Dorothy Must Die Novella #7

“Again!” Nox barked, and Lanadel gritted her teeth, preparing to repeat the knife stroke he'd just taught her for what felt like the hundredth time. She'd known training with the Order of the Wicked was going to be difficult, but she hadn't realized it was going to be
ridiculous
. She was dripping with sweat, her dark hair clinging to her neck in damp tendrils. Back home, her brothers had always given her a hard time about her wild, untamable curls that refused to stay put in a ladylike bun. They'd teased her mercilessly, pulling the loose strands like she was—

Lanadel stopped that thought cold in its tracks. Her brothers were dead, and that was why she was here. Thinking about them now wasn't going to bring them back. Their loss was so recent that every time her mind wandered she forgot they were gone. Forgot that she couldn't just go home after fighting practice, punch Beech in the shoulder on her way to fight Rowan for a loaf of their mother's fresh-baked bread . . .

Nox's fist connected squarely with her cheek, snapping her head back and sending her reeling. “Monkey's nuts!” she yelled, bringing her hand to her swelling cheek. “What the Ev did you do that for?”

“If we'd been on the battlefield instead of in the training caves, I'd have killed you,” Nox said coldly, his gray eyes hard. “You can't let yourself get distracted in the middle of a fight.”

Lanadel bit down on another curse. Nox was a ruthless teacher, merciless and sometimes even cruel, but he knew what he was doing. She knew he was right. And if there was anyone in Oz more stubborn than Nox, it was her—and there was no way she was going to let him see her cry.

“Right,” she said, steeling herself. “Let's do it again.” She was satisfied to see a flicker of surprise in Nox's eyes. She might not have his skills, but he couldn't beat her in willpower. She'd always been tenacious, but when her family died, her heart had turned as hard as the jewels that studded the walls of the Emerald City. She'd come to the Order to learn not just how to fight, but how to kill. And when she was ready, she was going to make Dorothy's minions suffer for everything they'd done to her family. She'd make sure their deaths were as slow and as painful as her family's had been. Right now, her will was the only thing keeping her from joining her brothers in whatever world Ozians went to when they died. For the first time in her life, she was alone. And since the loss of her family hadn't killed her, she was going to make their killers pay.

Lanadel gripped the hilt of the short obsidian knife Nox had
given her that morning and dropped into a fighting stance. If Nox was feeling particularly nasty, he'd use magic on her, but for now he was circling her with slow, measured steps, his crouch matching her own as he searched her defenses for a weakness. He lunged toward her with lightning speed but she parried his knife strike with the ringing sound of stone on stone and he danced back, resuming his circle.
Concentrate,
she told herself. Sometimes Nox favored his left side, just barely—but just enough. There it was, just the slightest give in his step. She saw her opening and feinted to the right. When Nox went to deflect her blow, she dropped into a somersault and kicked his left leg out from under him as she jumped out of the roll. He lost his balance—but not his nerve. As he lurched forward he grabbed her shoulder, throwing her to the ground and landing on top of her. “Checkmate,” he growled, his knife at her throat.

“Look down,” she said. He did, and rewarded her with the briefest flash of a smile. Her own blade was pressed up against his heart.

“Not bad,” he said grudgingly, rolling off her and to his feet in a single fluid motion. He extended one hand to her but she ignored it, pushing herself up on her own. Her head was ringing from Nox's earlier punch and she could feel her eye swelling shut. She'd twisted her ankle when he'd thrown her to the ground, too, though the injury was nothing a quick soak in the healing pool couldn't fix. But her training uniform was ripped in half a dozen places. She was bloody, bruised, and stinking—and Nox wasn't even out of breath. His thick, dark hair was unmussed.
He hadn't even broken a sweat. It was infuriating. As if he could read her mind, he gave her a dismissive look.

“You're getting better but you still have a long way to go,” he said in his now-familiar, cool, distant tone. “You'll need to pick up the pace if you want to fight with the Order. We don't have room for weaklings.”

Fury surged up in her, but she wasn't going to show him he'd gotten to her. “I've only been training for a few weeks,” she said, keeping her voice even.

He shrugged. “Time isn't a luxury we have here. We're on the brink of war.”

“You don't have to tell me that,” she said. She hadn't told him about her family—only Gert knew that, and as far as she knew Gert had kept the information to herself.

