Guarding the Great Hall was a low honor among Heart Cards. Those with the most skill and loyalty guarded the King, then Cheshire, then Dinah, and so on down the court line. Those who were either new to the Cards or had a questionable record of service guarded the palace’s many doors and rooms. Nothing happened in the Great Hall most days of the Wonderland year, and so the Heart Cards sent to guard its doors and hallways were ruthlessly mocked. As Dinah walked past them, they bowed lazily. Dinah removed a small pouch from her bag. Then she stumbled, sending the little bag flying out in front of her. A wealth of gold coins—more than enough to feed their families for a year—spilled out in front of them. The muslin satchel stayed tight on her shoulders. She saw Roxs’s eyes light up. Of course they would: he had not one, but two families to feed. He bent down to help her pick up the coins, and Dinah saw him slyly pocket a few. Perfect, she thought.
“I’m so sorry. So clumsy.”
“’Tis never a problem, My Lady.”
Dinah swiftly picked up the remaining coins, making sure to give the men a clean glimpse of all the coins inside the bag. The price of a necklace, she thought guiltily, just one of the many jewels that sit idly in my drawer, more than enough to feed a family. She often found herself feeling shame at such things. She nodded her head at Roxs, and then at the other Cards.
“Thank you. Good day.” Lowering her eyes, she made herself fidgety and breathless before them. She hesitated a second and leaned forward, letting her hair swing down over her face, her voice dropping to an urgent whisper. “Could you please tell me where the cloak room is?”
Roxs gave a nod. “Not sure why you would need that, Your Highness; you aren’t even wearing a cloak.”
Dinah put a hand on her hip. “It’s none of your business, and above your station to ask.”
Roxs’s eyes narrowed. No Heart Card liked being reprimanded by the royal family; it was an ultimate shame from those they swore to protect. “Forgive me, My Lady. I will walk you there.”
“No. Just tell me how to get there. I can walk there myself. Time is of the essence.”
Dinah could see the confusion play across their faces. Why is she in a hurry to get to the cloak room?
“Follow this hall, past the oratory, and around the corner. It’s a small door on the right, across from the servants’ privy. There is an iron and glass window on the front of the door.”
Dinah clutched her purse tightly against her chest and let a blush rise to her cheeks. “Thank you.” She hurried quickly past the Cards. The cloak room was very simple to find; Dinah had been there many times as a child, retrieving a winter cloak for her or for Charles. It was a long room, filled from ceiling to floor with every kind of cloak in every kind of color, all for the royal family or their distinguished guests. Steam hissed out from a fountain in the middle of the room—a porcelain whale that spewed mist periodically, making sure that the cloaks were always warm and soft, whatever the weather. Dinah quickly found a simple brown hooded cloak.
She set her muslin bag down on the ground, yanking open its cords. Inside was a gray cotton dress, a tiny white heart embroidered on the sleeve. It was the kind of dress a maid or servant might wear on her day off. Dinah had swiped it from Emily earlier that month. She quickly shrugged out of her elaborate magenta gown, the ruffles swimming around her like puffy clouds. She carefully folded it and placed it into the bag. The cloak room door opened and she gave a shriek as she stood with only a thin white slip on.
“It’s just me,” Wardley hissed.
Dinah turned her back to him and started to pull the gray dress over her head. Wardley crossed the room. “No. Wait. Leave it off.”
Her heart felt like it was plunged into icy water.
“They will be in here any minute. I saw their faces when I asked for the cloak room.” He shook his head and began grumbling. “The King should never have men like this in his service. In his attempt to build a strong set of Cards, he has taken even the worst of men. His ever-lowering standards are weakening the Kingdom.”
“Shhh—” Dinah heard heavy footsteps and the clanking of metal outside the door. Quickly, Wardley wrapped his hand around her waist and pulled her against him. His lips traced down her neck, his breath scorching as it passed over her creamy skin. She closed her eyes and surrendered, aware of how every curve of her body showed through the thin fabric, so close to him, so close to being just her skin pressed against his.
