Page 70 of Wondrous

“No,” the Queen said. “This jury has proven itself incompetent. But no matter—there are three queens here. That means we have a tiebreaker.”

I blinked in astonishment. The walrus slouched lower in his seat.

“What?” the White Queen said. “Oh—not guilty, I suppose.”

The Queen of Hearts seemed to be turning purple. The general said quickly, “The question is about the fate of the Alices, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, that.” The White Queen leaned around the walrus. “I thought this was a different trial. The one about the assassination of the Queen of Hearts. I suppose that happened in the future. That’s the problem with having a memory that works both ways!”

The Queen of Hearts had gone from purple to ashen. “What—assassination? What are you—oh, but you are only trying to trick me. Aren’t you? Horrible woman!”

The White Queen gave her a cool look. “I don’t like children,” she said. “Their futures are always murky, and sometimes they have the gall to change entirely.” She frowned at me, then at the other Alices. “Throw them out.”

“What?” I cried. “But—but how can you side with her?”

The other Alices were also protesting, several standing up to shout at the White Queen. But she disappeared behind the walrus again. I looked to the King of Hearts, trying to catch his eye, but he merely frowned at me in irritation and turned away.

“The Alice may remain,” the Queen of Hearts said over the chaos, motioning to me. “Remove the rest of these ungrateful children from my kingdom. The rabbit holes will be sealed to prevent them from returning.”

The general nodded, and the card soldiers began grabbing the other Alices one by one.

Many of them fought back, which confirmed they weren’t as resigned to losing Wonderland as I’d first thought, or perhaps it was only their instinct, as Alices, to push against impossible doors. But they were outnumbered. As I watched in despair, another troop of card soldiers poured into the room. They began dragging the Alices into the gardens, and I heard the distant whinny of horses—carts were waiting to bear them away.

A card soldier screamed. Someone had torn his card body nearly in two, a girl who loomed over him with a sword I recognized.

As the soldier collapsed, the girl made for the back door the King and Queen had disappeared through, perhaps hoping to conceal herself in the castle. As she did, the hood she’d been wearing over her hair flew back.

I gasped—it was Alicia! She’d survived—of course she had. Above everything else, Alicia was a survivor.

I sprang from the witness stand and put myself between her and the trio of card soldiers bearing down on her, forcing them to veer clumsily aside or plow into a Queen of Wonderland. It bought Alicia a few seconds, but it wasn’t enough.

The general stepped almost calmly into Alicia’s path. She slammed the length of her lance into the girl’s stomach, brutally knocking the wind from her, then spun it around and tripped her, sending her sprawling into the Queen’s empty throne.

Half a dozen card soldiers converged on her, taking her sword and binding her hands and feet. They lifted her into the air, glancing at the general for orders. She merely waved a hand dismissively and turned to follow the King and Queen. She seized the White Rabbit by the ear—he had been hesitating by the door, muttering “Oh dear oh dear” under his breath as the scene dissolved into chaos—and pulled him from the room.

My eyes met Alicia’s. I expected to see fury there, but the girl’s gaze barely lingered, as if she was focused on something far larger than her hatred of me. Somehow, she was still struggling, even gasping for breath and bound hand and foot, but her face was also wet with tears.

The card soldiers bore her from the room. Only a few Alices remained, including Alistair, but the fight seemed to have gone out of them. Alistair gave me a faint self-mocking smile that seemed to say, Can you believe this? I can’t.

And then it was just me and the Hatter and Hare, and Jack, and the other creatures of Wonderland.

Chapter 36

Jack and I landed in the White Rabbit’s garden early the next morning. It had been a sleepless night, haunted by the cries of the other Alices, and I had barely been able to appreciate being back in the Hare’s cottage, in my familiar creaky four-poster, with the ever-present scent of scones and custard tarts wafting under the door.

Only days ago, I would have given my left arm to be where I was now, utterly triumphant and a Queen of Wonderland. But I had realized how hollow triumph felt when you hoarded it all to yourself.

Perhaps it was the weight of my new title or merely the result of how dearly I missed Alex and Maria. But I knew I had a responsibility to the other Alices not to let the precious door I had found slam shut behind me. Somehow, I had to jam my foot in.

Jack let me slide off his back, and then, in a whirl of feathers and sinuous tail, he changed back into his human shape, his dark hair looking windblown from the transformation.

“Shall we knock?” he said, eyeing the pink door of the White Rabbit’s house mistrustfully. Jack, I’d noticed, didn’t care much for anywhere indoors.

“I—I suppose so,” I said, shivering. What if the White Rabbit wouldn’t agree to put the rabbit holes back? What if he was too afraid to defy the Queen of Hearts? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed—and how were Jack and I to convince him otherwise? Would my newfound authority as a Queen of Wonderland be enough?

The tea river, from the looks of it, had flowed through the White Rabbit’s garden, which I felt was an ill omen. His pumpkin patch was a soupy, muddy mess, pumpkins scattered about the woods and fields in a disheveled manner, and the distinctive floral scent of tea leaves hung in the air. I dearly hoped the White Rabbit would accept my apology and the explanation of the role my teas had played in saving Wonderland from the mock dragons. And yet it was the second time I had ravaged his home, and I worried he would not be any more reasonable about it than he had been on the first occasion.

Jack and I had heard reassuring accounts of the first two mock dragons we had met with. The golden-winged mock dragon had been spied by a pencil bird deep in the Mome Mountains, hunting for the perfect “glacial waterfall” breeze and generally causing no more inconvenience to anyone than rambling on about his breeze jars to those unwise enough to ask. The second still dwelt on the shores of the Lake of a Hundred Names—one of the White Queen’s knights had reportedly vanished in the vicinity, which perhaps wasn’t quite so reassuring, but at least the dragon wasn’t setting things on fire anymore. The pencil birds had changed the name of the path closest to the lake to Hungry Dragon Way, so the knights had only themselves to blame if they went galloping through her snapdragon meadows.