“Apparently I do,” he said coldly. “You need to work much harder than you have been if you expect to be able to be of any use to us. We're done for today; get that ankle to the pool. We meet again at sunrise tomorrow.”

“Yes sir,” she said sarcastically under her breath, but he was already striding away. Lanadel sighed and pulled her hair out of its totally ineffective ponytail. “You asked for this,” she muttered to herself as she followed him out of the training cave and toward the healing pool.

But when she got to the pool, she wasn't alone. Another girl was there already, making half-anguished, half-ecstatic noises as she thrashed around in the warm, clear water. No one had ever bothered to explain the pool's magic to Lanadel; it just worked. You got into it injured, and you came out healed, no matter how hard a beating you'd taken in practice—but the worse you felt, the more it hurt to get better. Which was probably some kind of metaphor for real life, but Lanadel was doing everything she could not to think too much about the real world.

“Sorry,” she said, embarrassed, and the other girl's eyes flew open.

“I didn't realize anyone was here!” she exclaimed. She was pretty—almost
too
pretty, with long, gold hair that swirled behind her in the water, clear green eyes, and a heart-shaped, pouting mouth. And she was totally naked. And she was totally ripped.

“N-no, it's my fault,” Lanadel stammered, realizing she was
babbling as she desperately tried not to look at the other girl in the pool. Living in a house with boys, she had seen plenty of them naked without wanting to. They were completely without shame. Conversely, no one had seen her naked for as long as she could remember. Lanadel's eyes found a safe space on the surface of the water as she wondered who the naked girl was. Was she another recruit? Lanadel had never seen her before, but people came and went a lot in the caves, and she hadn't been there long.

“Oh, don't be silly,” the girl exclaimed. She fluttered one hand in the water, splattering Lanadel with sparkling, crystalline droplets. “There's plenty of room, you just startled me.” She looked Lanadel up and down appraisingly. “And no offense, but you look like you need the pool even more than I do.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks,” Lanadel said, still stumbling on her words. The village she'd grown up in had been tiny, and other than her brothers, she hadn't had friends. She didn't know much about how to act around other people, and she definitely didn't know much about how to act around other girls. Whoever this girl was, she was calm and confident and completely unflustered by the fact that she was talking to someone without her clothes on. Was Lanadel supposed to just get naked, too? Averting her eyes and blushing furiously, she pulled off her tattered training clothes and slunk into the pool, hissing in pain as the water met her bruises and cuts.

“It's the worst,” the other girl said sympathetically. “Oh my god, believe me, it's just the worst. For months, honestly, until you get used to it. You're new, right?”

“Yeah,” Lanadel said, still wincing. But she was still grateful
the pain took her mind off of the fact that they were naked. “I've only been here a few weeks.”

“The first few weeks are the hardest,” the other girl said. “It gets easier, though, I promise. Pretty soon you won't even notice how much it hurts.” She laughed. “I'm Melindra,” the other girl added. “I've been fighting with the Order for a while now. Plenty long enough to know that”—she held up one hand, ticking her points off on her fingers with the other—“Mombi's nuts, Gert's a sweetheart, Glamora's way smarter than she looks, and Nox is an asshole.” She frowned thoughtfully. “He's a hot asshole, though,” she admitted. “And he doesn't flirt. Ever.”

Lanadel burst into laughter for the first time since she'd turned up outside the caves, clamoring to be taught how to fight. “You tried
flirting
with him?”

“Well, obviously,” Melindra said, yawning. “Once you figure out how to disarm him, there's not much else to do here. I mean, they'll teach you magic, obviously. But probably not for a bit. They make you learn to fight the hard way first.” She rolled her eyes, making quotation marks with her fingers. “Because there's no telling what Dorothy will throw at us,” she drawled, parroting the familiar, gruff bark of the old witch Mombi. Lanadel laughed again.

“Sounds familiar,” she said.

“You'll have the whole speech memorized by the end of the week,” Melindra predicted. “Duty to Oz, blah blah, bringing together all corners of the land in unity, blah blah, Wicked coming together for the first time in the history of Oz to confront this
profound and unexpected new threat to our safety as a country.”

