“That has nothing to do with this,” Nox said sharply. “This was Mombi and Gert’s decision.”
“Oh, I’m sure it was,” Lanadel said, her voice icy. “It just happens to be an incredibly convenient decision for you. But is it just me, or is sending your best fighter on a death mission a really bad idea, Nox?”
“She won’t be in danger,” Nox said. “Much danger,” he amended. “She’s just going to infiltrate the Emerald Palace, get some information for us, and come back.”
“You know she can’t do that!” Lanadel yelled. “She’s told me a million times! Glamora tossed her out of etiquette lessons because she couldn’t pretend to be a courtier!”
“She doesn’t have to be a courtier!” Nox snapped. “She’ll be a servant. And the details of her mission are none of your business, anyway. This isn’t your decision, Lanadel. I’m only telling you because—because—”
“Because you want me to know what happens when you actually have feelings for someone,” Lanadel said coldly. “You send them into the occupied Emerald City to die. I won’t let you do this.”
“I don’t have—” He cut himself off. “It doesn’t matter. She’s already agreed.”
“When could she possibly have had time to do that?”
Nox jerked his head toward something behind her. “You can ask her yourself.”
Melindra had come up behind them without Lanadel hearing her. “Is it true?” Lanadel asked her. “You’re going into the Emerald City?”
Melindra’s expression was filled with raw pain as she looked at Nox. “Somebody has to do it,” she said. “We need information about Dorothy’s soldiers if we’re going to fight them. How the Woodman’s creating them. If they have weaknesses. That kind of thing.”
“It’s a suicide mission,” Lanadel said desperately. “You can’t let them send you into the—”
“I wanted to go,” Melindra said, still not taking her eyes off Nox. “I volunteered.”
Lanadel opened her mouth to protest and then stopped. She knew why Melindra had volunteered, and it had nothing to do with the Order. Nox had broken her heart. But she couldn’t stop Melindra from going without admitting that she’d overheard their fight on the mountain. And she knew that Melindra, just like Nox, would never forgive her if she knew Lanadel had seen her at her weakest.
Melindra and Nox were so much alike—except that Melindra had learned how to let go of her tough exterior when something really mattered to her, and Nox was trapped by it. Melindra didn’t care if she died in Dorothy’s palace. She didn’t care if she never came back at all. She was going to go into the most dangerous place in Oz, and there was nothing Lanadel could do to stop her. It was like losing her family all over again. Tears welled up in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily with the heel of her hand. Lanadel wanted to beg her again to stay. To tell her that it was not worth it. But she knew down deep that her words could not stall Melindra from leaving. Only Nox’s could.
“When do I go to Ev?” she asked. She was proud of herself for keeping the tremor out of her voice. Melindra looked at Nox, startled out of her ice queen act.
“You’re sending her to Ev?”
“In a few days. It’s already been decided,” Nox said. Pure rage flickered in Melindra’s eyes before she tamped it down.
“I’ll be fine,” Lanadel said, although she had no idea if that was true. The last thing she wanted was to make Melindra worry about her. She grabbed Melindra in a sudden tight embrace, her nostrils filling with the sea-salt smell of Melindra’s hair. Words bubbled up again. Ones that she could not say. Ones that Melindra would never return. She took a deep breath and chose other words.
“Stay alive,” she whispered into her ear. “Please. For me.”
Melindra hugged her back fiercely. “You too,” she said quietly. “For all of us.”
“Mombi and Gert are working on a spell to get you across the Deadly Desert,” Nox said. Reluctantly, Lanadel let Melindra go. She didn’t—couldn’t—say what she wanted to. That the Order wasn’t worth dying for. That Nox wasn’t worth dying for. But she knew exactly how it felt to be willing to die because you had nothing left to live for. And she knew there was nothing she could say to Melindra that would make her change her mind.
“Anyway, the risk of death is worth it if it means I get away from Holly and Larkin for a while,” Melindra said. Her voice was light, but her eyes were distant. There was a cloud of sadness around her so thick Lanadel could almost touch it. “I’m going to check in on Annabel,” she added. Lanadel nodded. Nox watched her go, his expression unfathomable, and then continued as if they hadn’t been interrupted. “They’re figuring out another spell to get you back once you’ve gathered information. Mombi will have more instructions for you once the spell’s complete. Your mission may be dangerous,” he added unnecessarily.
“I knew what I signed up for when I got here,” she said. In just a few short months, the Order had transformed her into a fighter. But she owed them nothing. They’d never had any intention of helping her avenge her family. They just wanted another pawn—like Nox himself, even though he couldn’t see it. And she wasn’t going to help them anymore. Not unless they really had a way to stop Dorothy. Not unless they were really going to fight—and not just train all day in their mountain hideaway like children playing at being an army. Without Melindra, there was nothing to keep her here. And she wasn’t going to die for an Order that was willing to sacrifice someone like Melindra just because Nox didn’t want her around.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Nox said, looking at her. “Lanadel, I swear. She’s better than I am,” he said quietly, his eyes not leaving her face. “I’m doing what I can. You have to believe me. What you saw last night—it’s not everything.”
