Page 67 of Wondrous

Jack waved at me, beaming. I waved back, unable to stop myself from laughing. It was clear that Jack saw all this as merely an entertaining epilogue to our adventure.

Before anyone could work out what was to be done next, the doors to the courtroom flew open again, and in marched a pageant of card soldiers. Behind them swept the general, looking as tall and intimidating as a person made mostly from paper ever could, followed by the White Rabbit, looking—if anything—even wearier than he had before, but he managed to get in a few blasts of his bugle this time. Last came the Queen and King of Hearts, the King smiling and waving elegantly at the onlookers, the Queen glaring thunderously at everyone he waved at. I hurried to devour my cucumber sandwich, hoping the Queen wouldn’t notice. I couldn’t help resenting her for arriving just then—now that the room had settled, I wanted to ask Tobias for some tea.

“Silence!” the general called out. The seal sat up and clapped his flippers while three women who looked nearly identical, apart from having hair in varying shades of green, began to recite a nursery rhyme. I couldn’t make it out—something to do with lions and unicorns.

“Silence!” the general shouted again in a much more threatening voice, which got the point across. I stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth—in truth, I could have done with another three—and the crowd quieted but for a few whispers here and there.

“As you all know,” she continued, “we are here to name the Alice in Wonderland. While no doubt many of you children have bravely—”

“I didn’t know,” announced the man with eyes on the sides of his head.

“As all but one of you know,” the general continued, so smoothly that the Queen of Hearts couldn’t cut in, “we are here because—”

“Did anybody else know?” the man continued, looking around. Several audience members shook their heads. “I thought this was a beheading.”

“Well, we can’t let you leave disappointed,” the Queen said savagely, and then we all had to wait as her soldiers dragged the man screaming from the courtroom. The King of Hearts protested that his stomach was too delicate in the morning for decapitations, and the Queen grudgingly consented to throwing the man in the dungeon instead.

“As hardly any of you know,” the general continued, with valiant patience, “we—”

“What are you doing here?” the Queen of Hearts cried.

We all turned as one to stare at the woman who had strode into the throne room. I didn’t need to wonder who it was, though, for the whispers of the onlookers reached me before I laid eyes upon her.

“The White Queen. The White Queen is here!”

Chapter 35

Where the Queen of Hearts was fire and crackling energy, the White Queen was mist and cloud. Only her hair was white, tangled waves framing her brown face as if she rarely bothered to comb it. Her dress was layers of gray and palest violet, her cloak a sullen and muted beige, and over this was her gray shawl. She looked like a misty winter landscape, and she might have been eighteen or eighty. She wandered in and then stopped, brow furrowed, like someone who had gone into a room to retrieve something but forgotten what it was along the way.

The King cleared his throat as the White Queen continued to stand there in silence, either ignoring the Queen of Hearts’ question or deeming it unimportant.

“You are welcome to take my throne, Your Majesty,” he said, standing, and the White Queen blinked.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I would rather sit before thrones than over thrones, though I suppose that’s better than under them.” She then took a seat at the back of the room, behind a walrus in a top hat, which was inconvenient, because the rest of us had to crane our necks to look at her.

“Overthrown!” The Queen of Hearts had misheard, and leaned forward with a glare. “What do you mean by that? You are a Queen of Wonderland. We cannot be overthrown. Or at least, I can’t.”

“In fact, one can be thrown over a great many things,” the White Queen said behind the walrus. “I myself have been thrown over horses. Two streams. A battlement. That one hurt—it happened ten years from now. Or was it ten years ago? It’s dreadfully confusing to have a memory that works both ways—I’m always forgetting which direction is past and which is future. And I suppose one can be thrown over one’s throne, though I’ve never tried it. In any case, I wasn’t talking about you at all, but you never listen, do you? This is why I ignore your invitations.”

“Surely this is all beside the point,” the King said hastily as the Queen of Hearts seethed. The poor walrus was visibly sweating and tried to slouch down in his seat. I was beginning to wonder if we would ever get through the trial. It was proceeding about as logically as the last one I’d been involved in.

“Yes, we have come to hear from this Alice,” the general said. “Proceed, child.”

“Wait,” I said, quailing a little as everyone in the courtroom turned to stare at me. “Don’t—don’t you want to ask the White Queen about the prophecy? I’d still like to know if she said Alice or chalice.”

“Prophecy?” the White Queen said. “What prophecy? I haven’t given a prophecy.”

There was a confused silence. “Yes, you have,” I said cautiously. “The prophecy about Wonderland being in peril, and a small blue—”

“Be quiet, child!” The White Queen leaned around the walrus to glare at me. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to disrupt the flow of time? Have you never heard of the grandfather paradox? What do they teach children in schools these days?”

“But—but you’ve already given the prophecy, years ago—”

“I have not.” The White Queen folded her arms and went back behind the walrus. “That prophecy is of immense importance to my kingdom—that is, Wonderland. I distinctly recall delivering it in the future.”

“But—” the general sputtered. “But the prophecy has come to pass, Your Majesty.”

“Of course it has,” the White Queen retorted. “Do you doubt my abilities as a seer?”