of Maidens & Swords, Page 2

  It’s an honor I don’t have to share.

  “Hello, Ally,” I murmur as she approaches out of the shadows. She’s an angel deigning to walk into the muck, illuminated by the candle she holds just so. It casts light onto her perfect face and bare throat.

  “You never learn.”

  I shrug. She’s not wrong. I’m not any more likely to change than she is. I was what I am when I arrived in Wonderland, formed into the raw stuff that landed me here in her domain. No one knows exactly why some people fall into this fantastic world, but we all know there are only two ways to get here—be born to it or fall into it. Those born here cannot leave. The rest of us must constantly worry that we’ll break the wrong rule and wake up in the Original World.

  “Treason,” my queen adds, “is a very serious crime.”

  “I wondered what the charge was this time,” I admit. “One never knows with you.”

  She presses her lips together, and I see that they’re glossy with fresh lip-stain. I’m fool enough to be glad she still finds me worthy of painting those dangerous lips. The words that slide through them can condemn me to death; in fact, I suspect they have already done so if I’m charged with treason. I’d still sell a small country or two to have the Red Queen’s lips touch mine again.

  “I must protect the crown,” she says, as if I don’t understand.

  “He was a blight, Ally. Killing him was a gift.”

  She tilts her head, looking at me curiously, and very softly says, “Well, of course, it was. You know that, and I know that.”

  The Red Queen lifts a hand, summoning the constantly accessible ladies-in-waiting. Then she glances at the ground behind her. A chair—ivory with beautiful carved legs—materializes out of the shadows. Hands are all I see. The light of the queen’s candle doesn’t extend to the servants. Another woman reaches out of the shadows and places a matching footstool in front of the chair. Hands settle her skirts.

  Alice sits without looking.

  The chair, the stool, the dress, it will all be consigned to the fire by morning. The proof that she was here in the filth will be burned up like so many other things. My beloved is clever and cautious, despite what the people think.

  I glance at Alice’s shoes. When she became queen, Alice adopted a madness that seems to be bound to her role in this world, as if being queen meant some level of madness was inevitable. She is her office in ways, but in the heart of the madness, Alice still exists. The last Red Queen had no such shoes, but Alice wears strange, lovely ones that defy logic. Today’s have a cut-out heel featuring teeth.

  “Tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Tell me,” she repeats.

  I sigh. I want to resist her, but I can’t. Maybe in the Original World, maybe if we were both back there, I could resist her charm. Here? Everything in me wants to resist, but I still give in.

  “I love you,” I begin.

  “And?”

  “There is nothing I would deny you, Alice. Nothing.” I settle into the hard bunk of my dungeon cell. Briefly, I attempt to cross my legs, but am stopped by the clank of shackles. I stare at her through the bars and profess, “You are my world.”

  “And?” Her voice is different now. Softer. Hopeful.

  “So, I killed him. For you, Ally. I murdered him because you wanted him to die.”

  The Red Queen smiles at me in a way that makes me forget the filthy cell where I live now. I know then that I’d do it all again—and so much more—for the joy in her expression. She knows it, too. I suspect she knew before I did. She picked me. She groomed me to be the red hands of the queen.

  “I never wanted the king to die, Beatrice,” she lies. “He was my husband, ordained so by Wonderland.”

  And in her lie is the crux of the problem. The truth is that Alice wanted the crown. She won it from the last Red Queen, and so she became heir. She was the new queen, taking the throne, the power, the crown jewels—and the king. It was one almost perfect package.

  The king, unfortunately, adored the Red Queen. Not Alice. Not the last queen. Not the one before her. He adored the queen—whichever one she was.

  * * *

  My time at the Red Castle was illuminating in ways I couldn’t explain. I went from nameless maid, ordered about by every guard and courtier in the palace, to her maid. She chose me.

  That was the result of my first foray into the dungeon: She released me, renamed me, and I was New. I was hired as the Queen’s Personal Maid as if I were new to the castle. The head of the maids gave me a tour—including the very same rooms I’d cleaned the past four months.

