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Maybe if I can click my heels together …

I shift my weight a little, but as I do, the branch I’m holding cracks, the wood tearing away from the shaft.

Shit. This isn’t good.

Another whack hits the trunk and my branch changes trajectory, whipping toward the ground, and as the ground rises up to meet me, I let go. The momentum sends me sailing again, but this time I’m too high. The drop is too much. I’m going to break every bone.

I get my feet beneath me and clack my heels together and the magic of the slippers carries me to safety at the very last second.

I reappear in the middle of the grove of fighting trees, and through the tangle of branches, I can see Rook and his blade at the center of the tree.

And out of the corner of my eye, a large silhouette, dodging branches, running … right at Rook.

The Tin Woodman.

FORTY-ONETinman

My brother hits the dirt with a clack of teeth. But he’s up again, facing me.

“Decided to join the fun, did you?” he asks.

“You made a mistake giving me my heart back.”

His expression tightens. “Everyone is telling me my mistakes today. You might as well add to the list.”

“If you’d kept my heart, I wouldn’t have cared enough about any of this to intervene.”

“Why do you care? Why are you here, Silas?”

I let him keep my name this time.

And the surprise that registers on his face is exactly what I was aiming for.

“I’m not going to let you win,” I tell him.

“So who does win? You?”

I glance to my right, to Dorothy a hundred paces off. He follows my gaze and when we look at one another again, his teeth are gritted.

“You barely know her. Her recklessness killed Gabriel.”

“You cursed him. You let the West imprison him. You did nothing to save him.”

The darkness seems to mount around us like a cursed mist.

“She told me to leave him there. She said if I left him, she’d help me find the gods so we could save Oz. But she never did.”

“Who?” I ask, but there’s a needling in my throat. I already know who.

“Glinda.”

I know the Wizard cursed Gabriel as some kind of punishment against Glinda. Glinda’s source of magic is living things, primarily animals. And if her baby boy could be any animal at the drop of a hat, she wouldn’t risk it for power. Not where Gabriel was concerned.

If Gabriel was imprisoned in the West’s dungeon, then her worries were gone.

“Did she try to find the gods?”

He scans the ground nearby, searching for his weapon, and spots it fifteen feet to my left.