Authors: Danielle Paige
This time he didn’t bother screaming.
I tossed the knife aside, letting it disappear to wherever it went when I wasn’t holding it. But this time, when I drew my hand back, I pulled a long, dark tendril with it—a black, twisting skein of nothingness.
It was like a tentacle, like an extension of myself. All I had to do was think about it and the blackness twisted out through the
air like a snake slithering through the grass. It wrapped itself around the Lion’s neck.
The Lion clutched at his throat, gasping and trying to free himself.
All I had to do was want it, and the noose tightened.
“Beg me,” I said. The words hung in the air, dripping with venom. It barely sounded like me. If I was a character in a comic book, my dialogue would have been inked in thick, jagged letters. This couldn’t be me—could it? I knew what I had to do, but there was no reason to be so cruel about it.
I felt half possessed when I said it again. “Beg me,” I repeated, with even more cruelty this time, as the Lion tried to open his mouth.
His eyes widened, but he was barely struggling anymore; he was using everything he had left just to stay alive.
“Never,” was all he managed to say.
My knife had returned to me, and when I looked down at it, I saw that its blackness was seeping out of it and up my arm, like I was wearing a glove made of tar. My fist was gripping the hilt so tight that it hurt. It was twitching.
Cut him
, I heard a voice in the back of my head telling me.
Punish him for everything he’s done.
I wanted to do it. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself slicing him open. His stomach. His throat. Like I was watching a movie, I saw myself stabbing wherever I could, not paying attention to where I was striking, just hacking away as he convulsed and moaned, his hot, sticky blood squirting out in every direction while I kept going.
It was just my imagination. But I wanted it to be real. And it
could
be real. All I had to do was do it.
But then I heard another voice—a real voice this time, not in my head, but from somewhere outside of me. It was soft and lilting, barely more than a whisper.
It was Ozma.
“Come back,” she said simply.
With her, you never quite knew if she meant anything by it at all. I couldn’t even be sure that she was talking to me. But something about the way she said it brought me down to earth, and when I turned to her, I saw that she had dropped her bubble of protection and was now standing just a few feet away. Her bright eyes were fixed on me plaintively, with a look of deep, almost sisterly concern.
That’s when I realized that I wasn’t fighting the Lion to punish him. As much as I wanted to let my revenge fantasies play out, I had to remember that there was a larger purpose to everything I was doing. As much as I wanted to kill him—my body was still screaming out for his blood—I knew it wasn’t that simple. I needed something from him.
It all came flooding like a dream you’ve forgotten until something jogs your memory.
The Tin Woodman’s heart. The Lion’s courage. The Scarecrow’s brains.
With the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow it was obvious. Heart and brains. Duh. But where does a Lion keep his courage?
I looked at him lying there in battered, bloody defeat, toothless and bruised, his mangled tail twitching, the sad little ribbon
at the end of it soaked with blood, and then I noticed that there was something strange about it. The tail. It wasn’t glowing, exactly, but it had something like a halo around it. A jittery, golden aura so pale that it barely registered.
It made me take a closer look.
I don’t know how I’d missed it before, but now I saw it. The tail wasn’t even real. It was stuffed and synthetic and made from felt and stuffing, like something that belonged to a doll. At the base, I could see that it was sewn onto the Lion’s body in a sloppy cross-stitch. This wasn’t the tail that he had been born with. Of course: the Wizard had given it to him.
In one swift, smooth motion, I sliced it off. There was a high-pitched hissing sound, like air being let out of a balloon. The Lion gave a weak, stupid whimper.
I held the tail up, and it twitched in my hands. It was angry. I knew that my instincts had been right.
Looking down at the Lion confirmed it. He was cowering on the ground, covering his face with his hands. He would be out of his misery soon enough. I raised my knife over my head and prepared to finish him off for good.
I thought of everything he had done—all the innocent people he had terrified and tortured as Dorothy’s enforcer. I thought of everyone he had killed. Gert. Star. The ones I didn’t know—like Nox’s family. He had done it for no reason. He had done it just because he liked it. Because it was fun. Because Dorothy told him to.
