“Grief later,” I said, pulling Nox to his feet before he had time to let it all sink in. “We have to stop Dorothy and end this once and for all.”
We raced down the narrow passage behind the Nome King’s throne. I hoped that Madison was somewhere behind us, but now I could only worry about Dorothy.
We’d only been on the platform for moments; she couldn’t have gotten too far. When I listened hard, I could even hear the echo of her footsteps, somewhere in the distance. We followed the twisting, turning hallway down innumerable branches and forks, and I had an odd certainty—for reasons I didn’t totally understand—that we were gaining on her.
I was struck with déjà vu from the very first time I’d tried to kill her, when I’d chased her through the halls of the Emerald Palace, before the Tin Woodman came to her rescue. They say history repeats itself. I just hoped the ending was better this time.
Then the passage dead-ended at last in a large chamber, its walls covered floor to ceiling in bookshelves. Dorothy and her strange little servant—still dressed as a bush—were backed up against a shelf piled high with volumes bound in what looked an awful lot like human skin.
She’d taken a wrong turn, I realized. Now she was trapped.
There were three of us. There was one of her.
She realized her mistake at the same moment I did.
“Dammit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I should have made a map.” She looked at my feet with a hateful expression. “I see you still have my shoes,” she said.
“They’re nobody’s shoes,” I said cautiously. My magic was still weak, but so was hers. If her defenses were down, plain old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat might do the trick where magic couldn’t. “If anything, they belong to Lurline.”
Lurline, I thought. If there was ever a good time to make a surprise appearance, now would be it. Lurline, I thought at my shoes. Tell me what I need to do. Please.
“Lurline,” Dorothy said, rolling her eyes. “Whatever. Glinda gave them to me. No take-backs.”
“And now you have a new pair,” I pointed out. “So you don’t need these.” That was all it took to set her off: Dorothy threw herself at me like a little kid who’d been told Christmas had been canceled, spitting and screeching, and we fell to the floor. She raked her nails down my face, leaving long, bloody tracks, while her servant battered at my calves with a book. Nox was trying to pull Dorothy off me; Madison hit her over the head with an inkwell. But Dorothy was like a force of nature, unstoppable in her rage.
“Why won’t you just . . . leave . . . me . . . alone!” she screamed, banging my head into the floor with every word until I saw stars. I elbowed her hard in the jaw and she gasped in pain but didn’t relax her grip.
“Lurline, tell me what to do!” I yelled.
We are made of what shapes us. Her voice echoed in my head. The soothing power of her touch flowed through me.
My boots began to glow with silver light. Dorothy stopped hitting me, her jaw slackening in surprise. Her outline—and Madison’s, and Nox’s, and even the shrub’s—began to shine with the same silvery, angelic glow. The library around us shivered and dissolved.
And then it seemed to re-form. The air was charged with magic. My shoes felt more alive than they had since we left Oz.
We were standing on an open, barren plain under a green-hued sky. The Road of Yellow Brick glittered against the dusty earth, winding its way toward the horizon. In the distance, I saw a castle.
Overhead, storm clouds were gathering with a rumble of thunder. I heard shrieks and howls from the sky and looked up to see a group of winged monkeys circling through the air, spinning and diving. They were laughing, I realized. They hadn’t noticed us.
But they were looking right at us. It wasn’t that they hadn’t noticed us.
They couldn’t see us.
“I know this place,” Dorothy said. Her voice sounded strange, as if something had come over her. Her face was dazed and her expression childlike as she gazed across the ghostly landscape. “I was here,” she mumbled, almost to herself. “A long time ago. I was forced to work here.”
Something in the way she said it startled me, and I realized that, although she was saying the words out loud, I could sense them coming before she actually spoke them. It was almost like her thoughts were flowing into mine.
It was all coming back to her. “I worked for the Wicked Witch of the West,” she said. Or did she even say it?
Then I saw them both. A strangely familiar young girl in a white silk dress, her auburn hair tied back with a white bow and silver shoes on her feet. A small black dog danced nearby. Behind her loomed a one-eyed menacing figure. The girl was sweeping the dusty earth with a broom, over and over.
“She kept bees and crows and wolves,” Dorothy said. “The Woodman killed them all. I didn’t ask him to. Even then, he could be so cruel.”
