Bewitched in Oz

by Laura J. Burns

  When Vashti snuck out to get a drink from the well in the field behind them, Zerie decided to stay with Brink. She figured he would feel more like they were friends if she stopped treating him like a tagalong.

  As soon as the sun set, the three friends left their shelter and headed across the fields toward the road of yellow brick. It took them half an hour of arguing with the Glass Cat before she would agree to guide them to the road, and even as they made their way toward it, her spun-glass tail still switched angrily.

  “I don’t know what she’s so upset about. She’ll just run off again if there’s any trouble,” Zerie murmured to Vashti.

  Vashti giggled. “Did she ever explain herself?”

  “Brink says she thought the Foot Hills usually stay closer to Big Enough Mountain,” Zerie replied. “He said she seemed pretty offended that they’d moved.”

  “Everything seems to offend her,” Vashti said.

  “She told Brink that cats are intelligent enough to run when they sense danger,” Zerie said. “And that they’re fast enough to get away from almost anything.”

  “If only they were loyal enough to bring their friends with them,” Vashti murmured.

  “Cats are solitary creatures,” the cat said frostily. “And by the way, we have excellent hearing.”

  Vashti and Zerie exchanged an embarrassed look, and Zerie laughed.

  “There’s the road!” Brink cried, pointing up ahead to where a faint golden line snaked through the darkness. “Let’s go!”

  “Hold on,” Zerie said. “We need to sneak up on it. We all have to stay quiet and keep a watch for soldiers, or birds, or flying clockworks.”

  The Glass Cat snorted. “You’ll never see Ozma’s spies. You’re just silly children, while they are royal observers. As soon as you set foot on the road, you’re doomed.”

  “Why are you coming with us, then?” Vashti asked.

  The cat didn’t answer. She just stalked toward the road, tail held high.

  Hiding in the low, thick bushes that lined this part of the road, Zerie peered straight across the interwoven bricks. They were so yellow that they gave off a soft glow even at night, and so evenly placed and smooth that there were no crevices for small spies to hide in. Zerie would’ve been able to see the smallest chipmunk or snail on the road. She saw nothing.

  “Nobody coming from the left,” Brink reported from beside her.

  “No one on the right, either,” Vashti whispered.

  “And nothing on the other side, though it looks like there might be a drop-off over there,” Zerie said.

  “If we’re going to chance it, we need to walk as fast as we can and as silently as we can,” Brink said. “We’ll all have to act like the Glass Cat.”

  The cat’s emerald eyes glittered a bit in the moonlight as she turned to look at him. “That’s right,” she said, a little less snippily than before.

  Brink even manages to make nice with the Glass Cat, Zerie thought. I didn’t think anybody could do that.

  “Here we go,” Vashti said. She reached for Zerie’s hand, and Zerie grabbed onto Brink with her other hand.

  Together they stepped onto the yellow bricks, and Zerie realized she’d been holding her breath, as if the Winged Monkeys were going to swoop down on them the second they appeared on the road.

  The Glass Cat padded softly down the center of the road, and the three friends followed as quickly and quietly as possible. There were no sounds other than the usual crickets and night birds, but even those felt ominous. Zerie found herself looking over her shoulder as she walked, and more than once she caught Brink jumping at a sudden breeze or the hoot of an owl.

  “How will we know if a spy has seen us?” Vashti whispered after about half an hour. “Won’t it just fly back to Ozma and report? It won’t come after us, so how will we know?”

  “I’m not sure,” Zerie said, fear creeping up her spine. “I guess we won’t know until we see an airship.”

  An ear-splitting scream rang out across the land.

  Zerie froze, her friends beside her. For a moment all was silent. And then . . .

  Thundering hooves. There was no mistaking the sound.

  “Horses!” Vashti gasped. “It must be Ozma’s soldiers!”

  “Where are they?” Brink asked. “I can’t tell if the noise is in front of us or behind us!”

  “Get off the road,” Zerie cried. The Glass Cat was already running. This time they all took off after her.

