Authors: Danielle Paige
Nox took my hand and pulled me closer, putting a sure hand on the small of my back, steadying me. We began to dance. I breathed him in against my will. He smelled like the healing spring back in the caves, fresh and alive and full of magic.
Glamora called orders at us after every rotation we made around the room.
“Posture!”
“I don’t know how they dance where you’re from, but here in Oz no one leads.”
“You are equal partners in the dance. In the circle. In life.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that one.
“Are you ever serious?” Nox finally demanded, but even he was starting to break under Glamora’s ridiculous instruction.
“Are you ever
not
?”
The dance wasn’t quite a waltz—something that I’d never done but had seen in enough old movies on TV. It was more of an elaborate pentagram that crisscrossed the room over and over.
Another couple appeared beside us—a pretty woman with caramel skin and green hair, and a handsome man beside her in a top hat. I opened my mouth to ask who they were.
“Illusions,” whispered Nox as a Munchkin appeared behind him.
“Look at your partner!” Glamora barked.
In seconds the ballroom had filled with fake couples, swirling around us.
It made sense that Nox could do this. He was the most coordinated, most physical being I’d ever met. But still, with every step we took in unison, I grew more aware of him. Even if he was annoying, and arrogant, and too serious all the time, I had to admit it: he was hot.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t want him to see anything other than indifference in my eyes.
Prom was coming up in a couple of months back at school. There were already posters in the halls with a really cheesy silhouette of a couple lit from behind by the moon. The theme was “A Night to Remember.” I was never going to go to prom anyway. And it’s not like anyone would be dancing even remotely like we were now. But I suddenly realized that this might be as close as I would come to “A Night to Remember.” Dancing with a witch boy who didn’t want me here.
As we danced, I dared to steal glances at his face. In this moment, Nox didn’t look like he didn’t want me here. Maybe it was years of Glamora instruction, and he was simply good at being a gentleman. Maybe it was the tapping of her foot to the music against the floor that was almost hypnotic. But he didn’t look completely tortured.
“Remember,” Glamora said, her voice floating across the dance floor. “This isn’t a battle. Unless it is—in which case you should still keep your eyes on one another, to make sure that no one makes a move that isn’t wanted.” Glamora laughed, like it was an inside joke with herself.
Nox’s face shifted suddenly, like he was remembering something.
“You think that you’re too good for us,” Nox said, the brightness of his voice not matching up with his words.
“Excuse me?” No one ever thought I was too good for anything. I grew up in a freaking trailer.
“Gert says you’re holding back. You’re afraid to be like us.”
“That’s not true. I’m afraid to be like Dorothy. Not the rest of you.”
“You’re already like us, you know. You wished for this. You wished to be as far away from your mom as you could get and your wish came true.”
“How do you know that? And anyway, that doesn’t make me Wicked. Or formerly Wicked either,” I argued. I tried to drop his hand but he wouldn’t let me go.
“You’re afraid to do anything but wish for things to happen to you. You wish you could go show up on your dad’s doorstep, meet his new wife and new kid—you wish you could say all the things you want to say to him. You wish you could have left your mom on your own. You’ve wanted to run away for almost as long as you can remember. But it took a tornado to do it. You couldn’t even make that happen on your own.”
He gripped my hands even tighter and pushed me forward in the dance like I was a puppet.
Why was he saying all this? More importantly, how did he know?
Gert. Nox wasn’t in my head reading my thoughts. Gert was. She’d fed him my secrets, my entire life it seemed.
I had never done anything, he was right. I did go through my life just reacting to other people. When I was young I had escape plans—big, grand, dumb ones. I was going to start fresh somewhere where no one knew me and no one would call me Salvation Amy. But that part didn’t sting as much as the Dad thing did. I did think about going to visit him, all the time. I’d have some excuse like I was selling candy for school. And I would see the life he left us for. The pretty wife who was no prettier than Mom before she started with the pills. The little girl or boy, technically
my sister or brother
, who she was pregnant with when they moved away to Jersey. I was going to show up and meet them and warn that little girl or boy that one day Dad would get tired of him or her, too.
