by Eva Chase
“What’s with their clothing?”
“To mark them quickly as my assistants, and to ensure the toxins of the Otherland don’t affect them, since they haven’t my experience there,” Rabbit said.
The guard’s frown didn’t budge. “I don’t know... They don’t have the mark of the seal.”
Rabbit’s whiskers quivered again, but this time he managed to make them look indignant. “Shall I tell the Queen it is your fault when the club is unable to produce enough of her concoction to dose even half of the needed roses?”
The guard blanched, and the other one waved us toward the gate. “Get on with it, then.”
As we passed through and the bars clanked shut behind us, I heard one murmur to the other, “I’ll be glad when this whole to-do in the city is done with, won’t you?”
The guards were getting frustrated with the Queen’s tactics too. That was good. Every bit of leverage we had on our side was a step in the right direction.
Rabbit took us on a swift journey along the garden paths to a side door in the palace. The flowers blooming all around us formed a sickeningly sweet bouquet of scents that the mask couldn’t totally shield us from.
At the door, our escort had to go through a similar song and dance about why we were with him, but shorter. I guessed these guards figured if the gate sentries had let us through, who were they to argue?
Inside, Chess brushed his fingers over my arm in a gentle gesture to let me know he was slipping ahead. The rest of us treaded carefully across the velvet-carpeted halls, past ornate tapestries and paintings with gold frames. The arched ceiling loomed high above our heads. No one much was around along the route Rabbit took. We didn’t hear a sound other than the whisper of our steps.
We went up a flight of stairs and down another hall. Where it branched, Rabbit held up his hand. He’d told us last night that we’d need to part ways before we reached the Queen’s private quarters—the rooms I’d been in once before, where she kept the mirror to the Otherland. Theo wasn’t in her own chambers but, Rabbit suspected, somewhere not too far away.
I tipped my head in acknowledgment and thanks. Rabbit gave me a pained smile and headed onward at his halting gait. Hatter leaned against the wall, his eyes wary as he scanned our surroundings. Dee stretched his arms in front of him as if readying himself for a fight. I hoped we wouldn’t end up needing his skills for that purpose, only to speed our escape.
Chess had known we’d wait for him here. He should be scouting out the halls around here invisibly, watching for a hint of Theo’s location. If any guards wandered by while we were waiting for him, we’d just have to hope the excuses we could come up with worked as well as Rabbit’s had.
The seconds ticked by, seeming to crawl over my skin. I crossed my arms over my chest. Hatter set a reassuring hand on my side, and I shot him a grateful glance. Dee bobbed on his feet impatiently.
Then Chess spoke out of nowhere, his playful voice right by my ear. “I’ve determined where we are going, so let us go forward. Straight ahead, the second left, and then a right. There’s a door with two guards outside. Dee and I can deal with them.”
The creeping feeling intensified with his casual acceptance of the violence he expected to come. “We don’t kill anyone,” I reminded them. “Not if we can help it.”
“Of course not, lovely,” Chess said. I could almost hear his smile. “I’m not partial to permanent endings myself anyway.”
“Are you sure Theo is in that room?” I asked as we started down the hall. My gaze darted back and forth, every nerve on edge.
“I can’t think of what else they’d be guarding there,” Chess said. “And I watched for long enough to see a couple of those doctors the Queen must have working on his ‘cure’ emerge. I suspect we’d be better off getting to him before they get around to coming back.”
We walked a little faster. The velvet carpet absorbed most of the sound of our feet. Hatter brought his hat pins into one hand, spinning them between his nimble fingers. I’d have admired his dexterity, as familiar as it was becoming, if I hadn’t been so nervous.
Where we would take the right turn Chess had mentioned, we stopped. “Dee,” Chess murmured. “Ready?”
The redheaded twin nodded, his eyes glinting eagerly. His spirits had seemed dampened since I’d found the Spades in their underground hideout, almost as subdued as his serious brother, but this mission had perked him up.