  “We have to hide,” Vashti panted as they raced over the yellow bricks. “But I can’t see anything in the dark.”

  “The cat can. She’ll find a place. We just have to follow,” Brink replied.

  Sure enough, the Glass Cat suddenly veered to the left and leaped off the edge of the road. She vanished into the darkness.

  Vashti slowed.

  “There’s a drop-off on that side, remember?” Zerie said, grabbing her friend’s arm. “We have to jump, like the cat. Hurry! The hooves are getting louder!”

  “We don’t know how far our fall will be,” Vashti protested, but she ran along with Zerie anyway.

  Brink reached the edge of the road and jumped. Zerie got there a second later.

  She wanted to stop and look over. She had no idea if it was two feet or twenty. But the pounding hooves were so loud that the horses had to be almost on top of them. There was no time to hesitate. Clutching Vashti’s arm, she plunged over the edge.

  “Float,” Vashti cried. “Float!”

  They crashed into a dense bush and sank between the red leaves. Vashti was crying.

  “Hush!” Zerie whispered, stroking her friend’s arm. “We can’t let them hear us.”

  The hoofbeats slowed, and then stopped. Zerie held her breath and peered up into the darkness above the bushes. The branches were enough to hide them from view, she hoped. At least in the darkness. Can Ozma’s spies see in the dark like the cat can? she wondered. That would be bad.

  There were some scuffling noises on the road, and then slowly the hoofbeats began again, moving away. Finally, the sound of horses faded into the distance.

  Zerie waited for five more minutes before she even moved. “Are you hurt?” she asked, turning to Vashti. “Why were you crying? Did the branches scratch you?”

  “No. Well, yes. But not badly.” Vashti clambered out of the thick bush, tugging her clothes off the branches. “But I tried to stop our fall. I tried to levitate us.” Vashti’s words came out as sobs. “It didn’t work! We didn’t float.”

  “Oh, Vash.” Zerie pulled herself out of the bushes. “I’m sorry. But that was a great idea. Next time it will work.”

  “You did it when you had to. You saved me,” Vashti said.

  “Well . . .” Zerie thought about it. “This fall didn’t do anything more than knock the breath out of us. We weren’t in danger from it, even though we didn’t know that. Maybe your talent didn’t work because we didn’t really need it.”

  Vashti took a deep breath and swiped at her tears. “I guess we don’t know much about how this magic stuff works yet.”

  “You certainly don’t know much about hiding, either,” the voice of the Glass Cat said from somewhere in the darkness. “You’re both being far too loud.”

  “Sorry! Where are you?” Zerie asked, lowering her voice.

  “Down here,” Brink responded. “There’s a ditch, and the bushes grow right over it.”

  “Indeed the undergrowth is dense, but one can hardly call it undergrowth when it grows over one’s person, and so we cannot definitively say what it might be that covers this ditch,” said a girl’s voice.

  Vashti and Zerie exchanged confused looks. “Who said that?” Vashti asked.

  “Oh! You shouldn’t have said anything, not a thing, you should’ve stayed quiet,” cried another voice, this one a boy’s. “What if those creatures are unfriendly? What if they throw us out of our hiding place? If they do that, then we have nowhere else to go. If we have nowhere else to go, we’ll get
caught for sure. If we get caught—”

  “Brink?” Zerie interrupted the string of words. “What’s going on?”

  “Follow my voice,” he replied. “When you get to the edge of the ditch, I’ll see you and help you climb down.”

  “Silly people, not knowing how to climb in the dark,” the Glass Cat put in.

  “Oh!” the strange boy said. “If they fall, they’ll get hurt. If they get hurt, they’ll need medical attention! If they need medical attention, they’ll have to tell others where we’re hiding.”

  “Indubitably, to plummet from a great height can certainly result in injury to the body; however, we know not what type of creature these disembodied voices may be,” the girl’s voice replied. “Therefore the tumble from above may be either catastrophic or a dud.”

  “Brink? Are those people with you?” Zerie called as quietly as possible.

  “Yes. They are.” Brink sounded annoyed.

