by Frank Beddor
“You honor us with insight into your thoughts, Your Highness,” Bibwit intoned. If he was being sarcastic, he gave no sign.
“As I’m aware,” Arch said. “So long as you’re all loyal to me, your lives are safe. General, you’ll help me earn the respect and allegiance of the card soldiers. Knight, you’re to help me earn the same from the chessmen. I expect the lord and ladyship’s full cooperation in my taming of the Spade soldiery, and Bibwit, you and I will determine how I can best win the confidence of the populace. You’ll all soon recognize the benefit of having me as your sovereign. But as I also have the Millinery to rule over . . . where is the Great Defector Hatter Madigan?”
“I don’t know, my liege,” Bibwit answered.
Arch frowned for the first time. “For a tutor, Mr. Harte, you don’t know much.”
“It isn’t always the case.”
“Let’s hope not. Leave me—all of you.”
Bibwit and the rest of the Wonderlanders left the salon.
“Have them watched,” the king ordered. “And send in the Clubs.”
A minister hurried out to arrange surveillance while the walrus-butler ushered the Lord and Lady of Clubs into the salon. Arch was much pleased to see the ranking couple readily genuflect before him.
“Flugelberry wine?” he asked, dismissing the walrus with a flip of his hand and, without waiting for an answer, pouring the wine himself. He handed brimming goblets to the Clubs, raised his own in a toast. “To the kingdom of Wonderland!”
“To the kingdom of Wonderland!” the lord and lady echoed, and emptied their goblets in a single swig.
“I hear the House of Clubs has been busy stirring up the population against the former queen,” Arch said, pouring refills.
“The House of Clubs has done what it thought necessary for the betterment of Wonderland,” the lady responded.
“I wouldn’t have supposed otherwise.”
“Our house does not intend to continue its subversive activities,” the lord promised.
“Oh?”
“No need. Wonderland’s improvement, sire, has come with your being king.”
Arch’s eyes widened and the corners of his lips dipped toward his chin, pulling his mouth into an upside-down crescent. “And to what do I owe this prompt exercise of loyalty?”
“To our belief that you share our assessment of imagination’s lack of worth,” said the lady.
“And to your superior military,” added the lord with a wink.
Arch laughed. His intel ministers laughed. Ripkins allowed himself another slanted smile. Blister abandoned the withered pansies and walked up to a pot of amaranths, pinching their blooms dead.
“My military is superior,” Arch agreed. “As for what I think of imagination . . . I don’t claim it’s completely lacking in value, only that to me it’s worth more when it’s not around. More wine?”
The Lord and Lady of Clubs explained how their soldiers had forced imaginationists from their homes and corralled them in high-walled limbo coops they’d had constructed on their own lands. The lord mentioned the Pledge of the Unimaginative, to which he humbly hoped the king would add his name.
“Uncanny,” Arch said at length. “It’s as if you knew I was coming and had anticipated my intentions. I applaud the House of Clubs’ treatment of imaginationists who, although without their powers now, have spent their entire lives making others feel inferior. For that, they should suffer.”
The Clubs, having their own views reflected back to them by so royal a highness, were about to express their devotion anew when a Doomsine warrior hurried in and—
“We found it, my liege.”
“Boarderland’s tribal leaders are in the banquet hall,” Arch said to the lord and lady. “I doubt I’ll grant them the privileges I intend to grant you in the future, but you should find them admirably lacking in imagination. Get them to sign your Pledge.”
With that, Arch strode from the room, Ripkins and Blister following in his wake.
Mute as a monk vowed to silence, the Doomsine warrior led them to the palace grounds, where the plantings were equally quiet as the king and his bodyguards were led along a path to a hedge indistinguishable from those around it. The Doomsine stepped in amid the hedge’s branches; its roots shifted and a hatch camouflaged with furry groundcover retracted to reveal a subterranean chamber aglow with an uncertain light. Ripkins and Blister took up positions alongside the path. Alone, Arch descended through the hatch and down the bronzite steps to the platform halfway to the chamber floor.
