Sir Gorrann raised his voice. “Dinah, do not fight! They will kill you with a hundred arrows before you cross their line. We are surrendering. Put down your sword.” The Spade took his sword and laid it on the ground before raising his arms above his head. There was a murmuring in the crowd, and Dinah’s eyes widened as the Yurkei parted. The mushrooms began to hum with light and sound. The warriors all extended their arms and pressed the base of their palms together, thumbs linked, fingers spread. Like wings. Dinah heard a familiar thudding, and her stomach clenched.
A tan Hornhoov emerged out of the dim light, and astride him, a fearsome-looking man. His hair was as white as milk, shaved back in a long strip that caressed his shoulder blades. Stripes of white paint covered his deeply tanned and muscular body, his radiant blue eyes visible even from a distance. On his head was a woven headdress of feathers, white and blue and gathered in a circle at the crown before cascading down his back. The rest of the Yurkei watched him with rapt attention, their hands still spread before themselves. He gave the slightest nod and their arms dropped back to their original position—aiming arrows at her and Morte. He was almost upon her now: Mundoo, the chief of the Yurkei.
A cold fear shot through her as she remembered all the terrible stories she had heard about this warrior chief. He raised his hand to her, his voice steady and calm. “Girl. You have trespassed into the sacred burial ground of the Yurkei tribe and will now be punished as such: you must give us your steed, your supplies, and all of your food and then you may go with your lives. Otherwise, you will be pierced through with the arrows of my strong warriors. They do not miss.”
Dinah sat perfectly still, surprised at his perfect grasp of the Wonderland language. This seemed like a fair deal, but she did not want to part with Morte. Mundoo was eyeing him greedily—who knew what they would do to him.
Dinah coughed. “Jewels and gold are worth much more than this horse. I can get you all of those and more.”
Mundoo gave a click of his tongue and his pale Hornhoov approached, steam hissing aggressively out from his nose in Morte’s direction. The mare was almost the same size as Morte, the color of the purest sand, her white mane braided through with blue ribbons and paint.
Mundoo narrowed his glowing blue eyes as he neared them. “But that is not just a steed, my lady, as you well know.” As Mundoo grew closer, Dinah saw his blue eyes widen just before he drew his own arrow, pointed straight at her throat.
“Iy-Joyera! Iy-Joyera!” The tribe moved swiftly toward her, all arrows trained on Morte.
Mundoo stared past his quivering arrow. “I have seen this steed before. Iy-Joyera, the black devil. This is the king’s horse. This beast has killed dozens of my best warriors and carried the murderous King of Wonderland upon his back as he burned our villages.” Mundoo was now very close to Dinah, their Hornhooves dangerously close to each other as they heaved and pawed the ground, desperate to fight each other. Morte stumbled again, and Dinah lurched down toward Mundoo. The tip of his arrow brushed her throat.
“Tell me! Tell me how a dirty peasant girl has the horse of a king and the speech of a noble. Tell me now or I will spill your blood here. I will let you watch as we kill your devil, one arrow at a time.” Dinah raised her chin and stared deep into the chief’s eyes. She had no choice. They would no doubt kill her once they learned who she was, and it was better to die a quick death than a long one by torture. She would not go quietly, a meek, insecure princess. She would go out in a blaze of glory, a warrior who had come so far on her own, one who had made it through the Twisted Wood. She had seen death and pain, felt the blade of a sword on her neck and the thrill of the fear that preceded imminent death. She was a woman, not a girl, and she would not go without a fight.
Dinah raised her voice as she drew her sword quickly. “My name is Dinah, and I was the future Queen of Wonderland until I escaped my father and made my way here. You will not touch my steed this day, nor spill my blood. I do not fear death from your arrows, but you should fear my sword and my rage.” Morte rose up on his hind legs and she saw confusion and surprise register across Mundoo’s face as she sliced her sword down toward his head. Mundoo’s Hornhoov gave a skilled leap back, and Dinah swung into empty air before something hard and heavy hit the side of her head with a sickening crunch. The hazy light of the mushroom field went dim, and Dinah gave thanks that her death had been quick and painless. She closed her eyes and waited to see Charles’s happy face, just on the other side of the rabbit hole.
