Red Queen (28 page)

“Come back to me, come back to your Alice,” she said, her eyes closed and her arms tight around him. “You are wild and beautiful and deadly but you are not a wolf. You are my Hatcher and I love you.”

The nose that pressed against her nose was suddenly warmer, and her eyes flew open and there were Hatcher's grey eyes in
front of hers, and his mouth on her mouth, hot and tasting of blood and love.

She wasn't scared anymore, wasn't scared of his need and what he wanted from her, the thing that had scared her more than anything because she only remembered that it hurt before, that he would want her to be a woman, that he would want her the way a husband wants his wife.

But he did not ask that of her now, only kissed her and cried, and she cried too and kissed him back, and he said her name over and over and that he loved her beyond reason and that he was sorry he left her alone in the woods.

She stroked his hair, shaggier than ever, seeing something of the wolf still in his face, lingering in his eyes. Alice wondered if it would always be there now, and she thought it might, and she thought too that he might just wake up some nights and run with the moon on four legs instead of two. And if this happened she wouldn't have to worry, for he would run wild and taste blood but he would return to her in the morning and be her Hatcher again.

“Alice,” Hatcher said finally, and rolled away from her, sitting up and staring down with eyes so sad and serious.

She missed the weight and heat of him already, though she knew well enough that they could not stay here in this bower forever, the two of them locked away from the world. There was still a queen at the top of the tower, and the Lost Ones to return home.

“Yes,” she said, and sat up, and the crown on her head felt heavy.

She wished very much to give up the weight of it. She did not understand why anyone would choose to take the magic of another. It was a terrible burden to bear, and though the Red Queen's touch was light, Alice could feel her presence just inside her consciousness, a sense of someone who did not belong.

“It's Jenny,” Hatcher said.

Alice frowned. This was not what she had expected him to say. She thought he'd ask about the crown, or how Alice had gotten there in the castle, or what they were going to do about the White Queen who had cursed him. Perhaps he'd forgotten everything except their quest, the quest they'd started an age ago, the search to find his long-lost girl.

“What about her?” Alice asked, trying to feel her way cautiously through the tangle of his mind.

She'd been inside there now, knew how it felt to be Hatcher, how everything ran and melded together and then fogged up and cleared again, and how it all moved faster than a lightning bolt. She thought she would be more patient now that she'd felt all that.

“She's the Queen,” Hatcher said.

Alice stared. “Jenny? Your daughter, Jenny, is the White Queen?”

Now Alice's brain was the one that fogged up. This didn't make any sense. Hatcher's daughter was far away to the East, past the great desert. She'd been sold to a slave trader and made to work in a harem, and her beauty was so legendary that they
called her Sahar and whispers of her had floated all the way back to the City. She was not a mad queen made of ice at the top of a tower on top of a mountain. Hatcher was mistaken. Things had gotten knotted inside his head.

“It can't be,” Alice began, intending to tell him all of this.

“It is,” Hatcher said. “I know what you're going to say—that I made a mistake, that I got confused. I didn't recognize her, though I should have because her eyes are the same ones I see when I look in a mirror. Her face is not the same as it once was, and I don't mean just that she's older, a woman instead of a child. I mean that something inside her changed and it shows on her face. There's no kindness in her anymore, and she was the sweetest child there ever was.”

His heart was breaking. Alice could hear it happening, see it in his face. His Jenny was gone, replaced by some creature he did not recognize.

“Did she know you?” Alice asked. “Is that how you know it's Jenny?”

Hatcher shook his head. “No. She did not know me. How could she? I am not the father who failed her anymore. I'm not Nicholas but Hatcher, and the years have done their job on me too. It wasn't any recognition between us. It was the baby.”

“The baby?”