He could reach out and nearly touch it: the Heart Crystal.
Glowing brightly one instant, dimly the next, even suffering the lingering effects of WILMA it was something to admire. Its light, in its fuller moments, as life-affirming as the sun’s, its warmth the comfort of a fire on a winter’s evening: Rarely was a source of so much power also so beautiful. Arch spread out his arms as if to embrace it, to welcome its energy into his kingdom.
“It’s almost a shame,” he whispered.
Because to protect his reign from future threats, he was going to snuff out the Crystal forever.
CHAPTER 18
TWICE REDD had thought they would have a future together. She and Arch. The first time, she’d been the energetic, unconventional heir to Wonderland’s crown (“wild,” her father had called her; “defiant,” her mother had said). Impatient with princess protocol, lax in her studies with Bibwit, generally dismissive of the way things were done, she had enjoyed upsetting expectations of how she should and would behave. Her unruliness, defiance, rebelliousness, or whatever anybody wanted to call it, might have kept her in the crosshairs of her parents’ disapproval, but it’s also what initially intrigued Arch. Just twenty-two years old, he’d risen from obscurity to become king of a country that had never known a single overweening, overarching ruler. And despite his relentless ambition, his political and military genius, in his “off-time,” he too was wild and impulsive (“reckless,” King Tyman had called him; “immoral,” Queen Theodora had accused). In Rose Heart, he found a partner.
They met at a gathering for some charitable cause, peopled with starched government officials and high-profile do gooders, Arch invited because Queen Theodora understood the value of being on civil terms with her neighbors, especially those she didn’t like. Redd had just rebuffed a prospective dance partner, and the king, looking as if the closest he ever personally came to dancing was in battle, made his way to her.
“I know who you are,” she said after he introduced himself.
“And I you, Princess. I’ve heard of what you consider fun.”
That’s when she decided to test him. “You know what’d be fun?” She motioned with her head at the ballroom of dancers. “To send this boring bunch into a tizzy by inviting Wondertropolis reporters with me to a Black Imagination séance.”
“You know what’d send them into more of a tizzy?” he said, leaning close. “If I went with you.”
So at the height of the festivities, when they were sure of attracting the most notice, they left the palace. The resulting gossip was, to Redd’s mind, a satisfying tizzy, and after that she and Arch were constantly together—or were together as much as a queen-in-waiting and the ruler of a neighboring country inhabited by feuding nomadic tribes could be.
Often, without telling anyone, Redd would sneak over to Boarderland for a week at a time, and Arch, yet without any wives, exempted her from his notoriously dismissive attitude toward the female sex. She was the one genuinely strong female (the lone female) he seemed to respect.
“You haven’t just strength of imagination,” he told her. “You have strength of will. Imagination is nothing without that.”
She envisioned a future with him—cavorting as they pleased while she ruled Wonderland and he Boarderland, an enviable power couple if there ever was. Then it happened: Her mother told her she would not be queen and banished her to Mount Isolation. Arch promised to come to her but remained maddeningly vague
as to when. Too flush with resentment to wait, Redd scouted Boarderland in her imagination’s eye and spotted him camped with his tribe along a distant bend in the Bookie River. He wasn’t making preparations to travel to her, and when she unexpectedly showed up at the encampment, he seemed more to wince than to smile in encouragement. She began to fume about her mother’s nerve, exclaiming that Theodora had no right to remove the rightful heir from succession.
“This isn’t a good time for me, Rose,” Arch said, stopping her. And with the manner of one casting off a worn-out mantle: “You shouldn’t have come. I’ve no use for a banished princess who has no prospects of ever being queen.”
“You have . . . no use . . . for me?”
Sparkling clusters sizzled above her head. In the surrounding air: constellations of small explosions, countless miniature stars in their death spirals, but all of it harmless, her imagination directed not at Arch or anyone else because she was caught completely off guard by his rejection. She sulked back to Mount Isolation. And vowed never to be so weak again.
