of Maidens & Swords, Page 3

  “All deserving,” I say in a drier voice.

  The ones in my childhood don’t count. They never counted because if I hadn’t done it, they’d still have died. They could not count, and so I choose to forget them.

  The Red Queen stands and steps closer to the bars of my cell. She reaches out and places both hands on the metal cage. So quietly that no one else—even the ladies-in-waiting—would hear, she tells me, “The Red King deserved it, too.”

  * * *

  “Beatrice!”

  “Beatrice!”

  “Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice!”

  I wake to the strange in-tandem voices that seem to be caught in a call-and-response loop. While it is my name they call, they are not currently interested in my reply. I’m not sure what to do. I could interrupt, but it’s dreadfully dull in the dungeon. The only other alternative is to wait until they notice that I am awake. I sit in my cell and watch.

  “We’ll miss teatime,” Mark Hare says as he stares into his teacup.

  “Hush, dear. It’s always a grand time to have tea!” His companion, oddly, is a stranger to me—or at least I think he is. A ridiculous hat, oversized and garish, perches on his head and obscures his face. In the dim light of the dungeon, I would venture to say that the hat is puce, but I suppose it might be eggplant. I’m certain it’s not brown. Nothing quite so ordinary as brown will do for any of the natives of Wonderland.

  Mark, whom I only know because he is a lesser cousin of Lord Hare and has been lingering around the palace far too often, leans on the wall beside my cell and tosses his teacup over his shoulder. “Clean cup, if you please.”

  From the shadows a pale, shaking hand reaches out with a cup of tea in a saucer. Tea sloshes over the sides of the cup.

  “Without any biscuits?” his hatted companion asks in a tone that can only be called scandalized. “You barbarian! You . . . you . . . animal.”

  Mark flashes teeth in the sort of smile that is more feral than not and says, “Hop, hop.”

  The hatted man tsks at him—and then at me. “Eavesdropping. Quite the worst sort of behavior, you know.”

  “Worse than lacking biscuits?” I ask.

  The men both hum and mutter, lost easily in a curious sort of riddling that the Wonderlandians are prone to. Mark taps a finger on the teacup, sloshing the liquid over the edges in a rhythmic way. The hatted man paces and has a little chat with himself. Suddenly, as if responding to signal that I missed, they both say in unison, “Quite so!”

  I nod. Really, what else could I do? For all the ways that being here changes a woman, at the heart of it all, I am still me. I see no need to engage more nonsense or nuisance than necessary. Mark and the hatted man are not rational; few of the inhabitants of this place are. In truth, I rather like it. A bit of madness makes the things that one must do seem sane sometimes.

  At least that’s my theory.

  Mark watches me as he holds out a hand and demands, “Biscuit!”

  The same pale, quivering hand as before extends. This time it holds a biscuit. A key-shaped biscuit is placed gently onto his open palm.

  Mark extends the key-biscuit to me almost the moment it touches his palm. “Will you have tea with us, Beatrice?”

  “Indeed,” I murmur with as much enthusiasm as I can.

  He hands me the key-biscuit and . . . waits. No instructions. No anything.

  “What do I do with a biscuit?”

  “Marvelous riddle!” the hatted man exclaims with a clap. He claps several more times, muttering a series of queries that my question has sparked as he begins to pace. “A biscuit . . . What does a biscuit do? What is a biscuit?”

  “Does it signify?” Mark asks.

  “A biscuit?”

  “A biscuit,” Mark confirms with a nod.

  As they pace and ponder, I decide that there are—as happens regularly in this weird world—only a few choices. One, I eat the biscuit. Two, I see if the biscuit is a key. Three, I do nothing. I’m not great at nothing, and I have been starving since I was left to rot in Alice’s dungeon. On the other hand, if it failed as a key, I could eat the rest.

  “Key it is.”

  I reach between the bars of my cell with the biscuit key, shove it in the lock as carefully as one can with a biscuit, and try to turn it. Baked brown pastry flakes to the ground. Inside the key-biscuit is an actual key, solid, metal, and effectively granting my freedom. The lock turns.

