No Place Like Oz: A Dorothy Must Die Prequel Novella(32)

“I’m not going home,” I said firmly.

Ozma twisted her lips in thought. “You really don’t want to, do you?” she said.

“I don’t want to and I’m not going to,” I said. My mind was made up. I was staying here. In Oz. In the palace. No matter what.

“Well,” the princess said after a bit. “We’ll just have to make your aunt and uncle understand, then, won’t we?” She stood up and faced me. She took my hands in hers.

I wanted to trust her. I wanted to be her friend. But as I looked back into her big, glittering eyes, she averted her gaze for just the briefest moment, and I knew that she was hiding something from me. She’d said we were friends and I believed her but something gnawed at me—and it wasn’t just Glinda, or the Scarecrow’s warnings.



The bedroom that Jellia escorted me to after dinner was everything I had dreamed. It was three times as big as my room back in Kansas, with a panoramic window that looked out over the shimmering Emerald City skyline.

There was a huge vanity and a jewelry box overflowing with earrings and bracelets and necklaces, any one of which I was sure would have cost more than Uncle Henry earned in a year back in Kansas. The ebony wardrobe in the corner was stuffed with any kind of gown I could imagine, not to mention more than a few that I never would have been able to dream up on my own.

This was what I had wanted. Sitting alone in the field back in Kansas, covered in pig slop, with Miss Millicent in my lap, I had made a wish without even realizing it, and the wish had come true.

It was too good to be true, though. As I stood in front of the open wardrobe, wondering which dress to try on first, I had an itchy feeling in the back of my head that was telling me Ozma knew me too well. Like she was giving me all this because she knew it was what I wanted, and that she thought that if she kept me happy, I wouldn’t question her.

She had seemed so adamant when I’d asked her to teach me magic. Adamant, and a little sad, like it was exactly what she’d been afraid of. And she’d certainly been interested in my shoes.

Of course, the shoes were magic. I’d already figured out they were more than just a key that had unlocked the door to Oz for me. The way they’d been impossible to take off my feet for the Scarecrow, the strange feelings that had come from them all along my journey: all of that had suggested they could do more than I knew. And, of course, there was the way they had seemed to help me fight off the Screaming Trees in the forest.

Maybe I was a little afraid of them.

But Glinda had sent them to me to bring me here, I was certain of it.

And really—it seemed ridiculous that Ozma should be so against me doing magic. This was the Land of Oz. There was magic in the earth, in the air.

At the same time, it seemed obvious that she had figured out there was more to the shoes than I was telling. I was fairly certain she knew at least part of the truth. If she really didn’t want me doing magic, why hadn’t she taken them away from me?

What if she knew she couldn’t? What if she was afraid of them, too?

What if my shoes were the key to finding Glinda?

It all made a certain upside-down sense. Last time I’d been to Oz, I’d had the power in my Silver Shoes all along, and I hadn’t even realized it. It would be incredibly stupid to make the same mistake twice.

So I sat down on the edge of my bed and tried to call for the Sorceress. I knocked my heels together. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to conjure her kind, motherly spirit. I pictured her smiling, impossibly beautiful face.

Something was happening. I could feel the red shoes trying as hard as I was. They constricted on my feet; they burned and tingled, glowing with energy. A few times, I even felt like I was getting somewhere: I could feel the Good Witch’s presence filling the room. Once, I even thought I smelled her perfume. But, no matter what I did, she didn’t appear.

I could feel the magic inside myself. I could practically see it sparking from my fingertips as I waved them through the air trying to bring her forth. Still nothing.

Maybe it was just that I needed to start with something smaller.

I walked to the vanity, sat down, and looked at myself. I examined my face closely. I thought about what Ozma had done earlier that day—about the way she had woven her fingers through the air and changed my hair and my clothes, and I wondered if I could do the same. So I closed my eyes.

And I know it sounds strange of me. I don’t even know where it came from. I know, but I imagined myself as a giant tree standing in the center of the Road of Yellow Brick, with roots that spread out from my feet and pushed deep into the core of Oz, drawing up magic like it was water. I imagined that Oz was feeding me. That was sort of what my shoes had felt like on the Road of Yellow Brick—like the roots of a tree that connected me to Oz.

I could feel it working. I could feel the power filling my body, and the more it did, the hungrier it made me. I felt more alive than I ever had before. I felt like I could do anything.

But I was going to start small. I squeezed my eyes, touched my hair, and imagined the magic working on it. I imagined it changing colors, flipping through all the different possibilities the rainbow had to offer until I landed on the most beautiful color I could: pink. The pink of a sunset. The pink of Glinda’s dress.

And when I saw myself staring back from the mirror, a lock of hair tumbled across my forehead, and it was even pinker than I had hoped.