Red Queen (6 page)

Hatcher woke at the same moment Alice did. She recognized the quality of tension in his body that told her he was alert even if he had not moved. She shifted, moving to rise, and he unwrapped his arm from her waist.

They silently rolled their blankets and slung their packs over their shoulders. When all the tasks were complete Alice asked, “Hatch, did you hear them last night?”

“No,” he said. “But I see their footsteps.”

He pointed to the place where the grass was trampled by large feet, and something else. Something that dragged behind those large feet and left a long track. Something that might be a hammer, or a club.

The flattened grass was very near to where Alice and Hatcher had lain, as if the creatures leaned over them in the night.

“What are they?” Alice asked.

Hatcher shrugged, though Alice could tell he was not as nonchalant as he wished to appear. “Nothing we want to run into. Best get on. The mountains will take some days to cross.”

He reached toward the fountain with a cupped hand, to take a drink or splash his face with water. Alice threw out her own hand in alarm, knocking his back.

“No!” She did not know whether the conversation in the night was real or imagined, but Alice would take no chances. “Let's take water from the river.”

Hatcher's fingers were a whisper from the flowing spout. “Why?”

“Can't you take my word?” Alice asked, grabbing his elbow and leading him away. Under her breath she added, “I'll tell you when we are beyond the borders of the town.”

Alice's neck itched, like someone stared at it. Like someone was thinking of grabbing and twisting it and crunching on bones. Yesterday the village seemed eerie, but not actually dangerous. Today danger seemed to be all around them, making the air thick and Alice's breath fearful.

The village ended as abruptly as it began. There were no outlying houses or sheds or—and this only just occurred to Alice—signs of animals or farming.

Who had baked the goods in the bakery, and where had the eggs and flour come from if there were no pecking chickens to feed, no golden fields to tend? This isolated place could hardly gather resources from a nearby town.

“Why, oh, why didn't we see it right away?” Alice said.

“See what?” Hatcher asked.

He allowed Alice to lead him to the stream that ran alongside the village. Here the water tumbled merrily over grey-and-white
rocks before widening into the pool where Alice had bathed the previous day.

“It's magic,” Alice said, and as she said this she could smell the enchantment on the air, and see the faint shimmer of mist around the village.

Hatcher washed his face and drank from the river before filling a skin with water. He twisted around to stare at the buildings as he did so. “It's not real?”

Alice shook her head. “It's real. But it was put there by magic, not by human hands.”

She could hardly credit her stupidity, although if she were fair to herself she would remember that when they arrived they were parched, exhausted and half-starved. Alice supposed under those circumstances she might be forgiven for not recognizing the enchantment.

Still, they would need to be more watchful in the future. There was much more magic out here than inside the walls of the City. Magicians had been driven from the City, and that meant the wide world held even more peril for Alice and Hatcher.

“Why plant a pretend village?” Hatcher asked.

“As a trap,” Alice said, and repeated the conversation she'd heard (or possibly dreamed) the night before.

“I suppose it's lucky you're so honest,” Hatcher said. “If we hadn't left payment for the things we took, we would be in no end of trouble.”

“I may have imagined it all,” Alice admitted. “Because I felt
I was right in leaving the money and my dream-self wished to congratulate me.”

Hatcher grinned. “Feeling very clever?”

“If it saved our lives I suppose I have a right to, at least in a dream.”

His grin faded. “You didn't dream those tracks. Some creature was near us last night for certain. For reasons of its own it did not harm us, whether because it had no need or wish to or because it was restrained by some outside force. ‘Her.' I wonder who ‘her' is.”

“If everything follows, then she is the one who made this place, and that means she is very powerful.”

For the second time Alice wished to speak with Cheshire, an impulse that irritated her greatly. The little Magician was hardly a friend and probably a dangerous ally, but at least he had experience and knowledge. And for some reason unknown to her, he liked Alice.

