Bewitched in Oz

  Table of Contents

  .Prologue.

  .1.

  .2.

  .3.

  .4.

  .5.

  .6.

  .7.

  .8.

  .9.

  .10.

  .11.

  .12.

  .13.

  .14.

  .15.

  .16.

  .17.

  .18.

  .19.

  . Prologue .

  “Zerie Greenapple! Why aren’t you done sweeping yet?” Mama called.

  Zerie laughed. Her mama’s voice sounded amused. She knew perfectly well that Zerie was daydreaming again. Every time it was her turn to sweep the porch, Zerie mostly stood there and stared down the red dirt path in front of the house. If she squinted, she could just make out where it met up with the road of yellow brick out at the edge of town.

  Zerie liked to dream about what kinds of people she might meet if she ever went down that road. But her mother and her five older siblings liked to have the front porch clean when they ate dinner there on summer evenings.

  “Zerie, I’m coming out there in two minutes and you’d better be sweeping,“ Mama called.

  With a quiet sigh, Zerie picked up the broom again.

  Her oldest sister, Zelzah, used to tell Zerie that sweeping was the most important job in the Greenapple house. But now that she was fourteen years old, Zerie realized that her sister had tricked her.

  Zelzah just didn’t want to do the boring housework herself. She preferred to be out picking apples from the family’s orchard, because that’s where her new boyfriend worked.

  “I have a feeling you could do that a little faster if you wanted to,” said a voice behind her.

  Zerie jumped in surprise. “Grammy, I didn’t see you come outside!” she cried.

  Her grandmother smiled, contentedly rocking back and forth on the old wooden porch chair. “I can move quickly for an old lady,” Grammy said with a wink. “That’s why I know you can move quickly too. In fact, I think you could do the whole porch before your mama even gets out here.”

  Something in Grammy’s tone sent a thrill racing up Zerie’s spine. She tightened her grip on the broom handle.

  “I do want to finish fast. I hate sweeping,” she admitted.

  “Then think about the job being done. Picture the whole porch swept clean and sparkling,” Grammy said. “Close your eyes and imagine it. Can you see it?”

  Zerie nodded.

  “Then do it!”

  Zerie gripped the broom, picturing the familiar pattern in her head—left corner across the back to the right corner, then sweep everything toward the stairs in the center and off onto the dirt path.

  “What are you doing?”

  This time Mama’s voice didn’t sound amused. This time it sounded shocked—in a very bad way.

  Zerie opened her eyes and glanced around. Mama stood in the doorway, frowning at her. The porch was swept clean. Zerie frowned too. She’d pictured the job being done . . . but she hadn’t done the actual sweeping. Had she?

  “I said you could do it quickly, didn’t I?” Grammy’s eyes shone.

  “Mother! How could you encourage her to do this?” Mama cried, turning to Grammy. “Zerie was moving so fast I could barely even see her.”

  “She has the talent,” Grammy said proudly. “Just like me.”

  “Mother, it’s forbidden,” Mama replied. “You know what happens when a citizen of Oz uses magic—and you had Zerie do it right out in the open! What if somebody saw her?”

  “Saw me do what?” Zerie asked. “What’s forbidden?”

  “Sorcery!” Mama dropped her voice to a whisper. “Princess Ozma has outlawed the use of magic. Only she, Glinda, and the Wizard of Oz can do it.”

  Zerie’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. “I thought they were the only people who even knew how to do magic.”

  “No, child,” Grammy told her. “There has always been magic in Oz. Regular folk have the talent, too. We just aren’t allowed to use it anymore.”

  Zerie scanned the porch floor. It was perfectly clean. But all she remembered doing was a single swipe across the wood. “Do you . . . do you mean that I did magic? Just now?”

  “You swept the whole porch in the blink of an eye,” Grammy said. “Did you feel yourself moving?”

  “Not really.” Zerie felt her face break into a grin. “Is that my power? I just imagine things and they come true?”

  Grammy laughed, and even Mama smiled. “Not even Ozma has power like that!” Grammy said. “Your talent is the same as mine, Zerie. Speed.”

