I woke up to find Aunt Em sitting on the edge of my bed. She’d opened the windows, and the light was streaming through, casting her in a silhouette. The breeze hit my face. It smelled like grass and dirt and rain. It smelled like home.
For a second, I thought we were back in Kansas, and that it had all been a dream. I always hated it when stories ended that way.
“Dorothy,” Aunt Em said. I rubbed my eyes, still disoriented, and tried to think back to last night. It was foggy in my memory. There had been some kind of party, and I’d been dancing with the Lion and—
Oh.
I pulled the pillow over my face and groaned, trying to block it all out. If only I could go back to sleep, maybe everything would be okay.
“Dorothy,” Aunt Em said again. She pulled the pillow away. I grabbed for it, but she held it at arm’s length. “It’s nearly afternoon.”
“I need to sleep,” I said. “I think I ate something I shouldn’t have last night. I don’t feel so good.”
She pushed a lock of hair behind my ear and looked down at me. I expected her to be mad, but there was something tender in her expression. “I know, dear,” she said. “You know, you’re not in trouble.”
I sat up slowly and slumped against the silk-upholstered headboard. “I’m not?” I asked cautiously.
“Of course not. We all know that you didn’t mean to do any of that.”
“You do?”
“Yes, dear. Your uncle and I have had a long talk about it with Ozma, and we all agree that you’re not to blame. It’s those shoes. They’ve been doing something to you. Something terrible.”
“It’s not—”
“We just think it’s time for all of us to go home. We’ve stayed here too long already.”
“No!” I jumped out of bed and threw on the brocade robe that was draped over the armchair by the window. “Don’t you see?” I asked angrily. “It’s her. Ozma. She’s making you think that there’s something wrong with me, when really it’s just that she’s afraid I’m more powerful than she is, and now she wants to get rid of me, just like she got rid of Glinda. Well, the princess can’t always have her way. I’m not going anywhere.”
When I turned around, Ozma was standing in the doorway. In the late morning light, wearing a simple white shift, she looked more like a little girl than ever.
“You’re right,” she said sadly. “About one thing, at least. I was afraid of Glinda. She’s used to getting her way around here, you know. She was trying to manipulate me. I had to send her away. Oz has seen too many cruel rulers already. If Glinda had gotten what she wanted, I would have been another. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Spare me,” I said. “I don’t believe anything you say. You’ve been tricking me all this time. Trying to make me think you’re this kind, innocent, little girl, when really you’re just like the witches—you just want Oz for yourself.”
Ozma shook her head sadly. “Don’t you see? When she couldn’t control me, she thought she might be able to control you. So she sent you those shoes, and brought you here to do her work for her. And it’s working.”
“You’re lying! Glinda sent me the shoes because she knew I was the only one who could save her. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.”
I didn’t know why I was even bothering talking to her. This could all be solved with a simple knock of my heels.
All I had to do was wipe Ozma’s mind clean. I’d done it once before, and I could do it again.
I tried to summon a spell, but where my magic had once been, all I found was a deep, aching emptiness. A hunger. I had gotten so used to having it—even if I couldn’t always use it, it was always there. Comforting me, protecting me. Feeding me.
Now it wasn’t.
I looked down in a panic. My shoes were still on my feet. They were as red and shiny and beautiful as ever. But where they had once felt alive—like a part of my body, as important as my arms or legs—they now just felt heavy and separate. Just two ordinary shoes with extra-high heels.
Ozma gave a half shrug and looked away when she saw the distraught expression on my face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t take the shoes away from you. Whatever spell binds them to you is already complete, and magic like that is irreversible, even for me. But I can block your access to the power they possess. And I have. I didn’t want to—I thought maybe you would be able to handle it, that maybe you were strong enough to resist the corruption. You are Dorothy, after all. If anyone could fight off Glinda’s manipulations, it’s you. But the Sorceress is powerful and ruthless. She didn’t outlast the other witches by playing fair, you know.”
“No one could have resisted,” Aunt Em said. She had risen from my bed and walked over to me, placing a hand on the small of my back. I suppose it was meant to be comforting, but I slapped it away. “It’s too tempting,” she said. “It’s not your fault, Dorothy. You’ll see, someday. This is for your own good. It’s time to go back to Kansas.”
“No!” I screamed, whirling around in a rage, looking for something—anything—that I could use against the princess. But it was too late. Ozma waved her scepter and my palace bedchambers faded to white.
When the world re-formed, I found myself standing in the middle of an endless field of waving green grass. I felt dizzy and nauseated, and I struggled to stay on my feet. Was this Kansas? Had it been that easy to undo it all?
