No Place Like Oz (9 page)

“Yes, well, he did have a bachelor's taste, didn't he? Anyway, all this is thanks to you, Dorothy. You saved my kingdom when I was”—she paused—“you know. Indisposed. If it wasn't for you, the witches would probably be living here now.” She shuddered. “Can you imagine what they would have done with the place? You have no idea how much I owe you.”

I looked around at this dream palace full of treasure and beauty and luxury, and suddenly I had a pretty good notion of what she owed me, actually. Maybe I was just the teeniest bit jealous that she got to live like this, all thanks to me. There was a part of me that wondered if
I
would have been the princess if I'd stayed.

“Of course,” I said, forcing a smile. “Oz was in danger. I only did what any decent person would have.”

“No, Dorothy. Not everyone would have done it.
You
did it. You're more special than you know.”

How could I argue with that? “Okay,” I admitted modestly. “Maybe I'm a
little
special.”

Ozma threw her head back and let out a lilting, musical giggle. “I think we're going to be great friends,” she said, wrapping an arm around my waist and tipping her head against my shoulder. She led me through the great entrance hall to a series of French doors that looked out onto a lush, expansive garden dotted with fountains and topiary sculptures.

“So do I,” I said, remembering what the Scarecrow had told me. If I was going to find Glinda, it appeared that I had to make Ozma trust me. I had to become her friend. Truthfully, it didn't seem like it would be very difficult.

“It's a beautiful day,” Ozma said. “Well, it's always a beautiful day here, but still. Let's take a walk in the gardens. I've got so much to ask you. Starting with how in the world you got here!”

Twelve

In Ozma's gardens, the hedges were tall and greener than green, and were sculpted into strange, looming figures that were three times as tall as either of us. Some of them were covered in strange little blossoms, others were grown over with vines and fragrant honeysuckle and jacaranda and flowers that I didn't recognize.

Some of the flowers had tiny little eyes like the funny little puffballs that were growing all over the old farmhouse back in Munchkin Country. They all twisted in my direction to stare at me.

If you've never had fifty plants with human eyeballs stare at you, you have no idea how disconcerting a feeling it is.

A path wound its way through the grounds, forking off into other trails that led into little grassy valleys, groves of orange trees, little sitting areas with wrought-iron benches. Back home what passed for a garden was usually a couple of tomato plants and maybe some scraggly old petunias. This was something else.

Ozma wandered down the main path idly, her scepter slung casually over her shoulder and the train of her dress trailing on the ground behind her.

“Don't keep me in suspense,” she said. “So what was it? Another cyclone? I know it's not easy to get here from your world, believe me. I've looked into bringing you here myself, actually—we've had some political trouble, and since you were so good at handling it the first time—well, but that kind of magic is very complicated. There are few in Oz who can manage it.”

A part of me didn't want to lie to her. I've always believed that honesty will get you farthest. And it was hard to believe that someone as seemingly sweet and guileless as the princess could possibly have had anything to do with Glinda's disappearance. But the Scarecrow was my oldest friend in this world, not to mention the smartest person I'd ever met. If he thought it was best to keep a few things secret from her, I knew that I should trust him.

“Well,” I explained, remembering that it's always best to base a lie in some version of the truth. “It was my birthday, and you see, in Kansas, on your birthday, you get one wish. I wished I was back here, and next thing I knew, poof! We were all crash-landing in the middle of Munchkin Country.”

Ozma looked skeptical.

“That's it?”

“I wished very hard,” I clarified.

“But it's so odd,” she said, touching a finger to her red lips. “I thought magic didn't exist in your world. It seems that something would have had to
bring
you here.”

“It was my
sixteenth
birthday,” I scrambled to elaborate. “That's kind of a big deal over there. So that's probably why it worked. Besides, I always felt like being in Oz the first time changed me somehow. Maybe I brought a little bit of magic back with me.”

She
hmmm
-ed. Her tone was still unconvinced, but her eyes were open and trusting. It wasn't that she didn't believe me. She just thought there was more to the story.

I decided to change the subject. “But I want to know all about
you
,” I said. “Are you really a fairy?”

The path we'd been following had ended at a wall of tall, thick hedges, no more than twenty feet wide, right smack-dab in the middle of the courtyard.

“Hold on,” Ozma said, suddenly distracted. “I want to show you something.”

