Idris was such a flirt. I think every single woman in the audience stood up and gave him a standing ovation, and he wasn’t even half-naked in his man form. If everyone didn’t want Elore to play, I think the women hooting at him would have asked him to shift so they could see if he was just as sexy as he acted when he was a man. They probably wanted a good look at his bits too. It didn’t bother me because I knew that was just how Idris was.
The audience finally settled down when Idris and Zusim disappeared with the children. I’d sat in the corner while my mother played judge before and I don’t think any of the trials I’d sat through before had been so eventful. There were certainly no naked women and surprise children being brought out. The audience never spoke like this.
There were plenty more fucked up things to come in this trial. Roxar dismissed us for the night since the judges had long lost control of the audience. I needed to get a moment alone with my father. I was already having dinner with Roxar.
Things were tenuous. Oz didn’t remember war because of a curse. We were trying to bring back memories of good times and bad times.
We would be flinging a lot of ugly at them, and they could snap at any moment.
Chapter 36
Idris
H
onestly, I would have rather spent the afternoon rescuing dolls with Elore than sitting through one more minute of that trial. Pavius was infuriating, Nick Chopper seemed to want to kiss everyone’s ass since he spent so much time blaming Adora for his curse and ended up being wrong, and the Scarecrow hadn’t asked a single question. A curse hadn’t wiped my memory. I watched Azami easily handle complicated trials. This trial should have been presided over by four Sentinels and Ozma, but we couldn’t do that and it showed.
We were supposed to have dinner with Roxar tonight, and we’d already had a group discussion. We were on the same page. The audience was participating too much in this trial and we’d only just started. If this kept up, we would have riots. Someone needed to step up and control the audience and the only people on the judge’s panel I trusted to do that were Roxar and Pridius. Francesca would talk to her father later.
I thought we were just having dinner with Roxar, so color me totally shocked when my mother showed up wearing her human face and a dress that would shock even a Quadling. She wasn’t with her other mates either. Kazax never let her go anywhere alone. Where the fuck were her bodyguards?
“Mother? What are you doing?”
“Roxar invited me to dinner.”
Oh, shit. Mother fucker. I already knew where this was going. Roxar saw my mother naked like the rest of Oz, and he liked what he saw. My mother liked the way Roxar had handled the trial so far, so now she would be up in here flirting and considering him for a new mate. That’s why she was alone. She was vetting Roxar. Did Roxar even know what he was getting into? Sex with a Flying Monkey female was probably way more extreme than any game the Quadlings liked to play. Roxar wasn’t a Flying Monkey. She would break him, then eat him alive.
My mother went to chat with Francesca, Oprix, Galen, and Saffron. I stayed behind, and I felt Daxar stand next to me.
“Yes, I’ll think it’s strange too if my father ends up with your mother.”
“Your father has no idea what he’s getting into,” I moaned. “I don’t even know what she’s thinking. She was so against us mixing with humans for the longest time, and now she accepts a dinner invitation from the first man who asks her out because he likes what she looks like naked when she’s human?”
Daxar just shrugged. “Maybe seeing you and Zusim so happy has her wanting to experiment. My father and mother have an open relationship, and they both have their playmates. It doesn’t make it any less weird. What do I call your mother if she takes my father as a mate, but you and I are both with Francesca?”
“Ivia, like everyone else. She’ll be pissed if you call her mother. She considers being a mother right up there with being queen. She’d probably eat your face off if you tried to call her mother, and she didn’t give birth to you.”
“Duly noted. That must be my father,” Daxar said as there was a knock on the door.
I saw Daxar roll his eyes as he let his father in. His father had dressed way up, and he was holding fresh flowers. My mother was rolling her hips and flirting up a storm with that smile as she ambled over to Roxar. He was grinning like a rogue.
“Hello. I got these for you, though I don’t think I have permission to call you by your name yet.”
