Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Read online

  A maid in a short frilly uniform, all white thighs and rouged knees, greeted me when I arrived. She threw her arms around my neck with overwhelming familiarity.

  “Mr. Kristoff!” she exclaimed.

  When I paused to take a second look, I noticed with embarrassment that she was not actually a maid at all, but Lady Flashgleam Sparkle in costume.

  “Why in the name of Lurline are you dressed like that?” I asked.

  Flashgleam scanned for witnesses. “Not here. Come on.”

  She took my hand—so forward!—and pulled me across the threshold into one of the Palace’s many emerald-accented parlors. As she led me briskly through corridors lined with gems and mirrors, I expected someone to stop us and ask Flashgleam why she was in costume, but apparently no one pays heed to maids who are escorting visitors.

  We reached her rooms. She closed the door behind us and then went to her windows—which overlooked a courtyard where gardeners grew green orchids, green roses, and green hydrangeas—and swept the velvet curtains closed.

  Flashgleam Sparkle is the only remaining scion of the house Sparkle, which had once sent its noble sons and daughters to attend the courts of Ozma III through Ozma XVI. Now that the line of the Ozmas has been broken, and the Wizard sits in their stead, most of the old noble families have departed the Emerald City for country estates.

  Flashgleam, as the sole Sparkle heir, remained in the City of Emeralds, surrounded by the remnants of her family’s glory. Last year, after she had the family’s town house closed, declaring it too large for a single person, the Wizard offered her accommodations in his Palace as suited a person with her venerable lineage.

  This was all according to plan.

  While two people of our relative stations would not normally have interacted, Flashgleam had been my client for a number of years. Whenever she received gifts of jewelry—for instance, from suitors—she had the habit of commissioning me to craft facsimiles with which she could replace the original ornaments. Subsequently, she sold the genuine jewels through black market connections. It is always important—she says—for a woman to have unexpected reservoirs of cash.

  My discretion in helping her create such forgeries had encouraged her to invite me into her secret cabal.

  It has, I must say, made my life considerably more interesting than it was before.

  Flashgleam arrayed herself on a divan. She crossed her legs, exposing white thigh with the casual disregard of dignity that only women of high station can afford. She said, “When I’m wearing this uniform, I can poke around anywhere.”

  I asked, “What did you find?”

  “The pot of treasure,” she said with a broadening smile. “We were right about everything. He’s a charlatan.”

  When the show began, there were ten individual contestants. First thing, Glinda split them into teams. Team Dorothy (so named because she’d won the first challenge) approached the City from Munchkin Country. A group of three approached from Quadling Country and another three-entity group approached from Gillikin.

  None started in Winkie Country due to the embargo against the Wicked Witch of the West.

  The Quadling Team was the first to be eliminated. Their team leader, a lanky Quadling boy, lost a wrestling match with a Fighting Tree. After that, Dairy Belle, the animated butter pat, couldn’t figure out how to do a glamour shoot reflecting her unique Quadling heritage, not least because she melted under the spotlights.

  At first it seemed as though Pulp, who was one of the famous living paper dolls fashioned by Mrs. Cuttenclip, might make it on her own. She folded herself into a paper airplane and caught a passing wind. It would have carried her to the Emerald City much faster than the other teams could manage, but alas, the wind blew her into a river, where she turned into mulch and was swept downstream.

  Initially, the viewers—the cynical bathhouse crowd among them—were in it to watch blood and teeth. The Kalidah challenge mustered a great deal of excitement. The bathhouses echoed with ladies’ screams as the monsters’ ursine bodies lumbered into view. Even I admit having felt a tremor when the light flashed across their bared tiger-teeth.

  If it hadn’t been for the first interview with Dorothy, perhaps the show would never have been anything more than a blood sport.

  Glinda began the interview during a quiet moment. Dorothy sat under a peach tree in the evening light, her dog, Toto, running circles around her feet. Glinda knelt so that she was eye-to-eye with the child. She asked, “What do you wish for?”