It was possible she'd been foolish to break the connection between them. She'd like some advice from someone who had experience and knowledge. She'd like to know how to recognize magic before it was used against her.

“I suppose it was safe to eat those cakes and things?” Alice said. She could hear the doubt in her voice.

“If it wasn't, there's nothing to be done about it now,” Hatcher said.

That's true,
Alice thought. And it was also true that not for
the first time in her life did she wish she could go back and undo her actions, make a different decision. How many times had she dreamed that her sixteen-year-old self was not so curious, not wishing for a little thrill of danger, not so silly as to follow Dor into the Old City, a place nice girls should never go?

But if she had not followed Dor, had not been through everything an innocent young girl should not have experienced, then she would never have known Hatcher, and she couldn't be sorry for that.

No man in the New City could love her as Hatcher did—of that Alice was certain. It was deep and all-consuming but somehow never suffocating. It was unselfish. It did not ask for anything and yet he made no secret of his need. There was no one in the world like Hatcher, and if she hadn't been mad, there would be no Hatcher for her.

So she should not wish to undo the past but learn to accept its consequences, and remember that not all consequences were evil.

They had eaten food from the enchanted village. They must now accept what came next.

Although,
Alice reflected,
it would be lovely if a village were just a village.
She would like it if for once things were exactly as they seemed.

They followed the stream until about midday, as it led toward the mountains and there was no obvious footpath to follow. Occasionally they saw the flashing silver of fish in the water. Around lunchtime Hatcher decided to try his luck catching a fish.

“But you don't know a thing about fishing,” Alice protested. “You've lived in the City your entire life.”

“It can't be that difficult,” Hatcher said as he stripped off his shirt, jacket and boots.

He rolled his pants to his knees, revealing pale white bony feet and legs so lacking in fat that Alice could see the veins and muscles pressing against his skin. His naked torso was covered in scars, the product of his life before the asylum.

“There's fish and chips on offer every day in the City, so someone must be able to catch fish,” he said.

“Those fish are brought on boats,” Alice said. “Boats that come from the sea, and the fish are caught in nets.”

Alice recalled a young nurserymaid had once taken her on an outing to the docks, but only after obtaining Alice's solemn promise that she would not speak of the incident to her parents. Alice was very small at the time, perhaps three or four, and was so excited by the prospect that she promised immediately, would have promised anything to be allowed to go.

Her mother always scrupulously avoided that part of the New City, sniffing that it was “full of common people.” Alice's nurserymaid dragged the gawping child through the masses of burly, sweaty men, reeking of salt and fish and whiskey and tobacco smoke, their teeth and clothes stained, their arms and faces so brown from the sun that they looked like visitors from some exotic Eastern land.

Everywhere there was noise and movement—men shouting,
carrying barrels of goods, old sailors mending nets or sails, docks being scrubbed and supplies carted aboard for the next sailing.

There were a few people like Alice's father, dressed in suits, speaking intently to captains. There were men who invested in ships' concerns and kept scrupulous track of those investments.

There were others from the upper echelons of the New City, wrinkling their noses as they were led to ships' quarters for a sea voyage.
It would be lovely,
she thought,
to sail on a ship to a faraway country.

Her nursemaid halted before one of the smaller fishing boats, where she was hailed by a grinning young man with hair so pale it could not be called yellow and eyes of startling blue.

His name was Mathias, and he had a strange accent. He told Alice he was from a country of ice and snow, a place where there was barely anything green and the land was filled with white bears twice the size of a man.

Alice could hardly credit this, but Mathias said it was true. Then he put her on his knee and fed her some very strange dried fish that tasted mostly of salt and told her a story of a woman who fell in love with one of these great white bears, who was actually a prince in disguise.

