Authors: Danielle Paige
“Kansas,” I said.
“Indeed,” Polychrome said quietly. “And yet. Is it?”
I looked closer. It was Kansas, but it wasn’t. It was like one of those games in the back of a celebrity magazine, where you look at two pictures of Jennifer Aniston, and in the second one, everything is just a little off. Except in this version, the difference wasn’t that Jennifer Aniston was wearing a pink bracelet instead of a blue one. It was something harder to put your finger on than that.
It was something about the way the wind was blowing, something about the thick clouds that were rolling in. It didn’t just look lonely. It looked sick. It looked evil. It sent a chill down my spine.
“What does it mean?” I asked quietly.
Polychrome was silent. Heathcliff padded over to where she stood and she peeled her goggles off, then knelt and touched her forehead to the cat’s horn, staring into his eyes. She seemed to be consulting with him in a silent conversation.
Eventually she turned back to me, still kneeling.
“It could mean several things,” she said. “I still have many questions about these items. But, certainly, it means that they bear a deep connection with the Other Place. Your home. The Wizard’s home. Dorothy’s home. I also sense something not quite right about them. Something evil, I suppose. There was something about these things that was corrupting their owners.”
It was time to stop holding back, I knew. “The Wizard told me that until I gathered them, I wouldn’t be able to kill Dorothy.”
Polychrome twisted a lock of hair around her finger. She chewed on her lip. “It makes a certain sense,” she said. “If these
items were somehow holding a piece of Dorothy’s essence, it could explain this connection to the Other Place. It might also explain the evil about them. And yet”—she dipped a finger into the pool—“I don’t know. I sense nothing of Dorothy in the tincture. You would think . . .”
She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling, confounded. “I just don’t know,” she sighed. “Here in Oz, we understand so very little of the Other Place, or of how Oz is connected to it. We never have. It’s a shame that the one person who does have knowledge of it is the one person we can’t ask.”
“Dorothy?”
“No. Nor do I believe the Wizard has much expertise when it comes to matters of the Other Place, despite hailing from there. But Glinda has made a study of your world. Of Oz’s magic practitioners, she is the only one who has demonstrated an ability to summon visitors from the outside—though many have tried.”
“Do you think she’s the one who brought
me
here?” I asked. I was still struggling to put all the pieces together. Things were beginning to add up, but in a way I couldn’t quite see an order to. It was like being halfway through a calculus problem, knowing you’re on the right track, and having no idea of the answer or how the hell you’re supposed to get there. This time, I didn’t think I would get points for showing my work.
“It’s possible. But part of me doubts it. What reason would she have had? And why would she have made an enemy out of you so quickly, if she had been the one to bring you here?”
She was right. It didn’t really make sense.
“I’m sorry I could not have been more help,” Polychrome said. “Perhaps if we had the third item—the Scarecrow’s brain—it would complete the puzzle.”
“I’m already on it,” I said.
“And Amy? Do me a favor?”
“What?” I asked.
“When you cut him open, make it hurt.”
I smiled. “It’s a promise,” I said.
With that, some of the girlishness returned to Polychrome’s face. She gave me a conspiratorial look. “Even
before
Dorothy came back and turned everyone evil,” she said in a stage whisper, cupping her palm to her mouth, “the Scarecrow was
always
a bit of a dick.”
She giggled and tossed her hair, and some of the tension left the room.
“Now,” she said. “Before we retire for the evening, I wanted to look into one more thing.” She turned to her giant unicorn-cat. “Heathcliff,” she said. “Fetch me our friend the queen.”
Heathcliff stood up on command, took a powerful leap across the room, and, like a ghost, passed right through the wall.
When Polychrome saw my look of surprise, she pursed her lips. “Everyone doubts my unicorn,” she said tartly. “Just because he doesn’t grant wishes doesn’t mean he’s useless.”
“I can see that now,” I said. “But why do you need Ozma again?”
Polychrome pressed a finger to her chin. “When we were in my rumpus room, I noticed a disturbance in the princess’s aura,”
she said. “Something that made me suspect there might be more to her . . .
condition
than I previously suspected. I would like to examine her. Is there anything about her that you would like to tell me?”
