The Old King swept every corner of Hearts to find the child a mother, and came upon a noble woman, born to lead a country, and with just the right bosom to comfort a child.
The Old King declared himself in love, and married the raven-haired woman.
But she had a greedy heart.
And an even greedier ambition—one that rippled through Hearts with total destruction.
Tyranny.
Chapter 5
I crawled through the damp tunnel for so long that my kneecaps throbbed against my skin and my hands had gone numb. It wasn’t unlike the fall down the Forbidden Well. Timeless, without distance, it just … was. Then a faint light grew ahead.
I scrambled towards the light. The moment it flickered into existence, I felt the suffocating grip of the tunnel closing around me. My breaths drew rattled and tight, and I reached out my hand for the beam in front of me—a cry was torn out from my throat.
The light grabbed my wrist and snatched me into a blank space of nothing.
I plummeted.
I was tossed down into fresh chilly air, rushing up at me faster than the dust at the village.
Suddenly, I stopped falling.
For a moment, I hung, suspended. Dangling in the gap between time and space. Then the ground charged upwards and I landed on the ground with an agonised groan.
The impact had my bones quaking, pain speaking of bruises to come.
Gritting my teeth, I bit back a groan and rolled onto my side. As I blinked away the daze of my landing, everything started to clear around me. Darkness, trees and bushes—distorted and blurry. Even the chipped yellow bricks beneath me were blurred red in some places.
I gasped and slapped my hands to my face.
My glasses. They were gone.
Desperately, I flattened my hands to the road and spread them around, patting, searching for my sight. But they were nowhere to be found. And then, I remembered the voice that first spoke to me in the well.
‘A price taken, a price stolen, entry will cost you all.
A price given, a price paid, now please enjoy your fall.’
The Sisters stole my sight.
They doomed me in a foreign game, in a land strange to me.
I slumped against the road, feeling every twist tug at my insides. In the Hatterthon, without my glasses it was inevitable.
My defeat. Maybe even my death.
I was doomed.
Chapter 6
It was pitch-black. Darker than any night I’d ever known.
Aches already gathered behind my eyes, pain not unlike when I would stare into the flaming fireplace for too long at once or gaze up at the bright sun, and I’d only been walking for a few minutes.
Beneath the thin soles of my boots, the uneven yellow bricks stabbed at my skin. The yellow road was speared by old blood stains, stuck in the cracks and cement lines. My face twisted as it sprung to mind the attacker at the village whose blood sanctified my dagger.
But he’d had it coming. I could only hope the same could be said about those whose blood decorated the windy road uphill.
Dark, shadowy trees fringed the brick road, a black magic pulsing from their creaky trunks. I suspected I was in the Hatterthon’s playground, right in the middle of the game.
I climbed further uphill until a dozen orange glows speckled the darkness looming ahead. Candle-flames.
The light was enough that I could sparsely make out stone pillars at the tip of the hill. Blocking my way, a white rabbit was perched on a chair behind a desk made of stacked cards.
It struck me like a blade of nostalgia. The registry before the attack was just like this. For the tournament, not terribly unlike the Hatterthon. And I wondered if Spades was really a mirror world, a copy, but twisted and stained.
Two statue-like men flanked road, heads held high, and their indifferent gazes fixed on me. Thin leather seemed pasted to their bodies, and they wore on their cuffs metal scraps cut into the shapes of rooks. The craftwork was cheaply done, I noted.
I made to approach the desk, but before I could, a tall frog in a tailcoat hopped out of the trees and stopped in front of me. He held a crinkled scroll in his webbed hands.
The frog whipped the scroll open and, without lifting its buggy eyes to me, croaked a single word, “Age.”
I squinted down at the proud amphibian. “I’m—uh. Am I in the right place? My name is Shoshanna Rose White, and I’m from Crooked Grove on the edge of the Crooked Woods—”
I yelped as he whacked my side with a wet, slimy hand. “I asked your age, not your story.”
“Nineteen,” I grumbled. “For another month or so.”
If I hadn’t been so confused, I might have kicked the little slime-ball. Instead, I huffed and roamed my gaze to the small trail that forked into the woods.
Another table sat at the trail’s mouth, and behind it was a short, tiny dog with a beige coat and big black eyes. Its scrunched face looked as though it had been hit with a cauldron.
I nudged the frog. “Excuse me, but … where am I?”
In answer, he pointed to the table with the white rabbit.
Up close, I noticed that he wore a waistcoat and peered through a monocle at a stack of papers. He scratched the tip of an inked quill against a roll of parchment.
I’d never seen a rabbit take notes before. He must’ve been like those animals from through the glass walls in Hearts—the magical ones, born from the First Witch.
I marched over to the rabbit’s table. He didn’t lift his gaze from the parchment scroll. “Name.”
“Shoshanna Rose White.”
Rabbit muttered to himself and dragged the quill down the parchment. He stopped. “Ah. There you are. From Hearts?”
“Yes.”
Rabbit peered up at me through the monocle. “And are you of able-body?”
“I … I think so.”
“What do you mean you think so? You either are or aren’t.”
“I am.”
Rabbit frowned at me. His whiskers twitched and he leaned over the table, then he scrutinised me, from my flat lace-up boots to the dip of my neck where Holly’s ballerina pendant rested.
“Able-bodied,” he said decidedly, and ticked a box on the parchment. “What of your head, girl? Is it able?”
“I…” Under the heat of his stare, I squirmed. “Yes.”
Rabbit looked unconvinced. His oversized teeth chewed on the tip of his quill as he studied me. “Do you have all of your brain?”
I nodded.
“Skull?”
I nodded.
“Dreams?”
I lifted my chin to nod again, but hesitated. “Dreams?”
“Do you have dreams?” he repeated, loud and slow. “Dreammmssss!”
“I do.”
Rabbit’s whiskers twisted, giving away his dissatisfaction. He didn’t believe me, and by the pinched look on his face, I guessed that it wasn’t a good thing to displease him.
“Loads of them,” I added urgently, before he could boot me out of the game and condemn me to a life in Spades. “Just the other night I dreamt that I was floating, trying to fly, but I couldn’t lift off the ground.” I shrugged lamely. “I have that dream a lot.”
Rabbit’s whiskers stopped twitching and he sank back into his chair.
I let a sigh of relief run through me. My fingers stopped wringing.
Rabbit ticked another box before pushing an upside-down top-hat across the table. “Pick a button.”
I dove my hand into the top-hat and lazily stirred the buttons. The quiet rooks tilted closer, so slightly that I almost didn’t notice their interest at all. Then, suddenly, Rabbit scrambled onto the card-table and shoved a silver pocket watch in my face.
“Time!” he shouted.
I flinched.
“Hurry, hurry, haste, haste!” he shrieked. “It’s my time you waste!”
At random, I plucked out a red and black button, glitter glazed over it.
Rabbit looked from
the button to my face, once, twice, thrice.
Something hot prickled my palm. I glared down at the button and watched, stunned, as colours swirled all around it. A rainbow, melting in a pot.
A lazy grin pulled up my lips at the magic in my hand. Something I’d heard of, read about, known existed … but had never held.
The button’s colours hardened until they took the shape of black and red wedges, forming a floppy hat. All the glitter winked away, like stars slipping behind clouds.
Rabbit drew back into his chair.
“Jester court,” he said and signalled to the road that wound further up the hill. “Best of luck.”
Hesitation rooted me in place.
I landed my gaze on the rabbit. “What—um, what is the Hatterthon?”
Rabbit gave a heavy sigh and peered up at me, all cross and weary. “A game.”
“Yes,” I said. “But what sort? How do I play?”
Rabbit’s whiskers turned down and his eyes darkened. “The sort that can take your heart,” he said coolly. “Where many die and few triumph.”
I blinked at him for a moment. “Yeah, that doesn’t clear anything up for me at all.”
“Find the clues,” he snapped, impatience twisting his face. “Follow them—follow them straight to the end.” Then, he added with a malicious smile. “If you don’t recognise clues for what they are, or where they lead, the game will push you out. Here, we celebrate the strong—not the weak.” He leaned back in his flimsy chair. “And as you had to ask what many others have not, I doubt we’ll be seeing you for very long at all.”
Once I realised I wasn’t going to get much more out of him, other than the entirely unhelpful ‘find and follow clues’, I followed up the brick road to the court.
Some minutes uphill, I began to the see the outline of the court stretch up against the shadowy background. Even through the strain of my eyes, I saw the arch of the court grow taller, looming above me like a giant to be defeated. Only when I reached the arch did I see the beauty in it.
Carved into the stone, faces of strangers glared and smiled down at me—my gaze swerved back to the far corner, where a familiar face stared stonily at me, looking at those who came to the court with as much disdain as I felt for her.
The Queen of Hearts.
But what business did she have in Spades, let alone the Hatterthon?
With a frown pinching my brow, I dragged my attention away from the frightful queen, and took in the face of the court.
Drapes were pinned and tented around the arch so tightly that I couldn’t catch even a glimpse of what was in the court. Crumbling towers sprouted at the far back, and a single flag flapped in the wind above—the Spades’ crest, gleaming with wet paint.
I ducked into the tented drapes and—met a lot more drapes.
Thick, heavy velvet hit me at all angles. Blind among the layers, I mowed my way through with flailing arms until a head sprung out of the curtains.
The brightly-painted face grinned at me. “Sorry! Wasn’t expecting any more of you!”
She was a smiling jester in want of my admission fee—the button I’d gotten from Rabbit.
Bizarrely, she sniffed the button, then held it to her ear for a moment.
“You know you can hear the sea in these buttons,” she said before she pocketed it. “Trouble is, I can never tell which sea I’m hearing.”
With a flop of her belled hat, the jester handed me an old brass key and let me through the last of the curtains. “The show will start soon. Don’t wander off until it begins.”
That was strange, I thought. I’d never been to a show but I always imagined the wandering would happen before and after, not during the show.
The heavy curtain flapped closed behind me and the second it did, I was sucked into the wonder of the court.
Jesters swarmed the stone square like locusts on a hot evening, cartwheeling, lounging on black clouds of clustered shadows, and whistling tunes through thin silver flutes.
A few dangled from draperies that reached from balcony to balcony above, but most of them bustled around the curtained stage to the right, readying themselves for the show.
To my left were rows of chairs, an ensemble of thrones without cushions, toadstools, a few plush couches dotted between them, and, the most inviting, chairs sheathed in red velvet cushions.
Most of the seats were already taken, I noticed as I slipped through the rows.
There were more people than I expected. A lot more. At least a hundred swarming the seats, and that was just here at the court of jesters. How many more places were there in the playground? And how many people was I up against?
‘You must not only survive but triumph in the Hatterthon if you are to return home,’ Moss had told me.
But the odds must’ve slipped her mind, the cunning well-dweller.
Nerves started to creep into my tingling fingers. The more crowded I realised the court was, the harder I fought to breathe. Crowds. Never could stand them—another downfall of mine in the game.
I booted unmoving feet out of my way and headed for the far end of the audience.
Ahead, it was shadowy, but I could make out the faint outline of a heavily curtained pillar, tucked at the end of the chairs.
A good place to go unnoticed and watch the show.
But the closer I got to the pillar the more shadows seemed to gather. Then, a dark silhouette rose up from the farthest chair and blocked my path.
My heart skipped a beat.
The way the shadow faced me, the way it stiffened at the sight of me, had hope flooding my veins.
Lock?
In a scramble to reach the shadow, I jumped over people’s legs and kicked their feet out of the way.
For a second, time stopped completely and all hope gathered in my tight throat.
But as I reached him, the sharp edges of an ivory face cut into view. The man in front of me was as familiar as the chasm of his deep purple eyes. Not as familiar as Lock.
My heart dropped to my stomach and my shoulders slumped.
He stepped aside, his bowler hat absent from his smooth black hair. Other than some dots of blood on his white shirt, and a slight fray on his suspender, he appeared unmarked by the battle at the village.
“I see you survived.” No relief touched his cool voice, no disappointment or any emotion to dig out. “You either have very good fortune, or you’re better with your blades than I expected.”
This man saved my life back at the village when he dragged me from the fountain ruins. Still, I couldn’t find thankful words within me.
Disappointment of not finding Lock held me too tightly.
“And you,” was all I managed to say. His purple eyes glowed beneath dark lashes, like the fringe of twilight. “Shame you lost your hat to the fight.”
He waved his gloved hand dismissively. “Collateral. I have your fine dagger to thank that I didn’t lose my head along with the hat.”
A stuffy, courteous chat was the last thing on my list of what I wanted to do in the court. Jesters swarmed in higher numbers as the flutes’ melodies grey louder and tangled together.
“Call me Night,” said the plum-eyed man.
My eyebrows arched as he dipped his head slightly, a grim ghost of a smile on his lips.
I tried not to laugh. But my lips pursed into something crooked and pinched.
Night’s lashes lowered into a dark, shiver-worthy look. “I didn’t get your name in all the explosions and bloodshed.”
He offered his hand.
I slipped mine into his and tediously watched as he bent to graze a customary kiss over my knuckles. Another habit of the wealthier people of Hearts that widened the gap between us.
This wasn’t the sort of kiss I fancied from his lips, before everything went to shit at least.
“Shoshanna,” I said. “Shoshanna Rose White.”
Night repeated my name, each hush and syllable rolling over his tongue as though he were savouring a fine maple-
liqueur. “Shoshanna.” He pinned my gaze. “Rose in the old language,” he said. “Your parents named you Rose Rose?”
I snorted. “I guess so. Most people just call me Rose.”
Or Anna, but I didn’t fancy spreading around a horrid nickname that took me years to banish to distant relatives from other villages. A nickname too lazy for a name too long.
“Well, Shoshanna,” said Night. “I happen to like the old language.”
We both scrutinised each other, searching behind veils of secrets and shadows in our eyes. It might have been the strange land we were in, or the game, or maybe the striking meets with the Sisters, but unease climbed between us the way heat lifted from a wild fire.
We were sizing each other up, questioning whether we could trust each other. And something about those twilight eyes of his told me not to.
I might have been trapped in a foreign land in a cruel game, but a twinge of fear took me at the sight of those eyes, and I wondered if I was also trapped with a wolf in a fine man’s suit.
The flutters in my stomach started long before this game.
It was no secrets to those in Crooked Grove that I stuck to myself. Trust wasn’t the issue, it was that no one really interested me enough to lure me away from my work.
But with Night, I not only didn’t trust him, I didn’t trust how silly he made me feel. Silly girls for pretty boys never had happy endings.
Bells cut through the court. The candle-flames began to shrink, plunging us into gloom.
The jesters scrambled and spun into position. Across the court, the thick black curtains shimmered with the low lights dancing off velvet, and I found myself holding my breath.
This was it. A game I wasn’t prepared for.
The Hatterthon was starting.
The Cruel Heir and the Murderous Queen
Night was undeniably born into the wealthy of Hearts. I knew for certain when he offered me his seat and the pair of golden binoculars that came with it.
Of Steel and Steam: A Limited Edition Anthology Page 16
