by Eva Chase
The knots in my stomach loosened. I had to remember not to take anything too seriously here. It was still Wonderland.
“Did you understand anything she said?” I asked. It had seemed as if he had, enough to be happy about it.
But Theo shook his head. “It often takes a while before her comments become clear. She saw a lot, though. Keep her words in your head on your journey to find that key.”
Yes. And what Aunt Alicia had left for me in that box might tie all those fragments together.
Chapter Twelve
Hatter
Our Otherlander emerged from the spare bedroom about an hour after the sun came up. I had to admit she was pretty considerate as house guests went. I didn’t hear a sound from her other than the faint hum of the pipes as she must have washed up and the slightest creak of the stairs. When she emerged into the main room and saw I was up, her stance visibly relaxed.
“Good morning,” Lyssa said tentatively. Her face had a rosy cast to it from the recent washing, and her pale hair looked a bit rumpled despite her efforts at dampening it down. My heart gave an odd hitch. There was something undeniably intimate about witnessing another person first thing in the morning. It’d been more years that I could count since I’d had anyone spend the night here—other than Doria, of course.
I couldn’t imagine she was affected in at all the same way by the sight of me. “Morning,” I replied, glad that I’d happened to be up pouring myself another cup of tea. I leaned against the counter to watch her from a more distant vantage point as she approached the table. “I picked up an assortment of scones. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, please.” Lyssa swiped at her mouth as if suppressing a yawn and perched on the leather-topped stool, considering the platter of scones. The bakery down the street produced five different flavors, so I’d gotten two of each along with the honey-pineapple-coriander ones I’d already eaten.
I poured her a cup and set the tea in front of her. She spooned a little sugar into it absently, her attention still on the platter.
“Are you going to tell me what flavors these are, or is this a test to see if I can avoid the one everyone in Wonderland knows is horrible?” she asked with the beginnings of a smile.
I couldn’t stop my mouth from twitching upward in response. “I believe each of them is to someone’s taste. I have no way of accounting for yours yet.”
She picked up a scone with darker dough and purple flecks. “What’s this one?”
“Licorice-rosemary-rye.”
“Worth a try.”
She bit in, and her whole face stiffened for a second as the flavors must have hit her tongue. I had to bite my own tongue to hold in a laugh. That type was definitely an acquired taste. Doria liked them every now and then after a particularly busy day—Like a kick in the head to wake you up, she’d told me once, rather gleefully.
Lyssa chewed slowly and managed to swallow without outright grimacing, but it looked like a near thing. I expected her to set the rest of the scone down on one of the plates I’d set out and reach for another. Instead, she kept nibbling at it with smaller bites interspersed with gulps of tea, until she’d managed to down the whole thing. Did she think I’d be offended by the waste if she didn’t eat it? I supposed she had no way of knowing that waste was barely a concept that existed in Wonderland these days.
Perhaps it simply mattered to her to finish what she started.
I wasn’t here to make a list of her admirable qualities. I absorbed myself in my tea and the familiar prickle of caffeine through my body. Lyssa bravely lifted another scone off the plate, without even asking what she was getting into this time. It was one of the vanilla-cranberry-pine ones. Her face brightened with the first bite, and that scone disappeared much faster than the first, leaving her expression full of contentment. She drained the rest of her tea.
“Should we get going?” she asked. “Since this is such a long trip.”
Some small part of me had been foolish enough to hope she might have forgotten about her quest. If I were going to make a list of Lyssa’s most obvious qualities, “stubborn” would end up close to the top.
Of course, stubbornness might be exactly what this land needed if anything were going to be done. If I’d even thought that risk was worth it. It clearly wasn’t.
“Pick one or two of those in case you get hungry along the way,” I said. “I have a lunch we can bring. It’ll be around mid-day by the time we reach our destination.”
Lyssa snatched up the other vanilla-cranberry-pine scone without a second’s hesitation and bundled it in a napkin before tucking it into her bag. “How do we get wherever we’re going? Does everyone just walk everywhere here?”
“Not many of us are generally interested in going very far,” I said. And then there was the small matter of the queen having ordered every vehicle destroyed and every riding animal slaughtered, other than the few horses and carriages she kept on the palace grounds for her own use. She’d planned her oppression quite thoroughly. If we couldn’t construct or produce it and then use it in the course of a day, we were shit out of luck.
But those weren’t Lyssa’s problems, and I wasn’t going to court her temporary sympathies. She was here to vacation and locate her grand-aunt Alicia’s key, and when she was done with both of those purposes, no doubt she’d wash her hands of Wonderland.
“Good thing I brought my sneakers, then,” Lyssa said.
The sneakers in question were sky-blue, almost a perfect match for the flowy knee-length skirt she’d apparently packed, which teased around her bare legs as we set off down the street. She’d paired it with a pastel pink top with lacy straps—not quite the bold colors that were most popular here, but a closer fit than what she’d turned up in her first visit. She was a quick learner.
Alicia had been too.