The air shifted as Chess sprinted down the hall. At a thump and a groan, the rest of us dashed after him.
The two guards had sprawled next to each other, pressing their hands to their foreheads. Chess must have slammed their heads together. Before they could gather their wits enough to fight back, Dee’s elastic arms were jerking their uniforms up over their faces. He yanked their arms from the sleeves, knotted those and tugged them tight as a straitjacket, and tossed the guards into another room Chess had just opened the door to. Their muffled shouts fell away completely with the click of the door closing.
Hatter had already knelt by the other door, the one they’d been guarding. His fingers tensed and flexed as he worked his pins in the keyhole. The process seemed to be taking him longer than usual. He knit his brow, a curse slipping from his lips under his breath.
Voices carried from down one of the nearby halls. My pulse lurched—and the lock released with a metallic hiss. Hatter straightened up, met my eyes for just a second, and turned the knob.
The door swung open into a small room with rosy pink walls. We all darted inside to avoid notice. Then my gaze caught on the seat in the middle of the room and the figure sitting in it, and my throat constricted.
Theo was wearing clothes that presumably befitted a prince—crimson trousers and jacket over a pale pink shirt, gold detailing around the cuffs and collar—but I recognized his well-muscled body even without his usual white dress shirt and gray slacks. I had to recognize him from his body, which was tied to an ornate wooden chair with ropes around his wrists and ankles, because a metal helm sat over his head, completely hiding his face.
Tinny sounds seeped out of the helm. His arms and back were tensed against the chair, his hands balled into fists. A dribble of… was that blood? …streaked through the sweat beading on his throat.
Oh God. What the hell were they doing to him?
I sprang forward and grasped the helm. Dee’s face had paled, but he leapt in just as quickly to fumble with ropes. Hatter hustled around to the other side of the chair.
I yanked on the helm, but it was so heavy it didn’t budge, even as my muscles strained. Then Chess was beside me, a solid presence even if I still couldn’t see him, setting his broad hands next to mine.
“One, two, three,” he murmured, and we heaved on the helm at the same time.
With a clacking sound, it lifted up, revealing Theo’s rumpled curls—the golden shade that was his natural color, not the dark brown I’d been used to—and his sweat dampened face. His cocoa-dark eyes stared at us for a few seconds as if still seeing something that was no longer there before they focused on me. He blinked, and his lips parted.
“Lyssa,” he said hoarsely. “You—You were supposed to wait—”
A horrified laugh sputtered out of me. I tossed the helm to the side. “It’s a good thing I didn’t. We’re getting you out of here. Can you stand?”
Hatter and Dee had snapped the ropes. Theo pushed himself to his feet and took a couple of steps. His legs held his weight steadily enough, but his head listed a little from one side to the other in a way that made me queasy, watching.
Dee grasped Theo’s arm, joy shining in his face even as concern flashed through his expression. Theo had taken him in when the twins’ mother had been afraid the Queen would conscript them as guards because of their valuable talents. They’d lived and breathed the Spades since they were kids—and Theo, as the White Knight, had been their sort-of king. Only right now, seeing the play of emotions on his face, did I realize how wrenching the last couple weeks witho
ut their leader must have been for all his people.
Theo had lied, yes. He’d hidden things from me and from the Spades—from everyone. But he’d meant a lot to people in spite of that. Maybe he’d been honest with them in the ways that mattered most.
We could work through the ways that mattered most to me some time when we weren’t in the middle of the palace of our greatest enemy.
“You’ll be all right once you’re done with this place,” Dee said, as if to convince himself and Theo. “We’ve got you.”
“You do,” Theo said, with a little more confidence. “You do.”
“Here, you’ll want to wear these. They’ll help us get you out.” Dee handed over a white hoodie and a strip of cloth that was a pretty close match for our masks.
Theo pulled them on, his legs swaying slightly under him. His head jerked around abruptly. He reached toward me. I grabbed his hand, he tugged me closer, and in the rush of my relief, nothing that had happened before the last five minutes seemed to matter very much at all.
