by Eva Chase
“Let’s have that tart,” he said.
“How long does the new head take to grow?” I asked as we headed to the back of the beach by the rocks, pretending an approving interest in his work.
“Depends on the body,” Carpenter said. “If it’s a weak one, or too young or too old, we don’t bother at all. With the decent ones, it could be a week, maybe two, or anywhere in between. We’ve usually got a few down there at any given time. Can’t always replace ‘em as quickly as she removes ‘em.”
He snapped his mouth shut after that last word and glanced toward the water as if checking to see if Walrus might have heard that almost-criticism of the Queen. His co-worker hadn’t yet resurfaced. Carpenter let out a chuckle as if it’d been a joke all in good fun. As if even jokes couldn’t cost you your head these days.
The palace needed servants, and the Queen had the disturbing habit of running through them—and running them through—a lot more quickly than their natural lifespan should have been. Waste not, want not. Even the pearl-heads could be re-pearled if their bodies had held up, from what I’d heard.
“I’m glad to see you’re well,” I said carefully. I’d have had to take care with this subject even if I had really been here as a friend. “I have to admit one of the reasons I thought to come out here was, ah, concerns prompted by recent events. No ground feels completely secure when the atmosphere is constantly shifting, does it?”
I wasn’t sure how much Carpenter knew about the Queen’s proclamation this morning, but the tightening of his mouth told me he understood what I meant well enough. He gulped a bite of the pie, crumbs sprinkling his beard. “I make myself of use,” he said, by which I figured he meant, there weren’t many willing to do this job, so the Queen might not be in too huge a rush to displace him.
“You do indeed,” I said, managing to hold back the dryness that wanted to creep into my voice. “I admire your ambition. It’s only…” I glanced toward the water as he had. Still no sign of Walrus. I lowered my voice anyway. “I’ve heard a little talk about the previous Alice, saying she came out near this cove. That would have had to be before you had anything to do with this place, of course, but I’m not sure, when emotions are running high, all those details would be considered.”
Carpenter paused in mid-chew. He swallowed, but he’d turned a bit sallow. “No questions have come my way,” he said, seeming to gather his confidence. “Perhaps the suggestion has already been dismissed.”
“Perhaps,” I said, about to lead into my real gambit.
A faint splash brought both our gazes up. Walrus’s gray head had broken through the water’s surface. “Is he still here?” he asked in his ponderous voice, presumably meaning me.
“An old friend,” Carpenter said. “The work’s done, isn’t it?”
Walrus let out a huff of breath. My skin prickled. I couldn’t prod Carpenter with him listening. Especially when he was studying me with shadowed eyes.
“What’s his business anyway?” Walrus muttered.
I gave him a smile and raised my hat. “Hatter. I do have a few that can work in the water, if you’re ever so inclined.”
He grimaced as if the thought disgusted him, but to my relief, he pushed away from the cove. He swam for a few strokes above water and then dove back down.
“He isn’t a bad sort,” Carpenter said after a moment. “Just not very interested in being company.”
“Fair enough.” I hesitated, waiting until I was sure Walrus wouldn’t re-emerge, and then shook my head, making my tone as rueful as I could. “That story about Alicia is crazy anyway, isn’t it? I expect I knew just about everything that went on back then, and she never left the city.”
Hope lit inside me the second Carpenter’s chest started to puff up. Even when he’d been a Spade, he’d never passed by the chance to one-up someone else if he could. I’d purposely exaggerated my confidence to provoke his self-importance—and apparently there’d been something on that subject to provoke.
“You didn’t know so much as you think,” he said with a smirk. “That last time she came through, she snuck out to the Checkerboard Plains. Asked me to show her the way to the train.”
“The Checkerboard Plains?” I said incredulously, tamping down on my eagerness so it wouldn’t show. “What would she have wanted out there?”
