I obeyed this time, sitting on the chair but immediately twisting away from the mirror to face her. She took her hair out of its intricate bun and it fell in pretty waves well past her shoulders, framing the deep V of her purple dress and impressive cleavage. With her hair down she looked even more like her evil sister.

“I may not have Gert’s or Mombi’s gifts but I do have many things to teach you, my dear,” Glamora said.

I reached for the queen figurine again. It moved away from me.

Glamora sighed. “Showing is sometimes better than telling.”

I looked up at her as she placed her perfectly manicured hands over her face and then pulled them away like she was playing peekaboo with a toddler. I gasped. Her right cheek had a lunar-shaped hole in it—I could see her tongue. I could see her perfect white teeth.

“What happened to you?” I asked, horrified.

“Family can hurt us better than anyone.”

“Why would Glinda . . . What happened?”

“Glinda wanted to make sure that no one mistook me for her anymore. Looking exactly like your enemy can potentially be an advantage when we are on the brink of war, and she didn’t want me to have that advantage.”

Glamora didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed of it—but letting me see her scar was clearly a big deal, especially for someone so beautiful. And Glamora was still beautiful, even with her face carved up. Beautiful was in the way that she moved and spoke. Beautiful was an action as well as a description.

“Why don’t you use the spring?” I asked carefully.

Glamora ran her fingers over the scar almost lovingly. “When she faces me, I want her to face what she’s done.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen her. I’ve seen what she’s become. You don’t really think she’ll see this and beg for forgiveness, do you?”

I wondered if she was hoping that there was some part of her that still did. That was hoping Glinda would see the scar and be sorry. I knew a little about hoping for that—and I knew a lot about being disappointed.

Glamora laughed, a big bell of a laugh that went up so high that I felt like I needed to cover my ears.

“There is no more room for forgiveness. Not for me. I want the scar to be the last thing she sees before I end her.”

Glamora’s eyes studied mine, waiting for some kind of reaction.

“She didn’t kill you,” I said slowly. “She was clearly close enough to do that. But she didn’t kill you.”

“When you’re a witch and a twin, you’re connected. I used to be able to see what she was doing, I could feel when she was in pain. But since she did this, I don’t feel her anymore. I don’t see her anymore. There’s a chance that if the knife went all the way through me, then it would go all the way through her as well. Killing me could very well end her own life.”

“But isn’t that true for you, too? If you go after her, you could kill yourself.”

“That’s the difference between us. I wouldn’t hesitate if the outcome was ridding the world of her evil.”

I stared at Glamora as she touched her cheek and the scar disappeared, and she looked perfect and whole once again.

When I first saw Glamora just a few days ago, I thought she was the scariest thing in the world because I had thought she was Glinda. But now that I’d seen the real Glamora, I wondered if maybe she was scarier than Glinda after all.

“Now let’s get started, shall we?” She put her hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around to face the mirror. There were only two mirrors back home in the trailer. The broken one in our tiny bathroom and the one over my ten-million-year-old dresser that was warped and had a kind of fun-house quality that made my face appear even narrower than usual. I spent as little time as possible looking into either one of them.

This mirror was different. Or maybe I was.

I caught my breath. There was something tough in my eyes. Tougher than before if that was even possible. The pink was washing out of my hair, giving way to dirty blonde.

Cheap hair dye.

“Very pretty,” Glamora said, looking at me without an ounce of irony or fake sincerity.

I tried to get out of the chair, but she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down.

“Very pretty,” she repeated with the same certainty as Gert when she’d asked me who I really was. Like she wanted to make sure I believed her. Like she somehow knew that no one had actually called me that in my entire sixteen years.

Since I got here, Glamora had been judging my every move based on some crazy standard of etiquette. So the kind words threw me.

“What’s underneath is everything, Amy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enhance it. Beauty has its own kind of magic. And the appearance of something can have power, too.”

She tossed her own hair, and it changed from deep auburn to pale lavender. Then back again.

She touched my hair.

“What will it be?”

“You don’t like the pink?”

“When I first saw you, Amy Gumm, your hair was the thing that gave me hope for you. For all of us.”

“Seriously?”

Glamora scrunched up her perfect nose as if hair color were something too sacred to make light of.

“When Dorothy landed here in that precious gingham number I knew she was trouble.”

“You knew Dorothy when she first arrived?”

“Back then I was where my sister was. That is, until she found her place at Dorothy’s side. No one else sensed it, I don’t think—but I did. Something about that much sweetness didn’t feel right. But you, you didn’t have an ounce of sweetness and that hair was just the exclamation point.”