Page 36 of Wondrous

He grimaced, then met my eyes with a faint, rueful smile. “With friends. Don’t get any ideas. I’m—that monster rattled me around a lot before it threw me.”

“Of course,” I said quickly. I thought about how I’d almost pressed his hand—the gesture had seemed similar, somehow. The place where he’d touched me felt overly warm, as if I were blushing in that spot only.

“I guess I’ll make another pot of tea,” I added, looking away. “It seems like we won’t be getting any more sleep tonight.”

Chapter 19

Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far. I rinsed out the teapot, then leaned against a tree to wait for the kettle to boil. When next I opened my eyes, dawn had painted the sky the color of mussel shells, and the kettle had been removed from the fire. Jack was crouched at my side, and I realized he’d been saying my name.

“Mmf?” I grunted. “The tea— When did I—”

“Don’t worry about it. I came to say that the mock dragon’s waking up.”

He pressed a teacup into my hand—I caught a glimpse of the familiar donkey head painted on the side. “Did you—”

“Yes. How is it?”

I sipped the tea. He’d chosen the raspberry green, which was both refreshing and warming given the cool morning air.

“Not bad,” I said, though the aftertaste was sharp enough to make me wince. It almost ruined the brief memory of the Hare’s garden. “Don’t steep it so long next time. Six minutes is all this blend requires.”

“That’s it? It tasted all right to me. Well, we have different teas in the Jabberwoods.”

I didn’t doubt this, and a part of me wondered what those teas were made from—poison mushrooms and powdered beetles?—but I suspected I’d be better off not knowing.

He held out his hand and helped me to my feet. The blanket that had been covering me fell away, and I blushed—Jack must have placed it on me while I slept. Then I remembered that the mock dragon had burnt what was left of my blankets, and I realized that he’d placed his cloak over me. I couldn’t comprehend it—were all jabberwocks so changeable?

Jack had dragged—or, from the looks of the furrows in the grass, rolled—the mock dragon over to a large oak tree and tied him to the trunk with vines. He seemed to be stirring—his horned head twitched, and his snores were broken by muttering.

“Do you want to question him first?” Jack said, examining the mock dragon critically. “Or should I frighten him a little, to loosen his tongue?”

I remembered the ripples in the air that had choked the mock dragon before and shivered. “No. Let’s start off on a friendly foot, if we can.”

Jack nodded. Something in his manner had altered since yesterday, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. He seemed less cantankerous, that was certain. I decided to simply appreciate the change rather than think too hard about it.

The mock dragon’s eyes flew open. “My breezes!” he cried. “Where are my breezes?”

“Your breezes?” I repeated, glancing at Jack—who, as a creature of Wonderland, should be quicker to make sense of nonsense than me. As I expected, he was watching the mock dragon with mistrust rather than confusion.

“You mean those glass bottles?” he said. “I thought those might be important to you. I’ve taken them away and placed a hedgehog guard upon them, under strict instructions to break every last one if you try anything.”

I absorbed this in silence. Naturally, I didn’t believe for one second that Jack had put the hedgehogs on guard duty, but I wondered if Jack thought he had. After months of training, my hedgehogs knew how to perform exactly one function; they would simply wander off to gather tea leaves, or curl up and take a nap, if instructed to do anything else. It didn’t matter, though, for the mock dragon bought Jack’s threat.

“Oh, please no,” he said mournfully. “Those breezes are so dear to me! And they took me ever so long to collect—months and months of research, and patient observation, and—”

“You should have thought of that before you tried to roast us to death,” Jack said.

“I’m sorry,” the mock dragon whined. “I didn’t know you were a jabberwock. I don’t mean any offense by this, but you look like you’ve taken ill. Frightfully ill!”

“You call that an apology?” Jack said. “What about Alice? You’re saying that you don’t regret trying to roast her at all, and she’s standing right there.”

I stared at him, speechless in the face of his offense on my behalf. The mock dragon, meanwhile, began to sniffle, an alarmingly noisy sound. “I’m sorry, Sir Jabberwock, I didn’t—”

“Apologize to Alice,” Jack snapped.

“Ah, yes—I’m sorry, Alice,” the mock dragon said, turning his big wet eyes upon me. A stream of snot dripped from his nose and pooled on the ground, and I took a hurried step backward. “So very sorry. You see, I didn’t realize you were a friend of jabberwocks.”

I looked from one to the other—Jack, looking to me for approval, and the cottage-sized monster we had captured, blubbering away—and hadn’t the slightest idea how to respond. But good manners had been drilled into me since infancy, and eventually I replied distantly, “That’s—that’s quite all right.”