“You’ll be able to use your knife,” Nox said. “But it won’t be magic. It will just be a regular knife.”

“So I wait for the magic to go away . . . and then?”

Nox looked at me like he was surprised I was even asking. “Then you kill her,” he said.

I thought about it for a moment. “This is your big plan? Stab her at a party?”

“Yes,” Nox replied.

“And you couldn’t have told me that from the start?”

“We needed to be sure about you,” Nox replied. “Jellia was supposed to confirm your readiness, but . . .”

I thought of Jellia, bleeding, one arm missing at Dorothy’s feet.

“Oh, I’m ready.”

“Disabling all this magic isn’t easy,” he continued. “The palace is well protected. Just getting an agent in here is harder than you’d think. To place the wards, we’ll need witches strategically placed all over the grounds. They’ll only have one chance to act, and they might not be able to hold it for long. Without Jellia, it’s going to be much harder. You’ll have to act fast. But I’ll be here, and wherever you are, I’ll be right behind you.”

I studied Nox, his face stoic, but his words warm. I couldn’t figure him out. Was he using me or did he actually care about me? Hell, I couldn’t even figure myself out. Did I want to kiss him or punch him in the face?

“Great,” I replied, hoping to be as inscrutable as Nox.

He looked at me seriously. The anger in his face was gone now, replaced by concern.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Amy,” he said. “Everything we’ve done is for this moment. For you. Don’t let us down.”

And then he stepped through my mirror, disappearing on me once again. I didn’t have a chance to ask him how I could let them down if everything they’d done was for me. It didn’t matter. The end result was the same. I was getting out of this strange body and out of this horrible palace. One way or another.

And first, I was going to kill Dorothy.

Dorothy quickly named Sindra the new head maid.

Although Sindra tried to be humble about it for the sake of Jellia’s memory, she couldn’t hide her excitement. She took to the role easily, sliding into her newfound authority as if it had been custom-made to fit her.

She made us draw straws to decide who would clean Jellia’s blood from the throne room.

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered, before the process could even get under way. The other maids looked grateful, even Sindra.

It was my fault her blood was spilled. The least I could do was clean it up.

I’d been concerned with keeping my head down after Jellia’s arrest, but it turned out that I had nothing to worry about. In the twenty-four hours before Dorothy’s gala, we were all being worked so hard that there was no time for me to do anything suspicious.

Anyway, with the mystery of the missing monkey supposedly solved, no one around the palace seemed to be very suspicious anyway. Dorothy was too egotistical to realize that Jellia had just been the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t let myself think about what could be happening to her down in the Scarecrow’s laboratory. She only had to hold out for a little while. Once Dorothy was dead, the first thing I planned to do was free Jellia.

So the rest of the maids and I scrubbed and cleaned and dusted every possible surface. We reviewed checklists of each guest who would be attending and their strange and dumb requests. The Governor of Gillikin Country could only have purple sheets; the Shaggy Man wanted a pantry stocked with nothing but baked beans and a closet filled with the finest dirty rags. I didn’t bother asking who the Shaggy Man was.

That night, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I’d spent the day working so hard that I hadn’t even had a chance to let my mind linger on what was coming.

In my dream, I scoured the cobblestones of the throne room, cleaning up Jellia’s blood. It was exactly how I’d spent my afternoon, except when I was finished I didn’t move on to preparing the guest bedrooms for the mayor of Gillikin’s entourage like I had in real life. Instead, I moved on to the hallways and the ballroom, the kitchen and the solarium, every room of the palace smeared with blood and in desperate need of cleaning. The sounds of my scrubbing echoed through the empty palace. Whatever happened here, I got the feeling it was my doing. I wasn’t sure if Dorothy’s palace being an abandoned, bloody mess was a good thing or a bad thing.

I woke up with a strange feeling in my stomach. It was the first-day-of-school feeling, but it was the day before summer vacation feeling, too—I was nervous about what I had to do, but excited to know that it was all almost over.

Tonight. Tonight was do-or-die. Literally.

Could I do it? I wondered. Could I really kill another person—even someone like Dorothy?

I put my uniform on slowly, catching a glimpse of Astrid’s face in the mirror for what might be the last time. When I was dressed, I pulled my magic knife from the air and turned it over in my hand, admiring it. The shining, intricately engraved blade; the hilt that Nox had carved just for me.

I stared at that knife, feeling the blade pulsing with magic in my hand, and I realized that not only could I do it, but I wanted to do it. Seeing what Dorothy had done to Jellia, the callous disregard for her life, and her look across the crowd like this could be any of you. Dorothy was a monster.

I couldn’t help thinking about what Nox had said when he had given me the weapon, about why he had chosen the Magril on the handle especially for me. He’d told me it reminded him of me because of the way it transformed itself from something ordinary into something special—into something magical and fierce.