Page 49

“Sorry.” I pick up my pace, face hot despite the cool earth surrounding us. “I’m coming.”

I’m not sure how long it takes us to travel from one end to the other, but it doesn’t seem like long at all. Soon we’re emerging into the garden shed and Tin is taking my hand, hauling me out.

“Where is your fortune teller located?”

I didn’t get to stay in Glimming Hollow long and I have to rack my brain for the directions we were given by one of the East Enders who was flirting with Rook. I can see the woman’s dress in my mind, can see Rook eating fruit at our breakfast table and …

“Olligan Lane.”

Tin closes the door behind us and covers it with a dusty tarp and wooden crate. “Getting there won’t be easy. It’s in the middle of town.”

“Maybe the people of the Hollow didn’t hear the Wizard’s warning?”

Tin gives me a look.

“Right. Chances of that are unlikely?”

His metal hand comes to the small of my back and nudges me out of the shed.

It’s silent around the abandoned house, but light pollution from the town farther beyond makes it much easier to see here than in the forest.

“The people of Oz might not know what the Wizard looks like, but they treat him like a god. They will hang on his every word and do his bidding.”

“Is his sway absolute?”

With the shed closed up, we follow the dirt path away from the house and toward Glimming Hollow.

“No, not absolute. There are people who, if any of them got wind of a surviving royal, they would be ready to fight in an instant.”

“A surviving royal?” I ask.

He barely looks at me. “Don’t be daft.”

“Wait … I … oh. You mean me?”

“Yes, Dorothy. I mean you.”

“But I’m not—”

Now he stops to look at me. “You’re not what? The daughter of a former Oz princess? The niece of the former Oz queen?”

“But … that doesn’t mean…” I trail off, because what else do I think it means?

It hits me all at once. Even though I had all the same facts that Tin did. Even though Rook accused me in front of the entire population of Oz of trying to overthrow him.

I am royalty.

“Holy shit.”

“It didn’t occur to you?” he says, sounding a little annoyed.

“No!”

“Well then, catch up, princess.”

“Don’t call me that. I didn’t grow up here. Maybe on paper that’s how it works out, but in reality? I’m no more a princess than I am an astronaut.”

“A what?”