The Wizard Returns Read online

  “That was a dirty trick you pulled back there in the palace,” she wheezed, staring up at him. “But I think you just saved my life. Does that mean I have to thank you?”

  “No,” he told her. He stripped off his jacket and shirt, tore the shirt into strips, and did his best to bandage the worst of Iris’s wounds. If it had been magic that he had somehow summoned back there battling the Lion, it was gone now. But without it, he didn’t know if he could save the plucky little monkey he’d risked his life for.

  “That hurts,” she said crossly as he tied off a bandage too tightly.

  “Complain to the Lion,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. There was no mistaking it: Iris was close to death. And, he realized, he desperately wanted to save her. The feeling was so alien he didn’t know what to make of it. Another fit of coughing wracked her broken body, and he hushed her gently, cradling her in his arms. She closed her eyes. “Too bad you went to all that trouble,” she coughed. “I was following you, you know. To stab you in the back.”

  “Iris, hush,” he said. “Save your strength. You wouldn’t really have stabbed me anyway.”

  “Probably not,” she conceded, and then her head rolled back and she lost consciousness. Hex lowered her to the ground, frantically feeling for a pulse. There it was, at the side of her throat—faint, and growing fainter. “Iris,” he pleaded. “It’s my fault you’re even here. Please don’t die.” He felt an unfamiliar wetness coursing down his cheeks. Was he bleeding? But his hands came away wet with something clear.

  “Tears,” a voice said behind him, and he whirled around. Pete was looking over his shoulder, staring at Iris with an expression of intense concern.

  “Tears? You leave me like this—leave her like this—and that’s all you can say?”

  “You’re crying,” Pete said curtly. “Now get out of my way if you want her to live.”

  Hex moved aside, and Pete knelt over Iris’s body, holding his hands just above her chest. As they hovered over her, they began to glow. This time, Hex could see tendrils of magic rising out of the earth, forming a web that wrapped Iris’s body over and over again until she was an Iris-shaped purple light. Pete’s face was tense with concentration, his eyes closed, his lips moving silently as the magic intensified. His arms began to tremble and his forehead grew slick with a sheen of sweat, and Hex worried that he might faint. Finally, with a gasp, Pete slumped backward and opened his eyes. Iris was still out, but her breathing had evened, and the worst of her wounds had stopped bleeding.

  “She’ll be all right,” Pete whispered. “But the Lion did more than just harm her body. His power is to feed on others’ fear—on their very essence. She has to rest for a while, and so do I.”

  Hex covered Iris with the blanket from his pack; mysteriously, two more had appeared beneath it, along with a loaf of bread that looked decidedly fresher than what he’d eaten earlier. He spread out the blankets while Pete did his best to start a fire. It took him several tries, but finally he coaxed a feeble magical blaze out of the air.

  “Will the Lion come back?” Hex asked, tearing the loaf of bread in half. He handed the bigger half to Pete, who took it without commenting on Hex’s sudden generosity.

  “Not tonight,” Pete said. “We’re safe for a little while at least.” He settled back onto his blanket, chewing on his hunk of bread, and after a moment Hex did the same. While Iris snored softly, Pete and Hex stared into the fire, neither of them ready for sleep.

  “You knew,” Hex said, and Pete started.

  “Knew what?”

  “You knew the Lion had Iris. You knew he would kill her, if I didn’t stop him somehow.” Pete was silent. “She’d be dead,” Hex repeated. “If I hadn’t found a way to save her—if I hadn’t been brave enough to face down the Lion–you would have left her there to die.”

  “She didn’t die,” Pete said.

  “But she would have.”

  “None of us know what would have been,” Pete said quietly. “We only know what is.”

  “How is leaving her there to die any different than what I did in the palace?” Hex asked angrily. “We’re not so different, you and me. You tell me I only think of myself, and maybe that’s true—maybe it’s always been true. But you were willing to sacrifice Iris for some stupid test, to see if I’m eligible for some quest you want me for—”

  “Saving Oz is not ‘some quest,’” Pete said. “And the circumstances of the test choose themselves. I didn’t know Iris would be in danger.”

