Chapter 14

Fourteen

"If there was ever a time to go after Zolesha, it's now," Nick told Dorothy. They had left the Wizard's tower a few hours earlier and were still discussing what to do next.

Lional had received unpleasant news and had excused himself, somewhat tearfully, declaring that he didn't wish to burden the rest of the group with it after his one-on-one meeting with Isaac. They knew he wasn't perusing the city; it was easy to find out where a lionman in worn royal vestments had gone. The guard at the gates said he'd left completely, and there could only be one reason for that—which was probably for the best, in case his emotional state gave him a taste for something green, after all.

"Do you think the wand thing was the cherry on top of a crap pie for Lional?" Dorothy asked, gazing out of the window of the circular living room they'd been directed to, left to "decompress." A shorter tower, patchy emerald on the outside, gold and cream on the inside.

Nick resisted the urge to go and stand beside her. "I don't know, since he wouldn't say." He paused. "But Zolesha Cursed him and stole his castle, for one thing. Now she's living in it, which is a second bit of salt in the wound, and I'd wager he got the same answer we did, Curse-wise, for thirds. That's a triple axe strike if ever I've seen one."

The prince had said he was going to meet them down in the tent village below the Emerald City if they chose to leave and raid his former residence to get the wand that had brought Dorothy to Oz from Zolesha.

Straw was tracing tapestries again, pausing long enough to say, quite astutely, "He thought it would be easier than that. He didn't think he'd have to face her again." He flashed a grin, back to the scarecrow they knew. "But lots of things aren't easy. Walking! Who knew? And… jobs! So tricky, keeping so many thoughts together."

He resumed his tracing as Dorothy wandered back from the window, settling down on a bean-shaped couch opposite Nick. Not beside him on his own couch, as he'd secretly hoped for a moment. Toto hopped up onto her lap, and Nick could have sworn the dog flashed him a smug smile as he curled up.

"Zolesha is going to keep coming for you anyway, but she's likely still worn down from her Glinda battle to come at you too hard," Nick jumped back in. "Speaking of her, our Good Witch ally is still recovering from that same fight, so who knows when she'll be around to pull those silver shoes off of your feet. Plus, we're almost to the Summer Solstoz, when Wicked Witches have no power from sunup to sundown. So, like I said, now's the time."

Nick wanted to add that if he could get ahold of Zolesha when she didn't have magic, maybe he could finally be free of his own Curse. But he didn't want Dorothy making the choice just for him. Plus, he was magically compelled not to speak of the Curse anyway.

Dorothy cocked an eyebrow. "You didn't mention her looking too worn down when she tried to take her sister's shoes back in the poppy field."

There are a few things I didn't mention…

"And aren't you leaving, anyway?" Dorothy went on. He wanted to believe there was hopefulness in the question, but maybe that was only his own wishful thinking. "I thought you were going to bail after you got me to the Emerald City."

"I've decided that I'm going to continue on with you and Straw, assuming he's still heading that way."

The scarecrow chimed in, "Of course! I was made to go wherever Dorothy goes. I'm going to be with her forever!" He smiled sweetly, puffs of straw sticking out beneath the canvas under what would have been his chin.

"Hopefully not forever, ever," Dorothy replied in chagrin.

Unfortunately, her comment did not have the teasing effect she had obviously expected, as the scarecrow folded in on himself. "Well, if you don't want me to go, I can leave… and get back to not scaring crows." He started to dejectedly trudge away from them.

Nick interrupted the downward spiral before it could bottom out. "She doesn't mean it that way, Straw. What I think she's trying to say is you won't be able to go to Earth with her, right?" Nick looked at Dorothy with a tinge of longing in his eyes, wanting her to say that she was changing her mind, and that staying in Oz was more than just a fanciful possibility.

He was rewarded with a jagged shard of pain through the nape of his neck, his head temporarily paralyzed. He did his best to play it off as perfecting his posture.

"So, you're going to join, then?" Dorothy confirmed with Nick.

"I am," he replied carefully. "Zolesha has something I want to retrieve."

It was the most he was allowed to say about the Curse before it punished him for divulging too much.

