No one pays any attention to Jack as he shoulders his way into the infirmary tent. There's a crowd of soldiers present, but their focus is on the man lying grey-faced on the thin mattress.

From this angle the damage doesn't look too bad. The bullet carved a neat hole into the flesh underneath the man's collarbone and it's no wider than Jack's forefinger, but blood is flowing sluggishly from the wound and the bed underneath him is soaked in it.

It's Dorothy's soldier; his lips pressed tight against the pain, and sweat beading his brow. "Can you get it out?" he asks through gritted teeth, as the surgeon replaces the wadding over the wound.

"Sir," says the surgeon as he presses down gently on the bandages, a bloom of red already emerging against the white linen. "The bullet nicked a vein, and if we remove it without stopping the bleeding..." he falters to a stop. "Best to wait for the witches."

Lucas struggles to push himself up onto one elbow. "Not North," he says, his voice grating.

"No," comes a voice from behind Jack. "Not North."

Jack turns to see an older woman has appeared in the doorway. She looks crossly at the crowd of men around the bed and steps into the room, making a shooing motion with her hands as she approaches the bed. "Look at you all, clustered around like a flock of hens. Are you trying to smother your captain to death, since your idiotic toys didn't finish the job?"

"Mistress South," says Lucas, looking impossibly paler. He goes to rise, but stops abruptly when a second voice comes from the door.

"You need to stop trying to get yourself killed."

Her voice is deceptively nonchalant, but as Dorothy approaches the bed Jack can see the strain in her face. She looks even more tired that she did when he first saw her in Ozma's throne room, dust-covered and travel weary. There's something hollow and haunted in her face now, and Jack recalls the whispers he's heard and wonders if she blames herself for the guns, the beast, the war itself.

Dorothy runs an assessing glance over the blood-soaked bedding and a muscle jumps in her jaw. "I don't suppose you know what blood type you are?"

Lucas exchanges a confused look with the surgeon, who shrugs helplessly. "The red kind?" he ventures.

Dorothy shakes her head, and she's smiling, but it doesn't quite reach her worried eyes. "Did it go through you?" she asks. He shakes his head no, and she bites her lip and sighs. "OK."

Jack can see that her fingers are trembling just a little as she reaches out and lifts the bandage to take a closer look at the gunshot wound piercing Lucas's skin. She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders as she turns to Mistress South. "I know what to do, but I've never actually done it."

South's eyebrows lift, but she remains silent as Dorothy casts her eyes over the tray of instruments strewn haphazardly over a trolley next to the bed. She picks up one particularly sinister looking tool between two fingers and glares at it suspiciously before putting it back down in disgust.

"These are so primitive. I don't know..." She looks up and seems to see Jack for the first time. "Jack! You" – she gestures to his arm, his legs – "What my mother did to you. That would have required some surgery. Did she have instruments? Like forceps, um, tweezers? A scalpel–"

"Dorothy." Mistress South's voice is quiet, but when Jack turns to her she's looking at Dorothy with impatience. "Use the gauntlets, child."

"The gauntlets aren't–" Dorothy begins, but South cuts her off

"The gauntlets are a tool. My daughters have shown you how to wield them with blunt force, but–" she lifts her hand, and Jack sees a bright tendril of golden light no thicker than a strand of hair begin to dance from her weathered palm "– magic can be used as more than a weapon."

Dorothy watches the thread of power with hungry fascination for a moment before shaking her head. "You should do it," she says. "I don't know how, and Lucas is... He's important to the Queen. He's important to–" she breaks off, swallows hard. "He's important."

"More reason why you should be the one do this, my girl," says South. She lets the tendril of magic collapse into a glittering pool in the hollow of her palm, then lifts her arm and presses her hand firmly against Dorothy's breast. "This kind of magic is innate, it comes more from the heart than the head."

"Dorothy." Lucas' voice is a pained rumble, and when he reaches for her Jack sees fresh blood unfurling under the cotton compress. "I trust you ."

But she's still shaking her head, and turns to Mistress South. "Please," she says. " Please ."

For a moment Jack thinks South is going to agree, but then her eyes harden and she steps back entirely from the bed. "Roan and I have our own history," she tells Dorothy, her voice flat and cold. "Some time ago he went against my wishes, against my explicit instruction, and broke one of our cardinal laws."

"His name is Lucas -" Dorothy begins hotly, but South cuts her off.

"You can carve whatever name you'd like into his headstone if you have no intention of saving him."

Dorothy stares at her incredulously for a beat, then her jaw tightens and she turns her attention back to the man on the bed.

"I trust you," he tells her again.

"You shouldn't," she mutters, but she peels the red-soaked wadding back from his wound again and places her cupped hands over it, filigreed gold and blood red rubies glinting in the afternoon sun shafting into the room.

As Jack watches, a soft glow begins to emanate from the cracks between Dorothy's fingers. Her eyes are closed, her lips moving soundlessly.

North is watching avidly from her position at the foot of the bed, but even she must avert her gaze as the light brightens, engulfing Dorothy and Lucas both.

There are murmurs of consternation from the soldiers who have remained, and some begin to back uneasily towards the door. Then, suddenly, the light blinks out, and through the spots in his vision Jack sees Dorothy lift her palms from Lucas's skin, the glitter of something small that rolls with a soft clink to the floor.

Her eyes are still closed, her cheeks flushed and the breaths coming fast from open lips. Lucas's gaze is hungry on her face, all traces of pain swept away by something more primal; and without seeming to realise he's doing it, he lifts a hand and lays it against her cheek, his thumb tracing the fullness of her bottom lip.