  “If you had known the test would put her in danger, would you have consented to it?”

  Pete raised one hand in a helpless gesture. With a loud snort, Iris turned over and settled herself again. “I don’t choose the magic,” Pete said. “The magic chooses us. Oz chooses us. We can only do what it asks of us, and do our best to keep it safe. Sometimes that involves sacrifice, yes.”

  “But not your sacrifice,” Hex said.

  “I’ve sacrificed more than you will ever know,” Pete said sharply. “You don’t know the first thing about sacrifice, Wizard.”

  Hex was silent, watching the flames flicker silently from blue to pink to green and back to blue again. Though they burned for hours, they didn’t seem to require fuel. Just one more thing in this crazy country that didn’t make any sense.

  “I felt something strange,” Hex said quietly. “Back there, when I was trying to save Iris. I think it might have been something I’ve never felt before at all. Not even before, when I knew who I was.”

  Pete was silent for a long time. “Selflessness,” he said finally. “That feeling’s called selflessness.”

  Selflessness. Hex turned the word over in his mind. He’d cared about Iris’s well-being more than he’d cared about his own—maybe it was only for a few minutes, but it had opened something up inside him that felt different and new. He couldn’t undo the person he had been before, whoever that was, and whatever he’d done to make Pete feel such contempt for him. But he didn’t have to be tethered to that idea of himself either. The Wizard. The words still meant nothing, though they’d obviously meant something to Iris.

  “When I was the Wizard,” he said. “You said I didn’t have real magic, just a bunch of flashy tricks. But when I fought the Lion . . .” He trailed off, not sure how to ask.

  “That was magic,” Pete said. “The Old Magic of Oz. When you saved Iris, you tapped into it for the first time.”

  “Can I do it again?” he asked. Pete sighed. “I know, I know,” Hex said hastily. “There’s so much you can’t tell me. Of course. But what I did back there—that was new?”

  “Oz is changing fast,” Pete said. “And we’re all changing with it. Everything is going to be different now for all of us.” He looked at the dancing flames. “Get some rest,” he said. There was something new in his voice, something different. If Hex didn’t know better, he would have said it was respect. “You still have one more test to pass. And this one’s going to be the worst of them all.”

  TEN

  Hex expected Pete to leave him again in the morning, but to his surprise, Pete made the three of them a tasty breakfast of porridge and scrambled eggs—where he’d gotten the eggs, Hex didn’t ask—and showed no signs of departing after he had magicked away the breakfast dishes. The rest seemed to have done wonders for both he and Iris; Pete’s terrible pallor of the night before was gone, and though he moved stiffly, he had clearly regained most of his strength. Iris had a noticeable limp and difficulty moving one arm, but she babbled at them a mile a minute. The Lion had damaged her body, but he’d certainly done no permanent harm to her spirits.

  Pete was mostly silent, and Hex couldn’t help but wonder what his sullen mood meant. Iris chattered on at them both about a new formula she had developed to track banana consumption by age, happily oblivious, and Hex was grateful for her cheer. She hadn’t forgiven him exactly for what he had done in Lulu’s palace, but since he had saved her life, she seemed somewhat appeased, and she’d ap
parently forgotten all about her plan to murder Hex in his sleep. (He seriously doubted she had ever been capable of such an act, anyway, as much as she wanted them to believe she was a ferocious warrior.) She’d given them a detailed rundown of the current political situation among the Wingless Ones: with Quentin’s treachery exposed, Lulu had been able to restore order among the rebel factions. The chancellor had been storing away most of the supplies he’d stolen, and Lulu was busy redistributing them among the poorest of the monkeys. Anyone else would have managed to report this news in a few sentences, but Iris was only too happy to go off on long digressions about statistical analysis, equations for determining equitable distribution of goods, and cost-benefit analyses. While Queen Lulu still credited the mysterious sorcerer with exposing the chancellor’s wrongdoing, Iris said, shooting Hex a menacing look, Iris herself had been promoted out of the guards to a management position as soon as he’d left, and couldn’t be happier about it.