It had been so thrilling when Dorothy first returned to Oz. The Wizard's era had been before Lanadel was born, but she was old enough to remember the Scarecrow's rule. The kindly fellow had been a sweet and endearing ruler, but he'd never seemed particularly effective. For a while, he'd implemented the building of schools all across Oz. Like the other kids in her village, she'd dutifully trooped along with her brothers to a little schoolhouse. She'd learned a lot of strange facts that still stuck in her brain: the annual sunfruit exports of the Kingdom of the Beasts, the tariff rate on buzzleberries from Quadling Country, and the chief dangers of traveling among the winged monkeys. But it was hard to see the point of school, and soon enough parents stopped sending their children. There was too much work to do to waste the day memorizing the names of every ruler of the Winkies.

And then something had happened in the Emerald City, and suddenly the Scarecrow wasn't king anymore and they had a new ruler called Ozma, who'd been queen all along, or something like that. News took a long time to reach Lanadel's tiny village in the far hills of Quadling Country, and her people didn't have much use for rulers; their day-to-day life was much the same no matter who sat on the throne of Oz.

But even her village knew when Dorothy returned. The girl they'd heard about in bedtime stories and legends, the Witchslayer who'd saved Oz long ago—she wasn't just real, she was back. Lanadel's family had celebrated along with everyone else. And when Dorothy became Queen of Oz—well, even
better. Or so they'd thought. That was before. Before Dorothy had created those half-person, half-mechanical creatures. Before she'd begun raiding villages and towns across Oz, taking prisoners and leaving a wake of blood, chaos, and burning houses. Before those terrible things had come to Lanadel's village and—

No,
she thought.
Not now.
She couldn't let herself think about what had happened to her family. It would tear her apart before she had the chance to even the scales. And the Order was her only chance at righting the balance.

The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked was mysterious—their existence had only been a rumor when she set out looking for them after . . . after what Dorothy's troops had done to her family. It had taken her long weeks of traveling and asking careful questions in inns and markets before, half starved and completely exhausted, she'd found her way to their training caves high in the Traveling Mountains. There was no map—the mountains moved too much for that. She'd had nothing to go on but half-fantastical stories: that the Wicked Witch of the West was still alive and had raised an army in order to stop the newly minted tyrant Dorothy's rampage across Oz. That Glinda was a double agent, flitting between the Emerald City and a secret location in the middle of the mountains. That the winged monkeys were evil. That the winged monkeys were good. That somewhere on the side of Mount Gillikin was the entrance to a magical warren of caverns and tunnels that led to the heart of Oz—and a huge, secret army, training in stealth until they were strong enough to go up against Dorothy's terrible forces.

By the time she reached the foothills of the Traveling Mountains, Lanadel had long since run out of food. She knew going farther into the mountains meant certain death—unless the Order was real, and unless she could find them. But she hadn't hesitated as she took the first step on the narrow, rocky path that heaved under her feet as the mountains undulated around her with deep, rumbling booms and cracks. Revenge was the only thing she had left to live for. And so far, the Order was the only hope she had of avenging her family.

“Follow the shadow of Mount Gillikin,” she whispered, repeating the words an old innkeeper had told her in a sleepy hamlet in Gillikin Country. And maybe she was just delirious from starvation or exhaustion, but the innkeeper's words had taken on a literal meaning. Mount Gillikin was the highest peak in the ever-shifting range, and as the mountain moved, its long, immense shadow had taken on the shape of a giant hand beckoning her forward. She hadn't been walking for long when a huge storm descended on the mountainside, blowing snow so thick she could only see a few inches in front of her face. Half frozen and more than half starved, she had stumbled out of the storm into the meager shelter of a cleft in the rock that turned out to be the entrance to a much larger cavern. And there she had sunk to the ground, too exhausted to go any farther, and waited to die.

It was Gert, an ancient, grandmotherly witch whose sweet face belied her tremendous power, who'd found her collapsed on the floor of the cavern, and Gert who'd helped her to her feet and guided her to a tunnel at the back of the cave that led to the vast
warren of tunnels and caverns where the Order's headquarters were housed. Lanadel had no idea how far the caves extended, or how many troops the Order had. In two weeks, she'd seen a handful of other people, but they were always moving quickly back and forth along the corridors of the Order's caverns and no one ever stopped to talk to her. She slept alone, in a small cave with a thin mattress on the floor, and Nox brought her her meals. She had risked her life to find the Order, but since she'd gotten here, she had lived in a weird limbo.

