Red Queen (22 page)

“I'm alive,” she said, as if that should be a comfort.

Then she cried. She cried because she was frightened and alone. She cried because she'd been terrified of the goblin, because she so narrowly escaped becoming one of his victims. She cried because she still had far to go, because there were lost children to find and Hatcher to save. She cried because she still had to face the White Queen and because her hands were black with the goblin's blood.

When she was done crying (and it took a long time to be done, for her heart had carried many unshed tears), she stood up, dusted herself off and then stopped.

Her pack and cloak were gone.

It was logical, of course, that they would have been rolled up with the rest of the room and sucked into the hole. All she had now was the knife in her hand and the clothes on her back. That might not be a problem, but there was something more in the bottom of the pack.

There was a small glass jar with a pretty purple butterfly. That butterfly had fallen into a magical abyss and was now, she
hoped, gone forever. Part of her felt an immense relief at that thought, a weight lifted that she'd been dragging around ever since the day she'd tricked the Magician into it.

Another part of her, that niggling, nagging little voice that lived in the back of one's mind, was worried. What if the magic that had destroyed the goblin's lair somehow brought that little purple butterfly (from now on she wouldn't say his name, wouldn't even think it) back to life?

“You can't trouble yourself about it now, Alice,” she told herself firmly. “You have plenty of troubles in front of you without taking on more.”

But what if . . . ?

No, there would be no “what if.” The butterfly was gone now, and she certainly wouldn't reopen that hole and dive after it to make sure it was really dead, even if she knew how. There was only the path forward for Alice, always.

She glanced around the remnants of the room, looking for a door and finding none.

There must be a way out. If there is a way in, then there is a way out.

The goblin could come and go, and he had lured her inside here, so she just needed to examine the room very carefully.

It was terribly slow going, and more than once Alice wanted to just sit down and hope that someone would come to free her instead. Of course, anyone who came to free her would likely be an agent of the Queen, and that wouldn't end well for Alice, so she kept looking.

She ran her hand over every brick within reach, every beam of wood. She peered into every cobwebby corner, disturbing more than one spider, some of which were large enough to give her angry looks before scuttling away.

Finally, when she was far past the end of her rope and starting to despair, she found it. It was a very thin seam in the brick, camouflaged perfectly and shaped like a rectangular door. She pushed at it, and though it had no hinges, it swung open ever so slowly.

As she waited for the entrance Alice thought,
This had best not be one of those rooms of many doors again. I'm not choosing another door after the last one. If that's the case I
will
sit right down in the middle of the floor and let the Queen's soldiers find me.

Alice didn't know why she thought the Queen had soldiers, except that queens always had soldiers, or ought to. Weren't the pawns on a chessboard nothing but soldiers for the royalty in the back row?

This is rather like a game of chess, isn't it? A White Queen and a Black King and all the little pieces—me and Hatcher and the children from the village—moving in between, trying not to get swiped.

But the brick door revealed yet another tunnel, this time made of ice. Alice felt that this must mean she was finally close to her destination, that the White Queen would be at the end of this. She stepped into the passage and shivered despite the thick knitted sweater she wore. Alice thought longingly of the fur cloak that had disappeared along with her pack.

“Walk faster, Alice; you'll stay warmer,” she said, wrapping her arms around her elbows, careful not to drop the knife she still gripped, the last thing she had to defend herself.

Besides magic,
she thought, but she also thought that she was quite out of her class here, magic-wise. The White Queen had old magic, magic she had taken from someone else, magic that had endured for hundreds of years.

But magic that is also somehow . . . unstable?
Alice wondered. There was something there she could almost grasp, but not quite. It was important that the Queen's magic didn't belong to her. It implied that perhaps it could be taken away. Alice shook her head. She wasn't certain, and it would have been helpful to have a few hints from Cheshire now, but he had gone away again.

The cold soon made it difficult to think, to see, to even breathe. Every inhalation seemed to spread ice inside her from her chest outward. The passage was slippery and the upward slope of it inhibited fast progress. She shook with cold, the knife falling from her hand many times. On each occasion she spent several minutes picking it up again, only to have it slip from her numb fingers.

She remembered as she walked in a daze of cold, thinking of her dream of the castle made of ice at the top of the mountain. She wondered, too, what she would find when she arrived there.

In her dream all the children screamed, screamed all day and all the time, and she thought she could hear just the faintest echo of those screams, as if they had seeped into the ice and came forth again in the cold steam that rose when Alice passed.

Her teeth chattered. Her ribs shook so violently that her back seemed to seize up and freeze, all the muscles locked painfully against her spine. Her hands were blue and rimed with frost. When she blinked, crystals of ice fell from her lashes, burning her frozen cheeks. The upward slope of passage and the constant need to struggle for purchase made Alice tired and angry.

Upward because the Queen must have her castle at the top of a bloody mountain.
She paused for a moment in her thoughts there, for Alice was fairly certain she had never even thought such a curse word—a “low word,” her mother would have said—and despite the cold her cheeks flushed.

Why not a valley?
she continued, deciding that after having slashed someone's throat she should hardly worry about her language.
Then one could simply roll down the icy path until one turned into a giant snowball.

Alice imagined rolling and rolling in her great ball of snow, getting larger and larger and larger until you could not even see her hands or feet. The ball would roll and roll and gather speed until she was spinning so fast it would make her feel sick and dizzy but full of joy too, the way that she felt when she was on a carousel or riding a horse that galloped too fast.

The enormous snowball would crash through the gates of the Queen's palace and would break apart to reveal Alice inside, like a pudding with a prize in it. Then the Queen would think it all so funny that she would laugh and laugh, and she would set the children free and Hatcher free and they would all have tea and cake together in their best party clothes.

