Chapter 23

Twenty-Three

The scarecrow came rushing down the curved stairwell toward Dorothy and Lional, riding the iron banister in a flutter of straw and flannel. Toto, who had been sprinting up faster than the rest of them, nearly flip-turned off a step and chased the scarecrow back down the stairs. The lion-prince caught Straw before he could rush past them and break all his wooden bones somewhere in the stairwell's bottom.

Dorothy looked up and around the bend, hoping to see Nick right behind the running scarecrow. But there was only the beginnings of the smoke they had been smelling from the bottom of the tower, slithering down like a foggy snake.

"Dorothy!" Straw exclaimed, clutching a small metal tube in one hand and trying to detach himself from Lional's grip with the other. "You have to help!" He forced the metal wand-shaped tube into Dorothy's hands and continued rushing his words one over another. Dorothy tucked the bronze cylinder into the deep chest pocket of her overalls and tried to calm the scarecrow.

"Slow down, Straw," she said, suspicions sinking into her stomach like marbles. "What's going on?"

You idiot, her heart cried, gaze flitting upward again. You silly, beautiful idiot.

"Nick is upstairs," Straw blurted out, "and he's turned into a statue, and the place is on fire, and Zolesha killed the snow girl, and Nick made me leave and…"

"Enough!" Lional growled, putting Straw down on one of the steps and bounding upward, rocketing past Toto and the shocked Dorothy as he raced headlong into the unknown danger.

"Come on," Dorothy told the scarecrow, grabbing his hand.

She took the stairs two at a time, skidding around every curve, rushing ever forward, even as the smoke descended like fog around her. The steps guided her way, her T-shirt pulled over her mouth and nose, as she plowed on into the tendrils of gray smoke streaking the air, finally coming to where they were thickest.

The door to the room Lional had called the "observation chamber" was still open, heat and choking smoke flowing out into the stairwell.

Pockets of fires were scattered about the room, alight in tiny bonfires that might once have been books, licking across a burning rug and watering Dorothy's eyes, but she quickly ignored all of it, her gaze locking on the silver beacon reflecting the flames from all around the room.

Zolesha was pinned in Nick's arms, one of his hands over her mouth and one around her middle. He stood statue-still, even as the witch flailed her small form around, trying to break free of the "monster" she'd created.

"Oh shit!" Dorothy exclaimed.

Lional was already making his way into the haze, coughing and choking as he prowled toward the spectacle in the middle, keeping low on all fours, moving in a rolling-shoulder motion that made Dorothy shiver a little. That was probably what his dinner saw before he pounced.

Meanwhile, she grabbed Straw, who was trying to enter the fiery chamber, and shouted, "Stay here!" while pointing at the top of the stairs. He stepped backward, planting his feet, but looking like he wanted nothing more than to rush headlong in after Lional.

"You too, Toto!" Dorothy barked at her canine companion as he whimpered and risked rushing into the room as well, but he bounded down one of the stairs to stay next to the scarecrow as Dorothy entered the room.

The heat was worse than standing for too long in front of an open oven door on the hottest Kansas summer day. Still, Dorothy risked it. There was no way they were going to leave Nick behind.

Prince Lional's critics may have labeled him "the cowardly lion," but there was not a lick of fear in him as he shoved a desk, already on fire and laying on its side, into the largest pile of burning books, using it like a bulldozer to push the flaming stack away from their friend.

The lionman finally made it to Nick, rising back to two feet as he attempted to lift the solid metal sculpture of the man Dorothy loved, witch and all. She edged nearer, finally close enough to see Nick's face. His expression was forever locked in an oddly sorrowful happiness that broke Dorothy's heart even as it raced with fear of the fires all around, and what his frozen state meant. Could it be undone? He didn't seem to be moving at all. Even his eyes were glazed over with a thin sheen of silver.

The powerful lionman grunted and yanked on the statue again, attempting to deadlift Nick and the witch trapped in his arms.

