The Wicked Will Rise Read Free Page B

the normal way. Call me old-fashioned. It’s just easier.
    But falling out of the sky from five thousand feet probably qualifies as an emergency, right? If Maude, Ollie, Ozma, and I were going to land without becoming pancakes served Oz style, it was going to take some serious witchcraft.
    So as we plunged through the air, I just closed my eyes, tuned everything out, and concentrated, trying my best to ignore the fact that I probably had about fifteen seconds to get the job done. I couldn’t think about that.
    Instead, I focused on the energy that was all around me. I tuned into its frequency and gathered it all up, channeling it through my body as the wind whipped fiercely past me.
    Once, I’d seen Mombi do a spell where she reversed gravity, turning the whole world upside down and sending herself, alongwith her passengers, all shooting up into the sky. Like falling, but in the wrong direction. Or the right direction, depending on how you looked at it.
    I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to pull off that trick, but I hoped that even my bargain basement version of Mombi’s designer magic would be good enough that my friends and I just might be able to walk away from this. Or at least crawl away. Or whatever.
    And maybe because it was do-or-die or maybe it was something else, but for one of the first times ever, it came easily to me. I reached out with my mind and twisted the magic into something new; something that could help.
    The first rule of magic is that it gets bored easily—it always wants to be something different from what it is. So I imagined it as an energy re-forming itself into a parachute flying at our backs. I imagined it catching its sail in the wind, imagined it opening up and carrying us. It was like drawing a picture with my mind, or like molding a sculpture out of soft, slippery clay.
    When I opened my eyes again, we were still falling, but our descent was slowing by the second. Soon we were floating like feathers, gliding easily toward the earth.
    It had worked.
    I can’t say I wasn’t surprised.
    â€œSomeone’s been practicing her tricks,” Ollie said. There was a hint of suspicion in his voice, but mostly it was just relief.
    â€œI guess I just got lucky,” I said. It was kind of a lie. It hadn’t felt like luck at all. It hadn’t felt like I had known what I wasdoing either. Somehow I had just done it. But how?
    I tried to put my doubt aside. This wasn’t the time for me to be questioning myself. It had been a gentler landing than I’d been planning on, but I felt as exhilarated and exhausted from the feat I’d just accomplished as if I’d run a marathon.
    I picked myself up, dusted off, and tried to collect myself. My body was aching, sore from the trip, and my mind raced as I sifted through everything that had just happened, knowing that I had to stay alert. I had a feeling that the rocs hadn’t attacked us by coincidence, which meant that, for now, we were still in danger.
    And yet it was hard to be too worried when I saw where we had touched down: I was looking out over a sea of flowers, stretching far into the distance.
    When I say a sea of flowers, I really mean that it was like an ocean, and not just because I couldn’t see the limit to it. I mean, that was one thing, sure. More importantly, though, was the fact that it was moving.
    The blossoms were undulating like waves, building themselves up and rolling toward us, petals spraying everywhere as they crashed at our feet, petering out into a normal, grassy meadow. If this was an ocean, we were standing right at the shore.
    â€œI’ve heard of the Sea of Blossoms,” Maude said. “I’ve heard of it but . . .”
    Her voice trailed off as we all gazed out in something like amazement.
    The Sea of Blossoms. It was beautiful. Not just beautiful: it was enchanted. Of everything I had seen since I had come to Oz, this felt the most like the magic that was