Seven
There it was again, the swirling darkness, the inky sky, the floating clocks. Dinah twisted and turned inside it, struggling to move. Something was wrapped around her arms—a vine? No matter how much she struggled, it wrapped tighter around her, strangling her, pressing her organs uncomfortably together. She opened her mouth to scream, but the vines were in her mouth as well. Now they were the roots, the roots of the Black Towers, writhing in and out, filling her with their visions. Blood on a sword, a white ghost emerging from the darkness, its claws outstretched . . . Dinah’s body jerked, and she had the sensation of falling. Then something strong and hard encircled her waist and righted her. Awareness returned and she realized that she was bobbing up and down. She shook her head once and forced her eyes to open.
Morte. She was on Morte, but what was behind her? She managed to turn her head. The Spade was sitting behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other one clutching the red leather reins with desperation. She could see why. Sir Gorrann had been blindfolded. Dinah’s head dropped forward, and she could see that she was bound with a heavy white rope, its texture not unlike the branches of trees. In her mouth was some sort of fabric gag, and she forced herself to breathe through her nose before she choked. The side of her head felt like a blunt object had been shoved through it, and there was dried blood crusted over her eye and nose. She tried to move her mouth and felt the Spade’s hand feel its way up her face and gently remove the gag. His lips brushed against her ear, an angry rush of words pouring out.
“Do not say a word, not one godsdamn word. Yer lucky that I found a rock, otherwise you would be strewn about that field in a thousand pieces.” Dinah felt the waterskin brush her lips. “Drink some water now and yeh go back to sleep. I imagine we have more than a few miles to travel before reaching Hu-Yuhar.”
Dinah could barely nod her head with the thundering pain in her temple, but she managed to swallow a few gulps of water. Sir Gorrann had thrown a rock at her? Her thoughts were confused, cloudy. There were the mushrooms and the Yurkei and their arrows and then . . . she couldn’t remember. Why had the Spade taken her this way in the first place?
Morte’s easy lilt rocked her back to unconsciousness, and when she awoke again, the dusk was settling. She looked around. They were in a vast field of waving pale green grass, as tall as most men, interspersed with curling lavender trees that whirled and leaped from their roots. The wind rippled the grass violently from side to side, and when she tucked her head to avoid a lashing, the Yurkei didn’t even seem to notice.
A line of Yurkei warriors stretched out in front of them, and Dinah noticed that she was surrounded on all sides by Yurkei guards, eyeing her and Sir Gorrann with obvious loathing. She stared back unabashedly at the warriors, so different from anything she had ever seen before. Their skin was a glowing brown, the color of wet sand. Stripes of thick white paint ran from under their eyes down their entire body, covering their arms and bare torsos. Each one had vividly blue eyes that radiated out from their dark faces. They each had white hair that came to a point in the middle of their forehead. Most had short hair, cropped to just below the neck, although Mundoo’s was longer and braided down his back with stripes of blue. Each warrior wore pants (if one could call them that) made of white feathers that sat low and snug around their muscled pelvises.
They were handsome and moved with a graceful ease that eluded every human Dinah had ever known. Their horses were pale tan with white manes, smaller than the mares she had se
en in the Wonderland Palace stables. Horse and rider moved as though they were of one mind. Altogether, the Yurkei created the impression of an incredible mass of terrifying skill with their quivers hanging flat across their backs, full of white arrows flecked with gray.
Mundoo rode at the front, the heavy footsteps of his Hornhoov echoing across the quiet landscape. He was taller than the rest, and Dinah could see from the rippling of muscles across his back that he was an impressive specimen. It was strange to look upon Mundoo, whose name struck fear into the heart of every Wonderland girl and boy, and see that while he was no doubt a fierce man, he was still just a man. Stories of the Yurkei ran rampant in Wonderland—stories of the horrors they inflicted upon innocent towns, of how they beat their women, of how they sacrificed their children and gnawed on human bones. It was said that they mated with cranes, and that their offspring were the terrible white bears of the Twisted Wood. Dinah had always been skeptical of the Yurkei stories—mostly because she was skeptical of everything she learned—but she could see now with her own eyes that the stories were grossly exaggerated.