Alice had forgotten about the baby, the daughter of the Black King and the White Queen—or, she supposed, Bjarke and Jenny. Alice drew in a breath, realizing suddenly what it meant.
The child was Hatcher's granddaughter, Brynja's niece. Though she had cared that the child would survive, Alice had not devoted much thought to her. She'd assumed Bjarke would take his daughter and leave. Now the baby loomed large in her mind. Alice could not let Hatcher's granddaughter come to harm, and Bjarke had been half dead when Alice last saw him.

“The child looks just like Jenny did when she was a baby,” Hatcher said. “The spitting image of her. As soon as I saw her, even though I was nothing but a wolf, I knew the Queen was Jenny and that child was my kin.”

“Where is the baby now?” Alice asked.

“The Queen set me to guard the child from that one who was in the ballroom with you. I was not to let you climb the stairs. But then something happened. You disappeared and the man who was with you, the one who was sick unto death, he did something to me.” Hatcher frowned, trying to remember. “He waved his fingers and I felt very tired.”

“He must have had a little magic left,” Alice murmured, feeling the hard weight of the little glass marble in her pocket. “Just enough.”

“He went around me and I couldn't stop him, couldn't even snap at him. I followed him up the stairs but it was like swimming in water. I saw him go into the room with the baby and take her from her cradle. He didn't hurt her. He lifted her so gently and she was sleeping. He rested her head on his shoulder and wrapped his cloak around her and put his lips on her head. I thought it was all right then, though the Queen would not like
it much, and I was so tired, too tired to chase after him. He walked past me again, and he didn't even notice that I was there; his eyes were on the girl and they were shining.”

“He is her father,” Alice said softly.

“Aye. I wasn't as worried as I ought to be that he took her away,” Hatcher said. “Then I wandered away until I came to this room and the bed looked like a nice place to rest, so I did.”

So it was not an enchanted sleep of the Queen's,
Alice thought. It was the remains of Bjarke's last spell, just enough to keep Hatcher from going for his throat when the young man was retrieving his daughter. And it lingered enough to affect Alice too, to make her sleep when she should have woken Hatcher up.

But how would they get off the mountain? Bjarke was barely hanging on to life, and the baby was small and would need food and warmth. Alice thought of the ice and snow outside, the cliff ledges, the dangerous drop-offs. She remembered the passage of ice that branched away from the tunnels that went through the enchanted tree. That way was no safer. Yes, she was anxious now, worried about the baby. She did not know what would happen to Hatcher if the child was harmed.

“I don't know if we can save Jenny,” Hatcher said, drawing Alice back to him. His face was full of grief, and Alice thought it might have been better never to find her than to see his face look like that. “I don't know who she is anymore.”

“What I cannot understand is how Jenny took the White Queen's magic in the first place,” Alice said. “You have some Seeing in your blood, but you are not a Magician. Nor was your
wife. The White Queen's magic is strong, and old, for I have felt it. It would take a very strong and canny person to steal the magic from the original Queen. And how did she get here?”

“You stabbed the Rabbit in the eye and escaped from him,” Hatcher said. “Perhaps Jenny did the same to whoever held her.”

Alice knew that this was possible, but it still amazed her. Yes, she had stabbed the Rabbit in the eye and run away. But she'd run only as far as home. She hadn't escaped a foreign city and crossed a great desert and climbed a mountain after years of trauma. Jenny had a very strong heart, indeed.

But a heart that's been twisted and broken,
Alice thought. When Alice and the Red Queen took the magic from Jenny's body, what then? Would there be anything left of the girl Hatcher knew?

“Hatcher,” Alice said. “Where is the White Queen?”

He jerked his chin up. “At the very top of the tower, on her throne.”

“We must go to her,” Alice said. She stood and held out her hand to Hatcher.

He looked at it as he had never looked before—like he was afraid, like her hand might bite.

“She doesn't know who I am, Alice,” he said. “And I don't know if I can kill her, or stand by and let you do it, though I know she's done evil. I know about those children.”

“I don't want to kill her,” Alice said.