Oh, shit, this was so bad. We had a big, bad Quadling, dungeon master asking my mother for permission to use her first name. My mother’s boobs were all kinds of hanging out her dress. She practically pressed them right in his face.
“Let me get to know you, and I’ll tell you if you have permission, dear Roxar.”
Francesca finally realized what was going on and shot Daxar and me a bewildered look. We both just shrugged. I think Daxar agreed with me—like I could explain my mother when it came to the opposite sex. I couldn’t explain this at all.
Dinner was supposed to be Roxar getting to know Francesca, but he seemed to be more about getting into my mother’s pants. And, of course, my mother was encouraging him and being quite obvious about it. This was so bad. Daxar was practically purple the entire dinner.
When dessert was finally brought out, Francesca got to business. She cleared her throat until she got their attention.
“The judges need to control the audience better, or there will be riots. I’m not sure who you intend to call next, but with the future roster, people will be upset.”
Roxar just laughed and tipped his wine glass at her.
“Dear girl, I know. I’ve talked to the other judges, and we’ve changed our plans. We were planning on calling Dorothy and Ozma tomorrow to give people a better idea of how much Locasta hurt people. We scrapped that and go straight for Illyna. Ozma knows this, and she agrees with us.”
Please don’t flirt, please, don’t flirt. I was silently begging in my head for my mother not to sit in Roxar’s lap and tell him what a good boy he had been. I wouldn’t put it past her. But she didn’t. She daintily put her fork in her mouth and then sipped her coffee. Ah, she realized we were in deep shit and letting Francesca run the show.
“I thought Dorothy and Ozma were key witnesses?”
“They are, but the crowd doesn’t fully understand the gravity of this situation just yet. That’s why they are so rowdy. We need to let them know what we are dealing with, and then I’ll call Dorothy and Ozma. Galen, I intend to call you after your mother.”
Poor Galen. I watched him flush blue. He set his fork down and rubbed this forehead.
“Yeah, I knew it was coming. You just need me to talk about my father and Locasta, right?”
“Actually, no. You’ll be asked to talk about your mother and your escape too. People will suspect you. I want you to live a normal life when this is over and when people think about your father, I want them to remember you helped beat him. Your mother’s testimony should take all of tomorrow. She’s planning on whipping out that head. I’m not planning on calling anyone after her if she plans on shocking everyone with a talking head.”
I saw it. I knew what was next. My mother smiled like she just caught a mouse. She started stroking Roxar’s jacket sleeve.
“You may call me Ivia, dear.”
Daxar and I both exchanged a helpless look. We both knew our parents would be fucking tonight. I hoped Daxar wasn’t furious with me when his father showed up to trial with marks and bruises all over him.
Roxar had no idea what he was getting into inviting a Flying Monkey queen to dinner.
Chapter 37
Oprix
T
here wasn’t much for a Winkie farm boy to do during a trial of three insane people. Honestly, just when I thought this couldn’t get crazier, Daxar’s father invites Idris’ mother to dinner, and we all watched them flirt all night. Idris and Daxar were sure they would get down and dirty when they left and I b
elieved them. Ivia’s dress was strategically skimpy and easy to remove. I said more power to her. She knew what she wanted, and she took it.
Idris was sure Roxar would show up to the trial beaten to a pulp, but he looked damned pleased with himself when he took his place on stage. Before he left, Frankie insisted on going to check on Illyna to make sure she wasn’t being given the same treatment as Glinda was when she was being held here. Roxar insisted he wasn’t allowing it and was checking on her daily. Illyna was fine and just wanted to get her testimony out of the way.
We were back at the trial, except Idris. He was off playing with Elore. He would sit with us, but Zusim came out and said Elore was begging for him again. I already knew Idris was bored with this trial and would have rather been playing with babies. We watched him leave.
