The Queen of Oz Read online

  Pete tried to hold on to Mombi’s words. To hold on to himself. But Glinda’s light was so very bright.

  As the transformation completed itself, Ozma fluttered her eyes open.

  “Ozma?” A sugary far-off voice called to her.

  She blinked hard. Some strange shadow lingered. A tiny voice at the back of her head, crying out in protest. A piece of herself that she recognized as the boy she’d been for her entire life.

  “Pete?” she asked out loud, reaching for the name but not quite understanding its meaning.

  Pete wasn’t real, she told herself. Pete had never existed. Pete was Mombi’s creation. Pete was a lie. But she could feel his pain and confusion. She could almost hear him.

  She stretched out her arms. She touched her velvety soft skin. She felt real. The boy was the dream; one she had woken up from. The boy was the spell, she told herself.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling, no matter how good it felt to be herself again.

  There was a tiny scream inside her. Something that felt separate and constant and distant from her. But there all the same. She pushed it down.

  “Ozma?” Glinda said again gently.

  Ozma nodded. She was Ozma again at last.

  “Welcome back to us, Princess Ozma,” Glinda said. But instead of triumphant, her voice was thoughtful. “The transformation spell was so strong,” she murmured, her eyes distant.

  “Magic wants to be something else. . . .” Ozma murmured the words that were not hers.

  Glinda’s perfect eyebrows dotted up in concern. “You need to rest. There are echoes of something else still lingering. I had no idea Mombi had such power. Perhaps she did not act alone . . .” She blinked and shook herself. “Never mind,” she said brightly, turning back to Ozma. “You have returned, and that is all that matters now. Would you like to see your palace, my dear?”

  “My . . . palace?”

  “The Emerald Palace, of course.” Glinda smiled, delighted by Ozma’s surprise. “It’s yours now, my dear. Your true home.”

  As soon as she said it, Ozma knew it was true. The Emerald City. The Emerald Palace. Hers.

  Because it was her destiny. Because she was the true ruler of Oz, and her time had come at last to take the throne.

  Ozma took Glinda’s hands again and smiled, incredibly grateful to the witch who’d saved her. Who’d seen what she truly was, underneath Mombi’s dark magic. Glinda had helped her more than she would ever know. Because now she knew the truth about Oz: protection was a lie. Trust could be broken. Power twisted those who had it.

  She was Ozma, and Oz was hers and hers alone. Hers to rule to the very best of her abilities. Its people were her responsibility, its health her calling. No one would ever take that away from her again. Mombi had used her as a pawn to her own ends. Glinda might have restored her to her true self, but she knew better than to fully trust anyone with that kind of power.

  She was Ozma, the Queen of Oz. And she was never going to be anyone else’s prisoner again.

  EXCERPT FROM NO PLACE LIKE OZ

  SEE HOW DOROTHY ROSE TO POWER IN:

  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.

  Sometimes that chicken could be impossible. And without even really meaning to, I kicked at her. “Shoo!”

  Miss Millie jumped aside just before my foot connected, and I felt myself lose my balance as I missed her, stumbling backward with a yelp and landing on my rear end in the grass.

  I looked down at myself in horror and saw my dress covered in pig slop. My knee was scraped, I had dirt all over my hands, and my slop bucket was upturned at my side.

  “Millie!” I screeched. “See what you’ve done? You’ve ruined everything!” I swatted at her again, this time even more angrily than when I’d kicked her, but she just stepped nimbly aside and stood there, looking at me like she just didn’t know what to do with me anymore.

  “Oh dear,” I said, sighing. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. Come here, you silly hen.”

  Millie bobbled her head up and down like she was considering the proposition before she hopped right into my lap, where she burrowed in and clucked softly as I ruffled her feathers. This was all she had wanted in the first place. To be my friend.

  It used to be that it was all I wanted, too. It used to be that Miss Millicent and even Jeannie the pig were some of my favorite people in the world. Back then, I didn’t care a bit that a pig and a chicken hardly qualified as people at all.

  They were there for me when I was sad, or when something was funny, or when I just needed company, and that was what mattered. Even though Millie couldn’t talk, it always felt like she understood everything I sa
id. Sometimes it even almost seemed like she was talking to me, giving me her sensible, no-nonsense advice in a raspy cackle. “Don’t you worry, dearie,” she’d say. “There’s no problem in this whole world that can’t be fixed with a little spit and elbow grease.”