  Zerie inched forward in the direction of the voices, afraid with every step that she was about to fall again. This land was covered with the same type of low, prickly red bushes she and Vashti had landed in, stretching as far as she could see. “Brink? How did you end up in a ditch?” she called, wanting to hear his voice instead of the strange ones.

  “I followed the cat,” he called back. “She led me straight to it.”

  “This is the only place to hide for at least a mile,” the Glass Cat said. “Which is why we’re stuck hiding here with these loons.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Vashti whispered, gripping Zerie’s hand.

  “Me either. And I can’t make out any ditches,” Zerie replied.

  “I see you!” Brink cried. “Look down.”

  Zerie did. There, at the base of the closest prickly bush, was a deeper section of darkness, like a hole. And sticking out of the hole was a hand.

  Brink.

  Dropping to her knees, Zerie peered into the blackness. Brink’s face stared back at her. “You’re practically underground!” Zerie gasped. “How did you get down there?”

  “You just have to push the bushes aside. They’re prickly, but they’re ticklish,” Brink said. “Watch.” He ran his fingers up and down the nearest branch, and the bush shivered, shook, and pulled away from him. He did the same thing to the two branches next to it, and they both pulled away as well.

  “I wish I’d known that when we were trying to climb out of them before,” Vashti said. “One of these things tore my shirt!”

  Zerie knelt down and tickled the bushes until there was an opening between the branches big enough to climb through. Everything was darker inside, but Brink was there to help her down. Once she and Vashti were safe inside the ditch, Zerie took a look around.

  It was a deep ditch, about six feet from the bottom to the top where the tickle-bushes grew, their long branches intertwining to form a roof over the ditch. The whole thing ran like a tunnel for about twenty feet beneath the bushes, so there was plenty of room for Zerie, her friends, and the two other people huddled in there with them.

  One was a boy who looked to be about Ned Springer’s age. He had a round face, wore denim overalls and a straw farm hat, and as far as Zerie could see, he could’ve been a neighbor from their village. The other person was a girl of around the same age. Her hair was long and blond—Zerie could tell because it was light against the darkness. She had her hands on her hips and her eyebrows were drawn together in consternation.

  “There can be no doubt that this fine hole in the ground was made to accommodate two people with ample room,” the girl said. “One could argue that more than two would fit and still not find themselves forced to occupy so small a space that their comfort would be compromised. However, the amount of space required to satisfy one’s personal comfort is a variable and individual issue, and we cannot presume to decide for one another what that amount of space would be, although I find myself in this circumstance inclined to worry about—”

  “Worry! You’re worried?” the boy said, cutting her off. “Oh, no! What shall we do? If you’re worried when you’re so sensible, how will I know how to handle it? If you get scared, I’ll certainly be even more scared than you, and if I am even more scared, I might begin to scream and tear my way out of this ditch and run onto the road and be caught!”

  Zerie stared at them both, baffled.

  “What on earth are they talking about?” Vashti asked.

  “We are quite obviously having a discussion about multiple layers of the reality in which we find ourselves,” the girl replied. “A discussion might take one form when talking about the present and a separate form when discussing the multiple iterations of the future, which as we all know is an unfathomable state that does not allow one to draw any conclusions. Nevertheless, it is the human condition to attempt control of the aforementioned iterations—”

  “Stop!” Zerie said, holding up her hand. “I don’t care what you’re talking about. I want to know who you are.”

  “Oh!” The girl seemed startled by the question. “I am Ednah Florance, of the Florances of Rigmarole Town, although that is a suffix that we have only recently acquired, and by recently I refer, of course, to the last three generations. So few Rigmaroles are Rigmaroles born; you are familiar, I assume, with the Defensive Settlements of Oz, in which any citizen determined to be a Rigmarole is sent to live in Rigmarole Town? This means by necessity that most Rigmaroles originate from other geographical areas of the Land of Oz, but the Florances of Rigmarole have been Rigmaroles born for several years and therefore the suffix ‘of Rigmarole Town’ was adopted to celebrate the distinct strain of Rigmarole culture that we—”

  “Okay, great!” Zerie interrupted. “And who are you?” she asked the boy, although she was almost afraid of the answer.

