But when she got to the pool, she wasn’t alone. Another girl was there already, making half-anguished, half-ecstatic noises as she thrashed around in the warm, clear water. No one had ever bothered to explain the pool’s magic to Lanadel; it just worked. You got into it injured, and you came out healed, no matter how hard a beating you’d taken in practice—but the worse you felt, the more it hurt to get better. Which was probably some kind of metaphor for real life, but Lanadel was doing everything she could not to think too much about the real world.
“Sorry,” she said, embarrassed, and the other girl’s eyes flew open.
“I didn’t realize anyone was here!” she exclaimed. She was pretty—almost too pretty, with long, gold hair that swirled behind her in the water, clear green eyes, and a heart-shaped, pouting mouth. And she was totally naked. And she was totally ripped.
“N-no, it’s my fault,” Lanadel stammered, realizing she was babbling as she desperately tried not to look at the other girl in the pool. Living in a house with boys, she had seen plenty of them naked without wanting to. They were completely without shame. Conversely, no one had seen her naked for as long as she could remember. Lanadel’s eyes found a safe space on the surface of the water as she wondered who the naked girl was. Was she another recruit? Lanadel had never seen her before, but people came and went a lot in the caves, and she hadn’t been there long.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” the girl exclaimed. She fluttered one hand in the water, splattering Lanadel with sparkling, crystalline droplets. “There’s plenty of room, you just startled me.” She looked Lanadel up and down appraisingly. “And no offense, but you look like you need the pool even more than I do.”
“Yeah, uh, thanks,” Lanadel said, still stumbling on her words. The village she’d grown up in had been tiny, and other than her brothers, she hadn’t had friends. She didn’t know much about how to act around other people, and she definitely didn’t know much about how to act around other girls. Whoever this girl was, she was calm and confident and completely unflustered by the fact that she was talking to someone without her clothes on. Was Lanadel supposed to just get naked, too? Averting her eyes and blushing furiously, she pulled off her tattered training clothes and slunk into the pool, hissing in pain as the water met her bruises and cuts.
“It’s the worst,” the other girl said sympathetically. “Oh my god, believe me, it’s just the worst. For months, honestly, until you get used to it. You’re new, right?”
“Yeah,” Lanadel said, still wincing. But she was still grateful the pain took her mind off of the fact that they were naked. “I’ve only been here a few weeks.”
“The first few weeks are the hardest,” the other girl said. “It gets easier, though, I promise. Pretty soon you won’t even notice how much it hurts.” She laughed. “I’m Melindra,” the other girl added. “I’ve been fighting with the Order for a while now. Plenty long enough to know that”—she held up one hand, ticking her points off on her fingers with the other—“Mombi’s nuts, Gert’s a sweetheart, Glamora’s way smarter than she looks, and Nox is an asshole.” She frowned thoughtfully. “He’s a hot asshole, though,” she admitted. “And he doesn’t flirt. Ever.”
Lanadel burst into laughter for the first time since she’d turned up outside the caves, clamoring to be taught how to fight. “You tried flirting with him?”
“Well, obviously,” Melindra said, yawning. “Once you figure out how to disarm him, there’s not much else to do here. I mean, they’ll teach you magic, obviously. But probably not for a bit. They make you learn to fight the hard way first.” She rolled her eyes, making quotation marks with her fingers. “Because there’s no telling what Dorothy will throw at us,” she drawled, parroting the familiar, gruff bark of the old witch Mombi. Lanadel laughed again.
“Sounds familiar,” she said.
“You’ll have the whole speech memorized by the end of the week,” Melindra predicted. “Duty to Oz, blah blah, bringing together all corners of the land in unity, blah blah, Wicked coming together for the first time in the history of Oz to confront this profound and unexpected new threat to our safety as a country.”
It had been so thrilling when Dorothy first returned to Oz. The Wizard’s era had been before Lanadel was born, but she was old enough to remember the Scarecrow’s rule. The kindly fellow had been a sweet and endearing ruler, but he’d never seemed particularly effective. For a while, he’d implemented the building of schools all across Oz. Like the other kids in her village, she’d dutifully trooped along with her brothers to a little schoolhouse. She’d learned a lot of strange facts that still stuck in her brain: the annual sunfruit exports of the Kingdom of the Beasts, the tariff rate on buzzleberries from Quadling Country, and the chief dangers of traveling among the winged monkeys. But it was hard to see the point of school, and soon enough parents stopped sending their children. There was too much work to do to waste the day memorizing the names of every ruler of the Winkies.
And then something had happened in the Emerald City, and suddenly the Scarecrow wasn’t king anymore and they had a new ruler called Ozma, who’d been queen all along, or something like that. News took a long time to reach Lanadel’s tiny village in the far hills of Quadling Country, and her people didn’t have much use for rulers; their day-to-day life was much the same no matter who sat on the throne of Oz.
