I stood up and looked in the mirror. Astrid stared back at me. I touched the cool glass—solid now, no way back—and reminded myself that this was me standing there. This was me in Dorothy’s dumb servant attire: frilly white shirt, pleated green skirt, apron, and red patent-leather Mary Janes that seemed like a mocking approximation of Dorothy’s sky-high pumps. Cute.
I smoothed down my skirt and adjusted the apron, looking around while fighting back a wave of nausea at being in one of the palace’s tiny rooms. I needed to get used to it quick. After all, this was my new home.
The servants’ quarters weren’t much better than my cell had been. There was a little white bed with threadbare sheets printed with Ozma’s faded crest and a dresser with peeling paint that had seen better, grander days. A small silver bell sat on top of the dresser. That was pretty much it.
It made my room back in Dusty Acres seem lavish. And that room hadn’t even had walls.
I yanked open the top drawer of the dresser, not expecting to find much. I was right. There were three uniforms identical to the one that I was already wearing, and a couple of plain cotton dresses—one in a plain green satin and another in white. Glamora had told me that every maid had two dresses aside from her uniform—one for escorting Dorothy to parties and one for her monthly day off.
So this was it.
It didn’t take long to search the rest of my sad accommodations. I got excited for a second when I reached underneath the mattress and pulled out a battered old book. Maybe it was a diary. Some extra insight into servant life would come in handy. Hell, maybe Astrid had documented the one day a month Dorothy sunbathed in the warm glow of the Emerald City’s Rusty Knife Recycling Pile. That’d make my task easier.
Either I wasn’t that lucky or Astrid wasn’t that interesting, or both. It was just a dog-eared copy of a trashy-but-famous Oz romance called The Quadling and the Nome, one of the more boring books Glamora had forced me to read during our cram sessions.
I tossed it aside in frustration and sank down onto the bed. I was all alone for the first time in weeks, and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next.
Out of boredom, I opened my palm and was about to light a small magic flame when I remembered Nox’s warning not to use magic. I snapped my hand shut and leaned back. So much for my plan to pass the time by staring at fire. I sighed.
“Boredom,” I said aloud, “thy name is assassin-ing.”
It was only then that I realized I was overlooking the one friend I did have in the palace. Well, make that two friends. Friend Number One: Star the Rat. Who was, in theory, still being kept safe by Friend Number Two: Pete.
Pete. I’d almost forgotten him. Was he here? Did he know I’d managed to escape? I wondered. Or how I’d managed to do it?
Even if I found him, there was no way of telling him I was okay. I was Astrid now, and even though I had a good feeling about Pete, my witch-trained side knew I couldn’t take any unnecessary risks. I was supposed to follow the plan. Watch and wait.
I sat. I watched. I waited.
I almost jumped out of my maid’s costume when the bell on the dresser rose a few inches into the air and began to ring.
I knew it meant that someone in the palace needed service. I knew about the bell because Astrid knew about the bell. The spell Mombi had cast didn’t give me access to her memories—not exactly—but it did give me a vague sense of her instincts. What Astrid would do in this situation came through as a foreign tickle in the back of my mind.
I walked over to the bell and cautiously picked it up. It rang louder.
I held it at arm’s length toward the door. It got louder still. When I placed it back on the table, the tinkling chime faded.
It was like a game of hot and cold. The bell was telling me which way to go.
So me and the bell walked out the door, down one hall and then another and another and another. At each corner, I listened carefully, judging which way to go. The bell was getting louder and louder as I roamed through the palace. How big was this place?
When I reached a carved oak doorway, the ringing stopped. I’d really been hoping the bell would lead me to one of the normal doors, but of course it put me in front of this monstrosity at the end of the hall. The door was carved into a landscape scene that twisted and moved as I stared at it, almost like crude animation. In it, dozens of blackbirds repeatedly dropped dead over an endless field of corn.
I knocked, and then jumped back as a blackbird exploded into a puff of feathers beneath my knuckles.
An impatient, somewhat familiar voice told me to enter. My heart sank when I saw the Scarecrow sitting on the edge of his bed in the center of the room, waiting for me. Or rather, waiting for Astrid.
“Yes, Your Royal Scarecrow?” I chirped in my sweetest voice, even though I was shaking on the inside. I was face-to-face—and alone—with the monster who’d experimented on Melindra. I felt my hand tingling and I was comforted with the knowledge that my knife was there if I needed to summon it.
