They exploded into their awful laughter again and some of them broke off from the group to speed around us in circles, taunting us. “Flesh-feet think they’re too good for Wheelers! Wait until Princess cuts off your heads! Then you won’t be so smarty-smart! Little witches get Wheeler stitches!”
The Wheeler carrying me grunted and kicked out with one leg at the others. I grabbed his back, afraid of sliding off. I had no doubt that whatever the princess’s orders the others wouldn’t hesitate to run me over with their spiked wheels if I fell to the ground.
“They’re joking, right?” Madison said.
Nox cleared his throat. “That’s, um, sort of what she’s known for,” he said. “Her head collection.” Madison’s eyes got wide. I wasn’t sure I looked any better myself.
Princess Langwidere’s palace was close enough that I could make out its details. I liked it a lot better when it was far enough away that I couldn’t see the specifics.
It was big, for one thing. Really, really big. But that part wasn’t scary at all. What was scary was how it looked: as if the vampire Lestat had barfed up a gaudy cathedral. A forest of spiky turrets and towers bristled out of a massive, hulking body of black stone dotted with thousands of tiny black windows that seemed to suck up the sunlight rather than reflect it. The towers were carved with hundreds of heads and faces, misshapen and deformed. Some of them looked like they were screaming in pain or fear. Others were grinning evilly. One tower flowed into the next like a massive pile of candle drippings.
But the palace wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was definitely the road.
As if in twisted mockery of the Road of Yellow Brick, the road to Princess Langwidere’s palace was made of crumbling black stone that split into fissures so wide the Wheelers had to creak around them. The road was lined with dozens of spikes. And on every single one was impaled a rotting head.
Madison looked like she was going to throw up. I couldn’t decide whether I was more scared or more grossed out. The heads were in varying stages of decomposition. Some of them looked fresh, and others were just skulls with a few dried scraps of flesh and hair still clinging to them.
But as we passed them I sensed something strange. The faint, unmistakable, electric buzz of magic. Maybe I couldn’t use it here, but I could sense it. Where was it coming from?
And then I realized: the heads weren’t real. They were a glamour—a powerful one, if they were there all the time, but an illusion all the same. Why would someone go to so much gory trouble to line a road nobody seemed to use? Why would she send her scary minions to collect us if they weren’t going to hurt us? None of this made any sense. Who was this chick?
I glanced over at Nox, and he met my eyes. He’d noticed it, too. And from the look on his face, he was wondering the same thing.
I didn’t have any more time to think about it—we were approaching the castle gate. Like the rest of the palace, it was jagged and misshapen and carved with howling, grimacing faces. Whatever Princess Langwidere’s deal, she had a real thing for heads. I hoped that didn’t mean ours were on the line.
The gates swung open with a horrible screech as the Wheelers approached. In front of us was a courtyard paved with the same cracked black stone as the road to Langwidere’s palace. Walls surrounded us on all sides, pockmarked with windows that stared down at us like lidless eyes. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. It felt like the castle itself was watching us.
The Wheelers dumped us unceremoniously on the hard ground and circled us again, leering and throwing insults. “Say hi-hi to Princess!” the leader shrieked, happy. “We go now to burn and burn!”
“Burn! Burn! Burn!” the others chanted, wheeling back and forth ecstatically. And then, with one final rotation, they were gone, speeding out of the gate in a racket of clattering wheels and screams. The doors slammed behind them. We were alone.
And now we were trapped.
FIVE
DOROTHY
I awoke in the caverns underneath the Emerald Palace. It was all a dream, I thought. I’m dead. I’m underground, and I’m dead. I blinked sleep away, my vision clearing. Being dead felt pretty much the same as being alive. Actually, being dead felt a lot better than being alive had felt ever since that god-awful bitch Amy showed up in Oz. In fact, it was downright comfortable.
Because I was lying in a bed, I realized. A big bed. The kind of bed I’d always liked best—satin sheets (black with red trim, very goth, a little tacky, but obviously expensive), a rich velvet coverlet (more black), high enough off the ground to need a little stool to get in and out (also black, filigree, studded with rubies).
Was I in Hell? Was that the reason for the black sheets? Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had always told me I’d end up there if I didn’t say my prayers or feed the chickens on time or milk Bessie or follow any of the ten thousand other orders they gave me every single day, but they’d turned out to be wrong about a lot of things. They weren’t even my parents. I’d never even known my parents. It’s really a wonder I turned out so well.
I sat up in the giant bed and looked around. I was in a cave, true, but it was looking less and less like the caverns underneath the Emerald City and more and more like somebody’s very weird idea of high luxury. It looked like something out of one of those creepy paintings that had hung up in the church Aunt Em used to take me to back in Kansas. You know the kind I mean: devils tormenting sinners with pitchforks, rivers of blood, lots of gore and dismemberment and serpents? Well, imagine if one of those painters began decorating homes, and you’d start to get an idea of the room I was in.
No windows, of course—it was a cave, after all. Lots of velvet drapes and sinister artwork with people engaged in activities that looked either very unpleasant or very indecent. The rest of the furniture in the room matched the four-poster bed and the stool, all of it carved with creepy elf-looking creatures that had to be the Nome King’s various ancestors. If my family was that ugly, I certainly wouldn’t have commemorated it in stone, but to each their own. Everything was studded with more rubies, and I do mean everything.
And then I looked up and suddenly the Nome King was looming over me. I made a very undignified noise of fright as everything that had just happened came rushing back to me all at once.
Thankfully, it wasn’t actually him, and no one was in the room to witness my embarrassment. It was a huge, somber oil portrait, larger than life-size. His pale eyes seemed to be staring right at me in a way that gave me the shivers, but otherwise he looked very handsome. He was wearing his iron crown and regal robes of black velvet. One hand rested on a staff topped with a massive ruby. Serpents, tongues of fire trailing from their fanged mouths, coiled at his feet, looking up at him with what I can only describe as loving expressions.