“Nobody obeys you,” said Theodora. “Because you’re a liar and clearly you’re afraid of the crows and don’t want to get caught telling their secrets.” She gestured with a shoulder toward a nearby tree, where there was indeed a crow perched on a low branch.

  “I’m not afraid of crows,” said the lion. But Frank had seen him jump a little when he saw the crow. What with Theodora kicking him in the throat and him being scared of crows, Frank was reaching some unfortunate preliminary conclusions about the amount of the lion’s courage, and whether it existed at all.

  “How many inches from a coward is this lion?” asked Frank softly.

  “No inches,” said Theodora. “He’s obviously a carnival lion. Look at the scars on his behind. He was trained to the whip. He’s a beaten lion.”

  The lion burst into tears. “He waved a chair at me,” he wailed.

  “I’ll wave more than a chair at you,” said Theodora. “Where is my mother’s ring?”

  “The crow would have taken it to the Emperor of the Air,” said the lion. “Where else?”

  “How would I know?” asked Theodora. “I’ve never been a crow, and I’m not from around here.”

  “That’s where everything shiny and beautiful and strong gets taken, so where did you think?”

  “I thought maybe the witch. Or the crow’s nest.”

  “First, it’s not really a crow, it’s a raven. And the ravens are his agents. He sends them out into the world to watch. You are a very young and ignorant child, if you don’t know that.”

  Theodora turned to Frank. “I bet the scarecrow and the mechanical man both knew that.”

  “I bet you didn’t ask them where the crow would take the ring, did you,” said the lion.

  “They knew what I wanted,” said Theodora.

  “They knew what you asked,” said the lion. “I bet you asked which way the crow went.”

  “All right, take us there,” said Theodora.

  “Where?”

  “To the Emperor of the Air,” said Theodora.

  “He’s the Emperor of the Air,” said the lion. “How would I know where he is?”

  “The raven knew,” she said.

  “He can fly. Do you see any wings here?”

  Theodora kicked the lion in the throat for the third time. This time his legs collapsed under him and he splayed out on the road, coughing feebly. Finally he whispered, “I’m going to get angry very soon now.”

  “You’re going to take us to the Emperor of the Air.”

  “I told you that I—”

  “You asked me how would you know where he is,” said Theodora. “But you didn’t say that you don’t know. If you didn’t know, you would have said so.” She turned to Frank. “I believe that in the Empire of the Air, nobody can actually lie straight out. But they’re very good at dodging.”

  “Not good enough,” coughed the lion.

  “Take us there,” said Theodora.

  “He doesn’t want to see you,” said the lion.

  “Did he tell you that this very morning?” asked Theodora.

  “It’s a general principle,” said the lion.

  “He’ll see me because he has something that belongs to me and I want it back and he’s a good emperor!”

  “Who told you that?” asked the lion.

  “You see?” said Theodora to Frank. “A question, not an answer. If he really wasn’t a good emperor, the lion would have said so.”

  “I hate you even more than the mechanical man loves you,” said the lion.

  “By the power of my mother’s ring, I command you to take me.”

  “When you grow up,” said the lion to Frank, “do not marry this girl. I can promise you, she’s a future witch.”

  “I’m not going to marry her!” said Frank. “She’s nine and I’m six.”

  “I’m not a future witch,” said Theodora. “I’m a witch now.”

  “The question is, are you a good witch or a bad witch?” asked the lion.

  “I’m the witch who asked you where I can find the Emperor of the Air,” said Theodora. “It’s up to you whether I’m good or bad.”

  “You’re already bad,” said the lion.

  “But I can get worse,” said Theodora. “Or better. You pick.”

  “Follow me,” said the lion.

  And so they did. They walked a long time. The yellow road forked three times, but the lion seemed to know which way to go. Theodora stayed with him, holding on to his tail, and Frank held on to her.

  “You do realize that my parents will be upset if I’m not home for supper,” said Frank.

  “You will be,” said Theodora.

  “We’ve walked a long way, and we still have to get back.”

  “We’re in the Empire of the Air,” said Theodora. “The rules are different here.”

  “My parents are back in Aberdeen, and in our house they make the rules.”

  “The Emperor of the Air rules over everybody in both worlds,” said Theodora.

  “I know who the president is, and I know who’s queen of England, but I’ve never heard of the Emperor of the Air.”

  “Who’s president?” asked Theodora.

  “Benjamin Harrison,” said Frank.

  “Not here he isn’t,” said Theodora. “But the Emperor of the Air is emperor everywhere.”

  “Even under water?”

  “There’s air under water,” said Theodora. “That’s how fish breathe.”

  “They don’t breathe, they have gills, Father said.”

  “They have gills, but their gills still need air. There has to be air mixed in with the water, so the Emperor of the Air rules there, too.”

  “You are so ridiculous,” said the lion. “Thinking that your thinking is worth thinking about.”

  At last they came to a place where the forest opened up and there in the distance were the spires and turrets and towers of a great city. The towers were every color and texture, some bright-colored and shiny in the late afternoon sunlight, and some rich in color but not shiny, and some black as a cloudless night. Only one was gleaming pure white. It glowed as if its light came from within; it did not seem to reflect the reddening sunlight at all.

