by Eva Chase
The bowing grass at the edge of the ring I’d cleared hissed as I approached. I waved the sword at it, and to my relief the strands stilled. I’d shown them there was a force to be reckoned with around here.
All seven of us stayed close together as we waded through the subdued field, me staying in the lead this time, sword ready. Nothing jumped at us or grabbed us the rest of the way to the hill. As we came up on the immense shadow beneath the curve of the wave, I made out the raggedly arched entrance to a cave at the base of the hill beneath.
We’d just reached the edge of the shadow when a slim figure stepped out of the cave. I stopped in my tracks, raising the sword higher defensively.
The man gazed at us with a joyful light filling his wizened face. He swiped a hand over his wisps of white hair in an effort that didn’t do much to smooth it down and stepped forward with a clink of his plated armor, tarnished metal dappled with patches of worn red paint. With a grand sweep of his arm, he dropped into a bow on his knee in front of me. His voice creaked out of him like a wind-swayed branch.
“It is an honor to finally greet you, your Majesty.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lyssa
Your Majesty?
I let the sword drop to my side. “Er,” I said to the old dude in the armor, who was still crouched in his very committed bow. “There’s been some mistake. I don’t think any of us here is a majesty of anything. I’m definitely not.”
He looked up at me with an expression that was both awed and amused. “You wear the armor of the blood-marked ruby. You carry the sword. I assume you have the ring on you somewhere, for it will have led you to them. You are of the line of Alice, are you not?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “If you mean the Alices who came here from the Otherland. Our family isn’t royal.”
His pale blue eyes twinkled. “Not in the Otherland, it isn’t. Here in Wonderland, you are our rightful ruler. The Red Queen, come to reclaim her throne from the usurping Hearts.”
None of this was making a whole lot of sense to me. If there was a Red Queen who could topple the Queen of Hearts, wouldn’t someone have mentioned that before?
Beside me, Chess looked bemused. The shocked confusion on Hatter’s face echoed all the emotions rushing through me. I couldn’t see the others, but no one had piped up with an, “Oh, right! We forgot to mention that completely vital fact,” so I was going to guess this was news to them too.
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “My grand-aunt Alicia left the ring for me. I was using it to help the Spades find the ruby artifacts so they might be able to stop the Queen of Hearts, not so I could turn into some kind of queen.”
The man straightened up, his wispy white hair drifting with the cool breeze. “You don’t need to turn into a queen,” he said. “You already are one. But I know the Hearts family has wiped out every trace they can of their true history. Come here, all of you, and we’ll talk.” He glanced over my companions. “It’s good that you already have allies. Better still that you braved this land’s threats to find the sword and the armor. I hope that means you will stay with us where Alicia did not.”
He motioned for us to follow him deeper into the shadow of the arced hill. My pulse stuttered as I hurried after him. “Wait, you knew Aunt Alicia?”
“That ring led her to me,” he said over his shoulder. “I told her what her true purpose here was, but she didn’t want to believe me. Perhaps it is better that the task came down to you, if she wasn’t ready to face it.”
The words from Aunt Alicia’s letter came back to me. I didn’t really know how I fit in there or what my true purpose was. When the pieces all collided, I panicked. I ran away.
She’d run away from whatever this guy was about to tell us? I swallowed thickly. I’d come into the Checkerboard Plains hoping to find answers, but maybe I was going to get more than I’d bargained for.
Theo’s voice carried from behind me, a bit of an edge in his normally smooth baritone. “Who exactly are you, if we can ask that?”
“Ah,” the old guy said in his creaky yet resonant voice. “I am the Red Knight, loyal servant to the Red royal family. I have guarded the last of the artifacts until such time as the true rulers of Wonderland could be restored. It has been… a long time.”
No kidding. From the looks of him, he might be over a hundred in Otherland years. In Wonderland that could mean way older.
“Do you have a real name?” I asked, thinking of the other man I knew who went by the label Knight. “I mean, one that’s not just your role?”
The Red Knight paused at the edge of a firepit ringed with crumbling stumps. “I believe I did,” he said, his voice diminishing. “But I can’t say I remember what it was. I haven’t had much opportunity to introduce myself to anyone out here.”
Clearly. I sat down gingerly on one of the stumps near him. The others took seats all around me, Doria sitting on the grass between Hatter and Dee when it turned out there weren’t enough stumps. The Red Knight made an apologetic grimace.
Theo was watching him, his gaze considering but his jaw clenched. With the question he’d asked—did he not trust this guy? Had something the Red Knight had said contradicted his understanding of his world?
It was hard to figure what motivation the old man could have had for making this up, though.
“Let me try to tell the story fully,” the Red Knight said. “If I ramble some, I apologize in advance. There’s much to tell. And if you find yourself confused, do stop me and say so. It’s been fifty years since I last needed to explain, and that attempt didn’t go particularly well, as I’ve mentioned.”
He shifted forward in his seat with a clink of his armor, the tarnished steel plates covering him from feet to neck with small gaps in between. His gaze skimmed the people I’d brought with me.
“The only Queen you know of is the Queen of Hearts, am I right?” he said. “You believe Wonderland has been ruled by the Hearts for as long as it has been Wonderland.”
