Was I the Amy Gumm I’d always been, who took care of my mother even though I sometimes hated every vomit-y, thankless moment of it, who got by in school not even breaching the surface of all that potential that Dr. Strachan said I had? Was I Salvation Amy, the girl who always took the bait when Madison Pendleton pushed me too far? The girl who couldn’t keep her mouth shut literally when her life depended on it? The girl whose future looked as bleak as the Kansas sky she stared at every night through her tiny circular trailer window?
Or was I someone more extreme, someone I never imagined—a killer. A warrior. A girl who could stab someone in the face and know that she was doing the right thing? A girl who had strength she never even knew about?
“Who am I supposed to be?” I asked.
“It’s not a matter of who you’re supposed to be. The truth is, I already know exactly who you are. But my telling you—that won’t do you any good at all. You have to be the one to figure it out. Here, try again. Light the candles.”
I focused in on myself. I imagined the candles flickering and then lighting up.
But still, nothing happened.
Gert’s face didn’t betray any expression. I searched it for disappointment, but I couldn’t find any at all. She just clapped her hands together and smiled. “I think that’s enough for today,” she said. “You’ll meet with Glamora next. Now that should be interesting.”
I shrugged and stood up. As I got to the doorway, though, I turned back around to face Gert one more time.
“What about you?” The question that had been bouncing around in my mind came tumbling out just like that. “Are you really a Wicked witch?” I asked. “You said you were, but . . . you don’t seem Wicked to me.”
Gert’s smile faded. “That’s a complicated question,” she replied shortly, averting her eyes.
“I think I can handle complicated at this point,” I said.
She just sighed. “They used to call me the Good Witch of the North,” she said. “But that was a long time ago.”
“What happened to you?” What makes a Good witch turn Wicked? And if she couldn’t stop herself from Wickedness, how could she stop me from following Dorothy’s path?
“I knew Dorothy when she was young, when she first came here. When all she talked about was home. But I saw something else in her even then—she wasn’t honest with herself about what she wanted. She said she wanted home but she also wanted recognition. She wanted the world to sit up and recognize what she’d done. She couldn’t get that in her world so she came back to ours. But here she was living in the shadow of Ozma. So she neutralized Ozma and took the reins herself. But even that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted more.”
“I want things, too.”
“You want things to be right. There may be a boy you want to kiss, or you may want your mother to get better. But you don’t have what she has—more wanting than would fill that Kansas of yours, I’d imagine.”
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked quietly.
“I’m not wrong.” Gert’s voice was firm, unwavering. “Now go. You need to get all the rest you can before meeting with Glamora tomorrow.”
Was Gert still Good? I wondered, and if not, why? Her mouth formed a thin firm line that said she would not be answering anything else, at least not today. I found myself turning and leaving the room—and not of my own volition. Gert’s invisible hand gave me a push.
Back in my own quarters, I was more tired than I should have been. Somehow, I was even more exhausted than I’d been after that morning’s training session with Nox. By the time I’d finished wolfing down the bowl of tasteless green gruel that had materialized in my room, I was so exhausted that instead of bothering to take my clothes off, I collapsed into the bed still dressed.
My bed was barely a bed at all—it was just a bunch of pillows and sheets piled into a sunken pit in the middle of my room. But I’d already discovered it was more comfortable than any mattress I’d ever slept on. Sinking into it felt like sinking into a dream.
Despite how tired I was and despite how good it felt to finally get to lie down, I heard Gert’s thoughts echoing in my head as I tried to settle into sleep. Who are you? I should have had an answer to that. Everyone should have an answer to that. But I didn’t.
My first lesson with Glamora was something completely different.
When I stepped into her room the next morning, she looked up from behind a jewel-encrusted vanity that was unlike anything else in the caves.
Actually, Glamora’s entire quarters were like nothing else in the caves. It was pretty easy to forget we were underground at all.
There were rugs hanging from the walls of the cave in rich purples and reds, and carpeting the floor. Her bed was heaped with white fur, and there was a whole wall covered with mirrored closets so stuffed with dresses that the doors were all standing half open. One just contained jewelry, necklaces and rings and earrings spilling out onto the floor.
She stood from her vanity and moved to a tufted couch with a mirrored table before it. She stared at it and a tea set appeared. She beckoned me to sit.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re having tea.”
As I sat down, a tiered tray of pastries poofed into existence right next to the tea set. The tray was laden with inside-out sandwiches and square doughnuts and little scones with what looked like gold-leaf chips.
My mouth watered. After practically starving in Dorothy’s dungeons the idea of eating something that didn’t taste like sulfur weakened my curiosity. Why not just sit and eat with the crazy purple witch? But was she trying to get to know me? Was this some kind of supernatural test I wasn’t even aware of yet? Would we read the tea leaves when we finished the tea?
I was so hungry that I reached out for a tiny cookie that looked like a little pane of stained glass. Glamora slapped my hand away.
“Wait till the hostess pours before you touch anything,” she ordered. “You’ll need to be careful of even the smallest of gestures when you begin your mission. Everything you do will be watched. You’ll need to get close to Dorothy, and Dorothy is smarter than she looks. Anything could give you away.” She finally gestured for me to eat and I took a bite of one of the gorgeous petits fours. The flavors changed magically in my mouth, from layer cake to chocolate sorbet to some kind of banana pudding.
This all came as news to me. No one had told me the plan yet. “So I’m going to be going, like, undercover or something?” I asked, my mouth still half full of pastry. Glamora looked at me disapprovingly and didn’t answer my question.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. Now, pour me a cup of tea.”
We spent the next few hours reviewing manners—certainly something I had zero experience with back home. How to walk, how to speak. How to serve. She taught me how to curtsy and even how to look at Dorothy.
While the lesson with Gert had been full of conversation, almost like hanging out with a friend, Glamora was all business, barely even pausing on one topic before she’d moved on to the next. By the time it was over, my head was swimming with what felt like useless information.
And there was going to be a lot more where that came from. As I was leaving, she handed me a stack of books—architecture, art, etiquette, and a couple of novels.
“Everyone in Oz under the age of two hundred has read these. We’ll discuss them all next time.” She sat back down at her vanity and turned away from me, toward the mirror. Her hairbrush picked itself up and began brushing her hair.
What was I going to do, challenge Dorothy to trivia? Bore her to death?
“All of these?” I asked incredulously. It would take me at least a month to read half of what she’d given me.