Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (30 page)

I shouldn’t have been taken aback, but I was. I had allowed myself to be lulled by the fact that Flashgleam Sparkle had, so far, limited herself to subterfuge. I’d hoped that we might expose the Wizard as a hapless marionette and let the Emerald
Citizens themselves demand regime change without any need for cloaks and daggers.

“You’re going to kill the Wizard?” I asked.

“We needed to know if he was a fraud. He is. He has no magic. He won’t see us coming.” She shook her head. “But no, I’m not going to kill the Wizard.”

I knew what she was going to say next. I knew, but I still was unhappy when the words came from her lips.

“You are.”

When Glinda caught him alone, the Lion giggled nervously.

“I think I want to win. I mean, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t, right?” His amber eyes darted back and forth. “But then, thinking about it, if I had courage then I’d want to fight, right? And fighting…anything could happen. There could be, like, a bear. And he’d run at me, and I’d, like, snarl back, because I’d be brave, and he’d probably chew my ears off.”

His tail twitched.

“Is that what I’m competing for? A chance to, you know, have a bear chew my ears off?”

He rested his head on his paws. His downturned muzzle looked mournful despite his massive teeth.

“But I want to win. Of course I do. Uh. Courage. Give it to me. Yeah.”

Hesitantly, he swiped his paw through the air.

“Rawr.”

Despite a strong early showing, Team Gillikin fizzled midway.

Another child was heading that team, a twelve-year-old from Uptown with purple skin and telescoping limbs. She traveled with a nymph from the Gillikin fog banks and a melancholy man from the Flathead Mountains who carried his brain in a jug.

In the Forest of the Winged Monkeys, they were kidnapped by the location’s simian namesakes. One hundred feet into the air, the Flathead panicked and dropped his jug. At two hundred feet, a rising wind dispersed the mist maiden into the clouds.

Only the little girl survived; when the Monkeys lifted her into the air, she telescoped her legs so that no matter how high they took her, she was always touching the ground.

Though saddened by the loss of her companions, she was able to travel much more quickly without worrying about how they’d keep up. She telescoped her legs out as far as they would go and bounded by leagues.

Not far from the border, she glimpsed a pair of telescoping green legs doing the same. Upon investigation, they turned out to belong to a young green boy, who was off to seek his fortune in Quadling Country. Their conversation further revealed that they were both odd-colored, telescoping children born to tan, fixed-length parents, and—more importantly—that they enjoyed each other’s company.

The girl revealed that her wish had been to find someone else like her. As it had been fulfilled, she left the competition and telescoped into the clouds with her new green friend.

The first time that Lady Sparkle broached the subject of revolution with me, she was wearing a woolen traveling cloak, as if she planned to leave the City. A petite fascinator fashioned from feathers and silk left her head almost shockingly bare.

She handed me a pair of jade hair sticks and watched my hands as I examined the carvings I’d need to replicate in order to make convincing facsimiles.

She ordinarily made pleasant small talk, which was unusual for someone of her status. For weeks I’d been noticing that her superficially inane conversation was in fact driving at something. She’d been feeling out my politics, I was sure, though I didn’t know to what end.

That day, however, she made a direct assay. “I’ve heard stories about your grandfather, you know.”

I made a noncommittal noise and squinted at the hair sticks. The kinds of stories that aristocrats told about my grandfather were not my favorite subject of conversation.

She pressed me on it. “He was the royal jeweler, wasn’t he?”

Matter-of-factly I said, “He was.”

She gestured at my little shop with its dusty shelves and poor lighting. “So how did you end up here?”

I shrugged. Though I refused to meet her eye, I could feel her glance on me.

“You’re not untalented,” she continued. “In fact, you’re very talented indeed.”

With a sigh I looked up, still holding the jeweler’s loupe to my eye. Flashgleam Sparkle is a pretty woman, but under magnification, she looked all powder and artifice: a woman made of paint.

“You’ve heard stories about my grandfather,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me?”

Her dimples deepened, as if she was merely trying out a piece of juicy gossip, but her tone remained serious. “He was caught in a plot to overthrow Ozma the Sixteenth.”

“That’s right.”

Her smile broadened. She lifted her glasses away from her face. I barely contained my gasp—I was a man of the world, but still, a woman like her baring her eyes while alone with a man?

“He imbued her diadem with a sleeping spell,” Flashgleam continued.

I allowed myself a raised brow. “That part isn’t common knowledge.”

“I’m not a common woman.”

She leaned toward me, placing her hands on my desk. Her eye loomed giant in my jeweler’s loupe, an aristocratic shade of deep river-green.

“I think you’re more like him than you let on,” Flashgleam said. “Am I right?”

When I said nothing, she reached into the purse hung on her sash and pulled out a handful of sparkling green chips.

“I can offer incentive,” she said.

As I looked into her palm, I struggled to maintain my equanimity.

“They’re genuine,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “Lurline emeralds.”

Lurline emeralds were the most valuable gem in all of Oz. They’d been created when Lurline made fairyland, and they were imbued with her magic. My grandfather had worked with them when he was a jeweler for the court. None were supposed to exist outside of the Ozmas’ treasury.

Exercising my steeliest will, I waved my hand in refusal. “If I help you, I will do it out of conviction. Not avarice.”

The rest of our conversation is easy to imagine, but I’ll add one corroborating detail:

When Flashgleam Sparkle left my shop that afternoon wearing her woolen traveling cloak, neither I nor anyone else in the City saw her for several days. It wasn’t long after she returned that all the globes in the City lit up with those sparkling emerald serifs.

WISH.

There are many people in the Emerald City who are discontented with the Wizard.

Some are Ozma purists, waiting for the return of Ozma XVII. Others note his fascistic tendencies: public punishments, harsh curfews, a large and well-armored imperial guard.

Where the Ozmas had always delegated policy-making to the Witches of the Realms, the Wizard insisted on deciding all matters without regard for local hierarchies. Against his advisors’ warnings, he’d implemented the embargo against the Wicked Witch of the West, ostensibly motivated by concern for the Winkie people, but it was well-known that the actual dispute was about the Wizard’s attempts to control the provinces.

Flashgleam Sparkle dislikes the Wizard because, unlike the Ozmas, he declines to be controlled by the nobility. She finds herself cut loose from the power she’d always assumed would be hers by right of inheritance.

I myself dislike the Wizard for much the same reason that I expect my grandfather disliked Ozma XVI. My family has served monarchs as their jewelers for generations. We’ve always paid attention to their flaws. The Wizard doesn’t really care about the people. Ozma XVI didn’t either.

Maybe Flashgleam Sparkle will.

“I’m a bit different from the others,” the Tin Man told Glinda when it was his turn with her. “The Scarecrow never had a brain. The Lion never had any courage. I used to have a heart.”

He rapped his knuckles against the side of his head. The sound echoed in his empty skull. “I don’t have a brain anymore either, but what I miss is my heart.”

The illusion of emotion clouded his eyes, something complicated and delicate like wistfulness or regret.

“I don’t have blood anymore, so I won’t need my heart to pump,” he said. “All I need to do is feel. More deeply and more complexly than I ever did. Every minute. Every hour. I want to understand what it feels like to hate and love and laugh at something at the same time. I want to feel the poignant pain of looking at something beautiful and knowing it’s going to die. I want to feel everything. Everything.”

His fingers grasped the air, trying to hold on to something that wasn’t there, a gesture that could easily have been mistaken for passion.

His hand drifted back to his side.

“If I win, of course,” he added softly.