Wardley gathered her thick black hair in his hands. “Don’t oversell it,” he murmured.
The door burst open. The three Cards stood in front of them, grinning like fools. Roxs stepped forward. “Well, well, Princess; it seems you have acquired a taste for the stable boy.”
“Get out,” growled Wardley. “Don’t come near the Princess.”
“You should have taken that advice yourself. Seems like you have quite the handful there. She’s not to my taste—that leans more to the Lady Vittiore and those blond curls—but there is a certain appeal to her. I heard she’s feisty, like her father, and crazy like her brother. She has fire in the blood.”
Roxs circled Dinah, his lecherous eyes taking in entirely too much of her. “So, you’re plucking the Princess. This secret tryst of yours, what’s it worth to you?”
Dinah gulped. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how much gold was in that purse of yours? Two hundred? Three hundred? That would buy me land, girl, and food for my families.”
Wardley laid his hand across his sword. “You may not blackmail the Princess. The King will have your head on Execution Day for this.”
“Well, let’s go tell him, shall we?” Roxs headed to the door, his two henchmen grinning like idiots beside him.
“Wait,” Dinah said quietly. “How much do you want?”
“Everything that’s in that purse, miss, and nothing less to buy our silence.”
“That is a fortune,” breathed Dinah angrily.
“And that’s what I’m asking.”
Dinah reached for her bag.
Wardley stepped forward. “Let the lady and me discuss this, then we’ll talk.”
“Some lady,” grunted Fellen, but the Cards stepped out, shutting the door behind them. She could hear their greedy laughter outside the door.
“That went well,” whispered Wardley. He pulled Dinah close to him again and pressed his lips against hers.
The Cards barged back in, unable to wait. “Can’t keep your hands off each other, eh? I remember being young and lusty—you can’t keep your manhood down!”
The Cards jostled with glee. Wardley raised his hand and they fell silent. Even when they assumed he was just a stable boy, he commanded attention. “Here is what we propose. The Princess and I never have time to, let’s just say, be by ourselves. We will give you all the gold in this purse, along with—”
Dinah pulled out a large amethyst ring. The Cards’ eyes lit up.
“This, if you allow us to stay in this room for as long as we desire and make sure that no one, NO ONE comes in. That includes you. If anyone asks where the Princess is today, you are to say that she is having tea with the Lady Vittiore and studying in the library. You never saw us here. Do you understand? We’ll give you the coins now, but the ring we will give you after we are . . . finished.” Wardley let a naughty smile play across his face. “And we’ll need all day.”
Roxs stepped forward. “And why should we do this for you?”
“Because who will the King believe—a drunken Card accused of stealing the Princess’ gold, or his daughter?”
Roxs considered it for a moment. “Done.”
Wardley handed him the bag. “Remember. No one comes in and out. We want at least until nightfall together. When we come out, you will get the ring.”
Fellen gave a snort. “You think you can last that long, son?”
Wardley leveled him with a gaze. “Without a doubt.”
The Three Cards exchanged an envious look and backed out the room. “We must keep our watc
h over the Great Hall, but we’ll hear you if you sneak out. Don’t cheat us, boy!”
“Fine,” replied Dinah. “Keep your promise and I will keep mine, and I will NOT take your heads for your silence.”
The Cards left. Wardley glanced at Dinah with a bemused grin. “Men of questionable character can always be trusted in situations that involve gold.”
Dinah didn’t have time for banter. “Did you bring the breastplate? The uniform?”
“I did.”
Wardley also had a bag. Out of it he pulled a white breastplate with the gray Club symbol etched on it. He slipped the armor over a gray tunic and fastened his black cloak with a tiny glittering Club pin at his right shoulder. “How do I look?” he whispered.
“Like a Club,” Dinah replied. “Me?”
“Like a servant, only cleaner.”
Dinah quickly braided her hair, and then started pushing back the cloaks in the corner of the room. They moved cloak after cloak aside until they saw it: a small wooden door, expertly camouflaged with the wood around it.