These men weren’t so unlike the Cards. They dressed differently and spoke in a language that sounded like the flowing of water, but they were just men, not monsters. She had learned some basic Yurkei language in her studies, but the true lesson had been unspoken: they are the enemy. Know the language of your enemy.
Dinah struggled against her restraints as her arms fell asleep and her spine raged in protest from being bent forward for so many hours. “Yeh best quit moving,” noted the Spade quietly. “Don’t call attention to yourself.”
“How are you riding Morte?” she mumbled through her gag. Even with the blindfold, she could feel Sir Gorrann’s disappointment boring into her.
Finally, he gave a nod. “He let me climb up—probably because I was carrying yeh. He’s heavily drugged from the mushrooms—he probably isn’t even aware what’s happening right now. He’s just walking. Otherwise, I think he would have killed a great many today.” The Spade paused. “I want to warn yeh that Morte might not live long once we get to Hu-Yuhar. Yeh must understand that he has killed many, many Yurkei.”
Dinah felt her eyes blur with tears and the blood dripping from her head wound. She strained against her gag. “Whhhh . . .” Sir Gorrann pulled it out again. “Why . . . why did you lead me here?”
“Don’t yeh worry about that quite yet. It will all play out.” Dinah closed her eyes again, half-reassured, half-alarmed by the Spade’s presence behind her. “Sleep. I’ll wake yeh when we arrive. Best get yer wits about yeh. And don’t try to kill the chief again, otherwise we’ll both end up riddled with arrows.”
I can’t promise that, thought Dinah drowsily as Sir Gorrann struggled to blindly put her gag back in. I will fight for my pathetic existence, no matter how meaningless it is at this point. Her head throbbed, and she dropped swiftly into the soothing arms of sleep.
She awoke flat on her back, her eyes staring up at a circle of bright blue sky. She blinked a few times before her hands came up to wipe her watering eyes. Her arms were free. This was a good sign. She let her eyes play over her surroundings, hesitant to move. She was in a tent of some sort, but it wasn’t triangular or square. It was perfectly round and short, shaped like the tarts she had loved back at the palace. She knew if she stood that her fingers would brush the top of the roof, and if she were just a bit taller she would be able to stick her hand through the open hole at the top. Dinah pushed herself up shakily. She was sitting on some sort of incredible mattress made of woven grass. For the first time in a long time, Dinah felt truly rested. She stretched her arms out in front of her—which led to a pulse of pain that radiated down from her head.
Tenderly, she probed the wound near her temple. Dried blood covered the area, and a lump the size of a walnut protruded from just over her ear. Her head was pounding, and the sharp pressing against her skull made her grind her teeth. She sat still for a few minutes until the sensation decreased to where she could move around. Dinah took a breath. She was fine. She was alive. It was enough. She looked longingly back at the mattress of grass and considered simply curling up and playing dead for the rest of the day, but she had a feeling that wasn’t in her best interest. There were questions to be answered. Her eyes finally adjusted to the light of the tent and she saw that two Yurkei warriors stood silently near the door, their hands locked around their bows.
Dinah turned back to the mattress. A simple red tunic and a pair of white feathered pants had been laid out for her. She dressed herself quickly, vaguely aware that the warriors’ bright blue eyes watched her every move, even while their faces remained unreadable. She attempted to rebraid her hair, though the thick black curtain that she once so loathed was more a rat’s nest than a hairstyle these days. Her boots were gone, and she hoped that they weren’t gone forever if she was going to live through all this. She had grown quite fond of wearing boots.
When she approached the door of the pod-shaped room, the two guards parted. “Mundoo wish to see you,” said one of them in heavily accented Wonderlander. Dinah nodded, hoping they couldn’t sense her growing fear. They haven’t killed me yet, she told herself. That’s something. The seething hatred in one guard’s blue eyes was intense, while the other looked simply intrigued by her presence. Taking a breath, she pulled back the tent flap. White sunlight assaulted her eyes as Dinah struggled to comprehend what she was seeing. After a few moments, she let herself exhale, stunned into a respectful silence. She was in Hu-Yuhar, the legendary city of the Yurkei. She stood in a very narrow valley surrounded by rocky gray cliff faces on both sides that veered up and away. Past these towering walls of stone, the gorgeous Yurkei Mountains rose up around them, their tops always concealed behind a foggy mist that rolled and leaped like a child at play. The mountains were said to be endless, and the closer Dinah got to them the more she believed it.
