Playing Hearts (8 page)

By the time I was fifteen, there was no
doubt about the change. I did more puddle-gazing than travelling, trying to
keep under the radar at school and each current foster home, and what I saw in
the reflections worried me. When I
did
go to Underland, I mostly visited
Hatter and Hare. Though they didn’t encourage me to do it, they listened when I
told them what I’d seen—the latest outrage or
fracas
, or the Queen’s
sinister antics in the Mirror Hall—and they didn’t tell me not to poke my nose
where it wasn’t wanted. As far as I understood them, they found my information
useful, but didn’t want to push me to get it. They never said so, but I knew
they were trying to keep me safe as much as they could. By now they didn’t
question and even seemed to expect my constant presence in Underland: it was an
attitude that most Underlanders took to me. I’d thought that my coerced
engagement to Jack would have been enough to see me blackballed all over
Underland, but to my surprise, I found that no matter where I went in
Underland, everyone knew my name. More than that, they knew
of
me.
People knew of my first journey to Underland. They knew I’d saved Hatter and
Hare from the Jabberwock. It was a topic of dinner-time importance to decide
which teapot I had popped out of in my second journey to Underland, and the
rescue of Sir Blanc’s stolen wits was a story that was told to young
Underlanders everywhere. I knew this because in my trawling of the ripples I
had often discovered myself to be the topic of discussion. More worrying was
the edge I felt in the conversations: it was expectancy and tightly-repressed
excitement. I tried to tell myself it was just the slight madness that everyone
in Underland had, but I didn’t really believe it. It left me a little bit cold,
and wondering what it was they expected me to do.

I may have done more
puddle-gazing than travelling into Underworld, but I did enough popping in and
out of puddles to hone my skills considerably. I was old enough now not just to
pop in and out of Underland, but to wonder how it was done and what I could do
to make it more seamless. Before long I was slipping into Underland with barely
a pause between leap and landing, and arriving within a metre or so of where I
expected to be. I also began to make notes and draw maps, which I found more difficult
than I expected: Underland’s geography occasionally shifted without notice.
This made mapping slightly difficult, but was the cause of a useful
development: it wasn’t long before I learned not just to move between Australia
and Underland, but between
here
and
there
in Underland.

The first time I tried to
slip between places in Underland was more of an accident than an experiment.
I’d been frustrated several times in my journeyings into Underland to find that
I had appeared in the wrong place because another bit of it had shifted, and
I’d already wondered if it was possible to travel by reflection in Underland. I
was watching the ripples in the swimming pool this time: my current foster
family was surprisingly rich, and my favourite thing about their house was the
pool. By that time I had mapped most of the further reaches of Underland and
was beginning to narrow my sights on the centre– the Heart Castle. That day I
found myself snooping on the Castle itself. I was less frightened of seeing the
Queen these days: I’d found that if I avoided gazing at smooth reflective
surfaces and stuck to the rough, rippled ones, she wasn’t able to see me. That
struck me as very useful, and I had been exploiting it for some weeks now in my
search for information. I started with Downstairs, where the servants were
hunched, hurried, and frightened. Now that I knew how to hear as well as
see
,
it was a much more useful exercise. There was always someone saying something
interesting around the castle’s environs.

There was a difference
this time. Downstairs was always dingy and dull when I saw it through the
ripples, but it was more than that, now. The servants didn’t look at each
other. If they passed in the hall or on the stairs, they averted their faces
and hunched their shoulders. The kitchen was a fiery, sullen, clanking place
without the babble of conversation that should have attended the staff dinner
table; but despite the uncomfortable atmosphere, no one seemed willing to take
their food and eat elsewhere. It wasn’t until I saw the empty places that I
realised why. They had been deliberately left empty: plates set at each and
cutlery laid beside each setting. I’d heard Hatter and Hare mention a series of
three executions that had taken place over the last few weeks– Underlanders who
had colluded in the slowly growing rebellion against the Queen. Exactly what
they’d done, I’d never been told; but though they also wouldn’t tell me what
had happened, I knew each of the servants had had their heads cut off, and
their families thrown in the Queen’s dungeons. Hatter had said: “Big ears in
the Castle. That’s the problem. Big ears. When people had ears of a decent size
we didn’t have these problems,” by which I understood that someone had not been
careful enough in their talking, and had been overheard by someone loyal to the
Queen. It occurred to me that the whole of the Downstairs staff were afraid of
each other. The idea made me cautiously hopeful: that there was an informant in
the Downstairs staff wasn’t ideal, but the general air of suspicion and
discomfort also meant that most of the staff were not loyal to the Queen. I
made a mental note to mention it to Hatter.

I gazed once more at the
empty place settings—that was a kind of silent rebellion in itself—and moved my
attention higher in the castle. I found the Queen almost immediately: she was
by an open window that overlooked the garden, resplendent in her usual red
velvet and white-draped golden head-dress. She reclined grandly in a quilted
window seat with shiny red buttons, idly playing with her hand-mirror. It
seemed an unusually sedentary position for her, and it wasn’t until I pulled back
a little that I saw why. There was a painter with an easel sitting across from
her, his paintbrush working in sure, certain strokes to create the sweep of the
Queen’s white veiling. He seemed quite comfortable, but I saw the way her eyes
flicked from the painter to the easel and back again, and I wasn’t at all
surprised when she rose and stole quietly across the carpeted floor toward him.
The painter’s fingers stiffened, but he kept painting as she leaned over his
shoulder. Before long I saw his hands begin to shake slightly, and
still
she was gazing at the painting, her eyes narrow.

At last, in the
pleasantest of voices, the Queen said: “Wrong colour.”

“I– pardon, your
majesty?”

“Wrong colour. Surely you
can see the roses are red.”

The painter looked out
the window, visibly swallowed, and looked back at the Queen.

“
Red
, your
majesty?” I could see the roses as well as he could: their petals were pure
white.

“Indeed,” said the Queen.
“Red. They have always been red. Do you dispute it?”

“I– no, your majesty.”

“Is that so?” The Queen’s
voice was growing steadily softer and silkier, and I felt the stirring of fear
in my stomach. “Then can you tell me why you thought it good to
paint...them...white
?
Do you make a mockery of me?”

“No, your majesty! Pardon
me, I beg you!”

“It strikes me that a
painter who cannot mix his paints correctly is of little use. What say you to
that?”

I could see the painter’s
eyes. They were wild and scared and horribly unsure. He didn’t know what to
say. I knew better than him: I knew that whatever he said, it would be the
wrong thing. She was bored, and when she was bored there would be blood.

“Really?” said the Queen,
as if he’d spoken. “I’m sure you’re right. I have some skill in mixing paints
myself. Allow me to instruct you. Number Six!”

It all happened so
quickly that I wasn’t sure which of us realised what happened first, the
painter or me. A card shark stepped forward, his sharp nose scenting pain, and
at a signal from the Queen he spread the painter’s hand wide on his palette. I didn’t
see where it came from, but suddenly there was a flash of silver blade, and the
Queen slashed off the painter’s pinky finger. It dropped to the floor, flinging
blood as it fell, and the painter simply stared at it, his mutilated hand
forgotten on the palette. He made a peculiar noise in his throat—it wasn’t very
loud, but it made the Queen smile—and then stood mute as she held his injured
hand over the blob of white paint on the palette. Crimson dropped into white,
leaving tiny divots of red and overflowing into the other colours.

The Queen said: “I
believe you mix it now.”

He picked up his brush
again, face white, and rhythmically worked the crimson through the paint until
it was pink– then as crimson as his blood. Then he dabbed it lightly on the
edge of his palette and raised his hand to the painting again, stiffly brushing
over one of the white roses until it was red. When he was done with that one,
he went onto the next.

She wasn’t done with him.
I could see that. But she let him keep painting and bleeding, mixing the paint
with his blood. She sat back in the quilted window seat, her eyes on her tiny
hand-held mirror and very nearly closed until suddenly they weren’t anymore.

“How delightful,” she
said. “I see you have two daughters. Pilar and Cat, I believe?”

“My only family, your
majesty,” said the painter, and I wasn’t sure if he was saying it or pleading
it.

“They’re very fond of
pink,” said the Queen. I saw the flash of light on her mirror as she turned it
enough for the painter to see what she was looking at. She was observing a
bedroom from the dressing mirror, where two little girls in identical pink
dresses were leaping on a bed that was as offensively pink as their dresses. I
heard their squeals of delight as they played, and looked away from the mirror
just in time to see the Queen smile again. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“Very,” said the painter
in something of a gasp; and I froze, because the Queen was reaching into her
mirror. Her fingers touched the glass for the briefest of moments, then sank
right through like they had done when I reached through the ripples to save
Hatter and Hare. I saw her pinch and release, then one of the little girls
hurtled from the bed and hit the floor with a crash. The painter cried out, but
after a stunned moment his little girl picked herself up, briefly crinkling her
chin in pain, and climbed back onto the bed with her sister.

“Little children bounce
so well, don’t they?” said the Queen. She smiled at the painter and went back
to her mirror. With her eyes on it, she said, softly and coldly: “You may
continue painting.”

He went back to painting–
what else could he do? The Queen, meanwhile, watched her little mirror and
smiled. I hoped she’d had her fun, but after a few minutes of trembling
brushstrokes from the painter, she called: “Number Five!” The painter started
horribly, and while he desperately tried to fix the smudge he’d made, the Queen
said: “Number Five, this ah, talented and hardworking artist has two little
girls. Bring them to me.”

The painter made another
involuntary slash of crimson across the canvas and stumbled away from his
easel. “Your majesty, I
beg
you–!”

“Return to your
painting,” said the Queen, with a terrible coldness in her voice. The Number
Five card shark was gone in a flash, his eyes glistening with bloodthirsty joy,
and the painter stood trembling by his easel.

I almost stepped straight
through the ripples to the painter’s—and my own—doom. But there was a chilling
anger eating away at the hot fury, and it told me to wait. Having waited for
that essential moment, it occurred to me that it was no use going to the
painter’s help, only to be caught myself. I saw him taken away by two more card
sharks as he tried to dash from the room, his paints thrown aside, and knew I
couldn’t help him. Not now. But I
could
snatch his little girls away
before they went through the same thing I had gone through as a child. It
wasn’t likely that they would be as lucky as I’d been. So instead of leaping
into Underland in the fierceness of my anger, I deliberately pushed away the
scene I had been observing, and searched for card shark Number Five. I caught
up with him in the outer court of the castle: he wasn’t taking one of the
covered chairs—which wasn’t unusual for a card shark—but he also didn’t bother
with a horse or a hackney. That meant he wasn’t going far. I kept my rippled
view following along behind him until he turned into one of the flower-named
streets closest to the Heart Castle. He stopped at the fourth house in the street,
one that wasn’t very grand but was well kept, and set the knocker echoing
across the street. I didn’t waste another moment. I found a reflection in the
house, hoping it wasn’t a flat reflection that the Queen would be able to see,
and stepped through.