“That’s Dorothy,” Nox breathed, stepping close to me. “That’s Dorothy when she first came to Oz and killed the Wicked Witch of the West.” Of course. That’s why this looked so familiar to me.
“I didn’t mean to!” Dorothy—my Dorothy—cried. Her voice was still that high, strange, child’s voice. Her eyes were full of tears. “I never wanted to hurt anyone! I didn’t want to kill her!”
I felt a warmth in my feet and calves, and when I looked down, I saw that my boots were glowing so brightly with energy that I could barely make out their shape. The silvery magic was seeping out of them, and flowing in a shimmering stream, to where Dorothy stood, pooling around her ankles.
I didn’t know why, or how, but I knew what was happening. Sort of. The shoes were connecting us to each other.
I didn’t want to kill her. Dorothy’s lips weren’t moving anymore, but the words kept echoing in my head, as if it was a chant she was repeating to herself.
And for a brief, spinning second, I felt the ground drop out from under me as I thought of the night, long ago, on the terrace of the Emerald Palace, when I had almost killed her, and had stopped myself at the last minute.
The thought that had struck me in that moment so long ago came back to me.
Dorothy wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t until she killed the witch that she started to change.
I understood.
Before she killed the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy was just a little girl on a big adventure. After that, she was something else. Someone who’d taken a life needlessly. Someone who was open to evil. Not just Wickedness, but cruelty and suffering.
But what if I could change that? What if Lurline—by bringing us to this strange, frozen moment in the past—was giving me the opportunity not just to defeat Dorothy, but to undo all the damage that she had done?
If Dorothy never killed the witch, she would never become Dorothy the Witchslayer, the tyrant queen of Oz. She would never have come back to Oz a second time. All the death, the torture, and the pain that followed that would be undone as though it had never happened.
I didn’t want to kill her.
That was it—Dorothy herself was the answer.
That was why I’d been brought here. Not because I was the only person who could kill Dorothy, but because I was so much like her: enough like her that I understood her, but different enough that I had chosen another way.
Everything I’d been through, everything I’d learned, every battle I’d fought, had all been part of my journey toward the truth. To knowing that another world was possible if we took responsibility for creating it.
But knowing and doing are two different things.
If we changed the past—if Dorothy Gale never returned to Oz to become a tyrant—it also meant I’d be undoing everything else, too. I’d be undoing the very thing that had brought me here, and everything that being here had accomplished.
More than that, it meant not knowing any of the friends I’d made here. It meant never knowing Nox.
Our eyes met. I could see the anguish in his face. The wheels must have been turning in his head just as they were in mine. He couldn’t understand everything that was happening the way I could, but he could understand enough to know what was at stake.
I had the one thing I’d always wanted: the opportunity to free Oz for good. But it would mean losing Nox forever. It might even mean losing myself. I wanted to shut my eyes against the pain in his face. To will my heart against the pain I felt, too.
But I couldn’t. That was the whole point of everything. Dorothy would have chosen to be selfish. Now, as much as it hurt, I had to make the other choice.
“I love you,” I said to Nox. “Always.” Tears spilled over my cheeks as he nodded and reached his hand out toward me in a gesture of blessing. Or forgiveness. I wanted to say good-bye.
There was no time. Dorothy was wavering. She was looking up at me with a shattered, heartbroken expression, and I knew, without really knowing, that she’d just heard every thought I’d had. All the magic of Oz, and Ev—all the magic of everywhere—was flowing through our shoes, flowing so strongly between us that we were glimpsing the rawest part of each other’s soul.
“Dorothy,” I said urgently. “You don’t have to kill her.” I wasn’t sure who I was talking to: Was it the grown-up Dorothy I’d come to despise so much, or the little girl standing motionless before us, who still had a chance?
But the little girl couldn’t hear me. She was carrying a bucket of water. It steamed in the cool air: not with heat. With magic. Her face was set. She was looking up at the witch, her mouth twisted in a petulant scowl.
The grown-up turned her eyes in my direction, her eyes blank.
“She hurt Toto, and she put the Lion in a cage,” grown-up Dorothy said. “I had to stop her.”
