“That was a dirty trick you pulled back there in the palace,” she wheezed, staring up at him. “But I think you just saved my life. Does that mean I have to thank you?”

“No,” he told her. He stripped off his jacket and shirt, tore the shirt into strips, and did his best to bandage the worst of Iris’s wounds. If it had been magic that he had somehow summoned back there battling the Lion, it was gone now. But without it, he didn’t know if he could save the plucky little monkey he’d risked his life for.

“That hurts,” she said crossly as he tied off a bandage too tightly.

“Complain to the Lion,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. There was no mistaking it: Iris was close to death. And, he realized, he desperately wanted to save her. The feeling was so alien he didn’t know what to make of it. Another fit of coughing wracked her broken body, and he hushed her gently, cradling her in his arms. She closed her eyes. “Too bad you went to all that trouble,” she coughed. “I was following you, you know. To stab you in the back.”

“Iris, hush,” he said. “Save your strength. You wouldn’t really have stabbed me anyway.”

“Probably not,” she conceded, and then her head rolled back and she lost consciousness. Hex lowered her to the ground, frantically feeling for a pulse. There it was, at the side of her throat—faint, and growing fainter. “Iris,” he pleaded. “It’s my fault you’re even here. Please don’t die.” He felt an unfamiliar wetness coursing down his cheeks. Was he bleeding? But his hands came away wet with something clear.

“Tears,” a voice said behind him, and he whirled around. Pete was looking over his shoulder, staring at Iris with an expression of intense concern.

“Tears? You leave me like this—leave her like this—and that’s all you can say?”

“You’re crying,” Pete said curtly. “Now get out of my way if you want her to live.”

Hex moved aside, and Pete knelt over Iris’s body, holding his hands just above her chest. As they hovered over her, they began to glow. This time, Hex could see tendrils of magic rising out of the earth, forming a web that wrapped Iris’s body over and over again until she was an Iris-shaped purple light. Pete’s face was tense with concentration, his eyes closed, his lips moving silently as the magic intensified. His arms began to tremble and his forehead grew slick with a sheen of sweat, and Hex worried that he might faint. Finally, with a gasp, Pete slumped backward and opened his eyes. Iris was still out, but her breathing had evened, and the worst of her wounds had stopped bleeding.

“She’ll be all right,” Pete whispered. “But the Lion did more than just harm her body. His power is to feed on others’ fear—on their very essence. She has to rest for a while, and so do I.”

Hex covered Iris with the blanket from his pack; mysteriously, two more had appeared beneath it, along with a loaf of bread that looked decidedly fresher than what he’d eaten earlier. He spread out the blankets while Pete did his best to start a fire. It took him several tries, but finally he coaxed a feeble magical blaze out of the air.

“Will the Lion come back?” Hex asked, tearing the loaf of bread in half. He handed the bigger half to Pete, who took it without commenting on Hex’s sudden generosity.

“Not tonight,” Pete said. “We’re safe for a little while at least.” He settled back onto his blanket, chewing on his hunk of bread, and after a moment Hex did the same. While Iris snored softly, Pete and Hex stared into the fire, neither of them ready for sleep.

“You knew,” Hex said, and Pete started.

“Knew what?”

“You knew the Lion had Iris. You knew he would kill her, if I didn’t stop him somehow.” Pete was silent. “She’d be dead,” Hex repeated. “If I hadn’t found a way to save her—if I hadn’t been brave enough to face down the Lion–you would have left her there to die.”

“She didn’t die,” Pete said.

“But she would have.”

“None of us know what would have been,” Pete said quietly. “We only know what is.”

“How is leaving her there to die any different than what I did in the palace?” Hex asked angrily. “We’re not so different, you and me. You tell me I only think of myself, and maybe that’s true—maybe it’s always been true. But you were willing to sacrifice Iris for some stupid test, to see if I’m eligible for some quest you want me for—”

“Saving Oz is not ‘some quest,’” Pete said. “And the circumstances of the test choose themselves. I didn’t know Iris would be in danger.”

“If you had known the test would put her in danger, would you have consented to it?”

Pete raised one hand in a helpless gesture. With a loud snort, Iris turned over and settled herself again. “I don’t choose the magic,” Pete said. “The magic chooses us. Oz chooses us. We can only do what it asks of us, and do our best to keep it safe. Sometimes that involves sacrifice, yes.”

“But not your sacrifice,” Hex said.

“I’ve sacrificed more than you will ever know,” Pete said sharply. “You don’t know the first thing about sacrifice, Wizard.”

Hex was silent, watching the flames flicker silently from blue to pink to green and back to blue again. Though they burned for hours, they didn’t seem to require fuel. Just one more thing in this crazy country that didn’t make any sense.