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Ten minutes later, we’re in a massive dining room, our plates heaping with eggs, toasted bread, and bacon. I found a jar of marmalade in the cooling room, and brought that out along with two bottles of apple cider.

The dining table is long enough to seat a small army, but Tin and I take the two seats at the farthest end where a tall, arched window overlooks the castle’s side garden.

“I needed this,” I say. “I didn’t know you were a cook.”

“If a man doesn’t know how to cook some eggs, then he’s a fucking idiot.”

I burst out laughing. “I’m not sure that would land well where I come from. There’s a lot of people who still think it’s a woman’s job to stay in the kitchen.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “They like to say the man is the head of the household and his job is to provide. Women should make babies and care for the home and submit to the husband because they aren’t fit to lead.”

“That sounds like the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard. Have these men met women?”

Oh, I am delighted by the direction of this conversation. Tin is exactly the type of man who would be held up as the standard of masculinity. And here he is cooking me breakfast, completely baffled by gender roles in my world.

Or rather, the world I grew up in.

I’m realizing now that it wasn’t my world.

Oz was and it was taken from me without my consent.

When I was a child, I would tell Em, over and over, I want to go home. But I didn’t know what home was. I only knew that I desperately missed it.

When I try to think back to those early days, I can’t remember much before the West dropped me on Em and Henry’s doorstep. It’s all very murky, almost a blank.

I want to resent the West for leaving me, but she said the royals tried to kill me because I was a bastard.

So maybe I’m being too hard on her for making the decisions she did.

I break open one of the eggs and bright, golden yolk spills out. Just like our eggs at home.

I dip a corner of the toasted bread into it and take a bite.

Without thinking, another moan escapes me and when I look across the table, I find Tin staring at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, half joking. “I really love food. It’s, like, my favorite thing.”

“They’re just eggs.”

“Yes, but very good eggs.”

The triangle of toast disappears in a flash and I move on to the next one, slathering that in marmalade. There was no label on the jar, but I think it’s grape and when I take my first bite, I’m proven right. Except these grapes taste nothing like ours back home. These grapes have a much deeper flavor, almost bitter, and I wonder if it has anything to do with the lack of sunlight here.

“Tell me about the city outside the Emerald Palace. I’m assuming we’ll use the slippers to take us there? It’ll help if I know what it looks like.”

Tin points the end of his knife at a buffet table behind me. “I thought about the same and went to the West’s library to see what she had on the palace. I pulled out what I could find. Several have blueprints and paintings to orient you.”

“You continue to impress me,” I tell him, shoving my chair back.

His expression is blank, but I see the dip of his Adam’s apple as he swallows and there is no food in his mouth.

I go to the buffet and grab the heavy stack. There are six books total. The top one is called The Architecture of the Emerald Palace, so I start there, flipping it open to a random page.

As I eat, I scan the imagery.

The Emerald Palace has a mix of styles, like Art Deco meets Gothic. But I’m not sure palace is the right word for it. From the aerial painting, it looks like a small city with the palace at the head, and a city that spreads out from it.