This was perfectly true. She didn't want to kill Jenny. She wanted to help the Red Queen destroy the White Queen.
Perhaps when the White Queen was gone, Jenny would look at the face of her father and remember, remember something happy and good, the time they had together in that little house in the Old City.

“What will you do with that crown, then?” Hatcher said. He was a madman, his face seemed to say, but not a fool.

“The White Queen's magic is old and cruel, and the Red Queen's magic can drive it out,” Alice said.

“What will be left of Jenny then?” Hatcher asked.

“I don't know.”

There hadn't been much left of Bjarke. Just a small amount of the White Queen's power had drained the children, had wasted them away to nothing. How long had Jenny carried the White Queen's magic within her? That, Alice thought, would matter when the magic was taken away.

“We can't delay any longer,” Alice said.

She felt a sense of urgency that she hadn't felt before, and knew that it was anxiety about the children that drove her. Alice wanted the children out of the castle, wanted to find Bjarke and the baby and be certain that all was well there.

Most of all she wanted the confrontation to be over, to have this chapter resolved. Alice and Hatcher had done what they'd set out to do. They'd found Jenny, though she was not where they'd expected to find her. They'd found the Lost Ones. They'd found each other again. Alice was ready to rest, to find the place where the past would not trouble her any longer.

They climbed the stairs in silence, Alice leading Hatcher for
once. His step was reluctant behind her. She could almost feel how he longed to turn and leave, to not witness an act that might result in his daughter's death.

Alice noticed her knife had gone missing (had she dropped it by the bed?) and she was down to nothing but the crown. Hatcher did not have his axe or his pack. That meant the gun was gone, and all their supplies. It was only Alice and Hatcher and the Red Queen, which was still more than Alice had when she faced the Jabberwocky in the Old City.

And there is more of me now that the Red Queen has burned the remnants of the Rabbit and the Jabberwocky inside me.

They reached the top of the stair. The door was made of cracked wood that might have been polished and beautiful once, but no longer. It was damaged by water and age and had not been cared for in a very long time, like everything else in the castle.

Alice pushed open the door.

She'd expected splendor here, at least, that the White Queen would be magnificently dressed as she sat upon a magnificent throne. There was nothing of that.

The throne might have been painted gold once, but the paint was chipped and cracked, and the carvings on the arms and back were worn and faded. The draperies at the windows were torn from their hangings and sat in dusty heaps on the floor.

The Queen gripped the arms of her chair with brittle white fingers as if her hands were the only thing keeping her upright. The nails of her fingers were yellow and long and curled at the
ends. Her back and neck hunched low, as if she could not unbend even if she wanted to, and they could not see her face. White hair as long as a girl's from a fairy tale covered her head and wound around her in knotted clumps. Her dress was not the royal confection of silk and velvet that Alice imagined, but a white rag with openings for the neck and arms that draped over her, covering everything but her feet and ankles. They were strangely pathetic, her bare feet, small and fine boned and wrinkled. Something about bare feet always seemed so vulnerable to Alice, as if the world could hurt you more when you did not have shoes.

Upon her head was a silver crown with a blue jewel set in it, the nearly identical twin of the one Alice wore on her head. The jewel was faded, like everything else in the room, like the White Queen herself.

Everything about her seemed dry and withered and old, and Alice heard Hatcher gasp when he saw her.

“She did not . . .” he said, his voice trailing away.

“She did not look like this when last you saw her,” Alice said. “She may have put a glamour upon herself so that you would see an illusion. Or perhaps the breaking of her tie to the children aged her thus.”

Alice felt again a twinge of sorrow for this woman and the power inside her that caused so much harm. This was what it had come to, all her hatred and scheming. She was not a threat any longer but a broken thing.

The crown on Alice's head grew warm, and she felt the Red
Queen's sorrow, and also her disappointment. There was not to be a great revenge, then, only the quiet hastening of something already begun.

Hatcher seemed frozen, stunned by the changes wrought in the Queen. Alice approached her, wondering if the White Queen would attempt one last spell. The figure stirred, raised her head very slowly.