“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.

TWO

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.