  “Now that everything’s settled with the Lion,” she said finally, “I should be getting back to the Wingless Ones. Lulu’s a great ruler, of course, but she doesn’t have a head for numbers. I’m badly needed back at the palace.” She puffed her chest importantly, and then winced.

  “You shouldn’t travel alone,” Pete said. “You’re still hurt, and vulnerable.”

  “I can take care of myself!” Iris said, immediately furious.

  “The Lion may return at any time,” Pete said, and she deflated.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said, and her bravado fell away. “I thought I was going to die back there,” she said softly.

  “The Lion is far less likely to attack again if the three of us are together,” Pete said. “Especially now that he knows Hex is a match for him. And I think we got rid of the wolves for now. We’ll escort you back to the Sea of Blossoms. You should be safe enough the rest of the way to the queendom.”

  Hex looked at Pete in surprise, but didn’t ask any questions. Was this part of his third test? And why was Pete sticking around? But Pete was as infuriatingly inscrutable as ever as they rolled up their blankets and prepared to leave. Pete suggested they fashion crutches for Iris, but she scoffed at the idea. Her indignation was so comical that even Pete cracked a smile.

  At some point while they rested, the other path—the coward’s path, Hex thought—had disappeared, leaving them only one way out of the clearing. The trees were just as ominous, the weird perpetual twilight just as creepy, but Iris’s happy chatter lightened Hex’s mood, and it seemed as though they had only been walking for a few hours when the thorny underbrush thinned out and the trees began to grow farther and farther apart. Soon, real sunlight filtered down through the forest canopy, and at last they emerged, blinking, into a sunny meadow dotted here and there with huge, lush fruit trees that grew in tidy rows. A broad blue stream ran through the meadow, burbling merrily. The whole place was such a welcome contrast to the forest that Hex felt his heart lift immediately.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Pete said. Hex nodded, and Iris sighed in pleasure.

  “I should get out of the queendom more often,” she said happily. “There’s nothing like a good vacation to make you appreciate home, right?” Hex almost laughed out loud. Iris was the only person—well, monkey—he could imagine who would describe being attacked by a monstrous Lion while plotting a murder as a “vacation.” He wondered again about his own home. Had he wanted to go back? Or had he been happy here?

  “We should keep moving,” Pete said. “The Lion isn’t stopped by pretty scenery. Neither are the Tin Woodman’s soldiers.”

  “Soldiers?” Hex asked in surprise.

  Pete nodded. “Not everyone in Oz can access the kind of magic you did in the clearing. The Lion is doubtless on his way to warn Dorothy and Glinda, if he hasn’t already. And once they learn that someone with that kind of power is just wandering around Oz—well, it won’t be long before they’re hot on our trail.”

  “Dorothy,” Iris said, and spat on the ground. Hex was shocked.

  “Who is this Dorothy?” he asked.

  “She used to be the best thing that had happened to Oz,” Iris said, “but then she turned out to be the worst.” Hex waited for Pete to cut her off, but to his surprise, Pete let her continue, her voice growing even more passionate as they walked. “For a long time, a terrible usurper ruled Oz,” she explained. “He came from the Other Place in a beautiful balloon that floated in the sky. This was a long time ago, of course—the citizens of Oz were much more trusting then. He deceived everyone in Oz and made them believe he was a good and kind Wizard, when he was nothing of the sort! He didn’t even have magic—just a bunch of fancy tricks. He made the people of Oz build him the Emerald City, and then he shut himself up in the palace so no one would realize he was a fraud. He stole the throne from the fairies, the rightful rulers. We tried to stop him, but he was too powerful.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” Pete said drily. “The citizens of Oz have never done much to stop anything from happening.”

  “The monkeys did!” Iris said hotly. “We saw through him from the very first! We knew he was trouble! We called him the Traitor! We never bowed down to him!”

