The Wicked Will Rise

As she rolled along, I could see a fearsome glimmer of the Mombi I knew returning as she marshaled the little strength she had left to make her plea. She was building up steam.

“But what of those who can fight, and choose not to? Wingless Ones, while you cavort mindlessly in the trees, far from the troubles below, your brothers and sisters are in chains, forced to serve their mistress’s cruel whims. You turn your backs on them simply because you think that they are not as brave as you. Need I remind you what those backs look like now? Did you deform yourselves—pay the ultimate price—just so you could cover your eyes and ears to the truth? Is this bravery?”

She fluttered a quivering hand around the room dismissively and went on. “But I am not a young witch, and I know very well that monkeys do not learn new tricks easily. So I do not stand here asking you to fight. I only ask that you grant me safe harbor so that I might continue to do battle on your behalf.”

I was impressed—even after all the time I’d spent with her in the Order’s headquarters, I’d never been completely convinced that she was really the freedom fighter she claimed to be. As much as Nox had always sworn otherwise, I’d always had a nagging suspicion that maybe she was just an opportunist, eager to get rid of Dorothy so that she could be in power for herself.

Now, listening to her speech, I saw the true passion she had for what she believed in. It was hard not to admire it.

The monkeys of the council all looked convinced, too, and were exchanging nervous, thoughtful glances. The only one who didn’t seem to be buying it was Queen Lulu, whose eyes were fiery with anger.

“Save me the sob story, sister,” Lulu said. “You talk a good game, but I wouldn’t call bingo just yet. We all know who you are. We all know what you’ve done. If it weren’t for you, Oz might not be in this mess in the first place. Or are you forgetting the little deal you cut with the Wizard way back when?”

There was murmuring among the monkeys, but Mombi cut in.

“What do you want me to say?” she bellowed, suddenly full-throated in her rage. “That I’m nothing but a common bush hag like Glinda the Supposedly Good? You want me to say it? Yes, I’ve been wicked, and I regret my crimes! You want more blood? Well, if it’s blood you want, you’ll have that, too, I promise. Just let it be Dorothy’s blood—and mine, if it comes to it—rather than your own and the blood of your people. Persecute me not, Wingless Ones. Instead, let me rest here safely to recover my strength so that I can help destroy our oppressor before she destroys us all.”

With that, Mombi collapsed breathlessly onto the stool at her side, and there was silence again. Queen Lulu stroked the hairs on her chin in contemplation, and then, finally, climbed up onto the back of her throne. She slammed her gavel against the wall of the royal tree hut with so much force that the whole structure shook.

“The court has reached its decision!” she said. I took a step back in surprise. Wait, that was it? “Mombi, as not even you yourself dispute the charges against you, you have been found guilty on every count.”

There was a murmur throughout the room, and I held my breath, waiting to see what came next. Was I going to have to fight to save her? The Tin Woodman, fine. The Lion, okay. They were both monsters. But I hadn’t signed up to kill any monkeys. And I also wasn’t going to let them just kill Mombi for no reason.

Luckily, I didn’t have to make that choice. Because Lulu wasn’t done:

“However,” the queen went on. “In my role as monarch of the monkeys, I have chosen to overrule the decision of the court. There can be no doubt that Mombi is as guilty as a nun dancing the hoochie coochie on Sunday morning. Even she admits it. But for now, witch, out of the goodness of my heart, I’m reducing your sentence and placing you under house arrest.”

She banged her gavel again. She liked that gavel. “Justice has been served!” she proclaimed. “Miss Gumm, you may escort the convict back to the Princess Suite, where she will be allowed to contemplate her crimes while she recuperates. But I remind you once again: no magic. Capisce?”

“Capisce, your royal honor,” I said.

The court broke out into applause, and Mombi nodded solemnly. She stood, and slowly began hobbling to the door. When she got there, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, glaring at me. “Well?” she asked impatiently. “Are you going to escort me or not?”

I looked at Lulu, who nodded, dismissing me, and then followed the witch. I still wasn’t sure what had just happened. I was just glad it was all over.