  “So . . . I moved fast? Or the broom did?” Zerie asked.

  “Both, I think. The truth is, you’ll have to learn for yourself how to use the talent. I can’t teach it to you, for the power of the magic comes from within each person.” Suddenly, Grammy was standing next to Mama in the doorway. Zerie blinked. She hadn’t seen the old lady move. “Try a few things,” Grammy went on. “Learn for yourself. Or find the others and learn together. Friends are always strongest together.” Grammy turned and walked into the house.

  “Don’t listen to her, Zerie,” Mama said anxiously. “Princess Ozma says we mustn’t do magic, and she’s our rightful leader. Promise me you’ll listen.”

  Zerie bit her lip. She couldn’t break a promise to her mother. But she needed to know how she’d swept the floor so fast. She felt as if she might burst unless she figured it out.

  “I don’t even know how I did it,” she finally said. “I doubt I could do it again.”

  “Good.” Mama went inside.

  “But that wasn’t a promise,” Zerie whispered.

  .1.

  “Where are you going?” Zelzah asked as Zerie jumped down the porch steps.

  Zerie stopped just long enough to give Zelzah’s round-faced baby a kiss. “Vashti needs some help with the bread basket she’s making today. We’re going into the woods to find the perfect branches for the handle,” she said.

  Zelzah smiled. “Have fun.”

  Zerie felt bad for lying to her sister, but this was the way it had to be. Since the moment she’d discovered her talent two years ago, Zerie had been forced to do a lot of fibbing. She couldn’t let Zelzah—or Mama or Grammy or anybody else in the family—know what she and her best friend were really going to do in the woods.

  It was bad enough that Zerie and Vashti practiced magic at all. It would be even worse if the people they loved got involved. Zerie knew her mother wanted her to ignore her talent. It wouldn’t be fair if Mama got in trouble because of Zerie.

  But how could she ignore her magic? It was the most important thing in her life!

  Well, except maybe Ned.

  “Hi, Zerie,” Ned Springer called as she slowly wandered past his round, red-brick house. Sure, the Springer home was in the opposite direction from the woods. But Zerie knew Ned would be out on the porch that wrapped all the way around the house, tinkering with some clockwork machine. That’s where he always was.

  Zerie pushed a lock of her curly red hair behind her ear and waved at him. “What are you making?” she asked.

  “A cuckoo clock,” he replied. “With a hummingbird that comes out and flies around the clock once for every hour.”

  “Wow. I can’t wait to see it when you’re done,” Zerie told him.

  She loved all of Ned’s clockwork machines . . . almost as much as she loved watching his strong, bare arms as he worked. Or his thick dark hair, with that one curl that always fell over his soulful brown eyes.

  “Where are you going?” came another voice. Ned’s younger brother, Brink, peered at her through an open upstairs window.

  “Oh, um . . .” Zerie tried to think of a good reason
she’d be passing the Springer house on the way to the woods. “I was . . . well, I was . . .”

  “There you are!” Vashti Weaver came running up the dusty road. “We should hurry or Tabitha will think we’re not coming.”

  “You’re meeting Tabitha?” Ned asked. “Hi, Vashti.”

  “Hi!” Vashti’s smile lit up her whole face, and her dark eyes sparkled.

  “Where are you going?” Brink said again.

  “Nowhere interesting.” Zerie grabbed her best friend’s arm. “Bye, Ned!”

  “Bye, Ned,” Vashti called.

  Ned waved as they headed away.

  Zerie walked as quickly as she could toward the forest, which meant sneaking through old Pa Underhill’s garden.

  Vashti trotted along beside her. “Why were you at the Springers’?” she asked.

  Should I tell her that I like Ned? Zerie wondered. After all, Vashti was her best friend. But the very thought of admitting—out loud—the way she felt about Ned made Zerie blush. It was too personal, too embarrassing.

  “Why were you there?” she asked instead.

  Vashti hesitated. “I was looking for you.”

  Something in her tone made Zerie wonder if that was true. Did Vashti suspect Zerie’s secret crush?

