Red Queen (15 page)

“We passed into the mountains, and the winds howled there and the rocks fell, and we were hungry and thirsty and a few more were lost, but we kept on, for our elder's vision was true and we knew we must follow it.

“Finally, after many months of peril and hardship we reached this place. It seemed a good place to us, for there was a field to plant and the soil was rich and black. In the forest ran many animals to hunt, and there was a vein of water under the ground for the well. Yes, it seemed a good place, and a happy place, and we built our houses and planted seeds and lived in hope, for a time.”

“But the Queen?” Alice asked, thinking of the story Pen had told her. The Queen had cursed Pen and his brothers long ago, long before these people could have settled here.

“She was a different queen then,” Brynja said. “This queen, the new queen, is far crueler than the old queen was.”

“There was another woman as queen before?” Alice asked.

That didn't tally with what Pen said. He seemed to believe it was the same queen. If there were two different queens, then the old one was just as horrible as the new, for she had capriciously cursed three boys and kept them as her playthings for many years.

“This queen came from the East, and took the old queen's power into her body. I think, though I do not know for certain, that the taking made her mad.”

“How do you know any of this at all?” Alice wondered aloud.

“The Black King told us some, before he was the Black King,” Brynja said, and she looked away.

“Who is the Black King?” Alice asked.

“We are not to speak of him,” Brynja said, but her eyes told another story. She wished to speak of him. “He was one of us once.”

Alice waited, but Brynja did not say anything further on the subject. She stood and cleared the dishes, and Alice silently helped her wash and dry and put everything away neatly in a small cupboard. All the while Alice wondered about the Black King and the White Queen and the people who had come to this place searching for a safe home but found a nightmare worse than any they left behind.

She wondered, too, what the village leaders might be deciding at this moment. If they did not decide in her favor, then she must find some way to take the child's place, anyway, for her magic would not be sufficient to break any barrier the Queen had made.

Really,
Alice thought,
my magic doesn't seem to be good for much at all. And there is no one who can help me learn, for all the Magicians I have met have been mad or cruel or both. I was mad once too, but it doesn't seem to have taken properly. I didn't come out of the hospital with any powerful powers.

Brynja did not seem inclined to speak anymore, neither to make polite conversation nor to tell Alice more of the Black King or the White Queen. The other woman sat silently at the table, staring out the window (
hoping against hope that one of those shadows would turn into Eira,
Alice thought) and hardly seemed to notice Alice's presence now that the meal was over.

Alice pulled her blanket from her pack and arranged it before the fire. She stared into the flames, the hard floor making her shift uncomfortably, and thought that this was all very familiar. Soon she would fall asleep, and the fire would go out, and then someone would knock on the door and call her name.

Far away outside, perhaps from the very top of the mountain, a wolf howled. The sound was so faint that Alice thought she might have imagined it, except that Brynja started a little.

“A wolf,” the other woman said.

“It's only Hatcher,” Alice said sleepily. Her eyes closed but the orange flames still danced before her eyes. “Hatcher won't hurt anyone.”

Not the innocent, not on purpose, anyway.

The cry of the wolf sounded again, but it seemed closer. That was impossible, though. If the wolf was far away at the top of the mountain, it couldn't possibly be so close already, even if he ran very fast.

What if he had wings?

Stop being silly, Alice; wolves can't fly.

But neither can men have ears like rabbits or women have tails like fish, but you have seen both of those things and more.

Alice drifted in an almost-asleep place, strange nonsense thoughts running through her brain, listening as Brynja gave up her watch and settled into bed. The wolf sounded once more, and Alice felt a comforting warmth in her chest, knowing that Hatcher was out there.

Brynja rolled over on the mattress, the straw rustling as she moved. The fire shrank down and down, and darkness covered the little cottage, and both Alice and Brynja slept.

Alice awoke some time later, when there was nothing left of the fire but a few orange embers, and she shivered with cold. She sat up, groping for her pack in the darkness, looking for another shirt to wear even if it was dirty.

