“It would be a lot less difficult for me if you would just tell me what the hell is going on!” I yelled. I’d been through so much, and still hadn’t managed to kill Dorothy. Tears started to fall and I cried. I cried because Nox, possibly my only friend, probably wasn’t such a great friend after all. I cried for poor Polychrome, who’d I’d watched die trying to fight Glinda, and I cried for her dead unicorn. I cried for Star, my mom’s pet rat, who the Lion had swallowed whole in front of me. I cried for all the friends I’d lost already in this stupid, senseless, never-ending yellow brick war. And maybe, just maybe, I cried a little for myself, too. When I was done I lifted my tearstained face to find Gert, Glamora, and Mombi looking at me with eyes full of concern. I’d doubted them all, and for good reason. I was more than tired of doing other people’s dirty work. But maybe they really did care about me.
“You done?” Mombi asked, gruffly but not unkindly. “Because we have work to do, kid.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassment already beginning to replace my outburst of emotion.
Mombi waved a hand at Gert. “Tell her what she wants to know so we can get on with it,” she said.
Gert looked at me questioningly, and I nodded. “Okay, let’s start with the easy question first. You asked how I’m still alive,” she said. “The truth is, I never died.”
If that was the easy question, I couldn’t wait for the hard ones. “But I saw you,” I said. “I saw you when you died, right in the middle of the first battle I ever fought.” I pushed back the gruesome memory of my first meeting with the Lion and his awful animal army. Like a lot of things that had happened to me in Oz, it was something I never wanted to think about again. “I saw you fight the Lion, and lose. It happened right in front of me.”
“You did see that,” she agreed. “And I did lose, there’s no doubt about that either.” She shuddered briefly and closed her eyes as if in pain. I wasn’t in a mood to be sympathetic to the Order, but it was hard to stay mad at Gert. It was like holding a grudge against your grandmother for accidentally burning your favorite cookies. “But witches are very, very difficult to kill,” she went on, opening her eyes again. “Even in a battle like that one. I’m honestly not entirely sure what happened to me when the Lion defeated me. The best guess I can come up with is that Dorothy’s magic is weakening the boundaries between your world and ours. When the Lion won, everything went dark for me for a long time. It was as though I was wandering through some kind of shadow country.”
“The Darklands?” I interrupted, and Gert looked surprised. I realized that the first time I’d used my magic to find my way into that spooky, desolate parallel universe was after Gert died—or didn’t die. Whatever. Gert didn’t know I knew about the Darklands.
“She can get there, too,” Mombi explained curtly. Gert nodded.
“Your magic has grown considerably since last I saw you, Amy,” Gert said. “Anyway, no—I wasn’t in the Darklands, I don’t think. There’s a lot we don’t know about that place. As far as I know I was here, in this clearing, the whole time.”
It took me a second to realize she meant Dusty Acres. “You were in the trailer park?” I asked.
Gert looked confused. “I don’t know what that is,” she said. “But I couldn’t leave this area, no. I’d start out in one direction and somehow, without even realizing it, I’d be exactly back where I began, no matter how far I walked. I couldn’t touch anything—no matter how far I stretched, everything was just out of reach. I didn’t see any other people—not so much as a bird or a beetle.” She looked sad and incredibly old. “It was awful,” she said gruffly. “It took me a long time to regain any strength, and I’m still much weaker than I was before. But eventually, my magic was strong enough for me to get a message to Mombi and Glamora. They used the breakdown between the worlds to join me here. We had some idea the Wizard would try to use you to open a portal back to Kansas, and we knew the doorway would be in this place, so we came here to wait for you.”
“You knew the Wizard wanted to kill me—to use me to open a portal back to Kansas—and you didn’t stop him?” I asked angrily.
“Gert was next to useless,” Mombi said bluntly. “I’m pretty weak myself. The three of us weren’t strong enough to stop the Wizard outright. But we knew if Nox joined us and completed the circle, we’d be powerful enough to defeat him and Dorothy.”
“Wait, back up,” I said. “What circle? Does this have to do with what happened out there?” And if they were powerful enough to defeat the Wizard and Dorothy with Nox helping them, why had they ever needed me in the first place?
“You already know about the balance of power in Oz,” Gert said, and I remembered her uncanny trick of reading minds. “Oz depends on magic to survive, and no one person can tap too heavily into it without harming Oz. That balance is part of what the Order was trying to maintain. There have always been four witches—one each in the North, the South, the East, and the West. But that balance has been out of whack since Dorothy’s first visit to Oz, and it’s even more out of line now. When Dorothy’s house killed the Wicked Witch of the East, she opened up a vacuum that no one was strong enough to fill.”