Glamora tapped her foot on the glass floor to the beat of the music. “You’re losing the beat, Amy.”
Nox leaned in and dropped his voice to whisper words that I hadn’t heard since I stepped into Oz.
“Am I right, Salvation Amy?”
The room spun. I wasn’t sure if I was dizzy from him or from my anger. I dropped his hand.
He reached for me—but his hand missed me completely and grabbed the air next to me.
I was standing in a new spot. Across the room from where I started.
“What the hell? How did I . . . ?”
Had I—? Was it possible—? Had I moved myself across the room?
Don’t you see? You did it.
I heard Gert’s voice. She appeared in the center of the room. She’d been here all along. I felt hot. More specifically, my hands felt hot from casting the spell.
She had done this on purpose, made Glamora and Nox bring me to this room and beat at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. Like dipping me under the spring, she did what she thought she needed to do. But this time she’d gone too far.
The room spun again. My hands got hotter—light seemed to shoot from them. Not the gentle glow I’d seen from Gert. A searing red glow. Like darts of fire.
The fire darts seemed to be seeking Nox. But Nox lit up with a weird blue light of his own and the darts seemed to deflect off him. More darts came off my hands even though I wasn’t actually directing them. They shot straight up into the air and showered down like firecrackers.
I was angry. Too angry. No-turning-back angry.
I wanted to run away from him, from Gert, from all of them, but I couldn’t move. Nox made a beeline toward me and grabbed my glowing hands with his own. In a blink we were standing outside the caves on the same spot he’d taken me the first day of training—the peak of the mountain, this time looking out into a deep black sky dotted with strange constellations where the familiar ones should have been.
These stars were different from any stars back home. For one thing, they were brighter. For another thing, where the constellations I was used to never seemed to match the images they were supposed to resemble, these formed themselves into clear pictures the longer you gazed at them. There was a horseshoe and a bear and a tiger and a dragon, all as clear as pictures in a book.
“Gert thought
home
was stopping you from doing magic. We had to push. We had to know.” He pointed into the distance. “Look. That one’s always been my favorite.” As he pointed, a group of bright-white pinpricks rearranged themselves into the image of a bicycle. As I looked at it, a memory came back to me: my mother teaching me to ride a bike when I was five, before we’d moved to Dusty Acres.
It was the first time I’d ever tried it without the training wheels, and Mom had promised to hold on so I didn’t fall. But at some point, as I’d raced down the hill, the wind in my hair, I’d let out a whoop of triumph. I was doing it. It was only at that moment that I’d realized Mom had let go. I was on my own.
That was when I went crashing to the curb. When I crawled back to my feet, my knee scraped and bloody, my bike in a tangled heap on the ground, I’d looked up the hill to see my mom standing at the top, clapping for me.
I had been pushing back thoughts of Mom on a regular basis now. All Gert’s talk of forgiveness had planted a seed that I did not want to let grow. I’d told myself that all I’d been thinking about was where my fist was going next. About trying to light a candle just by thinking about it and remembering all the stuff in all the books Glamora had given me.
But it wasn’t true. She was still there no matter how much I didn’t want her to be. And now, standing on the top of the mountain with Nox, all I could think about was my mother.
I was an idiot. For a few minutes I had been thinking about prom and dancing with Nox and how he maybe didn’t hate it—and he was just following witchy orders.
And somehow that almost made me more angry.
“It matters how you do this,” I said through clenched teeth, staring him down. “What you do to get there. You can’t just
kill
someone. The ends do not make it okay.”
His eyes shifted away from mine and then back again. I saw something pass over his face. Guilt. Regret. No, it was maybe something else—like curiosity or realization—like he was happening upon completely new information.
Like it had never occurred to him that I would be hurt or mad or anything like that. Like being able to do magic trumped everything.
“We’re the only ones
willing
to take her down. The only ones capable. It’s us or nothing. We’re doing one bad thing for the good of Oz.”