  “I’m Edmond,” he replied. “Or at least that’s what my mother told me my name was. But what if she was wrong? What if she got confused between my brother Edgar and myself? What if I’m truly Edgar and not Edmond? That would mean that I’ve been acting like an Edmond when I should be acting like an Edgar, and who knows what an Edgar would’ve done in our situation? What I mean is, what if—”

  His voice became higher and higher as he went on, and Zerie got the feeling he would keep spinning out what-ifs for as long as they let him talk.

  “Your situation?” she cut in. “What situation?”

  For a moment both Ednah and Edmond were silent. Zerie could hardly believe it.

  “You two are hiding, just like we are,” Brink prompted them. “You were here already when I followed the cat down into the ditch. So tell us, why are Ozma’s soldiers after you?”

  “Ozma’s soldiers!” Edmond practically shrieked. “Princess Ozma is hunting us down? What if she finds us? If she finds us we’ll be dragged in front of her, and if we’re dragged in front of her I’ll be terrified by her power and beauty, and if I’m terrified—”

  “Edmond, calm your pounding heart and your speeding pulse and your irrational fear-spinning, if you’re able,” Ednah said, taking his hand. “Though, to be fair, I am also filled with an unaccountable terror at the implication that the military might of the ruler of the Land of Oz would be brought to bear against us for so minor a crime that—”

  “What are you talking about?” Vashti demanded loudly.

  “Ssshhhh!” everyone in the ditch told her.

  “Cease and desist from asking them questions immediately!” the Glass Cat said. “The Rigmarole will never stop talking, but will never actually get to the point. And the Flutterbudget will keep spouting unlikely possibilities until the sun comes up.”

  “Are you the Flutterbudget?” Brink asked Edmond.

  “What did I just say?” cried the Glass Cat, before Edmond could answer.

  “Sorry,” Brink muttered.

  “You’re holding hands,” Zerie commented, studying Ednah and Edmond in the dim light. “Are you together?”

  “Most assuredly we are together in that we occupy t
he same general space at the same general time, which is—”

  “She means are you a couple,” Vashti interrupted before Ednah could continue. “Just nod or shake your heads no.”

  They both nodded.

  “That’s preposterous,” the Glass Cat said. “Rigmaroles stay in Rigmarole Town by law, expressly so that they won’t torture other people with their constant speechifying. And Flutterbudgets live in Flutterbudget Center for the same reason. Neither one of you should have left home, and the two of you should never have met, and every conversation you have with one another will be utterly inane.”

  “That doesn’t matter if they’re in love,” Zerie said. “Is that why you’re here, so far from your homes? And why you’re hiding?”

  Ednah and Edmond both opened their mouths to talk. “Nod or shake your heads no!” Vashti reminded them. After a moment, they nodded.

  “But why would Ozma’s soldiers be looking for a couple in love?” Brink asked. “I know that they’re not supposed to leave their towns, but surely it isn’t actually against the law?”

  “It should be,” the cat said.

  “Ednah’s mother began explaining to my mother why we shouldn’t be allowed to date,” Edmond said, “and my mother became so frightened of the possibilities that she began wailing and thinking about all the what-ifs, and then Ednah’s mother had to explain away every single one of the what-ifs, and after a few days they both fainted from hunger because they’d been talking the entire time. That’s why we decided to leave, so we wouldn’t put them in any more danger from being together.”

  “Edmond! That was a very normal explanation!” Zerie cried. “Good for you!”

  He began to answer, but she cut him off before he could go into any what-iffing. “So you two are running off to be together. But why are you hiding from the soldiers?”

  “We . . .” Ednah paused, clearly trying to think of how to say it. “We . . . aren’t.” She clapped her hand over her mouth to stop the rest of the words from spilling out.

  Brink nudged Zerie and smiled. “You’re getting to them! They’re starting to talk like regular people,” he whispered.