No. We were still in Oz—the Emerald City was still visible in the distance, and Ozma was still standing in front of me. Aunt Em was here, too, stumbling around a bit from the transition, and Uncle Henry was a few paces away, holding Toto in his arms. As soon as my little terrier saw me, he wriggled out of my uncle’s grip and raced over to where I was struggling to stay on my feet. Toto circled my ankles, sniffing my shoes in confused concern. He could see that something was missing.
“I sure feel terrible,” Uncle Henry was saying. “You won’t believe me, but I know how much you wanted to be here. I hope you can understand, someday.”
“Sending you home isn’t simple,” said Ozma. “I really didn’t know how to do it for a while—so little is known about the walls that separate your world from ours. I needed to find something that already knows the way.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to find a way to stop her.
“When you arrive home in Kansas, none of you will remember any of this. I think it’s better that way. It will just seem like a pleasant, faraway dream. Something that happened to someone else in a story.”
“No!” I screamed one more time, lunging for her. She might have cut me off from my magic, but I still had two hands, and I would use them to strangle her if that’s what I needed to do to stay here.
But before I could reach her, she raised her scepter, and I hit a wall. I punched and clawed at it, but my fists bounced uselessly against the invisible barrier.
“I’ll always be grateful to you, Dorothy,” Ozma said, ignoring my screams. “You saved Oz. And I’ll always think of you as a friend.”
With that, Ozma threw her head back and lifted her scepter to the sky. Her wings materialized, and she rose up into the air as a column of blinding light shot down from the clouds and surged through her. She began to shine so brightly that she was barely even visible anymore—she was just a vague, burning ball of radiance.
Even in my fury, I couldn’t help being impressed. I had met witches and sorceresses and wizards, but I had never met anyone who could turn themselves into a star.
Uncle Henry put his arm around Aunt Em. Even Toto sat back on his hind legs and stared up in amazement.
As Ozma cast her spell, wind whipped through the treetops. Dark clouds swirled overhead. It looked like a storm was coming. The light changed; the sky around us was now a sick, pale, greenish shade.
In that moment, I felt something happening to me. My feet began to tingle, and then the rest of my body was tingling, too, until it was almost vibrating with power.
No one noticed what was happening.
Ozma must have been too consumed with her own spell to realize that whatever barriers she’d placed on my shoes were falling away. She must not have been able to manage both spells at once.
My magic was coming back.
In the distance, I saw it approaching. The old house—the shack that had brought me to Oz—was flying across the sky, spinning like a top as it drew nearer, getting bigger and closer by the second. That was what Ozma had meant by something that already knows the way. She was going to put us all back in that awful, ramshackle old house and she was going to make it take us back to Kansas.
I wouldn’t stand for it. My shoes gripped my feet so hard it hurt.
It all happened so fast. Important things always seem to, don’t they?
The house was careening through the sky, traveling faster than I thought possible, and then it was right over our heads and it began to hover in place as it made its descent.
My hair was whipping past my face; my whole body was twitching with fear and rage and power. More power than I’d ever felt before. More of anything than I’d ever felt before.
I didn’t know how long it would last. I only had one shot.
And I didn’t really even think about what I was doing. I just knew I had to do something. So I reached out in fury and desperation. I summoned every ounce of magic I could find, and I grabbed it. That’s really what it felt like. It felt like I was reaching out with giant hands and pulling the house from Ozma’s magical clutches. It was easy.
I just plucked it up and I threw it at her—sent the house hurtling for the princess like I was tossing a handful of chicken feed onto the ground for Miss Millicent.
Ozma saw it coming a second too late. Just before it was about to hit her, the column of light that held her suspended dissipated, and her body returned to her. She screamed, her black hair swirling around her as her wings flapped furiously. Acting on instinct, she flung her arms out in front of her to protect herself. A glowing green shield materialized in front of her.
Like I say, it happened fast. Too fast for me to react.
The house crashed into Ozma’s force field. But it didn’t shatter. Instead, the farmhouse ricocheted off of it with a thunderous crash and went sailing gracefully through the air, straight toward where my aunt and uncle were standing, frozen in place.
“Dorothy!” Aunt Em screamed, seeing it coming toward her.
“Do som—” Uncle Henry shouted.
Toto let out a howl, and I put my hand up, summoning another spell to stop it, but even as I did I knew I was a second too slow.
When the dust settled, the house had come crashing to the earth, still in one piece, and all that was visible of my poor aunt Em were her two feet sticking out from under our old front porch.