Red Queen (24 page)

“I don't know how,” he began, and stopped, for there seemed to be a mighty struggle within him. The muscles of his throat jumped in an odd and distorted way, like there was something alive in there trying to get out.

“I don't know how,” he repeated, swallowing several times, “to let it go. I needed it, to get her and keep her.”

“The White Queen,” Alice said.

“Yes,” Bjarke said. “But I couldn't keep her. And then she took away the only thing I wanted in the world, out of spite.”

“What did she take?” Alice asked.

The question hung in the still room for a long moment, and then everything shattered.

Bjarke howled, howled the cry of a bear with a thorn buried in his heart, and Alice realized she'd read her vision all wrong. She'd seen the Black King try to take something from the White Queen, and thought that he hadn't loved her as much as the Queen loved him, and that the Queen felt betrayed by this. But it was the other way around. The Queen did not love him as he'd loved her, and when the Queen's cry echoed from the mountain it was a cry of spite and hatred, not the cry of a woman betrayed.

He howled, and the magic that was eating him alive poured from his mouth like a cloud of tiny dark bugs, something terrible and amorphous that must be caught before it found someone else.

Oh, no, you don't,
Alice thought, and then her own magic was there easily in a way it had never been before.

A little glass ball surrounded the swarm of bugs and encased them, just as Alice had done with the butterfly. Only this time there was no killing what was inside. It wasn't a Magician but magic that had been set free by Bjarke's actions, and now it was dangerous. Dangerous because it could not be destroyed by the simple expedient of killing the Magician that housed it. It was wild magic now, magic that ate and burned, and all Alice could do was hold it.

And make sure no one else uses it,
she thought, as the glass ball grew smaller and smaller until it was the size of a child's marble. She pushed the crown back on her wrist like a bracelet and plucked the marble out of the air and put it in her pocket.

The Black King, now just Bjarke, was nothing but a huddled clump of cloak and bone, his eyes red from weeping.

“I'll never get her back now,” he said. “Never, never.”

Alice knelt before him. “I do not think you really want her; do you? She has been cruel to you, and to the people of your village.”

Bjarke looked at Alice in astonishment, as if she had lost her mind. For a moment she thought she had, for his look was so scathing.

“Her? You think I want the Queen back?” Bjarke said, and then his voice broke. “She took our
daughter
.”

“Daughter?” Alice said, and she was certain her face showed her shock. “Yours and the White Queen's?”

Now she understood the scene at the tree in her dream. The Black King and the White Queen had been lovers, and the
White Queen bore a child, and she would not give that child to the King.

“Why did she keep your child?” Alice asked.

“I told you, because she is a spiteful witch,” the Black King said. “She saw how much I wanted the child and she was jealous, for nothing can be more important than the White Queen. The stars and the sun and the moon must spin around her and her alone, and nothing can take her place in your heart. She took my child, and then she took Brynja's child, and when it wasn't enough that I was bleeding from my eyes and nose and ears from the pain, she took my cousins' children too. And I could not reach them. I could not break through the barrier she set, for my magic was not strong enough.”

“How did you get here now, then?” Alice asked.

“I followed you,” he said. “You went through the tree, and you broke something, just a tiny crack. I've no notion of how you managed it, but you did. Your passing made enough space for my magic to seep through, and I think one other as well. I thought I heard a laughing whisper as I traced your footsteps.”

“I'm sure you did,” Alice said drily. This explained how Cheshire's voice was able to follow her, though it was clearly difficult for him. “But how did you follow me so far without my knowing?”

Bjarke coughed, a wet, sickly cough, and a little blood showed in the hand he used to cover his mouth. “I wasn't directly behind you. It took me some time to widen the crack in the barrier.
And then you disappeared into a room and I couldn't follow, so I found another way through.”

“Be glad you could not follow,” Alice said. “That room was the lair of the goblin.”

Bjarke sniffed dismissively. It was an odd gesture coming from a man who looked like a half-dead corpse. “Him. There was nothing to be afraid of from him. He was all smoke and illusion.”