I couldn’t tell if I was being tested. Is it possible she knew about Pete? Or knew that I knew? So I decided to hedge for the time being. “Mombi was hoping you would be able to . . . fix her. Make her more like how she used to be,” I said, feeling guilty both for telling only half the truth and also for saying even that much. I’d been hoping to totally avoid the subject of Ozma. After my conversation with Pete yesterday, I was worried about what would happen if anyone started messing around with whatever magic was binding him to the princess. What if they were fused forever? What if Pete just . . . disappeared?
He had made good on his promise to help me find Nox, and I didn’t want to betray him now.
A few minutes later, Heathcliff came padding back into the room with Ozma at his side. The princess looked sleepy and listless, like she’d just been woken from a nap.
“Hello, cousin,” Polychrome greeted her. Ozma looked up with an open and curious face, and Polychrome gently removed her scepter from her hand. For a second, Ozma looked reluctant to part with it, but she didn’t put up a fight.
“Stand over here, just for a moment.” The rainbow fairy led Ozma to a small footstool, and helped the princess climb onto it. As Ozma stood there dutifully, Polychrome began to bustle around the room, pulling ingredients from the shelves in a way
that looked random and combining them haphazardly into a small cauldron that she suspended from a small stand over an eldritch flame.
“What’s that?” I asked, watching her suspiciously.
“Oh, nothing much,” Polychrome said. “Just a little Tincture of Revelation. Old family recipe. Not to worry; it’s quite harmless. Tastes quite a bit like Earl Grey, I’m told.”
She sniffed at the cauldron, and when she was satisfied that the tincture had been properly prepared, she poured it into a little teacup ringed with a delicate floral pattern and a gilded rim.
“Unicorn?”
She placed the teacup on the floor where Heathcliff could reach it, and he bent his head and touched the liquid with his horn. I didn’t notice that it had any effect, but when Polychrome examined the mixture again she seemed happy with the result.
She handed the cup to Ozma. “Drink up, Your Highness,” she said. “And let all that is hidden be revealed. When all this is over, I hope that we can be lovely friends again.”
Ozma sipped tentatively from the cup, and then, appearing to like the taste of it, gulped thirstily. As she drank, her movements began to slow. The empty cup dropped from her hands, and shattered on the floor.
“Never liked that pattern anyway,” Polychrome said to herself.
I wasn’t very worried about Polychrome’s china. I was too busy watching what was happening to the princess.
Her arms dangled lazily at her sides, her mouth went slack,
and her eyes were heavy-lidded in an expression of sedate peacefulness. Meanwhile, something was emerging from her, a green smoke that curled out from her chest and hovered in the center of the room.
At first, it was just an indistinct cloud. Then its colors shifted, and the smoke condensed as it gathered itself into recognizable form. No:
two
forms, each of them hanging in the air next to each other, translucent but clearly visible as separate, familiar bodies.
One of them was Pete. The other was Ozma—a second Ozma, a ghostly simulacrum of the version who was still standing in a semi-drugged state on the stool.
Pete looked utterly himself: slim and lanky and a little bit mischievous, his features sharp and strong, with an odd, mismatched beauty.
This version of Ozma though, was different. Not in any way that I could really put a finger on, but in a way that was subtle and at the same time impossible to miss. Her eyes were bright and full of intelligence; her posture, even as she hung suspended above the ground, perfectly still, was regal and dignified. She had a power about her; an awe-inspiring grace that, even knowing she wasn’t real, made me want to kneel and bow my head to the ground.
She looked, in short, like a queen.
Behind them, the real Ozma—or, what I guess was the real Ozma—observed the two spirit forms that had been summoned forth from somewhere deep within her. She didn’t try to move from the stool she was standing on, and instead was simply
looking on with the confused, sheepish guilt of a little kid who’s just been caught next to a broken cookie jar, the cookies scattered across the floor.
Polychrome looked back and forth between them and raised a knowing eyebrow.
“Interesting,” she said. “There have been two life forces occupying the princess’s body. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
She smirked in my direction, like she’d had a feeling all along that this is exactly what she would find.