The entire valley couldn’t have been more than half a mile wide. The ground was covered by a lush, bluish-green grass. Horses were everywhere, roaming free—eating, running, sleeping. The valley floor seemed to belong to them, although she watched hundreds of Yurkei going about their daily business on two narrow dirt pathways flanking the rock walls. Dinah looked up, shielding her eyes from the light that draped the whole valley in dewy sunshine. Tents—shaped just like the one she had awakened in—protruded from the mountainside, hovering above the ground like little clouds. Round and flat, they jutted out from holes in the rock or the edges of cliffs or, sometimes, just the vertical, flat rock face. Long wooden beams that twisted and wrapped under the pods secured each tent to the side of the mountain, supporting them from below. Biscuits, thought Dinah, that’s what the shape reminded her of. Round, flat biscuits.
Soaring through the space between the two mountain faces was a system of lofty bridges, made of the same wooden material that secured the tents to the cliff sides. Yurkei moved across the bridges with alarming speed: children chasing each other, women walking swiftly with baskets full of food, men dashing around carrying handfuls of arrows. The valley bustled with life, although most of it was taking place above Dinah’s head. Something hit her shoulder, something blunt and hard. She winced and turned around. The Yurkei warrior who had looked at her with such loathing stood behind her, brandishing the butt of a long, curved spear. “You. Move. To chief.”
Dinah began walking forward, not sure of where she was going until several Yurkei children ran in front of her and proceeded to lead the way. Their long white hair flowed freely over their shoulders, clean of the white stripes that marked the men. Boy or girl, Dinah found it hard to tell. Altogether they were lovely, until one of them turned and spat in her face.
“C’hallgu quon!” Then several others turned and followed suit. “C’hallgu quon! C’hallgu quon!” they chanted. Bad queen? Dinah tried to translate in her mind as she wiped the spit off her lip. Small rocks appeared out of nowhere and suddenly Dinah was being pelted with all kinds of things: grass, rocks, spit, a
nd dirt. She raised her hands to protect herself and the two Yurkei guards closed in on her, each taking one arm and barking orders at the children. Fervently, she looked around for Sir Gorrann, but his grizzled face was nowhere to be seen. She was alone.
On the sides of the valley, Yurkei women had lined up to watch her, this dirty and humiliated princess. She tripped over her feet as they stared, and she felt even more humbled by their wild beauty and piercing stares. The women wore only white feathered skirts that draped loosely around their legs and a white feathered band that covered their breasts. Each woman was muscled and lean, with smooth dark skin and shining blue eyes. Their hair was long and twisted back into several elaborate buns accented by sparse blue beads that winked in the sunlight. Dinah felt so out of place, a hideous monster with her pale white skin, black hair, and black eyes. Their eyes narrowed as she passed. The tunic was given to her with a purpose, she realized. She was wearing red, the color of Wonderland Palace, a color to remind those around her exactly who she was. Red, the color of blood, the color of the oppressor. I should have gone naked, she thought, stumbling again. I might have attracted less notice.
The crowds parted in front of her as she approached a massive white rope ladder that seemed to hang in midair. Dinah glanced up, her neck straining to take in its height. Far above, carved out of the two mighty rock walls that lined the valley, two cranes faced each other—their wings outstretched, their chests puffed out. Two long necks elongated into huge heads with terrible, open beaks. The carvings were so large that the beaks were almost touching, though they began on opposite sides of the valley.
“Meir hu-gofrey,” murmured the Yurkei warrior who had looked at her with such curiosity. “Our protectors and gods.” Dinah nodded. She knew that the Yurkei worshipped the birds, and that Wonderland’s fascination with birds had grown out of their early meetings with the Yurkei. A single large pod was suspended between the birds, harnessed by the same wooden supports she had seen in the valley. The chief lived there, she guessed, ruling his people from between two warring birds, each the size of a foothill.
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