Alice recognized that her thoughts were getting very silly indeed. It was the cold, the cold that made her eyes want to close. Her brain twisted into knots, going this way and that, and she felt she might never be warm again, never again.

If someone touched me right now I would shatter into a million pieces. A million million million shards of ice would Alice be. Little Alice bits all over the floor and no one to clean them up.

And then, like so many other occasions in Alice's life since the hospital, the tunnel ended and there was a door.

The door appeared so abruptly she was certain it was a figment of her fevered brain. She stopped, staring at it, trying to decide whether it was real or not.

Her hands reached for it of their own accord, a smooth perfect door made of ice, and she hoped there would be no trick necessary to open it. Alice was really and truly tired of tricks and trials and illusions and things never quite working out the way they ought to.

The door opened at the slightest pressure of her hands, and then Alice was inside the castle.

She didn't know what she might find—knights in shiny white armor that would come running at the sign of an intruder. Or perhaps courtiers made of snow, bejeweled and bevelveted, dancing to music played on instruments carved from ice. The ballroom would be all black and white like a chessboard, of course, and the Queen would sit imperiously at one end of the room, watching the dancers twirl with mad eyes.

At the very least there would be servants, carrying trays of food or feather dusters, servants who would stop and stare in astonishment at the frozen girl emerging from the wall.

But there was nobody and nothing but a blast of warmth that melted all of the frost from her body. She shook all over now as the heat seeped back into her fingers and nose and stomach and legs and down into her bones, and warming up was nearly as painful as the freezing had been. Alice fell to her knees, the short locks of her hair clinging to her head now as the ice melted, water flowing over her face like tears. Her teeth clattered together so violently, she feared she might bite off her own tongue.

After a while she was done shaking and shivering and felt that she could get up. The knife had fallen from her grip during these seizures and she rooted around in the dirt for a while before she found it. Once it was secure in her hand again, she felt she could look about safely, and that thought was another troubling one, that she would not go forward without a blade, like Hatcher and his axe.

There was nothing here that required her vigilance, though, for Alice appeared to be in some kind of cellar. It was like no cellar she had seen before. The cellar at her parents' home had bins of potatoes and turnips (she wrinkled her nose at this memory, as she had never been fond of turnips) and jars of pickled vegetables and strawberry jam and also some nice wine that her father saved for special parties.

This place was completely empty, no shelves or jars or bins,
though it had some of the same musty, earthy smells of a root cellar. At the far end was a staircase lit by a series of candles set in the wall. There was no noise at all.

Alice tried to breathe more quietly, so as not to disturb the stillness. She waited, letting her eyes search the shadows, making certain there was nothing lurking in the corners. She hoped very fervently that by stepping farther into the room she would not trigger a falling gate, or signal some monster to emerge from the stairs.

These things seemed absurd until you'd been in a maze with roses that tried to kill you or in a house where you had to drink a shrinking potion to go through a tiny door. When those things had happened, you began to expect the most absurd and horrible outcome to any situation, and Alice would not have been in the least surprised if a dragon slithered down those stairs in a moment and set her on fire.

No dragon appeared, nor any goblin or soldier or queen. Alice slid her boot an inch across the dirt floor, trying not to make a sound, though she thought the shifting of earth beneath her foot clattered like a rockfall on the side of a mountain. No cry went up, no creature appeared, and she slid forward again.

She reached the halfway point of the room slowly, like a snail moseying along in search of a nice green leaf (
and not knowing that a bird was about to swoop down upon it,
Alice thought, still waiting for something bad to happen as it always seemed to). She'd just about decided that her overcaution was unwarranted when she heard something.

Alice tilted her head to one side. The sound was so faint she hadn't even identified what it was. She took a firmer grip on the knife and held it out in front of her, heart racing.

What was it? She turned slowly in a circle, listening, listening.
There. There it was again.

She strained, trying to locate the source. It seemed to come from inside the wall to her right.

A snarling tiger breaking free,
the scared-little-girl part of her thought, but she dismissed that almost immediately. There was no tiger inside that wall, nor a bear or a unicorn or anything else. It was nothing but rough wood planks, sloppily nailed together.

There. Again.
A sound that went
thump-thump
.

There was no animal inside there (she was almost sure of this), but something wanted her attention. She pressed her ear against the wood and listened.

Thump-thump.

Alice drew her head back and stared at the place where her ear had been a moment before. A heartbeat.
Was
there something alive in there? Or worse . . . perhaps the castle itself was alive.

She stared around the room, half expecting the wood and dirt to melt into muscle and bone, to contract into a hand that would squeeze her tight until all her blood ran into the floor to feed the castle. But this was not the goblin's illusion room, and the castle was not alive. If it were, the heartbeat would be so much louder, she was sure. It would be so loud it would drown out her own heart, which was beating against her ribs like a butterfly's wings in a glass jar.

Curiosity was a dangerous thing, Alice knew, and this was no time to be curious. Hatcher was waiting for her. The sound was probably a trap, meant to lure Alice into some design the Queen had for her. She should go away; she should ignore it.

Thump-thump.

Curious,
Alice thought,
it's almost as if it is calling me, just me, and nobody else would be able to hear it.

She felt drawn irresistibly to the sound. She would not be able to leave this place without finding its source, without knowing what called to her and made her blood sing so.

There was a place where the boards were loose near the floor. Alice curled her fingers under the board and pulled it up with all her strength. The wood was brittle and old and it cracked immediately, coming away much more easily than she expected.