There was a large grey-eyed wolf in the window, its front paws perched on the sill and its tongue hanging from its open mouth.

“Hatcher,” Alice said, and threw the blanket aside.

A fur cloak hung on the chair where Alice had sat for dinner and she threw it over her shoulders, grateful for the warmth. She opened the door to Brynja's cottage and walked out into the night, a night where silence had fallen so completely that Alice thought she could hear the ringing of the stars above.

Her feet were clad only in stockings, for she had left her boots inside and wasn't inclined to go back for them. The wolf trotted around the corner of the house and stopped a few feet from Alice.

“Hatcher,” Alice said again, and stretched out her hand toward the wolf.

She expected him to approach her, but instead he turned and
trotted away. After a moment he glanced back at her expectantly. Alice followed him through the village, where nothing stirred except her and the wolf.

Soon enough they left the buildings behind, and the moon rose, revealing a stark landscape of tumbled boulders. High above, almost impossibly so, was the gleam of the Queen's castle.

I'd have to be a bird to reach that,
thought Alice. Even if she could pass this barrier everyone spoke of, it would be no easy task to get to the castle.

The wolf continued ahead of her, and Alice climbed after him, wondering that she was not clumsy and breathless as usual. She could only credit the quality of the air, which was so clear and pure that it seemed to penetrate into her blood and bones and fill her with an energy and vitality she had never known before. She felt strong, and quick, and she even felt like she might be able to do magic, proper magic, not just the wishing kind of magic.

Alice bounded after Hatcher, the fur cape streaming behind her. She lost her stockings somewhere along the way but her bare feet gripped better on the rock and it was easier for her to follow the sure-footed wolf. They came at last to a tree, and Alice thought this must be the great oak the villagers spoke of.

The wolf came and stood beside her and they waited. Along came a woman, her face and form covered by a white hooded cloak, yet still she somehow gave the impression of great beauty. Alice saw just a glimpse of her pale, luminescent skin and the fine bones of her face before they were covered again.

The woman stopped beneath the great oak, and a man appeared from the shadows. No, Alice thought, he was
made
of shadow, shadow and smoke, and when he took the woman in his arms her white cloak gleamed like the surface of the moon, like she was lit from within.

Alice turned her head away as they embraced, and when she looked again the two seemed to be arguing. The man tilted his head to one side, flashed a smile with so much charm even Alice could feel it, though it was not directed at her. But the woman shook her head and left him, and her stiff back told Alice she was angry.

Alice shifted, thinking to follow the woman (who was surely the White Queen), but the wolf nudged her leg with his nose, telling her to stay. The man slipped into the shadows again, moving not like a man at all, and Alice knew that he must be the Black King.

After a time the White Queen and the Black King appeared again, and Alice understood that this was a different evening she watched, that it was not the present she saw but the past. It was not a single past, either, but several pasts flowing through this space, like the memories of the tree. This time there was no tender embrace, no attempt at charm.

The man demanded; the woman refused. The Black King's shadow seemed to grow, to reach the height of the great oak, to smother the pale woman in the pale cloak. Her white hands emerged from the folds of cloth and the shadow shrank away, frosted with ice.

The shadow burst into angry flame, swiping at her, but she was no longer there. She dissolved into the moonlight. The Black King shot upward into the sky, howling his rage, and far away there was an answering scream, a woman's scream of heartbreak and betrayal.

“She loved him,” Alice told the wolf. “She loved him, but he didn't love her, or perhaps just not as much as her. He wanted something from her, though, something she would not give. I wonder what it was.”

The wolf banged his nose against Alice's leg again. Alice knelt and buried her face in his ruff and smelled the wild forest smell of his fur. Then the wolf pulled away from her and ran away, up the mountain where Alice could not follow.

She descended slowly back to the village, for the burst of strength had disappeared and now her breath came in painful gasps and her feet bled where they were cut by sharp rocks.