"Plus, I want to help Lional, since he's been helping us as best he can," he added. "Maybe we can find a wishing garment if we can't find the wand that Cursed him." He would've given anything to say "the wand that Cursed me," instead. But mentioning Lional was as close as he could teeter toward admitting his own issues.

"Hold up. There are wishes in Oz?" Dorothy's voice was laden with disbelief.

Nick really wanted to sport out a big smirk, but he kept his face to voice level as he said, "You're okay with lionmen, metal-skinned woodsmen, and walking, talking farm equipment, but you draw the line at wishes?"

Dorothy laughed, and the sound of it brought goose pimples to his silver-stained, yet more human than statue, arms. He had been relaxing in the city long enough that almost all the metal had retreated deep inside him. The only bites of pain and hardening were the slip-ups of him showing too much desire for Dorothy and her happiness.

"I'm not drawing the line there," Dorothy said. "I'm looking at the place the line should be drawn and wondering why I have painted a huge stripe down the middle of it."

He wanted to smile at the mental image but kept his face neutral as always.

"Let's just say, I'm still trying to figure this place out," she continued. "Exactly how powerful are these wishes? Do the witches grant them? How do they work? Can we go get one? What trigg?—"

"Slow down." Nick raised his hands in surrender as he interrupted her. When her rapid-fire questions came to a stop, he spoke again. "I can't tell you much about them other than they're usually attached to magical articles of clothing and not something that the witches can perform. In fact, they're one of the few things that can beat a witch's magic."

"Other than the Solstoz thing you mentioned."

"That doesn't beat the magic, just suppresses it. As for wishes, there's not much known about them. No one knows how they're created, or who creates them. Although, most people think the mice somehow craft them when they make their magical vestments."

"Get out of here," she laughed. "Mice making clothes? First, they clean your cabin, then they stitch you up a nice pair of slacks?"

"Yes, they've been known to stitch a skirt or two in their day."

The scarecrow raised his hand as if he were in class waiting to be called on.

"Yes?" Nick asked him.

"The Solstoz has been mentioned a couple of times now. What is it and when is it?" Straw said, sitting own on a round, glass side table he'd clearly mistaken for a stool. It held his light weight, either way.

"They are two events that mirror each other," Nick explained to them. "The Summer Solstoz event, which is always on the longest day of the year. From sunrise to sunset, there's so much light and goodness in the world that it smothers out and cancels the Curses that the Wicked Witches have cast. And mirror-opposite of that is Winter Solstoz, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. As you can guess, the Good Witches' Blessings are smothered during that night. It is a night of woe and misfortune, when the Wicked Witches are at their most powerful. So, there are celebrations and mournings involved with both, which is what this ball is about."

Aside from the guard's mention of it, the entire city was plastered with posters and fliers, inviting "one and all," except for anyone outside the gates.

"And we're about to have the summer one?" Dorothy asked.

"Yes," Nick replied, "it's the summer one. Usually, the day is full of feasting and rejoicing, and a few of us who've had the unfortunate happenstance of being Cursed can actually walk around without the effects of the Curse and shed that awfulness. I've looked forward to it every year since Zolesha decided I shouldn't be able to show—" He abruptly broke off talking, as if he had started to choke on a piece of food.

The progress he had made during the day with relaxing his body was instantly reversed as his skin tightened around his middle and his hips, a threat that he was giving out too much information about his affliction.

"Anyway," he backed up, "there's usually a dance to celebrate and watch the sun go down."

"The fliers say the ball is in a couple of days," Dorothy noted.

"We won't be here for it," Nick said, "not if we're going to go after Zolesha. It's going to take a couple of days to get to the castle she took from Lional, and we're going to have to rush as it is. If we're doing this, we need to leave no later than first thing in the morning."

"I think we should go to the castle in the morning," Dorothy slowly replied. She hadn't made the decision as fast as he would have expected from someone eager to get out of what she often referred to as his "wacky land."

But then, once again, maybe that was just wishful thinking.

The Wizard had offereda couple of guest rooms at his tower, and the remaining members of the group had jumped on the chance. It was too dangerous to start the expedition late into the evening, and they had decided one night of rest was worth the risk.

Nick unpacked his bag and had pulled out his razor for a much-needed shave when a gentle tap on the door froze him, blade to jaw.

