Dorothy Must Die Novella #2 by Danielle Paige Read Free Book Online

pen again.
    â€œI’ll send you out to the gardens for the morning,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about tending them or anything like that. Most of the landscaping is done by magic, and there are a few Munchkin gardeners who take care of the rest. But here in the kitchen, we use herbs and vegetables from the main garden, so you should make yourself familiar with it.”
    â€œWhat should I do if Glinda calls me while I’m outside? She was”—I paused, making sure my voice was under control—“unhappy with me for my tardiness last night.”
    â€œPunctuality is very important to Glinda,” Nox said drily. “But you should be safe for the morning, at least. Take this basket with you. Here’s what we’ll need for the day,” he said, handing me a basket from a shelf overhead and a neatly printed list of various vegetables, fruits, and herbs. “I imagine it will take you a few hours to find everything,” he added. That wasn’t even close to true, I thought, looking over the short list he’d handed me. He was basically giving me the morning off to wander around outside. If I didn’t know better, I would have hugged him. “Yes sir,” I said, and he smiled.
    â€œNox,” he said. “Please. There’s no need for formality in the kitchen.” And he smiled at me again—a real smile this time, winning and full of charm. I couldn’t help myself; I smiled back.

EIGHT
    Dorothy’s palace in the Emerald City had gardens far grander than Glinda’s, though never in a million years would I have been dumb enough to point that out. Even so, Glinda’s gardens were nothing to sneeze at. A little heavy on the pink flowers for my taste, of course—rows and rows of sweet-smelling singing roses in a dozen variations of the shade; towering pink lilac trees, which released visible puffs of perfumed smoke at intervals; an orchard full of pink-barked trees, each of which bore a different pink fruit: peaches, apples, hot-pink pomegranates (points for creativity, I guess, even if not for realism). There were even tiny pink flowers that covered the winding paths through the decorative portion of the gardens like a carpet, and when you stepped on them, they shot out little jets of pink glitter. By the time I got back to the kitchen I was going to look like a disco ball.
    It took me a while to find the vegetable garden, which was more or less hidden behind a low, pink brick wall, and which bore little resemblance to the rest of the landscaping. The plants here had a distinctly practical feel: unlike the rest of the gardens, which were beautiful but obviously designed to cater to Glinda’s unnatural passion for pink, these more humble rows of vegetables and herbs were comforting in their hominess.
    I’d been so young when my parents died that I had no memory of them. All I knew was what Ozma had told me: that I’d been born in a small village in the Oz countryside, to people who were too humble to leave me anything other than my name. Ozma had taken me in because I had no other family and nowhere else to go.
    Wandering the rows of the vegetable garden, I wondered if my own parents had grown food like this; if maybe they’d sat down every night to a dinner of crisp green lettuce and ruby-red tomatoes pulled from the earth just moments earlier. I rarely thought about my parents—what good did it do me to wonder?—but for a moment in Glinda’s garden I stopped to consider what my life might have been like if they hadn’t died. Maybe I’d be out in the countryside somewhere, lying in a field napping underneath the warm sun, or reading a book. Maybe my life would be my own, not Dorothy’s. But thinking like that was useless, and bound to get me nowhere. There was no point in crying about it. My life was what it was. There was no way I’d ever get away from Glinda, or Dorothy, or whatever