The Wicked Will Rise Read Free

silent type.
    Star snuggled up in the crook of my neck, and we coasted along silently into the night, the stars brushing against my cheeks like little snowflakes. The clouds stretched out in every direction like an infinite ocean. I dipped my fingers in and let them skim the surface, scooping up little cottony pieces just to watch them melt into nothing in my hand.
    Up here, things were peaceful. We couldn’t see the burning city anymore. It was just us and the stars. I could almost imagine that Oz was still the place I’d read about in storybooks, the magical, happy land of Munchkins and talking animals, where witches were wicked but could be killed with nothing more thana little old-fashioned Kansas elbow grease and a bucket of mop water.
    I was still imagining the Oz that could have been—the Oz I should have found—when I felt Star’s little body slacken against my neck. She was asleep.
    That did it. You might think it would be hard to relax in a situation like this—and believe me, it was—but between the twinkling stars and the wind on my face, the swooping up and down as Ollie sailed into one current after another, and the comforting, steady feeling of my rat nestled in my shoulder, soon I was asleep, too. I didn’t dream.

    When my eyes fluttered back open, the sun was a red wedge on the horizon. Morning was dawning, and all of Oz was spread out below us like an old crazy quilt. I’d never been in an airplane before, but somehow I had a feeling that this was better. We were flying low enough now to make out the details of the landscape—the purple swatches of farmland bordered by toy-sized villages; the winding, glittering rivers and the hazy, jagged mountains to the north.
    In the distance was a dark, forbidding forest that stretched as far as I could see. I had a feeling that was where we were headed.
    But as I watched the scenery below us, I noticed that something was happening down there. Something was changing. All across the grassy plain, I could see little pinpricks of color appearing and then spreading. When I looked more closely, I realized they were flowers, blossoming by the second. A fewminutes later, the grassy plain wasn’t grassy at all—it was an enormous, ever-changing expanse of blossoms popping up in every color I could imagine. Some were big enough that I could count the petals from all the way up here.
    The forest ahead of us was changing, too. At first, I thought that it was just because it was getting closer, but no. As we approached, it became easier to make out the fact that the trees were actually getting taller, twisting up into the sky, gnarling into each other, the branches wrapped in thorny, snakelike vines.
    The trees had faces.
    The wind howled, and I shivered before I realized that it wasn’t the wind at all. It was the trees. They were screaming.
    â€œThe Fighting Trees,” Maude said in surprise, noticing them at the same time that I did. “It can’t be . . .”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked, looking up at Ollie.
    â€œDorothy hated the Fighting Trees. Exterminating them was one of the first things she did when she rose to power,” Ollie said. “If they’ve returned . . .”
    â€œBut how ?” Maude asked him sharply.
    Ollie just shrugged and raised his eyebrows at me. “Did your friends do this?” he asked. I didn’t know. All I knew was that the world was rewriting itself before my eyes. Like a story being torn through with a red pen.
    Whose story was it, I wondered?
    Suddenly someone else spoke: “The magic is returning,” Ozma said, like she was explaining the simplest thing in the world. I did a double take. Had she really just spoken in a full,totally intelligible sentence? Ollie and Maude were both staring at her like she’d grown a third eye.
    But before she could say anything else—before we could ask her any questions about what she’d