  “You didn’t try to stop him until it was too late,” Pete said. “Until he sold you into slavery. And all of this happened before you were even born, Iris.”

  “Are you going to let me finish or not?” Iris snapped, and Hex was surprised to see tears in her eyes. Pete relented, waving at her to go ahead. “That was when Dorothy first showed up,” Iris continued. “She came from the Other Place.”

  If Dorothy was from the Other Place, and he was from the Other Place—did that mean they were related somehow? Had he known her? Something stirred at the back of his mind. He was so close, he thought, to putting it all together. So close to remembering who he was. But understanding was still on the far side of that shimmering wall—close enough to touch, but separated from him by a barrier he couldn’t yet cross.

  “Dorothy defeated the Traitor, and sent him back to the Other Place, and no one has heard from him since. Good riddance, if you ask me. She went back, too, and Ozma took the throne”—Iris gave a respectful little curtsy, as if this Ozma could somehow see her—“and everything was as it should be. But then Dorothy came back. Nobody knows how or why she got here, but this time everything was different. She was different. It was as if something—or someone—had brought her back to destroy Oz. At first, no one realized anything was wrong. She stayed in the palace with Ozma, and they had all sorts of banquets, and everyone who was anyone was invited—I didn’t want to go, of course,” Iris said quickly, “even if I’d had an invitation, I would have turned it down, I don’t care a thing about parties.” The wistful look in her eye belied her words. “But then Ozma changed somehow, and suddenly it was Dorothy this, Dorothy that. The Tin Woodman’s armies marching around and laying waste to villages. It’s like Oz has been wounded; the whole land is bleeding magic, and unless someone puts a stop to Dorothy, we’re all doomed.”

  Iris’s tone had grown more and more somber as she spoke, and even the weather echoed her mood: a huge thunderstorm was piling up in the distance, moving toward them rapidly, and the temperature was dropping. They were almost across the meadow; at the horizon, Hex could make out something bright and undulating that must have been the Sea of Blossoms. They were close then. Pete looked up at the sky. There was something unnatural about how quickly the storm was moving. Something almost—magical. “You wanted to know what the third test was,” Pete said, looking at him. “It’s coming for you now.”

  Hex stared up at the sky. The thunderclouds, directly overhead now, swirled and coalesced, taking the shape of giant men who battled each other fiercely. As each blow landed, thunder cracked and boomed and jagged spears of lightning shot down toward the earth. Iris shrieked as a white-purple streak of lightning struck the ground just a few feet from where they stood. Hex recognized nothing about the meadow, and yet everything about this sc
ene was familiar: the heaving purple clouds, the thunder, the color and sound of the lightning—he was in a basket, a basket floating in the air, while all around him a thunderstorm just like this one raged; he was fleeing something, or going somewhere. He was leaving Oz. It was so close—he grasped desperately for the tangled threads of memory, but they slipped away again, just out of reach. An earsplitting rumble of thunder followed another terrific crack of lightning that struck the earth in front of them so fiercely it split the ground open. Purple and gray smoke poured from the fissure, forming itself into a stairway that led down into the darkness.

  As quickly as it had come upon them, the thunderstorm dissipated into a few scattered clouds that veiled the bright sun and cast long shadows across the now-chilly meadow. Hex shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. Iris gaped at the staircase, her expression so comical that Hex would have laughed if he himself had not been filled with fear at the sight of it.

  “This is as far as we go,” Pete said calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “I’ll see Iris safely to the edge of the Sea of Blossoms, and then I must return to the palace. I’ve already been away far too long. Dorothy will be suspicious.”

  “What about me?” Hex said, his voice more plaintive than he would have liked.

  “I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me,” Iris said vehemently.

  “You’re not the one who has to,” Pete said to her. He pointed to Hex’s pack. “Change into the clothes you brought with you before you go,” he said. “You won’t need anything else.”

  Hex swallowed. “What if I refuse?”

  Pete raised an eyebrow. “If you refuse? Do you really want to wander around forever like the village idiot, never knowing who you are and where you came from?”