I was getting kicked out.
Verte tapped the wart on her crooked, green nose. “Plain as this beauty mark, we can’t stay here no more. And if you ain’t figured that you and Dot can’t be near each other yet, you deserve what comes next. I made a deal with you. Your service is no longer required. We’ll take care of everything from here.”
No, I wasn’t getting sent away. I was getting left behind.
“Abandoned again.”
Again? What the spell are you going on about now? I thought silently at Morte.
He chuckled, long and deep, a sound that made my bones shudder. “Very interesting.”
I stomped my bare heel to get my shadow to hush.
I felt Dorthea’s concern through our bond before I saw it on her face.
“It’s him again, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Not your problem anymore. I’ll be glad to have this place to myself. Rots that you had to trash it before you left, but it suits me.”
“It is my problem, and I’m going to try and fix it.” Dorthea pulled a small notebook out of her back pocket and started writing. The ink was red.
As she wrote, the leaf pile stirred—even though there wasn’t a lick of a breeze.
“Hey. No.” I backed up a step. “Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
I waited for the green haze and power drain to kick in while the leaves swirled around my feet.
Stones rumbled behind me at Oz’s workshop.
“Focus. Make every word count toward what you want.” Oz poofed himself into a catterfly and hovered over Dorthea.
Dorthea scrunched her face and wrote faster, the leaves speeding with the fury of her writing. They plastered themselves to my feet, the stems digging into my shins.
I screamed and collapsed to the ground. My skin felt like it was being sewed with acid. And then, when the flurry of leaves was over, I looked down, horrified. “What have you done?”
“There comes a time in every marionette’s life when you’ve got to cut the cords, you know?”
—Geppetto, Planned Puppethood
15
No Strings Attached
Dorthea leaned in to Verte, breathing hard. “Trying to protect you.”
“With shoes?!”
The leaves had knit together to form a pair of knee-high riding boots. With heels, no less. Because that’s totally what every girl needs for hiking through the forest.
Dorthea seemed to still have trouble catching her breath, so Verte answered. “Shoes worked before. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Oz the catterfly poofed into a rhimouserous, inspected his apprentice’s work, then poofed back into a crotchety geezer. “Should stop the pestilence from spreading and keep you anchored in Libraria, away from the underworld and its price.” He waited a beat before adding, “Assuming she did the spell right. I look forward to checking up in a week or so to see if the magic actually worked or not. Should be fairly easy—you’ll either still be you…or you won’t be anything.”
What? Before I could question it, he swapped forms again and scampered off, ducking down into a hole. His workshop rattled and shook before squishing together, folding in, and getting small enough to be sucked down the hole after its master.
And then there were four.
After making sure Dorthea could stand, Verte loaded their bags onto a freshly carved ironwood broomstick. She returned to me with a leather drinking skin. “Those leaves came from the same tree as this sap. It’s the last I could siphon from your tree. Drink some every day to keep the Emerald curse from nibbling at ya and to block Dorthea’s story from filling in the holes.” Her belt clouded over and her voice changed. “Be yourself. Ink is thicker than blood. Aim true.” She thrust the bag of sap in my hand, wiggled her nose, then patted my head, like a good Dalmatian. “Hope you don’t screw up.”
After six years with Verte, I knew that was the best good-bye I could expect.
Dorthea wobbled over. I waited for a weepy hug from the future hero of all of Story. Instead she held out her hand.
“Seriously? A handshake?”
“No. I gave you a gift. You owe me one too.”
That’s the princess I’d grown to know and occasionally loathe.
I held out my hands. “Sorry, aside from this goop, I lost everything.”
“Your necklace.”
I was about to tell off her greedy butt, when I saw a vision through our bond. Dorthea sobbing into the opal, wrapping her hair around it to bring me back to life. I saw it through her eyes. Her memory.
“It’s my fault you’re wearing that horrid thing in the first place.” She held out her hand again. “You should never have been tangled up in my story. Go find your own happy ending. I’ll keep the light on for you while you try.”
I nodded since I didn’t trust my voice and tossed her the opal, careful not to touch her. Just in case the Emerald curse wanted to take me over again.
She reverently placed the necklace over her head and tucked the opal under the neckline of her tattered dress. Nothing else was said while she and Verte hopped on their broomstick. It rose, sputtering and coughing glittery smoke, finally lifting high enough to skim over the trees.
And just like that, they were gone.
And that left two, just me and my shadow.
Not that I cared. Just last night I was spellbent on leaving them anyway. So what if this time I was the one left behind? I stared down, looking for my shadow. “Guess it’s just us.”
Silence.
“Copy rider got your tongue?”
The echo of my voice was the only sound. With the second sun low in the sky, my shadow should have stretched long behind me, but not a black speck spread out from those enchanted shoes. There was nothing.
Not two, then.
For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was truly alone.
My eyes started to burn. I rubbed them with my palms. “I’m just relieved,” I told the air. “Finally got exactly what I wanted.” The barren spot on my chest, where the opal once sat, ached.
I slumped to the ground, like a puppet whose strings had finally been cut.
I had waited so long to be free. To have no one ordering me about, telling me who I should be, that I wasn’t good enough, or bad enough, in certain cases. But I don’t think I’d ever sat down and thought about what it really meant to be on my own.
So I spent all night thinking. Which is an absolutely horrible habit to get into. You can come to terrible conclusions that way. In fact, after a very long and silent night, I had one of those sorts of revelations.
Turns out, freedom felt a lot like being lost.
Everyone else had such a clear purpose. Even Verte had one…it just wasn’t clear to anyone else.
Kato wanted to make his people proud, to continue being a guardian and return Blanc to her prison. Wherever he was, I’m sure he was still working with Bob, his overgrown, mangy butler who acted an awful lot like a dad. I remembered growing up with my dad in the Sherwood Forest pretty well. Trying to be one of the guys. To make him proud.