When she reached the well in the village, Alice pulled up a bucket of water and drank until her stomach pressed against her shirt. She was so thirsty.

Alice wiped her mouth and cleaned her sweaty face and hoped she would be able to find Brynja's cottage again. All the little homes appeared the same in the darkness and Alice had not observed very carefully their direction when Brynja had brought her home.

The brand of the Lost Ones seemed to glow like the coals of a dying fire on every door.
She takes the children as vengeance for the love he denied her,
Alice thought. Brynja said the Black King
had once been one of them, and so the White Queen must have thought to hurt him this way. In return, he burned everything he could, for she denied him something he wanted.

And all the villagers here, and the people who once lived on the burned plains, and Pipkin and the Walrus' girls, Cod and Gil, Hatcher, all of us, we are caught in the web of their anger and desire and suffer in their stead. And both would rather keep on trying to hurt than to yield.

There was a glow at one of the windows, and as Alice approached she saw her footprints in the starlight, interspersed with the pads of a wolf. She carefully opened the door to the cottage, expecting her hostess to be waiting to scold her.

Instead she found Brynja in conference with a man at the table, a candle guttering between them. The man looked up as Alice entered, and she gasped when she saw his eyes, for they were made of red flame.

She covered her face, afraid of the fire, and when her eyes opened again, it was morning. She had curled into a tiny ball on the floor, and her body felt stiff and frozen in place. Her fingers clenched the blanket to her neck and her bare feet stuck out at the bottom.

A dream,
she thought, but when she rose the soles of her feet were sore, and she noticed that they were cut and dirty. The window was open and Alice heard Brynja behind the cottage, milking the bleating goat.

Alice rubbed her face. Had the Black King really sat at the
table with Brynja? Had Alice really walked into the night with a wolf and seen a vision of the past? There was no sign of the fur cape, and no dirty footmarks on Brynja's well-washed floor.

The other woman reentered and gave Alice a brief smile. “A message came from Asgar this morning. You are to meet with the elders at noontime. I have some spare clothing you can wear, and I thought perhaps you might like a wash. I can bring the tub in, though the water will be cold.”

This, Alice thought, was a very tactful way of saying she needed a wash. She doubted if she would fit in any of Brynja's clothes, as the other woman was much shorter than Alice, but the offer was kindly meant and Alice took it in that spirit.

She felt troubled, though, as she ate the bread and butter and milk that Brynja put out for breakfast, and those troubled thoughts followed her as she washed in the icy bath. When Alice was done Brynja brought out a pair of woolen pants and a homespun shirt and thick grey sweater, and Alice realized she was given the clothes of Brynja's husband.

“Thank you,” Alice said, and tried to make Brynja understand that Alice knew that she had given her more than clothing.

“He won't come back and use them again,” Brynja said, stroking the sweater. “I made this for him in our first year together, and though I did a better job on others, he always preferred this, because it was the first.”

Alice dressed, and Brynja looked her over, saying, “You look like a boy.”

“I suppose I do,” Alice said, feeling her hair. It was perhaps the length of three fingers now, and could not be braided like Brynja's beautiful pale locks. Alice hardly thought of her appearance, most days, for it did not seem important anymore. She remembered party dresses and combing her long, long hair but those things were far away in the past.

“May I ask—how your face . . .” Brynja trailed off, indicating the long scar on Alice's cheek.

The scar was something else Alice hardly ever thought of anymore, now that the Rabbit was gone. He had marked her, and now he was dead, and his mark meant nothing. Nothing except that Alice wasn't pretty anymore, and it wasn't just the scar. There was the cut on her head that had been stitched by Bess, and the little pinch marks from the bites of the goose. Alice could feel the hollowness in her cheeks, the fullness of youth and good feeding disappeared long ago. No, she was not pretty, but pretty was not going to save her life, or Hatcher's, or anyone else's.