He didn’t bother stopping in the chambers Ozma had given him while he’d stayed in the palace. He didn’t say good-bye to anyone else, or acknowledge any of the servants’ greetings as he passed them. He kept his head down on the way out of the palace, seething as his ire grew.
The street outside was as bustling as it had been the day he’d arrived at the Emerald Palace what seemed like months ago, though really it had only been a few weeks. He raised his nose to sniff at the city air, full of the scents of spices and cooking and exotic wares.
He thought of Ozma’s words. She was wrong about him. Wasn’t she? I don’t know how much you care about good over bad, Lion. I think that you just like the thrill. The words pierced his pride. But that did not mean that there wasn’t some truth in them. She had forgiven him, but she would not let him in again. She was not, after everything, his friend. Not like Scare or Tin or Dorothy. They were his friends. They were the ones he would do anything for.
Had Glinda been right after all? Was Ozma too temperamental and unstable to rule? Ozma had said Glinda would find a way to escape her prison someday. Maybe it would be soon. He’d find his way back to the Emerald Palace somehow, and next time he wouldn’t be sent home quite so easily.
The Lion felt like fighting again. He felt like gobbling up the world. He set his paws on the Road of Yellow Brick and turned his face toward the Kingdom of the Beasts. For now, he’d wait in the forest. But the wind was shifting. This time, when Glinda returned, he’d be ready for her.
EXCERPT FROM NO PLACE LIKE OZ
SEE HOW DOROTHY’S RISE TO POWER BEGAN:
ONE
They say you can’t go home again. I’m not entirely sure who said that, but it’s something they say. I know it because my aunt Em has it embroidered on a throw pillow in the sitting room.
You can’t go home again. Well, even if they put it on a pillow, whoever said it was wrong. I’m proof alone that it’s not true.
Because, you see, I left home. And I came back. Lickety-split, knock your heels together, and there you are. Oh, it wasn’t quite so simple, of course, but look at me now: I’m still here, same as before, and it’s just as if I was never gone in the first place.
So every time I see that little pillow on Aunt Em’s good sofa, with its pretty pink piping around the edges and colorful bouquets of daisies and wildflowers stitched alongside those cheerful words (but are they even cheerful? I sometimes wonder), I’m halfway tempted to laugh. When I consider everything that’s happened! A certain sort of person might say that it’s ironic.
Not that I’m that sort of person. This is Kansas, and we Kansans don’t put much truck in anything as foolish as irony.
Things we do put truck in:
Hard work.
Practicality.
Gumption.
Crop yields and healthy livestock and mild winters. Things you can touch and feel and see with your own two eyes. Things that do you at least two licks of good.
Because this is the prairie, and the prairie is no place for daydreaming. All that matters out here is what gets you through the winter. A Kansas winter will grind a dreamer right up and feed it to the pigs.
As my uncle Henry always says: You can’t trade a boatload of wishes for a bucket of slop. (Maybe I should embroider that on a pillow for Aunt Em, too. I wonder if it would make her laugh.)
I don’t know about wishes, but a bucket of slop was exactly what I had in my hand on the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday, a day in September with a chill already in the air, as I made my way across the field, away from the shed and the farmhouse toward the pigpen.
It was feeding time, and the pigs knew it. Even from fifty feet away, I could already hear them—Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha—squealing and snorting in anticipation of their next meal.
“Well, really!” I said to myself. “Who in the world could get so excited about a bit of slop!?”
As I said it, my old friend Miss Millicent poked her little red face out from a gap of wire in the chicken coop and squawked in greeting. “And hello to you, too, Miss Millicent,” I said cheerily. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be getting your own food soon enough.”
But Miss Millicent was looking for companionship, not food, and she squeezed herself out of her coop and began to follow on my heels as I kept on my way. I had been ignoring her lately, and the old red hen was starting to be cross about it, a feeling she expressed today by squawking loudly and shadowing my every step, fluttering her wings and fussing underfoot.
She meant well enough, surely, but when I felt her hard beak nipping at my ankle, I finally snapped at her. “Miss Millie! You get out of here. I have chores to do! We’ll have a nice, long heart-to-heart later, I promise.”
The chicken clucked reproachfully and darted ahead, stopping in her tracks just in the spot where I was about to set my foot down. It was like she wanted me to know that I couldn’t get away from her that easily—that I was going to pay her some mind whether I liked it or not.