"Enter," Nick said, continuing to fill the green glass bowl on the elegant mahogany vanity with coal-heated water.

Dorothy opened the door and stood over the threshold, one foot in, one foot out. She was wearing a dress for the first time since he'd met her. It was heavy velvet, mainly green of course—no surprise there, having obviously been borrowed from someone in the emerald tower—but with a thick line of red embroidery carnations traveling in a swirl around the hemline at her feet. All of it draped perfectly around her legs and shoulders as if it had been made just for her.

Nick couldn't keep the surprise off his face, and the reward for letting his guard down was an instant ache in his lower calves as they sliced up on him.

"What do you think?" Dorothy said as she swished the skirt of the dress back and forth for a moment.

"You look lovely," he replied with a flat expression. His insides were another matter altogether. He clamped down on the need to lavish her with a hundred compliments, lest the emotion kill him: how she was a brighter jewel than the whole damn city; how she looked like she'd been conjured from the velveteen moss that grew near his cabin; how she ought to be careful walking around, lest she stop or break every heart; how she would shame the poppies that had tried to kill them.

"Did you catch a dozen mice and make them sew it for you?" was all he actually managed to say.

"Turns out Jellia is almost my size." Dorothy smiled as she entered the room and plonked down on his bed, crossing her ankles over each other and using one hand to spread out the dress. Nick noticed that she kept the other hand sort of halfway behind her back like she was holding something, but he wasn't going to press what it was. "I forgot how nice it is to be out of my work clothes."

"I assume they're cleaning them, then?" Nick asked.

"You trying to say something about my smell?" she teased him. Before he could defend himself, she continued, "You assume correctly, though. They're deep in a washtub somewhere, soaking off all the Oz we collected on the way here."

You'd wash us all away so eagerly… He bit down the unfair thought. This was a matter of muck and sweat, not feelings.

"She let me borrow this," Dorothy explained. "And then she told me about something going on in the city that sort of piqued my interest."

"Really? What?" Nick turned to face the mirror above the vanity and soaped up his silver chin with a bristly brush.

Dorothy watched in the reflection, fascinated. "There's a play that is quite the rage here in town. And when I heard the name, I knew exactly where it was from. My home! Well, England specifically, but the same planet."

"And that is?" he asked as he began drawing the straight razor in gentle sweeps down his jaw. It was a delicate process thanks to clunky hands and skin that was at that moment more human than metal, but he was getting it done.

"I know it's from my home because…" Dorothy's voice trailed off. "You know… because…" Her voice trailed off again.

She tilted her head a little bit as she looked at him in the mirror.

Nick paused and looked back at her.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Um. Nothing. Nothing at all," she hurriedly replied. And then, probably to cover her embarrassment, turned what she was going to say into a teasing joke. "With your skin, does that dull or sharpen the razor as you use it?"

Dorothy smiled over at him.

Nick wished he could smile in return, but only grunted instead, continuing to take the budding whiskers off his face.

"So anyway," she continued, "it's called Jomeo and Ruliet."

"I think I've heard of it," Nick said. "A troupe traveled through the village a few years back performing it."

"They do that in my world, too." Dorothy stifled a snort. "Did you see it?"

"No," he honestly answered. The more he stayed away from crowds, the better.

"Good. Anyway, the real play is called Romeo and Juliet, and obviously one of the visitors from back home decided to teach someone here the play. I am dying to know how badly they've changed it. Jellia told me she was supposed to go with someone named Miles, but they couldn't make the meeting happen. It's all very sordid, I imagine."

"Yeah," Nick replied. "Considering how arch-criminal she seemed."

"Hey, you never know about the quiet ones. Still, she had extra tickets."

As Dorothy announced this, she pulled her hand out from behind her back, a pair of tickets spread out between her fingers, like she was about to ask him to pick a card, any card.

"It looks like you only have two tickets," Nick stated.

"Well, I figured Lional's not in the city right now, and Toto is content making me jealous, getting all the love from Jellia and distracting from her chores. Straw would only ask questions throughout the whole thing, and for once, this is a play I really want to enjoy in all its—hopefully—muddled glory. So, that leaves you as my date. We've got an hour. So, hurry up with chiseling your jaw and primping all your nuts and bolts, silver boy," Dorothy said and smirked again. "Meet me downstairs in fifteen minutes, because they say it takes at least a half hour to walk there."