  “She said you’d know!” the hatted man exclaims. “She said it true.”

  Mark looks at me, shrugs, and smiles.

  I shove the door open with a squeak and screech—not the door’s sounds, mind you. Mark Hare and his awkward hat-wearing companion provide sound effects as the door opens.

  The dilemma, unfortunately, is what to do next. Leaving the cell or-- No, there is no dilemma. I love Alice, cherish her in a way that a fish loves water or an oyster hides a pearl or any number of explanations. The point is that she is both essential and my treasure.

  But I do not want to die. I’ve held on to my head despite everything. This time, perhaps, I will not evade the executioner unless I leave. Then I might literally evade him. It is my best hope.

  * * *

  The king is a pig. Some days I thought he might become so in form. He is a bore, a vulgar, rutting thing, voracious in appetite. In so many ways, the Red King is porcine. Yet Alice titters and laughs when he makes crude jokes. She pats his cheeks. She ruffles his hair.

  I hate him.

  “I don’t want a brat,” Alice exclaims as I rub oil into her skin. “If he continues as he does, I’ll be fat and mad.”

  “Plenty of women—”

  “What if I get sent back?” Alice asks softly. She is prone under me, belly down on her bed, naked but for another pair of absurd shoes and a jagged crown crookedly affixed atop her head. “What if I have a child, a native of this place, and I get sent home?”

  I cannot tell her she won’t. None of us who’ve fallen into this world know when our time will suddenly end. In full truth, I wonder sometimes if we are all in a shared coma, or if we are dead, or highly medicated. There have been times in my life when injury, death, and medication were all likely.

  “I don’t want him to touch me,” Alice admits. “Even if I wanted a squalling infant, I wouldn’t want him to touch me.”

  “He’s the king. Shouldn’t you . . . want him, or whatever?” I’m not completely clear on how the Wonderland things work, but if he wants the queen—every queen regardless of the woman under the crown—shouldn’t she want him, too?

  “I’ve tried,” Alice says, almost calmly.

  Then, she screams. Once. Twice. Several more times. She’s still on her stomach, naked under me.

  Guards come. A knight, tall and polished and far more dignified than most of the people here, enters the room.

  “Are you in danger, m’lady?”

  “Every day,” Alice says. “Bring me something to please me. Plan a ball. Find me a new dress. Burn it all down.”

  “Your Majesty?” the knight asks.

  The Red Queen stands, spilling me to the floor in her fit of temper. Two ladies-in-waiting begin to dress her. No one is surprised by her fits or moods. She stares at them all, gaze fixated on the knight.

  “You. Come at midnight.”

  He says nothing, simply bows and leaves.

  I wonder at the plan she has in mind, but Alice answers me before I ask: “Perhaps if I watch him rut with you—”

  “No.”

  “I cannot stand the king’s touch,” she says. “If I am aroused—”

  “No, Ally.”

  “What am I to do?” She looks lost, the confused girl who sometimes peers out of the mad queen’s eyes stares at me.

  “I’ll fix it.” I know before the next heartbeat that my plan is deadly, that there are no answers here that will not result in disaster. However, for my queen, there are no lines I cannot step beyond. She is my life.

  I have killed for
far less rational reasons.

  “Tonight?” Alice looks as if she’s holding her breath.

  I nod and think of my options. I have a king to kill, and there are no guns in Wonderland. It’s messier without the slick, simple finality of a bullet. Simple maids have no need of sharp knives or swords, but there was a knight here moments ago.

  “At midnight, you will seduce him,” I order my queen.

  “The knight?”

  “It’s treason to touch the queen,” Alice reminds me. “My maid might do so, but a knight . . .”

  “I did not say to fuck him.” I shake my head. She’s not so daft as this. “Seduce him and have him sent to your lovely dungeon. I will collect the weapons he leaves behind.”

  “To keep me safe,” she adds.

  We do not discuss what we both know I’ll do once I have his weapon. That is too direct. That is, in its truest terms, treason.

