Authors: Danielle Paige
“That took you long enough, Jellia,” she said sweetly. “You may bring the tray over here.”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” I said, trying not to trip on the carpets as I crossed the room.
“How are you finding the palace, Jellia?” she asked as she took the tray from me and settled it on her lap. Was she serious? I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. Her face was serene. She
was
serious.
“It’s as lovely as you are, Your Eminence,” I said cautiously.
She smiled. “You
are
very clever, aren’t you, Jellia? Tell me honestly—were you happy working for Dorothy?”
I kept my eyes on the floor. We were definitely on thin ice. What did she want from me?
“I’m always happy,” I said, and she actually laughed.
“Look at me, Jellia.” Cautiously, I looked up. She was still laughing, holding her bowl of ice cream so carelessly that it was in danger of spilling over onto her dress. “Jellia, I know you’re not stupid. And I
know
you’re not happy. Dorothy is . . .” She paused. “Dorothy can be quite difficult,” she said, although I didn’t think that was what she had meant to say originally. “But you have run her palace very well, and remained very modest—admirable qualities, in someone with your power.”
Was this about her machine? Or the magic she was mining? I had plenty of practice keeping my expression blank after all the time I’d worked for Dorothy, but something told me Glinda was going to be a lot harder to fool. “Perhaps you can be of more use to me than I thought,” she mused. She looked down at her ice cream and a sudden frown marred her perfect features. “But this ice cream has melted, Jellia, because you took so long to bring it to me.”
“But Your Eminence, we’ve been talking—”
Her frown deepened. “Now, Jellia, I don’t want to hear your excuses. I want you to do better next time. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Eminence. It won’t happen again,” I said. Next time I would have to use a spell on her sundae to keep it cold. No one had said anything about a ban on using magic in
Glinda’s
palace.
Glinda studied me and sighed deeply—a sigh that seemed to come all the way from where her puffy, feathered, pink high-heeled slippers dangled from her perfectly manicured pink-glitter-coated toes. “Tell me, Jellia. Do you
enjoy
your job?”
I blinked. “Enjoy, Your Eminence?”
“I mean, do you take real
satisfaction
in your work? At the end of the day, do you feel pride in what you’ve accomplished? Is it meaningful for you to be here?”
I had no idea how to respond to this. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, I don’t mean to be disrespectful—it’s just that it’s my first day, and I—”
“Because the thing is, Jellia, I get the sense from you that you just don’t
care
,” Glinda interrupted, her fructose-sweet voice tinted with genuine sadness. “It’s as though you’re just going through the motions—you’re clearly very smart, and very efficient, but I need you to understand that we’re all at the palace because we want to be here. Because our work is meaningful to us. I give my heart every day to magic, Jellia”—at this, Glinda laid her beautifully manicured hands over the bony area of her sternum that I imagined housed this, also doubtless pink, organ—“I show up for my work with joy, Jellia, because there simply isn’t anything I’d rather do than be Glinda the Good Witch. But you—I think you’d almost rather be anywhere else. Mistakes like this”—she indicated the bowl of melted ice cream with a gentle, regal nod of her golden head—“tell me that you think you’re too
good
to be here with us. Don’t get me wrong, you’re very competent. But I need to feel that you
care
, Jellia. I need to see
caring
from you. Can you do that for me?”
“I—I think so, Your Eminence,” I said, utterly confused.
“I’m sure things were different when you worked for Dorothy,” Glinda said, her voice losing none of its gentle sweetness. “But here, we don’t make mistakes.” In her hands, the sundae bowl began to glow red-hot, and the ice cream melted into a steaming swirl. Without changing her expression, Glinda threw the bowl directly at me.
I flung up my arms without thinking, as if to protect myself—and felt a strange buzzing surge through me. The air around me shimmered, and to my astonishment, the bowl shattered in mid-flight, as though it had hit an invisible brick wall. With a series of little pops, the fragments vanished before they even hit the floor. A few blobs of pink ice cream hung forlornly in the air before they, too, disappeared with a faint, sticky noise. I stared in disbelief, but Glinda was smiling.
“I thought so,” she said. “Oh, I had a feeling about you, Jellia, and I’m simply never wrong when I have a feeling.”
