Red Queen (14 page)

Alice sighed. It was quite unfair that they were suspicious of her simply because she hadn't been killed in the woods. “I do not know. There are many things I don't know and don't understand.”

“How are we to believe you, that you are what you say you are?” Gunnar asked.

“I have no way to prove it,” Alice said. This too was new territory for her. In every encounter in the Old City she had been instantly recognized because of the scar on her face. Here in this little village, though, no one had heard of Alice or the Rabbit. “But I assure you I mean no harm. I wish to rest here, and eat and drink if you will allow me to do so, for I must go to the top
of the mountain to find the one I love, and try to save him and bring him back again.”

“No one returns from the mountain,” Asgar said. “She takes them away there, but they never return.”

“Who?” Alice asked, though she thought she knew.

“Our children. The Lost Ones.”

A few of the women in the group covered their faces at these words, and more than one stifled a noisy sob.

“Why does she take them?” Alice asked. If she could understand this, then maybe she could also understand why she was here, why Hatcher had been taken from her.

“Who can comprehend the reasoning of a witch?” Asgar said, some of his spirit returning. “Once a season, on the third full moon, we are to send one of our own to the great oak and leave the child there. Always, some of the men will stay and try to capture the Queen before she takes the child away. Always, they fail. They fall asleep and when they wake the child is gone and there is no way to follow, for there is a barrier closer to the castle that none can penetrate. So you see—you can't reach her, or your man. None goes to the top of the mountain unless she wishes it, and if she wishes it you'll wish she hadn't.”

“You can't save the children who have been taken, and you can't prevent the taking of the others,” Alice said. “Why do you not leave here?”

“And go where?” Gunnar said. “To one side is the Queen's mountain; to the other side is the Queen's forest. If you truly
passed through the forest, then you know that monsters live there, giants that eat the flesh of men.”

Alice shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Pen waiting for her at the other end of the village. “Yes, I know of them. But I also know that two of those giants are dead, burned by a fire far from here, at the edge of the plain.”

“Did you set this fire?” Gunnar asked.

“No,” Alice said. “It was another who has been wronged by the Queen.”

“The Black King,” one of the women muttered, and another woman hushed her.

“The Black King?” Alice asked. “Is that how he is known?”

“We don't speak of him,” Gunnar said, giving the woman who'd spoken a quelling look. “But if he is indeed the one who killed those giants, then it would be far more dangerous for us to cross the forest. Besides, there is hardly a family here not related by blood or handfasting. Who would leave their kin behind, if there was even the smallest possibility that our children might come home?”

“If they leave the castle we must be here,” the woman who'd spoken of the Black King said. “How their hearts would break if they returned to us and we were gone.”

And how your hearts do break every day,
Alice thought. The grief of all suffused the air around her. How many of these people sat by their windows nightly, staring out at the shadows on the mountain, hoping against hope that one of those shadows would morph into a missing child? And how each mother, each
father would dream that they would run to their darling one and hold them and never, ever let them go again.

Instead of reunions would come more grief, as another child was sent away, and still another, and another, with no hope of escape and no hope of the end until all the children were gone.

And if the villagers went away through the woods, if they chose to save the remaining children, where then would they go? The plains were scorched by the man they called the Black King, and beyond was the City, and Alice knew well enough that there was no hope to be found there. So they would stay and wait for their inevitable fate, to waste away here until their future had completely disappeared.

“When is the third full moon of this season?” Alice asked, for she had no sense of time or the season.

“Three days hence,” Gunnar said. “The lot is drawn tomorrow eve.”

“The lot?” Alice asked.

“The child is chosen at random, by a lottery,” Asgar said. “It was the only way we could consider it fair, though I suppose it does not matter which order they are taken in. She won't be happy until she has them all.”

“There is no need to draw another name,” Alice said. “I will go in the next child's stead.”

Silence fell completely then, no mutterings or shiftings or intakes of breath. All the villagers seemed astonished. The old man was the first to regain his speech.

“Why would you do that?” Asgar said. “You owe nothing to us.”

“It is not for you,” Alice said. “It is for myself. I need to reach the castle, and only those left under the oak are able to cross the Queen's barrier. If I save one of your own children in the bargain, then so be it.”

“It will never work,” Gunnar said. “The Queen will not take you instead of one of our young ones. And then she will bring her vengeance upon us.”

“What vengeance could be worse than that which you already suffer?” Alice asked. “Besides, I think that she will take me. She wanted me in the woods and she didn't get me—or, at least, her goblin wanted me.”

As she said this Alice felt again the whisper of long fingers against the back of her neck, and she shuddered.

“We should let her try,” the woman who'd spoken earlier said. “She is right. Nothing can be more terrible than what we suffer now.”

“And if she fails, Brynja? If the Queen sends her goblin or some other creature here to destroy us all?” Gunnar asked.

“Then it will, at least, be over,” Brynja said. “If I had courage enough I would have taken a dagger to my own heart long ago.”

“That is not courage,” Alice said. “It takes more courage to go on living, to keep in hope.”

“What do you know of it?” Gunnar asked, his face harsh. “Have you lost a child?”

“Not in the way you think,” Alice said, thinking of the girl
she once was, the girl who had been swallowed up by the Rabbit. “But I understand suffering and loss, and I can't go forward without trying to get back my Hatcher.”

“Hatcher? Is that your man?” Brynja asked.

“Yes, that is his name,” Alice said, and something passed between the two women, some understanding.

“And what will you do when you get there?” Gunnar asked.

Wish,
Alice thought. She did not say this, for she thought these people might be suspicious of her if they knew she had magic, even though her magic was a poor thing when compared with the White Queen.

“I will confront the Queen,” Alice said.

“You'll die,” Asgar said.

