Red Queen (23 page)

She fell back on her bottom as several boards (poorly nailed together, as she'd thought) clattered to the floor. Her blood rushed in her ears as she sent a panicked glance toward the stairs, expecting booted feet followed by flashing swords, thinking that noise was surely loud enough to draw the attention of the inhabitants of the castle.

Again, there was nothing; there was nobody. Alice thought this was very odd, but then, it was not her castle, and of course, it was much better not to be taken prisoner. Especially as she had not yet found whatever heart thrummed inside the walls of this cellar, playing its music only for her.

Once the boards were removed, the thumping was much louder, or perhaps it was more insistent now that it felt Alice's
approach. She could not see what made the noise, as the wall behind the board was crumbled dark earth like the floor.

She pushed her fingers into the dirt, felt it give way, but there was still no sign of the heartbeat's source. Her hand went farther, until it disappeared up to the wrist.

Curious,
she thought again.
I must know what is inside this wall. I don't think I can leave here until I find it.

Her arm sank deeper, up to her elbow. Worms and spiders and other things fled from her grasping hand and fell out of the wall. They climbed over her hair and face and fell to her boots, and Alice hardly noticed.

The dirt encased her arm up to her shoulder now. And she thought that in a moment the rest of her would follow, that she would seep into the wall and swim through the earth like a mole until she found the thing that she searched for.

Then she touched it.

Her fingers went around it and she felt a surge of triumph. It was warm, so warm, like it ran with blood inside. She knew what it was as soon as her hand closed about it, for she had longed for it once before.

Alice drew it from its hiding place, her arm pulling free of the dirt that encased it and dropping several more small, crawling things to the floor. Those crawling things made a terrific din (or so it seemed to Alice) scurrying away, like a crowded room of people emptying out. Or maybe it was the thrumming of her own heart and the thing in her hand, the two of them twining together and beating in time.

The Red Queen's crown, removed from its hiding place, the gleaming wrought silver and winking red jewel unaffected by the dirt they'd been buried in, shimmering even though there was almost no light in the cellar.

Alice had been certain she'd never see this crown again after she'd turned from it in her dream, and yet here it was again. She recalled Cheshire's voice in that vision urging her to take it then because she needed it, saying it would be harder later.

“But getting it wasn't so very difficult,” Alice said, unable to keep the smugness out of her voice as she examined the crown. It was too beautiful for words, and the heat inside the metal seeped into her skin, making her feel as though she were lit from within. “All I had to do was take it from the wall.”

There was a very, very, very faraway whisper in reply, irritated and possibly not even really there.
If you had taken it when I said, you could have avoided all that bother with the goblin.

“Bother?” Alice hissed in reply. “Bother? I was nearly killed.”

And you could have avoided it, for the crown is much stronger than any hob of the White Queen's.
This was even fainter than the last comment, as if it were too difficult for Cheshire to break through the Queen's barrier, as if he were straining from a very long distance to speak to Alice.

She thought about arguing more, but the idea that Cheshire might be right (and he did usually seem to be) arrested her. Could she have escaped that final encounter with the goblin she
so feared if she'd only taken the crown earlier? She did not know, and could never know for certain. Cheshire was always certain, but she thought that was part of his magic.

Perhaps if Alice, too, were certain instead of scared and unsure, maybe she would be a powerful Magician. Or maybe she would still be Alice, because no matter what happened to her or around her, she always seemed to still be Alice; no amount of changing could change who she essentially was, the Alice that she had always been as a curious girl with Dor or mad in the hospital or on the run with Hatcher. Underneath all of it there was some essential Alice-ness.

There was some wisdom in that, she thought as she stared into the jewel set in the crown, the jewel that seemed to want something from her. If only she stayed Alice, if she did not let Cheshire or Hatcher or the White Queen change her, then she would be all right.

As she thought this the warmth in the crown waned a little. It was not a bad feeling—rather, it seemed Alice had done something correct, something that the crown liked.

