“Like you don’t know.”
There is a zap on Gabriel’s arm, a bit of magic assaulting him like a bolt of lightning. “Hey!” He lurches upright and rubs the sore spot. All the effervescence of the Oil is gone and reality crashes back in. “Is it not torture enough that you keep me prisoner here having committed no crime?”
“You are a prisoner, not because of what you have done, but because of what you can do.”
This is not the first time the witch has visited him in the dungeons. Not the first time she’s poked him for information about his brothers. But somehow, it still feels different. She’s always dodged his demand for answers specifically pertaining to his imprisonment. They would talk about anything else. Some days she would tell him the color of the cursed sky, the taste of the cold air. Some days she would share food with him and talk about her childhood and ask him about his.
But never why he was here. He was convinced that no amount of begging, bartering, or badgering would set him free. Only death. Or revenge.
Eventually he stopped asking.
So why is she telling him now?
“I don’t understand.” Using the rock wall behind him to steady his weight, he slowly rises to his feet. “What do you mean,what I can do?”
“Surely you know. You have a talent for finding lost things. A talent you inherited from your father.”
Gabriel barely knew his father. All he had were collections of the man. Collected stories, collected trinkets.
He was supposed to have been the love of his mother’s life,her fated one. Gabriel was the youngest of his brothers, and they all had different fathers. His mother was a fickle wife, and love had always seemed to thwart her, her men as impermanent as desert mirages.
The father of Gabriel’s eldest brother died in a small skirmish in the Oz hinterlands, in a battle over steel and gods and land. The father of his second eldest brother disappeared before his brother was born.
Andhisfather…
He was killed by a god.
His mother would not let him forget it, but if all Gabriel had were stories, this one, the details of his father’s death, was the one story he was desperate to possess and the only one just always out of his reach.
What reason would a Cardinal God have to kill a simple, mortal man?
Gabriel brings his hands to the metal bars, wraps his fingers around them. They have been his home for so long that he has come to think of them as extensions of himself. Wrought-iron rib bones that he can grip and rattle until his lungs hurt.
His bones are strong. They never give.
“Is that why you’ve held me prisoner all this time?” he asks the witch now. “To find something for you?”
Through the cutout holes of her golden mask, her gaze grows unfocused.
He was once terrified of the witch, but they’ve been unlikely housemates for years now and he suspects he’s grown fond of her in a way. Maybe she’s twisted his mind, made him think her soft when all of Oz thinks her sharp and brutal.
Even if that is true, he likes believing that the one thing he’s gained in his imprisonment is this knowing of the Witch of the West, a knowing unlike any other.
“The opposite.” Her voice is quiet, a whisper.
“How so?”
She sighs and then reaches behind her and undoes the straps of the mask.
When her true face is revealed, she licks her lips, closes her eyes, and exhales.
Her third eye, the one in the center of her forehead, the color of poppy milk, remains open. It has no pupil so it’s impossible to know where it’s looking, but Gabriel always gets the distinct impression it’s staring into his soul.
“You are prisoner here,” she says, “so that which is lost remains lost until it must be found.”
“And what is this lost thing?”
“Not a thing.” She opens her eyes and refocuses on him. “A god.”