“You don't know that for certain,” Alice said.
I was supposed to die when I met the Jabberwock, and I didn't.
“If I fail, nothing has changed for you. If I succeed, perhaps I can break the curse on this place. Perhaps she will return your children to me.”

If they are alive.
No one said this, but the thought seemed to run around the circle of faces.

“We must meet on this,” Asgar said. “Gunnar, call the others to the hall.”

Gunnar nodded and ran off. The other folk gathered at the well collected their water and hurried toward their homes.

“You may stay here at least this night,” Asgar said. “While we decide on your proposal.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.

She assumed some collection of village elders would decide
whether or not they should let Alice go in place of the child. But no matter what they decided, Alice knew she would go anyway, with or without their approval. She must reach the castle. She must see the Queen and speak to her and try to get Hatcher back, and the Lost Ones. Alice had no real notion of how these things might be achieved, but she must try all the same.

“You may stay with me,” Brynja said, and gestured for Alice to follow.

Alice trailed along beside the silent woman. She noticed Gunnar knocking on the doors of certain houses and speaking with certain men. If those men caught sight of Alice as she passed with Brynja, they stared, and Alice felt the weight of their suspicion.

Brynja led Alice to a small and neat little cottage with a clean stoop and the brand of the Lost Ones scorched on the door. The other woman lit the candle that stood on a small table just inside. The faint, flickering glow revealed a single room with a large fireplace on one side. In one corner stood a small round table with three chairs around it, and at the other side a large straw mattress with a brightly colored quilt spread across it. A very small wooden trunk stood at the foot of the bed, and beside the trunk was a pair of children's leather slippers.

Brynja followed Alice's eyes to the slippers. Brynja herself had very pale blue eyes and very light blond hair, almost white. “They belong to my daughter, Eira. She was one of the first to be taken. She was only five. My husband went mad after that. He could not accept that he could not cross the barrier to the castle. He spent
all of his time hunting for a way to reach the Queen, to get Eira back. He did not succeed; nor did he ever come home again.”

Brynja told this story with no emotion, like it was something that had happened to another woman, one whom she did not know very well.

“I am sorry,” Alice said. She was certain no phrase had ever been so useless or inadequate. “How long has Eira been gone?”

“More than two years,” Brynja said.

Two years?
Alice thought. The child is dead, or damaged beyond repair.

Brynja smiled an unhappy smile. “Yes, I know what you are thinking, for I have thought it too, that she is lost to me forever. I have nothing left but hope, and so I wait here for her. My man is gone, and he is probably dead, fallen from a cliff or killed by the Queen or perhaps even eaten by one of those giants. But my Eira might come home again. She might. Nobody knows what happens to them once the Queen takes them away.”

They scream,
Alice thought, remembering the nightmare she'd had in the woods. They scream all day and all night, and their cries are terrible to behold.

“I have some soup for you once the fire is high again,” Brynja said, and she bustled about the cottage in a way that told Alice she was keeping busy so as not to think too hard about Eira.

Brynja gave Alice some of the water collected from the well so Alice could wash her face and hands. Alice surveyed the state of her shirt and pants and wondered if she might be able to wash them the next day. She had spent many years in the hospital
wearing the same dirty shift day after day but now she was sick of the smell of herself. She longed to be able to change into fresh clothes daily, and take a bath if she wished it. She never realized, when she was young and lived in the New City, that these things could be taken away by circumstance.

Brynja put out soup and bread and glasses of warm milk (“fresh from our goat,” she said with a note of pride). Alice had to force herself to eat slowly so as not to burn her mouth on the soup, and also so she would not offend her hostess with her manners. The worst thing, Alice thought, besides not being clean was being hungry all the time.

“It's been long since you've eaten a decent meal,” Brynja observed.

“Yes,” Alice said. She had not done a very good job of hiding it, then, for she'd wolfed down her meal while Brynja sat picking at hers. “Food is hard to come by, in the forest.”

“And how is it that you came to be in the forest?” Brynja asked.

Alice considered how best to answer this question. She did not wish to lie to someone who had been kind to her; nor did she wish to tell Brynja all that had happened to lead Alice to this moment.

Finally she said, “Hatcher's daughter, Jenny, was taken from him a long time ago. We were following a rumor of her, a rumor that she had been taken far to the East.”

“We have heard of girls being taken to the East, even here,” Brynja said, her face troubled. “Their fate is not a pleasant one.”

“Neither is their fate pleasant in the City, which was where we came from before the forest,” Alice said. “But how is it that you and your people came to settle here?”

“Our ancestors came from the north, where everything is covered always with snow and ice. Our people kept to the old ways, but there were some who no longer approved of the old ways. They said that our gods were dead, and they burned our trees and our altars and our homes. We rebuilt our houses, and moved our altars to the forest, and replanted our trees. But they came again, always saying that our ways were wrong, even though some of those who said so had believed in those same ways not so long before. And they burned our homes again and told us we needed to obey or else things would not go so well for us the next time.

“Some of the men tried to fight, to convince others who did not love the new ways to rebel. But there were more of the new ones, always more, and if you did not do as they wanted, you could lose everything. Even those who agreed with us were afraid, afraid that their houses and farms would be burned, afraid that their children would be harmed if they tried to fight. So they went along with the new ways, and condemned us with the rest.

“Finally one of our elders had a dream, a dream that said we must cross the great ice and then over several mountains until we found one mountain on the edge of a forest, and that we would find a safe place to live there. So we who would not give up the old ways left our country and all we knew. We traveled across a great sheet of ice, so thick that it could hold up an entire
city, but dangerous, for the ice is not a settled thing. It shifts and cracks and moans under the surface, always changing, never constant. And so some of us fell when the ice shifted, but we knew this was the sacrifice the gods demanded of us, and we kept our faith and went on.