But, she recognized now, she’d been nearly as weak. Because after Arch dumped her, after she rid Wonderland of her mother and sister and installed herself on its throne; after ruling the queendom for thirteen years, communicating occasionally with Arch’s ministers but never with Arch himself; after losing Wonderland to her miraculously undead niece and jumping into the Heart Crystal to be birthed on Earth through some mediocre painter’s imagination; after recruiting and organizing a new army on Earth; after returning to Wonderland and navigating her Looking Glass Maze, thus increasing the strength of her imagination; after thinking herself beyond caring for anyone, impenetrable to the softer emotions, after all of this she had again paid Arch a surprise visit in his Doomsine encampment and—foolishly, idiotically—allowed herself to entertain thoughts of a future with him. She stripped him of his kingdom, but she didn’t kill him. Fearing that no matter how many assassins she surrounded herself with, no matter how many Cats she invented, she would always be alone, she had wanted a future with Arch, their mutual antagonism a game she envisioned them playing indefinitely. But he had swept his hand across the gameboard, knocking over the pieces. He had overturned the gameboard itself.
Sentimentality: the most dangerous weakness of all. It had brought her to this point, which she couldn’t have imagined even at the height of her powers: being without crown or palace, without a formidable army and—since lacking imagination she had no chance of avenging herself on the world—without even the spur of revenge that had pricked her on since she was seventeen. Her imagination should have returned by now. The green caterpillar was toying with her. There would be no Everqueen. It was time to lie down and die, and she trekked across the Chessboard Desert, leading Vollrath, The Cat, Sacrenoir and the rest of her assassins toward the one place that had been her home more than any other: Mount Isolation, where she would ease into her old sleep-pod and breathe her last breath.
CHAPTER 19
“YOU WERE right that I shouldn’t have gone,” Alyss confessed, at the foot of the dolomite wall behind one of the limbo coop’s tenements. Dodge was at her side, on the watch for guards while Mr. Dumphy stood with his back to the wall, feigning nonchalance and with unseen hands working his Rearranger invention against the thick dolomite.
“Huh?” the guardsman said.
“The anti-imagination rally at the salvage lot. I shouldn’t have gone. But I had to learn what I could firsthand.” Yet I learned nothing. “I wanted to understand why they resented me and my family for our imaginations.” I still understand nothing.
Half listening, Dodge burrowed a hand through the seam of his jumpsuit and took hold of an AD52 holstered under his left arm; a Three of Clubs had stepped to the lookout of the nearby guard tower and was scanning the limbo coop with a nightscope. Despite the abundance of weaponry he wore concealed about him, guardsman Anders knew he was ill-equipped. Hemmed in by the dolomite walls, outnumbered and outgunned, any recourse to his weapons had to be a last resort. If pressed to expose his weapons, it meant it was too late.
“I’ve tried to use my imagination to do what was best for the queendom,” Alyss said.
Her voice cracked, as it did whenever she was both offended and hurt: a lightning rod for Dodge’s attention. He might save Alyss from external mortal threats, but what about the subtler ones that came from within her own head? Self-doubt, paralyzing remorse—how could he save her from those?
“Maybe it has to do with your being the one who determines what’s ‘best,’” he said.
“But ‘best’ means whatever does the most good for the greatest number of citizens.”
Dodge kept his hand on the AD52 even as the Three of Clubs in the tower shouldered his nightscope. “You don’t have to convince me,” he said. “But Wonderlanders are not equal in their abilities and you know it. It’s a fact you live with the same as the rest of us. All you can do is try to make it so we’re equal in rights—subject to the same laws and afforded the same fundamental opportunities.”
No matter how kind or well-meaning you are, someone will always resent you.
“I didn’t ask for the responsibility of being queen,” Alyss said. “I don’t like to think I’ve been hated for having it.”