That the crown liked?
she thought, shaking her head.
No, not the crown. The Red Queen. The Queen's magic lives on in this object, and if I take it and use it against the White Queen, then the Red Queen will help me.

And not, Alice hoped, turn her into somebody who was not herself. She didn't think this Queen would, somehow. It wasn't that the Red Queen's magic was necessarily good and that the
White Queen's was bad. It was that the power that coursed through the crown was softer, perhaps kinder—though no less strong for all of that.

She turned toward the stairs now, those strangely silent stairs with the rows of flickering candles. The knife that had belonged to Brynja's husband was in her right hand and the crown that had belonged to the Red Queen was in her left, and in between there was just scruffy, dirty Alice. She didn't have to be Cheshire's ideal of a Magician or Hatcher's ideal of a lover or her parents' ideal of a daughter. She could be Alice.

And whoooo . . . ?

The whisper was so light and delicate now, hardly there at all.

And whooo . . . are . . . you?

“We shall see, won't we?” Alice said, and climbed the stairs.

She'd expected another long climb, perhaps with twists and turns and perils, but the stairwell was terribly ordinary and bare and comparatively short. At the top of the stair was a little alcove, and from the alcove Alice entered a large kitchen.

There was no fire in the huge brick fireplace, nor any cook stirring soup and shouting orders at those who were to wait at table. There were no stable boys hanging about searching for scraps or bits of cake to steal, nor dogs that weren't supposed to be indoors anyway. There were no harried maids carrying tea trays or valets trying to cozen those maids into a walk before bedtime.

There was nobody and nothing, and Alice should have expected this. When she and Hatcher emerged from the tunnel to the plains, they'd thought there would be green fields and
farms and pleasant travelers, and there was nothing. When they entered the village at the end of the forest, there were no people, only the doll's game set there by the White Queen. Even the forest itself had been strangely barren. Alice had not seen a fox or squirrel or deer in all the time she'd spent trudging through that crouching, creeping wood.

The only place that had been real and alive was the village at the foot of the mountain, and it was dying slowly. Everything the White Queen touched was wiped clean and barren and cold.

Where are the children?
Alice wondered. And what did the Queen do with them? Would Alice even find any of them alive?

She had to face, for the first time, the possibility that none of them were. The Queen might take the children and kill them as a sacrifice to her magic. Or they might not survive her presence simply because everything around her died. It was only the dream Alice had, the dream of the children's screams echoing through the castle, that made her think they were still alive. But her dream might not be true, after all.

Alice crossed through the kitchen, passing the rusted pans hanging from hooks and the dusty tables where no bread had been rolled out for a long, long time. She passed from the kitchen into another corridor, and thought she knew this time where she was going, for the dining room was usually a short walk from the kitchen. Important people who lived in palaces such as this liked their food to be the temperature it was meant to be—hot food should be hot, and cold food cold.

The dining room was where it ought to be, with a magnificent
long table carved of dark heavy wood and matching chairs. The chair seats had velvet covers in bright jewel tones faded by dust and age. The walls were covered in intricately threaded tapestries. Alice glanced over this disinterestedly; then something caught her eye and she stopped, staring.

The first scene showed a girl with long blond hair and a pretty party dress, walking hand in hand with another girl into the mouth of a rabbit hole. The next scene showed the same blond girl, all alone now and covered with blood. Next the girl was in a white room staring through the bars at the moon.

On and on it went, every detail of Alice's adventures with Hatcher and beyond. There she was sitting in the palm of Pen's hand, and climbing the mountain, and killing the goblin. There she was pulling the crown from the wall, and passing through the empty kitchen. She reached the end of the tapestry and her eyes widened.

In the carefully embroidered picture, Alice looked at a tapestry. She could see herself there, tall and thin and dirty, with the crown in one hand and the knife in the other, and behind her there was a shadow deeper than any night she'd ever known.