It's unbearably intimate, and Jack turns away to discover that he and South are the only observers left in the tent. Her gaze flicks to him and with a nod of her head she gestures for him to leave.

He does.

Lucas is sleeping, but his breaths are deep and even, and there's colour in his face. Instead of the ragged hole in his shoulder he has a shiny pink scar that looks weeks healed.

Dorothy rolls what's left of the bullet around her palm and thinks about magic.

She turns to South, who's standing quietly at the foot of the bed. "Why even bother with healers, when the witches can do this?" she asks.

South is silent for a moment, then extends a hand. "Let's take a walk, you and I." Then, when Dorothy looks at Lucas's prone body again, adds "He'll find his own way to you when he wakes. We should speak before then."

In the gardens she loops Dorothy's arm companionably through her own and leads her away from the palace, the gravel path crunching under their feet.

"How does it make you feel," she asks after a while, "the magic?"

Dorothy considers the question. "Strong," she says finally. "Powerful. Grateful that I can help."

South looks at her slyly out of the corner of her eye, "And?"

"It feels good," admits Dorothy, thinking of the sensation of magic humming like a live wire under her skin. "It feels like everything is amplified: colours, sounds, touch." She doesn't say it feels like sex , but something about the way South is looking at her makes her suspect that the older woman knows anyway, and it makes her flush.

North nods. "Magic is… a drug", she says. "And like most drugs, it's also a poison." She sighs and pauses for a moment, cupping an overblown rose in the palm of her hand and bringing it to her face to smell the heady scent.

"Many hundreds of years ago," she continues after a while, "Oz was part of your world, and travel between the two was common. But humans are a greedy race, and they coveted the magic that was found in the very bones of this place. They came in great numbers and built mines to coax the magic from the land and colonies to serve them, and in their greed they almost wiped out the native people of the land, the Munja'kins." South takes a breath, " We " she says after a pause. " We nearly wiped out the native people."

She begins to walk again. "But the magic of Oz didn't belong to us, and unlike the Munja'kins we cannot wield it without harm. To the land that we'd raped to acquire it, or - it turns out - to ourselves."

She draws Dorothy to a halt and circles her wrists with calloused fingers, looking into her eyes with gravity. "The magic gives us impossibly long lives, extraordinary powers, and the ability to survive great injury, but in return it burns away our humanity, taking from us our ability to love, to understand empathy, even to bear children."

From within the neckline of her dress South draws a chain whose links gleam the blue-black of a bird's wing. "The Elements – my chain, East's gauntlets, West's ring – act as a conduit for the magic. They lessen both the power and the poison. But we do not belong to this place, and the magic does not belong to us."

Dorothy remembers what Sylvie said earlier in the destroyed wreckage of the courtyard. "Glinda intends to outlaw the use of Elements."

South's lips tighten. "Mistress North is… a traditionalist."

"She doesn't use them herself? Even though she knows the risks?" Dorothy thinks of the coldness in Glinda's eyes, the ease with which she places her young charges in the path of danger, "Of course she doesn't."

"My daughter believes in the purity of the magic," says South quellingly. "And it has made her the most accomplished witch Oz has seen for generations."

"Fine," retorts Dorothy hotly. "She's a good witch. But she's a bad person. "

South pauses, sighs. "You mistake her lack of humanity for cruelty. But North is not a monster." She looks at Dorothy searchingly. "She feels loyalty to her sisters and to her students. She's walked fearlessly into battle because she wanted to protect Oz. Not too many years ago she felt strongly enough about a young man, a soldier, that she broke one of our most cardinal rules to take him as a husband."

Dorothy feels something like rage welling up inside her. "She would have doomed him to a life without love."

"He understood the terms," says South, coldly. "Perhaps he believed he loved her enough for both of them."

Dorothy thinks of Lucas's steadfastness and generous heart, and wants to cry. For him, for herself, for promises made and broken. She starts to walk away from the older woman, then turns on her heel and comes back. "What about Sylvie? Ozma? The girls in that wretched mausoleum she calls home? They don't use Elements either."

South shrugs. "The poison is slow. Leith has years before she will reach her full potential, and that's is assuming she doesn't stumble along the way. And Ozma?" She considers Dorothy for a moment, "Ozma is a special case. She is not entirely human." Dorothy stares at her incredulously, and she continues. "Her father was human, but her mother was of the Munja'kin people, and the magic of Oz is her birthright."

Magic, South tells Dorothy, is Oz. And Oz is her people. Unlike the colonising humans, the Munja'kin can draw on the magic in Oz's bones without tearing it from the earth. But in their avarice humans ripped the magic from the land and destabilised the world's delicate balance.

One man, Roquat, chafed the hardest against the limitations that the Munja'kin attempted to impose on the outsiders, and in his greed and his madness he stole so much magic that it changed him, turning him into a monster. Turning him into the Beast Forever.

"For hundreds of years the Beast terrorised the world," says South. "As fire, as flood, as terrible creatures that slithered or soared. And for the first time, the Munja'kin and the humans had a common enemy. Together they brought him down, and built the Prison of the Abject to contain him."

"And then I freed him," says Dorothy faintly.

South looks at her, and her face is not unkind. "His return was foretold. Your guilt is misdirected." She turns her face to the sky, where the first of the two moons is making its appearance against the darkening expanse. "Killing him would have destroyed the vast reservoir of stolen magic that he contains, and with that Oz itself. Without magic Oz cannot exist. But keeping him alive was a mistake, and with his return he has resumed his work of ripping the magic from the ground under his feet. No," she sounds defeated and terribly old, "he has doomed this world, and everyone in it."