  My new name was Beatrice. I cannot recall the old name. It no longer matters.

  As Beatrice I would wear a dress befitting the Queen’s Personal Maid. I hate dresses, but the pay was great. I signed my new name on the form presented to me, and so it was to be.

  On my second day as Beatrice I arrived to work, and I prepared to clean her royal chambers. I assumed that would require tidying her sitting room, possibly waiting to fetch her tea or her beloved tiny cakes. The queen, for all of her airs and etiquette, was fond of the hallucinogenic bakery—so much so that she’d burned it down and offered the bakers positions in the palace as Royal Bakers.

  I was wrong, of course. I arrived to find my employer naked and pacing. The room itself would take half a day to clean. Dresses, stockings, and jewelry were strewn everywhere as if she had thrown them in frustration.

  “How am I to dress without my maid?” She stomped her foot, frowned at it as if it ought to make a noise even though she wore no shoe and stood on thick carpet. She picked up a book and tossed it at the wall as she stomped again. When the book made an apparently satisfying noise, she smiled at her foot.

  My mouth gaped open in confusion.

  “We’re all a little mad here, Beatrice,” she explained conspiratorially.

  I nodded. What else was I to do?

  “I need cleaning and dressing.” Alice gestured with her left hand.

  Women appeared from behind curtains. They all stared at her feet as they glided forward. Each woman was laden down with some sort of bathing supply: buckets, sponges, soaps, and towels. Several slid a large tub toward the windows. None spoke.

  They left after depositing the mound of supplies alongside the tub. Once they’d gone, the queen stared at me expectantly. She looked at the tub. She looked back at me. Surely, she didn’t require aid to climb into a tub.

  “Your Highness?”

  The Red Queen looked at me, as if my speaking was a shock.

  “Shall I come back or clean now?” I gestured around the room. The clothing and jewelry that were everywhere—except in the path the tub had traveled—should have been my task as a maid.

  “Beatrice, truly?” She laughed as if I were ludicrous. “I need cleaning and dressing. Are you or are you not my maid?”

  Even then, I was not so unaware of her reputation. The queen’s madness was legendary. Her temper, however, was more so. I wasn’t about to risk my life if I misunderstood the way she was watching me.

  “Will I be sent back to the dungeon for touching you?” I asked.

  “Not today.”

  “For not touching you?”

  “No.” She offered me a rare, almost honest moment. “I would like you to please me, Beatrice. I selected you to do so, but there are plenty willing to look after my needs if you’re not so inclined.”

  She glanced toward the curtains behind which her ladies-in-waiting stood or sat expectantly. “I have people who exist to take care of everything I seek. All volunteers. I don’t see the point in bedding the unwilling.”

  I didn’t ask questions. Not about them. Not about the king. Not about anything. I simply set about doing as the queen desired. I bathed her, and I dried her. I knelt in awe as she stretched out before me on the floor. There—amidst satins and silks, diamonds and rubies, dresses and crowns—the Red Queen asked, “Love me?”

  And so, I did.

  Afterwa
rd, she asked, “Would you do anything I wanted?”

  “No,” I lied.

  She smiled, and I felt my soul shudder in fear.

  “That will change,” she warned me.

  I said nothing.

  “You may never leave me, Beatrice.” The Red Queen gripped my hands in hers. “Even when I tell you to go, you must not leave me.”

  And then she sent me to wait with the other ladies-in-waiting and summoned the king.

  * * *

  “I didn’t hate him,” the Red Queen says.

  I’m not sure if she’s lying. I suspect this is one of the strange, precious moments of honesty that can too often be overlooked in the maze of lies and madness that make up my beloved Alice.

  It doesn’t matter, though.

  “Will I be finishing my days in your dungeon or meeting the executioner?” I ask.

  “Must you be difficult, Beatrice?”

  I smile. She only wants me because I am difficult. The hardest task in my life is finding ways to be so. If I am complacent, if she knows I’d sell my soul at her whim, she’d be bored. Alice never meant to be a queen. She chose it over expulsion from Wonderland. In essence, she chose madness over death.