Alice remembered the shelves of heads, lined up neat and smiling on the wall. “No, he wasn't. Though perhaps he was no danger to you, and you felt that. When did the White Queen bear your child?”

“Six months past,” Bjarke said. “She showed me only my daughter's face, enough to let me fall in love, and then the Queen hid the girl away in the castle here.”

“And you went mad,” Alice said, thinking of Brynja's husband beating against the barriers day after day, begging for the White Queen to give back their Eira.

“Not at first,” he said. “But then the rage in me grew and grew, as time after time she would meet me and laugh when I said I wanted my girl, my own child. The White Queen didn't want her, only to keep her from me. She doesn't love that baby. The Queen told me I could have my daughter when I could come and take her. And here I am, and these months of madness have spent me. I am finally on my daughter's doorstep, and I am dying.”

“Bjarke,” Alice asked, remembering something. “Did men from the City come to try and take you? Men on flying machines?”

Bjarke nodded. “Special soldiers, I gathered, on the ministers' mission. They tell everyone in the City that there are no Magicians left, you know. But there are.”

“I know,” Alice said, thinking of the Rabbit and Cheshire and the Caterpillar and, yes, her mother, the mother who'd taught her to hide her magic deep down where no one could see it. The mother who'd been afraid, once upon a time, that someone would take Alice away. And then someone did take Alice away, and her mother decided she didn't like the daughter she'd gotten back. It was hard, Alice decided, not to be bitter about this.

“They keep the magic for themselves,” Bjarke went on as if Alice had not spoken. His voice was dreamy and faraway. “They use it for things that would shock the folk of the New City if they knew. And they hunt down and root out every Magician they can find, every child with potential. They take them and hide them and wring every last drop of magic out of their veins, until they are twisted and broken things to be tossed into the Old City.”

Twisted and broken and used by someone else, for if you can't defend yourself, the Old City will gobble you up in an instant,
Alice thought

“The ministers aren't afraid of magic. They're afraid of anyone having it but them,” Bjarke said.

These things Alice had already suspected. That Cheshire was able to stay in Rose Way with his obviously magical cottage meant that someone knew, and someone approved.

“How do you know all this?” Alice asked.

“I looked inside the mind of one of the men who came to take me away. Then I burned him until he was nothing but ash,” Bjarke said.

It did not seem as though this action troubled him at all, that burning people (evil or good) was of very little consequence. Alice did not care if he burned agents of the Ministry, for they did nothing to save the lost folk of the Old City. But she cared about those who'd strayed into the Black King's path, and therefore punished for nothing.

“And the plain too,” Alice said, thinking of Pipkin and the lost girls he'd tried to save. “And the village and the giants who lived in it.”

“Those giants,” Bjarke said, coughing more blood into his hand as he spoke. “They were nothing but the Queen's lapdogs. They ate people who passed through there, the ones that fell into her trap.”

Alice considered telling him of the innocents he'd killed in his rage, of how Pen and his brothers had been victims of the White Queen, as Bjarke was. Telling it could not change the past, though, and Bjarke had been more than punished for stolen magic. And there was more to do and no more time to tarry here while the Queen perhaps marshaled her magic against them.

“Are you coming?” Alice asked, standing up and holding out her hand.

Bjarke looked at her outstretched hand, hesitating as though he were afraid it would transform into a biting mouth. After a very long pause he took it. His hand felt as delicate as a moth's wing in
Alice's, the bones of the fingers long and somehow brittle, like she could crush them if only she exerted a little pressure.

“I want to see my daughter,” Bjarke said.

“I want to see my Hatcher,” Alice said. “Let's find them.”

They exited the dining room, found another corridor, passed through several unused sitting rooms and finally found the ballroom. It was almost exactly as Alice had pictured it when she was hallucinating in the tunnel. The floor was made up of alternating black and white tiles, like a chessboard. Tall floor-to-ceiling windows draped in white velvet curtains framed the ocean of ice and snow outside. The only thing missing was the courtiers. As before, as always, there was no sign of life but herself and Bjarke.