  * * *

  When I leave the cell and the dungeon, both Mark and the hatted man take off. Whatever plot they agreed to did not include staying in the company of the woman who murdered the king.

  “Regicide makes a girl a bit of an outcast,” I announce, knowing Tom’s there. I’m sure of it before his teeth appear in the dark. Tom, for all that he claims not to be the puppet master of this world, is nearby.

  In the Original World, in the Crescent City that was my last home, I would have thought that Tom was a tour guide dressed up as Baron Samedi. If ever there was sexier man, I’m not sure where or when he was. Tom, unfortunately, is also the single most terrifying man in the whole of Wonderland. Like the finest bluesman in all of New Orleans or the pirate at the helm of a cutthroat crew, Tom is a force unto himself.

  “The queen must have a king,” he announces. “There is a necessary order.”

  “And? Will I be calling you the Red King soon?”

  Tom laughs, and I am reminded of my father when he was luring victims to his traps. He was the spider, entrapping fly after ladybug after lesser spider. They all died because he willed it so. Those who lived, who avoided his lair, did so at his whim. Tom is more like that man who raised me than anyone I’ve ever met.

  “I am not interested in surrendering my power, Rose.” He extends his arm, and we begin to walk.

  A woman is dragged toward the dungeon as we continue down the flower-lined path. “My name is not Beatrice!”

  “Shame about the queen’s maid.” Tom glances at her. “Treason is such an ugly thing.”

  I miss a step. My feet tangle. “What?”

  “She’ll be beheaded at dawn.” He shrugs. “We must protect the throne, Rose.”

  “She’ll die?” I glance in her direction. “That woman will die?”

  “Indeed.” Tom gestures for me to go ahead of him. “Someone must.”

  And I know that this is one of those moments, a test of my character. Do I let another woman die so that I might live? I can’t say that I want to die. I can’t even say that I haven’t taken lives. None of them were truly innocent, though. No one is innocent.

  “Would it help if you knew she wasn’t, either?” He smiles, seeming genuine for a change, even trustworthy. “Innocent, I mean.”

  I stare. “How did you know I . . .”

  “You are as readable as a book in a language I almost know, Rose.” Tom’s voice is light. “You ought to be grateful I’m not scandalized by your salacious thoughts in my direction.” He leans in, kisses the tip of my nose, and adds, “And that I don’t tell Alice.”

  “I love her,” I say. “You wouldn’t be the first man I was willing to kill to make her smile.”

  And there, in the dark garden, Tom laughs. “You’ll make a fabulous consort.”

  “A what?”

  “A king, dear Rose. The role is unfilled, and the queen is useless since she has lost you.” Tom shook his head. “We have options. You could become queen, but then I’d still need a king to fill the vacancy you created. I could let Alice descend in madness and bring in a new queen to oust her, as Alice herself did with the last regent. Or . . .”

  He looks down at me, and I realize I’ve slid to the ground.

  “You become the king. Adore Alice and keep her in check, or if you prefer, I could make you a knight. Move a knight into the king’s position.”

  There are words. Millions of words I know. Most of them aren’t available in this instant.

  “I’d kill him,” I whisper.

  “Kill the knight, too?” Tom sounds aghast. He puts his hand to his chest in faux shock. “You truly are bloodthirsty enough to be queen, Rose. That was my plan, you know. Alice seemed so promising, but she became mad. They all do—such is the nature of queens.”

  “And Wonderland,” I add with more bite than I ought.

  He laughs again. “I simply want a world as beautiful as can be, and it gets so dreadfully boring if it’s only Wonderlandians here.”

  Suddenly, I realize with strange certainty that this world is his. We are all Tom’s puppets. Me, Alice, Lord Hare, Mark, the nameless knight, all of us. Maybe it should bother me, but we are puppets with lives and opinions.

  “If Alice is to be queen, she needs a king,” Tom says.

  “Yes.” My answer is neither enough nor too much. It is all that is left to say when the question is Alice. I will serve her. Not Tom. Not his world. I exist for Alice.

