No Place Like Oz: A Dorothy Must Die Prequel Novella(28)

The path began to curl into a spiral. Ozma’s voice was dreamy and far away, and I wondered if she was talking to herself more than to me.

“They rested there for eight days, eating and drinking and dancing, regaining their strength after all the hardship they had been through, and on the eighth day, Lurline was so grateful and happy that she pricked her thumb with her knife and let a drop of her blood fall into the pool. I don’t know why she did it, really. Just to say thank you, I guess. But whatever the reason, she gave Oz a piece of herself, and as soon as her blood hit the spring, the land began to change around them. Just like that. Lush, green grass grew where there had only been dirt and sand. Rivers sprung up, and they wandered wherever they wanted to wander. Hills and mountains burst out of the flatness. On the path that the fairies had walked, yellow bricks began to sprout like flowers. Lurline’s blood had blessed the spring with magic, and that magic began to flow through everything.”

The spiral we were walking in grew tighter and tighter as it looped in on itself toward a center. The path grew narrower and narrower until my shoulder touched Ozma’s. Then it was narrower still, and I felt my nervousness mounting. I dropped behind her as she continued with her story. She didn’t bother looking back at me.

“What had once been a barren desert had become a magical, untamed wilderness. It became Oz. But the queen knew that she and her band had already stopped for too long. It was time for them to keep going where they were going. And yet—it was so beautiful. She couldn’t just abandon it. So she left her favorite daughter behind, a girl not much older than me, and the smallest of the group. She was small but tough. It was left to her to look after the land in Lurline’s absence. To take care of it and nurture its magic the way you tend to a garden.

“That daughter stayed behind, alone, to become Oz’s first true princess. That daughter was my grandmother. Or was it my great-grandmother? Or my great-great-grandmother?” Ozma shrugged, finally stepping forward through an arbor into a clearing where the sun was warm and bright again. Birds were chirping.

We had come to the center of the maze.

And as soon as the sunlight hit her green eyes, the laughing, girlish Ozma who had greeted me at the gate returned in a flash. She giggled a little to herself, putting a hand to her mouth. “Great-great-great-grandmother? Well, who knows! At any rate she was the first princess—whatever her name was. I honestly have no idea! Me, I’m the last. At least for now until the next one comes. Sometimes I wish she would hurry up.” She gave a theatrical sigh.

The center of the maze was a circular area paved with flagstones. It was about fifteen feet across, with a ring of squat little trees inside the larger ring of tall hedges.

In the very center of it all was a single wooden bench that had obviously seen better days: it was silver and weathered and close to rotting. At the foot of the bench was a muddy, mossy puddle. All of it had a burned-out, sun-bleached look to it, as colorless as one of the old sepia photographs Aunt Em kept of herself as a child.

“So,” Ozma said. “I suppose that’s a very long way of answering your question. Yes, I’m a fairy. The truth is, it’s really not as exciting as you might think. It’s actually not so much different from being a regular girl.”


She was so matter-of-fact about the way she said it—the same way I would say that my aunt and uncle were farmers, or that I was from Kansas. I couldn’t imagine being a fairy princess and not even caring. And how could she think it was the same as being a regular girl?

“I know it’s stupid,” I asked. “But do you have wings? Fairies do usually, right?”

Ozma didn’t mind. She laughed and flipped her palms up as if to say, You caught me. She tossed her black hair and shook it out, and as she did, two huge butterfly wings unfurled from her back and fluttered a few times.

The wings were golden and translucent, lined with veins, and so delicate that they barely looked like they were there at all. They looked like nothing more than the impressions that burn into your eyes when you look at the light for too long.

“They don’t do me much good,” she admitted, flapping them a bit to demonstrate. She hovered a few inches from the ground and then let herself down again. “They work, but flying makes my stomach queasy, and anyway, I have the Saw-Horse to take me wherever I want to go. I hardly use them at all.”

The oddest feeling came over me. I wanted to reach out and touch those shining, beautiful wings so badly. If I had just asked, she probably would have let me, but I didn’t want to ask. It wasn’t like me at all, but I wanted to reach out and grab one of them and hold it in my fist. I wanted to know what it would feel like for it to be mine and not hers.

But I didn’t do it. I held my hand back, and Ozma drew the golden wings in. Rather than folding them up neatly like a bug’s wings, or a bird’s, her body just seemed to absorb them back into itself. If she noticed my reaction, it didn’t seem to bother her.

The princess walked to the bench and sat, letting her scepter clatter to the ground. She tucked her legs under her body and stretched her arms lazily to the sky. “This is my favorite place in the whole Emerald City. Maybe in all of Oz,” Ozma said. “I’d spend days here, if they let me.”

With an entire palace, an amazing garden filled with magical plants, and a whole Emerald City as a personal playground on top of it, I found it hard to believe that this drab little sitting area, with its broken bench and its muddy puddle, and its stunted, gray little trees—all surrounded by an enchanted hedge maze with obviously sinister intentions—was the best place the fairy princess could think to spend her free time.