NINE


“Monkeys,” Mombi muttered as soon as we were outside and out of earshot. “Winged, wingless, makes no difference. They’re all a damn pain in the ass. Now let’s get out of here before they change their minds. I could use a good foot massage after a day like this.”

She flashed me a sly grin, baring two crooked, slimy rows of teeth the color of moldy corn chips.

“You were amazing in there,” I said. “I’ve never heard you talk like that. All this time, I was never totally sure that you really cared.”

Mombi replied with a guffaw that turned into a hacking cough. “Oh, please,” she croaked when she’d recovered herself. “You really bought all that? I doubt even the queen herself believed a word of it. But, you know, Lulu and I go way back. This is at least the third time I’ve had to go before the monkey court, and it’s always exactly the same. In the end, she’s nothing but a puffed-up scullery maid at heart. You have to make her feel powerful—let her have her little trial; drum up some tears to show you respect her.”

I looked at her incredulously, kicking myself for being taken in by her load of bullshit in front of the monkey court. But had it been bullshit? With Mombi, you never really knew.

“But . . . ,” I started, and then stopped. Whether or not Mombi had actually been sincere was the least of what I cared about right now, and I didn’t have the patience to play games anymore. “Just tell me what’s going on,” I said. “After everything I’ve done for you, I deserve some honesty.”

We had come to the twisting, narrow staircase that led down to the rest of the village. She took a deep breath when she realized that she had to get down there somehow.

“Well, isn’t this nice,” she said. She looked totally humiliated as I put an arm around her waist to steady her. I clutched her frail body tightly, worried that if I didn’t drop her I might break her, and we made a slow, careful descent into the trees.

“Where were you?” I asked her. “What happened?” I was desperate to know what was going on, and at the same time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the answer. “After I . . .” I trailed off.

What I couldn’t say: after I failed. After I abandoned everyone. After I let Dorothy get away with her life. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Nothing I could have done would have changed anything. According to the Wizard, the only way to kill Dorothy was to remove the Tin Woodman’s heart, steal the Scarecrow’s brain, and take the Lion’s courage—something Mombi and the Order had failed to mention. But it didn’t matter what I knew now. The fact that I’d been given a job, failed, and ran away had been eating away at me ever since I’d left the Emerald City.

“Let’s just say it didn’t go exactly as planned,” Mombi said. “Then again, I suppose you know that already.” She glanced at me ruefully.

“It was fine at first. Better than fine, actually. While you tried to deal with Dorothy, and I worked to place a field around the palace to block her from using her magic, Glamora and Annabel led several of the Order’s other members on a mission to destroy the devices that Glinda had placed around the city to store and convert the magical energy they had been mining from Munchkin Country. Their success is the reason you may have noticed a sudden resurgence of enchantment throughout the kingdom.”

I nodded. I’d already figured most of that out, but I would have liked to have known about it from the start. “And then?” I asked.

“Then? What do you think happened then? You failed, and we did what we’ve always done. We kept fighting so you could have a running start without anyone following. Wanted to give you the best chance of escaping that we could.”

“Thank you,” I said simply.

Mombi reacted by rolling her eyes. “We weren’t doing it to be nice,” she said. “We were doing it because we need you. Personally, I would have given you right up, if I didn’t know how important you are. Lucky you. It wasn’t a fun fight, or a fair one. There were too many of them. Glinda, the Lion’s beasts, the Tin Soldiers. It felt like it went on for days—maybe it did. By the end, I don’t even know who we were fighting. Some of them were Dorothy’s people but others . . .” She shook her head. “Hell, maybe we were fighting our damn selves by the end. I just don’t know.”

With that, she sighed a creaky, defeated sigh. I felt like someone had stepped on my heart. She hadn’t answered the only question I really cared about.

“What about the others?” I asked.