Her expression suddenly melted from calm into anger, and when she spoke again, the seething rage in her voice shook my whole body.
“I hate her,” she snarled. “She deserved to die for what she did.”
“No,” I said. “You know you never meant to kill anyone. All you had to do was stop her. All you wanted to do was stop her. That’s who you were, then. Who you can still be.”
Dorothy cocked her head to the side as though she was remembering something. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. Not the witches. Not Aunt Em or Uncle Henry either. I just wanted to get my way.”
I’d forgotten. The Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t her only victim in those early days—her family was, too. But this was the first time I’d heard her blame anyone other than Ozma for their deaths. This was the first time she had ever taken responsibility. I felt a well of hope opening up inside of me. Was I getting through to her?
“What happened to them wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.” There were tears in her eyes now. “They wouldn’t have wanted this for you.”
I looked her right in the eye.
“You can change things.”
“Tin . . . Scare . . . the Lion . . . Toto . . . all their blood is on my hands.” She wiped her hands on her dress as if the blood was literal.
“Dorothy . . .” I said.
Nox and Madison were holding their breath. I could see it in their eyes: now they understood.
She shook her head suddenly and closed her eyes. “Auntie Em would be so proud,” she said bitterly.
“So make her proud now.”
Dorothy blinked her tears away, hard. “What’s done is done,” she snapped, her face blazing. “You can’t go home again. I read that on a pillow!”
I tried again. “It never had to be this way. This is your chance to change it all. You can bring them back—Em, Henry, Scare, Tin, the Lion—they’ll be alive again. It will be like none of this ever happened.”
Around us, Oz—its past, its present, and maybe even its future—was frozen as Dorothy struggled to make sense of who she was, and of how she’d come to this moment. I could feel her hesitation as she struggled to decide between the world she knew—the world she had come to love—and the world she thought she’d lost.
It was a feeling I understood better than I would have liked to.
“I’m strong now,” she hissed. “I’m a queen. Who’d want to change that? So I killed them. It only made me stronger, didn’t it?”
She was saying it all with conviction, but I knew she wasn’t sure. All she needed was a push. So instead of thinking of her, I thought of myself.
“Did it?” I asked.
But she turned away from me, and I knew my words weren’t reaching her anymore.
I closed my eyes and thought of Kansas.
Madison had been right. When I’d told her I put all my old hurt and pain in my rearview, didn’t mean I had let go of them. I was still holding on to Salvation Amy. I was still holding on to every unkind word and thing that had happened to me along the way.
I thought of my mother. I thought of Nox, and Pete, and even Madison and Mombi: all the people who’d helped to pull me back from the edge of my own darkness, whether they’d known it or not.
I called back all the hatred I’d ever had, against people back in Kansas as well as here in Oz. I let go of all the feelings I’d had growing up in Kansas with my addict, absent mom, the resentment toward my dad for basically abandoning me, and the anger I’d felt for all the bullies and people who’d ostracized me at school. Including Madison. Especially Madison. Finally, I called up my feelings about Dorothy herself. She’d taken so much from me, and Oz. I even let go of my wrath-filled feelings for Glinda.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a ball of red fire was suspended in the air. “I forgive you,” I said out loud. Like a mantra. Like a prayer. No—like a spell. The ball of fire dissipated into thin air.
I looked at Dorothy and repeated the words. “I forgive you.”
I expected a scoff. But Dorothy didn’t say anything. She was standing a few feet away from the girl she’d once been. A girl who was still innocent and guileless, and untainted by the blood that would soon stain her hands forever.
When she took a last step forward, the magic from our shoes rippled like she was wading through water.
Silently, and with a certain kind of gentleness, Dorothy put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. The girl looked up at her with a wide-eyed trust, as she saw herself for the first time.
That could have been me. I could have been her. Change a few things, and it would have been so easy for me to do what she had done—to become what she became. We all have a witch somewhere inside us.
As for the real witch, the Wicked Witch of the West: her face was frozen in fear, knowing what was about to happen.
Dorothy didn’t let it.
She looked back at me one last time.
“Good-bye, Amy,” she said. And then she took the bucket from the hands of her younger self, paused for the briefest of moments, then upended it over her own head.
The air around us held still.
Then the world fell apart.