  Dorothy looked up. Breeze stirred her wheat-blond curls.

  “I just want to go home,” she said.

  “Don’t you like Oz?” asked Glinda.

  Dorothy’s hand flew to her mouth. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “Oh! I should mind my manners! Of course I like Oz. It’s a beautiful place!”

  “So why not stay?”

  Dorothy’s cornflower eyes cut shyly away. She smoothed her pinafore. “Kansas is…well, it may be boring, but it’s home. You have to go back home. It’s where you belong.”

  A drop glittered in her eye.

  She murmured, “And Aunt Em must miss me terribly.”

  In the bathhouse, the intellectuals snorted derisively. “Sentimental manipulation,” they called it.

  Even so, Dorothy’s words had taken what had been a silly amusement—no more significant than any game of cards—and transformed it into something that could tug at any of us.

  We all remembered being children. We all remembered wanting to go home.

  I am reasonably certain that Flashgleam Sparkle is the mastermind behind WISH.

  I have not asked, and she has not volunteered the information. Still, the Good Witch of the South is reputed to be sympathetic to her cause, although the affiliations of witches are ever fickle.

  More to the point, while Flashgleam and I avoided the subject of the show’s derivation, we had discussed how well it suits her agenda.

  If the Wizard was indeed a fraud—as we had long suspected—then the show would present him a terrible dilemma.

  Once WISH became popular—an instantaneous phenomenon—he couldn’t shut it down without revealing not only that he wasn’t the architect behind it, but also that he had so little control of what was going on in his own territory that he hadn’t been able to identify and halt such a large, rebellious magical undertaking before it began.

  If he let the show run, he found himself tangled in yet another dilemma—he couldn’t refuse to grant an audience to the winner unless he was willing to show himself as both incompetent and heartless. Yet, if he was a fraud, he couldn’t admit the winner without being exposed as unable to grant their wish.

  So far the Wizard had appeared to be biding his time, plotting his strategy as he allowed the competition to unfold. Flashgleam believed that he would eventually find a way to cut himself free of the dilemma; fraud or not, the Wizard was not stupid.

  However, she also believed that the show would cause turmoil behind the throne. Frantic and furious, the Wizard would interrogate his staff, searching for his betrayer, disturbing the loyalties he’d so carefully built. During his reign, he’d quelled nascent rebellions with the mere threat of magic. Flashgleam hoped that disorder in his administration would give her the fingerholds she needed to pry the Wizard loose from his throne.

  All this hinged, of course, on the thesis that he was actually a fraud.

  “It’s all done with gears,” Flashgleam said. She smoothed the ruffled maid’s collar over her bosom. “And pulleys and levers and…I don’t know, I’m not a machinist. But it’s all machines.”

  “The Wizard?” I asked.

  “His audience chamber,” she corrected. “There’s a curtain drawn in front of it. But behind, it’s all machines. There’s something like a projector focused on the emerald throne. I think he’s using photographic stills to create illusions.”

  “That’s why everyone reports seeing different things in the throne room,” I said.

 
“Right!” She raised her hands in excitement. Her fingers shone with the convincing forgeries of rings her lovers had gifted her. “Flames, and bats, and women carved from wood. They’re photographs. Manipulations.”

  “So this is proof.”

  “Proof,” she agreed. “Finally.”

  I was no watchmaker, but as a jeweler, I had more experience than most with the intricacies of machinery. “If you can give me fifteen minutes or so with the machines, I can figure out how to disrupt them.”

  Flashgleam looked up, a slight frown on her face. “Hmm?”

  “He’ll be able to repair them eventually, of course.”

  “Oh.” Flashgleam laughed indulgently. “Always thinking like a craftsman, aren’t you? You’d solve everything with a chisel if you could.” She leaned forward. “Chaos is well and good, but assassinations are simpler.”