She ignored him. “When do I leave?” she asked coldly.
“As soon as the spell is complete.” He kept trying to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him. He could say whatever he wanted, but she knew the truth. Nox didn’t care about Melindra. At least not enough. He certainly didn’t care about Lanadel. The only things he cared about were himself and the Order. And they were one and the same. She turned to go.
“Lanadel,” Nox said. His voice was pleading. But she refused to look at him.
“I’ll go find Mombi and Gert,” she said.
She turned away from Nox and walked back into the caverns. Nox might have a plan for her, but that didn’t mean she had to follow it. She was on her own now. Forget the Order; she was going to find a way to avenge her family herself. On her own terms. They’d given her the skills she needed, and now she didn’t need them anymore. It didn’t matter. Gert and Mombi were giving her a ticket out of the mountain. Away from the Order. Let them think they were ordering her around. Let them send her away. She didn’t care anymore what the Order did. She could play their game even better than they could. She could be a dozen different people if that was what they wanted. A dozen fake selves, so that no one would ever guess which one was the real her.
The Order could send her to Ev. But no matter what happened, no matter what they wanted from her, she was never coming back. This time, she was really, truly alone. And she was going to make everyone who’d hurt her pay.
EXCERPT FROM NO PLACE LIKE OZ
SEE HOW DOROTHY’S RISE TO POWER BEGAN:
ONE
They say you can’t go home again. I’m not entirely sure who said that, but it’s something they say. I know it because my aunt Em has it embroidered on a throw pillow in the sitting room.
You can’t go home again. Well, even if they put it on a pillow, whoever said it was wrong. I’m proof alone that it’s not true.
Because, you see, I left home. And I came back. Lickety-split, knock your heels together, and there you are. Oh, it wasn’t quite so simple, of course, but look at me now: I’m still here, same as before, and it’s just as if I was never gone in the first place.
So every time I see that little pillow on Aunt Em??
?s good sofa, with its pretty pink piping around the edges and colorful bouquets of daisies and wildflowers stitched alongside those cheerful words (but are they even cheerful? I sometimes wonder), I’m halfway tempted to laugh. When I consider everything that’s happened! A certain sort of person might say that it’s ironic.
Not that I’m that sort of person. This is Kansas, and we Kansans don’t put much truck in anything as foolish as irony.
Things we do put truck in:
Hard work.
Practicality.
Gumption.
Crop yields and healthy livestock and mild winters. Things you can touch and feel and see with your own two eyes. Things that do you at least two licks of good.
Because this is the prairie, and the prairie is no place for daydreaming. All that matters out here is what gets you through the winter. A Kansas winter will grind a dreamer right up and feed it to the pigs.
As my uncle Henry always says: You can’t trade a boatload of wishes for a bucket of slop. (Maybe I should embroider that on a pillow for Aunt Em, too. I wonder if it would make her laugh.)
I don’t know about wishes, but a bucket of slop was exactly what I had in my hand on the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday, a day in September with a chill already in the air, as I made my way across the field, away from the shed and the farmhouse toward the pigpen.
It was feeding time, and the pigs knew it. Even from fifty feet away, I could already hear them—Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha—squealing and snorting in anticipation of their next meal.
“Well, really!” I said to myself. “Who in the world could get so excited about a bit of slop!?”
As I said it, my old friend Miss Millicent poked her little red face out from a gap of wire in the chicken coop and squawked in greeting. “And hello to you, too, Miss Millicent,” I said cheerily. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be getting your own food soon enough.”
But Miss Millicent was looking for companionship, not food, and she squeezed herself out of her coop and began to follow on my heels as I kept on my way. I had been ignoring her lately, and the old red hen was starting to be cross about it, a feeling she expressed today by squawking loudly and shadowing my every step, fluttering her wings and fussing underfoot.
She meant well enough, surely, but when I felt her hard beak nipping at my ankle, I finally snapped at her. “Miss Millie! You get out of here. I have chores to do! We’ll have a nice, long heart-to-heart later, I promise.”
The chicken clucked reproachfully and darted ahead, stopping in her tracks just in the spot where I was about to set my foot down. It was like she wanted me to know that I couldn’t get away from her that easily—that I was going to pay her some mind whether I liked it or not.
Sometimes that chicken could be impossible. And without even really meaning to, I kicked at her. “Shoo!”
Miss Millie jumped aside just before my foot connected, and I felt myself lose my balance as I missed her, stumbling backward with a yelp and landing on my rear end in the grass.
I looked down at myself in horror and saw my dress covered in pig slop. My knee was scraped, I had dirt all over my hands, and my slop bucket was upturned at my side.
“Millie!” I screeched. “See what you’ve done? You’ve ruined everything!” I swatted at her again, this time even more angrily than when I’d kicked her, but she just stepped nimbly aside and stood there, looking at me like she just didn’t know what to do with me anymore.
“Oh dear,” I said, sighing. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. Come here, you silly hen.”