  “Tabitha really is going to worry,” Zerie said, trying to change the subject. “Let’s run!”

  She took off across Pa Underhill’s garden, hopping over the low stone wall along the edge. Vashti laughed and followed, her long black braid flying into the air. Beyond the wall was a small meadow, and then the trees. That was where the two girls stopped, right at the edge of the grass. The forest was made up of thick, red-trunked trees that grew so tall they blocked out the whole sky with their wide, lotus-shaped leaves. Nothing grew underneath them except for nightdrops, a soft carpet of tiny white flowers that covered the floor of the woods as far as the eye could see.

  None of the villagers ever went into the forest, because there was nothing to do there—no berries to pick, no animals to hunt, and no paths to follow. The nightdrops spread so quickly that they covered up any path in seconds. It was the perfect place for Zerie and her two best friends.

  “Ready?” Zerie asked, holding out her hand.

  “Ready,” Vashti said. She took Zerie’s hand and together they stepped into the forest. “One, two, three, four,” Vashti counted the trees they passed.

  “Five, six, seven,” Zerie went on. “And stop.” They stopped and turned to the left. “One step, two steps . . .” Zerie counted their paces until she got to forty, and then they stopped again.

  Then Vashti counted twelve more trees as they walked past, and they turned left again. Zerie counted their paces until she reached seventeen. Now they just had to go three trees to the right. It was the only way to find the meeting place that the three friends had agreed on, and Zerie knew all the numbers by heart. Nobody else would ever be able to find them, because nobody else knew the count.

  The tiny clearing right next to the third tree was empty.

  “I can’t believe Tabitha is late,” Vashti said. “This must be the first time ever.”

  A tinkling laugh danced through the air, and suddenly Zerie noticed the nightdrops on the ground crunching as if something heavy was on top of them. Then it happened again.

  Zerie gasped. “She’s invisible!”

  Vashti’s dark eyes widened in surprise. “Tabitha? Are you here?”

  The laugh came again, followed by Tabitha’s face, which appeared slowly, starting from her smiling lips and moving out to show her rosy cheeks, her hazel eyes, and her silky blond hair.

  “Can you believe it?” Tabitha asked.

  Zerie stared at her friend, who was just a floating head about five feet above the forest floor. “No. And it’s a little strange.”

  “Sorry.” The rest of Tabitha appeared, and she laughed again. “I’ve been practicing every night because my father is away in the Emerald City. And it’s paid off!”

  Vashti bit her lip, looking worried. “Even if your dad’s not there, you shouldn’t do magic in your house. What if somebody saw you through the window?”

  “Or didn’t see you,” Zerie put in. “You know we have to keep our talents secret.”

  “We’ve been practicing in secret for two years now, and I’ve hardly learned anything about using my magic,” Tabitha replied. “But in the past week I practiced every day and look at me now.” She held up her arm and then made it disappear from the tips of her graceful fingers all the way to her shoulder. “I couldn’t do that a week ago.”

  Zerie felt torn. She and her friends met in the forest every week to explore their magical abilities. Zerie knew she could move fast, but so far all she’d managed to do was run back and forth quickly enough to make a path through the nightdrops. It wasn’t a big deal—the flowers grew back over her pathway within a minute afterward. And Vashti’s powers hadn’t grown much either. When she’d first admitted to Zerie that she had magic, Vashti had been able to make a pebble float about an inch off the ground. These days she could make the pebble float halfway up one of the tall, red tree trunks.

  But Tabitha had made herself disappear. That was a gigantic step forward. Like Zerie and Vashti, Tabitha had first realized she had a talent at fourteen, when she’d made the ends of her fingers fade away until they were almost transparent. In the two years since then, she’d managed to make her feet vanish . . . and that was the last thing Zerie had seen her do, a week ago.

  It was amazing how quickly Tabitha’s power had grown.

  “Did you really learn that just from trying?” Zerie asked. “Nobody showed you how to use your talent?”

  Tabitha shrugged. “I haven’t been doing anything else,” she admitted. “I didn’t even brush my hair today.” She ran a hand over her golden tresses and winced, even though she looked beautiful, as usual. Tabitha always looked gorgeous.