  I shouldn’t have been taken aback, but I was. I had allowed myself to be lulled by the fact that Flashgleam Sparkle had, so far, limited herself to subterfuge. I’d hoped that we might expose the Wizard as a hapless marionette and let the Emerald Citizens themselves demand regime change without any need for cloaks and daggers.

  “You’re going to kill the Wizard?” I asked.

  “We needed to know if he was a fraud. He is. He has no magic. He won’t see us coming.” She shook her head. “But no, I’m not going to kill the Wizard.”

  I knew what she was going to say next. I knew, but I still was unhappy when the words came from her lips.

  “You are.”

  When Glinda caught him alone, the Lion giggled nervously.

  “I think I want to win. I mean, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t, right?” His amber eyes darted back and forth. “But then, thinking about it, if I had courage then I’d want to fight, right? And fighting…anything could happen. There could be, like, a bear. And he’d run at me, and I’d, like, snarl back, because I’d be brave, and he’d probably chew my ears off.”

  His tail twitched.

  “Is that what I’m competing for? A chance to, you know, have a bear chew my ears off?”

  He rested his head on his paws. His downturned muzzle looked mournful despite his massive teeth.

  “But I want to win. Of course I do. Uh. Courage. Give it to me. Yeah.”

  Hesitantly, he swiped his paw through the air.

  “Rawr.”

  Despite a strong early showing, Team Gillikin fizzled midway.

  Another child was heading that team, a twelve-year-old from Uptown with purple skin and telescoping limbs. She traveled with a nymph from the Gillikin fog banks and a melancholy man from the Flathead Mountains who carried his brain in a jug.

  In the Forest of the Winged Monkeys, they were kidnapped by the location’s simian namesakes. One hundred feet into the air, the Flathead panicked and dropped his jug. At two hundred feet, a rising wind dispersed the mist maiden into the clouds.

  Only the little girl survived; when the Monkeys lifted her into the air, she telescoped her legs so that no matter how high they took her, she was always touching the ground.

  Though saddened by the loss of her companions, she was able to travel much more quickly without worrying about how they’d keep up. She telescoped her legs out as far as they would go and bounded by leagues.

  Not far from the border, she glimpsed a pair of telescoping green legs doing the same. Upon investigation, they turned out to belong to a young green boy, who was off to seek his fortune in Quadling Country. Their conversation further revealed that they were both odd-colored, telescoping children born to tan, fixed-length parents, and—more importantly—that they enjoyed each other’s company.

  The girl revealed that her wish had been to find someone else like her. As it had been fulfilled, she left the competition and telescoped into the clouds with her new green friend.

  The first time that Lady Sparkle broached the subject of revolution with me, she was wearing a woolen traveling cloak, as if she planned to leave the City. A petite fascinator fashioned from feathers and silk left her head almost shockingly bare.

  She handed me a pair of jade hair sticks and watched my hands as I examined the carvings I’d need to replicate in order to make convincing facsimiles.

  She ordinarily made pleasant small talk, which was unusual for someone of her status. For weeks I’d been noticing that her superficially inane conversation was in fact driving at something. She’d been feeling out my politics, I was sure, though I didn’t know to what end.

  That day, however, she made a direct assay. “I’ve heard stories about your grandfather, you know.”

  I made a noncommittal noise and squinted at the hair sticks. The kinds of stories that aristocrats told about my grandfather were not my favorite subject of conversation.

  She pressed me on it. “He was the royal jeweler, wasn’t he?”

  Matter-of-factly I said, “He was.”

  She gestured at my little shop with its dusty shelves and poor lighting. “So how did you end up here?”

  I shrugged. Though I refused to meet her eye, I could feel her glance on me.

  “You’re not untalented,” she continued. “In fact, you’re very talented indeed.”

  With a sigh I looked up, still holding the jeweler’s loupe to my eye. Flashgleam Sparkle is a pretty woman, but under magnification, she looked all powder and artifice: a woman made of paint.

  “You’ve heard stories about my grandfather,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me?”