My hand was poised over my head, my knife bursting with
magic. I realized that, sometime during the fight, the already graying sky overhead had covered itself in an ominous shroud of clouds.
It was like I had caused that. Like my anger and darkness had spilled out into the land around me.
In that moment, I couldn’t help being scared of myself.
But my fear was nothing next to the Cowardly Lion’s. “Please don’t hurt me,” he wheezed. He was crying now, curled into a fetal ball and rocking back and forth on the ground, clutching his face.
Seeing him like this it was hard to believe that he had ever been capable of any of the terror he had caused. Without his courage, he was nothing. And I had it now. His tail coiled itself up around my arm like a piece of jewelry. The Lion was less than harmless now. And I felt powerful. Maybe even courageous.
My hands were red with blood; blood had plastered my clothes to my skin. Even my hair was damp with it. Off in the distance, I heard a single bird chirp.
My shoulders loosened. I took a deep, gulping breath. My knife faded from my grip, and as it did, the clouds parted and the sun was shining down on us again. My whole body was shaking as I felt the magic that had filled me during my fight begin to dissipate.
I thought, for a moment, of my mother, and of how fragile she looked when she was coming down from one of her binges. I thought of all the times she’d tried to go clean, and of all the times I’d tried to help her. Of how she’d failed every time.
I stood and turned away from the Lion. “Go,” I said, gesturing out into nowhere.
The Lion rose shakily to his feet. He stumbled and fell, then stood again and looked up, his whole face trembling. “Thank you,” he sniveled. “How can I ever—”
I cut him off. “Do it, before I change my mind.” He flinched, and then went limping off into the forest without looking back, blood trailing his every step.
Two down, one to go.
After that, Dorothy would be mine, and one thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to let her off the hook as easily as I had the Lion.
Then the world began to come back into focus. In the rolling field of flowers, Maude and Ollie were standing stock-still, staring at me like they barely recognized me. Ozma, though, had a shy little smile on her face. It almost looked like pride.
I wanted to say something to them.
See?
I wanted to say.
I let him go.
It was true. I
had
let him go. Even so, I knew there was a line that I had almost crossed, and they had watched me walk right up to the edge of it. I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t have the words to explain any of it.
I was just standing there, still wondering what had just happened, when I saw the rest of them. They were everywhere. I had been so consumed with the Lion that I hadn’t noticed them arrive. Monkeys.
They were sitting in the branches of the trees and crouched in the hillocks of flowers and hiding in the thick shrubbery that
blocked the forest. There must have been a hundred of them, monkeys of all shapes and sizes. Too bad I’d never paid much attention in science class; it would have been nice to name all the different types of species that were represented among them.
Like Maude and Ollie, they were just staring at me, unblinking and impassive. Like Maude and Ollie, they all looked scared of me.
The Queendom of the Wingless Ones was built high in the trees, just below the thick canopy of leaves that covered the Dark Jungle. The monkeys had known the path through the jungle by heart and commanded enough respect in these woods that we’d been able to pass without being bothered by any of the creatures who shared it with them, but it had still taken us hours to make our way through the dense brush of vines and branches into the heart of the forest where they had their treetop home. We’d paused only once, for me to wash the blood off my body in a stream, before we stopped in front of a big tree.
I looked at Ollie.
“Why are we stopping?”
“This is the human entrance. You can’t very well climb up there like the others, can you?”
I looked up to where he was pointing. Most of the monkeys traveling with us had simply scampered up into the branches.
Ollie pressed his palm into a barely visible indentation in the trunk and a door slid open, revealing that the tree had been outfitted with a makeshift contraption kind of like a dumbwaiter. Ollie crawled inside and beckoned for us to follow, and once we were all in, he and Maude and I all took turns pulling on the rope that turned the pulley and raised the platform carrying us up, up, up, into the darkness.
Ollie was completely out of breath and I wasn’t doing much better by the time we emerged from the passage onto a narrow platform.