  But lately, things hadn’t been quite the same between me and my chicken. Lately, I had found myself becoming more impatient with her infuriating cackling, with the way she was always pecking and worrying after me.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Millicent,” I said. “I know I haven’t been myself lately. I promise I’ll be back to normal soon.”

  She fluffed her wings and puffed her chest out, and I looked around: at the dusty, gray-green fields merging on the horizon with the almost-matching gray-blue sky, and all of it stretching out so far into nothing that it seemed like it would be possible to travel and travel and travel—just set off in a straight line heading east or west, north or south, it didn’t matter—and never get anywhere at all.

  “Sometimes I wonder if this is what the rest of life’s going to be like,” I said. “Gray fields and gray skies and buckets of slop. The world’s a big place, Miss Millicent—just look at that sky. So why does it feel so small from where we’re sitting? I’ll tell you one thing. If I ever get the chance to go somewhere else again, I’m going to stay there.”

  I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I knew how I sounded.

  “Get yourself together and stop moping, Little Miss Fancy,” I responded to myself, now in my raspy, stern, Miss Millicent voice, imagining that the words were coming out of her mouth instead of my own. “A prairie girl doesn’t worry her pretty little head about places she’ll never go and things she’ll never see. A prairie girl worries about the here and now.”

  This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.

  I sighed and shrugged anyway. Miss Millie didn’t know there was anything else out there. She just knew her coop, her feed, and me.

  These days, I envied her for that. Because I was a girl, not a chicken, and I knew what was out there.

  Past the prairie, where I sat with my old chicken in my lap, there were oceans and more oceans. Beyond those were deserts and pyramids and jungles and mountains and glittering palaces. I had heard about all those places and all those things from newsreels and newspapers.

  And even if I was the only one who knew it, I’d seen with my own eyes that there were more directions to move in than just north and south and east and west, places more incredible than Paris and Los Angeles, more exotic than Kathmandu and Shanghai, even. There were whole worlds out there that weren’t on any map, and things that you would never believe.

  I didn’t need to believe. I knew. I just sometimes wished I didn’t.

  I thought of Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha, all of them in their pen beside themselves in excitement for the same slop they’d had yesterday and would have again tomorrow. The slop I’d have to refill into the bucket and haul back out to them.

  “It must be nice not to know any better,” I said to Miss Millicent.

  In the end, a chicken is a good thing to hold in your lap for a few minutes. It’s a good thing to pretend to talk to when there’s no one else around. But in the end, if you want the honest-to-goodness truth, it’s possible that a chicken doesn’t make the greatest friend.

  Setting Miss Millicent aside, I dusted myself off and headed back toward the farmhouse to clean myself up, change my dress, and get myself ready for my big party. Bertha and Jeannie and Ezekiel would have to wait until tomorrow for their slop.

  It wasn’t like me to let them go hungry. At least, it wasn’t like the old me.

  But the old me was getting older by the second. It had been two years since the tornado. Two years since I’d gone away. Since I had met Glinda the Good Witch, and the Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. Since I had traveled the Road of Yellow Brick and defeated the Wicked Witch of the West. In Oz, I had been a hero. I could have stayed. But I hadn’t. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry were in Kansas. Home was in Kansas. It had been my decision and mine alone.

  Well, I had made my choice, and like any good Kansas girl, I would live with it. I would pick up my chin, put on a smile, and be on my way.

  The animals could just go hungry for now. It was my birthday, after all.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DANIELLE PAIGE is a graduate of Columbia University. Before turning to young adult literature, she worked in the television industry, where she received a Writers Guild of America Award and was nominated for several Daytime Emmys. She currently lives in New York City.

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  BOOKS BY DANIELLE PAIGE

  Novels

  Dorothy Must Die

  The Wicked Will Rise

  Yellow Brick War

  The End of Oz

  Prequel Novellas

  No Place Like Oz

  The Witch Must Burn

  The Wizard Returns

  Heart of Tin

  The Straw King

  Ruler of Beasts

  Order of the Wicked

  Dark Side of the Rainbow

  The Queen of Oz

  Collections

  Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection

  Novella Collections

  Dorothy Must Die Stories

  Dorothy Must Die Stories Volume 2

  COPYRIGHT

  THE QUEEN OF OZ. Copyright © 2017 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-06-242382-5

  EPub Edition © February 2017 ISBN 9780062423825

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

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