“I still can’t believe this is in here,” Dinah whispered, running her hand over the minute cracks.
Wardley nodded. “This was how your Great-Grandfather snuck out of the Great Hall to meet his Yurkei mistress, a serving girl of the King. The tunnels through the castle are well known among the Heart Cards.”
“Except mine,” Dinah said softly.
“Except yours.” Wardley took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “Let out a cry.”
“What?”
“Let out a cry, a loud one.”
Dinah did as she was told.
“That should keep them satisfied for a while,” laughed Wardley. “Let’s go.” They ducked under the door.
The passage—a sort of hallway between wooden wall brackets—led them directly into a niche in the stone that pushed out into the Great Hall. Checking that the massive room was empty, they quickly ran up the steps and past the throne. Dinah led Wardley into the narrow foyer bordering her father’s privy.
“This is the way into the tunnels? Through the privy?”
Dinah didn’t reply. She was too busy turning over tapestries. The last one, an elaborate work of art depicting her father’s victory over Mundoo—the Chief of the Yurkei—showered them with dirt and dead spiders as she yanked it back. There, there was the door—the one she remembered from that terrible day when Vittiore had arrived and her father had led her proudly out like his prized steed. The day Cheshire had shown her the tunnel and she accidentally wove her way beyond the palace gates.
The door inched open with a loud creak. They slipped through it, making sure to leave the door unlocked behind them. Dinah led Wardley down into the damp stone tunnels that ran parallel to the Great Hall and then, with a sudden plunge, down underneath it. The tunnels were dank and cold, much more unpleasant than the last time Dinah had been down here. The buildup of winter snow around Wonderland had turned them into long, wet slabs of frozen mud and cracked rock. Dinah watched her breath freeze and fall to the ground in front of them with a loud tinkle.
Wardley grabbed a torch from the wall and lit it with his flint. Pink flame danced over his face. “We ought to hurry. You could fall asleep down here and never wake up. The cold is just cold enough . . . ,” he trailed off, his lips turning a deep shade of blue.
They ran. The tunnel became deeper and colder the farther they spiraled into the frosty earth. Several times Dinah had to backtrack, trying to remember all the twists and turns she had taken as a hysterical fifteen-year-old. It was nearly impossible; she had been so deeply wounded that day, running blindly through the weaving catacombs. Did she turn here, at that strange cat etching on the wall? Or was it up there, when the tunnel split into four hallways and then returned to itself? She gave a shiver through her cloak.
“We should have grabbed more layers,” Wardley whispered. They had been down in the tunnels for almost an hour by Dinah’s pocket watch, lifted easily off of Harris the day before. “Are we almost there? Maybe we should head back.”
It seemed darker than before, and a sudden rush of panic enveloped Dinah. “I’m not sure. It’s so dark down here.”
“And cold,” added Wardley. “Don’t forget cold.”
Dinah bit her lip as she took in her surroundings. “It’s so much darker because we are deeper underground—the same reason it’s getting colder. Hold the torch up to the ceiling.”
She looked up and trailed her fingers across the dirt. Wardley held the torch above her. The light flickered and jumped against shiny black roots running the length of the tunnel. Every once in a while they gave a tiny pulse, as if alive, and they seemed to move ever closer.
Dinah grinned in the darkness. “Roots! That happened the first time; I remember thinking they looked like black bones. We’re almost there!”
“I pray you are right,” muttered Wardley, his teeth chattering. “Otherwise, we are turning back and I will spend the rest of my day warming my toes by a fire while you feed me tarts.”
The stone walls started to narrow; Dinah and Wardley turned sideways as they squeezed through, their faces damp with sweat. They turned one corner and then another, a maze of barely visible walls and dirt. There was a downward slope and then suddenly they were there. The dirt circle. The collision of the three passageways.
Wardley let out a long breath and waved the torch at the drawings. “Incredible. This is old Dinah, very old. Ancient.”
Dinah ran her fingers over the wavy triangle. “When I was down here before, I thought this was a symbol for the Yurkei Mountains. But it is so clearly the Black Towers.”
