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Pink is her color, as if the brightness of it can hide her graying heart.

“He’s not well,” she adds, as if to convince me.

“Of course he’s not. He just spent three years locked in a dungeon. What did you expect?” I twist off the cap on a bottle of mead. Mead is Glinda’s favorite. It reminds her of her childhood. Her father had an apiary and used the honey to brew the mead. She doesn’t talk about her father often, but we’ve heard the story of how he lost his hive a dozen times.

It was the fault of the gods.

Everything is always the fault of the gods. Maybe that’s why they left. Because of self-righteous whiners who think power is owed to them.

Power must be earned.

I pour mead into one of the rainbow-hued wineglasses Glinda took from Lacosta. The north is well known for its glassmaking.

“Remove the curse.” She’s standing beside me now, her jaw set, her arms crossed.

“No.”

I don’t consider myself an empath, but I can always sense when my mother is angry. It’s a tug at my sternum, like a fisherman’s hook lodged into bone, the line being yanked.

She lowers her voice, but somehow still shouts at me. “How am I to know if he’s shifted?”

The panic makes her voice wobble beneath her frustration.

I turn to her. “You’re not.”

Her nostrils flare. The air around her glitters with soft light.

“Darling,” she says, but the term of endearment grinds between her molars. “I have no access to my power if I don’t know when and if your brother has shifted into any random animal.”

“But I thought you gave up killing animals?” The sarcasm is apparent.

Am I baiting her? Of course. Once the royal family was dead and the war over, she told the people of Oz she had given up killing animals for power. Her reputation needed a rebrand. She couldn’t be Glinda the Good while slaughtering goats.

But she never stopped. She just got better at hiding it.

Now my baby brother is free, and the curse I put on him? It makes him change into different animals depending on the day or the mood.

If it seems like that curse was crafted just to punish Glinda the Good, that’s because it was.

Gabriel might be her favorite, but she was never in a hurry to rescue him from the Witch of the West. As long as she knew he was safe and locked away, she could continue to burn through the animal kingdom for power.

Because there is nothing Glinda fears more than being powerless.

I suppose some of that rubbed off on me.

Her tongue runs over her teeth. “What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“God—”

I cut her off with a look that could draw blood. “Don’t call me that.”

She wrinkles her nose at me. “What, now you don’t like the name your mother gave you?”

When I don’t answer, she relents and asks, “Then what am I to call you?”

I scent the mead as it blooms in the glass. “Call me Rook.”