Roxar was taking forever to come out, and I was wondering if Idris was right. He would come out with bite marks and chunks of his hair ripped out. When he did finally come out, that was the face of a well-satisfied man. Ivia was sitting with the other Flying Monkeys and they had all shifted into men and women. Ivia fluttered her eyelashes at Roxar and he blushed before he faced the audience.
“We’ve decided to mix up the order of witnesses. We’re bringing out a collaborator to Locasta and the Fisher King. She will show and say things that are upsetting. I’ll expect you to be silent or I’ll have you removed from the grounds.”
It surprised me when Illyna was led out to the stage. She wasn’t restrained, and she was wearing a rather nice purple gown and she looked much healthier than she had the last time I saw her. When I first saw her at the graveyard, there was this haunted look in her eyes and her cheeks were hollowed out. Her face had filled out a little, and she looked like she was at peace with herself now. She looked like she was ready to talk about what she did and die.
“State your name, please,” Roxar said.
“Illyna of the North.”
“Can you explain why your hair is that color?”
“Yes, I can. Before they formed the Sentinels, in every generation, there was one child born with colorful hair like mine. Our skin was also colored a little differently than the rest of Oz. You’ll notice Francesca of the West has green skin, my skin has a ruddy tint to it, and Saffron of the East has a bronzed tone to it. Glinda has milk-white skin and is paler than anyone in Oz, no matter how much time she spends outdoors. It ran in families. There was one of us born to every generation. In my case, I was a twin and that had never happened before.”
“You predate the Sentinels then?”
“You could say I was instrumental in their formation. The Fisher King came to Oz much as the Wizard did, but unlike the Wizard, he really had magical powers. The Wizard was blown here in a balloon. The Fisher King used a magical ring to open a portal to Oz. He could come and go between worlds with that ring. Like the Wizard, he inserted himself as king of Oz, but he was much more evil than taxes.
“He pretended to be good at first, setting up a university to teach people magic like him. That university was never to teach people magic. He was vetting students to steal magic from. His ring could drain magic and the life force from any living being. There were five of us with magic like the Sentinels do today that worked against him.
“My twin sister was very good at glamours. She hid her magic, all but enough to interest him. She pretended to enroll at the school under the guise of a Gillikin peasant. You see, those of us with magic like the Sentinels can tell when someone is lying to us. She asked him all kinds of questions about the school, and he lied about every single one. She asked him if it was safe to leave the North and come to Emerald City to attend his school. The feeling we get when someone lies was so intense, she almost gave herself away.”
“How did you defeat the Fisher King?”
Illyna shrugged. “The same way women have been defeating men for ages—distracting them by thinking they can use us. We all enrolled in the school. We showed up as a group and pretended to be friends who wanted to learn how to use our magic. To say he was chomping at the bit to get us all alone was an understatement.
“Oh, we flirted and pretended to be in love with him. He didn’t know who he wanted to go after first. While he was distracted, plotting which one of us he wanted to bed and kill first, we used a specially designed teleportation potion to get all the students out of his school and back home. We told them to spread the word he was holding them hostage at the school and that students kept disappearing. They were to rally all regions of Oz for battle, and they did beautifully. All of Oz came together to beat him.”
Pridius stood and joined Roxar on stage. “But the Fisher King wasn’t beaten back then, only imprisoned. You were the one who let him back out again. Did you plan that all along?”
“Now, Pridius,” Roxar chastised. “We haven’t gotten there yet. How did Oz beat the Fisher King the first time, and why was he only imprisoned instead of killed?”
“The Fisher King has a power from his realm. It’s a form of dark magic called Necromancy. He can raise the dead and control them. He had all this mythos around him then, mainly about him being immortal. He told all of Oz he had drunk from a magical cup that granted him immortal life, and it gave him the ability to heal from any wound. We didn’t think we could kill him if he could just heal. We thought about cutting his head off, but we weren’t sure if it would just grow back.”
“How did five women manage to imprison a man who can raise and control the dead?”