Gert had shown her to the cave where she slept the afternoon she arrived, and brought her a bowl of warm, nourishing broth that sparkled with an eerie green light. “Drink up,” she urged. The soup fizzed in her throat as she swallowed it, and almost immediately she could feel her whole body tingling as the strength returned to her arms and legs.

She'd slept like a dead person until Gert woke her up again—she assumed the next morning, although in the windowless cavern, she had no way to tell. Gert had introduced her to gruff old Mombi and sweet, pretty Glamora, and then she'd brought Lanadel to the training cave where Nox awaited her. That first day had been brutal—and so had the day after that. But as the days passed, her muscles gradually adjusted to the constant, punishing routine of her training. She knew there were other trainees, but she hadn't met them. She hadn't met anyone at all, other than the witches.

It was as if Nox was waiting for her to do something special—demonstrate some impressive skill or undiscovered talent—before she would be allowed to do anything other than
eat her meals in silence and train obsessively with him. After a few weeks, she was so lonely that she was halfway tempted to run back down the side of Mount Gillikin and seek out somewhere else to go. Except that there was nowhere else. The Order was all she had now, for better or for worse.

Melindra was the first person other than Nox, Mombi, Glamora, or Gert that she'd talked to since she arrived. And it was hard to use the word “conversation” to describe the terse interactions she had with Nox. More like he barked orders, and she followed. And Melindra was funny, friendly . . . and gorgeous.

Melindra yawned widely and dunked her head in the warm water. “What I want to know is when we get to
fight
,” she said when she came back up, breaking into Lanadel's thoughts.

“You haven't been sent on any missions yet?” Lanadel didn't know what she was expecting. Everything about her life now was so new. So confusing. And so filled with pain. Every day felt like being torn in a thousand different directions—as if there were dozens of different Lanadels inside her, trying to get out.

“Oh, they sent me out to do some recon,” Melindra was saying, and Lanadel snapped back to attention as the other girl continued. “You know, trying to establish the strength and size of Dorothy's army, that kind of thing.”

“Those creatures are Dorothy's army?” Lanadel thought of the creatures who'd torn through her village. Of what they'd done. The idea that there might be a whole army of them was so horrifying she could hardly bear to think about it.

“Supposedly.” Melindra shrugged. “I don't know. I couldn't find much. Lots of rumors in the Emerald City, but I couldn't get near the palace without any kind of undercover setup, and I'm no good at that stuff. I can never keep my mouth shut. I got word back to the Order, and they sent another one of our best to try to get into the palace and find out what's really going on. She's still out there.” A flash of worry crossed Melindra's face. “We haven't heard from her in a long time, but I'm sure she's fine.” Melindra sounded like she was trying to reassure herself as much as Lanadel. “Anyway, Dorothy has guards everywhere, that's for sure, and her servants are terrified of her—or at least, the ones who manage to get out into the city sometimes. Supposedly she doesn't like it when they leave the palace. But secret armies, weird experiments on people—”

“Experiments?” Could that explain what those—
things
—had been that attacked her village? They definitely weren't human but they didn't look like any other creature she had seen or heard of. And what they'd done to her family—that was something that had never happened, not in the entire history of Oz. If they were some terrible experiment gone wrong, that might explain what they were capable of. But who would create such a monster? And why? She tried to keep her voice steady, but Melindra gave her a searching look before she continued.

“So far, it's all just rumors. No matter how hard we try, we can't get any concrete intel. And Gert and Mombi have been keeping mum about it if they know anything. The heads of the Order don't like to tell us much.” Melindra shrugged again. “I mean,
obviously, ever since Dorothy Gale came back to Oz things have been different.” Melindra glanced over at Lanadel and saw her expression. “Well, it sounds like I don't have to tell you,” she said quietly. “You know it didn't take long before everything changed for the worse. Even the Pond of Truth started to tell lies. And the rumors coming out of the palace . . .” Melindra shivered involuntarily. “Raids on villages at the outskirts of Quadling Country. Even
murder
. And worse than murder. Enslavement.”