The Wicked Will Rise

When my eyes fluttered back open, the sun was a red wedge on the horizon. Morning was dawning, and all of Oz was spread out below us like an old crazy quilt. I’d never been in an airplane before, but somehow I had a feeling that this was better. We were flying low enough now to make out the details of the landscape—the purple swatches of farmland bordered by toy-sized villages; the winding, glittering rivers and the hazy, jagged mountains to the north.

In the distance was a dark, forbidding forest that stretched as far as I could see. I had a feeling that was where we were headed.

But as I watched the scenery below us, I noticed that something was happening down there. Something was changing. All across the grassy plain, I could see little pinpricks of color appearing and then spreading. When I looked more closely, I realized they were flowers, blossoming by the second. A few minutes later, the grassy plain wasn’t grassy at all—it was an enormous, ever-changing expanse of blossoms popping up in every color I could imagine. Some were big enough that I could count the petals from all the way up here.

The forest ahead of us was changing, too. At first, I thought that it was just because it was getting closer, but no. As we approached, it became easier to make out the fact that the trees were actually getting taller, twisting up into the sky, gnarling into each other, the branches wrapped in thorny, snakelike vines.

The trees had faces.

The wind howled, and I shivered before I realized that it wasn’t the wind at all. It was the trees. They were screaming.

“The Fighting Trees,” Maude said in surprise, noticing them at the same time that I did. “It can’t be . . .”

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking up at Ollie.

“Dorothy hated the Fighting Trees. Exterminating them was one of the first things she did when she rose to power,” Ollie said. “If they’ve returned . . .”

“But how?” Maude asked him sharply.

Ollie just shrugged and raised his eyebrows at me. “Did your friends do this?” he asked. I didn’t know. All I knew was that the world was rewriting itself before my eyes. Like a story being torn through with a red pen.

Whose story was it, I wondered?

Suddenly someone else spoke: “The magic is returning,” Ozma said, like she was explaining the simplest thing in the world. I did a double take. Had she really just spoken in a full, totally intelligible sentence? Ollie and Maude were both staring at her like she’d grown a third eye.

But before she could say anything else—before we could ask her any questions about what she’d said—Ollie screamed.

“Rocs!”

I looked up and saw what he was talking about: two dark, giant birds were speeding straight for us, beating huge black wings and shrieking in an earsplitting chorus.

So much for the cheery little birds that Oz was supposed to be home to.

“Amy!” Maude barked. “Can you . . .”

I was already on it, mumbling a spell under my breath, trying to gather up a fireball in my hands as Maude and Ollie wove and zigzagged to avoid our attackers.

It was no use. The birds were on top of us before I could summon more than the tiniest flame. They screeched madly and circled over our heads, their big black wings blocking out the sun, and then they dove for us.

All I saw was their fearsome, strangely human faces as they slashed their long, razor-like beaks into Maude’s and Ollie’s wings, ripping them from their backs with the ease of someone tearing open a bag of potato chips. Then, as quickly as they’d appeared, the birds were speeding off into the distance, their work done. The air was filled with shredded bits of paper that had held us aloft, scattering on the breeze.

For a moment we all hung in the air like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Then we were falling.

The ground was getting closer by the second. Ozma whooped with joy. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that I’d found myself plummeting toward certain death, and I was getting kind of sick of it.

But I didn’t scream. Instead, I felt strangely calm in a way that I can’t really describe. It was like everything outside of me was happening in slow motion while my brain kept on moving at normal speed.

Once upon a time a girl named Amy Gumm had come to Oz on a tornado. She had fought hard; she had been loyal and fierce. She had done things she’d never in a million years imagined that she would.

She had learned magic; she had been a spy. She had lied, and stolen, and been thrown in the dungeon. She had killed, and she had not regretted it.

She had been both good and wicked and everything in between. She had been both at once, too, until it was hard for her to even tell the difference anymore.

That was my story. Well, I figured as I tumbled from the sky toward certain death, at least the ending will be killer.