“You don’t get to make that decision for me!” I said sharply. “This is everything I’ve trained for, everything you taught me to do!”

“I know,” he said brokenly. “Believe me, I know.”

“Joining the Quadrant requires we set our personal feelings aside,” Glamora interrupted smoothly. Nox looked like he was about to hit her, but he only shook his head in anger. I almost laughed. The Quadrant’s rules wouldn’t let me be with Nox, but they couldn’t stop me from volunteering for a suicide mission to save him.

“I’m going,” I said.

“You make me sick,” Nox said to Glamora, his voice cold. “All of you. You ask too much. You use people up and throw them away. I might be bound to you, but I don’t have to agree with what you’re doing.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

“Well,” Mombi said after a short, uncomfortable silence. “If we’re leaving for the Emerald City in the morning to save the world, we should all probably get some rest.”

TWENTY-NINE

There weren’t really enough blankets to go around, and the monkeys had already nabbed most of the palace stock. Ozma was sleeping peacefully with her head pillowed on Lulu’s back, and I paused for a moment to look at them both. Lulu was still snoring gently with her mouth open, looking a far cry from the fierce warrior I’d so recently seen in battle. And Ozma—was she really still in there somewhere? I’d seen her moments of clarity, but none of them ever lasted long enough to give me faith that she’d be back to normal anytime soon. I’d been fighting Dorothy for so long now that I’d never given much thought to what would happen once she was finally defeated. If Ozma was still loopy, who’d take over? The Nome King wanted it to be me. But I was tired of being a pawn in someone else’s story. Nox was right. I didn’t belong here. If Dorothy’s shoes had taken her back to Kansas, they might work a second time for me, too. Once I’d defeated her for good, I was going home, Nome King or no Nome King. Oz would have to solve its own problems.

Gert, Glamora, and Mombi had drifted off—to find private chambers of their own, probably. But as tired as I was, I didn’t want to go to sleep. Instead, I walked out into what had once been the Tin Woodman’s gardens.

The gardens were probably well-kept when he lived here, but they’d long since become overgrown and gone to seed. Still, as broken down as they were, most of the worst of the fighting had been far enough away from the palace that they weren’t any worse for wear than they already had been—save for some trampled patches and a scattered spot of blood here and there.

But elsewhere, flowers bloomed in the moonlight: huge, nodding blossoms that reminded me a little of dahlias, sighing on the wind and releasing little puffs of perfume into the cool air. A swarm of big-winged butterflies drifted past, flapping velvety-soft wings and singing a tiny, almost inaudible lullaby. A big yellow moon hung in the sky, so low that I thought I could touch it if I climbed up high enough. Like the moon at home, this one had a face; only Oz’s moon was a gently smiling woman who reminded me a little bit of Gert.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been standing there when I realized Nox was next to me.

“You should go to sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow will be . . .” He didn’t need to say it. We both knew. But sleep was the last thing I could think about. Suddenly, he grabbed my hand. I startled at the warmth of his touch. The feeling of his skin against mine.

“Look,” he breathed. “Night-blooming tirium.”

“What’s that?”

He held a finger to his lips and beckoned me to follow him, tiptoeing toward a tall plant the size of a sunflower. “Be totally quiet,” he said into my ear, his voice sending a thrill through me. “If you frighten it, it won’t bloom.” He settled down on his haunches to wait and I squatted next to him.

He was watching the tall plant as intently as a cat guarding a mouse hole. The seconds stretched into minutes. I fidgeted. He put one hand on my knee to caution me and left it there. All my senses felt totally alive. His sandalwood smell. The heat of his body. The movement of his breath. He smiled, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the plant.

A single pale tendril was unfurling from the top of the stalk, as slow and elegant as a ballet dancer pirouetting across a stage. Another delicate frond followed, and then another, waving gently in the night breeze. The tendrils sent out shoots of their own, like a silken spiderweb weaving itself in front of our eyes. Slowly, the strands knitted themselves together into a huge, white flower, sparkling with moonlight and moving back and forth almost as though it had a will of its own. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out in a long, slow exhale. The tirium flower was beautiful and impossibly fragile—a reminder that no matter how comfortable I got here Oz would always be an alien land, governed by rules I didn’t fully understand. <