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I close my eyes, creating the picture in my head while my heart starts thumping with worry.

I can do this. It’s just a click of my heels, right?

“To the left of the building is a storage shed and behind that a stable.”

“How many windows?”

“What? I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Two, three. Four, I think. In the front. I don’t know on the side.”

“Okay. Hold on to me.”

He scowls, clearly still very suspicious of all this, but he steps into my personal space and winds his arms around my waist, hugging me to his chest. The crossbow makes it a little awkward, but we manage to get close enough that whatever power may linger in my shoes will have no doubt we’re a package deal.

“Ready?” I ask and look up at him.

A lock of his brown hair hangs along his face and sweat gleams on his forehead from the effort of killing men and beasts.

Rook and Tin may be brothers, but they can’t be more different. Rook is clever like a fox, his presence as overwhelming as a storm cloud. Tin is steady like a mountain, but sharp as a blade.

They have different strengths, different faults, and they bring me different pleasures.

I wasn’t lying when I told Rook that perhaps I took from both of them exactly what I needed. Rook tests my mind like a puzzle box, and Tin has already helped me excavate all the things I’ve wanted to ignore.

“Ready when you are.”

I hold on to him tightly and click my heels together.

We’re yanked from the woods. Everything goes dark. Then, blinding light.

I feel weightless, which is not the same way I felt the first time, or the second, and when the world solidifies again, I realize we’re dropping out of the sky.

“Oh shit!” I yell.

Tin tightens his grip on me and we hit a thatched roof, bounce off it, then careen toward the ground.

Somehow, we’re lucky enough to land in a pile of hay.

We lie there for several long seconds, catching our breath.

“Fuck, I’m never doing that again,” Tin says.

“At least we made it. We did make it, didn’t we?”

Tin climbs to his feet and looks past the fenced-in area where we landed. I think I slightly overshot and carried us to the stable behind the tavern.

Ahead of us, the twangy music of a fiddle sounds through the cracks in the timbered walls.

“Yeah, we made it.”

“Then it was successful, if slightly overshot.”

Tin grumbles and unlatches the fence, letting me through first.

The Jolly Emerald Tavern sits in front of us on the edge of a dirt road. The Yellow Brick Road is nowhere in sight, but maybe that’s for the best.