“By learning his weaknesses. The battle between the Fisher King and Oz raged for ten years. The Fisher King wanted all of us. He gave ultimatums to all of Oz, and he would promise if they just let him have us, he would leave Oz and never return. I think all of you know Oz better than that. Its citizens fought rather than throwing five people to their death.
“We watched him and assessed his weaknesses. When he raised and controlled the dead, they didn’t like it. They fought back. It took all of his concentration to make them do his bidding. We just needed to catch him when he was deep in concentration and get that ring off him, which is what we did.
“He had no idea we were behind him because he was so intent on making his army of corpses slaughter a village of Munchkins. All five of us tackled him from behind. One of us got that ring off him, and it was like all of his magic left him. All the stolen magic he had amassed, he could no longer call on.
“We couldn’t bind his magic because it was tied to that ring, and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t destroy the ring. We locked him in a cave deep below the earth and had a meeting at the entrance of the cave. They formed the Sentinels after five days of talks. My twin took the North, and I stayed behind to guard the Fisher King’s prison. I thought I could handle it because I was always stronger at magic and fighting than my sister and I was born a few minutes before her. I was clearly wrong. I could have handled myself in any fight, but loneliness was not something I was prepared to deal with.”
“We’ll get to that. So, the five of you subdued the Fisher King. Why didn’t you test him? He had this mythos he could heal from any wound. Surely, after ten years of fighting, you had seen him get wounded. If you hadn’t, why didn’t someone just injure him with your sword and test him?” Pridius asked.
“I don’t think any of you understand what it was like back then. It wasn’t really ten years of fighting. It was more like ten years of slaughter, and the Fisher King never had to face anyone in battle to do so. No one had a chance to land a blow on him. He used his ring to open portals to cemeteries in villages all over Oz, and it was total chaos. The Fisher King just stood there, surrounded by graves and corpses, while his army of the dead slaughtered everyone. A corpse can’t be killed again. It feels no pain. The corpse won’t stop killing until its master tells the spirit moving it to stop and go back to rest.
“After ten years of showing up too late and finding dead people or showing up and trying to fight the dead, we believed everything the Fisher King told us about his powers.
No one in Oz had the ability to raise and control the dead. Everyone else in Oz had to brew a potion to teleport places. The Fisher King had a ring that could just rip a hole in the air that he could step into and be wherever he wanted. We were dealing with someone who had powers way beyond anything we had seen before. Yes, we should have tested his ability to heal. At the time, we just wanted to get him where he couldn’t hurt anyone before he whipped out any more surprises. Even as we tied his hands and led him underground, he was yelling he wasn’t done with Oz yet, and if he didn’t make us pay, our ancestors would. He told us again he could never die, and it was only a matter of time before he rose again.”
“And he did. Because you got lonely,” Pridius spat.
“Sir, How Old Are You?” Illyna asked.
Pridius puffed up his chest. “I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, but I was born seventy years ago.”
“I’m over five hundred years old,” Illyna said. “The only thing I can say in my defense is that living in a cave for four hundred years with no one to talk to can drive you mad. Eventually, you get desperate and will reply when the madman you’ve been guarding for the past four hundred years tries to talk to you and believe me, he tried for four hundred years before it got to be too much and I responded. He twisted my loneliness into anger at the Sentinels for leaving me there for that long, and I eventually let him out and gave him his ring back. I thought I was in love with him.”
Pavius had been making an ass of himself this entire trial, and I guess he decided to have a go at it again. Pavius was kind of round for a Gillikin and had hair growing out his ears.
“How do we know poor Locasta didn’t feel bad for you being stuck in that cave and tried to visit you? How do we know you aren’t jealous of her, and you killed the Fisher King and are trying to frame Locasta because you’re just a nasty, jealous woman? None of us remember the Fisher King. All we have is your word that he’s such a nasty person. How do we know all of this is not your doing?”
Oz Has Spoken: A Reverse Harem Academy Romance (Emerald City Academy Book 3) Page 20