I was too startled to keep up my perfect servant act. “What—happened?”
“All in good time,” Glinda said, and this time the gentleness in her voice seemed almost real. “I moved too quickly with you this afternoon. But there’s much, much more to you than meets the eye, and together we’re going to find out just how much you can help me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Leave the understanding to me,” she said briskly. “You’re dismissed, Jellia. We’ll have plenty of time to perfect your—education.” She waved a hand in my direction and turned back to the window.
Nox took one look at me when I finally found my way back to the kitchen and told me I was done working for the day. His demeanor was as gruff as ever, but I thought I saw sympathy in his eyes. “What happened up there?”
“I—to be honest, I’m not sure,” I said, and told him everything—Glinda’s sudden niceness, the ice cream, the thing I’d done to somehow make it disappear. When I got to that part, his eyebrows went up.
“You mean, you did magic?”
“But it wasn’t something I did on purpose,” I said. Before Dorothy and her rules, everyone in Oz had used magic all the time in the palace for little things, like polishing the silver, or making the flowers in the garden grow a particularly vibrant shade. Ozma had magic, of course—Ozma was a fairy, with all the powers of Oz at her disposal. And Dorothy had power, too: the power to control the weather, set the seasons to her liking, bewitch the Scarecrow’s weird experiments into more than just lifeless ideas strung together out of wood and wire—though none of us really knew where Dorothy’s power came from, or if she’d had it in the Other Place. But what I’d done in Glinda’s room was something different from the common household magic all the servants shared. It was far more powerful—and seemingly out of my control.
“You’ve never done anything like that before?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and then stopped. I
had
done something like this once before when I was a little girl. I’d been playing with some hand-me-down dolls that the other servants had given me. I was lonely—I was the only child in the palace, and one day I’d decided I wanted some real live friends, so I made my dolls come alive. I still don’t know how I knew the magic to make that happen, but I do remember when Ozma walked in on me and my animated friends. She’d instantly made them go back to being just stuffed dolls, and she’d made me swear to never do that again—and to never let anyone else know that I could do something like that. I always wanted to make her happy, so I’d never again tried to summon that kind of magic—I didn’t want to upset Ozma.
I’d always kept the extent of my magic a secret from everyone else in the palace. Adding a little extra shine to the silverware was no stretch for most Ozians, but ever since that day, I knew that my own powers were different—and stronger—from everyone else in the palace. Except Dorothy. And Ozma.
“You’re different, aren’t you,” Nox said, interrupting my reverie. I didn’t confirm his suspicions—he seemed to know without me saying anything. “That must be why we—” He cut himself off.
“Why what? And who’s
we
?”
“I promise I’ll tell you everything when it’s time,” he said. “But for now you’ll have to trust me.”
“Right,” I said. “Clear as mud.” I sighed, annoyed, but whatever he knew, he wasn’t going to tell me anything else now.
“You’ve had a long day,” he said. “Why don’t you get some rest, and you can get a fresh start tomorrow.” He lowered his voice again. “Whatever she says to you—whatever she lets you see—don’t trust her. Understood? She can act vulnerable, but it’s just an act.”
Nox summoned another Munchkin to show me to my room in the servants’ quarters. It was tiny, like my room at Dorothy’s, but it had none of the comforts of my room at home, where I’d spent my entire life. It was bleak and bare bones, with just a narrow bed, a low dresser, and a single small window that overlooked the palace gardens. The room was a stark reminder of how different my new life was, but at least here, I could be alone.
Just the summer
, I told myself again.
I just have to make it through the summer.
I collapsed on the bed, too exhausted to even change out of my dress, and fell immediately into sleep.
The next day the little bejeweled bird woke me up with a horrific shriek right in my ear. I sat bolt upright, my heart galloping in my chest, and it took me several minutes to remember where I was and what had happened to me. I looked down in dismay at my wrinkled, dirty dress. The bird fell silent after its initial blast, and I realized it was just some kind of alarm, not a call from Glinda. I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my hair, and muttered a quick spell over my dress; the previous day’s grime melted away, and the wrinkles dropped from the fabric. I didn’t exactly feel my usual chipper self, but the night’s rest had loosened up some of my aching muscles and done away with my headache at least. I put my hair up in a demure twist, pinched my cheeks to add a bit of color, and ran down to the kitchen.