“Of course,” Dum said. “No one’s ever talked about any other royal family.”
“Because the first Queen of Hearts took the heads of anyone who breathed a word about it,” the Red Knight said. “I was there, nearly two centuries ago, when the Hearts family and the followers they’d rallied stormed the palace. We weren’t prepared for a sudden assault. It was the middle of the night, and the attackers went straight to the royal chambers—slaughtered the few guards there, the king and the queen and their children in their beds. Claimed the rule as their own, made the property over in their image, smashed or beheaded anything and anyone that might hint at their treachery.”
“And Wonderland just forgot?” Hatter said.
“I expect some memory of it was carried on for a brief time,” the Red Knight said. “But as those who could directly remember the Red Queen and King passed on, there were so few left who’d heard, and the risks for speaking up were so great—and she’d destroyed any proof she could that would prove the story—” He gave us a tight smile. “History is to the victors, is it not?”
“You said the ‘first’ Queen of Hearts,” I said. “Not the same one who’s ruling right now?”
He shook his head. “She would be the third, if my understanding is correct. Her mother was a child when the coup took place. From what I hear of her attitudes, I’d imagine that experience was passed down: the knowledge that no matter how high you sit, you can always find your neck at the wrong end of an axe in the blink of an eye.”
“You haven’t connected this story to Lyssa,” Theo said quietly. He didn’t sound as if he doubted the guy now. “You said the Hearts killed the entire Red family.”
“They thought they had.” The Red Knight looked down at his hands, his mouth tensing and then releasing. “I had a daughter then,” he said. “A year younger than the youngest of the princesses, who’d only just turned sixteen. They didn’t look a great deal alike, but their hair was a similar color, and in the night
, when the attackers cared more about spilling blood quickly than checking who lay in which bed…”
He let out a ragged breath. “I heard them coming. I understood what I was hearing. I loved my daughter, you understand, but my first duty, the duty I’d sworn to carry out before all else, was to the Red family. Princess Alice had the last bedroom in the row—the most time for me to act. I got her up and had Matilda take her place in bed, and I fled with her, by the best ways I knew.”
“Princess Alice,” I repeated. My pulse had started to race.
The Red Knight met my eyes. “Yes. But I didn’t know where to take her to keep her safe. The murderers realized I was gone and took up the search for me. We found ourselves at the edge of a small pond outside the city. The one they call the Pond of Tears now, for all the weeping, even though no one remembers what anyone all that time ago would have been weeping for. Princess Alice looked at her reflection in the water, and she declared it was like a mirror, and that like those other special mirrors, it would carry her to another world where the ones who’d come for her blood couldn’t find her.”
Chess raised his eyebrows. “And it worked? Lyssa could have gone back through to the Otherland through the pond all this time?”
“No,” the Red Knight said. “That is, it did work. She leapt in before I could argue with her, and the water swallowed her up. But as she jumped, she commanded the pond that it should admit no one but her to where it would take her. She didn’t want there to be any chance of the villains following her, you understand. Even I couldn’t, diving in right after her. Although I’ve come to feel that was for the best—that I’ve served better on this side of things.”
“And you think she made it through to the Otherland,” I said. “You think I’m related to her.”
“I don’t know exactly what transpired on the other side of her slapdash looking-glass. But I know that more than once, young women named Alice or a variation on her name have traveled back through the Pond of Tears as no one else ever has. I know the proof your grand-aunt showed me with the blood-marked ruby. You do have the ring?”
I tugged the chain out from beneath my shirt, cupping the ring in my hand. He motioned for me to take off its protective shell. “Have you pricked your finger on it yet?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It—”
Oh.
“It glowed, yes?” That awed light came back into the Red Knight’s face. “Let me see it, if you don’t mind?”
My chest tightened, but I touched my thumb to the sharp point in the middle of the ruby anyway. It pinched through my skin. The drop of blood fell, and the ruby shone with that magical light.
“That ring is the marker of the Red royal line,” the Red Knight said in a hushed voice. “It will only glow for those who bear royal blood. Not even I…”
He held out his hand to demonstrate. The ruby’s glow had already faded. I let him nick his finger against the stone. Like with Theo, the blood simply seeped away into the stone dully.
Aunt Alicia had talked about the magic that ran through our bloodline. That had to be what she’d meant. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“There were ruins—part of a wall—out near the Topsy Turvy Woods,” I said. “It had the ruby symbol on it.”
The Red Knight nodded. “During the reign of the Reds, the royal family had structures all across Wonderland. The people of Wonderland wandered farther abroad much more often. The Red Queen and King served well, with generosity rather than greed. The Hearts destroyed all of that.”
“So, Lyssa is really going to be queen?” Doria said, her eyes wide.
I didn’t know how to answer that question. To my immense gratitude, Theo patted her shoulder and gave me a reassuring smile. “I think we’d better give our Otherlander some time to process this revelation. All of us need to rethink a lot of what we believed.”
The intent look he fixed on me felt like an offer of help, if I wanted it. I wasn’t sure what he could do to make this situation any less complicated.
The Red Knight stood up. “I should bring you to the last artifact,” he said. “I only managed to track down and recover the one of them after the Queen of Hearts hid them away. If I could have gathered all of them for you…”
He sounded heartbroken over his supposed failure. I pushed myself to my feet with a twist of my gut.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I got the other ones anyway. And that was hard enough with company. I can’t imagine doing it alone.”
“You’ll never be on your own again,” the Red Knight said with a determination that sounded almost more ominous than comforting to my ears.
This guy had been waiting almost two hundred years for his new queen to show up. No pressure or anything.
He led me into the cave at the base of the hill. Inside, the rocky floor and walls were smooth and dry, almost pleasant as caves went. I caught glimpses of a few rooms near the entrance, one holding a narrow bed, another with shelves of food.
At the end of the tunnel, the Red Knight ran his hand down the wall and pressed a spot that didn’t stand out at all to me. A stone slab slid back, revealing another room.
Mirabel had seen right about the three artifacts. A scepter lay on a small stone platform, most of its length a polished cherry wood, its head a massive glittering ruby encased in a chamber of gold shaped like a crown. More gold shimmered at its base.
I picked it up to test its weight. The scepter wasn’t half as heavy as the sword, which was a relief. It’d have been nice if my supposed royal ancestors had thought to include a scabbard or some sort of carrying case for their weaponry.
The ring I’d tucked back under my shirt flushed with pleased warmth. “What does it do?” I asked, turning the scepter from side to side.
“I have to admit I’m not sure,” the Red Knight said, with the same shamed air he’d had when he’d talked about not retrieving the other artifacts. “I saw the Red Queen—my first Red Queen, begging your pardon, your Majesty—command a herd of borogoves with it once. But the royal family didn’t use the artifacts often. I hadn’t much chance to witness their powers. I’m sure now that they’re in your grasp, your instincts will aid you in discovering all they can offer.”
Because I was on my own in this. If I believed everything he’d said, I was the only surviving descendant of Wonderland’s Red Queen—and as much as I’d have liked to argue his story away, I didn’t know how to dismiss the proof of it. The ring. The way the train had slowed for me—the way the jabberwock had gentled.
Hatter had been right. It wasn’t just the ring I was wearing. It was because it was me, wearing that ring.
Everything and everyone in Wonderland depended on me.
My lungs constricted for a second, with a flash of memory that shot me back to my eight-year-old self, watching my mother sob and sway over Dad’s old clothes. Pushing her toward the door to get to work, grabbing the money she left out before my brother could and buying the cheapest dinner fixings I could find after school, reading the bills, writing checks for Mom to sign, and on and on.
I’d survived that. I’d held my family together and made it through. But an entire land was a lot more than our tiny family.
I hadn’t signed up for this. Not at all.
“I don’t know if I can even do this,” I said to the Red Knight. “I don’t have any idea what it takes to be a queen. I don’t have any… training, or whatever queens usually get.”
“You’ll find your way,” the knight said confidently. We stepped back into the cave’s main hallway. “It’s your heritage. You’re meant for this.”
I could have had a hundred doctors in my family tree, and I still wouldn’t have known how to do a heart transplant just by being “meant for it.” Somehow I had the feeling ruling a country was at least as complicated.
And a task that took quite a bit longer. A task that never really ended.
“I have a life back home,” I said. God, what would Melody say if I tried to tell her
about any of this? Wonderland had been crazy enough before I’d been a supposed queen. “I know you think this is what I’m supposed to be doing, but I’d never even heard of Wonderland until a couple weeks ago. I have a family back there, I have friends—”
“They will understand that you must rise to your new role. How could they deny you an honor such as this?”
Well, for starters, if I told them they’d probably deny that I was sane. And that answer ignored how I felt about this new role. “That’s not really…”
I trailed off. What could I say to him that he’d understand? Even after Aunt Alicia had taken off on him, he still believed in me, in the rightness of me picking up where the queen he’d served had left off, as if it were entirely inevitable.
“Red Knight,” I said, still figuring out what I wanted to ask.
A frightened shriek pierced through the air from outside.
Chapter Fifteen
Hatter
“This is amazing,” Doria was saying as she hopped from one stump to another around the shadowed firepit. “We’ve got the real queen right here with us! Bye-bye, Hearts!”
Dee rubbed his hands together. “Can you imagine the look on their faces when they find out we know their claim on the throne is a bunch of bull? It’s going to be epic.”
“Completely epic!”
I watched them, wishing I could absorb their enthusiasm. My thoughts were racing around in my head as if they’d been sucked into a whirlpool that had no bottom. My balance felt rather unsteady too. I glanced toward the cave Lyssa had disappeared into with the Red Knight, torn between wanting to see her coming back to us right now and wanting to have the right words to say to her before she did.
I couldn’t say I didn’t see it. What quality would I want in a queen that Lyssa hadn’t proven she possessed in the past several days? Courage, compassion, determination, patience, smarts… The very fact that we’d made it here with the two artifacts no one before her had been able to retrieve showed she was meant for this role. I could picture her so easily standing with chin raised and eyes bright like she had when she’d insisted we set off on this quest, only with a crown resting on her head.