  * * *

  The coronation is a lavish affair. In true Wonderland fashion, there are as many impossibilities as can be. The band plays late into the night, and Lord Hare decides to replace the water for the teapots with white liquor. Tall, leggy women in pink dresses walk with the exaggerated elegance of drunken flamingoes, and an assortment of men who look like bloated, sullen toads sit at most every table.

  “They wish they were you,” Tom whispers as he escorts me to the rose-covered archway where the king’s crown rests on a pink velvet cushion.

  “I’d kill them,” I whisper back. I glance to my side and clarify: “Each and every one until there were no men left to bother her.”

  Tom gives me another toothy smile.

  At the front of the crowded gathering, we stop. Beside Alice is the knight who was almost chosen to be king. He gazes at Alice in awe, and she smiles briefly in his direction.

  I kneel before her and make a mental note to kill the knight after all.

  She extends her left hand and takes his sword.

  When my beloved lifts the blade into the air, I see bloodlust in her eyes. My Alice is mad. She debates my death. It is neither the first nor the last time.

  Then, steadily, she lowers the blade and pronounces, “I knight thee, Lord Rose. Stand and be recognized.”

  I stand, face the assembled crowd of both Wonderlandians and imports from the Original World. None of them matter. They are background at my union with the perfect woman.

  I take Alice’s hand. “My love. My queen. There is nothing I won’t do for you. No life I won’t end. No obstacle I won’t conquer.”

  “Such is the nature of the Red King,” Alice murmurs.

  She’s not wrong.

  “I’ll be better, though,” I swear. I stare into her perfect face. “For you, my love. I’ll be better.”

  Tom steps up to my other side.

  “Bow and be named,” he says.

  I can’t look away from Alice, but I bow my head as directed. The crown feels heavy, a part of me now as if silver thorns are slipping from the beautiful circlet and driving into my skull.

  “I present to you Lord Rose, Red King of Wonderland,” Tom pronounces.

  As our subjects cheer, I lead Alice to the dance floor and take my bride, my queen, into my arms.

  “No children,” I swear to her. “No ignoring you for this or that lord or hobby.”

  Alice looks at me in hope.

  “And if Lord Hare or any of the rest offend you, my beloved, I shall serve you their heads on jeweled platters.”

  The Red Queen laughs gleefully, and behind us, under the rose-bedecked
arbor, I see Tom tip his head to me.

  Ours is a mad, mad world, and I am grateful to serve my queen.

  “The Nameless”

  Our village is nestled on a ledge. Our houses are fashioned of the wood that the land provides. Our byways are woven of root and vine, strung from soil to canopy. We should be safe, but still they come, a never-ceasing barrage. The constant anxiety, the threat of wolves always pacing near: it's not how things should be. I am as sure of this as I am that the moon will be dark tomorrow. I cannot tell you how I know, only that I do. Some truths live in the meat and marrow of our bodies, passed from mother to daughter, carried forward in our breath and blood.

  And so I hunt. This is what I was raised to do.

  I scan the undergrowth, watching for the enemies that scale the cliffs to reach us. No matter how many we stop, how many arrows are loosed, the wolves still come. They came before my aunt Mila held the sword in her hand, before I drew breath, and they will still come when our bodies are rotting in the earth.

  "Hello," my aunt Mila says from somewhere behind me.

  Whatever route of vine and branch she traveled brought her touchably close to where I stand. No one but Mila would be able to get this close without my notice.

  "Wolves?"

  "None so far," she answers. "The archers think they've stopped all of them."

  I snort. "They always think that."

  They aren't always wrong. Sometimes, the archers are thorough enough to leave no enemies to fight. Other nights, though, Mila and I bloody our weapons as we stand at the edge of the woods. The wolves are a relentless tide.

  "Glenda was taken this morning," Mila says.

  "At the river? There were archers and--"

  "No. Gathering roots." My aunt's hand is resting idly on her sword hilt. Her fingers curl around it as if she's about to draw the blade. "Her daughter was in the birthing hut. The medic's roots weren't easing her pains."