definitely on thin ice. What did she want from me?
“I’m always happy,” I said, and she actually laughed.
“Look at me, Jellia.” Cautiously, I looked up. She was still laughing, holding her bowl of ice cream so carelessly that it was in danger of spilling over onto her dress. “Jellia, I know you’re not stupid. And I know you’re not happy. Dorothy is . . .” She paused. “Dorothy can be quite difficult,” she said, although I didn’t think that was what she had meant to say originally. “But you have run her palace very well, and remained very modest—admirable qualities, in someone with your power.”
Was this about her machine? Or the magic she was mining? I had plenty of practice keeping my expression blank after all the time I’d worked for Dorothy, but something told me Glinda was going to be a lot harder to fool. “Perhaps you can be of more use to me than I thought,” she mused. She looked down at her ice cream and a sudden frown marred her perfect features. “But this ice cream has melted, Jellia, because you took so long to bring it to me.”
“But Your Eminence, we’ve been talking—”
Her frown deepened. “Now, Jellia, I don’t want to hear your excuses. I want you to do better next time. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Eminence. It won’t happen again,” I said. Next time I would have to use a spell on her sundae to keep it cold. No one had said anything about a ban on using magic in Glinda’s palace.
Glinda studied me and sighed deeply—a sigh that seemed to come all the way from where her puffy, feathered, pink high-heeled slippers dangled from her perfectly manicured pink-glitter-coated toes. “Tell me, Jellia. Do you enjoy your job?”
I blinked. “Enjoy, Your Eminence?”
“I mean, do you take real satisfaction in your work? At the end of the day, do you feel pride in what you’ve accomplished? Is it meaningful for you to be here?”
I had no idea how to respond to this. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, I don’t mean to be disrespectful—it’s just that it’s my first day, and I—”
“Because the thing is, Jellia, I get the sense from you that you just don’t care,” Glinda interrupted, her fructose-sweet voice tinted with genuine sadness. “It’s as though you’re just going through the motions—you’re clearly very smart, and very efficient, but I need you to understand that we’re all at the palace because we want to be here. Because our work is meaningful to us. I give my heart every day to magic, Jellia”—at this, Glinda laid her beautifully manicured hands over the bony area of her sternum that I imagined housed this, also doubtless pink, organ—“I show up for my work with joy, Jellia, because there simply isn’t anything I’d rather do than be Glinda the Good Witch. But you—I think you’d almost rather be anywhere else. Mistakes like this”—she indicated the bowl of melted ice cream with a gentle, regal nod of her golden head—“tell me that you think you’re too good to be here with us. Don’t get me wrong, you’re very competent. But I need to feel that you care, Jellia. I need to see caring from you. Can you do that for me?”
“I—I think so, Your Eminence,” I said, utterly confused.
“I’m sure things were different when you worked for Dorothy,” Glinda said, her voice losing none of its gentle sweetness. “But here, we don’t make mistakes.” In her hands, the sundae bowl began to glow red-hot, and the ice cream melted into a steaming swirl. Without changing her expression, Glinda threw the bowl directly at me.
I flung up my arms without thinking, as if to protect myself—and felt a strange buzzing surge through me. The air around me shimmered, and to my astonishment, the bowl shattered in mid-flight, as though it had hit an invisible brick wall. With a series of little pops, the fragments vanished before they even hit the floor. A few blobs of pink ice cream hung forlornly in the air before they, too, disappeared with a faint, sticky noise. I stared in disbelief, but Glinda was smiling.
“I thought so,” she said. “Oh, I had a feeling about you, Jellia, and I’m simply never wrong when I have a feeling.”
I was too startled to keep up my perfect servant act. “What—happened?”
“All in good time,” Glinda said, and this time the gentleness in her voice seemed almost real. “I moved too quickly with you this afternoon. But there’s much, much more to you than meets the eye, and together we’re going to find out just how much you can help me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Leave the understanding to me,” she said briskly. “You’re dismissed, Jellia. We’ll have plenty of time to perfect your—education.” She waved a hand in my direction and turned back to the window.
Nox took one look at me when I finally found my way back to the kitchen and told me I was done working for the day. His demeanor was as gruff as ever, but I thought I saw sympathy in his eyes. “What happened up there?”
“I—to be honest, I’m not sure,” I said, and told him everything—Glinda’s sudden niceness, the ice cream, the thing I’d done to somehow make it disappear. When I got to that part, his eyebrows went up.
“You mean, you did magic?”
“But it wasn’t something I did on purpose,” I said. Before Dorothy and her rules, everyone in Oz had used magic all the time in the palace for little things, like polishing the silver, or making the flowers in the garden grow a particularly vibrant shade. Ozma had magic, of course—Ozma was a fairy, with all the powers of Oz at her disposal. And Dorothy had power, too: the power to control the weather, set the seasons to her liking, bewitch the Scarecrow’s weird experiments into more than just lifeless ideas strung together out of wood and wire—though none of us really knew where Dorothy’s power came from, or if she’d had it in the Other Place. But what I’d done in Glinda’s room was something different from the common household magic all the servants shared. It was far more powerful—and seemingly out of my control.
“You’ve never done anything like that before?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and then stopped. I had done something like this once before when I was a little girl. I’d been playing with some hand-me-down dolls that the other servants had given me. I was lonely—I was the only child in the palace, and one day I’d decided I wanted some real live friends, so I made my dolls come alive. I still don’t know how I knew the magic to make that happen, but I do remember when Ozma walked in on me and my animated friends. She’d instantly made them go back to being just stuffed dolls, and she’d made me swear to never do that again—and to never let anyone else know that I could do something like that. I always wanted to make her happy, so I’d never again tried to summon that kind of magic—I didn’t want to upset Ozma.
I’d always kept the extent of my magic a secret from everyone else in the palace. Adding a little e
xtra shine to the silverware was no stretch for most Ozians, but ever since that day, I knew that my own powers were different—and stronger—from everyone else in the palace. Except Dorothy. And Ozma.
“You’re different, aren’t you,” Nox said, interrupting my reverie. I didn’t confirm his suspicions—he seemed to know without me saying anything. “That must be why we—” He cut himself off.
“Why what? And who’s we?”
“I promise I’ll tell you everything when it’s time,” he said. “But for now you’ll have to trust me.”
“Right,” I said. “Clear as mud.” I sighed, annoyed, but whatever he knew, he wasn’t going to tell me anything else now.
“You’ve had a long day,” he said. “Why don’t you get some rest, and you can get a fresh start tomorrow.” He lowered his voice again. “Whatever she says to you—whatever she lets you see—don’t trust her. Understood? She can act vulnerable, but it’s just an act.”
Nox summoned another Munchkin to show me to my room in the servants’ quarters. It was tiny, like my room at Dorothy’s, but it had none of the comforts of my room at home, where I’d spent my entire life. It was bleak and bare bones, with just a narrow bed, a low dresser, and a single small window that overlooked the palace gardens. The room was a stark reminder of how different my new life was, but at least here, I could be alone. Just the summer, I told myself again. I just have to make it through the summer. I collapsed on the bed, too exhausted to even change out of my dress, and fell immediately into sleep.
SEVEN