Dorothy Must Die
Page 44

“Thank you?” I said. “I think.”
“It is a compliment. I’d take a million Mombis over one Dorothy. I don’t know about your tin farm, but here, sugar can be a poison.” She fluffed out my hair with her hands, as if shaking off the Dorothy cloud that passed over her face.
“I want to keep it. I like the pink,” I said, more brightly than I usually said anything.
Glamora’s fingers passed through my hair, adjusting the color—first blue, then green, then back to pink—a better pink—with depth of color and shine that my hair had never had even when it was its natural color, the dirtiest of blondes. Now it was just north of cotton-candy pink. I remembered rinsing out my hair in the sink of the trailer just a few days and a tornado ago. I had thought that changing my hair would change something about my gray little life. And now? Now I had the perfect shade of pink and more change than I knew what to do with.
She blinked and my cheeks were rosier. Again and my lips were a deep red gloss. And again and a delicate pattern of green and gray shadow made half-moons over my eyes. And again and my lashes seemed to grow a quarter of an inch. One more time and glitter showered from above me.
Glitter made me think of Madison. Sparkling like a damn disco ball in the hallway back at school—
But then I saw that Glamora’s glitter was nothing like Madison’s. It knew exactly where to go—highlighting just above my cheekbones, my eyelids. Dusting my clavicle and shoulder blades. Complementing what she did with the makeup. Not like blush but like something more natural. Or rather, supernatural.
In the mirror, I saw Nox appear in the mouth of the cave. I hadn’t seen him since yesterday, when he’d disappeared with the injured girl.
“Is she . . . ?” I asked, turning to face him.
Nox’s mouth opened but nothing came out as he stared at me.
Glamora giggled.
Nox found his voice.
“She’s doing fine,” he said with a cough. “The wounds were deep, but she’s strong.”
Glamora’s eyes lit up on Nox. “What wonderful timing you have. Doesn’t she look beautiful?” She winked, but I couldn’t tell if it was at Nox or at me.
Soon after Nox’s arrival Glamora had declared we were done for the day so Nox walked me back to my room—but that could have been because my room was on the way to his room.
I wondered what Nox’s room looked like. He probably slept on the floor or some austere stone slab like the one back in my cell in the Emerald City.
Nox didn’t comment on my makeover.
“What happened to them?” I asked Nox as we walked. “What was that scar in the middle of her forehead from? Why did the other one—why is she . . . did the Lion do that to her?” I thought of the girl’s bloody, half-tin face and shuddered.
Nox shook his head. “Melindra’s been half tin for a long time. She is one of the few people to escape from the Scarecrow’s labs.”
“The Scarecrow did that to her?” I’d seen him in the throne room. But he had looked pretty harmless compared to the Tin Woodman.
He nodded and continued. “Annabel’s a Horner. Was a Horner—from Quadling Country. Their horns contained powerful magic. Dorothy offered large rewards for them. There aren’t any Horners anymore.”
I tried to picture a unicorn horn in the center of Annabel’s pretty forehead. Magical or not, having something growing out of my forehead was not something that would have gone over well where I came from. But when I imagined someone trying to chop it off, I shuddered. Ollie’s wings, Melindra’s arm and face, Annabel’s horn—the body part count was rising every time I learned anything new about this place.
“They’re just kids,” I said slowly. “They should be going to school. They should be doing normal kid stuff like having fun and torturing girls like me.”
Nox shook his head like the idea of kids being kids had never even been a possibility for any of them. He sighed and looked at me like I didn’t understand anything. “When Dorothy rolls through a town, she takes the adults—the people who can work. Some of them go to work for Glinda in the magic mines, or for Dorothy in the palace. Some of them get brought to the Scarecrow to be his toys.”
“His toys?”
“He got it in his big brain to ‘help’ Dorothy. Finding ways to extract magic. Helping the Tin Woodman build a better army. But in his spare time he experiments.”
While I digested this he went back to Dorothy. “Sometimes she’ll take some of the kids, too, but most of them get left behind.”
“So you guys scoop them up and put them to work for you instead.”
It sounded like an accusation, like I was judging them. And maybe I was.
Nox nodded.
“Is that really any better?” I asked.
He just shrugged. “It was for me,” he said. “I was one of them. It was Mombi who found me. My parents were dead. I was almost dead myself. It was Mombi who taught me magic—taught me everything I know now. She taught me to be a person again. If it wasn’t for her . . . ,” he trailed off.
I tried to imagine Nox as a little boy, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him being carefree or vulnerable or innocent. I tried to imagine Mombi rescuing a little boy, taking him in, and being a mother to him. That was even harder to imagine.
“And as repayment she made you fight?”
“Dorothy took everything from me. Dorothy took everything from those kids back there. I choose to fight,” he said fiercely.