Carpenter shrugged, leaning back against the jagged rock and devouring another chunk of pie. “She was all mysterious about it, like she liked to be. I got the impression the idea came from something she saw or heard while she was in the Otherland, but she didn’t say what. Not that it matters now, does it?”
His tone darkened on that last question. I laughed as casually as I could. “If it didn’t back then, I’m sure it doesn’t now.”
Something she’d seen in the Otherland—something from one of the previous Alices who’d traveled to Wonderland, the same way Alicia’s notes had directed Lyssa? The information was a start. At least we’d narrowed down the scope of any investigations we took on.
I had enough wits not to leave the moment I’d gotten that answer. “Is it true the orangeberries grow better out here?” I asked, and let us ramble through another half hour of meaningless conversation.
The sun brushed the surface of the sea, and Carpenter stood up. “It’s getting late,” he said. “A long walk back to the city. I could give you a ride as far as the edge of the palace grounds if you don’t mind joining me and my pearly friend in the cart.”
The cart where the body of a friend had been lying just an hour ago. A creeping sensation ran through my nerves. But it would be ridiculous to turn an offer like that down if I wanted him to believe I was at ease with his current line of work.
“Perfect,” I said, girding myself. “Thank you for the lift.”
The sky was stark black with a scattering of stars by the time I reached the hat shop. I hustled up the stairs to the apartment, trying to be both quick and quiet. It turned out neither mattered that much.
Doria was curled up in the wing chair by the table, her hands circling a cup of tea. The smile she gave me managed to look accusing—and a little bleary.
“You said you wouldn’t be home too late,” she said, waving the half-full cup at me. The milky liquid nearly sloshed out.
“I believe I said I hoped I wouldn’t be back too late,” I said, coming over to lean on the back of the chair. I tugged one of the braids mixed in with her hair, and she made a face at me. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
“I missed the main excitement yesterday. I wanted to have a front row seat if anything interesting happened tonight.” She cocked her head at me. “Did you get some answers?”
“I think so,” I said. “But nothing all that exciting. Sorry to disappoint you.”
She sighed and motioned to the dish rack, where another teacup was drying. “Lyssa meant to wait up too, but I had to order her to go upstairs after she almost fell asleep on the stool.”
Of course our looking-glass girl would have insisted on washing her dishes even then. “She’s been through a lot in the last day and a half,” I said. “I’ll give her the news, such as it is, tomorrow. Now I’m ordering you to bed. Off with you!”
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered around a yawn.
As she headed up, I turned on the alarm device Theo had given us and pointed it at the apartment’s front door. Then I ordered myself to my own bed. It’d been a couple of long days for me too.
After all those years, it was hard to imagine I’d once slept in this bed every night. Remembering Lyssa’s morning greeting with a grin and a flicker of heat, I pulled off my tie. I did have actual pajamas around here somewhere, didn’t I? I hadn’t bothered with them in years since I’d always been reset back into that damned suit anyway.
There, folded in the drawer in the base of the wardrobe. They were nicer than I remembered, a silky fabric with purple and green stripes.
I burrowed my head into the pillow and let the memory of Lyssa’s presence sitting nex
t to me on the bed paint over the images of the Oyster Cove and Carpenter and the cart ride partway home. The taste of her lips. The heat of her hand moving down my—
I jerked awake without any sense of having fallen asleep. The sheets had tangled around my legs. A voice was hollering loud enough to carry from the street outside…
That was the Queen’s voice.
My pulse hitched, and I scrambled out of bed in an instant. The light drifting into the hall was only a touch brighter than dawn’s pallor. I hurried down to the living area with its large windows.
Looking outside, all my nerves jolted with the thought that our world had been reset after all. The rows of guards, the Queen on her throne, it was all as it had been yesterday morning.
Except not. As my heartbeat thudded on in my ears, I remembered that the sun had been higher when I’d watched this horrible spectacle with Lyssa and Doria. The sky had been unclouded.
And the head on the pike brandished in the midst of the parade had been Sally’s, not this one with the mane of faded hair I recognized as Smith’s.