Lyssa stayed quiet for the walk through the city, studying the buildings and the people we passed. Her gaze still stuck for a beat longer on the more unusual figures among my fellow Wonderlanders, but she’d also learned not to stare. I might not crave the constant excess so many had become fond of, but I had to think it must be rather monotonous living in a world where people were always people and animals only animals, and every house and shop stood itself in exactly the same way.
There is a certain comfort in knowing what to expect, Alicia had told me once, when I’d shared that thought with her. Maybe the best world would be somewhere in between.
I willed those thoughts away, letting my own gaze slide over the beauty and the decadence of our city. Leave the past in the past and focus on what I had today, that was the thing to do.
But just a few minutes after we’d left the buildings behind for the cobblestone road that led through the treed landscape near the Pond of Tears, Lyssa broke her silence.
“You obviously knew my grand-aunt at least a little bit. Maybe you can tell me… I talked to Mirabel—the White Queen?—yesterday, and she said something about secret meetings. And making her a ‘spade.’ And some other things, but they made even less sense. Do you have any idea what she meant by that?”
Theo had brought the Otherlander to the White Queen? What in the lands was he thinking? When I’d told him about the lingering teacup on Chess’s insistence, he’d seemed interested but unmoved. I’d thought maybe he’d want to have her by to see if her influence would work on his inventions, not to dig into the lines of her past and future.
For a second, my pulse beat at a faster rhythm, the same way it had when I’d come downstairs two mornings ago and found Lyssa’s cup still on the table. Had he seen a way—come up with a solution—
I clamped down on the flash of eagerness. He couldn’t have any idea the risks he was running, drawing her further into our world. He hadn’t been with us before—he’d never experienced the backlash firsthand…
“I’m not sure,” I said carefully. “What did the White Knight have to say about it?” Whatever he was trying to achieve, it wasn’t my business anymore.
If he meant to enlighten her, then he could do the enlightening. I had no intention of stepping beyond whatever lines he’d drawn and becoming complicit myself.
“Not really anything,” Lyssa said with a frown. “He was glad she’d said a bunch of different things, because there’s more chance I’ll stumble on something else that’ll help me put those pieces together. But he didn’t seem to have much idea of the bigger picture right now.”
So, he’d avoided telling her much of anything. He must have had his own purposes for arranging that meeting. What audacious plan was our current White Knight dreaming up?
It shouldn’t matter. It was nothing to do with me. As long as he didn’t draw Doria in over her head… My jaw tightened.
If I got wind that he’d conscripted my daughter for any greater part in his schemes, I’d have his head.
Better that Lyssa knew as little as possible, so she went seeking more answers elsewhere. Preferably on the other side of that looking-glass.
“From what I saw, your grand-aunt made quite a few friends in Wonderland,” I said. “She could have been meeting with any manner of them, secretly or otherwise.”
“But she trusted you enough to tell you about hiding this key.”
“Not just me. It was hardly a secret. She wanted to be sure if she sent someone looking for it, that it wouldn’t be too hard for them to find one of us who knew.”
Lyssa’s clear blue eyes snapped to my face. “She told you that? That she might send someone looking?”
I exhaled in a rush. She might as well know this much. Maybe it would speed along her travels here. The sooner she returned to her home, the sooner my home was that small bit safer.
“This is all I know about it,” I said. “I got the impression that she herself wasn’t entirely sure what her plans might be. She said she had two keys, and she wanted to leave one here in Wonderland while keeping the other with her. That way, if she ever wanted to hide something behind the lock those keys opened without any risk of someone solely from the Otherland retrieving it, she could dispose of the Otherland key knowing one remained here for her—or any other looking-glass traveler’s—use.”
“There was another key,” Lyssa murmured, as if that answered a question she hadn’t asked yet. “I wonder—No. If she said that to you, and from the note she left me, she must have done something with that other key to make sure I could only use this one.”
“Well, come on,” I said. If I kept her walking fast enough, she wouldn’t have the breath to ask many more questions—and we’d be done with this trip sooner. “Let’s get you there so you can use this one.”
The cobblestone road narrowed and gave way to plain old dirt. That path stayed well-trampled as it wound through the mushroom stands. Lyssa’s eyes widened taking in the toadstools that loomed well over our heads, their flesh blotchy with lurid pinks and purples and reds depending on their particular species.
The occasional thump and holler carried to us from where some of Caterpillar’s workers must have been on the job. From the giggles that also reached us, they were sampling the product while they collected it. I picked up my pace even faster.
Beyond the mushroom stands, patches of grass dotted the path until it was barely distinguishable from the fields around us. The green knolls on either side rose up in hunched and knobby shapes I’d imagined stories for as a child. This one might have been an elephant; that one a castle tower. Shrubs of fiery hues clung to their uneven slopes, and the breeze played a lilting melody through their whispering leaves.
It had been a long time since I’d come out this far. Doria had never seen the knolls. Maybe she was too old to get caught up in playing among them now. It might be good for us to take the trip out here anyway. I’d almost forgotten this side of Wonderland, wild but peaceful, unpredictable but hospitable.