“Do you ever not speak the witch party line—do you ever make a decision that is all your own?”
His eyes flicked away from mine.
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Do you ever ask
any
? You know absolutely everything there is to know about me and I don’t know anything about any of you. Not really.”
The cockiness from the dance floor was gone. He slipped out of it so easily it was a surprise.
“Do you really want to know who I am?” he asked.
I should have said no and backed away from him. But even though I was mad at him, I still wanted to crack him open and see what was inside. I nodded.
“I’m not Nox.”
“What?”
“Nox is just the name Mombi gave me. I don’t remember my real name. I remember my parents. Their faces. The way they smelled and sounded. I remember the day that they were taken from me. But my name washed away with them. And there’s no one alive who remembers it.”
“Nox . . .”
“It was in the beginning. When Glinda and Dorothy were just starting to mine everything and everywhere. Glinda hadn’t figured it out yet. She wasn’t using the Munchkins. She was just using her own magic to mine magic. She blasted a hole in the center of the town and boom. She hit the water table. Everything flooded. We climbed up to the roof. There was this old weather vane up there that was so rusty it didn’t even move when the wind blew. I remember my mother told me to hold on to it no matter what. And I did. But my mom didn’t. Or couldn’t. I wanted to let go, too, but I held on like she told me to. When the water went down, no one in the village was left except me.”
I inhaled sharply.
“Did Mombi find you then?”
“Later, much later I think. I went from town to town. I stole when I had to eat. I slept where I could. Sometimes people were good to me. And sometimes they were horrible. Mombi saved me during one of those horrible times. I stumbled upon the wrong town. The Lion was there. But so was Mombi.”
He glanced up at me, then looked away sharply. He didn’t want my pity.
“What I said back there when we were dancing—I’m sorry I had to do that. I needed to get a reaction from you. You’ve been fighting all along. You raised yourself. I had an army and three witches.”
Something hit me all at once. “What Gert said about magic—how can you use it if you don’t know who you are?”
“I know exactly who I am.”
“But you said . . .”
“I am a fighter. I am a member of the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.”
It occurred to me—maybe Mombi hadn’t rescued him out of the kindess of her heart. Maybe she had done it to make a perfect soldier. If all Nox had was a faded memory of some woman who may have been his mom, all Nox had ever really had was the Order. And all his magic came from there—from the person they made him. He was as pure as the magic that ran through the spring. He was all magic. Hardly a boy at all. He was the knife that he told me he could train me to be.
I wasn’t sure if I pitied him or envied him. Would I trade away the few good memories of my mom to get rid of all the bad ones? I thought the answer was yes, but who would I be without those memories? Who was Amy Gumm without her past?
I was running away from home. Nox was marching toward home. Home was battle for him.
And maybe it was for me, too.
Nox grabbed my hands suddenly. “Magic is just energy that wants to be something different,” he reminded me. “So take what you’re feeling right now and turn it into something different. Turn it into magic.”
I looked at Nox. I wished this moment had been the starting place for today’s lesson. Not what he did on the dance floor. But I pushed that aside and I tried to do what I’d seen him do. Tried to do what I saw Glamora and Mombi and Gert do. Be both in my skin and a part of the magic around it. I felt the energy coursing through my body like warm water. I thought of my mother. I thought of the question Gert had posed:
Who are you?
I focused on my sadness, the sadness I’d felt for my whole life, and I willed it to be something different. To change.
I thought of my mom again in the kitchen of our trailer, telling me what a disappointment I was. The image blotted itself out, becoming a fiery red light.
And then it happened. It was snowing. White, glistening flakes were falling all around me, around me and Nox. He looked at me with an expression that was somewhere between pride and awe.
“See?” he said quietly.
I stretched my arms out and spun around, laughing. The snow was accumulating.
“No one does this right away, not even me,” Nox said quietly. “You have power.”
I reached out my hand and let some flakes fall into it. It didn’t melt. It wasn’t snow, I realized. It was ash.