The monkey village was like the world’s coolest tree house crossed with something out of a
Swiss Family Robinson
theme party thrown by Martha Stewart. Throughout the village, wooden houses of all shapes and sizes had been built into the treetops, all of them connected by a network of suspended walkways constructed out of roughly hewn planks and twisted vines. Everywhere I looked were monkeys in human clothing. There were monkeys in sharp little three-piece suits, monkeys in sweatpants and T-shirts, monkeys in nurses’ uniforms, and even monkeys in tiny little ball gowns who looked like they could be on their way to the monkey Oscars. Most of them weren’t using the walkways; instead, the ones with places to be were swinging from vines and scampering across branches, looking perfectly unaware of the fact that we were at least five hundred feet up.
We were greeted by a monkey who seemed not at all self-conscious about the fact that she was wearing a French maid’s uniform.
“Welcome back,” she said to Ollie in a voice too low and gruff for her tiny size. She gave him a quick pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek before turning to the queen, sinking into a clumsy curtsy as I fought to stifle a giggle. “Greetings, Your Highness,” she said to Ozma. “I’m Iris. We are honored to have you join us in our village.” After lingering on the queen for a few moments, Iris directed her attention to me. Her smile faded. I was starting to realize that these monkeys didn’t quite trust me.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly. “I’m Amy.”
“Yes,” she said. “Queen Lulu has been awaiting your arrival. Ollie will take you to her while I escort Her Majesty to the quarters you’ll be sharing.” With that, Iris took the wide-eyed Ozma by the hand and led her away.
“I don’t think your friends are that into me,” I said to Ollie.
He just shrugged. “The Wingless Ones have a bad track record with witches.” Before I could protest he was already moving, scampering off across a rope bridge. I followed.
Because the canopy blocked out almost any light from the sun, the village was lit instead by strange, floating lanterns that looked like oversize, translucent lemons. They hung in the air along the walkways and over the tree houses, their glowing light giving the otherwise dim village the feeling of a fancy garden party just about to start. (Not that I’ve ever been to a fancy garden party, but back in Kansas I did sometimes used to watch HGTV with my mom. When we were getting along, I mean.)
“Sunfruit,” Ollie explained, seeing me staring at the lamp-things as we made our way across the walkways. “Try one.” He
plucked a fruit from where it hovered and expertly shucked a piece of soft, thin rind from the top, revealing a yellowish, glowing goop inside. He handed it to me.
The sunfruit felt warm in my palm and had the rubbery consistency of a gummi bear. I was a little afraid of it, but I didn’t want to offend him, so I stuck a finger in, scooped out some of the slime, and tasted it.
I was expecting it to be kind of gross. I wasn’t prepared for it to be pretty much the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. It tasted like ten things at once: like saltwater taffy and pineapples and fruity drinks with little umbrellas. It tasted like summer, and the last day of school, and the beach. I closed my eyes and savored it for a second, suddenly realizing exactly how long it had been since I’d taken the time to actually enjoy something. These days, distractions like that were pretty hard to come by.
I could have spent the next hour trying to separate out all the flavors of the sunfruit, but Ollie was already tugging at my sleeve. “We don’t want to keep Queen Lulu waiting. She is a wise ruler, but she gets frustrated easily. You’d rather not see her when she’s angry.”
I took his word for it, but I continued scooping up more of the sunfruit as we kept walking. A few minutes later, we came to a spiral of stairs that had been built into the outside of a thick-trunked tree. “The queen will see you alone,” Ollie said. “When you’re done, you can find your chambers near the waterfall.”
“A waterfall? Up here? In the trees?”
“Can’t miss it,” he said, jumping from the path and grabbing
on to a vine with his tail. He swung around and hung there upside down, looking me in the eye. “Thank you, Amy,” he said, and I knew that he wasn’t just thanking me for saving him, or for saving his sister.
Then he was gone into the leaves.
I took a deep breath and began to make my way up the rickety wooden stairs that twisted up toward the canopy. I took each wobbly step carefully, hugging the tree as closely as I possibly could, trying not to think about the fact that I was probably the first fully grown human to use this path in years. You’d think the day I’d just had would have cured me of my fear of heights, but nope.