I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. Theo returned my embrace with a rasp of breath that sounded both startled and pleased. His lips brushed my cheek. His voice spilled out warm and urgent.
“I did what I could. I got it ready for you.”
“What?” I said, confused, as I forced myself to pull back.
A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. “Your throne,” he said. “I swore I’d see you on it. I’ve cleared the last part of your way there.”
Chapter Nine
Hatter
“Does he seem quite like he did to you?” Dee asked me under his breath where we were leaning against the wall of the cave. On the other side of the alcove where we’d set up our bunch of foldable cabins, the former White Knight, now Prince of Hearts, was sitting with a plate of food one of the other Spades had brought him.
There’d been cheers and exclamations all around when we’d arrived with our supposed leader in tow. Theo—Jack?—had immediately grabbed Mirabel in a grateful hug. He’d asked for a couple of hours to recover himself before we assembled the Spades who still remained down here to hear what he had to say.
So far, that recovery had involved a shower and a change of clothes, rinsing dye powder through his hair to turn his curls back to the chestnut brown they’d been as long as I’d known him, a brief interlude in one of the cabins looking over the loot Chess had brought back from his office, and now a meal.
I supposed I couldn’t fault him for needing to get his bearings after the situation we’d found him in, but there were plenty of other offences I wasn’t ready to absolve him of yet.
“Whatever the Queen of Hearts had her doctors doing to him, it shook him up some,” I said. Theo still held himself with the same confident posture he’d always had, but his gaze flickered more than I remembered. Sometimes he tensed for no apparent reason, as if he were controlling an impulse he didn’t want to give in to.
Our White Knight had always given the impression of being perfectly in control, to the point that it’d annoyed the shit out of me. This Prince of Hearts appeared to be wavering on the edge of losing himself.
“He’s only been back a little while. He’ll get back to his old self soon enough,” Dee said, with characteristic optimism. He couldn’t quite summon a smile, though.
I wasn’t sure I totally believed what he’d said either. The Theo we’d known had been the man he’d constructed for us to see, as much an invention as his various devices. Now that façade was broken. How could he ever be the exact same person he had been, when that person had always been at least in part an act?
Word had spread to the other pods of Spades in the underground caves despite Theo’s request that we hold off on a real assembly. A few people drifted into our alcove, and then a few more. Doria came out of one of the cabins and lingered there, watching. Seeing my daughter hesitate to approach the man she’d followed without question just a few weeks ago set my teeth on edge.
Theo raised his head and seemed to take note of the new arrivals. His shoulders stiffened for just a second in the pale green shirt someone had lent him—even that hint of tension not quite how he’d usually have presented himself. Then he drew himself up with that assured air I now knew was a princely one.
The Queen of Hearts’ fucking son. It was right there in the authority of his stance, the boldness of that square jaw. The youngest descendent of a line that came and took what rightfully belonged to others while squashing every sign of dissent.
Oh, yes, he had plenty of offences to account for yet.
“Spades,” the prince said in his familiar rolling baritone. It filled the alcove and the passage beyond. Most of us looked sallow in the eerie glow given off by the stream, but somehow it lit him up like a supernatural aura of power. “I’m so glad to have come back to you. I wish I could take longer to relish my freedom, but we have far too pressing concerns we must address as quickly as possible.”
All the Spades emerged from the cabins or turned from what they were doing to listen. Dum and Mallo left off the game of cards they’d been playing to pass the time. Lyssa looked up from where she’d been sitting with Chess.
The tension in her expression made my heart squeeze. I loved that woman, I did, with every fiber of my being, and I knew how much Theo had hurt her beyond anyone else. He’d played her like a fool, taking her on that ramble through the Checkerboard Plains as if he had no idea that the artifacts might be meant specifically for her, why she could slow the train or calm a jabberwock.