Wardley wrapped his hand around her fingers with a friendly squeeze. “You wanted to escape what your father had just done. It makes sense that you wanted it to be the Yurkei Mountains—it was anywhere but where he was.”
Dinah’s black eyes glittered in the darkness. “Do you have the chains?”
Wardley gave his bag a shake. Dinah heard metal clang against metal. “Let’s go, Princess.”
“You can’t call me that anymore,” replied Dinah as she crouched on her hands and knees, and began crawling through the tunnel. “Once we get inside, you can call me any name other than that one. Be as cruel as possible.” She paused to catch her breath. “Pray that this goes to the Black Towers.”
Wardley grunted behind her. “I’m praying that it doesn’t.”
The tunnel sloped upward steeply, the air growing oddly stifling, almost humid. The warm dirt felt good underneath her freezing palms as they began their ascent.
Chapter Nine
Dinah’s knees ached when she rose again; crawling up a steep slope had been much harder than she anticipated. Up ahead, light appeared from a narrow hole at the end of the tunnel. Dinah poked her head out and gave a sigh of relief. The smallest flicker of sunlight leaked in from a single rusted window that seemed to be miles above her. They had come to some sort of stone cylinder, and the tunnel went no farther. She looked down. The almost-vertical shaft ended abruptly with a steep drop into a large pool of ice. Wardley pushed up from behind.
“Stop, stop, we could fall!” whispered Dinah frantically. She glanced at her surroundings and found what she was looking for. Jagged stairs led up and away from the drop: mangled teeth that spiraled up the wall of the concave ring.
Wardley wiped his face. “It’s warmer in here.”
Dinah looked at the ice. “Not warm enough.”
“We must be in a hollowed-out grain silo. There are a number of them around the Towers.”
Wardley went first, climbing over Dinah and pulling himself up against the wall. “Stay close to the wall. Inch by inch. I see a door up there.” He gestured his chin upward. Dinah swallowed. A fall would not kill them, but it would surely break them.
“Don’t look down,” he instructed Dinah. She did, her eyes following a crooked crack in the ice. Buried up to its waist, frozen forever, was a skeleton. Its bony fingers dug into the ice, the claw marks inche
s deep. The scream on its face was etched there for eternity, the jawbone hanging grotesquely from its hinge.
Dinah gave a shudder. “Was that . . . ?”
Wardley pressed his body against the wall. “Done on purpose? Yes. I told you the Black Towers were a brutal place. Club Cards find many ways of extracting information, mostly by torture.”
“So, that man. . . .”
“So that man was probably put down here in the water before the snow arrived and forced to watch as it froze around him. I would guess he’s chained to the bottom, at the ankles.”
Dinah stared, letting the revulsion wash over her. She shivered. “How is it both humid and cold in here?”
“It’s the Black Towers.”
Dinah stared at the skeleton. Wardley, ever so carefully, reached his fingers under Dinah’s chin and turned her head. “Look away.”
The thrill of finding their way through the tunnels diminished with each pensive step toward the door, ever mindful of the frozen ground. Dinah heard the cry of enormous Wonderland bats, sometimes known to attack horses. Don’t look up, she told herself, pressing tighter to the wall. Don’t look up and don’t look down, just stay steady. They climbed silently, until they reached a dilapidated, blackened door, eaten away by mold and bat droppings.
Wardley turned to Dinah, the flame casting a pink hue on her dark features. “This is it. We can turn back from here, but after we go through this door, we will have to finish what we have started.”
Dinah looked at the door with a steely resolve, her stomach churning in fear. Regret was beginning to worm its way into her brain. But then she saw the note, unrolled from its tiny vial, and remembered the feeling that overcame her when she read it—that whatever conspiracy swirled through Wonderland Palace was coming for her eventually, whether she accepted it or not. She looked at Wardley, a brown lock of hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. “Faina Baker, the Black Towers. That’s where we are going.”
Queen of Hearts (The Crown) Page 9