Oh, no. He must have offered—and of course our White Knight had accepted.
The Queen didn’t sound anywhere close to appeased by the fact that the Spades had answered her challenge. “This is barely a start,” she was ranting, waving her hands from her ported throne, her face flushed ruddy. “Where are the rest of the Spades? How will they atone for the crimes they’ve committed against all of us? Yesterday I took one. Today I take two. The deal remains the same. Let’s see how long they can pretend to be heroes.”
Even as she spoke, one of the guards was grabbing a man who’d been watching the parade with his door cracked ajar. An elderly woman already lay bound behind the throne.
“Oh, God,” Lyssa murmured.
I startled. I’d been so focused on the Queen that I hadn’t heard our Otherlander coming downstairs. She stood a couple steps back from the window, a caution I appreciated even as I wanted her all the way on the other side of the room. The color had drained from her face. Horror shimmered in her eyes as her gaze shifted to meet mine.
“Everyone thought she’d stop with this tactic if she got what she wanted yesterday—if the Spades proved they wouldn’t let other people die in their place,” she said in a thin voice. “Smith gave himself up to buy us some time. But she doesn’t care. She’s going to keep at it anyway. He didn’t change anything, and we’re still in the same awful position we were before.”
I rubbed my mouth as if that would draw the right words out of it to set Lyssa’s mind at ease. But my mind wasn’t remotely at ease. My spirits were sinking.
What I’d done yesterday hadn’t been enough either. There were too many people I didn’t know how to protect.
“Yes,” I said. “It appears we are. Let’s see what we can do about it.”
Chapter Seven
Lyssa
I walked into Theo’s office and nearly ran right into him as I pushed past the door.
“Lyssa,” he said, touching my shoulder to steady me and then nodding to acknowledge Hatter, who’d come in right behind me. With the sleeves of his white button-up pulled straight over his muscular forearms and his dark curls slicked back from his face more forcefully than usual, he looked like he meant business about whatever he was preparing to do.
He gave my shoulder a light caress before letting me go. “I was about to summon another meeting. You can come with me.”
“No,” I said, the words spilling out in a rush. “We don’t need a meeting. There’s only one thing to do that makes any sense.”
“All right,” Theo said, calmly enough, taking a step back to give us room to really come in. “And what’s that?”
I sucked in a breath. “Smith turning himself in didn’t stop the Queen’s plan. She’s obviously going to keep grabbing random people until she’s convinced she’s gotten all of the Spades, or at least most of you. And maybe me too.” That last bit made my throat constrict. I forced my voice out. “Sacrificing someone else isn’t going to help, and you said yourself that you’re not in a position to take her on head-to-head yet. Hatter got a lead—we know where my grand-aunt went exploring outside the city. I’m going to track down those artifacts, and then we’ll stop the Queen from killing anyone else.”
I couldn’t see another head waved on a pike. I couldn’t watch her slaughter Wonderland’s citizens to prove her warped and vicious point. Not when there was a chance the tools to defeat her were right here, waiting to be uncovered.
Theo’s gaze snapped to Hatter. “You found out something about Alicia’s travels?”
Hatter’s mouth twisted. He hadn’t been quite as committed to this plan as I was. I got the sense he’d come to the Tower with me at least as much to keep an eye on me as to provide support.
“Carpenter said the last time she came to Wonderland, she went out to the Checkerboard Plains,” he said. “I’ve got no reason to doubt him—he said she asked him to help her get on the train. That’s all he knew, though. It’s a still a lot of terrain to cover, without a very clear idea what we’re looking for.”
“But there’s got to be something important out there,” I put in. “Either she found the ring there, or something to do with the ring… Whatever she found, it made her feel like too much was riding on her—that’s why she ran back home and never came back.”
I wouldn’t falter like that. If my childhood had taught me anything, it was how to stand steady even while everything around me was falling apart. And this was about saving dozens, maybe hundreds, of lives.
