“To do this.” I gestured at my new clothes. “To do magic.”

Ozma looked at me long and hard, searching me like I was a puzzle to be worked out. Finally, she shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I can’t. Magic is dangerous. Even for those of us who are native to Oz, it’s dangerous. For people who aren’t from here, it can be too much to handle. It can do . . . strange things to you.”

“Strange things like what?” I was annoyed. How did Ozma know what I could handle? How did she know anything about people from my world, when I was the first that she had ever met?

“It can twist you,” Ozma said. And then, as if she was reading my thoughts, “You know, Dorothy, you’re not the first visitor to come here from the outside world. The Wizard wasn’t the first either. There have been others, over the years.”

“Who?” I asked.

She just shook her head, like the story was too sad to tell. And then she brightened and flung herself onto one of her lounges. She threw her feet up, took off her crown, and dropped it carelessly to the floor. “It gets heavy,” she explained. “It all gets heavy. The crown, the scepter, this big empty palace. It’s so much responsibility. It’s so lonely. I’m just happy you’re here.”

“I’m happy I’m here, too,” I said. But I didn’t like the way she had changed the subject so quickly. Who were the others who had come here before me? What had happened to them? What had happened to Glinda? And what was Ozma keeping from me?

“I’ve tried,” Ozma said. “Really, I have. At first, I thought Jellia and I could be the greatest of friends. But she’s so focused on the fact that I’m the princess, and that she’s my servant. I told her to stop calling me miss and Your Highness and that I didn’t even care if she brushed my hair and brought me my breakfast in the mornings. She wouldn’t listen. After that I invited the Patchwork Girl to come stay with me for a while. She’s so much fun—she’s stuffed, like the Scarecrow, but with cotton instead of straw, you know, which might be one reason for the lack of common sense and conversational skills. You can only keep up with someone like her for so long before it wears you down. But now that you’re here, Dorothy, it’s like I’ve finally found someone who I have something in common with. I just wish you didn’t have to go home.”

“I’m not going home,” I said firmly.

Ozma twisted her lips in thought. “You really don’t want to, do you?” she said.

“I don’t want to and I’m not going to,” I said. My mind was made up. I was staying here. In Oz. In the palace. No matter what.

“Well,” the princess said after a bit. “We’ll just have to make your aunt and uncle understand, then, won’t we?” She stood up and faced me. She took my hands in hers.

I wanted to trust her. I wanted to be her friend. But as I looked back into her big, glittering eyes, she averted her gaze for just the briefest moment, and I knew that she was hiding something from me. She’d said we were friends and I believed her but something gnawed at me—and it wasn’t just Glinda, or the Scarecrow’s warnings.

The bedroom that Jellia escorted me to after dinner was everything I had dreamed. It was three times as big as my room back in Kansas, with a panoramic window that looked out over the shimmering Emerald City skyline.

There was a huge vanity and a jewelry box overflowing with earrings and bracelets and necklaces, any one of which I was sure would have cost more than Uncle Henry earned in a year back in Kansas. The ebony wardrobe in the corner was stuffed with any kind of gown I could imagine, not to mention more than a few that I never would have been able to dream up on my own.

This was what I had wanted. Sitting alone in the field back in Kansas, covered in pig slop, with Miss Millicent in my lap, I had made a wish without even realizing it, and the wish had come true.

It was too good to be true, though. As I stood in front of the open wardrobe, wondering which dress to try on first, I had an itchy feeling in the back of my head that was telling me Ozma knew me too well. Like she was giving me all this because she knew it was what I wanted, and that she thought that if she kept me happy, I wouldn’t question her.

She had seemed so adamant when I’d asked her to teach me magic. Adamant, and a little sad, like it was exactly what she’d been afraid of. And she’d certainly been interested in my shoes.

Of course, the shoes were magic. I’d already figured out they were more than just a key that had unlocked the door to Oz for me. The way they’d been impossible to take off my feet for the Scarecrow, the strange feelings that had come from them all along my journey: all of that had suggested they could do more than I knew. And, of course, there was the way they had seemed to help me fight off the Screaming Trees in the forest.

Maybe I was a little afraid of them.

But Glinda had sent them to me to bring me here, I was certain of it.

And really—it seemed ridiculous that Ozma should be so against me doing magic. This was the Land of Oz. There was magic in the earth, in the air.

At the same time, it seemed obvious that she had figured out there was more to the shoes than I was telling. I was fairly certain she knew at least part of the truth. If she really didn’t want me doing magic, why hadn’t she taken them away from me?

What if she knew she couldn’t? What if she was afraid of them, too?

What if my shoes were the key to finding Glinda?