But even her village knew when Dorothy returned. The girl they’d heard about in bedtime stories and legends, the Witchslayer who’d saved Oz long ago—she wasn’t just real, she was back. Lanadel’s family had celebrated along with everyone else. And when Dorothy became Queen of Oz—well, even better. Or so they’d thought. That was before. Before Dorothy had created those half-person, half-mechanical creatures. Before she’d begun raiding villages and towns across Oz, taking prisoners and leaving a wake of blood, chaos, and burning houses. Before those terrible things had come to Lanadel’s village and—
No, she thought. Not now. She couldn’t let herself think about what had happened to her family. It would tear her apart before she had the chance to even the scales. And the Order was her only chance at righting the balance.
The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked was mysterious—their existence had only been a rumor when she set out looking for them after . . . after what Dorothy’s troops had done to her family. It had taken her long weeks of traveling and asking careful questions in inns and markets before, half starved and completely exhausted, she’d found her way to their training caves high in the Traveling Mountains. There was no map—the mountains moved too much for that. She’d had nothing to go on but half-fantastical stories: that the Wicked Witch of the West was still alive and had raised an army in order to stop the newly minted tyrant Dorothy’s rampage across Oz. That Glinda was a double agent, flitting between the Emerald City and a secret location in the middle of the mountains. That the winged monkeys were evil. That the winged monkeys were good. That somewhere on the side of Mount Gillikin was the entrance to a magical warren of caverns and tunnels that led to the heart of Oz—and a huge, secret army, training in stealth until they were strong enough to go up against Dorothy’s terrible forces.
By the time she reached the foothills of the Traveling Mountains, Lanadel had long since run out of food. She knew going farther into the mountains meant certain death—unless the Order was real, and unless she could find them. But she hadn’t hesitated as she took the first step on the narrow, rocky path that heaved under her feet as the mountains undulated around her with deep, rumbling booms and cracks. Revenge was the only thing she had left to live for. And so far, the Order was the only hope she had of avenging her family.
“Follow the shadow of Mount Gillikin,” she whispered, repeating the words an old innkeeper had told her in a sleepy hamlet in Gillikin Country. And maybe she was just delirious from starvation or exhaustion, but the innkeeper’s words had taken on a literal meaning. Mount Gillikin was the highest peak in the ever-shifting range, and as the mountain moved, its long, immense shadow had taken on the shape of a giant hand beckoning her forward. She hadn’t been walking for long when a huge storm descended on the mountainside, blowing snow so thick she could only see a few inches in front of her face. Half frozen and more than half starved, she had stumbled out of the storm into the meager shelter of a cleft in the rock that turned out to be the entrance to a much larger cavern. And there she had sunk to the ground, too exhausted to go any farther, and waited to die.
It was Gert, an ancient, grandmotherly witch whose sweet face belied her tremendous power, who’d found her collapsed on the floor of the cavern, and Gert who’d helped her to her feet and guided her to a tunnel at the back of the cave that led to the vast warren of tunnels and caverns where the Order’s headquarters were housed. Lanadel had no idea how far the caves extended, or how many troops the Order had. In two weeks, she’d seen a handful of other people, but they were always moving quickly back and forth along the corridors of the Order’s caverns and no one ever stopped to talk to her. She slept alone, in a small cave with a thin mattress on the floor, and Nox brought her her meals. She had risked her life to find the Order, but since she’d gotten here, she had lived in a weird limbo.
Gert had shown her to the cave where she slept the afternoon she arrived, and brought her a bowl of warm, nourishing broth that sparkled with an eerie green light. “Drink up,” she urged. The soup fizzed in her throat as she swallowed it, and almost immediately she could feel her whole body tingling as the strength returned to her arms and legs.
She’d slept like a dead person until Gert woke her up again—she assumed the next morning, although in the windowless cavern, she had no way to tell. Gert had introduced her to gruff old Mombi and sweet, pretty Glamora, and then she’d brought Lanadel to the training cave where Nox awaited her. That first day had been brutal—and so had the day after that. But as the days passed, her muscles gradually adjusted to the constant, punishing routine of her training. She knew there were other trainees, but she hadn’t met them. She hadn’t met anyone at all, other than the witches.
It was as if Nox was waiting for her to do something special—demonstrate some impressive skill or undiscovered talent—before she would be allowed to do anything other than eat her meals in silence and train obsessively with him. After a few weeks, she was so lonely that she was halfway tempted to run back down the side of Mount Gillikin and seek out somewhere else to go. Except that there was nowhere else. The Order was all she had now, for better or for worse.
Melindra was the first person other than Nox, Mombi, Glamora, or Gert that she’d talked to since she arrived. And it was hard to use the word “conversation” to describe the terse interactions she had with Nox. More like he barked orders, and she followed. And Melindra was funny, friendly . . . and gorgeous.
Melindra yawned widely and dunked her head in the warm water. “What I want to know is when we get to fight,” she said when she came back up, breaking into Lanadel’s thoughts.
“You haven’t been sent on any missions yet?” Lanadel didn’t know what she was expecting. Everything about her life now was so new. So confusing. And so filled with pain. Every day felt like being torn in a thousand different directions—as if there were dozens of different Lanadels inside her, trying to get out.