Mr. Dumphy stepped abruptly from the wall. “It’s not working. The dolomite’s too thick. My Rearranger’s molecular chamber fills up before it’s made anything more than a crater and it needs to be emptied to make a passage through the entire wall. Depending on the wall’s thickness, it might need to be emptied several times.”
“So empty it,” Dodge said.
“I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Anders. To empty it, I have to direct the molecules elsewhere, meaning that the portion of the wall I erase would have to be re-formed, and wherever I make that happen, it’s sure to attract attention. It would also mean leaving a deepening crater in the wall, visible for any Club soldier to see.”
“Let’s hold off a bit longer,” Alyss said. “I should start feeling my imagination soon, shouldn’t I?”
She hadn’t meant this to be a question; it had none of the assurance she’d intended, and Dodge was looking at her with a hint of—
Is that disappointment?
It felt as if she’d been frequently disappointing him these days—sometimes mildly, as now, other times poignantly, as with the salvage lot business. Did people in love always disappoint each other so much?
“Transmission,” Dodge said, and turned his back to the guard tower. He tapped his forearm keypad and a translucent image of Bibwit and General Doppelgänger formed before him.
“Unless you’re planning the queen’s rescue, we’re stuck here until Alyss gets her imagination back.”
“We don’t have the power to effect anyone’s rescue,” said the general.
“You mean he won?” Dodge was stunned. “Arch won?”
The general directed his words at Alyss. “My decks fought as hard as they could, my queen. They gave everything they had.”
Alyss did her best to smile, the muscles in her face stubborn. I was pressed into power too soon. Learning control of my imagination is one thing, gaining the knowledge needed to be queen another. “Of course,” she said.
“We hope Arch’s stay with us will be temporary,” Bibwit said. “Alyss, do you feel anything?”
“Right now, Bibwit, I feel many things, but my imagination isn’t one of them.”
Somewhere in a tenement: arguing voices, a wailing child.
“Redd is alive,” General Doppelgänger said. “Arch has sent packs of tribal warriors to hunt throughout Boarderland and the queendom. When they find her, they’re to dispose of her.”
“As yet,” said Bibwit, “the king doesn’t know of your whereabouts, Alyss, but that won’t remain the case for long. In addition, Hatter believes, and I agree, that because he betrayed Arch by sabotaging WILMA, the king will be vindictive toward him—or rather, toward him and Molly. He’s therefore taken his daughter
into hiding, but vows to be of as much use as he can while seeing to her safety.”
The loss of the queendom . . . my failure. I’ve disappointed so many.
“And how are the two of you managing?” Alyss asked. “At least you’re not imprisoned, which I assume since you’ve the freedom to make contact.”
The general glanced over his shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” Bibwit said to him. “If Arch’s spies try to catch us unaware, I’ll hear them beforehand. We’re followed everywhere,” he explained to Alyss and Dodge. “But I’m thankful Arch means to exploit us for his own benefit as much as possible. It’s the reason we are, relatively speaking, free.”
“For your own continued well-being,” Alyss urged, “cooperate with Arch.”
“We’ll be careful not to appear uncooperative, but we’ll not take initiative to aid him in his machinations.”
Dodge frowned. “Arch has to know Alyss will get her imagination back and that he’ll have serious trouble when she does, so he must have plans to prevent it.”
General Doppelgänger agreed. “He’s never without plans.”
It was the one thing Alyss and her advisers could know for sure.
She initially thought it was from a lack of nutrition—the prickling sensation similar to regaining feeling in a limb. She felt it in the sheath of skin covering her skull, radiating down from the top of her head to the back of her neck. Seven days and nights in a limbo coop will do that to you—leave you unsure of everything you feel except hunger and helplessness. Alyss was staring at the young imaginationist she’d seen sitting on her father’s shoulders who reminded her of the Liddells. Huddled beneath the protective arm of her father, the girl was picking at a handful of dried squigberries, putting them in her mouth one at a time and sucking on them.
