Page 21 of Wondrous

“That’s not the same,” I said quietly.

“Isn’t it?” The Hare seemed untroubled. “Well, I’m just a hare. You can’t expect me to understand these things.” He turned back to the Hatter. “Let’s give her four days. One per dragon, plus one for leeway. After that, we’re setting a place for her, and I don’t want to hear you whinge about it.”

Chapter 12

I took my personal belongings and teas from the cart and tucked them into a knapsack. I managed to stuff the tent in, too, though I couldn’t fit all the stakes, so it would be even more misshapen than it had been before. I removed my teapot from the wagon and threaded its handle with a scarf, then strapped it to my back like a sword. It felt all right, though the spout dug into my ribs a little.

I borrowed a belt from the Hatter and tied four of my favorite teacups to it with a bit of string, as well as my best kettle. I hoped very much that I wouldn’t break any of them.

The teacups I was bringing on my quest were these:

The teacup that had put the monster to sleep. It was white, with a traditional pattern of wild roses and less traditional ants, bumblebees, and spiders, because I’d never understood why bugs were always left out of floral scenes.

The donkey teacup that made happy memories, which Alistair had drunk from.

The teacup that made the drinker less dangerous, which was likely to be the most useful with dragons, though I’d no idea if I could convince them to drink from it. This had a pattern of swallows against a twilight sky.

The last teacup I had made, with its stars-and-moon pattern, which had helped me come up with a plan for dealing with the monster at my campsite—the teacup for wisdom, as I now thought of it.

The fourth one was for me, of course—I wasn’t going to serve the mock dragons with it. They were already terrifying enough; they didn’t need wisdom on top of that.

I didn’t need to carry my hedgehogs as I walked, apart from Hedgewitch, who was spoiled rotten. They were slower than me but more tireless, and whenever we reached a downhill section of forest, they would make up ground fast by tucking themselves into balls and racing down. They always caught up to me eventually.

I gave the Hatter and the Hare one last hug. The Hatter had started sobbing again, while the Hare pretended to be matter-of-fact about the hug, holding me stiffly with his paws. I knew he was upset, though, for he climbed carefully onto a boulder so he could keep me in sight for as long as possible as I marched back into the Tulgey Wood.

“Hello again,” I muttered, though it seemed silly to resent a forest. My teacups clanked gently, dangling from my belt, but otherwise I tried to move as quietly as possible. I had to pass uncomfortably close to the part of the forest where I’d encountered the monster. Three mock dragons were more than enough monsters to deal with, and I didn’t want—

“Oh,” I murmured, stopping dead in my tracks. Had that char-scented monster been one of the mock dragons the Queen had sent us after?

And yet, even if it was, I had fooled the creature once, hadn’t I? The thought should have given me confidence, but instead I only felt nausea. I felt as if I’d burnt my hand on a hot pan, then been told I would have to pick it up again.

Somehow, I managed to keep going, not out of bravery but by keeping my mind carefully blank and focusing on the warm lump that was Hedgewitch in my coat pocket. I hummed the Hatter’s unbirthday song under my breath, and it helped a little.

I didn’t see any of the other Alices, but I noticed footprints at the start of Here Be Monsters Path, one of three that terminated at the grounds of the Queen’s castle, the other two being Thisaway Path and Guillotine Way. I had always interpreted “Here Be Monsters” as referring to the Queen and her card soldiers, but I supposed it was possible there were monsters at the other end, too.

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going that way, because I wasn’t looking for the dragons yet.

I paused after an hour or two to build a small fire and brew myself a stiff green tea, which I poured into the happy-memory teacup. I still had a long hike ahead of me, and I wanted all the encouragement I could get.

In truth, I wasn’t very happy to be setting out again, not just for the obvious reason that I didn’t want to go hunting for dragons. It was because I wanted to go back to my little room in the Hare’s house, with the bay window and the smell of tea wafting up from the kitchen downstairs. I was tired and I needed a bath.

But the other Alices hadn’t seemed concerned about baths, which worried me, because perhaps that meant one of them was the true Alice. I had to stop to brush my teeth, though—I simply couldn’t stand the woolly feeling. Then I found another one of Wonderland’s inexplicable mirrors, a hanging one this time, nailed to the trunk of a tree, and brushed my hair neat before tying it back with a ribbon. I felt guilty the entire time, wondering if it made me less of a hero than the others, and then I felt nervous about feeling guilty, because didn’t heroes simply do what they wanted without worrying what people thought about them?

But then, heroes wouldn’t worry about whether they were hero-like, because they would just know they were, wouldn’t they?

“Ugh!” I exclaimed. I threw my hairbrush back in my knapsack and kept going, humming the unbirthday song again.

The morning deepened into afternoon, and the flamboyant tumtum trees began to sigh in the wind that always blew through the Tulgey Wood at that time of day. I stopped to drink more tea from the donkey teacup (which gave me another memory of the Hare’s cottage) and to eat an apple and a handful of acorns I’d gathered from the forest floor as I walked. Fortunately, the acorns of Wonderland weren’t toxic, and they didn’t make you grow or shrink. They were crunchy and tasted a bit like mustard.

The Tulgey Wood had grown darker as I walked, the path I followed weaving through the forest like a needle through a tapestry. I had never gone this way before—this path didn’t have any signs, though I did pass the occasional nail stuck in a tree, sometimes attached to a ragged scrap of wood, as if someone had torn the sign violently away.

It didn’t matter, though. The Hatter had warned me away from this path so thoroughly that I knew what to look for.

First, there were the mushrooms. They were spotted and an eerie sort of green, with little antennae sticking off them, like those of insects. Also, the trees were broader here, but it was a stout broadness, with none of the cathedral-like feeling one found in other parts of the Tulgey Wood. The canopy was claustrophobic, the branches hanging low across the path and woven together so densely only the sparest rays of sunlight snuck through.

Finally, there was the fact that the ground had grown increasingly boggy and wet. Sometimes a little stream ran right down the middle of the path, and the land was uneven with watery sinkholes and pits, places where the earth had simply collapsed into itself. Moss lined the path, and instead of birdsong, the forest was filled with a steady drip-drip-drip sound and the burble of little streams sliding through the shadows. It was as if the place didn’t entirely know if it was earth or water.

It was getting dark by the time I reached it. I had been walking all day and was now a very long way from the Queen’s castle—and the Hare’s house. But I knew I could finally stop.