  The power, on the other hand, she enjoys far too much to surrender.

  “Were you after my crown?” She touches her head. Today’s crown is blood ruby and onyx. Like the rest of her crowns, it’s a small circlet, so simple it could be mistaken for a headband.

  No mere citizen of Wonderland may wear a crown. A “crown” is any metal or jeweled ornament that rests atop one’s head. It’s one of the gentlest rules enacted by Her Mad Majesty.

  “I do not want your crown, Alice.” I keep my voice soft as we talk. The darkness makes it hard to be loud. “Nor the weight of it.”

  “I see.”

  “If I wanted your crown, I’d have killed you, not the king,” I point out.

  “True,” she muses. “But a queen must have a king. That is a rule.”

  To this, I have no answer. Wonderland is still a mystery to me. We strangers arrive here with no clue as to what it means, why us, why any of it.

  “If I break the rules, I have to go back,” Alice whispers. “I can’t go back, Beatrice. I can’t. I remember enough to know that I would rather die here than return to the Original World.”

  I want to hold her. When Alice is like this, lost and more frightened than mad, I want to be the knight who rescues her, the person who saves her. I killed the king. I’d do far worse for love of her.

  * * *

  “I hate him,” the queen told me as we were having the required afternoon tea. “I eat the little cakes and smoke the flowers to bear it.”

  I brushed her hair as she spoke. It was an excuse, not the task of a maid. No one really could overrule her, though—except him. I often thought she hated him simply for that.

  “He smells.” She paused and folded her hands. “He goes off to do who knows what, and I am in charge. I make all the choices. I rule. He . . . I’m not sure what a Red King does, but it certainly isn’t helpful.”

  “Do you need help?”

  I watched in the looking glass as the queen pouted. Her reflection did so sooner than the queen herself, who was sitting between my legs on the floor in a very un-royal way. Even now, however, I knew there was a level of dishonesty in her. My beloved Alice was rarely truthful unless we were both naked. Without her royal clothes, without the Red Queen’s crown, she was nearly sane. She was even honest in the way of regular folks sometimes.

  “I don’t need help with anything,” Alice lied. “I can do it all myself.”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Lord Hare, which was what the pale, red-eyed man called himself these days. One of the myriad guards that roamed the Red Castle stood beyond the curtains and announced, loudly, that Lord Hare had arrived.

  Alice stood and shoved her feet into today’s absurd red shoes. Through some magic or machination, this pair had long-lashed eyes that stared and fluttered as if someone were trapped within the shoes. Maybe they were.

  “I hate him,” Alice muttered.

  I didn’t ask which him. She was the Red Queen, and back in her royal garb, her answers were as likely to be true as to be utter gibberish. The magic of the place changed reality. It changed her. If I pondered the matter, I knew I’d realize it had changed me—but why would I dwell on it? I chose Wonderland, and my choice had led me to her. The rest was immaterial.

  I would never leave her.

  “My dress,” she prompted me, dropping her robe to the floor. Her voice was imperious, and the gesture matched. Her eyes, however, told me otherwise. My poor, delicate Alice. She was trapped in ways I could only try to fathom.

  I picked up the dress for the day. Pale blue. White sprigs. It reminded her subjects that she was once just a girl, facing an irrational queen. No matter that she’d become just as mad. No matter that she was as likely to behead a teapot as her once-trusted allies.

  I buttoned it up the back, fingertips lingering long enough to remind her that I was here, that I was hers, but not so long that she’d need to reprimand me. I straightened her full, heavy skirt by reaching under it with the excuse of a twisted fold of cloth.

  Alice stood mute as my hands touched her softly.

  “That won’t do,” she grumbled. “I have meetings. Lord Hare waits.”

  As I made to remove my hand, she added, “Beatrice, really? Dispense with the posture of gentility.”

  “Of course, my queen.”

  Alice wasn’t born and bred to be a queen. She was once an impulsive girl who ignored the rules. Such traits make for a temperamental queen—and exactly the sort of lover I cherished.

  I dispensed with everything gentle until the mad queen was calm again.