“It was chaos. Nox, Glamora, and I were separated from the rest of the Order. We were surrounded. Cornered. There were just too many of them. You see the shape I’m in now. I didn’t look any better back there, and neither did they. Let me tell you, it’s going to take a mighty long trip to the hair salon for Glamora to get herself all clean and pretty again. We weren’t going to make it. Simple as that. So I zapped us out of there. It was the only thing to be done. Tried to get us back to headquarters. But teleporting’s tricky stuff even on a good day, and with more than one person? Over that kind of distance?” She let out a long whistle. “That wasn’t a good day, and I was in no shape for spelling around. Didn’t go so well.”

I couldn’t stand it. “What happened to Nox?” I asked more urgently. “Just tell me.”

Mombi squinted at me. “Let me explain it this way. When I teleport, I travel through another place. A kind of limbo, I guess you’d call it. It’s not very pleasant but you move through it so quick you barely even know you were there. Not this time. I lost my anchoring point—the part of the spell that takes us where we’re going. Lost my hold on the others, too. Before you know it, I’m stuck in limbo, and they’re gone. They’re not teleporters really, don’t have much of a feel for it. They could be anywhere. For all I know, they’re still in the in-between trying to get out.”

I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. It wasn’t great news, but at least it meant that Nox was still alive. Probably. Maybe. “We have to find them,” I said.

We had finally reached the bottom of our descent through the trees, and Mombi gingerly stepped onto a platform. She wriggled free from my grip and fixed me with a withering glare.

“Don’t you think I know that? How do you propose we do it?”

“We have to go back in and get them. Into the in-between or whatever.”

“Go back? It doesn’t work that way. It’s not like taking a weekend in the country—you can’t go in without fixing your out first. That’s how you get stuck. And speaking as someone who was stuck in there for longer than I care to think about, I’m not willing to take that risk. Especially since we don’t even know that’s where they are. Just as likely, they never got stuck in the first place—could have been spit out the moment I lost them; could be anywhere in Oz. You just can’t say.”

I wasn’t happy with her answer, but I could see that she was right. Still, I wasn’t going to give up on finding Nox. I kept that to myself, though. I had a feeling Mombi wouldn’t be happy with my priorities.

“How did you get out?” I asked instead. “And how did you know to come here?”

“My, my, aren’t you full of questions? Don’t you think I’ve got a few of my own to ask you?” Mombi countered tartly. Then she paused, and sighed. “The truth is, I don’t know,” she said with a grimace, like it pained her to admit there was something she didn’t know. Or maybe she was just in actual pain.

“It’s like being underwater in there. Like under the mud, really. It’s dark, it’s cold as a fairy’s ta-ta, and you can’t see past your own two fingers. There are things in there, too—and I don’t mean kitty cats. Evil, slimy things. Things you’d run away from if you saw them caged up in a zoo—not that you can see them anyway. They just hiss in your ear, drool on you, rub up against you in the dark. I’m a tough old witch, but even I have my limits. You want the truth? I was about to call it a day, just flip the off switch on this old bag of bones. There’s a spell for that, you know, and I was ready to cast it. To just give up for good. And that’s when I saw you.”

I stepped back in surprise. “Me?”

“No, I’m just pulling your braids. Yes, you. Now, don’t get confused—you’re no favorite of mine, but seeing you in there, out of nowhere, lit up bright as day in all that darkness, you were a sight for sore eyes. So I followed you. You disappeared before too long, but by then it didn’t matter—I had myself a new anchor point, and it was you. Had to sniff it out some, but I kept at it, and then I was here. Would have preferred somewhere with less monkeys, sure, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?”

I tried to sort it all out as we walked, with Mombi staggering along behind me. What did it mean that she had seen me? Had I sent a signal to her somehow, without meaning to?

I was still thinking about the question of how to find Nox and the others when we were finally back at our hut. It had taken forever for Mombi to drag her battered body across the rope bridges and suspended platforms of the monkey village and now the sun was beginning to set. It occurred to me that time had been passing with a surprising regularity. I wondered who was turning the Great Clock—Dorothy sometimes forgot to do it until it felt like it had been the same day for a year. I put my hand on the door and then stopped.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Sorry? Sorry for what?”