"It is no good," Lional said. "I cannot lift him." He followed his words up with a series of coughs and pulled the edge of his cloak around to his front, using it as a makeshift mask. His next words were muffled by the violet-colored cloth. "The Curse has overtaken Nick, and the blaze will soon melt him. I cannot rescue him from the room alone." His golden eyes spotted a crack in the glass wall, far behind Nick. "Help me. We must smash the glass and… hope he survives the fall."

The fire eagerly flared up, gaining hold of one of the long white tapestries hanging from one of the four large pillars supporting the glass walls and crystal windows around them.

"First, let us drag him there," Lional said, looping his arm through Nick's.

Dorothy pulled her checkered handkerchief from her back pocket and wrapped it around her own face, coughing into it before nodding and grabbing hold of the other side of Nick's solid form. Together, they tilted Nick back, not toward the door but that enormous window-wall.

Zolesha may have been crazy in a thousand ways, but she seemed to realize struggling at that moment would only doom her. She relaxed in Nick's steel arms, an image that would have spiked Dorothy with jealousy if she wasn't terrified for all their lives in that moment. They began dragging what must have been a thousand pounds of Nick and the witch across the slippery floor—a smoothness that only hindered the ones doing the heavy lifting.

They made it half a foot before the weight became too great for Dorothy. Nick fell, thundering to the floor. The witch's legs whipped into the air as the statue went backward and she began flailing about again, attempting to wiggle free now that she was on her back. It was still useless. She would have to remove half her ribs to get out of the death hug Nick had her in.

"What do we do?" Lional asked, even as he grabbed one of Nick's shoulders and attempted to drag him by straight force across the floor. It was a battle of inches, and they would all burn to death long before they made two feet.

"If that damn Curse was off of him," Dorothy growled between coughs, "he could let go of this piece of crap," she gestured to Zolesha, who shot her a hateful glare, "and run right out of here with us,"

Like the Wizard's parlor trick with the great, glass orb, the room was filling more and more with smoke, despite the high vaulted ceiling.

Dorothy's eyes were blurring, the sting of ash and smoke burning them with every blink. Her heart pounded in panic, her own fear demanding she turn and run from the room. But there was nothing beyond that doorway except a life of pain, knowing she'd abandoned the man she had fallen in love with.

Her mind raced, but as if she were back in the root cellar with nothing but time on her hands, the compass of last-ditch ideas kept turning back to the silver shoes magically adhered to her feet. Remembering the flick of the witch's glance at them when she had said she wished the guards weren't in the cell with them earlier. Her mind flew back farther, to the time she was in Kansas and wished that the magic would hurry up and take her back if it was going to, and how she had arrived before the Oz sunset, Nick standing in front of her wondering how she had got back so early. Then farther back, this time to when she had wished Straw would be able to save them from a swarm of crows, and moments later he'd broke them apart on the road.

All those things surely weren't just coincidences. The shoes had to be the link, but she couldn't think how to activate them, and wasn't even sure if she was right in the first place.

"Zolesha!" Dorothy yelled at the witch who had pulled her feet up close to her stomach, away from the fire licking across the rug.

The Wicked Witch's face shifted slightly; she was unable to turn with Nick's hand clamped over her mouth, but her black eyes still found Dorothy's brown ones.

"Are the shoes a wishing garment?"

Zolesha screamed against Nick's grasp, the words a muffled string of hate and evil. The witch's greed for the magic outweighed her own desire to stay alive. There would be no verbal confirmation that they were wishing shoes, but the fury and resumed thrashing, hand clawing as if she could reach the shoes, gave up everything Dorothy needed to know.

Almost everything.

She heaved coughs into her checkered bandanna. Sweat rolled into her eyes, mixing with the burning smoke, every second wasted on figuring this out taking away her own chance to flee the room.

Dorothy searched her memories. She threw her mind back to those times she had used the word "wish." What had she been doing?

The realization came sudden and hot. She had been attempting to remove the shoes, one heel on top of the other, cowboy-boot style.

And so it was that Dorothy Gale of Kansas found herself standing in the middle of a new tornado, this one of smoke and ash, risking her life and her friends to save Nick, one heel on top of another and pulling her legs as if to slip her foot loose, harnessing Oz magic she could only hope she was right about.