  When the Red Queen descended to attend her courtiers and disloyal subjects, I followed with the flock of ladies-in-waiting. I was never quite sure what they did now that she claimed that I was the only woman in her bed, but I wasn’t about to ask. My queen would lie, and I would accept it.

  “Alice, my dear!” Lord Hare greeted her far too familiarly, and then he turned away from the Red King—who was in attendance suddenly, too—with a meek, “Sire.”

  The Red King had no concerns, no worry over Lord Hare’s manner. The king was too interested in the latest rifle he was being presented. If not hunting, the man was off racing. If not racing, he was with his own ladies-in-waiting. The Red King served no purpose. He existed to create the next heir, to procreate. I had no idea if he’d ever achieved such a thing with the other Red Queens.

  All I knew for sure was that when Alice was fertile, the Red King felt pulled by a mighty urge to rut with her. My queen initially had endured it. Over time, however, the king’s drink was spiked so he could not inconvenience her.

  Briefly, the king smiled in her direction, but his hands were on the hunting rifle.

  Lord Hare, however, reached for the queen as if to hug her.

  “Bunny,” Alice murmured in seemingly fond greeting, but I knew it was a rebuke for greeting her by name instead of her title.

  The pale man flushed red and bowed deeply. “Your Highness. I meant no offense. None.”

  He had concerns that he needed to discuss, and to be honest, I had no interest in hearing them. I watched instead as the king waved off drink after drink. I knew there was trouble ahead. I wasn’t sure what was coming, but life in Wonderland taught me to listen to my paranoia and star charts the way I had once watched the news.

  My queen was oblivious to the threat, and I was left with a choice.

  “Take this to His Highness,” I told a passing maid. I pulled a vial of sleeping medicine from my pocket. I didn’t use it myself, but I had brought over from the Original World a bit of this and that. Admittedly, a few times I had stirred it into Alice’s tea when I had things to do, but I had to protect her—even from herself.

  Anyone would’ve done the same in my place.

  * * *
/>   “Do you remember before?” the queen asks me suddenly. Her voice and the candle are the only lights in the dungeon.

  “Before?”

  “Before here, Beatrice.” Her voice is urgent now, and I want to fix it. Fix all of it. Anything. Nothing. Whatever will make her happy. “Do you remember before Wonderland?”

  I shrug. I suspect I could recall it if I wanted to try. There was a life there, a place I’d existed. People. Pain. Pills. There were things in my mind best left ignored, though, and I was certain that this was one of them.

  “Who were you?”

  “No one,” I lie.

  We both know I’m lying, though. I’m not good at it here. Before Wonderland I was an excellent liar. My entire world was balanced on the edge of lies, and I felt the end closing in. That’s why I took the chance, why I came here.

  “You are the only person I send to the dungeon repeatedly,” Alice confesses. “I have to, you know. It’s a rule. I must send you. I must punish you.”

  “A rule?”

  “Who were you, Beatrice?” she asks again.

  Images clamber to be given voice. A man dead at my feet. A man bleeding. A man with a knife blade in his belly.

  “My hand held the knife,” I say quietly.

  The Red Queen lacks context, does not see the men—for there are many, not one—whose faces I see. She hears enough, though, to nod.

  “Deserving?” she asks.

  Alice is, after all, a woman who has shrieked to have the heads of her enemies severed for offenses various and sundry. Spilling blood does not bother her.

  I close my eyes and let the stories flow into my mind. Once I was not Beatrice, once I was not in Wonderland—I was a volunteer. Shelters. Hotlines. Hospitals. I watched for men who were not stopped by the law, and I stopped them. No guardian angel. I did it because I wanted to kill, and I had too much religion to kill without cause. Still a murderer. Still a serial killer, if I were to use the words of the Original World.

  Without opening my eyes, I nod and declare, “The dead deserved to die.”

  Another face looms in my memories, one I shove back. I still hear my father’s voice, telling me how and where to press the tip of the knife while my mother prays on her knees next to the man sprawled out in the leaves. I open my eyes to erase that particular memory. His death is one of the reasons I must be sent to dungeons now.