This story so thrilled Alice that she wanted to go with Mathias back to his home, so that she too might marry a bear and live in a palace made of ice. He laughed and kissed her cheek and set her down. Then he and the nurserymaid (
Why can I not recall her name? I remember his but not hers
) had sat close on overturned
barrels, holding hands and murmuring to each other while Alice played a game collecting odd things she found on the dock. A ripped bit of netting, an interesting rock, a tarnished coin from someplace far from the City. She ran to and fro, gathering things in a pile at their feet.

After a time she'd found everything within easy reach and strayed farther and farther in search of something interesting. Suddenly she looked up, and realized she could not see Mathias' boat, and all around were the dizzying tall masts of ships and a busy crush of people who did not notice her.

She wanted to burst into tears but instead took one or two hesitant steps, hoping the movement would reveal the fishing boat nearby. But there was nothing familiar.

Alice felt her insides shrinking and all she wanted then was to be at home. It was nearly teatime, she was sure, and her stomach growled and her hands shook and she wanted her mother, wanted the sweet scent of roses to envelop her.

Then there was a man before her, a man clothed in the respectable suit and top hat of the New City, a man with a kind voice and hard, hungry eyes, offering to help her and pulling a sweet from his pocket.

She reached for it, forgetting her fear, forgetting the need to find her nurserymaid, and the man's other hand reached out for her, to close around her.

Then she heard, “Alice! Alice!”—a frantic cry—and she turned about and saw the white face of the nurse just behind her.

She scooped Alice into her arms, her face wet with tears, and scolded her for wandering. As she carried Alice away, Alice saw that the man with the top hat had disappeared.

They never went on another outing to the docks. A few weeks later, the nurserymaid left in the middle of the night and never returned, which of course made Alice's mother very cross until she could find a suitable replacement. But Alice hoped she had run away to the land of ice and snow, and that when she arrived she found Mathias as a great white bear, a prince in disguise.

Alice blinked suddenly, for her face was splashed by water, and found Hatcher standing before her looking proud and holding a struggling speckled fish in both hands.

Alice blinked again. “Where did that come from?”

“I caught it. Didn't you see?” Hatcher said, his face falling. “Were you not watching?”

“I'm sorry. I was remembering . . . something.”

Only now did she recognize that hard, hungry look of wanting in the man's eyes and realize how close she had been to danger. What would have happened to her if she had been too young to fight and run away, as she had with the Rabbit?

She pushed the memory away, returning her attention to Hatcher, who now appeared sulky that she had not properly appreciated his efforts.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, eyeing the fish as its flapping slowed. “What are you supposed to do with it now?”

“Cut it open and cook it,” Hatcher said.

“I don't know anything about cooking fish,” Alice said. She
had never eaten a meal that wasn't prepared by somebody else. “Don't you need a butcher or a fishmonger or something?”

“I
am
a butcher,” Hatcher said, and he proceeded to skin and gut the fish as though he'd been doing it all his life.

While he did this, Alice collected dry sticks and managed, after several tries and much repeated instruction from Hatcher, to start a fire. Soon enough the fish was roasting on sticks, and they made a lovely picnic of it with some bread from the village and water from the stream.

Alice hesitated over the bread, not wishing to eat more enchanted food, but Hatcher felt it was of no consequence now. They'd already eaten some, and more would not make a difference, was his reasoning. Alice paused, dithering, suspicious now that she knew the bread was made by magic.

Which is silly, really. You would be thrilled to eat this bread if you made it with your own magic,
she thought.

Hatcher noticed her uncertainty and snatched a large chunk off the loaf, shoving it in his mouth and remarking, “If you don't want it, I'll eat it.”

Alice ate the bread.

She was still inclined to worry that it might somehow be used against them. In a fairy tale the food would have led them to a witch's cottage, where the witch in question would imprison them until they were fat enough for eating.

Or else the bread would not be bread at all, only something enspelled to appear as bread. Alice half expected to find not a freshly baked loaf wrapped in a towel in her bag, but a
worm-ridden lump of dirt or something equally repulsive. However, the bread had still been bread, and she didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed.