by Eva Chase
“Not that I remember.” Hatter gave the veil one last tuck and moved on to an arrangement of flowers on a fascinator. “But she could have traveled around without me knowing about it. I only saw her through her involvement with the Spades.”
I frowned. “And no one else from those days is still around. Theo made it sound like it’d be pretty hard to track these things down without a starting point. I wish she’d left instructions or something.”
Hatter paused, twirling a peacock feather between his thumb and forefinger. “There is actually one other person she often ran with back then who’s managed to keep his head,” he said slowly.
“What?” I straightened up with my fingers splayed on the table. “Why didn’t you tell me before? You said everyone else was gone.”
“Well, he…” Hatter grimaced. “Carpenter has changed a lot since those days. I’d imagine the main reason he’s kept his head is he’s put it and the rest of him in service of the Queen. The work he does these days… I don’t know how he stomachs it. He’d probably turn a Spade in sooner than lend them a hand. We can’t trust him. But he might have some idea of Alicia’s travels that I don’t.”
“We have to go talk to him then,” I said. “We don’t have to tell him it’s anything to do with the Spades. Tell him we want to help the Queen too or whatever. It’s not like you’ve been part of the rebellion for a while anyway.”
“We are not doing anything,” Hatter said firmly, pressing another feather into place without even needing to look at his hands. “If he gets even the slightest suspicion that you’re related to Alicia, he’ll be carting you off to the Queen. I don’t want you getting within a mile of Carpenter.”
My stomach dropped. “But if I could find the artifacts—”
“I’ll go,” Hatter said. “On my own. He knows me. He won’t be as suspicious. I should be able to approach it in a way that won’t clue him in to our purpose.” He attached the last of the feathers and considered the spread with an approving eye. Then he raised his head again. “I can go today. We’re in a bit of a bind for time, aren’t we?”
Gratitude swept through me so quickly it clogged my throat for a second. “I— Thank you. Are you sure you’ll be all right going by yourself? If this guy is on the Queen’s side now as much as you said… You didn’t want to be part of anything to do with the Spades at all just a couple days ago.”
It was my idea he was following up on. He shouldn’t have to take on all the risks.
“Hey.” Hatter came around the table and took my hand. His bright green eyes held mine. “I trust that if you think this is a lead we should pursue, there really is something there. I convinced myself for a long time that keeping out of the rebellion was the best thing for the people I cared about, but it didn’t get us any closer to freedom. That mission last night did. Honestly, it felt good to dive back into the action.”
I’d been able to see that in the eagerness that had energized him as we’d made our way through the palace. His words didn’t completely erase my guilt, though.
“I’d just feel horrible if anything happened to you because of me,” I said quietly.
“You don’t need to worry, looking-glass girl,” Hatter said with a wry smile. “I’ll be fine. Believe me, I survived many exploits far more dangerous when I lived and breathed the Spades. I might be dipping my toes back in, but I’m not going to tempt danger unnecessarily. My days of being Mad Hatter are long over.”
Mad Hatter. That was a side of him I definitely hadn’t seen yet. He sounded so sure of himself that I let myself nod. I’d only be putting him in more danger if I insisted on coming along, wouldn’t I?
“Well then,” I said, “for luck.” I slipped my hand behind his neck and kissed him.
Hatter kissed me back with a restrained hunger that left me giddy. When he drew back, his eyes were sparkling.
When we passed through the shop, Doria was sitting on the counter, peering at herself in a layered confection of a hat draped with silk. The mint-green shade didn’t totally fit with her ruffled black dress, as she apparently decided for herself. She tossed the hat back onto the shelf and hopped off the counter.
“I have to run an errand,” Hatter told her. “Stick with Lyssa? I don’t really want either of you wandering around on your own with the Queen in her current mood.”
“Whatever you say, Pops,” Doria said.
He ruffled her hair in response to the nickname. “I’ll be back tonight, hopefully not too late. Why don’t you talk with Lyssa about the thing we were discussing earlier?” He glanced at me. “I’ll see you soon with whatever answers I can pry out of him.”
He set off with a tip of his hat and a swish of his suit jacket.
“The thing?” I asked Doria.
“Come on,” she said, motioning to the stairs.
In the apartment, she led me on up to the fourth floor where she slept. The top level of the building was set up like another apartment in itself, with an open concept kitchen-living area about half the size of Hatter’s main one and two bedrooms down the hall. Doria went into the master bedroom at the end, where an unscreened window looked out over a bit of roof and the back alley. The bedspread on the queen-sized mattress was rumpled, but I knew no one had slept here in years.
Doria set her hands on her hips. “This was my parents’ bedroom,” she said. “My birth parents, I mean. Dad was thinking you should sleep in here instead of the guest room downstairs, so you can hop out the window onto the roof right away if the Knave or whoever comes by again. We can clean things up now that Time isn’t stuck anymore.”
My pulse hiccupped as I looked at her. Doria’s birth parents had been killed when she was a toddler by the order of the Queen of Hearts—because of their involvement with the Spades, from what I’d gathered. When we’d escaped onto the roof to hide before, I’d seen the shapes of their long-absent bodies left under that bedspread, frozen in time like the rest of Wonderland. They were gone, but this room had remained as if they’d never left.
“Are you okay with that?” I asked.
Doria shrugged. “That’s what Dad asked me too. It’s really not that big a deal. I don’t even remember them, you know? This is all just… stuff. Anything I want to keep, I’ll stick in my room. I can do that now.” She grinned and then reached for the bed covers. “For starters, these haven’t been washed in about fifty years.”
Thanks to the resetting of time over those years, no dust stirred up as we stripped the bed and remade it with fresh sheets or when we moved to the desk in the corner and the wardrobe beside it. We picked up the few pieces of worn clothing that had been left draped on a chair or a knob. I brought a glass ringed with wine and a plate dappled with crumbs over to the kitchen.
Doria grabbed what must have been her mother’s jewelry box and all the darker dresses out of the wardrobe. I hauled the ones she’d picked out for me to borrow back upstairs from the guest bedroom. We shook out the rug over the edge of the roof and left the window open so the warm breeze could drift through. It carried a faintly buttery smell from the bakery down the street where Hatter bought his scones.
Doria studied the stacks of folded shirts and slacks that had been her birth father’s with a cock of her head. “I guess I’ll ask Dad if he wants any of these, and otherwise we’ll take them to the clothing shop,” she said. “They’re not really his style.” She hesitated. “Maybe I’ll just keep one shirt. To hang on to it.”
“Of course,” I said. “I think it’s good to hold onto a few things, for when you want to remember—or at least think about them.” I sank down on the edge of the bed. “I—I lost my dad too, when I was eight. I’ve still got a pair of his old gloves tucked away in one of my drawers back home.” Big sheepskin ones, so soft when my dad had picked me up and spun me around when I’d been little. Whenever I smelled them, I remembered those first winters—the couple I could remember from before his illness—perfectly.
Doria sat down on the other end of the bed, leaning a
gainst one of the wooden posts with her legs drawn up in front of her. “What happened to your dad?” she asked.
“He got sick,” I said. “Cancer. I guess that’s not really a thing here.” Chess had told me there were no illnesses in Wonderland. I groped for a way to explain it. “It’s basically—this thing starts growing inside you, crowding in on all the parts of you that you need to breathe and process the food you eat and… everything. We have treatments in the Otherland, but they don’t always work. And when they do, sometimes it’s just for a little while, and then the cancer comes back.”
I didn’t like thinking back to those memories—of Dad slumped so sallow and frail on the sofa or in his bed.
Doria grimaced. “That sounds awful.”
“Yeah,” I had to say. “It really is. He was sick for almost three years before he passed on, and he was really weak and in pain a lot of that time.”
“You still had your mom, though?”
More than Doria had hers. “It was hard on her,” I said. “For a while she went kind of… vacant. But she was there, and she got better, over time.” Until then, I’d been the one who held the family together through her listlessness and my older brother Cameron’s rages.
Kind of funny that here in Wonderland, where I literally had powers no one else did and a tyrant queen had spent decades crushing everyone’s spirits, I had way more support than I’d been able to count on back then.
I couldn’t let these people down. There had to be something more I could do to free them completely.
Doria hugged her knees. “Sometimes it pisses me off that I don’t remember them at all,” she said. “But sometimes I’m kind of glad. It would probably hurt more if I had a clearer idea what I was missing. Which doesn’t mean I’m not still really pissed off at the Queen.”
The corner of my mouth twitched upward. “Obviously. I guess there are upsides and downsides either way. At least you do have one really good dad, even if he hasn’t been keen on everything you want to do.” No one could see Hatter with Doria and fail to notice how much he loved her.
Doria smiled too. “Yeah,” she said. “Parents are supposed to be annoying, right?” A spark of mischief lit in her eyes. “Speaking of which…”
“Uh huh?” I prompted with a raise of my eyebrows when she trailed off.
She twisted the corner of the bedspread in her hand. “Dee came by the shop and told me there’s a meeting for all the Spades happening in a bit. I was planning on going.”
Which meant either I convinced her not to or I went with her, if I was going to stay with her like Hatter had asked. From past experience, I didn’t think the former option was going to pan out.
“I don’t think he’ll get angry at you for coming with me like he did last time,” she added quickly. “He knows I’d go anyway. He even started coming to the meetings with me.”
That was true. “I guess he didn’t actually say we shouldn’t go out anywhere,” I said. “Only that we should stick together. And… if the Spades are making plans, I’d like to be in on them too.”
Doria’s face lit up. “Then it’s settled,” she declared, jumping up. “We’d better get going. It’s almost time for the meeting to start.”
Chapter Five
Lyssa
It was kind of a shame that Hatter was missing the current meeting of the Spades, because Doria and I headed up the steps at the back entrance of a costume shop and found ourselves joining what looked like a giant tea party. A bright red table stretched the length of the room, set out with plates of cakes and cookies and pots of tea. I watched one of those pots lift up of its own accord to fill a cup it deemed had gotten too low.
Tall stools with low backs stood all around the table. The refreshments circulated a lot like the rotating conveyor belt at Melody’s favorite sushi place, but instead of the food traveling around while the diners waited, the food stayed put and the chairs glided from spot to spot.
Actually, “hitched” was a more accurate word than “glided.” The rotation stopped and started at an unpredictable pattern and with a grinding whir that gave me the impression the inner workings were starting to fail. Yellow sheets papered over the place’s broad front window, and dust bunnies had gathered in the corners. The sugary smell that laced the air was a little stale. But then, a happening café wouldn’t have made a very good secret meeting spot.
Theo stood by the head of the table where the stools shot straight around to the other side. He was the only figure in the room not in motion. Twenty or so others perched on the stools. Chess gave me a wave, and Doria bounded over to the empty stool next to the redheaded twins.
There were a lot of empty stools. Something like half of them were unoccupied. My heart sank as I hopped onto one between Chess and a burly guy I recognized from the pre-mission meeting yesterday evening.
No wonder the Spades were having such a hard time taking on the Queen of Hearts. The memory of this morning’s procession lingered in my mind—all those rows of marching soldiers. Even if only half of the people Theo might have counted on had shown up today, they couldn’t have risen up against the Hearts and won, not on their own.
Looking at the faces around me, most of them drawn and grim, I could tell they were well aware of that fact too.
I hooked my feet behind the rung on the stool’s base to help me keep my balance as my seat lurched to the right. There had to be some reason for hope. We’d just ended one of the Queen’s most awful acts of oppression. The Spades could make plans that spanned more than one day, build up more resources…
But the Queen’s parade and proclamation probably felt much more real to them than our victory. They hadn’t even gotten to experience one completely new day yet.
A couple more people trickled in, and then Theo cleared his throat. His warmly commanding baritone carried over the rasp of the mechanical chairs.
“You all know why we’re meeting again so soon, and why I wanted as many of you here as possible, so let’s not waste time rehashing this morning’s events,” he said. “Chess, you had a look around the palace grounds?”
“A look and a listen,” Chess piped up from his seat beside me. Even his grin looked a bit strained. “From what I heard, the Queen has stayed true to her word and locked her current prisoner in the palace dungeon. That is, four floors beneath the ground level, with guards at every level in between.”
“Attempting to break anyone out of there would be a suicide mission,” the man at my other side said.
The pained set of Theo’s mouth suggested he agreed. “Dee and Dum, your observations of the Hearts’ Guard in the city?”
One of the twins sat up a shade straighter. “They’ve cut back on the patrols. Just ten guards that we saw making the rounds—talking to the Clubbers, making friendly.” He wrinkled his nose. “They aren’t so much trying to catch us outright as trying to make a point about why the rest of the city shouldn’t count on us.”
“Turning the Clubbers against us right when we might have had a real chance of convincing them to rise up,” a woman across the table from me muttered around a mouthful of cookie.
“We can’t forget that we struck a major blow against the Queen’s rule last night,” Theo said. “As difficult a problem as she’s presented us with, we’ve gained ground. All this gambit means is that we need to rally our forces and gather more power to our side as quickly as possible.”
His gaze found mine for an instant before my stool yanked me past him around the table. More power—like the artifacts he’d talked about. If one of them was a weapon—if Aunt Alicia’s ring would allow us to use it—we had to find them. The Spades needed an advantage the Queen couldn’t match. And we needed it before her dungeon filled up with innocent civilians.
With another jolt of the stool, I found myself facing a woman with a pointed face and beady eyes like a ferret. She stared straight at me, frowning.
“Why is the Otherlander still here?” she demanded. “The Queen is cracking down on us even
harder because of her. We’ve got enough to worry about without that hassle too.”
My fingers curled tighter around the edges of my seat. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be unwelcome here.
“I came back because I thought of a way I could help reach the watch,” I said.
“And Lyssa did help us,” Theo said, a stern note entering his voice. “We couldn’t have freed Time without her. Because she was generous enough to put herself at risk so that we could break free of the cycle we’d been stuck in, she’s now stuck here with us until we can see her to another looking-glass doorway.”
“I’m doing everything I can to make sure I don’t draw attention,” I added, and motioned to my dyed hair, my clothes. “The Queen won’t even know I am still here.”
A mutter carried from farther down my current side of the table. “If the Otherlander really wants to help us, she should turn herself over. That would satisfy the Queen for a little while—or at least distract her.”
My head jerked around, a chill seeping through my skin all the way to my gut. I couldn’t tell who had spoken, but none of the faces I could see in that direction looked disturbed by the suggestion.
Chess caught my elbow, his grasp both steadying and protective. When I looked at him, he wasn’t so much grinning as baring his sharpest teeth.
Theo’s jaw had clenched with a flash of his dark brown eyes. His voice came out low but with a clear warning, so potent it sent a warm shiver under my skin despite my discomfort. “I sincerely hope we aren’t turning to the same tactics as the Queen, volunteering others to make their sacrifices for us,” he said.
“Of course not, White Knight,” several of the Spades hurried to say. Flickers of horror passed through some of their expressions. But there were others who still looked tense, as if they weren’t willing to speak up but didn’t exactly have a problem with that one speaker’s suggestion.