  Her dimples deepened, as if she was merely trying out a piece of juicy gossip, but her tone remained serious. “He was caught in a plot to overthrow Ozma the Sixteenth.”

  “That’s right.”

  Her smile broadened. She lifted her glasses away from her face. I barely contained my gasp—I was a man of the world, but still, a woman like her baring her eyes while alone with a man?

  “He imbued her diadem with a sleeping spell,” Flashgleam continued.

  I allowed myself a raised brow. “That part isn’t common knowledge.”

  “I’m not a common woman.”

  She leaned toward me, placing her hands on my desk. Her eye loomed giant in my jeweler’s loupe, an aristocratic shade of deep river-green.

  “I think you’re more like him than you let on,” Flashgleam said. “Am I right?”

  When I said nothing, she reached into the purse hung on her sash and pulled out a handful of sparkling green chips.

  “I can offer incentive,” she said.

  As I looked into her palm, I struggled to maintain my equanimity.

  “They’re genuine,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “Lurline emeralds.”

  Lurline emeralds were the most valuable gem in all of Oz. They’d been created when Lurline made fairyland, and they were imbued with her magic. My grandfather had worked with them when he was a jeweler for the court. None were supposed to exist outside of the Ozmas’ treasury.

  Exercising my steeliest will, I waved my hand in refusal. “If I help you, I will do it out of conviction. Not avarice.”

  The rest of our conversation is easy to imagine, but I’ll add one corroborating detail:

  When Flashgleam Sparkle left my shop that afternoon wearing her woolen traveling cloak, neither I nor anyone else in the City saw her for several days. It wasn’t long after she returned that all the globes in the City lit up with those sparkling emerald serifs.

  WISH.

  There are many people in the Emerald City who are discontented with the Wizard.

  Some are Ozma purists, waiting for the return of Ozma XVII. Others note his fascistic tendencies: public punishments, harsh curfews, a large and well-armored imperial guard.

  Where the Ozmas had always delegated policy-making to the Witches of the Realms, the Wizard insisted on deciding all matters without regard for local hierarchies. Against his advisors’ warnings, he’d implemented the embargo against the Wicked Witch of the West, ostensibly motivated by concern for the Winkie people, but it was well-
known that the actual dispute was about the Wizard’s attempts to control the provinces.

  Flashgleam Sparkle dislikes the Wizard because, unlike the Ozmas, he declines to be controlled by the nobility. She finds herself cut loose from the power she’d always assumed would be hers by right of inheritance.

  I myself dislike the Wizard for much the same reason that I expect my grandfather disliked Ozma XVI. My family has served monarchs as their jewelers for generations. We’ve always paid attention to their flaws. The Wizard doesn’t really care about the people. Ozma XVI didn’t either.

  Maybe Flashgleam Sparkle will.

  “I’m a bit different from the others,” the Tin Man told Glinda when it was his turn with her. “The Scarecrow never had a brain. The Lion never had any courage. I used to have a heart.”

  He rapped his knuckles against the side of his head. The sound echoed in his empty skull. “I don’t have a brain anymore either, but what I miss is my heart.”

  The illusion of emotion clouded his eyes, something complicated and delicate like wistfulness or regret.

  “I don’t have blood anymore, so I won’t need my heart to pump,” he said. “All I need to do is feel. More deeply and more complexly than I ever did. Every minute. Every hour. I want to understand what it feels like to hate and love and laugh at something at the same time. I want to feel the poignant pain of looking at something beautiful and knowing it’s going to die. I want to feel everything. Everything.”

  His fingers grasped the air, trying to hold on to something that wasn’t there, a gesture that could easily have been mistaken for passion.

  His hand drifted back to his side.

  “If I win, of course,” he added softly.

  Last night’s poppy challenge was a bit silly. Make the best bouquet you can in ten minutes. But oops, there’s a twist. The bouquet was only a decoy. The real challenge was to get out of the poppy field before falling asleep.