  “Do you think we could do that too?” Vashti asked. “Grow our talents as fast as you did? Maybe we could meet here two times a week instead of one.”

  “It’s hard enough keeping it secret now,” Zerie said slowly. “What are you going to do when your father comes back from the Emerald City, Tabitha? You can’t keep practicing in the house then.”

  “I know.” Tabitha frowned. “But I can’t just stop! I finally feel as if I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. It’s like the old story about Princess Ozma, when she was enchanted and turned into a boy named Tip—remember, the minute Glinda broke the enchantment, Ozma immediately knew who her real self was? That’s how I’ve felt since I made myself invisible for the first time, like I finally know exactly who I am.”

  Vashti and Zerie glanced at each other and smiled. Tabitha had an old Ozma story for everything. She loved all the legends about the heroes of Oz.

  “Don’t you feel that way?” Tabitha asked Zerie. “Don’t you wish you could be working your magic all the time?”

  “More than anything,” Zerie said. “I love my talent. I wish we didn’t have to hide.”

  “If we get caught, Ozma will take the talent away, that’s what my uncle from the city says,” Vashti put in. “He says he saw it once—an enchantress was brought before Ozma and Glinda the Good, and they agreed that she must be punished. The Wizard of Oz took her by the hand and led her into the Forbidden Fountain.”

  Zerie felt a prickle of fear.

  “Into the Water of Oblivion?” Tabitha asked. “That’s the most dangerous substance in the whole Land of Oz. In the old tales, it can even make people forget their own names! They don’t really put people in there just for using magic, do they?”

  Vashti nodded. “The Wizard put her in the fountain . . . and she vanished beneath the water.”

  Tabitha’s hand flew to her mouth, and Zerie gasped. “But what happened to her?” Zerie asked.

  “No one knows for sure.” Vashti shrugged helplessly. “My uncle said he saw her again a few days later and she seemed dazed. She didn’t remember anything—no
t the Fountain, and not her talent.”

  “Can that really happen? My talent feels like it’s part of me. Could they really just . . . remove it?” Tabitha asked.

  “I don’t want to even think about it,” Zerie whispered, wrapping her arms around herself. “It would be like cutting off my arm, or my nose.”

  “How do you think they’d find us, though?” Vashti said after a moment. “I mean, if anyone from the village caught us out here, they wouldn’t turn us in, would they?”

  “Maybe.” Zerie bit her lip. “Maybe Ozma has spies.”

  “Remember when Bill Pickle got taken away by the Winged Monkeys?” Tabitha dropped her voice to a whisper. “We never did find out how they knew that he was stealing from your orchard, Zerie.”

  Zerie shivered at the memory of the terrifying monkeys. She knew they were Ozma’s servants and that she shouldn’t be scared of them. But up close, their eyes had been so black and the sound of their wings so loud . . .

  “I don’t think it’s fair,” Vashti said. “Bill Pickle was a thief. He did something wrong. All we’re doing is being ourselves and practicing our talents. We don’t deserve to be treated the same way.”

  “That’s what my grammy says. Not to me—to my parents,” Zerie admitted. “I hear them talking about it sometimes. Grammy has the speed talent, too, and my mama knows about it. But my pop yells whenever Grammy talks about it. He says it’s nonsense and that Ozma’s rules are always for the best.”

  “Easy for him to say, he’s a man.” Tabitha rolled her eyes. “Men don’t have magic. What do they know?”

  “Well, some men do. The Wizard does,” Vashti said. She liked stories about the Wizard of Oz almost as much as Tabitha like stories about Ozma.

  Tabitha waved her hand in the air. “Maybe there are one or two around with a talent. But we all know that when it comes to magic, girls rule!” She made her face disappear again, leaving only her wide-set hazel eyes.

  Zerie couldn’t help laughing. Her friend looked ridiculous. Vashti giggled too. “Stop that! I’m going to have dreams about eyes just floating around on their own.”

  Tabitha’s smile appeared. “Levitate something,” she said. “Something bigger than a pebble.”