Nox was already there, going over a complicated-looking chart spread out on the big counter. “You’re late,” he said tersely without looking up as I entered the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t wake up until the alarm.”
“It’s not an alarm,” he said. “It’s the signal that means you should be at your post already. Don’t let it happen again.”
“I won’t.”
Finally, he looked up, and his expression softened a little. “I’m just working out the schedule for the rest of the day,” he said in a low voice, gesturing to the chart. “I’ll try to keep you out of Glinda’s way today. After yesterday, I imagine you could use a break. I can’t do much if she summons you directly, but at least this way you won’t be right in front of her. I’ll try to keep her occupied. Hopefully she won’t come after you until the afternoon.” In a more ordinary tone—one the cooks could easily overhear—Nox explained the workings of the palace to me. “This chart is posted in the kitchen with the day’s schedule. Sometimes we have various guests and dignitaries who are served meals in the dining hall, but right now Glinda is here alone. If she doesn’t have guests, she usually eats in her chambers. Servants eat in the kitchen after the main meal is served. I’m sure we’re a much smaller staff than you’re used to in the Emerald City; we all do a bit of everything. You’ll meet the rest of the maids today at dinner. But in the meantime . . .” He trailed off and studied me thoughtfully. His dark hair fell into his eyes, and he had that kind of mournful, beseeching look about him that would have suggested poetic depth to a girl with a slightly less pragmatic disposition than mine. I imagined he probably did pretty well among the ladies of the palace, although Glinda couldn’t have had much interest in his considerable charms if she kept him relegated to the kitchen. Then again, it was hard to imagine the words “Glinda” and “romance” in the same sentence. I couldn’t exactly picture her swooning over photos of heartthrobs, or waiting anxiously at fancy restaurants for her dinner date to show up. I wondered suddenly if Glinda’s interest in the Wizard was more than academic—after all, they were more or less equals. But it seemed more likely that she was trying to rope him into her crazy magic-mining plan somehow.
Nox was looking at me with one eyebrow raised, and I realized I’d been staring at him. “Sure,” I said, trying to remember what we were talking about. Meeting the maids—scheduling—dinner. “Dinner! Do I need to do anything to set up? At Dorothy’s my job was pretty . . .” I waved my hand around. “I mean, I was responsible for basically everything. Although Dorothy didn’t care what color her food was. I might need some help with the pink thing.”
But he shook his head. “That’s really what I’m here for,” he said.
I couldn’t help the note of petulance that crept into my voice. “Then why am
I
here? Really?”
He paused and looked over his shoulder. Right. The cooks. Eyes and ears for Glinda everywhere. Or else he was using them as an excuse not to tell me what he knew, what he meant by “we” yesterday. “Glinda wants to know how she can use you,” he said softly.
I saw out of the corner of my eye one of the cooks half turn in order to hear us better.
“It’s just that I want to be certain I do the best possible job for Glinda,” I said loudly, in a sugary voice. “It’s so important to me that I serve Her Eminence well.” One corner of Nox’s mouth twitched, and I realized belatedly he was hiding a smile.
Score one for me
, I thought. I’d made the Stone Man himself crack a grin. He reached forward, as if to touch my hand where it rested on the table, and then seemed to change his mind and picked up his pen again.
“I’ll send you out to the gardens for the morning,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about tending them or anything like that. Most of the landscaping is done by magic, and there are a few Munchkin gardeners who take care of the rest. But here in the kitchen, we use herbs and vegetables from the main garden, so you should make yourself familiar with it.”
“What should I do if Glinda calls me while I’m outside? She was”—I paused, making sure my voice was under control—“unhappy with me for my tardiness last night.”
“Punctuality is very important to Glinda,” Nox said drily. “But you should be safe for the morning, at least. Take this basket with you. Here’s what we’ll need for the day,” he said, handing me a basket from a shelf overhead and a neatly printed list of various vegetables, fruits, and herbs. “I imagine it will take you a few hours to find everything,” he added. That wasn’t even close to true, I thought, looking over the short list he’d handed me. He was basically giving me the morning off to wander around outside. If I didn’t know better, I would have hugged him. “Yes sir,” I said, and he smiled.