  “Is the white tower where he lives?” asked Frank.

  “He is alive wherever he goes,” said the lion. “How ridiculous to think he lives in only one place, when he can go anywhere he wants.”

  “I wonder if London looks like this,” said Theodora.

  “I’ve seen Chicago, and it does not,” said Frank.

  “You’ve never.”

  “Have so,” said Frank. “I was only four, but I remember. I’ve also been to New York City, but I don’t really remember that.”

  “This is the City of the Emperor of the Air,” said the lion. “There are no other cities worthy of the name.”

  Frank did not argue with him. He was not one of those foolish boys who has to quarrel and claim that whatever he likes or knows is better than whatever he doesn’t like or doesn’t know. Several such boys had tried to pick a fight with him that very day, at noon recess. But there could be no quarrel when Frank cheerfully agreed that their fathers could lick his father, their brothers his brothers, their mothers his mother, and they him. He only disagreed about sisters, and then only because he hadn’t any. “But if I had a sister, I’m sure your sisters could lick her.” Frank’s willingness to admit complete inferiority kept him from getting a black eye, and as his father had long since explained to him, “Let fools believe their foolishness; there’s no point in arguing with imbeciles.” This coincided nicely with Frank’s native disposition, which was to quarrel with no one and keep his innate superiority a secret from all. If it became general knowledge, it would only cause resentment.

  Besides, what if Theodora really was smarter than Frank and not just older and more experienced? Wouldn’t that be a shocker?

  As for the Emperor of the Air, Frank still held on to a bit of skepticism about whether he existed at all. After meeting the mechanical man and the talking lion, Frank was beginning to think that the world was a very different place than his experience had led him to believe. Wasn’t it possible, given what he’d already seen, that Theodora really was a witch? Anyone who could kick a lion three times in the throat and not get her head bitten off must have some kind of magical power. Or incredible luck.

  It seemed almost as long a time as they had already traveled, to get from the forest edge across the endless meadowland, close-cropped by goats and sheep, to finally arrive at the city, though they could see the city all the way. The yellow road changed color as soon as they entered the city, with strands of many colors arising among the bricks, coalescing, and then leading off in many directions. But always there was at least one street that was mostly yellow, or had a yellow band through it, and that was the road the lion followed.

  They passed many people dressed in many odd costumes. None of them seemed to care that a wild lion was walking among them—though some of them did stare at Theodora as if they sensed something important about her. They spared nary a glance at Frank, and he wondered if he might still be a bit invisible here in this place.

  The yellow street at last led them to a broad gate of intertwining iron rods. They could see through the gate into a garden, lush with greenery of many hues and alive with birds that lighted and took flight, usually alone but sometimes in great flocks. He knew many of the kinds of birds, because he was an observant child with a fine memory for names and classifications. But there were far more birds that he had never heard of, or seen, or even seen pictures of.

  “Is this the Garden of the Air?” he asked.

  “It’s the garden of the Emperor,” said the lion, “but I think he would like your name for it. It’s the birds, yes? So many birds, it makes it seem as if the whole garden were about to rise up and fly away. As if the birds were the lacework of the land, and someone were tossing the lace up and down like a blanket being aired out in the yard.”

  “You’re talking in very fine language now,” said Theodora.

  “I’m so much wiser inside the boundaries of this city,” said the lion. “Especially when I’m not being kicked in the throat.”

  The lion led them to the center of the garden, where a little stool sat in the middle of a green patch of low vegetation—not a lawn, but rather a broad cushion of small leaves undulating over the ground, with tiny blossoms scattered like stars in the sky.

  The lion circled the stool three times and then sat upon it. In that instant he became a man in a robe of tawny silk, with a circlet of woven lion’s mane hairs around his head.

  “How long have you been the Emperor of the Air?” asked Theodora.

  “As long as there has been need of one,” said the Emperor. “But you’re asking at what point I took the lion’s place and sent him back to rule over the woods and refrain from roaring until his throat healed, is that not so?”

  “Why did we have to come all the way here,” asked Frank, “if you were already with us?”

  “I could have come to you as a shabby man on the road, or in the guise of a clever scarecrow or as a love-besotted mechanical man or as a cowardly lion, but would you have known me then, or believed me if I named myself?”

  “I knew you before I saw you,” said Theodora, and she knelt before him and held out her hand. “You know why I’m here. You have something of mine.”

  “I think not,” said the Emperor of the Air. “You are quick to claim what you never owned.”

  “She’s dead, and I’m her only daughter, so it’s mine.”

  “Her daughter, yes,” said the Emperor, and he reached into his mouth and took from it a golden ring. “Was this tasty thing what you came here for?” He dropped it into Theodora’s open hand.

  At once Theodora’s fingers closed over it. Then she tried to push it onto each finger of the other hand in turn.

  It was too small for any of them.

  Theodora handed it back. “This is not the ring.”

  “You know it is,” said the Emperor. “You knew your mother’s love; you felt it every day of your life. You recognize it here.”

  Theodora’s eyes filled with tears, which quickly spilled out onto her cheeks in two thin shiny trails. “But it doesn’t fit my hand.”

