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“There was one story that the royals tried to bury more than any of the others. Because for them, appearances were everything, reputations must be unstained. The story of how the West became pregnant suddenly and out of wedlock, and she refused to tell anyone who the father was.”

Toto growls, low and deep down in his belly.

“That’s why she was exiled to the West Castle, the family’s summer estate.”

I push away from the wall and go to the bars running along the front of his cell. I crouch down closer to his eye level. He watches me with wariness.

“She must know by now that the West was her mother. Do you think she’s thought to ask who her father might be?”

The growl rumbles lower.

“You know who he is, don’t you?”

He breathes out, letting the growl fade.

“If only you could speak, so you could tell her.”

I straighten. He follows the movement and if a dog could scowl, he would be cutting me with this look.

“What do you think will happen if I find him first?”

A bark snaps out of him. He lurches to his feet.

I fold the letter back up and leave, his barking following me all the way up the stairs.

Gabriel sits in front of a table in the private dining room adjoining the bedroom known as the Oak Room.

It’s known as such because the furniture is made of oak from the Ancient Forest, back before the forest came alive and smashed anyone who dared to come near, let alone with an axe.

There’s a bowl of fresh fruit, a basket of cut bread, a spread of meats and cheeses, several jars of compound butter and jellies.

Most of the food is untouched.

“Is it not to your liking?”

He blinks up at me, startled, and hides the unease with a laugh.

“I dreamed of a feast almost every day I was in that cell. But all of it tastes too sweet, too … It’s just too much, I guess.”

“Mmmm.” I pluck a few red grapes from their vine and pop them in my mouth. Gabriel takes a swig of the ale. I notice all of his cups are nearly empty.

“How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know.” He fingers the stem of the wineglass that sits on his left.

“You took a bath.”

The dirt has been scrubbed from his face, his hands. His blond hair is still damp and raked back. He’s aged in the years since he was imprisoned, but not as much as he should have.

Men do not inherit magic, but if anyone were to find a workaround, it would be Glinda.

Gabriel’s power isn’t an active magic, not like mine, not like the Cardinal Witches’. His is an entirely different modality. If my magic is a thunderstorm, then Gabriel’s is a secret. It’s nothing that can be seen or felt or held. Only whispered.

“After all these years,” he says, “water feels like a luxury.”

I break open another grape, the juice blooming on my tongue. And because my mind is a traitor, it conjures an image of Kansas and the yearning always bristling beneath her carefully held exterior.

If I am a thunderstorm, then she is a hurricane pretending to be a summer breeze. All of that maddening possibility.