She closed the door, and the razor sparked against a jaw which had become metal-hard by the swelling happiness that he couldn't quite fight down.

The play was exhaustingly bad,but the company was the best Nick had ever had.

Dorothy had leaned against him in the cramped-tooth theater chairs, stealing pillow puffs from his paper bucket—she'd laughed at that, claiming they called it "popcorn" on Earth. As she'd chewed on the sweet snack and stolen more, she'd given a running commentary of the dramatic differences of what was being shown on stage versus the rendition she knew.

It was like getting a peek behind the curtain.

"What Shakespeare meant at this moment was…" she began as she explained, again and again, everything she knew about the original playwright between gasps of laughter from the absurd play being presented in front of a packed audience.

"What he meant here was…"

And on it went.

The patrons around them hushed her multiple times, but she kept whispering into his ear when she wasn't laughing so hard she cried. She outright howled, hunched over and holding her stomach, when the lovers indulged in a chase scene near the end, set to a jaunty tune, missing each other for a solid five minutes. Dorothy laughed the whole time.

And he wouldn't have quieted her for all the plays in the world.

"This… is… supposed to be… a tragedy!" she'd wheezed. "They're meant to… die here, but… they're… doing… slapstick!" She roared afresh, and Nick had never missed laughing more.

"Obviously, whoever brought it over wanted it to be a comedy, though I suspect the comedy was unintentional," Dorothy would later say, as they left the theater and walked side by side down the green brick road that made up all of the side streets of the Emerald City, branching off the main yellow one that spiraled around the perimeter before terminating at the mayor's palace.

Luckily, the humor of the play had escaped Nick, or he would have been unable to get back up out of the chair at the end.

Still, he would be reliving the memory again and again for as long as he lived.

Dorothy was so busy annihilating what they'd just seen that she missed a depression in the brick road and her ankle turned for a moment, colliding her into Nick. He grabbed her around the middle, keeping her from tumbling head over heels. But as he went to let go, Dorothy slipped her hand through his arm and steadied herself. It felt so natural, and so welcome, that Nick couldn't help himself as he placed his hand gently over hers as she held onto his forearm.

Something about the moment made Nick want to hear her laughter yet again. He thought back to the play and repeated the line that had made her lose her breath.

"But stealth! What robber through yonder window breaks? It is a beast, and not the sun!" He feigned a girlish shriek, as Jomeo had done, before moving smoothly into, "Jomeo, Jomeo, where the heck you at?"

Dorothy squeezed his arm tight, doubling over in laughter.

Nick slowed his walk to give her time to catch her breath. But as she recovered, he was unprepared for her response.

"What's in a name?" she said, mimicking the actors. "That which we call a poppy would still smell you to sleep…"

It was the chisel that found the crack in his emotional armor, and he let out the first laugh he had voiced in years. Even as it escaped his mouth, his entire left side seized up. Down he went onto the bricks, jaw first, bloodying his chin and nearly pulling her with him.

"Oh crap! Are you alright?" Dorothy cried out, bending over to try to help him get up.

"I'm fine," Nick lied and used his good side to roll onto his back. "Just give me a moment."

He lay sprawled at her feet, not sure if he could control the embarrassment. The less he could control it, the longer he'd have to lie there in a vicious cycle of humiliation, pain, humiliation, pain, while she stared down at him, not understanding.

The people walked around Nick, murmuring behind their hands and pointing at him as he stayed nearly motionless on the oil-lamp-lit road.

Dorothy suddenly laid down next to him. Flat on her back, her side against his, looking straight up into the stars above the Emerald City.

"What are you doing?" he asked, more dumbfounded than embarrassed now.

"I thought you shouldn't be alone," Dorothy replied. Then she looked up at a curious bystander who wandered too close to the road-obstructing pair. "Do you mind?" she playfully barked at the man. "We're trying to sprawl out down here!"

And just like that, Nick's heart broke free of the emotional cage he had spent nearly a decade constructing and sprinted with reckless abandon into the greatest danger he had ever faced…

Love.