  “No, because it wasn’t meant for you,” said the Emperor kindly. Then he reached out a hand and touched Theodora’s forehead. “You are already filled with your mother’s love. You had no need of this ring. She gave it all to you when she was alive, all that she had. She gave it to you, and it lives inside you, child. It never left you when she died.”

  “Then what’s the ring?” asked Frank.

  “It’s also Theodora’s mother’s love, every bit of it,” said the Emperor of the Air. “Love is infinitely divisible, and the more it’s divided, the greater the whole of it becomes. Sadly enough, hate and rage work much the same way, as do loss and suffering. You have them all, don’t you, Theodora? I felt them when you kicked me.”

  “It wasn’t you when I kicked the lion!” she protested.

  “That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it,” said the Emperor of the Air.

  “I’m sorry,” said Theodora. “I never would have hurt you. But the lion wouldn’t take me to you.”

  “The lion didn’t know where I was,” said the Emperor of the Air, “but he would have taken you here, to wait for me. His pain called to me, though he had no idea of how to summon me. And who were you, anyway, to command him?”

  “I am the . . . I was the master of . . . it was my ring that was taken . . . it was my mother’s ring.”

  “All this searching, only to find an outward token of a thing you already had in its entirety,” said the Emperor of the Air.

  “You think I’m a foolish child.”

  “I think everyone is a foolish child,” said the Emperor of the Air. “I know I’m one.”

  “I’ll go now,” said Theodora. “Frank needs to get back before suppertime.”

  Theodora rose to her feet and gripped Frank’s hand again. That was the first he realized that she had let go of him, and he hadn’t disappeared. Reluctantly, he let her lead him away from the stool in the middle of the greensward, though he could not help but look back again and again at the Emperor of the Air.

  The Emperor reached out his hand and spoke—softly, yet the words were clear and bright in the air. “Theodora,” he said. “My little Dotty. Aren’t you forgetting what you came for?”

  He held her mother’s ring in his hand.

  “But it’s not for me,” said Theodora. “You said.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s for no one,” said the Emperor. “It’s a great inheritance, and it must be passed along.”

  “Then who is supposed to inherit it?”

  “The one who doesn’t know she needs it. The one who never wanted it when it was offered to her so many times when your mother was alive. The one who inherited your mother’s burdens and yet hasn’t the strength to bear them all without breaking.”

  And in that moment, Frank could see understanding come to Theodora and burst inside her, and now she wept in earnest, great sobs. “Oh, give it to me, give it to me quickly!” she cried through her crying. “I must hurry home with it!”

  The ring dropped from his hand into hers. Theodora clutched it in her fist and started running toward the gate.

  “Don’t forget the boy,” said the Emperor of the Air. “I’m sure he’s delightful company, but he’ll quickly tire of the life here without you.”

  Theodora ran back, grabbed Frank by the hand, and led him toward the gate. She didn’t run now—he couldn’t have kept up. And so she walked, still crying. “Help me get back,” she whispered to him. “See the edges, where the cornfields are.”

  “We must have walked a hundred miles,” said Frank. “We’ll never make it home by dark.”

  “At the edges of your vision, where the cornfields are,” she said.

  Only then did he see that in fact the cornfields were still there. And with every step they became clearer, and the palace of the Emperor of the Air grew dimmer, and the road beneath their feet turned from yellow brick to the dust of Aberdeen, and they were in front of a certain house.

  A tiny house, barely two rooms wide and two rooms deep, and a woman sat asleep in a rocking chair on the little sagging porch. She looked exhausted and sad, and her face was etched with the harsh lines of a farmwife, though it occurred to Frank that he had never heard she was a wife of any kind, only the aunt to this girl. Auntie Bess. Bess Krassner, who had helped contribute to his father’s bankruptcy. Whose niece was grateful to her father for the credit he extended, which had saved her while it ruined him.

  Theodora let go of Frank’s wrist. His wrist was immediately cold where she had held him, for she and he had sweated profusely in their haste. He watched silently as she tiptoed up the steps and walked along the porch. It creaked under her foot, and Auntie Bess stirred and frowned but did not wake.

  Theodora took the woman’s suntanned left hand in hers, and with the other hand slipped the golden ring onto the finger where it belonged. It slid on easily, though the fingers were much thicker than Theodora’s, and for her the ring had been too small.

  In her sleep the woman’s face changed a little, just the tiniest bit, but now she seemed at peace, and the frown became one of concern and weariness instead of anger and loneliness. So much to see in such a tiny change, but Frank had learned that there were things to be seen at the edges of vision.

  Theodora moved behind the chair and touched the woman’s hair with her fingers, and then placed her hand across the woman’s brow and smoothed the lines there. The woman woke and her hand flew up and found her niece’s fingers there, and the hands held each other, and the woman smiled.

  “Theodora,” she said. “You lingered late at school? You weren’t in trouble, were you?”

  “I had a job to do,” said Theodora. “And I made a friend.”

  Only then did Bess notice the boy standing off the porch a little way. “Why, you’re Frank Baum’s boy, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I better get home now,” said Frank.