The Scarecrow’s room looked less like a bedroom and more like an enormous, filthy study. Every surface was cluttered with loose papers and dirty plates and bits of straw. The whole place smelled stale and moldy, like the bootleg firewood our neighbor used to wheelbarrow around Dusty Acres. Lying on the floor near my feet I noticed a bound leather book open to a drawing of a monkey’s internal anatomy, with little notes in shaky handwriting penciled in the margins.
I shivered and forced myself to look away, letting my eyes travel upward, where walls of bookshelves stretched beyond the reach of the candlelight.
“Well? What took you so long?” the Scarecrow snapped. My eyes snapped, too, back down to where he sat, his creepy button eyes looking right through me. “Why didn’t you just zap yourself to me?”
“Zapping is forbidden in the palace,” I said, the words out before I could even think about them.
I let out an internal sigh of relief when the Scarecrow seemed exasperated but not suspicious. “You should know by now that those silly rules don’t apply when I ring,” he grumbled. He gave me a meaningful look.
Oh no, I thought. Please please please don’t tell me he’s Astrid’s secret boyfriend.
But he just scowled as he gestured toward a square metal tray that was sitting on a table next to his bed. “I’m feeling duller by the second here.”
Doing my best not to disturb his mess, I carefully stepped over piles of junk and picked up the tray.
It took everything I had to stay calm when I saw what was actually on it: knives and scalpels and curved needles and pliers and an assortment of other things I didn’t even want to think about. Some of them were still bloody.
These were probably the same tools this monster used to dissect and experiment on innocent Ozians. On people like Melindra.
And what did he want me to do with them? I was still trying to figure it out as he casually leaned his stuffed body against his bed’s ornate headboard and started removing a series of straight pins from his scalp, dropping each one carefully into a metal wastebasket near his feet.
I noticed that they had blood on them, too. I cleared my throat and nodded toward the horror show of instruments on the tray.
“What would you like me to do with these tonight, Your Eminence?” I kept my voice detached, like a good, subjugated servant girl, even as my skin crawled at the scene before me. I hadn’t been prepared to face the Scarecrow within minutes of my arrival. I hadn’t been prepared for the Scarecrow at all.
He looked me up and down with his dead and shiny button eyes. “I want you to do the same thing I always want. What’s gotten into you?” Without waiting for me to answer, he plucked a scalpel up from the tray I held and began carefully using it to break apart the stitches that held his canvas skull together. “I got started without you. The syringe is already filled.”
I noticed it then: a syringe with a needle at least four inches long was sitting right there next to the rest of the bloody utensils. I picked it up, wishing I’d learned a spell to keep my hand steady.
When I turned around the Scarecrow was lifting the flap off his head, revealing his brain.
I’d seen a monkey brain once in biology class. This was kind of like that, only pinker and goopier. The whole thing was suspended in red, gelatinous mush that I’d mistaken for blood.
I picked up the syringe. I gave it a little squirt like I’d seen nurses do on hospital shows. Where was I supposed to stick it? My borrowed Astrid instincts were quiet. Maybe the magic only went so deep, or maybe she’d done such a good job blocking out these traumatizing scenes that they didn’t transfer over, or maybe my own instinct to run away screaming was overriding my Astrid sense.
Either way, I stood there holding the needle like a dummy.
When I waited a moment too long, his gloved hand shot up and grabbed my wrist with a steel grip. His hold was tight, yet I could feel his straw insides crunching as he squeezed. I almost flinched away, but that wouldn’t be an Astrid move. I kept my eyes downcast and frightened.
“Get it right, girl. Or I’ll be the one sticking needles into you next.”
“Yes, sir,” I said meekly, adding a shudder that wasn’t entirely feigned.
When he let go, I went for it, jamming the needle into the pinkest part of his brain mass. Part of me hoped there might be an air bubble in the needle or something, and my next job as servant girl would be mopping bits of Scarecrow off the walls. I pushed the plunger, releasing the fluid. The Scarecrow let out a long moan of relief. His head lolled over to his shoulder and a little felt tongue I didn’t even know he had dangled limply from his mouth. I willed myself not to throw up.
“Ahhhh,” he moaned again.
I pulled the needle out and put it back on the tray, slowly backing away.
“Do you know how many brains I had to drain for this stuff?”
The thing is, he wasn’t looking at me. It sounded more like he was talking to himself; he barely seemed to remember I was there at all.
“It’s exhausting,” he continued, “but it’s the price they must pay to have the finest brain in all of Oz.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.
“I’ll sew myself back up. It’s good to let it breathe for a bit.” He waved me away, a bit of straw escaping from his cuff. “Take the trash on your way out, girl.”
I grabbed the wastebasket, almost tripped over myself curtsying, and got the hell out of there.