Red Queen (11 page)

“I wanted to get you back to your man, but I walked all over these woods and couldn't catch the smell of him again. I've never known someone to disappear like that here. I've never lost a man under my own nose.”

“You said yourself the forest is larger than one expects.”

“Yes, but it's
my
forest,” Pen said. “No one knows these trees like me, every root and leaf and branch. If he was here, I'd have found him. That means he's not here.”

Alice shook her head. “You don't know Hatcher. He's . . . not like other people.”

“Not talking about his manner. Talking about his
smell
. He had a smell, and then he didn't. So unless he changed into something else, he isn't here.”

Alice deemed it wiser not to argue, and wiser still not to pursue the thought that Hatcher “changed into something else.” She'd wanted the giant to let her go, and now that he would finally comply she shouldn't hold him here quarrelling about Hatcher.

“Well,” Alice said rather pointedly. “I thank you, very kindly, for all you have done for me, Pen.”

She waited, but Pen did not lower her to the ground as she expected. He seemed to have fallen into a kind of fit, seeing and hearing nothing. “Pen?”

“My brothers are calling me,” he said, and his voice was low
and singsongy and his eyes were very far away. “The night is alive and so am I.”

There is something very wrong with these woods.
Alice thought she must be the only creature to pass through them without falling under their influence, quite possibly because she found nothing enchanting in rows of trees that crouched over one, almost as if their branches might reach down and grasp you by the neck.

“Pen, you can put me down now,” Alice said, very quietly. She didn't want to startle him out of his trance. Her gentle tone seemed to pierce the fog, and he lowered his hand to the ground.

For a moment Alice felt the ground was rising up to snatch her from the air, just as she'd felt about the trees, and when the ground touched her feet she would discover it wasn't solid at all. She would slip into it like sand, like water, and the earth would cover her head and draw her deep into its heart, never to let go.

Pen's fingers touched the ground with a soft thump. Alice put her feet on the forest floor for the first time in more than a day, and as her boot touched the solid firmness of the ground she shook away her odd little visions of being swallowed into the earth.

Really, Alice, and you were just thinking with some pride that this place wouldn't affect you.
It was best not to let strange fancies take hold. The real world was quite frightening enough without adding her imagination to it.

Alice glanced about and found that Pen had deposited her practically on the doorstep of a crumbling stone cottage.

“It isn't much,” Pen said. “But you'll have a roof above your
head and four walls around you, and that will keep you safe from most things here.”

Alice thanked him once more. Pen nodded, just the movement of a darker shadow against the black cloak of night, and then disappeared into the woods, the tremendous form making hardly a sound.

And here I am again. Alone in the woods, in the dark, no Hatcher, no knife, no notion of where to go from here.

She surveyed the cottage with chagrin. “There's probably a nest of vermin in there.”

Pen had doubtless meant it kindly, but the tumbledown structure hardly qualified as “four walls.” The only other option, however, seemed to be another night spent perched in a tree branch, and Alice had experienced quite enough of falling toward certain death.

So with much trepidation and certainty of discomfort if not danger, Alice pushed open the door of the cottage. And blinked.

Inside, the floor was washed, the fire crackled merrily in the hearth and the table was set with covered dishes. The smell of roast chicken and potatoes wafted toward her as she stood frozen in the doorway.

Alice stepped back, on to the small stoop, and surveyed the building again. It still appeared to be a run-down and apparently uninhabited fieldstone cottage. The door swung shut, hiding the vision inside.

The forest has got inside your brain, Alice. When you open the
door, it will all be just as you expected, some broken furniture and an empty hearth and a dirty mat inhabited by mice and flies.

Alice closed her eyes, pushed open the door and looked again. The fire hungrily devoured wood. The aroma of chicken and potatoes was tinged with fresh baked bread and something . . . Alice sniffed the air, like Pen, like Hatcher, like a dog that's caught hold of something good.
Cake.
She walked toward the platters, hand outstretched, abruptly aware of the gnawing deep in her belly, and the only food that could stop it was under those covers.

Her hand grasped the lid and lifted it partway, revealing just a hint of pink and blue and yellow, layers of frosting twice the thickness of her wrist.

She let the lid drop with a clatter.

Only a fool wouldn't notice the enchantment on this cottage. Thanks to Pen she knew for certain a Magician ruled here, one who called herself a queen and kept a goblin at her beck and call and turned human men into man-eating giants for some secret reason of her own. If the Queen had not set this enchantment, then some creature of hers had.

Alice and Hatcher had wriggled out of her trap once. Had Pen brought Alice here on the Queen's orders? Or had he simply thought he was doing her a good turn by finding her shelter from the night, and he knew nothing of the spell on the cottage?

It didn't matter, really, Alice supposed. She was not a mouse to be tempted by a piece of cheese. There was plenty of food in her pack. She did not need the Queen's cake.

Nor did she need the crisp white sheets and down quilt made up on the bed in the corner. Alice had her own (
scratchy wool
) blanket and had slept in places worse than a clean stone floor.

As long as she didn't accept hospitality, she thought she would be safe enough. Pen had invited her to use the four walls and a roof and so she would, and it was probably all right to sleep by the fire, as it was already set.

The bread from her pack was dry and stale. Alice tried to work up some enthusiasm for it, the same enthusiasm she'd had when she and Hatcher had entered the baker's in the village on the edge of the plain. But the chicken and the potatoes, and yes, the cake—Alice had always loved cake too much—had lodged inside her nose and wouldn't leave.

You don't need any cake. It was cake that got you in trouble with the Rabbit. You were too young then but you know better now.

“Just because something is there and you want it doesn't mean you have to take it,” Alice said aloud. Her voice was not nearly as strong and sure as she would have liked.