Millie bobbled her head up and down like she was considering the proposition before she hopped right into my lap, where she burrowed in and clucked softly as I ruffled her feathers. This was all she had wanted in the first place. To be my friend.
It used to be that it was all I wanted, too. It used to be that Miss Millicent and even Jeannie the pig were some of my favorite people in the world. Back then, I didn’t care a bit that a pig and a chicken hardly qualified as people at all.
They were there for me when I was sad, or when something was funny, or when I just needed company, and that was what mattered. Even though Millie couldn’t talk, it always felt like she understood everything I said. Sometimes it even almost seemed like she was talking to me, giving me her sensible, no-nonsense advice in a raspy cackle. “Don’t you worry, dearie,” she’d say. “There’s no problem in this whole world that can’t be fixed with a little spit and elbow grease.”
But lately, things hadn’t been quite the same between me and my chicken. Lately, I had found myself becoming more impatient with her infuriating cackling, with the way she was always pecking and worrying after me.
“I’m sorry, Miss Millicent,” I said. “I know I haven’t been myself lately. I promise I’ll be back to normal soon.”
She fluffed her wings and puffed her chest out, and I looked around: at the dusty, gray-green fields merging on the horizon with the almost-matching gray-blue sky, and all of it stretching out so far into nothing that it seemed like it would be possible to travel and travel and travel—just set off in a straight line heading east or west, north or south, it didn’t matter—and never get anywhere at all.
“Sometimes I wonder if this is what the rest of life’s going to be like,” I said. “Gray fields and gray skies and buckets of slop. The world’s a big place, Miss Millicent—just look at that sky. So why does it feel so small from where we’re sitting? I’ll tell you one thing. If I ever get the chance to go somewhere else again, I’m going to stay there.”
I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I knew how I sounded.
“Get yourself together and stop moping, Little Miss Fancy,” I responded to myself, now in my raspy, stern, Miss Millicent voice, imagining that the words were coming out of her mouth instead of my own. “A prairie girl doesn’t worry her pretty little head about places she’ll never go and things she’ll never see. A prairie girl worries about the here and now.”
This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.
I sighed and shrugged anyway. Miss Millie didn’t know there was anything else out there. She just knew her coop, her feed, and me.
These days, I envied her for that. Because I was a girl, not a chicken, and I knew what was out there.
Past the prairie, where I sat with my old chicken in my lap, there were oceans and more oceans. Beyond those were deserts and pyramids and jungles and mountains and glittering palaces. I had heard about all those places and all those things from newsreels and newspapers.
And even if I was the only one who knew it, I’d seen with my own eyes that there were more directions to move in than just north and south and east and west, places more incredible than Paris and Los Angeles, more exotic than Kathmandu and Shanghai, even. There were whole worlds out there that weren’t on any map, and things that you would never believe.
I didn’t need to believe. I knew. I just sometimes wished I didn’t.
I thought of Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha, all of them in their pen beside themselves in excitement for the same slop they’d had yesterday and would have again tomorrow. The slop I’d have to refill into the bucket and haul back out to them.
“It must be nice not to know any better,” I said to Miss Millicent.
In the end, a chicken is a good thing to hold in your lap for a few minutes. It’s a good thing to pretend to talk to when there’s no one else around. But in the end, if you want the honest-to-goodness truth, it’s possible that a chicken doesn’t make the greatest friend.
Setting Miss Millicent aside, I dusted myself off and headed back toward the farmhouse to clean myself up, change my dress, and get myself ready for my big party. Bertha and Jeannie and Ezekiel would have to wait until tomorrow for their slop.
It wasn’t like me to let them go hungry. At least, it wasn’t like the old me.
But the old me was getting older by the second. It had been two years since the tornado. Two years since
I’d gone away. Since I had met Glinda the Good Witch, and the Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. Since I had traveled the Road of Yellow Brick and defeated the Wicked Witch of the West. In Oz, I had been a hero. I could have stayed. But I hadn’t. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry were in Kansas. Home was in Kansas. It had been my decision and mine alone.
Well, I had made my choice, and like any good Kansas girl, I would live with it. I would pick up my chin, put on a smile, and be on my way.
The animals could just go hungry for now. It was my birthday, after all.
TWO
“Happy Swoot Sixtoon,” the cake said, the letters spelled out in smudged icing. I beamed up at my aunt Em with my brightest smile.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I’d already changed into my party dress—which wasn’t that much different from the dress I’d just gotten all dirty in the field—and had cleaned myself up as best as I could, scrubbing the dirt from my hands and the blood from my knee until you could hardly tell I’d fallen.
Uncle Henry hovered off to the side, looking as proud and hopeful as if he’d baked it himself. He’d certainly helped, gathering the ingredients from around the farm: coaxing the eggs from Miss Millicent (who never seemed in the mood to lay any), milking the cow, and making sure Aunt Em had everything she needed.
“Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t marry a master chef!” Henry said, putting his arm around her waist.
Even Toto was excited. He was hopping around on the floor yipping at us eagerly.
“You really like it?” Aunt Em asked, a note of doubt in her voice. “I know the writing isn’t perfect, but penmanship has never been my strong suit.”