She waved her scepter in a wide arc, and as she did it, the hedges parted, revealing a small opening. Ozma slipped right through it. After a moment's hesitation I followed, and as the opening grew shut behind us, I found myself in a hedge maze. To my left and right, narrow grassy paths were bounded by impenetrable shrubbery that rose high over our heads. In front of us was another opening, and on the other side of that more paths and another hedge wall.

Something about being in here made me nervous. The maze had looked small from the outside, but now that we were in it, I could see that it was much bigger than I had realized, the paths leading far into the distance in either direction.

The atmosphere crackled with energy. I didn't like the feeling of this place. Even though the sun was as big and bright as ever when I looked up, its light somehow wasn't reaching us in here.

I could feel magic everywhere. The leaves on the hedges nearly vibrated with it. But it was a different kind of magic than the magic that ran through the fields of Munchkin Country like a babbling brook. It was different from the dark, threatening magic in the Forest of Fear, too.

This magic was old and ancient. It was gnarled and weathered and fossilized. I don't know how I knew it. I just did. And I knew that if you stood still for too long in here it could swallow you.

For the first time, my shoes hurt.

“Which way do we go?” I asked.

“It's all the same,” Ozma said. She was different in here, too. In the garden, she had been girlish and sunny. In here, though, her spine had straightened and her chin was raised. Her dark hair was suddenly wild and tangled; her delicate, girlish beauty was now fierce and fiery. She seemed older. She seemed less like a princess and more like a queen.

“All the paths lead to the same place,” she said.

I wanted to ask where, exactly, that place was, but the words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

So we walked aimlessly, the bushes growing thornier and more overgrown and the leafy corridors narrower as we went. The air was still and quiet, and although the spires of the palace were just barely visible over the tops of the hedges if you craned your neck to see them, the city seemed very far away.

We took one corner and then another and another. Were we walking in a circle? My shoes burned on my feet, and I found myself wondering, again, what kind of magic exactly was pulsing through them. Were they communicating somehow with the magic in the hedge maze?

Ozma kept on walking. She had said it didn't matter which way we went, but I started to suspect, from the way she carefully considered each gap in the maze before deciding which one to turn down, that there was more to it than she was letting on.

I had so many questions to ask, but it was like the maze had cast a spell over me that kept me from speaking at all. It was a creepy feeling, but I felt oddly calm about it. It was hard not to when it was so peaceful in here. Ozma was the one who finally broke the silence.

“Oz is bordered on all four sides by the Deadly Desert,” she said out of nowhere when we had rounded a corner into a twisty section of the maze where the hedges were overgrown with thick, brown vines. They were dotted with tiny blossoms, deep purple and smaller than my thumbnail, and they stretched over our heads in a canopy that hid the sky. “A desert so dry that you touch just a grain of its sand and it will suck all the life right out of you. One touch and
poof
, you're dust.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“But, you know, when Queen Lurline and her band of fairies first came to this place, ages ago, Oz was nothing
but
desert. It wasn't quite so deadly back then—Oz had no magic to speak of in those days—but it was still dry and hot and dusty and flat and it went on and on and on. There was no Emerald City. There wasn't even a tree. It was no place for life.”

“Sounds like Kansas,” I said. “Though, at least we have trees there.”

The princess gave me a curious look. “I've always thought Kansas sounded very nice,” she said. “Anyway, the fairies were passing through the desert on their way to somewhere else, and they had been traveling for a long time. A
very
long time. They were hungry and tired and thirsty. They had used the last of their magic.”

“Where were they trying to go?” I asked.

“No one knows,” Ozma said. She plucked a blossom from a vine overhead and tucked it into her hair. “Pieces of the story get lost over time, you know. All we know is that they were coming from somewhere and they were going somewhere else, and wherever it was, they had to cross Oz on foot to get there. But Oz is a big place. You probably know that better than I do. I have a carriage, after all, and you've walked so much of Oz. Can you imagine doing that without anything to drink or eat? Fairies are powerful, but even they have their limits. After a while, Lurline and her people were too exhausted to go any farther. She knew that resting really meant
dying
, but what else could she do?”

“So they stopped. They just sat down and stopped, right there in the sand. Their travels had finally come to an end. Well, they thought they had, at any rate. But just when she had given up hope, Lurline put her hand down and felt a dampness in the dirt. When she scratched at it a bit, she could hardly believe her eyes—it was water, the first she'd seen in weeks. It was a cool, fresh spring. It was mostly covered over by the sand, but it only took a minute of digging for it all to come bubbling up.”