No watching eyes. No judging glances. A thread of tension that had become such a familiar presence I’d forgotten it wasn’t simply a part of me slipped from my chest.
Of course, I wasn’t actually alone here.
“Hatter?” Lyssa said, in a tone that pulled that thread of tension tight again.
She was gazing over the knolls, her brow lightly knit. I had another feature to add to the list of the ways she was different from Alicia. I’d never seen her grand-aunt produce an expression anywhere near that pensive.
“Yes?” I said.
“If Wonderland is all about having fun and enjoying yourself, and no one has to do anything other than make themselves happy… why aren’t you happy? I mean, you don’t seem to be. Most of the time.”
Her eyes flicked nervously toward me. I dragged my own gaze away. Hearts take me, how could I answer a question like that? It was a rabbit hole into a totally different Wonderland than she needed to observe. But she asked it so earnestly, as if she cared about the answer, that my stomach pinched as I considered a suitable lie.
I didn’t think Alicia would ever have asked a question like that, either.
“Perhaps I’m a beacon of joy when I don’t have stray Otherlanders to shepherd around,” I said. “You’ve hardly had the opportunity to take a broad sampling of my moods.”
Lyssa bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t really think about—you’re taking your whole day to bring me out here—I have asked a lot, haven’t I? I just didn’t know… This situation is so strange. But that’s not really an excuse.”
The pinching sensation in my gut dug deeper at her obvious distress. It wasn’t an act. She did care, at least in so much as she was impinging on a relative stranger. I hadn’t meant to make her feel bad, exactly.
I groped for something else to say that would be true when barely anything I could have said felt utterly so, and a sight appeared over the top of the whale-shaped knoll ahead of us that sent a wave of relief through me.
“Never mind about that,” I said. “I told you I’d bring you, and I have. We’re almost there.”
I pointed to the dark shape stretching up toward the sky. Lyssa blinked at it. “What is that?”
“It’ll be clearer when we reach them.”
We came around the knoll and into the midst of the giant columns. Lyssa’s jaw hung slack for a moment before she recovered her voice.
“They’re trees. Only… upside down.”
“We called this the Topsy Turvy Woods when people came out this way often enough to need a name for it,” I said, toeing the leafy branch that jutted across the ground from the base of the nearest tree. Its trunk rose so high into the air I had to squint against the mid-day sun to make out where it widened into twisted roots that nearly scratched the clouds.
“They all just grow like this?” Lyssa said. She wandered deeper into the strange wood, skirting the sprawled branches.
“As far as anyone can tell. There are tales about how ages ago some massive quake threw them onto their heads, but that sounds a little ridiculous to me.”
A laugh sputtered from Lyssa’s mouth. “Out of everything here, that’s where you draw the line?” Her pensive expression from earlier came back as she peered at the spiderweb of roots splintering the sky overhead. “It feels different from the other parts of Wonderland I’ve seen. Ominous.”
“I suppose you know why no one much comes out this way, then,” I said briskly. “Now, let’s see.” I counted off the trees in my head, checking each trunk, until I spotted the one with the knot just above the level of my head. My feet stilled.
Decades had passed, as much as time had passed at all here, but that long-ago moment washed over me with perfect clarity. I’d stood just about here, with March and May and Carpenter and the White Knight whom Theo had inherited his role from, all of us watching Alicia brandish her brass key. The wind had ruffled her golden hair that she kept short, just to the base of her ears, and she’d grinned in that fierce way of hers, and I’d thought there couldn’t be anything more beautiful in the whole of Wonderland.
The memory hit me with a pang that faded quickly. It was from long
ago, yes, and a time when I’d been so much more naïve than I was now. I hadn’t known what beauty really was. When March and May had kissed at their wedding, when Doria had beamed her first infant smile…
Of all the things I’d lost, Alicia didn’t even warrant a spot on the list. You couldn’t lose what wasn’t yours in the first place, after all.
Lyssa had come to a stop beside me. “The knot,” I said, gesturing. “It’ll pop out. The key should be behind it.”
She nodded and trod gingerly over the more delicate branches with a care I couldn’t help appreciating. When she reached the thicker branch that joined the trunk just a couple feet below the knot, she scrambled up it much like her grand-aunt had.
The knot gave way at the press of her fingers. Lyssa fumbled inside the hole and then turned toward me, her face lit up with victory. The key gleamed in her grasp. The wind whipped through her long white-blond hair, and my heart squeezed with sudden certainty.
We had to get her out of Wonderland before she turned everything here, both inside me and all around me, even more upside down.
Chapter Thirteen
Lyssa
I turned Aunt Alicia’s key over in my hands as we left the bizarre trees behind. The sooner we were out of the creepy Topsy Turvy Woods, the better.
A few bits of dirt clung to the key, but otherwise the brass surface gleamed as if it’d just been stuck in that tree yesterday. It looked like something from an antique store: a thin cylinder with a little notched bit protruding near one end and a circle of elaborate filigree at the other. The whole thing was about the length of my palm, and the filigree part took up half of that. The pattern of the lines and the indents at the top of the circle brought to mind a crown.