She took a sip of warm, musty water from the small skin in her pack. Somehow her throat felt drier than before, but Alice determinedly turned away from the offerings at the table.

She walked about the cottage, blowing out all the candles, careful not to touch anything, careful not to give even the momentary impression that she was using any object other than wood for the fire.

And I'll collect more in the morning to replace it. That'll put a bee in her bonnet.

She was quite certain all of this was the Queen's doing, and equally certain that her pleasure came from cruelty. Nothing good would come of letting such a person have her own way.

Alice wondered briefly what the Queen's interest was in her, and then decided it probably had nothing to do with Alice specifically. The White Queen seemed to keep a close eye on her forest. Alice and Hatcher had passed into it, and through the village trap unscathed. The Queen's interest was roused; that was all.

(or the goblin's)

No, Alice would not think of the goblin. For reasons she did not fully understand, the goblin terrified her. She spread her blanket before the fire, put her pack under her head and wrapped the ends of the blanket around herself.

Alice was not even a little bit tired, having just had a very refreshing sleep in Pen's hand. She stared at the shadows flickering on the ceiling, not wanting to move around the cabin and do something she did not mean to do, like eat the meal set at the table.

Now that there were no giants and no goblins and no immediate danger for a change, she realized something startling. This was the first moment that Alice had been alone—really, completely alone—for the first time in ten years. It was entirely possible that it was the first time she'd been alone in her entire life. She strained for a single childhood memory that didn't include at least one other person—a governess, a maid, her parents, her sister, Dor—

(the Rabbit the Walrus the Caterpillar Cheshire)

(a goblin in the woods)

(Hatcher)

A lump formed in her throat and she determinedly turned to one side. She would not cry just because Hatcher was gone. She wasn't a little girl anymore—

(little girl lost in the woods)

—and she would just have to find him and there was no need to cry about it, no need to cry—

(Hatcher was always with me. Always)

—because he had run away and left her alone in the woods.

The tears ran over her cheeks and nose and she did not wipe them away, because to do that would be to acknowledge that she was crying in the first place.

She would not think about the tears or Hatcher or the creeping, creaking noise outside the cottage. She would not think that it sounded like the trees were curling down to the roof, that their branches would break the panes of glass on the window or sneak under the door where the wind whistled.

Tomorrow she would find Hatcher, never mind what Pen said about knowing the whole forest and still not sniffing out a trace of Alice's beloved,

(Yes, my beloved, but that's my secret.)

She would find Hatcher. She would, and that was all. And after that they would continue to the desert to the East, to finish what they'd set out to do, to find Jenny. But in between them and Jenny was that mountain, and on top of the mountain was
the Queen, and the Queen would not, could not, let them pass without paying a price. Alice knew that must be true, for she'd yet to meet a Magician who didn't extract his price in blood or gold or power from everyone they met.

Worry about what's coming when it comes,
she thought, and found the shape of a spiky-leafed flower in the fire, a flower she'd noticed growing in the undergrowth outside. The flower became one star, then two. The points of the stars turned into teeth, the teeth of a bear's open maw; then the teeth became the clawed paw, slashing toward her face. She felt strangely apart from this, that the claws would tear her eyes from her head but it was all right. It wouldn't hurt.

“Alice?”

Alice struggled up, her eyes seemingly stuck shut.

(Or maybe gone altogether, taken by a bear and his claws.)

She thought she'd heard someone calling her name.

“Alice?”

A little voice, followed by a scrabbling sound like fingernails scratching at a windowpane.

“Alice? I'm scared.”

Alice rubbed her face, forced her pasted eyes open. The cottage was dark, the fire nothing more than a few yellow-grey coals. The room was cold, colder than ice and snow and a winter Alice had never known except in her dreams.

She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and peered into the darkness. She squinted at the fogged window,
trying to make out any shape outside but half afraid that she might actually see one. Nothing that was at your window in the dead of night could be a good thing.

“Alice?”

The voice again, a little girl's, so small and frightened. This time it sounded from under the door.

“Alice? Let me in. It's so cold out here.”

Alice could see her breath, crystals of frost making a dark cloud in a room of shadows, and felt the ice forming on her eyelashes.

“Alice!” the girl called again, insistent, compelling Alice to come to the door, to let her in.

She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing, stepping tentatively toward the door, her hand outstretched and her mind not quite present. She was nearly there when her bootlaces, half undone, seemed to reach for each other, tangling together, running under her soles, making her fall to the floor and slam her forehead painfully against the perfectly smooth planks. She raised her head, felt an ugly lump forming, but knew she wouldn't open the door now, no matter what sounded outside.

“ALICE!” the girl said, and she was screaming now, the sound of fingernails at the door frantic, her voice desperate, and it sounded exactly like Dor's.

Exactly like Dor's voice when they were small. Alice's wonderful friend Dor, who became a woman who sold her best friend away to a monster. And of course it couldn't be Dor, because Alice and Dor were not little friends in pinafores skipping and
singing and holding hands anymore. They were all grown-up, and Dor was dead. Hatcher had cut off her head and Alice had watched it roll away and felt nothing.

But now there was this noise at the door, this scrabbling and scratching and screaming, this nonsense meant to draw Alice from the cottage where she was safe and out into the night where she would be scooped up or cut up or changed into something horrible to make the White Queen happy.

“You'll have to do better than that,” she muttered, and turned her back to the door.

The scratching stopped.

The creaking of trees had also ceased, and so had the wind whistling under the door. There was nothing now except a blanket of silence, terrifying in its completeness. All things in these woods obeyed the Queen. They bent to her will. Alice knew then that the trap was not the village, but the whole forest. Once in the Queen's land there would be no escape except by that lady's leave.