Page 3 of Wondrous

When I leapt off the edge, it felt less like I was falling and more like Wonderland was hurrying to greet me, like a beloved friend after a long absence.

Chapter 1

My yellow teacup was missing. Not the one with the ivy pattern, which made anyone who drank from it argumentative, but the one I’d painted with a gentle riverside scene. I wasn’t sure how I’d done it—because I wasn’t really sure how I made any of them—but tea drunk from that cup made a person feel as if they’d just awoken from a restful nap. Specifically, one taken on a bed of moss and wildflowers beneath the boughs of a weeping willow while sunlight played through the leaves.

“Perhaps I can make another,” I muttered, though I was not very hopeful. If I didn’t know how the magic worked, how could I copy it? I sighed and loaded the last box of teacups into the cart.

“I don’t know about all this,” the Hatter said for perhaps the tenth time. He stood several paces back from the cart and kept eyeing it with suspicion, as if it might decide to scoop him up and carry him off with me.

“You know I must have an occupation if I’m to stay here,” I reminded him. “Like you and dear Hare. Well, this is what I’ve chosen.”

I patted the back of the cart, which now held three boxes of teacups, my two best teapots, another box of cozies and tea towels, a bag of sugar, two milk bottles in an ice chest, and twelve sacks of tea leaves.

“Yes, but—” the Hatter began. “But it’s my unbirthday tomorrow. Perhaps you could wait another day?”

His eyes had tears in them, and I felt a pang. The Hatter and the March Hare had been unendingly kind over the past month, as they had been during my previous visits to Wonderland, putting me up in their ramshackle house and warning me away from the darker paths of the Tulgey Wood. During one of my childhood visits, the Hatter had even taught me how to shape teacups from the clay that ribboned the banks of the stream behind the house.

“Perhaps I’m mistaken, Mr. Hatter,” I said in my politest tone, because anything other than politeness made the Hatter anxious, “but won’t the day after tomorrow be your unbirthday, too?”

His face fell, but then his mouth twitched in a cunning smile. “Well, yes, I suppose—but perhaps you could stay that day, also. Yes, stay two more tomorrows, and perhaps half of an anniversary, and then you can be off. What do you say?”

“I’m afraid that won’t do,” I said firmly. I had learned from experience that I could not win an argument with the Hatter, for the same reason I could not win an argument with anyone who had no use for logic. You might as well argue with the wind. The only thing that worked with the Hatter was putting your foot down, because a foot was even harder to argue with.

While the Hatter muttered mutinously, I turned to drink in the view of the house and garden, something I never tired of. The house was small and simple, its roof a lot of untidy thatch, with just one small bedroom upstairs and a little attic, where I slept, and the sitting room and kitchen on the main level. The floorboards moaned more than creaked, and a family of toves lived in the thatch—unfortunate, that, as they made unpleasant slithering noises at night. The garden was also on the small side, though it fit a long tea table, surrounded by neat hedges and trees that were themselves surrounded by the far less mannerly bulk of the wood. A string of colorful lanterns made the garden cheery and welcoming, even in the gathering evening shadows.

The longer I looked, the more misty-eyed I grew. A part of me still refused to believe that I’d done it—that I’d actually run away to Wonderland. Another part was convinced it would all be snatched away from me again, an ominous dread I could not explain. It made me all the more determined to earn my place.

“Are you bothering our Alice again?” the March Hare said. He’d emerged from his burrow deep beneath the house, which the Hatter and the Hare called “downstairs.” His waistcoat was rumpled, and he was blinking blearily in the lantern light of the garden. “There’s no sense in arguing with her like an old fool when you know her mind is made up.”

“Old fool!” the Hatter cried, his emphasis making clear that he took offense to the first word and not the second. “I am not half so old as you, my oldest old friend. By which I mean, of course, that we are both old in friendship, as well as years. Indeed, I believe our friendship is older than the two of us put together!”

“Naturally you would think that,” the Hare grumbled. “Always quarreling with Time as you are. I wish you’d leave him alone. He’s so dreadfully temperamental, Time!”

I wondered if the Hatter was right and the Hare was the older between them. As far as I could tell, the people of Wonderland did age, but very slowly. The Hatter looked much as he had when we’d first met, though the thatch of hair peeking out from beneath his hat was perhaps more white than gray now. The creatures of Wonderland also aged slowly, but this was a relative thing, with animals; a seven-year-old hare was unusually long-lived, and yet that was how long I’d known the March Hare. I worried about him sometimes—I didn’t think I could bear losing him, and I was certain the Hatter couldn’t.

“Go to bed,” the Hare told the Hatter. “The White Rabbit said he would come for tea tomorrow.”

“The White Rabbit! That’s very kind of him,” the Hatter said. Most of our tea parties consisted of just me, the Hatter, the Hare, and the Dormouse. The Hatter was overbearing and the Hare a curmudgeon, and most of their guests didn’t visit more than once or twice. It was a shame, because the Hatter loved company.

The Hatter hurried inside, muttering something about jam, leaving me alone with the Hare.

“Thank you,” I said. The Hare harrumphed.

The March Hare was quite a disturbing person, as most Wonderland creatures were. Not only was he too large—far too large—for a hare or rabbit, but he had a healthy thatch of hair on his head. Human hair. Once blond, now gone mostly to gray. In addition, the Hare dreamed. Many of his dreams seemed to consist of nightmares, from which he would awake shouting, “Not a rabbit! Anything but a rabbit!” He could never remember what he’d been dreaming about. And sometimes he would make offhand remarks about things a hare had no business knowing about, such as the sound of mermaid song or the hazards of sailing through winter storms, but when the Hatter or I tried to press him with questions, he would only blink in confusion and claim he’d never said any such thing.

I settled myself on a stump at the edge of the garden, which offered a view of the dark tangle of the Tulgey Wood. The Hare’s house perched at the edge of the vast forest like a lighthouse upon the shore of the sea, casting its glow into the darkness.

I felt a prickle of excitement that tomorrow I would be traveling farther into Wonderland than I ever had, serving tea to strange creatures and enjoying even stranger conversation. The paths of the Tulgey Wood were many and labyrinthine, and as nonsensical as anything else in Wonderland.

The Hare seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Forests are not nice places,” he said. “Much better to stay at home, where you can find everything you want, and everything you find is what you want. You might get the first in a forest, but never the second. And it takes so long to go everywhere on those nasty, windy paths!”

“I don’t mind,” I said, swinging my legs contentedly.

The Hare settled himself beside me, his joints creaking. He handed me a cup of tea—green with blossoms from the hairy marshmallow tree. “You’ll not forget about us, surely?”

“Of course not,” I exclaimed. “This will only be a short trip, to get my feet wet and see what the demand is like. You know I’ve only invented Alice’s Traveling Tea Shop so I can stay in Wonderland, and visit you two as often as possible. Don’t forget that I was away for a whole year and never forgot you.”

The Hare gave another harrumph, but I could tell my reassurance pleased him. That everyone in Wonderland needed an occupation was a well-known fact, though I hadn’t been able to make out if it was simply agreed upon by everyone or a rule that governed the world. That occupation could be—and almost always was—completely ridiculous. The unbirthday parties of the Hatter and March Hare were an example, but so were the Cheshire Cat’s riddles and the White Rabbit’s role as the Queen’s steward. The older I’d grown, the more Wonderland had come to remind me of a storybook come to life, with the same rules storybook characters had: namely, that everyone must have a reason for being there.