I nodded. What else could I do? But Polychrome didn’t seem to care that I had lied to her. “No matter,” she said. “We all have our secrets. One of mine is that I’m not as dim as people often think. But, actually, I have a whole cabinet of secrets. So much more convenient not to have them rattling around in my head, you know? It’s much safer to keep them all locked up where I can’t leave them lying around by accident. Anyway. I could run some more tests, but I have a nagging little suspicion that you already have most of the answers we could desire. Who is this second soul?”
She stepped over to the spot where Pete’s form hovered and circled him, looking him up and down wolfishly. “Is he as
charming
as he appears?”
I tried my best to explain the whole Pete situation—what I knew of it, at least—to Polychrome, who nodded along with the story as I related it to her.
“I see,” she said. “When Mombi attempted to disguise the
princess, she inadvertently created the seed of a new soul. It happens! The trick is catching it and nipping it in the bud before it comes into itself. Mombi has always been so sloppy when it comes to the details. It seems simple, now that you explain it. When Ozma was restored all those years ago, she suppressed this other soul. Then, when Dorothy did her little number on the princess, the thing was allowed to flourish again. At any rate, it shouldn’t interfere much with things.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“I can see now that the spell Dorothy cast on the princess was all anger and impulse. No sense of precision at all, but it was powerful, too. That makes it a bit more complicated, especially now that it’s had so much time to put roots down. But I think with a little elbow grease, I can restore Ozma to her proper state—the state you see before you instead of the simpering, foolish nincompoop who has been occupying her place all these years. And
that
will certainly change the game, won’t it?”
“What will happen to him? To Pete?” I tried to hide the panic I was feeling, but I don’t think I did a very good job of it.
“Oh, dear.” Polychrome gave me a sympathetic frown. “Did you develop a little crush on the rogue soul? Well, he
is
handsome, I’ll give you that. But you can’t let yourself get all mushy over it. I imagine it’ll just disappear.”
“Please,” I said. “You can’t. It’s not a crush. He’s a good person. I don’t want him to die.”
“Amy, sweetie. Listen to me. It can’t
die
when it’s not alive in
the first place. And it’s not a person at all—just a little bad witchery that got out of hand. No matter what happens, you’ll always have your perfectly lovely memories of it, now won’t you? And a memory is worth a lot, especially when Ozma’s return will do so much for Oz. So you lose yourself a plaything. There are more fish in the sea!”
I didn’t like the way she was talking to me. As if I was some dumb little girl and she was my big sister who had come back from college and thought she knew everything because she’d had sex a couple of times and had read some French novels.
But while people like me had been fighting for Oz, Polychrome had just been locked up here in her castle, doing practically no good to anyone while she played tonsil hockey with her vapid, rainbow-smoking boy toy. And now she was trying to lecture
me
about the good of Oz? Some people had a lot of nerve.
On the other hand, she had a point. Having Ozma back for real
would
change the game in a serious way. Was the risk of losing Pete worth it? And even if it wasn’t, could I stop it from happening?
At this moment, the only thing I could be sure of was that Polychrome was annoying. “Would you like a hug?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
She snapped her fingers, and the floating images of Pete and Ozma were instantly sucked back into the body of the
real
princess, who doubled over at the shock of having all of her parts returned to her. She stumbled from the stool on which she’d been standing and landed on her hands and knees on the stone
floor of the Lumatorium, and promptly began to retch.
Instead of vomit pouring from her mouth, a flurry of tiny rainbows came out, and pooled on the ground in a sick puddle of jumbled-up colors.
Polychrome ignored the fairy princess’s distress, and instead directed her attention to me.
“Don’t you fret over all this, at least not for now. The Ritual of Restoration will be difficult, and before I can perform it, I must ask my sprites to gather the necessary ingredients. Also, I need my rest—I can practically feel the dark circles forming under my eyes as we speak. And, not to be a bitch, but you look like you could use a little beauty sleep, too. I’ll let Heathcliff take you to your room, and tomorrow, we’ll get everything all settled, okay?”