Alice whirled around, the knife coming up to slash, but the shadow had already moved back and away, and now she could see that it was not a shadow at all. It was a person, a person cloaked in black so pervasive that his face and hands seemed to be made of nothing but the shifting darkness.

“I know you,” she said. “You're Brynja's brother. Bjarke.”

The darkness shuddered, as if the name Alice spoke hurt him.

“That boy is dead,” the shadow said. His voice ground out, as if with a great effort, like he'd forgotten how to speak. “I am called the Black King now.”

“No,” Alice said with great certainty, and she walked toward him as if she were not afraid. “Your name is Bjarke, and you have a sister named Brynja who loves you despite all you have done.”

Despite all you have done. Yes,
Alice thought,
I love Hatcher despite all he has done. And when I see him again I will not be a child trailing his coattails. I will be a woman, and I can love him with clear eyes.

It was a strange time for such a realization, when her life was probably in danger from this boy who called himself a king. She'd had a lot of realizations on this journey, and she was learning to take them when and how they came to her.

The Black King turned his head from Alice, or seemed to, at any rate. It was difficult to tell exactly where the head was, or the shoulders. The size of it seemed to change, to grow and shrink and move even when it was standing still, just like the way a shadow will in the corner when you think something is there but it really isn't.

“The person who was once my sister is a fool if she still loves me, for I do not love her. I love no one,” he said.

“I know very well that is not true,” Alice said. “You love the one who lives in this castle, and you have burned the plains and killed many innocents, only to make her take note of you.”

The shape of him grew again, threatening, tendrils of him seeping around the room like he would close around Alice and pull her into his darkness. But she was not afraid, and she wondered why.

“I can destroy you with a thought,” the Black King said. “My power is stronger than anyone's, even hers whose crown you hold.”

Alice could not see any eyes inside the shifting mass of darkness. Nonetheless she felt the hungry gaze of the Black King upon the Red Queen's crown, and the way the crown throbbed in warning.

“You can, or say you can,” Alice said. She had felt this calm only once before, when she faced the one she'd defeated in the streets of the Old City and put him in a little glass jar. “But if you can defeat me so easily, why have you not already? Why do you hesitate when you are so powerful?”

“I am!” he cried, and his voice was no longer the sound of darkness. It was the cry of a boy, a boy who wanted something and couldn't have it and didn't understand why, because he wanted it so badly, and when you want something so badly, then someone ought to give it to you.

The darkness covered the room now, everywhere except where Alice stood, and it was as though she were a clear prism lit by the sun. He could not touch her.

“No,” Alice said. “You are not a Magician. You took something that did not belong to you, all because you felt you should have it. And now it is eating you, eating you inside and you don't
know why and it's making you weaker every moment that you try to hold on to it, Bjarke.”

“Stop calling me THAT NAME!” he cried, and the room shook, and plaster fell from the ceiling.

“Bjarke,” Alice said again, wondering that the Queen did not come running at this display. Could she not feel his presence inside her castle? Hadn't she built barriers around it to keep him out?

The thoughts were idle ones, and did not trouble Alice. If the Queen wanted to suddenly appear, there was nothing Alice could do about it.

“Stop calling me that!” the boy shouted.

“Bjarke,” Alice said again, calm and assured.

A thin coil of darkness snaked around the crown in Alice's hand and pulled at it, trying to take it from her. The crown blazed with heat, though Alice did not need the warning. Alice didn't struggle, didn't fight or tug at the crown or try to prove she was in any way stronger than the Black King.

She said, very quietly, “That doesn't belong to you, Bjarke.”

He seemed to wither then under the relentless assault of Alice's steady assurance. The shadow shrank back into itself, until it looked almost like a man with a black cloak, a young man with a haggard face and eyes like his sister's, a very pale blue. His body seemed drained of blood, the skin so white it almost glowed, and the bones of his face were sharp against the skin. He might have been a handsome boy once, but now he was
a used-up thing, used by the magic that he should never have taken.