At the far end of the ballroom was a grand staircase, just the kind that beautiful ladies in long dresses used to make an entrance at a party. Alice could almost see them there, hair piled high and silk skirts swishing and their hands placed ever so delicately in their escorts'.

There was movement on the stairs, a quick, dark flash that went from the top to the bottom in an instant, and then there was a wolf sitting at the foot of the steps.

A grey-eyed wolf, hackles raised, ready to hunt.

“Hatcher,” Alice said.

She felt frozen, unable to believe he was finally before her and not simply another dream or vision or illusion of the Queen's. She had not seen him since he left her in the wood, and then he had been a person, so she supposed that she wasn't really seeing him again, but the thing he'd become under the Queen.

You're getting silly again, Alice.
She took one step toward him, thinking only that if she could touch him, say his name as she had said Bjarke's, the spell would be broken and he would be her Hatcher again.

“What are you doing?” Bjarke asked, grabbing at her shoulder. He seemed hardly able to hold himself upright, much less hold Alice back with his waning strength. “If you had any sense you wouldn't walk straight for a wolf that's growling at you.”

“That's not a wolf,” Alice said, and her voice came from somewhere faraway. “That's Hatcher.”

“Who's Hatcher?” Bjarke asked.

His eyes, Hatcher's grey eyes, no longer mad but wild. That wildness had always been there, the desire to run free and unhindered, but Alice hadn't wanted to see it. She wanted him to be with her, to stay with her. She'd thought he wanted that too.

Yet he'd run from her, run at the first opportunity. He'd run to the madwoman who ruled all she surveyed from the top of an ice-covered mountain.

She could hardly see him now, for her vision was blurry with tears. Alice shrugged easily out of Bjarke's grasp, moving toward the wolf who growled, who sat like a coiled spring ready to strike.

Bjarke followed her, grabbing her arms with more determination and strength than she would have suspected.

“For the love of . . . Stop, would you?” Bjarke said. “I don't even know your name, but you saved me, and I'm not going to let you walk into the teeth of a wolf.”

“I'm Alice,” she said. She couldn't tear her eyes from the animal at the bottom of the stairs. “He's Hatcher.”

Bjarke shook her a little. “Whoever he was before, he's not that anymore. He'll tear out your throat if you take another step, and he might do it anyway even if you stay still.”

“He won't hurt me,” Alice said, but her voice shook.

She wasn't sure anymore. Hatcher wouldn't hurt her, but this was a wolf. In her dream the wolf had walked beside her, let her sink her face into his fur. This wasn't that wolf.

But you must believe, Alice. You must believe that Hatcher is somewhere in there, else you would not have come all this way to get him back.

Bjarke looked doubtfully at the wolf. “I think he will hurt you, and me. I think that we should go back.”

“Back where?” Alice asked, her anger flaring. “There is no going back. You burned down the world so you could see your daughter again, and now that you are nearly there you would turn away? There is nothing behind us save dust and empty rooms. Hatcher is protecting something at the top of those stairs. Your daughter, the children from the village, perhaps the Queen herself. I passed through ice and blood and the scorched plains, and before that nightmares I can hardly describe. I will not leave here without Hatcher.”

She moved forward, ready for Hatcher to leap at her, for Bjarke to try to pull her back again, ready for anything except what actually happened. Her foot stepped onto a black tile—or, rather, what she thought was a black tile—and she fell through
the floor and into the earth. The last thing she saw was Bjarke's white face staring after her in astonishment as she disappeared down a long, twisting hole.

It wasn't at all a comfortable fall. Alice crashed into sides of the hole and scraped her face against tree roots. She tried to use the knife to slow her progress, digging it into the ground, but the slide was too fast and steep for her to make any difference. The Red Queen's crown jangled against her wrist, forgotten until just now. As she fell her sweater twisted up around her waist, leaving her skin exposed to rocks and other sharp things. When she finally crashed at the bottom she felt as though someone had put her in a bag of laundry and then scrubbed her on the washing board.