“Someone put it there by magic,” I said. “To help her.”

“No. It was just good luck. Lurline was the magic one. And as she drank from the pool, she felt her magic coming back to her. With the little bit of energy the water from the spring gave her, she was able to conjure a pomegranate tree, and she and the rest of the fairies ate. The food made her stronger, and so Lurline summoned another tree, and then another and another until a whole orchard had sprung up.”

The path began to curl into a spiral. Ozma's voice was dreamy and far away, and I wondered if she was talking to herself more than to me.

“They rested there for eight days, eating and drinking and dancing, regaining their strength after all the hardship they had been through, and on the eighth day, Lurline was so grateful and happy that she pricked her thumb with her knife and let a drop of her blood fall into the pool. I don't know why she did it, really. Just to say
thank you
, I guess. But whatever the reason, she gave Oz a piece of herself, and as soon as her blood hit the spring, the land began to change around them. Just like that. Lush, green grass grew where there had only been dirt and sand. Rivers sprung up, and they wandered wherever they wanted to wander. Hills and mountains burst out of the flatness. On the path that the fairies had walked, yellow bricks began to sprout like flowers. Lurline's blood had blessed the spring with magic, and that magic began to flow through everything.”

The spiral we were walking in grew tighter and tighter as it looped in on itself toward a center. The path grew narrower and narrower until my shoulder touched Ozma's. Then it was narrower still, and I felt my nervousness mounting. I dropped behind her as she continued with her story. She didn't bother looking back at me.

“What had once been a barren desert had become a magical, untamed wilderness. It became Oz. But the queen knew that she and her band had already stopped for too long. It was time for them to keep going where they were going. And yet—it was so beautiful. She couldn't just abandon it. So she left her favorite daughter behind, a girl not much older than me, and the smallest of the group. She was small but tough. It was left to her to look after the land in Lurline's absence. To take care of it and nurture its magic the way you tend to a garden.

“That daughter stayed behind, alone, to become Oz's first true princess. That daughter was my grandmother. Or was it my great-grandmother? Or my great-great-grandmother?” Ozma shrugged, finally stepping forward through an arbor into a clearing where the sun was warm and bright again. Birds were chirping.

We had come to the center of the maze.

And as soon as the sunlight hit her green eyes, the laughing, girlish Ozma who had greeted me at the gate returned in a flash. She giggled a little to herself, putting a hand to her mouth. “Great-great-great-grandmother? Well, who knows! At any rate she was the first princess—whatever her name was. I honestly have no idea! Me, I'm the last. At least for now until the next one comes. Sometimes I wish she would hurry up.” She gave a theatrical sigh.

The center of the maze was a circular area paved with flagstones. It was about fifteen feet across, with a ring of squat little trees inside the larger ring of tall hedges.

In the very center of it all was a single wooden bench that had obviously seen better days: it was silver and weathered and close to rotting. At the foot of the bench was a muddy, mossy puddle. All of it had a burned-out, sun-bleached look to it, as colorless as one of the old sepia photographs Aunt Em kept of herself as a child.

“So,” Ozma said. “I suppose that's a very long way of answering your question. Yes, I'm a fairy. The truth is, it's really not as exciting as you might think. It's actually not so much different from being a regular girl.”

She was so matter-of-fact about the way she said it—the same way I would say that my aunt and uncle were farmers, or that I was from Kansas. I couldn't imagine being a fairy princess and not even
caring
. And how could she think it was the same as being a regular girl?

“I know it's stupid,” I asked. “But do you have wings? Fairies do usually, right?”

Ozma didn't mind. She laughed and flipped her palms up as if to say,
You caught me.
She tossed her black hair and shook it out, and as she did, two huge butterfly wings unfurled from her back and fluttered a few times.

The wings were golden and translucent, lined with veins, and so delicate that they barely looked like they were there at all. They looked like nothing more than the impressions that burn into your eyes when you look at the light for too long.

“They don't do me much good,” she admitted, flapping them a bit to demonstrate. She hovered a few inches from the ground and then let herself down again. “They work, but flying makes my stomach queasy, and anyway, I have the Saw-Horse to take me wherever I want to go. I hardly use them at all.”

The oddest feeling came over me. I wanted to reach out and touch those shining, beautiful wings so badly. If I had just asked, she probably would have let me, but I didn't want to ask. It wasn't like me at all, but I wanted to reach out and grab one of them and hold it in my fist. I wanted to know what it would feel like for it to be mine and not hers.