“You don’t choose,” the Wheelers’ leader said to Madison. He lunged forward so fast that she didn’t even have time to scream, fastening his serrated teeth in her arm and dragging her toward the nearest Wheeler, who bent down on his elbows. The leader half dragged, half threw Madison on his back and he reared up again with Madison clutching frantically to his embroidered jacket. Blood seamed her shirtsleeve and her face was white and terrified.
“Now you,” the leader said to me, his teeth red with Madison’s blood. I swallowed hard as another of the Wheelers bent in front of me. The leader bared his teeth and snapped at me as I clambered awkwardly onto the Wheeler’s back. Next to me, Nox was doing the same. Up close, the Wheeler smelled even worse. And when I looked down, I saw fleas crawling in his dirty, ragged clothes. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to throw up.
“Now we go,” the leader said, and the Wheelers lurched forward across the barren earth.
I’d had a lot of bad journeys in Oz, but riding a Wheeler across the desert definitely took the prize for Most Awful Form of Transportation of All Time. The hot, merciless sun beat down on my back, sucking all the moisture out of my body. The Wheeler’s jagged wheels made his gait jolting and uneven, and although I was exhausted, I had to struggle every minute of the ride to cling to his filthy, bony back. I managed to tear off a strip of fabric from the bottom of my dress and toss it to Madison for her wound. She probably needed some kind of shot to ensure it wouldn’t get infected but this was the best I could do for now.
As the sun rose higher, the smell got worse. Every time I glanced over at Madison, she looked more and more as though she was about to pass out. Even Nox was turning a distinct shade of sickly green.
The landscape around us wasn’t much better. Mostly it was deserted, but here and there we passed tiny villages that looked even worse than I felt: houses with collapsing roofs and crumbling walls, farm animals with ribs that poked horribly out of their fly-dotted hides, poking dispiritedly along the sun-bleached, rocky ground in vain search of food. As we creaked and rumbled by, terrified faces appeared briefly in broken-paned windows and then disappeared again as everyone we passed hid from the Wheelers.
Once, one of the Wheelers broke off from our group, speeding toward a village with a howl of glee, but the leader sharply called him back and he returned reluctantly, still brandishing his knife in his teeth. The leader bit him hard on the ear and he yelped with pain.
“We follow Princess orders!” the leader snarled. “No play today. Serious business.” The other Wheeler shot him a murderous look but obeyed. I didn’t want to think about what the Wheelers considered “play.” The horror in the faces of the people we passed gave me a pretty good idea.
Nox looked at Madison, who was inspecting the bloody cloth around her arm.
“If you expect to make it here, you can’t bully your way through it. You need to take our lead.”
Madison looked up sharply. “Excuse me, you don’t even know me.”
“You’re the Madison who used to call her ‘Salvation Amy.’ That Madison? I do know you.”
I had forgotten that Nox had not been there for everything that went down in Flat Hill when I’d gone back with the witches. How do I explain how I had made up with Madison? Nox had been in my head during my initiation into the Order, he had felt every humiliation that Madison had dealt me, and judging from his face, he could not reconcile me forgiving her. I could hardly reconcile it myself.
“You weren’t there, Nox. A lot happened in Kansas. She risked her life for me,” I said.
Nox scowled, unimpressed. “One good thing doesn’t erase all the bad,” he said.
I loved that he was protective of me. But this was more than that.
“Hey, I know this isn’t about her. This is about Mombi, isn’t it?”
He looked up at me, surprised. “What are you talking about? She died doing what she loved. Protecting the Order. Protecting Oz.”
I took a deep breath. Nox had been raised to protect Oz at any cost. Duty coursed through him and the other witches. But there was more to him, and there was more to Mombi.
“She died protecting what she loved. You.”
Nox blinked hard and looked away. I wanted to put my arms around him. To make him give in to what he was feeling. But I couldn’t because I was stuck on the back of a disgusting creature.
“Shhh . . .” screeched the Wheeler beneath me, then it raced ahead to stall our talk.
The sun dragged slowly across the sky. I wondered if someone here controlled the time, the way Dorothy had once used the Great Clock. It certainly felt like some sadistic force was making the time pass as slowly as possible, but I suspected it was just the awfulness of the journey that made it seem endless.
I tried to remember everything I knew about Ev. Mombi had told me about the Nome King back when I’d found Dorothy’s journal in Kansas. Something about how he’d tried to invade Oz a long time ago, but Ozma defeated him when she was queen the first time around. When he showed up in Kansas, Mombi immediately assumed the worst and thought he might be trying to use me—and he’d basically told me as much when he’d crashed Ozma’s coronation party, dragged Madison into Oz, and murdered Mombi with Glinda’s help.
I didn’t want to think about the last time I’d seen her or the way she’d looked—almost resigned, as if she knew this might be her last fight. She had not given up—she was a fighter. And she had thrown herself into the fray to give me and Nox a chance to escape. But if the Nome King could take out Mombi, the witch with the most Wickedness, that didn’t say much for my chances of defeating Ev’s most sinister senior citizen on his own turf.
I was pretty sure she’d never said anything about any Princess Langwidere, though. I wished I could ask Nox more about who she was, but I didn’t want the Wheelers to overhear our conversation. Instead, I closed my eyes, concentrating on finding the magic within myself. Magic was the only weapon I had left. We had no idea what we were going to be up against with this Langwidere person. I had to be able to use my powers in case I needed them to help save us.
But trying to find my magic felt the same way it had on the road: I could almost feel it, but it was as if I was trying to reach through a wall. My boots throbbed again, but this time it felt like a warning. As if they were telling me to be careful. As if they were letting me know they might not be able to protect me.
“Look,” Madison said in a low voice, jerking me out of my thoughts. On the horizon I saw a black smudge that I thought at first was a heat-induced mirage over the shimmering desert. But as we slowly wheeled closer the smudge got bigger and bigger, looming over the landscape like a bad dream.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Princess! Princess!” screamed one of the Wheelers in delight. “Princess soon! Princess treat guests so well!”