“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Pete said. Hex nodded, and Iris sighed in pleasure.

“I should get out of the queendom more often,” she said happily. “There’s nothing like a good vacation to make you appreciate home, right?” Hex almost laughed out loud. Iris was the only person—well, monkey—he could imagine who would describe being attacked by a monstrous Lion while plotting a murder as a “vacation.” He wondered again about his own home. Had he wanted to go back? Or had he been happy here?

“We should keep moving,” Pete said. “The Lion isn’t stopped by pretty scenery. Neither are the Tin Woodman’s soldiers.”

“Soldiers?” Hex asked in surprise.

Pete nodded. “Not everyone in Oz can access the kind of magic you did in the clearing. The Lion is doubtless on his way to warn Dorothy and Glinda, if he hasn’t already. And once they learn that someone with that kind of power is just wandering around Oz—well, it won’t be long before they’re hot on our trail.”

“Dorothy,” Iris said, and spat on the ground. Hex was shocked.

“Who is this Dorothy?” he asked.

“She used to be the best thing that had happened to Oz,” Iris said, “but then she turned out to be the worst.” Hex waited for Pete to cut her off, but to his surprise, Pete let her continue, her voice growing even more passionate as they walked. “For a long time, a terrible usurper ruled Oz,” she explained. “He came from the Other Place in a beautiful balloon that floated in the sky. This was a long time ago, of course—the citizens of Oz were much more trusting then. He deceived everyone in Oz and made them believe he was a good and kind Wizard, when he was nothing of the sort! He didn’t even have magic—just a bunch of fancy tricks. He made the people of Oz build him the Emerald City, and then he shut himself up in the palace so no one would realize he was a fraud. He stole the throne from the fairies, the rightful rulers. We tried to stop him, but he was too powerful.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Pete said drily. “The citizens of Oz have never done much to stop anything from happening.”

“The monkeys did!” Iris said hotly. “We saw through him from the very first! We knew he was trouble! We called him the Traitor! We never bowed down to him!”

“You didn’t try to stop him until it was too late,” Pete said. “Until he sold you into slavery. And all of this happened before you were even born, Iris.”

“Are you going to let me finish or not?” Iris snapped, and Hex was surprised to see tears in her eyes. Pete relented, waving at her to go ahead. “That was when Dorothy first showed up,” Iris continued. “She came from the Other Place.”

If Dorothy was from the Other Place, and he was from the Other Place—did that mean they were related somehow? Had he known her? Something stirred at the back of his mind. He was so close, he thought, to putting it all together. So close to remembering who he was. But understanding was still on the far side of that shimmering wall—close enough to touch, but separated from him by a barrier he couldn’t yet cross.

“Dorothy defeated the Traitor, and sent him back to the Other Place, and no one has heard from him since. Good riddance, if you ask me. She went back, too, and Ozma took the throne”—Iris gave a respectful little curtsy, as if this Ozma could somehow see her—“and everything was as it should be. But then Dorothy came back. Nobody knows how or why she got here, but this time everything was different. She was different. It was as if something—or someone—had brought her back to destroy Oz. At first, no one realized anything was wrong. She stayed in the palace with Ozma, and they had all sorts of banquets, and everyone who was anyone was invited—I didn’t want to go, of course,” Iris said quickly, “even if I’d had an invitation, I would have turned it down, I don’t care a thing about parties.” The wistful look in her eye belied her words. “But then Ozma changed somehow, and suddenly it was Dorothy this, Dorothy that. The Tin Woodman’s armies marching around and laying waste to villages. It’s like Oz has been wounded; the whole land is bleeding magic, and unless someone puts a stop to Dorothy, we’re all doomed.”

Iris’s tone had grown more and more somber as she spoke, and even the weather echoed her mood: a huge thunderstorm was piling up in the distance, moving toward them rapidly, and the temperature was dropping. They were almost across the meadow; at the horizon, Hex could make out something bright and undulating that must have been the Sea of Blossoms. They were close then. Pete looked up at the sky. There was something unnatural about how quickly the storm was moving. Something almost—magical. “You wanted to know what the third test was,” Pete said, looking at him. “It’s coming for you now.”

Hex stared up at the sky. The thunderclouds, directly overhead now, swirled and coalesced, taking the shape of giant men who battled each other fiercely. As each blow landed, thunder cracked and boomed and jagged spears of lightning shot down toward the earth. Iris shrieked as a white-purple streak of lightning struck the ground just a few feet from where they stood. Hex recognized nothing about the meadow, and yet everything about this scene was familiar: the heaving purple clouds, the thunder, the color and sound of the lightning—he was in a basket, a basket floating in the air, while all around him a thunderstorm just like this one raged; he was fleeing something, or going somewhere. He was leaving Oz. It was so close—he grasped desperately for the tangled threads of memory, but they slipped away again, just out of reach. An earsplitting rumble of thunder followed another terrific crack of lightning that struck the earth in front of them so fiercely it split the ground open. Purple and gray smoke poured from the fissure, forming itself into a stairway that led down into the darkness.