The heels clicked together and slid off each other as she said the words: "I wish Nick Chopper was cured of the Wicked Witch's Curse."

There was a new flush of heat, not from the fire, but from the silver shoes themselves. They flared in a brief flash of bright, clean light that moved like fire across paper from toe to heel, transforming the silver sequins to blackish gray. Even as they drained of their silver, so did Nick.

His steel skin changed to a woodsman tan. His body spasmed and he screamed out something bordering the line between pain and relief, throwing his arms wide, his back arching off the floor.

In that moment, Zolesha tumbled to the burning rug and scurried forward through the flames, snatching up the same leather bandolier of wands she had used to torture Dorothy for two long nights. Several of them were on fire, and several more fell loose as she dragged the strap toward her body, yanking out one of the few remaining intact wands. She spoke an ancient word, and Dorothy braced herself to be struck down by magic. Instead, a serpent of red smoke appeared, snaking out of the point of the wand, mixing with the black smoke of the spreading fire, funneling down over the Wicked Witch. Reaching her feet, the wand smoke coiled back upward, a hazy red boa constricting around Zolesha.

A second later, she was gone.

Which was the same kind of gone they all needed to be.

"Let's go!" Dorothy yelled, trusting Lional to know what to do.

Sure enough, the prince scooped Nick's flailing, pain-racked body off the ground, and they threw themselves from the room.

They blasted past the entrance, and Straw slammed the massive heavy iron door closed a second later.

Sprinting across the circular landing, Straw jumped up onto the banister, again sliding away, swirling so quickly downward it made her dizzy. She chose to run, grabbing Toto.

Straw was waiting for them at the bottom of the tower, Dorothy pausing to cough and splutter, light headed. They were joined, a couple of minutes later, by the Nick-laden lionman.

"Will the fire reach down here?" Dorothy asked, pulling off her handkerchief mask and setting Toto down. Lional gently lowered the newly unconscious Nick to the ground before unwinding his own cloak from around his massive maw.

"There is nothing for it to burn between us and it," Lional responded. "Once it has devoured the furnishings of the observation chamber, it will have to be satisfied. That room is naught but stone and metal and gem-glass, tempered to withstand fierce heat."

Nick stirred at their feet, opening his now-blue eyes.

"Dorothy?" Nick said in wonder, his voice clear despite the smoky inferno they had pulled him from.

She tumbled onto the ground beside him, putting her arms around his chest and helping him to a sitting position. She unglamorously coughed into his face, her hands too busy to cover her mouth.

"Sorry," she muttered.

He smiled in response and then immediately frowned, lifting his arms. He stared wide eyed at his tanned skin, that frown curving upward in surprise, pulling his mouth with it, into the rarest and most beautiful smile. A smile that became a glorious laugh. A laugh that deepened into a throaty rumble as he wrapped his arms around Dorothy and held her close.

"What did you do?" Nick pulled back and looked her in the eyes.

She shrugged. "Had some wishing shoes glued to my feet by a Good Witch."

"You… freed me," he said, his voice a gravelly whisper, as if he couldn't quite believe it. "You wasted a wish to free me."

"Not a waste, if you ask me," she replied, hesitantly reaching up to touch his choppy black hair.

His face cracked with another beaming smile. "I don't know if this is a dream, or this is real but temporary, or real and permanent, or I'm dead and imagining every scenario that could've saved me, but… can I tell you my wish before anything else changes?"

Dorothy put her fingers to his lips to slow him down. A near-decade's worth of emotions were bubbling up from within him, and she wanted him to be more faucet and less broken dam, letting things pour at a steadier pace so they could both savor every second.

"Listen," Dorothy said. "We have the rest of our lives. You can tell me later."

"Aren't you going home?" the scarecrow asked, pointing to the wand tube that was jutting up from the center pocket of Dorothy's coveralls.

"I am home." Dorothy smiled as she nestled into Nick's strong, soft, loving arms, already making a few more wishes of her own. Wishes that no witch, only love, could make true.