No matter what his reasons had been, my arm itched with the urge to pay him back for that pain with a punch or two where he’d hurt too. But Lyssa wouldn’t like that. He was hers to deal with as she saw fit—and as queen, what she wanted to deal with, she did.
“You’ll have heard a lot of things in the last few weeks,” Theo went on. “I want to lay the facts as bare as possible. I am the son of the Queen of Hearts—I once went by the name Jack, and I faked my own murder so that I could escape from under her thumb and try to set things right on the other side of the palace walls. I kept my original identity a secret to avoid discovery that might have led to the end of the work I was doing, but I hate that I’ve needed to lie to you.”
Murmurs carried around the camp. Everyone had heard the gist of the story by now, but some might still have hesitated to believe it until hearing it from the man’s own lips.
Theo’s gaze roved over the gathered rebels, as dark and steady in this moment as it had ever been. “This is the truth: I am Theo now, not Jack. I am the man you called your White Knight and your Inventor. I’m not a prince—and I never was. The Hearts stole Wonderland’s throne from the queens and kings you should have had. But the Red royal family has returned to us. You can still come to me for guidance, and I hope I can offer much that is useful. When it comes to who leads us, I defer to Lyssa, the descendant of the Red Queen and the rightful ruler of Wonderland, as should all of you.”
Lyssa’s pose stiffened. She’d acknowledged the story of her origins with the rest of the Spades, but she hadn’t tried to lord it over anyone. She obviously hadn’t expected Theo to highlight her role quite that directly or emphatically. Even as I bristled on her behalf, though, I felt the rightness of his words.
Maybe he could have warned her he’d be pointing a spotlight on her, but we should place her word above his. He should renounce all claim on the palace or the throne in deference to her. That was the least she deserved.
Theo made a beckoning gesture, his expression softening as he met Lyssa’s eyes, and Hearts take me if I couldn’t see an affection and admiration there not so different from what stirred so often in my chest in her presence. Lyssa stood and took his hand to let him present her to the Spades. Despite her earlier surprise, a pleased flush had colored her cheeks. I didn’t think the affection went only one way.
Well, she had always been fond of him too. If he redeemed himself, all the better for all of us. When we’d won her proper place
back for her, there wasn’t any doubt which of us was best suited to stand beside her at that throne, was there?
The thought niggled down my spine until I clamped my jaw and shoved it away.
“We will take back the throne,” Lyssa said, her clear voice filling the room as powerfully as Theo’s had. The rubies on her woven vest gleamed, but not quite as bright as those brilliant blue eyes. What a woman she was, my looking-glass girl. “We will end this reign of terror. I know I haven’t been with you for very long, but I feel like I belong here. I feel connected to all of you, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to see all of Wonderland as joyful as it seemed to be when I first got here—but for real this time.”
A cheer rose up through the gathering. I raised my voice and clapped my hands to add to it, and so did Dee, with a hint of a furrow in his brow. He and his brother had admired the White Knight so much, I couldn’t imagine how this mess had affected him.
“I believe the first step we must take toward seeing our queen to her rightful place is to take back the artifacts of the Red’s rule,” Theo said, his hand coming to rest tentatively on Lyssa’s waist. “The ruby-marked sword and scepter are hidden away in the home belonging to our own Hatter.” He tipped his head toward me with a familiarity I couldn’t stop from rankling me. “I understand the Queen of Hearts has instructed her guards to keep a close watch on the premises, but I believe I have a plan that can get us to those treasures. Hatter, will you assist?”
Did he honestly expect me to refuse? “Of course,” I said automatically. Perhaps I should have waited to hear his plan first, but with the way Lyssa beamed at me, it was hard to have any regrets. That was, until Theo’s gaze flickered again, his mouth flattening against an involuntary twitch of his muscles.
My stomach knotted. Our Inventor had always been quick with his plans. Was the man who’d come back to us really ready to take on the Hearts’ Guard already—or was he going to lead us straight back into the Queen of Hearts’ clutches?