Nox, Madison, and I didn’t have long to wait. At the far end of the courtyard, a section of wall swung inward. It was a door, I realized, effectively camouflaged by being indistinguishable from the stone walls around it. We exchanged nervous glances.
“So, what’s the deal with this chick?” I asked Nox.
“To be honest, I wasn’t ever sure she was real,” Nox said. “We started hearing stories about her right before you showed up in Oz. But like everything in Ev, it’s impossible to say what’s true and what’s just some crazy story. It’s not like we have a passenger pigeon service across the Deadly Desert.”
“But it’s possible to cross, or you wouldn’t have heard anything.”
“Mombi—” He paused for a second, conflicting emotions battling for supremacy on his face. “There are . . . spells. It’s been done at least once.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes; he was being deliberately vague. I fought back the urge to hit him. He was always going to be Nox, no matter how I felt about him: refusing to tell me everything until he decided it was time for me to know the whole truth.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice even. “And obviously the Nome King can go back and forth. That still doesn’t cover who Langwidere is.”
“Honestly, I’m not sure you want to know,” Nox said.
“We’re about to go face this bitch in there,” Madison interrupted, jabbing her finger at the yawning black doorway, “and homeslice over here is holding back because he thinks his information is too ‘scary stories to tell in the dark’ for the girls to handle? In case you missed the memo, we’re going to find out the truth in about T minus five, so maybe tell us what you know?”
Nox looked at her, startled. Despite the seriousness of our predicament, I had to resist the urge to laugh. Madison clearly had no use for Nox’s pretty-boy mystery act.
He shot an apprehensive look at the open doorway and then said, “Supposedly she’s into wearing people’s heads. She has a . . . collection. Nobody knows what she really looks like.”
“Oh,” I said. Okay, that was pretty gross.
Incredibly, Madison rolled her eyes in disdain. “That’s so Silence of the Lambs it can’t possibly be real,” she said. “Somebody plagiarized that plot point just to scare you. I don’t believe it for a second.”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t have Anthony Hopkins in Oz,” I pointed out.
“I’m trying to keep our spirits up. Can you work with me?” Madison snapped.
“Right,” I said. “Sorry. So, our options are stay in the courtyard with no food and no water in the middle of a desert and die of dehydration shortly if we don’t sunburn to a fiery crisp, or go into Scary Princess Palace and meet an unknown, potentially very gruesome fate with no weapons and possibly no magic.”
Nox thought for a minute. “We could wait to see if the Wheelers come back,” he offered.
“Please tell me this isn’t really happening,” Madison said to the sky. “Someone? Are you there, God? It’s me, Madison.”
“I know,” I said sympathetically. “It’s not . . . ideal.”
“Ideal?” Madison snorted. “I’m still not convinced I didn’t accidentally smoke some really bunk weed. Not that I would do that. I am a mother now. But if this is real”—she waved a hand at the creepy courtyard—“we might as well get this part over with, right? Plus, I’m about to drop dead of heatstroke.”
“Ladies first,” Nox said, ushering me forward with the ghost of a smile.
At that, I did sock him in the shoulder, and he flashed me a real grin that made my knees weak. It felt like ten years ago that I’d been kissing him in the Emerald Palace and a flush of heat that had nothing to do with the scorching sunlight rose to my cheeks. He took my hand and squeezed it.
“We got this,” I told him, with more confidence than I felt. “It can’t be as bad as the Scarecrow’s lab.”
“It could be worse,” Nox said cheerfully.
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said, but I was smiling as we walked toward the doorway. Whatever was waiting for us, we were going to face it together.
Madison was right: the cool, dark corridor might be leading us to our doom, but after the hellish journey across the desert, being out of the sun was a blissful relief. If we got out of here alive, I was never going to take shade for granted again.
I stood blinking for a moment, allowing my eyes to adjust to the sudden change in light. As I got used to the dim corridor, I was able to pick out elaborate, carved murals in the stone walls. Dropping Nox’s hand, I stopped to look closer.
They were the stuff of nightmares: multi-limbed demons with white blubbery skin that reminded me of dolphins and oversize heads with bulging black eyes tearing people apart, monsters with three or four or five heads wolfing down human flesh, helpless humans boiling in vats of oil or being tormented on any number of awful devices. Most of the people seemed to be missing their heads, which were carried around instead by the monsters: monsters bowled with them, made necklaces out of them, lounged in huge thrones made of grinning skulls. . . .
“Someone’s into Eli Roth,” Madison said drily next to me. I raised an eyebrow. “If I’m not being a smartass, I’m going to start screaming my head off,” she said. “I’m assuming you prefer me being a smartass.”
“Yes,” Nox said from up ahead of us. “Definitely go with the smartass route, please. Can we get a move on?”
“Right,” I said. We’d have to face this mysterious Princess Langwidere sooner or later; might as well get it over with now. Without another word, I followed him down the hallway, doing my best to ignore the Saw V scenery. Madison was a few steps behind me.
The hallway wound up, down, and around. Here and there it was lit with torches that burned with a sickly greenish flame that gave off no heat at all—but when Madison reached out curiously to touch one, she yanked her hand back with a yelp of pain.
“It burned me,” she said, staring at the cold green fire. “But not like fire. I think it, like, frostbit me.”
The light was just enough to make our way by, although in places it created looming, flickering shadows that moved ominously toward us, until I was jumpy and paranoid, sure that at any moment something was going to leap out of the dark at us and tear us to shreds.
Sometimes we passed huge rooms: a banquet hall with a vaulted, gilt ceiling, curlicues of gold spinning down the walls in the shape of vines and thorns; a narrow stone table long enough to seat dozens of people; high-backed wooden chairs carved in more elaborate, twisted patterns. Rooms that looked like salons, with sofas covered in black velvet and more gilt, or bedrooms furnished with looming black wardrobes and shadowy figures that startled me into frightened silence before I realized they were just our own reflections peering back at us out of tall, ornate mirrors. Every room was deserted.
And every room was full of mirrors—and heads. Patterned into the carpet, carved into the chairs and bedposts, paintings of heads on the walls, velvet curtains embroidered with heads.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Madison said under her breath as we crept slowly forward.
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. Nox held up his hand to hush us. Madison rolled her eyes at him, but he shook his head.
“I can hear something,” he hissed.
In the ensuing silence I strained to catch whatever it was he was talking about, and then I heard it, too: a faint scratching, as if a mouse was scrabbling through the walls a hundred yards away. It was coming from up ahead, and I was pretty sure that whatever it was it wasn’t a mouse.
Nox jerked his head forward, one eyebrow cocked, and I shrugged. What were we going to do—turn around, try to escape the courtyard, walk back to the Deadly Desert, and hope the Road of Yellow Brick showed up again? As my mom used to say once upon a time, before the pills anyway, there was no way out but through.
My mom—but no. I pushed that thought down as soon as it reared up. I couldn’t think about her right now
“Let’s do this,” I said, and strode forward toward the source of the noise.
The narrow hallway opened up suddenly into a room so enormous I almost tripped in surprise. A vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling soared upward. Huge, black marble columns formed two orderly lines leading to an immense throne at the far end of the room. The floor was polished to a blinding glow but that wasn’t the part that made all of us shield our eyes against the sudden, dazzling light: every surface in the room was covered in mirrors. Every wall, every shelf, every corner, every nook and cranny.
As my eyes slowly adjusted to the brilliance, I realized that cunningly placed windows allowed sunlight in at angles that maximized the sparkle. It felt like we were standing inside a giant disco ball with a strobe light going. The effect was disorienting but strangely beautiful—a strange, alternate-world echo of the shifting, sparkling mists at Rainbow Falls. But it was sinister, too: the fragmented mirrors made it look as though our heads were refracted hundreds of times, looking out in disembodied confusion from every angle no matter which way we turned.
The scratching sound was coming from the far end of the room, where a black-clad figure—the only other person in the enormous space—was bent over a table in front of the giant throne. Slowly, cautiously, we walked closer. The figure was a woman. She was wearing a loose, silky, black kimono-type outfit, embroidered with faces in delicate gold thread. Long, glossy black hair spilled down her back.
But her face was hidden behind an eerie, expressionless silver mask.
She had a ledger of some kind in front of her; the scratching was the sound of an old-fashioned quill pen moving across the rough paper as she filled out line after line of numbers, pausing occasionally to dip the nib in a ruby jar of pitch-black ink. She didn’t stop writing as we approached her, and she didn’t look up, even when the three of us had crossed the entire room and stood in front of her.
I stepped forward. “Hi, I’m Amy Gumm, and this—”
“I know who you are,” the woman said shortly, still not looking up. “Wait until I’m done.”
Somehow, the mask actually moved with her mouth. As if it was a part of her. As if it was her real face.
The three of us exchanged glances. Who was this chick? Langwidere’s inexplicably disguised secretary? Was her mission to slay us with rudeness?
I looked down at my glittering boots, wiggling my toes. Madison fidgeted. Only Nox stood straight and still, looking calmly ahead at nothing as if all of this was perfectly ordinary. He’d grown up in Oz; maybe for him, it was.
Finally the woman reached the end of a column and set down her pen. Her hands were beautifully shaped with long, pale, slender fingers. She pushed back her heavy black hair before looking up at us. Behind the mask, I caught a flash of extraordinary green eyes, gold-flecked like a cat’s.
“Well, well, well,” she said. “Look what the Wheelers dragged in.” The mask’s silver mouth smiled sardonically.
“We’re citizens of Oz,” Nox began. “We have no quarrel with your country. The Road of Yellow Brick brought us to—”
“Still lying through your teeth, even after all these years?” the woman asked. “Of course you have a quarrel with this country, Nox.”
She said his name like it was a curse word. Nox started.
“How do you know who I am?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh, Nox,” she said, her voice like ice. “I know all about you. You might choose not to remember the past, but I don’t forget. Anything.”
I looked at Nox, but his face was a blank. I knew he was as confused as I was. He’d never been to Ev before; how could he have met this woman? Who on earth was she?
The silver mouth opened wide, and she laughed—a cold, cruel laugh that sent a shiver down my spine.
This was definitely not a secretary.
I took a step forward. “Are you Princess Langwidere?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral. “I’m Amy. Amy Gumm. I’m with Nox and um, my friend Madison, and we didn’t mean to disturb you at all. In fact, we could totally just, um, leave,” I added brightly.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to win any awards for diplomatic speeches. But still, I didn’t see a reason for this creepy chick to keep laughing at me.
“You’re the most recent conquest, I take it?” she said, when she was done chuckling. “You know you’re not the last in a very long line. Nox is quite the pretty boy, isn’t he? Always an eye for the ladies. So troubled and remote. ‘Only you can save him,’” she said mockingly.
“Look,” Nox said, his teeth gritted. Whoever she was, her barbs had landed. “I don’t know who you are, but you should really think about—”
“Oh, Nox,” she said. “Has it been so long? Have you really forgotten me so easily?”
Suddenly lines began to appear in the sinister mask. One by one, silver sections peeled away from her face like petals of a flower unfurling. As each section opened, the silver disappeared in a puff of gleaming smoke.
Underneath the mask her face was ordinary. Neither pretty nor plain. Something in the middle—a face almost remarkable for how completely unremarkable it was. I had the feeling if I glanced away from her I’d immediately forget what she looked like.
There was something almost uncanny about her ordinariness. Something almost . . . enchanted.
But next to me, Nox breathed out hard with a noise of total shock.
“Lanadel?” He was staring at her, his mouth actually open. I’d never, in all the time I’d known him, seen him so astonished. I looked back and forth between the two of them.
“Wait, you know her?” I asked. The air around her was charged with unmistakable, naked hostility as she stared Nox down, and to my utter surprise, he looked away first, his cheeks flooding with color. As if he was embarrassed—or ashamed.
“Who I used to be doesn’t matter anymore,” the woman said.
“But you’re—you’re—” Nox was still trying to get out a sentence.
“Not dead? Not so lucky for you, I’m afraid.”
“I didn’t—you weren’t supposed to—”
“Survive?” She smiled. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you, Nox. Listen, I don’t know why the road coughed you up at my doorstep, but this is not a good time to rehash our past.”
She stood up and walked away from us, the silky robe clinging to her body. As with her face, there was something almost impossible to pin down about it. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t short, she wasn’t thin, she wasn’t curvy.
Somehow, everything about her avoided description. As if her whole being was a disguise.
“Why are you here?” she asked curtly.
I took a deep breath. I had no idea how Nox knew this woman, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. But I could tell that she was on the verge of doing something bad. To all of us. And I needed us to get out of her palace in one piece. All of us.
“We don’t know,” I said. “The truth is—”
“Amy,” Nox said, a warning note in his voice. I knew what he was hinting at. Telling this person everything might be incredibly stupid—especially if she was on the side of the Nome King. But somehow, I didn’t think she was. The road had brought us here for a reason. Maybe it had meant for us to meet her. Besides, I was tired of the Wicked way of doing things.
“Nox, no more secrets,” I said. I saw something flicker in Langwidere’s eyes—something that could have been respect. “Like I said, we don’t know why we’re here. The road brought us across the Deadly Desert and dumped us.”
I quickly explained how we’d ended up running away from Oz, the road whisking us off. I didn’t tell her everything, because that would have taken all day. But enough.
She didn’t say much while I explained—just stopped me a couple of times to ask more questions about the Nome King. When I told her that the Nome King and Glamora had killed Mombi, her eyes widened, but she didn’t comment.
Nox stayed quiet. It felt good to be the one making the decisions. And why shouldn’t I? I’d been through as much as he had in the time since I’d met him. I’d trained like crazy and fought like a warrior.
Nox wasn’t in charge of me anymore. We were equals.
When I was done talking, she was silent for a long time. Madison had sat down on the hard stone floor and rested her head on her knees. Despite her bravado, it was clear she was overwhelmed. I knew how she felt. And she didn’t have the grandmotherly Gert to help her adjust like I’d had. I was tempted to join her. I was exhausted—we all were. But I stood my ground.
“Lanadel,” Nox said suddenly. “Langwidere—how did you get here? What are you doing here?”
She walked to one of the narrow windows overlooking the wasteland outside. The mirrored walls refracted her every move as if we were in an amusement-park fun house. The effect was spooky and distracting—as she moved it got harder and harder to pin down which image was her and which was her reflection.
“After you and Mombi sent me here to spy, the Nome King captured me,” she said. She held up one slender wrist and I saw a thin silver bracelet from which dangled a glittering ruby padlock and key.
Wait a minute. This girl had been in the Order? What was going on? I stared at Nox but he shook his head, warning me to stay quiet. Quiet was not exactly something I did well.
“He . . . interrogated me for information about the Order,” she continued. Her voice was steady, but I thought about what I’d seen of “interrogations” in Dorothy’s palace, and shuddered. “When he had what he wanted, he turned me into his spy.”
“You work for the Nome King?” I interrupted. If that was the case, we were in trouble.
She shrugged. “I stay alive. For now, that means keeping him happy.”
“Does he know we’re here?” Nox asked.
“Well, I haven’t told him,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have to. And he’s as connected to the magic of Ev as you are to Oz. If the road brought you here, he probably felt it.”
“So we’re not safe here?” Madison asked from the floor, lifting her head.
Langwidere glanced at her and smiled without warmth. “In these times? You’re not safe anywhere.”
Madison stood up and glared at her. “Okay, fine. Then can you just kill us now? Because I’m really tired and I’m pretty sick of listening to people talk.”
For the first time since she’d taken her mask off, Langwidere looked startled. And then she started to laugh. This time, there was nothing cruel about it. It was the laughter of a much younger and more innocent girl. Maybe the person she’d once been, before the Nome King got to her.
I was starting to feel almost sorry for her. Almost.
“You can rest here,” she said. “For now, at least.” She glanced at Nox, her eyes hardening again. “Until I decide what to do with you.”
“So you’re keeping us prisoner?” Nox asked.
“I’m entertaining you as very honored guests.” She smiled mirthlessly. She’d said “honored” like it was a curse. “These are strange times,” she added, looking out the window again. “You’re the second visitors we’ve had from Oz in a matter of days. The Nome King’s up to something, and I want to know what it is.”
“The second visitors from Oz?” I asked.
She turned back to us and raised an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t know?”
“Know what?” Nox asked.
“Dorothy’s here,” she said.
Nox and I looked at each other and then back at her. “Dorothy’s alive?”
“Very much so, I’m afraid.” She shrugged. “Until I kill her, that is.”