“The Checkerboard Plains would make sense,” Theo said. “It’s a confusing place, often difficult to keep your sense of direction—ideal for hiding things the Queen would hope no one ever discovered.”
“Ideal for us ending up lost and without anything more than we started with,” Hatter said, but he didn’t sound too set in his pessimism. He had come with me rather than trying to argue me out of my plan.
“We have to try,” I said. “If there’s something in the Checkerboard Plains that the Queen is afraid of, we need it. Once we’re out there, maybe I’ll be able to figure out more as we go—maybe I can connect the dots from things Aunt Alicia said that I didn’t realize the full meaning of at the time. It’s not as if I can head home and look for more clues there instead.”
Even as I laid out my case, my heart thumped faster. I didn’t actually like the idea of rushing out onto unfamiliar terrain—terrain Theo had just admitted was difficult and confusing—with only that vague plan. This was Wonderland. Almost anything could be waiting for us out there.
But because this was Wonderland, I also had people here on my side. Knowing that helped balance out my uncertainties.
As if he’d read my mind, Theo’s next words were, “You can’t go on your own. I’ll go with you—the legends I’ve heard may help guide us too. And we might need more help than that. I’ll gather a small team, assemble a few devices that may be useful along the way, and we’ll set off.”
I exhaled in relief. “All right. Good. We should leave as soon as possible, right? How long do we have before the Queen fills her dungeon if she keeps taking more people each day?”
Theo frowned. “I don’t know its exact capacity—and she may decide ‘full’ is a subjective term. I wouldn’t count on more than a week.”
Seven days to save Wonderland. Great. But it was a heck of a lot better than no chance at all. “Is there anything I should pack to bring along?” I asked. “I don’t know what to expect out there.”
“We can pack together,” Hatter said. “I’m coming.”
I glanced at him, startled. He crossed his arms over his chest in a defiant pose that I guessed was aimed at Theo, because a faint smile crossed his lips when he met my eyes. “I’m not sticking around here while you do all the work.”
He turned to Theo. “And we’ll bring Doria too. The way things are going, it’ll likely be safer out on the Checkerboard Plains than it will be here in the
city the next few days. The Knave already dislikes me. I wouldn’t put it past him to ‘randomly’ choose her for the dungeon next.”
If he’d expected an argument from the White Knight, he didn’t get one. Theo just smiled in return.
“It’s settled, then. Meet the rest of us on the road at the Plains-ward end of town as soon as you’re ready.”
The road Hatter, Doria, and I took out of the city didn’t look quite as pristine as the one that went by the pond and the mushroom farm. By the time we reached the last few buildings, the orange paint on the cobblestones was worn down and dull. I sidestepped a couple of gaps where old stones had been dislodged and not yet replaced.
“I thought you said people walked everywhere in Wonderland,” I said to Hatter. “Now there’s a train?”
“The train only circles through the Checkerboard Plains,” Hatter said. “Not many have any reason to go out that way these days. Some Clubbers used to take day trips for a little novel excitement, but the dip where the tracks veer closest to the city is still an hour’s hike from here. Even those who could be bothered to make the trip got bored after we found ourselves stuck in that one day.”
“I’ve never been out there before,” Doria said. “Dad wouldn’t let me.”
Hatter gave her a narrow look. “You get into enough trouble in the city. Anyway, I’m taking you now, aren’t I?”
“True, true. I shouldn’t complain.” She grinned at me. “And I’m getting to go as part of a special secret quest.” Her voice lowered. “Do you really think we’re going to find some kind of weapon out there that’ll take down the Queen?”
I wished I could answer that question a little more confidently. “I hope so,” I said. “If it’s out there, I’ll do whatever I can to find it.”
That reply seemed to satisfy her more than it satisfied me. She bounded on ahead, faster when a group of four figures came into view under the shade of a tree with leaves so vibrant they might as well have been carved out of jade.
